Bush's Chat With Novelist Alarms Environmentalists

One of the perquisites of being president is the ability to have the author of a book you enjoyed pop into the White House for a chat. Over the years, a number of writers have visited President Bush, including Natan Sharansky, Bernard Lewis and John Lewis Gaddis. And while the meetings are usually private, they rarely ruffle feathers. Now, one has.

In his new book about Mr. Bush, "Rebel in Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversial Presidency of George W. Bush," Fred Barnes recalls a visit to the White House last year by Michael Crichton, whose 2004 best-selling novel, "State of Fear," suggests that global warming is an unproven theory and an overstated threat. Mr. Barnes, who describes Mr. Bush as "a dissenter on the theory of global warming," writes that the president "avidly read" the novel and met the author after Karl Rove, his chief political adviser, arranged it. He says Mr. Bush and his guest "talked for an hour and were in near-total agreement. The visit was not made public for fear of outraging environmentalists all the more."

And so it has, fueling a common perception among environmental groups that Mr. Crichton's dismissal of global warming, coupled with his popularity as a novelist and screenwriter, has undermined efforts to pass legislation intended to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, a gas that leading scientists say causes climate change.

Mr. Crichton, whose views in "State of Fear" helped him win the American Association of Petroleum Geologists' annual journalism award this month, has been a leading doubter of global warming and last September appeared before a Senate committee to argue that the supporting science was mixed, at best. "This shows the president is more interested in science fiction than science," said Frank O'Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch, after learning of the White House meeting. Mr. O'Donnell's group monitors environmental policy. "This administration has put no limit on global warming pollution, and has consistently rebuffed any suggestion to do so," he said.

Not so, according to the White House, which said Mr. Barnes's book left a false impression of Mr. Bush's views on global warming. Michele St. Martin, a spokeswoman for the Council on Environmental Quality, a White House advisory agency, pointed to several speeches in which Mr. Bush has acknowledged the impact of global warming and the need to confront it, even if he questions the degree to which humans contribute to it.

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CULTURE OF FEAR: DEALING WITH CULTURAL PANIC ATTACKS

By Ronald Bailey, science correspondent for "Reason"

Earlier this week, the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, held a remarkably interesting conference titled "Panic Attack: The New Precautionary Culture, the Politics of Fear, and the Risks to Innovation." It was interesting not only because I was a participant, but because it looked at how many Western countries are losing their cultural nerve, as evidenced by the increasing cultural acceptance of the so-called precautionary principle. The strongest versions of the precautionary principle demand that innovators prove that their inventions will never cause harm before they are allowed to deploy or sell them. In other words, if an action might cause harm, then inaction is preferable. The problem is that all new activities, especially those involving scientific research and technological innovation, always carry some risks. Attempting to avoid all risk is a recipe for technological and economic stagnation.

At the AEI conference, University of Kent sociologist, Frank Furedi, summed up the danger of this loss of cultural nerve in a talk based on his new book Politics Of Fear: Beyond Left And Right. He identified five trends fueling the rise of risk aversion in Western cultures.

First, Furedi argued that there has been a shift in moral reaction to harm. People no longer believe in natural disasters or acts of God. Today, people suspect that someone is behind a disaster-an irresponsible corporation or a cowardly bureaucrat. Indeed, accidents don't happen anymore; they have been redefined as preventable injuries. Furedi argued that many of us now assume that every negative experience has some inner meaning. For example, when a teenager dies in a car crash, grieving parents regularly tell television reporters, "There is lesson to be learned from Johnny's death." The lesson usually is not that bad things randomly happen to good people, but that our roads don't have enough guard rails, or that we should enact laws to prevent teenagers from driving with friends and so forth. Furedi sees this kind of thinking as a return to pre-modern days of higher superstition, where every event has a deeper meaning. In the medieval era, the hand of God or the malevolent influence of Satan explained why people suffered misfortunes. Today the malevolent hand of government or corporate America is to blame for every catastrophe.

A second factor that Furedi sees contributing to our culture of risk aversion is that the nature of harms is represented in increasingly dramatic fashion. People are no longer expected to rise above adversity or encouraged to get on with their lives after they experience a hard knock. They are instead victims who are "scarred for life" and perpetually "haunted" by their misfortunes. Even the timescale of disaster has expanded. Anything that happens now produces consequences that you can never predict. Thus you have to be very careful about what you do today and worry about what might happen decades down the road. Treating people as permanent victims and constantly speculating about possible future harms is a recipe for social and economic paralysis.

The fear that actions like inventing new medicines, chemicals, and energy sources might have unknowable, irreversible, and ultimately catastrophic effects in the future leads to Furedi's third factor. Even as more people are living longer and healthier lives, life is perceived as a very dangerous thing. The boundary between analysis and speculation is eroded as worst case scenarios proliferate. What if an asteroid hits us; what if biotech wheat gets out of control; what if Iraq is giving weapons of mass destruction to terrorists? Worst case thinking decreases our cultural capacity to deal with uncertainty. Risk becomes something to avoid, not an opportunity to be seized.

The fourth trend that Furedi sees is the increasing treatment of safety as in end in itself. Furedi is not opposed to safety as a technical issue, of course, but he is against treating safety as a moral principle. Today, safety often acquires a "pseudo-moral" connotation as in "safe spaces," "safe medicine," and "safe sex." Furedi offered a personal story to illustrate what he meant. When he took his son to his new school, the principal told him, "Don't worry, our number one priority is your child's safety." Furedi responded, "I was hoping it was teaching him to read and write and do maths." A fifth trend that arises from our increasingly precautionary culture is a radical redefinition of personhood. People no longer believe that we have the capacity to cope and to act. We no longer really believe in the idea of individual autonomy. People are helplessly addicted to sex, alcohol, or shopping. People are represented as weak and vulnerable. More and more groups-children, women, minorities-are defined as "vulnerable." Policy is focused on reassuring and supporting people, and risk taking is stigmatized.

Despite these trends, Western countries still manage to innovate and take risks. Furedi acknowledges that in the physical world we still create all kinds of new technologies and are going ahead in a dramatic and positive fashion. He was advised to go to Silicon Valley to find real risk takers and he did find driven creative people working hard to create new technologies. But Furedi pointed out that the refrigerators of these same swashbuckling techno-entrepreneurs are chock full of pesticide-free produce; they abhor tobacco; drink just half a glass of wine with dinner; and wear knee pads, elbow pads, and helmets to go bike riding. "In terms of their lifestyles, they are very very precautionary, pussycats basically," said Furedi.

"But in the world of meaning, however, we've become very very confused," he argued. Furedi pointed to corporate advertising, which is seldom overtly about business or profits. Instead ads show blue skies and an interracial mixture of babies frolicking happily together. Corporations find it difficult to affirm culturally what they are really doing, that is, creating products, providing services, and making profits. To be called a risk taker used to be considered a compliment; it now carries generally negative connotations. Risk taking is just short of pedophilia in provoking social opprobrium. "Today, no one is criticized for not taking risks," said Furedi.

In the end, Furedi was very good at diagnosing what is wrong with our contemporary culture of fear, but he had very few concrete suggestions about how to restore people's belief in progress and the power of human creativity.

In 1982, the superbrilliant thinker Herman Kahn published The Coming Boom in which he pleaded for the re-establishment of "an ideology of progress." Kahn warned:

Two out of three Americans polled in recent years believe that their grandchildren will not live as well as they do, i.e., they tend to believe the vision of the future that is taught in our school system. Almost every child is told that we are running out of resources; that we are robbing future generations when we use these scarce, irreplaceable, or nonrenewable resources in silly, frivolous and wasteful ways; that we are callously polluting the environment beyond control; that we are recklessly destroying the ecology beyond repair; that we are knowingly distributing foods which give people cancer and other ailments but continue to do so in order to make a profit. It would be hard to describe a more unhealthy, immoral, and disastrous educational context, every element of which is either largely incorrect, misleading, overstated, or just plain wrong. What the school system describes, and what so many Americans believe, is a prescription for low morale, higher prices and greater (and unnecessary) regulations.

Kahn turned out to be right about the boom, but most of the intellectual class is still burdened with an anti-progress ideology that remains a significant drag on scientific, technological and policy innovation. As Furedi and Kahn point out, overcoming the pervasive pessimism of the intellectual class is the major piece of work left for us to do in the 21st century.






CANADIAN KYOTO-SCEPTICS TAKE OVER CONFERENCE OF PARTIES

Canada's new Conservative environment minister is taking over leadership of a key United Nations body overseeing the Kyoto Protocol but plans to use the post to push the party's differing vision on climate change. Rona Ambrose confirmed Friday that Prime Minister Stephen Harper has given notice to the UN that she will succeed her Liberal predecessor Stephane Dion in Canada's presidency of the Conference of Parties. The group is responsible for negotiating the next phase of greenhouse-gas emission reductions under the treaty, which marked the first anniversary of its implementation on Thursday. "It's a great opportunity, a privilege," Ambrose said after meeting B.C. Environment Minister Barry Penner. "We have some action plans that we have that you'll become familiar with in a short while around attacking climate change and clean air. It gives us an opportunity at the international stage to come forward with some of these ideas."

But despite the appointment, Ambrose did nothing to diminish the perception that the Conservatives aren't committed to the agreement. "We are a signatory to 59 international agreements that I'm learning about all the time and a lot of them we're very active in," said Ambrose, an MP from Edmonton. "On Kyoto, I will tell you that our government and our prime minister is very clear that there has to be a direct benefit to the Canadian environment and potentially to Canadian commercial investment in clean-air technology." Ambrose said the government will pursue elements of the Kyoto protocol that fit within her mandate to focus on domestic air pollution.

The use of emissions credits under Kyoto to offset over-production of greenhouse gases is a problem for Ambrose. "There will not be opportunities under this government, unlike the previous government, to purchase hot-air credits and allow Canadian companies to pollute on Canadian soil," she said. "Any sort of emission trading, whether it's domestic, international, has to have a direct benefit to the Canadian environment."

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ONE YEAR LATER, KYOTO-ENTHUSIASTS STRUGGLE TO MEET TARGETS

Europe's top environment official marked the one-year anniversary of the Kyoto Protocol on Thursday by accusing the U.S. of not doing enough to combat climate change -- despite the fact that many of the treaty's most enthusiastic supporters have done significantly worse than America in dealing with "greenhouse gas" emissions......

Washington says it shares the Kyoto goal of reducing emissions of CO2 and other pollutants blamed for climate change, but that its partnership with China, Japan, South Korea, India and Australia is a better way to achieve it. Environmental groups are highly skeptical of the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, calling it an attempt by the U.S. and Australia to undermine Kyoto. The State Department said last week the initiative "will complement, but not replace, the Kyoto Protocol.".....

In the U.S., figures released by the Energy Information Administration at the end of 2004 showed that emissions had risen by 13.4 percent from 1990 levels. But according to 2003 figures cited by Friends of the Earth Europe this week, some countries which, unlike the U.S., do have legally binding Kyoto targets are doing as badly, or even worse. For instance, Austria was set a Kyoto target of -13 percent, but emissions are running at +16.6 percent. Italy's target was -6.5 percent, and its actual emissions are +11.6 percent. Others that are off target include Belgium, the Netherlands and Spain, while France, Britain and Germany are nearer to being on track.

Compared to the aggregate -8 percent target for the E.U.'s then 15 member states, the actual situation is -1.7. "If current trends continue, Europe will not meet its Kyoto target," the green group said, adding that "if emission levels continue to develop as they did over the last three years, the [15 E.U. members'] emissions in 2010 will be +2.8 percent above of what they were in 1990." Other industrialized countries with Kyoto targets are doing no better. Canada was set a target of -6 percent but is emitting +24 percent of its 1990 levels. Japan's target is -6 percent, and emissions are running at +7.4 percent.

New Zealand's government announced in mid-2005 that it would be unable to meet its Kyoto commitment -- a target of no change from 1990 levels -- and the country was warned that compliance would cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.

In Washington, the Competitive Enterprise Institute said Kyoto's future looked bleak, as countries that have agreed to cut their emissions realize the costs involved. "Even as they damage their economies with limits on energy use, emissions continue to go up," said Myron Ebell, the institute's director of energy and global warming policy. "The sooner that Kyoto's supporters realize that it's a dead end, the better off the world will be.".......

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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