Bill Wirtz: Banning Plastic Bags Isn't Just Bad Economics - It's Bad for the Environment

In January, the British government announced its intention to extend their plastic bag tax to all shops.  As of now, only establishments which have more than 250 employees need to impose the charge on single-use plastic bags. In the United States, certain states or cities even go beyond a tax and put an outright ban on them. But the UK government's own research suggests that this is actually bad for the environment.

In 2011, the UK's Environment Agency published an earlier-drafted life cycle assessment of supermarket carrier bags. The aim: establishing both the environmental impact of different carrier bags which are in use and their reuse practice. The intention was to inform public policymakers about the impact that a crackdown on plastic bags could possibly have.  Needless to say, politicians had little concern for the actual assessment the report presented.

GWPF Newsletter: Russia Gains Gas Foothold In Britain As Relations Deteriorate

Trump Ousts Tillerson: What’s Next For The Paris Climate Treaty?

In this newsletter:

1) Russia Gains Gas Foothold In Britain As Relations Deteriorate
Financial Times, 14 March 2018  
 
2) Trump Ousts Tillerson: What’s Next For The Paris Climate Treaty?
Marlo Lewis Jr, Competitive Enterprise Institute, 13 March 2018 

Matt Ridley: Britain's housing crisis is caused by the wrong kind of regulation

Sajid Javid, the Housing (etc) secretary, is right – and brave -- to go on the warpath about Britain’s housing crisis in his new national planning framework, to be launched today. Britain’s housing costs are absurdly high by international standards: eight times average earnings in England, 15 in London. A mortgage deposit that took a few years to earn in the early 1990s can now take somebody decades to earn. Average rents in the UK are almost 50% higher than average rents in Germany, France and crowded Holland.

Britain really is an outlier in this respect. Knightsbridge has overtaken Monaco in rental levels. Wealthy, crowded Switzerland has falling house prices and lower rents than Britain. Over recent decades, most things people buy have become more affordable – food, clothing, communication – and the cost of building a house has come down too. Yet the price you pay for it in Britain, either as a buyer or a tenant, has gone up and up.

Karl du Fresne: The snarling and hissing of the illiberal Left

It’s hard to imagine now, but censorship was a cause celebre in the 1960s and 70s.

The banning or restriction of movies, books and even records was never far from the headlines. Post-war liberalism was colliding head-on with traditional morality and the official censors were struggling to draw new boundaries between what was acceptable and what wasn’t.

The film censor featured in the New Zealand media so often in those days that he (it was always a “he”) became virtually a household name. Between 1957 and 1973, cuts were made to 37 per cent of films because of sex, violence or bad language.

GWPF Newsletter: The New Lukewarmers

Scientific American Turns Down The Heat Over Global Warming

In this newsletter:

1) The New Lukewarmers: Scientific American Turns Down The Heat Over Global Warming
John Horgan, Scientific American, 8 March 2018
 
2) New Study: Cooling Clouds Caused Global Warming Hiatus
Jun Yin and Amilcare Porporato, Princeton University 

NZCPR Weekly: Will President Trump Bring Down Power Prices in New Zealand?

Dear NZCPR Reader,   

This week we examine New Zealand’s electricity sector and look into the potential repercussions of President Trump’s tariffs on aluminium production, our NZCPR Guest Commentator, Bryan Leyland outlines concerns over the future of our electricity system, and our poll asks whether you believe it’s realistic for the Government to aim for 100 percent dependence on renewable energy generation in New Zealand.

*To read the newsletter click HERE.
*To register for the NZCPR Weekly mailing list, click HERE.  

Frank Newman: The science fiction of pre-fab' homes

How unsurprising it is to have a new Minister of Housing who says he has the answer to our housing shortage. The solution, he claims, is factory built prefabricated housing.

Minister Phil Twyford told the gathering at the PrefabNZ's annual conference, "This is not some science fiction dream. We can do this, if we have a bit of backbone and pursue the right policies". He continued, "KiwiBuild using mass procurement gives us the opportunity to build at scale, with contract work at volume, and with the certainty of multi-year contracts, which will allow firms to invest in the technology, the production processes, and design, and business models, that will transform your industry."

GWPF Newsletter: Saudi Arabia Set To Join Shale Revolution

UK Eyes ‘Fracking Friendly’ Policy Changes

In this newsletter:

1) Saudi Arabia Set To Join Shale Revolution
Bloomberg, 7 March 2018 

2) UK Eyes ‘Fracking Friendly’ Policy Changes
Upstream Online, 7 March 2018

Alexandra Burnett: Teacher Education Must Rise Above Political Correctness

Increasingly, Canadian universities seem to be more concerned about political correctness than educating students. A prominent illustration of this is University of Toronto psychologist Jordan Peterson’s public battle with university administrators, professors and some students over his refusal to use gender-neutral pronouns when referring to students with varying sexual orientations.

A less well known but arguably much more serious example is the increasing tendency for Canadian faculties of education to use admissions criteria that are unrelated to the characteristics and skills needed by effective classroom teachers. At the University of Windsor, for example, special consideration is being given to candidates who reflect “the ethno-cultural and social diversity of Ontario’s schools”. And, last September, the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba went even further by aiming to admit 45 per cent of incoming teacher candidates on the basis of their self-identification as members of marginalised groups, such as indigenous, disabled, LGBTQ, minority ethnic or socially disadvantaged.

Melanie Phillips: The American right to bear arms

Having been travelling in America over the past couple of weeks, I observed at close quarters the fierce debate that erupted there over firearms in the wake of the massacre at the school in Parkland, Florida where 17 children and adults were killed and 14 others injured when they were gunned down by a mentally ill former student.

There have been too many such massacres of the innocent in American schools and other public places. This is the first time I can recall such an anguished debate: the first time the feeling that America can’t go on like this has transcended the usual suspects in the Democratic Party and on the broader political left.

Karl du Fresne: Playing the blame game over "Polish" death camps

Truth can be elusive. Consider the recent furore over the Polish government’s introduction of a law that, according to some critics, will greatly restrict public discussion of Poland’s involvement in the Holocaust during World War Two. The new law prohibits mention of “Polish death camps” – on the face of it, an interference in the right of free speech. Yet it’s hard not to feel sympathy for Poland’s lawmakers.

Auschwitz (or Oswiecim, as it’s properly known in Polish) and other notorious extermination camps – Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek – may have been sited on Polish soil, but they were not put there by Poles. They were built and administered by Nazi Germany, which preferred to conduct its programme of genocide outside its own borders. Perhaps that was the Nazis’ way of pretending their hands were clean.

GWPF Newsletter: Global Temperatures Keep Falling

Is Germany’s Energiewende Coming To An End?

In this newsletter:

1) Global Temperatures Keep Falling
Paul Homewood, Not A Lot Of People Know That, 3 March 2018
 
2) Stunned Scientists Discover ‘Supercolony’ Of 1.5 Million Adelie Penguins In Antarctica
Sky News, 2 March 2018

NZCPR Weekly: Political Correctness Threatens Free Speech

Dear NZCPR Reader,   

This week we examine the impact of political correctness on the freedom of speech, our NZCPR Guest Commentator, Lindsay Perigo explains why he thinks free speech in New Zealand is dead, and our poll asks whether you believe political correctness is undermining free speech in New Zealand.

*To read the newsletter click HERE.
*To register for the NZCPR Weekly mailing list, click HERE.  

Billy T James epitomised free speech in New Zealand - as we knew it!

GWPF Newsletter: Russia’s Secret Campaign Against U.S. Energy Policy Revealed

U.S. House Committee Reveals Russian Attempts to Influence U.S. Domestic Energy Markets by Exploiting Social Media

In this newsletter:

1) Russia’s Secret Campaign Against U.S. Energy Policy Revealed
The Wall Street Journal, 1 March 2018
 
2) Russian Attempts to Influence U.S. Domestic Energy Markets by Exploiting Social Media
United States House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Majority Staff Report, 1 March 2018

GWPF Newsletter: Freezing Britain Is Running Out Of Gas, National Grid Warns

Factories Prepare To Cut Energy Use

In this newsletter:

1) Britain Is Running Out Of Gas, National Grid Warns
Daily Mail, 1 March 2018 
 
2) UK Gas Crisis: Factories Prepare To Cut Energy Use Amid Big Freeze
The Daily Telegraph, 1 March 2018

Matt Ridley: The Russian role in the nuclear winter theory

So, Russia does appear to interfere in western politics. The FBI has charged 13 Russians with trying to influence the last American presidential election, including the whimsical detail that one of them was to build a cage to hold an actor in prison clothes pretending to be Hillary Clinton.

Meanwhile, it emerges that the Czech secret service, under KGB direction, near the end of the Cold War had a codename (“COB”) for a Labour MP they had met and hoped to influence — presumably under the bizarre delusion that he might one day be in reach of power.

Barend Vlaardingerbroek: Might a Kurdish nation emerge from the ashes of the Caliphate?

The Islamic State is kaput. Unfortunately, not all its murderous members are.

It irked me to see hundreds of ISIS combatants being driven out of Raqqa by a convoy of trucks under a deal whereby they would be allowed to leave quietly rather than fighting it out and being killed, as they should have been. Many of those escapees will have headed for Afghanistan, Libya or Yemen to where ISIS has metastasised. Making headway in those places is proving to be quite a challenge for them as everyone, even al-Qaeda, has it in for them. But the assertion that ISIS cannot survive without territory under its control, first made in The Atlantic in 2014,  are founded on wishful thinking – if anything, ISIS is gaining strength in Afghanistan, and doing so fast despite being at loggerheads with the Taliban and just about every other band of jihadist thugs as well as government forces.

Richard Epstein: The Trump Growth Machine

I discovered my genuine confidence in the sustainability of the current economic growth cycle when I recommended to my 27-year-old Uber driver that he invest some portion of his wages in a diversified index fund. Although the stock market will surely ease off its current pace, it nevertheless should prove far more profitable than standard money market funds with their puny returns. The good news is that the current trend likely will not fizzle out anytime soon thanks to several key factors, including lower taxes and deregulation.

Igniting economic growth, as the Trump administration’s policies are doing, is not as straightforward as it sounds because it is easy to make spectacular mistakes in judgment if caught in the grip of Keynesian economic theory. 

Frank Newman: Another foolish ACT

Oh dear. Another foolish Act.

One would have thought ACT leader David Seymour would have learnt from Rodney Hide's unfortunate experiment to gain love and affection from voters. David should be smart enough to know the best he could hope for from voters is respect, not love and affection. To be brutal about it, most people like politicians as much as they like those door-to-door sales people who drive around in their vans selling over-priced stuff to people financed at exorbitant rates of interest.

Rodney made a plonker of himself by going on Dancing with the Stars.

Clint Bolick: The Case For Legal Textualism

Having spent the past two years as a justice on the Arizona Supreme Court after 33 as a litigator, I’ve gained unexpected insights into judicial decision-making. Most cases involve judges rolling up their sleeves and combining their talent and expertise to reach the right outcome. But cases involving constitutional or statutory issues demand something more: a philosophy of legal interpretation. And what that philosophy is matters a great deal.

All judges have a philosophy of legal interpretation, even if they don’t think much about it. For many, particularly at the trial court level, it is often a matter of simply trying to get it right; that is, reading the law and higher court precedents and trying to make sense of them. Others place a high priority on their notions of fairness, justice, or efficiency. Even going along to get along is a type of judicial philosophy, though not exactly what most of us might expect from our judges.