June 2004 Archives

Lava Lake in the Madison Range just south of Bozeman is a favorite destination for participants in our summer programs for federal judges and law professors. Most years the lake trail is clogged with snow until early July. But that’s changing.

Shorter, warmer winters and drier summers are here. Warmer spring temperatures cause our rivers to peak about two weeks earlier than in the past. Good news, perhaps, for kayakers, but troubling for agriculture, fish habitat, and summer wildfires.

These changes are consistent with global climate models predicting the greatest warming over the higher latitudes during winter. This warming is likely due to human activity.

But the uncertainty is deep, and we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability. Evidence from ice cores in Antarctica and Greenland indicate that the range of natural climate change can be large and varied at local and regional scales over very short periods, e.g., a decade.

Read More »

Scott Burgess of the web log The Daily Ablution specializes in catching the UK media on the hop in its environmental coverage. His latest post, Manufacturing Environmental 'Fact'; Greenhouse Guardianistas, is a classic example and well worth a read.

Chris Horner ably refutes below the falsehood that President Bush "withdrew" from Kyoto. A related falsehood is that Bush's rejection of Kyoto-like CO2 controls makes the U.S. a minority of one, or nearly so. A June 13 NYT article repeats this tiresome canard. I respond to it in the letter, posted below. Alas, the Times did not think it fit to print.

Read More »

The Commons is pleased to host a copy of Glenn Schleede's examination of the costs and benefits of wind power. Glenn introduces the paper as follows:

On June 24, 2004, I had the opportunity to speak about wind energy to about 650 member-owners of Associated Electric Cooperative, Inc. at their annual meeting in St. Louis. Associated consists of 6 Generation & Transmission and 51 Electric Distribution Cooperatives. These Coops serve most of Missouri (except Kansas City & St. Louis), and parts of Iowa and Oklahoma.

My comments were based on a 20-page paper. The paper places the past (1950-2000) and prospective (2010-2025) contribution of wind energy in the context of overall US energy consumption and US electricity generation. The paper demonstrates that the contribution of wind has been and will be tiny -- despite the massive subsidies and mandates being provided, unwisely, by federal and state governments.

The paper notes that the wind industry, US Department of Energy (DOE) and DOE's National Renewable Energy "Laboratory" (NREL) -- using our tax dollars -- has been highly successful in misleading the media, public, Congress and other federal and state regulators and legislators about the costs & benefits of wind energy. The advocates have grossly overstated the benefits of wind energy, and greatly underestimated the environmental, ecological, economic, scenic and property value costs of wind energy.

The false and misleading claims by the advocates have led to government policies, programs and regulations that are detrimental to the interests of consumers and taxpayers.

The paper also admits that it is difficult, given the success of the advocates' propaganda, to reverse bad federal and state wind energy policies, programs and regulations. However, it notes that emerging citizen-led efforts around the world (e.g., US, UK, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Italy, Australia, and New Zealand) are beginning to be effective in bringing the TRUTH about wind energy to the attention of the media, public and government officials.

People interested in the wind issue might also be interested in the comments of the leader of one of those citizen-led efforts, veteran British environmental campaigner David Bellamy.

In today's Wall Street Journal, Alan Murray's Political Capital column (link requires subscription) repeats a foul old canard:

Bush's economic policies have been overshadowed by his foreign policies. It isn't just the war with Iraq that bothers the Irish, although that is certainly the heart of the matter. Their dim view of this president took shape when he withdrew from the Kyoto treaty on global warming.

That unnecessary move -- the treaty could have been altered, or even scuttled, without giving the rest of the world the diplomatic equivalent of the finger -- remains one of the Bush administration's most harmful foreign-policy blunders. It scored few points for the president at home (except among oil executives), while abroad, it cemented the view of President Bush as a Texas cowboy with little concern for the rest of the world.

I sent the following letter to the WSJ editors, to set the record straight:

To the Editors,

Alan Murray accepts conventional, but incorrect, reportage on the Kyoto Protocol for his premise that President Bush courted angst among our allies when he "withdrew from", or by "giving the rest of the world the diplomatic equivalent of the finger" regarding, the Kyoto Protocol on "global warming" ("Irish Dislike of Bush...", 29 June 2004). Kyoto, alert readers will recall, is according to Europe's Environment Commissioner Margot Wallstrom designed to "level the playing field for big businesses worldwide" (quoted by The Independent (London), 19 March 2002, p. 14). While Kyoto's own problem is its substance, at the heart of any related political problems is simply the administration's communication of its actual position, compounded by remarkably uninformed reporting of the issue.

If the U.S. withdrew from Kyoto, what were all of those (28) State Department, EPA and other officials doing at the just-completed 16-25 June, "Subsidiary Body" negotiation in Bonn, in preparation for December's "COP-10" in Buenos Aires? In truth, the Bush Administration has withdrawn from neither the climate talks, nor the treaty. President Bush has instead merely continued the Clinton policy of refusing to send the signed Kyoto to the Senate for a vote. Formal rejection by the executive is achieved by renouncing the signature, as President Bush did in fact do regarding the International Criminal Court (Rome Statute). No such communication to the United Nations has issued regarding Kyoto, as is readily confirmed by the State Department's website. Until then, we're in.

It is important to recall that on Bill Clinton's watch, in November 2000 at the negotiations in The Hague (where, btw, John Kerry was a member of the U.S. delegation), a too-clever EU attempted to take advantage of a Clinton-Gore team desperate over the ongoing Florida recount. There the EU, not the U.S., refused to take yes for an answer and instead continuously sought to tighten the screws. The BBC, for example, quite plainly blamed -- surprise! -- the French. This outcome was universally reported, if overshadowed by other news, until the occupant of the White House changed bringing new rhetoric but no formal moves of any kind. Since 17th March 2001, that rhetoric has remained that “We do not support the approach of the Kyoto treaty,” (Vice-President Cheney to MSNBC). The European response has been an instransigent "there is no Plan B" (Wallstrom). Kyoto has stalled and not gone into effect, but it is not Bush's or even American inflexibility that hath wrought the current circumstance. This, and that we regrettably we have not withdrawn from Kyoto, remain verifiable truths.

This Administration has not now and has never rejected the Kyoto protocol. If it had, at least the opprobrium it routinely receives from countries who are themselves nowhere near meeting their Kyoto targets would be worth it.

As Mr. Adler notes in his Corner post today, the Alvarez-Machain decision is indeed a significant one.

By rejecting the application of the Alien Tort Claims Act to allow foreign nationals to sue multinationals in U.S. courts, the Supremes helped to reduce the avenues for those who would try to use customary international law to bring about a new era of "environmental rights" determined by unaccountable bodies such as the United Nations. See in particular the efforts to draft an Earth Charter that would eventually be recognized as part of international law and which has already been endorsed by UNESCO. Terry Anderson and I wrote about the problems with such an idea in our PERC paper on The Greening of Foreign Policy.

Still, as the court noted, it has "left the door ajar." Let us hope the "vigilant doorkeeping" promised by the court is vigilant indeed.

Speaking of environmental fables, this past spring Reason's Ron Bailey revisited the story of Love Canal, New York, where the horror story of hazardous waste seeping into local homes provoked a local evacuation and eventually helped spur an environmental law disaster, Superfund. For those unfamiliar with the story, it's worth a look.

Many environmental problems are over-stated by activists and journalists. The plight of fisheries, global and domestic, is not one of them. Fisheries have been in decline for years, yet rarely receive significant media coverage or substantial attention from environmental fundraisers or publicists. Worse, the solution to many fishery problems is well known. At this point there is widespread academic agreement and substantial empirical evidence that the development of property rights in fisheries, such as through the impementation of individual fishing quotas ("IFQs" aka "ITQs") eliminates the "tragedy of the commons" in fisheries, improves efficiency, and creates incentives for sustainable resource management. (I've written about IFQs here.)

The Bush Administration supports greater use of IFQs. Unfortunately, the administration has been reluctant to expend any political capital on the issue. This is a shame because IFQs are a perfect case study of how property rights and market institutions can solve a pressing environmental problem. In other words, if the Administration is looking for an issue where the "conservative" approach is the "greenest" approach, this is it.

Fortunately, the coalition in support of IFQs appears to be growing. Recently, PERC, the Reason Foundation and Environmental Defense teamed up to create a website, IFQs for Fisheries, documenting the need for and benefits of IFQs and monitoring efforts to get them approved. If successful, the effort will represent a tremendous success for free market environmentalism and resource protection.

Senator Larry Craig's (R-ID) bill to eliminate the Fee Demonstration program from public lands, except for national parks, passed the Senate last month. A better bill, offered by Congressman Regula (R-Ohio), which would make the program permanent for Forest Service, BLM, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service lands remains in the House.

I currently have a piece on A Better Earth arguing for making the Fee Demonstration program permanent on all public lands, not just National Park Service lands. For those who haven't visited A Better Earth yet, it's a great site for FME types.

Also, my longer paper on recreation fees for public lands was published by PERC earlier this month. It defends recreation fees against arguments of double taxation, discrimination against the poor, reduced accountability, and commercialization.

On June 22, 1969, just before noon, an oil slick and assorted debris caught fire under a railroad trestle on the Cuyahoga River. The fire attracted national media attention, including stories in Time and National Geographic. The image of a river ablaze seared into the nation's emerging environmental consciousness. Former Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Carol Browner probably spoke for many Americans when she said “I will never forget a photograph of flames, fire, shooting right out of the water in downtown Cleveland. It was the summer of 1969 and the Cuyahoga River was burning.”

The Cuyahoga fire was a powerful symbol of a planet in disrepair and an ever-deepening environmental crisis, and it remains so to this day. That a river could become so polluted to ignite proved the need for federal environmental regulation. Following on the heels of several best-selling books warning of ecological apocalypse and other high-profile events such as the Santa Barbara oil spill, the 1969 Cuyahoga fire spurred efforts to enact sweeping federal environmental legislation. “The burning river mobilized the nation and became a rallying point for passage of the Clean Water Act,” noted one environmental group on the fire’s 30th anniversary. The fire even inspired a song by Randy Newman, “Burn On.”

There’s a problem with this story. Much of it is myth. Despite repeated retelling of the day the river caught fire, the conventional wisdom on the Cuyahoga is wrong. Oil and debris on the river’s surface did burn in 1969, and federal environmental statutes were the result, but so much else of what we “know” about the 1969 fire simply is not so. It was not evidence of rapidly declining environmental quality, nor was it clear evidence of the need for federal action.

To continue reading about the "Fable of the Cuyahoga," see my NRO article here.

For those that want to know ALOT more about the Cuyahoga River fire, see my extended treatment of the river fire in the Fordham Environmental Law Review here.

Joe Bast, president of The Heartland Institute, has a very interesting transcript on his website. It is from a speech he gave about environmentalism to the Libertarian Party Convention.

Among other things, Joe addresses the current state of the environment, his past as a self-described "hippie freak" and critiques a talk given earlier at the convention by the executive director of the Sierra Club.

Anyone interested in environmental issues will enjoy the transcript from Joe's talk about Common Sense Environmentalism.

This Reuters story endorsing global warming alarmism (and written almost directly from the Press Release [Word Doc]) could have done with better editing. There are a few redundant words in the first sentence:

The number of people vulnerable to floods is expected to double to 2 billion worldwide by 2050 due to global warming, deforestation, rising sea levels and population growth in flood-prone areas, U.N. researchers have warned.

A good editor would have changed that to:

The number of people vulnerable to floods is expected to double to 2 billion worldwide by 2050 due to population growth in flood-prone areas, U.N. researchers have warned.

Seriously, Florida is pretty flood-prone, too, as is Holland. Few, however, are killed in those areas because they have become wealthy and invested that wealth in defending themselves. Encouraging wealth creation by liberalizing trade is the best defence we can provide, not frantic attempts to control the tides at a global level.

George Woodwell’s attack in the letters page of the Boston Globe on James Taylor's article on The Day After Tomorrow is a textbook example of how the scientific establishment builds political mountains out of scientific molehills whenever anyone questions the vast sums paid out of taxpayers’ pockets to keep the global warming industry going. Woodwell’s critique of Taylor’s article omits important information the voter needs to help him decide whether global warming should be a priority when she needs to choose between, for example, education spending, climate change research funding and lower taxes.

Woodwell says the Earth has warmed rapidly over the last century. True (although "rapidly" is an overstatement), but as even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change admits, much of that warming happened in the first half of the century and man’s activities were not responsible. The planet cooled between the 1950s and 1970s. It is only in the past 30 years that scientists say the Earth has warmed owing at least in part to mankind’s contribution. The public needs to know that.

Woodwell says glacial ice is melting globally. Yes, glaciers all over the world are melting. Most of them have been melting for hundreds of years. The glaciers atop Kilimanjaro have been receding even though the temperature there has been falling. Other glaciers, however, like those in Scandinavia, are advancing. There are glaciers in Alaska advancing while others a short distance away are receding. The public needs to know that.

Woodwell says that sea level is rising. Yes over the past century, but again, sea level has been rising for a long time. Satellite altimeters indicate virtually no change in sea level globally over the past decade. On-the-ground research in the Maldives, one of the low-lying island chains often claimed to be at risk from the flooding Woodwell alleges, demonstrates that the sea level there has fallen significantly over the past 30 years. The public needs to know that.

Woodwell alleges that recent droughts in North America are “warming-induced.” The historical record indicates that North America has seen thirteen major droughts over the past 500 years, the worst of them by far in the Sixteenth century. We have seen nothing in recent years to rival this drought or that of the dust-bowl years. The public needs to know that.

Finally, Woodwell claims that anomalies such as tornadoes are becoming more common. True again, but intense tornadoes – the ones that do the damage – and deaths resulting from them have decreased . It’s probably that we see more tornadoes now simply because our monitoring systems are better at detecting small tornadoes than they were a few years ago.

The public needs to know all of this. Overall, the billions of dollars we spend on researching climate change reveal that the world is getting slightly warmer as a result of man’s activities. Whether this is anything to worry about is something voters and their representatives have to decide on the basis of full information. We should bear in mind that much of these scientists’ funding is dependent on voters being scared.

(In case anyone should object that my organization receives some funding from energy companies, I should say that CEI has a proud history of supporting free enterprise and limited government and we will continue to raise public awareness of the waste of public money climate alarmism represents regardless of our funding sources.)

The French assembly has voted to amend the French constitution to include the precautionary principle and the polluter pays principle. You can read a French language story on the subject here: La Constitution s'ouvre à l'environnement.

The passage was a victory for the right. The Socialists abstained. The Greens voted against.

Bjorn Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus met in Denmark in the last week of May. The project described itself as follows:

“The goal of the Copenhagen Consensus project was to set priorities among a series of proposals for confronting ten great global challenges. These challenges, selected from a wider set of issues identified by the United Nations, are: civil conflicts; climate change; communicable diseases; education; financial stability; governance; hunger and malnutrition; migration; trade reform; and water and sanitation.

“A panel of economic experts, comprising eight of the world’s most distinguished economists, was invited to consider these issues. The members were Jagdish Bhagwati of Columbia University, Robert Fogel of the University of Chicago (Nobel laureate), Bruno Frey of the University of Zurich, Justin Yifu Lin of Peking University, Douglass North of Washington University in St Louis (Nobel laureate), Thomas Schelling of the University of Maryland, Vernon Smith of George Mason University (Nobel laureate), and Nancy Stokey of the University of Chicago.”

The project ranked four projects as representing very good value for money. They were: new programs to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS; reducing the prevalence of iron-deficiency anemia by means of food supplements; multilateral and unilateral of tariffs and non-tariff barriers, together with the elimination of agricultural subsidies; and the control and treatment of malaria.

On climate change, the Consensus project considered a paper authored by William R. Cline of the Center for Global Development and Institute for International Economics, which suggested that the benefits of action now on climate change would outweigh the costs by $166 trillion to $94 trillion. However, the only way the paper was able to achieve such a benefit: cost ration was by using an unfeasibly low discount rate for the benefits of 1.5 percent. The panel rejected this economically nonsensical methodology.

In fact the panel ranked all three suggestions for action – an “optimal carbon tax,” a “value-at-risk carbon tax” and the Kyoto protocol as bad investments. The final report summarized:

“The panel looked at three proposals, including the Kyoto Protocol, for dealing with climate change by reducing emissions of carbon. The expert panel regarded all three proposals as having costs that were likely to exceed the benefits. The panel recognized that global warming must be addressed, but agreed that approaches based on too abrupt a shift toward lower emissions of carbon are needlessly expensive. The experts expressed an interest in an alternative, proposed in one of the opponent papers, that envisaged a carbon tax much lower in the first years of implementation than the figures called for in the challenge paper, rising gradually in later years. Such a proposal however was not examined in detail in the presentations put to the panel, and so was not ranked. The panel urged increased funding for research into more affordable carbon-abatement technologies.”

So is this all bad news for climate alarmists? You wouldn't think so if you read the Denver Post:

In addition to oil prices hovering at record levels, some economists say a carbon tax would encourage Americans to curb wasteful energy consumption that contributes to global warming.

Three prominent economists appearing here for the global economics conference "Copenhagen Consensus" agreed that the chances of approving a carbon tax during an election year are slim. Consumers would face the tax at the gas pump. ...

A carbon tax would be a more efficient means of addressing problems tied to global warming than many other measures that have won favor on the world stage, according to the economists: William Cline, a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics and the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C.; Harvard University professor Robert Mendelsohn; and Stanford University professor Alan Manne.

... While the men agree that a carbon tax would be one financially sound way to fight global warming, they disagree about how high the tax should be.

Quite how this squares with the final report of the consensus project - that three out of the four carbon tax proposals (including Kyoto, a tax in all but name) represent bad value for money, and that the fourth is not developed enough to judge - is beyond me.