Americans take electricity for granted. Electricity powers our lights, our computers, our offices, and our industries. But misguided environmental policies are eroding the reliability of our power system.
Try to ignore Earth Day, April 22. It won’t be easy. The print and broadcast media will engage in an orgy of environmental tall tales and the usual end-of-the-world predictions. It will scare the heck out of youngsters and bore the heck out of anyone old enough to know that we have had to endure the lies that hide the agendas that have driven the Greens since 1970 when the event was first proclaimed.
I was fortunate to have wrestled under Bill Koll for three years at Penn State. I say fortunate not because of the beating I took on the mats with my 1-4 career record – we weren’t as good as we are now under Cael Sanderson, but we always were a top 10 dual meet team and dominated the east, in spite of fierce opposition from the likes of Lehigh and Navy – but because wrestling under Coach Koll and assistant Andy Matter re-enforced the values I learned from my parents. The child of strict Italian parents, my first year or two at Penn State was like a kid being released into a candy shop whose never had a sweet before. I almost flunked out of school, but once I went out for wrestling, my grades shot up as the discipline returned. I quickly understood that if you want something you have to work for it. It also showed me why athletics can be a huge aid in education if done right. A big lesson for me: If you want something and someone is smarter or stronger than you, you have to outwork them to even have a chance.
I started covering some of the shenanigans from the solar industry last summer when I wrote about the “Green Tea Party” in Georgia. I had no idea what a can of worms I’d opened. In September, I wrote about the net-metering battle taking place in Arizona—and pointed out the national implications of what was playing out there. The following month, I addressed, what I believe, is an organized effort by the industry, to co-opt the language of the free-market/conservative/limited-government thinking population in an effort to convenience them that government-mandated and -subsidized solar energy was a good thing. Last month I warned consumers of solar scams in a column I wrote titled “Clouds on the solar horizon.”
Although many people, spurred by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, think “going green” means using less carbon dioxide, plants prefer just the opposite.
We all know plants need carbon dioxide to breathe, but many don’t know plants turn that carbon dioxide into carbon in the form of the roots, stems, trunks, branches, leaves, and fruit with which we are more familiar. And according to a new study by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, the more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the greener the planet gets.
Al Gore is back in the headlines, this time telling a Kansas audience their 1930s Dust Bowl conditions will soon return unless we stop using fossil fuels. We hope the Kansans will not be too alarmed, because Gore’s recipe for environmental salvation is actually the only sure way to bring the Dust Bowls back.
Keep up the good work, Chicago. With the ample snow and bitter cold, your efforts to fight global warming appear to be working!
Environment/Energy · Featured · Regulation
“[T]he GM debate is over. It is finished. We no longer need to discuss whether or not it is safe. … You are more likely to get hit by an asteroid than to get hurt by GM food.” So said Mark Lynas, the British environmentalist, who helped launch the anti-GMO movement in the 1990s.
Education · Environment/Energy · Featured
Our schools need to end the “green” indoctrination and ensure that students are presented with and taught to ponder and debate all sides of important and complex questions. Parents need to make sure they do so.
Environment/Energy · Liberty · Regulation
Companies everywhere extol their sustainable development programs and goals. Sustainability drives UN programs like Agenda 21, EU and US green energy initiatives, and myriad manufacturing, agricultural, forestry and other efforts.[...]
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