The climate czar has a deputy climate czar -- no really

Little fleas have smaller fleas upon their backs to bite them,
The smaller fleas have lesser fleas, and so, ad infinitum...

Barack Obama's dizzying list of czars now has a lower order.

At the UN Climate talks in Copenhagen today, the U.S. keynote speaker was Jonathan Pershing, deputy to Todd Stern, the Climate Czar. The Deputy Czar portentously delivered the news that the U.S. will  reduce "emissions" by 17% by 2020, and 83% (!) by 2050. He also promised that America will "pay its fair share" of $10 billion to the impoverished economies that would be "destabilized" by climate change.

Pershing has a personal stake at Copenhagen. He was a lead negotiator on the failed Kyoto Accords and the treaty it spawned which would have required draconian emissions cuts had it not been rejected unanimously by the Senate. He also served as review editor for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which -- guess what -- produced a report calling for draconian emissions cuts. Pershing was also lead author on the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report which called for.... you get the picture.

Given all the fuss over the dubious data used by the IPCC in its "the sky is falling" prognostications, putting the man who should have checked the facts up there on the worldstage must be seen as yet another pratfall by the banana skin prone Obama White House.

Notes:

Pershing previously worked at the World Resources Initiative, a think tank that promoted his alarmist opinions. He has also advocated for either a carbon tax or a cap and trade scheme, both of which would wreak havoc on the American economy.
 

Pershing's boss Todd Stern headed up the United States' efforts on the Kyoto Treaty. He has advocated for an international collaboration between the world's biggest polluters called the E8, which could impose tariffs on nations who refused to limit their pollution. He was an early proponent of cap and trade, and wrote in 2007, "The next president should approach this issue the way President Franklin Roosevelt approached the Great Depression: in a spirit of restless determination." Upon his appointment to climate czar, Stern imperiously declared, "The time for denial, delay, and dispute is over".