“Hey, Pals, This is Reading Kind of Ripe”

The Wall Street Journal ran a letter to the editor on Tuesday (August 13) from the president of the California State Board of Education about how an op-ed two weeks earlier, “California Wants to Teach Your Kids that Capitalism Is Racist,” was unfair since the curriculum in question was only a draft, not official policy.  A fair point, but only to a point, as the simple fact that the curricular draft was somehow deemed fit for dissemination and comment is telling.  Here are just two excerpts from the critical July 29th op-ed by Williamson M. Evers. “The document is filled...

The most important election of 2019

If you have not already done so, please vote for American Experiment's report, Doubling Down on Failure, for Most Influential Research!

Time to celebrate National Employee Freedom Week!

NEFW is an annual awareness campaign held each August that seeks to empower every American to make his or her own decision about association or union membership. Through the Center's EmployeeFreedomMN and EducatedTeachersMN projects, we have worked hard to make sure every public employee in Minnesota knows his or her rights and options regarding union membership.

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WindFail: Minnesota Wind Facilities Could Produce Less Electricity in 2019 Than In 2018

This is huge news. I was looking through some data from the Energy Information Administration’s website and I stumbled upon this interesting graph which shows that electricity generation from wind in 2019 could be less than it was in 2018 (red line added for emphasis). As you can see, generation from wind power peaked in December of 2017 and has not reached anywhere close to that height in the following months. In fact, wind output was 24 percent lower in December of 2018 than in December of 2017. It is interesting to note that wind generation did increases by about...

Why Keynes Believed Efforts to Fight Income Inequality Hinder Economic Growth

Keynes might not actually have said, “When events change, I change my mind,” but the flexibility of his beliefs was legendary.

Burning Wood Pollutes More than Coal-Fired Power Plants and Factories in Minnesota, Should We Ban Campfires?

Most people in Minnesota probably don’t realize that our air is incredibly clean. According to Minnesota Pollution Control Agency data, our air meets all federal air quality standards, which are designed to be protective of even the most vulnerable populations such as children and the elderly. In fact, none of the categories of pollutants measured (ozone, fine particulates, lead, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, or sulfur dioxide) were even a risk for exceedance. In a nutshell, it means our air is impeccably clean. Despite this fact, many renewable energy groups want to shut down our coal-fired power plants in order to...

Solar Roads Turned Out To Be A “Colossal Failure”

By now it should probably be more surprising when the next “big thing” in renewable energy isn’t a colossal failure, but until that time comes, people will be surprised by how inefficient and expensive wind and solar truly are. The last example is the solar roads built in France and the United States that have turned out to be abject failures. According to Business Insider: Two years after the world’s first solar road — the Normandy road in France — was set up, it’s turned out to be a colossal failure, according to a report by Le Monde. The road has deteriorated...