To guarantee continued delivery of public services at a reasonable cost, local, state, and federal lawmakers will soon be forced to to stand up to government employee unions, according to a new study by Lewis M. Andrews, executive director of the Connecticut-based Yankee Institute for Public Policy.

In “The Coming Showdown with Public Labor,” released in June

This Heartland Policy Study by education expert George Clowes addresses concerns about the efficacy of school vouchers that have been raised recently by some school reform advocates. The author distinguishes between “charity vouchers” and universal vouchers and explains why the former are unlikely to cause systemic reform of public schools. However, new data on the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program show that even charity vouchers demonstrate the reforming potential of school choice. Reform advocates shouldn’t give up on vouchers, Clowes concludes.

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Welfare Reform after Ten Years assigns grades to the 50 states and the District of Columbia based on how they implemented the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA), which gave states unprecedented flexibility in implementing welfare reform.

The six states with the most successful anti-poverty programs are Maryland, Idaho, Illinois, Florida, Virginia, and California. The five with the least success are Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Kansas, Vermont, and Missouri. The states’ overall ranking is an average of two separate analyses — anti-poverty success and welfare reform policies — evaluating a total of 12 variables.

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Although the bill had the support of Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) and received strong backing from environmental activist groups, it was weakened in the Senate and then defeated in the House.

Priority Among Activists
As first introduced, the bill was the most ambitious environmental proposal in Maryland this year and a top priority for the state’s environmental activist groups. Environment Maryland, an activist group that claims global warming is a crisis, worked especially hard in favor of the bill.

The bill proposed ambitious goals for slashing carbon dioxide emissions but did not specify mechanisms for doing so. The bill had momentum early on but was strongly opposed by labor unions and manufacturers, who feared it would dramatically raise energy costs, causing an economic slowdown and rising unemployment.

The Senate acknowledged the threat to the state’s economy, and it weakened the bill before passing it along to the House.
Original Bill Unrealistic
State Sen. Nancy Jacobs (R-Harford) emerged as a leader in opposition to the original bill, worried it would take too great a toll on the state’s economy. Jacobs helped weaken the bill in the Senate, supporting removal of unrealistic requirements.

As Jacobs said in an interview for this story, “The bill actually started with a mandated 25 percent reduction by 2020 and a mandated 90 percent reduction by 2050.” As the 90 percent reduction would be prohibitively costly and was technologically unrealistic, “the latter reduction was later stricken in committee,” Jacobs said.

Economic Costs Doomed It
Jacobs tried unsuccessfully to make further changes to the bill. “I tried to amend the bill to exclude businesses located in the Sparrows Point area,” she said. “Sparrows Point is where Maryland’s steel industry is located, and this bill would have been a fatal blow to an industry that is already hurting. Unfortunately, [the amendment] failed 21-26.”

Jacobs went on to explain, “I ultimately voted against the bill because it amounts to an indirect tax on the working middle-class families of Maryland. The bill would have inevitably led to substantially high energy rate hikes, and it is my opinion that Marylanders are already overtaxed and overburdened with state and local taxes, energy rates, and a high cost of living.”

Opposition Increased
When the amended Senate bill finally reached the House, it faced opposition from all camps. Consumer advocates and employers believed the bill was still too costly and unbalanced. Environmental activist groups did not like provisions subjecting future reductions to further General Assembly votes. In the end, the House Economic Matters Committee rejected the bill by an 18-2 vote.

Local environmental activists were especially anxious to enact carbon dioxide emission restrictions. Brad Heavner, director of Environment Maryland, said, “The longer we wait to take strong action on global warming, the harder it will be to roll out effective strategies.”

The bill’s defeat on the last day of the Maryland legislative session dealt environmental activists a hard blow. Businesses and consumers throughout the state, by contrast, expressed optimism for a stronger economy.

This article was published in Environment & Climate News, a publication of The Heartland Institution.

“No such consensus or settled science exists,” Arthur Robinson, founder and president of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (OISM), told a press conference May 19 at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. “As indicated by the petition text and signatory list, a very large number of American scientists reject” the hypothesis of human-caused global warming.

The institute, a non-profit research organization, first published the names and credentials of about 17,000 scientists in 2001. The current list of 31,072 Americans with college degrees in science includes 9,021 with Ph.D. degrees in various scientific fields.

Robinson said, “The very large number of petition signers demonstrates that if there is a consensus among American scientists, it is in opposition to the human-caused global warming hypothesis rather than in favor of it.”

Added Joseph Bast, president of The Heartland Institute and publisher of Environment & Climate News, “Claims by partisan and extremist organizations such as Greenpeace, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Union of Concerned Scientists that their views represent the ‘consensus’ never should have been taken seriously.

“They are not scientific organizations, and in fact they have long records of misrepresenting science to achieve political objectives,” Bast said. “This should go down as yet another case in which they were caught lying about science.”
‘No Convincing Evidence’

The Oregon Institute petition says, in part:

“There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the earth.”

Robinson noted roughly 35 new signatures are added to the petition every day. Signers include more than 40 members of the National Academy of Sciences. Theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson and atmospheric physicist Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are among the prestigious scientists who have signed the petition. Frederick Seitz, the first president of the National Academy of Sciences, signed before his death in early March.
Response Muted

For the most part, the mainstream media largely ignored the OISM’s news. That’s not surprising, noted James M. Taylor, a senior fellow for The Heartland Institute and managing editor of Environment & Climate News.

“The mainstream press is driven by alarmism,” Taylor said. “If you have great news–that 31,000 scientists don’t think the world is going to end–the press doesn’t really want to hear it, or share it with their readers and listeners.”

Internet attention to the release–both positive and negative–was more substantial. News sites and bloggers, including FOXNews, EcoGeek, Red Orbit, First Post (United Kingdom), and Enter Stage Right (Canada), wrote about it.

Bast lauded Robinson’s work.

“Art Robinson and the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine have performed a tremendous service for the cause of sound science,” Bast said. “Their petition confirms what international surveys of climate scientists and recent reviews of the literature show: Most scientists do not believe most or all of the modern warming is manmade, that future climate changes can be predicted with accuracy, or that future warming would be catastrophic.

“This petition ought to mark the end of a dark chapter in the history of the news media in the U.S. and around the world,” Bast continued, “a chapter in which they were used by interest groups to advance an anti-energy agenda with very harmful consequences for all energy users.”

The Petition Project, Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine: http://www.petitionproject.org/

This article was published in Environment & Climate News, a publication of The Heartland Institute.

Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY), Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), and a Sierra Club affiliate organized 95 congresspersons–mostly eastern state Democrats–in writing a letter to the federal BLM urging it to overrule the Utah Bureau of Land Management and ban energy recovery in more than three million acres of rich energy deposits in the state.

The letter was circulated by the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA), an affiliate of the Sierra Club. Notably, not one of the congressmen signing the petition was from Utah.

Oil Production a ‘Scar’

The April 16 letter seeking federal restrictions on Utah state land complains 86 percent of the land at issue “would be vulnerable to … oil and gas development.”

The letter argues, “Unfortunately, the preferred alternatives in the draft plans offer virtually no protection for these three million acres. These roadless areas would be vulnerable to damaging off-road vehicle use; oil, gas, and hardrock mineral development; and other development threats. Indeed, the BLM’s preferred plans would authorize nearly 1,000 miles of off-road vehicle routes in these roadless areas. Eighty-six percent of this land would be open for oil and gas development.”

The letter argues the federal government must usurp state control of the land to protect it “from the scars of off-road vehicle routes and energy development.”
Utah Wants Multiple Use

Utah state Rep. Mike Noel (R-Kanab) disagrees strongly. “Utah already is burdened with seemingly endless federal restrictions and federal ownership over millions of acres of land within our borders,” he said at a February news conference. “One thing we don’t need is the federal government–or East Coast-funded extremist groups operating in our state–further restricting the public’s access to public lands.”

State Rep. Roger Barrus (R-Centerville), chairman of the state House’s Natural Resources, Agriculture, and Environment Committee, agreed. “At a time when it is obvious that global energy demand will soon outpace that which we use in the United States, it is only prudent that we not shackle our ability to produce energy from the natural resources on public lands located in our state by creating more wildernesses,” Barrus said at the news conference.
‘Suffered Enough’

“Poor Utah has suffered enough at the hands of the environmental movement, what with the ‘monument’ locking up an enormous deposit of clean coal,” said Chris Horner, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, referring to the 1996 commissioning as a national monument some 1.7 million acres of land in Utah containing nearly one trillion dollars’ worth of clean-burning coal.

“Seeking to do this again, with or without Utah’s participation, is just more of the same,” Horner said. “But the fact of the matter is that what Utahans think is the last concern of the land-lockup types.”

“The hubris of Eastern legislators is not surprising, but it knows no bounds,” said Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis. “They regularly impose their desired land-use ideals on Western states.

“Eastern states certainly were not required to give up sovereignty over large parts of their territory to become a part of the Union,” Burnett added. “Can you imagine the outcry if Wyoming or Texas tried to dictate how New Yorkers would be allowed to use Long Island or even Central Park?”

This article was published in Environment & Climate News, a publication of The Heartland Institute.

The listing represents the first time a species has been given protected status based not on current animal population trends but instead on speculative climate models.

Survived Warmer Temps

In announcing the May 14 decision, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said he was “forced” by science and the Endangered Species Act, which he called “inflexible.”

Kempthorne asserted computer models projecting substantial Arctic ice loss and speculation polar bears would face a threat of extinction were the best available science, even though polar bears have thrived during extended periods of temperatures significantly warmer than the present. Global temperatures have been warmer than today for most of the past 10,000 years, scientists note, and Arctic temperatures during the most recent interglacial period–125,000 years ago–were a full 6 degrees Celsius warmer than today.
Decision Criticized

Leading scientists who have studied global warming, the Arctic, and polar bear impacts criticized the decision as ignoring real-world evidence in favor of speculative computer models that have consistently predicted more warming than has actually occurred.

Willie Soon, Ph.D., a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, pointed out computer models improperly assume the current short-term decline in Arctic sea ice will continue for an extended period of time, even though Arctic temperature and sea ice conditions have typically fluctuated back and forth between warm and cold spells.

“The globe has warmed and cooled a whole lot more dramatically than we currently observed in the last 100 years or so, and yet polar bears, as a species, clearly survived both much warmer and much cooler times,” Soon said.

“The scientific puzzle is really more on how polar bears survived ice ages, when there was little to eat and so much ice preventing them from getting to the seals” that are a big part of their diet when they can get them, Soon noted.

“Thirty years’ worth of data can hardly be called ‘climate,’ yet these folks are calling it some trends that will promise the demise of polar bears that had survived much warmer and colder times,” said Soon. “This is why this bear listing story is mostly political.”
Sound Science Ignored

“This decision represents a conflict between politics and science,” said Scott Armstrong, a forecasting expert at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. “Polar bear populations have been increasing in recent decades, so there is no current problem. The concern is based on forecasts. However, the government forecasts used to support the decision violate basic scientific principles and thus provide no scientific support for the listing.

“There are no scientific forecasts that would suggest a reduction in polar bear populations,” Armstrong added. “It would be improper, then, to designate polar bears as endangered. Application of proper forecasting methods suggests a small short-term rise followed by a leveling off. We provide full disclosure to support these statements at publicpolicyforecasting.com and at theclimatebet.com. In the long term, science will prevail.”

Responding to similar concerns expressed by many in the scientific community, the Alaska Legislature is proposing a $2 million study of polar bears to ensure sound science is utilized in determining whether they are threatened by global warming.

Robert Ferguson, president of the Science and Public Policy Institute, noted the federal decision contradicts polar bear research evaluated by the Canadian government.

“Canadians, who manage two-thirds of all [polar] bears, just reviewed their listing status and decided not to up-list the bear to a more serious status,” Ferguson said.

E. Jay Donovan (ejd38@hotmail.com) writes from Tampa, Florida.

This article was published in Environment & Climate News, a publication of The Heartland Institute.

So when the federal government commissioned studies last year to support the listing of polar bears as a threatened or endangered species, the project was greeted with near-universal acclaim. Those studies concluded the current growth trend in the polar bear population will reverse and the bears’ population will decrease substantially in the future.

The U.S. Department of Interior relied on such studies in its May 2008 decision to list the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.
Government Forecasts Flawed

However, when I joined forces with a prominent forecasting expert and one of the world’s leading climate scientists to audit the government’s forecasts, we found the predictions were based on false assumptions and violated many principles of scientific forecasting. In fact, we found the government forecasters followed less than one-sixth of the relevant principles of scientific forecasting.

The bottom line is that the government studies are irrelevant to the question whether polar bears are endangered or threatened.

The audit–in which I was joined by Kesten Green of Monash University and Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics–has been accepted for publication in the management science journal Interfaces. It is the only peer-reviewed paper on polar bear population forecasting that has been accepted for publication in an academic journal.
Scientific Principles Ignored

Decision makers and the public should expect people who make forecasts to be familiar with the scientific principles of forecasting, just as a patient expects his physician to be familiar with the procedures dictated by medical science.

Our research regarding polar bear populations shows the best forecast is that numbers are equally likely to rise as to fall. The polar bear population has been increasing over recent decades, and a continuation of that trend over the short term is quite possible.

Scott Armstrong, Kesten Green, and Willie Soon, “Polar Bear Population Forecasts: A Public-Policy Forecasting Audit,” Interfaces, forthcoming: http://publicpolicyforecasting.com

This article was published in Environment & Climate News, a publication of The Heartland Institute.

Sponsored by Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM), the ranking Republican on the Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee, the bill is one of the first congressional responses to growing nationwide unrest over soaring energy prices.

The legislation would reduce America’s dependence on foreign sources of energy by expanding the recovery and development of traditional energy sources while simultaneously promoting alternative energy technologies.

“For years now, I have been trying to develop more domestic production of oil and gas, and for years, with one exception in the Gulf of Mexico, I have been blocked for political reasons. Consumers are now paying the price for those years of obstruction,” Domenici said in a press statement accompanying introduction of the bill.

ANWR, Ocean Shelf

Nowhere has such obstruction been more obvious than in the failed efforts to open up a small section of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and broad swaths of the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) to exploration for oil and natural gas.

ANWR and OCS together could provide the U.S. with a total of 100 billion barrels of oil, analysts note. The United States currently imports more than 60 percent of the oil it consumes, and ANWR and OCS alone could produce as much oil as the U.S. imports in 50 years from all sources combined.

In addition to allowing resource recovery on just 2,000 of ANWR’s 19.7 million acres, the bill, introduced May 1, would permit states along the Pacific and Atlantic coasts to access the oil and gas reserves in the OCS.

Under a leasing agreement with the federal government, a revenue-sharing scheme would give states 37.5 percent of the revenues, the federal treasury 50 percent, and the Land and Water Conservation Fund 12.5 percent. Revenues from ANWR would be split 50/50 between Alaska and the federal government.
Refinery Bottlenecks

The legislation also addresses the nation’s overburdened refining capacity. No new refineries have been built in the United States in more than 30 years, and as a result America must now import an increasing amount of expensive refined gasoline from foreign countries.

The lack of refining capacity affects consumers because existing refineries are operating near capacity. When a refinery shuts down for repairs, bottlenecks can result, further driving up prices.

The bill would grant the Environmental Protection Agency authority to accept consolidated applications to streamline permits required to construct and operate refineries.

The bill would also free up an estimated 2 trillion barrels of oil in shale lying beneath Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming by repealing a one-year moratorium on funds to complete final regulations for the commercial leasing of oil shale.
Learning from Past Mistakes

“Economists and policy analysts have repeatedly warned the Green movement that their campaign of strangling fossil fuel production would lead to higher energy costs, which would translate into higher transport-related food costs,” said Kenneth Green, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

“They were also warned that creating a market for biofuels through subsidies and mandates would lead to land being used for fuel rather than food, with inevitable impacts on food price and availability,” said Green. “After 40 years it has all come to a head, and the economic naïveté of Green policies has created a genuine disaster as energy prices soar, food prices soar, and ecosystems are put under the plow for biofuels.”

Myron Ebell, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, points out opening more domestic production would bring down oil prices long before the operations even begin to deliver product.

“In 1995 Congress passed legislation to open the coastal plain of ANWR to oil and gas exploration,” Ebell said. “President Clinton vetoed the bill, and one of the reasons he gave was that because the oil wouldn’t start flowing for several years it wouldn’t do anything to reduce current [1995] high gas prices.

“Enacting legislation this year to open ANWR and OCS areas would not do anything to raise oil production immediately,” Ebell continued. “However, it would lower crude oil prices immediately. With high demand and many potential threats to production, there is a significant risk premium in oil prices. Opening up potentially huge new fields in a secure country would burst the speculative bubble.”

This article was published in Environment & Climate News, a publication of The Heartland Institute.

The conflict came to a head in January, when a California judge ordered a Sunnyvale couple to cut down or drastically reduce the size of their backyard redwood trees, which were partially shading a neighbor’s rooftop solar panels.

The California Solar Shade Control Act, passed at the urging of environmental activists in 1978, gives solar panel owners the right to prevent neighbors’ trees from shading their solar panels.

Simitian’s proposed law would exempt trees that were planted prior to the installation of a solar array.

As Simitian told the Palo Alto Online News, “Right now, a new neighbor can move in next to you, install a solar energy system and then–under threat of criminal prosecution–force you to take an ax to your trees if and when they grow.”

Simitian’s bill passed the Senate in late April by a 38-0 vote. The California State Assembly is scheduled to vote on the bill in July.
Environmentalists Split

The Sunnyvale case generated enormous press attention, with people all over the country taking sides. After the court ruled against the owners of the redwoods, news crews from around the world gathered to document the cutting of the trees.

Environmental activist groups began taking sides against each other over the dispute.

Those who favored chopping down the redwoods noted solar panels produce power without emitting greenhouse gases, and argued they therefore should trump the redwood trees. Other environmental activist groups argued a small amount of solar power generation did not justify sacrificing the state’s famous redwoods.

Kurt Newick, chairman of the global warming committee of the Loma Prieta Chapter of the Sierra Club, argued for chopping down the redwoods.

Newick, a solar panel salesman, told the San Jose Mercury News, “It’s actually better for the environment to put solar on your roof than to plant a tree.”

This article was published in Environment & Climate News, a publication of The Heartland Institute.