Hot Air

So the presumptive GOP nominee Senator John McCain gave a major policy speech on global warming the other day. Others have written on it, but so far I have not seen anyone talk about a couple of things that I caught from it, so....

Some of the most compelling evidence of global warming comes to us from NASA. No longer do we need to rely on guesswork and computer modeling, because satellite images reveal a dramatic disappearance of glaciers, Antarctic ice shelves and polar ice sheets. And I've seen some of this evidence up close.

However, Senator McCain seems to forget that "evidence" of previous years predictions.

At the first Earth Day celebration, in 1969, environmentalist Nigel Calder warned, "The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind." C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization said, "The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed." In 1968, Professor Paul Ehrlich, Vice President Gore's hero and mentor, predicted there would be a major food shortage in the U.S. and "in the 1970s ... hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." Ehrlich forecasted that 65 million Americans would die of starvation between 1980 and 1989, and by 1999 the U.S. population would have declined to 22.6 million. Ehrlich's predictions about England were gloomier: "If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000."

In 1972, a report was written for the Club of Rome warning the world would run out of gold by 1981, mercury and silver by 1985, tin by 1987 and petroleum, copper, lead and natural gas by 1992. Gordon Taylor, in his 1970 book "The Doomsday Book," said Americans were using 50 percent of the world's resources and "by 2000 they [Americans] will, if permitted, be using all of them." In 1975, the Environmental Fund took out full-page ads warning, "The World as we know it will likely be ruined by the year 2000."

Harvard University biologist George Wald in 1970 warned, "... civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind." That was the same year that Sen. Gaylord Nelson warned, in Look Magazine, that by 1995 "... somewhere between 75 and 85 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct."

All of the models that the so-called experts use are static models and we all know that this is far from a static world. Things happen on a daily basis that will throw off the best predictions of the best experts.

Another thing that the so-called experts fail to take into account that intelligence and ingenuity of mankind. You see, every time a "crisis" like this has happened every day, hard working men and women have stepped up to the plate and engineered a solution - WITHOUT THE INTERFERENCE OF GOVERNMENT!

Don't get me wrong...there are things that Sen. McCain has right. We need to get back into using nuclear power. Nuclear is a clean, inexpensive, efficient way to provide power to our homes and businesses. Government can also encourage development of ALL FORMS of alternative fuel. What they should not be doing (as I have long argued) is to pick one form of alternative fuel - corn based ethanol - over any others. Corn based ethanol mandates are guaranteed to put all other forms of alternative energy at a disadvantage because the market is being pushed toward one solution only. They should also not be talking about things like carbon taxes or cap and trade. Cap and trade would be an economic killer according to economist Art Laffer (of the Rich States Poor States report) Listen to this, from Larry Kudlow's program, where Mr. Laffer debates cap and trade versus carbon taxes with David Hamilton from the Sierra Club and with Dan Jergen.

It is past time to have a COMPLETE discussion on what we can be doing to be better stewards of ALL of our resources....economic as well as natural. A balance can and should be reached that will help us to enjoy a clean planet and still leave room for prosperity for all it's inhabitants.