December 2011

Yesterday, CEI’s Chris Horner testified before the Ohio House of Representatives Committee on Public Utilities, on legislation to modify the state’s existing green energy production quota by expanding the number of electricity generators that qualify as clean energy.

Below is his presentation and written testimony.

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Government-enforced environmental protection is often based on the notion that the environment is subject to a ‘tragedy of the commons,’ a famous concept in economics whereby goods that “cannot be privately owned” are abused because no one individual has an incentive to conserve. Therefore, conservation must be forced by a state. Matt Ridley in his brilliant book The Origins of Virtue provides a useful correction to this traditional account.

The Origins of Virtue was released in 1996

Scott Gordon, an economist concerned with fisheries, in 1954 wrote, “Everybody’s property is nobody’s property. Wealth that is free for all is valued by none because he who is foolhardy enough to wait for its proper time of use will only find that it has been taken by another. The blade of grass that the manorial cowherd leaves behind is valueless to him, for tomorrow it may be eaten by another animal; the oil left under the earth is valueless to the driller, for another may legally take it; the fish in the sea are valueless to the fisherman, because there is no assurance that they will be there for him tomorrow if they are left behind today.’ ….

An authoritarian biologist named Garret Hardin rediscovered this idea in preparing a lecture on population growth, and named it the ‘tragedy of the commons,’ which term has stuck. Hardin’s aim was not to try to solve the problem but to argue for the necessity of restrictions on the right to breed. ‘Coercion,’ he wrote, ‘is a dirty word to most liberals now but it need not forever be so.’

To make his point, Hardin chose the example of medieval common land, which was widely believed to have been ruined by overgrazing, in comparison to enclosed land. “The rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another… But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein lies the tragedy. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.”

In the abstract, this was true: free-for-alls are disastrously vulnerable to free-riding. The problem is, Hardin was wrong about grazing commons. Medieval commons were not disastrous free-for-alls. They were carefully regulated communal property, just like the lobster fisheries of Maine. True, there were relatively few written rights and not many obvious rules about who could graze them or cut coppice-wood on them. To an outsider, they looked like a free-for-all. But try adding your cattle to the common herd and you would soon discover the unwritten rules.

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In October this year, CEI’s Jackie Moreau blogged about victims of EPA’s wetland regulatory regime. “The once lovely face of Lady Liberty,” she wrote, “now wears the quintessential looks of the mean kid on the playground: class bully.” In this excerpt from Mugged by the State: Outrageous Government Assaults on Ordinary People and their Property, Randall Fitzgerald reinforces her point with some more outrageous examples of government environmentalism out-of-control.

Mugged by the State was published in 2003

Most people find the idea of healthy ecosystems and a clean environment to be desirable social goals. After all, the pollution of our collective air, water, or soil resources can potentially affect both our personal health and our individual property values. The broader social question is how do we measure and define environmental harm, and what benchmarks do we use to certify the point at which damage has occurred that adversely affects others. Examples from the regulation of private lands, public lands, endangered species, wetlands, and the record of the Environmental Protection Agency enforcement tactics illustrate how inflexible or misguided policies, relying on warped incentives and enforced by overzealous regulators, can often do more harm than good….

What if a law existed requiring every American who possesses a piece of Revolutionary War furniture to preserve the piece in perpetuity? They cannot actually own it, but they must protect it and care for it, at their own expense, under the supervision of a federal regulatory agency. If they fail to protect and preserve the furniture to the government’s satisfaction, they can be heavily fined and sent to prison. This is the sort of situation confronting who find part of the wetlands, or a plant or animal belonging to an endangered species, anywhere on their land. Under wetlands protection provisions of the Clean Water Act, landowners must sacrifice any use of their property that might impact wetlands or rare species and their habitat. Failing to do so subjects the owner to criminal penalties.

States have enacted similar regulations modeled after the federal laws. Homebuilder Lin Drake got bludgeoned in 1996 by both a Utah State wildlife agency and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service when he bought land near Enoch, Utah, for a housing subdivision. Employees from these two agencies found no habitat or holes made by prairie dogs on Drake’s land, but a federal wildlife employee claimed to have seen two prairie dogs scurrying away too quickly for their presence on the land to be documented by a camera. With only the testimony of this one employee about a single instance of prairie dogs being spotted, Drake was charged with violating the U.S. Endangered Species Act by “harming” prairie dogs and their habitat with his home building preparations. He was fined $15,000 in 1998.

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Yesterday’s excerpt from Energy & Climate Wars showed why increasing energy consumption in poor nations is essential for any quality of life improvements. In today’s post from Clearing the Air: The Real Story of the War on Air Pollution, Indur Goklany argues that the United States’ economic gains improved not only their wealth, but also their environment, and primarily without government intervention.

Clearing the Air was published in 1999

The real engines for progress on the urban smoke problem in the United States as well as in England were economics and technological change—forces that began in the late 19^thcentury and have continued, for one reason or another, to the present day. New, cleaner energy sources such as natural gas, oil, and electricity became increasingly available as substitutes for coal and wood in homes, businesses, and industries. Urbanization, while responsible for many environmental woes, accelerated the process of substitution because higher population densities reduced access to wood and increased cost-effectiveness and economics of distribution systems for natural gas and electricity.

New technologies entered the marketplace that increased the efficiency of all types of combustion equipment, reducing the amount of soot produced and fuel burned for a given amount of usable energy. Those technologies included more efficient and cleaner furnaces and boilers for homes, businesses, industries, and power plants. In some places, underground and street railroads powered by steam were electrified; in others, electrification replaced horse-powered street cars, reducing another, but no less real, form of pollution. The automobile, which would later be viewed as an environmental villain, was still a relatively little-used luxury; in 1910 there were two automobile registrations for every 100 households. In fact, the use of motor vehicles in urban areas served as environmental purpose by reducing the horse population and associated wastes, as did the electrification of street railways.

The realization that smoke signified unburnt fuel led industry, railroads, and even households to make efforts to reduce it. It was thought to be not only good economics but also good citizenship. That notion was clearly incorporated in the Ohio statute, which allowed municipal authorities to “compel the consumption of smoke.” In time, even the Great War would be pressed into service against this foe; as the Pittsburgh Bureau of Smoke Regulation exhorted, “it must never be forgotten that loss of black smoke means loss of heat and that every unit of heat thrown away is so much aid given to the enemy.” On the other hand, the Bureau of Mines, part of the U.S. Department of Interior, suspended  its smoke abatement “campaign” during the war years. At the other extreme in Milwaukee, the war was used as justification to go, literally, full steam ahead; as a result, “smoky” days increased from 47 in 1916 to 212 in 1918.

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