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Shocking. But isn't there a "consensus"?!
Criticisms of Mr. Gore have come not only from conservative groups and prominent skeptics of catastrophic warming, but also from rank-and-file scientists like Dr. Easterbook, who told his peers that he had no political ax to grind. A few see natural variation as more central to global warming than heat-trapping gases. Many appear to occupy a middle ground in the climate debate, seeing human activity as a serious threat but challenging what they call the extremism of both skeptics and zealots. Kevin Vranes, a climatologist at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado, said he sensed a growing backlash against exaggeration. While praising Mr. Gore for "getting the message out," Dr. Vranes questioned whether his presentations were "œoverselling our certainty about knowing the future."
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So we've had a warm winter. Many meteorologists have used this as grist to talk about global warming. While they might favor this sort of discussion, not even the scientists who argue most forcefully that we must act to combat global warming believe that the recent warm spell is due primarily to it. A weather forecaster makes this point:
I have been in operational meteorology since 1978, and I know dozens and dozens of broadcast meteorologists all over the country. Our big job: look at a large volume of raw data and come up with a public weather forecast for the next seven days. I do not know of a single TV meteorologist who buys into the man-made global warming hype. I know there must be a few out there, but I can't find them.
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Then, of course, there's the environment. Subsidies wreak havoc on the ecosystem. One small example: There's a 6,000-square-mile dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, larger than Connecticut. It's so depleted of oxygen because of algae blooms caused by fertilizer runoff that shrimp and crabs at the Louisiana shore literally try to leap from the water to breathe. This is endangering the profitable Gulf fishing industry. Most of the fertilizer comes from a few Midwestern counties that receive billions in subsidies (more than $30 billion from 1997 to 2002, according to the Environmental Working Group).
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George F. Will addresses the recent Supreme Court Decision on Campaign Finance.
Campaign finance reform is what it pretends to combat: corruption. The Supreme Court should have said something like that when it struck down, as unconstitutional abridgments of free speech, Vermont's severe limits on contributions to and spending by campaigns.
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The Supreme Court handed down a decision in the Rapanos case yesterday, opining that new limits could be imposed on the Clean Water Act. However, the 5-4 decision failed to define what those new limits might be.
In yesterday's ruling, a five-justice majority agreed that the Army Corps of Engineers, the lead federal agency on wetlands regulation, exceeded its authority when it denied two Michigan developers permits to build on wetlands. The court said the Corps had gone beyond the Clean Water Act by making landowners obtain permits to dump rocks and dirt not only in marshes directly next to lakes and rivers but also in areas linked to larger bodies of water only through a network of ditches and drains. But there was no clear majority as to where the Corps should have drawn the line, with a four-justice plurality made up of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. arguing for an across-the-board reduction in the Corps' regulatory role but Kennedy rejecting that view and calling for a case-by-case approach.
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If the goal of a carbon tax is to combat global warming, there exists one major problem: enforcement. In the global marketplace, a healthy climate would be a public good where all countries benefit. Therefore, even if the entire world may benefit on net from a global carbon tax, without a proper enforcement mechanism, each autonomous country may have an individual incentive to not sign onto the tax given that everyone else has signed on. This tragedy of the commons is solved only by an allocation of property rights or via government enforcement. But who owns the rights to the global climate? And would some governments have authority over other governments, and if so, how? Would this enforcement be via military force, trade sanctions, or merely diplomacy?
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Gore?s film recently hit its widest release on the June 9-11 weekend and is showing in 122 theaters nationwide. So far, despite a strong per-theater earning average, it?s not yet made $4 million in its three weeks on the silver screen. The aforementioned ?Gigli? only lasted in theaters for three weeks, but grossed more than Gore?s movie has to date, making $6 million.
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It seems that the automobile industry is regulating itself to take on the problems CAFE regulations caused with regard to vehicle downsizing.
As more Americans buy smaller cars to save money on gas, the danger of collisions between mismatched vehicles is escalating.
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An article in today's Wall Street Journal (subscription required) ponders whether Treasury secretary nominee Henry Paulson's environmental (read: "green") standpoint will make a difference at Treasury.
We probably won't know about Mr. Paulson's offense until after the November congressional elections. But given his record in using Goldman's power and money toward environmental ends, he just might use his clout to push the administration toward dealing with climate change or even -- don't mention it before the elections -- considering an energy tax. Christie Whitman, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency early in the Bush years, says just having a sympathetic voice at Treasury can be a big deal. "One of the biggest raps against some environmental proposals is that they're not economically sound," she says. "One of the things that his kind of advocacy can do is put a lie to that."
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Holman Jenkins notes a crucial point that somehow didn't make it into "An Inconvenient Truth."
Mr. Gore's narrative isn't science, but science fiction. It also contains a large element of political fiction, relying on the hack theme of good guys versus bad guys. Hint to filmmakers: An honest policy argument usually takes the form of one of two questions: "Whose rights trump?" and "What's welfare maximizing?" Mr. Gore did not discover global warming and hasn't been a voice in the wilderness. Our political system has looked at the question closely, in a way Mr. Gore's film doesn't, and repeatedly concluded that the cost of action is greater than the known or surmised risks. That's all it can do. Thus the Senate and Presidents Clinton and Bush all made clear that they wouldn't sign up for a Kyoto gesture that imposes real costs with no real benefits.
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But a factoid or two later, the Greenpeace authors were stumped while searching for the ideal menacing metaphor. We present it here exactly as it was written, capital letters and all: "In the twenty years since the Chernobyl tragedy, the world's worst nuclear accident, there have been nearly [FILL IN ALARMIST AND ARMAGEDDONIST FACTOID HERE]."
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