[Editor's Note: The announcement December 27, 2018, by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that it is revising cost findings behind its Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) ignited a firestorm of complaints on the ground that mercury is a known neurotoxin that can cause brain damage in infants and young people. While that is true, it's also true that the risk depends greatly on the degree of exposure---and there is compelling evidence that mercury emissions from coal-fired … [Read more...]
Why Christmas Won Over Greek Philosophy: PLATO . . . PARALLEL UNIVERSE . . . LOGOS
Logos (translated as “Word”) is a Greek idea first articulated by Heraclitus (535 - 475 BC). It postulated that our world makes sense because alongside our marvelous physical universe exists a parallel realm of reason and thought. Plato (428 - 348 BC ?) thought of Logos as the realm of truth, a parallel universe of Forms (including ideas, language and logic). That realm of Logos, Plato assumed, pre-existed our material world. The visible cosmos may be like a shadow, copy, or image of that true, … [Read more...]
Dumping CCS Is the Right Decision
Every once in a while—well, a lot more often than I wish—I miss a big story related to climate change and climate policy. Week before last, on my birthday, I missed a really big one: the decision by the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to reverse a critical piece of Obama-era energy regulation. Acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler—whom President Donald Trump nominated the following week to become permanent Administrator—announced December 6 that EPA would liberate … [Read more...]
A Million Here, a Million There—Pretty Soon You’re Talking about Real Penguins
Eighty years ago, a museum curator aboard a fishing trawler in the Indian Ocean got a shock felt around the world. In a net full of mundane fish, he found one he'd never expected to see. It was a coelecanth. Why hadn't he expected to see it? Because ichthyologists (fish scientists) believed it had gone extinct 65 million years before. Yet there it was, flopping around, all too alive to have gone extinct 65 million years ago. The discovery shook the world of marine biologists. Fast forward … [Read more...]
Is the Case for Drastic Climate Policy a Case of Misplaced Expertise?
Jonah Goldberg, writing about climate change and climate policy (yes, there really is a difference between the two) in National Review, hit the nail on the head when he said, "expertise doesn’t necessarily transfer over from one field to another." What he had in mind was the silliness of thinking that climate scientists, because they are (we'll concede the point for the sake of argument) experts about climate, are therefore also experts about what to do about it (assuming anything should be … [Read more...]
Are We “Lukewarmers”?
A friend of the Cornwall Alliance wrote us recently, saying: I've just read Roy Spencer's Global Warming Skepticism Busy People, and I am a little surprised at how much he concedes to the alarmists, e.g., there is warming, it is partially anthropogenic, a majority of scientists do believe in anthropogenic warming, a rise of 5 degrees Centigrade would be a problem, etc. Are these all positions with which Cornwall Alliance agrees? Roy describes himself early in the book as a "lukewarmer." Is … [Read more...]
Will Fighting Climate Change Make the World Cleaner?
This is the fourth and last in a series of answers to a common, popular defense of drastic measures to combat manmade global warming. For the first, click here; for the second, click here; and for the third, click here. Bob’s final argument was this: “On the other hand, if climate change isn’t our fault but we choose to act like it is, we still end up with a world less polluted and more enjoyable. And we will have done everything we can to protect the creation we have been made stewards of. I … [Read more...]
Is Failure to Fight Climate Change Really Suicidal?
This is the third in a series of answers to a common, popular defense of drastic measures to combat manmade global warming. For the first, click here, and for the second, click here. The third and fourth points “Bob” made were these: “For most people, I think this would be a no-brainer issue if it weren’t politicized. But if the above two points are true, your political party affiliation doesn’t matter. Desiring to see the world less polluted is non-partisan. Practically, if there is ANY … [Read more...]
Is Fighting Climate Change Really Fighting Pollution?
This is the second in a series of posts answering a popular way of defending drastic efforts to reduce global warming that I encountered recently on social media. For the first, click here. The second point “Bob” made was this: “Whether you think climate change is manmade or not, I don’t know a single person who likes pollution. Everyone I know loves experiencing the beauty of our planet and thinks it’s a good idea to preserve and conserve what we have. No one wants a mini-continent of plastic … [Read more...]
Are There Really No Downsides to Fighting Global Warming?
Recently, on a social media platform I won’t name, a well-meaning person summarized in classic form the typical layman’s—and, to be candid, the typical politician’s—case in favor of drastic efforts to reduce manmade global warming. That offers a great opportunity to answer in clear, simple terms that other laymen can use. So, here and in parts two, three, and four, I’ll present his case, and my responses. To begin with, Bob (not his real name) wrote, “I don’t know any person over 20 years old … [Read more...]
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