“Understanding government failure in the quest to address market failure could result in an optimal government policy of doing nothing in the face of a postulated negative externality from business-as-usual. But an activist policy expanding economic freedom in order to improve adaptation to climate change, natural or anthropogenic, qualifies as climate policy change too.”
Richard Mueller of the University of California at Berkeley is an important voice in the polarized climate-change debate. At the Huffington Post in mid-April, the physicist and philosopher posted “The Classifications of Climate Change Thinkers” with six categories (schools?) of thought.
His useful categories shortchange the political economy side where the scientist or citizen or politician must assess government failure along side market failure before deciding that the government should “do something,” as in pricing carbon dioxide or enacting a slew of surrogate regulation.…
Continue Reading“Bald and golden eagles are protected by state and federal laws. Slaughtering eagles is illegal, and nothing is ‘incidental’ or ‘unavoidable’ when it comes to enormous wind turbines.”
“Creating a vast imaginary population of eagles, avoiding true scientific research, falsely calculating an enormous, supposedly “sustainable” yearly harvest rate, and deliberately ignoring the huge eagle slaughter taking place around the wind farms really is fraud. The perpetrators should be prosecuted.”
[Editor note: This post completes Part I and Part II from last week.]
The word harvest connotes the reaping of editable crops to sustain humanity. As used by the Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS), “harvesting” is the killing of one of our most iconic species, one of our most magnificent raptors, by the “grim reaper” wind turbines.
Turbines supply some of our most expensive, unreliable, and heavily subsidized electricity, under blanket exemptions from the Endangered Species Act and other environmental laws that are applied with unflinching severity to virtually every other industry. …
Continue ReadingOn May 6, 2016 the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and Department of the Interior announced a plan that would set massive industry “bag limits” (permission or license to kill) for an eagle population that in many areas of America no longer or barely exists. In the case of the golden eagle, most of this eagle harvest will come from migratory eagles that nest outside the Lower 48 U.S. states. This is Part II of a four-part series which began yesterday.
Since 1997, when the Department of Interior’s Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) repository first disclosed that wind turbines were a major cause of eagle deaths, wind energy has increased its deadly footprint by more than tenfold into golden eagle habitats in the western United States.
The FWS’s Draft Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (DPEIS) created for the Eagle Rule Revision completely ignored the many thousands of eagle carcasses and autopsy records that exist in the Denver repository. …
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