Jay Lehr, Ph.D. is senior fellow and science director of The Heartland Institute, an independent nonprofit organization based in Chicago. He is an internationally renowned speaker, scientist, and author who has testified before Congress on more than three dozen occasions on environmental issues, and consulted with nearly every agency of the federal government and with many foreign countries. Dr. Lehr is the author of more than 1,000 magazine and journal articles and 30 books. He is editor of Rational Readings on Environmental Concerns, McGraw-Hill’s Handbook on Environmental Science, Health and Technology (2000), Wiley’s Remediation Technologies Handbook (2004), Environmental Instrumentation and Analysis Handbook (2005), the six-volume Water Encyclopedia (Wiley Interscience, 2005). He recently completed for Wiley Interscience Nuclear Energy Encyclopedia: Science, Technology, and Applications (2011). Dr. Lehr has spoken before more than 1,000 audience on topics ranging from global warming and biotechnology to business management and health and physical fitness. He invariably receives the highest scores for entertaining and energizing even the largest audiences. He was featured in Parachute Magazine in March 2010 for setting a new world record for having jumped from an airplane each and every month for 32 years.

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Jay Lehr

Kansas’ Probable Hidden Treasure of Water

What if fresh water like oil was treated as a critical economic resource in 1960? What if billions of dollars had been invested in ground water exploration over the past 50 years?  What if geologists had considered new paradigms and exploration technologies to discover and develop ground water?

Instead of believing that ground water resources increased by zero percent in the past 50 years, an ocean of water could have been discovered as has been the case in the oil and gas fields of the nation.

There is a new paradigm which we call the “megawatershed,” and it has succeeded in uncovering large new reserves of water in many parts of the world in recent decades.  As in the oil patch, private enterprise lead the way taking the risks and being open to innovation.

Conventional wisdom that has kept ground water development in the 19th century assumes the earth’s crust is effectively impermeable and not a significant source of renewable sustainable fresh water.

The megawatershed model recognizes that Earth’s mountains and the crust in general are pervasively fractured, hydraulically conductive and exposed to water infiltration, especially in mountainous areas where high rainfall occurs and bedrock is most fractured.

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Travelogue: Jay Lehr in Singapore

This is Part One of a multi-part series of blog posts from Heartland Science Director Jay Lehr, who is traveling in Southeast Asia this month.

I am a poor tourist, as I have already been everywhere in the world for work over my career. First, the Navy took me all over Southeast Asia. Then, 50 years ago — after receiving the world’s first Ph.D. in GroundWater Hydrology– I contacted every agency of the federal government involved in water, the United Nations, and World Bank and told them I would go anywhere in the world for 12 days to help them with a water problem for just the price of the plane ticket.

Well, some agency took me up on it nearly every year for 25 years, and I saw the world on interesting jobs. Unfortunately my wife Janet was not with me, and now she wants to see the world every chance possible.

To date we spent a day in Singapore which is a very clean city as you are jailed for chewing gum on the streets. It is a city of beautiful giant buildings and ugly cranes everywhere with absolutely nothing to do but shop.  In one giant mall we counted 58 jewelry stores all selling real diamonds.  It is evidently where rich folks in this part of the world go to shop.

After a day at sea — which was wonderful, as I never left the spacious gym where I will have no trouble working out four hours a day in early morning and late evening … which of course is a necessity with the incredible food they give away — we landed at an island off of Thailand called Koh Samui, where rich Southeast Asians come to play at beach side resorts.  Were the signs not written in Thai, you would not know you were not in any island in the Carribean. I have found that poverty has but one face all around the world.

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What Agriculture can expect from Washington

In my 50 years of experience with farm legislation there has never been a greater mystery as to what the next 6 year phase of farm support legislation may hold for American Agriculture. For decades many have predicted there would not be a “next” farm bill and of course the strong political power of America’s breadbasket proved that they were always wrong. It will still be wrong when Congress gets done debating what subsidies will be between 2012 and 2018, but never has it been a greater mystery — all because of the pressure on cutting our nation’s budget.

On November 23, the super budget committee of Congress will report to the president on how they plan to cut $1.2 trillion from the U.S. budget over the next decade. There is no doubt that as little as we know of the  the farm bill, we definitely know it will be in the cross hairs of the budget cutters. Sadly, few Americans know that as much as 60 percent of the cost of the perennial farm bill goes to food stamps and other programs to bring food to the poor — including the school lunch programs.

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Heartland Book Review (from One Skydiver to Another) of ‘Above All Else’

As a writer with 30 books in print, I am jealous that I do not think I could ever write a book as wonderful as Dan Brodsky-Chenfeld’s Above All Else. Of course no one else could write it as it is primarily an autobiography of one of the most extraordinary men I have had the honor to know in my life. But I also do not possess the skill to so artfully tell a story — that were it not true would be unbelievable and tell it with elegance, beauty, poise and clarity. Dan Brodsky-Chenfeld tells his story with the smoothness and flow of a mountain stream.

No one alive could read this book and come to the finish as the same person. It is a book about determination, courage and intensity that all will appreciate, and benefit from. In the end, Part Two is a brief well thought out self help book that can equate to any profession, though this book is about skydiving. But you could ignore self-help if you wish and just read this amazing story.

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Climate Change and Food Production: A Misunderstood Connection

The world’s food producers are frequently blamed for being responsible for some part of the “greenhouse gas” emissions thought to contribute to global warming, and consequently are targeted for regulations or carbon taxes. But the connection between climate change and food production is nearly the opposite of this popular but mistaken belief.

Increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – whether from humans, or from oceans and other much larger sources – increases all vegetation growth rates, making food and animal feed more plentiful and ultimately less expensive.

The idea that man has significant impact on the earth’s temperature is both arrogant and absurd. Between 1978 and 1998 when the earth was warming (it is not warming any longer) Mars, Pluto, Jupiter and the largest moon of Neptune warmed at the same rate. Our Hubble telescope found no SUVs on any of these celestial bodies.

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The Insanity of the EPA Continues

Whenever the EPA or the green movement uses the term, “it’s for the children” as a justification for their legislative and regulatory actions, it is time to look deeper. First, the EPA banned DDT. And yes….it was a ban.

It is true that there were exceptions written into the ban. And yes, it is true that this ban in the U.S. was not incumbent on other nations. And yes it is true that it was not a worldwide ban … on paper. However, so much economic pressure was placed on countries that didn’t ban it outright that it became a de facto ban in all but a few nations.

The cost to humanity has been staggering as a result. It is estimated that there are up to one million deaths from malaria each year. But that is the tip of the iceberg. Each year approximately 500 million people (some believe this number is underestimated by WHO) are infected each year with up to “365 million cases of malaria in Africa alone in 2002.”

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Angela Merkel’s Nuclear Folly

Once well-known German ingenuity will rapidly morph into German lunacy as Chancellor Angela Merkel takes a machine gun to the feet of German industry by ordering seven of the nation’s nuclear power plants shut down immediately, and the other ten within a decade.

She hopes to transition away from the 23 percent of energy provided by nuclear power by expanding coal and natural gas while targeting 2050 as the year Germans will get 80 percent of their energy from wind and solar.

Of course the latter is a physical impossibility due to the laws of the universe, which make wind and solar the least dense of all energy sources. Hundreds of square miles of land are required to produce the power of a conventional plant (1000 megawatts) instead of hundreds of acres for either fossil fuels or nuclear energy.

I am sure all of Germany’s European neighbors are quietly cheering this news for they know the resulting increase in energy costs will easily dethrone Germany from the top of Europe’s industrial pyramid.

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Heartland Book Review: A Little Radiation is Good for You

Charles L. Sanders’ latest book, Radiation Hormesis and the Linear-No-Threshold Assumption, is among the finest scientific research publications I have ever read. There are, believe it or not, 1,470 technical references within the text and bibliographies of its 15 chapters relating to Low Level Nuclear Radiation and each is referenced within the text — which means this author read every single one of them. A life’s work in itself

In spite of the vast amount of peer-reviewed literature on molecular, cellular, animal and epidemiological — indicating not harm, but benefit from low-dose ionizing radiation — outrageous, unsubstantiated statements continue to be made concerning its hazards, which we have all witnessed in recent months after the near-total distortion of potential harm to the Japanese population as a result of the nuclear power disruptions.

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Heartland Book Review: ‘Now Tell Me I Was Wrong’

If you enjoy reading outstanding prose on political, scientific and medical dilemmas, Now Tell Me I Was Wrong is a treasure trove of enjoyable reading by Tom Deweese, one of our leading conservative thinkers.  The book is a compilation of re-edited columns from his newsletter, The Deweese Report, written between 1996 and 2011.  It is divided into significant issues such as immigration, education, the United Nations, the environment and sustainable development, each with a newly written introduction for this book circa 2011.

Tom is neither Republican nor Democrat, but a true conservative and constitutionalist who is delighted with the Tea Party movement which has a chance to bring the nation back on track. He predicted that George W. Bush would be bad news because it was obvious his administration was accepting and advocating many of the same tired big government approaches we had heard before including central control of education and government land grabs in the name of the environment.

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Political Correctness Keeps Fukushima Water Out of the Ocean

In efforts to keep the fear factor high in Japan as radioactive gases from the damaged Fukushima power plants subsides, the focus has moved to the radioactive water that is flowing from the plants as a result of its use as cooling water.

The main fear is focused on the fact that some of the water has leaked into the ocean. Has the world really gone bonkers? There are about 310 million cubic miles of water in the ocean. How long will it take to dilute a few Olympic-sized swimming pools of radioactive water down to a harmless level? No more than a few days and more likely hours.

The radioactive water is not of significantly different density, so it will not move as a separate body but be absorbed thoroughly into the ocean. The oceans already naturally contain 3 parts per billion of uranium — enough that some have actually considered mining the oceans for it’s uranium.

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