Environment

Solar farm in North Smithfield

Let’s start making the obvious connections between environmentalist news stories.

By Justin Katz | February 23, 2022 |

Whether I’ve been failing or succeeding, all these years, I’ll leave to others to judge, but one of my core objectives has always been to foster the habit of making the sorts of connections that are too often covered over for political reasons.  Let’s look at a big one. Perhaps with the mixed motivation of…

A water drop and ripples

How is global warming notch by notch?

By Justin Katz | February 17, 2022 |

A government activist’s comment related to a Rhode Island–specific report on climate change brought something to mind: The planet “is warming, it has been warming. The last two decades have been the warmest in the history of climate records,” Kenneth Kunkel said. This assertion made me wonder what the update was on the 15-year pause…

A Nipyata

Do we want to be defined by nanny-state bans?

By Justin Katz | January 19, 2022 |

Democrat state representative from Warwick David Bennett continues his long streak of bad legislation with an effort to ban nips — those little bottles of alcohol that have been a fixture of liquor stores for decades: Rep. David Bennett, D-Warwick, is tired of spotting discarded nips strewn along the side of the road whenever he…

RI's "extreme" sea level map.

Aren’t there any standards for checking a politician’s environmental claims?

By Justin Katz | January 12, 2022 |

As a follow-up to Tolly Taylor’s sea-level scare addressed in this space yesterday, WPRI handed editorial control over Democrat Senator from Rhode Island Sheldon Whitehouse, whom the reporter permits to claim without context that Rhode Island will see nine to 12 feet of sea level rise by the end of this century. Seriously, don’t the…

STORMTOOLS graphic of Barrington with 3 feet sea rise

A little skepticism about sea-level scares is needed.

By Justin Katz | January 11, 2022 |

Have you ever seen a mainstream news report that treated scary environmental projections with even an iota of skepticism?  Consider Tolly Taylor’s report for WPRI, which bears the headline, “Parts of Barrington will be underwater by 2035, sea-level data shows.” The first paragraph of the story gives the impression that the headline is a bit…

A water drop and ripples

A state has to have priorities!

By Justin Katz | January 3, 2022 |

As the editor of the Rhode Report puts it while linking to this story, “This is what is important to the morons of the Democrat Party”: As of January 1, restaurants across Rhode Island are no longer allowed to give out single-use plastic straws unless a customer asks for one. Violators will get warnings for…

A water drop and ripples

Who doesn’t want New England to be warmer?

By Justin Katz | January 1, 2022 |

Most people with whom one speaks on an unseasonably warm winter’s day in New England will not express despair.  There’s a reason defenders of the status quo bring up weather as an alternative reason to taxes and regulations for why people leave the region. Of course, every development can have its dark lining if that’s…

A water drop and ripples

Another contrarian observation about climate change.

By Justin Katz | December 14, 2021 |

Well, salmon should be hoping for global warming, anyway: Melting glaciers may produce thousands of miles of new Pacific salmon habitat, a study published Tuesday by Nature Communications found. As glaciers in the mountains of western North America melt, or retreat, they could produce around 4,000 miles of new Pacific salmon habitat by the year…

A water drop and ripples

Environmentalism seems to being doing tremendous damage to the planet!

By Justin Katz | December 13, 2021 |

This deliciously contrarian article by Patricia Adams and Lawrence Solomon suggests that our planet is increasingly green, no thanks to the environmentalist mania of the last half-century in Western countries: The planet’s ecology is thriving thanks to carbon dioxide, despite first world policies that are undermining it. The ironic benefactors in this story are countries…

Burning $100 bills

Reality killed TCI.

By Justin Katz | December 8, 2021 |

Activist-paid-as-academic Timmons Roberts of Brown University rends his garments in the Boston Globe that the Transportation & Climate Initiative (TCI; i.e., another layer of gas tax) never managed to ignite.  The question of his headline is, “Who killed the TCI?,” which I’ve already answered.  In a word, it was Biden, who quickly drove up the cost…