Cato Institute: on Environment


Cato Institute: Minimal GMO labeling advances science & consumers

President Obama quietly signed legislation requiring special labeling for commercial foods containing genetically modified organisms (GMOs)--plants and animals with desirable genetic traits that were directly implanted in a laboratory. Gene modification typically yields plants & animals that take less time to reach maturity, have greater resistance to drought or disease, or have other desirable traits.

Most of the foods that humans & animals have consumed for millennia have been genetically modified. Usually this was done through the unpredictable, haphazard technique of cross-fertilization, a technique whose development marked the dawn of agriculture. Yet the new law targets only the highly precise gene manipulations done in laboratories.

Anti-GMO activists oppose the new law because it preempts more rigorous regulation. And that's exactly what President Obama and Congress intended to do: they have helped consumers and advanced science, to the frustration of the anti-GMO crowd.

Source: Cato Institute 2015-16 voting recommendation on GMOs Aug 1, 2016

Cato Institute: End federal grants to reduce diesel emissions

Spending money is like mainlining heroin to politicians. It doesn't matter how often they promise to reform. They just can't quit. The federal government seeks to reduce diesel emissions, a worthy objective. However, noted GAO: "Fourteen grant and loan programs at the Department of Energy, Department of Transportation, and the Environmental Protection Agency and three tax expenditures fund activities that have the effect of reducing mobile source diesel emissions; enhanced collaboration and performance measurement could improve these fragmented and overlapping programs."

EPA runs 37 laboratories housed in 170 buildings located in 30 cities. That agency concluded GAO "needs to revise its overall approach to managing its 37 laboratories to address potential overlap and fragmentation and more fully leverage its limited resources." The waste just keeps going on and on.

Source: Cato Institute 2015-16 voting recommendation on Diesel Mar 12, 2012

  • The above quotations are from Cato Institute congressional voting recommendations.
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