Do Health Risks from Mercury Justify Stringent Regulations on Coal-Fired Power Plants?

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[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 […]

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Why Christmas Won Over Greek Philosophy: PLATO . . . PARALLEL UNIVERSE . . . LOGOS

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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

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A Million Here, a Million There—Pretty Soon You’re Talking about Real Penguins

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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

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Is the Case for Drastic Climate Policy a Case of Misplaced Expertise?

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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

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Are There Really No Downsides to Fighting Global Warming?

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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

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