Environment

With great fanfare, California Governor Gavin Newsom recently signed “historic” legislative package designed to “advance an abundance agenda.” It’s a nod to the recent (and fashionable) book Abundance by the liberal bloggers Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, and it’s supposed to reform a state best known for a punitive cost of living and chronic shortages of everything essential – including housing, water, and energy.  Key to Newsom’s new legislation are Assembly Bill 130 and Senate Bill 131, both of which make fundamental changes to how the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) is enforced.

It’s early Monday morning here in Central Texas, and the rain just keeps on falling. Over the wettest weekend any of us can remember, water has saturated the ground and overflowed every culvert. Dozens are dead, an untold number of properties damaged. The drought is over, point taken. We surrender. Now we have to figure out who, if anyone, is at fault.  In the last few days, the blame has flowed faster and thicker than the raging muddy waters of the Guadalupe River. It started almost immediately on Friday morning, with a sickening torrent of anti-Texas vitriol from left-wing social media, the flip side of the horrible “God’s wrath” chatter we heard from the right during the Los Angeles fires.

Like the Marxist dialectic, or the predictions of the Gospels, the green movement has long seen its triumph as preordained. Yet sometimes the inevitable turns out to be not so. Over the past few years green policies — notably the drive for “net zero” — have been failing. Both markets and politicians have seen the light. WhatJoe Biden’s treasury secretary Janet Yellen once called “the greatest business opportunity of the twenty-first century” has revealed itself to be something of a disaster. The new American President is likely to be blamed for the implosion of the green agenda, but its collapse long pre-dates his re-ascension.

Hurricane Debby is barreling through Florida, America's economy is crashing, US troops were injured in Iraq Monday and conflict in the Middle East is on the brink of a dangerous escalation — sounds like the perfect time to ban the use of plastic cutlery, right?!  Instead of addressing the multiple crises the nation is currently grappling with, the Biden administration decided it was time federal government workers stopped using plastic forks. The Biden administration announced it is launching a plan to "phase out" the "procurement of single-use plastics from food service operations, events and packaging by 2027, and from all federal operations by 2035," according to the White House.

Washington was stunned this morning to learn of the premature death of California senator Dianne Feinstein at the mere age of ninety. Feinstein was elected to the Senate in 1992 and was its longest serving female senator. She was a vocal advocate for gun control and headed the Senate Intelligence Committee for several years, leading a review of the CIA's interrogation and detention program in the aftermath of 9/11. But to Cockburn, the most iconic moment of Feinstein's storied career came in 2019, when she deployed the heft of her decades in Congress to smack down some urchins from the Sunrise Movement who were hectoring her about climate change. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

There are few things better in life than taking a hot shower at the end of a long day, crawling into a freshly made bed and passing out into the deepest sleep ever. There are also few things that ruin this uniquely cozy experience more quickly than stepping into a shower with dinky water pressure. Luckily, I’ve rarely dealt had to deal with that issue because I grew up with a plumber for a dad. We eschewed so-called “water-saving” shower heads in our home in favor of ones with such high water pressure that showers felt like a deep-tissue massage. When I moved out after college, my dad would drop by my various apartments to drill a hole in the non-removable flow restrictors put in shower heads by management.

There was nothing new about springtime wildfires in Canada until the wind shifted unexpectedly last week. That shift blew smoky air all over the northern and eastern US, producing memorably apocalyptic-like orange air in New York City. Not wanting to waste a crisis, the lamestream media jumped right in with both feet. They blamed the wildfires on the much-dreaded “climate change,” scared the daylights out of everyone about the air quality and then warned that more like it was on the way unless we changed our fossil fuel-burning ways. Not unexpectedly, the media’s knee-jerk take was all wrong. Wildfires and smoky air have always occurred wherever there are forests. At least eighteen of these dark or “yellow days” occurred in the US and Canada from 1706 to 1910.

A pair of Wall Street Journal headlines announced last week that "renewables surpassed coal power generation in 2022 for first time,” and “coal prices tumble while use of wind power, solar energy leaps ahead.” Taken at face value, you might believe fossil fuels are about to go the way of the floppy disk. Not so. News of renewable triumphs is often greatly exaggerated. Pretending that we can dismiss coal and other fossil fuels as energy sources anytime soon is to bite the hand that feeds us.