Prior to its passage, I criticized GINA’s ban on employment discrimination in the National Law Journal for lacking a “direct threat” exception for public safety.  The Economist’s blog suggested its ban on insurance discrimination could fundamentally undermine insurance markets and the availability of private health insurance in the long run. 

He’s got a point. As well as the decidedly non-secular holiday of Earth Day, which appears to be celebrated at every public school in the US, my daughter’s Brownie troop was assigned a project recently to learn about a foreign country. As well as learning about famous people, landmarks and so on, they had to tell the other Brownies “how they are green.” Hmmmm.

Yet this example of pester power at work would also help explain one phenomenon that is infuriating to the environmental movement. Consistently, Americans have said they are concerned about global warming, but when asked to rank it among urgent issues that action must be taken on, they rank it next to or right at the bottom. For instance, a Pew Research Center for the People and the Press poll in January found it ranked right at the bottom, tied with “making the Bush tax cuts permanent.” Even a minority of Democrat supporters called it a “top priority.” I suspect this is compatible with an agenda in the household set by people who don’t have to make the hard decisions.

What will be interesting is how this translates as these children leave school and start having to square living a “sustainable” life with working for a living and having to satisfy other needs. Perhaps they will put a higher value on the environment than their parents (and if prosperity continues to increase, I think this is going to happen in any event), but if times get hard as a direct result of environmental policy, then the choices made will be very interesting.

Cross-posted from The Really Inconvenient Blog.

A news story today in the Post describes how ethanol production is devouring our food supply, even though a study shows that “greenhouse-gas emissions from corn and even cellulosic ethanol ‘exceed or match those from fossil fuels and therefore produce no greenhouse benefits.’ By encouraging an expansion of acreage, the study added, the use of U.S. cropland for ethanol could make climate conditions dramatically worse. And the runoff from increased use of fertilizers on expanded acreage would compound damage to waterways all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.” 

In the American Spectator, Iain Murray notes that ethanol production has caused “food shortages and massive increases in food prices around the world. There have been food riots in Indonesia, Mexico, Egypt, and most recently, Haiti — where the poor have been reduced to eating cakes made with bleach and are on the verge of bringing the government down. Even in America, some grocery stores have begun to institute a form of rationing.  Meanwhile, massive tracts of rainforest are being cleared in Indonesia to produce biodiesel, threatening the orangutan and other magnificent animals with extinction. In Brazil, the growth of sugar cultivation for ethanol is forcing food producers into the Amazon.”

By contrast, one of the Audubon Society’s chief bird sanctuaries (the Paul J. Rainey Wildlife Refuge in Louisiana), has 37 oil wells on site, and has produced natural gas for 50 years without harming the environment.  Drilling for oil hasn’t harmed the birds a bit.  But ethanol production causes environmental destruction, mass hunger, starvation, and rioting worldwide.

Disclosure: like many Americans, I have a retirement plan (both a 401(K) and an IRA).  Like most retirement plans, it contains mutual funds.  And most of those mutual funds own some stock in oil companies.  So when politicians demand that the government impose a “windfall profits tax” on oil companies, what they are really trying to do is take money from my retirement plan — and your retirement plan, too, if you have one.  That’s not going to encourage exploration for new sources of oil, or reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

The ABA’s actions violate 42 U.S.C. 1981 and the Supreme Court’s ruling in Gratz v. Bollinger (2003), which held in footnote 23 that racial quotas violate 42 U.S.C. 1981 (which bans both private and public discrimination) as well as the Fourteenth Amendment (which bans only governmental discrimination).  Moreover, the ABA and its accreditors are liable for pressuring GMU to engage in racial discrimination under 42 U.S.C. 1981, which allows not only employers and other institutions to be held liable for racial discrimination, but also individual discriminators.  And GMU and its president and law school dean, who were personally summoned to appear before the ABA in order for them to be pressured to maximize GMU’s racial quotas, have standing to sue over those quota mandates under Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod v. FCC, 141 F.3d 344 (D.C. Cir. 1998), which held that the Lutheran Church had standing to sue the FCC to keep the FCC from pressuring it to take race into account in hiring employees for its religious radio stations in order to satisfy a ”diversity” mandate.  (Note that GMU is a state university).

Earth Day was Tuesday, and NBC Universal has extended the celebration into “Earth Week.” Reprising its “Green Week” from last fall, NBC and its affiliates worked some sort of environmental message into all of its programming this week.

Amid its calls for individual sacrifices in the name of the environment and paeans to “green” legislation, the network once again failed to disclose prominently that its parent company stands to get rich off of “environmentalist” laws.

NBC Universal is owned by General Electric, which plays a regular role in this column because of how aggressively the company has hitched its profits to its lobbying successes. GE spends more than any other corporation in America on lobbying the federal government — more than $20 million annually over the past three years — and Green Week and Earth Week probably should be disclosed as lobbying efforts.

In many of GE’s businesses, the profit model appears to be: (1) invest in something for which there isn’t much demand; (2) then lobby to mandate or subsidize it.

This is all also part of of GE’s must discussed “ecomagination” campaign, which so far seems mostly to have produced ever more imaginative ways of getting U.S. taxpayers to pay GE to manufacture technologies consumers don’t want.

Last week, the New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin blogged about the World Bank’s decision to finance a major new coal fired power plant in India. Revkin ended his blog with a question: “Is all of this bad? If you’re one of many climate scientists foreseeing calamity, yes. If you’re a village kid in rural India looking for a light to read by, no.”

In response, the famed environmental writer Bill McKibben asked his own question:

“The really interesting question, to follow on the last sentence of the story, is: what if you’re an Indian kid looking for a light to read by-and also living near the rising ocean, or vulnerable to the the range expansion of dengue-bearing mosquitoes, or dependent on suddenly-in-question monsoonal rains.”

McKibben may think he knows better but I think the answer for that village kid would probably be the same. Take the electricity and the light to read by and worry about malaria and monsoonal rains later.

Indeed. Read the whole thing. It makes good use of the “maybe the horses will learn to sing” story so often misattributed to Herodotus. The only thing missing is some mention of the inevitable result of satisfying the material needs so rightly identified as a precondition for “the modern appreciation of the nonhuman world.” Not just value attached to the environment, but a more resilient society that is affected far less when the nonhuman world changes for the worst.

Cross-posted from The Really Inconvenient Blog.