A main selection of the Conservative Book Club, Christopher C. Horner’s The Politically Incorrect Guide To Global Warming and Environmentalism is more of a bashing of said topics than a balanced, helpful guide. Horner is a senior fellow at the Washington think tank, Competitive Enterprise Institute, which The Wall Street Journal praises as ’the best environmental think tank.’ I checked out their website, learned that they’ve been around since 1984 and looked through their stated history, leading me to discover such gems as this, which clues you in on their methods:

CEI advises the Food and Drug Administration to approve recombinant bovine Somatotropin, a bioengineered growth hormone for dairy cows that boosts milk production. We argue that mandatory labeling of dairy products from cows given rbST is inappropriate, but that the First Amendment allows individual producers the right to label dairy products as produced with or without the use of rbST. FDA policy ultimately reflects this position.

Book Content and My Criticism

This lengthy 2007 book didn’t start out well if it was at all attempting to convert people who believe there is global warming or people in the environmental movement. Horner makes his feelings about ‘greens’ very clear. They are communists who hate capitalism and people as well. Most of them are alarmists, including the current Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore, who are running the ideal scare campaign to establish ’global governance,’ as penned by Jacques Chirac of France about the Kyoto Protocol. It seems that environmentalists, for decades, have wanted more governmental control just to make our lives miserable. CEI, rather, touts free-market environmentalism.

Naturally Horner wants us to understand that the world must have abundant, cheap energy if we are to have safe, productive, happy lives and only fossil fuels are able to provide that. He briefly dismisses alternative fuel sources very unconvincingly, makes no mention of oil’s rising prices and dwindling supply, and criticizes the initial cost of a new energy program while omitting that it can save significant money after a while. The Kyoto Protocol is thoroughly bashed. Clinton and Gore may have signed it, but made no attempt to get it ratified, he gloatingly points out over and over.

Horner delights in telling us that Western Europe, in spite of trying to comply with the Protocol, has only greatly increased its greenhouse gas emissions and the countries that have managed to reduce them are the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe because of economic collapse. Maybe we should factor in how Western Europe shares the world’s air and many places like China and India are increasing their pollution. Maybe we should realize that dictators in communist countries couldn’t care less about clean air, as my Bulgarian born and raised friend commented. So Horner tries to convince us that economic stability requires no restrictions on energy use or we’ll become poor, susceptible to infectious disease and limited in our freedoms. Guess he’s never heard of West Nile virus that originated in Colorado and almost killed my father.

There’s a lot a conservative would love about The Politically Incorrect Guide To Global Warming and Environmentalism. Horner picks all the most radical environmentalists since Betty Friedan predicted a coming ice age in 1958 and quotes them and/or dissects the flaws in their science or philosophy. Gore and his An Inconvenient Truth movie and book, as well as his first book Earth in the Balance, get the royal treatment throughout and a separate chapter. A chapter about Hollywood movies in the alarmist mode is entertaining and I’ll write an essay about them.

Speaking of flaws in science, Horner has a whopper or two. The other reviewer of his book is a scientist and I'm not, so I sometimes referred to another book I’ll be reading and reviewing called The Weather Makers by Australian scientist/explorer/conservationist Tim Flannery. He explains the Medieval Warming Period that Horner often holds up as proof of climate instability in the past. Flannery also points out that new forests soak up more carbon dioxide to explain some cooling periods. I haven’t read much of his book yet, but am eager to get to it. Horner, you realize, is not a scientist and can only report old, selected news and frame it to further his arguments. He may make some valid points, such as overpopulation in low-lying coastland and Kyoto not being our salvation as the media might perceive it, but blaming France’s massive deaths during a heat wave to vacationing, young people leaving the elderly without air conditioning and their medics being on strike sounds, well, questionable.

I found the book somewhat interesting just to know how the skeptics think, but it was so ponderous that I often skimmed. His goal was to prove that man is not contributing to climate change and that change is natural as it has been throughout history. He hasn’t convinced me of anything except why it’s so easy to be skeptical if you’ve listened to many environmentalists and even scientists in the past up to now. I don’t agree that alternative energy sources and reducing carbon emissions are a waste of time and money.

Book Structure

There are twelve chapters in four sections. His Contents page gives you the titles to the subsections as well so you know what you’re getting into. The sections are:

Environmentalism and Authoritarians
Global Warming: The Convenient Lies
The False Prophets (and Real Profits) of Global Warming
Making You Poorer and Less Free

Horner includes an extensive Notes section in the back that I glanced at. He’s put a lot of effort into this oversized, paperbound book of 303 pages and it is filled with graphs and look-at-me inserts, but I question his demonization of all Democrats while praising the reasonableness of Republicans, although he doesn’t discuss many of them compared to Democrats. This is a book for conservatives.

I’ve read several books or watched documentaries on global warming and I still want to keep reading and watching to better understand this complicated issue. This is my advice to you: to learn as much as you can from learned people without a political bias. Horner isn’t one of them.

This is another entry in my Global Warming write-off (see my profile) and EpiWriMo (see http://www.epinions.com/user-kamel622).

Recommended: No