The Unseen Carbon Agenda

The Unseen Carbon Agenda The Wall Street Journal wrote today that, though cap and tax has been stymied for the moment, the White House is pursuing the aims of carbon abatement through other means, notably through EPA regulations. It made me reflect on the breadth of the carbon abatement agenda. It reaches throughout the realm. [...]

How Smart are Smart Cars?

An $18,000 Smart Car requires about 13,360 gallons of oil in its production. Smart!

Eating and Buying Local: Northern Exposure

The message from environmentalists and food planners for government schools and food planners that would foist their vision on all of us is to buy locally grown foods. Restaurants do it trying to look holy. In Montana, it’s tougher. If you want to buy local, you can have beef. In Bozeman, you will have a [...]

Code Green

Code Green This green building code is uneconomic. Pay $7,000 more for a little house to make it a tad more energy efficient. That will add $516 to the mortgage costs yearly. It will save $200 in energy consumption. This is another environmentally-driven requirement that actually harms the environment. The $316 difference could go to [...]

Cars equal personal mobility. Smart Growth hates it and them.

What Smart Growth dictates is centrally planned housing and transportation. A normal person wants to live in a single family home and drive his or her own car, individualist housing, individualist transport. Planners want social housing policies and mass transit. The dissonance pits social provision of services against the personal autonomy. Smart Growth is mass [...]

Constitutions and Environmental Values

Montana’s constitution strives to guarantee, “the right to a clean and healthful environment”. This promise is hard to keep. What is clean? What is healthful? Lack of clear definitions breeds confusion. No wood stoves in neighborhoods would satisfy some. No walking on forest lands would satisfy others. No automobile pollution, hence no automobile use, might [...]

Avatar: Cowboys and Indians

I have seen the movie Avatar. It didn’t take me long to realize this was not a story about bioethics or about biotechnology. It was a morality tale. Evil modernism destroys natural sacredness. The subjugation of native peoples by European invaders. Custer’s last stand. Indigineous peoples are portrayed as serene, cultured, civilized, loving, and, above [...]

The Complete Environmentalist; a Guide for the Earth-holy. Paragons of environmental virtue.

As I put out the garbage this morning, I noticed the size of our neighbors’ garbage cans. True environmentalists would not produce so much garbage. They would have smaller cans. They would not simply recycle newspapers, they would cancel their subscription. They would not read newspapers. So many lists of ideas for saving the earth [...]

LEED is DUMB

LEED is DUMB To have your building certified LEED, it must meet environmental standards. But it is an example of green-enthusiasm with blinders. Bozeman, Montana’s city library is a LEED building. It has a solar array on the roof that cost tens of thousands but returns energy at a paltry rate, a 50-60 year return [...]

Low Flow TVs and Smart Meters

The headline read: California Sets Energy-Efficiency Rules for TVs. Wall Street Journal, Nov. 19, 2009. The goals are clean air, energy conservation, saving water, saving rain forests, keeping forests from logging, reducing congestion, the environmental panoply. The list of things local, county, state, national, and now international governments are willing to do to constrain individual [...]