Science & Technology

Although many people take polyethylene for granted, almost everyone regularly uses myriad products made partly or entirely from it, including modern airplanes, trash bags, food storage containers, lightweight vehicles, stretch films, hard hats, detergent bottles, piping for natural gas and water, insulation for electrical wires, medical supplies, the list goes on and on.

Some things are seemingly so mundane, and we use them so routinely, that we scarcely notice how important they are to our lives. Take, for example, common kitchen supplies. Pause for a moment to consider how businesses developed four essential products—and how important those products are to our daily food preparation.

Oil producers in the "Bakken shale formation in western North Dakota and eastern Montana have produced 1 billion barrels of crude [oil]" as of the first quarter of 2014, reports the Associated Press. "North Dakota has generated 852 million barrels of Bakken crude, and Montana has produced about 151 million barrels."

Those of us who are not doctors, but who love our lives and our health, should not stand idly by as politicians and bureaucrats shackle the doctors on whom our lives and health may well depend. We should stand with those doctors who, like Craviotto, demand liberty to practice medicine in accordance with their own judgment.

Whereas in the United States owners of resources have a strong incentive to contract with frackers—development of Eagle Ford shale in Texas generated some $2.4 billion in leases in 2010 alone—European politicians and bureaucrats, who control the resources in question there, have little to no incentive (and likely negative incentive) to enable fracking.

What if, when you looked at a piece of cheese (for example), you saw not only the cheese’s shape, color, texture, and the like, but also its chemical composition? Thanks to portable near-infrared spectroscopes now under development, you may soon be able to scan cheese or virtually any other object to learn facts about its chemical makeup.

Due to government restrictions, UK producers have drilled only an averaged of 19 onshore wells per year over the last century. In stark contrast, because the U.S. government substantially protects the rights of private owners to subsurface oil and gas, energy producers here drill and frack thousands of wells annually.

SpaceX has successfully tested a soft landing of its Falcon9 rocket booster. Not only does such technology promise to vastly increase the launching of technologies and supplies into orbit, it promises to play a pivotal role in eventually transporting people to other planets, starting with Mars.

The measure proposes that local governments need only claim that fracking might somehow harm someone—under the so-called “precautionary principle,” they need not offer any evidence, much less prove anything—to trample the rights of energy producers and of the property owners with whom those producers contract.

Despite federal controls, American energy producers have dramatically expanded the production of domestic oil and natural gas, keeping consumer prices relatively low and providing work for millions of Americans. Cruz is right that restraining the federal government’s power to throttle energy producers will substantially free them to continue and expand their work.