Conflict of interest, the economy versus global warming agenda

From my Brenner Brief column

The Obama administration blames U.S. economic downturn on severe winter while pushing global warming agenda

Global Warming engulfs The White House|Photo Credit Wiki Media Commons

It is natural that this should happen since liberalism as practiced by the modern Democratic Party has become a never-ending balancing act of trying to enact leftist agenda driven policies to solve imaginary problems. So it is not surprising that the imagined world of the left to the real world awaits only a peek behind the curtain to be exposed. That being the case there still has seldom been such an obvious conflict in liberal orthodoxy as that which is taking place in the upper levels of the U.S. Government.

In order to deflect attention away from the Obama Administrations many failure and scandals while simultaneously ginning up support from an influential and powerful segment of the Democratic base, environmentalists, the administration has made a big push on climate change policy, aka global warming.

Starting with the release of the National Climate Assessment, Obama and his administration have begun a new push to warn Americans of the terrible threat facing us due to global warming. In speeches, in regulation proposals, and in threatened “executive actions“ the administration has hyped the global warming agenda.

Meanwhile, it was announced on Thursday that the nation’s first quarter gross domestic product (GDP) had been revised down into negative territory, -1%. The reason given for this bad news?

“Overall the first quarter was subject to a number of notable influences, including historically severe winter weather, which temporarily lowered growth,” said Jason Furman, head of the Council of Economic Advisers. “

This of course is in direct contradiction to the theory of global warming which predicts that winters are going to be warmer. In fact the second paragraph of the Overview of that much touted National Climate Assessment states

Winters are generally shorter and warmer. 

Well, except when they are not in which case harsh winters are a good cover for a shrinking economy brought on by Democratic policies. Which “coincidentally”in the same time frame saw the introduction of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) not to mention the threats of and recently implemented environmental policies that will needlessly hurt businesses,

While the administration is out pushing a “climate” report that claims that the winter of 2012 was one of the warmest ever, they fail to note that the winter that had just ended was one of the coldest on record. In fact the previous year (2013) was cooler than normal for the United States.

Much of the U.S. saw cooler-than-average and wetter-than-average conditions in 2013, according to the government’s official annual climate report released Wednesday.

It is undeniable that the severe winter of 2014 hurt the U.S. economy, colder weather always hurts the economy, which makes a thinking person wonder why the purveyors of doom and gloom attack warmer weather.  What is not being mentioned however is that we have had many cold and severe winters in our history but it is only when you are hovering near zero economic growth will colder weather throw the economy into the below zero range as has happened in the first quarter of 2014.

But the real charade is the Obama administration blaming a severe winter for a shrinking economy while simultaneously warning that global warming is having and will have a severe impact on  the US economy now and into the future. Irony is just so ironic.