Climate change and the campaign
President Obama’s latest weekly address commemorated the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service — and in extolling the virtues of our national parks, he couldn’t resist the urge to bring up climate change, even going so far as to claim that climate change could “threaten Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty.”
Anyway, the president’s insistence on continuing to make climate change a central part of the past few months of his presidency is having an impact on the 2016 presidential election. (Disclosure: My firm represents interests in the fossil fuel and nuclear power industries.) Hillary Clinton has already repeatedly promised to expand on President Obama’s executive actions on climate change-related regulations and policies. Her campaign website explicitly states, “Hillary’s plan will deliver on the pledge President Obama made at the Paris climate conference — without relying on climate deniers in Congress to pass new legislation” — and that’s just one
YOUR VIEWS small part of her frightening plan.
The Democrats like to pretend that global warming is an environmental issue, but in fact, they make it an economic issue and do so at their own peril. If the Democrats are going to make climate change a campaign issue, Republicans have an opportunity to call Clinton out when she is unable to reconcile her calls for more regulation and more spending on global warming measures with the more urgent need to revive economic growth and foster a friendlier business environment for job creation.
What do Clinton’s global warming plans mean for the U.S. economy? They mean more of the same: more of the malaise that produced Donald Trump, stalled GDP growth, deprived the U.S. economy of trillions of dollars and kept it from being the spark that could have helped bolster economies around the world.