OPINION/COMMENTARY

The April Fools Diet: How Government Pork Fights American Obesity

With the aim of addressing America’s growing obesity problem, Reps. Don Young (R-AK) and George Miller (D-CA) have proposed the Get Outdoors Act of 2004 (H.R.4100). But the Get Outdoors Act is not really about health or obesity; it is definitely, however, about fat. This legislation (proposed on April Fools’ Day, no less) is a pork-filled land grab just like its model, 1999’s Conservation and Reinvestment Act, and would significantly encroach upon many Americans’ private property rights and drive up federal spending.

As proposed in 1999, the Conservation and Reinvestment Act (CARA) would have established an off-budget trust fund to purchase land for wildlife protection, urban recreation, and other “conservation” needs.[1] The Get Outdoors Act and its Senate companion, the American Outdoors Act from Sens. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) and Lamar Alexander (R-TN) are a reincarnation of CARA, cleverly packaged as a public health measure to fight obesity.

According to Rep. Miller this legislation would “shrink Americans’ waistlines by expanding the number of goal lines and foul lines in the suburbs and inner cities and by expanding the number of hiking trails, bike paths, and other public recreation opportunities throughout the country.”[2] The public health link, however, is tenuous at best, given current below-capacity use of “recreation opportunities” throughout the country. Furthermore, CARA was originally proposed without any mention of public health; the obesity claims about the Get Outdoors Act seem to be nothing more than an imaginative marketing campaign....

A blossoming resistance to government control

There is no doubt that for a generation the environmental movement has dominated domestic policy. The 1964 Wilderness Act launched a string of environmental laws and regulations that now give the federal government jurisdiction, if not total control, over every square inch of land in the United States.

This outcome is not the result of citizens rising up begging the government to take control of the use of their land. It is the result of a well-planned, well-funded campaign to empower government to manage land – and people – in ways that conform more to socialist ideals than to the principles of freedom set forth in the U.S. Constitution.

The campaign has been remarkably successful. Hiding behind the banner of "protecting the environment," hundreds of organizations have promoted laws and regulations at every level of government that have the effect of expanding the power of government while reducing or extinguishing the individual's freedom to control the use of his own property....

Leaving a Trail

....A study recently published in the Journal of Climate attributes to air traffic all of the warming observed in the United States over the past twenty-five years. The paper by Patrick Minnis (a senior research scientist at NASA Langley) and colleagues Kirk Ayers, Rabindra Palikonda, and Dung Phan (of Analytical Services & Materials) outlines an often overlooked, observational explanation for regional warming, one that is unrelated to increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide.

A high-altitude jet airplane’s condensation trail (contrail) is a climatologically important byproduct of air traffic because it can function as a man-made cirrus cloud (a thin, high-altitude ice cloud). A contrail forms when hot and humid air from a jet engine’s exhaust mixes with cold and drier air in the upper troposphere through which the airplane passes. If the relative humidity of the high-altitude air is very low, a contrail quickly dissipates. If the air is moist, the contrail spreads horizontally and forms a thin layer of cirrus cloud that persists for many hours.

Cirrus clouds (and by implication, contrails) are climatologically important because they function as net warmers of earth’s atmosphere. Because they are very thin and composed entirely of ice crystals, most incoming solar radiation readily passes through them. However, water vapor (whether frozen or liquid) is the most important and most abundant of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Water vapor, like other greenhouse gases, traps outgoing longwave radiation that is reflected into space by the earth’s surfaces — the essence of the greenhouse effect. As a consequence, cirrus clouds produce net positive radiative forcing, or a net warming effect, on the atmosphere and the surface....

Fires Provide Excuse for Land Grab

The wildfire menace has returned to Riverside County—and so have the environmental zealots who help fan these flames. The environmental zealots—some from out of state—came pouring into the area starting soon after last summer’s torrential firestorms that consumed more than 12,000 acres in Riverside County and also blackened much of San Diego County.

With entrepreneurial zeal that would make Donald Trump say, “You’re hired!,” environmental activists began plotting how to use the blazes as leverage for their ongoing attack on urban development.

These eco-carpetbaggers aim to control, not comfort, the affected communities. Their aggressive descent on Riverside and San Diego—with promises of lawsuits and regulatory meddling—threatens not only to derail construction of new homes and roads, but also to stall fire victims’ rebuilding efforts. Here’s why....

Clearing the Air

....What, then, can we conclude from all these, sometimes conflicting, lines of evidence?

It is that, contrary to strong public belief, the effects of increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are generally beneficial. Enhanced plant growth has many obvious benefits, amongst them increased natural vegetation growth in general, and increased agricultural production in particular. And to maintain or slightly increase planetary temperature is also very much a global good if -- as Ruddiman and other scientists assert -- the human production of greenhouse gases is helping to hold our planetary environment in its historic, benignly warm, interglacial mode.

This news has yet to percolate up to the policy level within western governments, most of whom are still preoccupied with the politics of the now obsolete Kyoto protocol, including in many cases advanced plans for carbon trading taxes on energy consumption. Even worse, however, major government science agencies, or senior scientists such as the U.K.'s Sir David King, are continuing to propagate the view that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide are, of themselves, environmentally harmful....

Sierra Club Misunderstands the Lessons of Earth Day 2004

Earth Day has long been reserved for political stump speeches, environmental policy pushing and a good dose of rallies, protests and meetings. While it’s commonly understood that little of what is proposed on Earth Day stays around long enough to truly matter, it is still frighteningly funny to see what environmental activist organizations do to celebrate what for many is the environmental equivalent to Christmas.

Take the Sierra Club, an organization that manages to find culprits for every environmental ill that America may (or may not) suffer. This year the Sierra Club’s Earth Day message begins with a call for a national conversation on "how the Bush administration policies are harming the health of our families and communities." Because "many Americans are unaware of this assault on the environment," the Sierra Club announced a new campaign this Earth Day to "Build Environmental Community."

According to the Sierra Club experts Americans are too "busy raising families, looking for jobs, and worrying about the war" to focus on the supposed decline in air and water quality. As a result, the Sierra Club continues, Americans have become victims of the current administration's war on our air and water. The solution: enlist more environmental recruits to become foot soldiers in the Sierra Club army....

Compared to Lawn Mowers, Cars are Environmentally Friendly

Due to technological improvements, newer automobiles are less polluting than they have ever been. In fact, compared to the much smaller engines in lawnmowers, they are pristine:

---In one year, a gas-powered lawnmower pollutes the equivalent of 43 new cars, each driven over 12,000 miles.
---Retiring just 4,000 gas-powered mowers would reduce air pollution by 20 tons per year -- equivalent to the amount generated by oil refineries over a two-day period in Los Angeles.

Gas-powered emit their fair share of pollutants, and many states are enacting programs to do something about it, according to the New York Times.

---In Phoenix, a buy-back program which began in 1996 has eliminated 15,504 gas-powered mowers.
---Recently, clean air authorities in the Los Angeles basin announced a lawnmower "buy-back" program, where those who turn in their old gas-powered lawn mowers receive a $300 credit toward purchasing an electric mower.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger hopes to expand the Los Angeles program to the whole state and include rebate credits for older-model vehicles as well.

Source: Ben Bergman, "To Cut Smog, Los Angeles Places a Bounty on Mowers." New York Times, May 5, 2004.

For NYT text (registration required)
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/05/national/05MOWE.html