From George Will’s column today:

Plateau in Temperatures
Adds Difficulty to Task
Of Reaching a Solution
     — New York Times, Sept. 23

In this headline on a New York Times story about the difficulties confronting people alarmed about global warming, note the word “plateau.” It dismisses the unpleasant — to some people — fact that global warming is maddeningly (to the same people) slow to vindicate their apocalyptic warnings about it.

The “difficulty” — the “intricate challenge,” the Times says — is “building momentum” for carbon reduction “when global temperatures have been relatively stable for a decade and may even drop in the next few years.” That was in the Times’s first paragraph.

In the fifth paragraph, a “few years” became “the next decade or so,” according to Mojib Latif, a German “prize-winning climate and ocean scientist” who campaigns constantly to promote policies combating global warming. Actually, Latif has said he anticipates “maybe even two” decades in which temperatures cool. But stay with the Times’s “decade or so.” By asserting that the absence of significant warming since 1998 is a mere “plateau,” not warming’s apogee, the Times assures readers who are alarmed about climate change that the paper knows the future and that warming will continue: Do not despair, bad news will resume.

And from Bloomberg, “U.S. Northeast May Have Coldest Winter in a Decade“:

Sept. 28 (Bloomberg) — The U.S. Northeast may have the coldest winter in a decade because of a weak El Nino, a warming current in the Pacific Ocean, according to Matt Rogers, a forecaster at Commodity Weather Group.

When the climate crime trials come, Mother Nature will be sitting in the dock. And Mr. Sunspots will be waiting his turn.

New Deal analogies were being thrown around by the Roundtable panelists on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, starting with the useful reminder from George Will, “Before we go into a ‘New New Deal’ we can we at first acknowledge the New Deal didn’t work? That is, the biggest collapse in industrial production in history occurred in 1937, eight years after the stock market collapsed in 1929 and five years after the New Deal.”

A few minutes later (at the 7 minute mark) Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect responded:

Robert Kuttner: Now, on the question of whether the New Deal worked, Doris Goodwin said to me the other day, don’t look at the Roosevelt of 1933, look at the Roosevelt of 1941, 1942.

The New Deal got us halfway out of the Depression, and it was Roosevelt’s effort to balance the budget in 1937 that caused the downturn. But in 1941-42, we converted to a wartime footing and unemployment disappeared. And the deficit went as high as 28 percent of GDP. Now, I’m not saying the deficit has to go that high.

But Doris’ point was, look at the auto conversion in 1941, 1942, when they shut the lines, they retooled, they started making planes and tanks and produced aircraft and weaponry at a rate the world had never seen. We could do that with fuel-efficient cars as the price of the auto bailout.

Rarely does a self-styled progressive like Kuttner so clearly state the view of how the economy should be managed, that is, that it should be a government-directed, wartime economy — just without the war. So 1942 was the halcyon instance of the American economy, Kuttner suggests. What else was common in 1942?

• Rationing of gas, meat, tires, butter, sugar, coffee, on and on.
• Travel restrictions. A maximum “Victory Speed” of 35 mph.
• Mass civilian mobilization for everything from buying War Bonds to collecting scrap metal and cooking grease.
• The military draft. Ultimately, more than 16 million Americans served in WWII.

Bring it all back. Only this time make global warming the enemy and “public service” the equivalent of the draft. That’s the “progressive” prescription for the New New Deal.

(The photo of the rationing coupon comes from the American Historical Society’s website devoted to WWII rationing.)

• New York Times, “Drilling Boom Revives Hopes for Natural Gas “: “HOUSTON — American natural gas production is rising at a clip not seen in half a century, pushing down prices of the fuel and reversing conventional wisdom that domestic gas fields were in irreversible decline.”

• Reuters, “First mass U.S. crossing for hydrogen cars completed“: “LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Hydrogen fuel cell cars from nine automakers completed a 13-day cross-country trip this weekend, in the first such mass U.S. crossing for vehicles powered by a zero-emission technology still in its infancy.” The vehicles were trucked between Rolla, Mo., and Albuquerque because of the lack of hydrogen filling stations.

• Wall Street Journal, Washington Wire Blog, “Pelosi on Natural Gas: Fossil Fuel or Not?“: “On NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, the speaker twice seemed to suggest that natural gas – an energy source she favors – is not a fossil fuel. …”I believe in natural gas as a clean, cheap alternative to fossil fuels,” she said at one point. Natural gas “is cheap, abundant and clean compared to fossil fuels,” she said at another.

• Wall Street Journal, Environmental Capital Blog, “Texas Breeze: Landowners Call Wind Turbines Ugly; Court Says Too Bad“: “For now, wind power’s triumphant march in the U.S. can count on another legal smackdown of “NIMBYism,” after a Texas appeals court yesterday dismissed a suit by landowners upset with a big wind farm built by FPL Energy. Landowners decried the turbines’ noise and their spoiled sunsets—which the court agreed was a pity—but the appeals court couldn’t find grounds to rule against the power company.”

• Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, “ANWR Option“: “Sean Parnell, lieutenant governor and a Republican candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives, proposed a land swap as a way of opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. ‘I propose a land swap of 2,000 acres of state land to the federal government in exchange for 2,000 acres of the coastal plain in ANWR into state hands,’ Parnell said at a press conference Tuesday in Fairbanks.”

 
• George Will, “Obama’s Economic Fairytale“: “Obama has also promised that “we will get 1 million 150-mile-per-gallon plug-in hybrids on our roads within six years.” What a tranquilizing verb “get” is. This senator, who has never run so much as a Dairy Queen, is going to get a huge, complex industry to produce, and is going to get a million consumers to buy, these cars. How? Almost certainly by federal financial incentives for both — billions of dollars of tax subsidies for automakers, and billions more to bribe customers to buy these cars they otherwise would spurn.”