OPINION/COMMENTARY

Half-Baked Alaska

The inexorable drumbeat of climate disaster stories goes on, but no one seems interested in checking the facts. The most recent assault on common sense comes from Alaska. There, Republican senators Ted Stevens and Lisa Murkowski are said to be favoring onerous climate change legislation sponsored by Arizona's John McCain. McCain thinks he can ride global warming all the way to the 2008 presidential nomination, by grabbing the horde of green-leaning California and Pacific Coast delegates that will be off-limits to his Southern competition, Bill Frist (Tennessee) and George Allen (Virginia), who oppose McCain's expensive, ineffective bill. McCain's bill will do absolutely nothing measurable about global warming for the foreseeable future. It's nicknamed "Kyoto Lite" in Washington, because it is an imitation of the infamous Kyoto Protocol on global warming. Even Al Gore's scientists conceded that, over 50 years, with full participation by every nation involved, the change in global temperature caused by Kyoto would be a teeny thirteen-hundredths of a degree, an amount impossibly small to measure. Given that McCain's staff surely knows this fact, the hidden agenda for his presidential strategy becomes obvious. McCain's bill only went down 55-43 on Halloween, 2003, so the addition of Alaska's two conservative Republicans is ominously significant, and, as we say in academic circles, counterfactual. Stevens and Murkowski are largely concerned that the Inuit (to old timers, "Eskimo") culture is being damaged by warming....

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