Washington’s biofuel mandate is hurting poor people right now
The New Yorker is — mostly — a wonderful magazine. Although its left liberal leanings are hardly a secret, its cover illustrations are usually whimsical rather than political. The cover of its latest issue, however, portrays Santa Claus sitting on a tiny ice floe at the North Pole. Cute, but fraught with catastrophic implication (This past Christmas, the Suzuki foundation had a child-scaring fund-raising campaign based on the claim that Santa’s workshop was sinking).
In fact, the climate scare du jour relates not to the Arctic but to this summer’s extreme heat and drought in the U.S. Midwest, which is the worst since the mid-1950s and on a par with the Dust Bowl years of the Great Depression. However, while providing rich fodder for bloviation by the usual suspects, current weather is in no way outside the normal range, as three skeptical experts, MIT’s Richard Lindzen, Princeton’s William Happer, and American Geophysical Society fellow Roger W. Cohen, point out in a letter to The Wall Street Journal published Tuesday. How, they note, do you explain the greater heatwaves of the 1930s?
