The Bush Ban

A ban on incandescent light bulbsis set to take effect in the new year as part of Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. The ban was signed into law by George W. Bush who stated “Today we make a major step with the Energy Independence and Security Act. We make a major step toward [...]

Just in Case We Didn’t Have Enough to Worry About

Remember those remaining US nuclear reactors of the same design as Fukushima? Some are in Alabama. Reuters: All three units at TVA’s 3,274-megawatt Browns Ferry nuclear plant in Alabama tripped about 5:30 EDT (2230 GMT) after losing outside power to the plant, a spokesman for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said. A TVA spokeswoman said [...]

Not a Water-World

We’re often told that protecting natural resources is a responsibility of federal and global scope — the environment doesn’t respect political boundaries, the experts say. A new book on the politics of water points out that water conservation is almost always a regional issue: The water problems of Barcelona cannot be solved by conservation in [...]

Virginia Postrel on the Allure of Having Friends and Enemies

Virginia Postrel argues this weekend that environmentalists favor high-speed rail and wind power not because they reduce carbon emissions but simply because they look good. “These technologies,” she writes, aren’t just about getting from one city to another. They are symbols of an ideal world, longing disguised as problem solving.  You can’t counter glamour with statistics. Though she doesn’t [...]

Job-Killing Environmentalists

Jon Basil Utley, Associate Publisher of The American Conservative, has a new piece at Reason.com discussing how kowtowing to environmentalists’ demands is killing American jobs. President Barack Obama seems more concerned with appeasing environmental extremists in his administration than he is with the lost jobs of poor Americans. He’s letting the environmentalists run wild with [...]

Twit Happens

Who knew? Our outrage at the Gulf catastrophe is really just another form of bigotry: “BP has many problems in the U.S.,” Justin Urquhart Stewart, co-founder of Seven Investment Management in London, said. “One of them is that it has the word British in its title.” It was only a matter of time before our [...]

When Failsafes Fail

The April 20 Macondo blowout in the Gulf of Mexico is a gift from British Petroleum that keeps on giving: 11 human lives lost, 2,940,000 gallons of oil daily, a 2,500-square-mile oil slick, underwater plumes 10 miles across, softball-size tar balls washing up on beaches of Louisiana, marshes and wildlife wiped out, the regional economy [...]

Conserve, Baby, Conserve

The disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is only the latest example of some of the consequences of our continued over-reliance on fossil fuels. It was only a few weeks ago that the country’s attention was fixed on the most recent coal mining disaster in West Virginia that killed 29 men. A couple [...]

Spill, Baby, Spill . . .

Back in March Sarah Palin concluded her criticism of Obama’s offshore drilling plan in National Review‘s Corner by stating that “Next week I’m headed to the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans, where I look forward to discussing what ‘Drill, baby, drill’ really means.” Unfortunately, we have been finding out in the few days [...]

In Defense Of Non-Commercial Culture

Matthew Yglesias suggests that out-group bias against environmentalists explains why libertarians, in contradiction to their own ideology, so often defend sprawl. (Jim Henley, Erik Kain and David Schaengold and others also had interesting reactions to my earlier post.)  There’s something to that, though I’d like to add two more factors that may be at work. The first is [...]