Category

Environment

• 08.08.09
  The solution to pollution is socialization
  Bailouts, Environment (0)

  One of the great thing about government ownership of the means of production is that development doesn't need to be held back by environmental constraints. Take the nationalization of GM and Chrysler, for example. Now that a powerful government monopoly owns large portions of those two companies, they are able to walk away from responsibility for their polluted properties. (Detroit Free Press article here.) It's not quite the same as what happened around the Sea of Azov, but there are significant similarities. Ford, which is in a very different relationship to these same ...
  
  
• 10.31.08
  Pro-growth environmentalists
  Environment, Regulation (0)

  Your average "environmentalist," given a choice between growing the government and doing something good for the environment, will throw the environment under the bus every time. I've been saying that for several years now, but Steve Sailor suggests that a new opportunity may be coming whereby these people can prove me right again. It's in his article, "Infrastructure blowout." The usual tax and spend crowd wants the govt to spend money on infrastructure to boost the economy. But it takes a lot of time to do any big projects, given the need for environmental ...
  
  
• 06.07.08
  Asphalt
  Environment (0)

  USA Today: "Fewer roads will be repaved this summer, thanks to soaring prices of oil-based asphalt." That's pretty much what I expected. And it's worse here in Calhoun County, Michigan. Forget re-paving. We don't even get patches, except that here and there a road crew will throw some asphalt in the general direction of the potholes. I used to say that the worst roads in southern Michigan were in the two extreme corner counties: Berrien and Monroe. I used to defend other Michigan roads when out-of-state riders criticized them. ...
  
  
• 12.07.07
  SCHIP causes environmental degradation
  Environment, Welfare-police state (0)

  This photo belongs in my Spokesrider blog, but it belongs here, too. It was taken at the end of the most unusual segment of a 3-day Labor Day weekend bike tour back in 1998. There is a connection to that article that Eunice Yu and Jianguo Liu wrote about the "Environmental impacts of divorce." (I'll get around to explaining the bike tour part over at The Spokesrider.) I'm going to get started here WITHOUT explaining just yet how that photo fits. In their conclusions, Yu and Liu explain that their paper is about more ...
  
  
• 12.06.07
  Environmental impacts of divorce
  Environment (0)

  Dr. Liu kindly sent me a link that actually does lead directly to the paper: http://www.csis.msu.edu/PNASDivorce.htm
  
  
• 12.06.07
  Divorce is hell on the environment
  Environment (0)

  Michigan State University recently put out a press release about Dr. Jianguo Liu's work connecting divorce rates with environmental degradation. Title: "A really inconvenient truth: Divorce is not green." I had the opportunity to hear Dr. Liu some time back when he gave a talk about the habitat requirements of pandas in China. It was a good talk, and ranged over more ground than what's mentioned in this press release. But I do remember him mentioning the connection between divorce rates and habitat loss. More divorces mean fewer people per dwelling, which means more dwellings and ...
  
  
• 09.29.07
  Inconvenient youths
  Environment, School decentralization, Schools (0)

  This photo is dredged up from what once was a web site of mine, circa 1995. I got it to go with an article in the Weekend Edition of the WSJ, titled "Inconvenient Youths." Here are samples: In households across the country, kids are going after their parents for environmental offenses, from using plastic cups to serving non-grass-fed beef at the dinner table. Many of these kids are getting more explicit messages about becoming eco-warriors at school and from popular books and movies. and Some parents object to what they see as proselytizing by their kids' schools. Mark D. Hill, ...