Obama - the Al Capone of Climate Change - launches his next assault on democracy, the Constitution and the US economy

by James Delingpole

There are two main reasons why President Obama stands a polar bear's chance in hell of imposing a binding carbon emissions reduction treaty on the US in the name of combating catastrophic, unprecedented man-made global warming.

1. It will kill the jobs, prosperity and personal freedom on which the American dream was built.
2. There is absolutely no hard evidence that catastrophic, unprecedented man-made global warming is anything more than a figment of the President's and his greenie chums' warped imaginations.
Fortunately for all the rent-seeking one percenters, bent climate 'scientists', green activists, 'clean' 'energy' lobbyists, environment correspondents and professional victim groups who depend on the "global warming" scare for their livelihood, the president has hit on the perfect solution.
Obama plans to bypass the democratic process, override all those pesky checks and balances, and railroad through that legislation anyway by appealing to the higher authority of the United Nations.
According to the New York Times:

President Obama’s climate negotiators are devising what they call a “politically binding” deal that would “name and shame” countries into cutting their emissions. The deal is likely to face strong objections from Republicans on Capitol Hill and from poor countries around the world, but negotiators say it may be the only realistic path.
“If you want a deal that includes all the major emitters, including the U.S., you cannot realistically pursue a legally binding treaty at this time,” said Paul Bledsoe, a top climate change official in the Clinton administration who works closely with the Obama White House on international climate change policy.
Lawmakers in both parties on Capitol Hill say there is no chance that the currently gridlocked Senate will ratify a climate change treaty in the near future, especially in a political environment where many Republican lawmakers remain skeptical of the established science of human-caused global warming.

That article provides a useful insight into the mentality of the kind of people who are pushing for this legislation.
First, they are determined to misrepresent this as a party political issue - in which ignorant, ideologically motivated, Big-Oil-funded Republican "denialists" are wilfully and perversely obstructing the perfectly sensible climate policies fully supported by all Democrats. This wasn't true in 1997 when the Senate voted down the first attempt at a binding international climate treaty - Kyoto - by 95 to 0. It isn't true today.
Second, it refers to "established climate science" as if - to quote Al Gore - the science on global warming were "settled." This was a risible notion even at the height of the global warming scare back in 1992 during the Rio Earth Summit when for a period global mean temperatures were actually rising but when scientists couldn't agree why. It is even less plausible now, given that as all half-way serious scientists - alarmists and realists, alike - now acknowledge there has been no global warming in over 17 years.
So what, exactly, does the President think he is playing at?
Simple. He has been casting around for a legacy issue on which his disastrous presidency can be judged and realized that neither his handling of the economy, nor his universal healthcare program, nor his foreign policy are quite going to pass muster with future historians. So instead he has decided to stake his reputation on climate change.
Climate change, for a man of Obama's principles, has many merits.
First - if he is right, which unfortunately he isn't - it will enable him to go down in history as the man who saved the world from the Greatest Threat It Has Ever Known.
Second, it is the perfect way of shoring up his left-wing voter base while simultaneously rewarding all those rich liberal donors who have bankrolled his presidency. From Solyndra and BrightSource to the monstrously corrupt wind industry, Obama's cronies have been enabled, by presidential fiat, to make many billions of dollars - much of this money funneled straight from the pockets of US taxpayers, either in the form of stimulus loans for ventures which certainly would never have survived in a free market or in the form of compulsory subsidy payments for "clean" energy.
This crony capitalism is one of the blackest marks against the Obama administration. These "clean energy" businesses would never survive in a free market because there are so many better, cheaper and, indeed, more environmentally friendly ways of producing energy, such as shale gas. If the climate change scare were to end, these Potemkin industries would collapse (those that haven't already done so) in a trice. Which is why it is so imperative for all those rent-seekers with their snouts in the green trough that the climate change remains a live issue for as long as possible. And why Obama will live in infamy as the instigator of corrupt parallel economy not unakin to the one established by fellow Chicagoans like Al Capone during Prohibition - but on a much bigger scale.
The overwhelmingly skeptical US public is proving very unhelpful to Obama. In survey after survey, they fail to be nearly as concerned about global warming as Obama would like them to be. But his friends at the United Nations are proving much more sympathetic. It is the UN which hosts all the annual climate conferences, like the one in Paris next year, where Obama plans to slip through his new legislation. It is the UN which created the Intergovernmental on Climate Change (IPCC) - the heavily politicized body responsible for all those scary reports which insist, against all evidence, that climate change becomes a greater threat with each passing year.
It is no coincidence that just before news broke of Obama's plans for a new international climate agreement, the IPCC leaked to the media drafts of a "synthesis" of its most recent assessment report. The "synthesis" is replete with dire warnings:

'Continued emission of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and long-lasting changes in all components of the climate system, increasing the likelihood of severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems.'

The word "risk" is used 351 times in just 127 pages.
But there's a reason for this, as Breitbart London reported when the initial reports were released, here, here and here. All the scariest predictions come not in the body of the scientific assessment reports, but rather in the sexed-up summaries produced by spin-doctors for the purpose of galvanizing policy-makers into action. The summaries, in other words, have very little to do with current scientific understanding of climate change. Rather, they are designed to give people like Barack Obama the fig-leaf of justification they so desperately need to reward their liberal cronies and burnish their green credentials while bombing the global economy back to the dark ages.