Washington State Governor Jay Inslee, like California’s Governor Newsom, is mandating his state toward an all-electric state. In doing so, Inslee is demonstrating his visionary limitations, as he cannot see the ugly side of his wind, solar, and EV mandated world. For the vast acreage required for wind and solar, it’s pathetic destruction of pristine landscapes! Further, after decades of working around the world, wind turbines and solar panels continue to have a live expectancy of about 20 years. To-date there is yet to be discovered a financially viable means of recycling those renewables. A ..read more

Racial divisions have become the stalking horse of our politics and social discourse, with racism defined as white on black (often extending to Western vs. non-Western ethnicities). Google Trends reveals how the online topic of racism has steadily risen over the past decade, spiking like a seismic reading of an earthquake in June, 2020 that marked the George Floyd tragedy and the Black Lives Matter protests that followed. In due course we’ve been treated to a surfeit of acronyms to help us understand our racial divisions, from BLM and CRT to DEI, CSJ, and SEL.1 Our educational institutio ..read more

The overwhelming majority of the money involved in the energy and climate debate in the U.S. today is not on the side of traditional energy producers. Instead, the money, the media, and the momentum are clearly on the side of the NGO-corporate-industrial-climate complex. In 2021, the revenue for the top 25 NGOs in the anti-industry industry was more than four times the amount collected by NGOs that support the traditional energy sector. Those 25 anti-hydrocarbon/anti-nuclear NGOs had total revenue of about $4.5 billion which they used to fund campaigns on climate change, as well as efforts to ..read more

The current deceleration of globalism can herald either a greater period of nationalism, with its tendency towards authoritarianism and xenophobia, or we could return to a more decentralized political system that comports with both American and Canadian traditions and popular preferences. For some, the nationalist call is irresistible, even if it tramples on local rights and promotes autocratic power from Ottawa or Washington. This was seen particularly during COVID, notably in Canada, with centrally directed assaults on the rights of pandemic dissenters, ranging from the forced cutoff of priv ..read more

Last Tuesday during his State of The Union speech, President Joe Biden repeated a claim he has made many times over the past few years about renewable energy. Biden declared that the Inflation Reduction Act is “the most significant investment ever in climate change, ever. Lowering utility bills, creating American jobs, leading the world to a clean energy future.” In 2020, while campaigning for the White House, Biden released an energy plan that promised to “spur the installation of millions of solar panels, including utility-scale, rooftop, and community solar systems.” In 2021, Biden’s White ..read more

In the wake of liberal globalism’s failings, a nationalist tide is rising today, not only in China and Russia but also throughout the West. It is a dynamic eerily similar to 100 years ago, when war, pandemic and economic insecurity brought national tensions to the surface. Yet today’s undoubted turn against globalism need not herald a return to the dark days of aggressive nationalism. Instead, we are seeing the rise of a new community-based and self-governing model of localism. This new localism counteracts some of the worst aspects of globalism – homogeneity, deindustrialisation and ever-grow ..read more

The world may not be turning upside down, but it’s certainly tilting. In the long shadow of the pandemic, with war on the European continent and the West and China entering a new cold war, the “new economy” of bits and bytes that was supposed to connect and shape the world has hit a rough patch. Meanwhile, the much disdained “old” economy of manufacturing, agriculture and energy is thriving. Today, it’s not steel companies or gas plants that are experiencing mass layoffs, but firms such as Goldman Sachs, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Snap and Google. Last year, media companies  lost $500 billion in ..read more

Well, it’s big in Japan. That is what proponents of California’s high speed rail project say when asked about the whys and wherefores of the system. In other words, if it works somewhere else it will work here. That argument, though, falls in the face of a rather basic fact: California and Japan are different. It is true that Japan’s high speed rail system, first begun in 1964, actually makes money – a lot, in fact. The iconic first line, Shinkansen Tokaido, alone carries 90 million people a year and has an operating profit of about $4.4 billion dollars. That does not include capital costs, bu ..read more

Throughout history, excess wealth has been used to salve society’s problems, funding hospitals, food banks, and building libraries to develop minds and cathedrals to lift the spirits. But increasingly, the charitable urge has shifted away from such worthy causes and, increasingly, reflects a distinct progressive agenda that seeks, ultimately, to transform lives through the expansion of state power. This reflects, in part, the shift in the nature of wealth in America. In the past, rich people tended to be employers of middle- and working-class people and frequently identified primarily with the ..read more

As COVID-19 begins to wane and become endemic, the question for policymakers, theorists, and Americans at large is: What is in store for our nation's big cities? The nation has moved from a rural to urban population over the past century, but do the hearts and minds of Americans and, in particular, younger generations still pine for the lights and opportunities historically present in our nation’s big cities—from New York to Atlanta, Dallas, and Los Angeles? This book is being published as a series, with permission of the American Enterprise Institute. Each week a new chapter will be published ..read more