WaPo has a front page piece titled (in the print edition, and teased as such on the home page), “The climate issue takes a back seat”. It begins by noting that “Heather Zichal, deputy assistant to the president for energy and climate-change policy, makes a forceful case for the need to slash greenhouse-gas emissions and boost the efficiency of cars and small trucks: The moves will cut America’s oil consumption, foster the nation’s energy independence, save consumers money at the pump and help revive domestic auto manufacturers.”
Its second paragraph is an intended-to-be-impactful, lone sentence, isolated in the physical layout: “What she doesn’t volunteer is that they will curb climate change”.
WaPo’s best defense for this stunt is that it wasn’t really saying the ‘global warming’ rules would curb climate change, but just saying the White House aide doesn’t volunteer that they do (the reason for this being a Stan Greenberg poll “urging Democrats to play down ‘global warming’“, dropping “warming”, “climate” and “cap-and-trade” in favor of re-branding the effort as “clean energy”. That is, in effect counseling Dems to be even less candid than their Plan A of an end-of-days fear-based campaign aimed at attaining public acquiescence for state-created energy scarcity).
Later in the piece, WaPo quotes a greenie as saying “I don’t blame the president for the failure of climate legislation, but I do hold him accountable for allowing opponents to fill the void with misinformation and outright lies about climate change”.
This in a piece in which WaPo does just that (or else their environment writer, like the editors, are factually ignorant; I leave it to them to tell us which it is).
You see, WaPo did not support its plain implication that these rules would curb climate change — or even, according to anyone, impact it in any way that could be measured or discerned. The reason for this is because there is no support for the assertion. Period. Full stop. Not even arguable.
No one, and no computer model on which this agenda is premised, claims that that is the case.
It is possible that is why the president’s aide doesn’t make that claim. Except the White House regularly made the claim before being advised to change course.
Even the left-leaning PolitiFact Virginia concluded the following, after having sensed opportunity to sully Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli for noting there will be no climatic impact from these rules:
[Cuccinelli said] “It turns out that they believe, that if fully implemented with all the regulations that go with it, they will keep the temperature from rising nearly five one-hundredths of a degree Fahrenheit. By 2050.”
As the crowd laughed and jeered, the attorney general added, “I might not be able to see my breath by then.”
Only 0.05 degrees by 2050? Is that really what the EPA was claiming these rules would do?…
Let’s review. The Virginia attorney general said the EPA’s new tailpipe emissions rules for cars and other light-duty vehicles would reduce temperature increases by 0.05 degrees Fahrenheit. He said this would occur by 2050.
The EPA said the reductions would be between 0.011 degrees Fahrenheit and 0.027 degrees Fahrenheit and would occur by 2100. The agency’s claim is even more modest than Cuccinelli suggested…
Because his mistakes were minor and in the EPA’s favor, we rate his claim as True.
And that hypothetical small fraction of a degree is not detectable from background noise using even our most sophisticated technology.
The truth is that, running, e.g., EPA’s MAGICC model — that is, accepting all of the alarmist industry’s assumptions, methods and schemes — there is no detectable climatic impact from the more restrictive House-passed cap-and-trade legislation. There is none from even the ‘global treaty’, Kyoto. Zip, zero, nada.
WaPo’s statement is an emotional appeal, a political statement. It is at its very best, giving it more doubt than it ever gives anyone not fully in lock-step with WaPo’s agenda, highly and fairly cynically misleading. It is advocacy. Or it is ignorance. Regardless, it is wrong.
No one claims that the administration’s efforts in the name of temperatures would actually impact temperatures. It’s not about temperatures. Any more than WaPo’s reporting is about “just the facts.”
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