GlobalWarming.org

Environmental regulation is inherently political. Politicians pass laws that give agencies broad authority to “protect the environment,” but leave “protect” and “environment” up to the agency to figure out. Often these agencies fail to protect the environment from pollution for political reasons, the chief executive wants to “stimulate the economy” or he knows the businesses involved. For this reason, environmental regulation ought to be, for the most part, carried out by the courts, as citizens sue to protect their health and property.   Elizabeth Brubaker from the Canadian think-tank Environment Probe gives many examples of how property rights rather than legislation were used to prevent pollution in her book Property Rights in the Defence of Nature.

Property Rights in the Defence of Nature was published in 1995

In 1768, Sir William Blackstone, an English judge, wrote

If one erects a smelting house for lead so near the land of another, that the vapour and smoke kills his corn and grass, and damages his cattle therein, this is held to be a nuisance. And by consequence it follows, that if one does any other act, in itself lawful, which yet being done in that place necessarily tends to the damage of another’s property, it is a nuisance: for it is incumbent on him to find some other place to do that act, where it will be less offensive.

Soon after Huron Steel Products installed an 800-tonne press at its Windsor, Ontario, stamping plant in 1979, Douglass Kenney complained to both the company and the Ministry of Environment. As president of the corporation that owned an apartment near the plant, he objected to noise and vibrations from the press’s operation, which were driving his tenants away.

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This morning on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Joy Cardin Show, I discussed the President’s punt on the Keystone XL pipeline. Audio of the interview is below.

Iain Murray and I have a piece in the Washington Examiner today explaining how green energy policies benefit the rich at the expense of the poor.

One thing we can expect in President Obama’s State of the Union speech is for him to echo his declaration from last month, “That’s the very simple choice that’s facing Congress right now. … Are you willing to fight as hard for middle-class families as you do for those who are most fortunate?” Yet when it comes to the environment, the president showers favors on the rich while punishing the poor….

Consider the Obama administration’s subsidies for electric vehicles. To start with, there is the $7,500 credit for the car itself. Add to that the recently expired $1,000 credit for installation of a 220-volt charger. And on top of these, the government has thrown more than $3 billion at the Chevrolet Volt alone — which totals out to $250,000 per vehicle. Not only do these credits go to corporate giants like General Motors, they subsidize cars for the wealthy.

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The Empire State Divide is now available for viewing on the Foundation for Land and Liberty website.  It is a documentary film about the harm to human well-being wrought by an environmentalist campaign against hydraulic fracturing in New York. This film was inspired by my mother, Karen Bulich Moreau, President of The Foundation for Land and Liberty. It was funded exclusively by her mother and siblings in memory of my grandfather, Frank Bulich.

The documentary can be found here. In a previous post, I wrote about the film in detail.

Within 24 hours of rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline project, President Obama released a television ad touting his record on energy. The ad cites a study from the Brookings Institute and implies that President Obama has created 2.7 million jobs in green energy, a number that is “expanding rapidly.” Next the ad brags about the fact that for the first time in 13 years, America is now less than 50% dependent on foreign oil. Both numbers have some truth—but both have little to do with the President’s efforts.

First, the jobs number. 2.7 million green jobs is the total number of green jobs in the economy—many of which existed long before President Obama took office. Additionally, according to a Reason fact check, while the 2.7 million number may be “clean” jobs, only a small fraction of that number are actually in the “green energy” industry: 140,000 according to Brookings—and this was before thousands of jobs were lost at Solyndra, Stirling Energy, Range Fuels, or other green energy companies that have gone under in the past few months.

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In a previous post, I compared renewable energy spending in the 2009 Stimulus to a green albatross burdening the President. I argued that Stimulus spending was inherently wasteful, because politics invariably corrupts government’s investment decisions. The result is taxpayers losses on bankrupt companies that existed only by the grace of political favoritism, a la Solyndra. I predicted the green stimulus would haunt the President, in the form of a slow drip public relations nightmare, as a litany of bad investments go belly-up in the run up to the 2012 elections.

And so it continues. Yesterday, Evergreen Energy, a manufacturer of renewable energy components and recipient of Stimulus largesse, filed for bankruptcy.

Conventionality.