Washington, D.C., August 20, 2008—A Senior Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free market group critical of many of the environmental movements’ views on global warming, today endorsed policy prescriptions in a report from the National Wildlife Federation.
The NWF report “Increasing Vulnerability to Hurricanes: Global Warming’s Wake-Up Call for the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts,” points out that increased coastal populations, diminishing coastal wetlands, and shrinking wildlife habitat all serve to make hurricane damage worse.
“While I’m not convinced that human-caused global warming is the underlying cause, there can be little doubt that we’re currently moving through a period of heavy hurricane activity,” said CEI Senior Fellow Eli Lehrer. “When it comes to what we should do for the coast, the analysis in this report make sense whatever one thinks about the causes of major hurricanes.”
“Nature may cause hurricanes,” said Lehrer. “But human activity causes hurricane damage.”
Lehrer recommends that policy makers learn from the NWF and work to end explicit and implicit subsidies for development in sensitive coastal areas, eliminate price controls that subsidize insurance for the rich, and review the nation’s coastal infrastructure to make it more hurricane resistant. Lehrer also called for preservation of more coastal land.
Lehrer, however, said that he disagrees with calls to restrict all development in coastal areas. “I do think that rich, stupid people should be allowed to build on their own property if they want to,” Lehrer said. “But when a hurricane wipes away an ocean-front mansion, the government should send nothing besides a rescue boat—and a bill.”
Both he Competitive Enterprise Institute and the National Wildlife Federation are members of Americans for Smart Natural Catastrophe Policy, a national coalition of groups that support environmentally responsible, fiscally sound approaches to natural catastrophe policy that promote public safety. Its website is www.smartnatcat.org.
