May 2004 Archives

Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell (D) has proposed starting a week-long 'green' tax break twice a year in Pennsylvania. Under the proposal, consumers purchasing appliances carrying the EPA's "Energy Star" designation would not have to pay state sales taxes during those two weeks.

Russia's top scientists tell Putin to kill Kyoto, reports Reuters. Note that this is an official report from the Russian Academy of Sciences to the President of the Russian Federation. The reports as yet are slim on the scientific details, but it is clear that the scientists do not believe that the Kyoto Protocol will acheive anything meaningful.

We can assume, therefore, that any talk of there being a scientific consensus that Kyoto is necessary for the planet is mere cant. The representative body of Russian science has rejected this energy suppression plan as a means of mitigating climate change.

I wonder whether any mainstream media outlet will report this?

The National Center for Public Policy Research's David Almasi on lawn care:

Want a quick example of how private property rights are the best way to protect the environment? Look out at your front yard.

I just returned from a 10-day vacation. One of the last things I did before I left home was cut the grass. Within an hour of returning home, I was back out cutting the grass -- this time in 90-degree heat. I was also pulling weeds, planting vegetable seedlings in the garden. I then made arrangements for a professional service to come and do some fertilizer treatments. As I worked, three of my neighbors were also mowing. We all want to be proud of our lawns and not be a nuisance to others.

Compare this to what I see on my commute to and from work. On one major road, the grass on the median strip is so high that I almost cannot see the oncoming traffic. While the grass is high in the median, the weeds are even higher and now in full bloom. Along the Washington Beltway, weeds and grasses are over waist-high. Who's in charge of cutting and tending to these areas? The government.

Take this beyond my yard and my commute. Local governments, state governments and the federal government own a huge amount of land -- so much that they cannot adequately take care of it all. Homeowners, ranchers and businesses that own property, however, manage their property for reasons of pride and profit and most often go the extra mile to make sure that their land does not go fallow or cause harm. With government, neglect is often a write-off. It's also inconsistent. In the Washington area, a homeowner can be fined for not mowing, raking leaves or shoveling snow. If the government is lax in it's groundskeeping, well...

Private ownership: pride and attention. Government ownership: the potential for neglect. Any questions?

We've just posted on the National Center for Public Policy Research's website a piece by Senior Fellow Bonner Cohen, who explains to the uninitiated why so many people are frustrated with the Endangered Species Act. This essay has been reprinted in the Miami Herald and other newspapers; I'll excerpt a bit of it here:

In the 30 years since its enactment, the Endangered Species Act has emerged as one of the most powerful, and ineffective, environmental statutes on the books.

Of the some 1,260 species listed as "endangered" or "threatened" under the ESA, fewer than 30 have been taken off the list. And this is even worse than it looks. Some species were removed from the list because they became extinct; others, like the American alligator, were taken off because it was determined they were never endangered in the first place.

These meager results, however, are not the worst aspect of the ESA. In rural America, far away from urban skyscrapers and suburban malls, the ESA has imposed severe land-use restrictions on property owners...

Typical of the havoc the ESA has wreaked in rural America is the case of Ben Cone, Jr., whose father purchased 8,000 acres of timberless land on the Black River in North Carolina. Cone replanted the property with pines, carried out prescribed burns to control undergrowth, and selectively thinned his trees every few years to pay his property taxes and to turn a profit on his labor. Over time, his pines grew to such a height that they attracted the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker, which brought him into direct conflict with the ESA.

In testimony before Congress, Cone explained that "by managing [the property] in an environmentally correct way, my father and I created habitat for the red-cockaded woodpecker. My reward has been the loss of $1,425,000 in value of timber I am not allowed to harvest under the provisions of the Endangered Species Act. I feel compelled to massively clear-cut the balance of my property to prevent additional loss."

...The best way to serve the interests of both people and wildlife is to replace the ESA's rigid regulatory framework with voluntary, nonregulatory, incentive-based provisions....

This would be very similar to how the U.S. Department of Agriculture "protects" highly erodible land on the nation's farms by offering to pay farmers to place some of their land in its Conservation Reserve Program for a set term of years and then paying the landowners for their cooperation. "If this can be done for habitats of nonendangered wildlife," says R.J. Smith of the Center for Private Conservation, "it can also be done to protect the habitats of endangered species."

The National Center for Public Policy Research's David Almasi has a movie buff's take on the global warming disaster epic "The Day After Tomorrow":

In the new film "The Day After Tomorrow," our "disrespect" for Mother Earth threatens mankind with extinction unless a brave climatologist can convince us to mend our global warming ways.

The science behind the movie is dubious. But this hasn't stopped it from being used as a political tool by the likes of Al Gore and MoveOn.org, who want people to see it as more of a documentary than the disaster film that it truly is. But none of this is new.

The 1970s was full of films predicting a bleak future if we didn't mend our ways with regard to the environment. Let's consider Hollywood's track record from back then:

"Soylent Green" (1973) -- In 2022, 40 million people will be living in New York City, real food is a delicacy (jam goes for $150) and a conspiracy is uncovered in which dead bodies are converted into foodstuffs. "Soylent Green is people!" Today, genetically-modified foods are feeding starving people around the world and helping fight disease. After liberal obstructionism is overcome, starvation may be considered a thing of the past. Prediction: wrong.

"Logan's Run" (1976) -- In 2274, environmental devastation has driven humanity into domed cities. To control population, authorities have mandated no one is allowed to live past the age of 30, and the police strictly enforce the law. Even the ending of this film proved the late economist Julian Simon right. There's nothing man can do to the environment that the earth can't handle and survive. Prediction: wrong.

"Death Race 2000" (1975) -- Four years ago, America was supposed to be so unruly that an extreme sport where auto racers battle each other to the death and score points by killing innocent bystanders had been created to prevent a revolution. Reality TV? The X-Games? Professional wrestling? Maybe this one actually came true!

Joking aside, Hollywood is no great prognosticator. Movie-makers are not especially wise guides to public policy. But liberals are trying to use "The Day After Tomorrow" to promote the United Nation's Kyoto Protocol and the McCain-Lieberman bill in the U.S. Senate. Both would be costly mistakes that would do little to protect the environment but a lot to hurt our economy.

In a column for The Guardian, Jeremy Rifkin promotes the "Precautionary Principle" as an alternative to what he calls "Enlightenment science," which he says is too "primitive" to address the potentially global risks created by modern technological societies. The Precautionary Principle (PP) takes many forms, but a common statement of it by proponents is "When an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically."

But Rifkin is selective about when he thinks the PP should be invoked. For example, last year Caltech scientists published research showing that widespread use of hydrogen for energy has the potential to damage the ozone layer and alter global climate. The results are uncertain and have been challenged by other researchers, but that's immaterial, for the PP requires a halt to any technology at the first hint of danger. Yet Rifkin, a hydrogen proponent, responded to the Caltech research by arguing that "when you move into a new energy source you have to assume there's going to be some environmental impact," but that replacing fossil fuels with hydrogen "is our hope for the future." Whatever principle Rifkin is following, it isn't the PP. In fact, Rifkin's statements about hydrogen sound much more like traditional risk assessment, based on the "primitive Enlightenment science" that's ostensibly no longer applicable in the modern world.

For Rifkin and other activists, the Precautionary Principle is not really a principle at all, but merely a political and rhetorical tactic to ban technologies and activities to which environmental activists are ideologically opposed.

See the extended entry for a more detailed column on what Rifkin's response to the Caltech study says about how environmental activists view the Precautionary Principle.

Read More »

Jeremy Rifkin, one of the doyens of environmental alarmism, has written a defense of the precautionary principle for The Guardian, the avowedly leftist UK newspaper that serves as the paper of record for the environmental movement. A precautionary tale attempts to defend the principle against American objections, and concludes:

The precautionary principle is deeply at odds with the traditional Enlightenment idea about science. Risk taking is at the heart of modern science. To attempt to put limits on scientific pursuits, in lieu of greater certainty about their potential impacts on the environment, is, some scientists say, tantamount to squelching our very notion of progress.

The precautionary principle says, in effect, that because the stakes are so high, we have to weigh even the most dramatic benefits against the prospects of even more destructive consequences. The old Enlightenment science is too primitive to address a world where the bar for risk has been raised to the threshold of possible extinction itself. When the whole world is at risk because of the scale of human intervention, then a new scientific approach is required that takes the whole world into consideration.

It all sounds so noble, doesn't it? The principle is needed to defend nature against extinction and the world against its end. Yet that isn't how Europe applies the precautionary principle. Instead, it uses it to justify all manner of footling, pettifogging rules. Consider, for example, a new directive discussed by Christopher Booker in The Sunday Telegraph:

Even by the standards of the EU, the Animal By-Products regulation, 1774/2001, has created an astonishing fiasco. Inspired by wild-eyed exaggeration of the dangers of BSE, the regulation bans the burial of any "animal products", from dead chickens to pork pies, which must now be rendered into powder and incinerated.

It was obvious at once that this was totally impracticable. Since Britain has nothing like enough rendering or incineration capacity to cope with the millions of tons of meat products thrown away each year by supermarkets, Tesco and other big chains were given a "derogation" by Brussels, exempting them from the near-impossible task of separating meat products from their packaging (which cannot be rendered) until 2005.

Since May 1 last year, however, it has been a criminal offence for farmers to continue their age-old, harmless practice of burying fallen stock on the farm. Yet with no other arrangements in place to collect the stock, including millions of dead chickens, most farmers have been forced, with Defra's tacit consent, to break the law.

Defra has made forlorn attempts to install a "national disposal scheme", even setting up a Fallen Stock Company to organise it, although EC rules on "illegal state aid" limit the subsidies available to pay for it to a hopelessly inadequate £10 million (rules which France ignores).

(Booker's main point is actually that the directive cannot be complied with without the assistance of dogs from hunt kennels, which the British government is determined to close down). The directive is justified on the precautionary basis of protecting the public from "mad cow disease," although we now know that the human impact was grossly overstated.

Where is the extinction threat here? Where is the earth-shattering event that incineration of fallen livestock and half-eaten pork pies will prevent? The simple truth is that the precautionary principle, even if it is valid in those mega-cases, has little justification when it comes to the everyday cases that the EU applies it to. Instead, it is the enlightenment science that Rifkin derides that supplies us with the most rational framework for deciding what to do in those cases.

And if the precautionary principle is really valid in the case of massive risks, then one has to ask one thing: why is the EU not devoting massive resources to preventing the earth from being hit by asteroids?

The first preview audiences have seen the movie The Day After Tomorrow, and they're not impressed. Nature (Disaster Movie Makes Waves: But could the climate crash 'the day after tomorrow'?) reports:

At a preview screening yesterday, the audience's reaction to the hammier sections of the film's dialogue did not augur well. Their derisive laughter may scupper Emmerich's ambitions for political leverage.

Even in Paris, where one might assume that the bringing low of the United States would be greeted with enthusiasm, the initial reaction was unimpressed. The first review posted on the Internet Movie Database states:

Honestly, i don't like Roland Emmerich's movies in general. But i appreciate his taste for destruction! And because of the trailer, i was really impatient to see The day after Tomorrow. So did i, this morning for the french premiere. Well, i admit that the intro is tremendous. The visual effects are spectacular, frightening and it's a real experience to see the LA typhoons doing a big cleaning up in the city. After that...well, not a lot of things. As usual, Emmerich develops one thousand times already seen characters, give them some dumb lines to say and except for a scene or two, there's nothing memorable in this movie. It's a pity.

Al Gore and the George Soros-funded Moveon.org have staked a lot on the success of the movie. They seem to be as good at recommending movies as they were at choosing the best day to hold their last event warning of global warming; they held it on the coldest day of the year.

Today's New York Times reports that E: The Environmental Magazine, published by the Earth Action Network, pulled ads for The Index of Leading Environmental Indicators published by the Pacific Research Institute (PRI) and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). A statement explained the move as follows:

P.R.I.'s materials do not fit with our ad policy, because they suggest that green activities on behalf of the planet are unnecessary, counterproductive and a waste of time (and - this is crucial - supporting this conclusion with dubious science). If E were a magazine for horse lovers, we would not run ads for horse slaughterhouses, and P.R.I.'s ad and materials are similar in relation to E's environmental mission.''

Of course, long time readers of E realize that eschewal of dubious science has never been required of its editorial, let alone advertising, content in the past. Perhaps Earth Action Network is afraid it will lose contributors when they realize most environmental trends aren't all that bad.

James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web today has a hilarious point to make about a new book written by Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope.

Taranto notes that Pope complains that President Bush has (supposedly) turned back the clock on environmental protection "a full century" -- and Pope complains that Bush has "abandoned the environmental principles first championed by President Theodore Roosevelt."

But, Taranto points, out, "if Bush is trying to turn the clock back a century, that would be to 1904, when the president was . . . Theodore Roosevelt."

Over the past decade, a series of Supreme Court decisions has begun to curtail federal regulatory power. Environmental activists view this trend with dismay. The President of the Environmental Law Institute, for example, warns this is a "disturbing trend . . . that will weaken the framework of federal laws providing a safety net of environmental and public health protection for us all." It is an article of faith in much of the environmentalist establishment that restraining federal power necessarily inhibits environmental protection. But is it really so?

The Supreme Court's federalism decisions have begun to affect federal environmental laws, albeit only on the margins. If taken seriously, however, federalism principles would limit federal environmental regulations. Yet this need not hamper environmental protection. Constitutional limits on federal power may prevent the federal government from adopting certian environmental protections, but they also can limit the federal government from causing environmental harm. More importantly, it is a mistake to assume that the federal government has a monopoly on effective environmental protection. To the contrary, there is substantial evidence that, in many areas, state and local governments can be more effective.

I make these arguments in much greater detail -- albeit in draft form -- in "Judicial Federalism and the Future of Federal Environmental Regulation," available on SSRN. The paper will be coming (not so) soon in a law review. Until then, comments are welcome.

I have a new op-ed out (on the topic of the new global warming disaster movie), and thought I would share an abridged version of it here on The Commons:

Promoters of the global warming disaster movie "The Day After Tomorrow" must believe we were born yesterday.

The film focuses on a global apocalypse. Two hundred and ninety-foot tidal waves surge against Manhattan skyscrapers followed by a quick freeze that leaves Manhattan enshrouded in ice. Dozens of cities get hammered. A tornado levels Los Angeles, five-pound hailstones bombard Tokyo while San Francisco Bay freezes. It's a New Ice Age.

It's also the latest brainstorm of German schockmeister Roland Emmerich, best known for "Independence Day" and "Godzilla."

Those movies were enjoyable examples of the "sky is falling" fantasy genre. "The Day After Tomorrow," however, is the subject of a multi-million dollar PR campaign touting it as if it were a realistic warning of what could happen if we don't dismantle our economy to stave off global warming. Yet the extreme scenarios promoted by global warming theory advocates are supported more by politics than by science.

Kyoto was rejected by President Bush because of its draconian economic burdens and because the treaty wouldn't prevent global warming. There is little scientific evidence documenting the need for a Kyoto-style crusade against climate change, anyway.

Excepting the El Nino year of 1998, since about 1979, the Earth's temperature apparently has not been increasing. What minor warming the Earth experienced over the past century primarily occurred before 1940, when there were far fewer automobiles and power plants.

The U.S., in any case, is not ignoring climate issues. The U.S. government spent over $3.5 billion on climate change in 2003 alone.

Many of the horrendous events predicted by global warming scaremasters have no basis in reality. Even if global warming were to occur at the fast pace predicted by alarmists, it wouldn't unleash the New Ice Age predicted in "The Day After Tomorrow."

Says scientist Andrew Weaver in the journal Science, "it is safe to say that global warming will not lead to the onset of a new ice age."

It's green vs. green over wind farms in Europe, according to some recent news reports. One German activist argues "The destruction of the landscape needs to be entered in on the cost side of any cost-benefit analysis of wind power." Meanwhile, the expansion of wind power in England is producing similar controversy.

Of course, such controversies are not exclusive to Europe. This proposed wind farm off Cape Cod has provoked a similar controversy. According to this report, Massachusetts Senator Kennedy and Governor Romney oppose the project, but Senator Kerry is withholding judgment pending a greater assessment of its likely environmental impact. (Perhaps he'll be able to say he supported the project, before he opposed it.)

Why are wind farms so controversial? Perhaps because they spoil landscapes, tale up substantial amounts of land, and can cause bird kills. On top of that, they are rarely cost-competitive with other energy sources unless heavily subsidized. As Robert Bradley of the Institute for Energy Research concluded, wind -- like most "alternative" power sources -- is not cheap, and not green.

UPDATE: The Adam Smith Institute reports on recent research -- its own and the Beacon Hill Institute's -- suggesting wind power is a bad deal.

Last February, the Environmental Protection Agency got a lot of press when it published a report claiming that new roads simply induced more driving and so would not reduce congestion. Last week, after officials at the Federal Highway Administration severely criticized research flaws in the report, the EPA quietly withdrew it "for revisions."

The report was titled "Characteristics and Performance of Regional Transportation Systems," and it claimed that cities that had built a lot of new freeways were just as congested as ones that had not. This issue of "induced demand" is contentious, but in fact data from large numbers of cities show that building new freeways may increase freeway driving but does not increase total driving. In other words, new freeways draw cars away from other streets. Since freeways are both safer and faster, this is a good thing.

The reality is that the lack of new road construction in many growing urban areas is leading to small amounts of suppressed demand. In other words, a few people are not traveling, or at least not at the times they would like to travel, because of congestion. But immobilizing people in gridlock is not a solution to congestion or any other urban problem.

The EPA study looked at a few indicators for only thirteen urban areas. It did not do a statistical analysis of the large amounts of data that are available for (depending on the data you want) at least 75 urban areas. Since the U.S. has such diverse urban areas, picking and choosing can produce just about any result you want. Only by looking at the bigger picture can you get close to the truth. One prominent researcher in the U.S. Department of Transportation referred to EPA's study as having "felony-level methodological flaws."

Not surprisingly, none of the media outlets that reported on EPA's original study have reported that EPA has withdrawn it. (The only published report is in Inside EPA, a costly newsletter available on-line only by subscription.) But if you hear anyone citing the EPA study, you can tell them, "Withdrawn for felonious fabrications!"

Today I debated the director of Denver's transit agency over that agency's proposal to spend nearly $5 billion building six new rail lines. The goal of these new rail lines, he argued, was to give transit choices to middle-class people who own automobiles and won't ride buses.

I pointed out that nearly 95 percent of white families in the U.S. own an automobile, but only 75 percent of black families own one. Because automobility provides people access to far more jobs than can be reached by transit, lack of auto ownership is one of the biggest obstacles to getting people out of poverty, citing a recent University of California study. I added that, for less than the cost of one of his proposed rail lines, we could give a new car to every family in the Denver metro area who didn't have a car (without actually saying we should do that).

His response was that we don't dare let poor people have cars because they would only add to traffic congestion. That doesn't sound very compassionate. Many in the audience (virtually all of whom were white middle-class) nodded their heads at his lack of interest in helping the poor. I wonder how his attitude would play before a black audience?

Named in honor of the concept of The Tragedy of The Commons, this blog is dedicated to showing how environmental quality is best defended by free markets and property rights. The authors are all experts in free market environmentalism and bring many different areas of expertise to this common space.

If comments are invited, please remember you are a guest on private property. We shall defend the environmental quality of this blog as staunchly as we would defend any stream, forest or animal we own.