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Editorial See other Editorial Articles Title: Obama's Bad Example Campaign '08: Barack Obama plans to lower our standard of living to fight climate change and make the world love us. The last time you may be able to drive your SUV may be to an Obama rally. Campaigning in environmentally conscious Oregon over the weekend, Obama lit into Republican John McCain's environmental and energy policies. "For him to come to Oregon as an environmental president, but his big strategy is to do more drilling and to have a gas-tax holiday for three months, that's a phony solution," Obama said. Well, increasing domestic drilling and lowering taxes, even temporarily, doesn't sound too bad to us. Obama may prefer having a home where the caribou roam. But McCain's plan is better than being the only industrialized nation putting expensive oil into the ground instead of taking it out while burning food in the form of corn-based ethanol in our gas tanks. Obama's support of ethanol subsidies, which McCain opposes, and opposition to domestic oil production contribute to the rising price of both food and fuel both here and abroad. But Obama has even bigger ideas, such as repealing the Industrial Revolution. "We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times . . . and then just expect that other countries are going to say, 'OK,' " Obama said. "That's not leadership. That's not going to happen." Oh, really? Who's going to say we can't load up our SUVs and head out in search of bacon double cheeseburgers at the mall? China? India? Bangladesh? Obama called on the U.S. to "lead by example" on global warming. But as we have noted repeatedly, America's record on both energy efficiency and controlling emissions of so-called greenhouse gas emissions already leads the world and beats the pants off Kyoto signatories such as members of the European Union. Obama's remarks sound like defeated 2004 Democratic candidate John Kerry's global test for U.S. foreign policy decisions where "you have to do it in a way that passes the test — that passes the global test — where your countrymen, your people understand fully why you're doing what you're doing and you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons." What Obama wants to do is reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050. That assumes that such emission cuts are even necessary considering that the Earth has not warmed since 1998 and is likely to stay that way at least for another decade as the solar cycle wanes. Steven Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute has actually sat down and crunched the numbers and found that Obama's 80% reduction from 1990 levels means that in 2050 we cannot emit more than one billion tons of CO2. The last time U.S. emissions were that low, Hayward estimates from historical energy data, was in 1910. Hayward says that per capita carbon emissions would have to fall to just 2.5 tons in order to reach Obama's goal. Nations relatively independent of fossil fuels like France (nuclear) and Switzerland (hydroelectric) still emit 6.5 metric tons of CO2 per capita. What Obama sets as a goal for America is at the level of a Belize or a Somalia. Obama is talking about taking Reagan's shining city on the hill and turning it into a little house on the prairie.
Poster Comment: What Obama sets as a goal for America is at the level of a Belize or a Somalia. Somalia doesn't even have a functional government. This might not be a bad thing - crash the country and let the warlords rule!
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#1. To: mirage (#0)
Only when he's talking to white people; he speaks homie equally well.
If you will go along with me we'll travel with the tide Obama is right about one thing - McCain's gas tax holiday is a stupid economic idea. The gas prices will go right back up to what they were without the "holiday" as consumption goes up, so you pay as much as before at the pump. But the refineries and oil companies get to pocket the difference, which was probably McCain's goal all along. But it's a cheap vote-getter, and that's all that counts.
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