From the Archives: Environmental activist David Rothbard says 'lift up people and nature together'

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on April 10, 2012. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Environmental activist David Rothbard says 'lift up people and nature together'
April 10, 2012 6:00 AM MST

Since 1985, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) has tried “to promote market-based and technological solutions to issues relating to environment and development,” according to its cofounder and president, David Rothbard.

Rothbard recently spoke to the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner about CFACT, its mission, and its recent activities, including its outreach to college students across the United States.

CFACT’s offshoot organization, Collegians for a Constructive Tomorrow, is actually a return to the parent group’s roots.

Rothbard and his colleague, executive director Craig Rucker, started CFACT in the 1980s as a community organizing project on college and university campuses.

Battling Nader

“We actually got our start battling Ralph Nader on the college campuses,” Rothbard explained, with its specific goal to counteract “the negative check-off of mandatory fees that Nader was collecting" from students.

"We helped stop that [practice] in a lot of states but then, in some of the states, they said, ‘Look, we’re going to continue funding Ralph Nader but if you want to have a separate organization that can compete in the marketplace of ideas, go ahead.’”

The eventual result was Collegians for a Constructive Tomorrow, which began in 2001 and now has chapters on just over campuses in about 20 states. The group, Rothbard said, is “bringing a conservative message about environment and development to students across the country.”

The biggest issue on CFACT’s agenda for 2012 is energy, he said.

“There are those who would try to deprive us of the energy that supplies the most abundant, affordable energy for America,” Rothbard explained. “Things like coal and oil.”

CFACT supports renewable energy, he said.


“We think if it can compete in the marketplace, that’s great. If people can find ways to use solar and wind and other things, that’s great -- but the problem is when they’re trying to add on these costs to the most affordable, plentiful energy supply that we have in the name of science when there’s no good science to back it up. A lot of people will pay for that and that will not be good for our economy.”

Global warming

Another issue CFACT is addressing is climate change, although it does not resonate as it did a few years ago.

“Global warming has kind of faded a little bit,” Rothbard explained. “We’ve been in the midst of that battle now for, I guess, more than 20 years but as global warming’s faded, the agenda’s remained the same, which is energy suppression, but [that is] going under a different name, which is the promotion of green jobs and green energy.”

Asked what issue may be taking center stage 18 months from now, Rothbard did not hesitate to name sustainable development as “an issue that’s growing.”

He noted that grassroots groups are “beginning to hear about this thing called Agenda 21,” which is a plan supported by the United Nations and “major international environmental groups like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club.”

Agenda 21, he explained, “came out of the Rio Earth Summit that took place in Brazil in 1992. This June will be the 20th anniversary of that earth summit, taking place again in Rio.”

Along with Agenda 21, he said, “we’re starting to see this international push toward so-called sustainable development impacting local communities. It’s being pushed at the international level and that’s going to be an issue that’s growing in the coming 18 months.”

‘Make a difference’

Despite having run CFACT for more than a quarter century, Rothbard’s enthusiasm for the group’s activities is apparent when he describes plans for the near future.

“One of the reasons that we’re so excited about having a lot of students involved is,” he explained, that “we appreciate the fact that a lot of people care about the environment. They care about poverty, they care about public health, but we think it’s not enough just to care about it.”

Instead, he added, “we think you really need to be able to make a difference.”

Working with a board of scientific advisors, CFACT has been “able to promote positive, constructive solutions to these things.”

Moreover, he said, “we’re able to attract students from both sides, Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative, because if you’re really interested in helping people, if you’re really interested in helping protect the earth, then what you [need] to do is promote prosperity for people,” and advocate policies “that will lift up people and nature together.”

Suggested Links

Charlottesville writer Christopher Horner examines environmental ‘Power Grab’
Questions for the President on the State of the Union
‘Big Roads’ author Earl Swift brings interstate story to Charlottesville
Grover Norquist discusses congressional government and GOP candidates
Belafonte criticizes Barack Obama on civil liberties in Charlottesville

Blog Action Day 2009

Today is Blog Action Day '09, an annual even that this year has at least 7,262 sites participating. (You can see this blog listed on page 119 of some 303 pages categorized as "Who's Participating?" -- just after the German blog Der Tobe and just before Bobolhando of Brazil and HonestGreen of the United States.)

The topic for Blog Action Day in 2008 was "Poverty." In 2007, the topic was "the Environment."

This year the topic is "climate change," a subject I have addressed in the past. (Also here and here.) As the Blog Action Day web site explains,

Blog Action Day is an annual event that unites the world's bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day on their own blogs with the aim of sparking discussion around an issue of global importance. Blog Action Day 2009 will be the largest-ever social change event on the web. One day. One issue. Thousands of voices.

As one of those "thousands of voices," let me first see what's in the news about "climate change."

Here's BBC News, asking "What happened to global warming?":

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

....last month Mojib Latif, a member of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) says that we may indeed be in a period of cooling worldwide temperatures that could last another 10-20 years.

Strangely enough, yesterday Steve Shannon, a candidate for Attorney General in the Commonwealth of Virginia, circulated a video accusing his opponent, state Senator Ken Cuccinelli, of being "anti-science" because Cuccinelli said in an interview with WTOP Radio in Washington, D.C. (at marker 0:33 on the video):

"The last ten years, the globe hasn't warmed."

Is it anti-science to state a scientific fact?

It's not just the BBC that has taken note of the plateau in global temperatures. Christopher Booker wrote in the Daily Telegraph last December 27:

Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.

First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century....

Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a "scientific consensus" in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world's most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that "consensus" which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.

Next Sunday will see the simultaneous premiere, at dozens of locations around the country, of a new documentary film called Not Evil Just Wrong. (The film will be shown in Charlottesville at 8:00 p.m. in room 402 of Wilson Hall on the grounds of the University of Virginia; the screening is cosponsored by the Network of Enlightened Women and the College Republicans.)

A front-page article in the Washington Times on Tuesday described the entrepreneurial efforts of the filmmakers as they try to distribute their final product without the support of major studios or a big-name distributor. Movie critic Sonny Bunch reports:

Unable to get Hollywood studio backing for their new documentary, "Not Evil Just Wrong" - an answer to Al Gore's climate-change lecture "An Inconvenient Truth" - husband-and-wife filmmakers Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney have taken matters into their own hands.

Hoping to tap the surge of populist anger and activism on the right, they are bypassing traditional distribution avenues and bringing their film directly to motivated audiences through "cinematic tea parties," their term for the patchwork of grass-roots screenings in living rooms, campus auditoriums and rented theaters across the country that they have scheduled for Oct. 18.

Mr. McAleer and Ms. McElhinney are part of a new breed of guerrilla documentarians across the political spectrum. Taking advantage of cheaper, more accessible video-production technology and innovative, Internet-based direct marketing and distribution techniques, they are assembling new audiences for their films from the ground up - without the studio middlemen.

McAleer and McElhinney are also the producers of Mine Your Own Business: The Dark Side of Environmentalism.

As an indication of some of the hurdles faced by McAleer and McElhinney, John Fund reported in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week of a public appearance by former Vice President Al Gore at a gathering in Madison, Wisconsin, of the Society of Environmental Journalists, where the Nobel laureate agreed to answer questions from the audience:

Irish documentary filmmaker Phelim McAleer was in the line. A former Financial Times journalist, his new film, "Not Evil, Just Wrong," is a direct refutation of Mr. Gore's thesis and warns that rushing to judgment in combating climate change would threaten the world's poor. When his turn came, Mr. McAleer asked Mr. Gore about a court case in Britain in which a parent had objected to "An Inconvenient Truth" being shown to British schoolchildren because it was largely propaganda, not science.

Mr. Gore swatted away the question by claiming the judge had found in favor of his film. He also briefly addressed one of the objections to his film by scoffing at claims that polar bears weren't an endangered species. Mr. McAleer tried to follow up by pointing out that polar bear populations were increasing, but his microphone was quickly cut off. Organizers insisted that several other people were waiting with questions and they had to move on.

In fact, Mr. Gore didn't answer Mr. McAleer's question and was wrong on the facts. The British court found that An Inconvenient Truth "is a political film" riddled with scientific errors.

ReasonTV has produced a short (less than 5 minutes long) interview with environmental scientist Bjorn Lomborg, author of Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming and Global Crises, Global Solutions. The interview is conducted by Charlottesville's Ronald Bailey, who is science correspondent for Reason magazine. Both Lomborg and Bailey accept the validity of anthropogenic global warming. Lomborg posits that, based on an analysis by a panel that included three Nobel-prize-winning economists, government-mandated action (such as cap-and-trade legislation or other forms of carbon taxes) is likely to be the least successful approach to ameliorating the effects of global warming. As the infobox that accompanies this video on YouTube says:

What's the best way for humanity to reduce suffering from man-made global warming? No individual has been a stronger voice for rational cost-benefit analysis on this issue than Bjorn Lomborg, the head of Copenhagen Consensus Center, and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It! On Thursday, September 3, 2009, Lomborg stopped by Reason's DC HQ to discuss the latest iteration of his ongoing project with Reason magazine science correspondent Ronald Bailey.

The Copenhagen Consensus Center's expert panel of five top economists, including three Nobel laureates, has concluded that greater resources should be spent on research into climate engineering and green energy. They also concluded that the least cost-effective way to deal with climate change is carbon taxes. Such carbon taxes are the economic equivalent of cap-and-trade carbon rationing schemes like the Waxman-Markey bill being considered by Congress and which are being negotiated by the U.N.

The expert panel consisted of Nobel laureate economists Thomas Schelling, Vernon Smith, and Finn Kydland. They were joined by University of Chicago economist Nancy Stokey and Columbia University economist Jagdish Bhagwati. The panel considered and ranked 21 ground-breaking research proposals by top climate economists on the basis their benefits and costs in dealing with global warming.

You can watch the video for yourself:

People around the world are starting to catch on to what the costs of various government-mandated "solutions" to climate change will be. In Australia, for instance, the Sydney Morning Herald reported on October 12:

The Lowy Institute of International Policy is releasing its 2009 survey on attitudes to global affairs, which finds climate change has slipped in importance on a list of Australia's Top 10 foreign policy goals.

The survey, taken in July, showed protecting jobs was the foreign policy priority for the community.

Climate change had slipped to seven on a list of 10 goals in 2009, down from equal first in 2007.

Opposition environment spokesman Greg Hunt wants the government to heed the results.

"I think the government would be slightly shocked by these results," he told ABC Radio.

"They spend all their days talking about international negotiations and yet the message that comes through from people is we want a stable economic environment, we want to have a stable future, we want the opportunity of employment and hope and aspiration for our children and our grandchildren."

A commentary on that poll in the Wall Street Journal expands on the reasons Australians might have let climate-change concerns slip in their list of priorities:

Less than half of all Australians consider global warming a "serious and pressing problem," according to a poll released yesterday by the Lowy Institute, a Sydney-based think tank. That's 12 percentage points lower than in last year's survey. "Climate change" ranked 7th in a list of 10 "most important" foreign-policy goals—down from first only two years ago.

The poll, which surveyed 1,003 Australians by telephone in July, goes to show that fighting global warming is an expensive fad, not a moral imperative. Down under, citizens and businesses have grown more alarmed about Canberra's efforts to limit carbon emissions as the costs of doing so have become clearer. A July report by Melbourne-based research firm RepuTex estimated the cost of the bill for Australia's top 200 companies could reach as much as 2.8 billion Australian dollars ($2.5 billion) annually, costing thousands of jobs. Industry opposition was a big factor in the Senate's rejection of the government's first shot at passing the emissions-trading scheme in August.

Australians aren't the only citizens of Western industrialized democracies to have their doubts about carbon taxes and cap-and-trade schemes.

A Rasmussen Reports survey in early May had some surprising findings, given the large amount of coverage the legislation was getting in the news media at the time:

Given a choice of three options, just 24% of voters can correctly identify the cap-and-trade proposal as something that deals with environmental issues. A slightly higher number (29%) believe the proposal has something to do with regulating Wall Street while 17% think the term applies to health care reform. A plurality (30%) have no idea.

Another Rasmussen Reports poll, conducted in June, showed that 42 percent of Americans believe that the House-passed bill will hurt the economy. A majority of Republicans – 56 percent -- and independents – 52 percent -- said the bill would hurt the economy, while 23 percent of Democrats said the same thing. Thirty percent of Democrats said it would help.

Meanwhile, a Washington Post/ABC News poll published on June 25 showed that only 52 percent of Americans support a cap-and-trade approach to limiting greenhouse gas emissions similar to Waxman-Markey (see below). That was slightly less support than cap and trade enjoyed in a late July 2008 poll. Forty-two percent of those surveyed in June 2009 opposed such a program. That 42 percent and the 42 percent that Rasmussen found saying cap-and-trade policies would be harmful to the economy neatly match up, don't they?

The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (H.R. 2454), also known as “Waxman-Markey” after its two principal sponsors in the House of Representatives (Democrats Henry Waxman of California and Edward Markey of Massachusetts), passed the House on June 26, 2009, by a close vote of 219-212. In its printed form, H.R. 2454 runs to 1,428 pages. (That number is not a typo.)

The companion bill in the U.S. Senate (S. 1733), was introduced on September 30 and referred to the Committee on Environment and Public Works. The principal sponsors are Senators John Kerry (D-Massachusetts) and Barbara Boxer (D-California). In its printed form, S. 1733 only has 821 pages. S. 1733 is sort of The Fountainhead to H.R. 2454's Atlas Shrugged.

The spirit of Blog Action Day suggests that I should urge my readers to take action on the topic of climate change. So I shall.

Readers, I encourage you to call your Senators and ask them to vote "no" on S. 1733, the so-called "Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act" (also known as "Kerry-Boxer"). The number for the Capitol Hill switchboard is (202) 224-3121. If you don't know the names of your Senators, you can look them up on the U.S. Senate web site or at Congress.org, where you can plug in your ZIP Code and learn the names of all your elected representatives, along with their contact information.

Remember the message: Vote NO on cap-and-trade. Vote NO on Kerry-Boxer. Vote NO on S. 1733.

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Go, Pat, Go!

As you might expect, I am not one who usually encourages Pat Robertson in any of his projects or activities, but I found a reason to cheer him on.

According to John McCaslin's "Inside the Beltway" column in today's Washington Times:

That unusual TV ad aired of late featuring an unlikely pairing of outspoken preachers - conservative Pat Robertson and liberal Al Sharpton - has left a bad taste in the mouths of the left, who obviously don't like mixing with the right.

Results of a new national study of 305 Democrats, Republicans and independents reveal that Democrats are less supportive of immediate government action on global warming after viewing the ad featuring Mr. Robertson and Mr. Sharpton.

The study was conducted by HCD Research and the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion to obtain Americans' views on the ad about climate change.

Unfortunately, a look at the complete results of the survey reveals that the shift among Democrats is not very significant.

Still, any shift is better than none at all. Go, Pat, go!

Judge Rules on Al Gore's Truthiness

Speculation is strong that, when the Norwegian Nobel Committee announces its choice for the Nobel Peace Prize today, the winner's name will be Al Gore.

In the category of "wish-I'd-said-that," Damian Thompson writes in today's Telegraph:

The former US Vice-President has already taken over from Michael Moore as the most sanctimonious lardbutt Yank on the planet. Can you imagine what he'll be like if the Norwegian Nobel committee gives him the prize?

(That comes from an opinion article headlined, "What has Al Gore done for world peace?" Good question.)

The Nobel announcement, if it happens -- and there's no guarantee that it will; being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize is almost as easy as being nominated to be president of a middle school student council -- will occur under the cloud of a negative legal ruling against Gore and his film, An Inconvenient Truth, from a British High Court judge.

According to news reports, the movie contains errors and inaccuracies that require it to be shown in British schools only with a disclaimer or warning that indicates it is a political film.

Judge Michael Burton isolated nine significant examples in his ruling, which were summarized in yesterday's Telegraph:

# Mr Gore claims that a sea-level rise of up to 20 feet would be caused by melting of either West Antarctica or Greenland "in the near future". The judge said: "This is distinctly alarmist and part of Mr Gore's "wake-up call". He agreed that if Greenland melted it would release this amount of water - "but only after, and over, millennia"."The Armageddon scenario he predicts, insofar as it suggests that sea level rises of seven metres might occur in the immediate future, is not in line with the scientific consensus."

# The film claims that low-lying inhabited Pacific atolls "are being inundated because of anthropogenic global warming" but the judge ruled there was no evidence of any evacuation having yet happened.

# The documentary speaks of global warming "shutting down the Ocean Conveyor" - the process by which the Gulf Stream is carried over the North Atlantic to western Europe. Citing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the judge said that it was "very unlikely" that the Ocean Conveyor, also known as the Meridional Overturning Circulation, would shut down in the future, though it might slow down.

# Mr Gore claims that two graphs, one plotting a rise in C02 and the other the rise in temperature over a period of 650,000 years, showed "an exact fit". The judge said that, although there was general scientific agreement that there was a connection, "the two graphs do not establish what Mr Gore asserts".

# Mr Gore says the disappearance of snow on Mt Kilimanjaro was directly attributable to global warming, but the judge ruled that it scientists have not established that the recession of snow on Mt Kilimanjaro is primarily attributable to human-induced climate change.

# The film contends that the drying up of Lake Chad is a prime example of a catastrophic result of global warming but the judge said there was insufficient evidence, and that "it is apparently considered to be far more likely to result from other factors, such as population increase and over-grazing, and regional climate variability."

# Mr Gore blames Hurricane Katrina and the consequent devastation in New Orleans on global warming, but the judge ruled there was "insufficient evidence to show that".

# Mr Gore cites a scientific study that shows, for the first time, that polar bears were being found after drowning from "swimming long distances - up to 60 miles - to find the ice" The judge said: "The only scientific study that either side before me can find is one which indicates that four polar bears have recently been found drowned because of a storm."That was not to say there might not in future be drowning-related deaths of bears if the trend of regression of pack ice continued - "but it plainly does not support Mr Gore's description".

# Mr Gore said that coral reefs all over the world were being bleached because of global warming and other factors. Again citing the IPCC, the judge agreed that, if temperatures were to rise by 1-3 degrees centigrade, there would be increased coral bleaching and mortality, unless the coral could adapt. However, he ruled that separating the impacts of stresses due to climate change from other stresses, such as over-fishing, and pollution was difficult.

Gore's tendency toward bluster and braggadocio is not new. Reviewing Gore's then-recently published book, Earth in the Balance, Jonathan H. Adler (then an environmental policy analyst with the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington) wrote in the summer (north)/winter (south) 1992 issue of terra nova (a quarterly journal I then edited):

Billed as Gore's "journey in search of a true understanding of the global ecological crisis and how it can be resolved," Earth in the Balance is clearly the author's attempt to be all things to all people -- a committed green to the environmental establishment, a thoughtful and measured politician to the policy community, and an insightful and forward-looking leader to the average reader, it is this very presentation that makes the book so formidable. Founded on questionable premises and leading to woefully misguided political solutions, this book was carefully crafted to bring its author, and his green agenda, to the forefront of American politics.

The central premise of Earth in the Balance, as with so many other volumes of this sort, is that the world is facing an impending catastrophe of tremendous magnitude. Gore and other environmentalists learned this tactic from Cold War worriers who were concerned with the much more realistic threat of nuclear armageddon. During the Cold War, the nation was -- for all intents and purposes -- mobilized around a central organizing proposition: the fight against communism. Gore seeks to establish a parallel in the fight to protect the environment, but his arguments have little basis in scientific reality.

Prefiguring much of the criticism of An Inconvenient Truth, Adler continues:

Rather than using scientific evidence to establish the need for action, Gore adopts scare tactics so as to provide the impetus for decisive action, even in the face of uncertainty. "The burden of proof ought to be with those who claim that the most likely outcome is something that will be good for us." Innovation and development must be halted, until they can be proven to be without risk. However, he does not seem willing to apply the same standard to those programs he endorses as the appropriate political responses. The enormous economic costs and social dislocations to be imposed are of less concern to Gore than dubious claims generated by admittedly inaccurate computer models.

(Adler's full review, "Off Balance," can be found on pages 64-68 of Volume 1, Number 4 of terra nova. Kudos to the reader who can track it down in a public or university library.)

Of course, if somebody more deserving wins the Nobel Prize for Peace today, this whole discussion will have lost its pertinence.