Regulation, the Little Ice Age, and Biotechnology

REGULATION – WAYNE CREWS

Forbes.com: Why Regulations Aren’t Good — Again

The first week of Spring is also “hooray, regulation” week at the White House.

Regulatory policy chief Cass Sunstein, one of the most accomplished and cited legal scholars of all time, has been busy. He penned a Chicago Tribune oped called “Why Regulations are Good — Again“; issued guidance to Federal agencies on “Cumulative Effects of Regulations; appeared on an hour-long Politico breakfast-time panel with Mike Allen, and testified as lead witness in a House Judiciary Committee hearing on regulatory policy.

An explicit cumulative or redundancy burden assessment of regulation is welcome.

GLOBAL WARMING – MARLO LEWIS

Globalwarming.org: Antarctica: New Evidence Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age Were Global

Did the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and Little Ice Age (LIA) occur only in Europe, or were they global in scope?

This is a hotly debated question, because it is harder to make the case that the warmth of recent decades is “unusual,” ”extraordinary,” or “unprecedented” and therefore something to stress about if global climate oscillates naturally between warming and cooling periods. The catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) crowd tend to write off the MWP (~1000-1200 A.D.) and LIA (~1300-1850 A.D.) as regional phenomena, largely confined to Northern Europe. A new study finds evidence of the MWP and LIA in a region 10,000 miles south of Northern Europe: the Antarctic Peninsula.

FOOD BIOTECHNOLOGY – GREG CONKO

Monday, March 26: Agricultural Innovation in the 21st Century, CEI on Capitol Hill

Today, CEI’s Greg Conko will speak on U.S. and foreign regulation of food biotechnology and how an over-precaution has made it more difficult for scientists to develop, breed, and sell innovative new crop varieties that increase agricultural productivity and lighten farming’s environmental footprint.