This article will be permanently flagged as inappropriate and made unaccessible to everyone. Are you certain this article is inappropriate? Excessive Violence Sexual Content Political / Social
Email Address:
Article Id: WHEBN0002057915 Reproduction Date:
Ronald Bailey (born November 23, 1953) is an American libertarian science writer and author and editor of books on economics, ecology and biotechnology.[1]
Bailey was born in San Antonio, Texas, and raised in Washington County, Virginia. He lives in Washington, D.C. and Charlottesville, Virginia with his wife Pamela.[1]
Bailey attended the Reason Foundation, the CEI (where Bailey is an adjunct fellow) and the Cato Institute (where he is an adjunct scholar) as receiving funding from the U.S. Petroleum industry.[2]
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. This book was considered typical of the conservative movement's political defeat of the Kyoto Protocol in the U.S. through the portrayal of global warming and the changes from attempts to deal with it as, "threatening to American industry, prosperity, lifestyles and the entire 'American way of life'."[11]
The position taken in his 1995 book, The True State of the Planet has been described as "growth forever" or "Promethean" arguing for unrestrained exploitation based on assumptions of unending nature, value derived exclusively from man's changes to material, and exceptional human resourcefulness.[12] His followup book Earth Report 2000 was recognized for being among the works of established authors, "who have argued that past and present widely accepted visions of environmental deterioration and disaster...have little or no basis in fact."[13] Citing these two books, Holt, Pressman and Spash describe the CEI as believing, "technology will solve all environmental problems and that present environmental dilemmas are simply a necessary outcome of much needed economic growth."[14]
Bailey has described himself as a "libertarian transhumanist." He explains this in his most recent book Liberation Biology.[15]
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.[16]
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."[17]
Bailey voted for 2000 and 2004, a fact which he later wrote made him "disheartened and ashamed."[18] In 2008, he voted for Barack Obama because he felt that "[t]he Republicans must be punished and punished hard."[18]
Deforestation, Climate change and agriculture, Carbon dioxide, Ozone depletion, Renewable energy
Macroeconomics, Microeconomics, Adam Smith, Game theory, Utility
Biology, Evolution, Earth science, Earth, Genetics
Genetic engineering, Agriculture, Computer science, Biology, Genetics
Artificial intelligence, Life extension, Computer science, Science fiction, Technology
Bioinformatics, MediaWiki, Bethesda, Maryland, Wiki, Homo sapiens
Popular science, Abraham Lincoln, Beijing, Nature Publishing Group, American English
New Mexico, New York City, Al Gore, United States Senate, Davis Guggenheim
Cancer, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Malaria, Rachel Carson