When the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT)was first founded back in 1985, we had little idea that 22 years later we would be in the middle of the fight for economic freedom for the world’s poor. For years, in speeches, articles, and on our daily Just the Facts radio commentary, we have argued for positive approaches to solving environmental problems through technology and human ingenuity – and that people are the earth’s greatest resource. Our work soon took us around the world – to environmental summits and world trade conferences in places like Kyoto, Buenos Aires, Istanbul, Cairo, Marrakesh, and [...]

This article is part two of a two-part series. Teaching property rights here at home Here in the United States, over 70% of all households are occupied by homeowners. Indeed, as Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto has reminded us, the U.S. built its wealth as a nation on the bedrock of home ownership and the right to start one�s own business. Sadly, for generations we denied these fundamental rights to certain segments of our population, and in so doing created an underclass that only recently has begun to move up the ladder. Minority home ownership in the U.S. topped the 50% [...]

This is part one of a two-part series. "O give me a home, where the buffalo roam, and the deer and the antelope play ..." "A man's home is his castle ....." Or, as first-time homeowner Jennifer Sims, a black single mother of three, realized while planning improvements to her cream-colored stucco house in Hillsborough County Florida: “It’s mine. I can do what I want with it. I can tear the walls down – not that I would.” How many of us can relate to these words? What is the source of this pride of home ownership? This is the question [...]

“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean,” said Humpty Dumpty – “neither more nor less.” Lewis Carroll’s “Looking Glass” logic too often seems to be a guiding principle for environmental and corporate social responsibility (CSR) activists. They claim to be committed to people and planet, not just profits – and to honesty, transparency, accountability and human health. One would expect that such basic ethical standards would apply equally to for-profit companies and nonprofit advocacy corporations. However, the activists who defined CSR standards routinely exempt themselves and use the terms primarily to pressure companies, raise [...]

The following article was recently published in the special "Energy, Environment and Politics" Autumn 2006 edition of "European View," the magazine of the European People's Party in Brussels. The full magazine can be read online at http://www.epp.eu/dbimages/pdf/_copy_4.. As European nations adjust their internal and external policies regarding energy, the environment, and economic development to accommodate the needs and desires of the new European Union, there is a great opportunity to ensure that the new policies will be beneficial to the developing world, and in particular to African nations that were once European colonies. Clearly, most Africans have not benefited much from [...]

With CFACT's growing interest in helping spur economic and environmental prosperity in the developing world, this is the second in an ongoing series of articles dealing with Africa. What is the value of a first-class highway network? Consider the 70,000-kilometer U.S. Interstate Highway System, which transportation expert Wendell Cox in 1996 described as “an engine that has driven 40 years of unprecedented prosperity and positioned the United States to remain the world’s preeminent power into the 21st Century.” Total construction cost for the basic system was $129 billion, yet as of 1996 the return on this nation’s greatest investment in transportation [...]

While the housing market in the United States has fallen on hard times thanks in large part to fluctuating interest rates, there is another - worldwide - housing boom under way that is in large part a direct result of changes in U.S. foreign policy. Back in 2002, President George W. Bush announced his intention to reshape U.S. foreign aid policy and practice through creation of the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), which today determines a nation's eligibility for U.S. aid based on its record of fighting corruption, fostering entrepreneurship, and promoting social justice. This formation of the MCC has already spawned [...]

"The only good thing about the good old days is that they're gone." My grandmother's wisdom came from experience. As a teenager in late nineteenth century Wisconsin, she had cleared tons of rocks from fields, toiled on the family farm, and hauled countless buckets of water. If she had to select just one modern technology, she said, she'd choose running water. But electricity was a close second. No wonder. Without electricity, modern life reverts to her childhood: no lights, refrigeration, heating, air-conditioning, radio, television, computers, safe running water or mechanized equipment for homes, schools, shops, hospitals, offices and factories. Incredibly, this [...]

Our perception of reality and the role of government in our lives greatly influences how we view a subject like the issue of "property rights."  This nation's founders believed that life, liberty, and property were inalienable rights and that governments were instituted primarily to protect and ensure that those rights would not be taken away by force.   The "land of the free" is the prosperous nation it is today – and the beacon of light to oppressed billions the world over - largely because of these underlying principles.   Today, however, we are in danger of abandoning our founding principles and suborning [...]

Reading the headlines lately, we could not help but notice that two competing groups of evangelical Christians have been at odds over the nature and extent of human-induced climate change, as well as our nation's proper response to it    Reading between the lines, however, we believe both groups ought to be able to work together to improve the lives of people in the developing world who are the most likely to be impacted by weather conditions, whether or not they are ultimately proven to be related to global warming, and the least able to deal directly with floods, drought, and other [...]

A college student in Wisconsin.  An impoverished farmer in Mexico.  A radio listener in San Jose.  A parliament member in Brussels.  An internet reader in St. Louis.  A rancher in rural Idaho. What do they all have in common? Well I'm pleased to tell you that each one is among a growing number of people, here and around the world, who are gaining a fresh new perspective about issues of environment and development because of the work you and I are accomplishing through CFACT. With the goal of "enhancing the fruitfulness of the earth, and all of its inhabitants," CFACT is [...]

Of all the laws passed in the last thirty-some years, few have been more contentious than the Endangered Species Act (ESA) of 1973. Environmentalists complain that the ESA is not strong enough, but landowners are bitter because it too often destroys their ability to use their land.  Indeed, entire communities in Oregon and Washington became ghost towns in the 1990s when the listing of the endangered spotted owl prevented forest harvesting which was the economic lifeblood of these communities. Ironically, the concept of protecting endangered species has wide support, even among those who bitterly fight the current ESA. It is not [...]

In the weeks leading up to the early July G-8 meeting in Scotland, environmental  activists and analysts predicted the heat would be turned up on President George Bush  during the meeting to sign the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. To the contrary, the G-  8 meeting and other new initiatives such as the Methane to Markets (M2M) and the Asia-  Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, strongly suggest world leaders  appear to be moving away from Kyoto and towards Bush's climate change position.   Long before the Kyoto Protocol came into force in February 2005, the M2M agreement  was signed by [...]

From our beginnings two decades ago (the same year as the Live Aid concerts) as advocates for free-market approaches to environmental protection, the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) has grown into an international organization with a firm belief that the twin ideals of free people and free markets are essential to creating and maintaining a clean environment.    As we began traveling to world trade and environmental summits, our hearts were stirred for those living in poverty in nations with rich natural resources, but corrupt and oppressive, or just misguided, regimes.  Over the past two years we have devised a new [...]