Month: January 2008

  • Brutal cold snap in Greenland

    …a brutal cold snap is raging across the semi-autonomous nation of Greenland.On Disko Bay in western Greenland, where a number of prominent world leaders have visited in recent years to get a first-hand impression of climate change, temperatures have dropped so drastically that the water has frozen over for the first time in a decade.…

  • How many lives is a billionth of a degree worth?

    According to GM, the new federal fuel requirements will costs four to ten thousand dollars per car, mostly to use more expensive weight savings materials. Some environmentalists might dispute the numbers or cheer anything that makes cars more expensive to own, in the hope that fewer people are able to afford driving. However, that will…

  • California wants to control your thermostat

    The 2008 proposed building standards issued by the California Energy Commission include a requirement that new air-conditioners have a radio-controlled thermostat that cannot be overridden by the owner. This allows the state to override your settings during undefined “emergency events.” The explicit goal of this “feature” is to prevent blackouts by preventing people from lowering…

  • Global Warming Protest

    This is what a global warming protest looks like: While ironic, this image does not prove anything. Except perhaps, that a weather few degrees below average can have a much more dramatic impact on human life than a few degrees above average.

  • Do compact fluorescent lights really save energy?

    Earlier this month, Congress passed a law which will essentially force the public to switch to compact fluorescent lights. (CFLs)  Environmentalists and light bulb makers joined forces to boost power and profits, and perhaps sue the competition out of existence.Some people object to the narrow light spectrum and toxic Mercury content of CFL lights, but…

  • Allowing restaurants to make money off hungry people is wrong

    Statism doesn’t sound as great when it comes to other fields, does it? Mayor Thomas M. Menino embarked on a highly public campaign yesterday to block CVS Corp. and other retailers from opening medical clinics inside their stores… “Limited service medical clinics run by merchants in for-profit corporations will seriously compromise quality of care and…

  • Did Christianity's underdog origins allow the success of Western Civilization?

    It’s interesting to note that with the exception of Christianity and some schools of Buddhism, every other major world religion were created as a means for the ruling regime to justify its grip on power as an expression of divine will. The divine hierarchy of the Old Testament’s angelic pantheon reflects and perpetuates the rigid…

  • Proof most Americans are uneducated

    At least when it comes to biology. Update: there’s a discussion of this post on ObjectivismOnline.

  • Forget global warming, there's a cold spell coming

    Don’t throw out those fur coats just yet, warns Dr. Oleg Sorokhtin, Merited Scientist of Russia and fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences. Glaciers will one day reach below Moscow.