Alarmists have been decrying the effects of global warming on Greenland for years, even though Greenland was greenest during the Medieval Warm Period, and Greenland’s Vikings, who flourished during that warm period, died out when cold temperatures returned, reducing them to starvation. (It was warmer in the year 1003 than 2003.) Now, the residents of Greenland, the world’s largest island, are once again profiting from global warming, reports the Washington Post:
“Rather than questioning global warming, many of this island’s 60,000 inhabitants seem to be racing to cash in. The tiny capital of Nuuk is bracing for record numbers of visitors this year; the retreating sea ice means a longer tourist season and more cruise ships . . . Hunters are boasting of more and bigger caribou, and the annual cod migration is starting earlier and lasting longer. In the far south, farmers are trying their hand at an exotic form of agriculture: growing vegetables. ‘Before, the growing season was too short for vegetables,’ . . .‘Now it is getting longer each year.’”
Since 2009, the Environmental Protection Agency has sought to regulate greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (which we breathe out and plants consume) because they supposedly threaten public health in the United States by causing global warming. President Obama has backed a corporate welfare-filled global-warming bill that would increase electricity bills. Obama admitted to the San Francisco Chronicle in 2008 that under his “cap and trade” plan to address global warming, ”electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”
But even if greenhouse gas emissions are the principal cause of global warming (as opposed to natural causes), it’s not clear why such warming would harm public health in a non-tropical country like America. After all, people in America’s warmer cities have lower mortality rates, and higher life expectancies, than people in its colder cities.
Warmer climates may be particularly helpful for racial minorities in Canada. Most non-white Canadians suffer from Vitamin D deficiency, putting them at risk of cancer, osteoporosis, and diabetes, according to the Toronto Globe and Mail. Lack of exposure to the sun is a big part of the problem. More than 50,000 people die every year in the United States every year as a result of inadequate sun exposure. While milk is Vitamin D enriched, many non-whites are lactose intolerant. Sunlight is the most potent source of Vitamin D. But in northern regions like Canada, sunlight alone does not provide enough Vitamin D for many people who work indoors. There, the sunlight is too feeble in winter and fall for people’s bodies to turn sunlight into Vitamin D. To get enough Vitamin D from the sun, people have to go outside a lot during spring and summer to offset the weak sunlight in fall and winter. But increasingly sedentary lifestyles and office jobs have reduced outdoor activity. And cold temperatures in spring discourage warmth-loving people from going outside, even when the light is strong enough to produce Vitamin D. Thus, cold climates can be bad for their health.
Tech:
New Privacy Laws in India and China Could Make IT Outsourcing Ugly:
“Think privacy issues are a pain when they affect consumers? Get ready for the grandfather of all corporate computing headaches. Big privacy-law changes in India and China are about to turn data-processing outsourcing into a hurdle-leaping, paperwork-generating mess.”
How Drudge Has Stayed on Top:
“For most big news Web sites, about 60 percent of the traffic is homegrown, people who come directly to the site by dint of a bookmark or typing in www.latimes.com or www.huffingtonpost.com. The other critical 40 percent comes by referrals, the links that are the source of drive-by traffic, new readers and heat-seekers on a particular story.”
Google’s Eric Schmidt: Smartphones Should ‘Remember Everything’ (Video):
“Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt sat down on Sunday with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria for a segment on “Fareed Zakaria GPS” to talk innovation, Android tablets versus Apple’s iPad, and the future of technology.”
Global Warming / Environment / Energy:
A warm welcome in Brussels:
“The solar plane HB-SIA arrived last night at 21:39 in Brussels and the team’s first european flight is a great success.”
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Debate over the constitutionality of the massive health care law passed in 2010 has focused on its “individual mandate”: the requirement that individuals buy health insurance, a requirement that the law’s defenders claim is authorized by Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce. (I took issue with that argument here.)
But the individual mandate is not the only provision in Obamacare that violates the Constitution. It also violates the Tenth Amendment and limits on Congressional power under the Constitution’s Spending Clause, through its huge expansion of Medicaid, which imposes unfunded mandates on state governments. Florida and other states argue that Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion provisions are unconstitutionally coercive in violation of the Tenth Amendment under the principles laid down by the Supreme Court’s decisions in United States v. Butler (1936) and South Dakota v. Dole (1987).
On May 11, I filed an amicus brief in support of Florida’s challenge on behalf of a majority of Minnesota’s State House of Representatives and the leaders of the North Carolina and Minnesota legislatures. That brief explains how the health care law violates the “clear statement” rule in the Supreme Court’s Pennhurst decision by imposing vague, indefinite, open-ended additional burdens on states, including massive, unpredictable costs in the billions of dollars. Federal officials have issued over a thousand waivers of burdensome rules imposed by Obamacare, mostly to unions or other entities with political connections. Meanwhile, HHS officials have vastly expanded the reach of other burdensome provisions of the law. For example, they have largely nullified the law’s grandfather clause, which was put into the law to keep Obama’s broken promise to let you keep your existing health insurance if you like it. They also issued a rule rewarding end-of-life counseling, even though such a provision was removed from the bill prior to passage after the so-called “death panels” controversy.
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“GM sees China as a road to profit,” reports the Washington Post today. “GM last year sold more cars in China than in the United States,” ranging from “high-end Buicks” to “low-end Chevrolets.” It’s good that GM is expanding its markets overseas, because its current share of the U.S. auto market may not last.
Even GM’s own shareholders seem to recognize that, and the fact that its recent profits may only be temporary. As Mickey Kaus noted recently in the Daily Caller, General Motors’ “sales and prices are up recently in part only because competing Japanese car suppliers have been crippled by the earthquake and tsunami. GM’s stock fell today and is still below the initial IPO price” (that is, below the price of the stock when it was sold to shareholders by the U.S. government).
Before that, GM’s finances were temporarily buoyed by bad PR regarding Toyota’s alleged safety defects in its cars, which turned out to be largely bogus. (The Toyota crashes turned out to have been caused by driver error, not manufacturing defects).
These setbacks for Toyota temporarily drove buyers away from Toyota to GM, artificially propping up GM’s profitability. But devastating earthquakes like the one that hit Japan occur there only once or twice a century, and can’t keep GM profitable in the long-run.
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Combating “rogue websites” is a top priority for many in Congress this year. Lawmakers have held several hearings over the past few months to explore ways to address these rogue sites, which are typically foreign-based websites that are dedicated to trafficking in counterfeit goods and/or facilitating unlawful copyright infringement. Most recently, on May 12, several U.S. Senators introduced the PROTECT IP Act (bill text). The bill would establish new legal mechanisms designed to enable the government and rights holders to combat Internet sites that are “dedicated to infringing activities.”
Congress deserves praise for incorporating several of the ideas we proposed last year in the context of COICA, a similar bill that was introduced — but not enacted — in the last session of Congress. As several dozen law professors warned last year, COICA lacked procedural safeguards, was overly broad in its scope, and risked hindering free expression by triggering “false positives” rendering lawful websites inaccessible. Compared to COICA, PROTECT IP represents a more balanced approach to fighting online copyright and trademark infringement while recognizing fundamental civil liberties.
However, in spite of these improvements, the PROTECT IP Act contains some troubling provisions that should concern lawmakers who believe in balanced, thoughtful intellectual property laws that “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.”
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Even considering the usually sympathetic audience at the Huffington Post, liberal economist Dean Baker had a tough task of persuasion with his Monday column defending price controls on debit card “swipe” fees that primarily benefit big retailers such as Wal-Mart. In “The Big Retailers Versus the Big Banks: It Makes a Big Difference,” Baker, long a critic of Wal-Mart’s labor practices, argued to HuffPo’s progressive readers that — in his actual words — “In this case, Wal-Mart is on the side of the angels.”
But in making this case, Baker was on the other side of the facts. He completely misstated the findings of the Federal Reserve in writing the rule in question, asserting that the Fed estimated that the price caps would cover costs of banks and credit unions that issue the debit cards, when in fact the Fed said explicitly said it was setting price controls below-cost.
Baker was defending the Durbin Amendment from the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which puts price controls on the interchange fees — or “swipe fees” as retailer critics call them — that banks and credit unions charge merchants to process debit process debit transactions. Retailers pay this fee on each card purchase and in return they get more sales and the guaranteed payment for all purchase that was lacking in the “good old days” of bounced checks. But in implementing the Durbin Amendment, the Fed is drastically reducing this fee from an average of 44 cents to no more than 12 cents per transactions. The biggest retailers will get the biggest short-term benefits from these price controls.
Baker’s task was complicated by the fact that even writers for the normally pro-regulatory Huffington Post has published impressive investigative reporting that shows that Wal-Mart and Home Depot will be the biggest beneficiaries of the price controls as well as columns arguing that the price caps on merchants will shift the cost of debit card transactions to consumers.
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Reacting to the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) blatant efforts to promote organized labor’s agenda, Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) today introduced the Jobs Protection Act (S. 964). The Act aims to counter the NLRB’s campaign against Boeing for opening a new production line for its new 787 Dreamliner jet in South Carolina, a right-to-work state. The Senators’ joint statement sums up the bill thus:
The bill would:
- clarify that the NLRB would not be able to order an employer to relocate jobs from one location to another.
- guarantee an employer the right to decide where to do business within the United States.
- protect an employer’s free speech regarding the costs associated with having a unionized workforce without fear of such communication being used as evidence in an anti-union discrimination claim.
It should be outrageous that such a bill would be needed, yet it is, as the NLRB carrying water for Big Labor appears to be part of a pattern. The Board has also threatened to sue four states over amendments to their constitutions guaranteeing secret ballots in union organizing elections. As I noted recently:
Telling businesses where they may locate their facilities and states how they may amend their constitutions are, to put it mildly, highly unusual attempts to stretch federal power. But such abuse of the NLRB’s remit may be the best vehicle that Obama now has to reward his union allies — whose suport he will need in his 2012 reelection effort — following the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in the 2010 midterm elections.
Quite simply, this is unionization through regulation, whereby regulatory agencies circumvent Congress by “reinterpreting” the law beyond recognition.
Further, my colleague Iain Murray and I note in a recent op ed:
Boeing and the four states threatened by the NLRB have the law on their side, but it will need considerable patience to see their case through. The NLRB’s recent actions go so far in seeking to reinterpret the National Labor Relations Act that litigation could go far in the federal court system, potentially even reaching the U.S. Supreme Court.
Congress, for its part, should not wait for these cases to wind their way through the courts. It needs to rein in the NLRB before it does any more damage to the nation’s economy or to workers’ rights of free association.
This is the latest episode in the Obama administration’s pattern of politicizing the NLRB to act as an agent for organized labor, rather than an independent arbiter. Congress may still need to do more to rein in this rogue agency.
For more on labor, see here.
If you live in Texas, look over your shoulder before you tell a tall tale about your last fishing trip. The state legislature there just voted to make lying about the size of your catches in fishing tournaments a Class A misdemeanor. And if the prize money is over $10,000, you could spend up to ten years in jail as a convicted felon.
In 2009, an especially devious fisherman in the Bud Light Trails Big Bass Ray Hubbard tournament “put a one-pound lead weight inside the stomach of the 10.49-pound bass he had entered to win the grand prize, a $55,000 fishing boat,” according to the The New York Times.
Fishing tournaments, just like other competitive sports, have their own rules. Violators are punished. The NFL reserves the right to fine and suspend players for misconduct. Major League Baseball hands out 50 and 100-game suspensions for players caught using steroids. Pete Rose was banned from baseball for life for betting on his team.
The tournament organizers foolishly couldn’t punish their own cheater because they didn’t have a rule for it. But submitting a leaden fish is a kind of fraud, especially when the prize is $55,000. And in fact, the man was charged with felony theft. He served 15 days in jail, was hit with a $3,000 fine, plus five years of probation. His fishing license was also taken away for five years.
That’s precisely why the bill on Governor Rick Perry’s desk is unnecessary. One, theft is already illegal. Two, if the Bud Light Trail tournaments are competently run, they now have specific rules and punishments for cheaters. Seems like a classic “do something” bill that doesn’t do much at all.
Following my post yesterday on Portland’s immense rail transit waste comes this new report from the Brookings Institution. Released today, the report (and this cool interactive map) analyzes U.S. transit systems and their relation to employment access. Some of the key findings:
- Nearly 70 percent of large metropolitan residents live in neighborhoods with access to transit service of some kind.
- The typical metropolitan resident can reach about 30 percent of jobs in their metropolitan area via transit in 90 minutes.
- About one-quarter of jobs in low- and middle-skill industries are accessible via transit within 90 minutes for the typical metropolitan commuter, compared to one-third of jobs in high-skill industries.
Important takeaway: as metropolitan areas continue to suburbanize (including lower-income residents who previously resided in inner cities), the spoke-and-hub model of transit, which relies on monocentric urban land-use patterns, will become less useful for those who can least afford private auto trips. The high-skilled, high-income workers of central cities benefit the most from the status quo, while the increasingly lower- to middle-income suburban residents — who are more and more often finding work in the suburbs, as well — have less access to efficient transit.
As fixed-line (rail) transit best suits the old monocentric model, transit agencies (and, hopefully, private transit companies) will need more flexibility. If governments must spend money on transit authorities, bus rapid transit is obviously the more sensible alternative.
I don’t believe the Brookings authors go far enough in their conclusions or articulate the inconvenient truth that many Americans have rejected transit outright, but it is definitely worth reading. The full report is available for download as a PDF.
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