Alaska was an excellent selection for President Barack Obama’s scare campaign on climate change, during which he has warned entire countries could be submerged by rising oceans if global warming is not halted.
Obama has not mentioned, of course, that the draconian plan he has in mind will do virtually nothing to curb rising temperatures. It will force electric bills up for tens of millions of American families, however.
White House strategists who picked Alaska for Obama’s tour on behalf of his campaign to shut down coal-fired power plants should have read their history books.
Had they done so, they would have learned of a similar scare campaign during the early 1970s. Radical environmentalists warned then that construction of the Alaska pipeline would devastate caribou herds.
But by 2003, nearly 30 years after the pipeline had been completed, the Western Arctic caribou herd numbered about 490,000 animals – more than twice its pre-pipeline level. During the past decade, the caribou population has dropped substantially – but there is no reason to believe the pipeline is to blame.
But during the 1970s – at a time, by the way, when there were doom and gloom predictions about global cooling – radical environmentalists were quick to hop on the anti-pipeline bandwagon because of warnings about the caribou.
And before you ask, yes, energy fear mongers behind the caribou scare claimed the science on that, too, was settled.
