Environment
OSPRI’s Bill Felkner has an excellent summary of Rhode Island’s adventures in mandated expensive wind power in the Daily Caller: President Obama recently proposed spending $2 billion for the creation of 5100 green jobs. On government standards, that’s a very thrifty $392,156 per job — a bargain compared to the $2.2 million being proposed in…
Bjorn Lomborg is every climate change skeptic’s favorite scientist, and both sides do well to heed his advice. His point, basically, is that climate change is real, but that sufficient response is not currently within the realm of plausibility. So, he suggests, we should do what humankind does best: advance. Can we achieve this technological…
I’ve been preoccupied, today, with the sorts of thoughts that are hugely important to the individual, but quotidian details on a larger scale… and there’s been so much on that larger scale that might otherwise have merited consideration. The economy, obviously: The recovery lost momentum in the spring as growth slowed to a 2.4 percent…
In a climate of increasing regulation from Washington, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission recently recommended a five year moratorium be placed on lobster fishing all along the Atlantic seaboard. While the decision was fortunately voted down, it still represents a growing trend of dangerous restrictions being placed on individuals and industries by uninformed and…
The green smoke is emanating from Fountain Street where the ProJo editors celebrate the recent finding that Climategate really was much ado about nothing. Britain’s Royal Society and a panel at Pennsylvania State University said that while a couple of researchers wrote nasty and inappropriate e-mails about climate-change skeptics and didn’t want to share certain…
Even though my love of seafood is yet another taste that I rarely manage to indulge, I have to admit that cost was not my greatest concern when it comes to the consumable effects of the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico: Broadway Oyster Bar is not the only area business affected by…
I attend talks focusing on the influence of solar activity on climate, and the news is not good. Both speakers suggest that we will soon be entering another Little Ice Age! For those of you keeping score, the Little Ice Age is a well documented period from 1300 to 1850 AD when generally cooler temperatures…
The second half of the morning gets seriously wonkish. I enjoyed the presentation from Mike Jungbauer, a State Senator from Minnesota (“Come for the weather, stay for the taxes”) whom I had met at the 2nd ICCC in NYC last year. He describes the costs of many of the regulations in his home state: one…
The breakfast speakers are Patrick Michaels from George Mason University and George Allen, former Senator and Governor of Virginia. Professor Michaels is deadpan and funny with a serious message. He takes the reprobates associated with the “Climategate” scandal to task for corrupting the peer review process, labeling the behavior “hanging offenses”, and he is right.…
The room is packed. Heartland Institute officials tell me the room can only hold 800 people, and all the seats are filled. Attendance had to be closed down prior to the start of the conference. A small group of protesters, students from a suburban high school, were holding a long banner in front of the…