Upcoming editorials: Legal aid, bridge inspections and climate change
Here are some of the editorials we're working on for this weekend. Please let us know what you think. We'll run some of the best comments alongside the editorials in the print edition.
--Some of Maryland’s most important, and vulnerable, transportation choke points are the toll bridges and tunnels run by the Maryland Transportation Authority. From the Bay Bridge to the Fort McHenry Tunnel, these are heavily traveled links in the transportation grid, and should any of them fail, the consequences would be disastrous. That’s why last week’s recommendations by an independent panel of engineering experts to significantly upgrade the authority’s bridge and tunnel inspection program — and the agency’s apparent willingness to do so — are clearly a step in the right direction. While the panel found the authority’s existing inspection program meets federal standards, that’s not good enough to restore public confidence after last year’s Bay Bridge tractor-trailer crash. It was only during an investigation of that Aug. 10 fatal accident that workers discovered that the bridge’s traffic barriers were failing, the product of unseen corrosion to connecting bolts. For a full preview of this editorial, click here.
--For the first time in more than a decade, Congress has a real chance to lift the crippling restrictions on the federally financed Legal Services Corporation (LSC) that have hampered the agency’s efforts to assist poor people seeking redress through the courts. At a time when many people are struggling against the threat of foreclosure, eviction or loss of health and unemployment benefits as a result of the economic downturn, the LSC’s services are needed more than ever. Congress should seize this opportunity to make them available as widely as possible. For a full-length preview of this editorial, click here.
--The climate change bill being debated by Congress is not without flaws. Its targets are not aggressive enough given the threat posed by climate change. There are too many loopholes for polluters, particularly in the area of carbon offsets. Some environmental groups have already withdrawn their support because of these weaknesses. But such shortcomings don’t warrant abandoning such an important and groundbreaking effort. As much as President Obama and other supporters of the bill have touted its significance as a means to reduce dependence on foreign oil and create green jobs in the field of renewable energy, its real importance is to get the nation moving (finally) against global warming. Too often lost in the debate is just how serious a threat human-induced climate change poses in the form of rising sea levels, more extreme weather and droughts, retreating glaciers and a loss of fresh water resources, increases in disease and poverty, and much political upheaval and instability around the world. The evidence of climate change is too unequivocal and the consequences too dire to be ignored. Yet that course of action is precisely what opponents, primarily Republican conservatives, would prefer.
Comments
Please stop your fact-free fear mongering on global warming. If you bothered to read the IPCC’s scientific assessment report (AR), not the summary for policy makers (SPM) written by UN bureaucrats you would know that the science is not settled. Only 4, of the 23 panelists who reviewed the AR report chapter on anthropogenic causes, endorsed that finding. Furthermore Richard Alley the lead author of the chapter on seas-level rise told Congress last year “we don’t have a good assessed scientific foundation right now.”
Another inconvenient truth is as MIT climatologist Richard Lindzen noted, “no statistically significant warming since 1998.”
Even the EPA did a study that contradicted its own carbon dioxide endangerment findings. Oh wait the Obama administration suppressed that report.
But let’s take this editorial’s argument to its logical extent. Waxman-Markey, should it become law, would produce a benefit (if you can call it that) of a meaningless one-nine hundredth of a degree reduction in average global temperature. The costs as rightly estimated by the Heritage Foundation as opposed to the seriously flawed CBO report are:
•Reduce aggregate gross domestic product (GDP) by $9.6 trillion;
•Destroy 1,105,000 jobs on average, with peak years seeing unemployment rise by over 2,479,000 jobs;
•Raise electricity rates 90 percent after adjusting for inflation;
•Raise inflation-adjusted gasoline prices by 74 percent;•Raise residential natural gas prices by 55 percent;
•Raise an average family's annual energy bill by $1,500; and
•Increase inflation-adjusted federal debt by 26 percent, or $29,150 additional federal debt per person, again after adjusting for inflation.
The Sun editorialist, who writes about climate change needs to stop aping talking points from Al Gore’s venture capital firm and dig into the facts.
Posted by: Mark Newgent | June 27, 2009 8:54 AM
I heartily agree with all that Mark Newgent has posted. I've long believed that the brand of global warming "science" that has won over the TBS editorial staff is a gigantic dangerous hoax - Or, as the title of a recent excellent book on the subject by Chris Horner refers to it - 'Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed". But now that a climate bill is being pushed through Congress, none of whose members have the faintest idea of that science and have no interest to learn about it (a trait shared by the TBS editorial staff), the need to get serious about discovering the truth is urgent. I strongly disagree - and resent - the editorial's comment "...misinformation and hysteria that have typified the nation's climate change deniers" and can only respond with what I firmly believe: "misinformation and hysteria" have typified TBS and most of the mainstream media, our Congress, and the nation's climate change devotees.
There is a readily available wealth of solid information to support what Mark and I believe. One of the latest is that EPA report that Mark referred to. The Competitive Enterprise Institute made public on June 26 that Obama administration-suppressed EPA internal study on climate science. Anyone interested in the truth (and I hope that a TBS editor is reading this) should read it - at least the summary pages - at
http://cei.org/cei_files/fm/active/0/DOC062509-004.pdf.
And if an editor does read it, could it be discussed - supported or refuted - in the print edition? Let's get an honest and open debate going on this important subject!
Posted by: Nelson L. Hyman | June 29, 2009 12:14 PM
To give added inducement to read that EPA report that Mark and I referred to, I should add the CEI-supplied brief summary of that report that "was kept under wraps and its author silenced because of pressure to support the Administration’s agenda of regulating carbon dioxide."
The report finds that EPA, by adopting the United Nations’ 2007 “Fourth Assessment” report, is relying on outdated research and is ignoring major new developments. Those developments include a continued decline in global temperatures, a new consensus that future hurricanes will not be more frequent or intense, and new findings that water vapor will moderate, rather than exacerbate, temperature.
New data also indicate that ocean cycles are probably the most important single factor in explaining temperature fluctuations, though solar cycles may play a role as well, and that reliable satellite data undercut the likelihood of endangerment from greenhouse gases. All of this demonstrates EPA should independently analyze the science, rather than just adopt the conclusions of outside organizations.
Posted by: Nelson L. Hyman | June 29, 2009 12:25 PM