Banning products will not make them go away. It will only create incentives for illicit markets to offer them to adult or high school students alike. In 2013, Vermont became a New England leader by loosening its laws on cannabis possession, making it the first to do so by a legislative vote. Reporting on these events for Vermont Watchdog, I noted how this move was…
Dressed up as comedy, John Oliver dedicated an entire segment of his “Last Week Tonight” HBO program to focus on the ills of America’s freight rail industry. A self-professed train aficionado, Oliver had choice words for our commercial railroads on the matter of dangerous cargo loads, labor concerns, and an overall lackluster attention to safety. However, he doesn’t compare the industry to the troublesome safety…
I’m interviewed by Jim Lokay on Fox 5 DC on the latest legislative moves by Elizabeth Warren to undermine tech innovation. From grocery store mergers and sandwich monopolies to the breaking of phone encryption and Bitcoin, she is consistently singing a progressive, populist message that too often views technology as something to wrestle and regulate. However, this style of political campaigning is all too present…
Has air pollution improved in our lifetime? The narrative is that our atmosphere and air quality are more polluted than ever, requiring drastic economic and societal reform to clean it. But in the United States, the opposite is true. According to the EPA’s data, air pollution — measured using the six most common air pollutants — has reduced 42 percent since 2000. This measure considers…
Elizabeth Warren and other critics seized on the October 7 Hamas attacks to crack down on Bitcoin. But the terrorists use cash, not crypto. In war, the Greek poet Aeschylus said, the first casualty is truth. In the war between Israel and Hamas, there have been plenty of opportunities for lies to achieve political ends. In the United States, we’re seeing the demonization of and…
Fun Police Episode 2: The Billionaire Every prohibitionist movement needs its funders. Its moneymen. Usually, there are powerful industrialists who’ve made it big and are “giving back” by restricting choices of the little people. For popular movements against alcohol in the 1900s, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford were the principal philanthropists. Neoprohibitionists now rely on a man with a name as iconic…
Nearly half of all US states have pledged to go totally carbon-free by at least 2050. While many states and the federal government are pushing and subsidizing entrepreneurs to scale up carbon-free alternatives to fossil fuels such as nuclear energy, wind, and solar – other states are hoping to reach their goals by seemingly suing oil and gas companies into extinction. Though American consumers have been…
Today I was interviewed on Nick Craig’s morning radio program in Wilmington, North Carolina. We chatted about nuclear energy’s status quo in North Carolina, recent policy victories, and why many pro-green activists aren’t championing the power of the atom enough for future electricity generation. We also touched on why solar and wind tech both are far from a silver bullet for either climate goals or…
For decades, the fruits of the fracking revolution, plus our newly minted status as the world’s top net exporter of natural gas, demonstrated that American consumers were swimming in bountiful energy. But as the pandemic effects of supply chain shortages, the war in Ukraine, and higher government spending gave way to inflation hikes, suddenly all eyes were on utility bills. In 2021, Americans spent as much as 25% more…
My latest interview on Andrew Donaldson‘s Heard Tell Radio is a bit of a wild one. To begin, I discuss the growing movement for government disclosure on UAPs (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) or UFOs, and why it’s important for transparency and accountability. To simplify it, we know the government has classified or withheld various projects, events, or sightings of things in our skies. There are also…