Endangerment Finding delenda est
As the Punic Wars dragged on, Cato the Elder reportedly concluded every speech to the Roman Senate by proclaiming "Carthago delenda est"--"Carthage must be destroyed."
- Tuesday, September 4, 2018
Paul Driessen is a senior fellow with the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, nonprofit public policy institutes that focus on energy, the environment, economic development and international affairs. Paul Driessen is author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power, Black death
As the Punic Wars dragged on, Cato the Elder reportedly concluded every speech to the Roman Senate by proclaiming "Carthago delenda est"--"Carthage must be destroyed."
Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFÉ) standards were devised back in 1975, amid anxiety over the OPEC oil embargo and supposedly imminent depletion of the world’s oil supplies.
But recall, barely 15 years after Edwin Drake drilled the first successful oil well in 1859, a Pennsylvania geologist was saying the United States would run out of oil by 1878. In 1908, the US Geological Survey said we’d exhaust our domestic oil reserves by 1927; in 1939, it moved petroleum doomsday to 1952.
"Baby boomers" will remember Gilder Radner's Saturday Night Live character from the '70s--Emily Litella, who would launch into hilarious rants against perceived problems, only to discover that she had completely misconstrued what she was fuming about.
Not every poor person in impoverished places around the world aspires to the modern living standards they see and hear about: indoor plumbing, electricity for lights, a refrigerator and stove, a paucity of disease-carrying insects, top-notch schools and hospitals, their children living past age five. But many do.
We recently explained how Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) use manmade climate change alarmism to justify lending policies that reject funding for fossil fuel electricity generation, promote expensive and unreliable renewable sources, and thereby help keep impoverished nations poor.
"Foreign Operations" appropriation bills now working their way through Congress supposedly provide funding to "advance U.S. diplomatic priorities overseas," "increase global security," and continue "life-saving global health and humanitarian assistance programs for the world's most vulnerable populations."
You can understand their frustration, as the steady stream of radical environmentalist successes during the Obama years has been replaced with endless setbacks. Oil, gas and coal leasing, permits and production have risen significantly. Big Green just lost its first Big Cities v. Big Oil climate change shakedown lawsuit. President Trump pulled the USA out of the economy-wrecking, all-pain-no-gain Paris Climate Treaty and will soon nominate another Supreme Court justice.
The "mainstream media" remains riveted on alleged Trump-Russian collusion and how the Trump-Kim Jong Un deal will fail. But it mostly ignored reports on Russia-environmentalist collusion and China-environmentalist collusion--and milestones reached during the Trump Administration's first 500 days.
Saying the air traffic controller work force was "too white," the Obama Federal Aviation Administration allegedly replaced hiring standards based on science, math and ability to handle intense pressure with rules designed to increase racial diversity. It's hard to find a more flagrant example of bureaucrats putting people's safety and lives so low on their list of priorities. Difficult but not impossible.
Judge William Alsup has a BS in engineering, has written computer programs for his ham radio hobby, delves deeply into the technical aspects of numerous cases before him, and even studied other programming languages for a complex Oracle v. Google lawsuit.
Robert Mueller's politicized investigation into allegations that President Trump or the Trump campaign or some Trump associate somehow colluded with Russians continues unproven but unabated. Many think partisan politics ensure it will not be concluded or terminated before the fall 2018 elections.
Across the globe, genetically engineered (GE) crops face opposition from environmental and organic food activists, who claim the crops harm the environment and endanger human health.
How factual are their claims? The evidence strongly supports GE over organic crops.
Like most people I've spoken with, I have no innate, inflexible antipathy to ethanol in gasoline. What upsets me are the deceptive claims used to justify adding mostly corn-based ethanol to this indispensable fuel; the way seriously harmful unintended consequences are brushed aside; and the insidious crony corporatist system the ethanol program has spawned between producers and members of Congress.
Third Reich Forest Minister Hermann Goering was an avid hiker and ecologist who once sent a man to a concentration camp for cutting up a frog for fish bait. In 1933 he and other Nazi Party leaders enacted anti-vivisection laws to stop what he called "unbearable torture and suffering in animal experiments."
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt has proposed to end the longstanding EPA practice of using secretive, often questionable, even deceptive science to support agency policy and regulatory initiatives. His proposed rules will ensure that any science underlying agency actions is transparent and publicly available for independent experts to examine and validate--or point out its flaws.
This Earth Day (April 22) we need to ask whether environmentalism has gone completely bonkers.
Back in the 1970s, I skied Colorado's cross-country and downhill slopes pretty regularly. Some years were incredible: many feet of snow as glorious to behold as to ski on. Other years, like 1977, I'd come around a bend on my XC skis, see nothing but rock in front of me, and just ditch.
It's a good thing environmentalists have double standards--or they wouldn't have any standards at all.
Empire State legislators worry that anything above the current 0.0001% methane in Earth's atmosphere will cause catastrophic climate change, and that pipelines will disturb wildlife habitats. So they oppose fracking for natural gas in New York and pipelines that would import the clean fuel from Pennsylvania.
It's become a recurring, frustrating pattern, as legislators and regulators ignore the immutable laws of unintended consequences, to drive political agendas or aid favored constituencies, while harming others.
Anyone who thought "manmade climate cataclysm" rhetoric couldn't possibly exceed Obama era levels should read the complaint filed in the "public nuisance" lawsuit that's being argued before Federal District Court Judge William Alsup in a California courtroom: Oakland v BP and other oil companies.
The ultra liberal enclaves of New York City and San Francisco, Oakland, Santa Cruz, San Mateo, Marin, and Imperial Beach, California all claim to be deeply worried about manmade climate cataclysms. They detest petroleum, oppose pipelines, fracking and onshore and offshore drilling, and strongly support renewable energy and expensive electricity: already 17-18¢ a kilowatt-hour for families, rich and poor.