Jonah Goldberg documents a truly frightening development among many American conservatives.
Bruce Yandle calls out the mischief of Tariff Man.
David Henderson calls out the mischief of environmentalists who wish to use words inaccurately.
James Pethokoukis explains the danger lurking in Nancy Pelosi’s attack on Facebook.
Elaine Schwartz asks if Sears was an early Amazon.com.
It’s been calculated that if today’s population were to be fed using the mainly organic yields of 1960, we would have to farm 82% of the world’s land, whereas actually we farm about 38%. Thanks to fertilisers, tractors, genetics and pesticides, we now need 68% less land to produce a given quantity if food than we did in 1960. That’s a good thing. Most sensible conservationists now realise that “land sparing” is the right approach – intensive farming plus land set aside, rather than inefficient farming with some nature in the fields. Professor Andrew Balmford of Cambridge University led a team that did thorough research showing that this is the better approach not just for land use but for other environmental issues too: they found that organic dairy farms cause at least 30% more soil loss, and take up twice as much land, as conventional dairy farming for the same amount of milk produced, for example.
