The Silver in the Sand

AP -- President Barack Obama says the United States was slow to recognize the magnitude of climate change, but that Washington is moving swiftly to catch up...

Addressing the U.N. Climate Change Summit in New York, Obama said his administration has made the "largest-ever" American investment in renewable energy. And he called on other nations — the rich and the developing countries alike — to rise to the challenge.

Obama acknowledged that pursuing costly environmental clean up is difficult at a time when the world is trying to recover from a recession, but said it has to be done. The president said "we did not come here today to celebrate progress," saying the conference dramatizes the need for even more work...

"We understand the gravity of the climate threat. We are determined to act," Obama said. "And we will meet our responsibility to future generations."

Obama is under pressure to put political capital behind getting a serious clean-energy law at home and show that the U.S., an economic giant, will do its part to cut heat-trapping emissions. The U.S. House passed a bill this summer that would set the first mandatory limits on greenhouse gases, but a Senate version appears increasingly unlikely this year.

Calgary Herald -- When a leading proponent for one point of view suddenly starts batting for the other side, it's usually newsworthy.

So why was a speech last week by Prof. Mojib Latif of Germany's Leibniz Institute not given more prominence?

Latif is one of the leading climate modellers in the world. He is the recipient of several international climate-study prizes and a lead author for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He has contributed significantly to the IPCC's last two five-year reports that have stated unequivocally that man-made greenhouse emissions are causing the planet to warm dangerously.

Yet last week in Geneva, at the UN's World Climate Conference--an annual gathering of the so-called "scientific consensus" on man-made climate change --Latif conceded the Earth has not warmed for nearly a decade and that we are likely entering "one or even two decades during which temperatures cool."

While they deny it now, the facts to the contrary are staring them in the face: None of the alarmist drummers ever predicted anything like a 30-year pause in their apocalyptic scenario.

Even if warming was happening, there's no reason to believe the buffoons in the beltway could do anything close to efficient to mitigate it. It's pure politics at this point, and as for 2009, the U.S. will not take any action towards the global warming paper tiger. In a world in which the media isn't held hostage by its own ideology, you would expect a story like the one above to hold several headlines on multiple major newspapers. Instead, we get President blockhead all over the Internet damning the U.S.'s egregious industrialism.

I'm thankful that a more moderate, less aggressive democrat wasn't put into office in 2008. Obama has thoroughly stretched himself so incredibly thin (health care, energy, prodigal social spending for the next x years), and has stepped on board with much baggage (a less than impressive resume of friends and ties with a criminal organization [ACORN]), I'm going to be bold and predict that he's a one-term president. He hasn't done much of anything this year besides appeasing car manufacturers, a ~1.8 trillion dollar deficit, and pissing off a major fraction of this country with his agenda. I couldn't ask for a better president, in a way, because

The best Washington is a divided Washington.