The Green Albatross Around Obama’s Neck

It’s a trace gas. Does anyone even know what that is anymore?

Barack Obama may believe a lot of things, but he probably doesn’t believe the Sierra Club is key to his re-election. His decision to nix the Keystone XL pipeline will cost him votes but he did it anyway.

For one thing, he’s not given to unrealistic goals. He knows China and India are opening a new coal plant every week. He knows the huge amounts of fossil energy lying at humanity’s feet won’t be abandoned just because an American president says so. He can’t fail to notice that Canada’s oil sands won’t remain undeveloped; the oil will go to the Far East.

Demonstrators for and against the Keystone XL pipeline gather outside Pershing Auditorium near the Capitol in Lincoln, Neb., Sept. 27, 2011.

Mr. Obama also seems enough of a free thinker to entertain the possibility at least that global warming theory may be wrong. In a telling exchange with interviewer Charlie Rose a few years ago, Al Gore was asked to describe the evidence of man’s role in climate change. Each time Mr. Gore recurred to some version of a “consensus of scientists” or “the most respected scientists whose judgment I think is the best.”

The truth is, the theory may be popular, but the evidence has thus far eluded the tens of billions spent on climate science. The temperature data are so noisy that they reveal no pattern connecting rising CO2 in the industrial age with temperature trends. Some say because CO2 is a “greenhouse” gas, shut up, case closed. But the known relationship between carbon and climate doesn’t actually indicate a big reason to worry.

To produce worrisome scenarios, climate models must posit “feedbacks” that magnify the impact of CO2 by 300% to 500%. A cynic notices that these models became especially popular in the ’90s, when measured warming exceeded what could be attributed to CO2, so new fudge was needed to preserve CO2 as the culprit.

The WSJ

Still, let us admire the high-rolling political risk Mr. Obama takes in spurning affordable, strategically convenient energy from Canada. That risk includes, between now and Election Day, looking like a chump if oil prices surge because of the world’s vulnerability to the narrowness of the Strait of Hormuz

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