December 2011

Randal O’Toole used to be a mainstream environmentalist until he saw how government operated. In Gridlock: Why We’re Stuck in Traffic and What to Do About It, O’Toole (known as the Antiplanner over on his blog) describes how “behavioral” solutions to environmental problems fail, and why technical solutions that get the government out of people’s behavioral choices is the way to go.

Gridlock was published in 2009

When I went to college at Oregon State University, Ralph Nader came to Oregon and inspired students to form the Oregon Student Public Interest Research Group to do research on social and environmental issues. In the summer of 1972, I was one of the group’s first student interns, and I worked on air pollution issues….

Because of traffic congestion, Portland’s worst pollution was downtown. So I proposed that Portland’s three-year-old transit agency, TriMet, contract with churches on the city’s periphery to use their parking lots as weekday park-and-ride stations. This would allow commuters to leave their cars well outside of downtown.

Once downtown, people still might need to get around, so I proposed that Trimet create a demand-responsive jitney bus system. Signal boxes on every street corner would allow people to call a bus. The nearest bus would pick them up and, after picking up or dropping off other people, drop them off at their downtown destination. The hardware and software for such a system was commercially available but had never been used in the U.S.

Portland’s traffic engineer had a very different solution to the city’s air pollution problems. Cars pollute the most at low speeds, he pointed out. So his idea was to install a traffic signal coordination system on downtown at faster speeds. According to his department’s calculations, this program, combined with the EPA’s stricter air pollution controls on new cars, would bring the city in compliance of EPA’s pollution standards by 1980. I worried speeding up downtown traffic would simply bring in more traffic, which would offset the clean-air benefits of higher speeds. But the city adopted the traffic engineer’s plan….

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Two nights ago, I was invited to speak on Fox Business Channel’s Cavuto show, about renewable energy subsidies. To find out whether I am for or against taxpayer handouts to politically favored industries, watch the video below.

I’ve spent much of the last five months following (and fighting) the Environmental Protection Agency’s power grab on visibility policy. As I explain here, EPA is hybridizing disparate provisions of the Clean Air Act in order to engineer greater regulatory authority for itself. The Agency is using this trumped up authority to run roughshod over state decision making on policy to improve visibility.

At issue is a provision amended to the Clean Air Act in 1977, known as Regional Haze, that requires measures to improve vistas at federal National Parks and Wilderness Areas. A hallmark of the program is state primacy over EPA. The Congressional Record for the 1977 Clean Air Act amendments explains that the House of Representatives and Senate passed markedly different Regional Haze provisions. The House’s version gave EPA primacy; the Senate version made states the lead decision-makers. The Conference Committee, whose duty it is to reconcile the differences between the bills passed by the two chambers of Congress, adopted the Senate language. In the seminal case American Corn Growers v. EPA, a federal court remanded EPA’s proposed Regional Haze rule, because it insufficiently accorded states the lead role in policymaking to improve visibility. EPA’s own rules recognize the Agency’s secondary role. According to the preamble of EPA’s 2005 Regional Haze Guidelines, “…the [Clean Air] Act and legislative history indicate that Congress evinced a special concern with ensuring that States would be the decision makers (70 FR 39137).”

The legal and regulatory record is clear: States get to make visibility policy.

Fast forward to January 2009: President Barack Obama takes office, and launches a war on coal. On the supply-side, the administration moves to end surface coal mining in Appalachia. On the demand side, the administration is trying to force every existing coal fired power plant to install the most expensive controls—namely “selective catalytic reduction” systems for nitrogen oxides,  “scrubbers” for sulfur dioxide, and electrostatic filters for particulate matter—regardless whether these retrofits are warranted. For the average 500 megawatt coal fired power plant, costs of these controls range anywhere from $400 o $600 million. Presumably, EPA’s idea is to raise the price of generating electricity with coal, and thereby “bankrupt” the industry, to borrow a term turned by the President.

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Many people today believe that environmental conditions are worsening. In The Improving State of the World, Indur Goklany thoroughly refutes this idea. Nonetheless, environmentalists continue to perpetuate the view that increased wealth and prosperity mean a poorer environment, but as this excerpt from Goklany’s work shows, this is not the case.

The Improving State of the World was published in 2007

Clearly, technological change is one key to continued improvement in environmental and human well-being. At least two ingredients are necessary to bring about technological change. First, better technology must be brought into existence. With greater wealth, expenditures on research and development increase. Therefore, the likelihood of developing new or improved technology should rise with wealth, which helps maintain and enhance human capital. This, in turn, not only further enhances the possibility of devising better technologies but it also propagates knowledge about the existence and operation of existing and new technologies, which is a key element for the diffusion of technology.

But there is more to technological change than creating technology or being aware of its existence. Although poor countries (and their farmers) are cognizant of technologies that would improve agricultural productivity, they are unable to capitalize on that information, despite that many such technologies, for example, fertilizer and crop protection measures, are quite mundane. Thus, their agricultural yields are substantially lower as are their food supplies. As a result, hunger and malnourishment are higher, and pressures for deforestation are greater. Similarly, notwithstanding that nowadays authorities in even the poorest countries know how to extend access to safe water and sanitation to 100 percent of the population, they lack the wherewithal to do so. Consequently, 1.1 billion people worldwide still lack access to safe water and 2.4 billion to adequate sanitation, virtually all in the poorer countries.

The missing ingredient, of course, is wealth, without which not only it harder to invent, develop, perfect, and use new technologies, but even old technologies are often unaffordable. Greater wealth increases the likelihood of acquiring, operating, and maintaining new as well as existing technologies. That is, wealth not only helps create technology and conditions favorable for its diffusion but wealth also ensures that technology is, in fact, used to make technological change a reality. It is hardly surprising that in previous chapters, we saw repeatedly that virtually every indicator of human well-being or environmental impact sooner or later improves with wealth. Hence, wealth increases cereal yields, which helps reduce rates of deforestation. It boosts the ability to install air pollution controls and to substitute cleaner fuels for dirty ones. Wealth also increases access to safe water and sanitation, which then reduce mortality due to water-related diseases.

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During his 2008 campaign, President Obama made his support of climate-change interventions clear, stating that his presidency would slow the rise of the oceans and begin to heal the planet. He promised that a cap-and-trade system would curb global warming.

He was elected, but the electorate hasn’t liked many of his policies. Cap and trade never passed Congress. To this day, President Obama has remained comparatively popular, but people believe he is taking the country in the wrong direction—toward a European system. Even his Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu, believes our gasoline prices should be higher, like Europe’s.

Two weeks ago, my column addressed China’s act (ring #1) in the climate-change circus. Last week, I looked at Europe’s staunch support for climate-change intervention when the majority of the industrialized countries have rejected or resisted a Kyoto-style deal (ring #2). Using Italy as an example, I suggested that the country’s lack of natural resources made expensive renewable energy a viable option for them—though an economic tightrope destined to failure.

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