Trump Derangement Syndrome: Yes, They Have All Gone Completely Insane

How long is your memory?  For example, can you remember as far back as a month ago?  Way back on June 15, the big, big news was that five sources, all anonymous, had leaked to the Washington Post that, at the end of a meeting with then-FBI Director Jim Comey, President Trump had cleared the room and then asked Comey to go easy in his investigation of short-term National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.  Cries of "Obstruction of Justice!" rang out from every corner of elite Washington.  The story completely dominated the news for multiple days.  It fell of course to the Manhattan Contrarian to make the obvious point that the President holds the full prosecutorial discretion power of the government, and under direct grant of power in the Constitution he can order that anyone he wishes not be prosecuted at his complete whim, for any or no reason.  Admittedly, I wasn't the only one who made that obvious point, although the ratio of the insane commenters to the sane ones was at least 10 to one.  But the meme was so ridiculous that it was forgotten within a few days.  By now it seems like ancient history -- although possibly subject to revival by Special Prosecutor Mueller.  (If that happens, we'll really know that the world has gone irredeemably nuts.)

But what is it about humans that, when a few people lose their minds, thousands and millions more join in and mass hysteria ensues?  There have been dozens of examples in my lifetime.  Philip Terzian, in the current issue of the Weekly Standard, helpfully reminds us of "The Great Day-Care Sexual-Abuse Panic" of the 1980s and 90s.  If you aren't old enough to remember back that far, you may not even believe that this possibly could have occurred.  The case that started it all came out of the McMartin pre-school in Manhattan Beach, California:

A generation of preschoolers had [allegedly] been subject to all manner of sexual degradation and physical abuse, including rape; small animals had been ritually sacrificed and children fed their blood; there had been field trips to local cemeteries to dig up corpses. Peggy McMartin Buckey was accused of “drilling” the limbs of students, and her 26-year-old son was alleged to have levitated inside the schoolhouse.  In retrospect, of course, the details were not just lurid but ludicrous.

And in the wake of the McMartin case, dozens more such cases with remarkably similar allegations, involving hundreds of defendants, were brought around the country.  I can remember cases from places as disparate as Malden, Massachusetts, Wenatchee, Washington, and Edenton, North Carolina.  Reading articles about these situations at the time, I could only shake my head at the insanity, and wonder when -- if ever -- people would return to their senses.  Over time, all or nearly all of the cases fell apart, and the defendants were exonerated -- some having served jail sentences in excess of 20 years.

The blunt fact is that the “satanic” day-care ritual-abuse cases of the 1980s and early ’90s were our contemporary version of the Salem witch trials of the 1690s; and since human nature tends to be immutable, they featured many of the same symptoms across the centuries: mass hysteria, impressionable and unreliable child-witnesses, prosecutorial zeal and abuse, a mob tendency to prey on the hapless and defenseless.   

So dare I mention "Russia"?  This one is right up there as perhaps the most pervasive mass hysterias of my lifetime.  The only real rival is catastrophic climate change hysteria.  After now about 8 months of non-stop "Russia collusion" stories and literally nothing emerging as evidence to support them, yesterday the majority of the top stories on RealClearPolitics were more of same.  Donald Trump, Jr. met with a Russian operative in June 2016 hoping to get some dirt on Hillary Clinton!  That just has to be a crime!  How about TREASON!!!!!  I can choose from among dozens of the completely unhinged, but for now I'll pick on Ruth Marcus, writing in the Washington Post on Tuesday, "The Donald Trump Jr. emails could hardly be more incriminating."

By explicitly linking the source of the information to the Russian government and by describing it as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump,” Goldstone made crystal clear that he was offering the campaign a chance to collude — yes, that word is appropriate here — with a foreign government to “incriminate Hillary” Clinton and help win the presidency.  By reacting as he did, eagerly accepting the offer of this foreign aid, Trump Jr. made clear that he was a willing part of this incipient conspiracy — and yes, that word is appropriate here, too. “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer,” he responded, within minutes of receiving the inquiry.

Hey, Ruth, can you bother to tell us what is the supposed crime?  I think that after too many years at the Post poor Ruth is under the impression that "conspiracy" is a crime without any underlying wrongdoing, at least as long as the perpetrator is a Republican.  How about conspiracy to buy a vanilla ice cream cone at the DQ?

For a sane take on the situation, I recommend Eugene Volokh's post "Can it be a crime to do opposition research by asking foreigners for information?"  To be fair to them, Eugene's site is affiliated with the Washington Post as well.  Most important nugget:

Americans have the right to receive information even from speakers who are entirely abroad. See Lamont v. Postmaster General, 381 U.S. 301 (1965). Can Americans — whether political candidates or anyone else — really be barred from asking questions of foreigners, just because the answers might be especially important to voters?

The question answers itself.  Eugene goes on to eviscerate arguments made by various deranged TDS sufferers about such information being a "thing of value" under the statute that restricts campaign contributions from foreigners.  If you are interested in the subject, you might want to read the whole thing.  But frankly, at this point I would recommend that you don't waste any more of your valuable time on this Trump/Russia hysteria.

Law professor Alan Dershowitz also weighed in at Newsmax on Tuesday, and then in an appearance on Neil Cavuto's program on Wednesday night, as reported in the Washington Times:  

Mr. Dershowitz . . . said he doesn’t “see any crime at this point” in Mr. Trump Jr.’s behavior.  “Even if the worst case scenario as far as we know now, is the Russians get in touch with Trump Jr. and say, ‘we have some dirt on Hillary Clinton, come we’ll give it to you’ and he goes and gets the information. That’s what the New York Times did with the Pentagon Papers, that’s what the Washington Post did and many other newspaper did with information with Snowden and Manning,” he told Newsmax Tuesday. “You are allowed legally to use material that was obtained illegally as long as you had nothing to do with the illegal nature of obtaining the information, so at the moment I see no legal jeopardy for Trump Jr.”

Alan, you are doing your best to keep your friends from making fools of themselves, and you're getting nowhere.  Maybe you need a new group of friends.

Keeping Up With The Manhattan Contrarian: Wind And Solar Power Don't Work

Here's the big headline in the middle of the front page of today's print edition of the Wall Street Journal:  "The Energy Shortage No One Saw Coming."  (Admittedly, the online headline is different.)  Sub-headline:  "Australia, a major global gas exporter, can't keep the lights on in Adelaide."  For those who don't know, Adelaide is the capital and largest city of the Australian state of South Australia, which occupies about a seventh of the land area of Australia in the south-central part of the continent.

No one saw it coming?  Could they have missed the Manhattan Contrarian post of October 6, 2016?  The title was "Pay Attention To South Australia."  The specific subject was that South Australia had put on a big push to become the world leader in getting its electricity from wind and solar sources, and in the process had made itself hugely vulnerable to power shortages and blackouts:

[O]n September 28[, 2016], the entire state of South Australia was plunged into a power blackout in the midst of a major rain and wind storm.  Those who follow the subject know that South Australia has made a big thing in recent years of turning itself into the world leader of "renewable" energy, principally from the wind.  Immediately prior to the blackout, SA was getting some 50% or more of its electricity from its wind farms.  I have written several posts here (for example, this one) about how difficult it will be to make a fully-functioning 24/7/365 electricity system for a modern economy when production from intermittent sources like wind gets above about 30% of total electricity supply.

So how's that romance with intermittent wind and solar energy going, South Australia?  From the WSJ:

A nationwide heat wave in Australia [in February] drove temperatures above 105 degrees Fahrenheit around the city of Adelaide on the southern coast. As air-conditioning demand soared, regulators called on Pelican Point, a local gas-fueled power station running at half capacity, to crank up.  It couldn’t. The plant’s operator said it wasn’t able to get enough natural gas quickly to run its turbines fully. At 6:03 p.m., regulators cut power to 90,000 Adelaide homes to prevent a wider blackout.  Resource-rich Australia has an energy crisis. . . .      

You won't be surprised to learn why the WSJ thinks that "no one saw this coming."  The theme of the article is that Australia produces lots of gas, but then exports most of it, thus leading to unexpected shortages at home.  But there is barely a mention that South Australia has created its own crisis, in a way that everybody should have seen coming, by making a huge push to increase reliance on wind and solar sources of power, without ever thinking through how such intermittent sources can be integrated into an electricity system that must produce reliable power 24/7/365.  In a long article of several thousand words, this is all they say about the subject:

As exports increased from new LNG facilities in eastern Australia, some state governments let aging coal plants close and accelerated a push toward renewable energy for environmental concerns. That left the regions more reliant on gas for power, especially when intermittent sources such as wind and solar weren’t sufficient. 

This is an embarrassment for the Journal.  Has environmental religion penetrated even the Wall Street Journal's news pages to such an extent that they can't give an honest account of what is going on?  Sure the gas plant's unavailability that day was the immediate precipitating cause of the particular problem.  But what goes unmentioned is that the South Australians have painted themselves into a corner where one after another of such situations is inevitable, and if they didn't see it coming they are really blinded by their environmental faith.  First they increased renewable capacity, particularly wind, to the point of getting over 50% of their power from wind when it blows.  Then they forced closure of all coal capacity.  Then they prioritized the power from wind in the dispatch scheme, leaving the few remaining natural gas plants sitting idle much of the time and having no clue when they might be required to crank up at a moment's notice -- a regime under which the gas plant operators can't make money.  And finally, they claim to be "surprised" when the wind suddenly stops blowing and the gas plant operators can't or won't come on at a few minutes' notice.  Why should the gas plant operators contract to buy gas that they may never need at prices that they can't recoup?

To be fair, I'm not the only one who predicted that the push for wind and solar was going to leave South Australia subject to regular periodic shortages and blackouts.  For example, Australian blogger Joanne Nova has been all over it.  See for example, this post from March 29:

The [South Australia] Blackout on Sept 28 last year was an accident waiting to happen, and it wasn’t storm damage to lines that caused it.  The blackout would not have happened if wind power had not been so dominant.  The transition to a 35% wind powered system left the SA grid very vulnerable.

Well, at least this WSJ story was not as stupid as the New York Times this morning wetting its pants over the discovery that Donald Trump, Jr. once talked to some Russian.

Looks Like Global Action On "Climate Change" Is Dead

As a basic starting point, I suggest that on any story of political importance in the New York Times, the truth is probably exactly the opposite of what they report.  Consider that lead story on the front page of yesterday's Sunday print edition: "World Leaders Move Forward on Climate Change, Without U.S."   Scary!  The U.S. is getting completely isolated from the world community!

In a final communiqué at the conclusion of the Group of 20 summit meeting in Hamburg, Germany, the nations took “note” of Mr. Trump’s decision to abandon the pact and “immediately cease” efforts to enact former President Barack Obama’s pledge of curbing greenhouse gas emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.  But the other 19 members of the group broke explicitly with Mr. Trump in their embrace of the international deal, signing off on a detailed policy blueprint outlining how their countries could meet their goals in the pact.   

You can definitely count on Pravda not to look into what these other 19 countries have promised to do and let you know if there is any substance to it.  So the hard work falls once again to the Manhattan Contrarian.  If you just Google the letters "INDC" ("Intended Nationally Determined Contribution") along with the name of a country, you can find out exactly what that country has promised to do as part of the Paris Agreement.  So let's take a look at what a few of the big countries are up to.

• China.  We already know that answer from my post just last week.  China, through its companies, is planning to build over the course of the next decade or so well more than double the number of coal power plants that the U.S. has today.  Its INDC calls for its proceeding to increase carbon emissions as much as it wants through 2030, and only then (when everyone in China presumably has electricity and a couple of cars)  to level things off.  By that time its emissions will probably be at least triple those of the U.S.
• India.  India's INDC openly admits that it intends to increase its electricity supply by more than triple between now and 2030, with no commitment whatsoever as to how much of that will come from fossil fuels.  Oh, they say that they plan to lower the "emissions intensity" of their energy generation, and greatly expand (useless) wind and solar capacity, as well as nuclear.  Whoopee!
• Indonesia.   These things get more comical the more of them you read.  The first thing you learn in reading Indonesia's INDC is that the large majority of its emissions come from burning down the rain forest ("most emissions (63%) are the result of land use change and peat and forest fires") and very little from using fossil fuels for energy ("fossil fuels contribute[e] approximately 19% of total emissions").  So they'll promise to burn down less of the rain forest, and nothing whatsoever as to reducing use of fossil fuels for energy.  Their (completely illusory) "reduction target" of 29% by 2030 is not against a fixed amount of past usage (like the United States' benchmark of 2005 emissions), but rather is against what they call a "business as usual" scenario of projected future emissions that are a multiple of today's.
• Russia.  What, you didn't know that Russia was a member of the G20?  What is the chance that Russia would make an honest promise about emissions reductions?  Their INDC calls for reducing emissions by 25-30% below 1990 by 2030.  Impressive!  Wait a minute!  The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.  Then they closed down all that inefficient Soviet industry.  According to a graph at Climate Action Tracker here, by 2000 their emissions were down by almost 40% from the 1990 level, and they have only crept up a little from there since.  In other words, Russia's supposed "commitments" again represent increases from today's level of emissions.  Yet another total scam.
• Germany.  Germany is part of the supposed EU commitment to reduce emissions by 40% below 1990 levels by 2030.  Oh, but now that Germany has gotten its electricity production from renewables up to about 30%, it seems that it has hit a wall, and its carbon emissions have actually gone up for both of the last two years (2015 and 2016), according to Clean Energy Wire.  Exactly how do they plan to meet their goal?  Excellent question.

In other words, this whole thing is a total farce.  The G20 "climate" thing -- let alone New York Times reporting on same -- is nothing more than an international effort to bully the United States into crippling its economy while everyone else goes right ahead and uses fossil fuels exactly as they please.  Whatever else you might say about President Trump, he seems to be unusually immune to this kind of bullying.  

Without the U.S. in the game, all the biggest players are going to be increasing emissions, not decreasing them.  In reality, the whole "global action on climate change" thing is completely dead.  

I can't leave this subject without mentioning this great quote from former Obama State Department official Andrew Light:

[T]he U.S. has isolated itself on climate change once again, and is falling back while all other major economies step up and compete in the clean energy marketplace created by the Paris Agreement estimated to be worth over 20 trillion dollars,” said Andrew Light, a senior climate change adviser at the State Department under Mr. Obama.

As you can see, knowledge of basic economics was not a requirement to work at the Obama State Department.  Andrew apparently has no understanding that the forced use of less efficient energy sources destroys wealth.  

The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part XV

It's been several months since I've added a post to this series, since this one back on February 22.  There's good reason for that.  With the breakup of last year's big El Niño, global temperatures declined significantly.  The latest global temperature anomaly from the UAH satellite temperature series is +0.21 deg C for June 2017 -- down a remarkable 0.65 deg C from the February 2016 global anomaly of +0.86 deg C.  The Northern Hemisphere anomaly dropped even more, by 0.86 deg C, from +1.19 deg C to only +0.32 deg C.  Those declines represent well more than half of the entire warming that had been present in the satellite record at the peak of the El Niño, and bring recent temperatures below those recorded during many months in the 1980s and 90s.  It's no wonder that the breathless press releases from NASA and NOAA trumpeting "hottest [April, May, June, etc.] ever!" have at least temporarily ceased.

But the lack of "record warming" announcements coming out of the government has not stopped independent researchers from further examining the surface temperature records from NASA and NOAA (and also from a British group called Hadley CRU that gets its starting data from the same source) to try to quantify and understand the "adjustments" that continue to be made.  Readers of my series know that NASA, NOAA and Hadley CRU report global temperatures derived from a different source from the satellites, namely a network of land- and ocean-based surface weather stations known as the Global Historical Climate Network, or GHCN.  These so-called "surface temperatures" are inherently in need of some ongoing adjustments, to account for things like station moves and nearby urbanization.  But somehow the adjustment process has gotten into the hands of some committed global warming zealots, and next thing you know each round of adjustments seems progressively to make the past cooler and the present warmer, thus always enhancing the apparent warming.  Oh, plus the adjusters refuse to release details of the bases and methodology for the adjustments.  After a few decades of this, reasonable people come to have serious and well-justified doubts about whether the reported warming trends can be trusted.

The latest effort at analyzing the adjustments comes from a team of independent researchers led by James Wallace, and including Joseph D'Aleo and Craig Idso.  Their new Research Report can be found at this link, titled "On the Validity of NOAA, NASA and Hadley CRU Global Average Surface Temperature [GAST] Data & The Validity of EPA’s CO2 Endangerment Finding."  The new Research Report has seven highly qualified peer reviewers identified in the paper itself.  From the Abstract:

In this research report, the most important surface data adjustment issues are identified and past changes in the previously reported historical data are quantified. It was found that each new version of GAST has nearly always exhibited a steeper warming linear trend over its entire history. And, it was nearly always accomplished by systematically removing the previously existing cyclical temperature pattern. This was true for all three entities providing GAST data measurement, NOAA, NASA and Hadley CRU.  

As others have previously noticed, the periodic revisions to GAST data from all three entities have brought with them a systematic cooling of the past and warming of the recent and the present, to a degree that hugely strains credulity.  But the new Wallace, et al., paper takes another step, and examines the equally systematic removal from the surface temperature record of a cyclical pattern widely reflected in raw temperature data from multiple regions.  As the paper notes, if you look at much raw (unadjusted) data, a cyclical pattern is immediately obvious:  temperatures gradually increase from the beginning of records in the late nineteenth century through about 1940; then temperatures decrease through about the 1970s; then the increase resumes through about 2000; and finally temperatures level off through the present.  This cycle results in a temperature peak around 1940, sometimes referred to as the "blip."  The "blip" has long been recognized to be a problem for the hypothesis that human greenhouse gas emissions are the principal control knob for global temperatures, because human emissions had barely begun before 1940 -- when temperatures were increasing -- and then human emissions began to increase sharply from the 1950s to the 1970s -- when temperatures were declining.  Doesn't that significantly undermine the hypothesis?  The successive rounds of adjustments to the surface temperature records have systematically removed this "blip," making for a temperature record seemingly supporting the hypothesis.  Could this possibly be honest?  From the Wallace, et al., paper:

As has been clearly shown in Section IV above, the consequences of the changes made to previously reported historical versions of GAST data have been to virtually eliminate the previously existing cyclical nature of their previously reported trend cycle patterns. The notion that there was a 1930 and 40s warm period followed by a mid-1970 cool period now gets lost in the noise so to speak. 

As just one example from the paper, a comparison of the GAST data from NASA from May 2017 versus May 2008 shows that, in between the issuance of those two versions of the data, nearly all annual mean temperatures from approximately 1920 to 1940 have been reduced by between 0.05 deg C and 0.20 deg C, while nearly all annual mean temperatures from approximately 1980 to 2000 have been increased by between 0.05 deg C and 0.20 deg C.  The obvious effects have been substantially to remove the 1940s "blip" and to strongly enhance the warming trend.  Other data revisions at different points in time have made additional changes to the same effect.  The basis and methodology for these adjustments have never been explained.

Have these adjustments been part of an intentional program to alter data to fit the desired hypothesis -- in other words, classic scientific fraud?  The 2009 Climategate emails give additional evidence.  For example, one of the best known of those emails is the September 27, 2009 message from Tom Wigley of NCAR to Phil Jones, head of Hadley CRU.  In that email, Wigley proposes an intentional effort to reduce the ocean part of the surface record by 0.15 deg C, not to make the record a better representation of reality, but rather to make the evidence fit the narrative.  Excerpts:

So, if we could reduce the [1940s] ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC, then this would be significant for the global mean -- but we'd still have to explain the land blip. I've chosen 0.15 here deliberately. This still leaves an ocean blip, and i think one needs to have some form of ocean blip to explain the land blip (via either some common forcing, or ocean forcing land, or vice versa, or all of these). . . .  My 0.15 adjustment leaves things consistent with this, so you can see where I am coming from. Removing ENSO does not affect this. It would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blip, but we are still left with "why the blip".

From the conclusion of the Wallace, et al., paper:

While the notion that some “adjustments” to historical data might need to be made is not challenged, logically it would be expected that such historical temperature data adjustments would sometimes raise these temperatures, and sometimes lower them. This situation would mean that the impact of such adjustments on the temperature trend line slope is uncertain. However, each new version of GAST has nearly always exhibited a steeper warming linear trend over its entire history.  That was accomplished by systematically removing the previously existing cyclical temperature pattern. This was true for all three entities providing GAST data measurement, NOAA, NASA and Hadley CRU. . . .  

The conclusive findings of this research are that the three GAST data sets are not a valid representation of reality. In fact, the magnitude of their historical data adjustments, that removed their cyclical temperature patterns, are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data. Thus, it is impossible to conclude from the three published GAST data sets that recent years have been the warmest ever – despite current claims of record setting warming.  

The adjustments to the GAST record have been part of a coordinated effort to influence public policy by supporting restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions.  In the United States, the EPA's finding that CO2 constitutes a "danger" to human health and welfare rests on what EPA calls its three "lines of evidence," one of which is the supposedly "record warming" as shown in the GAST data.  Oh, it now seems that the "record warming" is not present in the raw data, but is nothing more than an artifact of adjustments made by government bureaucrats.  The final conclusion of the Wallace, et al., paper:

[S]ince GAST data set validity is a necessary condition for EPA’s GHG/CO2 Endangerment Finding, it too is invalidated by these research findings.      

 On July 6 my co-counsel and I submitted a Supplemental Petition to EPA, citing this new paper, seeking to have EPA reopen and reconsider the Endangerment Finding.  We have called upon EPA to hold hearings on the record and under oath, at which hearings the people who have made the "adjustments" to create supposedly record warming should be called upon to set forth their detailed methods.  It is high time that the people who have made these adjustments justify their handiwork to the American people.

UPDATE, July 9, 2017:  It occurs to me that readers may be interested in this tidbit of information:  That September 27, 2009 email from Wigley to Jones has a cc -- to a guy named Ben Santer.  Do you recognize the name?  He is another "scientist" on the government/taxpayer dime, and another serious global warming zealot, who works at the Livermore Lab in California.  You may have seen his op ed in the Washington Post on June 21, 2017, title "Attention Scott Pruitt: Red teams and blue teams are no way to conduct climate science."  Excerpt:

[C]alls for special teams of investigators are not about honest scientific debate. They are dangerous attempts to elevate the status of minority opinions, and to undercut the legitimacy, objectivity and transparency of existing climate science.

What are you afraid of, Ben?  Time to get this guy under oath!

And here's yet another bit of similar news.  You may recall that several years ago (real) Canadian climate scientist Tim Ball wrote of (fake) Penn State climate scientist Michael "Hockey Stick" Mann that "he belongs in the state pen, not Penn. State."  Mann sued Ball for libel in a court in Vancouver, Canada.  Ball demanded to get in discovery the underlying data and computer code that support Mann's "hockey stick" temperature reconstruction.  Back in February, the Canadian court ordered Mann to produce that information.  According to Principia Scientific, Mann has now defaulted on that obligation and has gone into contempt of court.  According to PS:

[U]nder Canada’s unique ‘Truth Defense’, Mann is now proven to have wilfully hidden his data, so the court may rule he hid it because it is fake. 

That may turn out to be an overprediction of how bad this will prove for Mann.  Still, it is very remarkable that Mann would think he could be a plaintiff in a libel case and not have to produce the data and code that support his statements.  Another guy to get under oath!

For all articles in this series on government temperature data tampering fraud, go to this link.

Independence Day Thought: Thank God That We Finally Got Rid Of Obama

Readers here know that President Trump was not my favorite candidate, and I have had numerous reasons to differ with him ever since he first became a candidate and up to the present.  But then, in a presidential election, the perfect candidate is never one of the options.  All you can do is choose between Option A and Option B.  Every candidate is badly flawed, and it's only a question of how badly.

So, now that we've had almost 6 months of Trump after 8 years of Obama, have things gotten better or worse?  OMG, it's not even close.  In honor of Independence Day, we should all thank God that we have finally gotten rid of Obama.

I will emphasize one of my recurrent topics, which is energy policy -- a subject which has somehow gotten completely intertwined with something called "climate change."  I find it beyond comprehension that this country elected as President, not once but twice, a man who not only thought impoverishing the people by increasing energy prices was a good idea, but promised, and then in office tried, to do everything he could to make that happen.  If you have never watched this January 2008 video of candidate Obama promising to make electricity rates "skyrocket" ("Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket"), you should.  The man actually thought he could change the weather by making you poorer!  And he looked down with supercilious scorn on anyone who dared to question him on that subject.  

And then, upon becoming President, he tried to push the plan through.  He briefly got control of both houses of Congress, with a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, but couldn't get the cap-and-trade price increase plan to advance.  Whereupon he set about to try to accomplish the same ends with the "pen and phone."  Next thing you know he was blocking pipelines; obstructing energy exploration on federal lands; forcing the closure of close to half of our electricity-generation capacity and replacement of same with uneconomic, expensive, intermittent and ultimately useless "renewables" like wind and solar; and agreeing at Paris without Senate consent to hobble the U.S. economy by forcing decreases in carbon emissions while the entire rest of the world (excepting the guilt-ridden dopes in Europe) got a pass and continued to build multiple times the coal generation capacity than we ever had.

This was not mere incompetence.  It was intentional, active effort at destruction of American prosperity.  Only by the grace of God did we have an energy sector not under the thumb of the President, that was able to circumvent Obama's efforts and produce the fracking revolution in spite of everything the President tried to do to stop it.

Over at the Supreme Court, Obama appointed people (Sotomayor and Kagan) who, whatever else, were completely reliable votes for unchecked expansion of the administrative state and of the total discretion of the President and his minions to do whatever they want by pen and phone and without checks and balances.  A third Obama appointment -- who would have cemented a solid majority for more of same for a decade or more to come -- was only staved off by a near political miracle.

Obama declared "income inequality" to be "the defining challenge of our time."  And then he proceeded to demonstrate that he knew nothing about the subject and to do everything he could to make things worse for low income people.  That is, everything other than increasing handouts and dependency.  But maybe that was the real point.  Food stamps exploded.  Social security disability exploded.  But how about making it easier for low income people to earn enough money to get ahead and be independent?  See above on intentionally increasing energy prices.  Did he even realize that the burden of such price increases would fall most heavily on the poor?  Of was he planning to fix that with a new handout program and more dependency?

Pushing income inequality as a moral issue, Obama lectured Americans that "at some point you've made enough money."  The Wall Street Journal reported over the holiday weekend that Barack and Michelle have just contracted to buy the mansion in Washington's Kalorama neighborhood that they have recently been renting.  It is 8200 sq. ft., and the price is $8.1 million.  I guess that moral lecture did not apply to ex-Presidents of the correct political affiliation.

And the kowtowing to foreign leaders and to international groupthink!  The United States does not have to apologize to anyone for its success.  We have the economic model and the economy that work, that have made us successful, and that we should offer as a model to the world.  And we had a President who did not like our economic model, was ashamed of our economy and of our success and of our country, and went around the world apologizing.  If you have not seen it, you might enjoy this article from Bloomberg over the weekend headlined "China, Germany Step Up As U.S. Retires From World Leadership."    Don't worry, it's not just Bloomberg.  Our entire press has no idea that "world leadership" comes from economic success and not from going along with international groupthink.

Our current President?   He issues too many tweets, some of which we might wish he could take back.  Big deal.  Meanwhile, he actually thinks that the idea of America is a good idea.  Undoubtedly that is the main reason that he is vilified by the Left.

What "Climate Leadership" Really Means -- Lots More Coal

Three weeks or so ago, we all got a good laugh from the New York Times fretting that China was in the process of seizing "climate leadership" from the United States.  As reported here on June 8, Pravda had just reported that China was aiming to win the "economic and diplomatic spoils" that would come from dominating the world markets for wind and solar energy.  Of course, this was big front-page news.

But wind and solar as sources of electricity are intermittent and fundamentally useless to power a 24/7/365 grid.  Are the Chinese really this stupid?  Or are they just putting up some token Potemkin village demonstration projects to deceive the deluded climate cultists into pressuring the U.S. to hobble its economy, even as China floods the world with hundreds of more coal plants?

Today's Pravda has the answer.  Of course, since the answer is inconvenient, it's not big front-page news, but rather buried on page A10.  The headline is "As Beijing Joins Climate Fight, Chinese Companies Build Coal Plants."   It seems that a German consultancy called Urgewald has gone out and compiled data on plans for new power plants around the world.  The compilation comes after a recent highly-publicized announcement that China had scaled back plans to build coal power plants, and had canceled more than 100 of them that had previously been planned.  That's "climate leadership"!  But according to the Urgewald data, even after the cancelations China seems to be gearing up to build some 700 new coal plants, both in China itself and in countries around the world:

China’s energy companies will make up nearly half of the new coal generation expected to go online in the next decade.  These Chinese corporations are building or planning to build more than 700 new coal plants at home and around the world, some in countries that today burn little or no coal, according to tallies compiled by Urgewald, an environmental group based in Berlin.

To give you an idea of the scale of this, the U.S. currently has around 600 coal generation units, of which close to 50 are currently scheduled for closure.  So, what the Chinese companies have in the pipeline for just the next few years is more than the entire U.S. capacity for generating electricity from coal.

And, of course, China is not the only one out there building new coal plants:

Over all, 1,600 coal plants are planned or under construction in 62 countries, according to Urgewald’s tally, which uses data from the Global Coal Plant Tracker portal. The new plants would expand the world’s coal-fired power capacity by 43 percent.  The fleet of new coal plants would make it virtually impossible to meet the goals set in the Paris climate accord, which aims to keep the increase in global temperatures from preindustrial levels below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

Did you somehow have the impression that the Trump administration was going to destroy the world's environment by declining to join the Paris climate agreement and failing to cut back U.S. carbon emissions by around 25%?  Well, how is this even relevant to anything when the rest of the world is currently in the process of planning and building some three times as many coal electricity plants as the U.S. ever had?  See if you can find the answer to that question anywhere in Pravda!

The whole climate thing is quickly devolving into a game where countries around the world make preposterous and obviously false statements of intent to appease the climate cultists, while at the same time going ahead and developing the fossil fuel resources -- particularly coal -- just as fast as possible.  I just hope that you appreciate the humor.