OpenMarket

The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) this week held a panel discussion titled “What did they know, and when did they know it?” on the growing swirl of state and municipal lawsuits alleging that ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies knowingly hid climate change risk from the public. The litigants—cities and counties in California and Colorado—hope to score billions in climate change “damages.”

Boulder, Colorado and Boulder and San Miguel Counties filed suit in state court this week against ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy. The suit claims that petroleum products sold by the companies contribute to climate change and that leads to all sorts of bad things—such as droughts, wildfires, and severe storms—that affect tourism and agriculture in the city and two counties.   

One of the lessons learned from this year’s “10,000 Commandments” study is that Congress needs to be more involved in the regulatory process. It needs to make sure that agencies only regulate when legislation tells them to, and it needs to vet major new regulations. Over at USA Today, study author Wayne Crews and I make the case that Congress should also establish an annual regulatory budget.

We’ve been publishing and promoting the study for many years, and our strategies and methods have changed as the years have gone by. When we first started our video project in the mid-2000s, we made “10,000 Commandments” one of our first productions. In the video here from 2008, we review the burdens of the regulatory state with talent from the CEI staff and video shot right in our office. Back then YouTube itself was only a couple of years old, and many nonprofit organizations were jumping into the online video space for the very first time.

Wayne Crews has ably documented the regulatory state for twenty-five years and running. But what will the next twenty-five years of “10,000 Commandments” look like? From here, the future looks precarious, but there is reason to be hopeful about reducing Washington’s regulatory bootprint on consumer choice and the economy. With persistence, good ideas, and a little luck, the 2043 edition Ten Thousand Commandments will be much sunnier than this year’s.

Trump economic advisor and Death by China author Peter Navarro’s recent column in The Wall Street Journal, “China’s Faux Comparative Advantage,” is a doozy. This is not a compliment; it is dangerous that someone so uninformed about basic economics has the president’s ear. Navarro’s mercantilism is the economic equivalent of Ptolemaic astronomy, and should be treated as such—a historical curiosity and an obstacle to human progress.

Federal regulation cost Americans $1.9 trillion in 2017, or nearly $15,000 per U.S. household—more than Americans spend on any category in their family budget except for housing. While the Trump administration has made noteworthy progress toward reining in the expansion of new rules, more substantial reform will need to come from Congress in order to significantly reduce this breathtaking government burden.

Yesterday, members of the House Energy & Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Communications and Technology held a hearing on Internet prioritization. Chairman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) opened by stating that the Internet is based on prioritization and that prioritizing some content over others is already a crucial tool for network management—analogous to ambulances being granted priority over passenger cars on roadways.

The British House of Lords recently published a report on artificial intelligence, which includes policy recommendations that would hamper the development of AI domestically and antagonize foreign innovators. Parliament would do better to focus on removing the barriers currently in place, rather than developing new ones.

Another day, another investigation in search of a crime. “Massachusetts’s top court on Friday ordered Exxon Mobil, Inc. to turn over company records to the state attorney general, who is investigating the firm for deceptive acts related to its knowledge of climate change and its public statements about the issue,” E&E News reports.