Looking Beyond Petraeus

My Creators Syndicate column for this week looks beyond the testimony of Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker to consider what the public envisions for the future.

More from the Bookshelf

For a lively account of Dwight Eisenhower's civil rights record–during his time in the Army and as president–be sure to get ahold of Kasey Pipes's Ike's Final Battle: The Road to Little Rock and the Challenge of Equality. Pipes, a staffer in the Bush White House, writes vividly and admiringly, but he doesn't flinch from reporting things that don't reflect well on Eisenhower. This book is a reminder of how very different white Americans' attitudes about race were as recently as half a century ago; wee are quite a different country today.

Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World, addresses the subject of global warming and CO² containment in Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming. It's short and can be read in an evening. For those who can't spare even that much time, here's the pivotal paragraph:

"What we must come to terms with is that even though CO² causes global warming, cutting CO² simply doesn't matter much for most of the world's most important issues. From polar bears to poverty, we can do immensely better with other policies. This does not mean doing nothing about global warming. It simply means realizing that early and massive carbon reductions will prove costly, hard, and politically divisive and likely will end up making fairly little difference for the climate and very little difference for society. Moreover, it will likely take our attention away from many other issues where we can do much more good for the world and its environment."