Get ready for life in ultra small cars, shorn of spare tires and other unnecessary weight. The Obama administration has set the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards to 54.5 mpg! There will be fines (read: added costs) if you choose the wrong kind of vehicle or buy from an auto company that fails...
Read More »

Perhaps if I only blog about the positive developments in politics it will save time. Well, here we go. House Republicans are pushing to preclude the government from banning incandescent light bulbs. This is an idea I can get behind. Incandescent bulbs are a glorious thing. They bring light, the essence of civilization, into...
Read More »

A self-described former climate alarmist, now skeptic, Dr. David Evans served as a full-time consultant for the Australian Greenhouse Office (now the Department of Climate Change) from 1999 to 2005, and part-time from 2008 to 2010, modelling Australia’s carbon. He is a mathematician and engineer, with six university degrees, including a Ph.D. from Stanford...
Read More »

Here is Independent Institute Senior Fellow Robert Higgs speaking on “Ethanol Subsidies Have Many Bad Consequences,” from the Mises Circle seminar, “Agricultural Subsidies: Down on the D.C. Farm,” held May 14th in Indianapolis. Download audio file (27:51 minutes) Please also see the following books: Plowshares & Pork Barrels: The Political Economy of Agriculture, by...
Read More »

According to yesterday’s weekly federal report, This Week in Petroleum, the average price of regular gasoline is up to $3.96 per gallon, just 15 cents shy of its July 2008 peak. A friend writes: So I’m deciding to ask an economist. It appears to me that the oil companies are really just gouging the...
Read More »

At least in part. In the run-up to the Iraq war, many protesters brandished signs declaring, “No War for Oil!” The response from those pushing for the war was typically that this was a childish and silly admonition. And of course, the precise economic reasoning involved in much of this dissent was indeed faulty:...
Read More »

The Obama administration has detained the alleged Wikileaks whistleblower under torturous conditions—for almost a year, he has been subjected to solitary confinement in a windowless 6×12 cell for 23 hours a day, under constant surveillance, prevented from exercising, lacking a pillow or sheets. For the remaining hour every day, he is allowed to walk...
Read More »

President Obama announced what this article called an “ambitious goal” of reducing oil imports by one-third by 2025. He’s setting a goal to be accomplished 14 years from now, when at most he will be in office for less than six more years. Even if President Obama is re-elected, and his successor serves two...
Read More »

The devastating earthquake in Japan has damaged multiple nuclear reactors, and at least one of these facilities is said to pose the potential of Chernobyl-levels of contamination. Germany is responding to this tragedy by temporarily closing down seven nuclear reactors, while France, the second-largest user of nuclear energy in the world, is reportedly planning...
Read More »

In a recent editorial, “The EPA’s Utility Men: Anticarbon regulations and the corporate rent-seekers who love them,” the Wall Street Journal notes that eight leading utility CEOs are cheering on the EPA’s new draconian, climate regulations and other policies because they stand to make huge profits by redistributing wealth to themselves. As the Journal...
Read More »