OPINION/COMMENTARY

Goldman Sachs Called on to Correct Statement Made at Annual Meeting

Action Fund Management LLC (AFM), investment adviser to the Free Enterprise Action Fund (http://www.FreeEnterpriseActionFund.com), called on Goldman Sachs today to correct a statement made at its annual meeting and requested that CEO Henry M. Paulson, Jr. reimburse the company for any shareholder assets spent to advance his personal interests. In response to a shareholder resolution presented at the meeting by Peter Flaherty of the National Legal and Policy Center (http://www.nlpc.org), Goldman Sachs' board member John Bryant responded, in part, by denying that the Nature Conservancy -- whose chairman is Goldman CEO Paulson -- was involved in the Goldman Sachs donation of 680,000 acres in Chile to the Wildlife Conservation Society. "The Nature Conservancy's tax return for 2004 states that Goldman Sachs paid the environmental group $144,895 between August 2003 and June 2004 for consulting services related to the Chilean land deal," said Steve Milloy of AFM. "When I pointed that fact at the Goldman Sachs shareholder meeting last week, my comment was met with silence by Mr. Bryan and the rest of Goldman Sachs' board." "The board's denial of facts that are contained in federal records underscores the need for a thorough and independent review of the land deal -- the sort of review already requested in a letter from us to Goldman's board in January and the shareholder resolution presented at the meeting," said AFM's Tom Borelli. "Another aspect of the Chilean land deal that we're interested in is why the donation was made, as evidenced by the group's tax return, from a Goldman Sachs partnership through the Goldman Sachs Charitable Fund -- a non-profit charity previously focused on providing scholarships, according to its tax returns -- rather than directly to the donee, the Wildlife Conservation Society," stated Milloy. CEO Paulson announced on April 3 -- the next business day after the March 31 shareholder meeting -- that he was transferring 637,000 shares of his own Goldman Sachs stock to a charitable foundation he established to donate to environmental causes....

Global Warming Hysteria Has Arrived

On April 4, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will hold a hearing to discuss a white paper that Senators Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) and Pete Domenici (R-NM) released on a mandatory cap and trade program for carbon dioxide emissions. The majority of panelists that will provide testimony in the hearing are for a cap-and-trade program, suggesting the Committee views global warming to be a serious problem and that a cap-and-trade approach is the preferred mechanism for fighting it. The hearing's timing couldn't be better, as it coincides with an intense global warming propaganda campaign by the media that is currently underway. The latest issue of Time magazine has a cover story on global warming entitled "Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid". (I wonder if this is meant to provide some balance for stories about the coming ice age that Time published as recently as 1994?) One of the new Public Service Commission's TV ads uses a freight train about to hit a little girl as a metaphor for the horrible impact of global warming on our children's future in just thirty years. (Even if the recent warming trend, since the 1970's, continues for another thirty years, global temperatures will only rise another 1 degree F.) For those of us who are visual learners, Al Gore has a new global warming movie coming out in May entitled "An Inconvenient Truth" which no doubt will be met by critical acclaim, Oscar nominations (probably not for best actor, though), and a possible Nobel Prize. Science magazine recently stuffed as many articles as it could find on the world's melting ice sheets, even though the bulk of the published temperature evidence shows no warming over Greenland or most of Antarctica in recent decades. One wonders, what in the world is going on here? It seems an undercurrent of anti-technology, anti-progress, anti-humanity sentiment is beginning to grip our culture....

Senators Domenici and Bingaman Work Together for Higher Energy Prices

Today’s Senate conference on mandatory greenhouse gas emissions limits is the latest attempt by Senators Pete Domenici (R-NM) and Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) to force the United States into a future of fewer choices and higher energy prices. The witness list, stacked with alarmist environmental activist groups and opportunistic corporations, demonstrates that Domenici and Bingaman have decided to shut out critical voices and proceed with an expensive energy rationing scheme regardless of its damaging effects on the economy. “Senators Domenici and Bingaman should be issuing white papers and convening experts to identify political barriers to the development of affordable energy for all Americans,” said Competitive Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Marlo Lewis, Jr. “Instead, they are pushing a Kyoto-lite agenda that would force consumers to pay more for gasoline, home heating oil, electricity, and natural gas. For shame!” An emissions trading program of the kind envisioned by Domenici and Bingaman would attempt to enact incrementally the restrictions of the Kyoto Protocol global warming treaty, which was previously rejected in the Senate by a vote of 95-0. This “Kyoto-by-Inches” strategy would amount to an undeclared tax on energy, raising the costs of energy and energy-intensive products for consumers in order to secure profits for a handful of well-positioned corporations. “Chairman Domenici and Senator Bingaman have decided to ask special interests what would be best for those special interests. It looks a lot like a gang of pirates gathering ’round to divvy up the booty....

America's Oil Weapon

President Bush has bemoaned what he calls the United States' addiction to oil. He has demonized America's oil use in speeches, and talked about the need to move beyond the petroleum-based economy. The president is certainly correct to point out harmful side effects to our use of oil and the need for us to address them. But in using the expressly negative language of addiction, the President not only cast a dark cloud over the fuel that presently underpins a huge portion of our economy, he badly confused a set of issues that demand clear thinking and fair analysis. It would be useful, then, to keep in mind the positive benefits our petroleum use has afforded. To start, oil was largely responsible for the right side winning the three epic wars of the 20th century. Call it the Oil Weapon, wielded by the United States and its allies with an expertise that should make OPEC blush. In the run-up to the First World War, Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill made the daring decision to switch the British navy's ships from coal to oil, the better to outrun German predators. When fighting broke out, the major oil powers like Standard Oil and Royal Dutch Shell saw to it that the Allied powers' military forces were always supplied. Meanwhile the Allies were able to deny the Kaiser's forces access to the oilfields in Romania and Baku at critical junctures in the war, ensuring victory. As the British statesman Lord Curzon noted, "The Allied cause had floated to victory upon a wave of oil." The story was similar in World War II....

Native Stewardship?

Lacking farms to grow food, California’s native Indians hunted its wild bird species nearly to extinction. When the first white pioneers settled California in the early 1800s, they found the San Francisco Bay area teeming with geese, ducks, shore birds, deer and elk. One early settler said “The wild geese and every species of water fowl darkened the surface of every bay…in flocks of millions.” This wildlife abundance seemed to endorse the legend that native Indians lived in supportive harmony with the wild birds and animals, harvesting only what their small communities needed to subsist. That legend has spread guilt among modern Americans whose food comes from crop fields that were once wildlife habitat. A painstaking California archeologist has now blown the Indian conservation legend into tiny fragments. Over seven years, he analyzed 5,700 bird bones from a huge Indian shell/waste mound on the shores of San Francisco Bay. The bones laid out a 1900-year history of the Indians’ bird hunting. They’d hunted dozens of wild bird species to local extinction, starting with the biggest geese and working their way clear down to tiny sandpipers. Archeologist Jack Broughton, a native Californian, says he found the bones of 64 different bird species, mostly waterbirds, but also quail and even eagles. The Bay Indians raided the island breeding colonies of cormorants, and caught the sea ducks floating far from shore. The early European settlers found birds in abundance, says Broughton, only because Spanish explorers had inadvertently brought such epidemic diseases as smallpox and measles, starting about 1500 AD. The shell mound shows that the Indian population crashed by 90 percent, and the Bay area bird populations then recovered....

Hybrids Consume More Energy in Lifetime Than Chevrolet's Tahoe SUV

As Americans become increasingly interested in fuel economy and global warming, they are beginning to make choices about the vehicles they drive based on fuel economy and to a lesser degree emissions. But many of those choices aren't actually the best in terms of vehicle lifetime energy usage and the cost to society over the full lifetime of a car or truck. CNW Marketing Research Inc. spent two years collecting data on the energy necessary to plan, build, sell, drive and dispose of a vehicle from initial concept to scrappage. This includes such minutia as plant to dealer fuel costs, employee driving distances, electricity usage per pound of material used in each vehicle and literally hundreds of other variables. To put the data into understandable terms for consumers, it was translated into a "dollars per lifetime mile" figure. That is, the Energy Cost per mile driven. The most Energy Expensive vehicle sold in the U.S. in calendar year 2005: Maybach at $11.58 per mile. The least expensive: Scion xB at $0.48 cents. While neither of those figures is surprising, it is interesting that driving a hybrid vehicle costs more in terms of overall energy consumed than comparable non-hybrid vehicles. For example, the Honda Accord Hybrid has an Energy Cost per Mile of $3.29 while the conventional Honda Accord is $2.18. Put simply, over the "Dust to Dust" lifetime of the Accord Hybrid, it will require about 50 percent more energy than the non-hybrid version. One of the reasons hybrids cost more than non-hybrids is the manufacture, replacement and disposal of such items as batteries, electric motors (in addition to the conventional engine), lighter weight materials and complexity of the power package. And while many consumers and environmentalists have targeted sport utility vehicles because of their lower fuel economy and/or perceived inefficiency as a means of transportation, the energy cost per mile shows at least some of that disdain is misplaced....

PETA 'Vegetarian' Celebrity Update

Singer P!nk (yes, that's an exclamation point -- she's just that hip) recently signed her name to a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) campaign condemning KFC for not conforming to standards invented by PETA. Her petition comes hot on the heels of lengthy profiles of the singer published recently in two UK newspapers. Displaying just how deep the singer's animal-rights philosophy goes, one article mentions the PETA spokes-rocker's leather boots, and the other her taste for fish. Speaking of the difference between PETA's official rhetoric and what people actually do: Shortly after we reported on Thursday that the rappers known as Little Brother are not actually vegetarians (as PETA has claimed), PETA removed its hip-hop hijacking of their image from the "PETA World" animal-rights website. PETA has given no reason for the quick turnaround, but it's only a partial return to reality: The group is still distributing anti-meat leaflets featuring a photo of Big Brother MC "Phonte." We note also that PETA's online list of "Sexiest Vegetarian 2005" finalists still includes Reese "Everything's Better With Bacon" Witherspoon. And PETA has yet to stop (ab)using the names of other famous figures in its materials....