“High-yield agriculture and long-distance trade have long delivered a similar outcome—more abundant and affordable food with reduced environmental impact—on a global scale…. So prepare your meal from the most affordable food you can find to do both your wallet and the planet a favor.”
The lessons of history can be very eloquent, if only we are willing to take the time to learn them. In a 2008 National Geographic article, journalist Charles Mann discusses how soil management policies in communist China led to the creation of terrace agriculture in unsuitable conditions, the cutting down of trees, and the planting of grain on steep slopes. The main results were increased soil erosion and soil depletion.
Daring to challenge official edicts, some villagers replanted the steepest and most erosion-prone third of their land with grass and trees, covered another third with harvestable orchards, and concentrated their crops on the remaining lower flat plots that had been enriched by the soil washed down from the hillsides.…
Continue Reading“Can we really afford to adopt California’s policies, laws and regulations in the rest of America, and then throughout the world? For that matter, how much longer can the once Golden State afford to inflict those policies on its own citizens?”
When George Washington was stricken with malaria and a throat infection in 1799, his physicians used leaches to bleed a quart of blood and remove “morbid matter” from his weakened body. Next they administered laxatives and emetics. A few hours later, Washington died.
This cure worse than the disease finds close parallels in California’s energy and environmental policy. This is the state that leaches energy from its neighbors, and that President Obama and his Environmental Protection Agency often view as their public policy standard bearer. But these energy “physicians” are threatening our nation’s lifeblood.…
Continue Reading“The actual justification for the Utility MACT, one of the most expensive and consequential regulations of all time, is to protect a supposed population of pregnant subsistence fisherwomen, who consume hundreds of pounds of self-caught fish from exclusively the most polluted inland bodies of fresh water.
I’ve documented this outrageous rationale here. [But] EPA has never actually identified a real-life member of this putative population of pregnant super-anglers with voracious appetites; rather, they are modeled to exist…. This regulation is nothing more than quid pro quo, business as usual, special-interest politics.”
On Sunday morning’s Platts Energy Week with Bill Loveless, FERC Commissioner Philip Moeller gave a bombshell interview regarding the clear and present danger to electric reliability posed by the EPA.
An excerpted transcript is posted below:
FERC Commissioner Philip Moeller: “We’re closing an enormous amount of coal generation, through a variety of rules, and a good number of those plants are set to retire next April.…
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