Environmentalism

For decades, the picture of Earth’s future – as laid out by journalists and climate scientists alike – has been bleak. By 2070 we will see famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us, melted icecaps, flooding, extreme hurricanes and ever-present tropical storms. "Vast swathes" of the planet will be inhospitable for human life. And Greta Thunberg, in her late sixties, will wear a gas mask as she sits on the steps of Swedish Parliament with a cardboard sign declaring, "I told you so." Advocates have poured gasoline on the climate-alarmism fire earnestly, backed by reports declaring, "There really is no serious scientific debate remaining about climate change.

California is catching the deregulation bug. The state legislature has apparently realized that people need houses too, and sometimes the endangered insects have got to go. On Monday, Gavin Newsom signed a bill streamlining permitting for building projects mired in environmental review.  About time, says Cockburn. Consider for a moment the California High-Speed Rail, a project to connect San Francisco and Los Angeles, which has yet to emerge from environmental clearance despite starting in 1996. The budget has multiplied, in the meantime, from $30 billion to $100 billion. The segment just from San Francisco to San Jose, where the train would use pre-existing Caltrain rail, almost limped across the permitting finish line in 2021.

The US Department of Agriculture rescinded the 2001 Roadless Rule last week, a regulation that restricted road building and timber extraction in about 30 percent of land managed by the National Forest System. Judging the pushback from environmentalists, you might think that President Trump was selling Yosemite to a logging company. But the red-tape cutting actually increases public recreation access and opens neglected forests to fire-mitigation projects. Conservationists should be celebrating. On paper, the Roadless Rule preserved America’s most beautiful landscapes. In practice, the regulation proved burdensome and ecologically counterproductive. For instance, some 2,400 Tinglit Native Alaskans reside on islands in the Tongass National Forest.

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.

A decade ago, when I first started contributing to the New York Times’s annual “52 Places to Go” list, the top user comments were about the destinations: Why was Calcutta chosen but not Chattanooga? This year, in a sign of the times, the most popular comments suggest that we should all just stay home to save the planet. The climate-obsessed among us are falling out of love with travel, particularly with the idea of exploring far-off places where your carbon footprint is greater. If their movement gains steam they won’t save the world, but they might well wreck the global economy and deprive themselves and others of much-needed perspectives and experiences that make the world a better place.

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.

Boris Johnson is considering doing something that should be a duty for every leader. In the wake of sanctions poised to disrupt the 8 percent of domestic oil and 18 percent of diesel the UK imports from Russia, Johnson is reportedly toying with the idea of putting his country first and on the road to self-sufficiency by lifting the UK’s moratorium on fracking. The British government banned hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” in 2019. Fracking is a method of extracting oil and natural gas by drilling deep underground and fracturing shale rock with a fluid mixture (99 percent water and sand) that allows fossil fuels to flow out, be captured, processed and used to myriad ends (including gasoline).