Independent Women's Forum - Research Areas > Natural Resources, Energy, and the Environment

The Andy Caldwell Show: Scared to Death Ch. 14

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 16:05:00 EDT

Co-authors Christopher Booker and Richard North of Scared to Death From BSE to Global Warming: Why Scares are Costing Us the Earth joined The Andy Caldwell Show.

The Amy Oliver Show: Global Warming Alarmism

info@iwf.org (Allison Kasic) — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 13:34:00 EDT

Allison Kasic joined The Amy Oliver Show to discuss the trend of global warming alarmism.

Podast Alert

info@iwf.org (Stacy Chin) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 11:30:00 EDT

New IWF podcast with Amy Watson and Allison Kasic on gas prices and the push for increased domestic drilling.

LISTEN HERE!

IWF Podcast: Gas Prices and Increased Drilling

info@iwf.org (Amy Watson) info@iwf.org (Allison Kasic) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 11:22:00 EDT

Allison Kasic and Amy Watson discuss gas prices and the push for increased domestic drilling.

The Amy Oliver Show: Update on Scared to Death with Christopher Booker and Richard North

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:54:00 EDT

Co-authors, Christopher Booker and Richard North, joined The Amy Oliver Show today to give an update on their book, Scared to Death and on global warming scares.

Saving the planet while letting children starve

info@iwf.org (Michelle D. Bernard) — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 10:43:00 EDT

The Examiner

WASHINGTON -

A certain moral vanity infuses the environmental movement. It demands drastic action to prevent possible warming a century away, but offers little or no hope to those starving or dying of AIDS today.

Protecting the planet is important. However, we must never forget that humankind is at the center of God's creation.

Climate change is horribly complicated. There has been warming over the last century, but not the last decade. New studies suggest that temperatures may actually cool through 2015. Knowledgeable scientists disagree over how much warming is due to human action and how much is due to natural factors.

Most important, we really don't know how much warming is likely to occur in the future. Imagine trying in 1900 to predict the world of 2000. We can do no better today looking ahead to 2100. Even small changes in assumptions could invalidate predictions of warming in coming years, let alone decades.

If it were easy to do, then we could dramatically cut CO2 emissions just to be sure. But carbon-based fuels - coal, natural gas, and oil - make up 85 percent of America's energy supplies.

Never mind years of research and billions spent on alternative fuels. Renewable sources of energy accounted for just 7 percent of America's total energy consumption last year. The share due to wind, solar and geothermal power barely registers. That's not going to change anytime soon.

Energy is what makes our economy run. It's how we fuel our cars and planes, heat and cool our homes, run our factories and produce the goods and services that turned a life of misery into one of plenty. Slashing CO2 emissions means slashing energy use, and slashing energy use means slashing economic growth.

One of the so-called "cap and trade" measures recently advanced in the Senate called for a 70 percent cut in emissions by 2050. The result of this sort of legislation would be dramatically higher energy prices. Forget $4 per gallon gasoline. Think twice that and more.

Looking at it another way, the Congressional Budget Office predicted that this approach could raise an average household's annual energy costs by $1,300. That's the same as the government imposing a $1 trillion tax on the economy.

The economic consequences of such a price shock would be huge. Manufacturing would be hurt the most. Analysts predict job losses in the hundreds of thousands or even millions.

Today's gross domestic product runs about $14 trillion, but the Environmental Protection Agency figures the legislation debated by the Senate could cut our economy's output up to $1 trillion in 2030 and $2.8 trillion in 2050. The accumulated losses would be staggering.

Incurring this kind of cost could be justified if it was the only means to save the Earth from disaster. But estimates suggest these economy-wrecking efforts would ultimately only prevent .013 degrees (Celsius) in warming. In other words, it would have no meaningful effect on our climate.

The poor would suffer the most. If we drain trillions of dollars out of the economy, it is the poor who find it hard, if not impossible, to buy a home, educate their kids, buy gas, put food on the table, get needed health care and more. Any money spent to try to prevent temperatures from rising generates an "opportunity cost," that is, we are missing out on putting that money to another use.

Think of America's great needs. Poverty still exists, even amid plenty. Our educational system is abysmal, failing to educate many children morally to be good citizens and economically to participate in the global economy. There is infrastructure to be built and investment to be made.

Every dollar spent to preclude a temperature increase that might never occur is a dollar not available to help a needy person today. And opportunity costs run global.

Danish environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg organized the Copenhagen Consensus, which brought together experts to debate how best to spend $75 billion to help the world's poor. Top of the list were vitamin supplements for children. Second was freer trade. Third were mineral supplements for kids. Fourth was expanded immunization for the young.

And so it went - food and education aid, women's programs and health care. The first global warming initiative checked in at only number 14: Research and development spending on low-carbon energy technologies. Mitigation, that is, cutting energy use to reduce temperatures, came in at 29 (when supplemented with R&D) and 30 (when considered alone).

That is, there are 13 better ways to save lives and improve people's standard of living than to do anything about global warming. The latter might be a problem, but it isn't the most important problem facing us. It isn't even among the top dozen.

Of course, if temperatures rise significantly, there will be consequences, but the most cost-effective way of dealing with them will be to adapt. That's what we did in past centuries as the Earth warmed and cooled. It's what we should do in the future in similar circumstances.

The Nobel laureate Milton Friedman told us there is no such thing as a free lunch; he was right. Politics is about trade-offs, and spending ourselves poor in an attempt to deal with uncertain climate problems in the future will cost our society, and particularly its most vulnerable members, far too much today. Protecting the environment requires that we first protect the people in it.

Michelle D. Bernard is author of "Women's Progress, How Women are Wealthier, Healthier, and More Independent Than Ever Before," president and chief executive officer of the Independent Women's Forum and Independent Women's Voice and an MSNBC political analyst.

Examiner

A Strange Way to Save the Planet

info@iwf.org (Carrie L. Lukas) — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 08:27:00 EDT

So much for "saving the planet." Charles Krauthammer makes the point that by preventing domestic exploration, Speaker Pelosi encourages more around the globe, where they are much more likely to make a mess of it:

Does Pelosi imagine that with so much of America declared off-limits, the planet is less injured as drilling shifts to Kazakhstan and Venezuela and Equatorial Guinea? That Russia will be more environmentally scrupulous than we in drilling in its Arctic?

The net environmental effect of Pelosi's no-drilling willfulness is (BEG ITAL)negative(END ITAL). Outsourcing U.S. oil production does nothing to lessen worldwide environmental despoliation. It simply exports it to more corrupt, less efficient, more unstable parts of the world -- thereby increasing net planetary damage.

Read the whole article here.

Drilling for Oil

info@iwf.org (Carrie L. Lukas) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 13:03:00 EDT

Over at National Review Online, Mark Hemingway has a really interesting story on his experience visiting an off-shore oil platform:

The platform is the size of a few football fields jammed together, and the top of the derrick was easily a few hundred feet off the water. Dozens of people lived on board, and everything - from the computer systems to the actual drilling rig - was state of the art. Brutus produced over 100,000 barrels of oil a day - down from over 300,000 at its peak capacity.

That sounds impressive. But here's what truly floored me: Shell decided Brutus's location in the gulf would be profitable for drilling in April 1999. The company then built the massive oil platform, transported it to the right location in the gulf, anchored the floating leviathan onto the seafloor 3,000 feet below, drilled 17,000 feet below that, and began producing oil in July 2001. It took only two years to get Brutus online.

Of course, as Hemingway writes, this doesn't mean that allowing additional exploration would mean that Americans would be enjoying $2 per gallon gasoline, but it does suggest that help could be on the way sooner than many drilling opponents are willing to admit. Of course, allowing more exploration might also encourage foreign producers to begin pumping more and discourage speculation. In other words, while allowing drilling isn't an immediate fix, it would generate positive effects very quickly.

Fueling a Furor

info@iwf.org (Donna Wiesner) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 09:50:00 EDT

The Washington Times

At a recent Senate committee hearing, Sen, Richard Durbin asked, "Does it trouble any of you when you see what you are doing to us?" The Illinois Democrat's question was aimed at U.S. oil executives, but would have been more appropriate if it came from millions of Americans and was directed toward Mr. Durbin and other policymakers.

Beyond the finger-pointing, it's important for Americans to understand that America's "big oil" industry did not place us in our current predicament. Congress and state legislatures - with the aid of special interests groups - are largely to blame.

The inescapable reality is that our nation needs and uses a lot of energy. And without policies that encourage increased domestic production of energy, fuel will get even more expensive.

Today, U.S. energy companies have very little influence on the price of oil, which largely determines the cost of finished fuel products such as gasoline and diesel fuel. Sadly, in part because of U.S. energy policy, worldwide oil production is determined largely by a limited number of companies from abroad.

Over the last three decades, progressive policymakers and activists have essentially blocked, banned or litigated nearly every conceivable means of new domestic oil production. The complex barriers set at the federal, state and local levels have ensured there has not been a new refinery or nuclear plant built in the U.S. in 30 years. More than 60 percent of inland federal lands and 85 percent of our coastal waters have prohibitions against production, and in some cases, even exploration. New coal generating facilities are being litigated out of consideration or failing to finance themselves with capital investments because of the likelihood of mandated emissions reductions.

In contrast, China, by way of Cuba, is now drilling closer to our shores than U.S. companies are allowed. Inland, vast deposits of oil shale have been identified in the Rockies and Western United States - estimated to be twice as large as the oil reserves of the Middle East - but restrictions are in place preventing any significant exploration.

While the United States restricts supply, global demand is at an all-time high. The result of these policies should be obvious. When increasing demand for fuel is placed against insufficient supplies, prices go up. When the majority of domestic oil and gas reserves are placed off-limits and we are forced to compete in an increasingly competitive global market for supplies, prices go up. When existing fossil fuels are penalized while alternative fuels that are not yet commercially viable are subsidized, prices go up. When arbitrary price controls and retaliatory trade measures are put in place, they create shortages ... and do we really want the Carter shortages all over again?

Unfortunately, Congress has once again missed the mark entirely as they try to pass legislation with the stated intent of bringing energy costs down. The playbook is getting entirely familiar. Once again a windfall profits tax on energy producers was voted on and defeated. A similar bill was passed in 1980 and quickly revoked after it produced less revenue than expected, decreased domestic production capability, and increased our reliance on foreign energy suppliers. Congress should not repeat this failed policy path.

Congress tried to revive another failed policy idea with a bill that claims to address "price gouging," which is legislative code for price controls. As we know from the 1970s, such laws would simply lead to supply disruptions, long waiting lines, and adverse economic consequences for all Americans.

Another congressional favorite has been the No Oil Producing and Exporting Cartels Act (NOPEC), which would require the United States to sue member states of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. The law states that nations would violate U.S. law if they "limit the production or distribution of oil, natural gas, or any other petroleum product ... when such action, combination, or collective action has a direct, substantial, and reasonably foreseeable effect on the market, supply, price, or distribution of oil, natural gas, or other petroleum products." Unfortunately, America's own citizens can't sue their government for the very same thing.

Casting scapegoats and villains won't address our energy challenges. Congress needs to quit passing the buck and embrace economic reality by crafting actionable public policies to help produce additional domestic energy supplies, both from alternative energy sources and traditional fossil fuels.

So, members of Congress, does it trouble any of you when you see what you are doing to us?

Donna Wiesner Keene is a senior fellow at the Independent Women's Forum and the chief executive officer of BrainTrain. She lobbied for the first successful energy deregulation bill in Maryland.

Strong Arm Tactics Won't Help Consumers At the Pump

info@iwf.org (Carrie L. Lukas) — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 09:10:00 EDT

Townhall

Other than being over age 25 and a resident and citizen of the state, there are no qualifications to be a Member of Congress. If you can get the votes, you can become a Member. Yet anyone listening to recent discussions on Capitol Hill about gasoline prices can be forgiven for assuming hubris and economic ignorance are also required.

A headline-making exchange between Representative Maxine Waters and John Hofmeister, president of Shell Oil Company is just the latest and most egregious example. During questioning, Rep. Waters asked the oil executive to "guarantee" that the price of oil will go down if oil companies are granted authority to drill off U.S. shores. When Mr. Hofmeister failed to offer such a guarantee, Representative Waters issued a threat: "And guess what this liberal would be all about? This liberal would be all about socialize...basically taking over and the government running all of your companies."

It's a breathtaking moment of honesty from a member of Congress. So much for concerns about the limits of government authority; so much for respect for private property and free enterprise. Rep. Waters shares the worldview of most of the world's dictators: if industry can't produce the desired results, then government should simply seize their property.

Beyond the totalitarian impulse, the exchange reveals Ms. Waters's ignorance about the role prices play in the economy. In a free market, prices help ensure that supply meets demand. The demand for energy has been growing, not just here in the United States but around the world. Unless supply keeps pace with demand, prices must rise. Rising prices send important signals to both consumers and producers: high prices offer producers an incentive to invest in producing more supply, while consumers are encouraged to buy only what is necessary, preventing shortages. The oil executive cannot promise that the prices will be lower in the future because he cannot know exactly how much demand will increase compared to supply.

Rep. Waters may think that if the federal government seized control of the energy industry, prices would fall, but she'd quickly learn (as did the Soviet bloc) that the laws of supply and demand are tough to escape.

Many will dismiss this exchange, made by one of the more radical, leftist Members, as out of step with the rest of the Majority. Yet the actual legislation that has been offered and passed in the name of bringing down oil prices reflects the same economic ignorance, and even shades of the same authoritarian impulse.

The "Gas Price Relief for Consumers Act," for example, has a nice sounding title, but actually will do little to advance the cause of lowering gas prices. The legislation would empower the U.S. government to sue foreign governments under U.S. antitrust laws. Of course, the government would have a tough time enforcing any decisions rendered against OPEC countries. Such action would be more likely to encourage retaliation then to actually encourage an increase in oil production.

The law would, however, have a real effect here at home, since the newly created antitrust task force at the Department of Justice would have massive new oversight authority over domestic producers. Forcing domestic energy companies to comply with additional document requests and new regulations would do nothing to encourage additional production here either-to the contrary, it would act as another drag on the industry and discourage new production.

Another piece of legislation championed by the House Majority, the "Energy Price Gouging Act" would create new penalties, fines, and possible jail time, for anyone in the energy supply chain found to inflate the price of energy "artificially." The federal government already has the power to investigate charges of price gouging, so this legislation would do little other than to discourage companies to do business, particularly in times of disaster or when supplies are short and price increases are an economic necessity.

The big losers from this ham-handed approach to policy are consumers. While there are certainly many factors at work in energy markets, supply and demand remain the basic factors that determine price. The problem we face today is that while demand for energy has grown dramatically, supply has not.

Many policymakers-particularly those on the Left who want to be seen as both environmentally friendly and a champion of the little guy-are uncomfortable with this simple fact. They damn the energy companies for high prices but work with environmental groups to prevent additional exploration and refining capacity. They're used to cognitive dissonance, but don't want voters to make the connection between their policies and its consequences.

If drivers are hoping for relief at the pump this summer, it's not going to come from Capitol Hill.

ABC Alarmism

info@iwf.org (Carrie L. Lukas) — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 07:52:00 EDT

ABC is going to "brief" people about predictions that civilization is doomed and then ask them to make videos depicting how terrible it will be. Is this really news or just incredibly alarmist speculation?

Global Warming Socialism

info@iwf.org (Carrie L. Lukas) — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 22:25:00 EDT

Pete DuPont has one of the best, though most disturbing, analysis of the recent global warming debate in the Wall Street Journal. Here's the ending:

The core of the Boxer-Lieberman-Warner legislation is that an expanded government, not the market economy, must control our society. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has produced a chart--click here to see it--showing that the bill "contains over 300 regulations and mandates," each of which must go through a federal regulatory process.

The bill does focus on some global warming objectives--although it is an America-only program estimated to lower global CO2 emissions only by about 1.4%--but it is less about that and more a step towards traditional socialism. The government would take control of our economy and regulate everything from electricity, oil and gas to imported shoes, our food, how high we may set our thermostats, and what kinds of light bulbs we may use. The EPA and the Energy Information Agency predict such controls would reduce GDP by "as much as seven percent (over $2.8 trillion) by 2050 and reduce U.S. manufacturing output by almost 10 percent by 2030."

Add to that the fact that Barack Obama and John McCain both support the bill, and that the next Congress is likely to have bigger Democratic majorities, and one can see in the next administration where a very collectivist America will be headed.

The only good news is that it seems that a growing number of people are questioning the science and the logic of such massive government action. Will it be in time? We can only hope.

What Would You Do With $45 Trillion?

info@iwf.org (Carrie L. Lukas) — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 08:48:00 EDT

Drudge's morning headline is that "$45 trillion needed to combat warming" -- that's the conclusion reached by some energy agency that wants to build thousands of nuclear power plants (this is the new goal of the radical environmentalist movements?).

Would this really be the best use of trillions and trillions of dollars in the world wanted to tackle some big problem? (As Bjorn Lomborg has argued many times before.)

This is a particularly important conversation now though since the Senate is still debatinig cap-and-trade legislation. Sounds like it won't happen, but the U.S. Congress is contemplating massively costly legislation that really has no prospect of affecting the environment in any meaningful way.

I just finished reading a book called The Deniers, by Lawrence Solomon. It is really interesting in highlighting a sampling of reputable scientists who have questioned global warming orthodoxy (often paying a steep price for it). As he concludes, it certainly doesn't mean that the global warming is just a hoax, but it does mean that the science is far from settled and we probably shouldn't take extreme measures to combat a problem we aren't sure exists. Makes sense to me.

Congress Plans to Raise, Not Lower, Gas Prices

info@iwf.org (Carrie L. Lukas) — Thu, 29 May 2008 12:22:00 EDT

On National Review online there are a couple of good postings about energy policy that are worth reading in their entirety. First, the editors make the simple point that if Congress really wants to lower gas prices over the long term, they need to take action to help increase the domestic supply of oil

But if members of Congress really want to mitigate the effects of high oil prices as much as they claim they do, they could start by letting oil companies bring America's vast untapped supplies to market.

We're not just talking about the Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR) - which Congress stupidly keeps off-limits even though proposed oil exploration there would only affect approximately 2,000 of its 19 million acres - though opening just that 0.01 percent of ANWR to oil and natural gas development could supply 5 percent of America's oil per year for 12 years before it starts to decline, according to Energy Department estimates. The Outer Continental Shelf - also off-limits to drilling - likely contains billions of barrels of additional oil and natural gas reserves. While Fidel Castro's Cuba saw no compunction about leasing its share of these waters to the Chinese, the U.S. continues to forbid oil and natural gas exploration in its share.

Critics of proposals to open these areas for business argue that they will take up to 10 years to bring any new supplies online. Of course, they were using this same argument 10 years ago, and if they hadn't prevailed then the U.S. would be less dependent on foreign oil today.

Of course, it doesn't look like this is going happen. Congress prefers to complain about high gas prices and pass bills that attack energy producers, but do absolutely nothing to lower gas prices. And as Chris Horner writes, Congress is considering so-called cap-and-trade legislation that's only certain effect will be increasing the cost of energy:

In sum, Lieberman-Warner is a price-hiking, job-exporting gesture that, as in Europe, will do nothing regarding the climate and likely won't yield any emissions reductions. Its goal instead is to demonstrate our seriousness of purpose, in the hope that doing so will prompt developing nations to follow suit - despite the fact that those nations have serially and adamantly stated that they have zero intention to do so.

Sometime the policy world can be just plain depressing...

55 Feedback with Pat Snyder: 2008 Farm Bill

info@iwf.org (Sabrina Schaeffer) — Wed, 28 May 2008 15:07:00 EDT

IWF Visiting Fellow Sabrina Schaeffer discusses the 2008 Farm Bill with Pat Snyder.

One News Now: Farm bill an economic "boondoggle"

info@iwf.org (Sabrina Schaeffer) — Wed, 28 May 2008 10:36:00 EDT

A conservative columnist says the massive farm bill enacted by Congress just before the Memorial Day recess is "an egregious form of corporate welfare" that will increase the cost of living for American families and further burden taxpayers.

The farm bill was enacted over the veto of President Bush, who says it makes no sense to hand over billions of taxpayer dollars to food producers who are already enjoying record-high prices for their products.

Sabrina Schaeffer, a visiting fellow at the Independent Women's Forum, calls the bill an economic "boondoggle" that will distort the farm market, hurt small farmers, and burden American consumers with higher food and gas prices.

"The farm lobby likes to pretend that these subsidies are going to sort of help preserve the small family farmer ...," Schaeffer continues. "But the fact of the matter is 60 percent of the direct subsidies ... are going to 10 percent of the wealthiest farmers in America today."

Schaeffer claims that the bill was a way of paying off constituents. "I think that this has a lot to do with Congress wanting to return home to their districts sort of pockets overflowing with goodies for their constituents," she offers. "And unfortunately there are not very many members of Congress who are willing to say, 'Look, enough is enough." She also claims that the bill will inhibit competition and limit consumer choice.

President Bush had requested that direct subsidies be limited to farmers that make under $500,000 a year, but Congress insisted that the subsidies continue to go to farmers who make up to $750,000.

What the 2008 Farm Bill Means for American Families

info@iwf.org (Sabrina Schaeffer) — Tue, 27 May 2008 12:18:00 EDT

Townhall.com

Slumping housing prices and ballooning gas and food prices have led many families to put the brakes on spending. Now Congress is set to make things worse for the American consumer by passing a $300 billion Farm Bill that will increase the cost of living for families and further burden taxpayers.

The 2002 Farm Bill was set to expire last October, but after a failure to compromise, Congress extended the bill. Now with the Memorial Day recess looming, Congress is working to pass a new Farm Bill so they can return to their districts, pockets overflowing with goodies for special interests.

The proposed five-year plan (no kidding) would increase subsidies for commodities like corn, soybeans, and wheat, boost spending on assistance programs like food banks and food stamps, and expand tax-credits for ethanol production.

Who benefits from this largess? The farm lobby likes to pretend the subsidies help preserve the small family farmer. But it's clear that's not the case.

According to one taxpayer rights group, 60 percent of today's commodity subsidies provide payments to the wealthiest 10 percent of recipients - "corporate welfare for the rich" as it has been described. And while the new Farm Bill makes a gesture toward curbing these subsidies, it plans to add up to $26 billion in direct payments to mega-farms over the next five years.

This kind of agricultural policy continues to bias the market in favor of a few crops that lend themselves to large-scale production at the expense of other crops - namely fruits and vegetables. Subsidies that reward a select segment of the agriculture industry encourage consolidation. They make it easier for large farms and absentee landlords to raise rental prices and make it more difficult for small farmers to grow other crops.

By manipulating the market, the federal government makes it desirable for more farmers to produce a few items like corn, wheat, and soybeans. That leaves fewer farmers producing everything else - driving the supply of fruits and vegetables down and the price up. It's a policy that ultimately hurts the consumer who will have fewer choices at the grocery store and will face the burden of higher prices.

It's not just at the supermarket, however, where consumers will feel the pinch. Americans are likely to spend more at the gas pump thanks to the Farm Bill's support for more ethanol production. While the existing tax-credit for corn-based ethanol will be trimmed by 6 cents a gallon, a new production tax-credit will be offered for cellulosic ethanol - a policy that will lead to even higher gas prices since mixing ethanol into gasoline supply reduces fuel economy.

President Bush has threatened to veto the bill, because it "has too much spending and not enough reform." But this frustration is not limited to conservative, pro-taxpayer groups. The left-leaning international anti-hunger organization Oxfam released a similar statement claiming the bill continues to favor a "system that rewards those who need help the least."

Even the reliably liberal Los Angeles Times editorial board supports Bush's promised veto, in part because of the "accounting shenanigans" Congress is relying on to balance the books. With this bill, Congress takes another step toward abandoning even the pretense of a budget, as it is to exceed the spending limit by nearly $10 billion.

The 2008 Farm Bill will hurt Americans at every turn by inhibiting competition, limiting consumer choice, burdening individuals with higher food prices, and exacerbating the rising cost of fuel. During a period of economic uncertainty, American families need more spending flexibility, not less.

As is too often the case, however, Congress's concern with special interests and political support trumps sound economic policy. If Congress really wants to bring something home to the American people this Memorial Day, they should go back to the drawing board and institute real reform to the Farm Bill.

Setting Priorities

info@iwf.org (Carrie L. Lukas) — Thu, 22 May 2008 08:04:00 EDT

Bjorn Lomborg, author of Cool It, has a great piece in today's Wall Street Journal on the need to set global priorities. The basic message is focusing on averting the potential problems associated with global warming which might occur in decades to come is much less urgent than dealing with the big problems we have today. Here is part of the piece:

The pain caused by the global food crisis has led many people to belatedly realize that we have prioritized growing crops to feed cars instead of people. That is only a small part of the real problem.

This crisis demonstrates what happens when we focus doggedly on one specific - and inefficient - solution to one particular global challenge. A reduction in carbon emissions has become an end in itself. The fortune spent on this exercise could achieve an astounding amount of good in areas that we hear a lot less about.

Research for the Copenhagen Consensus, in which Nobel laureate economists analyze new research about the costs and benefits of different solutions to world problems, shows that just $60 million spent on providing Vitamin A capsules and therapeutic Zinc supplements for under-2-year-olds would reach 80% of the infants in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, with annual economic benefits (from lower mortality and improved health) of more than $1 billion. That means doing $17 worth of good for each dollar spent. Spending $1 billion on tuberculosis would avert an astonishing one million deaths, with annual benefits adding up to $30 billion. This gives $30 back on the dollar.

I'm sure that I would differ with Lomborg, from a proper-role-of-government perspective, on some of the things he thinks we should do, but his argument for the use of basic cost-benefit analysis is very persuasive. It's a shame that so much of our policy is driven by what amounts to fads and policy popularity contests rather than sound analysis.

Scared to Death: From BSE to Global Warming How Scares Are Costing of the Earth

Wed, 21 May 2008 14:10:00 EDT

With politicians discussing adopting major, economic-crushing legislation in the name of stopping global warming, it is imperative that the public reads Scared to Death: From BSE to Global Warming How Scares Are Costing of the Earth. Scared to Death puts the global climate change craze in the context of other scares, which have turned out to be fueled by alarmist rhetoric and trumped up scientific claims. For a limited time, don't miss your chance to read the books full chapter on global warming by clicking here. The entire book is a must read and is available at Amazon.com.

IWF Event: Scared to Death

Fri, 02 May 2008 14:41:00 EDT

Below is the video from IWF's Book Event, Scared to Death From BSE to Global Warming: Why Scares are Costing Us the Earth, by Christopher Booker and Richard North.

Government at It's Worst

info@iwf.org (Carrie L. Lukas) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 13:44:00 EDT

It's hard to be surprise by bad policy that comes out of government, yet somehow I am still amazed that Congress would be preparing to pass another farm bill complete with giveaways for millionares in the agriculture businesses (it isn't really appropriate to call many of these folks "farmers"). As an editorial in the Sacramento Bee describes:

Given that big growers and commodity corporations are enjoying the windfall - and experts say these price spikes are not just a temporary "blip" - you might think that Congress would want to pass a farm bill that reflects current realities.

Nope.

Congress is close to approving another five-year farm bill that would cost the treasury about $300 billion. A good chunk of this funding - about $5.2 billion a year - will be in the form of "direct payment" subsidies to growers of corn and other crops, including some growers who are millionaires....

Will Congress ever reform the farm bill? Possibly, but not while powerful commodity interests have a lock on leaders of both parties, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Until that changes, Amercians will continue to pay twice for their food - once at the grocery store and once in their federal tax returns.

Politicians always say they are concerned about the middleclass and rising prices, but apparently that doesn't extent to issues like this one.

Happy Earth Day!

info@iwf.org (Stacy Chin) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 16:23:00 EDT

In honor of Earth Day, Dr. Richard North, co-author of Scared to Death From BSE to Global Warming: Why Scares Are Costing Us the Earth, joined The Thom Hartmann Show for a discussion on how political forces have driven global warming debates and the devastating fiscal repercussions.

Listen to the radio interview here.

The Thom Hartmann Show: Scared to Death with Dr. Richard North

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 14:41:00 EDT

Dr. Richard North, co-author of Scared to Death From BSE to Global Warming: Why Scares Are Costing Us the Earth, joined The Thom Hartmann Show.

The Telegraph: Stop the CO2 scare, before it's too late

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 17:31:00 EDT

The Telegraph

As President Bush finally caved in to international pressure last week and committed the US to spending untold billions of dollars on "the fight against global warming", I happened to be in Washington at the same time, talking on the same subject to more than a dozen very lively and opinionated radio shows.

I was there with my co-author Richard North, at the invitation of an enterprising Washington think-tank, the Independent Women's Forum, to launch our book Scared to Death: From BSE to Global Warming, Why Scares are Costing Us the Earth.

Speaking to audiences across the country, for up to an hour at a time, we were impressed by how well informed -and sceptical about global warming - were the array of presenters who interviewed us. We told them it would have been unthinkable to have such intelligent conversations on this subject on any BBC programme back in Britain.

But the highlight of our visit was dinner with Dr Fred Singer, a distinguished US scientist, formerly professor at two universities, and founder of the US satellite weather service. He has done more than anyone in the scientific counter-attack against the ruthless promotion of global warming orthodoxy by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Dr Singer played a key part in last month's scientific conference in New York organised by the Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), and gave me an advance copy of its new report (which is now available online - just Google "sepp" and "NIPCC").

The report - Nature Not Human Activity Rules the Climate - presents a devastating analysis of the IPCC's case. Intended for a lay audience and signed by scientists from 15 countries, it takes all the key points of the IPCC's "consensus" case and tears them expertly apart, showing how the Intergovernmental Panel has either exaggerated, distorted or suppressed the evidence available to it, or has imputed much greater certainty to its findings than is justified by the data.

One of the central flaws in the IPCC's case is its reliance on computer models, based only on those parts of the evidence which suit its chosen "narrative", omitting or downplaying hugely important factors which might produce a very different picture. These range from the role played by water vapour, by far the most important of the greenhouse gases, to the influence of solar activity on cloud cover.

The report's most startling passage, however, is one that examines the "fingerprint" of warming at different levels of the atmosphere which the computer models come up with as proof that the warming is man-made. The pattern actually shown by balloon and satellite records is so dramatically different that, even on the IPCC's own evidence, the report concludes, "anthropogenic greenhouse gases can contribute only in a minor way to the current warming, which is mainly of natural origin".

The significance of this can scarcely be overestimated. At just the moment when, thanks to the overwhelming pressure generated by the IPCC, the world's politicians, led by the EU, are committing us to spending untold trillions of pounds, dollars and euros on measures to "mitigate" the claimed effects of man-made warming, here is a galaxy of experts producing hard evidence that - if the problem exists at all - the official explanation for it is oriented in wholly the wrong direction.

Furthermore the consequences of that warming and of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have, on balance, been wholly beneficial, by increasing plant growth.

The real danger, the report warns, is not a continued warming but that temperatures and agricultural production might drop as the world faces its worst food shortage in decades (now being made worse by the crazed rush to give over farmland to biofuels). And if that is the way the evidence lies, how much are any of our politicians doing to prepare for a crisis already upon us?

In the News: Literally Chicken

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 11:46:00 EDT

ShopFloor.org

On 30 September [2005] David Nabarro, the senior official in charge of co-ordinating the WHO's worldwide response to bird flu, hit the headlines by warning that a pandemic could now occur at any time, and that the number of resulting deaths could be anything up to ‘150 million people'. ‘It's like a combination of global warming and HIV/Aids,' he told the BBC. Although a WHO ‘media spokesman' quickly pointed out that this was not an official WHO view, Mr Nabarro insisted that he stood by his claim.

Hey, where did all those dead victims of the avian plague go, anyway?

A good story to remember when mongerers demand immediate action and wrenching social change to address this, that or the other crisis, especially man-made global warming -- a theory subject to extraordinary amounts of misinformation, disinformation and nonsense. (See today's Wall Street Journal op-ed page, "Our Climate Numbers Are a Big Old Mess" by Patrick Michaels, a Cato fellow and professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia.)

The bird flu story is so illustrative that the authors of "Scared to Death -- From BSE to Global Warming: Why Scares Are Costing Us the Earth" open their book with it. The two, Christopher Booker and Richard North, spoke at an Independent Women's Forum book event Wednesday, laying out in detail the workings of the hype-steria machine -- activist groups, grasping and politicized "scientists," power-accreting bureacrats and the media, always the media, ginning up crises for their own ends.

Entertaining presentation and good context to remember as the world responds to the latest scare, whatever it may be. Cranberries? Nah, that's been done.

North and Booker are guests on this week's "America's Business with Mike Hambrick." Links later in the day.

For more on the bird flu scare, here's an excerpt from the book's prologue: Scared to Death.