Earlier this year, you might recall a pair of essays I wrote challenging green dogma. They were published at Discover’s website. The first was called “The Limits to Environmentalism” and the second, “Is Environmentalism anti-science?” This is a theme I’ve explored at Collide-a-Scape which, as one conservative reader has noticed, “provokes less than friendly responses from…Continue Reading…
Environmentalism, as a social movement, has atrophied. At the national level in the United States, it’s become reflexively oppositional, a marginal political force, and subject (with good reason) to caricature. This is because it remains wedded to an outdated paradigm, as I’ve previously discussed here. Despite its long history of anti-pollution advocacy, which has helped lead…Continue Reading…
Of all the postmortems on the recently concluded (and much maligned) Rio +20 Earth Summit, this observation strikes me as the smartest takeaway: “I think the expectation that there is one document or one approach that can solve one of the major questions of our time “” how do you maintain economic growth and protect the…Continue Reading…
As I mentioned yesterday, I participated in a panel discussion at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) on environmentalism. The event centered on Roger Scruton’s new book, “How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism.” (My fellow panelists included Daniel Sarewitz of Arizona State University and Kenneth Greene, an AEI resident scholar,…Continue Reading…
Last month, in several exchanges that pivoted off this post, Scott Denning, a climate scientist at Colorado State University, observed: There is an inexcusable silence from the political right about how to provide energy for 10 times as many people as we do today (almost all in China and India), without quadrupling CO2 for thousands…Continue Reading…
That’s the title of a new post I have up at Discover magazine’s website. I’m specifically drilling down into the widespread anti-GMO activism/sentiment within the green movement. As I write at Discover: The big story on this front of late has been the planned act of vandalism on the government-funded Rothamsted research station in the UK. Scientists there are…Continue Reading…
I have a confession to make. When I shop at a neighborhood foodie store for some organic staples, I sometimes forget to bring the environmentally correct, reusable grocery bags. It’s deliberate. For one thing, it pisses off my wife, a woman who hordes clothing catalogs the way I once collected comic books, and whose online…Continue Reading…
Some time ago, a mischievous person who works in the environmental/science communication sphere brought something to my attention: Laurie David, the producer of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth documentary, apparently became bored with global warming activism and moved on to a new cause. Nobody says that green activists should remain tethered to one particular issue….Continue Reading…
Some of you may be familiar with Portlandia. If not, here’s how the Oregonian describes the satirical IFC show: It’s a comic portrayal showing a town populated by compulsively organic foodies who interrogate their restaurant server on every detail of the chicken they’re about to order; aggressive bicycle commuters; humorless proprietors of feminist bookstores; and…Continue Reading…
When an institution remains wedded to a bygone era and unresponsive to change, It becomes irrelevant to people’s lives. Like the Catholic church. Many Catholics in the West don’t take the church’s anachronistic doctrine to heart. If they did, 98 percent of Catholic women wouldn’t be using birth control. Now when people criticize the Catholic church,…Continue Reading…