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Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx says the Highway Trust Fund is going to run out of money in August, and President Barack Obama is spending this week pushing his infrastructure plans. If Congress doesn't come up with the money to patch the shortfall, many states will likely start cutting back transportation projects, so the looming deadline is prompting an embarrassment of gimmicks and bad ideas.

House Democrats are dreaming of replacing the gas tax with a larger per-barrel tax on oil companies. House Republicans want to violate their own Budget Control Act rules to use 10 years of projected savings from a rag-bag of cuts in unrelated programs to pay for one year of highway funding. And Sens. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) and Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) recently proposed raising the federal gas tax, which is a political non-starter in an election year.

Congress is likely to pass a short-term fix that addresses none of the structural issues. And while there are a lot of things to disagree with in the president's transportation plans, the most sensible long-term solution for the Interstate Highway System is actually coming from the Obama administration, which is calling for allowing states to use toll revenue to finance the reconstruction of aging Interstate highways.

Most conservatives claim to support principles like privatization, market pricing, and devolving functions from Washington, D.C. to the states, but apparently not in this case. Everyone from prominent law professor and Instapundit blogger Glenn Reynolds to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) to The Washington Times opposes giving states the freedom to toll Interstates, which is currently banned by federal law. They fear it will result in the federal government "tracking" drivers via "government-mandated GPS" and argue Interstate highways have "already been paid for" by gas taxes, so tolling is unnecessary. Neither of which is true.

In fact, only the initial costs of building the Interstates, plus some ongoing maintenance, have been paid for by fuel taxes. Like most major highways, the Interstates were designed for a 50-year pavement life, after which they must be reconstructed (i.e., replaced). Many Interstates are already more than 50-years-old, and nearly all will reach that age over the next two decades.

In a Reason Foundation study last year, I estimated the cost of Interstate reconstruction and selective widening in bottlenecked areas at just under $1 trillion. Some think that number is too low, and there is no identified funding source for a set of highway mega-projects with that price tag. Even if the per gallon fuel tax is raised, its revenues will keep shrinking over the next two decades thanks to federal fuel-economy standards and the growth of non-petroleum-fueled cars.

The toll-financing approach would be feasible for all but a handful of states, with toll revenues capable of exceeding construction and maintenance costs. Tolls should replace gas taxes on Interstates, be limited to what's needed for the capital and operating costs of the rebuilt Interstates, and be implemented only after an Interstate has been rebuilt and modernized. All tolling would be done via state-of-the-art all-electronic tolling, with no toll booths needed.

This kind of project is tailor-made for private capital investment under long-term public-private partnerships. States would have companies compete for long-term contracts to finance, build, operate, and maintain specific Interstates. America already has about a dozen major toll road and bridge-replacement projects under way using this method, and its success is well proven in Europe, Australia, and Canada.

By using today's transponder-based all-electronic tolling systems like EZPass, the cost of toll collection could be kept to about 5 percent of the revenue and there would be no need for GPS boxes in vehicles.

Many conservatives are leery of this concept, especially given President Obama's endorsement, but they should support it for several reasons. First, it would be a large (and do-able) first step toward devolving the overextended federal transportation program to the states. Second, it would begin replacing a wasteful gas tax system with a true user fee, under which you pay only for the highways you drive on. Third, it would mobilize private capital for major projects that would otherwise be put off for decades, while the Interstates further deteriorate and become more congested. And, finally, it would allow using congestion pricing on urban Interstates, which would bring relief to long-suffering commuters and express buses.

The Interstate highway system is one of our most important 20th century accomplishments. It handles 25 percent of all vehicle miles of travel despite making up just 2.5 percent of physical highway lane miles. But unless we figure out a way to rebuild and modernize it soon, travel, trade, and the economy will be seriously constrained in coming decades. The status quo will not get the job done. But a customer-friendly approach via 21st century toll financing will.

The existence of gay Republicans is hardly a new phenomenon. The Log Cabin Republicans, an organization for gay men and women within the party, was founded back in 1977 in California. But every so often, the existence of gay conservatives gets media attention, particularly during election cycles.

In more recent years, gay conservatives have been getting more attention as the Republican Party struggles with its identity. American opinion has shifted significantly to support top issues among gays and lesbians, particularly in support of marriage recognition. Support for gay marriage among evangelical Christians has doubled over the past decade, according to one poll. The Republican Party has declared the primacy of heterosexual marriage even in its most recent presidential platform, but it's hard to visualize how the Republican Party will be able to sustain any position that can remotely be called anti-gay moving forward. This ambiguity about what the Republican Party might look like five years from now is not just about the relationship between the party and religious conservatives.  The party is fractured with debate between Tea Party activists and the establishment, between defense hawks and non-interventionists, between the business interests who have fixed the game to financially benefit themselves and those who want it to stop, and in other major policy issues as well.

So in this context, it makes sense that the three gay Republicans running for Congress are drawing significant media attention across the country. The three are Carl DeMaio, challenging Democrat Scott Peters to represent California's 52nd District in San Diego; Richard Tisei, challenging Democrat John Tierney again to represent Massachusetts' 6th District; and Dan Innis, challenging Democrat Carol Shea-Porter to represent New Hampshire's 1st District. (Full disclosure: DeMaio is an independent contractor for the Reason Foundation research division's pension reform project.)

The three candidates have been getting attention from The Hill, Al Jazeera, the Associated Press, and The New York Times, among other news outlets. If any of them win in the fall, they'll be the first openly gay Republican elected to Congress. Retired Republican Rep. Jim Kolbe of Arizona came out of the closet as gay while he was serving office, not prior to his election.

Whether DeMaio, Tisei, and Innis are embraced by Republican voters could send a stronger signal to the party that it's time to kick its anti-gay planks out of the party platform. DeMaio came in second in California's top-two primary system earlier this year and will face Peters in November. Tisei and Innis both have primaries in September. Tisei would have actually been the first openly gay Republican congressman elected in 2012, but he just barely lost to Tierney. His race was one of the few where a Libertarian Party candidate may have affected the outcome.

Although none of the three have made gay issues part of their campaign, they're not hiding their sexual orientations. All three make mention of or have been photographed with their partners or mention their relationships in their campaign biographies.

Innis says the media appears to be more interested in his sexual orientation and opinions on gay marriage than the voters he's encountered.

"Here in New Hampshire not that many people pay attention to it," he says. "I've been asked about it maybe two or three times. Here, it's settled law." Same-sex marriage recognition came to New Hampshire in 2010. "We have our 'live free or die' mentality. … I think the party has come to a place where it's much more accepting of us now and with us running for office."

DeMaio hopes that eventually the sexual orientation will become a non-issue for the party and that candidates will be judged on their positions and effectiveness.

"On election night, I said this should send a national message that the Republican Party should return to its traditional roots: Freedom in all aspects, lower taxes and regulation," he said. "If you're willing to trust people to spend their own money, are you willing to trust people to live their lives?"

DeMaio, Innis, and Tisei all have components of their platforms that may be of interest to libertarians. DeMaio has been fighting for public sector employee pension reform and pushing for privatization and government program efficiency. Innis has a section on his campaign site devoted to privacy issues, calling for more restraints on the National Security Agency and ending "backdoor" surveillance, making him a potential ally of libertarian Republicans like Justin Amash of Michigan. Tisei was not available for an interview, but Garrett Quinn singled Tisei out in Reason magazine's November 2012 issue as a "libertarianish" candidate for opposing tax increases, supporting medical marijuana, and opposing parts of the PATRIOT Act.  

Do Innis and DeMaio see the Republican Party moving in a more libertarian direction? Innis thinks it could be: "Let me put it this way—I'm a candidate that supports small government, low taxes, low regulation, and keeping the government out of my daily life. I think here in New Hampshire the Republican Party is turning in that direction."

DeMaio is more direct: "I think American people have grown libertarian. And the party has been flirting with it, and it's time the flirtation blossomed into a full romance."

Four billion more people than the 7.2 billion now alive could be fed an adequate diet if current crop production devoted to nonfood uses, such as animal feed and biofuels, were switched to direct consumption. This is one the fascinating calculations made in a new article published in Science by a team of researchers led by Paul West, a researcher at the University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment. West and his colleagues are looking for "leverage points" in global agriculture that would reduce humanity's impact on the natural world while at the same time providing more than enough food for the 9 billion or so people who will be alive in 2050.

This analysis stands in stark counterpoint to the perennial apocalyptic prophecies of impending famine spawned by overpopulation. Last year, in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the Population Bomber himself, Paul Ehrlich and his wife Anne asked yet again, "Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided?" and answered that the "human predicament is driven by overpopulation" among other horrors. In his 2013 screed, Ten Billion, Cambridge University computer scientist Stephen Emmott argued that humanity's growing population constitutes "an unprecedented planetary emergency." In addition, Emmott claimed, "By 2050, 1 billion hectares of land is likely to be cleared to meet rising food demands from a growing population. This is an area greater than the U.S."

West and his colleagues focus their analysis on 17 major crops consisting of the 16 highest-caloric crops consumed as food and cotton. They occupy 58 percent of the world's croplands and produce 86 percent of world's crop calories. They are specifically looking to see if it will be possible to boost crop production on the current land base while at the same time cutting inputs like fertilizer and irrigation that sometimes generate deleterious side-effects on the natural world.

One particularly promising strategy is closing the "yield gap." The yield gap is the difference between current yields and those possible using modern farming techniques. For example, corn yield in the United States averages 162 bushels per acre.  In Africa, India, and Latin America, corn yields average 32, 41, and 48 bushels per acre respectively. The world average is 81 bushels per acre. West and his colleagues calculate that raising yields in low performing areas to 50 percent of the attainable level would produce enough calories to meet the basic need of about 850 million people. This may be too conservative a figure.

In 2012, Jesse Ausubel, director the Human Environment Program at Rockefeller University, and his colleagues suggested that the world was on the brink of "peak farmland." Future agricultural productivity will be so great that farmers will increasingly spare more land for nature. How much? Depending on how demand for biofuels develop farmers will return between 146 million and 400 million hectares to nature. The first is an area the size of France, Spain, Portugal, and Britain combined, and the second is about equal to all the land in the United States east of the Mississippi River. This is quite in contrast to Emmot's baleful auguries about future land use.

Current practices of using modern fertilizers also result in harmful side effects including enhanced man-made global warming and the creation of algal blooms and dead zones in the oceans. Nitrogen and phosphorous fertilizers have been critical to boosting crop production over the past century. University of Manitoba environmental researcher Vaclav Smil reckons that 40 percent of the world's dietary protein now originates from synthetic nitrogen fertilizers. West and his colleagues calculate that the nutrients in harvested crops account for only 40 percent of the nitrogen fertilizer and 52 percent of the phosphorous spread by farmers, much of the rest runs off the fields into streams, lakes and the oceans. Given this excess, they estimate nitrogen and phosphorous applied to wheat, rice and corn could be cut by 14 to 29 percent and 13 to 33 percent respectively while maintaining current yields.  

Irrigation accounts for about 70 percent of all freshwater withdrawals and 90 percent of water consumption. The researchers looked only at croplands where evaporation rates exceed precipitation rates. Just raising the productivity of irrigated land currently languishing in the bottom 20^th percentile to above that benchmark would decrease water consumption by 8 to 15 percent while keeping food production constant.

The "diet gap" is defined as those crop calories that people could eat that do not end up in the food supply. Most of these are crops grown for animal feed and biofuels. Between 1961 and 2009, the portion of crops consumed directly as food has dropped from 57 to 51 percent. As noted in the beginning, if people consumed food crops directly, 70 percent more calories would become available, which is enough to feed an additional 4 billion people. The researchers figure that corn production in the United States accounts for 19 percent of their diet gap, representing enough calories to feed 760 million people. With considerable understatement, the researchers observe, "Although the diet gap presents opportunities to improve food security, cultural preferences and political obstacles create large challenges to reducing meat as well as overconsumption." Translation: People love to eat meat.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that average global meat consumption per capita increased from 53 pounds in 1965 to 91 pounds today. The average American eats about 270 pounds of meat annually. Interestingly, the per capita consumption of beef on a global basis has been essentially flat while there are big gains in pork and chicken. Recent research suggests that switching from a high meat diet to a vegan diet would cut an individual's greenhouse emissions associated with food production in half.

A lot of food is wasted. West and his colleagues cite a report from the FAO that estimates that, for example, around 30 percent of cereal grains are lost between harvest and consumption. They calculate that curbing consumer waste of foods made from wheat, rice, vegetables, and meat in the United States, China, and India could feed 413 million people.

What makes this study noteworthy is that it assumes no new agricultural or food production technologies, instead its analysis concludes that more judiciously deploying what is already available would be more than enough feed the world's future population. Nevertheless, significant new food and agricultural technologies are in the pipeline. Consider the problem of excess nitrogen. Biotechnology researchers are hard at work at developing crops that use much less nitrogen fertilizer as they increase yields. For example, the biotech seed company Arcadia Biosciences announced in 2013 that nitrogen use efficient variety of rice out-produced conventional varieties while using 50 percent less nitrogen. Meanwhile researchers at the International Rice Research Institute are heading up a project to endow rice with the more efficient C4 form of photosynthesis found in corn. If successful, the new rice varieties would need less water and fertilizer and yield 50 percent more grain than the best current varieties.

Solutions to providing more food may also come from outside of traditional agriculture. The concept of a diet gap makes it clear that growing a pound of meat takes a lot of feed and water. A 2011 study in Environmental Science & Technology calculated that vat-grown meat could lower energy use by approximately 7–45 percent, shrink greenhouse gas emissions by 78-96 percent, cut land use by 99 percent and reduce water use by 82-96 percent. And in 2013 other researchers reported that they have figured out how to turn abundant cellulose locked up in trees and grass into edible starches and glucose suitable for fermenting into biofuels.

West and his colleagues acknowledge that more work is needed to figure out how to get best practices that they identified widely adopted. Nevertheless they conclude that "a relatively small set of places and actions could provide enough new calories to meet the basic needs for more than 3 billion [and simultaneously] address many environmental impacts with global consequences."

In other words, the prophets of overpopulation doom and imminent global famine will likely once again be disappointed.

This side of paradise. (Sam Hodgson/Bloomberg News)