Regular U.S. News readers are bound to have noticed that the “One Week” section is usually devoted to a short editorialized missive on some news topic of the day.
It’s never labeled as an opinion piece, but you’ll not have much luck if you search for attribution of the thoughts and theories expressed from week to week.
This week, I’ll ignore most of Brian Duffy’s unattributed diatribe about global warming. (You can read it here.) One point does seem worthy of comment.
While whining that the federal government is not doing enough to address climate change, Duffy notes:
Ten major companies?industrial powerhouses like DuPont, General Electric, and Alcoa?are joining forces with leading environmental groups to urge a major nationwide cutback in carbon-dioxide emissions. This is big. Not only is most of the public light-years ahead of our politicians in addressing the planet’s overheating; now Big Business is, too.
What strikes me about this information — but probably does not cross Mr. Duffy’s mind — is that efforts in the private sector are likely to be more effective than any public sector efforts to deal with any problem that conceivably results from global warming.
Duffy suggests that the involvement of “Big Business” offers more proof that the federal government should do something about global warming.
On the other hand, I see this latest news as offering more proof that the government can address the issue most effectively by doing nothing. Government’s coercive powers would only limit future options; government inaction today leaves many doors open in the future if global warming ever causes any real problems.
