Rep. John Yarmuth Is Latest To Suffer Type-II Climate Derangement Syndrome

Congressman Constructs Alternative History of Senate Climate Policy

There is something about climate policy in America that drives alarmists batty.

Here’s the crux of their crazy:  Americans (like most of the world) lend low priority to “doing something” about climate change. In the face of this apathy, a small subset of political, economic, and academic elites suffer from extreme cognitive dissonance. Because they consider global warming to be the most terrible, awfullest threat ever, for them it simply does not compute that so many fellow Americans have different priorities.

Rather than accept the truth in hand, those terrified by AGW restructure reality. I know of two such delusions, which I call Climate Derangement Syndrome Type I and Type II (hereafter “CDS-1” & “CDS-2”)

• CDS-I is the belief that omnipotent fossil fuel companies manipulate the collective American mind into ignoring the dire threat posed by AGW. As I’ve before noted, this silly notion “is belied by a cursory Google News search of the term ‘climate change,’ which reliably engenders a parade of horribles on the impending catastrophic impacts in store for civilization.
• CDS-II is the widely held misapprehension that the only reason Congress hasn’t passed a climate policy is those darned republicans’ irrational refusal to work hand in hand with the Democrats on climate policy. In fact, congressional opposition to AGW mitigation measures is healthily bipartisan (reflecting the low priority lent to AGW by the preponderance of American voters).

Earlier this week, I brought your attention to a classic case of CDS-II exhibited by Slate reporter Alec MacGillis. This morning, I seek to draw your attention to another evident instance of CDS-II; this time, the victim is Rep. John Yarmuth (D-KY), who was hit with a fit of CDS-II during last Wednesday’s House Energy and Commerce joint-subcommittee hearing on EPA’s FY 2016 budget (about which I reported here).

Rep. Yarmuth was trying to rebut the (true) charge that the Congress has repeatedly voted down “cap-and-trade” energy rationing schemes. Here’s what he said:

Earlier today Chairman Whitfield mentioned the cap-and-trade bill, Waxman-Markey which he characterizes having been rejected by the Congress, which is one way to characterize it. It fact, it did received a majority of votes in both the House and the Senate. It was only killed because of Republicans in the Senate who filibustered that bill. Is it fair to say that if Waxman-Markey had been enacted in the law and not been stop by a Senate Republicans that we would not be involved with clean power rules right now?

In fact, a companion to the Waxman-Markey bill never made it to the Senate floor for a vote, despite the fact that the DNC was the majority party. As we covered extensively at the time here at globalwarming.org, then-Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid couldn’t even get the bill out of his own caucus! So there was no GOP filibuster; instead, it’s just another CDS-II fantasy.