May
19
2009

URLs du Jour

2009-05-19

  • Andrew Klavan watched the Keanu Reeves version of The Day The Earth Stood Still. Bad news for him, but good news for the rest of us.

    Anyway, as to the movie's plot: Keanu Reeves plays a monotonal alien, which is kind of like me playing a conservative novelist. He comes to earth on a mysterious mission so the Secretary of State summons astro-biologist Jennifer Connelly, because when aliens invade your planet, dude, you need the cutest scientist you can find.

    More seriously, Klavan notes that the movie unwittingly captures the "despicable and superstitious" misanthropy underlying at least some parts of the environmental movement.

    I gotta read me some Klavan.

  • You might remember the Barackrobatic campaign promise (noted here recently):

    "I can make a firm pledge," he said in Dover, N.H., on Sept. 12. "Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes."

    It depends on what you mean by "any form of tax increase", it turns out. If you mean laws and government regulations requiring you to shell out more money, well… Michelle Malkin notes the news story about new automobile "efficiency" standards:

    While the new fuel and emission standards for cars and trucks will save billions of barrels of oil, they are expected to cost consumers an extra $1,300 per vehicle by the time the plan is complete in 2016.

    The lame excuse:

    Obama said the fuel cost savings would offset the higher price of vehicles in three years.

    Due to other Obama policies, gas prices will almost certainly be through the roof by then, so this could be true, in an academic sense.

  • But that's OK, because you'll only have to shell out more money if you're one of the survivors. The new fuel standards, as Steven Milloy points out, won't just make us poorer, it will also kill a lot more of us by forcing us into lighter, more dangerous vehicles. You can get all cost-benefit here:

    The Natural Resources Defense Council said that the 35 MPG standard would save about one million gallons of gas per day. So how does that savings balance against the 2,000 fatalities per year that the National Academy of Sciences says are caused by those same lighter cars?

    For the sake of being utilitarian, let's generously assume that the mileage standards reduced the price of gasoline by $1. That would translate to daily savings of $1 million. Is that savings worth killing more than five people per day, plus other non-fatal injuries and property damage?

    When Andrew Klavan says that environmentalists are dangerous, he's not overstating things. And they're in charge, baby.


Last Modified 2012-10-08 8:32 AM EDT