Global warming alarmism, anyone? The public is cooling to the rhetoric - Human Events

President Barack Obama recently told Rolling Stone that he plans to make global warming a key part of his re-election campaign, but since American families pay more at the gas pump and more for energy in their homes because of this administration’s policies, we have our doubts.

To be sure, President Obama has many major green “accomplishments” to tout. By imposing backdoor global warming regulations through the EPA, he is fulfilling his 2008 campaign promise that energy prices would “necessarily skyrocket.” By vetoing the Keystone pipeline, he gave the far left what one of his supporters called the “biggest global warming victory in years.” By finalizing the most expensive EPA rule in history, he is making good on his campaign promise that if anybody wants to build a coal-fired power plant they canâ€"“it’s just that it will bankrupt them.” And, he succeeded in throwing hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars out the window on companies like Solyndra, which he said would lead us to a “brighter and more prosperous future.”

The irony, of course, is that through all of these great green “triumphs,” President Obama has presided over the collapse of the global warming alarmist movement. Long gone are the days of the hysteria from the left. When is the last time he or anyone has heard from Al Gore?

Alarmists jump ship

Furthermore, global warming alarmists continue to jump ship. Shortly after Al Gore’s science fiction movie, I started to document the number of scientists deserting the alarmist camp. Today, Marc Morano of ClimateDepot.com keeps tabs on the latest count, with well over 1,000 scientists disputing climate alarmism.

And the list keeps growing. Last month, British environmentalist James Lovelock admitted that, “The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist booksâ€"mine includedâ€"because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened.” The prominent environmentalist told MSNBC, “The climate is doing its usual tricks. There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now.”

He is not alone either. German physicist and meteorologist Klaus-Eckart Puls told Swiss Factum Magazine that, “Ten years ago I simply parroted what the IPCC told us. One day I started checking the facts and dataâ€"first I started with a sense of doubt but then I became outraged when I discovered that much of what the IPCC and the media were telling us was sheer nonsense and was not even supported by any scientific facts and measurements. To this day I still feel shame that as a scientist I made presentations of their science without first checking it.”

This dramatic shift has not gone unnoticed on Capitol Hill. In fact, at no time has a global warming bill reached the Senate Floor during President Obama’s presidency. Even when the Democrats had a filibuster-proof majority, they never dared to bring a global warming bill to the Senate Floor.

The president’s record

President Obama understands just how unpopular his global warming agenda has become, so with re-election on his mind, he has launched a dramatic effort to hide his far-left environmental record. Just last month, President Obama travelled to my home state of Oklahoma in an effort to explain to the American public that he is actually for an “all of the above” approach to energy. He then tried to brag about how oil and gas production has risen under his administration.

Of course, no one is buying this rhetoric. Even The Washington Post called out Obama for misleading the public, calling some of his statements “just simply wrong.” One of Obama’s favorite lines is that the United States has only 2 percent of the world’s oil supply.

Yet the United States Geological Survey just issued a report saying that America’s technically recoverable conventional oil resources are 26 percent of the world’s supply. Moreover, it shows that the United States holds almost 30 percent of the world’s technically recoverable conventional natural gas resources, without including our massive supply of shale gas.

War on affordable energy

Yet, perhaps the most telling of the Obama administration war on affordable energy came from a Regional EPA administrator back in the Oklahoma-Texas Region. Al Armendarizâ€"who recently resignedâ€"explained at a town hall in Texas in 2010 that the EPA’s philosophy is to “crucify” American energy companies. That’s right: the EPA administrator who oversees the part of the country that leads the way in domestic oil and gas production had it out for energy producers.

Here is what he said: “I was in a meeting once and I gave an analogy to my staff about my philosophy of enforcement, and I think it was probably a little crude and maybe not appropriate for the meeting but I’ll go ahead and tell you what I said. It was kind of like how the Romans used to conquer little villages in the Mediterranean. They’d go into a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw and they’d crucify them. And then, you know, that town was really easy to manage for the next few years. And so you make examples out of people who are, in this case, not compliant with the law.”

The bottom line is that the American public has caught on to the global warming alarmist agenda and rejected it. Look for the public now to reject the far left environmental policies of President Obama this fallâ€"no matter how hard he tries to run from them.

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Sen. James M. Inhofe, a Republican, is ranking member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, and represents the State of Oklahoma.

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