Starving the petroleum industry of capital is, as usual, too boneheaded and environmentally counterproductive for words
A year or so ago a picture circulated the web, a photo of an emaciated and sickly-looking polar bear. The poor beast was elected the new poster child for climate change (a disgusting claim since the bear was clearly ill, and the photographers made no effort to help the poor animal because they wanted to […]
Environmental extremism starts self-destructing – maybe now we can start thinking about a realistic energy transition plan
Maybe you’ve never had a similar experience, but I have one that recurs more often than I care to admit. Back in high school, teachers would make us read “literature” which was torture (as opposed to, say, a car magazine). How was Shakespeare or Hemingway ever going to improve my life? Of course, a few […]
Hard to believe but… sometimes passionate environmentalists are really bad for the environment
You may have noticed some very weird winds blowing around the world these days. These strange forces are all about the environment, yet are not really part of the environment at all; they exist between peoples’ ears and nowhere else. That doesn’t make these forces any less real; people of many stripes have been terrified […]
Canadians learning about trees from Italians? The benefits of a scarcity mentality
Some years ago, I bought my first house, a townhouse. It was one of those three story open-plan 1970s things with a west-facing back wall mostly of glass and a theoretical mountain view if you stood on a 12-foot ladder in the middle of the living room and twisted your head just right. The back […]
“JUST DO SOMETHING!” – how fear-induced actions are leading to disastrous climate change decisions, and examples of the opposite
Researchers have been analyzing the relationship between mental anxiety and the quality of decision making. While it may seem silly to study what is so glaringly obvious, there can be value when the study leads to new insights. In this example, researchers, perhaps bored with the unpredictable antics of humans, showed that a group of […]
