Category: Energy/Environment

Killer Conservationists

I have not read Cull of the Wild: Killing in the Name of Conservation, but from its title and description it sounds like it documents an important and under-appreciated point. The point is that to “conserve” some species, so-called “conservationists” sometimes kill large numbers of the members of other species. (See, e.g., my blog entry on west coast “conservationists” killing massive numbers of one kind of brown owl in order to preserve a similar species of brown owl.)

Species ebb and flow. This was true before humanity arrived and is still true now. “Conservationists” anoint some species as “indigenous” and others as “invasive,” which can only be done if some particular arbitrary moment is taken as the one that must be preserved or returned-to.

The book that looks promising is:

Warwick, Hugh. Cull of the Wild: Killing in the Name of Conservation. London: Bloomsbury Wildlife, 2024.

Trump Hits ‘New High Water Mark’ for Deregulation

In my friendly debate with fellow libertarians, the passages quoted below support my claim/hope that Trump’s deregulation and downsizing efforts will prove to be substantial.

(p. A2) WASHINGTON—President Trump is following through on his pledge to usher in one of the most sweeping deregulatory drives in modern U.S. history, moving swiftly to slash environmental rules and bank oversight, remove barriers to cryptocurrencies, and reverse the Biden administration’s restrictions on energy production.

The most aggressive plans for a red-tape rollback have come from the Environmental Protection Agency, which in a single day announced 31 actions to deregulate U.S. environmental policies, including rules for power plants, the oil-and-gas industry, electric vehicles and wastewater.

Venture Global, a liquefied natural gas exporter, in early March announced an $18 billion investment in a Louisiana project, following the administration’s reversal of President Joe Biden’s freeze on approvals for LNG gas export plants, which has yielded plans for new projects and expansions. The Trump administration is “getting the red tape, getting the federal government off the back of the worker, off the back of companies,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in an address to workers at the Louisiana facility.

. . .

Trump’s deregulatory moves are widespread: The Securities and Exchange Commission is backing away from Biden’s climate-related disclosure rules; the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. rolled back a Biden-era policy that had stepped up scrutiny of large bank mergers; and the Interior and Housing and Urban Development departments are aiming to streamline regulations to spur the construction of housing on millions of acres of federal land.

Taken together, Trump’s moves are setting “the new high water mark in terms of the deregulatory agenda,” said Travis Fisher, who served in the first Trump administration and is now the director of energy and environmental policy studies at the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank. He added that Trump is “moving more boldly than Ronald Reagan.”

Investors, bullish about Trump’s deregulatory agenda, sent stocks soaring after the election.

For the full story see:

Scott Patterson and Amrith Ramkumar. “Deregulation Hits ‘New High Water Mark’.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., March 29, 2025): A2.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date March 28, 2025, and has the title “Trump Ushers In ‘New High Water Mark’ for Deregulation.” The passages quoted include a couple of sentences that appear in the online, but not the printed, version of the article.)

New York Times Says Trump “Has Waged a Multipronged Assault at Regulations” on Environment

The passages quoted below are further evidence apropos my dialogue with my libertarian friends who argue that the Trump administration’s efforts to deregulate and downsize have failed.

(p. 1) With a flurry of actions that have stretched the limits of presidential power, Mr. Trump has gutted federal climate efforts, rolled back regulations aimed at limiting pollution and given a major boost to the fossil fuel industry.

. . .

To achieve such a wholesale overhaul of the country’s climate policies in such a short time, the Trump administration has reneged on federal grants, fired workers en masse and attacked longstanding environmental regulations.

. . .

(p. 31) [Trump] has waged a multipronged assault at regulations designed to curb pollution, immediately sweeping some rules to the side and circumventing the normally lengthy rule-making processes. At the same time, Mr. Trump has declared an energy emergency, giving himself the authority to fast-track the construction of oil and gas projects as he works to stoke supply as well as demand for fossil fuels.

. . .

The administration and Republicans in Congress plan to use a legislative maneuver to quickly erase California’s authority to ban the sale of new gasoline-powered cars in the state by 2035. That authority has never before been challenged in this way, and critics say the maneuver is illegal. But it would be much faster than trying to overturn the California ban through the standard process that requires months of public notice and comment.

“They’re doing all the things I thought they would do, and they’re doing other things that I only dreamed they might do,” said Myron Ebell, a conservative activist who led the E.P.A. transition team during Mr. Trump’s first term.

. . .

And in a move that could have far-reaching implications for government efforts to regulate industry, Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the E.P.A., has recommended that the agency reverse its 2009 finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger human health and welfare, according to three people familiar with the decision. That would eliminate the legal basis for the government’s climate laws, such as limits on pollution from automobiles and power plants.

“We’re talking about undoing 50 years of environmental regulation and accelerating the extinction crisis and risking the health of the American people,” said Ben Jealous, the executive director of the Sierra Club. “There’s so much shocking news every day. People are struggling to process all of it.”

. . .

Much of the damage to the country’s environmental regulatory apparatus may be long-lasting.

. . .

On Wednesday [Feb. 26, 2025] Trump said he believed Mr. Zeldin, the E.P.A. administrator, would be cutting about 65 percent of the agency’s more than 17,000 jobs. Mr. Zeldin later said that he thought the E.PA. could cut at least 65 percent of its budget and make cuts to its work force.

For the full story see:

David Gelles, Lisa Friedman and Brad Plumer. “Undoing Years of Climate Policy in a Few Weeks.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, March 2, 2025): 1 & 31.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed name and date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date March 2, 2025, and has the title “‘Full on Fight Club’: How Trump Is Crushing U.S. Climate Policy.”)

Trump Deregulates Biden’s Logging and Mining Bans on Public Lands

Trump’s agriculture secretary announced the deregulation of logging on 113 million acres of public lands–logging is now allowed on those lands. The Agriculture Department also announced the deregulation of mining on 264,000 acres of public lands, in order to “boost production of critical minerals” (p. A19).

Source:

Lisa Friedman. “White House Reverses Biden Limits on Drilling and Mining on Public Lands.” The New York Times (Thurs., April 10, 2025): A19.

(Note: the online version of the article has the date April 8, 2025, and has the title “Trump Administration Opens More Public Land to Drilling and Mining.”)

Extinct Homo Erectus Could Adapt to Global Warming and “Thrived in a Harsh Desert Landscape”

In my Openness book I argue that environmentalists often exaggerate the harm from global warming because they fail to consider the extent of human adaptability. Recent evidence (see below) suggests that even our extinct ancestor, Homo erectus, was already more adaptable to climate change than other advanced primates such as chimpanzees and orangutans.

(p. D3) Chimpanzees live only in African rainforests and woodlands. Orangutans live only in the jungles of Indonesia. But humans live pretty much everywhere. Our species has spread across frozen tundras, settled on mountaintops and called other extreme environments home.

Scientists have historically seen this adaptability as one of the hallmarks of modern humans and a sign of how much our brains had evolved. But a new study hints that maybe we aren’t so special.

A million years ago, researchers have found, an extinct species of human relatives known as Homo erectus thrived in a harsh desert landscape once considered off limits before Homo sapiens came along.

“It’s a significant shift in the narrative of adaptability, expanding it beyond Homo sapiens to include their earlier relatives,” said Julio Mercader, an archaeologist at the University of Calgary and an author of the study, which was published Thursday [Jan. 2?, 2025] in the journal Communications Earth and Environment.

. . .

For hundreds of thousands of years, the researchers determined, Engaji Nanyori had been a comfortable open woodland. But around a million years ago, the climate dried up and the trees vanished. The landscape turned to a Mojave-like desert shrub land — an extremely arid place that seemed inhospitable for early hominins.

“The data led us to a pivotal question: How did Homo erectus manage to survive and even thrive under such challenging conditions?” Dr. Mercader said.

Instead of fleeing, the hominins figured out how survive in their changing home. “Their greatest asset was their adaptability,” Dr. Mercader said.

They changed the way they searched for animal carcasses to scavenge, for example. The hominins found the ponds and streams that sprang into existence after storms. They didn’t just drink at these fleeting watering holes. They hunted the animals that also showed up there, butchering their carcasses by the thousands.

The hominins also adapted by upgrading their tools. They took more care when chipping flakes from stones to give them a sharper edge. Rather than just pick up rocks wherever they were, they preferred material from particular places. And once they made a tool, they carried it with them.

For the full story see:

Carl Zimmer. “Early Human Relatives Thrived in Harsh Desert.” The New York Times (Tuesday, January 28, 2025): D3.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Jan. 20, 2025, and has the title “Extinct Human Species Lived in a Brutal Desert, Study Finds.”)

The academic paper in Communications Earth and Environment, mentioned above, is:

Mercader, Julio, Pamela Akuku, Nicole Boivin, Alfredo Camacho, Tristan Carter, Siobhán Clarke, Arturo Cueva Temprana, Julien Favreau, Jennifer Galloway, Raquel Hernando, Haiping Huang, Stephen Hubbard, Jed O. Kaplan, Steve Larter, Stephen Magohe, Abdallah Mohamed, Aloyce Mwambwiga, Ayoola Oladele, Michael Petraglia, Patrick Roberts, Palmira Saladié, Abel Shikoni, Renzo Silva, María Soto, Dominica Stricklin, Degsew Z. Mekonnen, Wenran Zhao, and Paul Durkin. “Homo Erectus Adapted to Steppe-Desert Climate Extremes One Million Years Ago.” Communications Earth & Environment 6, no. 1 (2025): 1-13.

My book, mentioned in my initial comments, is:

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Global Warming Allows German Wine Entrepreneurs to Grow a “Superb” Chardonnay

In my Openness book, I argue that the costs of global warming have been exaggerated, partly because environmentalists forget that entrepreneurs can adapt, either lessening the costs, or sometimes even creating benefits. A case of creating benefits is apparently now the growing of “superb” chardonnay wine in Germany:

(p. D4) What accounts for the arrival of . . . German chardonnays? Certain wine regions like Rheinhessen, the Pfalz and the Obermosel have limestone soils, which chardonnay has a special affinity for, but the warming climate has made it possible to ripen chardonnay sufficiently to make superb wines.

Climate change influenced decisions to plant chardonnay in other ways as well.

“Climate change for us does not just mean it’s getting warmer and warmer, it means everything is getting more extreme — frost risk, weeks without rain, hailstorms,” said Klaus Peter Keller, . . . . “Therefore, we must spread the risk a bit more than we would 30 or 40 years ago. Rather than 100 percent riesling we have now 70 percent riesling, 15 percent pinot noir, 10 percent chardonnay and 4 percent others, and we think that will be the structure for the coming 30 or 40 years.”

Mr. Keller said he had wanted to plant pinot blanc rather than chardonnay but that their son Felix had pushed for chardonnay.

“Felix was right,” he said. “Chardonnay is much better adapted to climate change, with thicker skins, and it transmits the soil much better than pinot blanc.”

Felix Keller said by email that his grandfather had tried planting chardonnay in 1988, but that the timing had been wrong.

“Back then, it didn’t ripen every year,” he said. “It took us until 2018 to try again. We believe chardonnay has a bright future in Germany because we now have the climate that used to be in Burgundy in the early ’90s.”

For the full commentary see:

Eric Asimov. “The Pour; A Surprise From Germany: Chardonnay.” The New York Times (Weds., March 5, 2025): D1 & D4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated March 4, 2025, and has the same title as the print version.)

My book mentioned in my initial comments is:

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

E. Coli in Organically Grown Carrots Kill One and Sicken 39

Many years ago, when ConAgra was still headquartered in Omaha, I heard a speech by the then-C.E.O. in which he argued that big food producers have processes in place to make food safer than the processes often used by smaller independent local and organic farmers. Stories of contamination of organic food do not prove, but are consistent with, his argument. For instance it was reported in 2024 that organic carrots contaminated with E. Coli killed one person and made 39 others sick. Trader Joe’s was one of the stores where contaminated carrots were sold.

E. Coli in organically grown carrots was reported in:

Johnny Diaz. “Organic Carrots Behind Outbreak of E. Coli; 39 Sickened, 1 Dead.” The New York Times (Tues., November 19, 2024): B5.

(Note: the online version of the article was updated Nov. 18, 2024, and has the title “1 Dead and Dozens Ill in E. Coli Outbreak Linked to Organic Carrots.”)

Songbirds Adapt to Global Warming by Shrinking in Size

In my Openness book I argue that global warming is not as much of a threat as many claim. One part of my argument is that humans, and non-human life too, is much more adaptable than the environmentalists realize. Songbirds discussed below exemplify the point.

(p. A3) North American songbirds have been shrinking steadily in size over the past 40 years, according to scientists who measured tens of thousands of the feathered creatures from dozens of different species and attributed the changes to rising temperatures.

As the birds’ bodies got smaller, their wings gradually got longer, the scientists said in a paper published Wednesday [Dec. 4, 2019] in the journal Ecology Letters. The longer wings, the researchers said, may help offset the loss of body mass so the birds can fly efficiently on their long migrations.

. . .

Warm-blooded animals are generally larger in cold climates and smaller in warm climates because more compact creatures usually release heat more quickly, according to biologists and ecologists.

Given the well-established link, many scientists had predicted in recent years that global warming would affect the size of many animals. Yet until recently, there wasn’t much evidence of the effect at work during modern warming trends.

The new findings are the latest in a series of technical reports this year that link changes in body size among birds to warmer temperatures around the world.

Last month, researchers in Australia who studied physical changes in 82 songbird species, including honeyeaters, fairy-wrens and thornbills, reported in the Royal Society B journal that birds there have grown smaller due to warming over the last half-century, as the annual mean temperature increased regionally by about 0.012 degrees Celsius. They based their conclusions on an analysis of 12,000 museum specimens.

In March [2019], researchers at the University of Cape Town in South Africa who tracked the weight of a long-tailed songbird common across Africa called the mountain wagtail found the species gradually became lighter between 1976 and 1999, as regional temperatures increased by 0.18 degrees Celsius. They published their findings in the journal Oecologia.

For the full story see:

Robert Lee Hotz. “Songbirds Shrink in Size, Study Finds.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, December 5, 2019 [sic]): A3.

(Note: bracketed date and year added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date December 4, 2019 [sic], and has the title “Songbirds Are Shrinking in Size, Study Finds.”)

My book mentioned above is:

Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

The academic paper in Ecology Letters, mentioned above, is:

Weeks, Brian C., David E. Willard, Marketa Zimova, Aspen A. Ellis, Max L. Witynski, Mary Hennen, and Benjamin M. Winger. “Shared Morphological Consequences of Global Warming in North American Migratory Birds.” Ecology Letters (2019).

The academic paper in the Royal Society B journal, mentioned above, is:

Gardner, Janet L., Tatsuya Amano, Anne Peters, William J. Sutherland, Brendan Mackey, Leo Joseph, John Stein, Karen Ikin, Roellen Little, Jesse Smith, and Matthew R. E. Symonds. “Australian Songbird Body Size Tracks Climate Variation.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 286, no. 1916 (2019).

The academic paper in the Oecologia journal, mentioned above, is:

Prokosch, Jorinde, Zephne Bernitz, Herman Bernitz, Birgit Erni, and Res Altwegg. “Are Animals Shrinking Due to Climate Change? Temperature-Mediated Selection on Body Mass in Mountain Wagtails.” Oecologia 189, no. 3 (2019): 841-49.

Musk’s Defense of Free Speech Leads an E.V. Hater to Become a Tesla Cybertruck Lover

I admire Elon Musk’s energy, his ability to focus his mind in spite of distractions, and his ambitious entrepreneurship. The kid in me who got up early to watch Apollo space launches admires his ambition to take us to Mars. But what I admire most is his willingness to put that ambition at risk by spending $44 billion to buy Twitter (now X) in order to defend free speech. Too often entrepreneurs will put their dream above everything else. Musk put free speech above his dream.

And it’s not just the $44 billion. Many of his actual and potential Tesla customers are left-wing environmentalists who criticize his purchase of Twitter, and later his leading D.O.G.E. If that dislike leads to lower sales and profits at Tesla, then Musk will have even fewer funds to take us to Mars.

But the outcome is not certain. Maybe a society with free speech is one that is more likely to allow Musk the freedom to take trial-and-error risks to get us to Mars. And there is a small chance that Tesla will sell more cars because of his principled stand.

Tesla owners who supported Harris for President are buying bumper stickers to slap on their Teslas that read “I Bought This Before We Knew Elon Was Crazy” (Peyser 2024, p. D4).

But consider Berkeley Professor Morgan Ames who bought a Tesla in 2013. Even though she did not like Elon Musk’s views she later bought a second Tesla “because she couldn’t find other electric cars that matched Tesla’s capabilities” (Peyser 2024, p. D4).

And there is Oklahoman Sean Ziese who said to his wife: “If Elon is going to start supporting conservatives and free speech, I’m going to start supporting Elon, even though I hate E.V.s” (Ziese as quoted in Peyser 2024, p. D4). Then Ziese went out and bought himself a Tesla Cybertruck.

Ziese now concludes that his driving a Tesla Cybertruck is “a really neat experience. It never would have happened if Elon never would have bought X, and, you know, got free speech going again” (Ziese as quoted in Peyser 2024, p. D4).

The source article quoted above is:

Eve Peyser. “Tesla Owners Don’t Drive Away Quietly.” The New York Times (Thurs., December 19, 2024): D4.

(Note: the online version of the Eve Peyser article has the date Dec. 11, 2024, and has the title “For Tesla Owners, a Referendum Through Bumper Stickers.”)

To Kill a Dam, Environmentalist “Scientists” Lied About the Existence of the So-Called “Snail Darter”

In the 1970s the building of a dam in Tennessee was delayed because environmentalists claimed that its construction would threaten the extinction of a small fish they called the “snail darter.” Now fish biologists have established that there is no snail darter. The fish previously identified as a “snail darter” has the DNA of a small fish called a “stargazing darter” which was not, and is not, endangered.

A co-author of a new study says that this was no innocent mistake.

Dr. Near, . . . a professor who leads a fish biology lab at Yale, and his colleagues report in the journal Current Biology that the snail darter, Percina tanasi, is neither a distinct species nor a subspecies. Rather, it is an eastern population of Percina uranidea, known also as the stargazing darter, which is not considered endangered.

Dr. Near contends that early researchers “squinted their eyes a bit” when describing the fish, because it represented a way to fight the Tennessee Valley Authority’s plan to build the Tellico Dam on the Little Tennessee River, about 20 miles southwest of Knoxville.

“I feel it was the first and probably the most famous example of what I would call the ‘conservation species concept,’ where people are going to decide a species should be distinct because it will have a downstream conservation implication,” Dr. Near said.

In other words environmentalist “scientists” deliberately lied in order to promote their political agenda of cutting energy production.

The New York Times article quoted above is:

Jason Nark. “How a Mistaken Identity Halted a Dam’s Construction.” The New York Times (Sat., Jan. 4, 2025): A13.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of The New York Times article was updated Jan. 4, 2025, and has the title “This Tiny Fish’s Mistaken Identity Halted a Dam’s Construction.”)

The academic paper co-authored by Near, that Nark summarizes in The New York Times article mentioned and cited above is:

Ghezelayagh, Ava, Jeffrey W. Simmons, Julia E. Wood, Tsunemi Yamashita, Matthew R. Thomas, Rebecca E. Blanton, Oliver D. Orr, Daniel J. MacGuigan, Daemin Kim, Edgar Benavides, Benjamin P. Keck, Richard C. Harrington, and Thomas J. Near. “Comparative Species Delimitation of a Biological Conservation Icon.” Current Biology. Published online on Jan. 3, 2025.

New Evidence American Indians Were Eating a Lot of Mammoth Meat During the Time When Mammoths Became Extinct

Scientists once thought that the extinction of megafauna like mammoths was due mainly to climate change. But the extinction in America coincided with the arrival of humans, leading some to argue that early indigenous American Indians killed off the mammoths. This goes against the politically correct stereotype that American Indians were mostly peace-loving environmentalists.

A recently published article provides additional evidence. Using a skull from the Clovis period, roughly during the period when mammoths became extinct, the authors were able to conclude from the young child’s “isotopic signature” that two-thirds of the child’s diet came from his mother’s breast-milk, and one third mainly from the meat of large mammals like mammoths. They could also infer that the mother had a diet high in mammoth meat. Summarizing the academic article in The New York Times, columnist Carl Zimmer says: “a study analyzing the ancient bones of a young child who lived in Montana suggests that early Americans hunted mammoths and other giant mammals to oblivion” (p. D3).

I am not criticizing the early American Indians. If I had been alive back then and I could obtain nutrition for me and my family by slaughtering a few mammoths, I would have tried to do so. But we are making a mistake if we reject American exceptionalism in part on the basis of a false and sanctimonious claim that the indigenous American Indians acted on morally superior environmental values.

My musings above are based partly on the commentary:

Carl Zimmer. “Mammoth: It’s What Was for Dinner.” The New York Times (Tuesday, December 10, 2024): D3.

(Note: the online version of the story has the date December 4, 2024, and has the title “Mammoth: It’s What Was Once for Dinner.”)

The academic article that is the basis for Zimmer’s commentary is:

Chatters, James C., Ben A. Potter, Stuart J. Fiedel, Juliet E. Morrow, Christopher N. Jass, and Matthew J. Wooller. “Mammoth Featured Heavily in Western Clovis Diet.” Science Advances 10, no. 49 (2024): eadr3814.