Question Earthority!

“It would be easy, even tempting, to blame the turbulent state of the nation’s water affairs on the Bush administration. Certainly, they’ve provided ample cause: gutting, and failing to enforce, the Clean Water Act, for instance, and, at best, simply ignoring the obvious problems of floods, droughts, and hurricanes, of shifting weather patterns, of contaminants old and new, and a myriad of other water disasters through eight long years. The truth is, though, that scientists, engineers, and environmental planners have been advising Congress for years that holistic watershed management is the only rational and practical way to address complex water quality and quantity issues. Why that persistent recommendation? As Delaware River Basin Commission Executive Director Carol Collier told the Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment on June 24th, bodies of water don’t respect political boundaries; we have to manage them ‘on the rivers’ terms.’” (07/23/08)

http://www.alternet.org/water/92435/

“The Global Catastrophic Risks conference sponsored by the Future of Humanity Institute concluded on Sunday. Participants were treated to a series of presentations describing how billions of people could potentially bite the dust over the next century. The possible megadeath tolls of both natural and biotech pandemics were considered. The chances that asteroids, comets, or gamma ray bursts from a nearby supernova could wipe out humanity were calculated. The old neo-Malthusian threats of overpopulation, resource depletion, and famine were trotted out. But these risks to future human well-being paled in comparison to one main menace — malicious human ingenuity.” (07/22/08)

http://www.reason.com/news/show/127676.html

“In a huge document released last Friday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) lays out the thousands of carbon controls with which they’d like to shackle the whole economy. Thankfully none of it has the force of law — yet, says the Wall Street Journal. The mess began in 2007, when the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Mass. v. EPA that greenhouse gases are ‘air pollutants’ under current environmental laws, despite the fact that the laws were written decades before the climate-change panic.” (07/22/08)

http://tinyurl.com/64xuu4

“Less than a week after releasing its response to the April 2007 Supreme Court ruling that the EPA should take action to assess the risk of greenhouse gas emissions and regulate those emissions unless there is a good scientific reason for not doing so, the EPA issued a report entitled Analyses of the Effects of Global Change on Human Health and Welfare and Human Systems. On one hand the EPA asserts using the Clean Air Act to regulate greenhouse gas emissions would be ‘irresponsible’ and too much of an economic burden and on the other it warns of the ’substantial’ threats to human health in the coming decades.” (07/21/08)

http://www.enn.com/top_stories/commentary/37714

“Less than a century after electricity became cheap and reliable, we live as if the power will never go out. I hope it never does in a catastrophic way. But should the worst happen, I think most of us are not just unprepared, we’re living in homes that would be little more than uninhabitable caves. That’s not to say I want to transfer my family to some pre-technological cottage where we’ll pump our water by hand and bake our goods in a wood-burning hearth just so I’ll be prepared for post-apocalyptic life. The fact that I set up a computer and restored my Internet connection before tackling that tree shows where my priorities lie.” (07/21/08)

http://www.tuccille.com/blog/2008/07/lessons-from-blackout.html

“T Boone Pickens and Al Gore have proposed bold plans to radically reduce America’s addiction to fossil fuels. These two gadflies just might provide enough bite to provoke the next president to swifter action. Mr. Pickens argues that using wind power for electricity and powering vehicles with domestic natural gas can replace more than one-third of our foreign oil imports within 10 years. If nothing is done, the conservative Texas oilman says, the US will send $10 trillion out of the country in the next decade, ‘the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of mankind,’ he says. Building wind-powered generators in the heartland of America and new transmission lines would cost $1.2 trillion but it would make America the ‘Saudi Arabia’ of wind power, he says.” (07/22/08)

http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0722/p08s01-comv.html

“The issue of global warming rages on is some minds. Remarkably, there really hasn’t been much of a debate, not a serious science debate anyway. There have been shouting and screaming, predictions of doom, and the willingness to destroy our energy sources and our economy to ’save the planet’. But as P.J. O’Rourke noted, there are a lot of people who would do anything to ’save the planet,’ except take a science course.” (07/21/08)

http://tinyurl.com/68ontg

Cato podcast featuring Jerry Taylor. [MP3] (07/22/08)

http://tinyurl.com/cato072208

“Mr. T. Boone Pickens’ campaign for government subsidies to wind power, advertised in a full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal and subsequently in an op-ed piece in the same, seems erroneous in several respects. First, our reliance on imported oil is not a ‘crisis’ unless we make it one. There are cheaper supplies of oil and its substitutes here in the U.S., and the high prices we currently are paying would bring them out of the ground and to consumers were it not for anti-energy policies preventing exploration and drilling. Those policies ought to be changed, rather than executing this elaborate and expensive build-around.” (07/19/08)

http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=23535

“First, virtually all crop-based biofuels are worthless from a climate perspective and probably a bad idea from most other perspectives. Second, there is not a single commercial cellulosic ethanol plant in United States yet. Third, I’m not sure there is an agreement in the scientific community about how to do lifecycle analysis needed to determine the net carbon benefit from cellulosic fuels. Fourth, in a post-2050 world with three billion more people who are losing water from melting glaciers and desertification, arable land and water will be very dear commodities.” (07/18/08)

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/7/18/131530/338