William Yeatman

World business chiefs gathered here Thursday to discuss ways to tackle global warming as trans-Atlantic tensions emerged over how far industry should go to reduce emissions.

What’s true in athletics is also true with energy production: You can’t get good results if you don’t do the drills.

We are all global-warming alarmists now. President Bush's speech yesterday outlining the goal of halting the growth of greenhouse-gas emissions in the United States by 2025 runs the unusual gauntlet of promising something the private sector will probably deliver on its own — witness the spontaneous rise of "carbon offsets" and green investing — while also kicking the intellectual legs out from under a defensible conservative position on climate change.

Today, calls for America to become “energy independent” come from across the political spectrum. Among the most important energy-security advocates are conservatives concerned about national security. To make America less “dependent” on energy purchases from unstable regimes, they have proposed a variety of measures aimed at reducing the use of oil. However, rather than make the nation more secure, the proposed measures have the potential to inflict significant economic damage on America, weakening it at a time when national security demands strong economic resilience.

Today, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee will hold a hearing on the implications of climate change for human health. Malaria will top the menu, but so will ignorance and disinformation.

The law of unintended consequences has claimed many millions of victims over the centuries; the first decade of the 21st century is now demonstrating that governments have not lost the knack of destroying the livelihoods of the very people they purport to help.

So much for that job requirement of balance and objectivity. When it came to global warming the media clearly left out dissent in favor of hype, cute penguins and disastrous predictions.