President Obama has another unilateral plan.
There is one policy arena in which President Obama definitely does not lead from behind: the imposition of costly and pointless environmental regulation.
The president on Tuesday announced a crackdown on hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), a group of coolants used in virtually every home, office, and automobile. Unless we discontinue their use, we are told, the oceans will swallow our coastlines, hurricanes will lay waste to entire states, and all creatures great and small will fry under scorching temperatures.
The true believers are deadly serious about this. Eco-lawyer Durwood Zaelke told the Washington Post: “If we don’t deal with the HFC problem now, in the future these gases are going to kill us.”
It’s all a scam. Banning HFCs will have essentially no impact on global climate. In the first place, despite increases in so-called greenhouse gases, there’s been no warming during the past 15 years — which thoroughly contradicts all the climate modeling cited by the warm-mongers. But even if greenhouse gases such as HFCs were solidly linked to climate change, unilateral reductions by the U.S. would be insignificant compared with the increased emissions emanating from China, India, and the rest of the developing world. (Ironically, the federal government promoted the use of HFCs beginning in the late 1980s, as a substitute for the chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that were blamed for thinning the Earth’s ozone layer.)
As a bit of camouflage for this latest regulatory incursion, the president secured “voluntary” commitments from some of America’s largest corporations to reduce HFC emissions and to phase out their use. (One wonders just how many highly regulated corporations would likely spurn a request for such “voluntary” action from the regulator-in-chief.)
The companies that pledged to cooperate — including Coca Cola, Target, DuPont, and the like — won’t be crushed by the costs of converting to alternative coolants.