RightWave

I don’t mean to be flippant, but it seems as though we’ve dodged a bullet on the global warming front today.  Not forward progress, but at least it seems we haven’t lost ground.

To be honest, I was nervous about the President’s speech today on the White House initiative on Climate Change.  The scuttlebutt was that the President might endorse disastrous cap and trade legislation or other economy-killing measure to “solve” global warming, but it seems we’ve avoided that…at least for now.

But, I’m not so sure it was a good thing either.

What this address seems to have accomplished is to give fodder to the Left to bring the issue even more to the forefront and criticize the Right on inaction.  It also legitimizes the alarmist claims of the other side about the “onslaught” of global warming as well as the fact that government should, in fact, act.  For example:

These objectives are backed by a combination of new market-based regulations, new government incentives, and new funding for technology research.  We’ve provided billions of dollars for next generation nuclear energy technologies. Along with the private sector, we’ve invested billions more to research, develop and commercially deploy renewable fuels, hydrogen fuel cells, advanced batteries, and other technologies to enable a new generation of vehicles and more reliable renewable power systems.

While I’m not sure what “market-based regulations” are (isn’t that an oxymoron?), it seems that he did, for the most part, address the fact that over-regulation and higher taxes have the potential to grind this economy to a screeching halt.

Without question, this is a vitally important debate - and will continue to be throughout the Presidential campaign - and free-market advocates need to be aggressive in educating taxpayers on the real costs of the Left’s proposed “fixes” to global warming.  Let’s hope the President’s speech did more good than harm, but I’m not convinced.

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By the way - not to over-promote - but, sign up today for Americans for Prosperity’s Hot Air Tour launch on Monday, April 21.  Now, it’s even more important than ever that we turn out massive numbers of grassroots troops to this event and all of these events around the country to show to elected officials, the media, and, frankly, the other side that taxpayers care about this issue and oppose any new big-government schemes to “solve” the global warming “crisis.”    Check out the newly-launched (and quite snazzy) website here.

UPDATE - Just saw the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s press release on the speech.  I think they got it about right.