Environment Archives

February 15, 2023

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• On February 3, a freight train operated by Norfolk Southern derailed in Ohio near the small town of East Palestine, releasing toxic fumes and causing a massive fire.
• Residents were ordered to evacuate and there are ongoing concerns about the safety of their air, soil, and water.
• Far-right pundit Tucker Carlson expressed concern that the EPA was not aggressive enough in exercising its regulatory authority to protect residents.
• It would take regulations and reining in corporate greed to minimize the risk of train derailments and protect communities from environmental disasters.
• Rail companies have vehemently opposed federal safety initiatives for years, especially when it comes to the transport of hazardous materials.
• The Trump administration authorized the transport of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) by rail and the Biden administration has yet to reinstate the brake rule or expand the kinds of trains subjected to tougher safety regulations.
• Freight rail has become more dangerous due to cost-cutting systems like Precision Scheduled Railroading, which has resulted in job cuts and reduced inspection times.
• Norfolk Southern has used the higher profits from Precision Scheduled Railroading to repurchase shares of its own stock, benefiting executives and investors.

Published February 15, 2023
Visit Popular Information to read Judd Legum’s original post The environmental awakening of Tucker Carlson

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Climate Activism Has a Cult Problem [Zion Lights, The Free Press]

By Spencer Chen

In [The Free Press]

January 23, 2023

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• Extinction Rebellion is a movement that fights climate change by demanding governments stop using and producing fossil fuels immediately.
• Their methods seem unorthodox, and the author used to be a part of the movement.
• The author was part of Camp for Climate Action, where they protested a different corporation every year, and was part of the collective that took over Waterloo Bridge in London for two weeks.
• The author was asked to join the XR Media and Messaging Team, and her days were spent writing for the national press, feeding journalists quotes and information, and editing their newspaper, The Hourglass.
• The author was instructed to cry on television and bring her children to climate marches to manipulate emotions, and the XR office had a sign to keep shoes on due to people walking around without them.
• Roger Hallam, a 56-year-old organic farmer-turned-radical, is the most dominant leader of the climate change movement Extinction Rebellion (XR).
• He preys on the guilt and anxiety of his followers, mostly young men and women, and has been compared to a cult leader.
• Greta Thunberg, another prominent figure in the climate change movement, has been heavily influenced by XR.
• In October 2019, XR shut down the London Tube, which caused a lot of public backlash and splintered the movement.
• Roger’s extreme rhetoric and actions, such as his proposal to fly drones over Heathrow Airport, have caused many members to leave XR.
• Roger has since rebranded the most extreme faction of XR, Just Stop Oil, which is supported by the Climate Emergency Fund.
• His apocalyptic rhetoric has become more lurid, and he has been accused of brainwashing innocent children to do his bidding.

Published January 22, 2023
Visit The Free Press to read Zion Lights’s original post Climate Activism Has a Cult Problem

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Why Paul Ehrlich got everything wrong [Noah Smith, Noahpinion]

By Spencer Chen

In Noah Smith [Noahpinion]

January 6, 2023

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• Paul Ehrlich’s predictions in The Population Bomb were spectacularly wrong, but it is important to recognize that his warnings about environmental catastrophes should still be taken seriously.
• Ehrlich’s predictions were wrong due to countermeasures and adaptations that acted as a dampening force, slowing down the trend lines before catastrophe hits.
• These countermeasures and adaptations included the Green Revolution, lower fertility rates, and human ingenuity.
• The lesson from Ehrlich’s mistakes is that stabilization of global food supply was achieved via technological innovations by concerned scientists, which were then adopted by concerned governments.
• Paul Ehrlich’s predictions of population and resource scarcity in the late 1960s and 1970s have been echoed by degrowth advocates in the late 2010s and 2020s.
• Degrowth advocates often rely on aggregate measures of resource use and trend extrapolation, which are flawed metrics.
• Environmental catastrophes are a real possibility, and it would be dangerous to ignore the people warning about them.
• Alarmism about environmental catastrophes may be a useful counterweight to human callousness towards non-human life, and may help to keep habitat destruction in the public consciousness.

Published January 5, 2023. Visit Noahpinion to read Noah Smith’s original post.

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The big NEPA roundup [Noah Smith, Noahpinion]

By Spencer Chen

In Noah Smith [Noahpinion]

December 9, 2022

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NEPA is a procedural requirement for any project with federal involvement to do an environmental impact review before starting construction.
NEPA reviews often take several years to complete and can be used as a weapon by activist groups to delay or cancel projects they don’t like.
Op-eds have argued that NEPA allows excessive community input and is un-democratic, and that progressives are doing themselves a disservice by opposing Joe Manchin’s proposed permitting reforms.
Abolishing NEPA and replacing it with other procedures for enforcing environmental law has been suggested, though no guidance has been given on how to do that.
NEPA is a federal law that requires environmental reviews for certain projects, but it often delays projects that would improve environmental quality.
Think tanks have proposed various reforms to NEPA, such as extending favorable treatment to renewable energy projects, limiting judicial review, and creating special “corridors” with reduced permitting requirements.
Defenders of NEPA argue that it is necessary to protect the environment, and that delays are often due to other environmental regulations or lack of bureaucratic capacity.
They also suggest that NEPA can be a tool for speeding up decisions by coordinating information sharing between agencies.
NEPA is seen as a major obstacle to rapid deep decarbonization of the US economy.
Reforms to NEPA have been proposed, such as increasing agency staffing, using programmatic Environmental Impact Statements, allowing more renewable projects to use Environment Assessments and Categorical Exclusions, imposing time limits on some NEPA reviews, and requiring agencies to consider the positive environmental effects of a construction project.
James W. Coleman suggests that Congress should step in to restore a balance between making reviews more predictable and timelier while maintaining their rigor, and that energy projects should receive expedited review in the D.C. Circuit, with permits eventually being immunized from invalidation under NEPA if they are forced to wait an unreasonable length of time.

Click HERE for original. Published December 9, 2022

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TagEnvironment

The environmental awakening of Tucker Carlson [Judd Legum, Popular Information]

Climate Activism Has a Cult Problem [Zion Lights, The Free Press]

Why Paul Ehrlich got everything wrong [Noah Smith, Noahpinion]

The big NEPA roundup [Noah Smith, Noahpinion]

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