Politics
Four Great Republican Environmental Leaders
Teddy Roosevelt was an early conservation, who fought even as a young man to help preserve Yellowstone National Park from commercial exploitation. As President, he created the national forest system, TR created the Tongass and the Chugach forest reserves in Alaska. In Hawaii, he set several small islands aside as the Hawaiian Islands Bird Reservation, …
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CONTINUE READINGHow Environmentalism Can Strengthen the Middle Class
At the end of an interesting and constructive piece, David Frum stumbles on the idea: [T]he U.S. needs to reconsider the way it finances Medicare and the Social Security retirement system. The payroll tax has become more and more important to U.S. finances since 1980. Before the crash, payroll taxes supplied almost 40% of all federal …
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CONTINUE READINGWhat REALLY Happened in Durban?
Dan wants to know, and he is right to ask. Fortunately enough, it’s a pretty easy question to answer. As far as I can tell, the delegates agreed to negotiate a treaty some time in the future. That is diplomatic-speak for kicking the can down the road. As I have argued for well over a …
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CONTINUE READINGIs EPA regulation of carbon dioxide anti-democratic?
There’s been a lot of noise from House Republicans (and others) about how EPA regulation of carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act is somehow an end-run around Congress or anti-democratic. But it is neither.
CONTINUE READINGPrimary Colors with a Green Overtone
Frederick Anderson, a leading Washington lawyer who works on energy and environment issues, has written a novel about the current primary campaign. It features a candidate who starts thinking for himself, with predictably negative political effects. Gary Hart, who knows a thing or two about how a primary campaign can go wrong, calls it a …
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CONTINUE READINGThe “21st Century Contract with America”
I’ve just been reading Gingrich’s new version of the Contract with America. It repeats Gingrich’s desire to end most federal regulations in favor of federal coaching and subsidies for businesses and state governments: We must also replace the EPA, which pursues an anti-jobs agenda the economy simply cannot sustain. A pro-growth Environmental Solutions Agency in …
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CONTINUE READINGMore on “Distrust”
I posted a few days ago about declining public trust in societal institutions (including the courts, the presidency, big business, the military, the church, etc.) By coincidence, Nate Silver has a post today that touches on the same subject. He reports that Democrats tend to have more trust institutions these days than Republicans. Moreover, Republican …
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CONTINUE READINGDemocracy and Distrust
“Democracy and Distrust” is the title of a well-known book constitutional theory, which argues that courts should step in to correct dysfunctions in the democratic process. But that’s not what I want to talk about right now. Instead, I want to talk about public trust in the institutions that make democracy work: the media that …
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CONTINUE READINGKivalina and the Courts: Justice for America’s First Climate Refugees?
It’s hard not to sympathize with the Native Alaskan inhabitants of the Village of Kivalina. The 400 residents of Kivalina, a thin peninsula of land in Alaska jutting into the Chuckchi Sea north of the Arctic Circle, have the dubious distinction of being among the first climate refugees in the U.S. Their town is literally …
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CONTINUE READINGAnti-Urbanism in American Life: The Case of the Passport
For Thanksgiving, I was in Montreal for a family event, which was a little funny, since Canadian Thanksgiving went by about six weeks ago. But it did give me an opportunity to see a strange tick in one part of America’s self-conception. Take a look at your US passport. In the section for visas, you …
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