Environment
September 16, 2012 — Steven Hayward
Unexpected travel last weekend postponed the weekly Power Line Green Weenie Award, but that allowed me time to catch up with an important new book bearing on someone who deserves a shelf of posthumous Green Weenies: Rachel Carson, the author of Silent Spring. Published 50 years ago, Silent Spring remains an iconic book for the modern environmental movement, and Rachel Carson one of the movement’s heroes. (The EPA still hosts
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September 14, 2012 — Steven Hayward
BOZEMAN, Montana—I’m away to Big Sky country today to visit my friends at PERC, the Property and Environmental Research Center. These are the folks who work out the idea of free market environmentalism, that is, how markets and property rights provide superior environmental protection to government regulation. It provides a much better balance of genuine environmental protection with individual liberty. FME (as we insiders call it) begins with a simple
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August 20, 2012 — Steven Hayward
Hard to know how to pick from among the deserving contestants for the coveted Power Line Green Weenie Award this week. The deep greenies at Grist.com deserve an honorable mention for their speculation about whether the Syrian uprising can be linked to—wait for it—climate change! (Sigh.) A deserving nod also goes to the German greens who are opposing a huge offshore wind power installation—proposed to be eight times the size
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August 19, 2012 — John Hinderaker
Did you know that there are more “green jobs” in the U.S. than fossil fuel jobs? Well, that could be true, depending on how you define green jobs and fossil fuel jobs. The Science and Environmental Policy Project’s “The Week That Was” explains: During the US Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing held August 1st on “Update on the Latest Climate Change Science …”, Senator Barbara Boxer made much
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August 8, 2012 — Steven Hayward
Among the many of the EPA’s extremist crusades worthy of a religious fanatic is its regulatory juggernaut against particulates (or “particle pollution” as EPA renamed it a few years ago). The epidemiology of particulates is stronger than for some other forms of air pollution toward which the EPA is ultimately moving toward a zero emission standards (such as ozone), but a closer look shows how unrealistic the EPA’s goals have
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July 29, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
On Friday, George Will wrote a harrowing column about the Justice Department’s prosecution — courtesy of the Environmental Crimes Division — of Nancy Black, a marine biologist. Black captains a whale watching ship. Finding herself under investigation for “harassment” of a marine mammal, the alleged harassment consisting of whistling at whales to keep them near the ship for a while, she submitted a tape of the incident. Black edited the
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July 21, 2012 — Steven Hayward
I’ve drawn attention several times here to the fine science and policy blog of Roger Pielke Jr at the University of Colorado, but I’ve been remiss in bringing to the attention of Power Line readers an equally worthy blog of another environmental writer who departs frequently and pointedly from the party line: journalist Keith Kloor, whose Collide-A-Scape blog is definitely worth bookmarking and following on a regular basis. (You can
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July 20, 2012 — Steven Hayward
So last week I delivered a lecture on “The EPA and Property Rights” to Hillsdale College’s Kirby Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship up on Capitol Hill, and the good folks at Hillsdale have posted the video of the lecture below. It’s an hour long, so pour yourself a good glass of wine if you decide to indulge. Here’s the key paragraph from my “four propositions” about the topic:
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July 14, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
My conservative cousin from New York posted the following on his FaceBook page a while ago: Governor Cuomo’s plan to boost New York’s economy with casino gambling reminds me of a certain banker played by John Barrymore in the classic film “It’s A Wonderful Life.” Add a few dance halls, Governor, and much of Upstate New York will turn into Pottersville. [It] looks like Cuomo has updated Henry Potter’s vision
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July 11, 2012 — Steven Hayward
So, I’ve had a few curious correspondents noting my absence from the page this week asking: Are you back in Bulgaria? Is your power out again? Did we miss another “derecho” storm or something? Is the surf up in California? Have you eloped? No to all of the above. Like two weeks ago when I was teaching an intensive course on foreign policy at the Ashbrook Center in Ohio, this
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July 9, 2012 — John Hinderaker
I missed this story when it came out on Friday. It is another nail in the Green coffin: Apple “has pulled its products off the U.S. government-backed registration of environmentally friendly electronics.” It wasn’t long ago that Apple devoted considerable marketing effort to trumpeting its products’ environmental friendliness. But that was then, and now? Now, being Green doesn’t have the cachet it once did. Apple is abandoning the EPEAT standards
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July 3, 2012 — John Hinderaker
The shale gas revolution and Barack Obama’s lousy economy have achieved what endless global warming conferences couldn’t: U.S. industrial CO2 emissions are sinking fast. In fact, John Hanger reports at Watts Up With That?, U.S. carbon emissions may drop to their 1990 level this year. Hanger prepared this chart to illustrate the trend: What is causing the U.S. to go “green?” Part of the answer, although Hanger doesn’t mention it,
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June 30, 2012 — John Hinderaker
Hey, it’s not just polar bears. The oysters are suffering, too. The Portland Oregonian tells the sad story: For 30 years, the crew at Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery on Netarts Bay had been growing oyster larvae to supply oyster growers around the world. But one day in 2008, they were ready to walk away and give it all up. … That’s when they got together with scientists at Oregon State
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June 24, 2012 — John Hinderaker
Very little, happily. The Rio + 20 conference has ended quietly, with not much damage done. Ken Haapala, Executive Vice President of the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP), sums up the conference: Apparently, the Rio + 20 Conference ended on Friday. The word apparently is used jokingly. Saturday’s headlines of both the New York Times and the Washington Post failed to include any mention of the closing of the
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June 20, 2012 — John Hinderaker
This is what I don’t get: when a city is threatened by flood, it is normally because a river overflows its banks. In this part of the world, we have the Red River, which often floods in the spring because it flows south to north, and the Minnesota River, which has been known to crest five to ten feet above its normal level. But there isn’t any river that flows
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June 20, 2012 — Steven Hayward
The Rio+20 Earth Summit, our Green Weenie Award winner this week, is grinding along, and has produced a draft declaration entitled “The Future We Want.” If the whole thing weren’t so insubstantial and unserious (they don’t even try any more to offer any rigorous definition of “sustainable development”), it might be worth critiquing. It has 283 numbered points in 49 stupefying pages. A better way to get through this would
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June 18, 2012 — Steven Hayward
Well yes, it goes without saying that the UN deserves the coveted Power Line Green Weenie Award every week, but this week stands out for the simple reason that the Rio+20 “Earth Summit” is commencing down in Brazil. The original Earth Summit in 1992 gave us the Kyoto Protocol (how’s that workin’ out for ya, greenies?), a parallel diplomatic process on biodiversity, and a crazy-quilt, everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink, phonebook-sized wish list known
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