In my last post, I suggested that the externalities from coal-fired electricity generation were probably not as negative as was being touted in a recent report by Paul Epstein and colleagues from the Center for Health and the Global Environment. As further support for my contention, I submit the contents of a new book by copious carbon dioxide researchers Drs. Sherwood and Craig Idso titled “The Many Benefits of Atmospheric CO2 Enrichment: How humanity and the rest of the biosphere will prosper from this amazing trace gas that so many have wrongfully characterized as a dangerous air pollutant!”
The father-son authors take the reader alphabetically through the many benefits from an atmosphere enriched with carbon dioxide that they have gleaned from the peer-reviewed scientific literature, as well as the results of their own experimentation (also documented in the literature).…
Continue ReadingEditor Note: Part I yesterday examined the property-right and economics problems with Texas wind development.
“The government is using corporations as its arm. They’re not just destroying my land; they’re destroying my heritage. I was taught for as long as I can remember to be a good steward of the land. Now the government has given this company the right to take what they want and do whatever they want with it. Believe me, what they want will damage my land forever. It makes me feel helpless.”
– Mark Cadra, a Wheeler County rancher along CREZ route
As discussed yesterday, Texas landowners are fighting against eminent domain associated with a $4.9 billion (and counting) transmission line project to get the state’s wind generation from nowhere to somewhere. This project is hardly essential and is a case of throwing good money after bad.…
Continue ReadingEditor Note: Sam Pakan (full biography below) is a rancher and writer living in Wheeler County, Texas. Part II discusses the environmental controversy regarding Texas’s latest wind development push.
The eastern Texas Panhandle, a land of rolling sand hills, tree-lined creek beds and tall grass vistas, may seem a desolate place to outsiders. Still, it has its beauty, especially to the cattle ranchers and wheat farmers who work and live on it. But not for long.
Much of this land–the fragile habitat of the Lesser Prairie Chicken and the Whooping Crane–is scheduled to become industrialized if the Texas Public Utility Commission (Texas PUC), the Department of Energy (DOE) and Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) have their way. Incongruously, the demolition of this mostly native grassland is being proposed in the name of green energy.…
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