September 2006 Archives

On Friday, the World Health Organization announced that it will recommend indoor residual spraying with DDT as part of its malaria prevention strategy. According to its press release:

WHO actively promoted indoor residual spraying for malaria control until the early 1980s when increased health and environmental concerns surrounding DDT caused the organization to stop promoting its use and to focus instead on other means of prevention. Extensive research and testing has since demonstrated that well-managed indoor residual spraying programmes using DDT pose no harm to wildlife or to humans.

Yes, it would seem a stretch. Yet Al Gore enlists Churchill as a witness on behalf of his case in An Inconvenient Truth. I go through what is profoundly wrong with this my address to the Churchill Centre's annual dinner at the American Political Science Association meeting Philadelphia earlier this month, entitled "The Use and Abuse of Churchill in History." You can read the whole thing here.

A friend and I have coauthored a paper on regulation of gasoline markets that might interest people here. The paper is available on SSRN here.

We review the history of economic and environmental regulation and argue that the combined impact of 100 years of regulatory interventions has been to fragment the market for gasoline in the United States, leaving it vulnerable to supply disruptions and making it likely that prices will increase in the future.

Iain Murray directs our attention to this interview with Lester Brown in The Independent, where Brown dumps all over ethanol.

Sample:

Just a single fill of ethanol for a four-wheel drive SUV, says Brown, uses enough grain to feed one person for an entire year. This year the amount of US corn going to make the fuel will equal what it sells abroad; traditionally its exports have helped feed 100 - mostly poor - countries.

From next year, the amount used to run American cars will exceed exports, and soon it is likely to reduce what is available to help feed poor people overseas. The number of ethanol plants built or planned in the corn-belt state of Iowa will use virtually all the state's crop.

This will not only cut food supplies, but drive up the price of grain, making hungry people compete with the owners of gas-guzzlers. Already spending 70 per cent of their meagre incomes on food, they simply cannot afford to do so.