BREXIT BETRAYAL IMMINENT: Theresa May’s terrible deal that would put the UK in permanent bondage to the EU was voted down tonight by a huge margin. Tomorrow, the Mother of Parliaments will vote against “no deal,” because there are enough MPs scared of flights being grounded and borders clanging shut on March 29th. That means on Thursday the House will probably vote to delay Brexit. The EU has said it’s not going to negotiate further. The likelihood of a second referendum rigged to ensure remain wins (by pitting the May Deal against Remain, perhaps) has increased significantly.

It will be interesting to see if the weekend brings protests at the imminent betrayal of Brexit or whether (as I suspect) the British public are just so tired of the whole thing they’ll put up with remaining the way they put up with socialism for 40 years.

This will of course be touted as a win for “democracy.”

HAPPY INTERNATIONAL POLAR BEAR DAY!: A new report finds that there are more polar bears around today than at any time since they were protected by international treaty in 1973. As Guido Fawkes reports, the numbers are so high that Inuits have been pleading for their own protection from violent attacks by the not-so-cuddly critters.

HARD BREXIT > BRINO: The great Dan Mitchell sums up why a “hard” Brexit (I prefer “clean” Brexit myself) would be better than Brexit In Name Only. Of course, the New York Times is desperately trying to persuade its readers that prosperous Britain is already worse than Venezuela:

The scene that met Cockburn’s eyes upon exiting the terminal at Heathrow reminded him of his days as a foreign correspondent during the Lebanese civil war, or a night out in south London. A dog was eating the innards of a corpse, because supplies of Romanian dog food have broken down. A naked fat man had carved off a slice of his own buttock and was roasting it over a burning tyre, because imports of Bulgarian lamb are held up at Calais. A woman offered to prostitute herself for an avocado, and to sell both of her blank-eyed children for a packet of French butter. There were no black taxis either, because London’s notoriously pro-Brexit taxi drivers had all joined one nationalist militia or other. Finally, a black-market cheese dealer with a rocket launcher affixed to the back of his pickup agreed to take Cockburn into the city. They bribed their way through the checkpoints with wedges of brie. Or not.

All right, that was actually a Spectator columnist satirizing the Times’ coverage. But it’s not far off…

WHY THE COURTS WON’T SAVE CONGRESS FROM ITSELF: Or, why the President will win the wall fight – “Congress has been heading to hell for decades, and it is a bit late to complain about the destination.”

IT’S ALMOST LIKE AUTOMOBILITY IS CONVENIENT OR SOMETHING: Desperate handwringing in Cambridge, Mass., today as its residents just won’t do what they are supposed to do and give up their cars for public transport.

THE NEW DEAL ISN’T GREEN, IT’S RED: There’s only one word to describe the economic aspects of the Green New Steal, and that word is communism. I explain in a little more detail here as I examine each of the touted benefits of the scheme.

EVIL PLOT TO LET LEGISLATORS VOTE ON GREEN NEW DEAL: In a development I must admit I hadn’t seen coming, Sen. Ed Markey is objecting to the Senate Majority Leader’s plan for a vote on his Green New Steal bill:

You see, the idea that elected legislators in the national legislature’s premier debating chamber should debate and vote on an introduced resolution is actually a plot to sabotage a national debate on the legislation:

Got that? Good. 

THE GREEN NEW DEAL WILL MEAN TRASHING ENVIRONMENTAL LAWS: The Green New Steal…err…Deal envisages a massive and rapid transformation of society akin to mobilization for the Second World War. An under-appreciated aspect of what that means is that laws that delay projects in the name of assessing environmental impact will have to be ripped up. My colleague Myron Ebell explains:

One aspect of covering the landscape with hundreds of thousands of square miles of windmills and solar panels is that to do so would require suspending federal, state, and local environmental statutes, permitting procedures, and land use plans. Forget about the Endangered Species Act’s habitat protections and prohibitions on killing endangered birds and bats. The Clean Water Act’s wetlands protections will have to be overlooked. Environmental impact statements that now take years to prepare, years to move through the permitting process, and more years to litigate, are out the window. Wind and solar projects will have to be permitted in days.

There’s a lot more to complain about when it comes to The Great New Steal, but the duplicitous nature of the green environmental movement is on full display here.

LESS REGULATION AND LESS DEPENDENCY: That’s what Wayne Crews suggests should be the 5 word theme of tonight’s SOTU.

MEET THE CLIMATE RESISTANCE: On December 30^th, NBC Meet the Press host Chuck Todd devoted an entire episode to promoting the views of climate change alarmists. He said, “the science is settled, even if political opinion is not.” Todd expressly banned dissenting views, which are rooted in real-world scientific data.

My group CEI is pushing back with an ad campaign centered on a TV spot and a full page ad in the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. You can view the ads and help CEI push back here. [Updated with fixed link]

FEAR PROFITEERS: My colleague Michelle Minton has an extensive report out today detailing the links between public health advocacy groups and government agencies that result in unfounded public-private scare campaigns about vaping products:

Unfortunately, promoting public health is not the sole priority of health charities. Fundraising is also a primary objective for activist groups. The most effective way to raise revenue and influence is to sound the alarm in news headlines about an urgent health problem, whether real or exaggerated.

That problem is compounded by the fact that health charities and government agencies work together to raise one another’s influence and, ultimately, increase each other’s bottom line. Anti-smoking and health advocacy groups, like the American Cancer Society and the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, seek taxpayer-funded grants from government agencies, like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and the National Institutes of Health. In turn, the taxpayer-funded activists lobby Congress to increase funding for the government agencies that bestow grants on their organizations. These incentives can distort the debate around important public health issues like smoking cessation.

And students of the economics of regulation will not be surprised to hear that alongside these baptists is a bunch of bootleggers.

The result of this self-interested campaign is the FDA’s crackdown on products that have helped many thousands, including people in my own family, stop smoking. Read Michelle’s full report here.

LET THEM EAT CAKE: Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill on the Gilets Jaunes protests:

Most strikingly this is a people’s rebellion against the onerous consequences of climate-change policy, against the politics of environmentalism and its tendency to punish the little people for daring to live relatively modern, fossil-fuelled lives. This is new. This is unprecedented. We are witnessing perhaps the first mass uprising against eco-elitism and we should welcome it with open arms to the broader populist revolt that has been sweeping Europe for a few years now.

Jupiter’s response? To create a “High Council for the Climate.” It’s not as if there isn’t plenty of warning from French history about ignoring the true demands of the people.

NEW FROM THE WHITE HOUSE: A Council of Economic Advisers report on The Opportunity Costs of Socialism. As someone once said, they’re real, and they’re spectacular.

JUNK SCIENCE NEWS: My colleague Angela Logomasini has some potentially good news about a trial concerning the essential weedkiller Roundup, where the judge looks likely to toss an award of damages by a lower court that ignored the scientific evidence. Meanwhile, the Junkman himself, Steve Milloy, has a new report out that debunks false claims that the Trump administration plan to scale back government fuel efficiency mandates poses an offsetting risk of deaths from increased tailpipe emissions.

RESQUIESCAT IN PACE: I have just learned that my old friend Prof. David Henderson CMG has passed away at the good age of 91 (this is not the David Henderson of Econlog fame). David’s concept of the “Do It Yourself Economics” that politicians use was introduced in the BBC Reith Lectures in 1985 – well worth a listen. And at CEI we were privileged to publish an American version of his extended essay, The Role of Business in the Modern World, which critiqued the fashionable notion of “corporate social responsibility.” The world’s collective wisdom score just lowered slightly.

ALARMISTS GONNA ALARM: Some of the usual suspects used their perch in the Washington Post last week to allege that the administration’s new fuel economy rule (the SAFE rule) will lead to a post-apocalyptic hellscape. My colleague Marlo Lewis eviscerates this alarmist claptrap:

“Last month, deep in a 500-page draft environmental impact statement, the Trump administration made a startling assumption: On its current course, the planet will warm a disastrous 7 degrees by the end of this century,” [the authors] breathlessly report.

Actually, there is nothing startling about that assumption. It’s the same old catastrophe narrative begat by mating overheated climate models…with an emission scenario known as RCP8.5 that bizarrely assumes coal displaces gas as the world’s dominant electricity fuel throughout the 21st century…

The EIS [Environmental Impact Statement] finds that replacing the Obama mileage standards with the SAFE rule’s standards would have vanishingly small impacts on greenhouse gas emissions, global temperatures, and sea levels.

Specifically, under the SAFE rule, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration would reach 789.76 parts per million in the year 2100 instead of 789.11 ppm—an 8/100th of a percent increase. That extra 0.65 part per million of carbon dioxide would increase global average annual temperature by 0.003°C and sea levels by 6 millimeters in 2100.

In fact, the new SAFE rule will save lives. Not that the Post would deign to let you know that. Read Marlo’s entire post.

WHAT CAN THE MARKET KNOW THAT THE FDA DOESN’T?: The FDA announces new restrictions on vaping products, and tobacco stocks trend upwards. Hmmm.

GOVERNMENT FOR RENT: My organization (the Competitive Enterprise Institute) released a new report this morning by our brilliant Senior Fellow Chris Horner, detailing a scheme in which governors’ offices are coordinating with environmental activists and donors, who in turn are underwriting a massive, off-the-books campaign to provide staff and other resources to elected officials. The report, titled “Government for Rent: How Special Interests Finance Governors to Pursue Their Climate Policy Agenda,” uses public documents to demonstrate how donors are funneling tens of millions of dollars to privately fund staff—public relations professionals, consultants, and what aides call “necessary support functions”—for climate advocacy work at the governors’ disposal. This report follows Horner’s recent analysis detailing how activist donors are paying to place prosecutors in state attorney general offices to pursue an expressly partisan climate change agenda.

Lifezette has more coverage here.

LET THEM EAT KALE: A few years ago it was fashionable to ask, “Are we Rome?” Martin Hutchinson suggests a far better parallel would be 18th Century France:

Today’s intellectual Ivy-educated elite is wandering around the Petit Trianon playing at being a shepherdess, not playing cricket and hunting with ordinary folk.

In its economic attitudes, the U.S. elite is also 18th Century French. It sees essentially no limit to its ability to make economically damaging regulations if some pet cause is at stake. It takes a far greater interest in the theoretical possibility of global warming a century hence and in theoretical dangers to the environment from coal extraction than in the practical problems of generating electricity from wind power on a calm day or from solar power on a cloudy day.

Bien sur.

CONGRESS WON’T ACT – TIME FOR SCOTUS: The Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, better known as the CFPB, is blatantly unconstitutional, as Brett Kavanaugh wrote [PDF link] for the DC Circuit court (his verdict was overturned on review). Congress (more precisely, the Senate) has failed to pass the necessary reforms. So today my organization, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, filed for cert. with the Supreme Court in our case against the Bureau. You can read more about it here. I’ll try to keep you up to date.

DOUBLE WHAMMY: A few weeks ago I posted about New York City small business owner Eli Amsel, whose business was under threat from minimum wage laws. Now he is facing an even more existential threat to his plastic bag business thanks to a “who has the bigger Green credentials” fight between Andrew Cuomo and Cynthia Nixon. My colleague Angela Logomasini has the full story here.

A BIT LIKE HISTORY, THEN: The great Ron Bailey says most nutrition research is bunk.

DERANGED: That’s the only rational way to describe the reaction to this tweet by Zina Bash’s husband.

IF SOMETHING CANNOT GO ON FOREVER IT WILL STOP: Looks like Herb Stein’s maxim is being validated again in Germany, where its green energy policy is hitting the practical realities of Germany’s dependence on coal.

THE MODERN SPOILS SYSTEM: Further to Mark’s post this morning, I’d like to encourage you to check out my colleague Chris Horner’s new report Law Enforcement for Rent. It really is an appalling form of spoils system when a political office holder gives over some aspect of that office to donors in the form of privately-funded prosecutors. Chris says, “This mercenary use of state law enforcement power should be the subject of prompt legislative oversight.” Indeed.