Tag: regulation
Mandating Low-Nicotine Cigarettes Could Make Smoking More Dangerous
“the administration revealed plans to require cigarette makers to severely cut the amount of nicotine in their products. A proposed rule change “would establish a maximum nicotine level in cigarettes and certain finished tobacco products.” The idea, it says, is to make cigarettes less addictive.
Nicotine is the substance in cigarettes that makes them physically addictive. But nicotine itself isn’t what makes cigarettes so dangerous. (Some scientists “wonder if a daily dose could be as benign as the caffeine many of us get from a morning coffee,” notes Scientific American.) It’s the other ingredients in cigarettes, and the byproducts of combustion, that make smoking cigarettes so bad for you.
This is one reason why the war on vaping is so stupid, and also speaks to the half-baked premises of the Biden administration’s latest anti-smoking plan.
In a world with lower-nicotine cigarettes, people already addicted to nicotine will still be addicted—they’ll just have to smoke more cigarettes to get their nicotine fix. That means that mandating all U.S. cigarettes be low-nicotine cigarettes could actually make smoking riskier by requiring smokers to smoke more and consume more of the other substances in cigarettes in order to get the same level of nicotine they’re used to.”
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“If the U.S. goes all low-nicotine smokes, other countries will still be producing full-nicotine cigarettes. And this opens up a great opportunity for smuggling and black market sales of higher nicotine cigarettes.
A bigger black market in cigarettes means three things, none of them good. First, it creates more room for organized crime to operate. Second, it creates more room for counterfeit cigarettes that could be even more dangerous for consumers. And third, it invites more policing of cigarette sales, which means more police time wasted on victimless crimes, more monitoring and harassment of business owners, and more potentially dangerous interactions between individuals and police.”
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“lowering nicotine could also backfire by convincing some smokers that their habit is harmless.”
In a Surprise Move, the FDA Denies Approval for Juul Tobacco and Menthol Vapes
“After nearly two years of review, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is preparing to deny Juul’s application to keep its tobacco- and menthol-flavored vaping products on the market, according to reporting from The Wall Street Journal. The news is surprising; when compared to competitors’ applications, Juul’s was one of the most detailed and data-heavy, showing just how effective it was at transitioning smokers away from cigarettes, toward a safer alternative.”
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“But what appeared to be a classic Silicon Valley success story soon became a victim of an intensely ideological war on nicotine. Unfortunately, Juul also for a time became the most popular product among minors who were experimenting with vaping. Youth vaping rates rose substantially. Current e-cigarette use, defined as taking a puff or more in the past 30 days, jumped from 11.7 percent in 2017 to 27.5 percent in 2019.
Juul was squarely blamed for the rise of youth vaping, with critics pointing to its initial marketing campaigns showing people in their early twenties enjoying the product. Critics alleged that flavors like mango and cucumber were especially appealing to the younger demographic. But what they forget is that in late 2016, the company switched to exclusively using models who are 35 or older in their advertising campaigns, as well as only using real customers who have switched from smoking to vaping. What anti-vaping campaigners also ignore is that the vast majority of adult vapers quit smoking using sweet or fruity flavors; such products are not just desired by teens.
The claim that Juul’s flavors were the underlying cause for the rise in youth vaping is highly dubious, considering there were thousands of different flavors for other e-cigarettes on the market years before Juul took off. Surveys of teenagers by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that just 13.2 percent of young people who use e-cigarettes say they do so for the flavors. Experimentation with e-cigarettes mimics other behaviors like alcohol and illicit drug use, often with the same populations engaging in these types of activities. But to appease critics, Juul voluntarily removed all flavors other than tobacco and menthol from the market in 2019.”
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“In 2020, the Cochrane Review, widely considered the gold standard for evaluating evidence-based medicine, concluded that e-cigarettes are more effective than traditional nicotine replacement therapies for helping smokers quit. By banning the most effective and popular e-cigarette on the market, there is no doubt that the FDA’s choice will force a portion of current Juul users to go back to smoking, and an unknown number of smokers to never make the healthier switch to vaping. What economist Alex Tabarrok calls the FDA’s “invisible graveyard” just got a whole lot bigger.”
What would it mean to treat guns the way we treat cars?
“The decline of motor vehicle deaths in America over the past two decades is part of a broader trend that began in the 1960s. Ralph Nader’s seminal 1965 exposé, Unsafe at Any Speed, catalyzed an auto safety movement that culminated in the creation of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which set up the infrastructure for automobile safety.
From the 1970s onward, the NHTSA would maintained a database on motor vehicle-related deaths, make research investments, and provide safety certifications for cars on the market, incentivizing auto companies to adopt safety procedures. The work of the NHTSA and civil society groups like the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety helped usher in a new era where safety features like seat belts and airbags became standardized. All of this, along with measures like universal state licensing of drivers and registration of cars, led to the decline in youth and overall American motor vehicle mortality. The CDC would eventually tout this decline as one of the country’s biggest public health achievements of the 20th century.
And as Lee recounts in the NEJM article, that progress continued into the 21st century. In 1998, frontal airbags became mandatory in all cars and trucks sold in the US. Other improvements like automatic emergency braking, blind-spot detection, side airbags, and rear-facing cameras also contributed to an improved auto safety landscape. “What we’ve seen is more than a half-century of efforts to make the automobile safer,” said Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning and director of the Rudin Center for Transportation at New York University.
If cars went one way with safety, guns went the other. Guns are one of the only consumer goods whose safety is not regulated by any government agency. Gun manufacturers are also very insulated from lawsuits, and perhaps consequently, have little incentive to design safer guns, such as “smart guns” that would only be operable by the users they are registered to. As Moss said, “We really have a Wild West approach to the manufacture of weapons in this country.””
Would These 4 Gun Controls Prevent Mass Shootings?
“The New York Times reckons that four gun control measures Congress is considering “might have changed the course of at least 35 mass shootings” since 1999—one-third of attacks in which a gunman killed at least four people. While that conclusion is excessively optimistic, the newspaper is at least asking the right question: Are new restrictions on firearms likely to work as advertised?
President Joe Biden, by contrast, simply assumes the wisdom of the policies he favors and the bad faith of anyone who opposes them. “The issue we face is one of conscience and common sense,” he insisted last week, implying that skeptics lack one or both.
Among other things, Biden wants Congress to require background checks for private gun transfers, which means such transactions must be completed through a federally licensed dealer. The Times found that four of the mass killers in the 105 cases it examined bought guns in private transactions.
One of those perpetrators had already failed a background check. One of the other three, the Violence Policy Center reports, “legally bought” a pistol from a gun shop. According to a 2013 review in The Atlantic, it is not clear whether either of the two other killers had disqualifying criminal or psychiatric records.
In at least one case out of 105, then, an expanded federal background-check requirement might have been an obstacle. But that’s assuming private sellers generally would comply with that mandate, and data from states that notionally require “universal background checks” suggest such rules are widely flouted.
The Times found that at least 20 mass murderers used magazines that held more than 10 rounds. The 1994 federal “assault weapon” law, which expired in 2004, prohibited the production and sale of such magazines, and Biden wants Congress to renew that limit.
Even if we assume that the need to switch magazines after firing 10 rounds can make an important difference in mass shootings, the effectiveness of a ban is doubtful. A 2004 report commissioned by the Justice Department found that the 1994 ban had no measurable impact on the use of “large capacity magazines” in crimes, probably “due to the immense stock of exempted pre-ban magazines”—a stock that is even bigger now than it was then.
In 10 of the 105 mass shootings analyzed by the Times, the perpetrators used stolen guns. The paper suggests “safe storage” legislation backed by Biden might have made a difference in those cases.
One such bill would establish a $500 fine for gun owners who fail to secure their weapons in circumstances where a minor “is likely to gain access” to them or in households where a resident is legally barred from possessing firearms. If a minor or prohibited person uses an unsecured gun to injure or kill someone, the owner would face up to five years in prison.
The bill also would provide grants aimed at encouraging states to establish and enforce similar requirements. The idea that such laws could prevent would-be mass shooters from obtaining firearms assumes wide compliance and a lack of alternative sources, both of which are debatable assumptions.
The Times says “four of the gunmen might have been stymied” by a law prohibiting federally licensed gun dealers from selling semiautomatic centerfire rifles that accept detachable magazines to anyone younger than 21. That bill, which Biden also supports, avoids the arbitrary distinctions drawn by “assault weapon” bans, which target guns based on functionally unimportant characteristics.
Since the bill does not apply to private transfers, however, adult buyers younger than 21 could still legally obtain semiautomatic rifles. Furthermore, a federal appeals court ruled last month that prohibiting young adults from buying such firearms because a tiny fraction of them might commit violent crimes was inconsistent with the Second Amendment.
Before deciding whether to support policies like these, legislators should rationally weigh their costs and benefits, including their constitutional implications. Biden prefers a different approach, replacing logic and evidence with self-righteous certitude.”
The Supreme Court just okayed Biden’s “social cost of carbon.” It’s still way too low.
“according to some top environmental economists, we have good reason to believe the true cost of emitting carbon is actually a lot higher than even a $51 price tag suggests.
There are a couple of reasons for that. First, until recently, the economists who calculated the SCC had barely factored in one of the biggest harms that climate change can cause: human mortality. Second, the way the SCC had been calculated rested on a problematic premise: that damage in the future counts for significantly less than damage in the present.”
Study: Europe’s Aggressive Privacy Regulations Are Killing App Innovation
“Compliance costs are high and fines for failing to do so are significant”
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“The working paper’s four writers drilled down into the data and determined that GDPR helped push the exit of a third of available apps and also suppressed the introduction of new apps into the market. New app introductions in the quarters following the launch of GDPR enforcement dropped by half.
“Whatever the privacy benefits of GDPR, they come at substantial costs in foregone innovation,” the authors note.”
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“a sharp decline in both successful and unsuccessful apps entering the market. It wasn’t just bad or predatory apps being affected by GDPR.”
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” They also calculate that GDPR raises costs to produce apps by more than 30 percent.”
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“The report’s authors conclude that when the quality of a product is unpredictable (like an unknown or not-yet-existent app), the ease of entry into a marketplace is important to help determine its value to consumers. When regulatory barriers like GDPR drive up entry costs, then there can be “substantial [consumer] welfare losses” in the form of stillborn products and services we might want or need but never see.”
Eliminating Single-Family Zoning Isn’t the Reason Minneapolis Is a YIMBY Success Story
“Housing production is up, and rents do indeed appear to be falling. But the effects of Minneapolis’ particular means of eliminating single-family-only zoning, and allowing up to triplexes on residential land citywide, have been exceedingly modest.
Newly legal triplexes and duplexes make up a tiny fraction of new homes being built. Other less headline-grabbing reforms appear to be doing the Lord’s work of boosting housing production.”
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“Wittenberg credits the city’s elimination of parking minimums—which had typically required one parking spot per housing unit—with facilitating increased construction of smaller apartment buildings.
The city has been chipping away at residential parking minimums since 2009. The Minneapolis 2040 plan eliminated them entirely. (The city has also adopted some rather un-free market parking policies, including parking maximums in some areas and bike parking minimums.)
Data culled by Wittenberg, and shared with Reason, shows that 19 major projects have been approved by Minneapolis’ Planning Commission since parking minimums were eliminated. The median project provided .42 residential parking spaces per unit, with smaller apartment buildings typically including even less parking.
“For site constraint reasons and economic reasons, it would have been hard to park those buildings at one parking space per unit,” he says. “We’re pretty clearly seeing that is making a significant difference.”
In January 2021, Minneapolis also implemented additional parts of the 2040 Minneapolis comprehensive plan that allows for larger, denser apartment buildings in more of the city, particularly along commercial corridors and near public transit stops. That’s also helped facilitate more development, says Wittenberg.
Flisrand, on Twitter, argues that the fight over eliminating single-family-zoning sucked up most of the attention in the Minneapolis 2040 debate, thus paving the way for more impactful policies like parking minimum elimination and commercial corridor upzoning.”
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“One also doesn’t want to learn the wrong lesson that eliminating single-family zoning is the only supply increasing reform cities need to adopt.
There’s a certain current of thought on the political left—represented most prominently by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.)—that supports eliminating single-family zoning in wealthy neighborhoods while also expressing extreme skepticism of denser private, market-rate development elsewhere in the city
But legalizing the latter type of development, at least in Minneapolis’s experience, appears to go a lot farther in actually producing more housing units and holding down rents.
More and more jurisdictions across the country are catching on to the fact that their zoning laws are strangling housing production and driving up housing costs, and moving to make changes.”
It Can Already Take Weeks To Get An Abortion
“Oklahoma legislators who want to end abortion don’t have much more to do in their state. New data exclusively analyzed by FiveThirtyEight shows that it’s already very difficult to get an abortion appointment in Oklahoma — and it has nothing to do with the state’s new ban. Ever since the Supreme Court allowed a highly restrictive abortion law to go into effect in Texas last September, Oklahoma’s four abortion clinics have been overrun with demand from out-of-state patients. When a team of academic researchers posed as pregnant people and called the Oklahoma clinics at the beginning of March, all four told the callers they couldn’t schedule them for an appointment.
As is the case for all the data, it’s possible that someone calling at another time would have gotten a different answer. When FiveThirtyEight reached out to the four Oklahoma clinics last week, one administrator said in an email, “Our wait times at the beginning of March for the [abortion] pill was about 3 weeks and for surgical procedure about 3-4 weeks. … We did not stop scheduling at any point.”
Regardless, the impact of the Texas ban isn’t just being felt in Oklahoma. According to the research, waits of two or three weeks for an abortion appointment are common in eight states surrounding Texas — much longer than the waits in states further away.”
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“Further restricting abortion will affect people all over the country, including in blue states. In fact, that may already be happening. Even in states where abortion access is protected, there were clinics with long waits in the data we analyzed. Thirty-one percent of clinics in New York and 67 percent of clinics in Oregon, for example, had a wait time of more than a week. This was particularly pronounced for clinics in rural areas, but more densely populated areas weren’t immune. In seven metropolitan areas — about 3 percent of metro areas with clinics — there were no abortion clinics scheduling an appointment at the time researchers contacted them. In an additional 30 metropolitan areas — about 13 percent — the earliest appointment was more than two weeks away.”
Drilling permits spiked then plunged under Biden
““The oil and gas industry has millions of acres leased … they could be drilling right now, yesterday, last week, last year,” Biden said last week. “They are not using them for production now. That’s their decision.”
For its part, industry has not leapt to expand drilling.
The major public oil and gas companies that drive much of the United States’ activity are holding themselves back with uncharacteristically miserly capital expense plans, returning cash to investors instead of drilling new wells. Officials with some companies say they are also facing bottlenecks for equipment, rigs and labor.
When it comes to public lands and waters, though, oil and gas companies have accused the White House of not truly supporting their industry and aiming to curb production.
Ryan McConnaughey, spokesperson for the Petroleum Association of Wyoming, said the Biden administration has a “playbook” for federal development: “delay, distract and deflect.”
“It doesn’t come as much of a surprise that the Biden Administration’s approval of APDs [applications for permit to drill] has plummeted,” he said.
Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Western Energy Alliance, said the political focus on the drilling permits and leases already held by industry is a red herring from the White House.
“Just because Acme O&G isn’t using a permit right away doesn’t mean that ABC O&G doesn’t need one for a well it’s planning to drill now,” she said. “If the federal permitting situation weren’t so inefficient and fraught with political interference, companies wouldn’t need to request a large inventory even years in advance.”
If the White House wants drilling to increase, they could ease regulatory requirements and speed up permitting, she said.
The permitting showdown is the latest of many disagreements over the federal oil program under Biden. When Biden came into office last year, he paused oil and gas leasing on federal lands and last fall published a report criticizing the program as antiquated and deferential to industry.
The leasing moratorium was overturned by a federal judge, but leasing has been slow to resume — and bogged down in continued legal wrangling. The outlook for new leasing in 2022 remains in limbo as Interior has said it will be difficult to move forward after a Louisiana federal judge blocked the use of an interim climate metric.
Meanwhile, Interior is developing regulations on oil and gas that will increase royalty rates and bonding requirements on federal leases, as well as impose new methane rules.
But the administration has also taken heat from environmental groups for focusing on these regulatory reforms rather than aggressively working to retire the oil and gas program.
Fossil fuels developed on federal lands, including coal, are responsible for as much as a quarter of the country’s downstream carbon dioxide emissions, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, a statistic that’s underscored criticism of continued drilling from environmental groups and climate activists.
Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the environmental group Center for Western Priorities, said the Biden administration has continued to “rubber stamp” drilling approvals.
“Even under Biden, 96 percent are getting approved versus 98 percent under Trump,” he said.
Weiss downplayed the impact of the permitting slowdown on industry, arguing that the number of permits issued doesn’t have an immediate correlation to industry’s ability to drill and that companies frequently allow permits to expire without being used. His organization counted 8,000 permits that oil companies had not used or had allowed to forfeit between 2016 and 2021.
“A slight dip in approvals makes no difference at all because APDs and available leases have never been a bottleneck,” he said.
With oil and gas companies exercising “fiscal discipline” to please investors, that’s even more the case, he said.”