May 2006 Archives

Iowahawk offers a dead-on list of 10 Things You Can Do to Save the Planet.

Sample: 3. Crush a Third World economic development movement. One of the most pressing threats facing our environment is rising incomes in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Only a generation ago, these proud dark people were happily frolicking in the rain forest, foraging for organic foods amid the wonders of nature. Now, corrupted by wealth, they are demanding environmentally hazardous consumer goods like cars and air conditioning and malaria medicine. You can do your part to stop this dangerous consumer trend by supporting environmentally aware leaders like Robert Mugabe and Fidel Castro to foster an economy of sustainable low-impact ecolabor camps.

As the saying goes, read the whole thing, and print it off for your favorite conventional environmentalist. I should be good for at least 10 blood pressure points (for them).

Gregg Easterbrook writes in yesterday's New York Times that "As an environmental commentator, I have a long record of opposing alarmism. But based on the data I'm now switching sides regarding global warming, from skeptic to convert."

This claim seems somewhat disingenuous. While Easterbrook initially (in his 1995 book, One Moment on the Earth) elicited some scepticism about climate change, he certainly isn't a new convert to the cause for the US taking action on global warming: in September 2004, in a Washington Monthly feature he said: "The sooner the United States puts its shoulder against the global warming threat, the better for the world."

Meanwhile, way back in November 26, 2000, in an interview on PBS Easterbrook described carbon trading as a "practical economic tool" that has "a much greater potential for reducing greenhouse gasses in the world." Later in the interview he says, "Carbon trading would have the effect of transferring American capital and technology to the developing world to make energy use more efficient there."

Another angle on the story - Prometheus "welcomes Easterbrook to the NSH Club"

Update (Tuesday 30 May 2006): A response to Easterbrook's article written by AEI scholar Kenneth Green was published in today's NYT (copied below in case the letter goes offline):

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The Pacific Legal Foundation has launched the Rapanos Blog to cover the Supreme Court's upcoming decision in the Rapanos and Carabell cases. These cases challenge the scope of federal regulatory jurisdiction under the Clean Water Act over wetlands not directly adjacent to navigable waterways. I wrote about the cases for NRO here. There's also a great discussion of the cases, including a debate among some of the lawyers involved, here.

CEI's Angela Logomasini assesses efforts to improve chemical plant security.

The Supreme Court accepted certiorari in Environmental Defense v. Duke Energy (formerly United States v. Duke Energy). I discuss the relevant issues here.

Last week I had this column on NRO critiquing current Congressional efforts to address high gasoline prices. The discussion continued on the Volokh Conspiracy here.

In the Spring 2006 edition of Cato’s Regulation magazine, Randall O'Toole of the Thoreau Institute has written an excellent book review – of Robert Bruegmann's book, Sprawl: A compact history.

The Washington Post's Michael Grunwald has a fabulous story today about the environmental desrtructiveness of the Army Corps of Engineers. Among other things, Grunwald identifies a single Army Corps project that will destroy more wetlands in one place than all private development in the entire nation in a year.

While we're at it, don't miss Grunwald terrific book on the environmental history of the Everglades.

[Posted on behalf of Indur Goklany]
The price of gasoline is on everybody's mind these days, but affordability is just as important. To help put recent gasoline price hikes into perspective, some analysts and media outlets even provide us with information on the real price of gasoline, that is, price adjusted for inflation of the dollar. But even that provides, at best, an incomplete picture. A broader perspective is obtained by looking at trends in price relative to the personal income of the average American, as shown in the following figure. This figure plots the trend in the price of a gallon of regular gasoline in the U.S. from 1949 through the first quarter of 2006. This trend is displayed using three different measures: (a) nominal (or current) dollars, (b) real (i.e., inflation-adjusted) dollars, and (c) a ratio of the gasoline price to the per capita income. The last measure is an inverse proxy of the affordability of gasoline: inverse, because the lower this number, the more affordable the gasoline, and a proxy because it is an imperfect measure of affordability (more on this below). Each curve is normalized so that the price using any of the three measures is fixed at 65 cents per gallon (or $0.65 per gallon), which was the nominal price in 1978.

This figure shows that:
1. The nominal price of regular gasoline is higher now than at any time since 1949.
2. The "real" price during the first quarter of 2006 was at approximately the same level as it was in the early 1980s. Today (May 10, 2006), it is higher.
3. Relative to 1978, the price of regular gasoline has increased by 260 percent in nominal terms and 47 percent in real terms. However the price-to-income ratio has declined by 17 percent, i.e., it is more affordable today.

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Courtesy of Benny Peiser's CCNet, I came across this tantalizing thought piece by Freeman Dyson in the March issue of Technology Review. Building on Carl Woese's postulate that before there was "Darwinian" evolution, i.e., genetic evolution driven by the intense competition for survival among noninterbreeding species, there was "horizontal gene transfer". As Dyson explains:

horizontal gene transfer was universal and separate species did not exist. Life was then a community of cells of various kinds, sharing their genetic information so that clever chemical tricks and catalytic processes invented by one creature could be inherited by all of them. ...The whole community advanc[ed] in metabolic and reproductive efficiency as the genes of the most efficient cells were shared. But then, one evil day, a cell resembling a primitive bacterium happened to find itself one jump ahead of its neighbors in efficiency. That cell separated itself from the community and refused to share. Its offspring became the first species. With its superior efficiency, it continued to prosper and to evolve separately. Some millions of years later, another cell separated itself from the community and became another species. And so it went on, until all life was divided into species.

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Over the following billion years, the products of Darwinian evolution took over the world, but now Darwinian evolution is over, and horizontal gene transfer will be back -- thanks to biotechnology. It was brought to an end, he explains, about 10 thousand years ago when a single species, Homo sapiens, began to dominate and reorganize the biosphere. Since then, he says:

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Wired Magazine graded a few of the older environmental organizations in last month's issue regarding their willingness to embrace technology and capitalism.

A for Environmental Defense. B+ for NRDC. GreenPeace and Friends of the Earth looking at C's. The order seems right, but I think the rankings suffer from grade inflation --- especially at the lower end. If Friends of the Earth International and Greenpeace are pulling as high as C's and C+'s for embracing capitalism and technology, then China probably deserves a B-minus for embracing human rights and Hamas pulls its own gentlemen's C for embracing Israel.