Ronald Bailey
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- For the Australian rugby player, see Ron Bailey.
Ronald Bailey (born November 23, 1953) is the science editor for Reason magazine. He was born in San Antonio, Texas and raised in Washington County, Virginia, and attended the University of Virginia, where he earned a B.A. in philosophy and economics in 1976. He attended the University of Virginia School of Law for three semesters.
Bailey worked briefly as an economist for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission before turning to his career in writing and television production. According to his biography on the Reason website: "He has produced several series and documentaries for PBS television and ABC News. Mr. Bailey was the 1993 Warren T. Brookes Fellow in Environmental Journalism at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. His articles and reviews have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Commentary, The New York Times Book Review, The Public Interest, Smithsonian magazine, National Review, Forbes, The Washington Times, Newsday, and Readers Digest. He has lectured at Harvard University, Rutgers University, McGill University, University of Alaska, Universite de Quebec, the Cato Institute, the Instituto de Libertad y Desarrollo (Chile), and the American Enterprise Institute."
Bailey lives in Washington, D.C. and Charlottesville, Virginia.
Bailey has described himself as a "libertarian transhumanist." To this end, he has written a book entitled Liberation Biology: The Scientific And Moral Case For The Biotech Revolution[1].
In his 1993 book, Ecoscam, and other works, Bailey criticized claims that CFCs contribute to ozone depletion and that human activity was contributing to global warming. On this and other occasions, he suggested that the scientific consensus regarding global warming was the product of a scam or conspiracy. Writing in National Review in 1997, Bailey said,
Militia members are famously worried that black helicopters are practicing maneuvers with blue-helmeted UN troops in a plot to take over America. But the actual peril is more subtle. A small cadre of obscure international bureaucrats are hard at work devising a system of "global governance" that is slowly gaining control over ordinary Americans' lives. Maurice Strong, a 68-year-old Canadian, is the "indispensable man" at the center of this creeping UN power grab."[2]
However, he has subsequently revised his views, stating in 2005, "Anyone still holding onto the idea that there is no global warming ought to hang it up."[3]
Bailey has stated in the article "Global Warming — Not Worse Than We Thought, But Bad Enough":
Details like sea level rise will continue to be debated by researchers, but if the debate over whether or not humanity is contributing to global warming wasn't over before, it is now.... as the new IPCC Summary makes clear, climate change Pollyannaism is no longer looking very tenable.[4]
However, he is critical of Al Gore and his film about global warming, writing, "On balance Gore gets it more right than wrong on the science (we'll leave the policy stuff to another time), but he undercuts his message by becoming the opposite of a global warming denier. He's a global warming exaggerator."[5]
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[edit] DDT and malaria
Bailey wrote:
[Rachel] Carson’s disciples have managed to persuade many poor countries to stop using DDT against mosquitoes. The result has been an enormous increase in the number of people dying of malaria each year. Today malaria infects between 300 million and 500 million people annually, killing as many 2.7 million of them. Anti-DDT activists who tried to have the new U.N. treaty on persistent organic pollutants totally ban DDT have stepped back recently from their ideological campaign, conceding that poor countries should be able to use DDT to control malaria-carrying mosquitoes.[6]
[edit] Bibliography
- ECOSCAM: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse (St. Martins Press, 1993) ISBN 0-312-10971-7.
- The True State of the Planet (The Free Press, 1995) (ed.) ISBN 0-02-874010-6.
- Earth Report 2000: Revisiting The True State of The Planet (McGraw Hill, 1999) (ed.) ISBN 0-07-134260-5.
- Global Warming and Other Eco Myths: How the Environmental Movement Uses False Science to Scare Us to Death (Prima Lifestyles, 2002). (ed.) ISBN 0-7615-3660-4.
- Liberation Biology: The Scientific And Moral Case For The Biotech Revolution (Prometheus Books, 2005) ISBN 1-59-102227-4.
[edit] References
- ^ Liberation Biology: The Scientific And Moral Case For The Biotech Revolution (Book review at Innovation Watch)
- ^ Who is Maurice Strong. National Review.
- ^ "We're All Global Warmers Now", Reason
- ^ "Global Warming — Not Worse Than We Thought, But Bad Enough", Reason
- ^ "An Inconvenient Truth", Reason
- ^ "Silent Spring at 40", Reason
