Question: Why do you find graffiti on public bathroom walls but not on your own? Answer: Because you own your bathroom---and the rest of your house---so you have an incentive to take care of it. But "everybody" owns the public bathroom---and what everybody owns, nobody owns, and nobody has an incentive to take care of it. Question: Why are massive forest fires more likely to occur on publicly owned land (federal or state) than on privately owned land? Answer: For the same reason you … [Read more...]
Misleading Infographic about Climate Change and Wildfires
Someone recently wrote to us, "Wondering if you can help me with this? I've gotten myself into a friendly debate with a family member on climate change and he sent me this infographic. His argument is that combustion engines are bad for the environment and causing things like fires to happen. What would be a good rebuttal to this?" Here's the infographic: So, how to respond? The number of problems in that graphic is amazing. Here are some quick points: Mark Twain said there are … [Read more...]
EPA Takes Aim at Permian Basin in Continued War on Fossil Fuels
The federal Environmental Protection Agency has announced that from now through August 15 it will use infrared cameras mounted on planes to identify large emitters of methane from oil and gas wells in the Permian Basin, an area spanning west Texas and east New Mexico that supplies about 43 percent of the oil produced in America. The concern is that methane, a powerful “greenhouse gas,” contributes to dangerous global warming. It’s true that methane is about 30 times more powerful, molecule … [Read more...]
Are This Summer’s Heat Waves Extraordinary?
Are they driven primarily by global climate change? Want to know whether this summer’s heat waves in the United States are extraordinary—nay, even unprecedented—due to manmade global warming? Where should you go for solid, objective data? Obviously, to the authoritative source, the Environmental Protection Agency. So you go to its page titled “Climate Change Indicators: Heat Waves.” Immediately when the page opens up, this is what you see: There you have it: decade by decade, … [Read more...]
Should an Environmental Regulator Teach Old Laws to Do New Tricks?
Eight-and-a-half years ago, E&E News called Joseph Goffman a “law whisperer” because “His specialty is teaching an old law to do new tricks.” The epithet was well enough deserved that Harvard Law Today repeated it five years later. Now, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is considering Goffman’s nomination to become Assistant Administrator for Air and Radiation in the Environmental Protection Agency. What could possibly go wrong with a “law whisperer” in charge of EPA’s … [Read more...]
Lying with Statistics About American Electric Energy Sources
Back in 1954 journalist Darrell Huff published How to Lie with Statistics. The book exposed many different ways in which people use statistics, even true ones, to foist off falsehoods. Today while looking for data on trends in the numbers of operating coal- and natural gas-fired power plants in the United States I came across an interesting example of lying with statistics, this one promulgated by the U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA). The discussion that follows is rough; I don't claim … [Read more...]
Inflation and “Inflation”
The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today that year-on-year “inflation” through June was 9.1 percent, meaning the basket of goods constituting the “consumer price index” (CPI) that cost $100 a year ago cost $109.10 last month. That’s bad news, for several reasons. First, of course, it’s bad news because it means life gets tougher for everybody whose income isn’t enhanced by precisely those things that drive such “inflation”—meaning the vast majority of people. Second, it’s … [Read more...]
Sri Lanka: Canary in the Environmentalist Coal Mine
Last year the Cornwall Alliance reported on our blog that Sri Lanka was headed for serious trouble. Now, sadly, our prediction is coming true. The Associated Press (AP) calls Sri Lanka “a country hurtling towards bankruptcy, with hardly any money to import gasoline, milk, cooking gas and toilet paper.” In late June its prime minister said its economy had “collapsed.” Both he and President Gotabaya Rajapaksa agreed to resign in the face of mass protests that included crowds occupying their … [Read more...]
Could Glacier Melt Cause a Pandemic?
“Bacteria species found in glacial ice could pose disease risk as glaciers melt from global warming.” Such was the headline at Phys.org for an article announcing that Chinese researchers obtained snow, ice and cryoconite from several glaciers; attempted to grow the bacteria they scraped up; and sequenced all the DNA they found. The article went on to identify four potential threats that could lead to a new pandemic: I think the risk of glacier melt causing another pandemic is greatly … [Read more...]
Scientific Code of Values: Do Climate Alarmists Measure Up?
A few days ago I began reading Harold J. Berman's Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (1983). It's a scholarly tour de force covering an amazing range of subjects in law, history, theology, ecclesiology, and even the rise of science (particularly how Christian thought generated that). These paragraphs, from pages 155--6 and 157--8, particularly caught my attention: Although science, in the modern Western sense, has usually been defined only in methodological … [Read more...]
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