“Vanderbilt forest management set the stage for the U.S. Forest Service and the way it manages timber. Whether that was good remains in doubt.”
It makes a good story. In the late 1800s demand for wood was insatiable—for houses, for ships, for railroad ties. Americans were logging trees all over the country, then moving on to another forest, leaving ugly cutover land behind them. President Theodore Roosevelt expressed fear of a “timber famine.” Trees are being destroyed, he said, “far more rapidly than they are being replaced.” [1] Peak Trees? Peak Forestry? The same was being said for petroleum and other resources.
George Vanderbilt (grandson of “robber baron” Cornelius Vanderbilt) came to the rescue. Vanderbilt’s mansion near Asheville, North Carolina, was built on forest land, much of it already logged. Vanderbilt hired a young man, Gifford Pinchot, to manage about 125,000 acres around the Biltmore estate, with the goals of making money while restoring and protecting the forest.…
Continue ReadingThis week, a Hall of Shame business memo turns 27 years old. Dated December 12, 1997, it was written from Kyoto, Japan, by Enron lobbyist John Palmisano in the afterglow of the Kyoto Protocol agreement.
Global green planners were euphoric that, somehow, someway, the world had embarked on an irreversible course of climate control (and thus industrial and land-use control). But Kyoto predictably failed, and the Paris climate accord of 2015 teeters, with COP27’s recent failure making COP28’s prospects look grim.
Palmisano’s memo cites the benefits for first-mover ‘green’ Enron. Enron, in fact, had no less than six profit centers tied to pricing carbon dioxide (CO2)–and seven if CO2 were capped and traded. The story of Enron as the darling of Left environmentalists has been well told elsewhere.…
Continue Reading“If you’re pushing fossil fuels at this point, you’re anti-human.” – Andrew Dessler (2022)
“Fossil fuels are shredding our democracy.” Andrew Dessler (2024)
The recent election should have thrown climate scientist/alarmist/activist Andrew Dessler into a funk, even toward self-doubt and need to check his anti-CO2 premises. His all-out exaggeration about a climate emergency was resoundingly rejected by the winning party and abandoned as an important talking point by the losing party. [1]
Dessler will not shout (as before) that Americans are dumb and suicidal by rejecting his wise counsel. [2] He will not engage in some flagrant act of defiance like James Hansen getting arrested at a coal mine or Peter Kalmus disrupting a professional meeting of climate scientists. And, of course, he will not light himself on fire like a few climate crazies.…
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