21 pages of paper is apparently worth $30 billion taxpayer dollars — if you are too big to fail, that is. That’s 1,428,571,428.57 bucks per page. Here’s how ABC reports the story: An AIG report to the Treasury Department last month warned that if the government didn’t come to its rescue again, its collapse would [...]

The bad news is that the environmental movement wishes to interfere with our bowel movements. From the tree killers at The NY Times: The national obsession with soft paper has driven the growth of brands like Cottonelle Ultra, Quilted Northern Ultra and Charmin Ultra — which in 2008 alone increased its sales by 40 percent [...]

This is the single best, and clearest, explanation of the Rationalist Position on global warming I’ve Ever Seen Key line: “So, why don’t we ever talk about the suns contribution to global warming? …Well, because we can’t regulate it, tax it, or make it feel guilty for what it’s doing“. Got it in one there [...]

Apparently, our new President likes to crank up the thermostat: WASHINGTON — The capital flew into a bit of a tizzy when, on his first full day in the White House, President Obama was photographed in the Oval Office without his suit jacket. There was, however, a logical explanation: Mr. Obama, who hates the cold, [...]

For a long time, I’ve been pissed off about Daylight Savings Time. In my job, I work with a lot of people across the country, and thus I get into work early (7:30 or so) and leave about 5:00 PM. Before it went into effect this year, each morning I would drive to work in [...]

Many progressives are looking forward to increased government oversight over the auto industry. They see this as a chance to influence the types of vehicles that are produced and to dictate that production be turned to socially beneficial uses, including the manufacture of green cars that auto manufacturers are not manufacturing. These vehicles are not [...]

Both Obama and McCain suggest that with a cap-and-trade scheme, we can make headway against global climate change. Without getting into the debate over whether climate change is real or man-made, I think it’s clear that any climate change avoidance techniques America engages upon will not make a lick of difference to what China and [...]

Time has an ongoing series which advocates the need for “voluntary” national service. In the magazine’s latest article by Managing Editor Richard Stengel, the author praises both John McCain and Barack Obama for their urging of Americans to “serve interests greater than self.” It is a unique moment for the idea of national service. You [...]

California, in an attempt to fix the housing mess* by making houses less affordable by making you buy features you wouldn’t otherwise**, has announced new statewide building restrictions to go “green”. From the Governator on down, nanny statists in California are more than willing to use force to make your life more expensive, and are [...]

The government likes to support biodiesel. It has all the buzzwords. “Recycling”. “Sustainable”. “Environmentally-friendly”. So they subsidize efforts to blend diesel with biodiesel. One main problem here. Americans don’t use much diesel. So they’re subsidizing foreign, not domestic, use. In fact, they’re simply sending money for non-American-produced diesel that won’t be consumed on American soil [...]

Seen on Colbert: Sounds like a very cool concept… But his use of terms like what “the plan we would like to see implemented” worries me. I’m a much bigger fan of letting the market decide, not relying on some collective implementation of a plan* (i.e. government). So I went and checked out the group’s [...]

Over at Coyote Blog, Warren is discussing things that the NY Transit Authority can get away with that would get a private property owner fined: New York City Transit has spent close to $1 billion to install more than 200 new elevators and escalators in the subway system since the early 1990s, and it plans [...]

With record-high corn prices, and plenty of subsidy money floating around, an interesting thing is happening. Less farmers are growing corn! Why? Because the inputs used in growing corn are rising in price even more quickly: The amount of corn planted in the U.S. is expected to dip this year. Rice acreage in California, which [...]

Glenn Beck on CNN wrote a nice little piece about the hypocrisy of “environmentalists” and why we shouldn’t be demonizing “Big Oil” for working for profit.  Worth a quick read.

Allow me to engage in a bit of strawman-bashing. In the comments to Don Boudreaux’s excellent post at Cafe Hayek, a rather idiotic argument came up. It is the same argument that many of our own contributors received when we opposed Ron Paul, and commenters told us “If you don’t like Ron Paul, you must [...]

Seen today: “Earth Hour” is a worldwide event where individuals are asked to shut off their lights for an hour. Ineffectual, pointless, but that’s what we need to do “for the planet”. So what does Google do? Do they run some of their servers in a lower-power mode, perhaps sacrificing the speed of search results [...]

The Guardian- Gordon Brown is preparing for a battle with the European Union over biofuels after one of the government’s leading scientists warned they could exacerbate climate change rather than combat it. In an outspoken attack on a policy which comes into force next week, Professor Bob Watson, the chief scientific adviser at the Department [...]

Along this blog, I’ve been beating the anti-ethanol drum for quite some time*. Now, we have yet another reason to oppose it. Not only is it environmentally neutral (or harmful), not only does it drive up the cost of food products, it also sucks up scarce water resources! This is controversial for several reasons. There [...]

Democrats seem to want the federal government to invest huge sums of money in development of alternative energy sources. tarran, last year, pointed out that government has all the wrong incentives and thus often picks the most politically-palatable technologies, not the most effective. This is currently occurring in Britain, a nation which has gone down [...]

Last week, I posted about California’s proposed Big Brother Thermostat proposal, where they were planning to mandate that all new thermostats allowed the state utility companies to shut off your A/C if it was an “emergency”. They’ve backed down on this one, but only slightly: As initially proposed, these programmable thermostats would have deferred in [...]