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Posted on 03/15/2008 5:41:13 PM PDT by Delacon
Welcome to the Common-Sense Environmentalism Issue Suite, a comprehensive resource for people who support a common-sense approach to protecting the environment.
What is Common-Sense Environmentalism?
Common-sense environmentalism recognizes that almost everyone today is an environmentalist. We all want a healthy, green environment for ourselves and our families. What distinguishes common-sense environmentalism from more extreme environmental activism is a commitment to fight real environmental problems rather than imagined ones and a realization that free markets are an ally rather than an enemy of environmental stewardship.
Common-sense environmentalists recognize that environmental scares are frequently unsupported by sound science and are often launched to further an anti-corporation, anti-free market agenda. Activists use junk science to stampede the public into fearing chemicals in the air, food, and water, and the possible consequences of poorly understood phenomena such as climate change.
The best way to achieve a healthy and green environment is to use sound science to distinguish real environmental issues from imaginary ones, and then to tap the efficiency of market forces to address the environmental issues that truly do exist. This enables us to prioritize environmental and public health problems the first step in any serious effort to address a problem and to solve problems without trampling on other things we value, such as individual freedom and economic prosperity.
Air Pollution
Despite what you may hear in the media, air quality in the U.S. is improving dramatically. Air pollution is no longer a significant threat to public health. New laws to reduce the amount of soot and ground-level ozone are unnecessary and will be prohibitively expensive. Clean air debates should not focus on how much further air pollution ought to be reduced--“chasing the last molecule”--but rather on the most efficient means of continuing the progress that is already taking place.
Global Warming
Global warming is a prime example of the alarmism that characterizes much of the environmental movement. Media coverage of the topic is heavily slanted toward alarmism because “bad news sells,” making it difficult for climate realists to get a fair hearing. Al Gore’s recent movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” has been severely critiqued by many experts, yet it is being shown in high schools across the country as an educational documentary.
Climate science reveals that the world has warmed about 1 degree C during the past century, with half of that warming occurring before human emissions could have been responsible. Even if human activity is responsible for 100 percent of the warming since 1940, it is only about 0.5 degrees C., an amount so small it is within the error range of the instruments used to measure global temperatures.
There is no consensus about the causes, effects, or future rate of global warming. Most climate scientists doubt the reliability of computer models and the accuracy of land-based temperature records Reports by the IPCC are unreliable due to political editing and rewriting of the reports’ conclusions. Some of the key evidence cited in past IPCC reports has been shown to be fraudulent.
There is also disagreement over what to do about global warming. Economists believe the Kyoto Protocol, the treaty intended to reduce human greenhouse gas emissions, would cost its participants trillions of dollars while having little or not effect on the global climate. Meanwhile, the federal and state governments debate and pass legislation that will be similarly futile.
Many experts call for adaptation--making small changes to infrastructure and lifestyles to accommodate a slightly warmer world--rather than spend hundreds of billions of dollars trying to reduce emissions. Carbon sequestration could also play a role in responding to climate change.
All of the supposed catastrophic effects of global warming have been rebutted by scientists, including melting ice, hurricanes, other extreme weather, and extinction of wildlife.
An increasing number of experts believe the recent warming is due to natural cycles driven by variability in solar radiation.
Reliable experts on climate change include Patrick Michaels, S. Fred Singer, and Sallie Baliunas. Non-scientists who have rebutted climate alarmism include novelist Michael Crichton and Sen. James Inhofe.
For more information about global warming, go to Global Warming Facts, a Web site created by The Heartland Institute that focuses just on this issue.
Toxic Chemicals
Prior to the global panic over global warming, fear of “toxic chemicals” topped the agenda of many environmental activist groups. But here again we find a reliance on junk science, disregard for the cost of regulation or the risks created unintentionally by regulations, and a willingness to violate individual freedom and private property rights. The nation’s major federal law concerning toxic waste--Superfund--has been an expensive failure.
Over the years, environmental groups have launched campaigns against asbestos, dioxin, lead, mercury, pesticides, PCBs, chlorine, and endocrine disrupters. In every case, later research found the threats had been vastly exaggerated, and that public policies were adopted that cost far more than any benefits they created.
The key insight that environmental advocates, and the media that gives them sympathetic coverage, overlook is the First Law of Toxicology: The dose makes the poison. Many “toxic” chemicals are not dangerous if the level of exposure is below a threshold where physical affects can be observed, while many “harmless” chemicals can be deadly if we are exposed to too much of them. Many public health scares about chemicals are the result of overlooking this simple but important fact.
Free-Market Solutions
It is no accident that wealthy countries have made the most progress toward sustainable development. When people are forced to choose between food, clothing, shelter, medicine, or a green environment, a green environment becomes a luxury item. The best way to ensure effective stewardship of the environment is to encourage the development of wealth that makes environmental stewardship possible.
Free market to environmental protection focus on relying on markets and private property rights to create incentives to protect the environment. Free-market environmentalism is the opposite of the top-down government regulation favored by many environmental advocacy groups.
Risk assessment, while not in itself a free-market idea, is an important tool in overcoming many of the biases and errors of relying on government bureaucracies to protect the environment. Understanding the costs and benefits of regulations, and comparing the risks of action versus inaction, are fundamental building-blocks of common-sense environmentalism. The fact that government agencies do these things very poorly or not at all is a strong argument in favor of free-market environmentalism.
Learn More
To learn more about common-sense environmentalism, check out Environment & Climate News, one of The Heartland Institute’s five monthly newspapers. Click here to view the contents of the latest issue, and here to sign up for a free subscription by email. To subscribe to the print edition, click here.
PolicyBot, a free service of The Heartland Institute, contains thousands of studies and commentaries on environmental issues, all in a database searchable by author, topic, date of publication, and publisher. Click here to search the entire “Environment” topic category.
For an excellent introduction to the issues and principles at stake in the debate over how best to protect the environment, consider reading Eco-Sanity: A Common-Sense Guide to Environmentalism, by Joseph L. Bast, Peter J. Hill, and Richard C. Rue. The entire book is on this Web site, with each chapter saved as an easy-to-download PDF file. Chapters address resource depletion, cancer, “the crisis of the month club,” rules for thinking clearly about environmental problems, and a common-sense reform agenda.
Links to Other Resources
The Heartland Institute is not alone in providing information on common-sense environmentalism. Other good sources include:
World Climate Report--Dr. Patrick Michaels, past president of the American Association of State Climatologists, presents a comprehensive, concise, and hard-hitting overview of global warming science. World Climate Report is categorized by date and topic, and provides citations to the current scientific literature.
Science and Environmental Policy Project--Atmospheric physicist Dr. S. Fred Singer, Distinguished Research Professor at George Mason University and professor emeritus of environmental science at the University of Virginia, presents a weekly update on the latest global warming news.
CO2 Science--Dr. Craig Idso, a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Meteorological Society, and the Arizona-Nevada Academy of Sciences, presents a weekly review of the scientific literature regarding global warming issues. CO2 Science also provides historical temperature data from weather stations throughout the U.S.
Climate Audit--Geologist Steve McIntyre, who played a key role in exposing flaws in Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” graph purporting to show unprecedented recent warming, provides near-daily updates on the latest scientific data and literature regarding global warming.
Climate Science--Dr. Roger Pielke, Sr., a meteorologist with the Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University, provides near daily updates on the scientific literature related to global warming. Dr. Pielke insists that he is not a global warming “skeptic,” but does feel that global warming fears lack nuance and are substantially overstated.
Prometheus--Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr., a professor in the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Colorado, provides daily news and commentary on science policy regarding a wide variety of issues.
Center for Science and Public Policy--The Center for Science and Public Policy (CSPP) relies on scientific experts in many nations and the vast body of peer-reviewed literature to help lawmakers, policymakers, and the media distinguish between scientific findings that are agenda-driven and those that are based on accepted scientific methods and practices. The Center's Science Watch Team alerts policymakers, the media, and the public to unreliable scientific claims and unjustified alarmism which often lead to public harm.
Committee for a Constructive Tommorrow (CFACT)--CFACT’s E-FACT Report will keep you up to date on all the environmental issues that matter to you.
CCNet--Benny Peiser’s CCNet newsletter aims to disseminate information and foster debate about all aspects of “neo-catastrophism,” with particular focus on NEOs, the impact hazard and climate change. Among the newsletter’s almost 4,000 subscribers are more than 800 astronomers and researchers who work in almost every field of planetary and Earth sciences, but also many hundreds of science writers, columnists, policymakers and news editors from media outlets around the globe.
Common sense is an oxymoron.
ping
My mama taught me all I need to know about “Common Sense Environmentalism.”
Don’t make a mess.
If you do make a mess, clean it up.
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An oxymoron.
Good links made me go to a pdf that demands money. Go “pdf” yourself you “pdf” idiot.
Your mama is light years ahead of Al Gore. Of course you didn’t need to be told that having been brought up so well.
If there's ever going to be even a smidgen of honest debate on these issues in the MSM, then it's going to come from a group that knows that most government-funded studies are alarmist nonsense, and that where we do have problems, only free market solutions can solve them efficiently and permanently. If one type of light bulb really costs less to use, then people will eventually figure that out for themselves.
It’s called ‘Conservation,’ which involves the responsible harvesting of our country’s natural resources, not outright prohibition, as in ANWR.
Now I have some good stuff to read and savor until Monday.
I went back and checked. No pdf links at the bottom(the area that I recommended for links). Whats with the name calling either way? If there is a link somewhere in the article, I do apologize but you have to know it wasn’t intentional. Its not my article and I didn’t check many of them(there are many). If you only knew where I stand on pdf links. I did a vanity article:
Oh NO! I clicked on a pdf link!
3/10/08 | Delacon Posted on 03/10/2008 11:02:02 AM EDT
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1983257/posts
Good info here.
In case you run out...
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1986269/posts
Thanx for the link.
This should include a list of principles.
1) Men are not gods, and God does not come from a machine.
2) “Raising public awareness” is a tool of power and money hungry scoundrels. They don’t care about results, they want to steal resources for themselves and be praised for the theft.
3) A few experts who know what they are doing accomplish far more than a million fools holding hands and singing for an hour. Even if the experts just sit and think.
4) Many people feel want to feel superior by taking things away from other people, or denying them what is in abundance. They cannot enjoy a drink unless others are thirsty. They cannot enjoy the environment unless only they and their friends can use it. They hope that most people in the world die, because they hate them. They are sick and evil people.
5) The Earth’s mass is 6.0 sextillion metric tons. It is about 4.5 billion years old. It is essentially unchanged in that time. So much for The Butterfly Effect.
6) Stool gets everywhere. Background radiation cannot be eliminated. Nature creates far more toxic chemicals than man. The microbes in your body outnumber your cells by 20 times, and they are the dominant form of life on Earth. Every 100 years, all new people.
7) If there is a source of energy, nature will evolve something that eats it. 99.999% of everything nature creates is lethally flawed, but nature learns from its mistakes. Slowly. A form of life is only the best of its kind until something better comes along, then it is usually a goner.
8) People can follow the same rules as animals, but that doesn’t mean we have to act like them. And just because animals do things doesn’t mean we should.
9) People who are paid for something, even cleaning up a mess, will generally do better than those that aren’t.
It's freely electing to do your part to conserve resources for future use, WITHOUT government coercion.
Click on POGW graphic for full GW rundown
New!!: Dr. John Ray's
GREENIE WATCH
The Great Global Warming Swindle Video - back on the net!! (click here)
Ping me if you find one I've missed.
Bump for later reading.
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