by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow The Daily Sentinel In a popular Substack publication called Asterisk Magazine, a California physicist named Casey Handmer wrote a great piece titled “It’s 2024 and Drought is Optional,” about desalination technology. But he also touched on an even more fundamental point about how people don’t want to [...]
by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow The Daily Sentinel In 1937 the French poet and philosopher Paul Valéry published “Reflections on the World Today,” in which he originated one of literature’s great lines: “The problem with our times is that the future is no longer what it was.” The line was perfected later [...]
by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow The Daily Sentinel This week the Senate finally confirmed the new director of the Bureau of Land Management, former New Mexico Congressman Steve Pearce. The firestorm surrounding his nomination a few weeks earlier has not yet cooled and probably won’t. The volume is louder than the situation [...]
by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow The Daily Sentinel One month after proposing to put a man on the moon, JFK said getting drinking water from the ocean would be “one of the great breakthroughs of history” that would “dwarf any other scientific accomplishments.” Californians have worried about water for decades. The Colorado [...]
by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow The Daily Sentinel The Wall Street Journal headline said “San Diego Now Has So Much Water That It’s Selling It.” The article said San Diego generates enough water to rescue Arizona, though that’s jumping the gun just a bit. No such deal has actually been finalized yet, [...]
by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow The Daily Sentinel I don’t know anyone else who tracks the number of federal cops, but the watchdog group Open the Books occasionally reports on the burgeoning number of federal agencies with law enforcement divisions. The latest report, “The Militarization of Federal Bureaucracy,” detailed the astonishing scope [...]
by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow The Daily Sentinel The Colorado Legislature can only meet for 120 days a year, every legislator can only introduce five bills, bills must be passed by the 90th day, new programs must have a sunset clause, all meetings must be public and documents available for everyone to [...]
by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow The Daily Sentinel Green is an important color in Chinese culture. Jade symbolizes harmony with nature; the dragon represents transformation. Green tea symbolizes health; green bamboo implies resilience. And now, China wants to be known for its leadership of the global transition to green energy. But the [...]
by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow The Daily Sentinel I follow ups and downs of the environmental industry almost like a part-time hobby, for several reasons. For one, many environmental groups pretend to be local, grassroots activists, when in fact many are nationally organized and funded as part of a larger network. But [...]
by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow The Daily Sentinel I attended a meeting last week about federal ownership of Western lands and various proposals to transfer some of it to states. To settle a bet, I asked a popular AI tool how that might work, just to test its objectivity. It said, “Transferring [...]
