OPINION/COMMENTARY


Private Property Rights Under Fire in Missouri

It's hard to top the Supreme Court's decision in Kelo v. New London, which enabled government officials to seize homes and businesses and transfer the land to private developers who stood to profit by them. But Missouri has managed to make things worse. A state law allows nonprofit organizations to take private land for their own private uses — without paying the owners a dime. And on Feb. 7 the Missouri Court of Appeals refused even to consider whether the law is constitutional. Passed in the 1990s, the little-known statute allows nonprofit organizations to ask judges to condemn property if it has been unoccupied for six months, if the taxes are delinquent and if the property is a "nuisance" that the nonprofit organization intends to "rehabilitate." The law also defines "nuisance" as including property that is "blighted" — a term so vague that Missouri officials can take aim at virtually any property they want. When Charles Lasby of Kansas City died in 2002, he owed back taxes on his home. Two years later, the House Rescue Corp., a nonprofit group that claims to fix up abandoned houses, petitioned the government to take the land. Since House Rescue didn't notify Lasby's heirs, they sold the property in May 2005. But that was five months after a court had allowed House Rescue to take the property — for free. When the mix-up was discovered, the court ordered Karl Thomas, who had bought the home and paid the back taxes, to stop fixing it. Thomas argued that the law allowing nonprofits to take land violated the state and federal constitutions, but the court ruled against him. He filed an appeal, but only 48 hours later the Court of Appeals rejected his plea without explanation....


Here Come the Mandatory Carbon Limits!

Living in a carbon constrained world looks inevitable. Congress will be voting on a number of proposals to set limits on the emission of greenhouse gases later this year. So industrialists see the policy handwriting on the wall and are now rushing to help shape the emerging greenhouse gas (GHG)emissions regulatory scheme. In January the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, consisting of 10 big companies including DuPont, Alcoa, General Electric and Duke Energy, issued a "blueprint for a mandatory economy-wide, market-driven approach to climate protection." Also in January, the Electric Power Supply Association, the lobby group that represents the competitive power suppliers that account for 40 percent of the generating capacity of the U.S., acknowledged that "regulatory and legislative processes are moving forward seriously and with speed." The EPSA declared it "supports enactment of comprehensive, mandatory federal legislation to require steps to minimize the impact of greenhouse gases on the environment." And last week, the broader electricity lobby group, the Edison Electric Institute, came out in favor of "federal action or legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that ...involves all sectors of the economy, and all sources of GHG." Even the environmental lobbyists' favorite climate change whipping boy, Exxon Mobil, seems to be coming around to the idea that the Feds should act to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Industry wants the Feds to establish a nation-wide and industry-wide cap-and-trade market in greenhouse gas emissions, especially a market for carbon dioxide emissions. The proposals all also call for substantial federal subsidies for research and development of new low- and no-carbon energy technologies. All acknowledge that there are no currently available "silver bullet" energy technologies to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Any reductions in GHG emissions will have to be accomplished with a mix of increased energy efficiency in buildings and appliances, expanded nuclear power generation, a switch to hybrid vehicles, more energy from renewable sources, and, here's the big one, some kind of cost-effective technology to bury carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels....


US Doing Better Than its Kyoto Critics on CO2, Expert Says

Contrary to the widely held view, the United States is not "going it alone" in resisting the Kyoto Protocol's "energy rationing scheme," according to an expert on global warming treaties. Washington's reticence is shared by policymakers in 150 other nations, representing a majority of the world's population, Christopher Horner, a senior fellow with the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) said Thursday. Moreover, the same European critics who accuse the U.S. of unilateralism have failed to meet their own Kyoto targets, Horner told a meeting at the Heritage Foundation. The 1997 Kyoto treaty requires signatory nations to set limits on the emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other "greenhouse gases" blamed for climate change, by an average of five percent by 2012. The 15 European nations participating at the time - the so-called E.U.-15 - made a commitment to collectively reduce their emissions to the point where they would be eight percent lower than 1990 levels. Since the treaty went into effect, however, Europe's CO2 emissions have increased quite substantially - and at a rate three times faster than America's - Horner said. At the same time, Kyoto-related regulations have led to higher energy costs for E.U.-15 citizens....


Tilting at Wind Energy

Whenever anybody starts talking about how we can solve our energy problems and end oil imports, they always end up talking about windmills. Wind is indeed the fastest growing form of energy generation in the U.S., expanding at a brisk 25 percent a year. Installed capacity now stands at 11,500 megawatts (MW) -- the equivalent of ten or twelve standard nuclear or coal plants. Huge projects are popping up everywhere -- driven by tax incentives and state demands for "renewable energy portfolio." What's interesting is that these projects are now beginning to run into their own environmental opposition. It's not hard to see why. The standard 1.5 MW structure is now 40 stories, taller than the statue of liberty. The 3 MW towers waiting in the wings are as tall as New York's Citicorp Center, the third tallest building in Manhattan. In the Midwest these giant structures are being located on farms, where landowners can collect a few thousand dollars rent a year. On the East and West Coasts, however, the best place is on mountaintops since -- according to Bernoulli's Principle -- the wind always accelerates as it as it is funneled through a narrower space. That means mountaintops all along the Alleghenies, in upper New York State, and in Washington and Oregon are being decorated with little distant pinwheels that make the landscape look like a carnival...But the real question about windmills is whether they are producing any useful electricity at all. A modern electrical grid is a very delicately balanced high-wire act. Supply and demand must be kept in balance at all times. The National Electrical Reliability Council estimates that voltage levels can vary about 5 percent before trouble begins. Computer geeks talk about the "high 9's," meaning current must remain consistent within a range of 99.9999 percent to avoid erasing data. In Digital Power, Peter Huber and Mark Mills report, "Some years ago, a Stanford computer center found its power fatally polluted by an arc furnace over one hundred miles away." As the Industry Standard once put it: "Blips as brief as 1/60th of a second can zap computers and other electronic gear, and blackouts can be catastrophic." The problem with wind energy is that it is always fluctuating. The physics of windmills make it worse because output varies with the cube of the velocity. A 20 percent increase in wind speed will double output in a few minutes. Under these circumstances, large numbers of windmills are viewed by grid operators more as a liability than an asset....


Global Warming? Journalism? Don't Make Me Laugh!

At the heart of what is wrong with journalism today is that legions of journalists will stand shoulder to shoulder for the sole purpose of deriding any "global warming skeptic" rather than wonder for a second how the "news" of a coming Ice Age in the 1970s became the "news" of Global Warming in the 1980s. I am reminded of this daily as I read newspapers and news magazines in which various reporters blithely and deliberately inform the reader that all questions regarding the existence of global warming have been answered, that the science is beyond doubt, and that the cause is the production of greenhouse gases, largely from industry, transportation, and other human activities. This is not merely an error. It is a complete deception the journalists have joined. They have ceased to be skeptical. They want you to stop being skeptical despite all evidence to the contrary. "Global Warming, as we think we know it, doesn't exist," says Dr. Timothy Ball. He has Ph.D. in climatology, having earned his degree from the University of London, England, and taught for many years at the University of Winnipeg. A Google search of his name turns up a plethora of posts attacking him, always a sure sign that the Greens feel threatened by an outspoken scientist. The quote below explains why: "Believe it or not, Global Warming is not due to human contribution of Carbon Dioxide (CO2). This in fact is the greatest deception in the history of science." Dr. Ball is hardly alone in his views. Dr. Richard Lindzen, an atmospheric physicist and a professor of meteorology at MIT, as well as a member of the National Academy of Science, has said of Global Warming that, "the consensus was reached before the research had even begun."....


The REAL ID Act: Ill-Considered

When Congress passed the REAL ID Act, it had not had a hearing on that bill in either the House or the Senate. Bad process leads to bad results, and that is what you see in the REAL ID Act. In May 2005, Congress passed REAL ID by stripping out and replacing identification provisions in the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act that had been passed just the December before, in response to the report of the 9/11 Commission. The law that the REAL ID Act replaced had established a negotiated rulemaking committee in which state motor vehicle administrators, privacy experts, and federal representatives were to negotiate about how to do drivers license security. The ill-considered REAL ID Act has created many problems:
* According to the National Conference of State Legislators, states across the country will have to spend 11 billion dollars in the first five years if they implement REAL ID. The costs to Utah alone apparently reach into the hundreds of millions.
* It may be very difficult, if not impossible, for many of your residents to get these federally standardized driver's licenses Utah complies with REAL ID. Everyone will have to return to the DMV and wait in long lines, perhaps to learn that they don't qualify for the new license.
* Then there are the costs to your citizens' privacy. Compliance with the REAL ID Act would require Utah to capture digital images of drivers and keep digital copies of documents like their birth certificates. It would require you to put our drivers' information in a database that is accessible nationwide. A corrupt official anywhere in the country might be able to access this personal information about Utah drivers and residents. This threatens your citizens with identity fraud because it will contain all the information criminals need to open bank accounts and credit card accounts in their names, and maybe worse.
This national ID system will not provide the protections against terrorism that the law's backers claim. Identity systems are subject to both physical and logical avoidance. Wrongdoers can either avoid controlled borders and checkpoints, or they can enter the country or obtain documents legally, as the 9/11 attackers, for the most part, did. Of course, terrorists do not only come from foreign countries, as we know well from the Oklahoma City bombing ten years ago. This national ID system might make it harder for illegal immigrants to access our society, but it will also drive many of them deeper into criminality. Identity fraud would increase as people in this country illegally obtained more extensive documentation in order to work. I don't think you solve the illegal immigration problem by putting a national ID in the hands of the law abiding, native-born citizen. Congress needs to fix immigration law, not compound the problem by turning its enforcement efforts toward surveillance of the law-abiding citizen worker....