The Competitive Enterprise Institute Daily Update
1. ENVIRONMENT
The United Nations prepares to officially release its latest report on the predicted effects of global warming.
CEI Experts Available to Comment: Senior Fellow Iain Murray on the modest findings of the report thus far:
“The IPCC panel [has found] less projected temperature rise and less predicted sea level rise than it did in 2001. That isn’t good enough for those who want to break the back of the world’s energy system, so they have to attack it,” said CEI Senior Fellow Iain Murray. “For years, global warming alarmists built up ‘the consensus of scientists’ as the answer to legitimate concerns of climate skeptics. Now that they have seemingly successfully shut skeptical voices out of the debate on global warming, they have embarked on a process of delegitimization of that very consensus.”
2. FINANCE
Sen. Ted Kennedy introduces the Student Debt Relief Act to modify federal aid to college students.
CEI Experts Available to Comment: Center for Entrepreneurship Director John Berlau on how Kennedy’s plan would crowd private lenders out of the student loan market:
“Kennedy wants to make student loans a 100% government-run system, because he and others claim that this would save money by knocking out the middleman. So in his recently introduced Student Debt Relief Act of 2007, which is co-sponsored by fellow Democratic Senators Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, and Dick Durbin, the government would basically bribe schools with extra federal aid to participate only in the Direct Lending program, rather than have subsidized dealing with private banks.”
3. TRADE
Rep. Charlie Rangel prepares a new agenda on trade policy.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Bastiat Scholar Doug Bandow on the role organized labor could play in the new plan:
“[Rangel’s] approach seeks to empower a UN body, the International Labor Organization (ILO)—which promulgates rules on everything from child labor to union organizing—more than theU.S. government. This is what organized labor desires; American unions began taking labor controversies to the ILO years ago.”
Blog feature: For more news and analysis, updated throughout the day, visit CEI’s blog, Open Market.