“By concentrating the growing of crops in ever more suitable locations, hydrocarbon-powered long distance trade not only maximized output and drastically lowered prices, but also significantly reduced the environmental impact of agriculture.”
“Turning our back on the global food supply chain and, in the process, reducing the quantity of food produced in the most suitable locations will inevitably result in larger amounts of inferior land being put under cultivation, the outcome of which can only be less output and greater environmental damage.”
An article of faith among local food activists is that modern industrial agriculture damages the environmental more than decentralized food systems. The article of faith is that concentrated impacts are worse than multiple, smaller operations–negative environmental scale economies, as it were.
This belief is erroneous, creating a gulf between (good) intentions and result.…
Continue ReadingRoyal Dutch Shell has spent billions of dollars over six years preparing to drill for new oil in Alaska. The hidden treasure is an estimated 20–25 billion barrels of oil beneath the Beaufort and Chukchi seas.
Not surprisingly, drilling for oil in Alaska is complicated and expensive (See map of proposed offshore exploration and drilling in Alaska). Part of the complexity is the distant Arctic location and short summer exploration and drilling window, and part is caused by drifty U.S. federal regulations.
Oil exploration and production is never easy (as in “the ‘easy oil’ has been found”), and new frontiers, technological and geographical, are always the challenge. And in this case, federal regulation from an anti-oil administration is at work.
Shell’s Coming Restart
on Shell’s suspended Arctic drilling operations for 2013, the company hasn’t given up.…
Continue Reading“When the history of the global warming scare comes to be written, a chapter should be devoted to the way the message had to be altered to keep the show on the road. Global warming became climate change so as to be able to take the blame for cold spells and wet seasons as well as hot days. Then, to keep its options open, the movement began to talk about ‘extreme weather’.”
– Matt Ridley, “Nobody Even Calls the Weather Average,” July 9, 2013.
There is no link between global warming and Sharknado, tweats U.S. EPA. But this summer, global warming has been blamed for firefighter deaths, more thunderstorms, and poor lobster catches. The litany of abnormalities that is so big and broad that contradictions, not only prima facie absurdities, abound.…
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