Bill Richardson’s actions to attract aerospace jobs to New Mexico and to incubate the personal spaceflight industry put his state in the lead of US states promoting personal spaceflight. The only government that has done more to promote personal spaceflight is Russia’s. We would not make his choices about how to allocate those state dollars, but wise spending can come later after New Mexico reaps the benefits of being one of the leading states if not the leading state in personal spaceflight.

Our endorsement is provisional because we are looking for a national space commercialization and settlement policy from each candidate (and other policies to the extent they affect space commercialization and settlement) before we make a final endorsement. We’ll let you know who is leading throughout 2007 and 2008.

In Instapundit’s last poll he gets 62% thinking GOP will keep both houses. Tradesports has GOP keeping the House at 20-24% in today’s trading. We get to test the hard way whether infomarts are better than polls.

No anti-Krugman today. Times Select is free this week if you want to see what you’ve been missing.

Paul Krugman says that power usage is down in Iraq and that Bechtel did not finish the job on reconstruction. Krugman, as usual, takes a logical leap for the jugular.

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Richard Branson, ever the trend spotter, has pledged $3B in green investment. In the UK, they are beating the drum for a new CO₂ reduction treaty.

For this to work, it will need to be paid for x% by emitters, y% by users and 100-x-y% by countries that will benefit from abatement.

Air travel comprises 3% of emissions. Financial Times says get out of my face. 

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Carbon offsets are trading for about $5/ton in Europe. It turns out to be really cheap. What if it became really expensive like the doomsayers say like $100-$200/ton? So what. That turns out to be 7-15 cents per kWh or $1-2/gallon of gas. In Europe, it costs $130/tank to fill up. So we would have to pay an extra $1-$2/gallon in gas tax and we could sequester all the carbon we wanted. 7 cents per kWh? We generate 4 trillion kWh now at a cost of 7 cents per kWh that’s $280 billion in a $12 trillion economy or about 2% of our economy. So it would go up to 4% or 6%. So what!?

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Paul Krugman rants in tomorrow’s Times about how the Democrats should speak up if they win the House. Last week, he said this means spending 10% of the House’s floor time investigating the administration. This time he added Nancy Pelosi’s agenda item:

according to opinion polls, most Americans are actually to the left of Congressional Democrats on issues such as health care.

In particular, the public wants politicians to stand up to corporate interests. This is clear from the latest Newsweek poll, which shows overwhelming public support for the agenda Nancy Pelosi has laid out for her first 100 hours if she becomes House speaker. The strongest support is for her plan to have Medicare negotiate with drug companies for lower prices, which is supported by 74 percent of Americans — and by 70 percent of Republicans!

The first problem with this proposal is that Medicare has been captured by the drug companies and if they are empowered to do price controls, they will push prices up rather than down. Legislating lower prices is like trying to legislate the value of pi to be 3. It doesn’t work.

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Al Gore made some hay Thursday about Bush’s new national space policy. Gore asked space CEOs to read it. I consider myself a space CEO and am happy to oblige (even though I wasn’t present for the request). I also read Clinton’s space policy: