California’s Stranded Solar Assets

Regulators force PG&E to keep open the money-losing Ivanpah plant

WSJ editorial. Excerpts:

"The $2.2 billion plant received investments from Google, NRG Energy and BrightSource Energy, as well as a $1.6 billion loan guarantee from the Obama Administration. Don’t forget a 30% federal tax credit and a $535 million Treasury grant."

"it produced far less power than expected, and at more than four times the cost of new solar photovoltaic projects. It was also the world’s biggest bird fryer, incinerating thousands of birds a year."

"nixing Ivanpah could save ratepayers about $100 million a year."

"The state Public Utilities Commission rejected PG&E’s plan this month because it “risks stranding sunk infrastructure costs,” namely in transmission systems."

"the state plans to force them [Rate-payers] to keep subsidizing the project"

"One reason California electric rates are the second highest in the country . . . is that regulators impose mandates with little regard to cost."

The state "utilities to enter into long-term contracts for solar and wind when they cost significantly more." 

The Myth of Cuban Health Care

How did something so at odds with reality persist for so long? And why is it finally crumbling?

By Daniel Raisbeck and Jim Epstein. From Reason.

"If there's one thing they do right in Cuba, it's health care," said Michael Moore in a 2007 interview. "Cuba has the best health care system in the entire area," according to Angela Davis, "and in many respects much better than the U.S."

"One thing that is well established in the global health community is the strength of the Cuban national health system," said Clare Wenham, a professor at the London School of Economics.

Claims like these have appeared in hundreds of documentaries, newspaper articles, and magazine features over the years celebrating the supposed marvel of Cuba's health care system. It's a testament to the effectiveness of the Castro regime's propaganda apparatus that this myth, so deeply at odds with reality, has persisted for so long.

"The Cuban health care system is destroyed," Rotceh Rios Molina, a Cuban doctor who escaped the country's medical mission while stationed in Mexico, tells Reason in Spanish. "The doctor's offices are in very bad shape."

"People are dying in the hallways," says José Angel Sánchez, another Cuban doctor who defected from the medical mission in Venezuela, interviewed by Reason in Spanish.

According to Rios, Sánchez, and others with firsthand experience practicing medicine in Cuba, the island nation's health care system is a catastrophe. Clinics lack the most routine supplies, from antibiotics to oxygen and even running water, and their hallways are often occupied by ailing patients because there aren't enough doctors to treat their most basic needs. Cuban hospitals are unsanitary and decrepit. It's exactly what you'd expect in a country impoverished by communism.

The only thing that's changed is that because of social media and the COVID-19 pandemic, the government's propaganda facade has finally started to shatter.

And yet in 2021, some journalists were falling for the claim that the Cuban government had set the model in its response to COVID-19. By July of that year, ordinary Cubans had taken to the streets—and to Twitter and Facebook—in part to call attention to what the pandemic had actually meant for Cuban hospitals and clinics.

In the 15 years since the release of Michael Moore's documentary Sicko, which celebrated Cuban health care, everyday citizens have been armed with smartphones, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, empowering them to tell the truth about what it's really like to walk into a Cuban hospital.

So how did the Castro regime's propaganda machine manage to fool so many for so long? According to Maria Werlau, executive director of the Cuba Archive, the answer lies with Cuba's foreign medical missions, which are teams of health care professionals dispatched to provide emergency and routine care to foreign countries.

The first medical mission was sent to Algeria in 1963. After the fall of the Soviet Union, when the government lost its major source of aid, the program was ramped up significantly as a source of revenue for the impoverished nation.

The Cuban government has promoted the missions as a humanitarian endeavor, and a demonstration of the community spirit and selflessness central to the communist project. In his 1960 speech "On Revolutionary Medicine," the Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara said that "Individualism…must disappear in Cuba." He recounted the story of a group of physicians in Havana "who demanded remuneration" before going into the country's rural areas to treat the sick. He dreamed of replacing them with a new class of doctors drawn from the peasantry who would "run, immediately and with unreserved enthusiasm, to help their brothers."

Rios participated in the medical mission in Sierra Leone in 2013, where health care specialists from around the world came to help contain the Ebola epidemic. The members of the mission were told that when they returned to Cuba, they would be received as heroes. Rios says that, while he did receive a stipend that went to cover his living expenses, medical personnel from other countries were generously compensated.

The myth of Cuban physicians as selfless healers started to fracture in 2000 when two doctors from the mission in Zimbabwe slipped a note to an airline official with the handwritten word kidnapped. They had denounced the Castro regime and were being brought back to Cuba against their will, possibly to face jail time. Instead, they wound up in the U.S. and were granted political asylum.

In a 2020 report, Human Rights Watch said the Cuban medical missions "violate [doctors'] fundamental rights," including "the right to privacy, freedom of expression and association, liberty, and movement, among others." It noted that "many doctors feel pressured to participate in the missions and fear retaliation if they do not," and that "governments that accept Cuban assistance that includes the abusive conditions imposed by Cuba risk becoming complicit in human rights violations."

In 2006, the George W. Bush administration created the Cuban Medical Professional Parole Program, granting health care workers stationed abroad permanent resident status. All they had to do was make it to a U.S. embassy. Over 7,000 medical workers took advantage of the program.

In 2014, the New York Times op-ed page published an editorial calling for an end to the program. American immigration policy "should not be used to exacerbate the brain drain of an adversarial nation," it noted. In other words, the rights of doctors to decide where and how to live should be subordinate to what was best for the Cuban government.

After the mission in Sierra Leone, Rios was redeployed to a military base in Mexico. One day, he was sent with a group of doctors to buy some phone cards so they could connect with their relatives back home. He decided to make his escape. Rios found a job at a Mexican pharmacy and started saving money to pay a coyote to bring him into the U.S. He was picked up by border officials, and taken to an immigrant detention center for 42 days. After his release, he could join his family in Miami.

In 2018, a group of Cuban doctors who defected from the medical missions sued the Pan American Health Organization, which is part of the World Health Organization, for aiding in human trafficking and for earning $75 million in fees by acting as a middle man.

The medical missions are primarily a way of selling Cuban health care services abroad. So what's health care like for those living on the island?

Julio Cesar Alfonso is the president of the Miami-based Solidarity Without Borders, which helps Cuban doctors who have escaped. He says that there are two health care systems in Cuba—one that is used by the majority of regular citizens, and another that is reserved for tourists and the Cuban elite.

When defenders of Cuban health care acknowledge its deficiencies at all, they usually point the finger at the U.S. trade embargo, which has been in place since 1962. But the deplorable conditions in Cuban hospitals have more to do with a lack of basic health care supplies, which are readily available from other countries, such as antibiotics and steroids. Cuban hospitals also have a shortage of beds and stretchers, and some were without water for six to 12 hours a day at the height of the pandemic.

So what impact does the embargo really have on Cuban health care? Medical products have been technically exempt from the embargo since the passage of the 1992 Cuba Democracy Act. But the law does stipulate that U.S. companies need a license in order to sell to Cuba—and critics are correct to point out that this requirement adds red tape to the process. Total U.S. health care products purchased by Cuba from 2003 to 2021 averaged a mere $1.4 million annually, in what should be a $50 to $100 million market. But it's not the licensing process that accounts for such paltry sales; companies would gladly obtain permission to sell their products to Cuba if they could earn enough money to make it worth the effort. Cuba has a severe foreign currency shortage because it produces little in the way of goods and services that the rest of the world apart from the U.S. wants to buy.

Promoters of Cuban health care often cite the country's infant mortality rate as evidence of its success. "How is this possible" that "an American infant is, by official statistics, almost 50 percent more likely to die than a Cuban infant," wrote Nicholas Kristof in a 2019 New York Times column that looked at one of the most often repeated figures in support of the claim that there's something exceptional about Cuba's health care system.

While conceding that "the figures should be taken with a dose of skepticism," Kristof chose to interpret them regardless in support of his priors: "Cuba has the Medicare for All that many Americans dream about."

Cuba has a variety of strategies for manipulating its infant mortality rate, such as seeing to it that fetuses less likely to survive outside the womb never get the chance. There's significant evidence that Cuban doctors coerce women into aborting fetuses shown to have abnormalities after routine ultrasounds.

Vincent Geloso, who's an assistant professor of economics at George Mason University, co-authored a 2018 paper arguing that Cuba's low infant mortality rate is the result of misclassification using a different indicator known as "late fetal deaths."

Despite reports early in the pandemic that Cuba was an outlier in its success in combating COVID-19, by August of 2021 The New York Times was reporting that Cuba's health care system was "reeling," with oxygen supplies running low, a shortage of syringes, and mortuaries and crematories "overwhelmed." Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel blamed the U.S. trade embargo.

Sánchez thinks that, as the Castros' health care myth crumbles, ordinary Cubans are beginning to realize that they are not threatened by foreign enemies, as the regime propaganda machine has claimed for decades.

"The only enemy of the Cuban people," he says, "is the Cuban government.""

The UK Becomes a Case Study in How Not to Fix a Floundering Economy

Britain’s budget “fixes” reveal how fast a nation can worsen its finances by treating a supply-side problem as a demand-side one.

By John Phelan AIER. 

"In its manifesto for the 2024 general election, Britain’s Labour party listed “Five Missions to Rebuild Britain,” the first being: “Kickstart economic growth.” 

The party’s second budget since winning that election, delivered on November 26 by Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves, suggests it has already abandoned that mission — and offers a cautionary tale to other governments on what not to do.

Tax, Borrowing, and Spending Hikes 

Before the election, the Financial Times quoted Reeves admitting that, unlike previous incoming chancellors, she would not be able to claim she had “looked inside the books and realized things were even worse than they looked from the outside, giving a flimsy excuse for immediate tax rises or spending cuts.” She promised no increase in national insurance (NI, a payroll tax like Social Security), income tax, or Value Added Tax (VAT, a national sales tax).

Once elected, Reeves claimed she had, after all, looked inside the books — and discovered a £21.9 billion “black hole” in government finances. This supposedly arose from the previous Conservative government’s failure to spend enough, curious given that in 2023–2024, government spending as a share of GDP was higher than in all but seven of the previous 75 years.

Reeves now had her “excuse for immediate tax rises” in the October 2024 budget. Public sector workers were rewarded for supporting Labour with a £9.4 billion pay hike — 42.9 percent of the alleged “black hole” — while the perpetually cash-hungry National Health Service received £1.5 billion. To fund this, Reeves raised taxes by £40 billion — the largest increase since 1993 — including a two-percentage-point hike in employer NI contributions. She denied breaking her pre-election promise, noting that the employee share was unchanged, but this convinced no one. Overall, taxes were forecast to reach “a historic high” as a share of GDP.

Incredibly, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR, Britain’s version of the Congressional Budget Office) projected that Reeves’ budget would push government spending, taxes, borrowing, inflation, and interest rates up, while driving employment, disposable income, and GDP growth down.     

 The Economy Crashes

This is exactly what happened.

The unemployment rate is up from 4.3 percent in the three months to October 2024 to 5.0 percent in the three months to September 2025 and the number of “payrolled employees…fell by 117,000 (0.4 percent) between September 2024 and September 2025,” according to the Office for National Statistics. Over 40 percent of organizations reported reducing employee numbers in response to the payroll tax rise, according to last month’s Bank of England Decision Maker Panel survey, and one-third said likewise for a hike in the minimum wage.  

Growth of Total real pay, 2.4 percent in the three months to October 2024, is down to 0.7 percent in the three months to September 2025. Much of this is due to resurgent inflation. Annual growth in the Consumer Price Index is up from 2.3 percent in October 2024 to 3.6 percent in October 2025. “The government has undoubtedly added to, and extended, the inflation problem with its generous public pay settlements and minimum wage increases,” says Paul Dales, chief UK economist at Capital Economics. 

“The underlying fiscal outlook has also deteriorated since October,” the OBR noted in March, but it has continued deteriorating and, in November, it reported that “Borrowing in 2024-25 is £12 billion higher than estimated at the time of the March forecast.” Meanwhile, Martin Wolf notes for the Financial Times, “the yield on UK government bonds is one of the highest among all advanced economies.” Indeed, British government bond yields are now higher than those which brought Liz Truss down when she was said, by Reeves, to have “crashed our economy” in 2022. Kier Starmer’s government finds itself in the difficult position of having levels of borrowing and the cost of that borrowing increasing at the same time. Of course, it is a situation they chose to put the country in.    

More Taxes, Borrowing, and Spending Hikes 

Before the November 26 budget, Reeves — like some fiscal Hubble telescope — had discovered yet another “black hole.”

Closing it required raising “taxes by amounts rising to £26 billion in 2029–30, through freezing personal tax thresholds and a host of smaller measures,” the OBR noted. Freezing the thresholds will push 5.4 million additional people into the higher- and additional-rate tax bands by 2030, in what the Centre for Policy Studies calls the largest tax rise in at least the last 60 years. It breaks another of Reeves’ pre-election pledges — not to raise income taxes — and “brings the tax take to an all-time high of 38 percent of GDP in 2030–31,” the OBR reports.

But again, this wasn’t really about plugging some “black hole” — which Reeves may have lied about anyway — but about financing yet another expansion of government spending, mostly on welfare. “Budget policies increase spending in every year and by £11 billion in 2029–30,” the OBR reports, “primarily to pay for the summer reversals to welfare cuts and lift the two-child limit in universal credit.” Government spending will be higher as a share of GDP in 2030–31 than in 70 of the last 78 years.

Perhaps this could be justified if it were likely to “kickstart economic growth,” as Labour promised — but it won’t. The OBR revised real GDP growth for 2025 up from 1.0 percent to 1.5 percent but revised it downward for every year afterward owing to Reeves’ fiscal measures. Growth now averages 1.5 percent over the forecast, 0.3 percentage points slower than in March. The National Institute of Economic and Social Research estimates that fiscal policy will shave 0.4 percentage points off growth over the next five years. In October, real GDP shrank for the fourth month in a row. 

Lessons for the United States 

The United States shares Britain’s problems of yawning deficits and spiraling debts but, relatively speaking, it does not share its chronic inability to generate economic growth. Since 2008, GDP per capita has increased by 7.3 percent in real terms in Britain compared to 24.2 percent in the US

This Labour government’s economic record illustrates the folly of trying to close budget gaps — driven in part by a vastly expanding welfare state — through payroll tax hikes and minimum wage increases, soon to be joined by higher income taxes. These measures are strangling economic growth in Britain and would do the same in the United States if attempted here. You cannot expand your welfare state by shrinking your economy.

To the extent Labour is still thinking about growth, it diagnoses the problem as one of insufficient demand — much like the Biden administration did with its misnamed Inflation Reduction Act. It isn’t. Britain’s growth problems are supply-side, and so are the remedies. The issue is not a lack of money to spend but a lack of things to spend it on. Perhaps the most important lesson for the United States and any other country facing this familiar cocktail of problems is simple: it’s the supply side, stupid.

In opposition, Labour and affiliated think tanks made noises suggesting they understood this. In office, Kier Starmer and Rachel Reeves have delivered Labour at its most neanderthal, providing policymakers elsewhere with a cautionary example of what not to do."

Billions Spent, Few Trucks Delivered: The USPS EV Fiasco

By Craig Eyermann of the Independent Institute.

"At any given time, the U.S. government is spending taxpayer dollars that are being wasted. Today’s example is being delivered by the U.S. Postal Service (USPS).

That’s a shame, because with around 533,000 career employees and another 106,000 non-career employees, the Postal Service accounts for about one out of every five of the U.S. government’s three million civilian employees. From post offices to stamp machines, mailboxes, and mail trucks, they represent the most visible connection Americans have with the federal government in their daily lives.

But that connection doesn’t prevent them from squandering the resources of the taxpayers whose interests they are supposed to serve.

In August 2022, when the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act became law, taxpayers provided over $3 billion to government contractor Oshkosh Defense to design and build 35,000 electric battery-powered mail trucks. These supposedly environmentally friendly vehicles were intended to replace the Postal Service’s fleet of gasoline-powered mail trucks.

It has been described as both “unusual” and “ugly.” It’s certainly very different than the very familiar vehicles that have preceded it

Three years later, the U.S. Postal Service is far behind schedule in its ambition to switch over to battery-powered mail trucks. As of November 10, 2025, it is operating a total of 612 electric battery-powered mail trucks.

Oshkosh Defense’s production of the Postal Service’s Next Generation Delivery Vehicle (NGDV) has been troubled. According to the New York Post, the company is producing the vehicles at a rate of about 3 to 4 per day. That is far short of the 80 vehicles per day the company projected it would be making by December 2024.

The massive shortfall in actual versus projected deliveries of functional battery-electric mail trucks has prompted several fiscally responsible members of Congress to attempt to claw back funding and halt production of the vehicles, in favor of other vehicles that the Postal Service can acquire and operate in greater numbers.

They have a strong case. If Americans want to rely on receiving regular mail service, having postal carriers in mail trucks that can be built and operated as needed is vital to meet that demand. Despite its years in development and billions of dollars in cost to taxpayers, it doesn’t seem that the Postal Service’s battery-electric NGDV is going to deliver anytime soon."

The great climate climbdown is finally here

Matt Ridley.

"Finally, thankfully, the global warming craze is dying out. To paraphrase Monty Python, the climate parrot may still be nailed to its perch at the recent Cop summit in Belem, Brazil – or at Harvard and on CNN – but elsewhere it’s dead. It’s gone to meet its maker, kicked the bucket, shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. By failing to secure new pledges for a cut in fossil fuels, Cop achieved less than nothing. The venue caught fire, the air conditioning malfunctioned – and delegates were told on arrival not to flush toilet paper. Bill Gates’s recent apologia, in which he conceded that global warming ‘will not lead to humanity’s demise’ after he closed the policy and advocacy office of his climate philanthropy group, is just the latest nail in the coffin.

Different themes took turns as the scare du jour: overpopulation, oil spills, acid rain, ozone, sperm counts

In October, the Net Zero Banking Alliance shut down after JPMorgan Chase, Citi-group, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs led a stampede of banks out of the door. Shell and BP have returned to being oil companies, to the delight of their shareholders. Ford is about to cease production of electric pick-ups that nobody wants. Hundreds of other companies are dropping their climate targets. Australia has backed out of hosting next year’s climate conference.

According to an analysis by the Washington Post, in the US it is not just the Republicans who have given up on climate change: the Democrat party has stopped talking about it, hardly mentioning it during Kamala Harris’s campaign for president. The topic has dropped to the bottom half of a table of 23 concerns among Swedish youths. Even the European parliament has now voted to exempt many companies from reporting rules that require them to state how they are helping to fight climate change.

It has been a long, lucrative ride. Predicting the eco-apocalypse has always been a profitable business, spawning subsidies, salaries, consulting fees, air miles, bestsellers and research grants. Different themes took turns as the scare du jour: overpopulation, oil spills, pollution, desertification, mass extinction, acid rain, the ozone layer, nuclear winter, falling sperm counts. Each faded as the evidence became more equivocal, the public grew bored or, in some cases, the problem was resolved by a change in law or practice.

But no scare grew as big or lasted as long as global warming. I first wrote a doom–laden article for the Economist about carbon dioxide emissions trapping heat in the air in 1987, nearly 40 years ago. I soon realised the effect was real but the alarm was overdone, that feedback effects were exaggerated in the models. The greenhouse effect was likely to be a moderate inconvenience rather than an existential threat. For this blasphemy I was abused, cancelled, blacklisted, called a ‘denier’ and generally deemed evil. In 2010 in the pages of the Wall Street Journal I debated Gates, who poured scorn on my argument that global warming was not likely to be a catastrophe – so it is welcome to see him come round to my view.

The activists who took over the climate debate, often with minimal understanding of climate science, competed for attention by painting ever more catastrophic pictures of future greenhouse warming. They altered the name to ‘climate change’ so they could blame it for blizzards as well as heatwaves. Then they inflated the language to ‘climate emergency’ and ‘climate crisis’, even as projections of future warming came down.

‘I’m talking about the slaughter, death and starvation of six billion people this century. That’s what the science predicts,’ said Roger Hallam, founder of Extinction Rebellion, in 2019, though the science says no such thing. ‘A top climate scientist is warning climate change will wipe out humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years,’ tweeted Greta Thunberg in 2018. Five years later she deleted her tweet and shortly after decided that Palestine was a more promising way of staying in the limelight.

Scientists knew that pronouncements like this were nonsense but they turned a blind eye because the alarm kept the grant money coming. Journalists always love exaggeration. Capitalists were happy to cash in. Politicians welcomed the chance to blame others: if a wildfire or a flood devastates your town, point the finger at the changing climate rather than your own failure to prepare. Almost nobody had an incentive to downplay the alarm.

Unlike previous scares, climate fear has the valuable feature that it can always be presented in the future tense. No matter how mild the change in the weather proves to be today, you can always promise Armageddon tomorrow. So it was that for four long decades, climate change alarm went on a protracted march through the institutions, capturing newsrooms, classrooms and boardrooms. By 2020 no meeting, even of a town council or a sports team, was complete without a hand-wringing discussion of carbon footprints.

The other factor that kept the climate scare alive was that emissions reduction proved impossibly difficult. This was a feature, not a bug: if it had been easy, the green gravy train would have ground to a halt. Reducing sulphur emissions to stop acid rain proved fairly easy, as did banning chlorofluorocarbons to protect the ozone layer. But decade after decade, carbon dioxide emissions just kept on rising no matter how much money and research was thrown at the problem. Cheers!

Activists altered the name to ‘climate change’ so they could blame it for blizzards as well as heatwaves

Switching to renewable energy made no difference – literally. Here’s the data: the world added 9,000 terawatt-hours of energy consumption from wind and solar in the past decade, but 13,000 from fossil fuels. Not that wind and solar save much carbon dioxide anyway, their machinery being made with coal and their intermittency being backed up by fossil fuels.

Despite trillions of dollars in subsidies, these two ‘unreliables’ still provide just 6 per cent of the world’s energy. Their low-density, high-cost, intermittent power output is of no use to data centres or electric grids, let alone transport and heating, and effectively poisons the economics of building and running new nuclear and gas generation by preventing continuous operation. Quite why it became mandatory among those concerned about climate change to support these unreliables so obsessively is hard to fathom. Subsidy–addiction has a lot to do with it, combined with a general ignorance of thermodynamics.

Now the climate scare is fading, a scramble for the exits is beginning among the big environmental groups. Donations are drying up. Some will switch seamlessly to trying to panic us about artificial intelligence; others will follow Gates and insist that they never said it was the end of the world, just a problem to be solved; a few will even try declaring victory, claiming unconvincingly that promises made at the Paris conference a decade ago have slowed down emissions enough to save the climate.

Of course, Al Gore, the former US vice–president who did more than anybody else to alarm the world about climate change and made a $300 million fortune from it, has been at the recent conference in the Brazilian jungle – the one where they felled a forest to build the access road. As he railed against Gates last month for abandoning the cause and accused him of being bullied by Donald Trump, he sounded like one of those Japanese soldiers emerging from the jungle who did not know the second world war was over.

Perhaps Gore might now regret his exaggerated preachings of hellfire and damnation. In his 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth, for which he shared a Nobel prize, he predicted a sea-level rise of up to 20 feet ‘in the near future’ – out by around 19 feet and nine inches. In 2009 he said there was a 75 per cent chance all the ice in the Arctic Ocean would disappear by 2014. In that year there were five million square kilometres of the stuff at its lowest point – about the same as in 2009. This year there were 4.7 million square kilometres. At the film’s showing at the Sundance Festival, Gore said that unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases were taken within ten years, the world would reach a point of no return. Yet here we are 19 years later.

Gore is correct that fear of retribution from the Trump administration drives some of the corporate retreats. President Trump has already cancelled $300 billion of green infrastructure funding and purged government websites of climate rhetoric. But even if the Republicans lose the White House in 2028, it will be hard to reflate the climate balloon. The proportion of Americans greatly worried about climate change is dropping. If Trump takes America out of the 1992 treaty that set up the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change it would require an unlikely two-thirds vote of the Senate to rejoin.

Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish economist who is president of the Copenhagen Consensus and has fought a lonely battle against climate exaggeration for decades, recently explained the shift in public opinion: ‘The shrillness of climate doom also wears down voters. While climate change is a real and man-made problem, constant end-of-the-world proclamations from media and campaigners massively overstate the situation.’

A key figure in the collapse of the climatocracy is Chris Wright, the pioneer of extracting shale gas by hydraulic fracturing who was appointed by Trump as energy secretary this year. Wright commissioned a review of climate science by five distinguished academics that set out just how non-frightening the facts of climate change are: slowly rising temperatures, mainly at night in winter and in the north, correspondingly less in daytime in summer and in the tropics where most people live, accompanied by a very slow rise in sea level showing no definite acceleration, minimal if any measurable change in the average frequency and ferocity of storms, droughts and floods – and record low levels of deaths from such causes. Plus a general increase in green vegetation, caused by the extra carbon dioxide.

The climatastrophe has diverted attention from real environmental problems – and cost a fortune

Indoor air pollution caused by poor people cooking over wood fires because they lack access to gas and electricity kills three million a year. So yes, Gates, influenced by Lomborg and Wright, is correct to say that getting cheap, reliable, clean energy to the poor is by far the more urgent priority.

Sources tell me that Wright is treated like a rock star at international conferences: his fellow ministers, especially those from Africa and Asia, are thrilled to talk about the need to get energy to people instead of being hectored about emissions. Only a few western European ministers sneer, but even some of them (the British being an exception) quietly admit that they need to find a way to climb down off their green high horses.

Fortunately, they now have convenient cover for doing so: artificial intelligence. We would love to go on subsidising wind and solar, say the Germans privately, but if we are to have data centres, we need lots more reliable and affordable power, so we will build gas turbines and maybe even some nuclear.

Likewise, throughout the tech world of the American west coast, emoting about climate suddenly seems like a luxury belief compared with the need to sign contracts with power suppliers mostly burning natural gas – or get left behind in the AI race. The world’s gas glut is impossible to overstate: thanks to fracking, we have centuries’ worth of cheap gas. The tech bros are piling into nuclear, too, but that won’t address the needs for extra power until well into the next decade, and the need is now.

The climatastrophe has been a terrible mistake. It diverted attention from real environmental problems, cost a fortune, impoverished consumers, perpetuated indoor pollution and poverty, frightened young people into infertility, wasted years of our time, undermined democracy and corrupted science. Time to bury the parrot."

Fast Facts About SNAP

By Romina Boccia and Tyler Turman of Cato. Excerpt:

"The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) served 41.7 million Americans on average each month at a cost of roughly $100 billion in fiscal year 2024. The program suffers from rising costs, lax eligibility enforcement, and significant waste due to misaligned incentives as a result of its near-total reliance on federal funding. SNAP’s inclusion in the Farm Bill—combining rural agricultural interests seeking more subsidies and nutrition assistance advocates seeking expanded benefits—makes enacting meaningful reforms to reduce spending difficult. This fact sheet lays out key details that legislators and the public should know about SNAP’s problems and potential reforms to align authority with responsibility by devolving nutritional assistance to the states.

SNAP spending has grown far faster than population increases, economic conditions, and unemployment rates would predict.

 

Reasons include:

• Benefit increases
  • The 2021 Thrifty Food Plan (TFP) reevaluation violated congressional spending authority and broke a 45-year precedent by allowing TFP to grow faster than inflation, increasing benefits by 21 percent. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated that the reevaluation would add $180 billion to the deficit over FY 2022–2031.
• Loosened eligibility standards
  • State SNAP policies, including loosened eligibility and simplified reporting requirements, accounted for nearly half of SNAP’s caseload increase from 2000 to 2016.
  • Federal SNAP guidelines limit eligibility to households with gross monthly incomes at or below 130 percent of the federal poverty level (FPL)—$2,292 for a family of two, the average SNAP household size—and countable assets less than $3,000 ($4,500 for households with elderly or disabled).
  • According to 2025 estimates from the Foundation for Government Accountability (FGA), over 5.9 million people enrolled in SNAP through broad-based categorical eligibility (BBCE) did not meet the program’s eligibility requirements. Thirty-eight states use BBCE to abolish asset limits, and 35 have raised gross income limits above federal rules, with 27 setting the limit at 200 percent of FPL. In 2023, the FGA estimated: Four million had assets above federal limits, and 1.4 million had incomes above federal limits.
• Poorly enforced verification protocols
  • The 1996 welfare reforms required able-bodied adults without dependents (ABAWDs) to participate in a qualifying employment/​training program for at least 80 hours/​month.
  • Per FGA, roughly four million ABAWDs were on SNAP in 2023. Policies, including geographic waivers, allowed most states to shirk work requirements. In 2022, 84 percent of ABAWD SNAP recipients didn’t meet work requirements through employment.
  • The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) expanded work requirements for most ABAWDs from ages 18–54 to 18–64, restricted geographic waivers, removed or tightened most exemptions, and imposed stricter verification requirements.

SNAP’s top-down financing structure contributes to poor health outcomes, encourages widespread waste, and stifles innovation.

• States rely almost entirely on the federal government to fund SNAP. Although states are responsible for half of SNAP’s administrative costs, they pay nothing to provide benefits, which account for over 90 percent of the program’s total costs.
• SNAP’s financing model gives states little financial incentive to reduce improper payments.
• The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) reported in 2015 that 42 of 53 state agencies had weakened their quality control procedures, which artificially lowered reported improper payment rates. Consequently, the USDA suspended reporting of payment error rates for 2015 and 2016.
• Average improper payments have almost tripled from 3.66 percent in FY 2014 to 10.93 percent in FY 2024.
• A 2016 USDA study found that one in five SNAP purchases were for sweetened drinks, desserts, salty snacks, candy, and sugar. SNAP participants have poorer nutrition and higher rates of obesity compared to nonparticipants.
• As of December 2025, the USDA has granted 18 states waivers to restrict the purchase of items such as soda and candy. These changes will be implemented throughout 2026. Federal rules restrict states from setting their own nutritional standards without a waiver.
• By bundling SNAP with agricultural subsidies in the Farm Bill, Congress has created a durable political coalition of nutrition assistance advocates and farm interests, making cost-control reforms difficult. This is a textbook case of logrolling that shields both programs from accountability, transparent debate, and reform.
• OBBBA reduced the federal share of administrative costs from 50 percent to 25 percent (effective FY 2027) and required states with payment error rates above 6 percent to pay a portion of SNAP benefit costs (ranging from 0 percent to 15 percent, effective FY 2028)." 

Further reading:

• “The SNAP Loophole that Lets Millionaires Receive Food Stamps” by Romina Boccia and Tyler Turman
• “How Biden’s Thrifty Food Plan Change Broke SNAP’s Cost Controls” by Romina Boccia and Tyler Turman
• “Food Stamp Shutdown Reveals the Fragility of Federal Welfare” by Romina Boccia and Tyler Turman
• “SNAP: High Costs, Low Nutrition” by Chris Edwards

Download a printable PDF version of this fact sheet here.

 

An RCT on AI and mental health

From Tyler Cowen. 

"Young adults today face unprecedented mental health challenges, yet many hesitate to seek support due to barriers such as accessibility, stigma, and time constraints. Bite-sized well-being interventions offer a promising solution to preventing mental distress before it escalates to clinical levels, but have not yet been delivered through personalized, interactive, and scalable technology. We conducted the first multi-institutional, longitudinal, preregistered randomized controlled trial of a generative AI-powered mobile app (“Flourish”) designed to address this gap. Over six weeks in Fall 2024, 486 undergraduate students from three U.S. institutions were randomized to receive app access or waitlist control. Participants in the treatment condition reported significantly greater positive affect, resilience, and social well-being (i.e., increased belonging, closeness to community, and reduced loneliness) and were buffered against declines in mindfulness and flourishing. These findings suggest that, with purposeful and ethical design, generative AI can deliver proactive, population-level well-being interventions that produce measurable benefits.

That is from a new paper by Julie Y.A. Cachia, et.al.  A single paper or study is hardly dispositive, even when it is an RCT.  But you should beware of those, such as Jon Haidt and Jean Twenge, who are conducting an evidence-less jihad against AI for younger people.

Via the excellent Kevin Lewis."