How Banning Carbon Fuels and Synthetic Products Will Hurt the Environment is a new essay in the Institute’s series on the ESG (environmental, social and governance) movement. It shows how the development of carbon fuels, refined petroleum products and synthetics such as plastics and composite materials have made it possible to meet the needs of growing and increasingly wealthier populations, while gradually diminishing the human footprint on the landscape. Banning them, especially when the world’s population is now much larger than when they first displaced other inputs and technologies, will only recreate and exacerbate the problems they once solved.

This year’s report, Women's Economic Rights—Moving Closer to Gender Equality? tracks changes in economic freedom for women around the world and finds that 13 countries improved their Gender Disparity Index score by relaxing legal restrictions on women’s economic rights from 2018 to 2020, while 42 countries imposed greater restrictions on women’s economic rights.