I'm helping lead a study trip for Colorado Christian University in Washington Dc, May 10-15. Updates will appear on our '76 Blog, hosted by the Centennial Institute. Here's the first one.
Come to 5/1 Media Panel
What forces in America's economy and culture are threatening the survival of newspapers and diverting audiences to other information sources? What are the consequences for us as citizens in a free society? How can we take charge in the emerging new paradigm; or can we? Discuss all this with Centennial Institute panelists at Issue Friday, May 1, 10:00-11:00 am, on the Colorado Christian University campus. Where: CCU School of Business Room 102
What: "Rocky Times for Colorado News Media"
Who: David Kopel & Jason Salzman Former Media Critics for the Rocky Mountain News Panel & Open Forum Moderated by John Andrews
Reservations recommended * RSVP to Centennial@ccu.edu or call 303.963.3424
Directions to CCU Campus in Lakewood: From Garrison, go east two short blocks on Cedar, park on your right. Continue east into the campus, toward flagpole. School of Business is the 2nd low building on your right.
The Centennial Institute, directed by John Andrews, was established in 2009 as a project of Colorado Christian University. We sponsor research, events, and publications to enhance public understanding of the most important issues facing our state and nation. By proclaiming Truth, we aim to foster faith, family, and freedom, teach citizenship, and renew the spirit of 1776.
Earth Day then & now
(Denver Post, Apr. 19) “The trouble with the eco-crusader is that his false guilt and his false fears feed endlessly upon each other.” With Earth Day coming up on Wednesday, I remembered this line from an old presidential speech. Can you guess who said it? “From the emotional remorse that we have sinned terribly against nature,” it continues, “there is but a short step to the emotional dread that nature will visit terrible retribution upon us. The eco-crusader becomes, as a result, deaf to reason and science, blind to perspective and priorities, incapable of effective action.” That’s telling’em, Mr. President. Or it would have been, if Richard Nixon hadn’t let staffers talk him out of giving the Eco-Crusader speech in September 1971.
Fired up by attacks on the “disaster lobby” by Look magazine publisher Thomas Shepard, and uneasy about his own role in establishing the Environmental Protection Agency after the first Earth Day in 1970, Nixon directed me and other speechwriters to produce a warning against ecological extremism that he could deliver as a major address.
Our draft died on his desk amid concerns about political backlash. I kept the file as a historical curiosity – the presidential bombshell that wasn’t. Today, four decades into the age of true-believing green religion, Nixon’s undelivered speech reads prophetically.
So does Shepard’s diagnosis that the environmental doomsayers “are basically opposed to the free enterprise system and will do anything to bolster their case for additional government controls.” So does the denunciation by Prof. Peter Drucker, another source we consulted at the time, of the green fallacy “that one can somehow deprive human action of risk.” The battle lines have changed little in 38 years.
I wish now that President Nixon, a gambler in foreign policy, had risked this piece of domestic truth-telling. One politically incorrect speech from the White House couldn’t have halted the tides of earth-worshipping guilt and fear that still engulf us. But it would have been a start. With braver leadership, sooner, America’s voices for environmental common sense might have been less outnumbered today.
Two of those lonely voices were in Colorado last week. Terry Anderson, head of the Montana-based Property & Environment Research Center, and Christopher Horner, a fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington DC, brought a coolly factual message to deflate some of the new-energy hype and carbon-phobia that Bill Ritter trades on and Obama wants to emulate.
Anderson literally wrote the book on free-market environmentalism – a 1991 volume by that title. He told the Independence Institute about PERC’s research on such inconvenient truths as the wildly oversold benefits of green jobs and the grim toll that cap-and-trade legislation to mitigate CO2 will take on our standard of living.
Horner’s current book is “Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed.” He told the Centennial Institute, where I work, that a recessionary economy and ten straight years of global cooling make this the worst time for a burdensome new carbon tax that “would not detectably impact climate anyway.”
If the eco-crusaders were serious about cleaner energy, says Horner, they would support nuclear power. They aren’t, so they don’t. And again, we find the battle lines unchanged; the nuclear debate also pervades my 1971 White House file. No, their aim is control, as Thomas Shepard warned. “For a new enemy to unite us, the threat of global warming fits the bill,” gloated the anti-growth Club of Rome in 1991.
Cheerleading mainstream journalists have decided the likes of Horner and Anderson “are not news,” as one bluntly told me – so you heard little about their visit to Ritterville. The governor letting eco-crusading foundations pay his climate czar’s salary has caused no stir either. We're supposed to believe a staffer beholden to ideologues at the Hewlett and Energy foundations gives Ritter objective advice? What sheep we are.
Wow! Climate issue civilly debated
Amazingly enough there was an actual debate on global warming the other night. True, Al Gore and his followers in “The Church Of Global Warming” are loath to debate the subject. But some of us yearning for knowledge, so that we might make up our own minds, were able to listen to actual dialogue at a Centennial Institute forum sponsored by Colorado Christian University on April 8. On one side, there was the esteemed Professor James White of the University of Colorado in Boulder. He believes that man has grown to the point where we actually have the ability to change most anything on the planet: That does include the climate. He showed us some very impressive charts, most of which we have seen. He did include the warming that has occurred since the 1970s, but did not really address the cooling that has occurred in the last 10 years. He did do a very good job of explaining the science behind “Greenhouse Gases.”
The most notable part of White's presentation was his acknowledgement that while he does believe mankind has contributed to Global Warming, he is not sure it is wise to actually change the climate or to make major economic dislocations to mitigate “the problem.”
On the other side, we listened to the fast-talking and self entertained Mr. Christopher Horner. He is a noted author and senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC. Mr. Horner spent much of his time noting the past occurrences of Global Climate Change, that occurred before humankind had any influence. He accurately noted how there have been times in the past where Carbon Dioxide levels were much higher than today.
A great deal of time was spent on how there has actually been cooling for the past ten years. I felt Horner could have spent more time on the fact that NONE of the climate change models predicted this, and how convenient it is that no one is talking about this issue. To his credit, he did address the issue of how much of the discussion about “Global Warming” is political.
Overall, the fact that two people willing to have a rational, open discussion entertained us made it a very enjoyable and informative evening. However, I would like to tackle two of the issues I felt were not really addressed.
1. How “Cap ‘N Trade” is really nothing other than a massive tax transfer of wealth from rich nations to poor nations. Other than increasing taxes, there will be no real reduction in Carbon Dioxide or any real effect on the climate.
2. There really needs to be a discussion about how we address energy independence while we create alternative energy sources. Yes we need to get away from burning carbon, but that will take many years. What are we to do in the meanwhile; continue to send our hard earned dollars to people that hate us or want to kill us? How about create a whole new energy source like Hydrogen Power? Not only could we stop using oil and gas, but we would also create a whole new set of industries that we would own, we would control and we could sell to the rest of the world.
I guess here is where the wise guy in me comes out; I have a saying, that where government, science and actual discussion are concerned, why anyone would actually expect the right thing to be done. That is where we are today for the most part.
Wednesday's discussion was an excellent start. More of this needs to be undertaken. It is only when people talk, debate and listen that creative solutions can be achieved. PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE do not believe for one second that the debate about Global Warming, or Climate Change as they are calling it now, is over. It is not. It is only over if we the citizens don’t stand up and speak out. Otherwise, it will be over and we will all pay dearly for something that we have no control over.
2.
'Responsibility' vs. 'Do no harm'
Climatologist James White debated author and attorney Christopher Horner on policy responses to global warming, April 8 at the Lakewood Cultural Center, in the debut event of the Centennial Institute distinguished speaker series at Colorado Christian University. Interest from the campus community and metro Denver friends of CCU was high, with attendance of about 400 overflowing the 300-seat auditorium. "Global Warming: Is the Kyoto Agenda Warranted?" was the topic for an hour-long exchange between White, who directs a research center at CU-Boulder, and Horner, whose book Red Hot Lies alleges unfounded alarmism about CO2 emissions. The adversaries were respectful but forceful with their dueling slideshows. Audience questions continued past the scheduled hour of adjournment. If you'd like a DVD of the whole event, click here to request ordering information.
White insisted human activity is massively and adversely modifying the biosphere, but he stopped short of the doomsaying often heard from the Al Gore camp. People will get by even if warming worsens, he said, but we should take climate change as a warning to lighten our footprint -- "training wheels for sustainability." Change on earth is natural, he said, and that includes human-caused change -- "but unlike bacteria, we can control our actions. We can tell right from wrong, we have a sense of responsibility. What is our responsibility to the Earth?"
But Horner said that Obama's energy tax as contained in the cap and trade legislation before Congress violates the principle of "First do no harm." With 155 countries already signaling non-cooperation on carbon emissions, he said, stringent efforts by the US will have negligible impact on warming trends "while leaving us less well-off economically to deal with what's coming anyway."
If climate activists were serious about reducing carbon, he taunted, they would start with clean green nuclear power, not a job-killing tax. Further evidence that they are not serious, Christopher Horner noted, is in a 1991 strategy memo by Club of Rome which said in order to advance their no-growth agenda, "new enemies have to be identified [and] the threat of global warming fit the bill."
"Man has always adapted, and wealthier societies adapted best," Horner asserted in his closing argument. "Access to energy, not energy poverty," will position us to cope with whatever is ahead, another of his slides stated. For a future that may be literally more stormy than today, he pointed out, you'd rather live in affluent Florida than destitute Bangladesh. So the prescription is policies making all the world more like Florida and less like Bangladesh -- exactly opposite to the Kyoto agenda.
Centennial Institute Fellow Kevin Miller, an Aurora entrepreneur, commented afterward: "Can one begin to imagine such a debate being sponsored, let alone tolerated, on the CU-Boulder campus? That's the niche CCU is claiming with its new institute and thoughtful programs like this one."
John Andrews, institute director and former Colorado Senate President, joked that the event avoided being snowed out, only to be blacked out. The evening's mild weather put to rest worries about the "Al Gore jinx" of several recent warming conference, but the debate was ignored by mainstream media. For example, said Andrews, editors at Channel 7 for some reason didn't feel this fit their upcoming series on green issues, while the Denver Post environment reporter avowed Horner's presence made this occasion "not a debate... not news."
But CCU and the Centennial Institute shrugged it off. "Our two nationally-known experts on climate science and climate policy seemed to think it was a debate," said Andrews. "So did a century-old local university. So did our capacity crowd of several hundred open-minded Coloradans. If the MSM choose to be close-minded about this, it's really their problem, not ours."