Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has figured out what to do when you get in deep political trouble at home. You dress up as Al Gore and go to China.
The trouble has been well publicized. She was briefed by the CIA on waterboarding when it was first transpiring, did nothing to object and later told various stories meant to deny her tacit complicity. In short, she lied, and because of witnesses and documentation, got caught.
Reporters loved this story, and it got to where Pelosi had an increasingly hard time revealing how horrible Republicans were. Every time she held a press conference to excoriate them, the reporter bees would be abuzz with stinging questions, and she would look hurt and act confused. Finally, one day, she declared she would deal with the topic no more, and soon enough, she was off to China to do her imitation of Gore preaching about global warming.
Warming poses a "tremendous risk to the security and well-being of our countries" she told the Chinese. "We must work together," she said, and if her hosts were less than enthusiastic about ending economic growth through stringent emission controls, they did have a couple of thoughts.
One was that the United States and other rich countries fork over something like 1 percent of their gross domestic product to aid the cause in lower-level economies. This would be in line with a more ambitious United Nations scheme reported by Fox News. It is that the international body oversee a major shift of world wealth from haves to have-nots as part of a world-wide climate change treaty.
The other Chinese notion was that the United States ought to go much further itself in its fossil-fuel restrictions than any political leader on this side of the Pacific has so far suggested, and that's saying something. The House Energy and Commerce Committee has approved a bill that would lower carbon emissions by as much as 83 percent by 2050, and that falls short of what President Obama wants - an 80 percent reduction by 2050 below what we had in 1990.
Paul Driessen, a policy advisor for the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, has pointed out that getting to the Obama goal would require economic and industrial interventions of a range never before witnessed. That would take us back to the level of emissions we had in 1905 with roughly one-fourth of today's population and no cars, planes or household electricity. At that point, we would have little wealth to send to the Third World, unless you think hybrid cars, wind mills and the like will do the trick.
They almost surely won't, and as an object lesson I give you the compact fluorescent light bulb. This simple device was supposed to be hugely important in helping to make homes less an environmental threat -- Pelosi mentioned to the Chinese how important it was to achieve such an aim.
But a recent New York Times story notes many consumer complaints, such as the fact that some of these bulbs just plain don't work. By the same token, it has been noted in a magazine piece by someone concerned about our environmental future, gas-saving hybrid cars may simply encourage people to take more and longer trips and windmills are of value only when you have wind.
Americans are catching on to all of this. Polls show they put the economy above environmental protection, and I'd guess an alertness to alarmism is a factor along with a recession reminding us of what hard times look like. While embracing Obama's cap-and-trade tax and other extremes may once have seemed politically profitable, the public may be realizing that market-driven incrementalism is a better bet.
If so, what does Pelosi do? Claim she was never in China?
(Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay(at)aol.com.)
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