Topic: Energy and Environment

Shoot ‘Em Before They Poop Again

By
Jerry Taylor

If I were to ask you what the number one cause of bacterial pollution in the Potomac, Anacostia, and more than two dozen other rivers on the federal “impaired waters” list, what would you guess?  Sewage discharges?  Stormwater run-off?  Agricultural waste?  How about increased mountains of dung from our supposedly threatened wildlife populations?  You guessed it - because we have done such a good job making the human environment safe for all of God’s creatures, we are destroying the planet.

If you’re rushing off to make a bag of popcorn to watch the upcoming brawl between the National Wildlife Foundation (a polluter-defense league if there ever was one) and Greenpeace, walk, don’t run.  Animal pollution good.  People pollution bad.  But regardless, shouldn’t we at least require Bambi to secure a poop permit - or regulate the time and place at which these river-killing vermin can dispose of their waste product in an environmentally friendly manner? 

Topics: 
Energy and Environment, General

All Wet

By
Mark Moller

For wetlands and Commerce Clause groupies, I have a short piece published in the Environmental Law Institute’s National Wetlands Newsletter analyzing the impact of last term’s wetlands-meets-federalism decision, Rapanos v. United States, here. While every critic of the case singles out Justice Kennedy for criticism, I aim equal ire at the failings of Chief Justice Roberts’ short, and equally problematic, concurrence.

Topics: 
Energy and Environment, Law and Civil Liberties

Eat, Drink, and Be Merry, for Tomorrow We Die

By
David Boaz

James Lovelock, the author of the “theory known as Gaia, which holds that Earth acts like a living organism, a self-regulating system balanced to allow life to flourish,” has a new message for us: Never mind, it’s too late, Gaia can’t handle industrialization. Earth will be at least 10 degrees hotter in a decade or two. It’s irreversible. “We are poached,” the Washington Post reports.

So we might as well enjoy ourselves. Burn those fossil fuels. Build those McMansions. Eat those cheeseburgers. We’re doomed anyway.

Or you could recall an earlier doomsayer, Professor Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University, who wrote in 1968, “The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” He was slightly off. But he kept his job at the prestigious university, he made a bundle on his bestseller, and he still writes for publications like Scientific American. He’s even quoted praising Lovelock in the Post article.

As for Lovelock, he’s the subject of a huge, lavish, sales-boosting two-page profile in the Washington Post. Not to mention respectful reviews in major papers on both sides of the Atlantic. He’s speaking Friday at the respected Carnegie Institution of Washington. Why are people like Lovelock and Ehrlich treated seriously?

Crossposted from Comment is free.

Topics: 
Energy and Environment, General

The Myth, and Insight, of Owens Valley

By
Thomas A. Firey

Yesterday’s Washington Post included an article on the political battle between Las Vegas and northern Nevada over access to northern Nevada’s groundwater.

Unhelpfully, the article repeated the myth of Owens Valley, the southeastern California valley that, a century ago, became part of the nation’s first major water rights agreement. Under the deal, valley residents sold their property and water rights to Los Angeles, and much of the valley’s water was carried away by aqueduct to fuel the city’s growth into a major metropolitan area.

The Post repeats the myth faithfully:

The specter of California’s Owens Valley looms over the area, as people recall the aqueducts that almost 100 years ago turned a lush agricultural community into an environmental disaster so that water could be delivered to Los Angeles.

[…]

William Mulholland, as head of the Los Angeles water department in 1904, conceived the idea of an aqueduct from the Owens Valley. “He had no interest in draining the valley, he had no interest in creating that wasteland,” [Bob Fulkerson, state director of the Progressive Leadership Alliance of Nevada] said. “He did not want that to happen, but that’s what did happen because once the siphon was started it was impossible to turn it off.”

University of Arizona professor Gary Libecap, in research he summarized in a Summer 2005 Regulation article, has effectively exploded this myth.

Far from being a “lush agricultural community,” historical data show Owens Valley contained small, relatively low-production farms with a total of only about 50,000 acres in cultivation. Much of the valley’s income came from livestock, not planting. The area featured a fairly short growing season, high elevation, alkaline soils, and poor access to markets. In short, Libecap concludes, “Those data suggest that Owens Valley farmers may have been quite anxious to sell their land to an interested buyer.”

The Los Angeles–Owens Valley deal provided that buyer. Libecap’s research shows valley landowners were offered considerably more money for their property and water rights than what their farms were worth. The payments became even more enticing after the California legislature and courts forced the city to sweeten the deals.

That may ultimately prove the solution to the Nevada problem. As Ronald Coase famously argues, original distribution of property rights will not prove an impediment to ultimate efficiency so long as transactions costs are minimal. Put more simply, Las Vegas likely needs to up its offers to northern Nevada counties in order to get the water it needs. And, given Vegas’s growth rate, that bid is likely forthcoming.

Topics: 
Cato Publications, Energy and Environment

Rent-Seeking Weasels

By
David Boaz

We’ve all heard about how actor-director Rob Reiner sponsored an initiative in California in 1998 to raise cigarette taxes to fund preschool programs. Reiner then became chairman of the state agency created by the initiative. And then he funneled $230 million of state spending through the ad and PR agencies that had worked on the initiative. And then he spent another $23 million of state money to support Proposition 82 this spring, to create universal preschool programs. He had to resign from his position, and voters turned down Prop 82.

But he’s not the only person sponsoring an initative that would benefit himself, his family, or his friends. A wealthy real estate developer who thought stem cell research would benefit his diabetic son spent $3 million of his own money to get Californians to create a $3 billion taxpayer-funded stem cell research organization, which he then became chairman of.

And now comes Vinod Khosla, a founder of Sun Microsystems and former partner in the fabulously successful Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers, and recently number 1 on Forbes magazine’s Midas list of “the people who most successfully use venture capital to create wealth for their investors.” He’s been the subject of two admiring profiles in the Washington Post (one reprinted from Slate) in the past two days for his latest venture: ethanol. If Vinod Khosla says ethanol is a good investment, don’t bet against him. Or against fellow Silicon Valley megamillionaire Bill Gross, who says that “reinventing energy … dwarfs any business opportunity in history.”

But if it’s such a good investment, why is Khosla ”supporting an initiative on this fall’s ballot in California that would tax oil companies to generate $4 billion to help encourage the use of alternative energy,” as Slate writer Daniel Gross notes? Khosla told Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby that he wants just a little help from the federal government, too: “Khosla wants government to require auto companies to make more flex-fuel cars that run on gasoline or ethanol… .  Khosla wants government to require big gasoline distributors to install ethanol pumps at a tenth of their gas stations.” Oh, and a better subsidy.

Taxing your competitors to subsidize your industry is a rent-seeker’s dream. Usually you have to be more subtle about it. But if you have a “green” business idea, you can get liberal journalists to write gushing stories about you without even stopping to ask, “Hey, aren’t you going to benefit from these initiatives and laws you’re pushing? Isn’t that sort of like, you know, corporate welfare? Like we’re always accusing the oil industry of?”

We shouldn’t bet against Khosla. But if his latest investment is really such a great business opportunity, we should feel free to vote against subsidizing it.

Topics: 
Energy and Environment, General, Government and Politics

No Consensus

By
David Boaz

The Wall Street Journal reports that “as gas prices again approach $3 a gallon, consumers are buying new vehicles that are faster and heavier than ever,” much to the annoyance of the EPA. Sometimes, no matter how much we hector and even tax and regulate them, the masses just persist in doing what they want to do in defiance of elite opinion. The story reminded me of several other stories that I wrote up recently at the Guardian blog:

A weekend article in the FT comes with this teaser: “A generation ago, Shin Dong-jin was trying to stop South Korean women from having babies. Now his planned parenthood foundation has the opposite problem–there aren’t enough babies being born. He must persuade the country to go forth and multiply.”

Apparently Shin Dong-jin is just the only person in South Korea who knows, at any given time, how many children people should have. But people make their own decisions.

The FT piece reminded me of some other recent articles about how stubborn people just won’t do what the planners want. A front-page headline in the Washington Post read: “Despite planners’ visions, outer suburbs lead in new hiring.” I was particularly struck by the lead:

As a consensus builds that the Washington region needs to concentrate job growth, there are signs that the exact opposite is happening.

Over the past five years, the number of new jobs in the region’s outer suburbs exceeded those created in the District and inner suburbs such as Fairfax and Montgomery counties … contradicting planners’ “smart growth” visions of communities where people live, work and play without having to drive long distances.

Maybe if tens - hundreds - of thousands of people aren’t abiding by the “consensus,” there is no consensus: there is just a bunch of government-funded planners attending conferences and deciding where people ought to live. It’s like, “Our community doesn’t want Wal-Mart.” Hey, if the community really doesn’t Wal-Mart, then a Wal-Mart store will fail. What that sentence means is: “Some organised interests in our community don’t want Wal-Mart here because we know our neighbours will shop there (and so will we).”

Similarly, another Post story reported that the Ford motor company has dropped a pledge to build 250,000 gas-electric hybrid cars per year by the end of the decade. Environmentalists accused the company of backpedalling: it seems not many people want to buy hybrid cars - even though the planners want them to.

Again and again, individuals insist on making their own decisions rather than conforming to planners’ visions and purported consensuses.

Topics: 
Energy and Environment, General

Vanuatu: Islands of Fire or Heaven on Earth?

By
Will Wilkinson

There is an egregiously dumb “study” out today that reports that Vanuatu—best known as a place to hide money from the taxman and the site of “Survivor: Vanuatu - Islands of Fire”—is the world’s happiest country. The real travesty is that this study is being reported by reputable news outlets as if it wasn’t just the product of a few ideologues making stuff up. Bloomberg’s headline says, “Vanuatu, Pacific Islands, Lead U.S., World in Happiness Ranking.” UPI’s headline reads, “Pacific’s Vanuatu ‘happiest country’.” Sounds sort of official, no? Here’s the start of the Bloomberg article:

Vanuatu, a group of South Pacific islands populated by fisherman and farmers, is the world’s happiest place, according to a study published today.

The U.S. and U.K. are among the world’s least happy countries because of their higher consumption of natural resources such as oil, according to an index compiled by the New Economics Foundation, a London-based researcher. The biggest malcontents were in Zimbabwe, ranking bottom.

So, if you consume oil, you are therefore unhappy? Who is this New Economics Foundation? What’s the methodology here? Bloomberg:

The New Economics Foundation is a research group that organizes campaigns on environmental and economic issues such as debt relief. It was set up in 1986 to question the agenda of the Group of Eight leading industrialized nations.

The Happy Planet Index covers 178 countries by multiplying life expectancy by life satisfaction, and dividing it by environmental impact in each country, including carbon emissions. The index was compiled over two months, using United Nations life expectancy figures from 2003, World Database of Happiness statistics from 2005 and the World Footprint Network’s research on consumption and environmental impact.

The NEF from this description looks to my jaundiced eye like a front for hyper-ideological activists out to oppose the creation of wealth. Maybe they are. But they also have a very nice website. And they have partnered with the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister in the U.K. So maybe editors are duped by the luster of intellectual legitimacy.

But really! Multiply life expectancy by life satisfaction and divide it by environmental impact? That is, to be over-charitable, completely arbitrary. This is an index of, at best, the New Economic Foundation’s ideological preferences. It is a totally intellectually vacuous product meant to garner headlines, and it worked, to the shame of the Bloombergs and UPIs of the world.

Furthermore, it cheapens the work of real social scientists attempting to measure happiness and well-being. I worry that much of the happiness work is ideologically loaded, but most of it is at least an honest attempt study human welfare empirically. Too much of it, however, is stuff like the NEF’s index, basically an attempt to persuasively define something like “happiness” so that it comports with a statist, anti-growth agenda. This is sheer politics brazenly posturing as social science. If the Cato Institute published a study that, say, mutliplied life satisfaction by the rate of economic growth and then divided it by government spending as a percentage of GDP, and called it “The Happy World Index, ” would editors think twice? I hope they would. In fact, I bet they would. So why did this trash get through the filter?

The NEF is no doubt ideologically irritated by the fact that, say, carbon emissions per capita and reported life satisfaction are positively correlated. Here, for illustration, is a graph from Nation Master. If you’re concerned about “environmental impact” why not divide life satisfaction by life expectancy? Dead people don’t use fossil fuels!

More seriously, the NEF’s program to define wealth, happiness, and progress along their narrow ideological lines is an attempt to circumvent serious debate about human well-being by building substantive judgments about the relative priority of competing values into the project of measuring things we all care about. It’s a too-easy trick to simply define “happy” as whatever it is you think is important, and then show that places that best exemplify what you think important are the “happiest” ones. They present it as a significant finding that “Self appointed world ‘leaders’ – the G8 - score generally badly in the Index.” But they designed it so that the world’s wealthiest countries would come out poorly. Yes, the most productive economies use the most energy. But that doesn’t get headlines. This sort of thing does not advance human knowledge one iota. It’s certainly not newsworthy.

By the way, a denizen of Vanuatu can expect to live a full decade less on average than an American. And GDP per capita there is $3,346 a year, compared to $41,399 in the U.S. Now, the happiness data show very clearly that self-reported happiness increases sharply as a function of income up to around $10-$15,000 a year, when it begins to level off. I can’t actually find data for Vanuatu in the World Database of Happiness, the cited source. But unless the Islands of Fire is a massive outlier, Vanuatuans could become significantly happier by tripling or quintupling their wealth. Becoming happier by becoming wealthier—by growing the size of the surplus from economic cooperation—would very likely require an increase in Vanuatu’s energy use, and that would cause them to plummet down the NEF index. (It must be admitted, however, that the Vanuatu Statistic Office has a truly awesome website. Welcome to 1997!)

NEF is selling a “sustainable development” agenda. The point they’d really like to get in the papers from their study is this: “Overall, we are over-burdening the Earth’s currently available biocapacity,” which is a bit surprising in a study ostensibly about happiness. Now, sustainable is good and unsustainable is bad, but the biocapacity stuff is mostly nonsense. I guess they needed a “new economics” because the old economics didn’t fit their agenda. For an “old economics” tonic, check out Jerry Taylor’s excellent 2002 paper, “Sustainable Development: A Dubious Solution in Search of a Problem.” Here’s a snippet from the abstract:

[T]he fundamental premise of [sustainable development]—that economic growth, if left unconstrained and unmanaged by the state, threatens unnecessary harm to the environment and may prove ephemeral—is dubious. First, if economic growth were to be slowed or stopped—and sustainable development is essentially concerned with putting boundaries around economic growth—it would be impossible to improve environmental conditions around the world. Second, the bias toward central planning on the part of those endorsing the concept of sustainable development will serve only to make environmental protection more expensive; hence, society would be able to “purchase” less of it.

Or look at Jerry’s Julian Simonesque essay “The Growing Abundance of Natural Resources”:

That [overburdening or “overshooting”] argument, however, is in direct contradiction to every possible measurement of resource scarcity and the march of recorded history. If overshoot occurs when we use resources faster than they are created by nature, then the world has been in accelerating “overshoot” for the last 10,000 years, or ever since the development of agriculture. Moreover, our best “feedback” on scarcity—market prices—tells us that resources are expanding, not contracting.

There is simply no non-crazy sense in which Vanuatu is the world’s happiest country. And there is no credible empirical reason for docking countries on any kind of index of human well-being for producing a lot of wealth. The evidence says that the happiness of poor populations like Vanuatu’s would skyrocket with swift economic growth. But growth is exactly what NEF is trying to limit. Their pseudo-study encourages us to be complacent about the poverty of Vanuatu, which is, after all, the “happiest” place on our “happy planet,” on the basis of the fact that they use almost no energy. If you really care about the well-being and happiness of the world’s poor, then agressively misleading publicity stunt studies like this one, and the people who author them, deserve nothing but our scorn.

Topics: 
Energy and Environment, General

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