Sweeping election promises are easy, especially when the media don’t examine them. But once the election is over (or nearly over), the truth starts coming out. Juliet Eilperin and Dino Grandoni write in the Washington Post that, yes, last February Biden told a New Hampshire town hall: “And by the way, no more drilling on…
Tag: Parks
Nuclear energy . . . the Great American Outdoors bill . . . Anesthetics can change climate?
Nuclear energy may be safer than we think, says a new study from the Global Warming Policy Foundation. A reason to support the Great American Outdoors bill, just passed by the Senate: it would fund maintenance of our national parks, says PERC’s Brian Yablonski on Fox News. Religious diversion? The Vatican recommends divestment from fossil…
Monumental Abuse of the Antiquities Act, Part I
The 1906 Antiquities Act was one of the most ill-considered laws ever written, giving presidents dictatorial power to declare large swaths of the public’s land off limits to a variety of uses normally allowed on federal lands. Under President Barack Obama, this power turned into a monument acquisition spree.
The Antiquities Act grants the president discretionary power “to declare by public proclamation historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest … to be national monuments.” Congress originally passed the law as an emergency measure to prevent the looting of antiquities on Indian lands. It was intended, as the debate surrounding it shows, only to be used when public lands or artifacts faced immediate threats of destruction and the normal pace of congressional action might take too long to prevent harm.
Are Global Skeptics Dying Off?
Richard Lindzen, emeritus professor of meteorology at MIT, suggested at a recent meeting that prominent scholars who were skeptical about global warming are being replaced by a generation of students of climate science—which, he says, is often not science at all.
For the past 30 years, ever since global warming became a public issue, Lindzen has questioned the apocalyptic view of climate change. As the topic rose to public attention in the late 1980s, Lindzen was so prominent that his views could not be ignored. Richard Kerr wrote in Science magazine in 1989 that “no other U.S. skeptic has such scientific stature.”
But over time, Lindzen became a target of hostility from advocates of global warming extremism. More disturbing perhaps were sometimes subtle attacks by his colleagues, including editors of peer-reviewed journals. For example, as he recounted in 2008, the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society published a paper, written with colleagues, that found a strong cooling effect from clouds. But the Bulletin then published a paper disputing this cooling effect without giving Lindzen and his coauthors the opportunity to respond in the same issue (the normal practice). And American Scientist, the journal of the scientific honor society Sigma Xi, refused to publish an article by Lindzen unless he found as a coauthor someone who differed with him on global warming!
What Went Wrong with the Obama-Era “Waters” Rule?
In his new PERC policy paper, R. David Simpson reports on his experience reviewing the cost-benefit analysis of an Obama-era regulation defining “WOTUS.” (In Washington lingo, that is “waters of the United States.”) Simpson, an economist formerly with the Environmental Protection Agency, expresses regret that he did not press harder to improve the EPA’s cost-benefit analysis of the rule, issued in 2015. The rule was designed to extend the federal government’s jurisdiction over U.S. waters under the Clean Water Act, bringing relatively isolated streams and wetlands under government regulation.
“Should EPA Reverse Its Endangerment Finding on Greenhouse Gases?”
Treating carbon dioxide as an air pollutant is somewhat ironic since carbon dioxide is well-known as a gas that enriches plant growth. Undoubtedly, there is more to come.
Is There an Extinction Crisis?
Does the world face the extinction of 1 million species due to human activity? A UN Report says so.
An intergovernmental group sponsored by the United Nations announced that the world is facing the extinction of 1 million species, all because of human activity. “Nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history — and the rate of species extinctions is accelerating,” said its news release.