OPINION/COMMENTARY

CEI Challenges Attempted Ecological Takeover of Bush Foreign Aid Program

This week the Competitive Enterprise Institute submitted comments and a proposal to the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) regarding its search for new natural resource management criteria. The MCC was established as a government corporation to disperse aid money in the form of grants to developing countries that demonstrate a commitment to democracy and economic freedom. CEI recommends that the MCC abandon the search for a non-economic environmental indicator and focus instead on the original intent of the program. The Millennium Challenge Act of 2003 states that a candidate country must demonstrate a “commitment to economic policies that promote private sector growth and the sustainable management of natural resources.” Former EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman heads the effort to solicit proposals for the new, expanded metric. If the MCC wishes to clarify the linkage between economic growth and sustainable management, CEI proposes that it include the Property Rights Index component of the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom. Private property rights create an incentive for resource owners to consider both long-term and short-term needs when deciding how to use those resources, and transform ‘sustainable development’ into a working method for the efficient management and use of all resources....

Global Warming Blows—Or Does It?

In case you’ve missed the hype, MIT's Kerry Emanuel has a paper in the online version of Nature magazine saying that hurricanes are becoming dramatically more powerful as a result of global warming. Merely venturing into the discussion of hurricanes and global warming is more dangerous than most tropical cyclones. About Emanuel's article, William Gray of Colorado State University—the guy who issues the annual hurricane forecast that grabs headlines every summer—told the Boston Globe, "It's a terrible paper, one of the worst I've ever looked at." There's also nastiness if you say hurricanes aren't getting worse. A month ago, University of Colorado’s Roger Pielke, Jr., posted a paper that was accepted in the Bulletin of The American Meteorological Society concluding there is little if any sign of global warming in hurricane patterns. In a pre-emptive strike, Kevin Trenberth from the federally funded National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, told the local newspaper, "I think he [Pielke] should withdraw his article. This is a shameful article." Six months earlier, Christopher Landsea of the National Hurricane Research Laboratory, another federal entity, quit the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Landsea is probably the world's most respected hurricane scientist. He was furious that Rajenda Pauchari, director of the panel, condoned Trenberth's statements that hurricanes were worsening because of global warming....

Oil's Push and Pull

DAVID O'REILLY has made a big bet--big not only by Las Vegas standards, but by the standards of the swashbuckling oil industry. The Chevron CEO bet more than $18 billion that oil supplies will be tight and prices will stay high when he bought Unocal--after the Chinese authorities yielded to political pressure and withdrew CNOOC's higher, competing bid. He is betting that the fabulously successful boss of Exxon Mobil, Lee Raymond, is wrong to be optimistic about the future growth of world oil supplies. In O'Reilly's corner are some experts who say that we have discovered just about all of the big fields that exist; in Raymond's corner is the International Energy Agency, which reminds us that demand might slow and prices drop. Little wonder that my colleague at the Sunday Times, David Smith, says this is "a nervy time for the global oil market." One reason is that economists can make informed guesses about the future demand for oil, and experts can make equally good (or bad) guesses about supply prospects, but no one can accurately appraise the risks of supply interruptions. It is those risks that are adding a risk premium of indeterminate amount to the current price of oil. Start with Saudi Arabia, a country in which a medieval regime sits on the world's largest oil reserves. Authorities in Washington at one time calculated that there was a 50:50 chance that the regime would survive the next 10 years. They have now shortened that probable survival period to five years. The Saudis say they have stamped out the domestic terrorists who went on a bombing rampage, but they would say that, wouldn't they? A country in which the unemployment rate among young men is 25 percent, real income per capita has fallen by somewhere between one-half and two-thirds in the past decade, thousands of profligate princes keep the budget in chronic deficit, dissent means an extended visit to an unpleasant prison, and Wahhabi preachers favor bin Laden's brand of Islam is hardly a risk-free supplier....

SUPREME COURT MAY DECIDE STANDING IN WARMING CASES

Environmentalists and industry and government officials are watching three court cases that have the potential to limit plaintiffs’ ability to improperly broaden the enforcement of environmental laws, especially in global warming cases. “It’s high time that we reigned in environmental lawsuits,” said NCPA Senior Fellow H. Sterling Burnett. “Where purported harm is speculative at best and where the plaintiff may not have suffered harm, the plea should not get through the courthouse door.” At issue is the Supreme Court’s so-called “Laidlaw” decision in 2000 that relaxed provisions in Article III of the Constitution for plaintiffs to prove they have standing to sue. If the courts rule against plaintiffs in any of the three cases it could make it more difficult for future litigants to prove harm from any industry or government action affecting the environment. The pending cases are varied, but similar in that plaintiffs must prove that global warming has specifically affected them: * In one case, Friends of the Earth is suing two federal agencies claiming that the government failed to consider the environmental impact of loans and other financial guarantees for fossil fuel projects. * Several state attorneys-general are suing five New York State utilities seeking reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. * Another case in Connecticut argues that global warming is a phenomenon and not an injury....

Lacking Energy

It sometimes seems the longer that legislation hangs around Washington, the worse it gets. That’s certainly the case with the recently signed energy bill. President Bush had been trying for years to convince lawmakers to pass an energy bill. But when they finally did, all the … well, energy had been sucked out of it. In the end, it was typical Washington pork. There’s plenty of new spending -- an estimated $12.3 billion over 10 years, twice as much as the original proposal -- but few real solutions. Start with oil. When most people think of energy, they think of gasoline. Any sensible bill would take steps to increase the domestic production of oil. It’s critical we start reducing our dependence on foreign providers, especially since so many of them are in bad neighborhoods. We happen to have large oil reserves waiting to be tapped beneath the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. But the bill Congress passed specifically ignores ANWR. “If we put it in, we wouldn’t be here,” Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, explained to reporters. It’s true that previous energy bills had failed because liberals wouldn’t agree to pass a measure that allowed drilling in ANWR. But no bill is better than a bad bill. If we’re not going to take the most reasonable step available to boost energy production, there’s really no point in passing an energy bill at all. (ANWR, fortunately, isn’t dead; it’s likely to pass when lawmakers try to reconcile the budget in September.) Not only does this bill ignore potential solutions, it actually recycles the failed policies of the past. The bill provides tax breaks for homeowners who install solar panels -- a “reform” measure first drafted by the Carter administration. President Reagan removed those tax breaks when it became clear they wouldn’t work, just as a future administration is certain to remove them again....

The Worst Crime of the 20th Century

"Which kills more: ideology or religion?" asks author Andrew Kenney in the title of what is certainly one of the more startling pieces I've read in some time. What makes Kenney's article startling is not that the self-professed atheist necessarily concludes that the reds (communists) and the browns (fascists) have contributed much more heartily to history's flow of blood than any religion, but that, of the three available ideological colors, it is the extremists of the green standard whose hands are perhaps guiltiest for the last century's outpouring of crimson. According to Kenney over 50,000,000 people died in the 20th century because of the gratuitous recklessness of eco-extremists; this estimate is actually quite conservative in comparison to junkscience.com's claim that over 80,000,000 have dropped at the hands of the tree-huggers. "In purely numerical terms," says Kenney about the alleged murderous scheme, "it was the worst crime of the 20th century." But what was the worst crime? "The banning of DDT," says Kenney. Of course this could be comfortably put to rest as the ranting of just another, competing ideological nut were it not that Kenney is in very, very good company. A New York Times article of January of this year, titled It's Time to Spray DDT proclaimed what long ago became the obvious, that "the evidence is overwhelming: DDT saves lives."....

Don't Call It a Comeback

A group of scientists has proposed to "re-wild" North America with elephants and lions, thereby replacing large megafauna that became extinct at the end of the Pleistocene about 12,000 years ago. The proposal's authors, led by Cornell University grad student Josh Donlan, include paleontologist Paul Martin, the father of the overkill hypothesis. Their commentary appears in the August 18 issue of Nature. Overkill theorizes that hunting by humans led to the extinction of large mammals like mammoths and mastodons as the last Ice Age drew to a close. Many overkill proponents also believe "reintroducing" similar species like African and Asian elephants will restore the North American ecology to what it was prior to mankind's interference. Donlan and the rest want to transplant African and Asian elephants, lions, and cheetahs to private western ranches where the populations can be overseen and managed. Not only will this generate ecotourism, but in the words of a Reuters report, the plan "could spark fresh interest in conservation, contribute to biodiversity and begin to put right some of the wrongs caused by human activities." Wrongs such as overkill. To give one example, the authors believe the pronghorn antelope owes its speed to being chased by an extinct American form of cheetah. Introducing African cheetahs to the American wilderness will "restore what must have been strong interactions with pronghorn." Overkillers feel that North American megafauna were "naïve" to the hunting techniques of the first Americans and were easy targets. They argue that megafauna in Africa, which co-evolved alongside humans, was conditioned to avoid two-leggers and therefore survived. So the reintroductionists' doublethink is this: American megafauna went extinct because their behavior was different from that of African megafauna, but introduced African megafauna will fulfill the same ecological role as American megafauna because their behavior is identical....

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