Voice For Liberty

Category: Environment

  • In Obama administration, transparency and science take backseat to politics

    President Barack Obama has promised to make transparency the standard for his administration. He also pledged to base decisions such as our nation’s energy policy on science.

    As reported on this site, the Competitive Enterprise Institute uncovered a series of email messages within the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that raise questions as to how seriously these goals are followed.

    What happened is that an EPA analyst prepared a report that challenged the orthodoxy of global warming. His report was suppressed — until CEI uncovered the emails.

    The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly A. Strassel explains all this very well in her article The EPA Silences a Climate Skeptic.

  • Kansans will be hurt by global warming bill

    The Waxman-Markey climate bill, soon to be considered by Congress, will harm all Americans. Here’s a look at what it would cost Kansans. Two examples:

    Higher cost for energy. “An average family could pay an additional $1,500 a year for energy.”

    Fewer jobs: “For Kansas this could mean a loss of 22 thousand jobs just a few years from now. If those jobs were lost today it would increase Kansas’ unemployment rate from 6.1 percent to 7.6 percent.”

  • EPA suppresses internal global warming study

    Is there any doubt that the crusade against global warming is motivated as much by politics as by anything else?

    The Competitive Enterprise Institute has uncovered an effort within the Environmental Protection Agency to suppress “scientific analysis of climate change because of political pressure to support the Administration’s policy agenda of regulating carbon dioxide.”

    Further: “The study the emails refer to, which ran counter to the administration’s views on carbon dioxide and climate change, was kept from circulating within the agency, was never disclosed to the public, and was not added to the body of materials relevant to EPA’s current ‘endangerment’ proceeding.”

    A CEI official said this: “This suppression of valid science for political reasons is beyond belief. EPA’s conduct is even more outlandish because it flies in the face of the President’s widely-touted claim that ‘the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over.’”

    A Washington Post headline from March stated “Obama Aims to Shield Science From Politics.” I guess they didn’t read that at the EPA.

    ABC News quoted Obama earlier this year as saying this: “Because the truth is that promoting science isn’t just about providing resources — it’s about protecting free and open inquiry. It’s about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology.”

    You can read CEI’s testimony, complete with the emails that prove its assertion, by clicking on Proposed Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act, Docket ID No. EPA-HQ-OAR-2009-0171.

  • Earthjustice meddles in Kansas again

    The radical environmentalist group Earthjustice is again meddling in Kansas energy policy. They’ve sent a “warning letter” to the Kansas Department of Health and Environment. You can read it at Proposed Kansas Coal Plant Draws Warning Letter.

    Earthjustice opposes the building of a coal-fired power plant in Kansas. Our former governor Kathleen Sebelius, because she opposed the plant, was a darling of Earthjustice. See Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius at Earthjustice.

    Earthjustice is simply misinformed in many ways. For example, the press release states: “The truth is building a new, dirty coal plant really only serves the interest of a few while overlooking the virtually free wind energy resources of Western Kansas.”

    Consider that the “virtually free” wind energy is supported by a federal subsidy with each spin of the turbine blades.

    Consider that Westar’s investment in wind power plus the natural gas plants necessary to back up the unreliable wind has caused the utility to ask for several rate increases in the past few years.

    What was that about “virtually free” again? The inexpensive energy a coal plant would produce is a benefit to all Kansans, especially low-income Kansans, as they can least afford the expensive energy produced by alternative sources.

    Then, the press release states “The Holcomb coal plant will send most of its power out of state while leaving pollution all over Kansas.”

    The writer doesn’t state specifically what type of pollution she means. But the plant was not refused a permit because of what we traditionally consider pollution: sulfur dioxide, mercury, etc. That’s because coal plants now are quite clean with regard to these pollutants.

    So that leaves carbon dioxide as the “pollutant” in question. Which, of course, isn’t a pollutant at all. And if it’s a problem, it’s a problem on a global scale, not just “all over Kansas.”

    Hopefully our governor will disregard the call of the leftists at Earthjustice and let Kansas get on with its business.

  • Environmental myths of the Left

    One of the powerful stories radical environmentalists — or any environmentalists for that matter — tell is how the river in Cleveland caught on fire. Water burning: that’s a real environmental disaster. Government must step in and do something!

    Today the Competitive Enterprise Institute tells the true story. It turns out that it was not capitalism gone wild that caused the fire, but too much government and lack of property rights.

    Progressivism, Not Capitalism, to Blame for Cleveland River Fire

    Washington, D.C., June 22, 2009 — Today is the 40th Anniversary of the famous Cuyahoga river fire in Cleveland, Ohio. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is celebrating the anniversary, because it “led to positive results, including creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and passage of major environmental laws such as the Clean Water Act in 1972 [which meant] we paid attention to how much pollution manufacturers were putting into waterways like the Cuyahoga. The legislation set limits on pollution, and gave EPA the power to fine industry for violating those limits.”

    Yet this received wisdom mischaracterizes what happened in 1969 and the reaction to it. Thanks to the work of free-market environmental scholars like Prof. Jonathan Adler of Case Western University (a former CEI scholar), we know the truth about the Cuyahoga River, which includes facts like:

    • The fire of 1969 was not regarded as a big deal in Cleveland. The Cleveland Plain-Dealer covered it in 5 paragraphs on page 11 and firefighters were quoted as calling the blaze “unremarkable.”
    • The fire was under control within 30 minutes and no TV crews made it there on time. The images most people remember were stock images of an earlier fire in 1952.
    • Local industry had in fact been trying to get the river cleaned up for decades. A paper company had sued to prevent the city dumping sewage into the river as early as 1936. A real estate company actually won a victory in such an attempt in 1965, but this was overturned by the courts.
    • What prevented clean-up was government control. The City of Cleveland claimed a “prescriptive right” to use the river as a communal dumping ground. The State of Ohio operated a permit system that encouraged using the river that way.
    • Cleanup actually started after the 1952 fire, with fish reappearing in 1959, although this was delayed because of state and local government control over the river.

    Competitive Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Iain Murray wrote about the Cuyahoga River Fire in his 2008 book, The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don’t Want You to Know About-Because They Helped Cause Them. Murray said “the Cuyahoga River Fire of 1969 is an environmentalist myth. It is a myth because it was a minor incident, and it is a myth because it actually demonstrated government’s role in environmental degradation.”

    Murray added that “real riparian property rights would have stopped the fires from ever happening. You don’t spit on your own doorstep. Instead, Cleveland declared common ownership and invited spitting.”

  • The Threat of Big Brother in Green Clothing

    From the Competitive Enterprise Institute. This organization, particularly its site GlobalWarming.org, is a great place to look for information about the true nature of global warming and climate change. The following announces the release of a video message that spotlights the real threat of global warming fear mongering.

    Sixty Years After the Publication of George Orwell’s Classic, Do We Face a Real “1984”?

    Washington, D.C., June 8, 2009 — Sixty years ago this week, George Orwell’s most important work of political fiction, 1984, was published. Orwell’s novel warned of the centralization of political power and the lengths that a totalitarian regime, led by Big Brother, would go to maintain its control over society.

    On this anniversary, the Competitive Enterprise Institute reminds those who value freedom of a more current threat — the crusade for global governance led by environmental activist groups in the name of combating global warming. With calls for limits on energy use, new global taxes and the regulation of individual behavior, the recent development of environmental policy has tended ever more toward greater government control and less personal freedom.

    “Environmental campaigners have long benefitted from the assumption that they have good intentions,” said CEI General Counsel Sam Kazman. “Unfortunately, the modern environmental movement has focused increasingly on policies that increase government control over what business can sell, what consumers can buy and what individuals can do with their lives. Truly harmful emissions have been successfully restricted for the most part. But with the war on carbon dioxide being escalated to extreme levels, as demonstrated in the new Waxman-Markey bill, we see expanding government control become a goal unto itself.”

  • ‘Story of Stuff’ video attempts to shame us into depression

    A video claiming that American-style capitalism is ruining the earth is making its way into our nation’s schools as “a sleeper hit in classrooms across the nation,” according to a story on the front page of the New York Times in May.

    It’s produced by one Annie Leonard, described in the Times as “a former Greenpeace employee and an independent lecturer.”

    It’s a depressing video to watch. For example, extraction is equal to “natural resource exploitation” which is the same as “trashing the planet.” Leonard says “We are running out of resources. We are using too much stuff. … We are trashing the place so fast, we are undermining the ability of people to live here. … We’re using more than our share.”

    But then I realized that many of the claims are exaggerated or false. Here’s an example of one of the many dubious claims Leonard makes: “Where I live, in the United States, we have less than 4% of our original forests left.” While this may be true, it’s misleading. She wants you to believe that after logging companies cut trees, they leave the land bare. The reality is the companies replant and manage the forests. So yes, they’re not the original forests. They might even be better.

    She leaves out the fact that these forests provided raw materials for heating our homes, for building those houses, and for printing books and newspapers.

    During production, “we use energy to mix toxic chemicals in with the natural resources to make toxic contaminated products.” Somehow this leads to whole wasting of communities. Also, the amount of pollution admitted to by industry is probably less than actual emissions, because well, you know how industry is.

    Then there’s distribution. It’s a problem because big box stores don’t pay their employees well and they skimp on health insurance as much as they can.

    She wonders how a radio can be sold for just $4.99. The answer, of course, is exploitation. She didn’t pay for the radio. Others did, by being exploited. (An example is workers paying for their own health insurance.)

    She makes more dubious claims, such as 99% of the “stuff” that is “run through the system” is “trashed” within six months.

    It’s all a plan, Leonard says, to make consumption of consumer goods the cornerstone of our lives. It’s accomplished through planned obsolescence and perceived obsolescence. That’s where we’re persuaded to throw out stuff that is still useful, but not fashionable.

    The progress in computers is criticized because what changes in a new computer is just a small chip in the corner. I think she’s referring to the processor, which leaves out all the advances in other parts of a computer, such as memory, storage, and communications. She learned this at “a workshop called ‘The Literal and Figurative Story of the Computer’ at the Environmental Grantmakers Association’s annual retreat in Mohonk New York in September 2005.”

    Advertising, she says, is designed to make us unhappy with what we have, so that we go shopping. That leads to a spending treadmill.

    “Yes, yes, yes, we should all recycle,” but it’s not enough, according to Leonard. Even if we could recycle 100% of our household waste, it wouldn’t be enough because of all the waste generated upstream in the production process. “70 garbage cans of waste were made upstream just to make the junk in that one garbage can you put out on the curb.” Really?

    Here’s what the Heritage Foundation’s blog had to say about this video: “The Story of Stuff highlights the very extreme left’s Greenpeace view of America. Essentially it tells the story of how America is not a nation to be proud of, and in fact, your child should be ashamed for living in it.”

    This video is really a masterful piece of propaganda, and I mean that in the worse sense of the word — an impartial presentation of information meant to influence. The stereotyped images used in the drawings that make up the film are sure to impress young children.

    The video’s anticapitalist message fails to recognize all the good that capitalism has done to raise the standard of living in the countries where it has been allowed to flourish. The grim picture that Leonard paints is largely a result of exaggeration and falsehoods. To the extent that harm has come to the environment in America, things are getting better. We in America, because of the tremendous wealth that capitalism has provided, have the luxury of considering the impact of our lives on the environment. In countries that don’t have freedom and capitalism, concern for mundane things like daily bread and heat take precedence over the environment.

    If you decide to watch this video, I recommend as an antidote reading Some Fundamental Insights Into the Benevolent Nature of Capitalism by George Reisman, in which he states: “Capitalism is a system of progressively rising real wages, the shortening of hours, and the improvement of working conditions.”

    Another good essay to read is Everything You Love You Owe to Capitalism by Lew Rockwell.

  • More doubt about man-made global warming

    The evidence that global warming is a man-made phenomenon continues to fall under sharp questioning and doubt. Here the Boston Herald editorializes about information presented at the Third International Conference on Climate Change, sponsored by the Heartland Institute and held last week in Washington:

    “New analyses of satellite data could mean that the scenario of a global warming disaster without large reductions in emissions of earth-warming gases could be about to shrink like a cheap suit in the rain.” (Cool it on warming, June 7, 2009)

    The editorial refers to the research of Dr. Roy Spencer, highlighted last week in my post Why climate models are wrong.

    From the Heartland Institute’s site, you can download and view a PowerPoint presentation by Spencer titled Why We Cannot Trust the IPCC Climate Models for Global Warming Predictions. (You’ll need to have PowerPoint installed on your computer to view the presentation. Or, you can download the free PowerPoint viewer from Microsoft by clicking here and following the instructions.)

    The scientific evidence that global warming is a problem primarily created by man’s activity continues to fall under doubt. We have to start asking why so many scientists cling to beliefs that, increasingly, appear to be founded on incorrect assumptions and models.

  • More myths of green jobs

    On its surface, a seemingly strong argument for adopting a national policy of increasing reliance on renewable energy is all the jobs and economic growth that will result. It’s claimed by some that the switch to so-called “green” sources of energy will pay for itself this way.

    But there are many doubters. Here, the Property and Environment Research Center — “the nation’s oldest and largest institute dedicated to improving environmental quality through markets and property rights” — publishes a report titled 7 myths about green jobs.

    Here are some excerpts:

    The costs of the green jobs programs proposed by various interest groups are staggering. For example, the UNEP (2008, 306) report concludes that “No one knows how much a full-fledged green transition will cost, but needed investment will likely be in the hundreds of billions, and possibly trillions, of dollars.”

    The scale of social change that would be imposed is also immense. Green jobs advocates propose dramatic shifts in energy production technologies, building practices, food production, and nearly every other aspect of life. These calls for radical economic changes are wrapped in green packaging. The promise is not only a revolution in our relationship with the environment, but the employment of millions in high paying, satisfying jobs. Unfortunately, the analysis provided in the green jobs literature is deeply flawed, resting on a series of myths about the economy, the environment, and technology.

    To attempt to transform modern society on the scale proposed by the green jobs literature is an effort of staggering complexity and scale. To do so based on the wishful thinking and bad economics embodied in the green jobs literature would be the height of irresponsibility. There is no doubt that significant opportunities abound to develop new energy sources, new industries, and new jobs. A market-based discovery process will do a far better job of developing those energy sources, industries, and jobs than can a series of mandates based on flawed data. The policy debate should be open so we can dispel the myths and focus on facts and analysis.

    Like they say, economics is the “dismal science.” There really is no such thing as a free lunch. Wishing otherwise can’t make it so.