November 2005 Archives

Tim Haab reports on another inane gasoline policy proposal, this one from my adopted state of Ohio.

The Association of Environmental and Resource Economists is launching a new journal, Review of Environmental Economics and Policy. As explained in the AERE newsletter (and posted on the Environmental Economics blog)

The editors will be Rob Stavins (Harvard), Carlos Carraro (Venice and FEEM), and Charles Kolstad (UC Santa Barbara) with Rob taking the lead. Our new journal seeks to fill a niche similar to the Journal of Economic Perspectives by publishing less technically oriented papers that will help advance the policy debate on key environmental and natural resource issues.

Senator Larry Craig is zeroing out funding for the Fish Passage Center, an organization that collects slamon population data in the Pacific Northwest. It seems Senator Craig believes the data is too advocacy-oriented, perhaps because it suggests that reducing water flow through hydro turbines (and increasing spillage over hydropower dams) is necessary to maintain current salmon populations. Historically the Fish Passage Center has been funded by the Bonneville Power Administration, a federal agency that sells subsidized hydropower from federal dams. This year, however, Senator Craig inserted language into the energy and water appropriations bill blocking any BPA funds from going to the center during the coming fiscal year. According to a Craig spokesman, "This is about improving the program, taking advocacy out of science and ensuring we have dams and salmon in the Northwest."

Many environmentalists have embraced the "peak oil" hypothesis that world oil production has already peaked and will inexorably decline. Many Greens seem to believe that convincing the world that we are running out of oil will spur the adoption of government-mandated conservation and subsidies for alternatuive energy sources. Yet, as Dave Roberts notes, there is no reason to assume that the public reaction to a "peak oil" consensus will be so "green."

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This New York Times story details how rampant poaching in the former Soviet Union is threatening sturgeon populations in the Caspian Sea. Despite extensive conservation regulations, overfishing continues, fueled by corruption.

These fishermen are poachers, chasing one of the world's most threatened and coveted fish, although judging by the indifferent police officers stationed a few hundred yards away, even highly organized poaching here carries few risks.

No resource, not even the oil that has shaped this region's politics and economies, is more richly associated with the Caspian basin than the sturgeon, a group of primeval fish bound to human history along the shores of the world's largest landlocked body of water. Once fare for pashas and czars, its briny eggs are among the most valuable wildlife commodities on earth.
Now, scientists say, the Caspian's sturgeon risk entering a final downward spiral.

The fish have faced compounding problems for decades. Dams have walled off their spawning grounds. Pollution has silted and choked waterways. But the sturgeon's latest enemy may be its most lethal: corruption.

Since the Soviet Union's collapse, unchecked fishing and struggling hatcheries have led to catches of less than 10 percent of historic highs. As much as 80 percent of the remaining fish are male, scientists say, the lopsided result of years of harvesting females for eggs.

This is tragic, but eminently predictable. The Caspian is a regulated commons that produces a valuable resource in an relatively poor region of the world -- and such regulated commons are almost always overused. If proscriptive regulations do a poor job of conserving fish stocks or other living resources in developed nations with highly professional and independent regulatory bureaucracies, they are a disaster everywhere else.

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Courtesy of Jon Christensen’s blog, “The Uneasy Chair”, I came across a provocative piece, “Conservation Refugees: When Protecting Nature Means Kicking People Out”, by Mark Dowie in Orion. Dowie, while shedding light on some of the human toll of big conservation, confirms that colonialism is not dead – read Bob Nelson’s excellent historical account of the founding of some of the flagship nature preserves in Africa in “Environmental Colonialism: ‘Saving’ Africa from Africans”, here.

Dowie states that:

“It's no secret that millions of native peoples around the world have been pushed off their land to make room for big oil, big metal, big timber, and big agriculture. But few people realize that the same thing has happened for a much nobler cause: land and wildlife conservation. Today the list of culture-wrecking institutions put forth by tribal leaders on almost every continent includes not only Shell, Texaco, Freeport, and Bechtel, but also more surprising names like Conservation International (CI), The Nature Conservancy (TNC), the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). Even the more culturally sensitive World Conservation Union (IUCN) might get a mention.

“In early 2004 a United Nations meeting was convened in New York for the ninth year in a row to push for passage of a resolution protecting the territorial and human rights of indigenous peoples. The UN draft declaration states: 'Indigenous peoples shall not be forcibly removed from their lands or territories. No relocation shall take place without the free and informed consent of the indigenous peoples concerned and after agreement on just and fair compensation and, where possible, with the option to return.' During the meeting an indigenous delegate who did not identify herself rose to state that while extractive industries were still a serious threat to their welfare and cultural integrity, their new and biggest enemy was 'conservation.’…

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The Senate blamed oil executives for oil supply shortages Wednesday, while the House, finding its budget-saving measure held hostage by a tiny group of anti-drilling Republican moderates, decided to drop an effort to permit drilling for oil.

From the Washington Post:

House GOP leaders agreed last night to strip plans to permit oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and in the offshore continental shelf from a $54 billion budget-cutting measure, probably securing the votes to pass the bill today.

The move is a blow to President Bush, who has made expanded oil exploration a priority since he took office. Lawmakers said the White House applied pressure yesterday to Republicans to save the drilling provisions, especially in Alaska, even wooing conservative Democrats who have steadfastly opposed the GOP budget package...

No word on what energy source was used to get the moderate Congressmen home, but it probably was oil.

Peyton Knight of the National Center for Public Policy Research has more on the ANWR provision the House dropped.

Addendum: PostWatch has a photo. Two photos, actually.

Julian Morris and I recently co-edited an edition of the interdisciplinary journal Energy and Environment, in which we commissioned a series of reviews of Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond. Several of these reviews have now been posted on the contributors' websites, see my extended entry for links to these papers.

One broad problem with the book is that Diamond distinctly fails to discuss how institutions such as property rights have enabled (and continue to enable) individuals to address the 'tragedy of the commons'. Another problem is that the facts simply do not support many of his claims.

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This week, various energy and environment ministers met in London as part of the G8 effort to gather consensus on climate policy.

The consensus which seems to be evolving is that 1) some EU countries, including the UK, are failing to meet their existing targets under Kyoto and 2) poor countries do not want to negotiate to reduce binding emissions targets for themselves after 2012, when the Kyoto Protocol ends. Negotiations for post-2012 were due to take place at COP-11 of the Framework Convention on Climate Change next month in Montreal.

It is worth remembering that Article 3.3 of the Framework Convention obliges its signatories (including the USA) to undertake "cost-effective" policies and measures to cope with climate change. Emissions controls are probably the least cost-effective way to address climate change.

I have an article in the Bangkok Post today which argues that it is climate, not climate change, which poses the most risk to the world's poorest people, and that economic development is the most effective way to reduce their vulnerability to climate.

Here is a story on the adminsitration's new rules for off-road vehicle use in national forests that appear to take a small step toward decentralization of forest management

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After publishing this uninformed critique of economic thinking in Sierra magazine, it seems that the Sierra Club lost Jason Scorse as a member. Scorse explains his decision here. I agree with many of his points, other than his suggesting that RFK Jr. understands anything about economics, for reasons I've explained here.

The Measure 37 fiasco in Oregon is sure to fester for a while. An economist's take on the scenario is here. It might just be that "those granolas in Oregon" don't have a concatenated clue what they want.