Yesterday President Donald Trump announced 2 million acres of reductions in the size of two tracts of land---Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase-Escalante, set aside by President Obama as national monuments under the 111-year-old Antiquities Act. Predictably, Green lobbyists are up in arms. Ordinary citizens---not so much. Conservatives are celebrating, particularly because Trump's action is a move back toward federalism. As Shawn Regan writes in National Review, the act "allows … [Read more...]
Obama Administration’s EPA Caught Illegally Using Social Media To Push Agenda
Judicial Watch has caught the Obama era EPA red handed breaking federal law. It is illegal for a federal agency to attempt to sway public opinion, but that's exactly what they did. They used non-governmental groups who supported proposed policies, specifically the Waters of the United States rule and the Clean Power Plan, and gave them a way to use social media to change public opinion. I don’t want it to look like EPA used our own social media accounts to reach our support goal’ – EPA Director … [Read more...]
The Paris Agreement: A Fairytale’s Failure
The Paris Agreement is all set to become a massive failure. Major member states of the Paris agreement are set to miss the deadlines to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions. Why is it a debacle? The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) states that the Paris Agreement’s aim is to limit the global temperature rise to below 1.5–2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, by the end of this century. To accomplish this target, it required member states to commit … [Read more...]
Ending ‘Sue-and -Settle’ Extortion
Last week, federal Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt issued a directive aimed at reducing “sue-and-settle” lawsuits. For those who like voters to have input in the creation of environmental regulation, this is a great move. For decades, environmental advocacy groups have exerted outsized influence—and profited financially—from “friendly” lawsuits against the EPA. These lawsuits have been a conduit for activists inside and outside the EPA to get new regulations in … [Read more...]
Time to End Ethanol Mandate and Subsidies
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...]
What Unintended Consequences Accompany Mandatory Evacuations for Hurricanes?
While Hurricane Irma was making its way through the Caribbean as a Category 5 storm, the National Hurricane Center predicted that it would veer north before reaching Florida; then that it would veer north a little later, skirting Florida's Atlantic coast and bringing devastation; then that it would veer north still later, plowing right into Miami and then working its devastating way north; then that it would veer north later yet, skirting the Gulf coast and spreading devastation all along … [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...]
Dear Media: We Don’t Have to Agree to Have Intelligent, Friendly, Discourse
If you search the Web for my name and Cornwall Alliance, you’ll see that we’ve been the target of vicious attacks over the years, including several just in the past couple of months. They’re built on fallacies like guilt by association, post hoc, ad hominem abusive, ad hominem circumstantial, straw man, hasty generalization, and more, and thoroughly misrepresent our position and our reasons for it. (Ah, but who cares about logic nowadays? They don’t teach it much in school anymore.) That … [Read more...]
Repairing, updating, and expanding infrastructure: The Trump infrastructure permitting order is a good start, but there’s room for strengthening
One of the biggest barriers to investment in infrastructure all across the United States is the long, costly, and unpredictable permitting process. If you have any doubts, just consider the Keystone XL pipeline extension. Proposed by TransCanada in 2008, approved by the Canadian government and the State of South Dakota in 2010, it floundered around in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Interior Department, and State Department for another five years before President Barack Obama … [Read more...]
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