The track record
"Al Gore will be in Houston this week promoting his movie and book, 'An Inconvenient Truth.' Predictably, his message is dire. The planet must be saved -- and quickly -- from man-made carbon-dioxide (CO2) emissions produced by coal, petroleum and natural-gas usage. Self-interested consumer choices are the culprit, and a government-directed reshaping of energy production and consumption is necessary. The Gore-led campaign is clear: A grass-roots movement must arise to force politicians to give us our bitter medicine -- smaller cars, more expensive appliances and higher gasoline prices and electricity rates," Robert L. Bradley Jr. writes in the Houston Chronicle.
"Wait! Before we jump to government energy-planning, let's look at the track record of the sky-is-falling crowd. Didn't we hear in the 1960s that the 'population bomb' would cause food riots in American cities and mass starvation globally? Didn't the Club of Rome in the 1970s predict the end of mineral resources by now? Wasn't global cooling the scare before global warming? Isn't it suspicious that the problem is always individual behavior, and the solution is always government action?" said Mr. Bradley, president of Institute for Energy Research and author of "Climate Alarmism Reconsidered."
"There should be great hesitation before swallowing the Chicken Little du jour. The good news is that the bad news about the climate is exaggerated. Leading climate scientists such as Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Houston's own Dr. Neil Frank, a hurricane expert, as well as popular writers such as Michael Crichton, John Stossel and George Will are not careless, deceivers or plain bad folks. They are reporting the flaws in the analysis behind climate alarmism." |
