By spice, Dr. J. means energy. Dr. J. has said in the past that cheap and plentiful energy is the heart of a robust economy. It is the engine that drives everything else. Similarly, the economy struggles when energy becomes a significant cost. The rise in price of fossil fuels has driven up the cost of everything else in our economy.

So you could understand that Dr. J. was banging his head on his desk yesterday as the president put forward his Climate Action Plan yesterday.

Even Lady J. rolled her eyes at the announcement.

It takes a Brit to take him to task for this nitwittery.

James Dellingpole writes over at the Telegraph:

Personally, though, I think the one they will eventually plump for is Obama’s Climate Action Plan of June 25 2013. The economy, after all, is everything. Without an economy you can’t afford a domestic policy, let alone a foreign policy. So you’d think the very last thing any president would do as his country began to show the first vague signs of slow – and quite possibly illusory – recovery after a long recession would be to jeopardise it with a whole new raft of utterly pointless regulation and wasteful government expenditure. Why it would be like seeing a man drowning and, instead of throwing him a life line tossing him a lead weight.

Dellingpole is a guy who gets it.

Don’t say we didn’t warn you, YEARS AGO!

Another guy who gets it is Anthony Watts over at Wattsupwiththat.com.

He rehashes up the whole thing here. Going through it point by point.

He writes (but he shows his work, so go read his very detailed article):

THE BAD: 

1. More hand-outs for an already bloated climate science culture… Apparently Obama never got the memo that climate models aren’t working. 

2. More regulations on existing power plants, as if they don’t have enough already… 

3. Pie in the sky savings… 

4. Outright lies. (from the fact sheet)… 

5. The trucking industry is going to get hit again…   

6. Fast-tracking green energy – more pie in the sky since just about every green initiative and handout in Obama’s first term has ended in failure… 

7. No comprehensive nuclear power plan, no mention of a Thorium reactor initiative, much like China is doing…   

8. Giveaways. Mobilizing Climate Finance…   

9. Higher prices at the pump…  President Obama is calling for the elimination of U.S. fossil fuel tax subsidies in his Fiscal Year (FY) 2014 budget… 

This will of course get passed on to consumers.

As you can see, bad energy policy gets passed on to you, John Q. Public, who will pay in less prosperity due to a higher cost of living. Given that real wages are stagnant, this sort of policy makes Americans poorer rather than richer, the antithesis of the American Dream.

UPDATE: Even NRO got in on the act with their stellar editorial today.

Consider the president’s thinking: While the value of vaccinations is undisputed among scientists, he believes that it requires more research, because people who are prone to lunatic theories about vaccines vote Democratic. But when it comes to the climate, he acts not only as though there were no scientific questions in dispute but as though capital-S Science had corporately blessed his policy agenda. Even if the scientific consensus on global warming had not been weakened by the past 15 years’ worth of data, the policies the president proposes would not necessarily logically follow from that consensus. Limits on greenhouse gases in the United States are likely to have no effect at all on the atmosphere of a planet that includes China, India, and their factories and people. Even the most radical changes in the United States would likely have a negligible effect on climate change, which is if nothing else a global phenomenon by definition. Even if we had absolute scientific certainty, we would also have another kind of certainty: that China and India, and many other countries, are not going to radically reduce their peoples’ standards of living to accommodate Barack Obama’s policy preferences.

But even they leave out the big one, and that is when does life begin?

A new human life begins at conception, that is scientific fact. The zygote, or fertilized egg is a new human life, it is not the mother, it is not the father. It is no less human though it lacks fingers and toes. It has a journey through the fallopian tube to the uterine wall that is fraught with peril, and sometimes it doesn’t make it. It has to develop a heart tube, and then a heart by 12 weeks, and that too, is no easy feat. Sometimes, naturally, those human lives to not survive until birth, but they are no less human. Why else do women grieve when they miscarry? Because, even though it is bad luck, they lost their child.

This is what then candidate Obama has to say about when life begins:

“This is something that I have not, I think, come to a firm resolution on,” Obama said in the forum. “I think it’s very hard to know what that means, when life begins. Is it when a cell separates? Is it when the soul stirs?” Obama added: “What I know, as I’ve said before, is that there is something extraordinarily powerful about potential life and that that has a moral weight to it that we take into consideration when we’re having these debates.”

Dr. J.