The following photographic essay illustrates the changing landscape at California’s Yosemite Valley and undermines the myth of a static “balance of nature.” The author, Shawn Regan, is vice president of research at the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC). The photograph above shows Yosemite Valley in 1899 (left) and today (right). If it seems like…
Search Results for: environmental management
‘Negligible’ Fishermen Sue to Stop New England Wind Project
The long-planned Vineyard Wind 1 Project, to be located south of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket islands off the shore of Massachusetts, has hit turbulence again. In December, an arm of the Texas Public Policy Foundation sued the federal government on grounds that it was wrong to approve the project. The foundation is representing six fishing…
Is the Interior Department Leasing More Land for Oil and Gas than Trump Did?
An investigative report by Adam Federman in the Washington Post says that the Biden administration is issuing oil and gas permits at a rate faster than Trump did. “Between Jan. 20 and Oct. 31, the Bureau of Land Management [part of the Interior Department] approved 3,091 new onshore drilling permits—permits it could have deferred or…
The ‘Academic Mobbing’ of a Senior Climate Scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder
I recently wrote a post about a lecture given by Roger Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. The lecture was based on the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and indicated that carbon dioxide emissions are less than previously expected and that most kinds…
The West Is a Fire Plain. Get Over It.
Guest author Randal O’Toole has a degree in forestry from Oregon State University and has spent several decades studying forest policy. He is the author of six books, including Reforming the Forest Service, and author of The Perfect Firestorm: Bringing Forest Service Wildfire Costs under Control, a Cato Institute Policy Analysis. Every summer, smoke from…
Prosperity Improves the Environment (We Knew That but Many Don’t)
The 2020 Environmental Performance Index shows a close relationship between environmental success and a country’s GDP. This annual index, developed jointly by the Yale Center for Environmental Policy and Law and the Center for International Earth Science Information Network at Columbia University, ranks 180 countries. Writing on HumanProgress.org, Ethan Yang finds that wealth and environmental…