Today, the Wall Street Journal reports that the global bio-fuel boom, by increasing the global supply of transportation fuel almost 300,000 barrels a day, has decreased the price of gasoline by 15%.
That's well and good, but no account of biofuels in complete without an acknowledgement of their nasty side effects, including: rising food prices, environmental degredation, and depletion of our aquifers.
In fact, there's a better way. As noted by my colleague Iain Murray, we could up conventional production by 800000 barrels per day by drilling in ANWR without the associated costs of biofuels.
In 1989 Stanford professor Stephen Schneider said in an interview in Discover magazine, "We (scientists) need to get broad-based support, to capture the public's imagination. That entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts we might have." In 2006 Al Gore told the radically environmentalist magazine Grist, "I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations."
ENERGY was one of the few issue areas in which David Paterson was allowed at least briefly to play a visible role during 14 months in the shadows as New York's lieutenant governor. But now that he has succeeded the disgraced Eliot Spitzer in the governor's office, Paterson needs to break with policies that have made energy increasingly expensive and potentially scarce in New York.
I have lost the count on the number of stories I have seen about coral reefs dying out because of global warming. A recent report in Proceedings of the Royal Academy of Sciences details the corals warming adaptation strategy.
As the so-called climate change deniers emphasize continually: Climate changes, the only thing stable about the climate is that it changes. They are a modern day version of Heraclitus and his proclamation Panta Rei! for those of you who remember your western civilization classes. If climate change is permanent, it follows that the species alive today have a strategy for coping with the change.
We have seen this in papers published last year as well; one I remember quite vividly was about the migration of plants in the Arctic.
Now we have documentation about how the rich ecosystems around coral reefs adapt, so maybe its time to stop crying wolf and dedicate ourselves to an honest and meticulous examination of the actual effects of the changing climate?
RSS Updates 
RSS E-Mail Updates 
CEI.org