January 26, 2021
Basic Science Helped Us Win World War II. It’s Also Why We’ll Defeat COVID-19
President Biden has announced a “full-scale wartime effort” to vaccinate the American people against the coronavirus. This is hardly the first time our struggle against the pandemic has been likened to warfare. Operation Warp Speed, the public-private partnership that helped spur the invention of two COVID-19 vaccines last year, has often been compared to the government’s programs during World…
January 23, 2021
Climate Policy Is the Purview of Congress, Not the Courts
The Supreme Court on January 19 heard oral arguments in a case (BP PLC v Mayor and City Council of Baltimore) that addresses an exceedingly narrow topic: whether or not the “federal officer jurisdiction” doctrine should direct climate lawsuits by states and municipalities against energy producers into state or federal court. Most such lawsuits attempt to…
January 21, 2021
COVID-19 Vaccines: An Overnight Success Decades in the Making
After decades of being told it takes years to produce new drugs, we’ve now been spoiled by the magicians in pharma who invented multiple COVID-19 vaccines in mere months. Policy-makers and pundits will expect no less from technology in the future. And not just for diseases, but for all manner of societal challenges, from cancer to…
January 21, 2021
The Case for Climate Change Realism
There is a long and infamous history of world leaders marking humanity’s “last chance” to avoid the ravages of man-made climate change. In 1989, for instance, the director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program warned that rising sea levels would cause entire nations to disappear if the global-warming trend were not…
January 18, 2021
Keystone XL Opposition Not Based on Facts
Everything old is new again: The Biden administration reportedly will revoke the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, opposed during the Obama years, favored during the Trump term, and now disfavored yet again. But one reality is eternal: The arguments against Keystone XL are as weak today as ever. The all-purpose climate argument is the…
January 7, 2021
End Discrimination in Bank Lending
The opposition to “discrimination” by political activists has not prevented them from applauding constrained access to capital by such politically unpopular businesses as producers of fossil fuels and firearms or operators of for-profit colleges and private prisons. The list of disfavored economic sectors will only grow over time as government engages in ever-more economic favoritism. This…
December 29, 2020
Comment Letter to OCC on Rule for Fair Access to Financial Services
My name is Benjamin Zycher. I am a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. This letter responds to a request from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for comments on its proposed “Fair Access to Bank Services, Capital and Credit” rule (hereinafter referenced as the “Fair Capital Access” rule),…
December 15, 2020
Biden’s Incoherent Proposal to Ban Fossil Fuel Leasing on Federal Lands
During the election campaign, President-elect Joe Biden pledged to end new oil and gas leasing and permitting on federal lands (including federal waters); that is, to ban on those lands the discovery and development of fossil energy resources by private companies, and to end approvals of specific drilling proposals that result from leasing rights. Biden further pledged to…
November 19, 2020
The Perversities of Biden Rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement
Joe Biden has pledged to rejoin the Paris climate agreement on the first day of his administration, a promise unambiguous and therefore certain to be fulfilled, notwithstanding the essential absurdity of the Paris agreement narrowly and of climate policies more generally. Applying the EPA climate model under highly favorable assumptions, the Paris agreement if implemented immediately and enforced strictly would reduce global temperatures in 2100 by about 0.17…
October 28, 2020
The Biden/Trump Divide on Climate and Energy Policies
I betray no secret when I note that Donald Trump is not a man of policy sophistication. It is obvious that he is uninterested even in details that are crucial; instead, he goes with his “gut,” that is, his instincts, which often are sound but sometimes are dreadful. And despite, or perhaps due to, almost five decades in…