“Absentee landowners may be gaining financially from [wind power] development, but the idea that ‘wind farming’ is a compatible agriculture use is more myth than reality in Illinois…. In fact, those Illinois farmers who have leveraged their operations conservatively tell us that they’re not interested in the ‘windfall’ of wind farming.”
The wind industry continues to claim that wind “farming” and agriculture are compatible land uses. Here it is again in a recent letter in the Wall Street Journal by the American Wind Energy Association defending the economics of wind power.
For years, politicians and urban/suburbanites have been treated to heaping doses of win-win business tales of family farmers leasing sections of their crop land for wind development, while working the soil right up to the towers and earning extra revenue to keep the land open.…
Continue ReadingTuesday July 2 begins my new Mises Academy online class, “Adventures in Energy Economics.” This five-week $59 course will cover the economic treatment of depletable natural resources, pollution, and climate change, as well as the current public policy debate.
The course naturally will focus on an entrepreneurial, property-rights, Austrian perspective, but the standard mainstream views will be accurately presented. All reading materials will be provided and are included in the course fee.
After the five-week course, the student will have a solid command of some of the major issues in energy economics and will be able to handle typical objections to laissez-faire capitalism coming from an environmentalist perspective.
Scope
The weekly lectures will run from July 2 through July 30. The first week will address the question, “Will we run out of energy?”…
Continue Reading“Social justice is really simply injustice…. While true justice strives to conform to a universal, objective standard of right and wrong, according to which different behavior naturally leads to different outcomes, social justice strives for a changing, subjective, egalitarian outcome.”
“Last month, the EPA released for public comment an 81-page ‘Draft Technical Guidance for Assessing Environmental Justice in Regulatory Analysis,’” reports Cornwall Alliance Senior Fellow Dr. Steven F. Hayward:
The ‘technical guidance’ lays out a detailed framework for assessing the demographic and racial impact of regulations, such as how to identify minority populations at higher health risk. “Minority, low-income, and indigenous populations experience greater exposure and disease burdens that can increase their risk of adverse health effects from environmental stressors,” the guidance states.
Well, EPA got one part of that right.…
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