Congress is auditioning for the Super Hero role on low-probability global-warming catastrophes and ignoring impending collapse of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
The latest bogey-man under the bed is the IPCC report released February 2, 2007.
Clive Crook wrote in a National Journal article dated February 2, 2007:
In congressional hearings this week, ahead of a new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, senators took turns stressing the gravity of the climate issue. Sen. Thomas Carper, D-Del., according to The Washington Post, said he did not want his children and grandchildren to blame him for doing nothing. “I don’t want them to say, ‘What did you do about it? Weren’t you in the Senate?’ “ Carper said he wanted to be able to tell them, “I tried to move heaven and earth to make sure we took a better course."
What, pray tell, will Senator Carper tell his children and grandchildren that he did to avert the complete breakdown of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and possibly national bankruptcy? How will he explain the bland assurances of Democrats and liberal Republicans, who tell us that reform of Social Security is unnecessary, that we can just keep loading higher taxes on the dwindling proportion of active workers to support the rising proportion of elderly and infirm?
Liberal-progressives tell the public that President Bush has used scare tactics in order to take away senior citizens’ benefits (and somehow thereby to benefit “the rich"). But liberals employ their own scare tactics to foreclose any approach other than raising taxes, the preferred tactic to achieve socialistic wealth redistribution.
In reality, of course, no one is proposing to take away existing levels of benefits to senior citizens and the poor under Medicaid. The intent is to provide for benefits to future recipients by inducing people to save more and to put those savings into investments that will yield much higher rates of return than the interest rates on Treasury Department IOUs that constitute the “assets” of the Social Security fund.
What a pity that liberal Republicans and liberal Democrats can’t acknowledge a really devastatingly threat to survival of American political society, but are prepared to waste millions of tax-payer dollars on a pie-in-the-sky issue.
Global-warming disasters are predicted by “scientists,” who admit that they are exaggerating for effect.
In their efforts to capture the public’s attention, then, have climate scientists oversold global warming? It’s probably not a majority view, but a few climate scientists are beginning to question whether some dire predictions push the science too far. “Some of us are wondering if we have created a monster,” says Kevin Vranes, a climate scientist at the University of Colorado.
--Eric Berger, Houston Chronicle, 22 January 2007
If you want an example of the sort of scientific exaggeration that should concern both scientists and advocates involved in the climate debate (but typically goes uncorrected), next week’s Newsweek magazine has an article on the growing tab of disaster losses, which it attributes to global warming. We have interacted with Evan Mills before, and despite having his work throughly debunked and the existence of an expert workshop report on the topic cosponsored by Munich Re, he continues to fundamentally misrepresent the state of the science to suggest that comparing disaster losses unadjusted for societal change from the 1970s to the present says something about global warming. It does not.
--Roger Pielke Jr., Science Policy, 22 January 2007
Every study of the economic costs of implementing the Kyoto Protocols to reduce greenhouse gasses shows that major unemployment and reduced standards of living will result. Even socialist Germany has balked at the latest EU proposals to reduce automobile emissions.
Germany’s Minister of Economics Michael Glos has warned that the car industry faces tens of thousands of job losses if EU environment commissioner Stavros Dimas should put through his proposal for new emissions limits.
“The plans pursued by Greek EU-commissioner Dimas and environment minister Sigmar Gabriel against the German car industry must be stopped urgently,” the CSU-politician said.
According to the chair of the workers council, Daimler Chrysler would have to close several of its factories. “Affected would be factories in Sindelfingen, Untertürkheim and Bremen with approximately 65,000 workers.”
The boss of Germany’s IGM Trade Union Jürgen Peter is also putting pressure on the EU. In a letter to the president of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, Peter has asked “urgently for a delay of the decision on the EU-directive so that labour unions can participate in the shaping of public opinion in Europe.”
--Reuters, 28 January 2007
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