Jimmy Carter's Cardigan

Remember the seventies? Remember the energy crisis of the seventies, with its long gas lines and high prices? 

Remember the picture of Carter, sitting in the Oval Office in a cardigan sweater, telling us to turn down our thermostats to conserve energy?

Carter claimed to the press that he was saving energy by having solar panels installed on the roof of the White House to heat hot water. "It would not generate enough hot water to run the dishwasher in the staff mess," a White House staffperson says. "It was a fiasco. The staff mess had to go out and buy new equipment to keep the water hot enough. That blew any savings." Carter did not manage to broker an adequate energy policy. He tried to promote conservation by example, turning down the thermostats at the White House and in other government buildings, wearing cardigan sweaters, and installing solar panels and a woodstove at the White House. He also deregulated energy prices, launched a program to develop synthetic fuels, and successfully legislated fuel-efficiency standards. But in an era of soaring oil prices and long lines at the gas pumps, it did not add up to a policy.

I thought about our friend Jimmah today, when I heard yet another variation of "I'll start getting serious about global warming, just as soon as its proponents do". You have to hand it to Carter, that at least he made a show of turning down the thermostat* and wearing the Charlie Brown sweater, and installing the not-ready-for-primetime solar panels** on the White House roof.

In an age when public shame is practically unheard of, except for when you violate political correctness, there seem to be no excesses to which the global warmists will go, oblivious to the enormity of their own carbon footprints. Al Gore flies all over the world in a private jet, infamously having his limo drivers keeping the motors running in his limos while he delivers his phoney baloney message on global warming, so that he doesn't experience even any momentary discomfort between his plane and the air conditioned lecture halls.

Remember that Live Earth concert recently? They had to fly bands, and even the audience to Antarctica, just so that they could say they covered all seven continents. How large a carbon footprint did that require? For a mere symbolic gesture. I'm sure the penguins appreciated it! If the threat of catastrophe caused by man made global warming were real, don't you think that even one of these Apostles of Apocalypse might alter his life style accordingly?

Obama takes a gas guzzling, carbon spewing 747 from Andrews AFB to the swampland of Florida, so that he can address literally dozens of people on the perils of global warming. Haven't these people ever heard of Skype? Conference calls?? Go to meeting???

All of the scare mongering of the seventies and eighties that foretold the oceans dying, oceans rising, millions starving, ice caps melting, and after all the increases in manufacturing and farming and population increase over the last half century, the temperature needle barely wavered. Ted Danson was very specific. He said we only had ten years to save the oceans...about forty years ago now. How'd that work out for us, Ted? And the scientists whose funding is directed to locate global warming, find it only with the help of forged and faked data.

The extent that global warming did not occur forced its ardent disciples to try to change the name of the movement. Same doom and gloom, but now any "change" in the climate indicates the need for a Marxist curtailment of all capitalistic human activity. Record heat? Global warming, er, "climate change"! Record cold? Record snowfall? "Climate change"!

I guess the closest nod to some sort of show of modest travel by this president, is when he loads his Canadian built, campaign bus on a plane, along with his staff, Secret service and multiple car entourage and flies them to some location to where he can roll out the bus and show the peasants his humble roots. Because nothing says 'I'm saving energy' like flying your bus to meet you at a campaign stop.

Since Obama is taking the mantle of "Worst President Ever" from Jimmy Carter, couldn't he get the cardigan to go with it?

*As opposed to Barack Obama, who reportedly kicks up the thermostat somewhere between "toasty" and "parboiled"!

**As I have said elsewhere., I'm not opposed to solar energy where it is feasible.  My own solar panels generate more energy than I use, nearly every single day.