OPINION/COMMENTARY

An Inconvenient Economic Truth

AS THEY STRUGGLE to cope with voters' new concern about global warming, the world's politicians seem to be standing in front of Snow White's mirror asking, "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who in the land is the greenest of all?" while desperately chanting the Everly Brothers hit, "Let it be me." Australia's Prime Minister John Howard opened the bidding by banning the sale of incandescent light bulbs, starting in 2010; Britain's Tony Blair and Germany's Angela Merkel are competing for the anti-global warming leadership of Europe, while the British prime minister-to-be entertains Al Gore for what can only be an ample lunch; Tory leader David Cameron is erecting windmills on his house and targeting air travel, with people who fly most often (read: wealth-generating businessmen) to be taxed at the highest rate; California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has converted one of his Hummers to hydrogen and another to biofuel, and says the environmental movement is taking off just like the body-building movement once did; and George W. Bush is lavishing billions of taxpayers' money on America's already-cosseted farmers to get them to grow more corn. All of these plans have two features in common: rationing and new costs....


Who really owns beachfront property?

Few places in the world offer a more spectacular view than the Gulf of Mexico, seen from the top floor of a beachfront condominium in Naples, Fla. That's why – we'll call him Charlie – chose to live in this condo, three miles north of the Naples pier. It was a beautiful March day when Charlie noticed a county truck with four workers driving on the beach in front of his condo. The workers were driving stakes into the ground. Charlie, and other residents of the building, asked the workers not to drive the truck onto their private property and not to put stakes into the ground. The workers said they were identifying where sea oats, an endangered species, would be planted. Charlie and the other residents, again, asked the workers to get off their private property. Presently, another county truck arrived, and the project manager, an employee of Collier County, emerged and, according to Charlie, announced that the property in question was "owned by the federal government."....


TRUTH ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING TOO INCONVENIENT FOR GORE

While former Vice President Al Gore did his best to limit his exposure while testifying at Congressional hearings, he cannot hide from the various mistakes, misstatements and outright falsehoods in his movie and books on global warming, says H. Sterling Burnett, senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis.

There are several instances where Gore is out-of- step with science, says Burnett:

* Gore implies that human-caused global warming is instigating a decline in the snow pack on Mount Kilimanjaro; however, according to studies in the International Journal of Climatology and the Journal of Geophysical Research, the retreat began in the late 19th century -- before most human greenhouse gases were emitted.
* Gore also says that human-caused global warming poses a threat of extinction to polar bears; yet current polar bear numbers have increased dramatically, from around 5,000 polar bears in the mid- century to between 22,000 and 25,000 today.

Additionally, Gore has implied that in the near future global warming threatens to raise sea levels between 20 and 40 feet, swamping coastlines and creating 200 million refugees:

* However, the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report provides a high estimate of only 17 inches of sea level rise in the next century -- less than half its previous high estimate.
* And a 2005 study in the Journal of Glaciology by a NASA scientist concludes the glacial loss is occurring slowly: 0.05 millimeters on average per year. At that rate, it will take a millennium for the oceans to rise 5 centimeters (roughly 2 inches) and 20,000 years to rise a full meter.

Source: "Truth About Global Warming Too Inconvenient for Gore," National Center for Policy Analysis, March 21, 2007.

For text:http://www.pr-inside.com/truth-about-global-warming-too-inconvenient-r72576.htm



Gore on the Rocks

As international celebrity and film star Al Gore prepared to testify about global warming on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, it was already apparent that the hot air may be leaking out of the global-warming balloon. After a year of concentrated effort that includes a multimillion-dollar p.r. campaign on top of An Inconvenient Truth and slavish media coverage parroting the climate-alarmist line, recent polls show that public opinion has barely budged. Only about a third of Americans, according to a recent Gallup survey, are agitated about climate change, and even people who say the environment is their most important issue rank climate change behind air and water quality in importance. Meanwhile a backlash in the scientific community has begun. Last week, New York Times veteran science reporter William Broad filed a devastating article about scientists who are “alarmed” at Gore’s alarmism; Gore’s account of global warming goes far beyond the evidence. The dissents from Gore’s extremism, Broad explained, “come not only from conservative groups and prominent skeptics of catastrophic warming, but also from rank-and-file scientists” who have “no political ax to grind.” It appears Gore refused to be interviewed directly for the article; he responded to e-mail questions only. This backlash has been quietly building for a while....


A Milestone of a Mistake: Inconvenient CAFE Truths

Demands for tighter auto fuel-economy standards are a major part of the global-warming bandwagon, and the newly unveiled Markey-Platts bill on auto fuel economy is being touted by environmentalists as a “bipartisan milestone” on the issue. Unfortunately, it’s a milestone of a mistake. It continues a central tradition of proponents of this program, known as CAFE (for corporate average fuel economy)—namely, never admit that CAFE has any impact on auto safety. In fact, CAFE is a well-established killer of a regulation, because it restricts the production of larger, more crashworthy vehicles. According to the National Academy of Sciences 2002 study of CAFE, this downsizing effect contributes to about 2,000 deaths per year—a huge toll for a program that’s been in effect for three decades. But according to the Markey-Platts bill, the NAS study “clearly states that fuel economy can be increased without negatively impacting the safety of America’s cars and trucks”. Actually, the study doesn’t say that at all. It does suggest that new technology can allow CAFE to be increased without further downsizing, but that’s quite a bit different from say CAFE will stop killing people. The NAS study does not conclude that new technology will allow a reversal of the downsizing that’s already occurred under CAFE. Second, the study never addresses the more fundamental point that more stringent standards would very likely restrict the upsizing of the new-vehicle fleet. That upsizing—an increase in average vehicle size and weight—is something that many consumers will want if (or, more likely, when) gas prices stabilize or fall in the future. The more stringent the CAFE standards are, the less the auto industry will be able to respond to that demand. In short, more stringent CAFE standards will be even more deadly than the current ones, and the NAS report is no basis for pretending otherwise....


Don't knuckle under to the enviro-luddites

In spiritually weak moments, I sometimes envy the blind faith of the environ-zealots, even if the object of their faith is hardly sacred. For all their self-congratulation over their allegiance to science and the scientific method, they flatly violate the spirit of scientific inquiry in their approach to environmental issues. Of course they cloak all of their claims with the cover of science. They accompany their manifestos with endorsements from hundreds or thousands of scientists, who serve as the functional equivalent of human shields to insulate their extreme claims from scrutiny by the not yet converted. Never mind that many of the credentialed signatories are anything but experts on climate science. They are scientists, and they buy into the dogma. End of discussion. Never mind that the reports said to be the final word on these subjects are sometimes crafted by results-oriented, ideologically intoxicated bureaucrats and published before the signatories have had the opportunity to read them. What matters is that the bishops of this secular cult have issued an edict proclaiming that a consensus on global warming has been reached: It is occurring, human behavior is contributing substantially to it and radical alterations of that behavior are mandated as a moral imperative....


Ethanol isn't worth getting pumped up about, but oil shale might be

There are no easy answers, but we can develop new sources of power. First, though, we need to move past one attempted solution that simply isn't working: ethanol. Because ethanol comes from homegrown corn (much of it from right here in Illinois) politicians love to pretend that adding ethanol will reduce the need for foreign oil. That's why President Bush recently called for quadrupling the amount of ethanol we use. But ethanol can't solve our energy problems. For one thing, it's expensive to refine ethanol, and it's difficult to add it to the existing fuel supply. That all costs money, which was reflected in last year's higher prices at the pump. Also, scientists have shown that burning ethanol actually wastes money. Cornell University professor David Pimentel found that processing corn into ethanol requires 29 percent more fossil energy than the fuel it produces. Others disagree on the exact percentage, but there's no doubt it takes a significant amount of energy to produce ethanol. "There is just no energy benefit to using plant biomass for liquid fuel," Pimentel says. And, of course, ethanol costs drivers, too. The federal government says that cars burning gasoline mixed with ethanol get fewer miles per gallon. That means more fill-ups, more often....