Reviews of New Books

GREEN DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES
By William Leon

Global Warming and Other Eco-Myths: How the Environmental Movement Uses False Science to Scare Us to Death.
Edited by Ronald Bailey
Prima Publishing, 320 pages, $24.95

Global Warming and Other Eco-Myths, a new book edited by Reason magazine’s science editor Ronald Bailey, breaks no startling new ground. It does gather an impressive array of researchers to explain that the things environmentalists think they know aren’t necessarily so. Global Warming follows up its injection of impertinent reality into public debate by demonstrating the links between environmentalists’ bad science and their worse policies.

Take energy policy. Environmentalist solutions to non-existent energy shortages seem grounded more in science fiction than science fact. One of the most frequently proposed solutions is the fuel cell. Fuel cells emit no potentially dangerous gases into the atmosphere because they are not based on combustion. Instead, they chemically transform hydrogen into electricity. The devices are generally safe, quiet, efficient, and non- polluting. The technology is already in use in spaceships and as back-up power sources for hospitals and some vehicles.

They have serious drawbacks, however. Global Warming explains that the hydrogen which powers the cells has to come from somewhere--and that’s usually natural gas, propane, or gasoline. While the cells are "clean" once generating, Greenies ignore the environmental impact of producing the hydrogen needed to fuel them. Creating hydrogen throws off emissions, including more carbon dioxide than is emitted by reformulated gasoline. In addition, hydrogen contains only one sixth the amount of energy of a comparable volume of gasoline. That means much larger tanks and many more refills will be necessary.

"Renewable" and "environmentally friendly" energy sources, despite the cries of activists, remain niche technologies--too costly or unruly for general use, compared to our mainstays of coal, natural gas, oil, and nuclear power. Innovation may eventually improve alternative energies’ prospects, but so far, even with substantial government subsidies, progress has been slow. The Energy Information Agency predicts that by 2020 all "renewable" energy sources will account for less than 4 percent of the U.S. energy supply.

In 1999 they contributed 3.37 percent.

Ironically, environmentalists often slow the pace of technological progress, rather than speeding it. While the American public sees many benefits in advancing knowledge and science, environmentalists see problems lurking behind every corner. In order to prevent "disaster," they insist that science and technology must be proven absolutely risk free before even being considered for use. The premier battleground for this philosophy has been agricultural biotechnology. A London University biologist calls genetically modified (G.M.) crops "worse than nuclear weapons or radioactive waste," while activist Jeremy Rifkin calls their introduction "the most radical, uncontrolled experiment we’ve ever seen." When the U.S. sent a shipment of corn and soy meal that included some G.M. varieties to aid the victims of a cyclone in India, activist Vandana Shiva declared that "the U.S. has been using the . . . victims as guinea pigs." (American consumers have been eating this food for years.)

This mindless resistance to new science has dire consequences. Having been informed by Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth that G.M. corn is "poison," the president of Zambia refused U.S. food aid, despite widespread starvation in his country. As Professor Tony Trewavas from the Royal Society of Edinburgh recognizes: "We would never have developed electricity, gas, or aeroplanes, or trains, or anything if we had ever taken that principle to heart in life."

Biotechnology is a boon to mankind. G.M. crops can raise farm yields, reduce the use of pesticides, and let farmers conserve precious topsoil. Biotech researchers can create plants that grow more quickly, resist drought and disease, endure temperature extremes, and provide increased human nutrition.

Activists like Shiva argue, along pseudo-Marxist grounds, that G.M. crops invest power in global corporations at the expense of poor developing farmers. They even criticize "golden rice." A perfect model of how biotechnology can help the world, golden rice is engineered to contain beta-carotene, which the body can convert into vitamin A. This could help prevent as many as 1 million deaths per year in the developing world, and eliminate many afflictions, including blindness. Scientists developed the rice primarily with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, which promises to give the rice to developing world farmers at little or no cost. In resisting innovations like these, greens show the costs of fanaticism.

According to Global Warming, environmentalism is now "the only global ideological competitor to liberal democratic capitalism." Like Marxism before it, environmentalism "claims the mantle of objective science" to support its political programs. But when the science falters under the harsh glare of reality, so does the ideology. And, as this book demonstrates, both the science and the ideology are built on shaky ground.

--William Leon is a research consultant in Washington, D.C.

OBVIOUSLY GREAT
By Leslie Carbone

Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World
By Margaret Thatcher
Harper Collins, 512 pages, $34.95

In her latest book Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World, former British prime minister Margaret

Thatcher offers an approach to foreign policy and national security that is both practical and principled. "The demand that power be limited and accountable," she writes, "the determination that force shall not override justice, the conviction that individual human beings have an absolute moral worth which government must respect . . . are the bedrock of civilized statecraft."

The Iron Lady’s discussion of Western aid to the Third World provides an example of how she derives policy from principle. She relies on the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides, who taught that "the highest level [of charity] consisted of raising the recipient up to the point at which he was self-supporting--a charity that removed the need for future charity." The Thatcher prescription: "A limited amount of assistance strictly targeted at helping . . . create the right framework for free-enterprise capitalism."

Mrs. Thatcher offers five conditions necessary for successful free enterprise: "private property," "a rule of law," "‘culture’. . . conducive to free-enterprise capitalism and thus to economic progress," "diversity and competition between states," and "an encouraging framework of tax and regulation." Foreign aid that fosters such conditions will help the Third World care for its own far better than state-to-state transfers that reward misgovernment. As Thatcher notes, "The Third World is very much like the First World--just poorer: What works for the West will work for the rest as well."

Elsewhere Thatcher takes on another leftist sacred cow. She explains that "the current obsession with human rights" makes her "uneasy" because "rights no longer seem to mean what they used to do, and are being used to diminish not expand liberty."

She argues that the United Nations 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights confuses liberty with other things . . .  which may actually be opposed to it. For example, the Convention proclaims such ‘rights’ as ‘social security’ . . . 'the right to work . . . and to protection against unemployment’ . . . 'the right to rest and leisure’ . . . ‘the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of [oneself] and [one’s] family,’ and to ‘education,’ which among other things should ‘further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace…. The document . . . displays a catch-all approach, in which numerous . . . aims are declared ‘rights,’ without recognition that their fulfillment depends upon circumstances and, above all, upon the willingness of one group of people to accept burdens on behalf of another.

In other words, fabricated rights which have to be provided by somebody else cannot truly be rights.

With such arguments, Thatcher overcomes one of the practical weaknesses of conservatism. Since conservative philosophy is based on reality not utopianism (unlike utopian-based leftist philosophy), conservatives often fail to state the obvious (because it seems self-evident to them). This puts conservatives at a disadvantage, because it keeps the obvious out of discussion and leaves leftist fantasy unchallenged.

Thatcher also makes short work of fabrications regarding the U.S. role in the Cold War. In an era of pervasive America-bashing, Thatcher’s applause for the United States and American ideas is refreshing and courageous. "America alone has the moral as well as the material capacity for world leadership," she writes, and "America is uniquely equipped to lead by its historic and philosophical identification with the cause of liberty."

While implicitly acknowledging that Britain’s "day" is over, Thatcher asserts that English ideas lie at the heart of America’s greatness: "America is more than a nation or a state or a superpower; it is an idea--and one which has transformed and continues to transform us all. America is unique--in its power, its wealth, its outlook on the world. But its uniqueness has roots, and those roots are essentially

English . . . It was from our Locke and Sidney, our Harrington and Coke, that your Henry and your Jefferson, your Madison and Hamilton took their bearings."

Statecraft "is dedicated to Ronald Reagan, to whom the world owes so much." Thatcher’s brief recounting of the Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Reykjavik is an example of how the Iron Lady rebuffs revisionist interpretations and sets the Reagan record straight.

During the 1986 summit, the father of glasnost was desperate to keep the United States from developing the Strategic Defense Initiative, which would allow the U.S. to defend herself from missile attacks. He tried to tempt Reagan by offering deep cuts in Soviet nuclear-weapons stockpiles. Reagan famously refused to trade away missile defense, and the talks broke down. For this, Reagan was skewered by the liberal elite. But the Cold War was finally won in unambiguous fashion precisely because Reagan refused to back down on this and other fundamental points. The Soviet Union had only one claim to superpower status: military might. By building up America’s military capabilities and weakening

Russia’s, Reagan undercut all Soviet claims of superiority. And without military might, the whole empire crumbled. It is this drawing on the lessons of history, stating the obvious, and resting on principle that makes Statecraft such an invaluable book and a pleasure to read.

--Leslie Carbone is coeditor of Fifty Years After the Declaration: The United Nations Record on Human Rights.

LAW SCHOOL DAZE
By Clark Stooksbury

Brush With the Law
By Robert Ebert Byrnes & Jaime Marquart
Renaissance Books, 336 pages, $24.95

Brush With the Law is actually two books. One by Harvard Law School graduate Jaime Marquart, and one by Stanford Law School alumnus Robert Byrnes. Both wound up at the same Los Angeles law firm and

Compared notes about their graduate school days. The myth that slavish, ascetic devotion is required to make it through a top law school should be thoroughly dispelled by their tales.

I graduated from the University of Memphis law school in 1993. Although that institution is an earthbound counterpart to heavenly entities such as Harvard and Stanford, the process is about the same: pompous, tweedy professors attempting to intimidate students and trip them up using the Socratic Method.

The environment at a place like Memphis may even be tougher than at Harvard and Stanford in some ways. Unlike Byrnes and Marquart, I was almost always required to attend class. Yet I know from personal experience that successfully graduating from law school is perfectly compatible with plenty of goofing off. After the initial terror wears off--it takes about a month--law school is at worst manageable, and often easy.

Compared to the experiences of Byrnes and Marquart, my lazy law school days were a tour in the salt mines. Marquart devised an elaborate system to minimize the amount of work he did after his first year. It called for taking classes with large enrollments and boring professors who had a preference for take-home exams. Courses with gaseous titles like "Law and Society" and "Gender and the Law" are invariably fluff classes, Marquart advises. He even went so far as to calculate a "ditch ratio" based on the number of people who evaluate a class (generally on the last day before the next semester) compared to the number who eventually enroll. He surmises that if few students bother to show up on the last day, when valuable information about the final exam is likely to be imparted, then few found it necessary to attend throughout the semester. The lesson of his system is that success as a lazy law student requires a bit of industriousness.

When did Marquart actually get his legal education? "Turns out," he explains, "nine days [of the Introduction to Legal Studies course] is enough to learn everything you need to know to start work in a law firm." (Note that he did not say "to be a lawyer.") While I suggest it takes longer than nine days, it’s true that three years of legal education is usually a huge waste.

Byrnes and Marquart both tell compelling stories, but they lard them down with detail about their personal lives that is excessive for anyone uninterested in the doings of mid-to-late-’90s slackers. Do we care about Marquart’s gambling losses and various romantic and personal belly-flops?

But cut away the fat in Brush with the Law and there is still plenty of meat that the gatekeepers at Harvard and Stanford would rather you not digest.

At the beginning of their book, the authors quote an anonymous Yale law graduate suggesting: "I would caution you to be somewhat circumspect about what you write, whether or not it’s true . . . The value of your degrees--and that of every one else’s--may be affected by what you write." To the extent that Brush with the Law is taken seriously, this Yale graduate is correct. The students, parents, alumni donors, and foundations that fund august institutions such as Harvard and Stanford--as well as the employers who pay bloated salaries to their graduates--may begin to wonder just what they are buying with all that money.

--Clark Stooksbury writes from Knoxville, Tennessee.