Studies are pending — and due this year — by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the nonprofit American Rivers group on the feasibility of removing locks and dams on the upper Allegheny River.
As the Tribune-Review reports, it comes down to a matter of spending tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to repair these aging navigational facilities or a few million dollars to remove them.
Indeed, many of the facilities are long in the tooth and failing. And if they are not failing now, it’s only a matter of time. But, as the Trib notes, there are myriad things to consider in decommissioning this waterway infrastructure.
What will the resulting lower or higher river pool levels mean for communities along the river?
What about intake pipes for drinking water?
How might hydroelectric power facilities be affected?
How will recreational boating be affected?
And, as we would ask, what about any remaining or future river commerce? Might locks and dam removal cut off the proverbial nose to spite the face? True, “river commerce” in the upper Allegheny corridor borders on being an oxymoron. But what about that future?
We look forward to perusing these important studies when they are released, now set for this summer. Here’s to a thorough, frank and, above all, honest discussion.
Richard Reavey makes a curious comment to The New York Times in a story about how America’s coal industry supposedly is finding common cause with environmentalists to address “climate change.”
Says Reavey, vice president for government and public affairs at Cloud Peak Energy:
“We can’t turn back time. We have to accept that there are reasonable concerns about carbon dioxide and climate, and something has to be done about it. It’s a political reality, it’s a social reality, and it has to be dealt with,” he says.
But note what “reality” Reavey did not include in that quote — scientific reality.
The Times notes that America’s largest coal companies — Cloud Peak, Peabody and Arch — are embracing “carbon capture and sequestration.” It’s a process by which carbon is buried underground.
But it’s hardly cost-effective and it is hardly without its own perils, as a number of conservative economic and liberal environmental researchers have noted.
And it’s hardly the basis on which coal producers should be seeking more and more tax credits to appease envirocrats — envirocrats who, ironically, also question the efficacy of carbon capture and sequestration.
It behooves Pennsylvania gun owners to keep a close eye on a federal appeals court ruling that affirmed Maryland’s dubious Firearms Safety Act.
The crux of the ruling (in Kolbe v Maryland) — which has no direct effect on Pennsylvania but could have an ancillary effect since it is applicable, at least for now, in not only Maryland but West Virginia — decrees that the individual right to bear arms (as affirmed in the U.S. Supreme Court’s Heller decision) “does not extend to any firearm with military utility, which is arguably pretty much every gun ever made,” says Jonathan F. Keiler, writing in the American Thinker.
Keiler notes that the ruling, by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., also relies on the canard that semi-automatic weapons that look like automatic military weapons are “assault weapons” and de facto weapons of “military utility.”
The appellate court, which also ascribed nonsensical firing rates to semi-automatic weapons, also upheld Maryland’s ban on magazines holding more than 10 rounds.
“The 4th Circuit’s decision … was a direct, if often legally incomprehensible attempt to greatly limit the Supreme Court’s seminal decision in Heller and set the stage for a new national ban on semi-automatic rifles,” says Keiler.
Or as David French put it, writing in National Review:
“Here’s the bottom line, citizens of Maryland: A federal court has defied the Supreme Court and decided that the constitutional right to keep and bear arms is limited to those guns that have no modern military analog and have not (yet) been used to carry out a mass shooting.”
The 4th Circuit’s ruling most assuredly will end up before the Supreme Court. For rank ignorance and thumbing one’s nose at the Constitution is no basis for sound public policy.
Colin McNickle is a senior fellow and media specialist at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
.
