Seven years ago Indur Goklany, an economist formerly with the U.S. Department of the Interior and associated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since its inception in 1988 as an author, expert reviewer, and U.S. delegate to the organization, concluded a thorough analysis of the effect of American biofuels policy on the world's poor with these words: ... the production of biofuels [in the U.S.] may have led to at least 192,000 additional deaths and 6.7 million additional lost … [Read more...]
Why do Ranchers Grouse about Federal Regulations to Protect Sage Grouse?
One of the basic principles of environmental stewardship is that the people closest to a problem are likely to understand it best. Yes, there might be exceptions when experts from outside can come to understand it better, but what really happens in those instances is that the outsiders get up close. If they don't, they won't. A great illustration of this is the unintended consequences of federal regulations meant to protect sage grouse, an allegedly endangered species in some of the American … [Read more...]
WHILE THE WEST BURNS, NO ONE NOTICES
Twenty-nine years ago record drought and fires hit the West and no one seemed to notice. Frustrated, I sent query letters to the three largest East Coast newspapers, and to my surprise, The New York Times answered. My article on the West’s drought and fires ran in August 1988 in the New York Times Magazine and was syndicated and distributed world-wide. Here we are again. In many areas of the Northern Great Plains the 2017 drought and fires are worse. And again, the news media is hardly … [Read more...]
How Ideologues Abuse Power in Professional Associations—Exhibit A: AMS Letter to Pruitt
By now everybody knows that the national academies of science of the world's top countries, and various professional scientific associations, and in short all people with brains firmly believe that human emissions of carbon dioxide have been the primary driver of global warming/climate change for the past half century. But what most people don't know is that those organizations' official positions on the matter rarely reflect the considered opinions of their members. They tend to be adopted … [Read more...]
Has NOAA’s “Pausebuster” Been Busted?
“The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him.”—Proverbs 18:17 Major news outlets and the climate change-focused blogosphere erupted over the last few days with the The Daily Mail’s publication February 4 of David Rose’s “Exposed: How world leaders were duped into investing billions over manipulated global warming data.” Rose reported serious data mishandling behind a study published in Science (Karl et al.) in 2015 by NOAA’s Tom Karl, Thomas … [Read more...]
EPW Chairman Introduces Cornwall Letter Supporting Pruitt EPA Nomination into Hearing Record
As I write, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt's confirmation hearing before the U.S. Senate Environment & Public Works Committee is in lunch recess. Shortly before recess, committee Chairman John Barrasso (R-WY) introduced the Cornwall Alliance's open letter supporting Pruitt into the record: I’d like to submit to the record as well, having heard that some of my Democratic colleagues have concerns that Attorney General Pruitt is not open to the finding of science, especially as it … [Read more...]
Global Warming: Policy Hoax versus Dodgy Science
By Dr. Roy Spencer In the early 1990s I was visiting the White House Science Advisor, Sir Prof. Dr. Robert Watson, who was pontificating on how we had successfully regulated Freon to solve the ozone depletion problem, and now the next goal was to regulate carbon dioxide, which at that time was believed to be the sole cause of global warming. I was a little amazed at this cart-before-the-horse approach. It really seemed to me that the policy goal was being set in stone, and now the … [Read more...]
What Would the Precautionary Principle Imply for Ethanol?
In 2007 Congress passed a law requiring the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to study and report every three years to Congress on the environmental impact of EPA’s ethanol mandate. And in the intervening nine years, EPA has complied with the law once—in 2011. Now it says it’ll be 2024 before it can manage it again. So by the time it should have filed five such reports and be working on its sixth, EPA expects to file its second. Meanwhile, multiple studies not done by EPA have … [Read more...]
Can We Defend Liberty against a Militarized EPA?
Did you know that the federal Environmental Protection Agency spends millions of dollars on guns, body armor, camouflage equipment, unmanned aircraft, amphibious assault ships, radar and night-vision gear, and other military-style weaponry and surveillance activities? You read that right—EPA, not the Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marines. Why? Because EPA regulations are so ubiquitous, so onerous, and so contrary to the spirit of our freedom-loving nation that ordinary Americans find … [Read more...]
Justice Antonin Scalia, 1936-2015
Justice Antonin Scalia, a champion of originalist Constitutional interpretation and one of the most brilliant justices in the history of the Supreme Court, died today. His strict adherence to the text of the Constitution made him the champion of every friend of liberty and the opponent of every attempt by government to exceed its Constitutional limits. One of his most recent opinions for the majority related to Cornwall Alliance's core concerns came in Michigan v. EPA last summer, in which the … [Read more...]
