Year: 2012
Supersized Drinks, Social Welfare, and Liberty
Obesity is an environmental issue because the food system (from farm to table) uses a lot of energy and produces significant water pollution. More food equals a bigger environmental footprint. Sweetened soft drinks are a good example: they use corn sweetener, and corn production has a large footprint because so much fertilizer is required. There …
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CONTINUE READINGMore Idiocy from the Wall Street Journal Op-ed Page
A few years ago, a friend of mine suggested starting a blog entitled something like, “Why The Wall Street Journal Editorial Page Was Idiotic Today.” You’d never run out of material for posts! Certainly that was the case today, as Senator Lamar Alexander and Representative Mike Pompeo, both Republicans, make a case against the wind …
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CONTINUE READINGHow to Interpret Empirical Studies: Four Lessons from Political Polling
Political polls provide a good setting for a discussion of empirical research. They seem simple and are often in the headlines so we’re familiar with them. Also, we don’t always have an accessible compendium of all the studies on the same topic, but it’s pretty easy to find polls in a presidential race during the …
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CONTINUE READINGAdapting to Drought Through International Free Trade
In a world where people and nations do not trade, you can only consume what you produce. If you want a cup of coffee and can’t trade with anyone then you better know how to make one. International trade breaks the link between consumption and production. When nasty drought occurs in one nations, but …
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CONTINUE READINGHow Worried Are Small Businesses About Environmental Regulation?
We’re heard a lot recently about the supposedly dire effect of environmental regulations on small businesses. A recent poll of small business owners by George Washington University using the Thumbtack site has some interesting findings about this. One of the questions in the survey was, “How important are the following issues to the success of …
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CONTINUE READINGRussell Train (1920-2012)
We are saddened by the new of the death of Russell Train earlier today. Mr. Train headed the Council on Environmental Quality under Nixon and later EPA under Ford. He represented a happier time when environmental protection was a bipartisan goal. Mr. Train’s father had served Herbert Hoover as an aide. He was a judge …
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CONTINUE READINGOrganic Farming and the Environment
A Stanford study of organic food garnered lots of media attention last week (here’s coverage on NPR, in the New York Times and on CNN). The bottom line: organic foods, by and large, according to the Stanford researchers, confer few health advantages when compared to their conventional counterparts. Critics of the study — or at least of the media coverage …
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CONTINUE READINGClimate Change and National Security
The two parties disagree sharply about whether climate change can be considered a threat to our national security. A recent paper by Andrew Guzman (Berkeley) and Jody Freeman (Harvard) summarizes the support for this idea among serious students of national security: In 2008, the National Intelligence Council produced the most comprehensive analysis to date of …
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CONTINUE READINGSilent Spring and Cost/Benefit Analysis
The NY Times has published a book review about Rachel Carson. Here is my favorite part of the review; “As Carson and her publisher expected, the chemical industry pounced on “Silent Spring” — even as it climbed best-seller lists — for overstating the downside and ignoring the upsides of pesticides. (Souder quotes Carson directly defending …
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CONTINUE READINGOn “pretextual” listings of species for protection under the Endangered Species Act
The folks over at Pacific Legal Foundation’s (PLF) blog have been nice enough to post about an article that I co-authored with Berry Brosi at Emory University (paywall protected, unfortunately!). The article investigates the role that citizen petitions and citizen suits play in the process of listing species for protection under the Endangered Species Act …
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