Buffet, according to the Wall Street Journal weekend edition is “betting on good old fashioned stuff - such as grain, coal for power plants and consumer goods imported from Asia - and the need to move it.”  Let’s hope he knows something we don’t - perhaps, Obama is about to do a “Clinton” reversal.  That would be good for America, for affordable energy and (ironically) also good for the Democratic party.  We can hope.

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 left behind by the Bush administration from $4.4 trillion to $9.3 trillion. His record-setting budgets flagrantly violate his promise to propose a “net spending cut.”

Obama broke his campaign promise not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year by signing into law a regressive excise tax increase to expand the SCHIP program, and by proposing a cap-and-trade energy tax that could charge up to $2 trillion, a massive cost that Obama himself has said will be passed “on to consumers,” as well as homeowners and motorists. (In 2008, Obama privately admitted to the San Francisco Chronicle that if he was elected, electricity bills would “skyrocket” under his administration, but it didn’t report that.)

He also broke his promise not to raise taxes by backing health-care bills that would impose a laundry list of new taxes on the middle class, including a tax on uninsured people.  Americans for Tax Reform earlier summarized the tax increases in ObamaCare: an individual mandate tax of $900 per individual or $3800 per family (if you don’t have health insurance); an employer mandate tax of $400 per employee if health coverage is not offered; an “excise tax on high-cost health plans”; a “medicine cabinet tax”; capping Flexible-Spending Accounts (FSA’s); abolishing most HSAs; and increasing tax penalties for HSAs.

The costly cap-and-trade energy bill supported by Obama would lead to big tax increases, administration officials privately have conceded, even though they publicly claim otherwise.  “Officials at the Treasury Department think cap-and-trade legislation would cost taxpayers hundreds of billion in taxes, according to internal documents circulated within the agency and provided to The Washington Times” by CEI.  It could raise household taxes by $1761 per year, equivalent to a 15 percent tax increase.   It would also result in “loss of steel, paper, aluminum, chemical, and cement manufacturing jobs.”  (Obama earlier admitted that “under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”)

Although cap-and-trade backers claim it will cut greenhouse gas emissions, it may perversely increase them and also result in dirtier air, as well as harming forests and water supplies.   It would enrich politically-connected corporations, and result in massive destruction of the world’s forests.   By expanding ethanol subsidies and mandates, it would cause enormous “damage to water supplies, soil health and air quality.” Ethanol subsidies have already resulted in forests being destroyed in the Third World, and by diverting cropland to fuel production away from food production, they have already caused famines that have killed countless people in the world’s poorest countries.

Over and over again, Obama has broken his campaign promise to give the public five days of notice before signing bills into law, including his very first law, the trial-lawyer backed Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Obama also repeatedly made false claims about the Supreme Court decision that the Ledbetter law overruled, misstating the facts of that case and how long it gives employees to sue over pay discrimination (the Court did NOT say that employees have to sue even before discovering discrimination).

Obama broke seven campaign promises dealing with transparency and clean government in signing the $800 billion stimulus package, much of whose contents were secret until shortly before Congress voted on it, and whose 1400 pages went unread by most Congressmen who voted on it.  (It repealed welfare reform and contained loads of welfare, pork, and waste, while wiping out jobs in the export sector.)

Obama’s broken promises are part of a larger pattern of dishonesty. Obama claimed his $800 billion stimulus package was needed to avert “irreversible decline.” But the Congressional Budget Office concluded before and after its passage that the stimulus package will actually cut the size of the economy in the long run. Obama’s budgets don’t add up, either, piling up $9.3 trillion in red ink, according to the Congressional Budget Office, a staggering $2.3 trillion more than Obama claimed.

The Washington Examiner explains how the bill will lead to deforestation, and thus increase greenhouse gas emissions in the long run.

The bill, which is loaded with pork for special interests, is backed by Obama, who once admitted that under his cap-and-trade scheme, electricity and utility bills would “skyrocket” and coal-fed power plants would go “bankrupt.”  Treasury Department analysts estimated it could increase taxes on the average American household by $1,761 per year.

The bill also contains environmentally harmful provisions, such as massive ethanol subsidies, which will result in “damage to water supplies, soil health and air quality.” Ethanol subsidies have resulted in forests being destroyed in the Third World, and caused famines that have killed countless people in the world’s poorest countries.

Now, Brand has written a new book, called Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, in which he takes on these environmental shibboleths in a more concerted fashion.  On American Public Radio’s Marketplace program yesterday, host Kai Ryssdal discussed the new book with Brand.  Asked what prompted him to write the book, Brand said that,

“My fellow environmentalists have been wrong about a couple of issues and were getting in the way of important things we should be doing, both with biotechnology and with nuclear technology, and in terms of how we think about cities, and in terms of how I know we’re going to think about geoengineering–that is, direct intervention in the climate.”

Ryssdal contrasted Brand’s earlier support for the back to the land movement with his current belief that big cities are better for the environment.

“Not only big cities, but big slums … that’s how [poor people in the developing world] are getting out of poverty.  They’re emptying out a lot of the subsistence farms that have been tough on the landscape all over the world, moving into towns for opportunity, building jobs for each other.  They’re also moving up what’s called the energy ladder, toward more and better grid electricity.  By and large the cities are probably the greenest thing that humans do.”

On his support for biotech crops, Brand said,

“Already, the crops we have now, the herbicide-tolerant and the insect-resistant crops … [are] getting what amounts to higher yields. You can raise more food on less land, and all of that is good for ecology in general and the climate particularly.”

Challenged that critics call them Frankenfoods, Brand replied,

“The idea there was that Dr. Frankenstein was doing something against nature, and that somehow the genetically engineered food crops are against nature.  And as a biologist, I’m just baffled by that line of argument because agriculture has been in that sense against nature for 10,000 years. That we’re finally able to do more precise tuning of the crops is a huge gain, not a loss.”

“Past debates about the use of new technologies for agriculture have tended to adopt an either/or approach, emphasising the merits of particular agricultural systems or technological approaches and the downsides of others. This has been seen most obviously with respect to genetically modifi ed (GM) crops, the use of pesticides and the arguments for and against organic modes of production. These debates have failed to acknowledge that there is no technological panacea for the global challenge of sustainable and secure global food production. There will always be trade-offs and local complexities. This report considers both new crop varieties and appropriate agroecological crop and soil management practices and adopts an inclusive approach.”

Read the whole report here.

“The fight to end hunger is being hurt by environmentalists who insist that genetically modified crops cannot be used in Africa, Bill Gates, the billionaire founder of software giant Microsoft, said on Thursday. Gates said GMO crops, fertilizer and chemicals are important tools — although not the only tools — to help small farms in Africa boost production.”

That’s great news, of course, but not the only good news on the food biotech front.  Today, the UK’s Telegraph reports that a year long investigation into food biotechnology by the Royal Society is expected to conclude in a report issued next week that:

“GM crops should be used in the future to alleviate food shortages. This study is going to move the debate forward. The Government will have to take notice of this. The world is undergoing dramatic change and it won’t be long before people are thinking ‘where is my next meal coming from?’ Where GM has been proved effective at either increasing yields or else resistant to diseases it should be used in the UK. GM crops need to be looked at one by one. They are not the only solution to world hunger but they are part of it.”

And Reuters reports that, even European Union Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel has given a modicum of support to food biotech, suggesting that “EU countries should look at scientific evidence rather than emotions, as is now the case, when deciding on authorisations for new biotech products.”  Boel said last Thursday that “For the [EU] farm sector, the imbalance in GMO approval between the European Union and the rest of the world is a clear and present financial threat.”

All in all, I’d count that as a good week.

Coase asked, the question, “Why are there firms?” – which Williamson has explored further. Like Coase, he sought to understand the reasons why firms take on the structures that they do. His work is a welcome warning of the dangers that overzealous antitrust regulators can pose to economic growth.

Eilinor Ostrom is a wonderful choice – coming far outside the normal priesthood of economics. Her work (some together with her husband Vincent) has focused on the ways in which traditional societies manage commons. Her work makes clear that property rights evolve in response to scarcity – often illustrated by real-world cases ranging from the allocation of lobster rights in Maine to water rights in California.

CEI’s work on environmental and competition policy relates closely to the works of both these award recipients. On this one, the Nobel Committee got it right!

One of the best pieces of work on public choice was done by Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University, Governing the Commons. She’s looked at a huge number of commons problems in fisheries, grazing, water, fishing water rights, and stuff like that. She finds that the commons problem is solved by many of these institutions, but not all of them. Some of them cannot make it work. She’s interested in why some of them work and some of them don’t.

One example is the Swiss alpine cheese makers. They had a commons problem. They live very high, and they have a grazing commons for their cattle. They solved that problem in the year 1200 A.D. For about 800 years, these guys have had that problem solved. They have a simple rule: If you’ve got three cows, you can pasture those three cows in the commons if you carried them over from last winter. But you can’t bring new cows in just for the summer. It’s very costly to carry cows over to the winter—they need to be in barns and be heated, they have to be fed. [The cheese makers] tie the right to the commons to a private property right with the cows.

The entire interview is available in two parts. (Turn to page six of each issue; the Ostrom discussion is on page nine of part two.)

UPDATE: Vernon Smith comments on Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize in Forbes today:

Previous Nobel laureates such as Ronald Coase (1991), William Vickrey (1996) and Leonid Hurwicz (2007) have also made significant contributions to investigating these big questions, but Ostrom brings a distinct style in applying her skill in different methodologies. She blends field and laboratory empirical methods, economic and game theory, the really important ingredient of scientific common sense, and she constantly challenges her own understanding by looking at new potentially contrary evidence and designing new experiments to challenge her understanding of the emergent historical rules and the theory used to explicate them.

The AP also notes that the Administration’s proposed health-care tax increases contradict “Obama’s campaign pledge on taxes”:  “”I can make a firm pledge,’ he said in Dover, N.H., on Sept. 12, 2008. ‘Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.’ He repeatedly promised ‘you will not see any of your taxes increase one single dime.’”

Obama earlier broke his promise not to raise taxes by signing into law a regressive SCHIP excise tax increase and backing a massive new cap-and-trade energy tax (supposedly to fight global warming)

It’s part of a long line of broken promises, such as Obama’s pledge to enact a “net spending cut,” which he broke with huge budgets that will explode the national debt through $9.3 trillion in massively increased deficit spending.

The costly cap-and-trade energy legislation passed by the House and supported by Obama would lead to big tax increases, Administration officials privately have conceded, even though they publicly claim otherwise.  “Officials at the Treasury Department think cap-and-trade legislation would cost taxpayers hundreds of billion in taxes, according to internal documents circulated within the agency and provided to The Washington Times” by CEI.  It could raise household taxes by $1761 per year, equivalent to a 15 percent tax increase.   It would also result in “loss of steel, paper, aluminum, chemical, and cement manufacturing jobs,” as jobs migrate overseas to countries which have fewer environmental protections than the U.S. does.

Obama earlier admitted that “under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket,” since its costs would be passed “on to consumers.”  Although cap-and-trade backers claim it will cut greenhouse gas emissions, it may perversely increase them and also result in dirtier air, as well as harming forests and water supplies.

Americans for Tax Reform summarizes the tax increases in ObamaCare: an individual mandate tax of $900 per individual or $3800 per family (if you don’t have health insurance); an employer mandate tax of $400 per employee if health coverage is not offered; an “excise tax on high-cost health plans”; a “medicine cabinet tax”; capping Flexible-Spending Accounts (FSA’s); abolishing most HSAs; and increasing tax penalties for HSAs.

All these tax increases won’t even pay for Obama’s massive spending binge.  He is relying on $2 trillion in imaginary savings to pay for his health-care plan.  Even Democratic governors have criticized its huge cost.

One of Obama’s economic advisers said his health-care plan would lead to “crippling deficits” and “higher taxes.”  The Congressional Budget Office also says it will increase the deficit.

[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 it has been afforded more due process rights than probably any defendant in the history of environmental litigation.

While he implies, without evidence, that I’m some sort of mouthpiece for Chevron, I found it strange why I’m the only writer critical of his case cited in his piece. (In fact, my employer, CEI, has been critical of a recent Chevron ad campaign.)

Why is this? I have no idea, but my guess would be that the fact I’m Ecuadorian should make me an especial target of criticism, because I know my country and the issues affecting its indigenous tribes. I highlighted this recently on blogger Fausta Wertz’s Podcast, and questioned the environmentalist NGO movement’s motives:

This kind of NGOs tells the developing world what to do. They say they represent them. But at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, where I work, we argue with that. Who gave them the right to represent my Ecuadorian people? How come these internationally-funded NGOs dare to say to represent them?

Another writer critical of Donziger’s case is The Miami Herald’s Glenn Garvin, who questions the entire basis of the case:

The conduct of the Chevron case has been an outrage from the beginning, with faked cancer cases, backdated documents, findings of pollution at nonexistent wells and grotesquely inflated costs estimates. (One court-appointed “expert” recommended billing Chevron $2.2 million for cleaning up each well pit, even though Petroecuador cleans up its own pits for $ 85,000 a piece.

And, far from a plucky underdog:

Donziger, the lead attorney representing the Ecuadoreans, is Barack Obama’s law-school pal who raised more than $ 40,000 for the campaign and likes to brag about his political clout.

More articles critical of Dozinger’s case and the environmental groups behind it can be found at www.theAmazonPost.com

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 cap-and-trade legislation would cost taxpayers hundreds of billion in taxes, according to internal documents circulated within the agency and provided to The Washington Times” by CEI.  It would also result in “loss of steel, paper, aluminum, chemical, and cement manufacturing jobs,” as jobs migrate overseas to countries which have fewer environmental protections than the U.S. does.

Obama earlier admitted that “under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.” As Obama admitted, that cost would be directly passed “on to consumers” — just the way Herbert Hoover’s excise tax increases were in 1932, aggravating the Great Depression. Although the tax’s supporters claim it will cut greenhouse gas emissions, it may perversely increase them and also result in dirtier air, as well as harming forests and water supplies.

Americans for Tax Reform summarizes the tax increases in the trimmed-down version of ObamaCare revealed by its principal drafter, Senator Max Baucus (D-Montana).  Here is a partial list:

· Individual Mandate Tax.  If you don’t sign up for health insurance, you will have to pay a tax in the following range:

· Employer Mandate Tax. $400 per employee if health coverage is not offered.  Note: this is a huge incentive to drop coverage, as $400 is much less than the average plan cost of $11,000 for families or $5000 for singles (Source: AHIP)

· Excise Tax on High-Cost Health Plans.  New 35% excise tax on health insurance plans to the extent they exceed $21000 in cost ($8000 single)

· Medicine Cabinet Tax.  Americans would no longer be able to purchase over-the-counter medicines with their FSA, HSA, or HRA

· Eliminate tax deduction for employer-provided retirement Rx drug coverage in coordination with Medicare Part D

· Report Employer Health Spending on W-2. This is clearly a setup for the easy individual taxation of employer-provided health insurance down the road.

· Cap Flex-Spending Account (FSA) Contributions at $2000. Currently unlimited.

· Backdoor Death of HSAs. By requiring that all plans (besides the few that are grandfathered) provided first-dollar coverage for most services, there would be no HSA-qualifying plans available from the Massachusetts-like exchanges

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 who ever lived.

Norman Borlaug was an American agricultural scientist and plant breeder whose work sparked what is now known as the Green Revolution.  He was recognized with countless scientific and humanitarian awards, including, in 1970, the Nobel Peace Prize. Quite tragically, he died of cancer yesterday, at the age of 95.

Borlaug was born on a small farm in Cresco, Iowa in 1914 and developed an interest in applying science and technology to agriculture during the Depression-era dustbowl that desiccated the Great Plains in the first half of the 1930s.  He went off to study forestry and plant pathology — and compete on the wrestling team — at the University of Minnesota in 1933.  He eventually would complete a Master’s and Ph.D. at the U of M, after brief stints with the U.S. Forest Service that periodically interrupted his studies.  After completing his Ph.D. in 1942, Borlaug worked for two years at DuPont, contributing scientific research for the war effort.

In 1944, Borlaug got the opportunity that would come to define the rest of his life, joining a Cooperative Wheat Research Production Program co-funded by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations and the Mexican government.  At the time, corn still made up the vast majority of Mexico’s cereal production, even though wheat had been introduced hundreds of years earlier by Spanish settlers.  The problem was that wheat varieties adapted to Mexican soil and climatic conditions were susceptible to numerous problematic diseases.  Borlaug’s team bred various domestic and foreign wheat varieties together to generate cultivars that would resist most of these diseases, then crossed those long-stem wheat varieties with a semi-dwarf wheat variety from Japan in order to produce an adapted variety with stems that were short and strong enough to hold up the better producing seed heads.

Perhaps Borlaug’s biggest contribution was the development of an accelerated breeding schedule he called “shuttle breeding,” which let him improve the genetic composition of his wheat lines twice as quickly as with normal breeding.  Despite opposition from fellow plant breeders who insisted this couldn’t be done, Borlaug and his team would grow one generation of plants at the higher elevations around Mexico City during the summer, and then grow a second generation at sea level some 700 miles to the north near the Sonoran coast during the winter.  Not only did shuttle breeding work, by doubling the progress of Borlaug’s breeding schedule, it also had the fortunate, but unintended side effect of producing wheat strains that were not sensitive the amount of light received each day, as nearly all other plant breeds are.

In just four years, Mexico went from importing almost all the wheat its people consumed to being self-sufficient in wheat production. Borlaug continued working in Mexico, but by the 1960s, his reputation had spread around the world.  He was called on first to travel to India and Pakistan to help improve wheat production there. And after a stunning success, he went on to the Philippines and China, where his innovative breeding methods were used to raise yields in the rice varieties consumed by roughly half the world’s population.  By the 1980s, Borlaug teamed up with Japanese billionaire philanthropist Ryoichi Sasakawa to try to spread the Green Revolution to Africa.  Wherever he went, the combination of better plant varieties, along with agricultural chemicals such as anhydrous ammonia and other inorganic fertilizers, and synthetic herbicides and insecticides, have helped to more than triple wheat yields in less developed countries since the 1950s.

None of this was easy, however. Borlaug and his colleagues met severe resistance from local seed breeders and farmers set in their ways, as well as national and regional governments who didn’t want to see others succeed where their own programs had failed.  Borlaug wrote in the Foreword to my 2004 book, The Frankenfood Myth, that, “As we created what became known as the ‘Green Revolution,’ we confronted bureaucratic chaos, resistance from local seed breeders, and centuries of farmers’ customs, habits, and superstitions. … At the time, Forrest Frank Hill, a Ford Foundation vice president, told me, ‘Enjoy this now, because nothing like it will ever happen to you again. Eventually, the naysayers and the bureaucrats will choke you to death, and you won’t be able to get permission for more of these efforts.” Indeed, bureaucratic hassles became much worse, he wrote. ”If our varieties had been subjected to the kinds of regulatory strictures and requirements that are now being inflicted upon the new biotechnology, they would never have become available.”

But, perhaps no critics were tougher on Borlaug than western environmentalists.  As Borlaug moved from Mexico to Asia, doomsayer Paul Ehrlich claimed that Borlaug “doesn’t have any idea of the magnitude of the problems in food production.” He said, “You aren’t going to make any major impact on producing the food that’s needed.” And Ehrlich wasn’t alone.  Today, much of the political left still sees the Green Revolution as a failure, despite it’s obvious successes, because it promoted technological tweaks to address the deficiencies of nature, weakened socialist agrarian reform movements of the 1960s and 1970s by improving rural productivity, and permitted the survival of hundreds of millions — perhaps billions — of lives who just end up despoiling the environment.

This failure of the political left, particularly the environmental movement, to acknowledge the usefulness of innovative agricultural technologies led Borlaug to eventually reject the movement he once embraced.  Although he was largely apolitical, one lamentable aspect of Borlaug’s politics was his early belief in the necessity of global population control. But, by the 1990s, Borlaug had a change of heart.  He also became one of the biggest boosters of food biotechnology and one of the biggest critics of those who believe organic agriculture is the only sustainable option. On the 30th anniversary of his Nobel Prize, he said “I now say that the world has the technology — either available or well advanced in the research pipeline — to feed on a sustainable basis a population of 10 billion people. The more pertinent question today is whether farmers and ranchers will be permitted to use this new technology? While the affluent nations can certainly afford to adopt ultra low-risk positions, and pay more for food produced by the so-called ‘organic’ methods, the one billion chronically undernourished people of the low income, food-deficit nations cannot.”

I came to know Norm — and he always insisted that everyone call him Norm — about ten years ago.  He was an energetic, inquisitive, and thoughtful man, and he always spoke with great passion about his own work and that of the countless others whose innovative research he has helped to spread around the world. I had the honor of spending the better part of a week hosting Norm in Washington in May 2004, when CEI arranged for him to give a “newsmaker” speech at the National Press Club.  And, on the occasion of CEI’s 20th Anniversary, we presented him with our first ever Prometheus Award for Human Achievement. Despite being in the presence of one of my very few heroes, I was struck most by Norm’s sheer humility.  I thought it delightful, for example, that, even at 90 years old, the former wrestler still insisted on carrying his own luggage — and Norm seemed like he’d be willing to deck a guy, however well-meaning, for insinuating that he might be so frail as to need his host to carry it for him.

His beloved wife Margaret, an accomplished basketball star in her younger years, died just over two years ago, also at the age of 95. As I wrote then, “It’s not every spouse who will gladly pick up her family and move it to a foreign land, where they will live in modest conditions. [Borlaug had rejected an offer by DuPont to double his salary if he would pass up the position in Mexico.] But, Margaret was a strong and wise woman, and she gladly moved with Norm and their children to Mexico, where they dedicated their lives to helping others by promoting science, technology, and common sense. Her contributions were thus as important to the Green Revolution as almost any other person’s. So, anyone who values freedom and progress owes both Norm and Margaret a great deal of thanks.”

Today, reflecting on Norm’s death, I am reminded of Winston Churchill’s words following the Battle of Britain: “Never was so much owed by so many to so few.”  Indeed, never was so much owed by so many to a single man.  Norman Borlaug will be sorely missed.

Ronald and Adamchak, who is an organic farmer, reject the dogma that only a narrow-minded organic approach to agriculture can be sustainable.  Instead, they suggest that “a judicious blend” of the best “organic” attitudes regarding soil health and respect for biodiversity on one hand and the best of new technologies and methods such as biotechnology and integrated pest management on the other, is the “key to helping feed the world’s growing population in an ecologically balanced manner.”

Read the Boston Globe column for a quick summary.  But, I very highly recommend the book as well.

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 themselves as representatives of the Ecuadorian government and its ruling party.”  The president responded, in part, by threatening to shut down a television station that aired the videos.

In a Forbes commentary this summer (”Toxic Revenge“), CEI journalism fellow Silvia Santacruz explained why the lawsuit was unjust in the first place (exempting the state-owned oil company, for example).  She noted that Ecuador lawsuits targeting international companies face a court system rated corrupt by the United Nations, the International Bar Association and the U.S. State Department.

Santacruz also explains why such lawsuits, along with a 50% “windfall profits” tax, have directly harmed the people of Ecuador, scaring away foreign investment.  Lago Agrio, where the lawsuit against Chevron was brought, is poor in literacy levels and in basic needs, like running water.  In fact, Santacruz produced a YouTube video, UnderMining Prosperity, to call attention to the plight of Ecuadorian people.

One of the commonly held misconceptions is that water is a resource that will run out, and many environmental organizations have started using the term “peak water,” likening the availability of water to that of oil, even though the two resources are distinct and have completely different characteristics. For human purposes, oil is non-renewable due to the millions of years it takes to form. Water, on the other hand, naturally replenishes itself through the water cycle. There are, of course, certain circumstances when aquifers run the risk of being depleted (when water is removed at a faster rate than it can be replenished), but in these cases, the resources would actually be significantly better off with private ownership.

Sustainable use of such water supplies requires management, which is what market pricing provides. Where water supplies are low, prices would naturally go up to promote conservation. But if supplies are plentiful and prices are low, there is no dire need to “save” the resource. Problems emerge mostly where government mismanagement prevents the development of private water markets. Water is either a government resource that is not priced properly, or the water is essentially owned by no one.

In the first case, under-pricing can encourage users to over consume, producing shortages, which usually occur when the government subsidizes water usage. On the second case, a “common water” resource that is not owned, protected, and managed by anyone becomes overused and polluted.

The solution involves establishing water as an owned resource—protected by its owners from pollution—that is sold in private markets with market pricing. Water will then flow where it is most needed, and prices will promote conservation where most needed.

Therefore, it is a good idea to allow private owners, like Nestlé and other water bottlers, to manage these resources sustainably into the foreseeable future. They have a distinct interest in long-term viability of the water supply and can work with local communities on mutually beneficial arrangements. Indeed, the water bottling operation is slated to give Chaffee thousands of dollars in taxes every year along with jobs for people in the community. Wholesale opposition to such use of the water makes little sense.

Chaffee County and other communities around the country face a choice: they can either choose private management and sustainable use, or no management and unsustainable use. Assuming these communities would like to ensure there will be water available for future generations, the choice is sparkling clear.

Image:  By Randolph Femmer, National Biological Infrastructure Public Image Library.

“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 – indeed, they have some good things to say about big businesses. But they do skewer yet another free range sacred cow, and that always makes their show fun to watch.

The episode first aired last night on the Showtime pay-cable network, but you can watch the trailer and get scheduling information here.

On their faces, the requirements of the bill don’t appear to be especially onerous.  Mainly, it includes things like enhanced power for FDA to order food recalls; a requirement that FDA inspect food production facilities more frequently than it now does; a requirement that FDA issue performance standards to minimize foodborne contaminants; and a requirement that food production facilities (which will now include farms, not just packaging plants and slaughterhouses) establish food safety plans and implement preventative controls that make it harder for contaminants to enter the system and easier to spot them if they do. There have been some kooky attempts to make these proposals seem much worse than they really are.  But the fact of the matter is that the proposals really are pretty bad. The problem is that, while US agriculture is intensifying rapidly (and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that), most “food production facilities” in the country are still fairly small operations and run on shoestring budgets. Many of them simply will not be able to afford these new bureaucratic hassles and paperwork costs.  So, the next time you hear some bleeding heart member of Congress lament the decline of the small farmer, you can reply that Washington has done more than its fair share of harm to America’s small farmers.

More importantly, it is not reasonably possible to eliminate every last bit of contamination from our food supply.  Food is grown outside — in dirt.  And dirt is … well, you know … dirty.  There are a few things that we can do to make our food a little bit safer.  But, unless we’re willing to have all our fruits and vegetables grown hydroponically in greenhouses, irradiate every last bit of our meat, permit no more unpasteurized dairy products, and pay the very hefty financial costs for doing so, we won’t really put much of dent in the presence of foodborne contamination.  So, all of this hand-wringing about Congress needing to do something about food safety smacks of tilting at very expensive windmills.

Sensing an overwhelming victory, however, the House of Representatives yesterday brought up H.R. 2749 for a vote on the floor, under a rule that permitted very little debate and allowed for no amendments, but which required a 2/3 majority vote to pass. I’m happy to say that the bill failed to reach the required 2/3rds majority by the slimmest of margins and did not pass.  Still, only 23 Democrats and 127 Republicans voted against the measure, meaning that there are a sufficient number of supporters to pass the legislation under normal procedures.  Sic transit gloria muddy.

As CNN notes, Obama’s plan would take away “5 freedoms,” including the freedom to choose your doctors, the freedom to choose what’s in your plan, the freedom to keep your existing plan, the freedom to be rewarded for healthy living, and the freedom to choose high-deductible coverage.

Obama’s health-care plan is drawing criticism from one of his own advisers, Harvard University’s Martin Feldstein. In the Washington Post, Feldstein warns that “For the 85 percent of Americans who already have health insurance, the Obama health plan is bad news. It means higher taxes, less health care and no protection if they lose their current insurance because of unemployment or early retirement.” Obama’s plan would “cost more than $1 trillion,” and raise the top federal “income-tax rate from 35 percent today to more than 45 percent,” he notes.

Its increase in health-care costs is so obvious that even Democratic governors openly worry that it will explode their states’ Medicaid costs. Conservatives are concerned that it would single out illegal aliens for preferential treatment, because it permits illegal aliens, but not American citizens, to avoid buying health insurance, even though illegal aliens could access government-sponsored health insurance through the so-called “public option,” thanks to its lack of eligibility verification safeguards. Supporters of universal health care coverage like Mickey Kaus worry that it will lead to arbitrary restrictions on health care for people who now have decent health-care coverage.

In 2008, Obama promised not to impose any kind of tax increase on people making less than $250,000 a year: “I can make a firm pledge. Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.” (Barack Obama, September 12, 2008, Dover, NH). But millions of people now face direct or indirect tax increases under his plan.

Obama’s plan so obviously would increase the deficit that its supporters are now crafting a tax on health insurance provided to non-union workers. Never mind that Obama’s campaign spent millions of dollars on campaign ads attacking the very idea of taxing health-insurance benefits.

It’s not the first breach of Obama’s campaign pledges to the middle class. Obama earlier broke his promise by signing into law an excise tax increase (the SCHIP tax) paid mainly by the poor, and advocating income tax increases on households that make thousands of dollars less than $250,000 a year. These tax increases are part of a long line of broken promises, such as Obama’s pledge to enact a “net spending cut,” which he flouted with proposed budgets that will explode the national debt through $9.3 trillion in massively increased deficit spending.

Obama also backs a huge cap-and-trade carbon tax that would be borne disproportionately by low-income households. (The cap-and-trade tax was pushed through the House before the text of the bill even became available. The bill was over 1090 pages long and contained special interest giveaways to a legion of big corporations and their lobbyists. At the last minute, 300 more pages were added to the bill that few in Congress had even read, and had to be manually inserted into the existing 1000 pages after the bill was passed, based on guesses about where those pages would fit in. Thus, the bill did not even really exist at the time it was passed). In 2008, Obama privately admitted to San Francisco Chronicle reporter that his cap-and-trade carbon tax would cause people’s electric bills to “skyrocket.” The cap-and-trade bill will cost the economy trillions, while doing little to cut greenhouse gas emissions, since it contains so many special interest giveaways and environmentally-destructive provisions like protections for ethanol, which promotes soil erosion and deforestation. Meanwhile, Obama sabotaged nuclear power, which reduces greenhouse gas emissions, by blocking use of the Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste disposal site after billions of dollars in taxpayer money had already been spent developing it.

The Wall Street Journal explains how the health-care bills backed by Obama would destroy many cheap employer health-care plans by gutting key provisions of the federal ERISA law, which slices through red tape and allows employers to provide economical health-insurance plans on a nationwide basis. The bills would open the floodgates to costly lawsuits against employers that provide health insurance to their employees, and require bureaucratic approval of health-insurance plans before they could go into effect on a national basis. In the absence of ERISA, health insurance plans provided by a national company have to satisfy a bewildering array of conflicting regulations and mandates that differ from state to state, add cost, complexity, and delay to medical care, and balkanize the health-care sector.

Other countries that have cheaper health care do not have local health-insurance regulations, preferring one national regulatory scheme for everyone. My French father-in-law is a communist trade unionist, but it was obvious even to him that he needed private supplemental health insurance to fill the gaps in France’s national health-care system. So he bought a private health insurance policy on the free market that came in handy when he needed continuing care after his quadruple bypass surgery. Supposedly socialist France actually has much less regulation of health insurance than supposedly capitalist America, where insurance is terribly costly in states like New York and New Jersey because of all the regulations and government mandates.

Economists and insurance experts have long proposed ending the federal regulation that allows states to block consumers from buying health-insurance across state lines. Almost every other product can be bought across state lines. But the Obama Administration is rigidly opposed to this reform. In a debate with Sarah Palin, Joe Biden championed this harmful regulation that impoverishes American consumers to reinforce the power of state bureaucrats and the profits of expensive health-insurance providers that benefit by thwarting competition from cheaper out-of-state rivals. So much for fixing what’s wrong with the status quo.

Without the reforms opposed by Obama, we will never get our health care costs down to the levels of other countries, which have enormous cost advantages over the U.S. through things like lower doctor and nurse salaries, less defensive medicine from costly and unwarranted malpractice suits (America uses virtually unguided juries to decide malpractice cases, even though juries are not experts either at seeing through unfounded claims, or at recognizing genuine ones where the doctor was really negligent), and lower drug costs (mostly from those countries’ artificial caps on drug costs, which effectively forces U.S. consumers to pay for the entire world’s R&D costs, and partly from other factors like lower products-liability costs, since the U.S. refuses to preempt even lawsuits against FDA-approved drugs). Liberal lawmakers are seeking to make Obama’s plan even worse and more costly by turning it into a “trial lawyer bonanza.”

Earlier, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office gave an honest but “devastating assessment” of the incredibly high cost of the health-care plans backed by Obama, which would cost well over a trillion dollars, to cover just 16 million of the more than 40 million uninsured Americans.

Obama is angry about that truthful conclusion, as well as the CBO’s finding that his wasteful stimulus package will actually reduce the size of the economy “in the long run.” (The stimulus package also destroyed thousands of jobs in America’s export sector, and ended welfare reform).

So Obama recently invited CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf, a “Democratic appointee,” to the White House to pressure him to reduce his cost estimates. Earlier, Democratic Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid earlier attacked Elmendorf for reporting the truth about the Administration’s costly health care plans, suggesting that Elmendorf should “run for Congress.” To Reid and Obama, politics comes before truth. But the last thing we need is Enron-style accounting from government accountants.

Obamacare would also restrict resources for end-of-life care for the elderly, and mandate the provision of wasteful end-of-life counseling for the elderly (such as lecturing them about the right to hasten their own death by refusing nutrition).

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 Rep. McClintock took several questions from the audience:

The event continued with a panel discussion moderated by CEI President Fred L. Smith, Jr. and featuring commentary by Tom Tanton of the Pacific Research Institute, Jason Peltier of the Westlands Water District and Anthony Randazzo of the Reason Foundation:

Fred and the panel also took questions afterward: