Natural Resources

Ominous Enviro News Updates

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 17:31:00 -0400

There might be more fresh oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico; meanwhile, the Feds are reportedly gagging marine biologists from releasing info on dolphin deaths possibly related to last year's spill:

The gag order was contained in an agency letter informing outside scientists that its review of the dolphin die-off, classified as an "unusual mortality event (UME)," had been folded into a federal criminal investigation launched last summer into the oil spill.

"Because of the seriousness of the legal case, no data or findings may be released, presented or discussed outside the UME investigative team without prior approval," the letter, obtained by Reuters, stated.

On problems associated with industrial civiliation's other main way of powering itself, Fukushima iodine-131 release levels have reached 73 percent of Chernobyl, and cesium-137 release levels 60 per cent of Chernobyl, with the ongoing situation "still very unpredictable," says Japan's prime minister.

What Energy Crisis? Natural Gas Supplies Could Last 250 Years

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 10:22:00 -0500

(image) In its Annual Energy Outlook report for 2011, the U.S. Energy Information Agency concluded that

the United States possesses 2,552 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of potential natural gas resources. Natural gas from shale resources, considered uneconomical just a few years ago, accounts for 827 Tcf of this resource estimate, more than double the estimate published last year. At the 2009 rate of U.S. consumption (about 22.8 Tcf per year), 2,552 Tcf of natural gas is enough to supply approximately 110 years of use.

Now UPI is reporting that the International Energy Agency's analysis finds that the world has enough natural gas to last 250 years:

Supplies of natural gas could last more than 250 years if Asian and European economies follow the U.S. unconventional reserves, the IEA said.

The abundance of shale gas and other forms of so-called unconventional gas discovered in the United States prompted a global rush to explore for the new resource.

The International Energy Agency said Australia is taking the lead in the push toward unconventional gas, though China, India and Indonesia are close behind. European companies are taking preliminary steps to unlock unconventional gas as are other regions....

Global supplies of natural gas could last for another 130 years at current consumption rates. That time frame could double with unconventional gas, the IEA said.

Since burning natural gas releases about half the carbon dioxide that burning coal does, increasing its use could go a long way toward reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that are thought to be warming the planet. In addition, natural gas could be substituted for oil as a transport fuel reducing concerns about dependence on oil imports. However, abundant and cheap natural gas will undercut the rationales for investing in and deploying more expensive renewable energy technologies, e.g., solar and wind.

Ted's Not Afraid to Die, the People All Call Him Alaska

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 12:39:00 -0400

Of the send-offs to Ted Stevens that I've read this week, the most enlightening is probably Charles Homans' obit at Oil & Glory, which highlights Stevens' role in making the modern Alaskan economy. Here's an excerpt:

(image) In 1968, shortly before Stevens was appointed to replace the recently deceased Senator Bob Bartlett, geologists for the Atlantic Richfield Company found the largest oil reserves in the United States on Alaska's North Slope. Crucially, the oil was on state, not federal land -- thanks in part to Stevens's deft Washington maneuvering in the leadup to statehood -- meaning the bulk of the royalties would stay in Alaska. It was Stevens who helped draft a claims settlement with Alaskan Natives -- who had legal right to much of the state's land -- that enabled the construction of the mammoth Trans-Alaska Pipeline that connected the North Slope oil fields to the port of Valdez, completely transforming Alaska's borderline-nonexistent economy.

By dint of its geographical isolation and the contentious relationship with the federal government that Alaskans carried with them from the territorial era into statehood, Alaska gradually became an odd sort of de facto petrostate, within the United States but not really of it. Oil money brought the Alaskan government the resources it needed to build clinics and schools across its vast hinterland, which even today is exotically undeveloped by American standards. (As recently as the ‘90s, state leaders were waging a public health campaign against the "honey bucket", a container that residents of remote Arctic communities, lacking indoor plumbing, used in lieu of a toilet.) But it also lashed the state to the fortunes of the tumultuous energy market. Alaska rode high at times of geopolitical disorder -- the OPEC embargo, the Gulf War -- and fell hard when oil prices descended, as they did in the early '80s and late '90s.

As he rose to influence on Capitol Hill, Stevens became gifted at smoothing out these bumps in Alaska's perpetual economic roller coaster ride. A master of legislative small print, he created a massive pipeline of federal subsidies that funneled billions of dollars a year -- more per capita than any other state for most of the past 25 years -- north to his constituents. In the end, he was too good at what he did: Accustomed to complementary flows of oil money and federal dollars, Alaskans never managed to establish much of an economy beyond the oil and gas industry. (Alaska's next largest export, seafood, produces less revenue for the state than cigarette taxes.) Citizens got in the habit of judging, and electing, politicians based on their ability to keep these two faucets -- the North Slope and the U.S. Treasury -- open.

In the end it was this intermingling of oil and politics that brought down Stevens, along with a solid cross section of Alaska's Republican political establishment.

Elsewhere in Reason: Jacob Sullum explains why "Stevens' real crime was his record of 'service' to the people of Alaska, which in any other context would be recognized as theft on a grand scale."

Another Schwarzenegger Idea Runs Dry

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 18:38:00 -0400

(image) Proposition 18, a ballot initiative that would have put California taxpayers on the hook for an additional $11 billion in water bonds, has been withdrawn by the state legislature.

This effectively ends another of the many dreams Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger pursued during his tenure. The Gubernator came into office with bold visions for permanently ending the state's water crisis, and he has returned to this theme through both his terms. The California Water Plan 2005 Update, for example, envisioned a strategic realignment of water practices stretching through 2030, large investments in storage, plans for desalination and other ambitious projects. Post-Hurricane Katrina attention on the poor state of Central Valley levees helped boost the governor's plans for an upgrade, and Schwarzenegger has proposed grand and controversial projects such as a peripheral canal for the Sacramento Delta.

In 2006 California voters approved more than $5 billion in new flood control and water bonds. These funds ended up leaking into unrelated projects or getting absorbed into operating costs. Californians have a long history of largesse with respect to water projects, yet the money always ends up evaporating. As of right now, there has been no upgrade to the levees, the 2030 plan remains a pipe dream, and essentially none of the governor's water plans have come to pass.

Now Prop. 18 supporters have opted to remove the initiative from the ballot and bring it back in 2012 -- when, they hope, the state will not be facing a nearly $20 billion deficit and voters will be feeling more expansive. There's reason to doubt that, but even if it passed in two years, the initiative would be far short of Schwarzenegger's plan and take effect long after he has left office.

It was probably a bad idea, in a state whose water supply depends directly on mountain runoff, to appoint a man named Les Snow as director of Water Resources. But the water problem is vast and complicated, involving resource and rights questions, Colorado River water sharing arrangements with other states and Mexico, and the hard fact that much of the state is a desert. Some of the heat has gone out of this issue thanks to slowing population growth and a few decent years of rainfall. But this has been another matter in which Schwarzenegger was doing all the things that voters supposedly wanted -- thinking big, planning for the long term, using his magnetic leadership to solve complex, longstanding problems. And yet in the end nothing came of it.

Got Environmental Problems? Think Government.

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 16:30:00 -0400

The Gulf oil gusher may be capped (for now), but “many of the world's greatest environmental catastrophes continue, with no end in sight,” according to Foreign Policy magazine. Foreign Policy lists five such catastrophes: Nigerian oil spills, Chinese coal seam fires, Haitian deforestation, desiccation of the Aral Sea, and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. While Foreign Policy identifies five true catastrophes, it fails to grapple with the main problem behind what is causing them. So what does the Gulf oil catastrophe have in common with the five ongoing disasters? The first question you should ask whenever you see someone behaving badly with respect to the stewardship of the natural environment is: What is the government doing that encourages people to act that way? It may turn out that government policies are not at fault, but history shows that it is usually a good place to start. In the case of the Deep Horizon oil spill, BP’s risky behavior was encouraged by the congressionally mandated $75 million cap on liability on damages to natural resources and economic losses suffered by private parties resulting from offshore drilling spills. In addition, by placing lots of promising onshore domestic petroleum resources off limits to exploration and production, Congress encouraged oil companies to make riskier endeavors offshore. Still it must be said, that as bad at the Gulf spill is, it the first such huge domestic oil spill in 40 years, and the U.S. has the resources to ameliorate its bad economic and ecological effects. But what about the five big ongoing disasters highlighted by Foreign Policy? Are bad government policies behind them? In a word, yes. The annual Economic Freedom Index put together by The Wall Street Journal and the Heritage Foundation combined with the World Bank’s Rule of Law Index provide a good shorthand way to illustrate bad policies. Let’s briefly consider each of the five catastrophes. Five decades of Nigerian oil spills are the first ongoing disaster featured by Foreign Policy. On the economic freedom index Nigeria ranks 106 out of 183 countries and is described as mostly unfree. On the rule of law index, the country garners a pitiful 11 out of a possible 100 score. The Nigerian government owns all petroleum resources and works in partnership with Western oil companies to produce it. Since 1966, some 546 million gallons of oil have been spilled—the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez spill every year. Oil accounts for 90 percent of Nigeria’s exports and 80 percent of the government’s revenues. Naturally, the government is more interested in maximizing revenues than it is in reducing pollution. In fact, the government has been so assiduously draining the Nigerian National Petroleum Company of revenues that the company is reportedly now insolvent. Foreign Policy notes that the number and severity of spills may increase as oil exploration extends into more remote and difficult terrain. The second big ecological disaster cited by Foreign Policy is the massive coal seam fires in China. China ranks 140th on the economic freedom index (mostly unfree) and scores 45 out of 100 on the rule of law index. Coal seam fires are a vexing problem around the world. Given the right conditions coal seams can spontaneously ignite; however, most occur in abandoned mines. Foreign Policy specifically cites 62 underground coal fires in the province of Inner Mongolia that have been burning since the 1960s. That was when the coal industry was entirely run by the country’s communist government. The Chinese constitution explicitly states that "mineral resources are owned by the state." As part of its drive to develop its “socialist market economy,” the Chinese government now leases some mineral rights to private companies. China is currently the world’s largest producer of coal and the mineral provides 70 percent of the country’s energy. The underground fires burn up more than 20 million tons of c[...]

Gulf Oil Crisis: Case for Government, or For Freer Markets?

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 14:23:00 -0400

While being widely seen as an example of exactly why bigger, better government is needed to ameliorate or somehow prevent mega-natural resource and pollution crises, anarcho-theorist and Seasteading guru Patri Friedman takes a swing at explaining how and why a truly free market, including some changes in current corporate liability law, has a better chance of managing such disasters. The key:

BP is worth about $250B, and current estimate are the spill will cost them $1B.   So damages after the fact can actually work.  I think the $1B number is very low, but even if it is off by two orders of magnitude, they could afford to pay $100B in damages.

Unfortunately, there are laws which limit the liability of oil companies for disasters, and thus prevent them from having the proper incentive. (Krugman blames libertarians for these laws, which is ridiculous, libertarianism != crony capitalism, and there is nothing libertarian about limiting damage liability). So BP can't legally be charged the full cost of the cleanup - which is a government failure, not a market failure.  Government implemented a policy which benefits special interests - big surprise.

Now, this idea of damages after the fact doesn't hold for all disasters - it just happens that the oil industry has the largest companies in the world, so they can pay damages even for very large disasters.   In other industries, where potential damages exceed company assets, I think the answer is to require liability insurance with amounts large enough to cover worst-case damages. Then you get a free-market price put on the risks (by the insurance market), which gives companies the right incentive to avoid risky behavior even if the damages are to large for them to pay.

If you have a 1% chance of causing $1B in damages with your $100M company, insurance will charge you $10M/year (plus a little profit for them).  Thus the company must bear the expected value of the disaster - which is exactly the optimal thing, it's the true cost of the activity.  Thus they will only take this risk if the benefit is greater than the cost.  Whereas if they don't have to have insurance, they face only a $1M/year cost (1% of the $100M max they will have to pay since that's all they have), which is not the true cost of their activities.  Note that one way to bring about this situation is to remove the limited liability of corporations for damages, which I favor on moral and practical grounds.  (Limited liability for business debts, or any other contractual interactions with persons, can simply be done through a consensual contract.  But why should liability be limited when you hurt people you didn't get consent from?).  If shareholders, officers, and staff were personally liable for damages in excess of the corporation's assets, you can bet your ass that every venture would have insurance!

You could argue with Friedman about this, if you care to, on Reason's first cruise ship excursion, early next year.

Peak Everything?

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 15:15:00 -0400

When you really need something, it's natural to worry about running out of it. Peak oil has been a global preoccupation since the 1970s, and the warnings get louder with each passing year. Environmentalists emphasize the importance of placing limits on consumption of fossil fuels, but haven't been successful in encouraging people to consume less energy—even with the force of law at their backs. But maybe they're going about it all wrong, looking for solutions in the wrong places. Economists Lucas Bretschger and Sjak Smulders argue that the decisive question isn't to focus directly on preserving the resources we already have. Instead, they ask: “Is it realistic to predict that knowledge accumulation is so powerful as to outweigh the physical limits of physical capital services and the limited substitution possibilities for natural resources?” In other words, can increasing scientific knowledge and technological innovation overcome any limitations to economic growth posed by the depletion of non-renewable resources? The debate over peak oil is heavily politicized, so let's set it aside and test the idea of imminent resource peaks and their consequences for economic growth on three other non-renewable resources: lithium, neodymium, and phosphorus. Peak Lithium Lithium is the element at the heart of the electric car revolution that many green energy enthusiasts are trying to foment. For example, the Chevy Volt, scheduled to be at dealers this fall, will be energized by 400 pounds of lithium ion batteries, plus a gasoline engine to produce electricity to extend the car’s range of travel once the batteries are drained. In 2007, William Tahil, an analyst with the France-based consultancy, Meridian International Research, issued a report that alarmingly concluded that there is “insufficient economically recoverable lithium available in the Earth's crust to sustain electric vehicle manufacture in the volumes required.” Tahil added, “Depletion rates would exceed current oil depletion rates and switch dependency from one diminishing resource to another.” Not everyone agrees with Tahil’s peak lithium prognostications. Geologist R. Keith Evans, who has long been involved in the lithium industry, issued a rebuttal arguing that lithium resources are much higher than estimated by Tahil. Evans also asserts that as prices rise other sources of lithium will become economical. And lithium prices have indeed been increasing. But for the sake of argument, let’s assume we are “running out” of lithium? So then what? Even Tahil’s original report argued that there were alternative battery technologies in the works using far more common substances that could substitute for lithium. For example, the Swiss company ReVolt is developing rechargeable zinc-air batteries which hold 300 percent more charge than lithium ion batteries and cost half as much. And then there is Fluidic Energy which claims that it can develop a metal air battery that will hold 11 times the charge of the best lithium ion batteries for less than one-third the cost. A car running on such batteries would have a range of 400 to 500 miles on a single charge. These batteries are made from far more available materials which can be fairly easily recycled. Peak Neodymium Neodymium is a rare earth metal used extensively to produce permanent magnets found in everything from computer magnetic disks and cell phones to wind turbines and automobiles. For example, the magnets that drive a Prius hybrid’s electric motor use more than two pounds of neodymium. Interestingly, neodymium magnets were invented in the 1980s to overcome the global cobalt supply shock that occurred as the result of internal warfare in Zaire. Because China can more cheaply produce neodymium than any other country in the world, that country is now the source of 95 percent of the world’s neodymium. Recently, however, China’s governm[...]

Peak Oil, Revisited

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 01:40:00 -0400

In May 2006, I reported in reason that global oil reserves were ample to supply humanity’s needs for liquid fuels until at least 2030, despite headline-grabbing predictions that our supply had already peaked. Afterwards, the world experienced an unprecedented run-up in oil prices topping out at $147 per barrel in July 2008, which led some negative prognosticators to get a little cocky. One of the leading doomsters, Houston investment banker Matthew Simmons, told CNBC in July 2008, “The idea that it’s a bubble is all poppycock.” He confidently added that the price of oil “is not going to collapse.” Simmons advised Americans to move into villages and to buy locally produced foods and goods.

Following the July 2008 peak, the price of oil dropped to $33 per barrel; it has since leveled out at $60. Meanwhile, official estimates of proven oil reserves have increased slightly from 1.292 trillion barrels in 2006 to 1.342 trillion barrels in 2009.

So why are people still worried about a petroleum crunch? Two words: resource nationalism. As I noted three years ago, the sad fact is that nearly 80 percent of the world’s oil reserves are in the hands of government-owned companies. Even though there are no geological or economic reasons to expect imminent peak oil, the world could easily experience “political peak oil.”

Most of the government-owned oil companies are badly run, technologically backward, and being systematically looted by corrupt politicians. Under the direction of the Castro wannabe Hugo Chavez, for example, Venezuelan oil production has dropped from 3.3 million to 2.4 million barrels per day. Iran, which has the world’s second highest proven oil reserves, produced 6 million barrels of crude per day in 1974; a 2007 U.S. National Academy of Sciences study estimated that Iran’s oil exports could fall to zero by 2015. Mexico’s national oil company, Pemex, has seen steep production declines, and some analysts believe that Mexico will stop exporting oil by the middle of the coming decade. Russia, the world’s second biggest producer of oil, has nationalized its oil industry, and now production is falling. And the political and economic stability of such oil exporters as Nigeria, Chad, Iraq, and Ecuador is far from assured.

“The challenges the world faces in growing supplies to meet future demand are not below ground, they are above ground,” BP chief executive Tony Hayward wrote in June. “They are human, not geological.” If peak oil comes, it will be the result of human folly, not of the world suddenly running out of crude.

Alaskan Oil Abundance Versus Washington's Wasted Billions

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 18:00:00 -0400

Oil imports now count for almost 80 percent of American consumption and cost some $300 to $400 billion yearly. They wreck our trade balance, subsidize many of our enemies, and add to our already mountainous foreign debt. For political reasons, Venezuela, Nigeria, and Mexico—all major sources of U.S. oil imports—have suffered precipitous declines in production, with scant hope of recovering soon. Russian oil production is limited by government incompetence and lack of re-investment. Iraq's vast oil potential is paralyzed by political strife. At any moment, Iran might be attacked by Israel or America which would shut down its production. Further, Iran has threatened to retaliate against any attack by blockading the narrow passage in the Arabian Gulf through which most Saudi Arabian and Kuwaiti oil flows. Analysts are already forecasting 100-dollar-a-barrel oil within a year. Yet the Obama administration is still blocking offshore drilling in America—even though it was approved by Congress last year—and wants to raise taxes on oil companies. Several years are needed to get major new production on line, even without anticipated environmental lawsuits designed to stymie or at least harass and delay any drilling of new wells off of America's east and west coasts. In Alaska, we have a pipeline which could flow another 1.5 million barrels per day—worth nearly $50 billion per year—from vast oil resources waiting to be drilled. Oil appears to be abundant all the way across Northern Alaska from the Canadian border, where British Petroleum (BP) spent a billion dollars for new Canadian leases, to the shallow Chukchi Sea near the border with Russia, where test drilling is planned for next year. New oil drilling in Alaska and off America's coasts would create hundreds of thousands of American jobs and billions of dollars in real tax revenue for Washington. Compare that to government spending to create jobs, which costs some $200,000 per job. Furthermore, administration claims for alternative energy rarely mention the billions of dollars in subsidies, lost tax revenue, and new government debt they require.   For example, solar power involves billions of dollars in costly subsidies which add to the ballooning budget and trade deficits, as many of the panels are imported. A 30 percent tax credit comes right off an installer's income taxes. Giant companies such as Florida Power & Light, for example, now pay much lower income taxes mainly because of the credits. Wind farms receive a 30 percent cash subsidy from the government in a program estimated to soon cost taxpayers some $10 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal. And billions more in government financing will still be needed to build transmission lines from out-of-the-way locations. Ethanol was similarly hyped by Washington—another gigantic political boondoggle with severely damaging consequences for food prices and tens of billions of dollars of wasted resources. Making gasoline economically from switch grass and other plants remains another pipe dream. Major technological breakthroughs make vast new oil production possible—once Washington permits it. Natural gas is already abundant and promises to stay cheap into the foreseeable future (see my previous article at Reason.com, "The Coming Energy Abundance"). Many trucks, buses, and taxis could be easily converted to run on natural gas, costing less than a dollar a gallon for the energy equivalent of gasoline or diesel oil. According to USA Today, there exists tremendous potential for natural gas in auto and truck engines, which consume some 20 percent of all the fuel used on highways. Still, nothing compares to oil products for most transport needs. They are relatively safe, easy to store and divide up, and easy to transport. For oil, extended reach drilling has made vast new production[...]

Reason Writers Around Town: Shikha Dalmia on the Sci-Fi Thinking Behind the Cash-for-Clunkers

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 12:27:00 -0400

In her latest Forbes column, Shikha Dalmia is sorry to add to the loud kvetching over the Cash-for-Clunkers program, but feels she can't stay quiet given the program's high lunacy-to-spending quotient, especially when it comes to its alleged environmental benefits.

Writes Damlia:

"The program's basic idea involves paying owners of fuel-inefficient clunkers worth less than $4,500 a voucher up to the value of their vehicle toward a new, more fuel-efficient car on the hope that this will stimulate the moribund auto sector and slash carbon dioxide emissions. If you disregard the poor taxpayers financing it, everyone is a winner under this scheme.

But that's only in the fantasy land on Capitol Hill......"

Whole thing here.

Pricing Wedge Rides Right Up National Crack

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 19:40:00 -0400

An excellent Art Laffer op-ed explains how concealing total health care costs from patients drives up prices: The health-care wedge is an economic term that reflects the difference between what health-care costs the specific provider and what the patient actually pays. When health care is subsidized, no one should be surprised that people demand more of it and that the costs to produce it increase. Mr. Obama's health-care plan does nothing to address the gap between the price paid and the price received. Instead, it's like a negative tax: Costs rise and people demand more than they need. To pay for the subsidy that the administration and Congress propose, revenues have to come from somewhere. The Obama team has come to the conclusion that we should tax small businesses, large employers and the rich. That won't work because the health-care recipients will lose their jobs as businesses can no longer afford their employees and the wealthy flee. The bottom line is that when the government spends money on health care, the patient does not. The patient is then separated from the transaction in the sense that costs are no longer his concern. And when the patient doesn't care about costs, only those who want higher costs-like doctors and drug companies-care. I should come out of the closet: I'm a hidden-costs buff, and I don't care who knows it. You may be haunted by the grassy knoll, the mechanics of burning jet fuel in building demolition, even the president's birth certificate. I just want to know what was the all-in cost of each of my kids' deliveries (including the last one -- remember, Cedars Goddamn Sinai? -- the one that I and my no-English neighbor actually delivered, but that you still billed my insurance company for in full?). Hidden costs, by the way, are a great topic to deploy when you want to get civil servants talking, because they alone have ventured outside the cave, learned the true shape of the world, and come to know how much we all owe to the limitless self-sacrifice of civil servants. Like John Saxon, they're all convinced we should be paying multiples of whatever it is we pay now for public services. But deep down, they don't actually want us to. The Los Angeles version of the Hundred Years War pits the L.A. Department of Water and Power against its customers. The struggle is especially pointed because the DWP -- which as far as I can tell is under strict orders to deliver nothing better than Brezhnev-era brown-water service -- cultivates an image as the thinking-man's utility, and its current general manager H. David Nahai looks like he should be playing a suave but creepy professor in The Oxford Murders. When he's not covering the department in glory or plotting in secret to jack up rates, Nahai is concocting schemes to keep everybody except himself from using too much water. I once spent a very dull afternoon getting Nahai to agree that the DWP could reduce usage by raising rates, and that the DWP is hamstrung by its inability to raise and lower rates at will. But he balked when I suggested the solution was to spin the department off from the city and let it deal with its customers directly. And from his perspective that makes sense: If you're not a government monopoly, people might decide they'd rather do business with somebody else. In this case, reducing the pricing wedge might improve your balance sheet (zzzz!), but widening the wedge increases your power (sssexxxy!). So, for example, the DWP can now brag that usage dropped slightly in June because the department forced people to conserve, rather than because L.A. has become a waste land of vacant apartments and empty storefronts that's looking more like the set of Omega Man every day. Which is a roundabout way of saying I think Laffer misses [...]

Science Fiction 'Czar'

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 12:00:00 -0400

Dr. John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy—better known as the "science czar"—has been a longtime prophet of environmental catastrophes. Never discouraged but never right. And thanks to resourceful bloggers, you can read excerpts from a hard-to-find book co-authored by Holdren in the late 1970s, called Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment, online. In it, you will find the czar wading into some unpleasant talk about mass sterilizations and abortions. It's not surprising. Holdren spent the '70s boogying down to the vibes of an imaginary population catastrophe and global cooling. He also participated in the famous wager between scientist Paul Ehrlich, the now-discredited Population Bomb theorist (and co-author of Ecoscience), and economist Julian Simon, who believed human ingenuity would overcome demand. Holdren was asked by Ehrlich to pick five natural resources that would experience shortages because of human consumption. He lost the bet on all counts, as the composite price index for the commodities he picked, including copper and chromium, fell by more than 40 percent. Then again, it's one thing to be a bumbling soothsayer but quite another to underestimate the resourcefulness of mankind enough to ponder how "population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution," as Holdren did in Ecoscience in 1977. The book, in fact, is sprinkled with comparable statements that passively discuss how coercive population control methods might rescue the world from ... well, humans. When I called Holdren's office, I was told that the czar "does not now and never has been an advocate of compulsory abortions or other repressive measures to limit fertility." If that is so, I wondered, why is his name on a textbook that brought up such policy? Did he not write that part? Did he change his mind? Was it theoretical? No straightforward answer was forthcoming. No big deal. Even today, many environmentalists and anti-immigration activists believe in the myth of population disaster. In this world, human spammers are a disease, not a cure. And Holdren never has ceased peddling calamity as science. Today, for instance, though Holdren publicly has tempered his aversion to population growth, he still advocates that government nudge us toward fewer children. Instead of coercion, though, he is a fan of "motivation." When, during his Senate confirmation hearing, Holdren was asked about his penchant for scientific overstatements, he responded that "the motivation for looking at the downside possibilities, the possibilities that can go wrong if things continue in a bad direction, is to motivate people to change direction. That was my intention at the time." "Motivation" is when Holdren tells us that global warming could cause the deaths of 1 billion people by 2020. Or when he claimed that sea levels could rise by 13 feet by the end of this century when your run-of-the-mill alarmist warns of only 13 inches. "Motivating"—or, in other words, scaring the hell out of people—about "possibilities" is an ideological and political weapon unsheathed in the effort to pass policies that, in the end, coerce us to do the right thing. Holdren's past flies in the face of Barack Obama's contention, made on the day of the science czar's appointment, that his administration was "ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted or obscured by politics or ideology." Holdren embodies the opposite, actually. David Harsanyi is a columnist at The Denver Post and the author of Nanny State. Visit his Web site at www.DavidHarsanyi.com. COPYRIGHT 2009 THE DENVER POST DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM[...]

Collecting Rainwater No Longer Illegal in Colorado

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 11:47:00 -0400

I wrote a short article for our October issue about how it was illegal—and had been for more than a century—for Coloradans to collect precipitation that falls on their property. The law also made it illegal for retailers to sell rain barrels and similar items—even something like a bucket, if the retailer suspected his customer would use it for illegal purposes.

No more. Two new laws taking effect this year now make it legal for Coloradans to collect rain.

Free-Market Environmentalism in the New York Times

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 11:21:00 -0400

A "libertarian moment" moment: The New York Times defends attempts to establish quasi-private property in fish in the ocean as a means to preserve them. From its editorial earlier this week:

Under the present system, America’s regional fishing councils, which are run largely by fishermen with federal oversight, set annual catch limits. To meet these quotas, most commercial fleets follow a detailed “days at sea” approach regulating the number of days they may fish, how many fish they may catch and what kind of equipment they may use. The system does not work well. Some people obey the rules, and others don’t. The days-at-sea restrictions often lead to a frantic race to catch as many fish as possible as quickly as possible, which in turn leads to indiscriminate and wasteful fishing.

Ms. [Jane] Lubchenco’s [of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] alternative would give individual fishermen or groups of fishermen fixed shares — a guaranteed percentage — of the annual catch, then let them set the rules. The theory is that share-holding fishermen will have a vested interest in seeing their resource grow, much like shareholders in a company.

Fisheries that use this system — also known as “dedicated access” fisheries — have prospered in places like New Zealand. The dozen or so American fisheries with catch shares, accounting for about one-fifth of the total domestic catch, have also done well.

Ron Bailey explained and defended the "individual fishing quota" system for New England back in 2005. A Reason Foundation study on how to implement such quotas in the U.S. from 2004.

[Hat tip: reader Ray Eckhart]

The Invisible Hand of Population Control

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:00:00 -0400

"The freedom to breed is intolerable," ecologist Garrett Hardin declared in his famous 1968 essay, "The Tragedy of the Commons." I recently re-read Hardin's call for population control, and this passage caught my attention: "We can make little progress in working toward optimum population size until we explicitly exorcize the spirit of Adam Smith in the field of practical demography." Hardin specifically wanted to exorcize Smith's claim in The Wealth of Nations that an individual who "intends only his own gain," is, as it were, "led by an invisible hand to promote...the public interest." Hardin believed that Smith's metaphor of an invisible hand was contributing to "the dominant tendency of thought that has ever since interfered with positive action based on rational analysis, namely the tendency to assume that decisions reached individually will, in fact, be the best decisions for an entire society. If this assumption is correct it justifies the continuance of our present policy of laissez faire in reproduction." As the essay makes abundantly clear, Hardin is convinced that "rational analysis" will prove that Smith's invisible hand leads to inevitable population ruin. In fact, several recent studies suggest that Hardin might have it backward. Under certain circumstances, there may actually be an invisible hand that leads to an optimum population. “There is no prosperous population in the world today that has, and has had for some time, a growth rate of zero,” Hardin declared. That’s no longer true. Japan is now experiencing a fall in its population due to reduced fertility, as are Germany, Russia, Italy, Poland and 25 other countries and territories. And there are many societies in which total fertility rates are rapidly decelerating. Let's take a look at two intriguing lists. The first is a list of countries ranked on the 2009 Index of Economic Freedom issued by the Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal. Then compare the economic freedom index rankings with a list of countries ranked by their total fertility rates. Of the 30 countries that are ranked as being free or mostly free, only three have fertility rates above 2.1, e.g., New Zealand at 2.11, the Bahamas at 2.13, and Bahrain at 2.53. If one adds the next 53 countries that are ranked as moderately free, one finds that only 8 out of 83 countries have fertility rates above 3. It should be noted that low fertility rates can also be found in more repressive countries as well, e.g., China at 1.77, Cuba at 1.6, Iran at 1.71, and Russia at 1.4. In 2002, Seth Norton, a business economics professor at Wheaton College in Illinois, published a remarkably interesting study on the inverse relationship between prosperity and fertility. Norton compared fertility rates of over 100 countries with their index rankings for economic freedom and another index for the rule of law. "Fertility rate is highest for those countries that have little economic freedom and little respect for the rule of law," wrote Norton. "The relationship is a powerful one. Fertility rates are more than twice as high in countries with low levels of economic freedom and the rule of law compared to countries with high levels of those measures." Norton found that the fertility rate in countries that ranked low on economic freedom averaged 4.27 children per woman while countries with high economic freedom rankings had an average fertility rate of 1.82 children per woman. His results for the rule of law were similar; fertility rates in countries with low respect for the rule of law averaged 4.16 whereas countries with high respect for the rule of law had fertility rates averaging 1.55.  Economic freedom and the rul[...]

Comments (0) - Read and Add your own Comments