Today’s Raleigh News and Observer reproduces an interview with Bill Chameides, Dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University, titling the article “Duke dean promotes sustainability. (Sustainability being a code word for whatever policies are currently being advocated by the left wing environmental advocacy community.) Many of the statements from Chameides cross the line into the absurd. Here’s a couple, with my commentary:
The drought that ended in 2008 highlighted how vulnerable N.C. is to overuse of its water resources.
Huh? If anything it shows the opposite. Were people dying of thirst, starving because crops were failing, going to the hospital with dehydration? Nope. People had to limit how much they could wash their cars and water their lawns. In light of stories like this, Chameides should be emabarrassed to call these incredibly minor inconveniences evidence of vulnerability. Here we are two years later and most people hardly remember it.
We’ve a couple of the most polluting coal-fired plants right here in
N.C., and that not only impacts our health but climate as well.
First, this is a real slap in the face to North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Resources and all the legislators who voted to pass the Clean Smokestacks Bill in 2002, imposing the most stringent NOx and SO2 regulations on coal fired power plants in the nation. The costs of the bill to rate payers are now estimated at over $3 billion ? and NC’s plants are still “the most polluting“? As far as these coal-fired power plants’ impact on the climate ? I challenge Chameides to produce one study that shows any impact at all from North Carolina’s coal-fired plants.
Is this guy a college dean or a propagandists for the Sierra Club?
