...damned if you don't" news category, it appears that officials in Germany are in a quandary. A bird that was near extinction just two decades ago is doing fine now, thank you, with more than 6,000 cormorants in the wild. The problem? Well, the cormorants are eating endangered fish. "About 90 percent of river fish […]
The Sacramento Bee's Dan Walters column today reports on the flip side of the allegedly Republican-supported military-industrial complex: the enviornmental-corporate complex. In contemporary California, we should be equally concerned about the rising political power of what one might term an "environmental-corporate complex," whose game works something like this: A corporation acquires land, proposes development and […]
The Hoover Institution's Henry Miller has an op-ed piece in today's New York Times on DDT. Miller argues that the limited use of DDT to kill mosquitos and prevent the spread of malaria, West Nile virus and other diseases is good public policy. I agree. DDT is cheap and safe for both humans and the […]
Remember the endangered school lunch program the Newt Gingrich and his Republican cohorts were trying to "cut" back in the mid-90s? The "cut" was a reduction in the rate of increase (if I get a 3 percent pay raise one year and a 2 percent pay raise the next, has my pay been cut?), but […]
On occasion I'm asked where I disagree with the Bush administration. Well, global warming is one of them. Bush thinks that global warming exists and is a problem. I'm skeptical on the existence of global warming -- especially the culpability of human action in having any major effect on the world's climate. Iain Murray, over […]
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman's body has been taken over by aliens. Or at least, you'd think so if you read only the first sentence of his latest column where he actually praises the Bush administration for new the new rules on diesel emissions. However, it's clear the aliens have not completely asserted control […]
Sen. Joseph Lieberman was on "The O'Reilly Factor" last night and complained that President Bush had lost the goodwill of the world by, among other things, withdrawing from the Kyoto Treaty on global warming. The same treaty the Senate voted 95-0 to indicate that it would not ratify. Apparently Democrats are more concerned about appearances […]
In the past, when the Bush administration has been poised to destroy the environment, be it his "Clear Skies" initiative or arsenic in drinking water, the New York Times editorial page and its writers have written to the rescue. The Times has spared no amount of vitriol when it comes to protecting the environment from […]
Count on The Wall Street Journal to publish a commonsense article on the entire issue. My carburetor analogy in the article below turns out to be amazingly apropos. In one famous case, DTE Energy Corp., parent of Detroit Edison Co., tried to replace older, less efficient propeller blades in several steam turbines at its biggest […]
...you'd believe that the state of the environment in the United States is continually getting worse. While that's not factually the case, in his Tuesday column, Krugman argues just that. [L]ast week the Bush administration announced new rules that would effectively scrap "new source review," a crucial component of our current system of air pollution […]