OPINION/COMMENTARY


Fox’s Changing Climate

The climate is changing right before our very eyes. It’s not the weather I’m talking about – it’s the media climate. On Sunday, November 14, Fox News set aside its status as the best network for coverage of the global warming debate and for one night became one of the worst. According to the Fox special “The Heat Is On,” “The earth is sending out a desperate alarm.” Now, conservative and free-market groups as well as climate change skeptics are sending out their own alarm. Climatologist Patrick J. Michaels has pointed out that predictions of climate disaster are overblown and “we now know with considerable confidence that warming within the foreseeable future will be modest,” he said in a November 15 Cybercast News Service story. But Michaels added an important note: “The other side, which I now include Fox News on, seems to do everything it can to suppress that story.” There is no question Michaels is right about the latest Fox broadcast. It began with all the hype of a Hollywood movie trailer. Flickering scenes of smokestacks, trucks and cars whizzing down the highway and dead fish in a stream filled the screen as the program began. “The Heat Is On” went downhill from there, piling on a steady stream of left-wing activists, Hollywood celebrities, inaccuracies and exaggerations to paint a picture of a global climate apocalypse. It even included clips from the left-wing propaganda film “The Day After Tomorrow” as well as an interview with Jeffrey Nachmanoff, one of its screenwriters....

Fight! Fight!

PETA is not writing the books on how to win friends and influence people. Currently the animal rights extremists are going after a number of environmental groups because, to some extent or another, support animal testing. PETA is hosting two new sites: MeanGreenies and WickedWildlifeFund. This ought to be fun to watch. (This is a post from the CRC-Greenwatch Blog)

Do the Math

In the last few weeks there have multiple articles, evening news reports, and instances of political posturing in regard to the oil executives and their quarterly profits. The Washington Post ran an article saying, “Senate Democrats want a temporary windfall profits tax, and some consumer groups say the profits should go to build new refineries. But most drivers just want the prices to come down, so they don’t have to shell out wads of money to feed the profits that have America fuming.” The Post quoted one man as saying, “I feel cheated. We’re all getting cheated.” Consumers are quick to run to the phones or take out the pen and paper to inform their respective elected government officials about the evil profiteers, but they rarely sit down to think about how much they waste on products that surely will not, and can not, run their SUV down the local state highway. The next time you hear someone ranting about paying more than $2.10 for a gallon of gas, it would be interesting to see their daily expenditures on products that might be considered by some to be “non-essential” items compared to what fuels their means of transportation:

1 Gallon of Lipton Ice Tea - $ 9.52
1 Gallon of Gatorade - $10.17
1 Gallon of Evian Water - $21.19
1 Gallon of Scope - $84.48
1 Gallon of Vick’s Nyquil $178.13
1 Gallon of Pepto Bismol - $123.20

A post from the Freedom Talks blog.

Global Warming, Global Governance

The European Parliament this week adopted a resolution on a report authored by one of its MEPs. Entitled, "Winning the Battle Against Global Climate Change," it offers a new example of the institutionalized scare-mongering so characteristic of the current climate debate. This mindset is a fertile breeding ground for a quantum leap in international governance, shifting sovereignty from the national level to that of international organizations. In a way, they might promote a phoenix-like rebirth of earlier attempts, in the 1970s and 1980s, to establish an International Economic Order (NIEO), aimed at the "management of interdependence". These proposals encompassed a series of measures and reforms in the areas of raw materials, including oil, international trade, development aid, the international monetary system, science and technology, industrial development and the global food supply. They were the topic of a string of international negotiations, which took place in the second half of the 1970s in countless conferences organized by the UN, UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development) and UNIDO (United Nations Industrial Development Organization). It takes little imagination to see that all this would have resulted in a degree of government intervention - at both national and international level - which has never been equaled in the history of mankind....

The Killer That Matters Most

Coincidently, at the same time this study was released, I happened to be at the Ugandan Embassy in Washington D.C. The Ambassador to the U.S. from Uganda, Edith Ssempala, spoke forcefully and passionately about the negative influence that western policies have had on her people. Due to the unintended negative consequences of policies that the wealthier countries of the world have adopted, Africans continue to die by the millions each year. But the policies the Ambassador was criticizing had nothing to do to with global warming. What is killing Africans in greatest numbers is poverty, and international trade policies that prevent Africans from protecting themselves from diseases that are easily preventable. The Ambassador mentioned pressure from environmentalists in wealthy nations that has prevented the construction of hydroelectric dams in Africa, denying electricity to millions of people. Two billion of the Earth's inhabitants still do not have access to electricity, leading to massive death tolls from problems such as food-borne illnesses (due to a lack of refrigeration) and pneumonia brought on by breathing air contaminated by the burning of dung or wood for heat and cooking. Anyone that has had to suffer through a loss of electricity for any length of time becomes quickly aware of how necessary electricity is for daily life. Worries over death tolls from global warming is a case of misplaced concern and priorities....

U.S. Should Not Import European Laws

As globalization fosters economic growth around the world, Americans should be vigilant of an unintended consequence: the imposition on U.S. businesses and consumers of the non-science-based, environmentalist-promoted, European Union-embraced standard known as the "precautionary principle." The precautionary principle is the subject of a new Washington Legal Foundation report entitled "Exporting Precaution: How Europe's Risk-Free Regulatory Agenda Threatens American Free Enterprise." Authored by Lawrence Kogan of the Institute for Trade Standards and Sustainable Development, the report describes how "international bureaucrats and influential activist groups use the precautionary principle as a vehicle to diminish America's competitive position in the global economy and advance special interest agendas hostile to free enterprise and technology." Kogan aptly calls the precautionary principle "regulation without representation." The precautionary principle is a scheme for establishing environmental, health and safety regulations that are based on irrational fears rather than empirical science....