WARNING: Individual Research Findings and Economic Models May Not Be Fully Grounded.
A couple of weeks ago, a major paper on the economics of government deficits turned out to have huge flaws. Matt and Jonathan have already had something to say about this, but I'd like to add some thoughts about the implications for environmental issues."Interesting," you say, "But what does that have to do with the environment?" I see two big lessons. The first lesson is about the danger of overreacting to a dramatic research finding, especially when you reall...
CONTINUE READINGAlberta, Open Sewers and the Keystone Pipeline
Al Gore raised the hackles of the Canadian government this week when he criticized the country's large scale extraction of oil from the Alberta tar sands. The tar sand oil reserves are among the world's largest but are particularly energy intensive to extract. That means that extracting oil that will then be burned will emit significantly more greenhouse gases than oil extracted through more conventional means. Gore said that the extraction has led to damage t...
CONTINUE READINGNiall Ferguson, Climate Smear Artist
Big kerfluffle over the weekend concerning remarks by right-wing Harvard Professor Niall Ferguson, who claimed that Keynesian economics is not concerned about the future because Keynes himself was gay and didn't have children. Now, not only is this bigoted, but it is untrue on its own terms: Keynes was married, he was childless because his wife had a tragic miscarriage, and the man himself was deeply committed to future generations; he wrote an essay called "Economic...
CONTINUE READINGEric Cantor Leads the Anti-NSF Chorus
Eric Cantor, the House Majority Leader, is rounding up the good citizens of the country for a campaign against those evil scientists who are wasting society's money. Just check out his YouCut website, which tries to crowd source the search for suspect research funding by NSF. He admits NSF does fund some worthwhile research: including "more than 10,000 new grant awards annually, many of these grants fund worthy research in the hard sciences." Note that the goo...
CONTINUE READINGThe Roberts Court’s Corporate Romance
Forty years ago, before going on the Supreme Court, Lewis Powell wrote a call to arms for business interests, calling on them to counter "enemies of the free enterprise system" like Ralph Nader. Among other things, he recommended a concerted campaign to influence the courts. The campaign seems to have been a success. The NY Times reports today on a new study auggesting that the current Supreme Court is the most business friendly since the end of World War II. In p...
CONTINUE READINGChina’s New Environmental Courts
Pollution in China has been much in the news recently, from premature deaths caused by air pollution to news of thousands of dead pigs found in a Shanghai river. Could law help solve China's environmental problems? My recent post on China Dialogue takes a look at what China's new environmental courts have been able to accomplish so far....
CONTINUE READINGThe problem of stale NEPA reviews
There’s been a mini-boom in uranium mining in the United States, in part because of increased interest in nuclear power as a partial response to climate change. Using nuclear power to reduce greenhouse gases has been quite controversial because of the obvious risks that nuclear power poses (exemplified by the Fukushima disaster in Japan). But uranium mining has its own impacts – both on human health and on the landscape and wildlife. Given those impacts, it’s ...
CONTINUE READINGThe Tea Party, the GOP, and the Environment
According to a recent study, non-Tea Party members of the GOP are actually a bit closer to Democrats than to Tea Party members on environmental issues. That creates a conundrum for the GOP. More than half of Republicans support the Tea Party, and supporters tend to be more active than others. Yet the Tea Party favors candidates with dubious electoral prospects. Consider a couple of recent news items from Political Wire: Ted Cruz is considering a presidential run, a...
CONTINUE READINGLeave Agribusiness Lobbyists ALOOONE!!!
A few weeks ago, I posted about the Obama Administration’s effort to change outrageous and wasteful food aid rules that line the pockets of agribusiness and shipping companies. The more you look at the absurd policy preventing USAID from purchasing food locally for famine relief, the worse it looks: it wastes money, it prevents getting food to people that need it, it undermines local agriculture, and it despoils the environment. I didn’t think it could get an...
CONTINUE READINGOne More For the Supreme Court Scorecard: Chief Justice Roberts Feels Very Sorry for Multinational Corporations
In my view, Dan's helpful post the other day about the Supreme Court's environmental cases neglected one very important case decided just a few days ago: Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, about which I have blogged earlier. The "in my view" in the last sentence is more than throat-clearing, for Kiobel raises the question, also flagged by Dan, about what an environmental case is. Kiobel concerned the grotesque human rights violations that occurred against the Ogoni pe...
CONTINUE READING