“EPA and ER had simply ‘miscalculated’ how much water had backed up…. We were ‘very careful.’ The highly acidic, toxic flood was ‘worse aesthetically’ than in reality. Contaminants were ‘flowing too fast to be an immediate health threat.’ … The river is ‘restoring itself’ back to ‘pre-spill conditions’. We just need a ‘focused dialogue’ moving forward.
Can anyone imagine EPA or President Obama making such statements in the wake of a private industry accident? Just recall the hysteria over the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska, Deepwater Horizon (Macondo) blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, PCB contamination in the Hudson and Fox Rivers, Duke Energy coal ash spill in North Carolina, and other accidents.”
Tom Sawyer would be proud. Rarely has there been a finer whitewash than EPA’s with the Gold King Mine disaster.…
Continue ReadingJulian Simon’s The Economics of Population Growth (1977) was hailed as a “path-breaking work” that offered “a new paradigm in the Kuhnian sense” (Joseph Spengler, quoted in Simon, 2002: 256).
The overused term “paradigm” must be applied with caution, however, because few new ideas really create paradigms, and paradigms can be wrong. Also, contra Kuhn, there are examples of science cumulatively approaching the truth short of revolution (Weinberg). Still, Simon put together the parts of an alternative worldview that continues to penetrate its way into the scientific orthodoxy, particularly in economics (Bradley, 2000: 19–20).
Simon’s extraordinary science (in Kuhnian terms) reached two major conclusions:
(1) a growing population can improve virtually all environmental welfare indicators; and
(2) scarcity measures of mineral (“depletable”) resources are not qualitatively different from that of other economic goods.…
Continue Reading“Japan is now the world’s largest supporter of coal-fired power plants in developing countries, using its advanced Ultra-Supercritical design. This clashes with the stance of the Obama administration, which has opposed the financing of coal-fired power plants anywhere in the world.”
Between 2007 and 2012, Japan provided more than $20 billion in financial support to build new advanced coal-fired power generation capacity in developing countries. This country’s Ultra-Supercritical coal-fired plants can be found in such places as Chile, Vietnam and India.
Japan is currently replacing many of its old coal plants with new advanced-design units and plans to build more than 40 new such facilities.
In short, Japan is placing the interests of its people ahead of climate change hysteria. Compare this to Obama administration’s war on coal whereby regulations are issued to prevent the use of coal and building new coal plants, even new, highly efficient Ultra-supercritical plants.…
Continue Reading