The Dallas heat wave looks like it’s about to break, which will leave the
Vice President with nothing to blame on global warming—a temporary
condition, at least until hurricane season. Here in Washington, D.C., as in
much of the United States, the summer thus far has been slightly on the cool
side.
Not that the weather had much effect on panicky pragmatists in the Senate.
According to a July 30 report from the Bureau of National Affairs, some
Senate Republicans are worried about the tough language in the global
warming bill passed by the House 10 days ago. Says BNA, the goal in the
Senate "is to get a bill that the president will sign" and to "minimize very
controversial issues." Well, a very big controversy for the White House
are the restrictions on Kyoto passed by the House. Clinton Administration
plans to backdoor the Climate Treaty, buy off the business community with
greenhouse pork, and spend tax dollars to lobby for the establishment of an
international bureaucracy to allocate energy have been temporarily
curtailed. Is the Senate going to blow it with what policy analysts have
called "pre-emptive capitulation"? Let’s hope they have more guts.
Guts aplenty down in Australia, where the Australian Broadcasting
Corporation has just finished airing the British documentary series "Against
Nature." Predictably, outraged letters from Green activists are now pouring
in, including one from Clive Hamilton, executive director of The Australia
Institute, which appeared in the Australian Financial Review July 29. In
many circles, Green activism is associated with Marxist/socialist ideology,
so Hamilton's argument that viewers shouldn't believe anything that was
said--because, he says, the series' producers are all a bunch of
Commies--was just too funny. Indeed, the day Hamilton's piece appeared, we
were e-mailed another attack on "Against Nature," this one by Allen Meyers
from the Australian group GreenLeft. Mr. Meyers accuses Australian
Broadcasting of "pro-capitalist political correctness" and says claims that
the "Against Nature" producers are Marxist are nothing but a "cover-up."
The problem with these critics is that in making personal attacks on the
producers and those interviewed for the series, they fail to address the
issues raised. Have Green activists NOT blocked hundreds of hydroelectric
dam projects in the Third World? Have they NOT blocked attempts to
introduce high-yield agriculture into Africa? Have they NOT emphasized
draconian population control over industrial development? Are the
well-dressed, well-fed, well-housed activists NOT essentially saying to the
poor, "I've got mine. Too bad the planet can't afford for you to get
yours"? Apparently, neither Green activist Mr. Hamilton, nor GreenLeft
activist Mr. Meyers, had any response.
Maybe that was intentional. These days the accepted way of promoting
policy is simply to personalize the debate, reducing it "to unilateral
pronouncements and glib but quotable clichés," as U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Clarence Thomas remarked last week. No one needs to "do the hard work of
dissecting an argument," said Justice Thomas. All one has to do is "attack
and thus discredit the person making the argument."
That doesn’t resolve the matter, of course, which is why we agree with Mr.
Hamilton on one point: a fair debate would put scientist against scientist
(and leave out the activist rant).
No doubt, Dr. Paul Reiter, head of the Dengue Fever Branch of the U.S.
government’s National Center for Infectious Diseases in San Juan, Puerto
Rico, would have welcomed a chance to face-off with promoters of hype. The
National Consumer Coalition brought Dr. Reiter to Washington July 28 to
brief Congressional staff and the press on claimed threats of tropical
disease epidemics due to global warming. (Some of Dr. Reiter’s writings on
this issue are on the SEPP home page, under "Controversies: Link Claimed
Between Diseases/Floods and Global Warming") What most frustrates him, he
said, is that unwarranted alarms are being spread by those who are not
specialists in tropical diseases. Some have persisted in making wild claims
even after their "facts" have been specifically corrected by the experts.
As we remarked in the last TW2, so-called "mainstream" media are beginning
to take a harder look at the politics behind the global warming issue, and
how Carol Browner is running the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Now
we have word that journalist John Tierney has a critical piece in the works
on the wind turbine industry, possibly for the New York Times magazine.
Wind farms, referred to as a "blight on the landscape" by Britain’s Prince
Philip and others, have come under fire, even from some Green groups, for
playing havoc with bird populations. At the Altamonte Pass facility in
California, the largest wind farm in the United States (and the world, for
that matter), the population of golden eagles has been decimated. There
are rumblings, even within the industry, that Altamonte Pass should be shut
down before the Greens start publicizing a "Save the Birds" campaign.
Tierney has written some tough articles on environmental policy. It will be
interesting to see what he comes up with.
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times, which has long been an advocate of
California’s ban on smoking in public places, printed a balanced account of
the federal court ruling against the EPA’s cooked science on secondhand
smoke. The editors put it on page one, above the fold. Perhaps even
newspaper ideologues "get it" eventually.
But not politicians wives. Cherie Blair, wife of the British Prime
Minister, has been spotted wearing a "bioelectric pendant," which is
apparently the latest in State Dinner chic. The Bioelectric Shield Co.,
which makes the pendant, said it is designed to ward off electromagnetic
radiation from modern office equipment, i.e. computers, copiers, etc. A
company spokesman says the pendant was recommended to Mrs. Blair by Hillary
Clinton. (These two are smart lawyers?) As Robert Park of the American
Physical Society, who passed along this item, notes, neither Cherie nor
Hillary have been harmed by electromagnetic radiation since donning the
pendants.
We are so relieved...
TW2 is compiled by SEPP Research Associate Candace Crandall. Be sure to visit
The Science & Environmental Policy Project web site (www.sepp.org) for more
articles and updates.
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