All environmental issues can be solved with money--except global warming

The inescapable conclusion of alarmist rhetoric is that for us to stop global warming, the developing world will have to stop developing.

As a liberal Democrat that is unacceptable to me. I'm glad the science is on the skeptic's side, pace what the alarmists (and even the administrations's new members) say. But, it's also why I support green technology and investment--because we will need to help developing countries grow more cleanly. It's not just CO2 that gets emitted, and there's no reason that people have to die in the future from pollution we can prevent today. And locally generated clean energy makes it less likely that the money developing countries need will get shipped to oil plutocracies.

But at the end of the day, the rhetoric from some of the alarmists sounds like they just want us to stop having a good life--and global warming is just as good an excuse as any for them to push for it.

Hot Air » Blog Archive » Are Democrats overreaching on cap-and-trade?

Barack Obama successfully flipped key Rust Belt states for the first time in decades in November, in part because he started selling himself in the general election as a post-partisan moderate who understood the need for the coal economy. Moderate Democrats, especially those who rode in on those coattails, know that they can’t get re-elected if they drive coal production and use out of business, and hike energy costs so high that families can’t afford to keep their houses heated and lit. The imposition of cap-and-trade as envisioned by Waxman and Markey will do both.

That could give the Republicans a convenient rally point for the midterms, and history provides an example. In 1993, Bill Clinton made the mistake of thinking that he had a mandate to nationalize the American health-care system, and put Hillary in charge of an elite team to reorder a huge sector of the American economy. Americans responded by throwing Democrats out of Congress, giving Republicans — who wisely focused on free-market principles and limited government — control of the House for the first time in over 40 years in the midterms.