Barbara Boxer may be even worse than you think

A few days ago, Ed Morrissey at the Hot Air blog posted a video of Sen. Barbara Boxer claiming that carbon pollution and the associated problem of global warming would be the big national security problem in the near future.

The video:



The Congressional Record version:

"I am going to include for the Record a host of quotes from our national security experts who tell us that carbon pollution leading to climate change will be, over the next 20 years, the leading cause of conflict putting our troops in harm's way. That is why we have so many returning veterans who want us to move forward and address this issue so we can create the new technologies that get us off this foreign oil. Every time we import oil, we hurt ourselves. We have to get off these old energy sources. It is a transition. It is not going to happen overnight. But if we do things such as the Murkowski resolution, we will create chaos. We are going to see jobs lost. We are going to see us continue in an economic situation that has no new paradigm for economic growth, as we have learned from our venture capitalists, as we have learned from analysts, such as Thomas Friedman, who are so clear on this point.

The question before us is this: Will we protect the people we represent from dangerous pollution or will we choose to reject science? Will we choose to ignore the findings of the scientific community, the public health officials, and national security experts?"

Unfortunately, I have not located the documents that Boxer vowed to add to the record.  It will be interesting to see whether she was even in the ballpark with her representation of what security experts are saying.

While searching for the portion of the record that matched Morrissey's video, however, I stumbled over another statement from Boxer that might even better exemplify cluelessness:

"The Murkowski resolution threatens jobs, jobs that we need, that are made in America for America.

Our hearts break every day that we look at what is happening in the Gulf. It seems to me more than ironic that Senator Murkowski is advocating repealing the scientific finding that too much carbon pollution in the air is dangerous, at the same time every American sees graphic evidence on television every single day of the deadly carbon pollution in the Gulf of Mexico.

We see here in the saddest pictures what too much carbon -based pollution does in water, what it does to our shorelines, what it does to our beaches, what it does to our wetlands. I will show a couple of other photographs. They are almost too painful.

But what we do here has consequences. And for someone to come to this floor and say too much carbon is not dangerous, then I am sorry, we are going to have to look at these pictures even though we do not want to. We know the devastation this causes. Our eyes do not deceive us.

This horrific spill in the gulf has disrupted the lives of hundreds of thousands of people employed by fishing industries, tourism industries, recreation industries along the gulf coast. So, yes, this resolution, this Murkowski resolution, is about jobs."

The Murkowshi resolution attempted to restrain the power of the EPA to regulate carbon emissions after the EPA published a finding that carbon dioxide was harmful because of its role as a greenhouse gas.  The Supreme Court ended up backing the EPA.

Boxer hilariously uses the oil spill as an example of the the dangers of limiting the EPA's power to regulate greenhouse gases.  The oil in the gulf is "too much carbon," as she puts it.

It's not even as close as a comparison as apples and oranges.  We might as well let the EPA deal with terrorists and enemy soldiers, since they are carbon-based life forms that may threaten the environment.  For that matter, the EPA might even have the power to thin out the human population ("too much carbon") based on the threat to the environment posed by the growing population.

That's your senator, California.