October 2005 Archives

Ron Bailey's review of Jared Diamond's Collapse is a couple months old, but for those who missed it, the read is a worthwhile one.

The purest bison bloodlines are found in Sullys Hill, North Dakota according to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Were they saved by private entrepreneurs?

Writing in yesterday's The Observer British Prime Minister Tony Blair speculates on what may be the correct climate policies after the Kyoto Protocol first commitment period ends in 2012. Despite his belief that science is settled (while it is not), Mr Blair sets forth a number of challenging points:

• "[E]ven if the US did sign up to Kyoto, it wouldn't affect the huge growth in energy consumption we will see in India and China."

• "There are huge opportunities in environmental technology and huge possibilities in sustainable development, if the right framework for low carbon energy generation can be stimulated."

• "We need to create the right market conditions to increase the necessary investment to develop and install new low carbon energy generation - and to ensure it is shared with emerging economies."

Yesterday the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee reportedly rejected S.1772, legislation introduced by Senator Inhofe to, among other things, remove regulatory barriers to increased domestic refinery capacity and gradually reduce the number of boutique fuel formulas refiners are required to produce. Each of these provisions should have helped relieve upward pressure on gasoline prices -- pressure that exisitng government policies helped produce. As a result, this bill (unlike the energy legislation Congress adopted earlier this year) might have actually helped lower retail gas prices.

Unlike the more expansive, and more controversial, bill adopted by the House of Representatives a few weeks back, this bill neither trampled on state and local prerogatives nor adopted ill-considered "price gouging" provisions. It did, however, include a few subsidy provisions (what energy bill doesn't?) designed to enhance the likelihood of passage. Equally significant -- and contrary to the claims of some groups -- the bill did nothing to lessen substantive environmental protections. for more on the bill, see here.

I testified on some of the better parts of the bill on October 18. A copy of my written statement is here.

Instapundit reports here.

An Oregon judge overturned the statewide referendum passed last November, Measure 37, which required that "state and local governments either compensate land owners when regulations lower property values or waive the rules." (Hat-tip to RedState.)

At the Campaign for Fighting Diseases website, Richard Tren, director of Africa Fighting Malaria, writes that German chemical company Bayer has supported the European Union's threats against Uganda should the country decide to use DDT in its malaria control programme.

Not only is this scandalous -- it is a major conflict of interest. Tren points out that "[A Bayer representative] sits on the board of the World Health Organization's Roll Back Malaria (RBM) coalition - as do other commercial contractors to US Agency for International Development (USAID)."

Tren is a signatory to the Kill Malarial Mosquitoes Now (KMMN) declaration, what Tren calls "A new coalition which has emerged in the US to focus the minds of USAID in their malaria control efforts."

IPN has just published a new book co-authored by Gary Marchant, a professor in both the Arizona State University law school and school of life sciences. The book - Arbitrary and Capricious: The Precautionary Principle in the European Union Courts - explores how the principle has been employed in over 60 court decisions. Marchant concludes:

No one can argue against being safe rather than sorry. But the precautionary principle is flawed in theory and practice, and its enshrinement sets Europe down a path that will wreak havoc on the economy and public health of not only itself but also its trading partners.’

Today, Gary has an article in the Wall Street Journal Europe - "Unprincipled Precaution" (link to article on IPN's website) - which explores some of the book's themes. [for WSJ subscribers - original link]

In a Parthian shot at President Bush, soon to be (thankfully) ex-Chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, is quoted as saying in a speech to trade unionists, "I can think of a recent disaster that shows what happens when a country neglects its duties of state towards its people... My post as chancellor, which I still hold, does not allow me to name that country but you all know that I am talking about America." Schroeder's remarks were reportedly greeted with laughter and applause (perhaps tinged with Schadenfreude?).

I too "can think of a recent disaster that shows what happens when a country neglects its duties of state towards its people." Specifically, during the 2003 European heat wave, there were 5,250 deaths in Germany.^1,2 These were eminently avoidable, especially if the German government had spent a fraction of the time, resources and energy -- yes, energy -- to help its population cope with the extreme heat as it seems to spend on cheerleading for the ineffective, not to mention wholly wasteful, Kyoto Protocol. [Click here for an analysis of how (in)effective and wasteful the Protocol would be.]³

The Supreme Court granted cert to two Clean Water Act (CWA) questions on Tuesday. One of them could lead to another showdown on the Commerce Clause.

The first question is whether the Army Corps of Engineers may regulate wetlands that are only hydrologically related to a navigable waterway or whether the wetlands must "directly abut" a navigable waterway. In light of the Supreme Court's 2001 SWANCC decision, the 4th, 6th, 7th, and 9th Circuits have said the former while the Fifth Circuit has required the latter. To answer this question, the Supreme Court has consolidated two cases out of the 6th Circuit, Carabell v. Army Corps of Engineers and Rapanos v. U.S..

"Endogenous Pollution Havens: Does FDI Influence Environmental Regulations?" - a new paper from Mathew Cole, Robert Elliott, and Per Fredriksson - available on SSRN. Here's the abstract:

We suggest a novel perspective on the relationship between the stringency of environmental policies and foreign direct investment (FDI). We develop a political economy model with imperfect product market competition where local and foreign firms jointly lobby the local government for a favorable pollution tax. FDI is found to affect environmental policy, and the effect is conditional on the local government's degree of corruptibility. If the degree of corruptibility is sufficiently high (low), FDI leads to less (more) stringent environmental policy, and FDI thus contributes to (mitigates) the creation of a pollution haven. Our empirical results using panel data from 33 countries support the model's predictions.

"Endogenous Pollution Havens: Does FDI Influence Environmental Regulations?" - a new paper from Mathew Cole, Robert Elliott, and Per Fredriksson - available on SSRN. Here's the abstract:

We suggest a novel perspective on the relationship between the stringency of environmental policies and foreign direct investment (FDI). We develop a political economy model with imperfect product market competition where local and foreign firms jointly lobby the local government for a favorable pollution tax. FDI is found to affect environmental policy, and the effect is conditional on the local government's degree of corruptibility. If the degree of corruptibility is sufficiently high (low), FDI leads to less (more) stringent environmental policy, and FDI thus contributes to (mitigates) the creation of a pollution haven. Our empirical results using panel data from 33 countries support the model's predictions.

On Thursday the Senate confirmed H. Dale Hall as the new director of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. Of note, Hall is a career FWS employee, having worked for the Service for 27 years. He is also a biologist. With his confirmation this means that two of the most important federal environmental agencies -- the FWS and EPA -- are headed by career civil servants with scientific backgrounds.

Does economic openness improve sustainability? Most contributors to this site woudl say so, but others are not so sure, fearing economic liberalization will produce ecological exploitation. Yet as I have noted before, the empirical evidence suggests such fears are unfounded. Well, here's another study further finding a correlation between economic openness and a measure of sustainability. Paper details and the abstract are below.

A new paper by Harvey S. James, Jr. of the University of Missouri argues that sustainable agriculture advocates should pay more attention to Adam Smith. At the same time, he seems to argue for a less laissez-faire interpretation of Smith than some might expect. It's a somewhat different take than that put forward by J. Bishop Grewell and Clay Landry in their book The Ecological Agrarian. The paper is here; the abstract is below.

If global warming is real and its effects will one day be as devastating as some believe is likely, then greater economic growth would, by increasing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, sooner or later lead to greater damages from climate change. On the other hand, by increasing wealth, technological development and human capital, economic growth would broadly increase human well-being, and society’s capacity to reduce climate change damages via adaptation or mitigation. Hence, the conundrum: at what point in the future would the benefits of a richer and more technologically advanced world be cancelled out by the costs of a warmer world?

Indur Goklany attempted to shed light on this conundrum in a recent paper presented at the 25th Annual North American Conference of the US Association for Energy Economics, in Denver (Sept. 21, 2005). His paper — "Is a richer-but-warmer world better than poorer-but-cooler worlds?” — which can be found here, draws upon the results of a series of UK Government-sponsored studies which employed the IPCC’s emissions scenarios to project future climate change between 1990 and 2100 and its global impacts on various climate-sensitive determinants of human and environmental well-being (such as malaria, hunger, water shortage, coastal flooding, and habitat loss). The results indicate that notwithstanding climate change, through much of this century, human well-being is likely to be highest in the richest-but-warmest world and lower in poorer-but-cooler worlds. With respect to environmental well-being, matters may be best under the former world for some critical environmental indicators through 2085-2100, but not necessarily for others.

This conclusion casts doubt on a key premise implicit in all calls to take actions now that would go beyond “no-regret” policies in order to reduce GHG emissions in the near term, namely, a richer-but-warmer world will, before too long, necessarily be worse for the globe than a poorer-but-cooler world. But the above analysis suggests this is unlikely to happen, at least until after the 2085-2100 period. Assuming that it takes 50 years to replace the energy infrastructure, that means we have at least 30 years (= 2085-50-2005) before embarking on a greenhouse gas emission reduction program that goes beyond “no-regrets” provided, in the interim, we use this time wisely by specifically focusing on: