An Oxford physicist claims he can trace individual “extreme weather events” to climate change, thereby allowing people to sue the corporations that are the biggest greenhouse gas contributors for the damage caused in those events. An attorney for Native Americans has already filed such a lawsuit in the name of Alaska villagers who might actually have to live on land instead of ice if the permafrost melts.

Of course, if you want to find those really responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, don’t blame the corporations: look in the mirror.

On the other hand, some people remain unconvinced that anthropogenic climate change is real. What if they are right? Can corporations sue environmental groups for any costs they have imposed on them in a wasted effort to reduce emissions?

Or at least some of it has. Environmentalists are now paying timber companies to stay in business. What?

Apparently, environmental groups have decided that, though they hate clearcutting, they hate urban sprawl even more. So they are willing to subsidize timber companies to keep cutting timber so they don’t want to subdivide their property.

In the 1970s and 1980s, when the Antiplanner was working as a forestry consultant to the Sierra Club and other major environmental groups, environmentalists hated timber companies because they replaced natural, diverse forests with monocultures.

“Timber companies practice selective logging,” the always-quotable Andy Kerr liked to say: “they select a watershed, and then they log it.” Industry forests were not true monocultures like corn fields, but the were a lot less diverse — in both ages of trees and numbers of species — than natural forests.

Continue reading →

The Antiplanner doesn’t go to movies often, preferring to wait until the DVDs come out. So until last week all I had seen of the Dark Knight were the trailers. I was particularly intrigued to hear the Joker say, “It’s all part of the plan.”

The good and evil antiplanners.

Now that I’ve seen the movie, I understand why people have suggested that the late Heath Ledger deserves an Oscar nomination. His portrayal of the Joker really carried the show. But the trailer took his planning statement out of context.

Continue reading →

Government bureaucrats are true heroes: they all want to help stimulate the economy. They way they want to help, of course, is for Congress to give them billions of dollars.

The noble Forest Service, for example, has a $10 billion wish list for road maintenance and culverts. Not just any culverts, mind you, but “culverts for fish passage.” That makes them extra “green.”

The Forest Service is also preparing a “green jobs” that would create 90,000 jobs, mostly treating fuels on private lands. This is in accord, says the document, with the agency’s “cohesive strategy” for protecting homes in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) from fire.

Continue reading →