A Moment on the Earth

...Easterbrook further relates that the temperature record since 1940 (the period of heaviest man-made carbon dioxideemissions) does not support Gore's assertion of cause and effect between human activity and the record temperatures of recent years...

...It is well and good for a professor to claim that these terms are clear, but they are a Pandora's box for American businessmen trying to comply with the law...

...We shouldn't stop being careful about man-made toxic chemicals, but there's no reason to fear substances simply because they are man-made...

...He ends up defending the political establishment's response to most environmental issues, even when his own description of the costs and benefits of those policies points the other way...

...It may be in some circumstances that will be required...

...And he claims the environmental situation today is "the worst crisis our country has ever faced...

...H ad Easterbrook set out just to shed light on the politics and science of the environment, he would have accomplished quite enough...

...This makes a farce of the concept of equal opportunity: requiring an employer to spend.an extra $25,000 per year to provide "equal opportunity" to one employee—$25,000 that could have gone instead to the salaries of other employees...

...Perhaps Kendall should check how many blind people have driver's licenses...

...Neither small businesses, nor landowners, nor taxpayers get much sympathy from him for the burdens they have had to shoulder...

...In developing countries, slash-and-burn agriculture, indoor cooking fires fueled by wood or dung, and dust from unpaved roads threaten the health of people and ecosystems...

...Regarding Kendall's claims that a system of explicit job subsidies to encourage hiring the handicapped is "a system of bribes," I do not concede that "the market has failed" for the handicapped...

...And, as with Clinton, the "pain" she "feels" most intensely seems to be that of squawking liberal groups...

...Sue S. Williams ADA Compliance Officer Statesboro...

...Kendall claims that "universal design" of all facilities to accommodate handicapped people should be the norm for society...

...The lesson for the Republican Congress: Ignore media clucking about the Court's "turn to the right" and don't rely on the Court to resolve the country's most contentious social issues...

...Today, Easterbrook notes, "Gore doesn't talk about Revelle any longer...

...Exactly right—but it is Gore and other popularizers of scary greenhouse scenarios who have been pointing at short-term temperature fluctuations to justify a massive policy response...

...Because they are ideologically obsessed, and because they need to keep direct mail dollars flowing, environmentalists have what he calls "an almost aching desire David Andrew Price is president for litigation affairs with the Washington Legal Foundation...

...The market has failed for the kind of people who are increasingly abusing the ADA—people who like to sleep late and then claim they suffer from narcolepsy, people who used illicit drugs and later claim to be deserving victims, and people who engage in violent 70 The American Spectator September 1995...

...even "establishment" journalists such as Keith Schneider of the New York Times and John Stossel of ABC News have challenged the prevailing attitudes...

...The EEOC decreed, "An individual's need for an accommodation cannot enter into the employer's or other covered entity's decisions regarding hiring, discharge, promotion, or other similar employment decisions, unless the accommodation would impose an undue hardship on the employer...

...Neither your body nor the environment at large can tell whether a substance comes from a "natural" or "artificial" source...

...For instance, he reports that NASA, eager to justify its funding, announced with great fanfare the possibility of an ozone hole over the Northern Hemisphere, but later relegated to "low-profile technical documents" the fact that it could not find one...

...The businessman takes his best shot—and then the disabled person's lawyers are cordially invited by the EEOC to take their best shot at the businessman...

...Cynthia Pierre, the deputy director for the EEOC's Chicago district office, declared last year: "Accommodating a [disabled] person is very individualized...

...If people die in an airliner crash caused by an engine fire that could have been suppressed by halons, the environmental movement will find there is hell to pay...

...A free enterprise economy, like the environment itself, can withstand a great deal of pounding, but we need the help of honest environmental journalists to keep us from abusing either the Earth or the economy through folly and ignorance...

...While conceding that some job loss in American heavy industry might be the result of environmental regulations, he writes, "Nearly all economists consider automation to increase productivity, job flight to low-wage countries, labor intransigence on work rules and management self-indulgence to be greater factors...

...Three years after the Exxon Valdez spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil in Prince William Sound and killed thousands of animals, "the sound was so close to its former state it was impossible to determine where the spill occurred without resorting to navigation charts...

...The EEOC has abysmally failed to clearly establish the legal obligations of businesses...

...Gore used to say that he learned about global warming in a Harvard class taught by oceanographer Roger Revelle...

...Notwithstanding his shaky normative ground, Easterbrook is to be credited for doing what reporters are supposed to do: work hard to give us the facts...

...The incongruity between his descriptions and prescriptions is all the more difficult to understand because he plainly understands the dangers of handing power to the political sector, given its predilection for empire-building...

...E asterbrook takes aim at numerous targets, including Greenpeace, Worldwatch Institute president Lester Brown, misanthropic "deep ecologists," super-doomsayer Paul Ehrlich, and Ted Turner (for preaching conservation to loggers while owning a corporate jet...

...B ut A Moment on the Earth is par- ticularly noteworthy, reflecting both Easterbrook's gifts as a science writer (a 1992 poll of environmental journalists found Easterbrook the one most admired by his peers) and his relentless energy...

...But where he ventures into economic and social prescription, he stumbles in puzzling ways...

...Easterbrook is also generally untroubled by overregulation...

...Economic progress is nature's ally...

...And amidst the pettifogging legalism of his colleagues, Thomas was often the sole champion of sturdy common sense, as in Capitol Square, where he noted how strange it was to treat the Klan cross as a religious symbol...

...But Gore is simply wrong in asserting that a consensus of climate scientists supports the existence of a greenhouse emergency...

...CI JEREMY RABKIN (continued from page 27) The good news is that Justice Thomas emerged as a powerful independent voice on the Court...

...He was fearless in scorning liberal pieties...

...Bowman approached the professor after class and asked for his thoughts about "positive trends"—that, for instance, although the total number of pounds of pesticide in use has increased, the numbers are down in proportion to farm production, apparently because farmers are using pesticides more carefully...

...This illustrates the fundamental dishonesty of the ADA's lexicon...

...Halons, banned [as ozone-threatening] at the insistence of environmental lobbyists though they were never produced in large quantities, are the best known fire-fighting chemicals...

...Apart from the fate of the loggers in the Pacific Northwest, he is also undisturbed by the effects of environmental hype on blue-collar jobs...

...Though Easterbrook does not mention it, more than fifty climatologists and meteorologists signed a letter in 1991 criticizing the push for massive policy changes based on "unsupported" assumptions...

...Ronald Bailey's Eco-Scam and The True State of the Planet, Michael Fumento's Science Under Siege, and the work of the late Warren Brookes cast doubt upon many of the movement's arguments...

...Chris Bell, EEOC's assistant legal counsel, observed in 1991, "If a person with the disability had a job coach, it would be a reasonable accommodation for the employer to permit that person to bring it...

...Why should bureaucrats have the right to throw a huge wrench into apartment designs that intentionally sacrifices the interests of 98 percent of renters...

...It might also be anaccommodation for the employer to pay for that job coach...

...A Moment on the Earth is, of course, not the first work to look askance at environmentalist claims...

...A s Easterbrook keeps an unwavering eye on the big picture—what he calls "thinking like nature"— a few encouraging propositions emerge...

...The problem he sees with the perpetual alarmism of some greens is not that it causes money to be wasted—except to the extent that overregulation mops up resources that America could spend on the Third World—but that it detracts from the image of environmentalism as a success story...

...Easterbrook found these dangers were either nonexistent, or greatly exaggerated and on their way to being solved...

...For all his "eco-realism," as he calls his fact-centered approach, Easterbrook is strangely quick to back away from the implications of his reporting when they might cast doubt on current policies...

...How wrong...

...The EEOC also noted, "Providing personal assistants, such as a page turner for an employee with no hands . . . may also be a reasonable accommodation...

...In fact, he observes, most toxic chemicals that Americans ingest are from "natural" sources...

...that news stay bad...

...In a 1989 New York Times op-ed, Gore argued that those who believed there wasn't enough evidence to justify costly limits on carbon dioxide emissions were analogous to those who acquiesced in the murder of millions by ignoring the portents of the Holocaust...

...The "resilience of life," as he puts it, is obviously no argument for mankind to inflict avoidable damage...

...It never ceases to amaze me that the courts are so willing to assume that anything that is predominantly black must be inferior," he wrote in Jenkins...

...Nature bounces back...

...Georgia James Bovard replies: Professor Kendall asserts that "the law is clear"—and then repeats the rote phrases of ADA defenders: "reasonable accommodation," "perform the essential functions," and "undue hardship...

...The Central Arctic caribou herd, which lives around the [Alaska] pipeline, was expected to be wiped out...

...The EEOC officially defined "accommodation" as "any change in the work environment or in the way things are customarily done that enables an individual with a disability to enjoy equal employment opportunities" Thus the employer may be required to restructure a person's job and other activities in order to create a facade of equal opportunity...

...The notion of environmental optimism as the enemy of the good, no matter what the facts show, is precisely what Easterbrook set out to vanquish in A Moment on the Earth...

...The notion of a fragile environment," Easterbrook writes, "is profoundly wrong...

...But one alert student—Sacramento Bee environmental reporter Chris Bowman, who was visiting Harvard as a Nieman Fellow—had just been reading Gregg Easterbrook's A Moment on the Earth...

...Comparing mechanized New York with low-tech Bangladesh, Easterbrook finds that, like much of the Third World, Bangladesh is far worse ecologically...

...economy...

...And a former official at the Environmental Protection Agency told him, "Everything the EPA does is driven by political rather than scientific considerations...

...Like President Clinton, she seems to prefer mixing political calculation with labored assurances that she "feels your pain...

...Stepping over the homeless on subway grates, taking detours to avoid the parts of town where schoolchildren die in drug shootouts, The American Spectator September 1995 69 Americans are dreaming if they think capitalism is anything other than a transitional phase in pursuit of some method of economic organization that insures the well-being of all members of society...

...He finds little to worry about in the possible consequences of environmental regulations for the U.S...

...We didn't rule it out...

...Easterbrook digs into a dizzying range of scientific controversies, and though the book would have been stronger had he backed more of his factual claims with references to his sources, what we can see of his technical sources is impressive and convincing...

...In the main environmental initiatives ought to be considered worth the price unless proven otherwise," he contends, because every environmental initiative of the past "appears a bargain in retrospect...

...vast numbers of people with moderate disabilities have successfully found work and are earning their pay without the help of threats from EEOC bureaucrats...

...Instead its numbers have increased sevenfold since Prudhoe Bay began...

...What he means is unclear, but he runs the risk of falling into the same hypocritical stance as Al Gore, who Easterbrook rightly ridicules for finding "jets and homes and driveways only objectionable when SOMEBODY ELSE desires them...

...The scientific base for a greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time...

...In 1992, Gore called upon journalists and scientists to muffle evidence that belies the notion of omnipresent crisis, for fear of impinging on "the effort to build a solid base of public support for the difficult actions we must soon take...

...A 1992 Gallup poll of climatologists found that only 17 percent considered weather trends in this century to be the result of a man-made greenhouse effect...

...He calls for our society to renounce "materialism," an exhortation backed by an account of Native American culture evidently lifted from Pocahontas...

...Not only that, but the majority of reporters—normally skeptics by nature—have been quick to accept and propagate the panic story of the day, be it acid rain or asbestos, global warming or the landfill shortage...

...We can sum up our conclusions in a simple message," he wrote...

...In the Environmental Defense Fund's 52-page reply to Easterbrook, the EDF criticizes him, ironically, for looking at short-term changes in regional temperature: "It is the long-term, global pattern that is considered significant in the global warming context," the group retorts, "not annual or seasonal changes in temperature in particular regions, which can be quite variable...

...But he singles out Al Gore as one of the most egregious peddlers of silly assertions...

...From the standpoint of nature, though not from the standpoint of some who claim to speak on its behalf, American affluence is far less threatening...

...Though he is a liberal environmentalist himself, he delights in making statements on practically every page that will send many true believers around the bend: • "Though bus transportation does save fuel, from a pollution-control standpoint the riders of a city bus might do better for the Earth by being the sole occupants of new cars...

...In the course of writing about the environment for The Atlantic Monthly and Newsweek, Easterbrook learned that environmental organizations see ecological doom and gloom everywhere, including in many places where it plainly isn't...

...And why should banks be forced to spend thousands of dollars to put Braille type on ATM machines at drive-through bank windows...

...His arguments were often dazzling in their scholarly range (his references to classical texts and neglected conservative commentaries ought to be collected as a bibliographic guide for aspiring jurists...

...E asterbrook's lack of concern over these issues appears to stem partly from a surprising source: a visceral dislike of capitalism, which he shares with many of the environmentalists he criticizes: Capitalism certainly needs work: I hope that someday it is replaced by a more just and less stressful system of production and distribution...

...And "a single cup of coffee may contain, by weight, as much carcinogen as your entire year's exposure to pesticide residues...

...We can't tell employers, 'You must do X in this particular situation and then you'll have complied.' They have to take their best shot at it...

...Nature recovers and life thrives, even at filthy toxic-waste dumps and sites of natural destruction such as volcanoes and forest fires...

...In most affluent countries, forest cover has not been declining but expanding for at least several decades...

...The word "artificial" isn't in nature's vocabulary...

...Yet understanding it "helps us put the enviA MOMENT ON THE EARTH: THE COMING AGE OF ENVIRONMENTAL OPTIMISM Gregg Easterbrook Viking / 698 pages / $27.50 reviewed by DAVID ANDREW PRICE 68 The American Spectator September 1995 ronmental issues of the day into a perspective larger than our own...

...And he doubts the environmental good faith of most Republican politicians...

...In the last paper Revelle published before his death in 1991, however, the researcher said he was troubled by the bandying-about of images of disaster...

...The professor avoided and answered the question at the same time: "The danger of ending with an optimistic note," he replied, "is that it decreases the sense of urgency...

...After becoming chairman of a House subcommittee, Gore arranged for Revelle to appear as a witness at his first global-warming hearings...

...The EEOC's Bell also observed: "Whether or not [the hiring of] a personal assistant would be required for toileting and eating is going to have to be determined on a case by case basis...

...CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 12) giant step in working with faculty on accommodations in the classroom...

...With their victory over logging companies in the spotted owl debate, "affluent environmentalists with white-collar sinecure destroyed thousands of desirable skilled-labor jobs in order to satisfy an ideology and boost the returns on fund-raising drives...

...Many of them, yes—but all of them...

...The science is always tailored to support whatever has already been concluded politically...

...Since Rachel Carson warned against pesticides in Silent Spring, he said, American farmers have actually doubled the quantity of the chemicals they are applying...

...How can the hiring of a page-turner or job coach for one worker but not the next be a form of non-discrimination...

...Justice O'Connor, in particular, seems wedded to a personalistic jurisprudence that disdains clear logic and sways with the feeling of the moment...

...But why should government force building companies to squander a high percentage of the floor space in all small apartments to make halls and doorways large enough for wheelchairs when only a tiny percentage of renters will ever use wheelchairs in their homes...

...The bad news is that the conservative impulse on the Court can rarely muster a majority without concessions to the soft, muddled sensibilities of the Court's swing voters...