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Cato Dispatch for May 15, 2008

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(Links to outside sources were active as of the date of this dispatch; however, not all news sources maintain links to current stories indefinitely. Some links also may require registration.)

Polar Bears Designated as Threatened with Extinction

"The Interior Department on Wednesday designated the polar bear as threatened with extinction because of shrinking sea ice, making it the first creature added to the endangered species list primarily because of global warming," reports The Los Angeles Times. "The designation under the Endangered Species Act requires the agency to identify critical habitat to be protected and to form a strategy to assist the bear population's recovery."

Patrick J. Michaels, Cato senior fellow in environmental studies and author of Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media, comments:

"This is a political, not a scientific act. Polar bears are at or near record population levels today. They clearly survived eras in the past where Arctic climate was warmer than it is now. For several millennia after the end of the last ice age, summer temperatures in the Eurasian Arctic were 4-13°F warmer than modern temperatures. As some summer sea-ice is lost at today's temperatures, it seems likely that it was probably absent during that era. Obviously the polar bear survived, as did the fledgling Inuit culture.

"This marks the first instance of a species being listed based upon a computer model of future climate from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). There has been no net warming in the last decade, and scientists recently discovered that it is likely there will be little if any for the next decade. Not one of the IPCC's models includes a two-decade hiatus in global warming. Consequently this listing is based upon obsolete science. This makes the listing of the Polar Bear obviously political and hardly scientific."

Schwarzenegger Presents Budget Plan

"To close California's huge budget gap, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has a plan: get a Wall Street investment firm to lend the state $15 billion against future proceeds from its rather unsuccessful lottery program, with the lending firm taking large risks for a low-yield return," reports The New York Times. "And if that fails, the state's sales tax will go up a penny over the next few years. The lottery idea with a tax increase only as a backup reflects the severity of California's $17.2 billion budget gap and Mr. Schwarzenegger's unwillingness to reverse course on a longstanding pledge not to raise taxes and to continue pressing his most unpopular budget cuts from this year."

In the Cato-at-Liberty blog post "Kindergarten Cop Out," Cato budget policy analyst Elizabeth Karasmeighan writes:

"Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger just released his revised budget proposal. ... Interestingly, in his comments, the finance office director notes that the underlying problem in the state is the tendency to spend one-time revenues on spending increases that continue indefinitely. Unfortunately for Californians, their proposed solution is not to reduce the size of the state government, but to call for a rainy day fund to smooth fluctuations in revenue growth, which will be funded by more debt. Hopefully, as legislators consider the spending plan for 2008-09, they will take a closer look at reducing spending and enacting a spending limit to address the underlying problem of unsustainable spending growth."

BRIC Nations Consider Alliance

"First came the booming economies," reports Bloomberg. "Then came the rush of investors. Now the so-called BRIC nations -- Brazil, Russia, India and China -- are talking about forming a political alliance. The four largest emerging economies are sending their foreign ministers to Yekaterinburg, Russia, to meet on May 16 for the first time outside the venue of the United Nations. On the agenda are such non-economic issues as weapons proliferation, counter-terrorism, energy and climate change." 

In "Cracks in the Foundation: NATO's New Troubles," Cato research fellow Stanley Kober writes:

"Alliances lead to counteralliances... [A]s NATO has expanded, Russia's relations with China, in particular, have grown apace, leading initially to the formation of the Shanghai Five and then to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. ... In short, the world is in danger of dividing just as Europe divided a century ago -- a process that should have been foreseen by those who naively thought other countries would not respond to NATO expansion by taking their own corresponding measures."

Laura Osio, editor, losio@cato.org