Obama Botches Climate Science in Lake Tahoe Speech

President Barack Obama made a stop at Lake Tahoe on Wednesday to talk climate change, spending, and environmental regulation — distorting science along the way.

The president was addressing the 20th Lake Tahoe summit, along with leading Democratic legislators from across the region.

Obama asserted that climate change is “manmade,” as a matter of dogma: “It’s not ‘I’m not a scientist, so I don’t know.’ You don’t have to be a scientist. You have to read or listen to scientists,” he said.

He then conflated anthropogenic climate change, which is a theory of how burning fossil fuels may raise overall global surface temperatures, with ordinary environmental conservation, which refers to protecting a specific resource from overuse or pollution from identifiable, proximate causes. “So conservation is critical not just for one particular spot … We embrace conservation because healthy and diverse lands and waters help us build resilience to climate change,” the president claimed.

“[B]ecause climate and conservation are challenges that go hand in hand, our conservation mission is more urgent than ever,” the president said, building up to a case for more money to be spent on Lake Tahoe, on top of $2 billion already spent on it. He touted his administration’s environmental policies — including the unconstitutional Clean Power Plan, which threatens the coal industry — and talked up the Paris climate change agreement, which was designed to evade a Senate ratification vote.

Along the way, he made another glaringly unscientific claim — namely, that as a result of his administration’s new fuel economy standards, “during the first half of this year, carbon pollution hit its lowest level in a quarter century.”

The reason carbon “pollution” (a misleading term, since carbon dioxide is not toxic) began falling, before Obama took office, is because of a switch to natural gas, largely through fracking — often over the objections of Democrats and the federal government.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. His new book, See No Evil: 19 Hard Truths the Left Can’t Handle, is available from Regnery through Amazon. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.