All Posts Tagged With: "air pollution"

The Real Environmental Crisis: Why Poverty Not Affluence, Is the Environment’s Number One Enemy

The extraordinary thing about this excellent book is not its content as much as its source. Jack M. Hollander is a retired professor of energy and resources at the University of California, Berkeley. Although he has had an impressive career in the field of energy (he has more than 100 publications to his credit), in [...]

6Jul2010 | Jane S. Shaw | 0 comments | Continued

Government Moonshine

From its minor role as an oxygenate additive for gasoline, ethanol has become the darling of Washington. Politicians embrace ethanol as a miracle elixir. All the fashionable energy buzzwords can be applied to it. It is “green power”; it’s “renewable” and will provide “energy independence” for America. Legislation has been promoting ethanol nonstop. The Energy [...]

24Mar2010 | Michael Heberling | 4 comments | Continued

Are Highways Subsidized?

I have always loved trains. I am an ardent cyclist, and I never particularly liked automobiles. So I always took it for granted that the reason most Americans drive and passenger trains have nearly disappeared is that our highways are unfairly subsidized. I felt particularly incensed that the Interstate Highway System, which took business from [...]

1Nov2006 | Randal OToole | 8 comments | Continued

A Higher Gasoline Tax Will “Solve Everything”?

Regrettably, I have to criticize someone who, in the past, I have admired a great deal. John Tierney is an iconoclastic columnist for the New York Times who has been writing on environmental issues for at least a decade. His now-classic 1996 Times Magazine story critical of recycling was a well-researched article that I have [...]

1Apr2006 | Roy Cordato | 0 comments | Continued

Does Light Rail Worsen Congestion and Air Quality?

Growth in traffic has outpaced growth in population ever since the automobile went into mass production. This puts great demands on our transportation infrastructure. Trying to keep up with growing traffic by building more roadway capacity is a daunting task, particularly in urban regions. There are limits to how many lanes of roadway can be [...]

1Jun2005 | John Semmens | 3 comments | Continued

The State of the Air: Propaganda, Not Science

Each May the American Lung Association (ALA) issues “The State of the Air” in which it reports on ground-level ozone pollution county by county over a three-year period. The study gives each county a grade (A-F) based on what are called “ozone exceedence days” and calculates the number of people “put at risk” for respiratory [...]

1Oct2003 | Roy Cordato | 0 comments | Continued

Government-Reformulated Gas: Bad in More Ways than One

The amended Clean Air Act (CAA) of 1990 called for cleaner automobile-engine combustion and a reduction in tailpipe emissions. To meet these goals, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) directed the petroleum industry to modify the composition of gasoline to comply with the “Oxygenated” and “Reformulated” Gasoline (RFG) Programs. While only those parts of the country [...]

1Sep2003 | Michael Heberling | 1 comment | Continued

Beware "New Urbanism"

Most folks would never consider that the choice between intown and suburban living could hold any moral implications. The questions of cost, security, education options, house size, and yard size are far more important in buyers’ minds. But to those who fear the sprawl of cities into suburbs and beyond, the decision to live either [...]

1Oct2002 | C.C. Kraemer | 2 comments | Continued

Getting the Most Out of Pollution

The Environmental Protection Agency’s attempt to reduce pollution with command and control suffers from the same problem as attempting to direct the economy with socialism—central authorities dictate outcomes without knowing what the outcomes should be or how they are best achieved.

1Oct2001 | Dwight R. Lee | 0 comments | Continued

The Smart-Growth Scam

H. Nathan Hart recently graduated from Birmingham-Southern College in Birmingham, Alabama. Paul Cleveland is an associate professor of economics at Birmingham-Southern College. Transportation is essential to the daily life of nearly every American. Millions of people flock onto the freeways and streets to accomplish innumerable tasks each day. Americans love their cars. No other mode [...]

1Jul2001 | and and H. Nathan Hart | 2 comments | Continued

How Government Prevents Us from Buying Safety

There is a limit to how much people will voluntarily pay to reduce the risk of accidental injury or death. In other words, the marginal value people place on their lives is finite. We accept some risks to take advantage of opportunities to do things that, at the margin, provide more value than the expected sacrifice in health and life expectancy.

1Dec2000 | Dwight R. Lee | 1 comment | Continued

Clearing the Air: The Real Story of the War on Air Pollution

From the mid-1960s on into the early 1980s, it seemed obvious: Were it not for the benevolent protection provided by the federal government, America’s smoke-filled cities and slime-ridden rivers would have become environmental wastelands. The caves were beckoning. Somehow simultaneously struck dumb, citizens by the millions happily traded the last smidgen of clean air for [...]

1Oct2000 | Bruce Yandle | 0 comments | Continued

Exploiting Asthmatic Children

Ben Lieberman is a policy analyst with the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Childhood asthma is on the rise, and the experts are not sure why. The Environmental Protection Agency blames air pollution, and uses concerns about asthmatic children to justify its aggressive implementation of the Clean Air Act. In contrast, a recent National Academy of Sciences [...]

1Aug2000 | Ben Lieberman | 0 comments | Continued

The Green Scare

Roger Meiners teaches in the economics department at the University of Texas, Arlington, and is a senior associate at PERC. During the Cold War, anti-communist activists were accused of using Red Scare tactics. They were parodied along these lines: The communists were everywhere, maybe even under your bed, so support the politicians who would spend [...]

1May1999 | Roger E. Meiners | 1 comment | Continued

The Commons: Tragedy or Triumph?

In the summer I watch ruby-throated hummingbirds fly and hover near a feeder that my wife, Dot, carefully fills with nectar and hangs in view of our kitchen window. The store-bought nectar is colored red, since people think that hummingbirds find that color attractive. Business around the feeder picks up following rains that wash away [...]

1Apr1999 | Bruce Yandle | 9 comments | Continued

On Airports and Individual Rights

Tibor Machan teaches ethics in the school of business at Chapman University. His latest book is Generosity: Virtue in Civil Society (Cato Institute). For a couple of years, Orange County, California, has been buzzing with controversy over what to do when the El Toro Marine Air Base is closed. The question on everyone’s mind is [...]

1Feb1999 | Tibor R. Machan | 1 comment | Continued

Driving America: Your Car, Your Government, Your Choice

John Semmens is an economist with the Laissez-Faire Institute in Chandler, Arizona. Driving America is a well-reasoned brief on behalf of the automobile. The car is the travel option of choice because it offers a fast, comfortable, convenient, and affordable way of getting where one wants to go. Nevertheless, there are those who would sacrifice [...]

1Nov1998 | John Semmens | 0 comments | Continued
Older Entries

    • © Copyright 2011 Freeman - Ideas on Liberty. All rights reserved.

    77 queries. 1.265 seconds