The World’s Leading Climate Scientists, in Their Own Words

Lawrence Solomon, a longtime environmental activist, began wondering a few years ago how it could be that some scientists were questioning the apparently solid consensus that humans are causing a global warming crisis. He began seeking them out, and interviewing them on the topic.

Before long, Solomon came to realize a substantial number of the world’s leading scientists are making a very strong case that humans are not causing any sort of global warming crisis.

In 2006 he began publishing his interviews with these leading scientists in Canada’s National Post newspaper. In his outstanding new book, The Deniers: The World Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud , Solomon presents the best of these interviews, while sharing additional insights for which his newspaper columns did not have room. Solomon’s book breaks new ground in the global warming discussion, presenting the most important scientific evidence in the words of the scientists themselves. Continue reading . . .

Free Trade versus Protectionism

There’s a growing anti-trade sentiment in our country. Much of the dialogue is grossly misinformed. Let’s try to untangle it a bit with a few questions and observations. First, does the U.S. trade with Japan and England? Put another way, is it members of the U.S. Congress trading with their counterparts in the Japanese Diet or the English Parliament? An affirmative answer is pure nonsense. When I purchased my Lexus, I had nothing to do with either the Japanese Diet or the U.S. Congress. Through an intermediary, a Lexus dealer, I dealt with Toyota Motor Corporation.

While it might be convenient to speak of one country trading with another, such aggregation can conceal a lot of evil, particularly when people call for trade barriers. For example, what would be a moral case for third-party interference, by either the Japanese Diet or the U.S. Congress, with an exchange between me and Toyota Motor Corporation? Some might reason that since Japan places restrictions on U.S. products entering their country, an appropriate retaliatory measure is not to allow Japanese products to freely enter the U.S. By the way, Japanese protectionist restrictions on rice imports force Japanese consumers to pay three or four times the world price for rice. How much sense does it make for Congress to retaliate against Japan by imposing restrictions on their products thereby forcing American consumers, say Lexus buyers, to pay higher prices? Should our rule be: If one country screws its citizens we should retaliate by screwing our citizens? Read more . . .

The Health Care Bailout of 2018

In the 1990s, politicians wanted to make home ownership as universal as possible. They used laws such as the Community Reinvestment Act to force banks to make unsustainable loans to millions of people. They also expanded quasi-government agencies such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to guarantee these loans.

This scheme could last only a few years. In 2008, the housing bubble finally burst and economic reality caught up with the politicians. American taxpayers were stuck with the tab for these “toxic” mortgages. The result was the Wall Street Bailout of 2008 and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

In 2008, politicians want to guarantee “universal health care” with new laws and new government programs. President-elect Barack Obama wants to require health insurers to sell policies whether or not those policies are economically sustainable (for instance by requiring them to issue policies regardless of pre-existing conditions). He has also proposed creating a massive new “National Health Insurance Exchange” to help ensure “universal coverage.”

But no politician can evade the laws of economic reality. Massachusetts’ program of “universal coverage” requires hundreds of millions of dollars of federal money a year to stay afloat, paid for by the taxpayers of the other 49 states. If the U.S .attempted this at a national level, there would be no one to bail us out. Read more . . .

Homeland Security or Homeland Pork?

There’s big controversy here in Pittsburgh about the mayor taking the city’s anti-terrorism van to a Toby Keith concert during the summer. But, really, where would our federally-supplied anti-terrorism vehicle have been that August night if the mayor hadn’t taken it? Riding around the city streets looking for al-Qaida? Checking out the Ali Baba eatery, or Pita Land?

I’d say the mayor got it right that night, whether by design or chance, in terms of national security.

The Department of Homeland Security, seeing Pittsburgh as a potential target of Islamic fundamentalists, gave us the GMC Yukon for surveillance, to identify potential terrorism targets, and for intelligence gathering — to ride around and keep an eye out for anything that looks suspicious or out of place.

The vehicle isn’t a tank. There’s no button on the dashboard to launch a surface-to-air missile and knock down an incoming plane that’s been taken over by a gang of religious martyrs. The vehicle is just for blending in, for shadowing, especially in target-rich environments. Read more . . .

End States That Sponsor Terrorism

Fifty years of increasing American appeasement in the Mideast have led to fifty years of increasing contempt in the Muslim world for the U.S. The climax was September 11, 2001.

Fifty years ago, Truman and Eisenhower surrendered the West’s property rights in oil, although that oil rightfully belonged to those in the West whose science, technology, and capital made its discovery and use possible. The first country to nationalize Western oil, in 1951, was Iran. The rest, observing our frightened silence, hurried to grab their piece of the newly available loot.

The cause of the U.S. silence was not practical, but philosophical. The Mideast’s dictators were denouncing wealthy egotistical capitalism. They were crying that their poor needed our sacrifice; that oil, like all property, is owned collectively, by virtue of birth; and that they knew their viewpoint was true by means of otherworldly emotion. Our Presidents had no answer. Implicitly, they were ashamed of the Declaration of Independence. They did not dare to answer that Americans, properly, were motivated by the selfish desire to achieve personal happiness in a rich, secular, individualist society.

The Muslim countries embodied in an extreme form every idea–selfless duty, anti-materialism, faith or feeling above science, the supremacy of the group–which our universities, our churches, and our own political Establishment had long been upholding as virtue. When two groups, our leadership and theirs, accept the same basic ideas, the most consistent side wins. Read more . . .

The GOP Betrayal of Capitalism, Alan Greenspan’s Lies and The Scapegoat Phase of the Bear Market

Near the end of nearly every bear market and banking crisis in modern times typically comes what might be called the “scapegoat phase” — a grueling, seemingly endless, multi-month period of further bearishness due not so much to worsening, underlying fundamentals, but to business-bashing, populism, demagoguery, Congressional show trials, and legislative-regulatory uncertainty. In this rather ugly phase, public attention is deflected away from the real perpetrators and toward those who either didn’t cause the crisis or are its victims. This sheltering of the guilty is achieved by blaming and punishing the innocent. We’re now going through just such a phase – all ginned up, due to the election.

Consider just some of the bearish injustices we’ve seen lately. American taxpayers, 95% of whom pay their debts on time, have been forced to finance more than $1-trillion to bail out the fraction of those people and firms that are deadbeats, whether on Main Street or Wall Street. We’ve seen protections (and $200-billion of taxpayer funds) afforded to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, those corrupt, mismanaged and insolvent quasi-state mortgage entities that now control 60% of the U.S. residential mortgage market. We’ve watched healthy banks with minimal exposure to the sub-prime loan debacle compelled to take “equity injections” from the U.S. Treasury and, in turn, forced to freeze their dividend levels and restrict the compensation of their top performers, thereby curbing incentives to continue performing well. We’ve witnessed politicians like Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-CT) and Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) getting away scot-free, while raking in millions of dollars in campaign funds, as heads of powerful committees that enacted the very laws which authorized the bureaucrats to perpetrate this credit-housing mess in the first place. Read more . . .