For generations economists have recognized the "problem of the commons." The phrase harks back to when villagers all shared a common pasture. The natural incentive for each villager was to graze as many livestock on it as he could, because if instead he restricted his herd so the demand on the pasture's grass growth was sustainable, his neighbors would run more livestock, the commons would still be exhausted, and he'd be left behind. When instead each person must own the land on which he grazed … [Read more...]
Fighting Global Warming—For Which Children’s Sake?
On May 14, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that the state's Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has failed to reduce the state's greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as required by Massachusetts's 2008 Global Warming Solutions Act (GWSA), which aimed to reduce the state's GHG emissions to 25% below the 1990 level by 2020 80% by 2050. The court ordered the DEP to “promulgate regulations that address … greenhouse gas emissions, impose a limit on emissions that may be released … … [Read more...]
Concerned Americans Tell Congress: Stop EPA Overreach on Greenhouse Gases
Washington, D. C. May 18, 2016 The Honorable Paul Ryan, Speaker U.S. House of Representatives Washington, D. C. Via e-mail Dear Mr. Speaker, The undersigned organizations write to express our concerns about federal agency overreach, especially the Environmental Protection Agency’s campaign to de-carbonize the U.S. electric power sector and dictate national climate policy. The Environmental Protection Agency’s climate-related regulations will have … [Read more...]
What does the Threat to Prosecute “Climate Deniers” Mean?
The threat by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and "AG's United for Clean Power" (a group of 17 attorneys general) to investigate and prosecute for fraud corporations and organizations questioning belief in manmade global warming so dangerous as to justify spending $Trillions to reduce it by fractions of a degree has some precedent. No, not in the prosecution of tobacco companies for covering up the evidence of their product's carcinogenicity. The biophysical link there was crystal clear … [Read more...]
Did Sea-Level Rise Swallow Five Pacific Islands?
"Going, going, gone. Five of the Solomon Islands have been swallowed whole by rising sea levels, offering a glimpse into the future of other low-lying nations." That was the lead sentence to Alice Klein's New Scientist article "Five Pacific islands vanish from sight as sea levels rise." The second sentence showed only slightly less panic: "Sea levels in the Solomon Islands have been climbing by 7 millimetres per year over the last two decades, due to a double whammy of global warming and … [Read more...]
Dangerous Global Warming—Now You See It, Now You Don’t
A picture can be worth a thousand words---especially if it's deliberately designed to mislead and scare people, because of course so many think "seeing is believing." That's why CAGW alarmists are so eager to show us pictures like this of the annual global surface temperature anomaly from 1850 to 2015: That comes from the UK's Met Office and shows (from three different data sources) the really frightening warming from about 1910 to about 1945 and the equally frightening warming from … [Read more...]
What Scientific Idiot Would Say this about Climate Change?
An email I received this morning included in its thread one from someone saying this: This morning I got out my little toy telescope and watched Mercury transiting the Sun. The striking fact was not the little black image of Mercury but the total absence of sunspots. I have seen many transits before this one, but never without sunspots. It seems the sun has gone to sleep as it did in the Maunder Minimum in the seventeenth century. In the seventeenth century we had the Little Ice Age and now … [Read more...]
How Theology Can, and Should, Contribute to Scientific and Public Discourse about Anthropogenic Global Warming
A paper presented to the Round Table on Theology, Climate Change, and Politics, University of Western Ontario, May 29, 2012 Paleoanthropologist and philosopher Loren Eiseley (1907–1977), who though religious in the tradition of American Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau was certainly no orthodox Christian theist, on reflecting on the kind of soil in which science could flourish, wrote, “In one of those strange permutations of which history yields … [Read more...]
Climate Litigation in a Topsy-Turvy World
Last month federal magistrate judge Thomas M. Coffin ruled that a lawsuit filed on behalf of 21 children and teenagers seeking damages from the federal government for its failure to fight climate change (enough) could go forward. His decision surprises many legal scholars, but Michael B. Gerrard, Director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law (I can't resist the temptation to refer to King Canute!) commented, It is the first time a federal court has suggested that government may have a … [Read more...]
Why Do Taxpayer-Subsidized Businesses So Often Fail?
Subsidize renewable energy? What a great idea! If you like wasting money. SunEdison, which once described itself as the "largest global renewable energy development company" and was America's fastest-growing renewable energy company, filed for bankruptcy April 21. It seems that $1.5 billion combined subsidies and loan guarantees (including $650 million in grants and tax credits---i.e., outright handouts) wasn't enough to make up for the combination of hubris-driven over-expansion, … [Read more...]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 48
- 49
- 50
- 51
- 52
- …
- 78
- Next Page »
