OPINION/COMMENTARY

Senate rejects McCain-Lieberman global warming bill

By a vote of 55 to 43, the U.S. Senate yesterday [ed: Oct. 30] defeated a bill that would have imposed mandatory restrictions on emissions of carbon dioxide, raising the energy bills of all Americans and slowing the economy.

The margin of defeat for the legislation, introduced by Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz) and Joe Lieberman (D-Conn), may have been even wider if some Senators had not been under the mistaken impression that bill would cost their constituents practically nothing.

On the day of the vote, the Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed by Senator John McCain. The piece carried the headline, "Fight Global Warming for $20 a Year." That is the cost of the economic damage, per household, estimated in a study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The study, however, is suspect on several counts. On Wednesday, a separate study, by Charles River Associates (CRA), a respected economic consulting firm, found that the cost of the McCain-Lieberman bill would be a minimum of $350 annually per household through 2010, rising to $530 per household by 2020. Using its peer-reviewed model, Charles River also found that, under other assumptions, the cost could rise to as high as $1,300 per year per household. McCain made no mention of this study in his article...

Celestial-climate Connection Revealed

On July 1, the prestigious Geological Society of America (GSA) released a blockbuster scientific paper (pdf)that fundamentally challenges the view that carbon dioxide is the principal driver of climate change. Apart from its scientific importance, it has political implications as well, since it pulls the rug out from under the Kyoto Accord. Co-authored by University of Ottawa (and Institut für Geologie, Mineralogie und Geophysik, Ruhr Universität, Germany) geology professor Dr. Jan Veizer and Israeli astrophysicist Dr. Nir J. Shaviv of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, this study shows that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), the gas most targeted by Kyoto, has had little effect on Earth's long-term temperature variations in comparison with natural causes.

In a unique cross-disciplinary study, Veizer and Shaviv combined their perspectives of earth sciences and astrophysics to show that the primary driver of Earth's major climate swings over the past half-billion years almost certainly originates with the most violent natural phenomenon known -- supernovas, the cataclysmic explosions that end the normal life of the galaxy's largest stars...

Scorched-Earth Policies

The wildfires that blackened more than 1,200 square miles of Southern California this past week were not simply "acts of nature." For most of the 20th century, the Forest Service has failed to manage our national forests properly while treating fire as a virtual moral evil (the California fires are burning in or near four national forests). Unless these policies are reversed, fires that consume millions of acres and inflict billions of dollars in damage will become more and more common.

In 1998, reflecting the conclusions of earlier government reports, the General Accounting Office (GAO) warned that too little was being done to address the problem of "high levels of fuels for catastrophic fires" that were "transforming much of the region into a tinderbox." The GAO fears were realized in 2000 when forest fires burned 8.4 million acres, the worst fire season in half a century. There was another terrible fire season in 2002, when 6.9 million acres burned and federal fire-fighting costs set a new record of $1.7 billion. In 2003, matters were looking better until Southern California erupted in flames...

Environmental organizations also bear a large responsibility for the general failure to take effective action to reduce the risks of catastrophic fire. They sued the Forest Service and other government agencies at every opportunity to block timber harvesting and virtually any other management action. The Wilderness Act of 1964 symbolized the policy aspirations of the environmental movement that have been increasingly extended to all forests. According to the Act, a wilderness is an area "untrammeled by man."

Because of the fierce opposition of environmental groups, any mechanical thinning of national forests was virtually impossible throughout the 1990s. Even today, having grudgingly accepted the need for some thinning after the disastrous fires of 2000, environmental organizations insist that the government must pay the full costs. A thinning operation that makes a profit is treated like the "usurious" lending of money in the Middle Ages -- you can do it but a private gain is immoral. Even last week, as fires were devastating her own state, Sen. Barbara Boxer declared that any future solutions must not involve "logging."...

Stop that Energy Bill!

A House/Senate energy conference committee is preparing to disgorge a 1,700-page legislative abomination that should cause both the Left and Right to choke. Although the bill has yet to be released, enough is known to conclude that it will be three parts corporate welfare to one part cynical politics. It is so wholly without merit that even we -- policy analysts from the Cato Institute and the Sierra Club respectively, who rarely agree about anything -- can agree that the bill is a shocking abdication of our leaders' responsibility.

The centerpiece of the bill is a nearly $20 billion package of tax breaks and production subsidies designed to further rig the market to favor well-connected energy producers (almost all of which already enjoy plenty of federal handouts) at the expense of others. The biggest winners will include nuclear power (a technology investors have shunned for over 20 years), small domestic oil producers (source of the among the highest-cost oil in the world market today), "clean coal" technology (which has yet to produce a commercially operable plant despite billions in public subsidies over the past couple of decades), and various exotic energy technologies that can't attract much private capital from skeptical investors.

In an unrigged market, a technology with economic merit needs no subsidy. Likewise, if a technology were without economic merit, no public subsidy -- no matter how large -- would turn an ugly market duckling into a beautiful economic swan...

"Rails to Trails" Versus Original Landowners

Over the past decade the federal government has spent $4.5 billion on "Rails to Trails," a program created in 1983 -- ostensibly to preserve abandoned rail corridors as trails until the day the nation might need them again for rail traffic. Although popular with conservation groups, the program has run into opposition recently from farm groups, landowners, property-rights lawyers and some members of Congress. They argue that trails invade privacy, invite crime and, in some cases, violate the U.S. Constitution by taking land that should revert to others.

--In the early 1900s there were 300,000 miles of rail lines in the United States, but about half of the nation's routes have fallen into disuse.
--More than 12,000 miles of hiking and biking trails have been created from the former rail lines with grants from the federal government to improve the right-of-ways.
--In September, trail opponents persuaded the House Appropriations Committee to delete a $600 million in program funding, but in the full House, trail backers restored the funding.

The original 1983 Rails to Trails law decreed that an "interim use" as a trail would stop the land from legally reverting to its previous owners. But the heirs of some previous owners are suing because the railroads in the 1870s in some cases bought only temporary rights for a specific use. Some railroads simply took land from farmers.

According to the Justice Department, about 5,000 land owners are in federal courts, and the expenses of defending these cases can be enormous. In Kansas, the government was required to pay land owners $10,000 for taking their land -- and reimburse the lawyers who represented them for over $900,000. The Bush administration is considering opposing more trails unless states foot increasingly steep legal bills.