The headline says it all.

Today on Slate:

The Ethanol Trap

The oil blowout will mean more
subsidies for the corn-fuel industry. That's bad news for consumers.

Conservatives have been writing about the ethanol scam for years -- how it is a lousy, inefficient fuel that drives up food prices; wastes food, fuel, and cropland; does zilch to help the environment; and gobbles up enormous amounts of public funds to no good end. It is nice to see that at least some liberals can take a break from sneering at how dumb and greedy conservatives are long enough to agree with us.

Not that the Slate author mentions that conservatives have been banging the drums on this for years, but no matter. The important thing is that the truth about this boondoggle -- a boondoggle fully supported by President Obama and his band of selfless supergeniuses -- is being reported in a place where liberals might read about it.

Our banana republic

On early Friday morning, House Democrats added a 300-page amendment to the "climate-change" bill, bringing the bill's total length to either 1,309 or 1,500 pages, depending on the report. (This recent edition of War and Peace is only 1,296 pages.) The House narrowly passed the bill later that day. Hugh Hewitt comments:

They could not have read the bill.

A 300 page amendment to a bill that greatly impacts every American and greatly burdens every American business was introduced at 3:00 AM Friday and passed 16 hours later. The spectacle of the House voting for a massive tax increase and a 300 page amendment they could not have read is a low point for post-segregationist Congresses. Never have so few read so little about so important a proposal, and yet brazen forward oblivious to the deeply embarrassing charade it presents to the world. Banana republics make a better show of governing themselves than did the U.S. House of Representatives today.

The unseriousness of our political leaders is simply breathtaking. It would be unsurprising, from time to time, for a member of Congress to vote on (or even for) a bill he or she has not read in its entirety. This is not ideal, and not particularly honorable, but given the number, breadth and scope of the bills that Congress considers each term, it's probably inevitable. A Congressman from Queens with no knowledge of agriculture could be excused for deferring to a trusted colleague from Nebraska when voting on a farm bill, for example.

But for a member of Congress to vote on -- and especially to vote for -- a bill that not one member of Congress has read in its entirety is an abdication of duty, the legislative equivalent of a soldier firing a machine gun with his eyes closed. If you think that analogy is overheated, remember that climate-change ideologues warn us that the earth is egg-shell fragile; that every increase (or decrease) in temperature anywhere around the world is evidence of man's predation and of impending catastrophe; that if we don't make things precisely right we are doomed, and that the hour is very, very late indeed. If you believe this to be true, wouldn't you also believe it is important to read carefully (and perhaps even debate) a wide-ranging piece of environmental legislation before passing it?

Our elected officials owe us their best judgment. (Based on the available evidence, many of them are capable of good judgment only intermittently, but we at least deserve their best efforts.) We don't get even that. Important bills are rushed through so quickly that even earnest representatives could not hope to read them carefully, much less analyze their potential effects. The climate-change bill and the stimulus package are two glaring examples, but as the organization Open Congress has noted, they aren't the only ones.

To vote for a bill no Congressman has read in its final form, while simultaneously declaring its passage vital to the survival of the planet, is cynicism at its worst.


P.S. Check out Open Congress's "Read the Bill" proposal, which would require Congress to provide a 72 hour reading period, beginning once a bill is put into its final form, before putting it up to a vote.

Administration report on "climate change" relies on non-peer-reviewed sources, ignores peer-reviewed ones that contradict its thesis

John Tierney, the science writer for the NY Times, reports:

The new federal report on climate change gets a withering critique from Roger Pielke Jr., who says that it misrepresents his own research and that it wrongly concludes that climate change is already responsible for an increase in damages from natural disasters. Dr. Pielke, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, asks:

[Why] is a report characterized by [White House] Science Advisor John Holdren as being the “most up-to-date, authoritative, and comprehensive” analysis relying on a secondary, non-peer source citing another non-peer reviewed source from 2000 to support a claim that a large amount of uncited and more recent peer-reviewed literature says the opposite about?

(Tierney's post is here. Dr. Pielke's website is here. Via Instapundit)

This sort of thing is disturbingly common. When evaluating a scientific claim, it's important to "follow the footnotes" -- i.e., to check the sources cited by the author to see if the sources really support the proposition for which they are cited. Given the hyperbole surrounding climate change and the grandiosity of the proposed solutions for it, following the footnotes is crucial task these days.

The same goes for historical claims. Two authors who have done yeoman's work in this vein are Ramesh Ponnuru and Christina Hoff Sommers. Ponnuru debunked a famous legal brief that 281 historians submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court in an attempt to influence the decision in the abortion case, Webster v. Reproductive Health Services. The historians argued that at the time of America's founding, abortion was legal under the common law -- and that therefore even the modest restrictions on the abortion license at issue in Webster should be struck down. Ponnuru followed the footnotes and discovered that "the published work of the signatories disproved [the brief's] historical arguments." The brief was, for the most part, an utter falsehood. (Read Ponnuru's article on this subject here. It's also discussed at length in his book, which I strongly recommend).

Sommers has similarly unmasked a number of claims made by the shriller left-wing feminists, such as the claim that there is a dramatic increase in spousal abuse on Super Bowl Sunday, a widely quoted "statistic" that has, quite literally, no basis in fact.

Feeling trampled by the "herd of independent minds" in the press and the academy? Follow the footnotes.