Another week of keen competition for the coveted Power Line Green Weenie Award. The climateers and their media echo chamber are in the running. Between the heat wave, the Colorado Springs fire (which should more properly be blamed on environmentalists themselves), and the “derecho” storm that knocked out power to half of the Power Line writing staff a week ago, the folks who always dismiss unusually cold weather as meaning nothing, nothing at all, have revised their statement that “weather is not climate.” Now, it is seems the axiom of the climateers is “weather is not climate . . . unless we say it is.” And right now they are saying It Is. All of the usual suspects, such as that noted science expert Eugene Robinson at the Washington Post, say that if you “don’t believe in climate change? Then you’re either deep in denial or delirious from the heat.” Ditto for the PuffHo, etc. And then there’s Janet “The-System-Worked” Napolitano saying that the heat wave must prove global warming. Hey, if Big Sis Janet says it, it must be true.
But much as we’d love to give this week’s Green Weenie to such obviously deserving winners, they already have a shelf full, and will undoubtedly earn several more since this is such a typical story line for the climateers. It really should take some extraordinary achievement to get a Green Weenie. And so this week’s Green Weenie goes to (drum roll please) the government of Australia, which launched a carbon tax on July 1. Australia’s carbon tax, a key demand of the Green Party entering the coalition that enabled the Labour Party to form a government after the last election, is Australia’s answer to Obamacare: it is deeply unpopular, and the Liberal Party promises to repeal it if they win the next election. If the current polls are any guide, the Liberal Party will win in a landslide. One lesson here is that we should be thankful we don’t have the awful proportional parliamentary system here in the U.S. that enables marginal extremist parties to hijack entire nations. Here, Democrats can mostly ignore environmentalists (the battered spouses of American politics, as I argued once before) when the green weenies scream for carbon taxes.
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