President Joe Biden’s climate and energy policies are one critical factor in his sinking poll numbers and in the dwindling chances that the Democrats will keep either house of Congress in the mid-term elections. Biden’s and the Democrats’ fortunes are falling almost as fast as the average American’s energy, food, and fuel prices are rising….
Category: H. Sterling Burnett
Hypocrisy, Thy Name Is Climate Alarmists
Global elites regularly decry the supposedly “existential” threat purported human-caused climate change poses to the environment, civilization, and even human survival. These same elites propose policies intended to avert global climate disaster, almost all of them involving ending the use of fossil fuels and fundamentally changing how people live—forcing people to live in high-density urban…
Do I Want an Electrical Vehicle? My Personal Assessment
Sterling Burnett, Ph.D. (hburnett@heartland.org) is a senior fellow at The Heartland Institute, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research center headquartered in Arlington Heights, Illinois. I’ve been thinking about electric vehicles a lot lately. My wife and I take pleasure trips every year—sometimes three- or four-day getaways, sometimes week-long vacations, sometimes longer journeys. Many of these trips are…
An Unsettling Book about the State of Climate Science and Policy
On May 4, the day of its release, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What it Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, by physicist Steven E. Koonin, became the top-selling book on Amazon Kindle in the categories “Weather,” and “Climatology.” In just over 12 hours since its official launch Unsettled was the second-best selling book in…
Where Are the Eco-tourists’ Dollars?
Reports from Africa confirm what I’ve written about the continuing criticality of hunting to wildlife conservation, along with the inability, unwillingness, or lack of awareness of the need for the eco-tourism industry to step up to the plate, replace hunters’ dollars, and protect wildlife. Domestic and international travel bans and internal economic shutdowns brought international…
The Right Way Forward on the Antiquities Act
As I previously discussed here, the Antiquities Act is probably unconstitutional, and by modifying the size of two monuments, Grand Staircase/Escalante and Bears Ears, President Trump has reined in its worst excesses. But the law remains. While no president has ever undone a national monument designation entirely, as John Yoo and Todd Gaziano explain in a study published by the American Enterprise Institute, previous presidents have downsized national monuments on 18 occasions and modified the management of a number of other monuments. No presidential action to downsize or change the management of a monument has ever been successfully challenged in the courts, however, so it is likely Trump’s actions are legal and will withstand judicial scrutiny. Trump has yet to act on Zinke’s other recommended monument changes and it is unclear if he will.
Although I think Trump’s actions are justified and, indeed, that he should reverse and rescind more monument designations, in truth no president’s actions alone can fix the problems inherent to the dictatorial, entirely undemocratic, and arguably unconstitutional Antiquities Act. As Trump and other presidents before him have shown, what one president establishes as a monument, later presidents can modify.
Indeed, Trump himself yielded to the siren song luring Presidents to declare national monuments. Less than a year after he dramatically reduced the size of two national monuments, he designated 525 acres in Kentucky, once the site of a civil war camp and depot, the Camp Nelson National Monument.