Search Results for “water” – Page 4

Are Conservation Leases the Key to Resolving Competing Demands on Public Lands?

Posted on May 16, 2023May 19, 2023 by Shawn Regan

This guest post by Shawn Regan is a substantive analysis of the recent proposal by the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management to allow leasing of public land for conservation purposes. Regan is vice president of research at the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) in Bozeman, Mont.

Most conservation issues involve balancing competing uses of natural resources. Should a parcel of land be developed for energy production, harvested for timber, grazed by livestock, managed as wildlife habitat, or set aside as open space? In a world of scarce resources, the main question is: How do people best resolve these competing demands?

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What’s This Chevron Precedent and Why Does It Matter?

Posted on May 8, 2023 by Jane Shaw Stroup

The Supreme Court has agreed to take up a case (Loper Bright Enterprises et. al vs. Raimondo) that will revisit a past Supreme Court decision known as the “Chevron precedent.” If the Court overturns or modifies that precedent, it would weaken agencies’ power to regulate. A group of New Jersey fishing companies has sued the…

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Are There Profits in Landfill Gas? One Big Waste Firm Says Yes

Posted on April 7, 2023April 7, 2023 by Jane Shaw Stroup

Waste Management, the nation’s largest waste hauler, has a big idea: Invest heavily in extracting natural gas from landfills. Natural gas has a lower “carbon footprint” than other fossil fuels, and Waste Management (WM) has a lot of landfills. Landfills emit methane, a greenhouse gas. But it can be captured and used or sold as…

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How Concerned Should We Be about “Forever” Chemicals?

Posted on April 6, 2023April 6, 2023 by Jane Shaw Stroup

Industries such as food packaging are nervously trying to get rid of PSAS or “forever chemicals,” as the EPA takes its first step in regulating them. April Reese writes in Waste Dive: “PFAS—a group of thousands of synthetic chemicals once prized for their resistance to oil, grease, water and heat—have been used in hundreds of…

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Trade-Offs: Biden’s Push for Bio-energy from Agriculture Worries Environmentalists

Posted on April 5, 2023 by Jane Shaw Stroup

The “Inflation Reduction Act” will provide $140 billion in agricultural “tax incentives, loans and grants” to promote energy. Environmentalists are not happy. Keith Schneider of the New York Times: “Despite pushback from environmental groups concerned about increased pollution from farm waste, developers across the country see opportunities to build ambitious renewable energy projects to convert…

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Wednesday Highlights

Posted on March 1, 2023March 1, 2023 by Jane Shaw Stroup

India is expanding coal mining. The government has “reopened old coal mines, carved out new ones, and, perhaps most telling, extended contracts to private mining companies for longer periods,” says Karishma Mehrotra in the Washington Post.
$375 million here; $2 billion there. The Dept. of Energy is lending money to private firms to produce mineral components for electric vehicles, says Jeff St. John of Canary Media.
A federal public/private partnership is offering $10 million in federal funds for “recycling, reuse and remanufacturing R&D projects.” (Pocket change compared with the above.)
William McGurn talks sense about East Palestine chemicals in the Wall Street Journal.
“The force-fed energy transition to renewable fuels is destabilizing the U.S. electric grid,” writes the Wall St. Journal editorial board.

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