activists

Lately, education scholars at Washington, D.C.-based, nominally conservative think tanks have spun themselves into a tizzy about the education reform movement’s splintering into quarreling factions.

In this edition of The Heartland Daily Podcast, Jackie Stewart, from Energy in Depth, and Research Fellow Isaac Orr discuss the origins and influence of the Keep It In The Ground movement, and how they affect public policy. This affect on public policy comes despite receiving rebuke from Sally Jewel, the Secretary of the Interior, who dismissed the movement as unrealistic.

Anti-fracking activists have pointed the finger at fracking for the dramatic rise in earthquakes in Oklahoma over the last several years, however a new video featuring Dr. Mark Zoback, a professor of geophysics at Stanford University, explains fracking is not to blame for the quakes.

Frustrated that nobody seems to care about climate change, “the country’s biggest individual political donor during the 2014 election cycle,” has pledged even more in 2016. Tom Steyer spent nearly $75 million in the 2014 midterms, reports Politico. He intends to “open his wallet even wider” now.

The Heartland Institute sent a delegation of climate scientists and other expert to Paris in early December to attend the United Nations’ 21st Convention on Climate Change (COP-21), at which time they conducted a counter-conference, held news conferences, and attended official and unofficial events in Paris.

Politicians, international bureaucrats, radical environmental activists, and bought-and-paid-for government scientists recently gathered in Paris to shape a climate change treaty less about fighting climate change and more about ensuring the existence of an ongoing flow of big-dollar research grants to researchers and activist organizations and greater control of the world economy for politicians and bureaucrats.

Today’s edition of The Heartland Daily Podcast features Kathleen Sgamma of the Western Energy Alliance. Sgamma joins Research Fellow Isaac Orr to discuss the origins of the anti-fracking movement and their current status.

Gasland was many Americans’ first exposure to hydraulic fracturing, and the film sparked anti-fracking organizations around the country. These activist groups used the film in efforts to convince people that fracking is responsible for a whole host of environmental problems, including contaminated water supplies, overuse of water, and even earthquakes.

In April, it took a correction from Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Barbara Jaffe to establish that Hercules was not in fact a person eligible for a writ of habeas corpus. The New York Post reported that the judge “acknowledged that she inadvertently got turned into a monkey’s uncle by signing court papers, submitted by (The Nonhuman Rights Project,) that inadvertently bestowed human status on two chimpanzees” used at a state university.

Both of the nation’s retail hardware behemoths, Home Depot and Lowe’s, recently sold out to activists in ways that are the corporate equivalent of a dog’s putting his tail between his legs and slinking away from a bully. Home Depot announced that by the end of this year it will stop selling vinyl flooring that contains a class of chemicals called phthalates. It described the move as an effort to “continually challenge our suppliers to develop new, innovative options for our customers.” Baloney. What the company did was abandon both science and its customers under pressure from the activist group Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families, which sponsors the “Mind the Store” campaign that has been strong-arming retailers to remove safe, useful, and affordable products from shelves.

The contrast between the spin put on youth e-cigarette use data last Fall and the story told by the actual data, released last month, is startling but not surprising, given the U.S. government’s over-zealous tobacco prohibition posture.

According to some activists, charter schools are the villain in the nation’s current education narrative.

Nanny-state activism will not be as effective as market-based reforms.