OPINION/COMMENTARY

Media Fish Fry

The week before Thanksgiving, the World Wildlife Fund, an environmental NGO got what it wanted in the lead up to the United Nations' latest meeting to discuss climate change, taking place in Montreal -- scary stories about dire effects from global warming. "WWF: World's Fish Are In Hot Water," CBSNews reported. "Group: Higher Water Temps Threaten Fish," intoned ABCNews International and MSNBC. "Global Warming Threatens Fish," FoxNews declared. All the major networks carried headlines about the WWF's report: Are We Putting Our Fish In Hot Water? The report itself was filled with lots of glossy pictures, lots of information on the importance of fishing to diets and the world economy, and lots of scary speculation about what might happen if waters are allowed to warm more than 2 degrees Celsius. The only thing lacking was scientific documentation to warrant such a media frenzy. If the media really wanted to know what is going on with fish it might have attended the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas 2004 workshop, "The Influence of Climate Change on North Atlantic Fish Stocks," in Bergen, Norway, or at least reviewed some of the more than three dozen scientific studies and reports presented there. Then they would know how simplistic and misleading WWF's generalizations are. Consider WWF's supposed fishery expert Katherine Short's bald statement: "The balance is set to tip, as climate change continues the pressure on fish populations already strained by overfishing, pollution and habitat loss." What fish populations is she talking about? Salmon? Arctic char? Cod? Haddock? Tuna? All of them are reviewed in the 2004 workshop, and there was no evidence that man-made climate change is or will have any major impact....

PICK UP A RIFLE

Unchecked by predators, deer populations are exploding in a way that is profoundly unnatural and that is destroying the ecosystem in many parts of the country. According to Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York Times, we should bring back hunting and reestablish a balance in the natural world. In a wilderness area, there might be 10 deer per square mile, but in parts of New Jersey, there are up to 200 per square mile. The exploding deer populations are harming humans, says Kristof:

* More Americans are killed by deer each year than by any other large American mammal, including bears, cougars and wolves.
* A study for the insurance industry estimated that deer kill 150 people a year in car crashes nationwide and cause $1 billion in damages.
* Ticks and Lyme disease, a more indirect effect from deer, also kill humans.

Agreeing on a solution for controlling deer populations and protecting humans has proven difficult. These days, among the university-educated crowd in the cities, hunting is viewed as barbaric. Towns in New York and New Jersey are talking about using birth control to keep deer populations down, although deer contraception has not been very successful. Meanwhile, some towns are paying big bucks, taking out contracts on deer through discreet private companies. Kristof says this is ridiculous. We have an environmental imbalance caused in part by the decline of hunting, he says. Humans first wiped out certain predators -- like wolves and cougars -- but then expected their own role as predators to sustain a rough ecological balance. The humane and green solution, says Kristof, is to encourage hunting, and many environmentalists agree. Deer are not pets, and many find hunting them is preferable to letting deer die of hunger and disease. Furthermore, hunting connects people with the outdoors and creates a broader constituency for wilderness preservation.

For text: Nicholas D. Kristof, "For Environmental Balance, Pick Up a Rifle," New York Times, December 4, 2005.

For text (subscription required):

http://select.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/opinion/04kristof.html?hp&oref=login


Senator Bingaman's Bogus Climate Proposal

U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) is scheduled to deliver a speech at the UN global warming meeting in Montréal this afternoon on his plan for mandatory carbon dioxide emissions controls in the United States. If similar to proposals Sen. Bingaman intended to offer earlier this year in the Senate, the plan would represent significant economic sacrifice without measurably reducing global greenhouse gas emissions. “While Sen. Bingaman’s approach has been presented as a moderate and sensible response to the possibility of global warming, it clearly is neither,” said Competitive Enterprise Institute Director of Global Warming Policy Myron Ebell. “If Bingaman were taking the alarmist position held by supporters of the Kyoto Protocol seriously, his plan would be far too modest to be of any value. If he were concerned about its economic impact, it would be far too expensive.” Sen. Bingaman’s proposed amendment to energy legislation this summer was withdrawn once it became clear that it would be defeated. It represented a scaled-back version of carbon dioxide emissions limits first advanced by Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Joseph Lieberman (D-CT). The McCain-Lieberman amendment was defeated by 38 votes to 60 in the Senate and itself represented a much-reduced version of the emissions reductions which would have been called for had the U.S. Senate ratified the Kyoto Protocol. “Bingaman’s approach would be both expensive and useless, making it difficult to believe he takes even his own current position seriously,” continued Ebell....

More Than One Best Way

A new consensus is emerging at the United Nations' Climate Change Conference in Montreal. Some participants are beginning to recognize that the Asia-Pacific Partnership for Clean Development and Climate Change (AP6) is at least part of the way forward in a global effort to deal with any potential harms from man-made global warming. The AP6 was announced last summer and includes China, India, South Korea, Japan, Australia, and the United States. The goal of the AP6 is to address climate change by focusing on creating and deploying technologies that emit less greenhouse gas such as carbon dioxide. Dr. Shin Boo-nam, the deputy director general of South Korea's ministry of foreign affairs and trade explained, during a panel discussion organized by the International Council for Capital Formation, that the AP6 members aim to use technological innovation and cooperation to improve their energy security, reduce air pollution, and address climate change. The goals of the AP6 appear to be aligned with the new proposals for combining economic development and climate policies being offered by various participants in the Montreal conference. For example, the environmental think tank the World Resources Institute issued a new study that focuses on how to boost the economic growth of poor countries while simultaneously helping them improve their energy efficiency. The report, Growing in the Greenhouse: Policies and Measures for Sustainable Development while Protecting the Climate, offers a series of case studies in which fast growing countries like China and India are urged to adopt policies that encourage both economic growth and energy efficiency. The WRI calls this sustainable development policies and measures (SD-PAMs). The idea is that developmental paths are favored that result in significantly lower future greenhouse gas emissions....

An Unethical Environment?

I've been thinking a lot lately about people who - -despite living in industrialized countries -- find affluence and the associated consumption of natural resources troubling. By their lights, wealthy countries like the US are the world's principle consumers -- unfairly rich, winners of life's lottery, polluters of the environment and so on. They claim that rich countries wish to "impose" their way of life on the rest of the world. Maurice Strong, for example -- long an influential executive officer at the U.N. and the head of the 1992 Earth Summit -- once said: "Isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn't it our responsibility to bring that about?" In his book Earth in the Balance, Al Gore (who could easily be the US president right now) advocated "bold efforts to change the very foundation of civilization." What motivates these people? Have they tried poverty and decided that poverty is better than wealth? I doubt it. The poor of the world aspire to gain what we have. Many will risk their lives (some will lose their lives) to enter the United States to be able to enjoy what we frequently take for granted. The single most important underlying theme that unites these critics of affluence is a misunderstanding of basic economics. I'm not talking about the intricacies of economic theories and their associated technical buzzwords. I'm talking about concepts that are so basic to the health and happiness of a society that they should be taught in every high school -- perhaps before.....