#They didn’t warn Germany and other commentary

Climate beat: No, They Didn’t Warn Germany

With everyone from Greta Thunberg to Angela Merkel blaming Germany’s recent floods on climate change, Ross Clark at Spectator World points out that “far from predicting more summer rainfall in the German Rhineland, climate models have tended to do the opposite: to predict less.” A map from the European Environment Agency clearly predicts the area’s “summers will become drier. Indeed, when Germany did have a dry summer last year, that, too, was put down to climate change.” The “alternative explanation for last week’s floods is “that they are mere weather. Weather, indeed, caused similarly devastating floods in nearby areas in 1954, leaving 10,000 Germans homeless.” This “is a case of predicting one thing, and then, when the opposite happens, to turn round and say, ‘Look, I told you so.’ ”

Libertarian: Dems’ Backfiring Carbon Tariff

Democrats want to tax goods from countries, such as China, that don’t adopt stricter environmental standards, yet their “scheme looks like it would tax Americans to punish” non-complying foreign manufacturers, observes Reason’s Eric Boehm. It would also “require a massive expansion of federal bureaucracy” to measure the carbon output of every import, set tariff rates and enforce payment — a “recipe for cronyism,” as one economist warns. Meanwhile, Boehm argues, tariffs aren’t a “particularly effective tool at getting other countries to change their behavior. It’s like telling your annoying neighbor that you’ll smash your fist into your own front door if he doesn’t stop blasting his music. He might care enough to prevent you from hurting yourself, but it wasn’t the threat that did it.”

From the right: Keep CRT Out of the Military

Even though critical race theory is a “poisonous ideology” that “essentially advocates burning down” basic American structures, norms and institutions, including the US military, “senior military leaders seem to be endorsing” it, warns John Cooper at the Washington Examiner. “Introducing CRT’s racial division and resentment will erode camaraderie” and “undermine the instrumental unity that is essential for the US military to successfully protect our national interests.” And yet professors at service academies are indoctrinating the newest class of America’s defenders with a theory that suggests our “Constitution is a racist, dehumanizing, flawed document.” Where the focus should be “training and equipping young men and women to be the best warfighters and leaders in the world,” it would seem that “our military leaders have a different priority. China and Russia must be celebrating.”

Foreign desk: The Fragility of Freedom

“Did we really mean ‘never again’? The world doesn’t look like we did,” laments National Review’s Kathryn Jean Lopez. “At every turn” at the first International Religious Freedom Summit in Washington, “you ran into someone extraordinary, with a harrowing story to tell.” Ensaf Haider’s husband, Raif Badawi, was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes in Saudi Arabia for “asking questions about faith and challenging extremism.” Mariam Ibraheem “lived to tell the story of her death sentence” in Sudan — for “refusing to recant” her Christian faith. “Tursunay Ziyawudun, a Uyghur Muslim, described the ‘indelible scars’ on her heart from the violence she suffered” in Chinese detention camps. These “persecuted” men and women should “remind us of the fragility of religious freedom.”

Iconoclast: Beware the Corporate State

Nearly 120 years ago, GOP President Teddy Roosevelt warned his countrymen of the dangers of unaccountable corporate power, a posture many Democrats also embraced in the last century — yet now, Jonathan Turley thunders at The Hill, it’s “Democratic leaders” who “increasingly advocate for corporate governance, while Republicans voice populist themes. From supporting the largest censorship programs in history to privately mandated vaccine ‘passports,’ liberals are looking to companies like Apple or American Airlines to carry out social programs free from constitutional and political limits imposed on the government.” This is a sinister development that, left unchecked, could leave citizens at the mercy of “corporate governors.”

— Complied by The Post Editorial Board