LIBERTY, ECOLOGY, AND PROSPERITY
Hunting Restores Wildlife in Mozambique
A new video by PERC (the Property and Environment Research Center) describes how trophy hunting in Coutada 11, an area in Mozambique that extends almost 500,000 acres, has brought back its wildlife. Devastated by a civil war that ended in 1992, Mozambique lost most of its wildlife, especially large animals such as lions and elephants. As part of the recovery from the war, the Mozambique government began leasing its game reserves to private businesses.
In 1994 Mark Haldane, who runs an African safari business in South Africa and Botswana visited Coutada 11, which is in the Zambesi River delta. “It was absolutely beautiful,” he says in the video. “The problem was they had hardly any animals.”
Using funds from his existing business, Haldane began building up wildlife again. The key was to involve the local community. The company built a clinic and a school and regularly provides meat from hunting. It also hired former poachers as salaried anti-poachers.
The biggest threat to protecting the animals, says Haldane, is proposed laws that would ban the importation of trophy animals such as elephants and lions into the U.S. and other countries.
Tuesday’s Links
How duck hunters are preserving prairies.
When regulation fails, can property rights protect? Supreme Court hears Montana case.
New York legislators try again to pull fossil fuel investments out of pension funds.
‘Europe’s environment is at a tipping point,’ says European Environmental Agency.
Recent Links
‘How wrong can one [New York Times] article be?’
Fight despair: Pursue energy abundance.
Renewable energy growth flattens out across the globe.
Why oil and gas companies oppose nuclear waste disposal.
Snow cover at record high for lower 48.
Jane Fonda on the climate ’emergency.’
Putin calls U. S. oil shale production ‘barbaric.’
What to be thankful for: this politically incorrect list starts with styrofoam.
Matt Ridley: At long last, one country-–Bangladesh—may allow life-saving genetically modified rice.
Is Anybody Abiding by the Paris Agreement?
As noted in a recent Washington Times article, nearly four years after the Paris agreement was enacted with full force, only two of the 32 top emitting countries — Morocco and Gambia — have actually “enacted policies consistent with holding global temperature rise from pre-industrial levels below 2 degrees Celsius by 2100, according to the Climate Action Tracker.”
Faced with public backlash (on the streets and at the ballot box) against costly climate policies that have raised energy prices, the European Union and Japan — the two main driving forces behind the demand for stringent emissions reductions — have enacted policies that have increased their greenhouse gas emissions since the Paris agreement was signed.
And there’s more from H. Sterling Burnettt in the American Spectator.
(Comment? Click “Leave a Comment” below.)
Recycling Goes Bust, So Interest Groups Seek Federal Help
In three recent articles by Waste Dive, an online newspaper that covers the waste-and-recovery industry, this picture emerges:
Recycling is in trouble, thanks in part to China’s decision in 2017 to stop accepting waste from other countries. Residential recycling, which has never made money, is cash-strapped.
What to do? Look for federal funds.
Fighting Fires with Finance
Wildfire is causing needless loss of life and resources. Last year, the Camp Fire that burned in northern California took 85 lives, destroyed nearly 19,000 structures, and burned 153,000 acres. Efforts to prevent a similar tragedy this year led to intentional blackouts that left millions without electricity. Yet the fires rage again, consuming 75,000 acres this year. Wildfires across the west burn on average 7 million acres annually.
Fire-fighting now takes up more than half of the Forest Service’s annual budget, leaving few dollars for restoring forests and preventing future fires. A century of fire suppression and decades of reduced commercial harvest have increased forest density and left an accumulation of fuels on the forest floor. Add that to a drier climate and residential development expanding on the forest edge, and the mix is a design for disaster.
‘I Get Attacked from People on Both Sides of the Issue’
Roy Spencer is a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and U.S. Science Team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer on NASA’s Aqua satellite. In a recent post on his blog he wrote:
One would think that the practice of science would be objective. I once believed this, too. As a fresh post-doc at the University of Wisconsin, when I discovered something new in satellite data, I was surprised to encounter NASA employees who tried to keep my work from being published because they feared it would interfere with a new satellite mission they were working toward. I eventually got it published as a cover article in the prestigious journal, Nature.
But the subject I was dealing with did not have the profound financial, political, policy, and even religious import that climate change would end up having. Furthermore, 35 years ago things were different than today. People were less tribal. There is an old saying that one should not discuss politics or religion in polite company, but it turns out that social media is far from polite company.
From a practical standpoint, what we do (or don’t do) about human-caused climate change supports either (1) a statist, top-down governmental control over human affairs that involves a more socialist political framework, or (2) an unconstrained individual-freedom framework where capitalism reigns supreme. So, one could easily be a believer (or non-believer) in the ‘climate emergency’ based upon their political leanings.
About this blog
This blog is about appreciating the environment and protecting it using the tools of economics. Your blog manager is Jane Shaw Stroup, a former senior fellow of the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC).
We are grateful to the Goodman Institute for providing this opportunity.
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Please note: We are affiliated with the Goodman Institute, a virtual think tank founded and operated by John Goodman. The institute’s mission is to find private alternatives to government programs that aren’t working. These areas include health care, taxation, entitlement, and environmental protection. John Goodman is one of the leading experts in health care, and the Goodman Institute works with many prominent thinkers.
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