Search Results for: energy
We’ve Just Had the Best Decade in History
Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 percent of the world’s population for the first time. It was 60 percent when I was born. Global inequality has been plunging as Africa and Asia experience faster economic growth than Europe and North America; child mortality has fallen to record low levels; famine virtually went extinct; malaria, polio and heart disease are all in decline.
And here is the environmental good news: We are using less stuff:
The quantity of all resources consumed per person in Britain (domestic extraction of biomass, metals, minerals and fossil fuels, plus imports minus exports) fell by a third between 2000 and 2017, from 13.7 tons to 9.4 tons. That’s a faster decline than the increase in the number of people, so it means fewer resources consumed overall.
Let Environmentalists Bid
In this guest post by Shawn Regan, a research fellow and the director of publications at the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) in Bozeman, Montana, looks at the fact that to acquire rights to natural resources in the West, you must use the resource. This is an obvious barrier to many would-be environmentalist bidders.
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.
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Chance of Zero Emissions Is Zero
It’s futile to hope for zero carbon dioxide emissions, the former Prince Philip Professor of Technology at the University of Cambridge told the Global Warming Policy Foundation on November 10. Michael Kelly, a specialist in new semiconductor physics and technology and the manufacturability of semiconductor structures at the nanoscale, spoke on “Energy Utopias and Engineering Reality.” Some excerpts:
The main message is that our present energy infrastructure is vast and has evolved over 200 years. So the chances of revolutionizing it in short order on the scale envisaged by the net-zero target of Parliament is pretty close to zero; zero being exactly the chance of the meeting Extinction Rebellion’s demands.
What Happened to California?
Here’s Todd Royal of Law & Liberty on the forest fires in California:
What we are witnessing is a “man-made power outage problem” caused by Democratic Party-aligned environmentalists, activist judges, and the California Air Resources Board. Obama-era environmental regulations rewrote decades-old solutions to forest management by eliminating controlled fires to clear away dead foliage, and allowed plaintiffs attorneys and judges free reign to impose crushing judicial and regulatory costs for basic land management. If these regulations continue unabated then PG&E’s grid will continuously be shut off when hot winds affect their customer base.