Imagine if there were no reliable records of global surface temperature. Raucous policy debates such as cap-and-trade would have no scientific basis, Al Gore would at this point be little more than a historical footnote, and President Obama would not be spending this U.N. session talking up a (likely unattainable) international climate deal in Copenhagen in December.

Steel yourself for the new reality, because the data needed to verify the gloom-and-doom warming forecasts have disappeared.

Or so it seems. Apparently, they were either lost or purged from some discarded computer. Only a very few people know what really happened, and they aren't talking much. And what little they are saying makes no sense.

In the early 1980s, with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, scientists at the United Kingdom's University of East Anglia established the Climate Research Unit (CRU) to produce the world's first comprehensive history of surface temperature. It's known in the trade as the "Jones and Wigley" record for its authors, Phil Jones and Tom Wigley, and it served as the primary reference standard for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) until 2007. It was this record that prompted the IPCC to claim a "discernible human influence on global climate."

Putting together such a record isn't at all easy. Weather stations weren't really designed to monitor global climate. Long-standing ones were usually established at points of commerce, which tend to grow into cities that induce spurious warming trends in their records. Trees grow up around thermometers and lower the afternoon temperature. Further, as documented by the University of Colorado's Roger Pielke Sr., many of the stations themselves are placed in locations, such as in parking lots or near heat vents, where artificially high temperatures are bound to be recorded.

So the weather data that go into the historical climate records that are required to verify models of global warming aren't the original records at all. Jones and Wigley, however, weren't specific about what was done to which station in order to produce their record, which, according to the IPCC, showed a warming of 0.6° +/- 0.2°C in the 20th century.

Now begins the fun. Warwick Hughes, an Australian scientist, wondered where that "+/-" came from, so he politely wrote Phil Jones in early 2005, asking for the original data. Jones's response to a fellow scientist attempting to replicate his work was, "We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?"

Reread that statement, for it is breathtaking in its anti-scientific thrust. In fact, the entire purpose of replication is to "try and find something wrong." The ultimate objective of science is to do things so well that, indeed, nothing is wrong.

Then the story changed. In June 2009, Georgia Tech's Peter Webster told Canadian researcher Stephen McIntyre that he had requested raw data, and Jones freely gave it to him. So McIntyre promptly filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the same data. Despite having been invited by the National Academy of Sciences to present his analyses of millennial temperatures, McIntyre was told that he couldn't have the data because he wasn't an "academic." So his colleague Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph, asked for the data. He was turned down, too.

Faced with a growing number of such requests, Jones refused them all, saying that there were "confidentiality" agreements regarding the data between CRU and nations that supplied the data. McIntyre's blog readers then requested those agreements, country by country, but only a handful turned out to exist, mainly from Third World countries and written in very vague language.

It's worth noting that McKitrick and I had published papers demonstrating that the quality of land-based records is so poor that the warming trend estimated since 1979 (the first year for which we could compare those records to independent data from satellites) may have been overestimated by 50 percent. Webster, who received the CRU data, published studies linking changes in hurricane patterns to warming (while others have found otherwise).

Enter the dog that ate global warming.

Roger Pielke Jr., an esteemed professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, then requested the raw data from Jones. Jones responded:

Since the 1980s, we have merged the data we have received into existing series or begun new ones, so it is impossible to say if all stations within a particular country or if all of an individual record should be freely available. Data storage availability in the 1980s meant that we were not able to keep the multiple sources for some sites, only the station series after adjustment for homogeneity issues. We, therefore, do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (i.e., quality controlled and homogenized) data.

The statement about "data storage" is balderdash. They got the records from somewhere. The files went onto a computer. All of the original data could easily fit on the 9-track tape drives common in the mid-1980s. I had all of the world's surface barometric pressure data on one such tape in 1979.

If we are to believe Jones's note to the younger Pielke, CRU adjusted the original data and then lost or destroyed them over twenty years ago. The letter to Warwick Hughes may have been an outright lie. After all, Peter Webster received some of the data this year. So the question remains: What was destroyed or lost, when was it destroyed or lost, and why?

All of this is much more than an academic spat. It now appears likely that the U.S. Senate will drop cap-and-trade climate legislation from its docket this fall — whereupon the Obama Environmental Protection Agency is going to step in and issue regulations on carbon-dioxide emissions. Unlike a law, which can't be challenged on a scientific basis, a regulation can. If there are no data, there's no science. U.S. taxpayers deserve to know the answer to the question posed above.

First, before Congress approved the Interstate Highway System, it had a good idea how much it would cost. In contrast, Congress approved $8 billion for high-speed rail without knowing the total cost, which is likely to be at least $90 billion.

Second, highway users paid for interstate highways, whereas high-speed rail will be almost entirely subsidized by general taxpayers who will rarely use it.

Third, interstate highways connect all 48 contiguous states and major metropolitan areas. The FRA's high-speed rail plan consists of six unconnected networks that reach only 33 states and less than two-thirds of the nation's 100 largest urban areas.

Fourth, the average American traveled 4,000 miles on interstates in 2007. High-speed rail proponents optimistically estimate that the average American would ride the FRA's high-speed rail system less than 60 miles per year.

Finally, interstate highways improved social welfare by increasing highway safety. In contrast, far from saving energy and reducing pollution, high-speed rail would actually increase energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

For all these reasons, the United States government should not fund high-speed rail. The $8 billion in high-speed rail stimulus funds should be invested in safety improvements, not in new trains and new routes that will add to future taxpayer obligations.

"Well, me and few of your other neighbors are tired of looking at Ted's Toyota Tundra and thinking about all of the environmental damage that he is doing with that truck. So here's our plan. We're going to take up a collection. Once we get $4,500 or so together, we're going to offer it to Ted on the condition that he use it to buy something a little less gas-guzzly. And since it is Ted we're talking about, we know he won't go for this deal unless we let him buy something short of an econo-box. Of course, he has to sell the Tundra as part of the deal, but we'll see to it that the Tundra is scrapped so nobody else can inflict that truck upon this neighborhood again. So . . . can we sign you up for a contribution?"

While there's nothing obvious in this for you, it does bug you to see that Toyota Tundra on the road. And if you don't pay Ted to buy a more fuel efficient car or truck, you fear that he's simply not going to no matter how often you surreptitiously leave those Earth in the Balance DVDs in his mail box.

Still, there's a few nagging concerns that keep you from reaching for your checkbook. For instance, it occurs to you that nobody gave you $4,500 to go out and buy your Prius (OK, you got a pretty chunky tax credit, but if Ted wants to avail himself of it, it's still there). Aren't we simply rewarding Ted for saying no to fuel efficiency for all of these years?

"Well, maybe," we say, "but it sure doesn't look like Ted is going to give up that Tundra any time soon." But on second thought, you're not so sure. Ted may like Sarah Palin and all, but he was none too happy when gasoline prices hit $4 a gallon last summer. He even mentioned to you last year that he was thinking of trading the Tundra in as soon as he got the next big repair or maintenance bill. Maybe if you wait long enough, Ted will buy a more fuel-efficient car on his own volition, especially if gasoline prices go up . . . as your Greenpeace friends keep telling you they inevitably will, given that we're running out of oil (at least, that's how they tell it).

Moreover, you worry that this scheme of ours might encourage all kinds of undesirable behavior from Ted. He's strikes you as just the kind of guy to start letting his lawn go in the hopes that, once again, a neighborhood collection is made to get him to break-out the lawn mower or buy one that can do the job quicker and easier. Or the sort who would buy an Honda Civic, drive it for a few months, and then sell the thing and buy a new Tundra! After all, as long as he can turn around and sell the Civic for more than he paid for it (whatever he can negotiate from the dealer minus the $4,500 we propose to give him), he will actually make a profit... and he's just the sort of weasel who would use that profit to get back in a Tundra on our dime.

Even if Ted doesn't play some game like that, is this really the best way to save the planet? You make a mental note to do a little math tonight to see how this proposition pencils out. The calculation you have in mind is fairly straightforward. Total up all the greenhouse-gas emissions that are avoided by replacing Ted's Tundra with an econo-box, divide by the neighborhood bribe, and the result is the cost of reducing a ton of Ted's automotive greenhouse emissions. You suspect that it costs a lot more to take greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere this way than it would to, say, plant some trees throughout the neighborhood. And doesn't making a new car for Ted put its own basket of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere?

You relate these concerns to us, but we are unmoved. "Well, think of all the autoworkers you'll help out," we say. "Even if you don't like Ted, think of them. And think of their children!" Now, no one ever accused you of being a stone-hearted Republican, but you are even less moved now. This isn't the first time, after all, that someone came to your door to save some autoworkers, most of whom make more money than you do. When are these people going to stop asking for handouts? And what about helping people who don't hold membership cards with the UAW? After all, there are people in your neighborhood who work in retail sales and residential services who recently lost their jobs. Why not pay Ted to paint his ugly house and landscape his dying front yard? Don't painters and landscapers deserve as much help as these wealthy autoworkers you've never met?

"Perhaps they do," we say. "But regardless, you'll help us stimulate the economy and thus get the country back on its feet." That's sounds reasonable at first, but you can't help but wonder how destroying a bunch of perfectly good cars and trucks is going to help the country grow rich. If destroying private property created wealth, Cuba would be fabulously wealthy by now.

We're getting annoyed at your intransigence. "We've seen this done before in other neighborhoods," we say tartly. "And by gosh, people love it!" Sure, you think, it's obvious why people like Ted love it when you give them money.And it's obvious why autoworkers love it when you pay people to buy the cars that they make. But you're not sure why anyone else should love this idea.

You mutter something about being in the middle of dinner and will get back to us tomorrow. And you shut the door. Nicely.

If the proposed fuel efficiency standards were in place today, Edmunds.com reports that only two cars — the 2010 Toyota Prius (50 mpg) and the 2009 Honda Civic Hybrid (42 mpg) — would meet the standard. Angry environmentalists might thus find themselves key-scratching "gas guzzlers" such as the 2009 Honda Fit (31 mpg), the 2009 Mini Cooper (32 mpg) and the 2009 Smart ForTwo (36 mpg).

There is little dispute that, as a consequence, cars would become more expensive and industry profits more scarce. Even the Obama administration concedes that automotive costs would increase by $600 per car on average and that industry revenues would decline by $13 billion to $20 billion a year. Others offer larger figures, but it's difficult to peg costs with any certainty.

What do we gain by this? Very little.

We wouldn't reduce our reliance on foreign oil: If we reduced global demand for crude oil, the most expensive-to-produce oil would go away first, and that oil is not in the Middle East. It's in North America.

Consumers would not be better off: If gasoline prices remained in today's neighborhood (that is, near their historical average, adjusted for inflation), the fuel savings from these new hybrids would not offset the higher sticker prices.

Moreover, many consumers would be forced to buy cars they don't want.

Greenhouse gas emissions might not decline much, if at all. U.S. emissions would likely decline, but reduced U.S. demand for crude would mean reduced global crude prices, which in turn would increase demand for — and consumption of — oil outside the USA. Eventually, most if not all our reductions might be offset by increases elsewhere.

Finally, drivers and passengers would be less safe. Plenty of hard evidence suggests that smaller, lighter cars equal more highway injuries and fatalities.

Reduced fuel consumption is not an end unto itself. It is a means to an end. These means wouldn't achieve the advertised ends.

The politics of global warming are becoming increasingly disconnected from the people. Day after day, hour after hour, telescreens shout, "Go Green! Go Green!" Fewer and fewer people care.

On April 19, Rasmussen Reports released a new global warming poll: 48 percent of respondents believe that observed climate changes are being "caused by planetary trends," while 34 percent believe they are a result of human influence on the atmosphere. When Obama was sworn in, the relative numbers were 44 percent and 41 percent. Just three months ago, opinion was pretty much evenly split, and now there's a whopping 14 percent plurality in favor of "natural causes."

This is a change from bad to worse in the eyes of environmentalists. In January, Gallup found that, out of 20 prominent issues, Americans ranked global warming dead last in terms of importance. If the newer Rasmussen results are any guide, support has waned even further since then.

If the political class would have done its homework, it would have seen this coming. The incessant hype has generated a massive political backlash. It was first documented over a year ago in the refereed journal Risk Analysis, by Paul Kellstedt and two colleagues, political scientists at Texas A&M University.

The standard thinking is called the "knowledge deficit" model. That's academese for the notion that the poor blokes aren't concerned about global warming because they're just stupid and haven't heard enough about it. Obviously no one watches television any more (CNBC's peacock is green this week), walks outside in major urban downtowns (plastered with billboards and posters — from energy companies — urging their customers to use less of their products), or goes to the movies (The Day After Tomorrow, An Inconvenient Truth, Ice Age: The Meltdown, etc).

Actually, people still do go to the movies, and watch TV, and are assaulted every urban minute with global-warming propaganda. And, according to Kellstedt, the more people know about global warming, the less they care:

Contrary to the assumptions underlying the knowledge-deficit model, as well as the marketing of movies like Ice Age or An Inconvenient Truth, the effects of information on both concern for global warming and responsibility for it are exactly the opposite of what were expected.

Jon Gertner touched on this in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine. He noted that debate as to why climate change isn't higher up on the priority totem-pole usually is blamed on "the doubt-sowing remarks of climate-change skeptics," or "the poor communication skills of good scientists."

This prism has bent the light on global warming exactly wrong. In fact, it is the communication skills of scientists that are responsible for people's opinions. Kellstedt found that people "with high confidence in scientists . . . show less concern for global warming," as did the "more informed respondents." Americans' lack of alarm has less to do with "skeptics" than it does with people's perception of mainstream science.

Interestingly, this is parallel to other issues at the science-political nexus. Despite years of campaigning against genetically modified (GM) food on the part of many environmentalists, the more people learn, the less concerned they are about that, too.

Maybe this has to do with the fact that Americans have been consuming, in one form or another, GM food for decades, and we obviously aren't dead yet. Sober scientists note that GM foods are nutritionally indistinguishable from their progenitors — so when someone else loudly and angrily foretells disaster upon disaster that will befall us from the use of GM products, people say "so what?" And when they see some movie about the horrors of global warming — if they know that scientists observe that the planet's surface has been warming episodically and modestly for a century — they likewise say, "So what? It's a movie."

Washington would be well-advised to pay attention to what folks are telling pollsters out beyond the Beltway.

But it's Earth Day, so I expect the response of the political class here will likewise be, "So what?"

Close scrutiny of these plans reveals that they do not live up to the hype. As attractive as 110-to 220-mile-per-hour trains might sound, even the most optimistic forecasts predict they will take few cars off the road. At best, they will replace for profit private commuter airlines with heavily subsidized public rail systems that are likely to require continued subsidies far into the future.

Nor are high-speed rail lines particularly environmentally friendly. Planners have predicted that a proposed line in Florida would use more energy and emit more of some pollutants than all of the cars it would take off the road. California planners forecast that high-speed rail would reduce pollutionand greenhouse gas emissions by amere 0.7 to 1.5 percent—but only if ridership reached the high end of projected levels. Lower ridership would nullify energy savings and pollution reductions.

These assessments are confirmed by the actual experience of high-speed rail lines in Japan and Europe. Since Japan introduced high-speed bullet trains, passenger rail has lost more than half its market share to the automobile. Since Italy, France, and other European countries opened their high-speed rail lines, rail's market share in Europe has dwindled from 8.2 to 5.8 percent of travel. If high-speed rail doesn't work in Japan and Europe, how can it work in the United States?

As megaprojects—the California high-speed rail is projected to cost $33 to $37 billion—high-speed rail plans pose serious risks for taxpayers. Costs of recent rail projects in Denver and Seattle are running 60 to 100 percent above projections. Once construction begins, politicians will feel obligated to throw good taxpayers' money after bad. Once projects are completed , most plans call for them to be turned over to private companies that will keep any operational profits,while taxpayers will remain vulnerable if the trains lose money.

In short, high-speed rail proposals are high cost, high-risk megaprojects that promise little or no congestion relief, energy savings, or other environmental benefits. Taxpayers and politicians should be wary of any transportation projects that cannot be paid for out of user fees.

Renewables (excluding hydroelectric dams) produce less than 3% of U.S. electricity, much of which is hardly clean. About two-thirds comes from burning scrap vegetation ("biomass") and garbage, which produce the same pollutants and carbon as coal. The real job is to produce fewer of them, rather than changing fuels from fossilized to non-fossilized vegetation.

Geology limits geothermal opportunities, biomass is environmentally questionable, and solar remains prohibitively expensive. That leaves wind power, but efficient wind turbines pollute in their own way taller than the Statue of Liberty and maddeningly noisy. A national requirement would engender the same environmental resistance as conventional generators and transmission. Opposition to California's requirement is so strong that today, it gets a smaller percentage of power from renewables than in 2001.

Wind generates only when it is blowing, and it blows least when power is most valuable. At peak demand hours in 2006, wind plants in both California and Texas produced below 3% of their potential. To maintain reliability will require continued investment in full-scale backup generation. Wind generation is itself expensive even at today's fuel prices, it requires a massive federal tax credit to survive.

A national policy that creates jobs in renewables destroys them elsewhere. Forcing people and businesses to buy expensive power leaves them less to spend on other goods and investments in future productivity. If unemployment is a national problem, attack it with a national policy rather than special-interest legislation for the renewables industry.

That industry is already big enough worldwide that a U.S. requirement is not needed to bring forth better renewable technologies. And renewables don't matter for national security or energy independence; these are about oil, which produces about 2% of our electricity.

If pollution and climate change are problems, attack them directly. Don't confuse this special-interest legislation with an efficient solution to them.

Although media reports suggest that many people are taking public transit instead of driving, actual numbers show that recent increases in transit ridership account for only 3 percent of the decline in urban driving. Also, contrary to popular belief, rail transit does not save energy. Many light-rail operations use more energy per passenger mile than the average sport utility vehicle, and almost none uses less than a fuel-efficient car such as a Toyota Prius. People who respond to high fuel prices by taking transit are not saving energy; they are merely imposing their energy costs on someone else.

Rail transportation is also much more heavily subsidized than other forms of travel. Where highway subsidies average less than a penny per passenger mile, and subsidies to flying are even lower, Amtrak costs taxpayers 22 cents per passenger mile and urban transit costs 61 cents per passenger mile.

Even if rail transport did save energy, spending more money on rail will get few people out of their cars. People who want to save energy should plan to buy more fuel-efficient cars and encourage cities to invest in traffic signal coordination, which can save far more energy at a tiny fraction of the cost of building new rail transport lines.

This costs almost as much as the original construction, which means for taxpayers that rails are a "pay now, pay more later" proposition.

The Chicago Transit Authority is on the verge of financial collapse. The agency estimates it needs $16 billion it doesn’t have to rehabilitate tracks and trains.

To keep the trains running, the agency siphoned money away from the city’s bus system and lost a third of its bus riders between 1986 and 1996.

Newer systems face other financial challenges. San Jose’s light-rail system put the city’s transit agency so far in debt that when sales tax revenues fell short early in this decade, it was forced to cut bus and rail service by 20 percent.

Rail construction almost always costs more than the original estimates.

Denver voters approved a 119-mile rail system in 2004 on the promise that it would cost $4.7 billion to build it by 2017. The current estimate is up to $7.9 billion, and the regional transit agency says the system might not be complete until 2034.

Once built, light-rail systems never live up to their promises, even in places like Portland. Before building light rail, Portland’s bus system carried 9.8 percent of the region’s transit riders to work. Today, thanks to cutbacks in the bus system forced by the high cost of rail, transit carries just 7.6 percent.

Nor is rail transit good for the environment. Most U.S. light-rail lines use more energy, per passenger mile, than an SUV.

Considering that most of Missouri’s electricity comes from fossil fuels, a Kansas City light rail, like the ones in Dallas, Denver and Cleveland, is also likely to produce more greenhouse gases per passenger mile than an SUV.

Buses can provide better, faster, safer transit service than light rail at a far lower cost.

Light rail is a hoax perpetrated on taxpayers by companies that profit from designing and building rail lines.

Rail advocates tell Kansas Citians that they need to catch up with other cities that have rail transit. I suggest instead that Kansas City should be proud not to fall for the light-rail hoax.

This debate is an echo of efforts to reduce toxic air pollution, such as carbon monoxide and smog, which began in 1970. Some said we should encourage people to drive less and take transit more. Others said we should use new technologies to make the cars we drive cleaner.

Hindsight

Looking back, we now know that technical solutions were phenomenally successful: though we drive three times as much as we did in 1970, total auto emissions are down by about two thirds. Meanwhile, attempts to change people's lifestyles were miserable failures. Despite investing hundreds of billions in transit, the share of people and commuters riding transit has declined throughout the U.S.

A new study from the Brookings Institution ignores this history when it recommends that cities invest in transit and compact development to reduce their carbon footprints. On a per-passenger-mile basis, transit buses emit more greenhouse gases than an average SUV, and most light-rail lines emit more greenhouse gases than the average automobile. Denver's light rail is even worse than the average bus.

Meanwhile, data gathered by the Australian Conservation Foundation revealed that per-capita carbon emissions from people living in single-family homes are lower than people living in low-rise, mid-rise, and high-rise apartments and condos. This suggests that compact development will increase, not reduce, our carbon footprint.

Even to the extent that transit and compact development could reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we have to ask: at what cost? A recent report published by McKinsey, the famous consulting firm, found that America could significantly reduce its total greenhouse emissions by investing in technologies that cost no more than $50 per ton of reduced emissions. Neither compact development nor transit would meet this cost test.

More efficient cars

Instead, McKinsey urged auto manufacturers to make cars out of lighter weight, energy-saving materials. This would pay for itself in lower fuel costs.

Traffic congestion causes motorists to waste nearly 3 billion gallons of fuel and spew 26 billion tons of CO2 into the air each year. Relieving that congestion by tolling freeways can reduce greenhouse emissions at practically no cost, while coordinating traffic signals on city streets will reduce emissions at a cost of about $11 per ton.

Transit improvements, however, will cost far more than $50 a ton. Converting buses to biodiesel, for example, costs nearly $200 per ton. Using buses with hybrid motors costs more than $1,000 a ton.

When you count the carbon footprint from building rail transit, rails almost always lose, especially in regions where fossil fuels are used to generate most electricity. The Minneapolis light rail is one of the more successful lines in the country (which isn't saying much). It operations produce less carbon emissions than the average auto, but at a cost of nearly $5,000 per ton—not counting the carbon emitted during construction.

Even in regions that rely on hydro and other renewable energy for electricity, rail transit loses when you count the carbon emissions from the feeder bus systems needed to support the rail lines. Transit systems in Portland, Sacramento, and other cities ended up consuming more energy and emitting more greenhouse gases, per passenger mile, after they open new rail lines because of extensive, but little-used, feeder bus networks.

Nor is there any evidence that compact development can cost-effectively reduce CO2 emissions. One study found that compact development reduces emissions, but estimated the cost would be more than $60,000 per ton.

Again, better technology makes more sense than trying to change people's lifestyles. Homeowners can save more energy and greenhouse gas emissions by installing better installation than by moving into high-density developments. The concrete and steel needed to build mid-rise and high-rise apartments, for example, emit huge amounts of greenhouse gases.

If global warming is truly a problem, we can't waste resources trying to get people to make expensive and ineffective changes in their lifestyles. Anyone who recommends changing your lifestyle to reduce greenhouse gas emissions without showing you that those changes are cost effective is wasting your time and money.

Reporters straining for angles and bureaucrats with obscure national mandates, but little accountability to locals, often ignore the important things — and the more important environmental concerns. Nowhere is that truer than in mainland China, where the combination of a booming manufacturing sector and weak property rights is wreaking environmental havoc.

For example, parts of Tai Lake, China's third-largest freshwater lake, are still beautiful. But, after 25 years of unchecked industrial growth, pollution has become widespread. Small numbers of activists have protested about the ongoing contamination, and some have reportedly been fined, had their properties seized or, in some cases, even been beaten and imprisoned.

"The state owns the water sources under the current law, so I think it would be very difficult for individual farmers without ownership or use rights to the lake to bring a claim," says Keliang Zhu, of the US-based Rural Development Institute, a non-profit organisation of lawyers dedicated to helping people in developing countries obtain legal rights to land. "Not to mention the difficulty of enforcing the judgment, if they ever get a favourable one from the court."

The announcement last week that the Ministry of Commerce would join the weak State Environmental Protection Administration in enforcing environmental regulations is good news. But between the concerns of local residents and those of massive manufacturing operations, the government is clear where it stands. The locals have little hope of restraining businesses' excesses.

"Only the collective villages, or the village groups, are the legal owners of the land. That gives the farmers a significant disadvantage if their land suffers pollution in some way," added Mr Zhu.

In the US, developments like that around Tai Lake would lead to a local backlash, campaigns and media attention. Property owners could band together and pursue class-action lawsuits against the companies polluting their land and water sources. It's hard to do that, however, when you don't have paper contracts or certificates to prove you own the properties being polluted.

In August, the State Council approved a plan to issue land-rights documentation to 90 per cent of farm households by the end of the year. But that's an extraordinarily ambitious goal, and without proof of ownership, farmers have little recourse. Beijing has been slow to acknowledge the extent of the pollution around Tai Lake, but lately it has begun using the internet to encourage local and grass-roots responses to the most egregious cases. Contamination has grown so pervasive that the government needs eyes and ears on the ground.

But for years, Beijing and businesses have worked hand in hand to build manufacturing facilities and there are endless numbers of foreign companies trying to reap the benefits. The government remains, at best, capricious in its enforcement efforts.

In the US, homeowners who lost their houses to the California wildfires received insurance payments, and no doubt many will rebuild their houses. Whatever the cause of property destruction, preventing and hedging against it requires the right incentives. It requires co-ordinating responses in a manner that empowers the individuals affected, rather than officials hundreds of kilometres away. It also requires clearly defined property rights, and the ability to seek redress of grievances.

Between 1957 and 1970, particulate matter concentrations in urban areas declined 15 percent, while sulfur dioxide concentrations peaked in 1963, declining 40 percent between 1962 and 1969. Incidence of malaria had been reduced from 592 per million in 1940 to 1 in a million in 1960 with a significant assist from DDT. The death rate from various gastrointestinal diseases, which had been 1,427 per million in 1900 had declined to 6 in 1970 in large part due to chlorination. Similarly, and for the same reason, deaths from typhoid and paratyphoid which claimed 313 victims per million people in 1900 had been virtually eliminated by 1960. Cropland, nature's major competitor for habitat that species need to survive, had peaked in the 1930s.

The heightened environmental consciousness signaled by the first Earth Day allowed Congress to pass grandly-titled laws and claim enormous credit for environmental battles that had, for the most part, already been fought and won in the shadows before these laws spotlighted them.

Why were things already improving, before the environmental quality laws were enacted? Mostly for economic reasons. As per capita wealth increased in the post World War II boom, families switched their home furnaces from coal over to oil or gas, creating an immediate air quality benefit. Trains, whose coal-fired steam engines had been among the leading causes of air pollution, also converted, first to diesel and then to electric. Power plants turned to more efficient facilities, and moved away from urban areas. While the federal government helped fund water treatment plants, it kept away from heavy-handed regulation. State and local regulation also helped to promote environmental quality, as individual communities began to attach a higher priority to the environment.

Today, America's environment is cleaner—and Earth Day has indeed helped ensure that.

Earth Day allowed Congress to pass grandly-titled laws and claim enormous credit for environmental battles that had, for the most part, already been fought and wonBut our environmental impulses also have a dark side. The United States and other rich countries, having won their war over malaria with the help of DDT, now ban it within their borders. This ban, widely touted as one of the major environmental achievements of the 20th century, was aggressively exported through aid agencies and NGOs. It helped stall the worldwide campaign against malaria and contributed to the disease's rebound in many developing countries.

Today, malaria kills more than a million people annually, mainly children in Africa. Fortunately, the pendulum on DDT seems to be swinging back with an assist from the US Agency for International Development, belated acceptance from the World Health Organization, and constant badgering from a few stalwart groups such as Africa Fighting Malaria., but with little thanks to politically-correct European bureaucracies and, at best, only grudging acceptance from NGOs previously in the vanguard for a global ban on DDT.

Environmental zealotry, this time over chlorine, also threatens to rollback the enormous public health related gains obtained from conquering death and disease from water-related diseases. It also threatens two of the more remarkable environmental achievements of the 20th century, namely, first, the near stabilization of humanity's agricultural footprint, expansion of which is the single largest threat to biodiversity worldwide and, second, the spectacular reduction in chronic hunger and malnutrition.

Between 1990 and 2003, habitat lost globally to cropland increased less than 2 percent whereas population increased 20 percent, while the prevalence of chronic hunger in developing countries declined from 37 percent to 17 percent between 1970 and 2001 despite an 83 percent increase in population. These improvements are largely owed to wider adoption of more productive technologies which, among other things, produced more food per capita even as population increased.

However, there is unfinished business. Despite the improvements noted above, today about six million still perish each year from hunger and malnutrition. And population could grow another 50 percent by mid-century. Further improvements in agricultural productivity are jeopardized by the overwhelming and generally unfounded environmental antipathy to bioengineered crops, even though they promise to increase agricultural productivity while reducing dependence on pesticides and fertilizers. Considering the lives at stake, the results of this particular environmental campaign could be even more tragic than forsaking use of DDT for public health purposes.

On Earth Day, we should renew our promise to keep the environment clean—without adding to human misery or stalling improvements in the human condition.

How sooo 1990s. The California Global Warming Solutions Act is a watered-down version of the 1996 UN Kyoto Protocol, which mandates that most industrial nations reduce their emissions a tiny bit more by 2008-2012. Only one or two major nations may meet Kyoto. The rest failed. California will fail at Kyoto-lite, and New York shouldn't follow in its footsteps.

The world will fail Kyoto because the technology to reduce emissions simply isn't there or isn't politically acceptable (i.e. nuclear power). Californians can't simply wish it into existence by driving their SUVs to Big Sur and singing Kumbaya. Their law requires a 25% reduction in overall emissions while, thanks to all kinds of immigration, population growth rises rapidly.

The entry-level cars for these entry-level Californians are going to be quite used, not the $30,000 hybrids that are chariots of the chi-chi. Thanks to a largely snowless climate, old beaters last a long time out there, and so will current emissions trends.

But let's dream that California does lead the nation and even the world, and that every nation that has any obligations under Kyoto magically achieves a California reduction in emissions. According to scientists from the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, the amount of warming these reductions would prevent by the year 2060 is 0.05 degrees Celsius. That's right, one-twentieth of a degree. But that nothing will cost something.

The biggest cost is going to be people's faith in environmental policy. California's law (and some upcoming federal ones) are being couched in a climate of hysteria. Hurricanes have gotten worse from global warming, we hear. Greenland's ice is disappearing. We're all going to die unless we do something STAT.

Yet the frequency of category 4 and 5 hurricanes is the same today as it was 50 years ago. In fact, Greenland was cooler in its last decade than it was from 1910 to 1940.

But, thanks to this hysteria-driven policy, people will expect severe hurricanes to become rare and Greenland to somehow go back where it wasn't. That's simply not going to happen.

The NSF study, released with two other federal research entities and entitled "Impacts of Ocean Acidification on Coral Reefs," landed with a thud, and it is remarkable how the press has received it. Writers have editorialized about it, literally with one voice, without any critical fact-checking. In a July 11 editorial, the editors of the Cincinnati Post wrote, "This report is a fraction of the available evidence indicating anthropogenic climate change....The evidence is clear and convincing. The global-warming critics are neither." On July 12, the Albuquerque Tribune, in its own in-house editorial, printed the same words (without attribution).

It could have done something more original and scrutinized the NSF report. There's a major problem with it, right at the beginning. Its first paragraph states correctly that, as a result of the burning of fossil fuel and other activities, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is rising. From there, however, the report loses its way. "Rates of increase," it says, "have risen from 0.25% [per year] in the 1960s to 0.75% [per year] in the last five years."

Really? The standard reference for atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is that registered at Mauna Loa Observatory, beginning in 1958. The average rate of change in the 1960s was 0.30% per year, and in the last five years, it was 0.55%. This last value is not statistically distinguishable from the average rate for the past 25 years. The real change from the 1960s to the last five years is 0.25% per year, while the NSF-sponsored report gives it as twice that.

The precise figure is important, because the rate of increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide is directly related to the amount of warming it creates and to changes in the acidity of the oceans; computer models using a carbon dioxide increase rate twice that which is observed show twice as much warming. And that is precisely what has occurred: there are now four separate, taxpayer-supported reports "intercomparing" the dozens of climate models for global warming that have evolved in recent years. Each one uses a carbon dioxide increase of 1% per year, or twice the real rate. Ever wonder why they predict so much warming?

It gets better (worse). The coral report then states that "The current atmospheric CO2 concentration...is expected to continue to rise by about 1% [per year] over the next few decades."

"Continue"? The average increase for the last decade was 0.49 per year, for the decade before that was 0.42%, and for the decade before that was 0.43%. Again, about half of what the report expects to "continue."

The current concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is about 380 parts per million. Before we industrialized -- back when life expectancy was in the 40s -- the concentration was about 280.

Fewer than 100 million years ago, or 400 million years after corals first arose, the carbon dioxide concentration was a bit less than 3,000 ppm. Around 175 million years ago it was pushing 6,000. If there was that much more carbon dioxide around, the oceans would have been that much more acidic, which would have killed the corals. And yet they lived.

How does the report take this problem into account? It balances the increase in acidification that these concentrations of carbon dioxide would bring about with some countervailing change in its opposite, alkalinity. So the report speculates that "ocean alkalinities could have been higher during periods with high CO2 levels." (Emphasis added.)

Then there's the problem of identifying a definite decline in corals. The report says that it is "difficult" to find this effect, and that "on average" it does not exist, because the rates of coral growth are controlled by many other factors that are apparently obscuring their decline.

How on earth did all of this make it through peer review? Or do we no longer care enough to get the facts right before expressing opinions under the mantle of scientific authority?

To many editorialists, when it comes to global warming, facts don't matter. But here are a few: corals have been around for half a billion years, on a planet that was much, much warmer, had much more carbon dioxide in its atmosphere, got hit by an asteroid or two, experienced ice ages and is now in the midst of a slight warming trend. You can bet that they'll be around a long time after humans have come to the end of the evolutionary road.

The current law provides no clear explanation of what constitutes a modification, creating both uncertainty and the opportunity for regulatory mischief. The Bush administration wanted to create a bright-line rule that the a modification would be considered major only if it cost at least 20 percent of the plant's original cost. Environmentalists justifiably opposed the rule as being too broad -- industry could break up major renovation and expansion projects into stages that individually would not cross the 20 percent threshold, and old plants would never become subject to the Clean Air Act's equipment mandates.

The environmentalists -- both environmental organizations and state attorneys general -- should be pleased with their victory, but they should not ignore the fundamental problem with New Source Review. The problem is not that the modification threshold is unclear or that it could be construed too broadly -- the problem is that the exemption exists at all.

The 1977 Clean Air Act Amendments "grandfathered" plants that were built before August 7, 1977 and allowed those plants to replace equipment and undergo minor modifications without triggering the new pollution control requirements. While this seems like a fair approach, it is actually grossly unfair in that it creates a two-tier regulatory environment that disadvantages the owners of new plants. It also is environmentally disastrous because it creates an enormous incentive for industry to keep old plants up and running. Grandfathering slows the turnover of polluting capital, locking in archaic technologies and keeping alive power plants built during Herbert Hoover's presidency. Old, patched-up, grandfathered plants account for an enormous percentage of U.S. air pollution.

Environmentalists display an unfortunate stubbornness when they remain committed to fighting the modification battle. Last month's decision was only the latest (and not the last) round in a decades-long legal fight over New Source Review. Thousands of work-hours have been spent litigating the issue of how significant a modification must be before it triggers pollution control requirements.

There is a better way to fight air pollution. For decades, economists have argued for the levy of pollution taxes to provide economic incentives to reduce pollution. If set stringently enough, pollution taxes can accomplish all of the environmental objectives that pollution control requirements are meant to accomplish. Moreover, by not forcing industry to employ the specific (and often extremely expensive) pollution control equipment designated state-of-the-art, a pollution tax would encourage industry to explore and develop new technologies that could be more effective and less expensive.

Perhaps most importantly, a pollution tax would be much easier politically to apply to all sources, old or new, thereby doing away with grandfathering. Because of the presumptive universality of taxes, people expect them to apply to everybody, not just new polluting sources. By contrast, the U.S. has never really embraced the notion that equipment regulations should apply to all pollution sources. That is why, for example, the nation has a relatively small number of old cars on the road that account for a large portion of our vehicle pollution problem, and why we allow a large number of old, outdated industrial pollution sources to enjoy a huge regulatory advantage over new plants.

The expensive and talent-consuming litigation over New Source Review has gone on long enough. Wholly apart from economic efficiency concerns, there are the thousands of people who die prematurely from air pollution annually who deserve better than the fruitless legal wrangling. The public, as well as the environmental movement and industry, would be better served by less fighting and more thinking about reducing air pollution.

Carbon dioxide has been called breath of our civilization, and as we are technologically constituted, it most certainly is. We burn fossil fuels (which combust mainly to carbon dioxide and water) for manufacturing, to go places, and to produce electrical power. While we could certainly substitute in more nuclear fuels for power production, the same forces that are so exercised about global warming being caused by carbon dioxide, in general, won't permit the nuclear option. (That being the definition of environmental insincerity.)

So it is not news at all that our emissions are at a record high along with GDP. What is more newsworthy is how the emissions per unit of GDP -- the economic bang for the energy buck -- continue their steady decline. We now produce a constant dollar's worth of goods and services with only 78% of the energy we used in 1990. In 1990, we used about two-thirds of the energy we used in 1970 for the same dollar's worth. These are remarkable increases in efficiency in the last 35 years.

The New York Times recently reported that the 2004 change in overall emissions was nearly double the annual average, neglecting to report that single-year statistics are virtually meaningless. If one had taken the average of the last five years and compared that to figures generated back to the mid-'90s, percent changes in emissions of carbon dioxide turn out to be remarkably constant.

For 1999-2004 the increase averaged 0.8% per year. From 1996 through 2001 the change averaged 1.0%. Given year-to-year fluctuations, these numbers are indistinguishable from each other.

The same applies on a global scale. Our computer models for global warming have assumed, for decades, that carbon dioxide would increase at 1% per year in the atmosphere. For those decades the real rate of increase has been quite constant, and less than half of 1%. In the ten years ending in 2004, the average rate of increase was 0.49%. Ten years before it was 0.41%, and ten years before that, 0.42%. This is why climate models have generally predicted too much warming, too fast -- about twice as much, in fact.

Taken together, all of these facts mean that most of the assumptions about the growth of global warming gases in the atmosphere have to be thrown out. There's little, if any, exponential increase, and the vibrant economies continue to produce more and more things with fewer increments of carbon dioxide.

But, if carbon dioxide is the cost of economic growth, it would seem obvious that it will continue its upwards ascent for the foreseeable future.

Will it? The answer lies in the well-established trends towards increasing efficiency in economies such as the United States' (despite the large number of SUV's panting in increasingly long traffic jams). This did not happen here because of concerns about global warming -- because no one really gave much of a care about it until New Orleans got smacked by a Category 3 (yes, it's been downgraded) hurricane.

Instead, the increases in efficiency resulted because businesses compete with each other to produce things that cost less to run and build. And, if they are built, people will come. And so do investors.

As an example of this process, get on your Yahoo financial tracker and plot the stock performance of Honda, Toyota, GM and Ford for the last two years. You'll find the share price of the producers of the Accord and the Camry up an average of 40% while the American companies have dropped 50% in value.

This creates a snowball effect in a warming world. People in vibrant economies have capital to invest in increasingly efficient companies, which rewards them with more capital, which is re-invested etc.

The prospering companies are efficient in many ways. They use less energy to produce cars in their newer plants. Their cars use less energy on the road. Their labor forces tend to be relatively young and they haven't been promised the moon in benefits and retirement with 40% of their time on earth left to run.

As these companies accumulate capital, they have been reinvesting it in development of even more efficient vehicles, some of which may emit no carbon dioxide at all, which means that some day the pressures for efficiency may indeed drive carbon dioxide emissions down. But, without investment in those technologies -- made by private individuals in publicly traded corporations -- be assured that development of the clean machines of the future will be delayed until the planet gets warmer than some might want it.

(Disclosure: The author owns shares in Honda and Toyota, sold all of his shares of Ford in 2002, and a GMAC bond in 2005.)]]> Wed, 18 Jan 2006 00:00:00 EST http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=5401 http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=2717 California's newly released regulatory initiative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from new cars sold in that state represents the triumph of symbolism over substance. It's an ill-considered gesture that ought to annoy partisans on both sides of the global warming fence.

How much will these new emission rules help in the fight against global warming? "Not much" would be a charitable answer.

Back-of-the envelope calculations derived from computer simulations performed by climatologist Tom Wigley (who, by the way, supports aggressive action to address the threat of global warming) suggest that even if every state in the union adopted California's new program, global temperatures would drop by something less (actually, probably far less) than one-tenth of 1 degree Fahrenheit by 2050. What everyone in the scientific community understands but few want to discuss publicly is that stopping global warming - or even slowing it down appreciably - requires the near total abandonment of fossil fuels.

Suggesting otherwise only encourages the public to believe that they can meaningfully address climate change without sacrifice.

Because I'm against economic sacrifice, that's fine with me. While the planet is indeed warming - probably due in no small part to industrial greenhouse gas emissions - the warming has been modest, benign, and largely confined to northern latitudes during winter nights. There are good reasons to expect that warming pattern to continue. And that warming pattern does not threaten to usher in the convulsive climatic events we are warned about in the press or in the movie theaters. In fact, some scientists and economists can make a pretty good case that global warming will prove a net plus to both the economy and the global environment.

So perhaps I should applaud California's regulations. Unfortunately, this empty gesture isn't completely cost-free.

The California Air Resources Board estimates that their plan will add about $1,000 to the cost of a new car by 2015. Question: How many people would be willing to pay a $1,000 tax each time they buy a new car to reduce global temperatures 46 years from now by a number too small to measure? How many economists could you find who'd accept that such a tax passes any sane cost-benefit test? Not many, I'll bet.

When pressed on this, environmentalists counter that anything that begins the long regulatory journey they envision before us is valuable in and of itself. But if the first baby steps necessary to initiate this journey are so expensive and so obviously incapable of passing any reasonable cost-benefit test, how expensive do you think future steps might be that environmentalists dare not forward at the moment?

Then there are the hidden costs. Because there are no technologies available to remove greenhouse gas emissions from automobile tailpipes, the only way to comply with the California mandate is to improve auto fuel efficiency. Yet improving fuel efficiency reduces the marginal cost of driving one's car, and economists have demonstrated that people respond to those lower driving costs by actually driving more.

What does more driving mean? More pollution, that's what. Economist Andrew Kleit of Pennsylvania State University calculates that a 50 percent increase in the fuel efficiency of the automobile fleet - essentially what California is requiring through these regulations - will increase net automobile emissions of volatile organic compounds by 1.9 percent, nitrogen oxides by 3.4 percent, and carbon monoxide by 4.6 percent. In other words, environmentalists are asking us to trade off an infinitesimal reduction in global temperature for more smog than we might experience otherwise.

This wouldn't be the case if environmentalists were more honest with the public about the costs associated with their policy prescriptions. The fact is that the only way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is to increase the cost of fossil fuels via an implicit or explicit tax. But imposing a fuel tax makes the cost of these policies transparent and, environmentalists fear, difficult to defend politically.

They're right.

While a few energy doomsayers such as Paul Ehrlich rile against "garish commercial Christmas displays," few of today's headline grabbers (Arianna Huffington, where are you?) have attempted to stir up debate over the generator-hours devoted to making the season glow. Indeed, holiday lighting seems a dazzling exception to the activists' goal of reducing discretionary energy usage.

But if holiday energy guzzling can be overlooked, why not excuse outdoor heating and cooling, one-switch centralized lighting, and instant-on appliances that "leak" electricity, not to mention SUVs? Prancing around to turn on individual lights or waiting for the photocopier to warm up wastes the scarcest and one truly depleting resource: A person's time.

Known world oil reserves are more than 20 times greater now than they were when record keeping began in the 1940s; world gas reserves are almost four times greater than they were in the 1960s; world coal reserves have risen fourfold since 1950. Transient developments, often political, can drive supplies down and prices up, but the raw mineral resource base is abundant -- and expanding in economic terms thanks to an inexhaustible supply of human ingenuity and exploratory capital.

Record energy consumption has been accompanied by improving air quality. Urban air quality is a third better today than in 1970. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reported that air emissions of the criteria pollutants declined by 25 percent, as energy usage increased by 150 percent. Further air emission reductions are expected, but they will not be accomplished by forcing higher prices or inconvenience on consumers. Future reductions will be accomplished with market incentives, technological improvement, and regulation based on sound science, not alarmism.

Should good citizens think twice about holiday lighting, given global warming and other suspected climate changes supposedly caused by increasing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide? Hardly. A moderately warmer, wetter world, whether natural or anthropogenic, such as experienced in the 20^th century, is a better world. Carbon dioxide from the combustion of fossil fuels "greens" the biosphere through the well-documented carbon fertilization effect. But most importantly, the wealth created from affordable, plentiful energy provides the primary means for societies to improve the environment. In the final analysis, wealth produces environmental health, which explains why increasing energy usage and environmental improvement have gone hand in hand in the Western world.

There is much to be thankful for this holiday season with our energy economy. But thoughts about the less fortunate should be with us, too. The World Energy Council estimates that 1.6 billion people lack electricity for lighting, heating, cooling, or cooking. A Christmas tree for us is likely to be firewood for those living in energy poverty. For fully a fourth of the world's population, there could be no greater holiday gift than affordable electricity, explaining why the developing world has flatly rejected proposals from environmental elites to forsake future energy usage in the quixotic quest to "stabilize climate."

Energy consumption is good -- for comfort, convenience, and even celebration. May one and all in good conscience enliven this holiday season with lights aplenty. With sources of conventional fuels steadily expanding and energy technologies rapidly advancing, Americans can look forward to even more energetic celebrations and shared goodwill in the holiday seasons ahead.

To bring you up to date, lawyers in the EPA's enforcement division have declared that the agency will no longer go after old Midwestern coal-fired electricity plants that allegedly violated the Clinton era pollution-control rules that applied to pre-1970 vintage boilers. Instead, EPA enforcers say they'll only go after those that violate the revised standards recently issued by the agency.

The reaction has been predictable. Environmental activists and attorneys general in the Northeast -- a region that activists say is blanketed by pollution from Midwestern smokestacks -- rage that the new EPA policy is both a cave-in to polluters and a gutting of the Clean Air Act. The utilities, on the other hand, maintain that the old rules were based on a flawed interpretation of federal law and that the new policy corrects a miscarriage of justice. The mainstream press has given the political combatants center stage even though the EPA shift will have little effect on environmental quality one way or the other.

Curiously absent from the hue and cry has been any criticism of the Congress, which gave those plants a special pass from federal air pollution rules in the first place. That's too bad, because the real story isn't "Bush vs. the Environment," but "Congress vs. Responsibility."

The origin of this squabble can be found in the (genuflect now) Clean Air Act of 1970, which set one standard for post-1970 facilities (so-called "new sources" under the Act) while leaving the regulation of pre-1970 facilities ("old sources" ) to the states -- as long, that is, as the owners of old plants did not substantially modify their facilities, upon which they would be deemed "new sources" for regulatory purposes. Unfortunately, Congress never spelled out its definition of "substantial modification" and EPA provided few hard-and-fast rules on the matter, preferring instead to decide such things through informal negotiation with facility owners on a case-by-case basis.

Because many existing plants possessed a valuable asset -- the right to pollute at 1970 levels -- the plant's owners have kept them online far longer than anyone in 1970 had anticipated. The EPA, moreover, offered few objections.

In 1994, EPA administrator Carol Browner -- who shared the environmentalists' frustration over the situation -- decided to lower the boom. Enforcement responsibility for the New Source Review program (bureau-speak for the regulations governing when plant upgrades turn an "old source" into a "new source") was transferred from the EPA divisions that drafted and implemented regulations to a dedicated enforcement unit. The enforcement division then turned around and retroactively sued a number of those "old sources," charging that maintenance performed on those power plants over the years exceeded routine levels.

Browner's prosecutors argued that this made them subject to the stricter regulations governing "new sources" of pollution and, more ominously, criminal sanction for long-running violations of the Clean Air Act. This despite the fact that plant owners had received EPA promises that their now-suspect facility upgrades would not turn their "old sources" into "new sources" under the law.

Into this swirling legal chaos stepped the Bush administration. Their first step was to reduce the regulatory uncertainty surrounding the NSR program by ruling that an upgrade costing less than 20 percent of the value of a pre-1970 plant constituted routine maintenance under the Clean Air Act. Their second step came earlier this month in a ruling by the EPA enforcement division that the lawsuits initiated after 1994 would be dropped because those cases would not be prosecutable under the new definition of routine maintenance.

Now, there's little doubt that the new Bush standards constitute a dubious definition of routine maintenance. In five years, for example, your pre-1970s plant can essentially become a brand-new, state of the art facility, yet still escape tough EPA regulations for "new sources." On the other hand, there's also little doubt that there was something seriously wrong with a regime that failed to clearly demark what was and was not permissible and that allowed retroactive prosecution for actions given a green light at the time by EPA regulators.

Whatever your position, however, the real culprit isn't the EPA. It's Congress, because they are the ones that required the EPA to treat new and existing pollution sources differently. And it was Congress that left the EPA little guidance regarding what constituted routine maintenance.

Why did Congress do that? The health effects of emissions from old plants, after all, are no different than the health effects of emissions from new plants. Instead, there were two reasons.

First, politicians want to have it both ways. Passing the Clean Air Act allowed politicians to take credit for establishing a goal of cleaner air. Leaving the actual rulemaking to the EPA allowed those same politicians to keep their fingerprints off the inevitable tradeoffs involved in securing that goal.

Second, politicians wanted to transform business opposition to the Clean Air Acts of 1970 and 1977 into business support by imposing the Acts' costs on future competitors rather than existing firms. It had the same economic effect as allowing existing firms to collude and raise the costs of their future rivals without any of the political fallout and press scrutiny. But rather than calling the legislation "The Incumbent Industrial Collusion Act of 1970," it is called "The Clean Air Act" and its supporters are on the side of the angels.

If Congress really wanted to settle this dispute, it could simply pass a bill establishing once and for all the rules of the road. After all, they've done it before. Just last September, a federal judge ruled that the Federal Trade Commission did not have the authority to administer a national list of people who did not want to receive unsolicited calls from telemarketers. Within a week, the Congress passed and President Bush signed legislation giving the FCC explicit authority.

The fact that Congress instead lets everyone sue the EPA to resolve the dispute tells us that politicians on both sides of the divide are unwilling to take responsibility for the economic or environmental costs of their positions. That -- and not the EPA -- is the real problem.]]> Wed, 26 Nov 2003 00:00:00 EST http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=5369 http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3151 A funny thing happened to me the other day driving through rural Virginia. I almost stared to cry, but it wasn't over my 401 (k). Instead it was air pollution -- in particular, a massive burst of ozone -- that, for the first time in 24 years in that bucolic spot, burned my eyes. What provoked this unprecedented event?

Massive ozone "exceedences" occur when volatile organic compounds (VOCs) react with nitrogen oxides, which are produced by cars and industry, in the presence of strong sunlight and light winds. This has been known for a long time. What is unexplained is why this suddenly appeared in a rural, Mid-Atlantic setting.

It wasn't because of changes in nitrogen oxides, produced by cars, power plants, and manufacturing. There's been no sudden up-spike in the number of polluting cars. In fact, every new car that is sold, replacing an old beater, produces an increment of cleaner air.

Nor has there been an explosion of new power plants. As any utility executive will tell you, it takes many years from imagination to electricity to satiate the regulatory monster.

Nor has there been much of a general up-tick in economic activity, at least as can be surmised from both national GDP data and more regional estimators.

What has changed is this: In Summer 2003 the Mid-Atlantic region is greener than an Atlantic City crap table. Over much of the region, trees are the largest source of volatile hydrocarbons. Plants produce two of these, isoprene and terpenes, in huge quantities (one tree = nine new cars), and the more green material there is, the more they emit. For what it's worth, 60 percent of the volatile organic compounds produced in Metro Atlanta are from trees, not people.

According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, the region where my eyes burned has just experienced its wettest spring (March-May) in 109 years of record keeping. In addition, the same place also experienced the record number of days with measurable rainfall for any calendar month, totaling a Seattle-like 22 days in May. June isn't far behind, and together the two are likely to combine to an all-time record for number of rainy days that could stand for a century or two.

So, not only was it wet, there also were an amazing number of cloudy days. The two combined to produce abundant vegetation, an experiment you can repeat at home. Put plants under a grow-light, which produces a lot less photosynthetic light than the sun (mimicking a cloudy day), water them well, and then you will see a massive profusion of leaves. Anyone who grows his own tomatoes knows how they sprawl under such conditions.

More leaves = more isoprene and, in some cases, more terpenes. More of these, in the presence of nitrogen oxides, means more smog.

Of course, we put most of the nitrogen compounds in the air, by driving cars, consuming electricity (produced by combustion of fossil fuels), and simply making things. They won't go away completely until we no longer burn this fuel, and that's not going to happen anytime soon.

Don't blame President Bush for rolling back some executive order from late in the Clinton administration that would have created an additional increment of nitrogen oxide reduction. There hasn't been any change in emissions as a result. It takes more than a few months (often a decade or so) for regulatory changes to produce much that can be measured. In fact, if eastern visibility has changed very little in the last quarter-century.

Don't blame global warming either: The same places that were so wet nearly set their records for the coldest spring as well.

Sorry, it was a new class of pollutant that made a lot of rural Mid-Atlantic residents cry on June 25. It was rain. May showers brought June pollution

Environmentalists, however, do have some reason to worry. It turns out that being designated as one of the League of Conservation Voters' "Dirty Dozen" was less a kiss of death than a political "good housekeeping seal of approval." The Sierra Club, the LCV, and a host of other Green groups spent millions of dollars to hammer "Dirty Dozen" denizens John Sununu (New Hampshire), Wayne Allard (Colorado), Saxby Chambliss (Georgia), and Jim Talent (Missouri) - to no apparent effect. While the Greens did bag half their targeted list (mostly the small fry in less important House campaigns), pollsters report that environmental issues had virtually no effect on those races.

Until the Democrats can prove that being tarred as "an enemy of the environment" will have political consequences, Republicans might well become more emboldened to take on Greens than they have been in the past.

Still, there's little reason to think that a wholesale assault on environmental regulations is in the offing. First, the Senate is a 60-vote institution given the omnipresent threat of a filibuster. The Democrats might be wounded, but they still have a lot of Senate votes and a political base that they can abandon only at their peril. Remember, were it not for Green defections to Ralph Nader in 2000, Al Gore would be sitting in the White House today. Accordingly, the Democrats can be counted on to filibuster - and prevail - over any symbolically important Republican environmental initiative that reaches the Senate floor.

Second, the Republicans lack an environmental agenda and thus have nothing in the policy cupboard to put on the political table. If anyone out there in GOP-land has plans to "gut" the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, or any of the two dozen major environmental laws that govern this country, I have yet to hear about it. Of course, environmentalists would counter that Bush's regulatory agenda over the past couple of years put the entire Green enterprise in jeopardy. But that's symptomatic of The New Republic's Gregg Easterbrook's observation that the trouble with environmentalists is that they are incapable of distinguishing between a bicycle accident and the end of civilization. Aside from the fight over the Artic National Wildlife Refuge, President Bush has, on balance, stood accused not of rolling back regulations but of slowing the pace of regulatory advance or of making exceptions in the federal review of environmental impacts in the use of particular public lands. On balance, however, environmental regulations and federally directed environmental cleanup activities are tighter and more thoroughgoing today than they were under the Clinton administration.

Third, and most importantly, Americans are by-and-large reasonably comfortable with the environmental code as it exists. While they clearly aren't ready to jump off an economic cliff and embrace the Kyoto Protocol, they aren't about to enlist for political jihads against environmental regulations. Although a strong case for sweeping reforms can be made, the president would have to spend a tremendous amount of political capital to convince the public (and thus, its representatives in Congress) that the proposed changes wouldn't lay waste to the environment. Without success in that arena, no substantive environmental reforms will pass no matter how aggressive the corporate community gets or how much "free-lancing" occurs within the Republican caucus.

While such a reform campaign is long overdue, President Bush is well known for carefully husbanding his political capital. With wars against terrorism and Iraq and political campaigns for tax cuts, Social Security reform, terrorism insurance, tort reform, his "faith-based" initiative, and judicial appointments, it's unlikely that President Bush will find the time to open up yet another can of political worms - particularly since opening this can could energize the Democratic base and lead to no end of poisonous demagoguery.

I wish it were otherwise, but there it is. While Green fundraisers will certainly find it useful to cry that the corporate wolf is at the environmental door, those warnings are less from the three pigs than from Chicken Little.]]> Tue, 26 Nov 2002 00:00:00 EST http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=4152 http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=4163

Would environmentalists argue that we need to learn more about this risk before acting? Almost certainly not. It's safe to say that environmentalists would argue that "the precautionary principle" demands that, in the face of uncertainty, we assume the worst about this threat.

Environmentalists have, after all, vigorously crusaded against environmental health risks that range as high as 1-in-1-million and have been willing to spend several billions of dollars to save one statistical life. They have, moreover, militantly opposed any requirement that environmental risk reduction efforts be subjected to cost-benefit or risk-risk analyses. So it's probably safe to say that the Greens would launch the political equivalent of a holy war against this environmental pollutant.

Would they be right to do so? Well, substitute the phrase "environmental pollutant" with the phrase "Saddam Hussein" and you've actually got a reasonably fair depiction of the debate about whether the United States should preemptively strike Iraq to prevent chemical, biological, or even nuclear weapons from falling into al Qaeda's hands.

Risk is risk. Whether we're talking about the risk of global warming or the risk of being subject to a nuclear attack, the fundamentals about how we should think about risk and how we should go about dealing with it shouldn't vary based upon the particular risk at hand. If we are to take Greens seriously about how we should approach risk in the environmental arena, why shouldn't we use their decision-making template when confronting other sorts of risks?

It's worth noting, however, that absolutely nobody engaged in the debate about war with Iraq -- even the environmentalists! -- would dream of applying the environmentalists' approach to risk assessment. Hawks and doves both accept that there are great uncertainties; that risks abound both in action and inaction; and that not undertaking cost-benefit and/or "risk-risk" tests would be madness. The "precautionary principle" could cut either way and is accordingly useless.

Why do we think one way about environmental risks but another about public risks in other contexts? Or to put it another way, why do some of us have far greater tolerances for some risks (like getting nuked by bin Laden because he got the bomb from Saddam Hussein) but not for others (like getting cancer from PCBs because you ate too many fish from the Hudson)?

For no reason that we can see. The science behind many of the environmental risks we worry about, after all, is no more certain than the geopolitical calculations used to justify war or peace. The cost-benefit calculations are just as tough.

This isn't to say that we should or should not launch a war against Iraq. It is to say, however, that the decision framework employed by environmentalists would look absurd in any other policy context if it were stripped of its emotional baggage. To focus only on the benefits of action rather than on both the costs and benefits of action, as well as inaction, is logically indefensible whether we're talking about our war against terrorism or our war against pollution.]]> Fri, 15 Nov 2002 00:00:00 EST http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=4163 http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3598 The United States has achieved large declines in air pollution during the last few decades, yet polls show most Americans think air pollution has been getting worse. A misleading new report by the Public Interest Research Group helps explain why. PIRG cooked the pollution books to mislead Americans into thinking air pollution is bad and getting worse, when just the opposite is the case.

PIRG's "Danger in the Air" is the latest in a series of recent activist group reports intended to scare Americans into believing they're seriously harmed by current air pollution levels, and that they should support more draconian and expensive regulations.

PIRG doesn't want Americans to know that progress on air pollution has been nothing short of spectacular. San Bernardino, California, the smoggiest area of the country, exceeded federal health standards for ozone smog on more than 130 days per year during the 1980s. Today, that number is down to around 15 to 30 times per year and dropping. That success was repeated across the nation. Of the more than 1,000 government ozone-monitoring sites, only 46 percent met federal health standards in the early 1980s. Today, 86 percent meet the standards. Those gains occurred at the same time that Americans increased their automobile use by 75 percent.

PIRG didn't want to tell that story. So it artificially inflated pollution levels. For example, PIRG's report proclaims, "During the 2001 ozone season, the national health standard for ozone smog was exceeded on no fewer than 4,634 occasions." That's a shocking number. But it has nothing to do with anyone's pollution exposure. According to government data, areas that exceed the federal ozone health standard do so an average of about 3 days per year.

Even in areas with the highest ozone, PIRG's claims are a gross exaggeration. For example, PIRG asserts California exceeded the federal ozone standard 241 times in 2001, in effect telling 34 million Californians that they're breathing dangerous air on two of every three days. Yet most areas of California had no more than a few ozone exceedances in 2001, and even Crestline, with the worst ozone in the state (and nation), had 27.

Air pollution will only continue to improve. Cars and trucks account for the majority of ozone-forming pollution. But thanks to technological progress, newer vehicles start out cleaner and stay cleaner as they age compared to older models. On-road pollution measurements show that, as a result, average vehicle emissions are declining about 10 percent a year, ensuring continued clean-air progress.

Once again ignoring inconvenient facts, PIRG nevertheless claims that clean air laws are under assault and that recent Bush administration regulatory proposals to revamp "New Source Review" (NSR) would allow industrial facilities "to emit millions of tons of additional smog-forming pollutants" into the air. If true, this would represent an increase of as much as 25 percent to 50 percent in industrial pollution emissions. PIRG doesn't include any analysis on how that could happen. That's no surprise, because it couldn't happen.

NSR requires that "best available control technology" be installed on new industrial facilities, and on older facilities that make a "major" modification to their equipment. The Bush NSR proposal wouldn't change NSR at all for new sources. For older sources, it would streamline procedures and relax somewhat the definition of a "major" modification. If the Bush NSR plan increases emissions at all, it might be by a few percentage points at some older facilities. More likely, NSR reform will encourage modernization at older facilities, increasing energy efficiency and reducing emissions. Ironically, most of the Bush NSR proposals had already been promoted by the Clinton administration, but without the associated alarmist rhetoric from environmental groups.

Regulatory issues aside, PIRG never explains how a few existing older facilities could increase production by the several-fold factors necessary to cause such large increases in overall industrial emissions. PIRG's errant claims also ignore the ongoing declines in vehicle pollution-the major cause of ozone smog.

Ironically, PIRG's deceitful report could end up reducing Americans' overall health and safety. Encouraged to overestimate the danger of current air pollution levels and the prospects for future reductions, Americans may demand additional unnecessary regulations. But regulations increase the price that consumers pay for goods and services, draining families' resources for other needs like food, health care, education and entertainment. When society wastes effort on small or non-existent risks, fewer real problems get the attention they deserve.

"If you torture the data enough, it will confess to anything," goes a cautionary statistics joke. PIRG seems to have adopted this maxim without a trace of irony.

But that apparently hasn't killed the PNGV, which was designed as a financial and technological assistance program for Ford, GM, and Chrysler (now Daimler-Chrysler). Now, despite the facts, the Bush administration is pushing the PNGV boondoggle even further down the road to nowhere.

Some people saw this coming. Last year, Rep. John Sununu (R-NH) tried to kill PNGV. For his efforts, he is now the target of a TV campaign sponsored by the Sierra Club and the other fat cats of Big Enviro.

What the Academy found -- - which they could have learned by reading Consumer Reports -- - is that the much-vaunted hybrid automobile technology, which cleverly combines gas and electric motors with "regenerative" braking (turning the electric motors into generators and recharging their batteries), really doesn't buy that many mpgs unless the car is unusually driven.

Consumer Reports compared Toyota's hybrid Prius with its conventional Echo. Prius has been around (in Japan) since 1997, and Echo is an economized version. A base Echo sells for $10,525, and a Prius for $20,520. The difference in miles per gallon found by CR's drivers? Three miles per gallon (41 vs. 38).

Is that all you get for your money? CR also tested the Honda's hybrid Insight, another $20,000 machine, and got 51mpg. It seats two and weighs 1820 lbs. Testers at Edmunds.com got the same, after over a year of ownership. Total U.S. sales in its 18-month history are a miserable 7,500 units.

These "mass market" mpgs are lower than what you find on "enthusiast" Web sites. That's because those intrigued by the technology (like this driver) do their best to see what it can get. In fact, you can get much more mpg out of both conventional and hybrid cars if you try. When we look at this subset, Prius owners average around 45mpg and Insighters around 62 (mine shows 69.7). But this group is much more obsessive about mileage than, say, SUV owners.

So if you're an average Joe driver, it's pretty simple. Would you pay twice as much for a car that gets you three more miles per gallon?

Of course not. But the hybrids are chic and politically correct. And no American auto company needs a bit of PC more than Ford. So, after helping to spend our $1.5 billion in the PNGV, they announced last week that they're going to stuff hybrid technology made by Toyota (!) in their Escape SUV. That's gratitude to us taxpayers for you.

How much gas will this save? Consumer Reports got 17 mpg out of their Escape. Analogizing to the Echo-Prius comparison, expect an 8 percent increase in fuel economy for average Joes, or about 1.4 mpg. For this saving of about $100 in gas a year, you'll pay a premium of several thousand dollars, because Toyota's not going to give away this technology to Ford. In fact, this is where they will recoup some of their substantial Prius losses.

Ford's position is all emissions and mirrors. They know it's not going to sell well in the United States, just like the other hybrids. According to Aisin AW, of Takefu, Japan -- - 40 percent owned by Toyota and the supplier of Toyota's (and now Ford's) hybrid technology -- - they expect to produce about 15,000 units for Ford. Given that not all of these are going to be sold in the United States, that looks like about 12,000 vehicles. This equals the total annual sales for the Prius is about 2.5 times the annual sales of the Insight, and is about what Honda expects when it puts its hybrid technology in the four-passenger Civic next spring. Don't expect a lot of advertising, either; the more hybrids that each of these companies sell, the more they lose. A reasonable guess is that Honda has dropped $80 million on the Insight, and Toyota even more on the Prius. Ford won't make money either using Toyota technology.

So there's little demand for the hybrids and the PNGV pie-in-the-sky doesn't work. This is why Congressman Sununu did what he did; it seems that logic and political incorrectness run in his family. Meanwhile, the Bush administration now proposes that PNGV live on, by cramming taxpayer-subsidized hybrid technology into -- - you guessed it -- - SUV's like the Escape.]]> Tue, 04 Sep 2001 00:00:00 EDT http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3909 http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=4882 Sun, 01 Oct 2000 00:00:00 EDT http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=4882 http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=4932

A fresh analysis of nationwide air quality and emissions data from the Environmental Protection Agency shows that air quality was already improving rapidly before federalization. The improvements were especially pronounced in urban areas, which had the worst pollution problems. Sulfur dioxide emissions declined 40 percent between 1962 and 1969. Smog, a problem first and foremost in the Los Angeles area, had been lessening in that region since the 1950s.

National emissions per dollar of gross national product peaked in the 1920s for sulfur dioxide, the 1930s for the volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxides that produce smog, and the 1940s or earlier for particulate matter and carbon monoxide. At least 70 percent of the reductions between those peaks and the 1997 levels predated federalization.

Actual data refute claims of a "race to the bottom" and prove that the air was not getting worse in the years before federalization. Furthermore, federalization seems not to have accelerated declines in emissions or improvements in air quality for the most important pollutants.

Another justification for federalization is that pollution can have interstate impacts, but 30 years of experience show that federalization does not guarantee successful solutions to interstate problems such as acid rain.

Moreover, several international environmental agreements indicate that cross-boundary problems can be addressed collegially, without imposed solutions from above.

The rise and subsequent decline of air pollution during this century tracks well with the premise that states continually strive to improve their quality of life. In the early stages of economic development, societies focus on becoming wealthier so that they can better afford basic public health and social services like sewage treatment, electricity and hospitals.

During this period, the environment suffers. Initially, the "race to the top" of the quality of life is mirrored in a "race to the bottom" of environmental quality.

To continue to improve a society's quality of life, more resources must be devoted to solving environmental problems. Increased wealth and technological advances makes this task easier. Thus, environmental degradation is first arrested and then reversed; that is, society goes through an environmental transition. After the transition, greater wealth and technology improve rather than worsen environmental quality. This is borne out in America's environmental evolution: the first improvements came voluntarily when prosperous households, businesses and industries started switching from coal and wood to cleaner fuels like oil and electricity, and began installing more efficient technologies that conserved energy and raw materials.

Since the rationale for federalization is weak and the nation is past its environmental transition, devolution of responsibility for air quality to the states is unlikely to roll back past gains. To ensure that further improvements in environmental quality and the quality of life go hand in hand, environmental requirements should be fine-tuned to each state's special circumstance, something impossible with one-size-fits-all federal regulations. Moreover, the current command-and-control, pollutant-by-pollutant approach should be replaced with one that would minimize overall risks to public health and welfare. Emissions trading should be broadened to allow trading across pollutants. Trading should encourage not just emission reductions but reductions in risks to health and welfare.

In combating intrastate pollution, the federal government should become an equal partner with states, with Washington setting idealized goals and states determining their own schedules and control measures to attain those goals. This is only appropriate since they will be the major winners or losers from their own actions (or inaction).

Solutions to interstate pollution problems should be negotiated by the affected states. Downwind states should be free to accept alternative risk reductions if they would provide greater benefits. For example, a downwind state might accept funding to provide some health insurance for its indigent population instead of additional scrubbers upwind. Because many factors affecting the quality of life are unquantifiable, optimizing the quality of life should be left to each state's political process.]]> Tue, 23 Nov 1999 00:00:00 EST http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=4932 http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=5772 A few weeks ago, the Clinton administration finally got around to signing the Kyoto Protocol, the global warming treaty that obligates the United States to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 7 percent below 1990 emission levels by the year 2012. Both supporters and opponents of the treaty agree that meeting that goal will require between a 30 and a 40 percent reduction in the greenhouse gas emissions that would otherwise occur about a decade hence. Beyond that, sorting out the scientific and economic argument between the two is difficult for a nonspecialist. Here's the scorecard to date.

Treaty supporters say that just about all the scientists engaged in global warming research now accept that the problem is real and must be addressed. Well, yes and no. Most (but by no means all) scientists engaged in the field agree that industrial emissions are probably affecting the climate. But the evidence is circumstantial. As the United Nations' International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) noted in its most recent (1995) report, the evidence thus far "cannot be considered as compelling evidence of cause-and-effect link between anthropogenic forcing and changes in the Earth's surface temperature."

The "balance of evidence suggests" (in the words of the IPCC) that industrial emissions are the culprit, but that's hardly conclusive. And the consensus about the matter is not as nearly universal as suggested. Seventeen thousand scientists (half of whom are trained in physics, geophysics, climate science, meteorology, oceanography, chemistry, biology or biochemistry) recently signed a petition written by Frederick Seitz, a past president of the National Academy of Sciences, declaring that there is no compelling evidence to justify reducing greenhouse gas emissions at all.

Nor do scientists agree on how hot it would get if we did nothing. The IPCC's "best guess" back in 1990 was that industrial greenhouse gas emissions would increase average global temperatures by 5.8 degrees (all temperature figures are Fahrenheit) by the end of the next century. In 1995 the IPCC adjusted its "best guess" down to 3.6 degrees. Three studies published this year (by Hansen, Dlogokencky and Myhre) suggest that the present "best guess" stands at about 2.25 degrees of warming by the end of the next century. Most experts doubt that that amount of warming would be particularly worrisome (indeed, we're already about half way there temperature-wise, and the effect of this "global warming" has thus far proven underwhelming, to say the least).

Killing the coal industry to reduce temperatures 1/7th of 1 degree 50 years hence is justified by treaty advocates as a necessary "first step" of about 30 that must necessarily come. Treaty opponents do a quick cost/benefit analysis and conclude that treaty advocates have lost their grip on reality.

While the Kyoto Protocol envisions significant cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, scientists on all sides of the debate agree that its impact will be virtually undetectable. Tom Wigley, a highly respected senior scientist at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research (and a scientist, moreover, usually thought of as in the alarmist camp), recently calculated that the Kyoto Protocol would only reduce temperatures by 0.13 degrees by 2050 if we accept the IPCC's 1995 estimate of warming under a business-as-usual scenario. The Kyoto Protocol would have no meaningful impact on future climate change because, as along as we use fossil fuels, the question of global warming is not "if" but "when."

Finally, advocates of the treaty argue that its costs will be negligible, while opponents warn of a replay of the 1970s energy crises. The best evidence for each argument comes from studies issued by the Clinton administration (the study most optimistic about costs comes from the president's Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), the most pessimistic from the Energy Information Administration). Both studies make valid projections. The differences are found in the assumptions. But it's worth noting that the economic models relied on by the CEA reveal that, absent a truly global emissions trading system (a system that was hotly opposed by most nations at the recently concluded talks in Buenos Aires), America would be forced to abandon coal-fired electricity within the next decade to keep compliance costs from skyrocketing.

Killing the coal industry to reduce temperatures 1/7th of 1 degree 50 years hence is justified by treaty advocates as a necessary "first step" of about 30 that must necessarily come. Treaty opponents do a quick cost/benefit analysis and conclude that treaty advocates have lost their grip on reality.

And that, dear readers, is where we stand today. Misleading public characterizations of the global warming debate notwithstanding, the case for the Kyoto Protocol is pretty threadbare. Of course, the Senate is unlikely to ratify the treaty, a fact conceded by the administration in its decision not to send it up for a vote until at least 2001. If the past is any prologue, the case for ratification will continue to weaken. The question is, Will anyone be able to see through the political hot air to notice?

The 1992 amendments to the Clean Air Act mandated that local governments that violate federal ozone (urban smog) standards abide by a dizzying array of regulations, many of the most controversial of which--centralized state inspection and maintenance programs, carpooling requirements, zero-emission vehicle sales quotas, use of alternative fuels, and new-vehicle emission standards--are intended to control automobile emissions.

Both empirical evidence and candid reflection suggest that current approaches to vehicle pollution are extremely inefficient, economically costly, and of only limited help in improving air quality. The use of remote sensors, mobile, roadside emission-sensing devices, could do more to improve air quality than all other approaches combined at only a fraction of the cost. Moreover, a remote-sensing program would embody the concept that the polluter--not society at large--should pay for pollution. But remote sensing is largely neglected by the Clean Air Act.

A detailed examination of how such a program could be implemented in Los Angeles indicates that remote sensing would prove far more effective and about five times less costly than the current decentralized inspection and maintenance program, known as Smog-Check.

Accordingly, Congress should amend the Clean Air Act to allow states to adopt remote-sensing programs in place of the unpopular and less effective programs currently required by the act. Such a reform would be a boon to drivers everywhere and would better meet environmental goals.