Cybrpnk's Rantings

I was listening to NPR recently. Either 'To The Point' or 'Which Way L.A.' One of the guests was from The Cato Institute. He stated that it was a mistake for California to require lower emissions from cars and trucks because scientific projections showed that even if every state in America adopted California's limits, global temperatures would only be a fraction of a degree Celsius lower by 2050. I then saw a similar statement accepted as fact in an editorial in The LA Times. I'm not sure which is more disappointing, the uncritical repeating of this position by the LA Times, or the fact that the other guest on NPR, who was a scientist, failed to point out the fundamental flaw in this argument. The flaw is that we are not currently primarily concerned with lowering global temperatures, we are concerned about reducing the increase in temperatures. If reducing auto emissions results in temperatures being slightly lower in forty years, that's not a small shift relevant to the baseline today, that's a large shift relative to where temperatures will be if we do nothing.

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It is, indeed, time for us to be turning our attention as a nation to eliminating rampant abuse of the legal system. There are people out there who are draining tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars a year out of the economy into non-productive lawyer's fees. Often these lawyers are fighting to protect their client's from the consequence of the client's own actions. I'm not talking about the frivolous filing of lawsuits, I'm talking about the frivolous defense of them. Due to an appalling web of arcane rules and regulations, corporations that are involved in truly nefarious deeds are able to fight a war of attrition against those who would challenge their hegemony. Classic examples of this form of lawsuit abuse include Microsoft's antitrust defense, Exxon's battle over the Valdez disaster, and Union Carbide's efforts to avoid taking responsibility for Bhopal. Similar battles are fought all across America every single day. Companies weaseling out of the responsibility for the radioactive waste they dumped into a municipal dump. Corporate polluters challenging laws that prevent them from substantially raising the leukemia risk in the communities downstream of them.

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