Via Hot Air Headlines comes this tacit admission that all of that stuff about global warming that Obama pontificated about at his last Inauguration? Yeah, that was just what we call pillow talk, baby: “White House spokesman Jay Carney Jan. 23 deflated environmentalists’ hope of a major federal program to counter climate change, by declaring that the ‘we have no intention of proposing a carbon tax.'” Shocking, I know: truly, truly shocking… that Carney was being so uncharacteristically blunt and coherent. I can only assume that he has the flu – it’s a bad year for it – and the drugs are making Jay Carney talk and act all funny.
Anyway, this part is particularly interesting:
“I think the President has long supported congressional action on climate change,” Carney said Jan. 22. But “he looks at [climate control] in a more holistic way, and he will move forward in implementing some of the [regulatory and spending] actions that he took in the first term,” he said.
“Holistic” is, of course, Democratic Beltway for “vague and indeterminate;” it’s the term that lefty politicians use when they want to position themselves to be able to take credit for random favorable events while at the same time ensuring that they’re never going to take the blame for random unfavorable ones. And, honestly? There are worse sins in the political lexicon; not every uncharitable thing that a Democratic politician does is a horrible attack on the very pillars of the Republic. Especially when what they’re doing ends up leaving professional environmental activists sitting at the poker table and vaguely wondering why they still can’t figure out who the sucker is.
Moe Lane
PS: If I was still a Democrat, and if I advising the President, and if I thought that he’d listen to me, right now I’d be telling him that this is the time to smack the anti-fracking crowd in the chops by going gangbusters on energy production. Natural gas, Keystone pipeline, wide-open offshore drilling expansion, limited ANWR drilling expansion, ending green energy subsidies, sitting on the EPA’s bad habit of finding obscure critters for the purposes of mischief: basically, get the heck out of the way of the people who will happily make the money Barack Obama needs made in order to get this country’s economy off of neutral. Alas for the country and my consulting fees*, Barack Obama’s not smart enough to know when to turn advantage into rout.
*Which are largely theoretical anyway, although I’d be happy to discuss terms and contracts. The kids aren’t going to be part-time students forever, after all.
I read ‘holistic’ as ‘Democrats are going to hire Dirk Gently’.
We were robbed out of a great show.
Wow, bummer, I hadn’t heard that they had made a TV series out of Dirk Gently.
I keep hoping beyond hope that we’ll get a Restaurant At The End Of The Universe movie eventually.
As we saw with the first term, Obama doesn’t need legislation to create problems. No direct carbon tax per se but alot of rules and regs through the various cabinet posts. All under the guise of clean air/water.
It’s a lot easier to have the EPA start imposing regulations limiting CO2 if you’re making public statements against that type of thing. Especially if you’ve got a compliant press that’s eager to point to what you’ve said, over what you’re actually doing.
I think this makes the attempt of a carbon tax (direct or indirect) more likely.