When Berkeley, California became the first U.S. city to ban the installation of natural gas lines to new homes last year, Mayor Jesse Arreguín proudly stated, “We are committed to the Paris Agreement and must take immediate action in order to reach our climate action...
As of May 20, the United States had more than 1.5 million confirmed cases of the Wuhan Coronavirus. US deaths related or attributed to the virus topped 92,000 (though many were really due to old age and related co-morbidities). Because of COVID-19, much of the US...
Since the early days of the internet, it has been a digital environment of communication across wide distances, a repository of shared files, and a place of shadowy exchanges of digital media of dubious ownership. The internet has exploded in use and user base since...
If there is one thing that the coronavirus pandemic has taught us, and it has taught us many things, it’s that partisan politics has completely taken hold of public discourse and, in effect, banned common sense. This truth was made most clear in early May when UK...
The staid and venerable television program 60 Minutes aired a segment last Sunday night that focused on a topic that has been examined before, but not with the same widespread receptivity and credibility. It had to do with ‘UAPs’, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, what...
“For better than a century many historians have found it useful to employ a Fabian tactic against critics in related fields of intellectual endeavor. The tactic works like this: when criticized by social scientists for the softness of his method, the crudity of his...
“And then came the global warming hysteria, an idea that has more to do with Europe’s prosperous middle class politics and media than it has to do with Science but which no politician in the West could be seen to question let alone oppose. It basically makes three claims: that the world is warming up; we are causing it; and it is a bad thing. Each of those claims could be challenged but no one dared to be seen on the `wrong’ side of this `debate’.”
Psychiatrists have detected the first case of “climate change delusion” – and they haven’t even yet got to Kevin Rudd and his global warming guru.
High-flying tech stocks crashed. The roaring housing market crumbled. And oil, rest assured, will follow the same path down. The longer prices stay stratospheric, the worse the eventual crash – simply because the higher the prices and bigger the profit margins, the bigger the incentive to over-produce.
As the prices of food, fuel and other basic commodities continue to skyrocket, the tiny voice warning that the sky is falling becomes louder and more insistent. The lesson is that markets work. Shortages cannot persist in a free marketplace because higher prices prompt consumers to economize on their purchases and producers both to expand existing supplies and to search for cheaper substitutes.
Instead of banning exports or providing subsidies, governments should be removing barriers to production and distribution, and letting the market respond effectively to changes in supply and demand.
The problem is not that supply and demand is such a complex explanation. The problem is that supply and demand is not an emotionally satisfying explanation. For that, you need melodrama, heroes and villains.
However, just as livestock are eating the food that would have been consumed by poor Africans, so Americans are running their SUVs on it. One SUV tank of biofuel uses enough grain to feed an African family for a year.
He has little patience for “well-fed utopians who live on Cloud Nine but come into the Third World to cause all kinds of negative impacts,” by scaring people and blocking the use of biotechnology.
Delegates from some 160 nations are in Bangkok to discuss a post-2012 climate treaty – but any plans to force “poor polluters” like India and China to cut back on emissions will increase poverty and deaths, according to the 45-member Civil Society Coalition on Climate...