A decade ago there was controversy over allowing oil drilling in the gigantic Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The people living there all wanted it because they knew what the area the drilling would occur was like - the moon more than the earth we love. Activists nonetheless showed pictures of caribou munching on grass far below where the actual drilling was.It wasn't even explored until the...
read moreVegetables have had a lot of foodborne outbreak scandals, but two times since the 1980s they have also impacted meat in a big way. Mad Cow disease in 1986 and Listeria in 2019 killed people. Mad Cow disease was due to poor quality control and a lack of coherent meat-chain understanding - the annual Burns Supper is coming up but you still can't buy haggis from Scotland - while more recent...
read moreYou may not drive 250 miles back and forth to work but you may drive 125 on a trip, and that could be all you are getting in an electric vehicle when it is cold. Electric car efficiency plummets below moderate temperature, 40 percent or more, but just like government will go after conventional fuel companies who get their emissions wrong, now electric isn't without scrutiny. And they are getting...
read moreCritics of scientists and science writers who speak plainly usually note it is better to be more neutral in tone, informational - 'show them some slides.'Yet very little actually gets done that way. A few places can stay in existence writing 'the universe is mysterious' articles but environmentalists know how to move the needle, financially, politically, and cultural. And it is not by being...
read moreIn 1066, Duke William of Normandy left France on a fleet of ships to fight his cousin and competitor for the vacant English throne, Harold Godwinson, and at the Battle of Hastings, the matter was settled. Harold, the last Anglo-Saxon claimant, was dead, and a new age for England began.(1)Had the EU existed then, he'd have never had the chance. Given current EU red tape, efforts to make a replica...
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