Environmentalism
Oil and the Doomers’ Dire Predictions
Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008From the moment oil first made it into the mainstream, peak oil and the imminent depletion of fossil fuels have been vehemently predicted.
A by-no-means exhaustive list of those predictions might run something like this:
“I take this opportunity to express my opinion in the strongest terms, that the amazing exhibition of oil which has characterized the [...]
Thanksgiving: the REAL history
Wednesday, November 26th, 2008In May of 1606, the first American settlers arrived in Jamestown.
The Virginia Tidewater Region, where these original 104 set up their colony, was a breathtakingly fertile chunk of land, and so it was that these first American settlers found more resources than they could at first believe: oceans teeming with seafood; the woodlands alive with [...]
Sustainable Development, Unmasked
Monday, November 17th, 2008An angry reader writes:
Dear Sir: I’ve been asked to write this on behalf of a number of people who, for the past two months, have been reading your articles with a kind of horror. We are troubled, not because what you say doesn’t contain truth — it may or may not — but because your [...]
Cognitive Dissonance
Friday, November 14th, 2008In his book True Believer, the brilliant autodidact and intellectual workingman Eric Hoffer wrote the following:
“Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power.”
The term cognitive dissonance, which presupposes faith above reason, was popularized (but not coined) by a social psychologist named Leon Festinger (1919-1989), in his seminal work on the subject A Theory of Cognitive [...]
Drilling For Oil and Building Highways: more energy efficient (by far) than bicycles
Sunday, October 26th, 2008Based upon mountains of faulty data, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and its many off-shoots advocate now as a “solution to the fossil fuel problem” the return to so-called “carbohydrate economies.”
This sort of economy essentially consists of families, communes, or small groups doing their own farming; re-enacting, to some extent, the barter system; high [...]
Bailout
Wednesday, October 8th, 2008Mercantilism is the system of securing special economic favors from government.
Capitalism is the system of private ownership of the means of production and the primacy of the individual over the group.
Mercantilism is in every significant way the exact opposite of laissez-faire capitalism.
Most businessmen today are not capitalists — insofar as they seek, demand, and [...]
The Sickening Truth About Sierra Club
Friday, October 3rd, 2008Sierra Club is the oldest environmental group in the nation. It was founded in 1892 by a Scottish immigrant named John Muir, whose stated goal was “to make the mountains glad.” In many ways, that puerile policy compendiates perfectly the essence of Sierra Club.
Among other things, John Muir was an unapologetic racist, writing in [...]
Are our fish really being poisoned with mercury?
Thursday, September 25th, 2008If you smell something fishy in this latest wave of methyl mercury talk, the reason is that there is something fishy in it — very fishy — and it stinks to high heaven. Please don’t be lured in. The relevant facts are these:
In this country, there hasn’t been a single scientifically documented case of fish-related [...]
Wind and Solar Energy versus Nuclear
Thursday, September 18th, 2008Energy is like a river; it exists in two ways: flows and stores.
When you store energy, you create a dam to capture it.
What environmentalists call “renewable energy” is really just the stored energy of the sun.
In actuality, there’s no such thing as “renewable energy”: all energy, even the sun, is limited.
Fossil fuels are [...]
Can laissez faire handle pollution and climate?
Monday, September 15th, 2008The United States is still the world’s most prosperous nation, and there is still no need to dwell upon this fact because, for the most part, it’s still uncontested.
The point is worth reiterating, however, if only because it stresses a fact which has been touched upon in a previous article. That fact is this:
So long [...]
Natural Resource and Goods Theory
Saturday, September 13th, 2008The economist George Reisman writes:
The two essential claims of the environmentalists, which I take for granted are already well known to everyone, are (1) that continued economic progress is impossible, because of the impending exhaustion of natural resources (it is from this notion that the slogan “reduce, reuse, recycle” comes), and (2) that continued economic [...]
Glass Recycling
Friday, September 5th, 2008This article is the second part of a two-part series. Read Part One Recycling Trash here.
Take an empty beer bottle. We can either throw that glass bottle away or recycle it.
Assume for a moment that we all want what’s best for the planet. Assume, therefore, that we want to use as few resources as [...]