Do they believe what they're saying about climate change?

Of course not.

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James Taranto asks the question, though:

Do Obama and other politicians really believe the things they say about global warming and killer carbon dioxide? The Daily Caller reports that Obama’s flight to the Paris powwow “emitted more CO2 than driving 72 cars for a year”:

Obama’s Paris jaunt will send more CO2 into the atmosphere than 31 American homes‘ energy usage for an entire year. The president’s trip is equivalent to burning 368,331 pounds of coal or 797 barrels of oil, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s carbon footprint calculator.

Just one leg of the president’s Sunday trip to Paris emitted 189 tons of CO2 after travelling 3,855 miles and burning 19,275 gallons of jet fuel, according to Daily Caller News Foundation calculations based on past presidential flights. Obama’s return flight to Washington, D.C., would double the amount of CO2 burned to 378 tons—more than 72 cars driving for a year.

Maybe the symbolic value of the president’s presence in Paris outweighs the purported costs of emitting all that nontoxic gas. (To those of us who are concerned about terrorism, it was good to see the president go to Paris—something he did not do after the last major attacks there, in January.) On the other hand, for the president of the United States to forgo international travel and do business by teleconference would arguably send a stronger signal of seriousness.

But Hillary Clinton also flew a lot as Obama’s secretary of state, the Boston Globe reports:

Seven months before [Mrs.] Clinton left office, a top aide suggested to her that she still had “plenty of time” to “run up the score on total countries” and set a globe-trotting goal of 110 countries, according to an e-mail released Monday.

The e-mail, sent by Clinton press aide Philippe Reines three years ago, casts a political light on one of Clinton’s core talking points as a candidate for president: that she was a nonpolitical and hard-working secretary of state, who, as she frequently notes, visited 112 countries. . . .

The subject line for the e-mail is: “100 and counting . . .”; Reines included a list of 94 countries that Clinton hadn’t yet visited for her to “choose from,” as he put it. Some of the countries had asterisks by them.

“Asterisks appear next to countries you visited prior to becoming SecState, but not since—so they would count,” Reines wrote.

Clinton replied to the e-mail by asking one of her staff members to print it out for her—her standard response to messages she deemed important.

This was purely gratuitous; Mrs. Clinton was flying to country after country for no reason other than to get there. Now she’s the inevitable Democratic presidential nominee, and her campaign declares: “We need to take bold action to combat climate change.” Maybe she actually believes this stuff, but she doesn’t practice what she preaches.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-change-fish-story-1448997737?tesla=y