Caving in on global warming

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As a great public service, someone should send a copy of Michael Crichton's new book "State of Fear" to the chief executive officer of every Fortune 500 company in America. Mr. Crichton is not a scientist, but he understands science and how to separate out fact from fiction.

His book undresses the environmental alarmists for a lack of evidence to support their apocalyptic claims of global warming and does so with impressive documentation.

"State of Fear" has become a best-seller precisely at the time business leaders across the nation are capitulating to an environmentalist global warming agenda that could severely cripple the U.S. economy and cost hundreds of thousands of jobs -- to say nothing of denting corporate profits.

In recent months, dozens of major Fortune 500 companies have waved the white flag of surrender to radical environmental groups by signing on to the antigrowth agenda on global climate policy. Like prisoners who have come to admire their captors, many corporate leaders have agreed to lobby beside the very interest groups that would put them out of business.

In August, the Conference Board -- an organization of hundreds of major corporations in the United States and around the world -- issued a self-righteous and scientifically dubious statement insisting there is an "increasing scientific consensus that humans are contributing to the warming of the planet" and that government and corporate boards must take action.

Meanwhile, dozens of major Fortune 500 firms have signed on and started donating to the radical left-wing lobbying and research activities of the Pew Research Center on Climate Research. Pew has been about the most apocalyptic and irrational of any organization in the country about the coming catastrophe of melting ice caps, massive flooding and soaring temperatures.

Here is how the racket works: environmental groups relentlessly attack firms, such as Exxon, that have refused to be bullied into submission. This in turn empowers radical environmental organizations with even more money and more credibility, which they then use to bludgeon and isolate corporate holdouts, which forces more capitulations, which leads us ever closer to an anti-industry policy agenda that will puncture a hole in the American economy.

The corporate shills for the environmental groups, have essentially agreed to two highly questionable findings about the science of global warming:

(1) Global warming is a major environmental threat to the future of the planet.

(2) And global warming is a direct result of man's imprint on the globe.