Cato Institute "Renewable energy is quite literally the energy of yesterday. Few seem to realize that we abandoned 'green' energy centuries ago for five very good reasons." (03/29/11)
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=12922"Ever wonder what it would take to cut carbon dioxide emissions 60 percent by the year 2050 to fight the alleged global warming crisis? In Europe, according to a European Union plan announced yesterday, one of the requirements will be banning automobiles from cities. What happens if you live in a suburb?" (03/29/11)
http://tinyurl.com/4uxqpgn"The UK has rejected proposals from the EU which call for a ban on petrol and diesel cars from city centres by 2050. The European Commission said phasing out 'conventionally fuelled' cars from urban areas would cut reliance on oil and help cut carbon emissions by 60%. But UK Transport Minister Norman Baker said it should not be 'involved' in individual cities' transport choices." (03/29/11)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12879566"The Mojave, where the sun shines more than 300 days a year, would seem like a perfect home for the solar hub — unless you happen to be a threatened desert tortoise, in which case you can kiss your burrow goodbye. Across the country, environmentalists are finding themselves in the awkward position of having to choose between clean energy and wildlife: In the Midwest, wind farms ensnare bats and migrating birds, and hydropower dams in the Northwest decimate salmon spawning grounds." (03/11)
http://tinyurl.com/4cd6kzj"Chevron Corp. (CVX) won a bid to extend a court order barring Ecuadorean residents from enforcing an $18 billion judgment against the oil company until its racketeering case against the villagers and their lawyers is decided. U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan said in a ruling today that Chevron faced 'imminent' and 'irreparable' harm to its business relationships and reputation. ... Chevron acquired Texaco in 2001. Chevron, the second-largest U.S. oil company, was ordered Feb. 14 to pay as much as $18 billion in compensatory and punitive damages for Texaco’s alleged dumping of toxic drilling wastes in the Ecuadorean jungle from 1964 to about 1992." (03/08/11)
http://tinyurl.com/4hq298z"Sitting in on a March 1 Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) press conference regarding global warming and heavy snowfalls, I couldn’t help feeling like the chairman of the Senate committee questioning mafia capo Frank Pentangeli in Godfather II. The chairman, listening incredulously as Pentangeli contradicts a sworn written statement he had earlier given to the committee, waves the written statement in the air and protests, 'We have a sworn affidavit — we have it — your sworn affidavit…. Do you deny that confession, and do you realize what will happen as a result of your denial?'" (03/07/11)
http://tinyurl.com/4rwwjzg"The U.S. has approved the first deepwater drilling permit in the Gulf of Mexico since BP's massive oil spill. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement announced Monday that it issued a permit to Noble Energy Inc. to continue work on its Santiago well about 70 miles southeast of Venice, La. Drilling will resume nearly one year after BP's blowout created the worst offshore spill in U.S. history." (02/28/11)
http://tinyurl.com/67wzxd8"Eco-towns -- remember them? For a while they was a flagship New Labour project. Then they became a flagging New Labour project. And now? 'As it stands, it’s up to the local authorities whether they get built,' came the rather non-committal response from the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG)." (02/24/11)
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/10238/"The New Hampshire House voted yesterday to end the state’s participation in a cap-and-trade program aimed at reducing carbon emissions at the end of the year. The House voted 246-104 for a bill that would repeal the law under which the state joined the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. New Hampshire is one of 10 Northeastern states participating in a cap-and-trade program for carbon dioxide. Under the program, generators must reduce pollution or bid at auction for allowances giving them the right to produce certain amounts of carbon dioxide." (02/24/11)
http://tinyurl.com/45k38ws
Independent Institute "The e-mails leaked from the University of East Anglia in November 2009 produced what is popularly called 'Climategate.' They exposed the thoroughly unethical behavior of a group of climate scientists, mainly in the UK and US, involved in producing the global surface temperature record used and relied on by governments. Not only did these climate scientists hide their raw data and their methodology of selection and adjustment of temperature data, but they fought hard against all attempts by independent outside scientists to replicate their results." (02/21/11)
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2991"A University of Georgia scientist has gone public with video and slides showing how oil from the BP spill remains stuck on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. The images demonstrate that the oil isn't degrading as hoped and has decimated life on parts of the sea floor." (02/20/11)
http://tinyurl.com/6xojxy6
Reason "How far might dematerialization go? In earlier work, Ausubel and Waggoner calculated that if the average productivity of the world’s farmers were raised to the current level of productivity of a corn farmer in Iowa, a world of 10 billion people could be fed an American diet on about half the farmland being used now." (02/15/11)
http://reason.com/archives/2011/02/15/deconsumption-versus-demateria"An Ecuadorean judge ruled Monday in an epic environmental case that Chevron Corp. was responsible for oil drilling contamination in a wide swath of Ecuador's northern jungle and ordered the oil giant to pay $9.5 billion in damages and cleanup costs. The amount — $8.6 billion plus a legally mandated 10 percent reparations fee — was far below the $27.3 billion award recommended by a court-appointed expert but appeared to be the highest damage award ever issued in an environmental lawsuit." (02/15/11)
"A Vermont brewery is giving new meaning to the idea of green beer. Magic Hat Brewing Co., of South Burlington, says it is the first site to use a device that turns spent grain from the brewing process into natural gas that is then used to fuel brewing operations. The 42-foot tall anaerobic methane digester, installed last summer, extracts energy from the spent hops, barley, and yeast left over from the brewing process." (02/14/11)
http://tinyurl.com/4msfxyz"Vowing to curb the authority and the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency, congressional Republicans are attacking the agency to a degree never seen in its 40-year history. The EPA’s effort to tackle the latest and perhaps most challenging environmental problem, global warming, has made it a central target of the new Republican leadership’s antiregulatory agenda." (02/10/11)
http://tinyurl.com/4rdffux"In the first salvo of a new congressional battle over global warming, House Republicans charged Wednesday that emissions rules sought by the Obama administration would mean 'higher prices and fewer jobs.' 'Let’s face it, these regulations and others from EPA amount to a war on domestic coal,' Rep. Ed Whitfield, R-Ky., said of the Environmental Protection Agency's plan to use the Clean Air Act to curb greenhouse gases tied to warming temperatures." (02/09/11)
http://tinyurl.com/47tofn2 Reason "In his State of the Union speech a couple of weeks ago, President Barack Obama planned to 'win the future' by, among many other things, having the federal government 'invest' in 'clean energy technology — an investment that will strengthen our security, protect our planet, and create countless new jobs for our people.' But will investing in clean energy actually produce countless new jobs?" (02/09/11)
http://reason.com/archives/2011/02/08/seen-green-jobs-unseen-layoffs"Having a definition of 'green jobs' doesn't bring us any closer to understanding how they fit into an economic recovery." (01/12/11)
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=why_call_them_green Independent Institute "The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, created during the presidency of Richard M. Nixon, blew out 40 candles on its birthday cake recently. While EPA administrators and employees were congratulating themselves on some jobs well done — the amount of particulate matter being inhaled by Americans has fallen dramatically under the agency’s enforcement of the Clean Air Act, for example — after being reenergized by President Obama’s support for an activist 'green' policy agenda, it also has proposed or already approved new regulations that promise to hobble economic growth and add to the nation’s unemployment problem." (01/09/11)
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2957"As much as I try to follow the global warming debate I have yet to find one succinct article that outlines precisely what we should expect to see if there were NO global warming." (12/30/10)
http://tinyurl.com/38ntbjz"Governor Deval Patrick’s administration set an ambitious limit yesterday on statewide greenhouse gas emissions to be achieved by 2020, through a suite of new and existing policies that balance energy efficiency and reduced fossil fuel use with cost savings. Over the next decade, the plan aims to bring greenhouse gas emissions to levels that are 25 percent below those in 1990, the maximum possible limit allowed under the state Global Warming Solutions Act of 2008. That legislation mandates an 80 percent reduction in statewide greenhouse gas emissions by 2050." (12/30/10)
http://tinyurl.com/25dgf9j Independent Institute "In a nearly unanimous vote, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) just approved a statewide cap-and-trade scheme to limit emissions of CO2 from six hundred major industrial plants, starting in 2012. ... The regulations, if they go into effect, will create the largest market for carbon trading in the country. (Ten states including New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and the New England states are participating in a less extensive system known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which covers only electric utilities.)" (12/27/10)
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2948"[M]ainstream coverage has treated the disaster as an accident due to factors unique to particularities of the well. However ... the spill followed a consistent pattern of cost- and corner-cutting by BP, reflecting a clearly inadequate provision for the huge danger to the Gulf's battered ecology in the event of a major spill. These costs to the ecosystem, for which businesses typically are not held accountable, are therefore considered 'externalities' from the point of view of market exchange." (12/10)
http://www.zcommunications.org/bluewashing-by-rob-larson"The Obama administration, facing complaints from businesses who balked over the disclosure of what they see as confidential business information, on Monday said it would delay until as late as 2014 a measure to force companies to reveal the amount of fuel and solvents associated with greenhouse-gas emissions." (12/20/10)
http://on.wsj.com/gL5Gs5
Where the buffalo roam
by David Samuels
"The notion that people living on the Plains should cede their land to bison is rooted in a deliberately heretical 1987 article in the academic magazine Planning, titled 'The Great Plains: From Dust to Dust.' Authored by professors Frank and Deborah Popper (he teaches at Princeton and Rutgers; she teaches at Princeton and the City University of New York), it suggested that a large portion of the Great Plains — comprising most of Montana, the Dakotas, Wyoming, and parts of six other Western and Midwestern states — would become almost completely depopulated within a single generation, and should therefore be 'returned to its original pre-white state,' i.e., a bison range." (04/11)
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