Cancel Mom’s Grocery Bag Misinformation

I don’t deliberately avoid organic foods or markets, but I don’t seek them out either. Claims that organic food tastes better or is more nutritious are not supported by evidence and certainly don’t justify the far higher prices. Mostly, I’m put off by assertions that organic food is pesticide-free, safer, and more planet-friendly. Those assertions […]

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Recovering the Moral Foundations of Economics

Editor’s note: This piece was originally published by the Acton Institute over a decade ago. Many years later, this piece still provides a poignant reflection on economics, socialism, environmentalism, and Christian ethics.  During the summer of 1980, I met weekly for breakfast, prayer, and study with a minister friend of mine. A warm-hearted, intelligent man,

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A ‘Plan B’ for addressing climate change and the energy transition

I have a new article published in the latest issue of International Affairs Forum. The topic of this issue is Climate Change and Energy. Mine is one of twenty papers. A range of topics are covered. My article is the least alarmed among them. You may recognize several of the authors, which include Don Wuebbles and

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Will Young Conservatives Embrace the Ideology of Climate Change?

I came of age politically in the age of William F. Buckley, Jr, and Ronald Reagan, which means I escaped being indoctrinated into the progressive ideology behind John Maynard Keynes’ economics and Rachel Carson’s environmentalism. So I was baffled by a recent article in World Magazine discussing how many of today’s young “conservatives” embrace the ideas I avoided

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Federal District Court Enjoins Use Of The “Social Cost Of Carbon”

In the U.S. so far, efforts to enact legislation in Congress to “save the planet” by restricting fossil fuels and transforming our energy economy have gone almost entirely nowhere. President Obama’s big idea of “cap and trade” legislation died early in his first term and was never resurrected. President Biden’s “Green New Deal” has so

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As coal use surges, America finds it’s hard to unplug from carbon

So much for the myriad claims about going “beyond coal.” According to a new report from the Rhodium Group, U.S. coal consumption jumped by 17 percent last year compared to 2020 levels. That’s a huge increase, which Rhodium says was “largely driven by a run-up in natural gas prices.” Rather than burn gas, which averaged about $4.93

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When The Administrative State Slips Its Constitutional Bonds

For the past few weeks, everybody’s attention has been focused on the looming demise of President Biden’s legislative agenda. Both the massive social spending bill (going by the Orwellian name “Build Back Better”) and the anti-voter-integrity bill, have now conclusively failed, at least in their most recent forms. A major part of the Build Back

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