Category: Environment
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Oilfield Reality Check
By Peter Galuszka One has to laugh at just how fantastic the debate over energy has become. Conservatives are trying to make President Barack Obama a goat for not bowing to the propaganda about the Keystone XL pipeline which would take unusually dirty oil from Canadian tar sands all the way to the U.S. Gulf…
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From Rising Temperatures to Big Government In Six Easy Steps
by James A. Bacon When the United Kingdom’s Met Office released its 2011 global temperature numbers back in November, the results were ambiguous enough that both the Global Warming (GW) establishment and skeptics felt vindicated. A compilation of the world’s three leading global temperature databases — the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, the NOAA Climate…
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Up to Our Alligators As Area Warms?
By Peter Galuszka Holy magnolia! The area just south of Washington on the Potomac River and all the way north of Baltimore on the shores of Chesapeake Bay have become noticeable warmer over the past 22 years. Consequently, it is possible to grow species of plants in that zone that previously needed warmer, more southerly…
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Good Move on Uranium
By Peter Galuszka Gov. Robert F. McDonnell has punted on the uranium controversy and that’s a good thing, assuming the General Assembly doesn’t lift the mining ban anyway. There are simply too many unknowns about mining the tract owned by Virginia Uranium near Chatham and the state has no knowledge or regulations about mining the…
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Malodorous Portsmouth
By Peter Galuszka Is there something stinky going on in Portsmouth? It’s a question that has suddenly wafted up when residents of the port city learned that the Virginia Ports Authority has been in secret talks with Canadian-owned PCS Phosphate to put in a plant to melt sulfur pellets for fertilizer production. The same project…
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More Hypocrisy from Philip Morris USA
By Peter Galuszka Tobacco has always been a powerful industry in Virginia since the days of the Jamestown colony. It is no less influential today as Henrico County-based Philip Morris USA and its parent firm, Altria, constantly play shell games about the hazards of their products. Just before Christmas, and right in time for the 2012 election year,…
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Clash of Principles in Wind Farm Debate
by James A. Bacon The Floyd County board of supervisors is considering a ban on structures taller than 40 feet on mountain ridges, an action that would kill any chance of building a wind farm in the Southwest Virginia county. The proposal is bound to be controversial in the sparsely populated jurisdiction — and it…
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Virginia’s Energy Fantasies
By Peter Galuszka Plans to mine uranium in Southside Virginia did not get the boost some had been hoping for now that a 22-month-long review by the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering has been released. Far from rubber-stamping the plan, the independent analysis reported that there are “significant” health and environmental…
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The Heritage Foundation Takes on the Anti-Agenda 21 Crowd
by James A. Bacon Finally, someone has responded to a bizarre sub-current of the conservative movement, the anti-Agenda 21 crowd. Wendell Cox, Ronald D. Utt, and Brett D. Schaefer with the Heritage Foundation have published a paper arguing that the anti-Agenda 21 movement is a distraction from the larger task of opposing “destructive smart growth…
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Why Not Public-Private Partnerships for Parks?
by James A. Bacon Few people outside the Roanoke area have heard of Virginia’s Explore Park, a 1,100-acre facility set in the mountains of Roanoke and Bedford counties. Launched with great fanfare in 1986 as a public-private partnership, the park offers mountain bike trails, a forester’s trail, a fishing and kayaking access point to the…
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The Wonk Salon, November 21, 2011
U.S. Industries Need a “Competitiveness Audit” Progressive Policy Institute Local, state and federal government need a “competitiveness audit” of American industries to guide the allocation of economic development resources. Target those industries that have a chance of becoming economically competitive and write off the losers. New Technologies More Effective than Compact Development at Cutting Greenhouse…
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What’s McDonnell Up To With Transportation?
By Peter Galuszka The McDonnell Administration is taking a chain saw to policies that promote smarter, more efficient growth by axing reforms to make neighborhoods connected and pushing design contracts that fast-track road construction and discourage public input. Such are the conclusions drawn from two blog postings by David Alpert of Greater Greater Washington and…
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Save the Bay — with Property Rights
Same Chesapeake Bay, two different states…. and two very different fishing industries. Virginia’s fisherman are doing OK, adapting to pollution, over-fishing and oyster-killing diseases. Maryland’s are barely hanging on. Why is Virginia’s doing better? Property rights. At least, that’s the spin of Rona Kobell, writing for the Reason Foundation in, “Privatizing the Chesapeake.” Maryland has…
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McDonnell’s Energy Pep Rally
By Peter Galuszka One conceit of Gov. Robert F. McDonnell is that he magically wants to transform Virginia into “The Energy Capital of the East Coast.” The idea smacks of Alice in Wonderland. An example is “The Governor’s Conference on Energy,” that began in Richmond on Monday. I dropped by today and noted that the…
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Can Japan Keep Pitching?
By Peter Galuszka (Last of a series) TOKYO, Japan — “Technology is like water, it runs down hill.” My old Japanese friend and I are chowing down on delicious fried oysters and sashimi in a downtown Tokyo restaurant. We had just had drinks at the Foreign Correspondents Club Of Japan which offers a spectacular, 20th…