How we know that human-caused global warming is a joke

Our leaders tell us that the planet is threatened with destruction by global warming, caused by human emissions of CO2. This is, they insist, an unprecedented crisis. President Obama has instructed us to turn our thermostats down (in the Winter), and the Defense Department has made combatting global warming a prime military priority.

And yet…our purported leaders have never seemed inclined to rein in their own carbon dioxide producing activities, whether it be jetting around the world or enjoying a wintertime White House suited to growing orchids. If we didn’t know better, we might think that global warming hysteria is a hoax designed to scare voters into approving of vast subsidies for politically connected “green” energy companies.

Glenn Reynolds has often said that he will believe that global warming is a crisis when the climate alarmists start acting like it is a crisis. In today’s USA Today, he enlarges on the theme:

[T]he people who talk about saving the planet the most seem to have the biggest carbon footprint. But I have some ideas for fixing that.

In this, I’m inspired by Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Tex., who noticed something peculiar recently. It seems that EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy, who spends a lot of time telling Americans that they need to drive less, fly less, and in general reduce their consumption of fossil fuels, also flies home to see her family in Boston “almost every weekend”; the head of the Clean Air Division, Janet McCabe, does the same, but she heads to Indianapolis. In air mileage alone, the Daily Caller News Foundation estimates that McCarthy surpasses the carbon footprint of an ordinary American. …

We’re constantly told by the administration that “climate change” is a bigger threat than terrorism. And as even President Obama has noted, there’s a great power in setting an example: “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.”

Likewise, it’s hard to expect Americans to accept changes to their own lifestyles when the very people who are telling them that it’s a crisis aren’t acting like it’s a crisis. So I have a few suggestions to help bring home the importance of reduced carbon footprints at home and abroad:

1. Extend Smith’s bill to cover the entire federal government. We have Skype now, and Facetime. There’s no reason to fly to meetings. I’d let the President keep Air Force One for official travel, but subject to a requirement that absolutely no campaign activity or fundraisers take place on any trips in which the president travels officially.

2. Obama makes a great point about setting the thermostat at 72 degrees. We should ban air conditioning in federal buildings. We won two world wars without air conditioning our federal employees. Nothing in their performance over the last 50 or 60 years suggests that A/C has improved things. Besides, The Washington Post informs us that A/C is sexist, and that Europeans think it’s stupid.

3. In fact, we should probably ban air conditioning in the entire District of Columbia, to ensure that members of Congress, etc. won’t congregate in lobbyists’ air-conditioned offices.

There is lots more. You have heard about claims of rising sea levels? The weird thing about that is that property values in coastal areas are rising rapidly rather than falling. It is almost as though people don’t really believe the global warming pieties they keep spouting. (I mean, why did Al Gore buy an $8 million oceanfront mansion?) So maybe we should do something about that:

[I]t’s not just the government. We’ve been told that global warming will cause rising sea levels that will inundate coastal cities and produce devastation. I think we need to get ahead of that problem by encouraging people to move away from the coasts before things get bad. We can do that by a steadily-increasing tax on coastal property that will discourage people from moving to, or staying in, coastal cities. Sure, this will hurt property values in Boston or New York, but we all have to do our share.

Heh. More at the link. Let’s not forget Leonardo DiCaprio, who–if we take him seriously–is doing more than almost anyone else to destroy the planet. But when has anyone ever taken Leonardo DiCaprio seriously? Or, for that matter, Al Gore? Actions, as some wise person once said, speak louder than words.