The Environment

How a treaty could lead to the loss of life. (Analysis by adjunct scholar Roy Cordato.)

When FEMA takes over, liberty ends.

Another public hysteria debunked by science.

The strange new politics of suburban economic growth.

Should the market or regulators place plants and waste sites?

When Carol Browner, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, proposed new air quality standards last year, she claimed that thousands of Americans are being killed every year by tiny particles in the air with diameters of less than 2.5 microns. The EPA currently regulates airborne pollutants 10 microns in diameter, so Browner asked to have the agency's powers expanded. Charcoal grills, lawnmowers, and other gasoline-powered equipment could be outlawed when they produce too much pollution.

When the Soviet Union's central planners failed year after year to produce a respectable grain harvest, they blamed "bad weather." If only the weather could be controlled, Moscow dreamed, communism might be made to work. Officially, communism is dead, but the bureaucratic obsession with controlling the weather lives on in Washington, D.C.

For ages, man's right to exploit the living world—to use it for his purposes—went unquestioned. Trees were for lumber, crops for harvesting, animals for eating and skinning as well, of course, as for companionship. When not consumed directly, the products into which human labor transformed living things found their way to the market. Nothing seemed more, well, natural.

Employees at the Environmental Protection Agency presume to protect us from all sorts of supposed evils. But in doing so, no bureaucrats, save the tax collectors, are more vicious in their trampling of property rights. For example, they have made life miserable for people who own auto salvage and parts companies, and the drivers who depend on them.