One of those big-picture looks at how America came to its current juncture - crammed into a Townhall column

Paul Dreissen isn't a columnist whose stuff I read every time I see it. He tends to have a circumscribed range of focus: environmental issues. These are important, as the ample number of LITD posts in that category will attest, but on any given day, I may or may not have time to check out the latest on that front.

But his column today is worth everybody's time. I will say the contour of it is a little weird. Using his attendance of a recent jazz performance to riff off (pun intended) into a look at the unprecedented blessing to humankind the was this nation's founding, and how collectivism, particularly in its environmentalist form, has sullied the founders' vision seems a bit forced.

But once he gets going, he has important things to say:

What indeed was our Creator thinking, when he gathered those brilliant, classically educated farmers, merchants and tradesmen from all over Colonial America, giving them Divine Guidance to debate ideas and craft documents that declared independence from the then-most powerful nation on Earth, launched a novel, untested form of government – and birthed the bold notion that all men (and women) are created equal … at least as an ideal, at least eventually, at least after the long, bitter struggles of the Civil War and Abolition, Suffrage and Civil Rights Movements?

They didn’t stop there. The 1787 Constitution also launched the concept of federalism: the idea that a national government should legislate and rule only on national issues, but otherwise should leave individual states to innovate and test their own governing principles, for better or worse. They might devise brilliant solutions that are copied by all, or provide glaring examples of what not to do elsewhere.

Concerned about pure democracies and a tyranny of majorities, our Founding Fathers also established a separation of powers via three co-equal branches of government – and an Electoral College to prevent big urban areas from overwhelming sparsely populated rural and small town areas during presidential races. Five candidates have since received a majority of votes, but not electoral districts, and so lost their bids.

When was the last time you saw the essence of the United States of America so clearly articulated?

Then he - necessarily - gives us a case of the sads:

[We've been saddled with] government agencies and activist groups that ignored the enormous environmental progress America has made over the past four decades, and were demanding that we spend trillions of dollars on imaginary problems and for barely detectable (or even fabricated) benefits from further reductions in pollution – even substances that clearly are not pollutants: plant-fertilizing, crop-enhancing, planet-greening, life-giving carbon dioxide, for instance. 

And he reminds us that all the ways the jackboots would have us drastically alter our way of life would amount to a drop in the bucket in changing the numbers they profess to want to change:

 . . .the Energy Information Administration says fossil fuels will still provide 79% of US energy in 2050–globally too. Wind and solar remain too expensive, unreliable and land-intensive to power economies or give impoverished nations the living standards they dream of.

Meanwhile, the Obama EPA’s MAGGICC climate analysis model determined that even shutting down all US coal-fired power plants and drastically limiting the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions – at a cost of up to $39 billion per year – would prevent just 0.03 degrees F of manmade global warming by 2100, even assuming CO2 drives climate change, because the world will still be burning fossil fuels. In fact, all the damage and dire threats supposedly caused by greenhouse gases exist only in computer climate models.

And those models haven’t worked in the past, don’t work now and are unlikely to work in the foreseeable future, say scientists like William Happer and Anthony Sadar. That’s because they focus on CO2, ignore the most important atmospheric gas (water vapor) and can’t solve enough equations needed to accurately describe Earth’s climate. Relying on them to decide energy and economic policies is folly and fakery. 

He ends by not-altogether-gracefully tying it all back to the jazz concert. I guess it does work, in the sense that jazz is another one of those blessings to humankind that is originally and distinctly American.

And American things are good things.