Lawrence Summers is a past university professor who rose to become president of Harvard University. He served as the secretary of the treasury in the George W. Bush administration, then as a top economic advisor to Barack Obama for the first two years of his presidency. A veteran member of the world-government-promoting Council on Foreign Relations, his personal credentials place him at the top among our nation’s liberals, progressives, and internationalists — all of whom love taxes and consider the productive middle class their opponent. His allies in the Washington Post were only too pleased to publish his thoughts in an op-ed on January 5.
Still speaking out about economic matters even though he no longer has an academic or government perch, he proposed that the decline in the price of each barrel of oil greatly improves chances for imposing a carbon tax on the nation. In other words, don’t let the people who consume increasingly available energy resources enjoy the benefits. He even mentions the real beneficiaries — those who use gasoline for their vehicles and heating oil for their homes — as some sort of culprit. The benefits to be derived from lower energy prices should go to government, not the people, says Summers. And he never even mentioned the other beneficiaries of tumbling oil prices — the factory owners and farmers who produce our goods and harvest our food.
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A carbon tax is a must, according to this spokesman for bigger government. It must be imposed because energy use is creating global climate change and polluting the air we breathe. He allows no mention of the increasing number who dispute the claims of those insisting that the earth is warming because of human activity, especially those ordinary people who burn fossil fuels. He pontificates that a carbon tax enacted here in the United States would be “compatible with World Trade Organization rules.” And enacting one “would be a hugely important symbolic step ahead of the global climate summit in Paris later this year.” That confab is certain to produce recommendations that Lawrence Summers will applaud.
In the lead article of The New American for August 25, 2014, Alex Newman pointed to hard evidence that climate doomsayers are wrong, that the polar ice isn’t melting catastrophically, that sea levels aren’t about to flood coastal areas, and that there is nothing unusual about a warmer summer from time to time. And William Jasper followed Newman’s treatise with statements from several renowned former global-warming alarmists who have changed their tune and now reject what they were once stimulated to believe. In other words, the truth is getting out: Global warming or climate change caused by human activity is a myth.
No amount of good sense will deter the likes of Lawrence Summers, Al Gore, Barack Obama, the EPA, or the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The fact is that their unproved theories and assertions are wrong. The two authors named above joined in asserting that “there has been no global warming for the past 17 to 18 years.” This is the conclusion that should be brought before the U.S. Congress to keep its members from acting to correct the nonsense offered by Lawrence Summers and many other believers in a supreme falsehood. In the end, truth will prevail, but only if pains are taken to bring it to light.
John F. McManus is president of The John Birch Society and publisher of The New American. This column appeared originally at the insideJBS blog and is reprinted here with permission.
