Environment
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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January 8, 2013 — Steven Hayward
So here I am late in the evening on a rare flight (LAX to JFK) that has in-flight Internet. Despite topping 100K of flight miles (a dubious achievement, believe me; plus I really don’t like knowing TSA agents by their first names anyway) in both of the last two years, this is only the second flight I’ve been on with wi-fi. If you must know, I’m on my way to
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January 3, 2013 — John Hinderaker
As you probably have heard, al Jazeera is buying Al Gore’s Current TV for, apparently, several hundred million dollars. Al Jazeera is owned by the government of Qatar, which has a great deal of money, and Al Gore likes money. A lot. That affinity is more than enough to explain the deal, but there is more, as the Wall Street Journal reports: The deal comes several months after Messrs. Gore
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December 15, 2012 — Steven Hayward
What’s the opposite of the Green Weenie? Not sure, but we we’re going to have to come up with one for the folks in the environmental camp who break with orthodoxy or think critically about the subject, risking the wrath of the environmental establishment in the process. We’ve mentioned Keith Kloor here on Power Line before (“Definitely Not a Green Weenie”), and he’s got an important story about what I
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December 7, 2012 — John Hinderaker
Promised Land is making a serious run at that title. It is an anti-fracking film that stars Matt Damon, and was written by Damon and John Krasinski of The Office, who unfortunately appears to be a bonehead. In the original script, heroic anti-fracking activists exposed the hazards of extracting natural gas. But the writers apparently realized that fracking has an excellent track record, so they revised the script so that
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December 2, 2012 — John Hinderaker
Well, it wasn’t exactly a headline, but it did get reported by the Science and Environmental Policy Project. It happened in Doha, Qatar, where the latest global warming gabfest is taking place: On Monday, November 26, the 18th annual Conference of Parties (COP 18) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) opened in Doha, Qatar, for a two-week session to try to reach an agreement for the
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November 30, 2012 — Steven Hayward
The Green Weenie Award is troublesome this week, because some kinds of environmental wackiness descend into a realm so sordid that it deserves something a lot worse than a Green Weenie. Like a jail sentence, for example. The news media has always covered eco-terrorism as weakly as possible. The usual asymmetry can be observed. While every time an abortion clinic is bombed or vandalized, or an abortion doctor murdered, the
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November 17, 2012 — Steven Hayward
If you’ve ever dropped in for an episode of the IFC channel’s cult hit mockumentary “Portlandia” and wondered if Portland, Oregon, is really that wacky-crunchy, the answer is an unqualified Yes it is. Even the trees are green there. You think I joke! The public toilet handles are green—and that’s not a joke. Let’s see, a place where it rains something like 200 days a year needs to save water?
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November 12, 2012 — John Hinderaker
Unlike me, Bjorn Lomborg more or less believes in anthropogenic climate change. Nevertheless, in Foreign Policy, he points out that the purported anti-global warming efforts of the last 20 years have been a complete failure: The total efforts of the last 20 years of climate policy have likely reduced global emissions by less than 1 percent, or about 250 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. Even if this
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October 29, 2012 — John Hinderaker
Much of the East Coast is being evacuated in anticipation of Hurricane Sandy. Nothing wrong with that, and our thoughts are with the millions of Americans who are threatened by the worst weather event in some time. But not everyone is moving out. Today, this photo of Old Guard soldiers, standing guard over the Tomb of the Unknown Soldiers, swept the internet: ABC News reports that this particular picture was
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October 26, 2012 — Steven Hayward
Daniel Botkin, who describes himself as a “renegade naturalist,” is professor emeritus of ecology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the author of one of my all-time favorite environmental books, Discordant Harmonies. Dan is just out with a new and updated edition entitled The Moon in the Nautilus Shell. I caught up with Dan earlier this month, and in the latest interview series for Power Line, here’s
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October 18, 2012 — John Hinderaker
The vision of the future touted by many environmentalists includes electric automobiles. The dream of the electric car is an old one; for quite a few decades now, electric vehicles have supposedly represented the future. Thus, a friend sent me this photocopy of a newspaper article titled “Ford Chief Says Electric Car Now Is Under Development.” The article appeared in January 1971; click to enlarge: Ford Motor Co. is nearing
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October 15, 2012 — Steven Hayward
Charles Krauthammer mocked President Obama mercilessly last spring when Obama mentioned the potential for algae-based fuels in our future. I share the instinct for Obama mockery on general principle, but think the great Dr. K might have gone just a bit too far on this one, for one simple reason: unlike ethanol, wind, and many other energy boondoggles, there is a lot of private capital going into algae energy research,
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October 7, 2012 — Steven Hayward
This week is only a few hours old, but we have winner already for our coveted Green Weenie Award. And it’s a repeat winner—the electric car! This really is necessary because of the commenter who suggested that we idiot Californians deal with our high gasoline prices by getting electric cars; yeah, great idea with our long commutes and near highest in the nation electricity rates. Anyway, electric cars win their
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October 6, 2012 — Steven Hayward
I am told that I’ll turn up quite a bit tomorrow night in Bret Baier’s special documentary “Behind Obama’s Green Agenda,” airing on Fox News at 9 pm eastern time. I was interviewed at length for the story, though I don’t turn up in the trailer. (Bjorn Lomborg does, though, so you can expect screeches from the greenies.) I may well miss it: I’m heading back to Bozeman, Montana, tomorrow
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September 30, 2012 — John Hinderaker
Earlier today, Steve gave this week’s Green Weenie award to Matt Damon for the anti-fracking movie Promised Land, which, it turns out, was financed by the United Arab Emirates. Who, trust me, acted out of a noble concern for the environment and had no thought of suppressing American fossil fuel development which would compete with the Emirates’ product and likely cost the Emirates billions of dollars. But the movie is
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