IndieDwell converts shipping containers into affordable housing. The Idaho-based business has taken an idea championed locally by entrepreneurs Sheila and Sidney Gunst (see “Thinking Outside the Container“) and turned it into a growing business enterprise. The company now sells 640-square-foot dwellings, including the cost of delivery and installation, for $78,000....
The American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) submitted WOTUS comments to the U.S. EPA on April 15, 2019. The 25-page document is worth reading. The AFBF comments are on a subject dear to the hearts of all who own land in the United States. The comments are submitted regarding the revised...
There is a hotbed of carbon tax advocacy at George Mason University, led by a former GOP congressman sent packing by South Carolina voters because he’s ready to tax them into embracing solar and wind. Robert Inglis was part of the carbon regulation panel discussion May 17 at the National...
While it would have been a popular step with his political base, and one he was expected to take, Governor Ralph Northam may have been smart to pass on seeking to veto state budget language preventing Virginia membership in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. Nothing in the budget language prevents...
In the last issue, I wrote about a new study published in Nature Sustainability, and the blog was entitled “Growing Corn Kills People”. After some difficulty I was able to obtain a copy of the maize study listed above, which I did not have on April 11. The conclusion that growing corn (maize)...
My Reason colleagues and I have long argued that per-gallon fuel taxes should be replaced by mileage-based user fees (MBUFs). I served on the Transportation Research Board committee that alerted the transportation community to the looming decline of fuel tax revenues, in 2006. My colleague Adrian Moore served on the...
With the U.S. unemployment rate at a nearly 50-year low of 3.6 percent in April, this year’s graduates should have an easier time finding jobs than their predecessors. And even better news is that wages for employees at private nonfarm companies have started rising — they were up 3.2 percent...
If the public policy debate over affordable dwellings is as impoverished as that described in The Virginia Mercury recently, poor Virginians are doomed to lives of housing misery. Here’s how reporter Ned Oliver sums up the controversy: “Is affordable housing something for the state to tackle, or should it be left to...
The building season is here, but for developers of Virginia’s two hotly-contested natural gas pipelines, activity is back in the government agencies and courthouses. The construction sites remain largely silent, delays running up the ultimate cost of the projects, including the cost of failure. Here is my (probably flawed) attempt...
Jason Hill, a professor at the University of Minnesota, and a team of other scientists issued a study on April 1, 2019, which initially I thought was an April Fool’s joke. It is no joke!According to one publication and its author, Prachi Patel, wrote on April 4, 2019 “…corn is...
