When Ken Salazar was selected by then-President-elect Obama to be Secretary of the Interior, radical environmental groups panned him as “especially weak in…combating global warming."  The “Center for Biological Diversity” tried to paint Salazar as nearly conservative (though everyone in Colorado recognized his non-leftist votes to be a facade covering who he really is), including noting that he “fought federal action on global warming.”

There is some justification for the left’s view at that time (which is about the best thing I can say about Ken Salazar).  In a February 14, 2008 hearing of the Senate Finance Committee (transcript HERE) to discuss “cap and trade” legislation based on the incorrect supposition that CO2 is an important driver of climate change, Salazar said that based on “dialogues with people in my State…we are not ready to do it now."  Salazar suggested that since China and India are very large emitters of CO2, there would be little point in the United States moving forward with its own independent legislation.

Salazar also seemed to understand the possible change in political dynamic which the next president (whom we now know to be Barack Obama) might have on the discussion, but even then Salazar’s point wasn’t that a new president would or should simply get cap-and-trade passed but that he (or quite possibly, at that time, she) would put together international agreements to constrain other nations’ emissions along with ours.

(Again, his entire argument is based on the Algore hoax of CO2 being a primary culprit in man-made “global warming", even though the planet had been cooling for a decade even by the time of the 2008 hearing.)

Yet in a Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works hearing (Salazar’s testimony starts about 140 minutes into THIS video archive), Secretary Salazar said that his department and the Obama Administration want to “finally, once and for all, address the signature issue of our times, energy and climate change."  And later in the same hearing (about 157 minute mark), “the urgency of this bill is there, and I believe that one of our responsibilities is to be able to tell that story of urgency to America.”

How did it become urgent for Secretary Salazar to pass a bill when the conditions that Senator Salazar said needed to be in place for a bill to be relevant have not even begun to be met…or even addressed, given that developing nations’ emissions are routinely left out of international negotiations – even though the developing world now emits more CO2 than the industrialized world?

Salazar is trying to enforce his urgency through fiat, with the NY Times reporting that “Western Republicans are objecting to an order by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to incorporate climate change impacts into decision-making at his department."  Rather than quote extensively from the article, which has a lot of important details about how objectionable Salazar’s move is, I encourage you to read it yourself.  Here’s just a taste:

“Whether through administrative action or court challenges, these new rules will allow special interest groups with narrow agendas to block all existing and future activities on federal lands in the name of climate change,” the lawmakers wrote. “This would impose an incredible new burden on federal land managers without any congressional guidance.”

And this is the NY Times, not the Washington Times, giving voice to the job-killing Salazar power grab.

As Salazar’s location has moved right, his position on cap-and-trade legislation has moved left.  I can practically see Barack Obama pulling the strings that move Salazar’s lips.  On one hand, who can really blame Salazar’s feckless compliance with The One, given the way the Obama Administration savages its “enemies"?  On the other hand, nobody from Colorado believed that Salazar’s earlier “moderate” votes were anything but cynical political positioning. A cowboy hat does not a conservative make.