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Jonah Goldberg documents a truly frightening development among many American conservatives [3].
Bruce Yandle calls out the mischief of Tariff Man [4].
David Henderson calls out the mischief of environmentalists who wish to use words inaccurately [5].
James Pethokoukis explains the danger lurking in Nancy Pelosi’s attack on Facebook [6].
Elaine Schwartz asks if Sears was an early Amazon.com [7].
Matt Ridley makes clear that any threat to biodiversity will not be eliminated by eliminating free markets [8]. A slice:
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.