From CampusRefor.org

 

  By Oliver Darcy, on Nov 28, 2012

EDITOR'S NOTE: This story has been updated since its original posting. Scroll down to the bottom for the latest.

Administrators at a public college told a student group they are prohibited from using the word “Christmas” to promote an ongoing Christmas tree sale aimed at raising money for charity.

“We cannot market your trees in association solely with a Christian event,” an official from Western Piedmont Community College (WPCC) allegedly told the BEST Society, which is sponsoring the sale.

Administrators at a public college have forbidden a student group from using the word “Christmas” to advertise their Christmas tree sale.

Officials from the school have since replaced the word “Christmas” with “holiday” in the group’s advertisements for the event.

“The BEST Society will be selling Holiday trees,” the text now reads.

A spokesperson for WPCC did not immediately return calls to Campus Reform for comment.

The student group claims that as a direct result of this change, community members have said they will no longer purchase trees from the club’s sale whose proceeds provide Christmas gifts to children.

The BEST Society has since reached out to Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) for legal counsel.

“It’s ridiculous that anyone would have to think twice about using the word ‘Christmas’ as part of a Christmas tree sale,” said attorney Matt Sharp, who is representing the group.

“Not only is it perfectly constitutional to use the word ‘Christmas,’ it is unconstitutional to prohibit use of it,” he added.

ADF has sent a letter advising the college to return the wording in the advertisements to its original form so that they do not need to pursue legal action.

According to their Facebook page, the BEST society aims to promote renewable energy and “help reduce our carbon footprint.” A spokesperson for their group was not immediately available for comment to Campus Reform.

The Christmas tree sale is scheduled to end on December 6th.

UPDATE: 11/29, 10:00 AM EST

FOX News’ Todd Starnes reports that the school has reversed their original decision to prohibit the club from using the word “Christmas”:

“It’s a misunderstanding based on a legitimate mistake we made,” Atticus Simpson, vice president of student development at Western Piedmont Community College, told FOX News.

She added that the college “thought we were violating the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment by promoting the sale of Christmas trees — which we thought would be promoting one religion over another.”

The school has since restored the original wording to the group's event.

Follow the author of this article on twitter: @oliverdarcy

H/T: Todd Starnes

96 percent of Ivy League presidential donations were for Obama

From The Daily Caller

An overwhelming majority of Ivy League college faculty and staff that donated to a presidential campaign this year, gave money to President Barack Obama’s campaign, according to the Federal Election Commission.

Among the Ivy League faculty and staff that donated to a 2012 presidential campaign, 96 percent contributed to Obama’s campaign.

Ivy League schools donated over $1.2 million in total to Obama, but only $114,166 to Romney.

A whopping 99 percent of donations to presidential campaigns from Brown University and Princeton went to the Obama campaign.

The lowest percentage of contributions to Obama came from Dartmouth College and the University of Pennsylvania. Just 94 percent of donations from each school went to the Obama campaign.

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SCHOOL FORCES CHILD TO REMOVE ‘GOD’ FROM VETERAN’S DAY POEM: ‘SEPARATION OF CHURCH & STATE’

Posted on November 30, 2012 at 11:06am by  Billy Hallowell

West Marion Elementary School in Marion, North Carolina, is at the center of controversy after educators ordered a six-year-old girl to remove the word “God” from a poem she was slated to deliver at a Veteran’s Day event. The first grader intended to use the opportunity to honor her two grandfathers who fought during the Vietnam War.

The contentious line that led the school to take action was, “He prayed to God for peace, he prayed to God for strength” — clearly a reference to her relatives’ personal, wartime invocations. After a parent allegedly heard of the inclusion of a higher power, he or she complained. The school, apparently working diligently to balance church versus state concerns, then decided to tell the child to remove the line.

“The discussion [about the poem] occurred between myself, the principal and the assistant principal at West Marion,” Superintendent Gerri Martin told McDowell News. “We wanted to make sure we were upholding the school district’s responsibility of separation of church and state from the Establishment Clause.”

After consulting and considering the law, the school decided that allowing the line would constitute an endorsement of “one single religion over another.” Some in the Marion community, though, are concerned that the young girl’s First Amendment rights were violated when she was told that she could not utter God’s name during the Nov. 8 event.

One district employee, Chris Greene, spoke out at a Board of Education meeting this week, explaining that the school was guilty of “hushing the voice of a six-year-old girl.” He contended that she was not trying to pray or coerce others to engage in a conversation with God, but that the first grader was simply explaining what her grandfathers had done in their time of need.

Photo Credit: AP

“She was told that she was not allowed to say the word God during this program,” Greene said. “Being a six year old, and not knowing her rights, she did what she was told.”

But not everyone agrees, as Greene does, that an apology to the young girl is warranted. In an interview with McDowell News, Ken Paulson, president and chief executive of the First Amendment Center in Washington, D.C., said that the school was within its rights to remove “God” from the poem.

“Courts have consistently held up the rights for students to express themselves unless their speech is disruptive to the school,” Paulson maintains. “The First Amendment protects all Americans. She had every right to mention God, [but] that dynamic changed when they asked her to read it at an assembly.”

Because the event was planned and not spontaneous, Paulson said that the school could have potentially run into church versus state trouble. The audience was “captive” in that it had nowhere to go if members did not want to hear “God” be mentioned. In the end, he agreed with the school’s assessment and actions (so far, the girl’s family has been silent about the matter).

What do you think? Let us know in the comments section, below.

(H/T: Fox News’ Todd Starnes)

Golden State turns to lead, now leads poverty rankings

From The Daily Caller

Neil Munro

The Golden State has reached a poverty rate that is now twice as bad as West Virginia’s and substantially worse than the rates of poverty in Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas and Texas, according to a new measure of poverty developed by the federal Census Bureau.

Democrat-run California earned its last-place rank under the federal government’s new measure of poverty, which incorporates more detailed analyses of welfare payments and the local costs of food, gasoline and housing. (View the new census data report)

The state’s costs are boosted by its environmental and workplace regulations, and by 38 million residents’ competition for housing close to the sea.

The new measure, however, also incorporates a controversial calculation of relative equality that demotes states, including California, that have wide gaps between wealthy people and people with less than one-third of state residents’ average income.

California snatched the last-place prize from Mississippi, which had the highest poverty rate under the older and simpler measure, which gauged people’s ability to buy basic services and goods.

Democratic California Gov. Gerry Brown’s office did not release a comment Nov. 15 about the new ranking, but did note that he would be attending a housing conference, the “Greenbuild International Conference and Expo,” in San Francisco Nov. 16.

The new measure, dubbed the “Supplemental Poverty Measure,” revised the California’s poverty rate from 16.3 percent up to 23.5 percent.

The report estimates that roughly 8.8 million people in California were poor during between 2009 and 2011, when Democrats controlled the state legislature and governorship, as well as the White House.

The stunning reversal in fortunes for the Democrat-dominated state — once a worldwide symbol of glitz and wealth — is underlined by previous census reports, which showed that only 11.1 percent of the state’s population was poor in 1969.

Only 13.7 percent of Americans were poor in 1969, and many of them were found in the agricultural states of the Old South. A third of Americans in Mississippi, and a quarter of Americans in Arkansas, Louisiana, South Carolina and Western Virginia, were poor.

Forty years later, after waves of federal and state regulations on housing, banking, health care and air quality, and amid increased financial aid for unmarried parents, youth, immigrants and unskilled people, the national poverty rate has climbed to 15.8 percent, according to the new Census Bureau measure.

The new measure supplants a poverty gauge developed in the 1960s. It incorporates the economic impact of welfare programs, transportation and child-care costs, changes in child-rearing practices — especially the impact of single parents raising kids — plus differences in the region’s average prices and health care costs.

The new ranking leaves California at the bottom, along with and close to the 23.2 percent poverty rate in the District of Columbia.

The next worst-off state is Arizona, which has a poverty rate of 19.8 percent, followed by Florida at 19.5 percent, Nevada at 19.4 percent, Georgia at 19 percent, and Texas at 16.5 percent.

Hawaii’s poverty rate is 17.4 percent, largely because of the state’s high cost of living.

Even Michigan, home of the much-reduced U.S. auto industry around Detroit, has a poverty rate of 13.5 percent, or 10 points lower than California’s rate.

The least poor states tend to be the unglamorous, undiverse and sprawling communities close to Canada.

Iowa, Vermont, Nebraska, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming have poverty rates just below 10 percent. Iowa’s rate is the lowest in the nation, at 8.4 percent, roughly one-third California’s poverty rate.

In 1969, only 11.1 percent of Californians were poor, partly because the state’s movie and defense industries had drawn in a migrant population of skilled World War II veterans. But the rate nudged up to 11.4 percent in 1979, to 12.5 percent in 1989 and to 14.2 percent in 1999, according to the U.S. census.

California contains some of the nation’s wealthiest people and communities, which are clustered around the Democratic-dominated movie, software and silicon industries. The state’s wealthy people include actor George Clooney, movie producer Harvey Firestone and Google’s co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

But outside the wealthy zones, there are high rates of poverty in the Central Valley — where the agricultural sector still relies on low-wage, immigrant stoop labor, rather than crop-picking machines — and throughout the chain-link conurbations that stretch from trailer parks in San Jose to barrios in San Diego.

The well-being of Californian children has also shriveled in recent decades, partly because of the state’s declining education sector, according to a July report by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

That report rated California’s education system 43rd in the nation, just ahead of Alabama’s in 44th place and well behind Texas in 32nd place and Arkansas in 34th place, according to the foundation’s study, titled the 2012 Kids Count Data Book.

The foundation also rated the “well being” of California’s children lower than that of their peers in West Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky, but higher than the well being of children in Texas, Alabama and Mississippi.

The Census Bureau’s new measure reduced estimated poverty rates in several of the Canadian border states, and in some of the states long viewed as the poorest. West Virginia’s poverty rate tumbled from 16.9 percent to 12.3 percent. Kentucky’s poverty rate slid from 17.1 percent to 13.4 percent.

Mississippi’s rate plunged from a chart-leading 21.1 percent to 15.8 percent.

Under the old measure, Indiana and California shared the same poverty rate of 16.3 percent. The new measure sets Indiana’s poverty rate at 14.6 percent, or 8.9 points below California’s rate.

EPA rejects states’ requests for relief from biofuel mandate

From The Daily Caller

Michael Bastasch

On Friday, the Environmental Protection Agency rejected requests from seven states seeking relief from the biofuel-blending mandates required under the Renewable Fuels Standard, arguing that the states did not meet the requirements set by Congress for waiving the mandate.

“The body of information shows that it is very likely that the RFS volume requirements will have no impact on ethanol production volumes in the relevant time frame, and therefore will have no impact on corn, food or fuel prices,” the EPA wrote in its decision to deny the waivers.

The Associated Press reports that Governors of Arkansas, North Carolina, New Mexico, Georgia, Texas, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Utah and Wyoming asked for waivers and were joined by members of Congress and a coalition representing farm groups and other industries that oppose increased ethanol production.

In order to get a waiver, the states had to show that the RFS itself caused severe economic harm and was more than just a “contributing” factor to the harm. Also, the states had to show that waiving the RFS would remedy the hardships of livestock producers. However, the agency did not find evidence of severe “economic harm” which would allow a waiver to be granted.

“We recognize that this year’s drought has created hardship in some sectors of the economy, particularly for livestock producers,” said Gina McCarthy, assistant administrator for EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, in a statement. “But our extensive analysis makes clear that Congressional requirements for a waiver have not been met and that waiving the RFS will have little, if any, impact.”

However, in August, Arkansas Democrat Gov. Mike Beebe said in a letter to the EPA that ethanol production was taking a “terrible toll” on animal agriculture in Arkansas and would force consumers to pay more for food.

“The governors’ request, and the Environmental Production Agency’s rejection of an ethanol mandate waiver, serves to underscore the pervasive problems with the Renewable Fuel Standards (RFS),” said Charles T. Drevna, President of the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers in a statement. “Failing to eliminate this mandate will adversely impact consumers and our economy.”

The RFS requires gasoline and diesel refiners to blend in renewable fuels, primarily ethanol, with petroleum-based fuels and mandates that 13.8 billion gallons of ethanol be produced in 2013 — requiring 4.5 billion bushels of corn which is good for ethanol producers.

“Despite millions of dollars spent by Big Oil and Big Food to shamelessly attack American-made ethanol, it comes as no surprise EPA denied the requests to waive the RFS because the facts are on our side,” said Brian Jennings, vice president at American Coalition for Ethanol Executive Vice President.

Most biofuel produced in the United States for commercial use is ethanol made from corn. Currently, 40 percent of the U.S. corn crop goes toward ethanol manufacturing which, according to some, is pushing food prices higher.

“The Obama EPA shows little concern for the hardships being faced by American consumers, and the denial of the governors’ request signals four more years of regulatory burdens, bureaucratic indifference, and politicized rule-making from this administration,” said Thomas Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance. “As long as government mandates trump the free market, Americans will continue to suffer.”

“We have the capability of being energy self-reliant, but only if excessive and ineffective mandates are repealed,” said Drevna. “At stake are jobs, economic growth and a stable national security.”

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Beware: ObamaCare's Now Reality

From The New York Post

• By BETSY McCAUGHEY
• Last Updated: 3:44 AM, November 13, 2012
• Posted: 10:06 PM, November 12, 2012

President Obama’s re-election and Democratic gains in the US Senate end any possibility of repealing the Obama health law. It will roll out as written, imposing major changes soon on you and your family. If you are uninsured because you can’t afford it, help may be on the way. But if you are one of the 250 million Americans with coverage, there are big problems ahead.

If you get your health insurance through a job, you might lose it as of Jan. 1, 2014. That’s when the new “employer mandate” kicks in, requiring employers with 50 or more full-time workers to provide the government-designed health plan or pay a fine. The government plan is so expensive, it adds $1.79 per hour to the cost of a full-time employee. That’s incidental if you're hiring neurosurgeons but a hefty increase for hiring busboys and sales clerks.

Currently, employers in retail and fast-food industries pay less than half that to cover their workers.To avoid thecostly mandate,some employers will push workers into part-time status. Other employers will opt for the fine. Either way, workers lose their on-the-job coverage.

Worse, they risklosingtheir jobs.Even the fine adds 98 cents an hour to the cost of labor, enough to make some employers cut back on their workforce.

As many as a third of employers are considering canceling coverage, according to McKinsey & Co. management consultants. But that doesn’t mean you’ll be uninsured; you won’t have that choice.

When you file your taxes, you will have to show proof that you are enrolled in the one-size-fits-all plan approved by the federal government. It’s mandatory, starting Jan. 1, 2014, or the IRS will withhold your refund. If you’ve been going without insurance, or your employer drops coverage, your options will be enrolling in Medicaid (if you’re eligible) or buying a government-approved health plan on your state health exchange.

What’s an insurance exchange? It’s like a supermarket that only sells cereal. The exchange will sell only the government-designed plan. In most states, exchanges will be an 800 number, a Web site and a government office, like the DMV. People with household incomes up to $92,200 will be eligible for a subsidy.

If you’re a senior or a baby boomer, expect less care than in the past. Cuts to future Medicare funding pay for more than half the Obama health law. Hospitals, for example, will have $247 billion less to care for same number of seniors than if the law had not passed. Hospitals will spread nurses thinner. California nurses already are striking over the increased workloads.

When Medicare cuts led hospitals to reduce nursing care in the past, elderly patients had a lower chance of surviving their stay and death rates from heart attacks rose, according to a report last year by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

For the first time in history, the federal government will control how doctors treat privately insured patients. Section 1311 of the law empowers the Secretary of Health and Human Services to standardize what doctors do. Even if you have a private plan from Cigna or Aetna and you paid for it yourself, the federal government will have some say over your doctors’ decisions, with an eye toward reducing health-care consumption.

If you sell your house and make a profit, you’ll likely be paying a new 3.8 percent tax on the gain. The law includes about half a trillion dollars in tax hikes, including a new 3.8 percent tax on gains from selling any asset, including your home, small business, stocks or bonds, effective Jan. 1, 2013. That’s on top of capital-gains taxes and applies to any profit that pushes your income over $200,000.

These changes are spelled out in the 2,572-page law, but many more changes will be imposed by regulations yet to be written. The Obama administration is adding federal workers at a rapid pace to churn out and enforce new rules. The government’s own projections say the cost of health-care administration — bureaucrats telling doctors and patients what to do — will soar from $29 billion when President Obama was first elected to $71 billion by 2020, some $40 billion dollars a year more in bureaucracy.

What a shame: That’s enough money to buy private health plans for fully half of all Americans who are now uninsured because they can’t afford it.

Betsy McCaughey, author of the new book “Decoding the Obama Health Law,” is a former lieutenant governor of New York.

New dawn? This looks more like a new dusk

From The Daily Mail

The next four years for America look bleak. It’s not so much a new dawn as a new dusk. And with 50 months left in power, President Obama, his hands tied by a Republican-controlled House of Representatives, is a lame duck already.

He was re-elected despite a majority of voters thinking the economy is on the wrong track. And with tax rises that could wreck recovery due on January 1 – the so-called ‘fiscal cliff’ – experts fear a recession here in 2013.

The most sensible policy – which a Romney administration would have pursued – is deficit reduction. Instead, the second Obama term will increase the deficit, further diminishing America’s economic power and credibility.

Lame duck :President Obama, pictured with his wife and daughters at an election night party, has his hands tied by a Republican-controlled House of Representatives

Contradiction: Obama won the election with a decent majority over Romney, despite a majority of voters thinking the economy is on the wrong track

Around $1trillion a year will be added to debt – bringing the total to $20trillion by 2016. This will drive up interest rates on US bonds, and hard-pressed Americans will have to pay more taxes to fund higher interest payments.

Meanwhile, the President is determined to push through his ‘Obamacare’ health insurance policy, which would account for a large part of that increase.

But the Democrats are well aware that the pumping of federal money into corporate bail-outs and infrastructure projects in declining regions is the key to creating a state clientele that keeps voting them back into office.

The administration is already devising stealth taxes to help pay for the bribes it wishes to offer the coalition of minorities that comprise its supporters. Some will corrode the core of American self-reliance, such as taxes on any substantial capital gains made from house sales. Others are simply opportunist, such as a tax on tanning salons.

Obama's 'Obamacare' aims to increase the governments funding of healthcare for Americans, but will cost billions- adding to the crippling debt

These are all measures of how desperate the financial situation is – a reality apparently kept from most of the American electorate, so far.

Washington observers speak of the incompetence of the Obama administration – not just its ability to waste money, but also to target funds so badly. There is very little to show for the $787billion fiscal stimulus of 2009. A fraction of it could have been used to create serious sea defences around New York and New Jersey, to avoid the devastation of last week’s storm, for example.

Sensible: Mitt Romney (seen here with his wife Ann during his election night rally in Boston) would have pursued deficit reduction, which is the most viable option to save America's economy

Many feel that Super-storm Sandy occurring so close to the election swung many voters in Obama's favour

Swingeing taxes that fall disproportionately on wealth-creators and entrepreneurs will not be all that stalls an economic recovery. So too will a failing national infrastructure whose state of disrepair is beyond pork-barrel handouts from Washington to local communities, but requires a big federal programme – and big federal money.

Roads, rail and airports all cry out for investment and improvement. But as long as money is thrown at failing industries – such as in the car industry bail-out that helped Mr Obama win Ohio and Michigan this week – the administration cannot afford to take big strategic decisions such as these.

The domestic economy is, however, only the beginning of Mr Obama’s problems. The Republicans will do all they can in the House to obstruct high-spending and socially damaging policies – creating legislative deadlock.

And as America subsides into a welfarist, subsidy culture, so will its paranoia about China – already running at near-hysterical levels in some manufacturing regions – grow. America increasingly fears China both as an economic and a military titan – the two components of being a superpower.


Defence cuts in America are inevitable once the borrowing binge brings serious damage to the economy – as it will by mid-term, if not before – and that will increase the nation’s sense of vulnerability towards the Chinese. 

And America’s intractable unemployment problem – it was 8 per cent when President Obama assumed office and is 7.9 per cent now – is increasingly perceived as the result of a highly disciplined and well-trained workforce in China that systematically undercuts over-regulated American business.

Mr Obama must choose a new Secretary of State. Hillary Clinton – who may well run for the Democratic nomination in 2016 – has signalled a wish to stand down. Whoever succeeds her – and a favourite is John Kerry, who lost the 2004 presidential election to George W Bush – has to deal with Iran’s determination to become a nuclear power, and that state’s continuing threats against Israel.

The human cost of such a conflict would be terrible, and American diplomacy might not be equal to preventing either Israel or Iran choosing to strike at the other. 

Less widely appreciated is the catastrophic effect it would have on the global economy through oil prices, and especially on an America that is already hobbling.

Team: Obama called Biden 'America's happy warrior' as he paid tribute to his role in the election campaign

Obama’s supporters claim the worst is over, and the best is yet to come.

Such clichés patronise not merely the American public who, by re-electing him, have chosen the soft option rather than a confrontation with economic reality. They also patronise a substantial part of the developed world that, even if it no longer looks to America for political leadership, relies for its standard of living on the US being economically strong.

On the evidence of the past four years, notably Mr Obama’s record of serial economic incompetence, the next four are going to be exceptionally trying – and, sadly, not just for Americans.

Roger Pielke: Hurricanes and Human Choice

Sandy was terrible, but we're currently in a relative hurricane 'drought.' Connecting energy policy and disasters makes little scientific sense.

By ROGER PIELKE JR.

Hurricane Sandy left in its path some impressive statistics. Its central pressure was the lowest ever recorded for a storm north of North Carolina, breaking a record set by the devastating "Long Island Express" hurricane of 1938. Along the East Coast, Sandy led to more than 50 deaths, left millions without power and caused an estimated $20 billion or more in damage.

But to call Sandy a harbinger of a "new normal," in which unprecedented weather events cause unprecedented destruction, would be wrong. This historic storm should remind us that planet Earth is a dangerous place, where extreme events are commonplace and disasters are to be expected. In the proper context, Sandy is less an example of how bad things can get than a reminder that they could be much worse.

In studying hurricanes, we can make rough comparisons over time by adjusting past losses to account for inflation and the growth of coastal communities. If Sandy causes $20 billion in damage (in 2012 dollars), it would rank as the 17th most damaging hurricane or tropical storm (out of 242) to hit the U.S. since 1900—a significant event, but not close to the top 10. The Great Miami Hurricane of 1926 tops the list (according to estimates by the catastrophe-insurance provider ICAT), as it would cause $180 billion in damage if it were to strike today. Hurricane Katrina ranks fourth at $85 billion.

Enlarge Image

EPA

A worker pushes water toward a storm drain on Wall Street as the city tries to recover from the effects of Hurricane Sandy in New York on Wednesday.

To put things into even starker perspective, consider that from August 1954 through August 1955, the East Coast saw three different storms make landfall—Carol, Hazel and Diane—that in 2012 each would have caused about twice as much damage as Sandy.

While it's hardly mentioned in the media, the U.S. is currently in an extended and intense hurricane "drought." The last Category 3 or stronger storm to make landfall was Wilma in 2005. The more than seven years since then is the longest such span in over a century.

Flood damage has decreased as a proportion of the economy since reliable records were first kept by the National Weather Service in the 1930s, and there is no evidence of increasing extreme river floods. Historic tornado damage (adjusted for changing levels of development) has decreased since 1950, paralleling a dramatic reduction in casualties. Although the tragic impacts of tornadoes in 2011 (including 553 confirmed deaths) were comparable only to those of 1953 and 1964, such tornado impacts were far more common in the first half of the 20th century.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports that drought in America's central plains has decreased in recent decades. And even when extensive drought occurs, we fare better. For example, the widespread 2012 drought was about 10% as costly to the U.S. economy as the multiyear 1988-89 drought, indicating greater resiliency of American agriculture.

There is therefore reason to believe we are living in an extended period of relatively good fortune with respect to disasters. A recurrence of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake today, for example, could cause more than $300 billion in damage and thousands of lives, according to a study I co-published in 2009.

So how can today's disasters, even if less physically powerful than previous ones, have such staggering financial costs? One reason: There are more people and more wealth in harm's way. Partly this is due to local land-use policies, partly to incentives such as government-subsidized insurance, but mostly to the simple fact that people like being on the coast and near rivers.

Even so, with respect to disasters we really do make our own luck. The relatively low number of casualties caused by Sandy is a testament to the success story that is the U.S. National Weather Service and parallel efforts of those who emphasize preparedness and emergency response in the public and private sectors. Everyone in the disaster-management community deserves thanks; the mitigation of the impacts from natural disasters has been a true national success story of the past century.

But continued success isn't guaranteed. The bungled response and tragic consequences associated with Hurricane Katrina tell us what can happen when we let our guard down.

And there are indications that we are setting the stage for making future disasters worse. For instance, a U.S. polar-satellite program crucial to weather forecasting has been described by the administrator of the federal agency that oversees it—the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—as a "dysfunctional program that had become a national embarrassment due to chronic management problems." The lack of effective presidential and congressional oversight of this program over more than a decade can be blamed on both Republicans and Democrats. The program's mishandling may mean a gap in satellite coverage and a possible degradation in forecasts.

Another danger: Public discussion of disasters risks being taken over by the climate lobby and its allies, who exploit every extreme event to argue for action on energy policy. In New York this week, Gov. Andrew Cuomo declared: "I think at this point it is undeniable but that we have a higher frequency of these extreme weather situations and we're going to have to deal with it." New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg spoke similarly.

Humans do affect the climate system, and it is indeed important to take action on energy policy—but to connect energy policy and disasters makes little scientific or policy sense. There are no signs that human-caused climate change has increased the toll of recent disasters, as even the most recent extreme-event report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finds. And even under the assumptions of the IPCC, changes to energy policies wouldn't have a discernible impact on future disasters for the better part of a century or more.

The only strategies that will help us effectively prepare for future disasters are those that have succeeded in the past: strategic land use, structural protection, and effective forecasts, warnings and evacuations. That is the real lesson of Sandy.

Mr. Pielke is a professor of environmental studies and a fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado.

A version of this article appeared November 1, 2012, on page A17 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Hurricanes and Human Choice.