Charlie Cooke clearly has the better argument here.
Emeritus NC State economist Thomas Grennes documents the robustness of today’s energy markets. A slice:
Additional barriers to trade included U.S. environmentalists lobbying to limit U.S. exports of fossil fuels. On January 26, President Biden announced a pause in approvals for new LNG exports. In addition, Russian exports of natural gas fell with the sabotage of Nord Stream 1 and 2.
However, these new barriers to global energy supplies were not insurmountable. American suppliers found it profitable to produce and export record volumes of crude oil. New and expanded terminals for liquefied natural gas (LNG) contributed to record exports of U.S. LNG. Other non-OPEC suppliers also increased energy exports, adding to the abundance of energy products. Prices of crude oil, LNG, and products, such as gasoline, at the end of 2023 were all lower than a year earlier.
Here’s Scott Lincicome on the new ‘pause’ in LNG exports. A slice:
As I explained in a new column for The Dispatch and in a 2013 Cato briefing paper on US energy export restrictions, systemic reform—not simply a narrow reversal of this week’s DOE pause—is needed here. That’s because current law (the Natural Gas Act of 1938 and its amendments) provides DOE—and thus any president who might just be in the middle of a close reelection campaign—with essentially unlimited discretion to block natural gas exports destined for countries without a free trade agreement (FTA) with the United States on undefined “public interest” grounds.
David Fickling reports that “the world’s forests are doing much better than we think.” A slice:
Take England. Forest coverage now is greater than at any time since the Black Death nearly 700 years ago, with some 1.33 million hectares of the country covered in woodlands. The UK as a whole has nearly three times as much forest as it did at the start of the 20th century.
That’s not by a long way the most impressive performance. China’s forests have increased by about 607,000 square kilometers since 1992, a region the size of Ukraine. The European Union has added an area equivalent to Cambodia to its woodlands, while the US and India have together planted forests that would cover Bangladesh in an unbroken canopy of leaves.
Pierre Lemieux reviews some basic facts about GDP – basic facts that are easy to overlook. A slice:
If, and to the extent that, producers are not at liberty to make money by producing what consumers demand on free markets (what is called consumer sovereignty), the configuration of the number of units of goods and services produced and their prices (GDP is the name of this configuration) is basically meaningless; or, if you will, it represents what the rulers want to be produced at prices that represent the trade-offs they make.
In economic jargon, a government-dictated increase in GDP does not signal a Pareto improvement, that is, an increase in the welfare of some individuals without a decrease in the welfare of anybody else. Most economists, however, would view as Pareto improvements the production or financing of “public goods” wanted by everybody but not excludable to non-payers (such as territorial defense), as well as the reduction of “externalities.”
Ian Miller tweets: (HT Jay Bhattacharya)
The best part about the endless list of doctors and “experts” who demanded mandatory COVID vaccines and passports while decrying government involvement in healthcare is that not one of them has acknowledged their own blatant hypocrisy
They just don’t care, politics comes first
