Taking corn out of fuel and putting it back toward food production would make food more affordable while also reducing the negative environmental consequences that have resulted from the government’s multiple interventions.
Other than anarcho-libertarians, most agree that government has a role to play in preventing and suppressing epidemics, a classic public-health problem. Viral or bacterial infections are not passed from animal to person, or person to person, by voluntary exchange. Instead, proximity to another’s infection can lead to an individual’s becoming infected, notwithstanding any market...
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[The recommendations herein were substantially revised, 1/17/19, as noted in the section “Which Discount Rate to Use?”, and corrected 2/14/19.] Two recent position papers from the conservative libertarian Niskanen Center and the libertarian Cato Institute take diametrically opposite positions on the desirability of a Carbon Tax. [Corrected 2/8/17 per communication from Jerry Taylor.] Jerry...
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Shale gas deposits underlie about a third of the State of Tennessee. Tapping that low-carbon resource is essential if electric utilities there and across the nation have any hope of complying with the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Energy Plan, which mandates a 30 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by 2030. Yet environmental groups...
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A story by Matthew Wald in the New York Times on January 9th demonstrates the poverty of governmental attempts to pick “winners” in the realm of green technologies, the wasteful subsidy programs supporting that policy goal and the huge costs for the private sector of being unable to march to Washington’s tune. Among its...
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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...
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The Wall Street Journal reports: The Supreme Court agreed Monday to decide whether eight states and other plaintiffs can proceed with lawsuits that seek to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by utilities. The lawsuit is part of a push by some states for “greenhouse gas” regulations that go further than efforts by the U.S. Environmental Protection...
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I was on the road a good deal last week, driving from my home in southeast Louisiana first through a long stretch of Mississippi to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, then to the outskirts of Birmingham and on to Auburn, Alabama, and finally from there back to my home by way of Montgomery and Mobile. Along the way, I was...
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To follow up on my earlier posting, “The Climate-Industrial Complex,” award-winning meteorologist Brian Sussman has a helpful, new article at American Thinker, “Carbon Cronyism: Why Cap-and-Trade Is Not Dead Yet.” Author of the new book, Climategate: A Veteran Meteorologist Exposes the Global Warming Scam, Sussman details some of the key, interlocking business and government...
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I received a message today from someone who questioned the position I had taken in a recent op-ed article on the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Because I was unable to get a reply through to the person who wrote to me, and because others might have the same concern he raised, I am...
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