The United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development concluded last month in Johannesburg, South Africa. Real progress was made in debunking a recurring and fundamental error. Here’s the error: Most environmental problems are due to modernization and affluence. In fact, across time and cultures, technological advances and economic growth have proved the only sure path […]
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Although the UN’s recent World Summit on Sustainable Development looked set to become simply another opportunity for environmentalists and Europeans to trash the US, leaders of developing countries injected a healthy dose of reality. Rather than submitting to the West’s eco-imperialism, poor countries were able to retain their freedom to pursue economic development as they […]
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For more than a decade we’ve run a series of seminars for federal judges. We don’t teach law but rather explore contentious scientific issues with policy implications. Several hundred federal judges have come to Montana to learn about biotechnology, endangered species, climate change, and energy policy, for example. Whatever the topic, ethical concerns always emerge. […]
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There’s general consensus in the scientific community that global average temperatures are rising. It’s also generally agreed that increased carbon dioxide is a major factor. However, there’s still a great deal of uncertainty about the amount of warming and its expected ecological and economic effects. Because of CO2’s prominent role in warming (i.e., it remains […]
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Here’s a book describing 20,000+ hippies, New Agers, and camp followers descending on an isolated rural community. Imagine a conservative federal district judge conducting a “jury view” of the site to settle conflicts between state public health rules and First Amendment constitutional rights to peacefully assemble in a national forest. “Judge Dave and the Rainbow […]
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Social movements, like ecosystems, evolve. Although many challenges remain, there is little doubt that Americans have changed the way they think about the environment. In some cases, the results are dramatic. For example, in the 1960s the U.S. Navy occasionally used whales for target practice. A quarter century later, the Navy spent over a million […]
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The Ethanol Producers and Consumers met this week in Whitefish. If you had attended you would have seen the political equivalent to the law of gravity at work. Here it is: Well-off, well-organized groups use government to transfer wealth and opportunities from the poorly organized and less well off to themselves. Both Republicans and Democrats […]
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Does the Bush administration care about the environment or the sensitivities of conservation-minded voters? On western public lands issues environmental groups have successfully portrayed the Bush administration as pandering to the old Sagebrush Rebels and Wise Use constituencies. And although Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey is a former lobbyist for the timber industry, his plan to […]
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Bjorn Lomborg calls himself “an old left-wing Greenpeace member” . He teaches statistics in the department of political science at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. In 1997, an article about the late economist Julian Simon angered him. He claimed that the state of humanity and the natural environment were both improving. Specifically, Simon predicted: “The […]
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Bjorn Limber calls himself “an old left-wing Greenpeace member” . He teaches statistics in the department of political science at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. In 1997, an article about the late economist Julian Simon angered him. He claimed that the state of humanity and the natural environment were both improving. Specifically, Simon predicted: “The […]
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