nuclear

“Cities are probably the greenest thing that humans do.”

by Greg Conko on October 27, 2009

in Agriculture, Culture, Energy, Environment, Global Warming, Nano & Biotech, Natural Resources, Personal Liberty, Precaution & Risk, Private Conservation, Regulation, Zeitgeist

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: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, in which he takes on these environmental shibboleths in a more concerted fashion.  On American Public Radio’s Marketplace program yesterday, host Kai Ryssdal discussed the new book with Brand.  Asked what prompted him to write the book, Brand said that,

“My fellow environmentalists have been wrong about a couple of issues and were getting in the way of important things we should be doing, both with biotechnology and with nuclear technology, and in terms of how we think about cities, and in terms of how I know we’re going to think about geoengineering–that is, direct intervention in the climate.”

Ryssdal contrasted Brand’s earlier support for the back to the land movement with his current belief that big cities are better for the environment.

“Not only big cities, but big slums … that’s how [poor people in the developing world] are getting out of poverty.  They’re emptying out a lot of the subsistence farms that have been tough on the landscape all over the world, moving into towns for opportunity, building jobs for each other.  They’re also moving up what’s called the energy ladder, toward more and better grid electricity.  By and large the cities are probably the greenest thing that humans do.”

On his support for biotech crops, Brand said,

“Already, the crops we have now, the herbicide-tolerant and the insect-resistant crops … [are] getting what amounts to higher yields. You can raise more food on less land, and all of that is good for ecology in general and the climate particularly.”

Challenged that critics call them Frankenfoods, Brand replied,

“The idea there was that Dr. Frankenstein was doing something against nature, and that somehow the genetically engineered food crops are against nature.  And as a biologist, I’m just baffled by that line of argument because agriculture has been in that sense against nature for 10,000 years. That we’re finally able to do more precise tuning of the crops is a huge gain, not a loss.”

Iain Murray on the Anti-Stimulus

by Richard Morrison on February 12, 2009

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Stimulus to Nowhere

On behalf of my distinguished colleague Iain Murray, who is busy speaking at a very important press conference this morning, let me present his prepared remarks on the impending stimulus bill:

Remarks of Iain Murray, Director of Projects and Analysis, Competitive Enterprise Institute

Good morning. Others have already told you what an unutterable waste of money this so-called stimulus package is. I just want to make two points. First, that the American people have been misled about the nature of the bill, and been sold a pig in a poke. Second, that if you really want to stimulate economic activity, there is a very simple way to do it that doesn’t cost a penny; we call it “liberate to stimulate.”

The American people were told that this bill would give Americans jobs as a result of great public works projects. It won’t. Congress and the Agencies have between them made it very difficult to undertake great infrastructure projects, and impossible to do it quickly. That’s why almost all the supposed “shovel-ready” projects in the bill are maintenance projects and the like. If you thought Americans would be building roads, only 3 percent of the Senate stimulus package is for roads. Only 7 percent is for new infrastructure in general.

As for so-called “green energy,” the much-vaunted aim of doubling alternative energy can be achieved by business-as-usual, so little energy is provided by wind and solar. My colleague Jonathan Tolman and I also worked out that the House bill contains just about $6.4 billion aimed at creating “green jobs,” and only 70,000 would be created. This bill is not what was advertised.

So how can we stimulate the economy? As I mentioned, Congress has made it very difficult to build infrastructure. It needs to lift those restrictions. Gov. Schwarzenegger and three former California governors have all complained about the restrictions of the National Environmental Policy Act causing misallocations of infrastructure funding. Those restrictions need to be removed, as Gov. Schwarzenegger has asked. Similarly, we need clean electric power, and we need large amounts of it, but it takes ten years or more to break ground on a nuclear power plant. If the regulators sped up the permitting process like they’re doing in the UK, then we could get moving on new nuclear build very quickly. Those sorts of reforms don’t cost anything, and can get America back to work, which is what we all want to see.

Check out more on the topic under the “Deregulate to Stimulate” category.