Old Canards from Young Journalists
Inside Liberty Watch Today - June 27, 2006
The Las Vegas Review-Journal has evidently decided to compete head-on with the Las Vegas Sun as to which paper can print the most nonsense each Sunday.
The R-J's publisher Sherman Frederick has his own column now to blather on about absolutely nothing each and every Sunday, countering the Sun's Brian Greenspun who prattles on, unedited, and with no apparent direction or purpose other than to waste any reader's time who is foolish enough to plow through his turgid discourse in hopes that on the oft chance some worthwhile information may be found.
But as if to really annoy their loyal readers, the R-J has decided that Geoff Schumacher and Erin Neff should dominate the Sunday editorial section. As if we don't get enough of what these two nitwits go on about from either the Sun or virtually any other paper in the good old US of A, excepting the Orange County Register.
Schumacher believes that he is enlightened as to local growth issues, right down to deciding what is good architecture and what is bad. In a column recently, he extolled the virtues of Frank Gehry's design of the Lou Ruvo Alzheimer Center. Its clear Schumacher, who in his writing consistently displays his lack of economics knowledge, believes that Las Vegas architecture, outside of the Strip, follows "mind-numbingly familiar formulas."
However, real estate developers must construct buildings that are economically viable. Tenants will only pay so much rent no matter how innovative or distinctive the design. Therefore, developers will spend the least amount they can to attract the most rent. What Schumacher considers daring architecture is expensive and doesn't necessarily add economic value to a development. Plus, with Las Vegas' high land prices, architectural frills must be kept at a minimum for projects to pencil. Beyond the Strip, only buildings funded by taxpayers made Schumacher's short list that he considered "interesting." That should tell him something.
Also, Schumacher should design a building and go through the process of design review and permitting at one of the local municipalities. He will gain a whole new appreciation for "mind-numbing." The local municipalities are not exactly keen on innovative designs. It is local government that wants everything to look the same.
Geoff Schumacher also hails the efforts of the Sierra Club as forward thinking while ridiculing those Neanderthals who want to travel by automobile in Las Vegas. "The holistic, long-range transportation planning the Sierra Club was demanding through its lawsuit is starting to occur," wrote Schumacher recently. "The fact that it's happening is a victory for the Sierra Club and others who believe Las Vegas must evolve beyond a single transportation option: the almighty car (or, more likely in Las Vegas, the four-wheel-drive pickup)."
Mr. Schumacher may not like it, but people drive automobiles because they want to. The idea that poorly designed neighborhoods force people to be dependent on automobiles is a myth, explains Randal O'Toole, senior economist with the Thoreau Institute, and expert on urban land-use and transportation issues.
This past Sunday, Erin Neff thinks she found some sort of smoking gun in the global warming debate, because there was an item printed in the news section of the R-J that Nevada is second only to Alaska in growth of carbon dioxide emissions. And since she had just seen Al Gore's new movie-"The Global Warming Chainsaw Massacre" she thought it column worthy to urge us all to stop emitting so her son might see a glacier one of these days.
OK, the earth is warmer today-by a whopping .5 degrees Celsius. Pretty scary. Interestingly, the period from 1910 to 1945 saw the most rapid temperature increase. This helps explain why ice is melting at the poles where it was still frozen way back when. Ice may continue to melt for a while, because of the warming of the early 20th century, but the fact is there is nothing we can do to stop that process.
The late Jude Wanniski went to the trouble of finding out how much petroleum was consumed in the first half of the 20th century, when the earth was warming, and how much in the second half, when temperatures steadied.
"According to the American Petroleum Institute, 6.4% of all the petroleum oxidized since it was first discovered in the 1860s, in Pennsylvania, took place before 1950. The other 93.4% -- more than 900 billion barrels -- has been consumed since 1950 with no increase in temperatures where theory should have expected one. This does not make any sense if we are to believe mankind, not solar activity, is to blame."
Dixy Lee Ray, in her book Trashing the Planet, wrote: "The eruption of Mt.
St. Helens in 1980 dumped more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than all that has been released since the industrial revolution. Volcanoes have been erupting for millions of years with the same result. If this really affected climate, don't you think it would have happened by now?"
And while Erin Neff and Al Gore try to scare us into believing that the glaciers and polar ice caps are melting and those poor polar bears will soon become extinct (and it's mankind's fault), people who are actually on the scene tell a different story. Nima Sanandaji and Fred Goldberg wrote recently that Capten Årnell on the summer expedition with the polar-ship Oden indicated that he had never seen so much ice in the Arctic than in 2005. He in fact had difficulty passing through the region.
As for polar bears, their numbers are actually increasing rather than diminishing. Mitch Taylor, a Canadian expert on animal populations, estimates that the number of polar bears in Canada has increased from 12,000 to 15,000 during the past decade. The World Wildlife Foundation while warning that the populations of the polar bears might become extinct due to global warming admits that the number of polar bears is really increasing.
In WWF report "Polar Bears at Risk" the world's polar bears are divided into 20 populations. The report confirms that only 2 of these populations are decreasing, while 10 are stable, 5 are growing and 3 are not possible to comment about.
I can't wait until next Sunday to read what Neff and Schumacher will pontificate on. R-J Editor Thomas Mitchell constantly laments the low readership of daily newspapers. Old, tired canards from young, naive journalists may be the reason.
Doug French, Liberty Watch Columnist
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