Tag Archives: Topic: Environmentalism

The Hill: “I am not interested in debating what is not debatable,” Moniz said in his remarks at the Tuesday ceremony. “There is plenty to debate as we try and move forward on our climate agenda.”

Guardian: Final draft of nonbinding education standards ‘buries’ human role but gives cohesion in introducing students to climate science

AP: President Barack Obama is telling Congress that he will take action to combat climate change if lawmakers don’t do it themselves.

CBS Chicago: Hold on to your wallets: we are in the middle of a gas price spike, and experts say it will only get worse. CBS 2′s Courtney Gousman learned several factors might push the price in our area to more than $4 a gallon.

Stefano Gennarini at C-FAM: A major disagreement among demographic experts threatens to upend efforts to include population control and family planning programs in the United Nations new development agenda. Experts who view population growth as an obstacle to development are criticizing the “laissez-faire attitude” of developing countries toward population growth and high fertility. Yet other experts disagree, saying that population control and family planning are not essential to development strategies.

NCPA Policy Digest: The renewable fuel standard (RFS) is increasing the biofuel-blending requirements. This change can give rise to numerous damaging spillovers throughout the economy, says Marlo Lewis, a senior fellow in environmental policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institu

Bloomberg: New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, an independent, issued a surprise endorsement of President Obama’s re-election Thursday, pointing to the president’s belief in global warming.

Wall Street Journal: President Obama is campaigning as a champion of the oil and gas boom he’s had nothing to do with, and even as his regulators try to stifle it. The latest example is the Interior Department’s little-noticed August decision to close off from drilling nearly half of the 23.5 million acre National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska. The area is called the National Petroleum Reserve because in 1976 Congress designated it as a strategic oil and natural gas stockpile to meet the “energy needs of the nation.

LA Times: Gov. Jerry Brown took “emergency steps” Sunday to try to bring down record gas prices in the state. He directed the California Air Resources Board to increase the fuel supply by allowing the immediate sale and import of cheaper and more available winter-blend gasoline.

USA Today: In the nation’s densest motoring Mecca, some southern California gas stations are starting to run out of gas. And $5-a-gallon gas could be on the way.

Reuters: Mitt Romney’s support of the coal industry during his debate with President Obama sent coal company stocks higher on Thursday, analysts said.

NCPA Policy Digest: For instance, if a pipeline in Phoenix were to burst and prevent supplies to the city, Phoenix could not look to Tucson for supplies because there are different EPA standards for the blend of fuels they each use.

Jonathan Adler at the Volokh Conspiracy quoting from a Wall Street Journal article: For most of the 20th century, the United States was a single market for gasoline. Today we have a series of fragmentary, regional markets thanks to dozens of regulatory requirements imposed by the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and state regulators.

CNSNews: report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that lifting the ban on federal oil drilling in certain areas could increase U.S. petroleum reserves by 30 percent, including an estimated 8 billion barrels of oil in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).

National Journal: After giving then-Sen. Barack Obama a full-throttled endorsement in the 2008 presidential election, the United Mine Workers of America has decided not to endorse either Obama or the presumptive Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, in 2012.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: Can a “human-centered approach” to issues include policies with the express purpose of eliminating people? This argument is cropping up, particularly in debates over climate change and now health care.

AP: Midwest ranchers have never been enamored with environmental regulators, but they really began to complain after learning that federal inspectors were flying over their land to look for problems.

Human Events: “This effectively kills coal in America,” said Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), author of the measure.

International Herald Tribune: Hu Xijin, the editor of Global Times, a populist pro-government newspaper, criticized the abortion on Sina Weibo, the Twitter-like microblogging service in China . . . But he also suggested the one-child policy was still necessary, saying that “world resources cannot afford to feed a China with billions of people.”

Carrie Lukas at Townhall: The problem for my family—and millions of families like mine—is that new cars are expensive, and the government is making them more so.

Turtle Bay and Beyond links to the paper and provides an excerpt.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: “The Future We Want” will not be a binding document. It is a political document without legal import. Whatever goals and ideals make their way into the document will not change the world over night. But, the outcome document of this conference will have political significance. It is an indication of the direction in which the political elites of the world want our future to go. For the most part, its success will only be assured if policies from the document become hard law through national legislation.

AFP: Graphic images posted online showing the bloody corpse of a baby whose mother was allegedly forced to terminate her pregnancy at seven months have caused an uproar in China.

Donald Rumsfeld at the Wall Street Journal (via Google): The Law of the Sea Treaty is as harmful today as it was when Reagan and Thatcher first opposed it in 1982 . . . When I met with Mrs. Thatcher in 1982, her conclusion on the treaty was unforgettable: “What this treaty proposes is nothing less than the international nationalization of roughly two-thirds of the Earth’s surface.” Then, referring to her battles dismantling Britain’s state-owned mining and utility companies, she added, “And you know how I feel about nationalization. Tell Ronnie I’m with him.”

LifeSiteNews (video embedded): Turner had to answer for his history of provocative statements, and made a few new ones, when members of the website WeAreChange.org caught up with him on camera late last month.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: In the last months leading up to the Rio +20 summit, yet another report was released promoting population control as essential in the fight to eradicate world poverty. The report, published by the Royal Society of London, titled “People and the Planet” . . .

Rael Jean Isaac at the Wall Street Journal (via Google): Unless Europe radically rethinks its obsession with carbon-dioxide emissions and the anti-fossil fuel energy policies that flow from it, growth is likely to remain elusive.

Guardian: Official forecasts often predict light pollution while US embassy tweets say conditions are bad, hazardous or even ‘crazy bad’

Guardian: Drug firms oppose an EU call for controls on potent chemicals that have been blamed for the gender mutation of freshwater fish . . .

Findlaw: Colorado Mining Association President Stuart Sanderson wants the Supreme Court to reverse the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals decision. Sanderson claims, “If allowed to stand, the roadless rule will effectively prevent future mining operations on roadless lands, leading to a decrease in mineral and coal production, job losses and sharp decreases in taxes and revenues from the coal mining industry that are critical to local governments and public school systems,” the Denver Post reports.

NCPA Policy Digest: However, a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) undermines the president’s assumption. Focusing on the Green River Formation in Wyoming, Utah and Colorado, GAO Director of Natural Resources and Environment Anu Mittal told Congress recently that just one small part of the United States is capable of out-producing the rest of the planet.

Phyllis Schlafly at Townhall: The stunning repudiation of Sen. Richard Lugar’s, R-Ind., bid for a seventh term has sent shock waves through Washington’s internationalist lobby . . . Americans today are in no mood for subordinating U.S. sovereignty, plus seven-tenths of the world’s surface area, to another entangling global bureaucracy, so advocates are using Orwellian talking points to pretend that LOST would do the opposite.

Acton Institute Power Blog (video included): Our friends at the Foundation for Research on Economics & the Environment (FREE) in Bozeman, Mont., have put together another strong slate of summer programs for clergy, seminary professors and other religious leaders with the aim of deepening their understanding of environmental policy. In its description of the program, FREE notes that many in faith communities “see an inherent conflict between a market economy and environmental stewardship.”

Bloomberg: Scalia’s approach is fueling the perception that the biggest cases this term, including health care, may be influenced by politics, rather than the legal principles that he and other justices say should be their guide.

NCPA Policy Digest: Deep-pocketed environmental groups are collecting millions of dollars from the federal agencies they regularly sue to enforce conservation measures. The payouts, which aggregate to tens of millions of dollars, even allow for reimbursement of legal fees, further encouraging enterprising environmentalists to take on the government in court, says Fox News.

Human Events: After regaling a group of environmentalists last week on military initiatives to pursue biofuels and prepare for climate change, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta advanced another tenet of a far-left military agenda Wednesday when he appeared at a forum to push for ratification of the United Nations Law of the Sea Treaty. The treaty would create an international regime of law to dictate actions and activities on and in the oceans

The HIll: Al Armendariz, the Environmental Protection Agency official under fire for comparing enforcement of environmental laws to crucifixion, has resigned.

Education News (includes video): Schools brainwash children into preferring non-existence. A 12-year-old girl has responded with the stunning “I wish we didn’t exist” to questions about how she feels about pollution and humanity’s impact on the earth, according to a new video released by Brian Sussman, author of “Eco-Tyranny: How the Left’s Green Agenda will Dismantle America.”

The HIll: Salazar, in one of his most fiery speeches in months, accused Republicans of creating a false divide over energy policy that doesn’t reflect public sentiment and stretches the facts to suit their political agenda.

The Hill: Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) on Wednesday is expected to introduce an omnibus energy/federal land use bill combining several bills that have passed the House over the last year but have stalled in the Senate due to Democratic opposition.

The HIll: Senate Democrats will hold firm and reject House Republican demands to include approval of the Keystone oil pipeline in transportation funding legislation, their leader said Tuesday.

The Hill: The coal industry will suffer the same fate as Osama bin Laden under new climate regulations proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency, the head of the United Mine Workers of America said this week.

One News Now: “This is a lose-lose for the American people,” he decides. “We are the Saudi Arabia of coal, and yet President Obama through the EPA is preventing us from using that natural resource.”

LifeSiteNews (includes video): Oh wow,” Duggar responded. “The idea of overpopulation is not accurate because, really, the entire population of the world, if they were stood shoulder to shoulder, could fit in the city limits of Jacksonville,” she continued. “We’re not anywhere near being overpopulated.”

SCOTUS Blog: The EPA acted under the Clean Water Act, and it insisted — with the approval of lower courts — that the couple could not sue to challenge the order and had to wait for court review at the option of EPA. That was the result the Court overturned in Sackett, et al., v. EPA, et al. (docket 10-1062).

One News Now: A pastor is pushing a new family planning campaign, but not the type that calls for being fruitful and multiplying. Instead, Richard Cizik, formerly of the National Association of Evangelicals and now with the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good, wants to reduce the population to fight alleged global warming.

The Hill: The White House scrambled Monday to contain the political damage from rising gas prices, which have emerged as a primary threat to President Obama’s reelection.

The Atlantic: From drugs to help you avoid eating meat to genetically engineered cat-like eyes to reduce the need for lighting, a wild interview about changes humans could make to themselves to battle climate change.

Erik Michael Johnson at the Huffington Post: It was just this understanding of rights as obligations that governments must obey that formed the basis for a declaration of rights for cetaceans (whales and dolphins) at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science held in Vancouver, Canada last month. Such a declaration is a minefield ripe for misunderstanding, as the BBC quickly demonstrated with their headline, “Dolphins deserve same rights as humans, say scientists.”

Washington Post: Senator James Inhofe’s (R-Okla.) recent comments about climate change have turned a policy debate into a theological conundrum.

LifeSiteNews: While President Barack Obama and Kathleen Sebelius claim contraceptives can lower health care costs, influential environmentalist activists say birth control may save the world from the scourge of global warming. At a think tank conference last week, activists promoted Agenda 21 and United Nations climate change meetings, claiming that promotion of lower fertility rates “trumps almost anything else” and that the average 14-year-old girl “needs to know how to have” sex “for her pleasure.”

Daily Caller: During a discussion series on Monday at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., speaker and activist Kavita Ramdas argued that contraceptives should be part of a strategy to save the planet, calling lower birth rates a “common sense” part of a climate-change reduction strategy.

The Hill: Republican candidate Newt Gingrich said President Obama should fire Energy Secretary Steven Chu following his remark this week that reducing gas prices is not the “overall goal” of his agency.

Heritage Foundation The Foundry: But for Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu, those steep prices aren’t even a concern. In fact, he says his goal is not to get the price of gasoline to go down.

The Daily Caller: The November decision to reject the construction plan “was the result of a decision made, to honor, the concerns of those in Nebraska, including the Republican governor … [that the pipeline] would threaten the water supply in Nebraska,” Carney said.

The Hill: Three House Democrats urged President Obama Wednesday to consider releasing oil from the country’s emergency stockpiles in order to lower gas prices.

The video and a report are available at CBS website. (direct YouTube link)

OneNewsNow.com: Rick Santorum says he questions President Barack Obama’s worldview, but not whether he’s a Christian.

The Hill: A green evangelical group won’t bow to conservative anti-abortion-rights leaders or Republicans who are pressuring them to stop casting support for new EPA pollution rules as a “pro-life” position.

Bloomberg: Prime Minister Stephen Harper, in a telephone call yesterday, told Obama “Canada will continue to work to diversify its energy exports,” according to details provided by Harper’s office. Canadian Natural Resource Minister Joe Oliver said relying less on the U.S. would help strengthen the country’s “financial security.”

The Hill: The Obama administration will reject the Keystone XL pipeline Wednesday afternoon, according to a source closely following the issue.

Bonian Golmohammadi at the : Huffington Post: On December 15-16, governments, international agencies and civil society groups met to discuss hundreds of recommendations on sustainable development in preparation for the June 2012 U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development. Focuses ranged from creating green jobs, to improving food security, achieving universal energy access, bettering water resource management, and addressing shark finning and marine pollution.

LaTimes.com: In a cause celebre for the right, an Idaho couple seeks a hearing on an EPA warning that a dry lot for their dream home is protected ‘wetlands.’

C-FAM Friday Fax: or decades, a basic tenet of the international population-control lobby has been that declining fertility rates will generate a more stable international order. But according to an impressive panel of scholars who have contributed to a new book, this scenario of “geriatric peace” is untenably optimistic. Population Decline and the Remaking of Great Power Politics is a collection of nine research essays . . .

The Hill: But they face vehement opposition from Republicans and industry groups, who argue the rules will harm the economy, force the closure of coal-fired power plants and threaten the reliability of the country’s power grid.

Washington Times: The bill doesn’t actually amend the 2007 law, but does prohibit the administration from spending any money to carry out the light bulb standards — which amounts to at least a temporary reprieve . . . The GOP tried but failed to attach restrictions on the Obama administration’s nuclear waste policy, its international family planning policy and major restrictions on the president’s environmental agenda.

NCPA Policy Digest: Electric bills have skyrocketed in the last five years, a sharp reversal from a quarter-century when Americans enjoyed stable power bills even as they used more electricity, says USA Today.

Washington Times: Idaho Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter said the Republican governors of the Midwestern states who back the stalled Keystone XL oil pipeline should bypass the federal government altogether and make the agreements necessary to get the $7 billion project up and running.

NCPA Policy Digest: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced plans to ban 20 rat and mouse control products because they use loose bait.

Daniel Henninger at WSJ.com: The decision by the Obama administration to “delay” building the Keystone XL pipeline is a watershed moment in American politics. The implication of a policy choice rarely gets more stark than this. Put simply: Why should any blue-collar worker who isn’t hooked for life to a public budget vote for Barack Obama next year?

The Washington Independent: The influential lobby for the environment said Friday that it was jumping into the same-sex marriage debate because of its commitment to social justice.

Breitbart: Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Sunday that he was looking at exporting more oil to China after the United States delayed a decision on a controversial pipeline.

NYTimes.com: The Obama administration is preparing to delay a decision on the contested Keystone XL pipeline while it studies an alternate route, effectively pushing any action past the 2012 election, officials and lobbyists who have been briefed on the matter said on Thursday. An announcement is expected as early as Thursday afternoon.

NPR: Chantell and Mike Sackett say the EPA violated their right to due process when it said they were building a house on a wetland and ordered them to restore the land.