“Biden Wants Minerals, but Mine Permitting Lags,” says a headline in E&E News‘s Greenwire. And the Washington Post asks: “Is Sustainable Mining Possible? The EV Revolution Depends on It.” If the minerals for electric vehicles are to be available, overly strict and lengthy environmental reviews must be curtailed or we must rely on China (and…
Category: ENVIRONMENT
How to Protect Eagles from Wind Turbines
A paper by Molly Espey and Eamon Espey says that tradable permits can reduce the killing of eagles and other birds by wind turbines. “By effectively creating a market for eagle take, wind energy producers would be forced to consider the marginal cost of killing an eagle and adjust their behavior accordingly, ” say the…
Regulation Is Holding Back Geothermal Energy
Geothermal energy, which comes from steam hidden beneath the earth’s surface, should be an attractive source of fuel these days because it is carbon-free. But its use right now is tiny. While Iceland gets 65 percent of its energy from geothermal sources, few other places do. That’s because Iceland exists on a fault line that…
Recycling Plastic Bottles: A Tangled, Costly Web
Major bottling companies like Pepsi-Cola and Coke are under pressure to produce more bottles out of recycled bottles, but recycled plastic bottles are increasingly scarce! As a result, recycled plastic is a more expensive raw material than virgin plastic. (The material used for bottles is polyethylene terephthalate, or PET.) The Wall Street Journal explains: “Recycled…
The Dangerous Turn to Conservation Syndicates
For 30 years, I was an appraiser and a frequent expert witness on the value of property. Sometimes government agencies would condemn property under eminent domain, and I would estimate what the agency should pay the owner; at other times, I estimated the value of land or easements given to a conservation group such as…