No reasonable person would deny the importance of protecting the environment. The accomplishments of the environmental movement over the past 50 years are undeniable: cleaner air and water, protected wildernesses, and more efficient use of resources. The list is endless and illustrious. Environmentalist values are an integral part of any responsible public policy agenda. But the pendulum has swung too far.
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The conventional wisdom among America’s liberals, often seconded and rarely challenged by conservatives, is that population growth in the United States should be channeled as much as possible into the footprint of existing cities. Surrounding cities should be “greenbelts,” suburban growth should be rejected as unsustainable “sprawl,” and human settlement in areas defined as the “urban-wildland interface” should be discouraged and, where possible, reversed.
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Joe Biden needs to put the pedal to the metal as he races toward his goal of ridding America’s energy sources of carbon emissions by 2035. But the president-elect’s headlong rush toward a green future may be slowed by a snarl of political speed limits in the states.
One of Biden’s most ambitious aims is to completely clean up the electrical grid, today powered mostly by fossil fuels, in only 15 years. Many energy executives consider that goal quixotic because it would require a breathtakingly fast transformation of the massive power industry — from replacing hundreds of dirty power plants to upgrading thousands of miles transmission lines.
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Environmental group. The Sierra Club, pledged to examine its “substantial role in perpetuating white supremacy” and to remove or rename monuments of founder John Muir, Fox News reports.
According to the organization’s website they plan future blog posts to talk more about the struggles Indigenous people, people of color, and their white allies went through to get this organization to evolve on issues like immigration and environmental justice. The posts will also include the viewpoints of its founder, famed conservationist John Muir. In an open letter entitled “Pulling Down Our Monuments,” Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune said it was time for the Sierra Club to reckon with the words of Muir and other early members.
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The coronavirus has had, at least, the unanticipated benefit of obscuring and diminishing the very tedious public clamoring about climate change. It is a slightly redeeming virtue of crises that they tend to supersede and diminish previous crises; if a crisis is serious, public opinion can rarely worry about more than one menace at a time.
When Iran took over the role of principal promoter of terrorism in the Middle East, and Turkey, rebuffed by Europe, began imposing itself on the fringes of the Arab world, support for the Palestinian onslaught against Israel effectively collapsed. All the nonsense about Israel as an “apartheid state” has almost stopped, and the simpering of naïve or devious advocates of one big happy, multiracial Palestine (a formula for the subjugation or expulsion or even massacre of the Jews one more time) is rarely heard.
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Despite voicing increased concerns over climate change, Senators Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) are turning to private planes to aid tight schedules amid President Trump’s impeachment hearing.
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At its best, the environmental movement is based on evidence, balances benefits with costs, and focuses on the good of humanity. This is just common sense, the classic values of prudence and conservatism. But, as with the Romantic-era critics of the Industrial Revolution, there is no small amount of aesthetics and even religion at the root of modern environmentalism, and its manic concern for global warming and associated demands for the West to jettison its economic and material progress.
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by Kevin Daley Environmental groups and House Democrats urged the Supreme Court not to disturb a lower court order blocking the reallocation of military funds for border wall projects. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to put that ruling on hold while litigation continues July 12. Granting that request — called…
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