THE EVILS OF COW MANURE

Gardeners love it but the Greenies don't -- even though it is "natural"

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. joined environmental groups Friday to launch a campaign against huge dairies that they blame for polluted groundwater in the Central Valley. "Mega-dairies cannot just ignore the hormones, antibiotics, bacteria and toxins in their millions of gallons of manure waste at the expense of the health of California families," Kennedy, a longtime environmental advocate, said in a news release.

These dairies, some with thousands of cows, have edged out the smaller farmer, leading to a greater concentration of animals and more wet manure that pollutes area waterways, said environmental groups Baykeeper and the Sierra Club. "Of course, there are dairies that are putting a lot of money into complying with environmental laws. But they're an industry like any other. There are people who are going to get around rules if they can and in this case it is very harmful," said Carrie McNeil, director of a local chapter of Baykeeper.

The groups, backed by Kennedy, launched the campaign to raise awareness and push state officials to adopt stricter water standards, McNeil said. Kennedy has lead similar efforts against large poultry and hog farms on the East Coast. But Michael Marsh, of the Western United Dairymen, said dairy owners know that dumping water or waste off their grounds can mean jail time and fines in the millions of dollars, prompting most of them to comply. "Dairies have impact just like any other human activities. We try very hard to minimize that," he said.

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Death to the Tree-Killing Death Tax

A predominantly Democratic group of U.S. senators wants to preserve a law that destroys 2.98 million acres of forests annually - an area the size of Yellowstone and Yosemite national parks, combined. When the Senate votes this morning, Republicans and fair-minded Democrats should stop this arboricide by killing the federal death tax.

"While liberals support the Death Tax in order to break up concentrations of wealth, large and concentrated land holdings often are good for the environment," says Cato Institute tax-policy director Chris Edwards. "The Death Tax winds up favoring developers over natural habitat."

The death tax comes alive once human beings pass away, then fatally stomps on flora and fauna alike. According to a Congressional Joint Economic Committee (JEC) study released last month, "The estate tax undoubtedly is bad for environmentally-important habitats and is a serious impediment to preserving endangered and threatened species." The death tax is particularly onerous for endangered animals, "since half of all listed species are primarily found on privately-owned land," the JEC concluded, citing a May 2003 report from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Selling and splitting up land is especially tough on animals like the endangered Florida panther. It needs to run freely in up to 450 square miles of open space.

Relying on a 2001 analysis, JEC found that "approximately 2.6 million acres of forest land must be harvested each year to pay for the estate tax. Another 1.3 million acres must be sold to raise funds to pay estate taxes, of which close to one-third (29 percent) is either developed or converted to other uses." Add these extra 377,000 acres to the figure above, and the death tax devours some 2.98 million acres each year. Put differently, a tree-filled area nearly equal to Yellowstone's 2,219,271 acres and Yosemite's 761,266 acres annually is converted into two-by-fours or parking spots so that Americans who just buried loved ones can endure the additional nightmare of shipping Uncle Sam large chunks of their inherited assets.

These 2001 numbers pre-date the gradual reductions in death-tax rates from 55 percent in 2002 to 46 percent today, and the increases in asset levels at which these rates apply. Nonetheless, these statistics remain relevant.

The House of Representatives voted 272-162 on April 13, 2005, to terminate this tax; President Bush will sign its death certificate, if the Senate cooperates. If the Senate does not permanently repeal the tax, it will revert from the 0 percent rate in 2010 to the previous 55 percent rate in 2011. At that point, the perverse incentives to log forests and pave prairies will rise from the dead. Indeed, they could intensify. As Baby Boomers mature, so do their properties. When they eventually pass away, more and more acreage will pass down to their heirs - likely more than in 2000, when the Forest Service's study was conducted - and at higher values than prevailed back then. (Land prices nearly always rise across time.) Pricier property will mean higher death taxes, prompting more heirs to exploit their land to pay their tax bills, rather than let wildlife roam through untouched habitat.

"Death tax supporters think they're visiting vengeance on rich old people who've gone to their graves, but they're really wreaking havoc on other living things, like forests, meadows, lakes, and all the creatures they support," says National Taxpayers Union communications director Pete Sepp. "Committed liberals should commit the death tax to their compost heap of history."

A big problem here is that the death tax strikes many who are land-rich and cash-poor. In a May 2003 study, Pamela Villarreal of the National Center for Policy Analysis found that "The average tree farm is valued at about $2 million, while the average annual household income of a tree farmer is less than $50,000." Such cash flow cannot cover huge death-tax liabilities. So, up go the "For Sale" signs. Among the 33 percent of forest owners who paid the death tax, "40 percent sold timber or land in order to make the payment . About 57 percent of those who sold land had no other assets available to pay the estate tax."

U.S. Department of Agriculture research found that in Mississippi alone, 18 percent of death-tax cases involved the tax-driven sale of land or timber, causing increased development on those properties. "There are tons of reasons to end the death tax: It's economically damaging, unfair to hardworking Americans, and disproportionately hurts small and minority business owners," says Mallory Factor, chairman of the Free Enterprise Fund. "Atop all this, it is also environmentally destructive. The federal government appraises farmland at a higher value because of the surrounding commercialization and development of land. But farmers don't want to sell, they want to farm. When they die, the farmland is valued so highly that the death tax ends up breaking up the family farm - and the land gets developed anyway."

Yes, progress requires land development. Without trees, things like newspapers, desks, and homes would be rarities. Still tree harvesting and land development should satisfy market needs, not federal tax debts.

While it's no surprise that tax fighters like Cato's Chris Edwards, NTU's Pete Sepp, and FEF's Factor hate this levy - FEF has aired $3.7 million in TV commercials urging the death tax's repeal - even the Nature Conservancy's Michael Bean has slammed it. He once called the death tax "highly regressive in the sense that it encourages the destruction of ecologically important land in private ownership."

It's bad enough that the death tax double-taxes and sometimes triple-taxes the assets that decedents bequeath the bereaved. It also spells death for trees, endangered species, and other living things. The Senate should give Mother Nature a break and put the death tax to death

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Now almost certain that Brits will get more nukes

Gordon Brown [heir apparent to Tony Blair] backs more nuclear power stations in Britain in a move today that makes it certain that the Government will soon approve the commissioning of new plants. Any hopes of anti-nuclear campaigners and many Labour MPs that a change of prime minister might see a reversal of Labour's pro-nuclear stance will be extinguished by the Chancellor's article in The Times today in which he explicitly supports new stations. At the same time he clears away one of the last remaining areas of potential policy difference with Tony Blair, helping what most politicians believe will be a handover of power within 12 months.

The Government's energy review is due to report within weeks. The widespread expectation is that it will recommend that the power gap will have to be filled by a mix of more renewable sources, greater fuel efficiency and nuclear stations, probably built on existing sites. Mr Brown has never uttered anti-nuclear sentiments but his emphasis has always been on the need to justify the long-term costs of waste disposal and decommissioning. Today he leaves no doubt. Mr Brown writes that over the coming weeks and months "we will demonstrate our enhanced flexibility with further reforms in planning, skills and labour markets, and in energy policy, including new nuclear".

A Treasury source said yesterday that the Chancellor had accepted the argument in principle for more nuclear stations and would do what was necessary to achieve them. He added that Mr Brown still believed that the key issue was to hammer out the commercial and financial details to ensure that it represented the best deal for the country. Sources said that companies were watching the situation to see whether they were to be given a blank cheque, and they needed to know that the Government would be hard-headed in negotiations over new building. "But Gordon is up for nuclear, no doubt."

Mr Brown's endorsement of nuclear power came as Mr Blair gave yet another hint that his own mind was made up. After a summit in Paris with President Chirac, the Prime Minister said that a new agreement to share nuclear expertise showed that energy policy was "right at the top of the agenda". A bilateral nuclear forum will bring together ministers, business and experts from each side of the Channel. Mr Blair said: "The establishment of a British-Franco nuclear forum will allow us to discuss all the policy issues. One thing is for sure: this policy, for reasons of energy security, is right at the top of the agenda." He insisted that he was not pre-empting the results of the energy review. But people would look back with anger in 20 or 30 years if today's politicians ducked the decisions that could secure electricity supplies for the future.

Mr Blair said: "We have 20 per cent of our electricity today from nuclear power. In 15 or 20 years' time, that's gone. Today we are 80 or 90 per cent self-sufficient in gas and oil. In 15 or 20 years' time we will be importing 80 to 90 per cent. "The decisions we take today will be felt in 15, 20 or 30 years' time, and I don't want people looking back and saying, `What were those guys doing, when the facts were very clear and very obvious to them?' "

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A rising tide of bad science in Australia

During the past fortnight the reportage of the debate on greenhouse gases has come close to what the climate-change industry is apt to call a tipping point, the point of no return. Almost every day, it seems, true believers in catastrophist science have been coming out with fresh claims that the debate is over and all the world now acknowledges the gravity of the matter.

Julia Baird, a columnist with The Sydney Morning Herald, was among the more artless cheerleaders. "The nuclear energy debate this week has been fascinating and - no matter what your thoughts on its use here - a relief of sorts. At least we're all agreeing on one thing - global warming and climate change are serious, and potentially catastrophic, problems. "Serious scientific research is no longer being misrepresented as a left-wing beat-up propelled by mad greenies and anxious scientists. At last, the vocal deniers are shrinking like the Wicked Witch of the West, drenched by a bucket of melting icecaps."

So there you have it. Greenhouse gas sceptics have, at the stroke of a pen, been turned into deniers , the moral equivalent of anti-Semites, along with David Irving and the pseudo-historians who say the Holocaust never happened. What's more, those wicked few of us left who still refuse to face facts are confounded by the evidence of polar meltdowns that threaten to engulf us. As if to reinforce the point, ABC television's mid-evening news last Saturday reported, as though it were a fact, the following: "For thousands of years, Alaskan islanders have lived on this remote island. As their part of the earth slips away, the Bush administration stands accused of trying to silence nature's compelling warnings."

Whether in the form of Alaskan inundations, drowning atolls in the Pacific or the flooding of New Orleans, there seems to be no shortage of cataclysmic events and no shortage of scientists, journalists and even multinational corporations prepared to attribute them to greenhouse gas-induced global warming.

Last year Munich Re, an insurance conglomerate, solemnly warned us that rising sea levels and coastal erosion caused by global warming were going to be two of the biggest problems for insurers in the new millennium and - wonderful to relate - that premiums would have to rise accordingly.

Closer to home, at the end of May The West Australian reported new predictions of sea levels rising by up to a metre by the end of the century. John Church, a CSIRO researcher, and Will Steffen, director of the Australian National University's Centre for Resource and Environment Studies, announced that they "wouldn't be buying low-lying homes because rising oceans would affect their value".

Federal Environment Minister Ian Campbell is a born-again believer in the greenhouse crisis, or "cooking the planet", as an editorial in The Australian Financial Review rather breathlessly encapsulated it last Tuesday. But, sensing how these extravagant claims might erode the plausibility of the theory, Campbell dismissed them out of hand and said that significant sea rises were still between 1000 and 2000 years away: "Climate change is a very serious issue. However, we have trouble enough ensuring people take it seriously without ludicrous claims like this."

The federal Opposition's spokesman on the environment Anthony Albanese responded by saying that Campbell should respect scientists and not shoot the messengers when he didn't like the message. "Low-lying Pacific nations are flooding because of climate change and it is a window to the future for Australia unless action is taken."

There are more generally accepted and empirically testable processes that account for the selective inundation of the Pacific atolls. I refer, of course, to the constant rising and subsidence of the earth's surface. Ian Plimer, head of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Adelaide, is an eminent greenhouse sceptic with a nice turn of phrase who's had plenty to say on this subject in The Independent Weekly and deserves a wider audience. "Subsidence can play some cruel tricks ... This is what is happening in many Pacific Ocean atoll nations and this subsidence produces an apparent sea-level rise. We naughty fossil-fuel burners are not causing sea levels to rise. Some, but not all, of the Pacific Ocean atoll nations are sinking as part of a normal geological process," he says.

Albanese and those who share his convictions should think long and hard about that phrase "some, but not all". Why should some low-lying coral formations be engulfed and others arbitrarily spared by the self-same rising seas ? Plimer points to Charles Darwin's book The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs, published in 1842. In it Darwin showed that volcanoes emerge at various heights above the sea floor and provide platforms for the growth of coral. If sea levels fall or a volcano rises further from the sea floor, coral attaches itself, only to be killed on exposure to air. Places such as Vanuatu feature coral reefs well above sea level on the sides of volcanoes, due to their having risen. If the sea level rises, volcanoes become inundated and coral attaches itself to them, so that they grow vertically as well as horizontally as the sea level continues to rise, producing atolls. The same thing happens if a volcanic island begins to sink.

The moral of the story, as Plimer says, is that "a rise in sea level produces coral atolls. It does not destroy them. Darwin showed this in 1842. Atolls were drilled to test Darwin's theory by [Douglas] Mawson's Antarctic compatriot T.W. Edgeworth David and Darwin's coral theory has been validated by more than 150 years of independent, interdisciplinary science. Why has this been ignored by the catastrophists?" There is another element in the cycle that contributes to the illusion of engulfing sea levels. "Coral atolls can sink due to compaction of coraline sand, pumping of groundwater or sinking of the volcanic substrate. This is a normal process that induces the rapid growth of coral to re-form the atoll."

The sooner Albanese and Bob Sercombe, the ALP's spokesman on Pacific Island affairs, come to terms with all this, the better. In January this year in The West Australian (a journal much concerned with inundation) they co-wrote an article entitled "Time for us to help drowning neighbours". Their disaster plan encompassed rescuing whole populations, accepting them as "climate change refugees" and assisting them "with intra-country evacuations when people are moved to higher ground". They say we should help evacuees "to adapt to new countries" and "provide assistance to preserve their cultural heritage".

This is daylight madness. Our island neighbours may well have claims on our foreign aid, but as a matter of charity rather than any sort of entitlement. In the absence of compelling evidence, and in defiance of Darwin's model, Labor shouldn't be encouraging them to believe that they are the victims of profligate coal, gas and oil-fired economies. Nor should it be creating unrealistic expectations that, as the largest regional consumer of fossil fuels, Australia has endless obligations to a new class of mendicants from Kiribati, Tuvalu, the Carteret or the Marshall Islands and the Federated States of Micronesia.

Never mind, you may be thinking, about Pacific islands and their vagaries. Even if we accept Plimer's account, it doesn't explain away the melting polar ice. The sinking island in Alaska may be subsiding rather than being engulfed by a rising tide, but it's still being submerged and what about all that extra water, that rising tide? Plimer notes that "the tidal measuring station at Port Adelaide is sinking, thereby recording a sea level rise". The same is true of many other areas of subsidence, a fact apparently lost on most contemporary oceanographers. "If there is a sea-level rise we would expect every atoll in every ocean to be inundated. But we don't see this. We would expect harbours around the world to record a sea level rise. This is not recorded. So something is seriously wrong with the catastrophist dogma."

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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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