TS-NEWSMAIL.CF - Incredibly, in Sunday’s weekly video address, President Obama said,
“Today, there is no greater threat to our planet than climate change.”
I say “incredibly” because that just isn’t true – and if President
Obama really believes it is, then it is time to panic. Given the state
of the world and the urgent problems facing us that directly affect our
prospects for peace and prosperity, global warming shouldn’t even be in
the top five on the list of problems our president should be worrying
about. In case this administration hasn’t noticed, a lot of the world is
burning and global economic growth is so stagnant that it feeds the
prospects of instability at home and abroad.
No less than Graham
Allison, director of the Belfer Center for Science and International
Affairs at Harvard University, and Dimitri K. Simes, president of the
Center for the National Interest, wrote a piece published this week that
asks “Could a U.S. response to Russia’s actions in Ukraine provoke a confrontation that leads to a U.S.-Russian war?”
And not just any war, but one with “catastrophic consequences.” Russia
is a nuclear power “capable of literally erasing the United States from
the map.” Anything Graham Allison says has to be taken seriously.
If
that’s not enough to worry you, after world economic leaders gathered
in Washington last week for the International Monetary Fund and World
Bank meetings, even the New York Times wrote that,
“concern is rising in many quarters that the United States is
retreating from global leadership just when it is needed most.” The
chief economic adviser to the government of India called that concern
“the single most important issue of these spring meetings.”
That
New York Times piece echoed what Larry Summers, former economic adviser
to President Obama, wrote earlier this month. In an op-ed in The Post
(in which he didn’t mention President Obama), Summers asked if it was
time for “A global wake-up call for the U.S.?”
Summers implies that our allies are not only ignoring us, but wholesale
abandoning the American point of view by siding with China and joining
the new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). He wrote that
America’s “failure of strategy and tactics” in persuading allied
countries to eschew the AIIB “should lead to a comprehensive review of
the U.S. approach to global economics.”
Here at home, economic
growth is anemic and job creation has stalled. In the Obama era, more
people are on the dole, business start-ups are at an all-time low as
entrepreneurs throw in the towel and the world is in more turmoil and
danger than at any time since the end of the Cold War. Doug Holtz-Eakin
of the American Action Forum wrote a paper, “The Growth Imperative: How Slow Growth Threatens Our Future and the American Dream,”
which was published by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. In it, Holtz-Eakin
states that, “since 2007, trend growth in per capita income in the
United States has been 0.7 percent – only one-third of the postwar
average of 2.1 percent prior to 2007.”
We have a lot of problems.
So why would our president say global warming is our biggest threat?
Probably because it suits his ideology and his management style. The
truth is, if you accept at face value everything he says about climate
change, there is nothing he can do in the 20 months he has left in
office that will appreciably affect the climate. This is especially
true given what the president defines as “success.” He champions his
agreement with China on cutting carbon pollution, but all it really
means is the United States begins to raise energy costs immediately and
China agrees to have a meeting in 2030 to discuss what actions they may
or may not take.
(washingtonpost.com)