A few years ago, environmental guru, Merry Prankster, and Whole Earth Catalog author Stewart Brand caused a minor stir with an article he wrote in the MIT publication, Technology Review. Brand, who was an early advocate of the “back to the land” movement of the 1960s and 1970s, had done some re-thinking, and concluded that environmentalist opposition to things like urbanization, population growth, biotechnology, and nuclear power generation, was wrong and needed to change.
Now, Brand has written a new book, called Whole Earth Discipline:…
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by Ivan Osorio
October 13, 2009 @ 11:38 am
In honor of the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Economics to Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson, it’s worth recalling a mention of Ostrom’s work by a previous Economics Nobel laureate, Vernon Smith, then at George Mason Univeristy, whom I interviewed for CEI’s newsletter, the Planet (then Monthly Planet). Here’s the 2002 Economics Nobel Prize winner, on the future 2009 winner:
One of the best pieces of work on public choice was done by Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University, Governing the Commons.…
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Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal, a new book by British author Tristram Stuart, will soon be hitting shelves in the UK and the US. It’s is a detailed indictment of the massive amount of edible food that industrialized countries throw away, both in the factory and at home. “In America, around 50 per cent of all food is wasted,” the Telegraph summarizes, “while over here [in the UK], we dump 20 million tons of food every year. Put all…
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This story in the San Francisco Chronicle just shows the insanity of the conventional wisdom these days advanced by greens and anti-corporate farmers. They blame big agriculture for E. coli problems and some propose foolish laws and regulations that will simply create other problems.
Despite claims to the contrary, profits don’t cause microbes. And it’s not big “industry” farming that is the culprit. Small farms and family farmers can have just as much difficulty—if not more–eliminating pathogens.
E. coli just happens.…
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I’m very sorry to see that Ken Burns’ new film series is to be entitled The National Parks: America’s Best Idea. As I detail extensively in my book The Really Inconvenient Truths, the nationalization of so much wonderful scenery has led to appalling mismanagement and environmental degradation. When the Parks Service and Forest Service spent hours in 1988 debating whether or not a fire counted as “natural” because it started from a lighning bolt striking a telegraph pole, large areas…
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If we want to help save species, we need to start getting the facts right about what problems we need to address. Unfortunately, the press circulates much misinformation. Look at the misinformation in this AP story. It points out that the Aplomado Falcons disappeared from US more than a half century ago and that the first cause was “pesticides.”
The last official record for Arizona was 1940. And the falcons began disappearing rapidly by the first decade of the 1900s. In…
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by Ryan Young
June 08, 2009 @ 4:03 pm
Actor and noted intellectual Ted Danson has a piece on CNN.com entitled “World’s Biggest Fish Are Dying.”
To his credit, it is not about whales.
Unfortunately, most of his analysis is on a similar intellectual plane. As PERC’s Terry Anderson recently pointed out on 20/20, the best way to save endangered species is to eat them. Cows, chickens, and pigs will never be threatened species as long as we need them for food.
Rising demand for buffalo meat has given entrepreneurs ample incentive to…
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The greens are getting a taste of their own medicine. For years, they have used the Endangered Species Act to regulate use of private and public property around the nation, and now one species listing could undermine one of their sacred cows: green power. A story in today’s Land Letter, highlights the fact that windmill operations in Wyoming—which are subsidized by the feds under the global warming agenda of the Obama Administration as embodied in the American Recovery and Reinvestment…
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Whole Foods profit has fallen 32 percent, reflecting changes in consumer demand during economic hard times. It appears that organic food becomes a luxury item that must be dispensed with when times get hard. Despite the fact that organic food isn’t necessarily any healthier or better for the environment than conventional food, many people view it as environmentally superior and are willing to pay more for it—but only up to a point. There is a lesson for environmentalists to learn here.…
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This year, we at the Competitive Enterprise Institute are suggesting that those who will be celebrating Earth Day remember the challenges presented by living in the natural world, and the inspiring ways that human beings have worked to overcome them. This new perspective is celebrated in a short video titled “Humans Make Earth Day Better.”
While Earth Day has previously focused on traditional concerns like pollution and recycling, we think it’s also a perfect time to think about the challenges human…
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I’ve always been a fan of Lewis Black’s take on things, even when it’s obvious we disagree politically, but this take on the way TV networks are marketing Earth Day to kids is great whether you’re deep green or a free-market environmentalist. Enjoy.
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
M - Th 11p / 10c
Back in Black - Kids’ Earth Day
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes
Economic Crisis
Political Humor
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“Mars Sets Goal for Sustainable Cocoa Sources”
Another Washington Post story suggests that “sustainability” –whatever it may mean — still can stir the cold hearts of capitalist managers. Utopians have long been distressed by the differential working conditions around the world. Poverty does have less pleasant impacts than affluence. The problem is that associated with all egalitarian policies.
Our desire to improve the plight of the poor too often merely cuts away the rungs on the ladder out of poverty.
…
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When it comes to things such as environmental policy, the Progressives have been rather successful at promoting their world view. They realized that it would be futile to argue that property rights and human ingenuity could not solve anything - so they did not try (immediately) to socialize oil or other sub-surface minerals but they did succeed in derailing the evolutionary process by which institutions emerged to resolve emerging problems. The economist Ronald Coase noted this in an essay pointing out…
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This week CEI announced the creation of Human Achievement Hour (HAH) to be celebrated at 8:30pm on March 28th 2009 (the same time and date of Earth Hour).
Our press release described ways people might celebrate the achievements of humanity such as eating diner, seeing a film, driving around, keeping the heat on in your home—all things that Earth Hour celebrators, presumably, should be refraining from. In the cheekiest manner, we claimed that anyone not foregoing the use of electricity in…
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by Wayne Crews
February 16, 2009 @ 8:03 am
Maybe to have no life.
As this article over at the Ayn Rand Institute points out, the more “eco-friendly” you try to live, the more apparent the contradictions in that green philosophy become.
Everything we do to sustain our lives has an impact on nature. Every value we create to advance our well-being–every ounce of food we grow, every structure we build, every iPhone we manufacture–is produced by extracting raw materials and reshaping them to serve our needs. Every good thing in our lives…
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One of the main themes of my book, The Really Inconvenient Truths, is that misguided environmental policies often lead to humanitarian and environmental disaster. We’ve just seen another example in Australia, where fires have claimed many lives. Distraught survivors are certain they know at least part of the reason why the fires were able to do so:
During question time at a packed community meeting in Arthurs Creek on Melbourne’s northern fringe, Warwick Spooner — whose mother Marilyn and brother Damien perished…
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