Environment
May 6, 2013 — Steven Hayward
In what constitutes sort of a reverse-Green Weenie Award, we need to give credit to the New York Times when they get something right. And they get something really right today with a feature and video that revisits the infamous Mobro Garbage Barge episode from the late 1980s: that was when TV news viewers were treated to nightly images of the garbage barge trawling up and down the Atlantic seaboard looking
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April 23, 2013 — Steven Hayward
In my Weekly Standard article out a few days ago (“The Climate Circus Leaves Town”), I predicted: What [Obama] may do is tentatively approve Keystone along with a major policy shift that will please environmentalists and subject Keystone to further and perhaps fatal delays. There is talk that the administration may expand the scope of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to require that proposed projects like Keystone document their
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April 22, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Hey everybody—it’s Earth Day! I know, you can hardly contain your excitement. I’m planning to observe it as I do most sunny days on the coast: by lighting up my carbon-intensive barbecue and roasting some green weenies. I’m behind on a lot of things these days, one of them being the update of my Almanac of Environmental Trends. I have managed to complete an update of the air quality section,
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April 11, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Have left-liberals killed liberal education? I’ve come to think so, and recent developments at Vassar and Bowdoin help confirm my fear. The indispensable Stanley Kurtz is on top of both stories. At Vassar, the subject of this post, he reports on attempts to block a speech by Alex Epstein, a proponent and defender of America’s conventional energy industries. Epstein was invited to speak by Vassar’s Moderate, Independent, Conservative Alliance (MICA).
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April 1, 2013 — John Hinderaker
The case for global warming hysteria rests entirely on certain computer models that committed warmist partisans have been paid tens of billions of dollars by greedy governments to develop. It is hardly a shock, then, that these programs crank out one alarming scenario after another. They predict endless cataclysms resulting from an always-warming Earth, even as the actual Earth, not the computer-generated one, stubbornly refuses to heat up, year after
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March 21, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Haven’t seen a lot of notice for a recent study of water pollution from natural gas fracking in Pennsylvania, produced by Resources for the Future and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. So far it seems only Michael Levi of the Council on Foreign Relations has shown it much love: The team’s conclusions are fairly straightforward. They find enhanced chlorine concentrations downstream of waste water treatment
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March 21, 2013 — John Hinderaker
Sure, that’s an optimistic question to ask. But following the election, fissures have appeared in the Left’s coalition, and frustration is mounting. Here are a couple of examples. First, an email that MoveOn.org sent out yesterday on gun control. The email is long, so I will excerpt it: Subject: Argh! Dear MoveOn member, This is the nightmare scenario: “Reid guts Senate gun control bill.”1 “Tuesday’s developments are a major win
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March 15, 2013 — Steven Hayward
If you have nineteen minutes–and if you don’t, you should find a way to get them–sit back and take in this video of Matt Ridley by our friends at ReasonTV. Here Ridley explains his “greening earth” hypothesis–why many environmental conditions are getting better around the world–so long as we don’t keep doing stupid things like growing food for biofuel. (Among his other stunners in this presentation is the factoid that
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February 21, 2013 — John Hinderaker
As President Obama deliberates whether to continue blocking the Keystone Pipeline–or pretends to, anyway–environmentalists have gotten more passionate. Last week, 48 climate activists were arrested at the White House as they urged Obama to stop the pipeline. Notables who were arrested included the head of the Sierra Club, Robert Kennedy, Jr., Bill McKibben and Julian Bond. The activists’ sign said that blocking Keystone constitutes “leading on climate.” But does it?
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February 17, 2013 — Steven Hayward
Special thanks and a shout out are owed this morning to the several Power Line readers who turned up Friday afternoon at the University of Colorado, Boulder for my lecture on “Is ‘Conservative Environmentalist’ an Oxymoron?” And kudos also to the university administration. There had been rumors that two different student groups were thinking about protesting my appearance, and perhaps disrupting it. I was fully prepared for the pie-in-the-face treatment—this
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February 17, 2013 — Scott Johnson
There is a flip side to the due process problem of making everything a crime — the problem Glenn Reynolds has dubbed “Ham Sandwich Nation.” On the one hand, in Ham Sandwich Nation innocent citizens are subject to the whim of prosecutors and their masters (the Aaron Swartz case, cited in Glenn’s essay). On the other hand, when everyone is guilty of something, there is a lot of truly culpable
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February 13, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
President Obama’s discussion last night of “energy” was dishonest even by his standards. After briefly citing the nation’s energy gains under his administration, he turned to “climate change,” using a few quirky weather events as the springboard for advocating more federal regulation of the economy. Ben Cole of the Institute for Energy Research has offered a forceful and, I think, largely meritorious response to Obama’s BS on energy and climate
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February 5, 2013 — Steven Hayward
One of my axioms when I lived in Washington was that you have to get up pretty early in the morning to get the drop on Ramesh Ponnuru, and Hayward’s First Corollary of the Ponnuru Principle is that whenever I find myself disagreeing with Ramesh, I better check my math. Fortunate today we’re in heated agreement about plastic bag bans. I had meant to flag yesterday the new research from
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January 29, 2013 — Scott Johnson
A reader deep within the bowels of the Environmental Protection Administration — and nasty bowels they are too — says he is following the orders of outgoing EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson by forwarding this message from her to “all agency employees.” We pass on this important message verbatim, minus only the EPA@Work banner displaying Jackson’s smiling countenance: Dear Colleagues: I am proud to share with you an important effort our
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January 27, 2013 — Steven Hayward
The defectors from the True Church of Green Religion (i.e., environmentalism) are starting to line up faster than defectors from Soviet Communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A few weeks ago, the reliably green British journalist Mark Lynas issued a mea culpa about his longtime opposition to genetically modified organisms (GMOs). As I’ve experienced first hand, European opposition to GMOs is nearly as sacred as opposing plastic bags
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January 25, 2013 — Steven Hayward
A few days ago in “Great Moments in Failed Predictions” John visited what Bjorn Lomborg called in another context “The Litany” of environmental doom and gloom culminating in the spectacular flameouts of Paul Ehrlich. As I noted in a recent spindle dump (Item #4), the “population bomb” turned out to be a wet firecracker. (I’ll add, in passing, that I have debated Paul Ehrlich twice, and believe it or not
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January 20, 2013 — John Hinderaker
As we contemplate another four years of Barack Obama, a sense of doom has settled over the nation. It is easy to imagine man-caused disasters from which the United States cannot recover. So perhaps it helps to be reminded how consistently doomsayers have been wrong over the years. Anthony Watts has an entertaining post titled “Great Moments in Failed Predictions.” An excerpt: * In 1865, Stanley Jevons (one of the
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