OpenMarket

The Notre Dame cathedral in Paris caught fire and sustained heavy damage. The rebuilding will likely take years, though people began politicizing it almost instantly. In other news, the Mueller report was publicly released on Thursday. Cable news networks on both sides of the partisan divide, in a show of unity, have reportedly agreed to report on nothing else for the remainder of 2019. Meanwhile, rulemaking agencies issued new regulations from synthetic cannibinoids to grapefruit grading.

On Wednesday, I submitted comments on the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) proposal to rescind its justification for the 2012 Mercury Air Toxics Standards (MATS) rule. MATS established first-ever maximum achievable control technology (MACT) standards for mercury and other hazardous air pollutant (HAP) emissions from coal- and oil-fueled power plants.

It’s an old argument: as population increases and we use up more of the earth’s natural resources, everything is become more scarce. Soon the pressures of so many billions of human beings on the planet will cause a crisis—maybe even a collapse of civilization. It wasn’t an entirely novel theory even back when Rev. Thomas Malthus made it in 1798, and it didn't get any fresher when Paul Ehrlich made it in 1968, but for some reason it keeps scaring the pants off of many otherwise reasonable people.

Nationwide 5G networks are coming. They will expand possibilities for everything from smartphone applications to GPS to streaming video, and will enable new technologies that have not yet been invented. President Trump wants the U.S. to be a world leader in 5G adoption. But his Justice Department’s antitrust division might hinder that goal by blocking the proposed merger between Sprint and T-Mobile.

Earlier this week, The New York Times Magazine rolled out another edition of the tired old trope of how former acting Director Mick Mulvaney “destroyed” the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This accusation is by no means new, and I have challenged it in the past.

Antitrust regulation is a complex, multifaceted issue. It brings together insights from law, economics, political science, history, philosophy, and other disciplines. Right now both political parties are ramping up their antitrust rhetoric, and it will likely be a live issue throughout the 2020 election cycle. A working understanding of how antitrust regulation works is important for understanding why it works so poorly, and should ultimately be abolished.

A few days ago, the Trump administration issued a memorandum strongly discouraging what the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Wayne Crews has called “regulatory dark matter.” The memo instructs federal agencies to submit all policymaking rules to Congress to be vetted under the Congressional Review Act, even if these rules come in the form of informal “guidance.”

Yesterday’s E&E News ran an article titled “Inside conservatives’ disarray on climate.” E&E reporter Mark Matthews was inspired to write the piece by an email from Alliance for Market Solutions executive director Alex Flint. Flint’s thesis: “Anyone who denies the risk of climate change is irresponsible. And being irresponsible disqualifies anyone from being a true conservative.”

E-cigarettes pose less risk than smoking. The science is clear: while cigarettes kill about half their users, e-cigarettes have perhaps five percent of the risk. Therefore, e-cigarettes have the ability to save the lives of those smokers who switch to vaping. Yet, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is trying to eradicate e-cigarettes, a move that would sacrifice smoker lives and squander one of the greatest public health opportunities of our generation.

In a remarkable human achievement, scientists took the first-ever image of a black hole. The effort took eight telescopes on five continents, five petabytes of data, and an algorithm designed by a team led by MIT grad student Katie Bouman. On a smaller scale, a forthcoming executive order could help rein in “​​​​​​​regulatory dark matter,” a cosmological term CEI’s Wayne Crews borrowed to describe regulations that “require compliance without ever having been subject to a period of public comment and review.”