Wall Street Journal opinion writers target President Obama’s climate plan
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.2500
Republicans are ‘gleeful,’ reports a New York Times article , in the belief that President Obama’s new climate plan means victories in the 2014 congressional elections. At the Wall Street Journal in the week following the president’s 25 June climate speech, opinion contributors energetically outlined talking points for achieving those hoped-for successes.
The president described plans to cause carbon emissions to be reduced at power plants, to push renewable energy, and to help states and localities prepare for consequences of human-caused climate disruption. Opinions about his speech and plan ensued immediately and widely, with the WSJ editors publishing an editorial condemning the plan within hours.
The editors denounced the ‘carbonated’ president’s speech as ‘grandiose,’ ‘surreal,’ ‘threatening,’ and showing ‘contempt for democratic consent.’ They wrote: ‘Some 12 million Americans still can’t find work, real wages have fallen for five years, three-fourths of Americans now live paycheck to check, and the economy continues to plod along four years into a quasi-recovery. But there was the President in tony Georgetown, threatening more energy taxes and mandates that will ensure fewer jobs, still lower incomes and slower growth.’ The editors charged that the Environmental Protection Agency will ‘take coal to 0%' in US electricity production.
Soon the WSJ ran six letters in response, all supporting the headline ‘Obama’s carbon policy is folly and misprioritization.’ The first letter opened by declaring that the editorial ‘nails the important issues of excessive power from an unaccountable president and bureaucracy and the consequences that follow.’ Readers declared further that the administration is ‘waging a war against the future’ and that
* The country ‘should wait for a stronger economy and broader consensus.’ * The president acted out of mere self-interest and ‘wants those who provide energy and pay taxes, and who actually produce the power to fuel the toys he and his elite friends enjoy, tossed to the unemployment line.’ * Congress should thwart the president by explicitly prohibiting government agencies from treating carbon dioxide as a pollutant. * Other nations will build coal plants regardless of US policies.
Other WSJ opinion writers joined the discussion. In a sharply satirical column , Holman W. Jenkins Jr argued that instead of impoverishing the country through ‘futile gestures,’ the president should nurture free-market economic dynamism that could actually cope with climate change. In ‘Best of the Web ,’ the regularly sarcastic James Taranto recalled from the speech the president’s own sarcastic line about a climate-denying Flat Earth Society, then pointed out that an actual Flat Earth Society exists—and that its president believes in anthropogenic climate change. In an online opinion column , former Delaware governor Pete du Pont charged that the president pursues an anti-energy agenda, partly by seeing energy within environmental rather than economic framing, and partly by perceiving that federal regulations and subsidies stimulate energy advances. In a Political Diary entry , Stephen Moore, a WSJ editorial board member and economics writer, observed that members of Congress are ‘overjoyed that Mr. Obama is back to recycling the kinds of green energy policies that voters rejected in his first term.’
A WSJ headline writer summarized a Potomac Watch column from Kimberley A. Strassel: ‘The president’s environmentalist base has him boxed in’ on the issue of approving or rejecting the Keystone pipeline, a topic the president addressed in his climate speech. Strassel, like her colleagues, saw the speech as ‘grandiose.’ She expressed amusement at the president’s Keystone political dilemma:
The president’s foot-dragging on what should have been a straightforward pipeline approval has allowed the left to elevate Keystone into a litmus test of his climate bona fides. Environmentalists are clear: No matter how sweeping his other climate promises, nothing will make up for the approval of Keystone.
At the same time, more than 70% of Americans support Keystone. Many of them will view the president’s decision as a litmus test of his commitment to affordable energy, the economy and jobs. A rejection would be a gift to Republicans, who would brutalize Democrats in next year’s midterms.
In a second editorial , ‘The ‘social cost of carbon’ gambit,’ the WSJ warned somewhat bitterly that as part of a ‘vast new anticarbon-energy agenda,’ the president intends to use the federal bureaucracy to rig calculations of carbon’s real costs. ‘If the cost can be whatever some regulator claims, based on pressure from some green outfit or competing energy lobby,’ the editors cautioned, ‘the government has the power to put any fossil-fuel industry out of business whenever it feels like it.’
They added, ‘All of this is profoundly undemocratic. Congress has never legislated that there are social costs to carbon emissions, much less how to measure them. Mr. Obama couldn’t pass his anticarbon agenda through Congress in his first two years even with a Democratic supermajority. He’s now trying to impose it by regulation.’ The editors declared, ‘Someone needs to impose a political cost on Mr. Obama’s arbitrary rule by regulation.’
In a video accompanying the online version of the editorial, a WSJ editor asked whether the president’s climate plan is a good idea or ‘a train wreck in the making.’ She also wondered whether the Republican Party will get some coaching on how to use social media to succeed politically.
But almost none of this week’s worth of commentary addressed or even mentioned climate science, though the original editorial did recycle a ubiquitous charge in complaining that the president ‘never explained how his plan will reduce warming, or why climate models have failed to predict the warming slowdown of the last dozen or so years.’
A blog posting at the Guardian commented on the general ubiquity of this dog-that-didn’t-bark phenomenon among the politicians whom the WSJ supports concerning climate:
Given that nearly 70 percent of Republicans in Congress and 90 percent of the party’s congressional leadership deny the reality of human-caused global warming , you might expect them to attack President Obama’s climate plan on scientific grounds. On the contrary, Republican politicians have critiqued President Obama’s plan almost entirely on the economics . Even Senator James Inhofe, who wrote an entire book based around the absurd premise that ‘global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,’ did not even touch upon climate science when responding to the climate plan .
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.