Climate Negotiations, Senate Health Care and the Nobel Prize
1. ENVIRONMENT
Climate negotiators attempt
to reach an agreement ahead of UN-sponsored talks in December.
CEI Expert Available
to Comment: Director of Energy and Global Warming Policy Myron Ebell on the latest
statement from the
European Union:
“It’s a few years late, but it’s great to see the European
Union finally acknowledge that the Kyoto Protocol has failed. CEI said Kyoto couldn’t possibly
work after it was first negotiated in 1997, and we have been pointing out ever
since that it was failing to reduce emissions and wasting huge sums of money
even while failing. As negotiations on a new global warming treaty continue, I
hope that when the European Union presents its next hare-brained scheme to save
the planet from global warming, people will remember how wrong the EU was about
Kyoto.”
2. HEALTH
The Senate Finance Committee prepares to vote on health
care legislation.
CEI Expert Available
to Comment: Senior Fellow Gregory
Conko on free market health
care reform:
“Most Americans agree that our
health care system is broken and must be fixed. But it is increasingly clear
that what ails health care is not too little, but too much government
intervention. Federal and state tax preferences for employer-sponsored health
insurance distort the market in a way that limits choices for individuals,
reduces competition among insurers, and artificially inflates costs for health
care services. For most working Americans, switching jobs often entails
switching health plans and doctors or losing coverage altogether, while many
others find non-employer-sponsored insurance unaffordable or difficult to
obtain.”
3. FINANCE
Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson share the Nobel Prize for
Economics.
CEI Expert Available
to Comment: Journalism Fellow Ryan Young on this year’s winners:
“Congratulations to Elinor Ostrom
and Oliver Williamson. Both are highly deserving.
Ostrom’s work shows that market
behavior emerges in settings not usually thought of as markets (condo
associations, within government, etc.). Williamson has made brilliant
contributions to the New Institutional Economics (NIE), which says that
changing the rules of the game (the existing institutions) will alter the
behavior of the people affected. Williamson’s work applies the economic way of
thinking to deduce exactly how, with an emphasis on how transaction costs
affect the interplay between individuals and firms.”
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