Environment

The U.S. Administration’s strategy for meeting the other objection of the Senate is to rely on emission trading. In principle, trading should reduce the cost of complying with the Kyoto Protocol. It would result in the lowest-cost industries cutting their...

The KYOTO PROTOCOL is not needed, is not effective in mitigating climate change (even if developing nations were to cooperate), is economically destructive, and therefore politically unacceptable. Yet, it has already spawned a large international bureaucracy —...

The KYOTO PROTOCOL is being advertised as an international agreement to reduce the “threat” of greenhouse warming to the global climate. As its framers and supporters phrase it, global warming is the “greatest challenge to human existence on this...

This interview has been edited by CM and has not been reviewed by Peter Schwartz. Prodos for Capitalism Magazine: Today I want to look at Environmentalism – it’s heart and soul. What is it really about? Let’s look at the ideas, the motivations, the...

For the first time in American history, the government is ordering the destruction of a dam–for environmental reasons. This July, Edwards Dam, a small hydroelectric facility on the Kennebec River in Augusta, Maine, will be torn down by the Federal Energy...

El Nino and global warming: What connection? It’s been a hot year, thanks to El Nino. (According to weather satellite data, the first half of 1998 ranked well above the average of the last two decades; 1999 though is likely to be quite cold.) Much to the...

Undiluted hype about global warming and climate disasters is polluting the journals and airwaves; multimillion-dollar propaganda campaigns are underway by environmental activists, generously financed by compliant foundations and by government grants. The White House...

The nation’s two top authorities on global satellite temperature data — Dr. Roy Spencer of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and Dr. John Christy of the University of Alabama in Huntsville — came to Washington last week to discuss the reasons...

In Washington, D.C., there’s nothing quite like a little nuclear saber-rattling in Third World countries to put lead in the old Eberhard-Faber (pencil, for those overseas). Two days after the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington, D.C., hosted a half-day,...

In primitive cultures, witch-doctors encouraged tribal chiefs to sacrifice people to mystical beliefs and deities. The Aztecs slaughtered thousands per year hoping to secure good weather from a mythical sun god. Power lusters throughout history have discovered...

More than 15,000 scientists, two-thirds with advanced academic degrees, have now signed a Petition against the climate accord concluded in Kyoto (Japan) in December 1997. The Petition (see text below) urges the US government to reject the Accord, which would force...

There are a lot of behind-the-scenes scheming going on in Washington, D.C., as Administration appointees and EPA career bureaucrats plot to circumvent Senate ratification of the Kyoto Accord by classifying carbon dioxide as a pollutant rather than what it is, a...

In 1980, Julian Simon, the recently deceased economist and author of The Ultimate Resource, offered to environmentalists a wager based on his assertion that the price of any raw material would indefinitely decline on a future date. The wager was taken up by Paul...

As delegations from more than 150 countries were busy lobbying in Kyoto two months back in December, to discuss international controls on carbon dioxide emissions to mitigate a putative future global warming, climate scientists from Europe and North America warned...

The United States no doubt holds the prize for environmental violence, courtesy of Al Gore fan and alleged Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. But for sheer buffoonery, it’s hard to beat the eco-activists in Great Britain. In spring 1997, to cite just one example,...

In the last couple of weeks it’s been snowing in Kyoto, snowing in London, snowing in Washington, and snowing all over Mexico — in Guadalajara for the first time since 1881. Early flurries should have given some of the delegates to the Kyoto Global Warming...

Before we accept environmentalists’ claims that the sky is falling, let’s survey some of their past predictions.

Environmentalism regards wild speculation as the equivalent of scientific proof, and the “environment”–from California condors and spotted owls to rock formations and jungles–as intrinsically valuable and fully on a par with the value of human life.

America is a rich nation with seemingly limitless compassion, partially evidenced by our $5 trillion failed effort to eliminate poverty and dependence. After 30 years of failure, we might start asking some questions about the nature of our compassion toward the poor....

In total opposition to the Industrial Revolution and all the marvelous results it has accomplished, the essential goal of environmentalism is to block the increase in one source of man-made power after another and ultimately to roll back the production of man-made power…

The antihuman premise of nature’s intrinsic value.