In the recent flurry of moves to ban plastic bags a frequently cited statistic is that more than 100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles die each year from entanglement in, or ingestion of, plastic bags.
The original scientific study upon which this estimate relied actually attributed these deaths to fishing tackle in the oceans, not plastic bags. Yet the terms “100,000 marine deaths” and “plastic bags” now circulate happily through our public discourse, solidified as established fact.
Being a little behind on my reading I just encountered former Bush speechwriter and current Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson’s friday column weighing in to add context to Sen. Hillary Clinton’s claim that “the world was with us after 9/11. We have so squandered that goodwill and we’ve got to rebuild it”. Along the way he lends some unjustified support to it.
Yes, hers is a standard talking point since, oh, 2002. Yes, the point isn’t that Congress caused this rift but President Bush. And, yes, there is something to it, if generally not that which is attributed to the problem. Recall the late Tom Lantos’ observations how relations between the U.S. and its two greatest 2001-2006 antagonists, France and Germany, improved remarkably not with any change in our leadership, but changes in theirs.
Typically associated with this cooling of the relations are two complaints specifically echoed by Gerson, Guantanamo and global warming. The relevant tension will be remedied because “the next president, Republican of Democrat, is likely to close Guantanamo and sign legislation to restrict American carbon emissions, mollifying two justified European criticisms.” (emphasis added)
Leaving the Gitmo issue to Andrew McCarthy and the gang at the Corner, let’s walk through our progressions on the other point, shall we?
Gerson’s implication of course is that part of the Bush-driven rift with Europe (which he, too, admits has lessened appreciably) arises from said lack of CO2 legislation.
Question: how does such legislation come to be signed by presidents? If you guessed “Congress first passes it” you are correct. So once Bush is gone Congress will pass such a law, which they have chosen to not do to date. Congressional inaction driven by fear of a Bush veto is logically Gerson’s presumption in possible explanation why this point goes without elaboration.
Question: has this Congress shown a reluctance to pass bills on the fear – or even express promise – that Bush will veto them? If you also guessed “no” you’re at the head of the class.
So, at this point we know that if Congress acts in a way that to date they have chosen to not act if without a good excuse, Bush’s rift will be healed. But this wasn’t clear from the piece.
Also unspoken was the whole Kyoto thing, which hangs over Gerson’s column like those plumes of other-than-CO2 emissions (CO2 is invisible) that the media show you to dramatize any story about CO2 emissions (for fun, Google “squander post-9/11 goodwill Kyoto”, and gape in slack-jawed amazement at the number of returns).
To repeat: Bush articulated his Kyoto policy on March 17, 2001. Whatever your calendar – Julian, Gregorian, Wookie… – this event came six months before 9/11 and is very ill-timed for anything that might be described fairly as having contributed to “squandering post-9/11 goodwill.”
Further, that position that Bush articulated on 3/17/01 was that he had no interest in seeking Senate ratification. Period. The mythical “unsigning” is as real as the silly, contradictory news stories claiming that Bush “refused to sign” Kyoto. Clinton (specifically, then-Acting Ambassador to the U.S.’s UN Mission, Peter Burleigh) signed it on November 12, 1998.
It is inarguable that as a substantive matter this position articulated six months before the world was united beside us was an affirmation of the Clinton-Gore policy, regardless of whether the latter ever had a press conference to announce it (they tried to keep word of signing the thing as quiet as such things can be – go ahead and find it on the internet, you’ll see one Planet Ark story – so I assure you they never did that). I'm not saying the French liked him actually saying that, just that that's all he did and said.
So for over three years after Gore originally agreed to the pact for us on December 11, 1997 until they left office, the Clinton-Gore administration’s policy was the Bush policy.
Finally, why might Europe "justifiably criticize" us for not passing a law to cap CO2 emissions? Presumably because they are doing that themselves, right? Somehow capping emissions, that is, not passing laws at the EU level which we by now know to be unenforceable and more subject to gaming than even domestic carbon laws. See below, aware that when this chart is updated, likely in the last week or so of June, after a drop of about 0.8% in 2005 these emissions will have risen 2006-over-2005 by about a percent and a half, according to member-state data already in the public domain.
In short, Europe has absolutely zero grounds for claiming that CO2 or Kyoto justified their anti-American snit(s) after we were dealt with ground zero. Period.
Everyone’s emissions are increasing; everyone’s. Of course, not everyone’s are increasing as fast as Europe’s. And as regards the U.S., our emissions went down the last year on record, 2006; over the period since 1997 when Europe began its grandiose promises, US CO2 emissions performance is to have increased emissions at an annual rate that is half of Europe’s, even while our economy and population grew faster than theirs. Since 2000, the gap widens significantly. Europe’s criticisms are not justified. Period.
In a normal election year, this would be an issue, and these facts would become more widely known. This clearly, however, is not a normal election year.
The first time Li Gengxuan saw the dump trucks from the nearby factory pull into his village, he couldn't believe what happened. Stopping between the cornfields and the primary school playground, the workers dumped buckets of bubbling white liquid onto the ground. Then they turned around and drove right back through the gates of their compound without a word.
This ritual has been going on almost every day for nine months, Li and other villagers said.
In China, a country buckling with the breakneck pace of its industrial growth, such stories of environmental pollution are not uncommon.
From CEI's OpenMarket
The weekend Wall Street Journal features an interview with Czech President Vaclav Klaus, who will be the keynote speaker at this year’s CEI dinner — on May 28 in Washingotn, D.C. — in which he discusses his interest in the politics of global warming.
“I am not a climatologist,” Mr. Klaus cheerfully admits. “I am not disputing the measurement of the temperature.” Even so, Mr. Klaus believes that his many years of experience in the fields of economics and econometrics give him some insight into the nature of the problems faced by climatologists and policy makers. In climatology as in economics, he says, “there are no controlled experiments. . . . You can’t repeat the time series.” So, just as you can’t run a controlled experiment to determine the effect of, say, deficits on interest rates, we can’t directly determine the effect of CO2 on climate. All we have are observations and inferences.
Mr. Klaus is also interested in the politics of global warming. He has written a book, tentatively titled “Blue, Not Green Planet,” published in Czech last year and due out in English translation in the U.S. this May. The main question of the book is in its subtitle: “What is in danger: climate or freedom?”
President Klaus’s book, I should mention, is being published by CEI in the United States.
House Democrats introduced legislation Thursday to overturn a decision by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to block California from setting its own emissions standards for automobiles.
Last spring, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states could set their own regulations on the emission of carbon dioxide. The California emissions standards were scheduled to take effect in model year 2009 and provide a 30 percent fleet-wide reduction in emissions by 2016 – vehicles sold in California would have to meet those standards.
He has a mighty big carbon footprint.
Al Gore's opulent lifestyle and his virtuous plea to save the planet from global warming don't mesh, according to the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), which announced plans yesterday for a new national advertising campaign to showcase the contrast before the American public.
Who says that the issue of global warming is a matter of science, not faith? Just last week, Mayor Gavin Newsom proved belief trumps data. The Chronicle reported that a San Francisco Public Utilities Commission study found that the giant turbines he wanted to put underwater below the Golden Gate Bridge would cost way too much money to install and maintain. They would generate power at a cost of 80 cents to $1.40 per kilowatt hour — as opposed to Pacific Gas and Electric's 12 cents per hour commercial rate. It seems the turbines would produce only one or two megawatts of power — not the 38 megawatts Newsom envisioned.
The task of cutting greenhouse gas emissions enough to avert a dangerous rise in global temperatures may be far more difficult than previous research suggested, say scientists who have just published studies indicating that it would require the world to cease carbon emissions altogether within a matter of decades.
Their findings, published in separate journals over the past few weeks, suggest that both industrialized and developing nations must wean themselves off fossil fuels by as early as mid-century in order to prevent warming that could change precipitation patterns and dry up sources of water worldwide.
In a major shift, a group of Southern Baptist leaders said their denomination has been "too timid" on environmental issues and has a biblical duty to stop global warming.
The declaration, signed by the president of the Southern Baptist Convention among others and released today, shows a growing urgency about climate change even within groups that once dismissed claims of an overheating planet as a liberal ruse. The conservative denomination has 16.3 million members and is the largest Protestant group in the United States.
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