The Competitive Enterprise Institute Daily Update
Issues in the News
1. CONGRESS
The Senate refuses to allow the Capitol grounds to be used for an Al Gore-sponsored “LiveEarth” global warming concert.
CEI Experts Available to Comment: Senior Fellow Iain Murray on the numbers behind Gore’s policy recommendations:
“And when it comes to the economics of the issue, Gore is way outside the mainstream. Appearing before a House committee, he said that changing the American economy in the way he proposes—a plan of freezes, taxes, market controls and regulations that would represent a massive expansion of government control over the economy—would not be costly. Yet he also endorsed the ill-fated Kyoto Protocol (which he helped negotiate). The U.S. Energy Information Administration calculates that Kyoto would reduce U.S. gross domestic product by $100 billion to $400 billion a year.”
2. LEGAL
A federal judge refuses to allow a class action suit against State Farm Insurance over claims related to Hurricane Katrina.
CEI Experts Available to Comment: Senior Fellow Eli Lehrer on the debate over homeowners’ insurance along the Gulf Coast:
“In this uncertain [legal and political] environment, the state’s largest insurer, State Farm, has stopped issuing new homeowners’ policies, and its second largest, Allstate, has cut back. All others have stopped writing new wind insurance policies along the Gulf Coast. Because they expose a key inconsistency in America’s mixed private-government insurance system for coastal areas, these events herald a stark choice for the whole country: Either homeowners will take responsibility for their own homes or taxpayers will become the nation’s major source of homeowners’ insurance.”
3. SCIENCE
Scientists develop a genetically modified sheep that is “15% human.”
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Senior Fellow Gregory Conko on the safety of genetic engineering in animals:
“Thousands of cloned animals have been born since the world met Dolly the sheep in 1996, but critics still claim the process will create monstrous new hybrids in some kind of barnyard ‘Boys from Brazil.’ Nothing could be further from the truth. Scientists today know far more about the health and well-being of cloned animals than the activists against this technology would have us believe.”