OpenMarket: Risk and Consumer Freedom

Environmental crusades to ban pesticides often exaggerate chemical risks with little, if any, consideration of how bans undermine food production. And there is a reason for that: a balanced approach undermines the greens’ radical agenda. Just recently, some activists have gone as far as to ask a federal court to basically ignore an amicus brief filed by farm groups. It details the damage that a court-ordered pesticide ban could cause.

Yesterday the Competitive Enterprise Institute published Steve Milloy’s new policy brief on the impact of revised federal rules for auto mileage and emissions, “Will the Trump Fuel Economy Reform Proposal Create Deadly Air Pollution?” This reform to the Obama-era policy on corporate average fuel economy standards is one of the current administration’s biggest (de-)regulatory initiatives, so the debate over what effects it’ll have on Americans is particularly important. 

Recent accusations that a popular weed killer harms honeybees have become headline news in a wide range of sources including CBS News, The Guardian, and Popular Science. Yet the solitary study they all cite doesn’t hold much water.

Yesterday, Congress passed an appropriations bill that kept funding intact for the United Nations body known as the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). The House version of the bill originally included a provision that would have placed strings on U.S. funding for IARC. That language was stripped out at the last minute, unfortunately, so now the funding has been retained in the next fiscal year’s appropriations for the departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, Labor, and Education.

I recently wrote a blog post about entrepreneur Eli Amsel, who reached out to me about how nanny state regulators and lawmakers have waged war on his New York City-based small business. My first post address the state’s new insane minimum wage law. Now we turn to regulations on plastic and even paper bags that may be the last straw, shutting down Amsel’s business permanently.

Here we go again. A new round of news headlines implies any level of alcohol consumption is bad for you, based on the findings of a single study that contradicts decades of research. “No amount of alcohol is safe, health experts warn” as a CNBC headline put it, with others like CNN, CNBC, The ...

The Food and Drug Administration has failed to approve a single reduced-harm nicotine product in the past year, despite unveiling a new “roadmap” in July 2017 that emphasized the role such products can play a reducing tobacco-related illness. That lapse does a huge disservice to millions of smokers who could benefit from switching from cigarettes to a far less harmful product.

Why are self-styled safety advocates opposing the first legislative step that could help usher in the greatest automotive safety improvements in history? This is a question to ask a handful of senators, led by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), who are holding up Senate passage of the bipartisan AV START Act, which would establish the first nationwide regulatory regime for highly automated vehicles (HAVs), often called self-driving cars. The House’s companion bill, the SELF DRIVE Act, passed that chamber by voice vote in September 2017.

The latest Environmental Working Group (EWG) “study” sounds an alarm regarding the chemical known as glyphosate, which is the active ingredient in the herbicide known as “Roundup.” EWG claims that Cheerios, Quaker Oats and other cereals contain dangerous levels of glyphosate. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) has also jumped into the fray.