January, 2001

Maybe heresy is a bit hyperbolic, but the fact is that few things bring me so indignantly out of my chair as items in the news that fly in the face of one another and don't point out the irony. Such is the case with a couple of New York Times articles, the first titled 150 Nations Start Groundwork for Global Warming Policies and the second standing there innocently and without so much as a blush, headlined Whitman Promises Latitude to States on Pollution Rules, each of them from the January 18th issue.

On behalf of this world-class newspaper, I will blush for them.

The hundred fifty nations agree that records show the last century to be the warmest of any century in the last thousand years. A thousand years, folks. They further agree the nineties to be the warmest of any decade in that period. Freeze-free zones are widening, snow cover is down by 10% since the sixties and sea levels are rising at the fastest rates in 3,000 years. Better put your rubbers on.

These guys are trying to do something in spite of the fact that the Kyoto Protocol, on just these issues, was not signed by Bush the Father and no further progress was made in November in the Netherlands under Clinton the Departed. We're still studying. We will be still studying when the Atlantic laps up against Donald Trump's empire. Guiliani will finally win and the homeless will leave New York because the cardboard boxes will be too wet to sleep in. Studying, as we all have been told by our parents is a good thing and it's more comfortable to fire up the old SUV when someone's got the books spread out. Nero was more honest, actually fiddling while Rome burned, having never been much of a student.

By the way, you don't have to dogsled to the North Pole anymore, you can sail there over open water. Just don't expect to have your picture taken on the site unless you're wearing a Mae West.

Ah, juxtaposition.

Governor Christie Whitman of New Jersey is up for Director of the Environmental Protection Agency in Bush the Child's Cabinet and promises greater latitude in heeding the federal rules already in force. She also said that all environmental rules should be subject to cost-benefit tests. I wonder whose costs she means, whose benefits are on the scale? The senators nodded judiciously. Nodding judiciously is their long suit. She cut New Jersey's environmental protection budget but promises a "strong federal role" in environmental protection. Foxie Christie watching the chickens.

Mrs. Whitman also said she would review a string of environmental regulations issued in recent months by the Clinton administration, including a clean-air rule for big trucks and buses that critics said would unwisely burden industry and the economy. Well, we certainly can't have all those chickens becoming a burden to the fox, now can we?

Mrs. Whitman faced not a single note of criticism during her one-day hearing and appeared to be headed for speedy confirmation.

I see that Parliament is about to pass a law outlawing fox-hunting in England. Those Brits, always behind the times---we've never allowed the foxes to be hunted in America, it would be just too expensive and irksome to the foxes and who the hell listens to chickens?

Cluck, cluck, cluck.

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