January 2006 Archives

Or so says the Yale Environmental Performance Index.

New Zealand is greenest, the lowest ranked are Ethiopia, Mali, Mauritania, Chad and Niger.

The US is #28, well below Canada (#8). The accompanying press release notes that the US score "reflects top-tier performance on environmental health issues, but also indicates that the United States is underperforming on critical issues such as renewable energy, greenhouse gas emissions, and water resources."

The report purports to be data driven, but the weight given to environmentally questionable policy choices suggests some serious problems.

Asked in the January/February issue of the Stanford alumni magazine, "What longtime belief have you changed your mind about?", Professor Paul Ehrlich answers:

In the 1960s, I believed that lowering human birthrates would be teh most difficult task facing those who wished to acheive a sustainable society--because having fewer children was basically going "against biology." In fact, lowering birthrates has proven easier than I expected, and substantial (but not enough) progress has been made since then. Reducing overconsumption has proven very much more difficult.

I'm reading a fascinating and thorough account of the disastrous petroleum price controls of the 1970s that deserves a wide readership. Anyone looking for a careful study of the flaws in price controls and import quotas should read:

William C. Lane, Jr., The Mandatory Petroleum Price and Allocation Regulations: A History and Analysis (American Petroleum Institute 1981).

It isn't a formally published book, and so it may require using interlibrary loan to track a copy down. Definitely worth it.

A comment to my previous post raises what might be an interesting question. I am not enough of a constitutional scholar on the Establishment Clause to know the legal ramifications, but what sort of church/state issues would the purchase of Dr. King's center by the National Park Service raise? My understanding is that the Court's current take involves the traditions of the site in question when it determined whether the Ten Commandments could be part of state displays or not. To the extent that Dr. King's works reflect religious teachings and doctrine, what sort of management, display, or ownership problems would the religious nature of his writings impose on the Park Service?

I'm sure there must be historic churches that are on the National Historic Register. How are they managed? Are services still allowed to occur at those sites? Could legal challenges be raised to services continuing at such sites? Would explaining the religious beliefs of Dr. King and continuing the study of his writings at a Martin Luther King, Jr. Center under Park Service ownership create a state/church conflict?

UPDATE: An article from today at law.com shows the current state of flux in the Supreme Court's Establishment Clause jurisprudence.

CNN has a poll going at the moment over whether the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center in Atlanta should remain independently run or should be sold to the National Park Service. Just over half of respondents would rather see the center remain independent. The King family is equally divided. Two of King's children are worried that ownership by the federal government would compromise the center's independent voice and water down Dr. King's message of social justice.

As one model, the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association does a wonderful job of maintaining George Washington's Mount Vernon estate in the private sector.

Andy Borowitz says yes. (Note - after today, you will need to look in the archive to find this article.)

The environmentalist misrepresentation of Judge Alito's record continues, as I document here.

For more on this subject, see here. For a skeptical perspective, see here.

Thanks to Jesse Walker over at Reason for pointing me in the direction of the following news story.

Apparently, in the 1980's, the British government and the Scottish government engaged one of the great conservation questions of our age: How do we protect the Loch Ness Monster from poaching should Nessie ever surface?

The Department of Agriculture and Fisheries ruled out the Salmon and Fisheries Protection Act because "Unfortunately, Nessie is not a salmon and would not appear to qualify as a freshwater fish." Meanwhile, Sweden apparently passed a special law specifically to protect its equivalent of Nessie --- though that act was revoked two months ago.

Author Michael Crichton's November 6th talk on complexity and environmental management can be found here. In a discussion that spans the gamut from Y2K to the Population Bomb to Yellowstone Park, Crichton explains how the earthquakes, hurricanes, and floods of the past year aren't the end of the world --- rather they are how the every day world works.

Thanks to Jane Shaw for providing the link.

John Kerry and Al Gore both attended an Aspen, Colorado conference of 120 leaders in government, religion, media, and science over the weekend of October 6 to 8 with the goal of setting an agenda to address a perceived gap between the science on climate change and action on climate change. The conference was sponsored by the Yale School of Forestry and details can be found on pages 24-25 of the document here. The other participants were a who's who of the environmental community. Among the most controversial of the recommendations that I found from the conference was the following:

The Education group recommended incorporation of climate-change content into K-12 curricula and teacher-certification standards (using the occasion of the 2007 review of the National Science Education Standards), as well as into instructional technologies, devices, and software products, including video games and educational simulations such as SimCity.

I am concerned about how balanced the curricula approach to climate-change can be, given the general black-white treatment of "truth" in K-12 education. But I am even more concerned about what requirements would need to be met for teacher-certification on the issue. Would science teachers merely be required to attend educational seminars on the topic or would they be required to agree with portions of the climate change agenda that remain in question?

Finally, given that the conference is focussed on the gap between science and action, will the Education Group's recommended curricula also include "action" as part of the educational curricula? And will a variety of action agendas be included in such curricula or is the appropriate action list confined to accepting the Kyoto Protocol or an analogous international mechanism?

Here is a blog from down-under focusing on the intersection of economics and environmental policy.

Apparently RFK Jr's opposition to the development of a wind farm off of the coast of Cape Cod is not sitting well with many other environmentalists. GristMill has the details here.

New research by Oregon State University scientists found that salvage logging of Oregon's Biscuit fire did more ecological damage than good. It killed more than two-thirds of the seedlings that sprouted after the fire and left debris behind that made the area more susceptible to future fires. This research was reported in today's Oregonian.

To be fair, the research was done by graduate students and at least one forestry professor, Michael Newton, is quoted by the paper saying that killing seedlings today is not the issue -- the issue is how many seedlings will grow into trees in twenty years or so.

On the other hand, another professor of forest ecology, Jerry Franklin, says that the trees that were removed would better have been left to provided nutrients "to nourish forest recovery and lend shelter to wildlife." "Salvage almost never achieves any ecological goal," Franklin is quoted as saying. "It almost always is a tax on the ecological process."

But what is most telling is the Forest Service's response, given by the deputy regional forester for Oregon and Washington national forests. The agency had to sell the trees, he claims, because cutting them brings in revenue that the Forest Service can use to do other work such as stabilize erosive hillsides. "It's a revenue source that we shouldn't be passing up."

In other words, as I have long argued, Forest Service timber sale decisions are driven as much or more by the budgetary incentives built into the sale process as by any social or ecological benefit from cutting timber. Forest Service managers always think they need more money to do some good work in the national forests. If timber can provide that money, they will justify the timber sales in their own minds no matter how sound they are otherwise. The fact that they keep a share of receipts for "overhead" also influences the decisions.

I am sure some people can argue that the timber sales are worthwhile. But my point is that we cannot trust the Forest Service to make such decisions when the rewards to the agency from selling timber are huge and the rewards from not selling it are nil. A secondary point is that the current process actually encourages the Forest Service to design sales so that they lose money because any money made for the Treasury represents an opportunity cost for the Forest Service -- that is money the Forest Service could have kept for itself.

Yesterday, former Vice President Al Gore showed up at the weekly, off-the-record Wednesday morning conservative coalition meeting hosted by Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform. Gore sought the meeting because he is making a sincnere effort to convert more conservatives to environmental causes. Apparently this willingness to exchange views with his political opponents impressed many in attendance -- and suggests that many in the environmental community who prefer to demonize conservatives could learn from him. Steve Hayward offers this report.

Several environmental groups have announced their formal opposition to the confirmation of Judge Samuel Alito. I assess their claims, and find them wanting, here.

UPDATE: Some of GristMill's readers are skeptical of my analysis, but offer no critiques of the cases. Activist groups and some judges are certainly results oriented, but all available evidence suggests Judge Alito is not. In my opinion, Earthjustice and Alito's other environmental critics provide no evidence to the contrary.

The October earthquake in Kashmir was a horrible catastrophe, not only killing thousands but also destroying much of the infrastructure in the rugged region. Relief efforts have focused on trying to help survivors through the harsh winter.

However, some refugees have refused to leave their destroyed homes for fear of losing legal claim to them. Farooq Kathwari, chairman of Refugees International reported

The winter is already there. They need shelter, especially for those who are still at higher altitudes. Lots of people who live in these mountainous regions don't want to give up their homes; that's the only thing they possess. And also they don't have the kind of deeds that we have over here, so they're concerned that if they leave, that possibly they may lose their home. So the challenge has been to take shelter to them.

Relief efforts are being strained further by the need to extend assistance beyond centralized refugee camps to those maintining claim to destroyed homes. You can read the rest of Kathwari's interview and more about the situation in Kashmir here from PBS.