Far from damaging brains and killing seals, applying basic economics to the environment preserves it.
If the Endangered Species Act were applied uniformly to all of the species in the US that are potential candidates for its reach, Congress would swiftly repeal it. The act's potential costs are often too high to enforce aggressively.
Improvements seen across key environmental indicators should be cause for celebration this Earth Day, according to Steven F. Hayward, Ph.D., author of the new book "Almanac of Environmental Trends."
Moynihan seemed to be in the middle of every major political controversy for 40 years. As a result, this new collection of his letters, memoranda, and diary entries, ably edited and annotated by former New York Times reporter Steven Weisman, illuminates not only Moynihan's thought and character, but the age he lived in.
Amazingly, an era of energy abundance is upon us, unless politicians and environmentalists get their way.
The liberal reaction to Paul Ryan's budget plan makes it evident that liberals are more terrified than they've been since Jack Kemp (one of Ryan's mentors) advanced supply-side economics back in the late 1970s.
President Obama recently expressed enthusiasm for aggressive offshore drilling--in Brazil. His energy "blueprint" will get no further than all previous presidential schemes because it is unserious at its core.
Will Japan's catastrophe affect the "nuclear renaissance" in the United States? Four experts weigh in.
Will we have the maturity to learn and move forward from nuclear energy's worst moment?
Some Republicans are helping environmentalists get rid of coal energy, because they have invested interests in natural gas, but who is to say that natural gas won't be next?
Mitch Daniels needs all three legs--economics, social policy, and foreign affairs--to reach a majority.
Steven F. Hayward, author of "The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counter-Revolution, 1980-1989," answers questions on the policies and life of Ronald Reagan.
Shifts in the Earth's magnetic fields may be the new scare for eco-apocalyptics.
How did Reagan become a successful president and enjoy growing respect even among his ideological opponents?
Who knew that the centennial of Reagan's birth would be the occasion for a remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers?
People are misrepresenting Reagan's necessary compromises while in office, to incorrectly associate him with having a liberal agenda.
In "My Father at 100: A memoir", Ron Reagan attacks his father on several fronts, yet it seemed to lack substance on why he disagreed with him.
In an age of intensely polarized politics, the filibuster assures that a genuine consensus exists for Congress to move forward.
Ever so slowly, liberals are attempting a subtle revisionism of Ronald Reagan's presidency.
Dan P. McAdams, professor of psychology at Northwestern University, offers one of the first comprehensive psychological profiles of Bush in "George W. Bush and the Redemptive Dream."
The instinct of some liberal voices to lay blame for the Arizona shootings on the right, before any facts were known, is unseemly and potentially more divisive that the spirited rhetoric that is their target.
Bradley Lecture
January 10, 2011
Here's how serious people transcend ideological differences. And we don't need no stinkin' ‘no labels' badges.
While his Climate Fix sounds like yet another exercise in magical thinking, Pielke unloads one heresy after another.
This Cancun meeting ought to end like the last one, with the kleptocrats sent packing with copies of the Collected Economic Wisdom of the Gipper as the best prescription for dealing with climate change.
With the collapse of cap-and-trade in Congress, it is no longer possible to avoid the inconvenient truth that serious carbon constraints are a non-starter.
Policy makers should promote abundant and affordable energy, and oppose policies that raise energy prices and restrict energy access.
The House and Senate elections of 2010 have similarities with the elections of 1980, when many Republicans owed their election to populist reaction against the Panama Canal Treaties.
Energy is entering a new round of political neglect from both parties, but government should pursue a policy to drive energy innovation.
American energy policy is at a standstill. A new approach is needed that focuses on energy innovation as a key driver of American economic growth, national security, and health and safety benefits.
The greens have been so friendly with Democrats and so relentlessly hostile to all Republicans--even ones with conventionally pro-environment records--that Republicans have little reason to accommodate their views.
This week marked the 40th anniversary of its passage with scarcely any observance of the magnitude of progress under the legislation.
The annual gathering of the American Political Science Association probed the relevance of political science as an academic field, and failed to secure the attendance of any political luminaries, fomenting the question: is it important to consider how scholarly work relates to the policy world?
Though liberals may have put away their wings in foreign affairs, they are ever ready to soar higher at home, and Peter Beinart thinks our foreign policy travails are reason to cheer them on.
Norman Stone's new history of the Cold War, The Atlantic and Its Enemies, is a worthy addition to the essential Cold War canon.
The hysteria of the media and the political class over the Deepwater spill could have second-order environmental impacts that could be cumulatively worse than the spill itself, both for the Gulf and for other environmental arenas.
Greens keep returning to their abuser after another promise to do good, but nothing in President Obama's oil spill speech should offer them any hope that the administration is really going to change.
The Deepwater Horizon spill is clearly an ecological disaster, but overreaction to it could cause more environmental and economic harm than good.
Liberals sadly disdain Sir Winston Churchill, though he ought to be as much of a hero for liberals as he is for conservatives.
The United States needs a serious reassessment of a national energy policy and what energy issues to tackle first, as a transition to a post-fossil fuel world is not in the near future.
The environmental movement is falling out of favor because it has steadily moved to the left, abandoning the conservatives who were originally sympathetic to the cause.
The contrast between PBS's celebration of the huge public events of the first Earth Day in 1970 with the sleepy affair it is today tells you what is wrong with today's environmentalism: it is stuck in the past.
A recent survey confirms that Tea Partiers are much more concerned with economic rather than social issues, and that racism is not a dominant factor in their activism.
Whatever the new problem, environmentalists always end up back at the same old "solutions."
The revival of conservatism, drawing upon the richness of American exceptionalism, explains why America has refused to make peace with the modern welfare state, why it remains a military superpower, and why Americans remain religious people.
Numerous problems with temperature stations demonstrate why the supposedly settled issue of climate change has recently become so unsettled.
A recent leak of e-mails revealing errors and exaggerations about climate change could spawn the meltdown of the climate campaign.
Ronald Reagan would probably recognize, and approve of, aspects of Sarah Palin's political persona, especially since virtually all the criticisms of Palin were lobbed at Ronald Reagan before and during his time in the White House.
The climate campaign's trump card in the United States--the EPA's announcement of its intention to regulate greenhouse gases through the Clean Air Act--may turn out to be a joker.
Even before Climategate, the climate change hysteria was beginning to resemble a Broadway musical that had run too long, with sagging box office and declining enthusiasm from a dwindling audience.
The Climategate controversy calls into question the data on human-caused global warming, and it highlights the detrimental effects of politicized scientific research.
The occasion of remembering the fall of the Wall is a fitting time to recall the broader sweep of events that surrounded it.
House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade, and Consumer Protection
October 7, 2009
The two main issues that should be considered when assessing the prospects for increased export potential for American energy technology are the actual dynamics of the present market environment and the cross-cutting factors that will come to bear on how trade flows will unfold in the real world.
The leading conservative figures of our time are now drawn from mass media, and conservatism has been reduced to sound bites.
The Van Jones case illustrates the confluence of the environmental and civil rights movements in a way that exposes the senescence of both.
Alternatives to traditional energy sources are still too expensive.
Even with major increases in efficiency and conservation efforts, the world must triple its energy supplies over the next forty years.
Resident scholar Steven F. Hayward addresses whether President Barack Obama is a socialist.
Reagan remains the beau ideal of a modern conservative statesman, whose skills and insights are worthy of the closest study and emulation.
Patrick Allitt's inclusive history is a solid and worthy contribution to the growing literature about conservatism, but it will still leave many observers scratching their heads.
Will the media's penchant for accentuating the negative prevail over its pro-Obama sentiments?
Placed next to Reagan, Obama presents a picture of a politician with formidable gifts and vision, but weak and indecisive leadership.
More than a few observers have pointed out that President Obama and the Democrats in Congress seem determined to repeat the errors of the 1970s by returning to inflationary spending, tax increases, auto company bailouts and cuts to the defense budget while coddling dictators who hate America.
Waxman-Markey is a bundle of contradictions.
There was no Reagan "mystique"--study him closely and you see that he worked very hard at becoming a good politician, and part of that was concealing just how hard he worked at it.
The Right should ask itself why what was called "the Reagan Revolution" twenty-five years ago is being apparently swept away with such ease by President Obama.
AEI Online
April 13, 2009
Over the last decade, many conservatives have forgotten aspects of the Reagan presidency that disappointed or frustrated them to various degrees.
The climate change issue highlights the constitutional defects of the modern administrative state.
Reducing greenhouse gas emissions 80 percent by 2050 essentially requires replacing the entire energy infrastructure of the United States over the next four decades.
Arnold Schwarzenegger caves to the Democrats as his state drowns in red.
The environment and earth sciences aisle of any bookstore is usually a tour of titles that cover the narrow range from dismay to despair.
Steven F. Hayward reviews Presidential Command: Power, Leadership and the Making of Foreign Policy from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush, by Peter W. Rodman.
Reagan did not assume his landslide was a license for whatever he wanted.
Steven F. Hayward reviews William F. Buckley Jr.'s final book, The Reagan I Knew.
Like Harry Truman, Sarah Palin is a natural-born executive.
Steven F. Hayward reviews Martin Gilbert's Churchill and the Jews: A Lifelong Friendship, and Michael Makovsky's Churchill's Promised Land: Zionism and Statecraft.
Economic Club of Indiana
April 30, 2008
Contrary to some rhetoric, climate change cannot be solved by decree; there are revolutionary--albeit controversial--ways to address the problem.
There has been a strong push to lower the amount of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
Enormous environmental progress has been made since the first Earth Day in 1970--so much that the public may soon get bored with the issue.
The consistent improvement in America's energy efficiency is an untold and underappreciated long-term story.
The irony of the left's favorite epithet.
An attempt to break out of the rut of contemporary environmental politics is more likely to receive serious consideration from the Right than from the Left.
The IPCC moves too slowly and its reports omit too much recent evidence on key climate variables to provide up-to-date input into climate policy debates.
A new book on climate change.
Al Gore's Nobel Peace Prize is likely to be the high water mark of climate-change hysteria.
The current Republican candidates are incapable of effectively leading individually.
A new book diligently linksthe downfall of American liberalism to the assassination of former president John F. Kennedy.
The Forgotten Man grasps the meaning, realities, and particularities of the Great Depression as no revisionist text has ever done.
A new book by former president Jimmy Carter reveals the full extent of his character flaws and tendency to mislead readers.
William F. Buckley Jr.was presented today with the Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
Which climate policy approach will succeed the Kyoto Protocol: cap-and-trade or a carbon tax?
In an interview, Hayward outlines reforms that will lead to true environmental improvement.
Energy independence may be a hollow slogan, but "energy security" is something we can achieve.
Do nottell us what kind of light bulbs to use or cars to drive. Let consumers chose from among a diversified supply of energy sources.
Claremont Review of Books, Spring 2007
April 10, 2007
Former vice president Al Gore's global warming claims may be too extreme.
AEI Online
February 22, 2007
A growing worldwide effort to stifle anyone with doubts about the proposed causes of global warming is proving to be very troubling.
Green and Hayward respond to the chilling effect of the global warming consensus.
What virtues exist in liberal historian Gordon Wood's books?
A review of The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister by John O'Sullivan.
Claremont Review of Books
January 1, 2007
Claremont Review of Books
January 1, 2007
In hindsight we can now appreciate just how well Gerald Ford served his country.
A National Review Online symposium asks: "Is it all about you? Or them?"
A close reading of Al Gore’s views on the linkages between environmental issues and broader social and philosophical currents reveals their problematic political and policy implications.
Churchill Centre American Political Science Association Dinner
September 2, 2006
Nietzsche's framework for understanding the use and abuse of history are helpful in reflecting on some of the contemporary uses to which Churchill’s memory is now put.
The campaign to fight global warming--often based on exaggerations and conjecture rather than science--obscures effective steps that could be taken to address the issue.
The crusade to fight global warming with tough reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions has entered its war-room phase.
A Review of Churchill and America.
A Review of Churchill and America.
China has indeed reached a tipping point on the environment--the point at which it begins to make environmental improvements.
A review of Jimmy Carter's Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis.
AEI Online
March 19, 2006
The UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment inclusion of human resiliency and adaption suggests that it may represent a turning point from old-style Malthusian fatalism on the environment.
Climate change is heating up again in American politics, the result of an orchestrated campaign to push the issue to the forefront.
The tentative collaboration of evangelicals and environmentalists may provide a path out of the rut of current popular environmental discourse.
The twenty-fifth anniversary of Ronald Reagan's first inauguration coincides with a renewal of concern about the intentions of Iran.
Recent environmental news out of China has lent new momentum to the gloomy view of China's environmental future amidst its rush for economic growth, butthe gloom may be overstated.
The time has come for a representative of the next generation of interpreters or advocates of the conservative cause to step forward and take the reins.
The issue of hurricanes and climate change--a linkage not established in current climate science--distracts from the most significant environmental lessons of the Katrina disaster.
What do environmentalists and evangelicals share in common, and how can they learn from each other?
Philanthropy Roundtable Meeting
June 20, 2005
Why can't conservatives and conservationists get along?
A review of Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays by Christopher Hitchens.
The Weekly Standard
May 23, 2005
A review of Gil Troy's Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s and John Ehrman's The Eighties: America in the Age of Reason.
Dallas Morning News
May 14, 2005
The lesson of the past century has been that environmental progress depends on economic and technological progress, which are best produced by dynamic markets.
A review of Victor Navasky's A Matter of Opinion.
National Review Online
April 22, 2005
What are you doingfor Earth Day?
Perhaps the time has come to consider competition as the means of checking the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's monopoly and generating more reliable climate science.
Climate change is a legitimate issue, but between the shabby way environmentalists and the Left exploit it, and the faulty record of so many past predictions of the eco-apocalypse, deep skepticism remains the sensible default position.
National Review
January 31, 2005
The global warming hype is running out of (greenhouse?) gas, as it very much deserves.
The authorcompares the Democratic Party's recent performance to that of popular stocks.
National Review
November 8, 2004
Review of Reagan's Path to Victory, edited by Kiron K. Skinner, Anderson, and Anderson.
A slew of environmental books in 2004 is testimony to the persistence of environmental apocalyticism, despite environmental progress in the United States and the developing world.
Claremont Review of Books
September 1, 2004
How did Ronald Reagan see that liberalism's lack of a limiting principle would be its undoing, especially since the most severe derelictions of liberalism lay in the future?
National Review Online
July 27, 2004
National Review
June 28, 2004
While RonaldReagan will be compared to Franklin D. Roosevelt because he represented a turning away from New Deal liberalism, he deserves to begroupedwith Winston Churchill.
Times Union
June 12, 2004
Like Franklin D. Roosevelt, RonaldReagan upended the near-monopoly of theDemocratic Party on the nation's political life.
President Reagan will be remembered as one of the most influential presidents of the twentieth century.
San Francisco Chronicle
June 7, 2004
Whetherone liked his views or not, Ronald Reagan could be a genial person and govern effectively too.
The author remembers Ronald Reagan.
Tallahassee Democrat
May 27, 2004
The Day After Tomorrow transforms the worst-case scenarios of climate change into the apocalypse.
Washington Times
May 21, 2004
Far from being a marginal figure in the Democratic Party, Jimmy Carter is the pivotal influence in moving Democratic Party liberalism away from Cold War realism.
The American Lung Association's "State of the Air 2004" continues to inflate air pollution levels and health risks inorder to maintain an unwarranted climate of public fear.
New Source Review is going to be the red herring environmental issue for 2004's presidential campaign.
U.S. News & World Report
April 22, 2004
The United States hasbeen so successful in improving environmental quality in recent years that we should be celebrating, not despairing.
Claremont Review of Books
April 1, 2004
Review of Reagan: A Life in Letters, edited by Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and Martin Anderson.
New York Sun
February 13, 2004
State regulators have resisted replacing their inspection programs with on-road testing, yetthere is no other means to more substantial, rapid, or inexpensive improvements in air quality.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
January 4, 2004
Know-nothingism and doomsaying about the poor state of the environment is more profitable, and it gets better headlines.
Acloser look at the data reveals that high ozone levels are found to be occurring on weekends, when emissions of nitrogen oxides are often 40 percent lower than weekdays.
Environmental justice seeks to integrate civil rights concerns with environmental regulation, but much of the research purporting to show racial bias in environmental regulation is slipshod.
National Review
October 27, 2003
The weird and improbable event that is Arnold Schwarzenegger's election.
American Spectator
October 1, 2003
National Review
September 15, 2003
California can get well--and stay well--with sensible, though politically difficult, reforms.
Claremont Review of Books
September 1, 2003
Review of Living History, by Hillary Rodham Clinton, and The Clinton Wars, by Sidney Blumenthal.
National Review
September 1, 2003
It looks like Gray Davis could well go down in history as the one Democrat even less popular than Al Gore.
The Environmental Protection Agency hasannounceda controversial decisionto reopen public hearings over its proposed changes to the Clean Air Act's New Source Review regulations.
Subcommittee on Energy Policy, Natural Resources, and Regulatory Affairs
June 6, 2003
Putting the EPA on commensurate footing with other cabinet agencies will make it more accountable to the President, informative to the public, and efficient in its operations.
Many current criticisms over the George W.Bush administration environmental policyare founded on data from the Reagan administration in the 1980s.
Claremont Review of Books
June 1, 2003
The Weekly Standard
May 12, 2003
Review of Searching for Joaquin: Myth, Murieta, and History in California by Bruce Thornton.
Tech Central Station
May 1, 2003
State of the Air is designed to generate alarming headlines rather than provide the media and the public with accurate information on air pollution.
Scientists question the methodology by which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has made its long-term estimates of man-made carbon dioxide emissions for the twenty-first century.
The Public Interest
March 22, 2003
Theidea of sustainable development has been around for nearly two decades, but its vagueness has kept it from being a useable guide for policy.
While we need several more years of data to resolve questions about many chemicals, the early results suggest that fears of human exposure to chemicals are exaggerated and unwarranted.
Bjørn Lomborg's real sin is environmental incorrectness.
Claremont Review of Books
January 1, 2003
National Review Online
December 19, 2002
Despite vigorous public support for environmental protection, the environment is a decisive issue for only a tiny segment of the electorate.
On Principle
December 1, 2002
The State of the Nation's Ecosystems analyzes environmental trends, provides a check-up on environmental conditions and identifies problems in assessing environmental trends.
Numerous corporations have embraced the concept of the triple bottom line: financial, environmental, and social.
Religion & Liberty
September 8, 2002
This issue of the Environmental Policy Outlook examines some basic aspects of sustainable development and reviews recent attempts to quantify the sustainability of the world economy.
Energy Daily
July 31, 2002
Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service
July 24, 2002
Law of Unintended Consequences is the most frequently enacted statute in America, and the perverse outcome of well-intentioned lawmaking is on full display in California at the moment.
This issue introduces the Environmental Policy Outlook, a monthly essay on trends and controversies in environmental policy.
On Principle
June 1, 2002
The World & I
March 1, 2002
Ask a cross section of informed citizens to identify the single largest public-policy success story in America in recent decades, and most will probably answer crime and welfare.
Tulsa World
January 27, 2002
Sept. 11 depreciated the claim that the ruin of the environment is the single most urgent threat facing civilization, and it deprived them of their favorite whipping boy--the Bush administration.
The Weekly Standard
October 30, 2000
Environmental quality in Texas has improved under Governor Bush by virtually every useful measure.
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