The great state of Alaska had two notable visitors this week, with both President Barack Obama and a convoy of Chinese warships dropping by. The former was there to whip up support for his initiatives to end “global warming,” and the latter presumably had other reasons.
Whatever motives the Chinese might have for their provocative journey into the Bering Sea just off the Alaskan coast, they were probably more successful than the president. Global warming alarmism is unlikely to play well in Alaska, where the people are more troubled by the lack of infrastructure that has resulted from environmental regulations than they are by the fact that winter nights will soon -23 below Fahrenheit rather than -30 below Fahrenheit, even if the president’s dire predictions of a seven point rise in temperatures prove true, and they’ll be disinclined to worry that the difference will result in any rise of the sea levels. Obama is probably willing to write off Alaska’s reliably Republican and rather insignificant number of electoral votes to use its recently more acclimate climate as means of scaring the lower 49 states into panicked submission to earth-saving regime of brand new regulations, but all the polls confirm our belief that this is unlikely to sway a public that is already paying higher electric bills as a result of all other earlier regulations.
Perhaps Obama’s target audience was the rest of the world, which has always provided the approval he seems to most desire, but that also doesn’t seem to be working out. The big visit to Alaska and one of its recently retreating glaciers, but not one of its recently increasing glaciers, came in advance of the president’s meeting with several northern hemispheric countries on Global Leadership in the Arctic: Cooperation, Innovation, Engagement and Resilience, so clumsily named so that the acronym spells out GLACIER, where he hopes to reach an agreement on limits of carbon emissions and other environmentalist bugaboos. Despite all those photographs of Obama standing near a glacier that has reportedly receded a few meters or so in recent years, the governments of China, Russia, and India have already declared they’ll have nothing to do with it. Given the combined carbon emissions of these economies it’s hard to see how Obama will will keep his campaign promise to halt the rise of the seas, even if you do believe his dubious theories of “global warming,” so the time spent on the Alaska trip might have been better spent attending to other matters of more pressing importance.
Meanwhile, it’s hard to say what that provocative convoy of Chinese warships is doing in the Bering Sea just off the coast of Alaska, one of the fully-fledged and great states of the United States of America. Our guess is that they’re testing the extent of America’s weakness, but the country’s government seems to have other priorities.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 