~Global~Sophists

Victor Davis Hanson hit a home run… again:

In classical Athens, public life became dominated by clever and smart-sounding sophists. These mellifluous “really wise guys” made money and gained influence by their rhetorical boasts to “prove” the most amazing “thinkery” that belied common sense.

We are living in a new age of sophism — but without a modern equivalent of Socrates to remind the public just how silly our highly credentialed and privileged new rhetoricians can often sound.

Take California, which is struggling with a near-record wet and snowy winter. Flooding spreads in the lowlands; snow piles up in the Sierras.

In February 2009, Nobel Laureate and Energy Secretary Steven Chu pontificated without evidence that California farms would dry up and blow away, inasmuch as 90 percent of the annual Sierra snowpack would disappear. Yet long-term studies of the central Sierra snowpack show average snow levels unchanged over the last 90 years. Many California farms are drying up — but from government’s, not nature’s, irrigation cutoffs.

England is freezing and snowy. But that’s odd, since global warming experts assured that the end of English snow was on the horizon. Australia is now flooding — despite predictions that its impending new droughts meant it could not sustain its present population. The New York Times just published an op-ed assuring the public that the current record cold and snow are proof of global warming. In theory, they could be, but one wonders: what, then, would record winter heat and drought prove?

In response to these unexpected symptoms of blizzards and deluges, climate physicians offer changing diagnoses. “Global change” has superseded “global warming.” After these radically cold winters, the next replacement appears to be “climate chaos.” Yet if next December is neither too hot nor too cold, expect to hear about the doldrum dangers of “climate calm.”

In 2009, brilliant economists in the Obama administration — Peter Orszag, Larry Summers and Christina Romer — assured us that record trillion-plus budget defects were critical to prevent stalled growth and 10 percent unemployment. For nearly two years we have experienced both, but now with an addition $3 trillion in national debt. All three have quietly either returned to academia or Wall Street.

There is also a new generation of young, sophistic bloggers who offer their wisdom from the New York-Washington corridor. They are usually graduates of America’s elite colleges and navigate in an upscale urban landscape. One, the Washington Post’s 26-year-old Ezra Klein, recently scoffed to his readers that a bothersome U.S. Constitution was “100 years old” and had “no binding power on anything.”

…(read more)…


California Battered by Record Flooding Rains, Snowfall
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“BP is Going to Help Us Save the World” ~ Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu

Pretty soon we will all be dressing like the Buck Rogers TV show:

Oh my! These guys are killing me… with laughter! This is a rockin’ article by BIG GOVERNMENT – Thanks:

While the White House really, really wants you believe that they have their boot on the neck of BP, it turns out that a key Administration official had his head inserted somewhere else just three short years ago. Do you think NOBEL LAUREATE (and Secretary of Energy) Steven Chu still thinks BP is going to help save the world?

 

This is one of the ironies of the disaster in the Gulf. From all available evidence, BP is as committed as anyone to the “comprehensive energy reform” agenda of the White House. No doubt this reflects both political realism and market opportunism on their part, but BP’s 2009 “Road Map for America’s Energy Future” could have been written by John Kerry. Higher energy prices, cap and trade? Bring it on, says BP.

And this isn’t a recent shift on BP’s part. Here’s embattled BP Chairman Tony Hayward back in June 2007:

From BP’s perspective, the evidence that climate change is happening, and that it is manmade, is mounting all the time. As the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has found, the evidence is almost overwhelming. We could wait until the science is 100% certain, but BP believes that, as an energy company, it has a duty to act pre-emptively. When you balance the likely impacts of not taking action against the real opportunities that exist to take action, it is difficult to believe that humanity will not move towards a solution to climate change…

We need to ensure that the costs of emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are included in the price we pay for everything – whether it be a television, a train journey, or switching on a light – all should reflect the cost of emissions in their price.

This can be achieved through a Cap and Trade system, taxation, or regulation.

So it makes perfect sense that back in 2007 Steven Chu and UC Berkeley would be more than happy to accept a $500 million investment from BP to form the Energy BioSciences Institute. The relationship between Chu and BP was so cozy in fact that Chu subsequently brought on BP’s Chief Scientist Steve Koonin as an undersecretary at the Department of Energy.

My guess is that this history – and these relationships – played a part in the Administration’s initial confusion over whether BP was a “partner” in the effort to resolve the Gulf spill. Because for many within the Administration BP had been one of the good guys.

This also explains why BP has been so willing to prostrate themselves in front of their Democratic overlords in Congress and the White House. Here they thought they were trusted partners in saving the world from impending climate disaster. It turns out that their allies in the Obama Administration might soon be the only thing saving BP from the anger of a raging public…and insolvency.

Steven Chu! Saving the Cosmos One Planet At a Time

“It’s A Tough Job,  But Someone Has To Do It”