In several books and papers Michael Mann, director of Penn State’s Earth System Science Center, has made charges against the Breakthrough Institute, an organization that seeks to use technology to solve environmental problems. In his newest book, Mann calls it “a group originally linked to fossil fuel interests that has more recently been called a…
Category: The Environmental Blog
We’re Energy-Independent Now, But We Won’t Be with Renewables
In Senate testimony on February 3, Mark Mills of the Manhattan Institute warned that replacing oil and gas with renewables will make the United States vulnerable to other countries—but barely reducing carbon dioxide emissions. “While the U.S. is essentially self-sufficient today in net hydrocarbon use, it is an importer of alternative energy materials and machines….
The Surprising Spread of Free Market Environmentalism
This is the second post by Shawn Regan of PERC, the Property and Environment Research Center, on “what free market environmentalists support.” Those who support the role of property rights and markets in environmental protection may not realize how many organizations agree with them. Here are a few examples (for others see Part I of…
‘An Extraordinary Act of Executive Fiat’
President Biden’s canceling the Keystone XL pipeline is “an extraordinary act of executive fiat that has few peacetime precedents in American history,” writes David Blackmon in Forbes. Added to its audacity is the disdain for the workers who have lost their jobs or will never get them. “In a statement reminiscent of Barack Obama’s famous…
Free Market Environmentalism Is Action, Not Theory
How a would-be academic discovered he was an ‘enviropreneur’ Wallace Kaufman, a regular contributor to this blog, describes his discovery of how profit-making projects can protect land. In the late 1950s what new college student with a social conscience didn’t think the world needed a better way of motivating people than profits? My parents had…
Cancellation of Keystone XL: A Win for China?
Daniel Turner, an advocate for energy production, writes in RealClearEnergy that President Biden’s decision to curtail the Keystone XL will cause Canadian oil to go to China rather than to the Gulf of Mexico. It will also give more business to Russia. (The 1200-mile pipeline, an extension of the original Keystone Pipeline, would go from…