The Competitive Enterprise Institute Daily Update
Issues in the News
1. SCIENCE
A growing number of scientists express skepticism of global warming alarmism.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Senior Fellow Iain Murray on the attempt to muzzle skeptical voices in the climate change debate:
“It’s astonishing that elected officials would use their taxpayer-funded offices to bully a company’s president into changing his corporation’s philanthropic giving practices. And it’s deplorable that in trying to discredit critics of catastrophic global warming, Rockefeller and Snowe would stoop to using smear rhetoric that alludes to “Holocaust denial”—and is inaccurate to boot. No one seriously denies that the Earth is warming. The debate is over the extent and consequences of such warming. Remarkable, too, is the senators’ cryptic reference to a “scientific group” that would soon issue its ‘findings,’ words that bestow authority on what, as we expected, would turn out to be no more than a political attack.”
2. CONSUMER
New washing machines fail performance tests due to new government efficiency mandates.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: General Counsel Sam Kazman on energy efficiency rules:
“Government mandates for higher efficiency are almost accompanied by claims that the higher prices they cause will be more than offset by their alleged savings from lower energy costs. But that raises a fundamental question—if these new technologies are so good, then why do we need laws to force consumes to buy them?”
3. POLITICS
Televangelist and Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell is dead at 73.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Senior Fellow Eli Lehrer on Falwell’s political legacy:
“…in my judgment, the movement he helped begin did a great deal for the cause of liberty. The so-called ‘Christian Right’ that he helped to found realized that too-powerful state with high taxes and too many regulations tended to corrode the ability of people to live in accordance with their religious beliefs. When the state takes most of individuals’ income, it regulates every aspect of their being.”