Cragislist founder Craig Newmark has an interesting op ed in today’s Washington Examiner on ways in which voluntary collaboration will help resolve new issues of trust in the always-developing online world (and in some cases in the real world). He sees great promise in “neutral, independent reputation systems, like the ones in eBay or Amazon, but independent of any particular business,” and in “forms of collaborative filtering acting as BS screens, which will make it easy for people to figure…

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What’s worse than trade protectionism and compulsory unionism? Trade protectionism and compulsory unionism that shred national sovereignty, as CEI adjunct fellow Doug Bandow writes in TCSDaily today. He notes that some Democrats in Congress seek “to empower a UN body, the International Labor Organization (ILO) — which promulgates rules on everything from child labor to union organizing — more than the U.S. government. This is what organized labor desires; American unions began taking labor controversies to the ILO years ago.”…

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Via Roger Pielke Jr, we have the unedifying spectacle of at least one leading IPCC scientist engaged in selling alarmist predictions of what climate change might do to your property in a new venture called Climate Appraisal Services LLC. If you get a free report, you get temperature measurements for your address, some information about UV radiation and some chilling maps of how much of the USA will be under water if sea level rises 20 feet (and we can’t be…

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Is there a special award for someone who lays out a lengthy argument in support of some law, and then yanks the rug out from under himself at the very end?

Consider this letter in today’s Wall St. Journal from Edgar Dworsky, head of Consumer World. Mr. Dworsky, a former Mass. assistant attorney general, defends a state law that requires groceries to mark prices on every individual item they sell. He devotes over 10 column-inches to explaining how convenient individually price-marked items…

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Lots of items you may have missed:

Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) says U.S. emissions restrictions might only take effect if major developing countries also impose them
My colleague on Marlo Lewis on how Congress is reverting to the thinking of the Byrd-Hagel resolution
Al Gore’s Quebecois allies lose big in elections
Only 24 percent of Americans consider Al Gore an expert on global warming
… which leads Roger L Simon to ask whether Gore hurts his own cause
British energy consumption booms and emissions rise
European Union climate…

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The private equity buyout of Texas Utilities that was brokered in such a way as to appease environmental groups has brought despair to one Texas town:

In Colorado City and surrounding Mitchell County, “there were lots of long faces,” Mayor Jim Baum says. “The plant would have been our salvation, even more so than the discovery of oil.”

Up to 3,000 workers would have poured in for three years of construction, spending their pay at local stores. The plant, once operating, would have…

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The Kyoto crowd crowed when the Senate, on June 22, 2005, voted 54-43 in favor of a Sense of the Senate resolution on climate change drafted by Sens. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) and Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.).

The critical language appears below:

(b) Sense of the Senate.—It is the sense of the Senate that Congress should enact a comprehensive and effective national program of mandatory, market-based limits and incentives on emissions of greenhouse gases that slow, stop, and reverse the growth of such emissions…

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Roger Pielke Jr has posted a letter to his Prometheus website that he wrote in response to an op/ed by CEI Adjunct Fellow Dr Henry Miller, which commended Dr Pielke Jr for drawing attention to the benefits of adaptation to global warming.  Dr Pielke Jr says:

Any effective approach to climate policy will require that we both mitigate and adapt. The urge to present adaptation and mitigation as somehow in opposition is a reflex shared by those on opposing sides of the debate…

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Capitol Hill is on a global warming hearing binge. Al Gore made the big splash in terms of media coverage, but several recent testimonies merit your attention.

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BP’s latest carbon emission reduction figures illustrate how easily carbon trading schemes, which rely on emissions reporting, cab be manipulated. According to the Sunday Times, the oil giant claims “a cut of 830 m tons in its annual carbon dioxide emissions — roughly equivalent to the entire output of Britain and the Netherlands combined.”

Environmental activists should be giddy over this engineering “marvel,” right? Wrong. Some of them blame “creative accounting” for this reduction. BP, reports the Times, “has decided to exclude…

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Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott, angry with the whole insurance industry over the situation in his home state of Mississippi, has announced that he wants to do away with the 1945 McCarran-Ferguson law. Friends on the Hill tell me he’s quietly gathering support. It won’t move forward for now, but I could see things changing.

Right now, the McCarran-Ferguson Act grants insurance companies a limited antitrust exemption. The law lets insurance companies share risk and rating data in a way that other…

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In Scotland and Australia, two places as far apart on the globe as you can get, people are realizing that rationing carbon is a socially regressive move.

In Scotland:

An energy underclass could develop in Scotland if personal carbon trading is introduced in the fight against climate change, urban planning experts warned yesterday.The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors in Scotland voiced concerns that low-income households could be driven into an eat-or-heat situation if tradable allowances were introduced.

In Australia:

THE jobless would be hardest…

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The excellent classical liberal economics blog www.cafehayek.com had a short post Friday by Russell Roberts on Richard Lindzen’s podcast on Bloomberg. The posting generated a lot of interesting comments on global warming — and whether economists have anything to contribute on that issue.

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A firefighter in the UK is facing suspension for breaking fire service regulations.  His breach?  Saving a drowning woman’s life:

The brigade’s rules state: “Personnel should not enter the water.” The fire crew should instead have tried to haul the woman out using poles and ropes.

Stephen Hunter, chief fire officer of Tayside Fire and Rescue, admitted that fire engines in Perth were not equipped with the correct poles and ropes, but insisted that Mr Brown had broken the rules.

He…

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Last week, Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.)introduced H. R. 1531, the “Video Game Decency Act.” This bill is in response to the Hot Coffee controversy, which refers to the sexually explicit unlockable mini-game in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

Sen. Brownback (R-Kan.) has also introduced a bill to deal with this controversy (see my 2/15 post on Sen. Brownback’s bill). His bill would require the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) to play the “entire game,” a measure that shows Senator Brownback and his staff…

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Fortune magazine has come out with its list of “America’s Most Admired Companies.” Here are the top ten:

1. General Electric

6. FedEx

2. Starbucks

7. Apple

3. Toyota Motor

8. Google

4. Berkshire Hathaway

9. Johnson & Johnson

5. Southwest Airlines

10. Procter & Gamble

According to the magazine:

To create the top 20 for our 25th annual rankings, Fortune and its survey partners at Hay Group asked 3,322 executives, directors, and securities analysts to select the 10 companies they admire most. Having fresh ideas and being green are among the qualities…

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I love The New York Times. Not the news and editorial departments of course - the true object of my desire is the food, style, design and travel coverage. The reason for this is very simple: whenever I need a pretentious, out-of-touch theme story on the latest trend in sustainable caviar-spoon technology, my beloved Times is there. The lifestyle editors would rather vacation on the Jersey coast than print something as prosiac and bourgeois as, say, “10 Easy Chicken Recipes…

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Citizen groups in many small Midwestern towns are trying to stop ethanol plants from being built in their communities, according to today’s front-page article in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required). Fueled by a 51 cents per gallon federal government subsidy and other incentives for “alternative energy sources,” ethanol production from corn is driving up the cost of food, meat and poultry, as well as the prices of Midwestern farmland.

Corn-based ethanol has been touted by policymakers — and producers — as…

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For those of you who missed Bjorn Lomborg’s testimony after Gore’s “triumphant return” (Katie Couric’s words, not mine) to Capitol Hill, he did a great job attacking the crisis mentality on climate change. His main point was that all peer-reviewed cost-benefit studies suggest we should do very little regarding the climate and referred to “vast frivolous projects like the Kyoto Protocol.”

Chairman Bart Gordon (D-TN) did a vicious hit job on Lomborg in his introduction. He said while America takes great…

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Norman Borlaug, the Nobel Peace Prize winning agronomist, will turn 93 on Sunday, March 25, 2007. It’s a birthday well worth celebrating. His life’s work — known around the world the Green Revolution — is estimated to have saved more than a billion human beings from starvation. Still, at age 93, Borlaug still spends much of his time in the wheat and corn fields outside Mexico City, helping teams of scientists and farmers breed new and improved varieties. And, he…

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