CEI Daily Update
Issues in the News
1. CONGRESS
The House of Representatives passes an energy bill requiring expanded use of alternative energy sources.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Director of Energy Policy Myron Ebell on the costs of the new mandates and subsidies:
[The] anti-energy policy measures the House is considering or will likely consider this year would gouge consumers of motor fuel, food, electricity, appliances, and autos; add to the annual highway death toll; weaken America’s ability to recover from Katrina-like supply disruptions; create a fiscal pretext for tax hikes, and make it harder for the world’s poorest people to feed themselves.
2. BUSINESS
Number two residential lender American Home Mortgage Investment Corp. files for bankruptcy.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Senior Fellow John Berlau on the paternalistic response to the fluctuation in mortgage default rates:
…in one of the first bills he has introduced since the Democrats took control of Congress, [Sen. Chuck] Schumer ignores his own advice and looks down his nose at …real middle-class families. Schumer’s bill condescends to the middle-class voters worried about housing market woes. Using concerns about subprime loans for lower income homebuyers as a pretext, the bill treats all families like basket cases and assumes that they are incapable of choosing the home loan that fits their needs. While the message Schumer repeats in his book is ‘it’s the middle class, stupid,’ the message underlying his paternalistic Borrower’s Protection Act of 2007 is ‘the middle class are stupid.’
3. ENVIRONMENT
Montana’s governor declares a statewide fire emergency.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Senior Fellow Robert H. Nelson in the Wall Street Journal on how the federal government’s disastrous land management policies have led to increasingly destructive wildfires:
Even the strongest environmental advocates recognize that forest fire can never be allowed to ‘run free,’ as wolves and grizzlies — also suppressed in the 20th century — are now increasingly encouraged to do. Yet, environmentalism has shown a virtual religious commitment to the idea that the forests must be restored to their ‘natural’ condition.
4. SCIENCE
Researchers find that “brown clouds” made up of solid particles suspended in the atmosphere may contribute to warmer, rather than cooler temperatures, as previously thought.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Adjunct Analyst Steven Milloy on the significance of the research:
If manmade global climate change is something worth fretting over — and it’s not at all clear that it is — the aerosol study opens up the possibility for an entirely new hypothesis for global warming with aerosols as the culprit. Yet up to now, the ‘consensus’ crowd has portrayed aerosols in the opposite light as cooling agents. When so-called ‘consensus’ can be that far off, it would seem that there’s plenty of room for serious debate.
Blog feature: For more news and analysis, updated throughout the day, visit CEI’s blog, Open Market.
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