RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Supreme Court’s stay of the EPA’s sweeping Clean Power Plan (CPP) is one of several developments undermining the efforts of President Obama and his fellow climate zealots. The Obama administration expected the CPP to seal the U.N.’s first universal climate agreement, but now that the president’s grand plan has been put on hold until final judicial review on the merits, its fate will likely not be known until late 2017 at the earliest. Furthermore, the prospects for upholding the power plan are not that strong. As a legal condition of imposing the stay, the Supreme Court had to conclude that the EPA’s plan would likely be overruled in the Court’s final review.

Last December in Paris the climate agreement was declared a fait accompli, with representatives of around 190 countries expected to sign it on Earth Day (April 22) at the U.N.’s headquarters in New York. The Paris deal does not “enter into force” until at least 55 countries that together account for 55 percent of man-made greenhouse gases ink the document. But if President Obama’s grand plan to reduce CO2 remains in legal limbo for two more years, why would other countries go ahead and submit their economic future to the terms of the U.N. agreement?

In response, the White House has apparently assigned Todd Stern, the State Department’s special envoy on climate, to get busy on damage control. Stern last week warned the presidential candidates that they would be well advised to stop sowing seeds of doubt about the CPP. In Brussels, Stern reassured EU officials that the Court’s freeze on the CPP would not weaken the EPA’s resolve on pledged carbon cuts or delay the signing of the agreement in April.

However, the European Union has good reason to worry about the viability of the Paris deal if the United States’ contribution is uncertain. After ambitious green efforts over the last ten years, many EU member countries have substantial economic concerns about expanded carbon dictates. As a result of the carbon policies they already have in place, Germany, Britain, and Spain have experienced soaring electricity rates, energy poverty, unsustainable subsidies, and industrial flight — all while failing to achieve meaningful carbon reductions.

The incoherence of the policies spawned by the U.N.’s earlier Kyoto climate accord is increasingly undeniable. Germany is subsidizing the construction of coal-fired power plants as necessary backups to renewables, and Britain is burning wood imported from the United States to generate electricity on a massive scale. Renamed “biomass” and declared “carbon neutral,” wood is no less polluting than coal. Headlines in the Daily Mail excoriate the retrofit of Britain’s largest coal plant to burn wood as a “forest-destroying symbol of the shameful absurdity of European energy policies.”

Some students wore sombreros to a tequila-themed birthday party at Bowdoin College — and others were so offended that the school had to provide them with safe spaces and counseling to deal with it.

According to the school’s newspaper, the Bowdoin Orient, the e-mail invitation to the event called it “a ‘tequila’ party” and then added, “we’re not saying it’s a fiesta, but we’re also not not saying that 🙂 (we’re not saying that).”

This phrasing was, presumably, aiming to poke fun at the way the PC police often lose their minds over pretty much any party where tequila is present — which wound up being exactly what happened with this one.

Yep. According to the Orient, one student (1) reported that some of the attendees had been wearing sombreros at the same time as they were drinking tequila at the party, and all hell broke loose.

In an e-mail to National Review Online, sophomore Richard Arms states that there have been “3 school-wide emails from deans and our president, and there have been several ‘safe-space’ opportunities on campus for students to discuss how they were hurt and offended” by the party.

What’s more, the General Assembly of Bowdoin Student Government issued a “Statement of Solidarity to stand by all students who were affected by the ‘tequila’ party that occurred on 20 February 2016.”

“The Assembly, representing the entire student body of Bowdoin, stands by all students who were injured and affected by the incident,” the statement reads.

(Yes — “injured.”)

According to the statement, even though the school offered offended students counseling (!) to help them deal with the fact that their classmates were drinking a kind of booze with a kind of hat on, the response just wasn’t enough for something so serious.