Climate Change, Email Privacy, and the CEI Podcast

Climate Change

In The Wall Street Journal this week, Arnold Schwarzenegger urged lawmakers to take climate change dangers more seriously.

Policy Analyst Brian McGraw says that Schwarzenegger is skimming over the real truth about climate legislation—that is, no matter how much you believe in the science, the proposed “solutions” aren’t going to help anybody.

“The only proposal floated by Congress was found to be horribly ineffective, even by many environmentalists. During that fight, the Obama administration threatened opponents to accept it, because EPA regulations would follow if the legislation didn’t pass, and the EPA wasn’t capable of providing efficient or even effective ‘solutions.’ And here we are, with the EPA moving forward on costly regulations (during a recession) that, according to their own estimates, will reduce temperatures in 2100 by anywhere from 0.0015 to 0.006 degrees centigrade. Remember, Arnold, whatever your opinion on the historical benefits of the EPA, past performance is no guarantee of future success.”

Email Privacy

CEI has joined several other groups in urging Congress to update U.S. privacy laws.

Associate Director of Technology Studies Ryan Radia was on The Laura Ingraham Show this week to explain why current privacy laws are inadequate.

“In 1986, e-mail was actually brand new, and the notion that somebody would be storing their e-mails for 180 days was just unheard of. Today, of course, companies like Google encourage you to store all of your e-mails on the cloud forever. It’s really convenient, but it creates this real risk that government, law enforcement will get your e-mails with a mere subpoena, which is pretty much rubberstamped by a court.”

CEI Podcast

In the new CEI Podcast, Warren Brookes Fellow Kathryn Ciano interviews Carrie Lukas from the Independent Women’s Forum about the male-female pay gap.

Listen here.