The Competitive Enterprise Institute Daily Update
Issues in the News
1. ENERGY
Oil prices hit a new spike amid continuing military and political unrest in the Middle East.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Director of Energy Policy Myron Ebell on the need to increase access to domestic energy sources:
“Affordable and stable energy supplies are vital to our collective economic health. Starving ourselves of energy by placing blanket restrictions on developing new oil and gas resources is sheer foolishness.”
2. HEALTH
A new study finds changes in diet have no affect on the treatment or prevention of cancer.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Adjunct Analyst Steven Milloy on the myth of low-fat diets as a weapon against cancer and heart disease:
“The unfortunate fact is that, when it comes to diet and health, we’ve been misinformed, ripped off and unnecessarily medicated by junk scientists, behavior-control nannies and unscrupulous marketers in the government, public health community and the food and pharmaceutical industries. And, of course, let’s not forget the media that seldom miss opportunities to pump health scares and scams.”
3. TRANSPORTATION
The Senate considers boosting funding for Amtrak.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Senior Fellow Iain Murray on why Amtrak should be privatized:
“However much they might pretend, the people running Amtrak aren’t businessmen, dedicated to selling a product to customers. They’re bureaucrats, whose main task is to get more money out of Congress, not to improve its lousy service. In such a situation, there is little incentive to change.”
4. SCIENCE
The House Energy & Commerce Committee holds a hearing on climate change science and the “hockey stick” temperature studies.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Director of Energy Policy Myron Ebell on the results of the National Research Council’s latest study on temperature change:
“On the issues that the committee was charged with investigating, the report finds that the proxy evidence does not support the conclusions that the twentieth century was the warmest or that the 1990s was the warmest decade or that 1998 was the warmest year in the past 1000 years, claims which were originally made in papers by Professor Michael Mann, et al. and were given widespread publicity in the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report. All those claims could, of course, be true, but they are not confirmed by the available evidence according to the committee report.”
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FOR MORE INFORMATION
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