The people at Washington Policy Center do their homework.  Good article about all kinds of hooey, including grocery (gross-ery) bag bans.
​

​Six Environmental Myths To Get Rid of This Earth Day

By TODD MYERS  |  
Apr 19, 2018
 
First do no harm is a good maxim for Earth Day in more than one way. Many will think of it in the most obvious terms – don’t harm the planet. But, it is also a reminder to be thoughtful about actions intended to help the environment, but which may do more harm than good.
 
Here are six environmental myths people can give up this Earth Day.
 
Buying Local Food Helps the Environment: False
 
Contrary to the claims of the environmental left, buying local food dramatically increases environmental harm.
 
At the University of Washington tomorrow, the Earth Day presentation will feature a speaker promoting “transformation” of the food system to support “small-scale organic farmers.” Organic farming is fine, but it is primarily a luxury for the wealthy and widespread use would dramatically increase the use of water, fertilizer, and even pesticides.
 
If we moved to local production for 40 major crops, research shows the U.S. would have to increase land use – and the water and fertilizer that goes with it – by 60 million acres, about the size of Oregon. 
 
Cotton Grocery Bags Protect Water Quality: False
 
Banning plastic grocery bags has become a fad among local cities, but organic cotton bags do far more environmental damage, causing 606 times as much water pollution as plastic bags. A study by the Danish Ministry of Food and Environment found organic cotton requires so much fertilizer that it significantly contributes to the worst water quality problem, deoxygenation that creates “dead zones.” 
 
Politicians who push plastic bag bans point to photos of the bags harming marine life. They ignore the far more damaging, but less obvious, impacts of cotton bags. Consumers would have to use a cotton bag every week for 11 ½ years just to break even compared to using plastic bags that whole time.
 
Honeybees Populations Are Collapsing: False
 
The number of honeybee hives in the United States is at the highest level in 20 years. You wouldn’t know that by listening to some environmental groups, who claim honeybee populations are falling. As a beekeeper, I have an interest in protecting honeybee health, but those who make these claims know almost nothing about the issue.
 
Although the percentage of hives that die each year has increased from about 20 percent to about 35 percent, the U.S. Department of Agriculture notes that beekeepers are replacing lost hives and increasing the total number of bees. Additionally, the threat to honeybees is not pesticides but the varroa mite, which attaches itself to honeybees. Agricultural beekeepers, whose bees are most exposed to pesticides, have the lowest mortality. 
 
Solar Panels Are Free Electricity: False
 
Imagine spending a dollar to save a dime. Despite the perception that solar energy is free, that’s exactly what taxpayer subsidies for solar power do. Solar panels enjoy huge taxpayer subsidies, despite the fact that most people who can afford to install them are rich.
 
Even with improvements in solar technology, the Energy Information Administration estimates solar panels will still cost thirty percent more, on average, than natural gas. In Washington state, this is even worse. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory indicates Seattle receives half the solar radiance as Arizona or California. Even though the energy is “free,” the cost to install solar panels means we pay far more than with other energy sources and a much higher cost to reduce CO2 emissions. 
 
Washington State’s Snowpack is Declining: False
 
The Governor’s carbon tax bill this year lamented that climate change is “already” causing Washington state to experience “depleting snowpack.” This claim ignores the fact that for the 2017-18 winter, snowpack finished at 119 percent of normal. It wasn’t an anomaly. Ten of the last twelve years have seen above normal snowpack in Washington state. 
 
The snowpack myth persists despite clear and consistent data. Former State Climatologist Mark Albright of the University of Washington charted snowpack across 223 sites across the Pacific Northwest and found average snowpack has been steady for more than 30 years. We can still believe that climate change will have future impacts, but the impulse to ignore basic data shows how politics, not science, is driving the discussion on climate policy. 
 
Subsidizing Electric Vehicles Helps the Planet: False
 
Two years ago, a line to preorder the Tesla 3 stretched three blocks in Seattle, with people eager to place deposits on a car they had never seen or taken for a test drive. If you have the disposable income to commit to a car, sight unseen, you don’t need a tax break as an incentive.
 
Later this year, Washington’s sales tax break for electric vehicles will expire, but it was unnecessary from the beginning. For wealthy buyers of Teslas or the Nissan Leaf, a tax break simply offers tax breaks for the wealthy and gives politicians an opportunity to take credit for supporting cool technology while doing little to incentivize car sales or improve overall fuel efficiency or reduce CO2 emissions.
 
AUTHOR
TODD MYERS
Director, Center for the Environment
tmyers@washingtonpolicy.org  (206) 963-3409

TIMOTHY R. SNOWBALL -  ATTORNEY
Pacific Legal Foundation
​
This is the ninth part in a series discussing the principles of the American founding, their embodiment in the United States Constitution, and the ways in which the Supreme Court has all too often negated these principles to the detriment of individual liberty:
 
The size, scope, and power of the modern administrative state has far surpassed even the direst imaginings of the Founding Fathers. One of the primary ways Thomas Jefferson justified the split from Great Britain in the Declaration of Independence was King George III’s empowerment of bureaucrats to “harass our people and eat out their substance.” After the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, the Framers of the Constitution took great pains to prevent just such an abuse by dividing the power of the new federal government into separate but co-equal branches, designed to check and balance each other. Familiarly, Congress is vested with the power to make the laws, the President is vested with the power to sign or not sign the laws, as well as enforce the laws, and the Supreme Court is vested with the power to decide the constitutionality of the laws passed by Congress. According to James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution,” “[t]he accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” And yet this troubling mixing of constitutional powers is exactly what has occurred in the modern administrative state, which has been allowed to perpetuate and fester for decades.
 
But it is the so-called Chevron Doctrine that represents the single greatest threat to individual liberty.
 
Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. began simply enough. In 1977 Congress amended the Clean Air Act to ensure that states complied with air quality standards established by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Under the amended Act, non-compliant states were required to establish a permit program regulating “new or modified stationary sources” of air pollution. The problem in the case centered, as it does in many legal challenges, on competing definitions. Under Jimmy Carter, the EPA defined “new or modified stationary sources” of air pollution as individual polluting devices. But once Ronald Reagan took office, the EPA redefined “new or modified stationary sources” of air pollution as encompassing entire plants, the effect being that as the total emissions from a plant did not increase, even equipment that violated the new standards could be legally procured. The Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental protection group, challenged the new EPA regulation. When the district court ruled in the Council’s favor, Chevron U.S.A., a party affected by the outcome of the case, appealed the decision to the Supreme Court. The question facing the Court was how much judicial deference is due to agencies when they interpret their own congressionally mandated enabling statutes. Or, put another way, should agencies be allowed to determine the limits of their own power?
 
In perhaps the most stunning example of judicial abdication in the last forty years, the Court answered: yes.
 
Writing for a six justice majority, Justice Stevens laid the groundwork for the most constitutionally damaging doctrines of the modern era:  “When a court reviews an agency’s construction of the statute which it administers, it is confronted with two questions. First, always, is the question whether Congress has directly spoken to the precise question at issue. If the intent of Congress is clear, that is the end of the matter; for the court, as well as the agency, must give effect to the unambiguously expressed intent of Congress. If, however, the court determines Congress has not directly addressed the precise question at issue, the court does not simply impose its own construction on the statute, as would be necessary in the absence of an administrative interpretation. Rather, if the statute is silent or ambiguous with respect to the specific issue, the question for the court is whether the agency’s answer is based on a permissible construction of the statute.” That is to say, when Congress speaks clearly, it has spoken clearly. Easy enough. But the issue in the case concerns when Congress does not speak clearly. What then? What happens when congressional mandates are ambiguous? What is a “permissible construction”? How are agencies supposed to define “permissible”? These are questions that the Court left purposefully open.
 
As a result, in the decades since the decision the Chevron Doctrine has allowed agencies nearly unfettered authority to determine the limits of their own congressionally bestowed powers, enabled Congress to enacted purposefully ambiguous statutes as a means of avoiding democratic accountability, and left individual liberty subject to the whims of professional bureaucrats. How in any rational sense can such a system be described as a government of limited powers?
 
James Madison also once wrote that “[i]t will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?” Unless and until we reign in the power of the modern administrative state, beginning with the poisonous Chevron Doctrine, the American people risk the Framer’s experiment in liberty becoming so compromised as to no longer exist.
 
The time to fight back has come.
 
Series:
Part 1: Government is not the source of our rights
Part 2: Government power must be limited
Part 3: Individual rights trump government power
Part 4: Judges should do their jobs
Part 5: All rights were created equal
Part 6: All men are created equal
Part 7: Liberty is more important than security
Part 8: Absolute government power corrupts absolutely
Part 9: The greatest threat to liberty
Part 10: The solution to unconstitutional government: Fight Back
​