Ideologies have financial costs. One such ideology is exemplified by the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) Wild Horse and Burro Program. In 1971, Congress banned the hunting of wild horses and burros on public land. The genesis of the movement stemmed from the work of Velma B. Johnston who was upset with the manner in which people captured and used wild horses for commercial purposes. Unfortunately, when people confuse abuse with use and therefore ban human use of animals, bad things often … [Read more...]
NOAA Seeks to Expand Federal Oversight of Hawaiian Waters: New plan will limit use of Hawaiian coastal waters by surfers, fishermen and tourists
With the incredible recovery of humpback whales, NOAA recently proposed to delist them as an endangered species. The logical follow-up step is to dismantle the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary. Instead, NOAA is moving forward with a 24 million dollar proposal to expand their focus to much more than whales, while increasing regulations and restricting use and enjoyment of areas within the revised sanctuary boundaries. Located mostly in state waters, the current … [Read more...]
If they Could Put a Man on the Moon …
A couple of years ago a group of engineers and other scientists involved in the Apollo space program took interest in the debates over global warming. They called themselves The Right Climate Stuff, and they set out to make as objective assessments as they could of the arguments pro and con on global warming, human influence on it, and proposals to mitigate it. Lots of folks wondered why astronautical engineers should have thought they had anything special to contribute to the debate. Over the … [Read more...]
Vatican Postpones Release of Pope Francis’s Encyclical on Environment
Did Cornwall Alliance’s Open Letter to Pope Francis on Climate Change cause the Pope and his advisors to think twice? Maybe, maybe not. But “sources inside Santa Marta [where Pope Francis makes his home] are reporting that the Pope will not be publishing [the] already completed text [of the encyclical], and has—for the time being—tabled the entire project.” “The reason, according to [Vaticanist Sandro] Magister, is that the Pope realized that the document in its current state had no chance of … [Read more...]
Socialist Papal Advisor Caricatures Our Concerns about Forthcoming Encyclical
Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, thought by many to be Pope Francis’s closest advisor, went out of his way at a press conference in Rome before the start of an assembly of Caritas Internationalis, a federation of Catholic charities, to condemn efforts by the Cornwall Alliance, the Heartland Institute, and others who met in Rome in late April to present an alternative view to the global warming alarmists who have had Francis’s ear heretofore. “The ideology surrounding environmental issues is … [Read more...]
Cinematic Monkey Business: Self-Contradictions Among Hollywood’s Nature Loving, Anti-Capitalist Activists
While thinking about the storyline in Disney Nature’s new animal movie, MONKEY KINGDOM, we came across a funny contradiction in the movie’s story, and in many other animal documentaries, that shows a problem in the thinking of many of pro-environmentalist, animal-friendly activists. MONKEY KINGDOM’s story follows a troop of monkeys in the jungles of Sri Lanka. There is a strict pecking order to this monkey troop, which is led by alpha males. Maya is an adult female born into the lower class. … [Read more...]
World’s Poor Desperately Need Abundant, Affordable, Reliable Energy
Cornwall's "Open Letter to Pope Francis on Climate Change" drove home multiple scientific and economic reasons for Pope Francis to send Ban Ki-Moon and Jeffrey Sachs packing last Tuesday. But most important is this: The world's poor desperately need abundant, affordable, reliable energy, and Sachs and Ban would deprive them of it. Pope Francis should protect the poor by ensuring that no policy he embraces on climate will delay their gaining access to abundant, affordable, reliable electricity. … [Read more...]
Humpback Whales Ignore Global Warming Hype
NOAA recently proposed removing most of the world’s humpback whales from the endangered species list, and for good reason. Whales are back. With many species hunted nearly to extinction at the turn of the 20th Century, a number of factors are responsible for their incredible comeback. While rarely mentioned, one of the biggest factors in whale recovery is economic. As E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D., mentions in the documentary BLUE, nobody is concerned with running out of whale oil anymore, but … [Read more...]
Sustainable Churches
How can the government use the Church to spread the gospel of saving the planet? The EPA has just funded a little project to study the Christian Church in the US to answer just that question. As an anthropologist might scan the habits and thoughts of natives, the EPA is concerned to try to understand how one might channel the spiritual energies of the Christian Church to service an environmentalist agenda. The Church of Jesus Christ is on the defensive in the Western world, silenced by a love a … [Read more...]
Hydrocarbon Use and Human Material Wellbeing: A Case Against Mitigating Global Warming by Reduced Fossil Fuels Use—Talk Given in Rome, Italy April 28, 2015
I have a very simple point to make for you today: that because human material wellbeing depends heavily on access to abundant, affordable, reliable energy, and because fossil fuels are and for the foreseeable future will be, along with nuclear, our best source of such energy, the demand to reduce our use of fossil fuels to reduce our CO2 emissions to reduce manmade global warming amounts to a demand to reduce human material wellbeing. I’m going to illustrate that with 8 simple slides … [Read more...]
