It’s been a year since the president was elected, and he’s already piled up an impressive list of lies and broken promises.
The broken promises include his pledge to enact a “net spending cut,” his promise not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year, and his promise not to sign bills without first giving the public five days of notice.
The Congressional Budget Office says that Obama’s proposed budgets will explode the national debt through massive spending increases, increasing the already large deficits…
Read the full story
Two EPA lawyers criticized the cap-and-trade energy bill passed by the House as a scam, noting in The Washington Post that it will be manipulated to profit politically connected corporations and reward certain kinds of pollution, while not cutting greenhouse gas emissions. A similar scheme enacted in Europe in the name of fighting global warming enriched polluters, while not reducing emissions, which actually rose faster in most of Europe than in the U.S.
The Washington Examiner explains how the bill will lead to deforestation, and thus increase greenhouse gas…
Read the full story
A few years ago, environmental guru, Merry Prankster, and Whole Earth Catalog author Stewart Brand caused a minor stir with an article he wrote in the MIT publication, Technology Review. Brand, who was an early advocate of the “back to the land” movement of the 1960s and 1970s, had done some re-thinking, and concluded that environmentalist opposition to things like urbanization, population growth, biotechnology, and nuclear power generation, was wrong and needed to change.
Now, Brand has written a new book, called Whole Earth Discipline:…
Read the full story
The UK Royal Society’s long-awaited study on improving agricultural productivity and increasing food security was released this morning. Although I’ve only had a chance to skim the report, it seems to have lived up to its promise of eschewing politically correct pop-environmentalism and instead embracing the use of science and technology for producing more food on less land. The report acknowledges that farming is an inherently un-natural and ecologically disruptive endeavor. But, it suggests that a healthy concern for protecting the environment necessitates…
Read the full story
Last week, Bill Gates announced at the World Food Summit in Des Moines that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation would be redoubling its efforts to improve agricultural productivity among poor farmers in less developed countries. He announced that the foundation would be making $120 million worth of new grants for agriculture research and development. Importantly, Gates eschewed the politically correct approach urged by major environmental organizations and explained, as Reuters put it, that:
“The fight to end hunger is being hurt by…
Read the full story
After the weird “future” award to President Obama of the Nobel Peace Prize, another Nobel committee has made a brilliant choice – awarding the Economics prize to Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson. Their work follows the lead of Ronald Coase (himself a Nobel prize winner years ago), which showed that the institutions of liberty are far richer than the atomistic market concepts of buying and selling.
Coase asked, the question, “Why are there firms?” – which Williamson has explored further. Like Coase,…
Read the full story
by Ivan Osorio
October 13, 2009 @ 11:38 am
In honor of the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Economics to Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson, it’s worth recalling a mention of Ostrom’s work by a previous Economics Nobel laureate, Vernon Smith, then at George Mason Univeristy, whom I interviewed for CEI’s newsletter, the Planet (then Monthly Planet). Here’s the 2002 Economics Nobel Prize winner, on the future 2009 winner:
One of the best pieces of work on public choice was done by Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University, Governing the Commons.…
Read the full story
Shovelnose sturgeon population figures are healthy. Why does the Fish and Wildlife Service want to list it as a threatened species, then? Because it looks like the pallid sturgeon, which is currently listed as endangered.
Read the full story
The Associated Press is now chiding President Obama for falsely claiming that his proposed tax on uninsured people is not a tax. It is a tax increase, the AP says, and it would be enforced by the IRS: “Memo to President Barack Obama: It’s a tax. Obama insisted this weekend on national television that requiring people to carry health insurance - and fining them if they don’t - isn’t the same thing as a tax increase. But the language of Democratic…
Read the full story
In Forbes yesterday, New York lawyer Steven Donziger, consultant attorney for Ecuadorian plaintiffs in the suit against Chevron, criticizes my article, “Toxic Revenge,” in the same publication:
[W]riter Silvia Santacruz rolled out the latest of Chevron’s counter-attacks: that Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa has publicly supported the plaintiffs and made a fair trial impossible; that plaintiff attorneys have made a career out of pursuing Chevron; and that this is really just a case of radical environmentalism at work. What Chevron doesn’t say is that…
Read the full story
The middle class is facing big tax increases thanks to Obama and liberal congressional leaders.
Even the trimmed-down version of Obama’s health-care plan recently announced by a ranking Senator contains lots of tax increases for the middle class (see below).
And the costly cap-and-trade energy legislation passed by the House and supported by Obama would lead to big tax increases in the name of fighting global warming, Administration officials privately have conceded, even though they publicly claim otherwise. “Officials at the Treasury Department think…
Read the full story
He may have saved a billion people from starvation, but, if you asked a random sample of reasonably well educated Americans who Norman Borlaug was, they’d probably answer, “Norman who?”
I’ll tell you Norman who. His biographer, Leon Hesser, called him the Man Who Fed the World. Science reporter Gregg Easterbrook called him the Forgotten Benefactor of Humanity. I’ve called him a Modern Prometheus. And comedians Penn and Teller said (well, mostly Penn said) that he was the greatest human being…
Read the full story
Congratulations to Pamela Ronald, a UC Davis plant pathology professor, on winning one of this year’s Science in Society Journalism Awards, sponsored by the National Association of Science Writers. The award is for a column Ronald wrote for the Boston Globe last year, and which was based in part on her wonderful book, Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetic and the Future of Food, co-authored with her husband Raoul Adamchak.
Ronald and Adamchak, who is an organic farmer, reject the dogma that only…
Read the full story
A major scandal has arisen in the biggest environmental lawsuit in history - the $27 billion lawsuit against Chevron oil company brought by a lawyer representing citizens of Ecuador.
As reported in Tuesday’s New York Times, Chevron has released video implicating Ecuador government officials close to the president in a massive bribery scheme. Chevron claims its covertly recorded videos “reveal a $3 million bribery scheme implicating the judge presiding over the environmental lawsuit currently pending against Chevron and individuals who identify…
Read the full story
Chaffee County, Colorado currently has the opportunity to engage in an advantageous business partnership, but environmental groups are attempting to derail this proposition that would benefit many community members. County commissioners are deliberating on whether to approve a proposal by the Nestlé Corporation that would allow the company to draw water from local aquifers that would be piped to a nearby facility and eventually sold under the company’s Arrowhead brand. Several other cities in the United States are facing the same issue:…
Read the full story
The irreverent and hilarious comedians Penn and Teller have produced another episode of their television show Bullshit about organic foods. Friends of CEI, Ron Bailey and Alex Avery, make appearances. The episode, titled “The Organicsons” blows the proverbial whistle on the alleged “local-ness” or organics:
“Some people eat organic foods because they want to support small local farms – but eating organically might mean you’re getting your food from giant corporations or China.”
Penn and Teller note that they have nothing against giant corporations –…
Read the full story
With all our attention diverted to the government’s attempted takeover of the half of US health care that isn’t already nationalized, the attempted destruction of our economy by crippling fossil fuel use, and the highly un-stimulating stimulus plan, you could be forgiven for not noticing that Congress is also trying to re-formulate America’s food safety regulations. The leading proposal is Rep. John Dingell’s (D-Mich.) H.R. 2749, the Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009. It’s got plenty of support from both…
Read the full story
In 2008, Obama promised not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year. But he is now breaking that promise by proposing to tax some middle-class families to pay for health care. Obama has also falsely pledged that if you like your health insurance, you will be able to keep it under his plan. But the Congressional health-care bills he backs would destroy countless inexpensive health-care plans by gutting a federal law called ERISA that makes it possible for employers to offer…
Read the full story
CEI and the Pacific Research Institute recently co-hosted a Capitol Hill briefing on “California’s Meltdown” - the unprecedented combination of flawed economic, energy and environmental policies that have left the state with a massive budget deficit and facing even tougher times ahead.
Our keynote speaker was Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA), a first term member of the House of Representatives but a 22-year veteran of the California state legislature. He was introduced by Director of Energy & Global Warming Policy Myron Ebell:
After his speech…
Read the full story
The sixteenth in an occasional series that shines a bit of light on the regulatory state.
Today’s Regulation of the Day comes to us from the Fish and Wildlife Service ($2.32 billion 2008 budget, 7,960 employees).
After a 12-month study, the Fish and Wildlife Service has determined that the desert valvata snail is not endangered. A proposed rule would remove it from the list of endangered species.
For more information, see pages 34,539-34,548 of the 2009 Federal Register.
Read the full story
Loading ...