Macomber on Brookes

At The American Spectator, Shawn Macomber has very good article on Warren Brookes, after whom CEI’s journalism fellowship is named. He highlights Brookes’s debunking of radical green hokum:

BROOKES BALKED AT a U.S. Congress “determined to legislatively overturn…rational approach with regulatory absolutism that borders on the occult.” He mocked McDonald’s ill-advised switch from easily recyclable polystyrene containers to not-so-easily-recycled coated paperboard containers at the behest of a marauding Environmental Defense Fund as “not sound science but ill-informed yuppie-ism.” He coolly disassembled the widely accepted, yet “very largely counterproductive” insistence on paper recycling, pointing out paper was a “completely renewable resource whose production has been rising for the last 40 years,” commercially valuable, and “superb for the environment (consuming carbon dioxide, enriching — albeit acidifying — surface soils and preventing erosion),” and, thus, worthy of constant production. And in the late-eighties Brookes challenged “‘global warmers'” who in the early- to mid-seventies “were predicting an ice age because of sharp cooling since 1938, which was not explained by any global warming model,” and offered a slew of scientific evidence debunking other tenets of the new climate change faith.

Well worth a read.