OPINION/COMMENTARY

Woodpecker Racket?

Last year’s reported sighting in eastern Arkansas of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker, long thought to be extinct, raised the hopes of bird-watchers everywhere. But now a prominent bird expert has cast serious doubt on the report, characterizing it as “faith-based” ornithology and “a disservice to science.” Writing in the ornithology journal The Auk (January 2006), Florida Gulf Coast University ornithologist Jerome A. Jackson criticized the “evidence” put forth to support the conclusion that the Woodpecker wasn’t extinct after all — including a four-second video of an alleged sighting which garnered widespread media attention; several other anecdotal sightings; and acoustic signals purported to be vocalization and raps from the Woodpecker. “While the world rejoiced, my elation turned to disbelief,” wrote Jackson. “I had seen the ‘confirming’ video in the news releases and recognized its poor quality, but I had believed [anyway],” he continued. “Then I saw [a still image] and seriously doubted that this evidence was confirmation of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker. Even a cursory comparison of this figure with [photographs and illustrations of real Ivory-billed Woodpeckers] shows that the white on the wing of the bird… is too extensive to be that of an Ivory-billed Woodpecker,” Jackson wrote.
Jackson dismissed the other unverified sightings with, “I do not question the sincerity, integrity or passion of these observers [but] we simply cannot know what they saw.” The researchers who claimed to video the Ivory-billed Woodpecker later admitted that the acoustic information “while interesting, does not reach the level we require for proof.” Jackson went on to conclude that, “My opinion is that the bird in the [video] is a normal Pileated Woodpecker… Others have independently come to the same conclusion, and publication of independent analyses may be forthcoming.”....

Global Warming Science, or Policy?

A nasty little spat has arisen as a result of NASA's leading climate scientist, Dr. James Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), speaking out on the Bush Administration's reluctance to begin imposing carbon dioxide restrictions to help slow global warming. The first salvo by Hansen was fired on October 26, 2004 when, speaking to an audience at the University of Iowa*, he said, "In my more than three decades in government, I have never seen anything approaching the degree to which information flow from scientists to the public has been screened and controlled as it is now," referring to pressure he apparently has experienced from the Administration. The issue has now surfaced again after a more recent lecture, and Hansen has said he will ignore NASA's restrictions on him. Those restrictions call for coordinating with NASA's public affairs office, and getting management approval for any of his talks that touch on policy, as opposed to science. I have some familiarity with these restrictions on government employees, as they were a major reason I resigned from NASA over four years ago. But back then, the shoe was on the other foot. NASA knew I was not supportive of the popular gloom-and-doom theory of global warming, and before any congressional testimony of mine on the subject, I was "reminded" that I could speak on the science, but not on policy matters. Well, it turns out that expert witnesses on this contentious subject are almost always asked by a senator or congressman, "What would you do about policy if you were me?" When the question came, I dutifully dodged it. I am not sure, but disobeying my superiors would probably have been grounds for dismissal, if they wanted to press the point....

Dim Prospects for Property Rights

This spring the U.S. Senate is expected to consider the Threatened and Endangered Species Recovery Act of 2005, a bill passed by the House in September to overcome the abuses of private property caused by the 1973 Endangered Species Act (ESA). But Senator Lincoln Chafee (R-Rhode Island), chairman of the Subcommittee on Fisheries, Wildlife, and Water, says he won’t consider the bill until he receives a report from a “working group” set up by Colorado’s Keystone Center to review the ESA. Will the report seek to water down the bill’s reforms? Go here (pdf) to read the full Capital Research Center report.

Dusting Off the Old Energy Policy

No doubt, President George W. Bush struggled to come up with something new on energy policy for his State of the Union address. After all, the massive 1,725 page Energy Policy Act of 2005 was passed only six months ago, and its wide-ranging provisions have just begun to be implemented. This energy bill contained a host of federal outlays, tax breaks, subsidies, and other inducements to encourage the development and use of alternative energy technologies and the upgrade of conventional ones. So rather than add something new, the President’s remarks on energy offered more of the same. Unfortunately, this is not a promising approach. Rather than expand government interference in energy markets and pick winners and losers from among emerging technologies, Washington should get out of the way and let market forces work. Streamlining energy regulations and removing federal restrictions on domestic energy production would have been a good place to start and should have been part of the speech. Much of the energy focus in the speech was on America’s growing dependence on oil -- especially oil from unreliable and unfriendly regimes. This is a legitimate concern, though the President‘s "addiction" rhetoric was excessive. The President’s solution is government-led research and development of petroleum alternatives that might one day meet the nation’s transportation needs. The favored technologies include hydrogen fuel cells and cellulosic ethanol. This type of research is nothing new. The federal government has spent billions on these efforts since the 1970s and made little progress. Invariably, the research reveals that these kinds of alternatives have serious problems of their own, such as costs that are often far higher than those of conventional fuels. Even after decades of research and development, commercial viability of alternative fuels remains elusive....

The Deadly Toll of Federal Fuel Regulations

A new study this week from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reinforces what researchers have long known: larger vehicles are safer than smaller ones in the same vehicle category. For passenger cars, SUVs and pickups, the occupant death rate generally was worse in the smaller vehicles within each category. This study, like others before it, indicates that the government’s fuel economy mandates reduce vehicle safety by restricting the production of larger vehicles. Environmentalist demands for more stringent standards would increase traffic deaths even more. “The federal mandate to increase mileage in new cars over the past thirty years has had deadly results,” said Competitive Enterprise Institute General Counsel Sam Kazman. “In order to comply with the government’s fuel economy rules, carmakers have been forced to produce smaller, lighter vehicles. Those lighter cars have translated into tens of thousands of additional traffic deaths.” In 2002 the National Academy of Sciences found that the federal government’s Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) regulations contribute to between 1,300 and 2,600 additional traffic deaths per year....

Has Bush Gone 'Green' on Energy?

President Bush seems to have gone “green” in his energy policy. His State of the Union address resonated with themes John Kerry argued against him in the 2004 presidential election campaign. What happened to the defense of drilling in the ANWR? Evidently the solution to America’s dependence upon foreign oil is to use more biofuels, adapt our cars to ethanol and invest more in research. Who knows, maybe we will come up with the non-exploding nuclear battery, so we can all forget about the energy crisis once and for all? Has Bush forgotten his roots in the oil industry? The Energy Information Administration (EIA) of the U.S. Department of Energy reports that today there are 1.28 trillion barrels of proven oil reserves, more than ever in human history, despite world consumption of oil doubling since the 1970s. Very possibly “peak oil” is just another energy oil hoax. The first reports that we were running out of oil came in the late-1880s when the U.S. Geological Survey began worrying that no more oil would be found in Texas or California. These days, President Bush talking about oil is sounding a lot like Jimmy Carter. On April 18, 1977, in an address televised to the nation, President Carter said that in the 1980’s the world would begin running out of oil. A quarter century later and the EIA still reports we have more oil worldwide than ever. How could that be if we are truly running out? The 2005 federal energy bill allocated approximately $6 billion in federal funds to assist in the development of ethanol plants around the country. But is ethanol really fuel efficient? A recent analysis conducted by David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell University, and Tad Patzek, professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, came to the conclusion that the production of ethanol burns up more hydrocarbon fuels than it saves. Taking into account the production of pesticides and fertilizers needed to grow the corn in the first place, the running of farm machinery and irrigation, the grounding and transporting corn to the ethanol plant, and the fermentation and distillation of ethanol from the water mix, the two scientists concluded that corn requires the expenditure of 29 percent more hydrocarbon energy than was saved by the resulting ethanol. Maybe that’s why the ethanol industry would most likely collapse if the federal subsidies went away....