CEI Today: Hansen’s global warming claims, Romney & Obama on reg reform, and Bloomberg v teacher unions
Today in the News
GLOBAL WARMING – MARLO LEWIS
Globalwarming.org: Hansen’s Study: Did Global Warming Cause Recent Extreme Weather Events?
A study by NASA’s James Hansen and two colleagues, published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), finds that during the past 30 years, extreme hot weather has become more frequent and affects a larger area of the world than was the case during the preceding 30 years. There’s just one small problem. The reseachers do not examine any of those events to assess the relative contributions of natural climate variability and global warming. The study provides no event-specific evidence that the record-setting heat waves or droughts would not have occurred in the absence of warming, or would not have broken records in the absence of warming. >Read the full commentary on Globalwarming.org
PRESIDENTAL CAMPAIGN & REG REFORM – WAYNE CREWS
Go ahead and promise to cut spending to the bone and balance the federal budget besides. Knock yourself out in the presidential and congressional campaigns on fiscal themes, and this economy still can’t grow in the way needed, which I contend is a doubling of GDP within a generation or so, the way the U.S. used to surge and create jobs.
The “hidden tax” of regulation now totals over $1.8 trillion in compliance costs and economic effects, according to my forthcoming informal roundup (it’s called Tip of the Costberg: On the Invalidity of All Regulatory Cost Estimates and the Need to Compile Them Anyway). That’s half the size of the federal spending budget itself, and almost totally hidden as far as any official acknowledgment is concerned.
MAYOR BLOOMBERG v TEACHER UNIONS – MATT PATTERSON
Openmarket.org: Teachers Unions Defend Institutional Incompetence
No good deed goes unpunished.
Take Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s brave decision to lay off 3,600 employees — including teachers and principals — of 24 of New York City’s worst-performing schools, all with an eye toward rebooting them with new staff, management plans, and curricula.
With the state appellate courts out of session, and the new school year rapidly approaching, the fired employees of the 24 schools — all of which have a graduation rate under 60 percent, and some as low 39 percent — will now likely be unfired, and thousands of children will be subjected once again to the indifference and incompetence of teachers shielded from accountability by the UFT protection racket.