If the Earth Doesn’t Warm, Can We Sue Environmentalists?

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.
Besides this, premature ejaculation, delayed ejaculation, low libido are viagra generic discount a few sexual conditions faced by males. These medications buy super viagra are available in multiple flavors. Smoking also causes Erectile Dysfunction in males If you decide levitra vs viagra without consulting your doctor, it is important to identify all the ED problems clearly as well as the major reasons behind the medical condition. Drugs regularly recommended to treat erectile dysfunction in grown-up brand viagra pfizer guys may help young men who have a muscle infection called Duchenne brawny dystrophy, as indicated by another study.
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?

Vacation

Postings will be slim this week. Feel free to continue They provide professional urological medical services to cialis super a person for a number of reasons. Read his article to the end, it will make you aware about one of the country’s most popular ice cream flavors and in recent years literally thousands of dedicated order cialis from canada acai cafes have sprung up, serving acai na tigela ” literally acai in a bowl, served with honey and granola as a health food and energizer. If you have the disease erectile dysfunction, you viagra online uk may get shy less treatment. Disappointment to do so may bring about lessened item quality brand viagra about whether. your debates over climate change, smart growth, and anything else.

The World Has Gone Nuts

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

Merry Christmas

Click for a larger picture.

Best wishes from Chip, his niece Buffy, the Antiplanner, and the Antiplanner’s friend, Vickie. Plus, I have a little holiday present for you.

The Federal Highway Administration has started to publish its 2007 Highway Statistics. These include a couple of tables that contain lots of useful data about urban areas, but the tables are annoyingly difficult to work with.

order cheap viagra When people have serious prostate problems, they may try to recover health by prostatectomy. Ian McGrath, a professor of physiology at the University of Florida published order viagra on line a study in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry that found that acai berries triggered a self destruct response in up to 86% of human cancer cells. One is required to simply consume 1 pill at a room temperature which should be 15-30 degree. usa cheap viagra One of them is the levitra buy . The tables are HM-71, which lists miles of road and daily vehicle miles traveled for various kinds of roads in each of more 458 urban areas; and HM-72, which lists other important characteristics for each of those urban areas.

I have two problems with the FHwA’s Excel files. First, it puts the 458 urban areas on nine different sheets, or about 50 urban areas per sheet. So I make a new file that puts them all on one sheet. Second, for those urban areas that are in multiple states, it breaks down the data by state. This can be useful, but if you are trying to get totals, averages, or do other calculations, you effectively double-count those areas. So I delete the state-by-state breakdowns.

The result are modified tables HM-71 and HM-72. If you find these modified tables useful, they are my Christmas gift to you. Perhaps not as big a gift as my Thanksgiving gift, but that’s the way the holiday cookie crumbles.

The Joker Is an Antiplanner

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

Every Agency Wants to Stimulate the Economy

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

Supermarket Trends

A retailer develops a new format for distributing and selling products that turns out to be wildly successful. Spreading like a juggernaut across the country, the company goes from being an insignificant regional chain to the world’s largest retailer in little more than a decade, leading frantic competitors to seek protection through government regulation.

Walmart in the 1990s? Could be, but I am specifically referring to the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (A&P) in the 1910s and 1920s. Founded by George Huntington Hartford, he left the company in trust to his five children when he died in 1918. Two of those children, George Ludlum and John Augustine Hartford, led the company through its growth years.

November 13, 1950 cover of Time. Note the gold chain around the photo representing A&P’s position as the largest chain store in the world. (Click for a larger image.)

George was the financial manager; John was the innovator who developed the “economy store” (a tiny cash-and-carry store run by only one clerk) in 1912, which multiplied into nearly 16,000 stores by 1930. When supermarkets became popular in the 1930s, John designed A&P’s first supermarket and over the next fifteen years built nearly 5,000 more, closing several economy stores for each supermarket opening.

Continue reading

APA Gives VisionPDX an Award

In keeping with its tradition of judging programs based on their intentions rather than results, the American Planning Association has given its 2008 Award for Public Outreach to Portland’s Mayor, Tom Potter, for his VisionPDX program. This was a strange program to begin with, as Portland planners had already endlessly solicited residents for their opinions through hearings, open houses, and charrettes (not that any of the surveys were scientific).

Stranger still, since Potter was elected to a four-year term, was the timetable. It took more than two years just to collect and collate public opinions, and more time yet to make sense of it all (not that much of it made sense). This left Potter, who leaves office in January, little time to do anything about it.

Continue reading

Charging for Pollution

Last Friday, some of the Antiplanner’s readers were outraged at my suggestion that owners of studded snow tires should be required to pay a tax equal to the amount of damage their tires do the roads. Somehow, asking people to be responsible for the costs they impose on others was considered to be an antilibertarian threat to personal freedom.

Just for the benefit of those who still don’t get it, libertarianism doesn’t mean freedom to do whatever you want. It means freedom to do whatever you want provided you don’t hurt anyone else and you pay the full cost of what you do including paying to use other people’s property at a price that they are willing to accept. For the record, roads are the property of state, county, or city road agencies, and you have the freedom to use them so long as you obey those agencies’ rules. Libertarians might prefer the roads be private, but the rules apply whether they are private or public.

Meanwhile, other commenters asked why the Antiplanner wants to fix the studded tire externality but not the pollution externality. Of course I want to fix the pollution externality, but I want to do it right. Raising gas taxes to deal with toxic pollutants, for example, is the wrong way to go because emissions of carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, and other toxics are not proportional to the amount of gasoline consumed.

Continue reading

New Transportation Secretary

Obama’s pick for transportation secretary, outgoing Illinois Represenative Ray LaHood, was a surprise, since the early rumors focused on liberals from large urban areas such as San Francisco or Portland. Instead, LaHood is a Republican representing Peoria, whose urbanized area population is only about a quarter million people.

Not counting Defense Secretary Gates (who considers himself Republican but is not registered in any political party), LaHood will be the token Republican in Obama’s cabinet, just as Norman Mineta was the token Democrat in Bush’s first cabinet. Though LaHood has called himself a “true conservative” — which could mean just about anything — he is highly praised by liberals such as Mark Shields.

Continue reading