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An American Apologizes in Paris

by Phyllis Schlafly

December 9, 2015

It was only “Issue Three” on the weekly episode of “The McLaughlin Group,” but if President Obama has his way, the 140-nation conference on global warming – excuse me, climate change – will be the most consequential event of his presidency. If Obama’s plans to reduce America’s energy use are allowed to go forward, it would go a long way toward fulfilling Obama’s 2008 promise of “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

The meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was held near Paris at a secure conference center overlooking Le Bourget airport. That’s where the great American hero, Charles Lindbergh, landed his “Spirit of St. Louis” on May 21, 1927.

Lindbergh was greeted by over 100,000 cheering Frenchmen who carried him off the field on their shoulders and delivered him to the President of France where he was awarded the prestigious Legion of Honor. Obama’s tedious keynote speech at Le Bourget was somewhat less warmly received, as he kept droning on for many minutes beyond his allotted time, ignoring the chimes that repeatedly signaled his time was up.

It was another stop on his apology tour: “I’ve come here personally, as the leader of the world’s largest economy and the second-largest emitter, to say that the United States of America not only recognizes our role in creating this problem, we embrace our responsibility to do something about it.”

Obama flattered the delegates that “this is the moment we finally determined we would save our planet.” He claimed that “our nations share a sense of urgency about this challenge and a growing realization that it is within our power to do something about it.”

That silly statement was reminiscent of his 2008 campaign boast: “I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that . . . this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

Obama also bragged about his three-day tour of Alaska in September, where he personally inspected one of the melting glaciers that entertain tourists on cruise ships. Of course, those glaciers have been melting in the summertime ever since we bought Alaska from Russia in 1867.

Although glaciers may be melting in Alaska and the Arctic, ice has been expanding at the other end of the planet, in Antarctica. In any case, UNFCCC executive secretary Christiana Figueres recently admitted that climate change “is not about the temperature. That is just a proxy. The discussion is about the decarbonization of the economy.”

At a previous UNFCCC meeting three years ago at Doha, Qatar, Figueres let the cat out of the bag when she revealed that the goal of the whole process is a “complete transformation of the economic structure of the world.” Earlier this year she said “this is probably the most difficult task we have given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model, for the first time in human history.”

That kind of dictatorial attitude is why climate change fanatics are called watermelons – green on the outside; red (for Marxism) on the inside. The climate change movement is where many Communists found a new home after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Obama knows that Congress will never approve any of the specific proposals that come out of the Paris conference, so he plans to double down on executive action by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy. EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy and Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz both attended the Paris meeting with a large contingent of aides and officials.

The EPA’s Clean Power Plan, which would basically eliminate coal-fired electric utilities and cause all Americans to pay much higher electricity bills, is currently pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. That court was stacked with four new Obama judges in the last two years after then-Majority Leader Harry Reid invoked the “nuclear option” to change Senate rules by a simple majority vote.

Congress still has the power of the purse and should use that power to block, delay, or defund Obama’s assault on the production of energy that powers the American way of life. It should refuse to provide the $100 billion a year that Obama has promised to the Green Climate Fund starting in 2020.