Utopia, you are standing in it!

H/T The GWPF

All those trees would have absorbed large amounts of the carbon dioxide they claim to be so scared of. Somehow all this is deemed to be ‘sustainable’, using the climate excuse.

The EU wants to save our climate with supposedly green biofuels and has deemed palm oil “sustainable”. Yet on the other side of the globe, rainforests are being clear-cut to produce the 1.9 million tons of palm oil that end up in European fuel tanks every year, says Rainforest Rescue.

The European Union wants to protect the climate and reduce carbon emissions from motor vehicles by blending fuels with increasing shares of supposedly eco-friendly “biofuels”.

Last year, 1.9 million tons of palm oil were added to diesel fuel in the EU – in addition to millions of tons of equally harmful rapeseed and soybean oils.

The plantations needed to satisfy Europes’s demand for palm oil cover…

by Bishnupriya Gupta (University of Warwick and CAGE)

The full paper of this blog post was published by The Economic History Review and it is available here 

Official of the East India Company riding in an Indian procession, watercolour on paper, c. 1825–30; in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Available at <https://www.britannica.com/topic/East-India-Company/media/1/176643/162308&gt;

There has been much discussion in recent years about India’s growth failure in the first 30 years after independence in 1947. India became a highly-regulated economy and withdrew from the global market. This led to inefficiency and low growth. The architect of Indian planning –Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister, did not put India on an East Asian path. As a contrast, the last decade of the 20^th century has seen a reintegration into the global economy and today India is one of the fastest growing economies.

Any analysis of Indian growth and development that…

The fishermen who work off America’s Atlantic coast, are furious over plans to spear thousands of industrial wind turbines into their fishing grounds, destroying not only the seabed (the source of their income and prosperity), but wrecking their fishing grounds, forever.

Trawlermen off the New Jersey coast have already told developers what they can do with their projects: Deepwater in Deep Trouble: Fishermen Tell Off-Shore Wind Farm Developers to F@*#K Off

Trawlermen everywhere face plenty of mortal peril dished up by Poseidon and mother nature. However, for those fishermen braving the elements off the coast of Rhode Island and Massachusetts the prospect of hundreds of these things providing a deadly obstacle course is simply too much.

Fishing For A Living Is Dangerous. Will Offshore Wind Farms Make It Worse?
WSHU
Nadine Sebai
1 August 2019

New England commercial fishermen have one of the most dangerous jobs in the country. Now…

My collection of liberals who are honest on the issue of gun control is expanding.

• In 2012, I shared some important observations from Jeffrey Goldberg, a left-leaning writer for The Atlantic. In his column, he basically admitted his side was wrong about gun control.
• Then, in 2013, I wrote about a column by Justin Cronin in the New York Times. He self-identified as a liberal, but explained how real-world events have led him to become a supporter of private gun ownership.
• In 2015, I shared a column by Jamelle Bouie in Slate, who addressed the left’s fixation on trying to ban so-called assault weapons and explains that such policies are meaningless.
• Most recently, in 2017, Leah Libresco wrote in the Washington Post that advocates of gun control are driven by emotion rather empirical research and evidence.

Now we have another addition to the list.

Alex Kingsbury of…

My primary job is dealing with misguided public policy in the United States.

I spend much of my time either trying to undo bad policies with good reform (flat tax, spending restraint, regulatory easing, trade liberalization) or fighting off additional bad interventions (Green New Deal, protectionism, Medicare for All, class warfare taxes).

Seems like there is a lot to criticize, right?

Yes, but sometimes the key to success is being “less worse” than your competitors. So while I’m critical of many bad policies in the United States, it’s worth noting that America nonetheless ranks #6 for overall economic liberty according to the Fraser Institute.

As such, it’s not surprising that America has higher living standards than most other developed nations according to the “actual individual consumption” data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

And America’s advantage…

In partnership with the Parliamentary Archives alongside their current exhibition on Parliament and the First World War, we recently held events in Parliament exploring the institution during the war years…

Parliament and the First World War exhibition, Westminster Hall

The Parliamentary Archives exhibition on Parliament and the First World War, still open in Westminster Hall, proved an excellent opportunity for us to gather together historians and discuss the impact of the First World War on Parliament.

Firstly, Dr Mari Takayanagi (Vote 100) spoke on ‘The Girl Porters and the Court Twins: Women Staff in Parliament in the First World War.’ Dr Takayanagi’s research had uncovered several women who had, because of the shortage of labour, had the opportunity to work in occupations within Parliament that had previously been closed to them because of their gender. She spoke of two examples: firstly the ‘girl porters’ who took messages…