The unspoken truth about wildfires

By Matt Ridley. Excerpts:

"wildfires are getting less frequent worldwide, not more, as the globe warms. The acreage burned has decreased steadily since 2000, according to NASA’s satellites, and is thought to have almost halved in a century. The great fires of 1871 in Wisconsin and Michigan burned more than a million hectares long before anybody drove a car"

"this year is an unusually quiet year for wildfire: so quiet it is breaking records for lack of fires by this date, even in Europe. If you don’t believe me, check the figures produced by the Global Wildfire Information System: as of last week, the world had seen 106 million hectares burn this year, the lowest at this date since these records began in 2012. In Europe, just 3.6 million hectares have burned—less than half the average for this date."

"It has been known for many decades that in fire-prone habitats, the longer you go without a fire, the worse the fires will be. So preventing the build-up of tinder by controlled burns is the most important factor."

Here in Britain the government has consistently and relentlessly demanded less ‘cool’ burning—low-intensity, controlled fires—in winter on heather moorland, Britain’s most fire-prone habitat. Such fires have been used by farmers and gamekeepers for generations to create a mosaic of short and long heather. This encourages fresh young heather shoots for sheep and grouse to feed on and makes open areas for rare birds such as golden plover and curlew to nest in. If done in winter it can burn off the rank heather plants while leaving the moss underneath barely touched, as demonstrated by a famous video in which a gamekeeper places a Mars bar in the moss, lights a fierce fire over it, then picks up the unscorched, unmelted chocolate bar, unwraps it and eats it.

Natural England argues that regular cool burning harms the habitat; researchers at York University and elsewhere argue the opposite: that it encourages the growth of sphagnum moss and other species by letting light in. But both sides agree that regular cool burns can dramatically reduce the risk of much more damaging wildfires, which burn down through the moss layer and into the peat. Cutting heather instead is less effective but better than nothing. Yet Natural England has banned heather burning on deep peat altogether and is pushing hard to limit it further everywhere—or at least tie it up in complicated licensing rules. As a result, the fuel load on heather moorland has been increasing; in places the heather is now waist-deep. The National Fire Chiefs Council warned last year that such restrictions on heather management would increase ‘the danger to firefighters and the public’."

"The authorities know their policies increase the fire risks. Here is what the Cairngorm National Park says in its Integrated Wildfire Management Plan about plans to increase shrubs and other vegetation by reducing deer and stopping burning: ‘These habitats will take many years to develop and during the intervening period fuel loads will increase, as will the corresponding need for fire risk mitigation.’ So they knew the risk was increasing. But little was done. John Kirk, a board member of the Cairngorms National Park Authority, told the Strathspey Herald: ‘Everyone is furious… the entire Abernethy forest has no firebreaks.’"

Data Centers Are Not the Problem. Bad Policy Is.

By Scott Lincicome of Cato. 

"there are actually many different types"

"data centers have been around for decades, and there are thousands already operating in the United States. They’re basically any “purpose-built building that runs large numbers of computers reliably, securely and around the clock,”"

"Several regional and national studies have found little merit to the common claim that data centers have already caused large, localized increases in Americans’ electricity bills. In fact, a brand new, peer-reviewed study found that data centers actually caused average U.S. retail electricity rates to “fall modestly” between 2015 and 2024, because the centers’ high, steady power demand helped spread a grid’s fixed costs over more usage. This finding is counterintuitive but consistent with research from 2025 that high-demand areas—including ones like North Dakota and Virginia that saw an explosion of data centers—“saw lower prices overall,” while prices rose in places like California where demand had declined"

"arguably the most viral water claim—that a single Google data center in Chile consumed more than 1,000 times the water supply of a town there—was later acknowledged by its author to be “off by a magnitude of 1,000.” They added that all U.S. data centers combined use less than 0.5 percent of the United States’ freshwater, and that “Google’s thirstiest facility, in Iowa, uses approximately what some golf courses do.”"

"U.S. data centers consumed about 17.5 billion gallons of water in 2023, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. That sounds like a lot until you compare it with total public water supply: it’s about 0.3 percent. Beef production, cotton farming, and golf courses each quietly consume far more"

"a lot of “data center water usage” stats in various studies include non-potable water, indirect usage from nearby power plants, and water actually recirculated instead of consumed (thus causing little change to local supplies). Doing this can inflate water usage stats"

"Masley estimates that the water all American data centers will directly consume onsite in 2030 will be the equivalent of just 8 percent of U.S. golf industry usage and just 1 percent of the water used for American corn production. It’s also dwarfed by industrial usage for things like steel plants."

"The 100 billion gallons used in 2023 amount to a drop in the bucket (pun!) compared to what we use each year for golf courses (550 billion gallons) and lawns (3 trillion gallons)."

"data centers aren’t major sources of water pollution in host communities, mainly because most of their usage (e.g., for cooling) is in closed systems."

"Masley has since run the same exercise on land use and waste heat, reaching similarly benign conclusions. Air pollution too. The Taxpayers Protection Alliance, meanwhile, has debunked recent online claims that data centers generate intolerable ambient noise." (AI researcher Andy Masley has done yeoman’s work eon “data center water usage)

The source of the real problems. And how to fix them.

"None of this means data centers are perfect, and it’d be intellectually lazy to claim the pushback is entirely manufactured (though some of it surely is). Where real problems exist, however, the cause is almost always a policy choice rather than an immutable feature of data centers or AI. And that means the issues can be fixed with policy, too.

The most obvious place to start is by nixing all the subsidies that certain states and localities toss at data center projects—and their billionaire owners. Virginia’s data center sales and use tax exemption, for example, cost more than $1 billion in 2024 and is projected to cost almost double that in 2025, with benefits accruing to Google, Amazon, and other bajillion-dollar companies. Indiana’s subsidies are almost as big. Given demand for AI and every other internet-based service in the United States, these data centers will be built without all the subsidies. So, much like sports stadiums and corporate relocation incentives, the handouts are less about real economic development and more about companies playing states and localities against each other to get the sweetest deal for themselves—at taxpayers’ expense. Kill ’em all. The industry doesn’t need the help, and every subsidy dollar is one that not only diminishes data centers’ tax revenue benefits but also fuels a legitimate grievance by the pro-moratorium crowd—maybe their only legitimate grievance.

The next obvious solution is to liberalize the supply side of the electricity market, where the only serious economic risk likely exists. As Pielke notes, various studies confirm that local power prices wouldn’t rise if supply could meet new demand, yet—

The constraint is our national inability to build—hampered by permitting queues and interconnection backlogs that mean that new transmission takes six to 10 years to build—while new demand emerges much faster. A moratorium seeks to freeze demand to match a sclerotic supply side. A better response speeds the creation of supply to meet demand. That means permitting reform, faster interconnection, advanced transmission, and water system investment, including new supply. Blocking construction treats the symptom rather than the disease.

Other things, such as tariffs on transformers, electrical steel, solar panels, and other essential equipment, add to these burdens. Fix them, and some of the demand-side pressure from data centers will be released.

For the rest, Cato’s Travis Fisher and Huddleston have an even better idea: Let data center developers contract directly with private generators or build their own power, through “consumer-regulated electricity” (CRE) reforms:

[CREs] allow for privately financed, off-grid electric utilities to serve new customers under voluntary contracts. These utilities would be physically “islanded” from the regulated grid and would not be subject to economic regulation at the state or federal level. Because they would not interconnect with incumbent systems, CRE utilities would impose no costs, reliability risks, or stranded-asset exposure on existing customers.

Letting these giant, cash-rich companies pay their own way makes abundant (pun!) sense, yet utility regulations and related factors make that impossible in most places. And that, not data center demand, is the problem. Fortunately, as Fisher writes, there are some positive developments in this regard: A few states have already begun experimenting with CRE, and the White House’s voluntary Ratepayer Protection Pledge, signed by most hyperscalers, gestures at similar principles. But much more needs to be done—and fast.

Other data center issues, such as noise, pollution, and land use, have a simpler solution: localities enforcing the relevant laws they already have on the books and making local decisions about whether to permit data centers in their communities. NIMBYism drives a lot of the opposition to data center projects, and I think almost all of it is wrong. The bright side, however, is that it’s an exercise of local control, not a statewide or federal moratorium that blocks an entire industry. In the former case, a data center can move to more welcoming U.S. areas that will enjoy the direct benefits—and occasional headaches—that rapid development offers, while negotiating site-specific terms and mitigation directly with developers, the way Loudoun County did. America’s great Laboratories of Democracy can do their thing.

As Huddleston notes, on the other hand, turning a local land-use dispute into a federal ban would throw out the baby with the bathwater, generating economic harms that go far beyond a few NIMBY-captured communities." 

 

 

Revenue over reason: A case for home distilling

By Ben Semark of CEI. 

"Want to distill spirits at home? Congress says you can’t. This ban from the Reconstruction era was not instated for health or public safety reasons. Rather, the prohibition arose from the inability to accurately tax home-produced alcohol. This reasoning does not justify such a restrictive practice. Distilling is a historically significant process with deep ties to the culture of this nation. Depriving Americans of this liberty in their own home undercuts a storied American tradition.

Creating home-brewed spirits was not a niche or commercial practice in early America; it was an everyday routine. Alcoholic beverages were a staple of the early American diet and were often much safer than local water sources. Wives were often responsible for the process and used various crops distilled into safe beverages to quench the thirst of their households. Stills were treated as ordinary kitchen appliances, like a butter churn or wood oven. In the late 18^th century, 25 percent of households in Augusta County, Virginia owned and operated home stills.

Distilling was not just a household chore; it was also a primary source of income for many farmers. Common crops, such as barley, corn, apples, and peaches, were all vulnerable to spoilage even across short distances. Where travel was especially difficult, distilling these crops provided a more resilient product and a steady source of income for many.

After the Revolutionary War, Alexander Hamilton proposed an excise tax on distilled spirits to tackle the extreme debt the country had accumulated. Excise taxes operate by taxing the manufacture of a targeted good rather than the income generated from sales. Many farmers reacted in outrage, sparking the famed Whiskey Rebellion, during which George Washington led a militia of 13,000 troops to quell the unrest.

The rebellion represented the first violent domestic challenge under the new American Constitution. Hamilton’s enforcement of the tax required every still, no matter how small, to be registered with the federal government. The upheaval underscored the importance of distilling culture in early America. Citizens felt betrayed by their newly formed government, not only due to the tax, but also government intrusion into routine household activities.

Distillation remained common in the home despite the tax, and Jefferson later repealed it, much to the delight of many Americans. Soon after the distilling culture exploded. The early 19^th century came with many advancements in distilling, making the practice accessible to non-farmers. An author at the time noted “we find men of science, men of capital, lawyers, doctors and merchants abandoning other pursuits to learn the art of extracting spirit from grain.” Distilling was no longer merely a household chore or a farmer’s practice; it had become a hobby.

The Civil War marked the second excise tax on spirits. Lincoln had to finance the war, and since stills were so common, spirits were the obvious choice for a tax. Once the war was won by the North, the tax extended to the southern states. The agriculturally dependent South hated the tax, often flouting federal collection officers. In fact, during the early days of the policy, nearly seven out of every eight distilled spirits went untaxed.

This led to a federal clampdown on spirits. In 1868, in order to “secure the revenue” of the spirit excise tax, Congress passed sweeping reforms on enforcement. Distillers were instructed by statute to turn over the keys to their distilleries, allowing inspectors to enter the premises at all times. If they were denied entry at any point, congress authorized them to use any force necessary to gain access.

Because of the obvious hurdles involved in enforcing this surveillance, home distilleries were banned outright. Taxing home distilled spirits would be nearly impossible. In order to further dissuade home distilling, Congress attached harsh penalties to the activity. From that point onward, operating a still in or near a home resulted in a felony, up to five years in federal prison, and, in some cases, forfeiture of their property. Home distilling, once the task of the homemaker and the fun of the hobbyist, was now strictly illegal.

The Treasury was not passive in its enforcement either. The 1880 annual report of Internal Revenue declared “the day of the illicit distiller” over with 4,061 illicit distilleries seized and 7,339 people arrested on account of the new enforcement techniques. Distillers were pushed into the forest under moonlight to avoid internal revenue officers, earning them the now infamous name “moonshiners.”

Around this time social perception of distilling was soured by its close association with violent criminal activity. Moonshiners would clash with enforcement officers, often leading to shootouts. The alignment of some moonshiners with the Ku Klux Klan damaged their reputation as well. Once the 18^th Amendment and Volstead Act were passed, illicit distilling, including home distilling, had firmly cemented itself as a stigmatized practice.

However, the Prohibition would not stand for long. Due to enforcement problems, the propagation of organized crime, and the loss of revenue from the excise tax, the 21^st Amendment repealed the 18^th Amendment, decriminalizing the production and sale of alcohol. However, this liberty remained limited to heavily regulated commercial breweries, wineries, and distilleries. The government was seeking an easily taxable commodity to pull itself out of the Great Depression.

1978 marked the first meaningful restoration of home production of alcoholic beverages. With extensive advocacy efforts from the hobbyist brewing lobby, H.R. 1337 was signed into law. It amended the tax code exempting home-brewed beer and wine from taxation and legalizing their production for personal use. Notably, home distilling was neither decriminalized nor exempted from the tax.

Legalizing home distilling is the next logical step. The prohibition was a step too far, and ever since the regulation of alcohol has been trending downward. For such a common practice during the founding, it is shocking that home distilling carries such steep penalties. The federal government picked this fight, not frontier farmers. The ability to produce spirits in your home for personal consumption should not be infringed. It is what George Washington, with his own home distillery, would have wanted."

The ancient fear of overpopulation is rendered unwarranted by innovative free markets

By Chelsea Follett via Cafe Hayek.

"Chelsea Follett writes insightfully about the ancient fear of overpopulation – a fear rendered unwarranted by innovative free markets. Here’s her conclusion:

Globalized markets and modern technology have accomplished what even Zeus could not in the wildest dreams of the ancients. Humanity has pushed back the constraints that once seemed as fixed and inescapable as a hero’s fate in a Homeric epic. We now easily feed a population perhaps 100 times larger than the one known to the ancient Greeks. If only public wisdom would catch up."

Illiterate and innumerate Americans earn as much as average British workers (and average workers in other G-7 nations)

See The United States vs. Europe, Part VI by Dan Mitchell.

"What’s the best public policy:

1. A small-sized welfare state such as Singapore?
2. A medium-sized welfare state such as the United States?
3. A large-sized welfare state such as those in Europe?

I prefer Option #1. Sadly, almost nobody in Washington is pushing for that choice.

The debate in D.C. is about whether the U.S. should expand the burden of government (per-child handouts, Medicare-for-all, green new deal, etc) and become more like Europe (option #3).

I’ve written a five-part series (here, here, here, here, and here) explaining why that’s a bad idea.

All of those columns cite data showing that the United States is richer than Europe and that the gap is growing. The should-be obvious takeaway is that it would be a mistake for the U.S. to copy the policies that have resulted in lower levels of prosperity.

Today’s column will be Part VI in this series and it’s motivated by two amazing charts from the U.K.-based Financial Times. As you can see, illiterate and innumerate Americans earn as much as average British workers.

 

The charts also show that Americans at all levels of literacy and numeracy out-earn their British counterparts.

And it’s not just that the United States is out-performing the United Kingdom.

Here’s the same data for the G-7 nations (the major countries of Europe plus Canada and Japan). All of those countries, even Germany, lag way behind the United States at every level of literacy and numeracy.

 

The numbers for Italy and Japan are especially shocking. Illiterate and innumerate Americans have higher wages than university-level workers in those two nations.

But the data for the other G-7 nations is also underwhelming. Americans with the lowest level of education earn more than average workers in England, France, and Canada. And they almost earn as much as average workers in Germany (based on what’s happening in Germany, I expect that nation’s numbers to deteriorate in the future).

Looking at all this data, I’ll ask a different version of the questions I presented at the start of today’s column: If the goal is higher wages for workers, especially workers with limited skills, is it better to have smaller government or bigger government?"

The McNamara Fallacy Returns: How Inequality Metrics Distract From the Real Causes of Poverty

By David Youngberg. He is an associate professor of economics at Montgomery College. Excerpt:

"Complaints about inequality that rely on political influence are really complaints about cronyism. Cronyism defies easy measurement, but it is what matters, and as long as the focus is on what’s easy to measure, we avoid tackling the underlying issue and the “solutions” just create bigger distortions.

But what about redistribution? Critics of inequality typically pair their concerns with some kind of tax-and-transfer system, and those funds would certainly help struggling families. If you take $1,000 from the rich and give it to the poor, the gap shrinks while the poor’s plight improves. Transfers, funded by taxing the super-wealthy, have a certain logic to them.

Even if the math worked, it’s not so simple. High taxes discourage work and encourage tax avoidance and evasion. The rich spend money on accountants (to find legal workarounds) or lawyers (to defend them if the government catches their illegal workarounds) rather than building new companies and ideas. They eschew high-risk investments when the high rewards that usually go with them are cut to a fraction. Getting rich is sometimes a matter of nepotism or corruption, and sometimes it’s a matter of hard work, thoughtful risk-taking, intelligence, out-of-the-box thinking, and all the things we associate with creating a more prosperous world. Punish that with higher taxes, and society suffers.

Economists call this the equity-efficiency trade-off. The economic pie can shrink as it’s cut more equally, so redistribution can leave the poorest people worse off, not better.

There are super-rich people who got their wealth completely from cronyism, and there are super-rich people who made their fortunes completely by creating and investing in things that make society wealthier. Most are in the vast gray area between: they have created companies that genuinely improved people’s lives but have also used governments to secure protections against competition. How much of each billionaire’s wealth grew the economic pie and how much was due to cronyism? The answer is as hard to measure as Viet Cong morale.

When the emphasis is on the gap between the rich and poor, hurting “the rich” becomes a goal in itself and leads to misidentified threats and misplaced efforts. For example, it’s not just the rich that benefit from cronyism. Occupational licensing restricts competition in jobs nowhere near the top of the income ladder: cosmetologists, taxi drivers, athletic trainers, travel guides, and countless others all drive up prices for everyone, low-income households included.

Unfortunately, tackling this particular problem won’t shrink the income gap because licensed salaries don’t reach the stratosphere. As long as anger is directed at the big numerical gaps, this very real problem doesn’t resonate. But taxing the super-rich, the very-rich, or even the somewhat-rich will “improve” inequality even as investment predictably falls. Inequality metrics decrease as the stated goals are quietly ignored. 

Progressives often tout Europe’s low income inequality as evidence of the success of its generous social programs and broad, heavy taxes that pay for them. Those taxes, paired with a mangled mess of regulation, also stifle entrepreneurship and stunt firms that would otherwise grow. The end result is sobering. After factoring in both taxes and benefits, including health benefits, the median incomes of the largest European economies are 14 to 45 percent lower than America’s. Income might be more equal, but the typical person is worse off.

 

The focus on shrinking the measurable gap makes it harder to achieve much-needed regulatory reform. Robin Hood policies of redistribution might not help the poor, but they will definitely reduce inequality, and as long as that’s what’s prioritized, the real problems linger." 

The Deadly Focus on Income and Wealth Inequality

Wealth Inequality, Sylvia Nasar, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bernard Madoff, LBJ

By David R Henderson. 

"Readers under age fifty-five might not realize this, but economic inequality was not a large issue in American political discussions until 1992. After that year, discussions of the issue ebbed and flowed. So much of what has been said by opponents of inequality is simple assertion. What has been missing in the statements of those who want government to reduce inequality is much information about why it exists and any sense of why some kinds of inequality are good.

Unfortunately, a single-minded focus on reducing inequality will lead to bad outcomes, even death. That conclusion follows from standard economic reasoning about the causes of economic growth. Reducing inequality by lopping off wealth from the wealthiest would lead to less economic growth; lower economic growth makes death rates higher than otherwise.

You might think that the focus on wealth inequality has come about because of the huge growth in wealth of the 100 or so wealthiest people in the world, many of whom live in the United States. While that surely has made the issue more prominent, the upset about inequality began well before that. I date it at 1992. In 1992, Jeff Bezos, whose wealth is close to $300 billion, had not yet even started Amazon, the source of his wealth. He and his then-wife MacKenzie Scott started Amazon two years later, in a rented garage. In 1992, Elon Musk, now the world’s wealthiest man, was a twenty-one-year-old undergraduate at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, who was about to transfer to the University of Pennsylvania.

So, if not the wealth of Bezos and Musk, what did lead to the focus on economic inequality? Two key factors were an article in the New York Times and a politician running for the Democratic nomination for president who picked up on that article.

The New York Times article was reporter Sylvia Nasar’s “The 1980’s: A Very Good Time for the Very Rich,” March 5, 1992. In that article, Nasar reported data from the Congressional Budget Office on income gains at various percentiles of the income distribution. She quoted Paul Krugman’s exaggerated statement that “it [the additional income from a growing economy] all went to the very top.” As a good reporter, she also gave balance. She quoted Lawrence Lindsey, who, in his book The Growth Experiment, had noted that the early 1980s drop in the top federal income tax rate from 70 percent to 50 percent encouraged high-income people to use fewer tax loopholes and thus show more taxable income on their tax forms. One important example, which Nasar didn’t mention, was municipal bonds. Interest on those bonds was exempt from the federal income tax and so that interest income was not reported on tax forms. But when the top rate fell to 50 percent, high-income people shifted much of their investment away from tax-exempt municipals to other investments whose income was subject to the federal tax. The income from those investments showed up on their tax forms, making it look as if their income had risen substantially; in many cases, it hadn’t.

These are the opening paragraphs of my latest Hoover article, “The Deadly Focus on Income and Wealth Inequality,” Defining Ideas, August 6, 2026.

And:

The other main myth is that the rich don’t deserve their wealth. It’s true that a small percent of them didn’t or don’t deserve their wealth. If they obtained their wealth through fraud or by using the political system to get special treatment, then they are undeserving. Exhibit A for someone who got his wealth through fraud is Bernard Madoff, who ran a Ponzi scheme to take wealth from strangers and even from friends.

Exhibit A of someone who got his wealth as an insider in the political system is Lyndon B. Johnson. In the 1940s, after he had defended the budget of the Federal Communications Commission, an official at the FCC suggested that the Texas congressman’s wife buy a license to operate a radio station in the Austin market. She did so and only a few weeks later, applied for a better part of the spectrum and for longer hours of operation. Both requests were granted within weeks. The FCC also was slow to grant licenses for other radio stations to compete in the lucrative Austin market. By the time LBJ ran for president in 1964, the market value of his and his wife’s net worth was between $9 million and $15 million, over half of which was the value of their media holdings. To put that in perspective, $14 million in 1964, when adjusted for inflation, would be $151 million today."