In his January 2011 State of the Union speech, President Obama called for “more research and incentives” so that America could “become the first country to have 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2015.” In yesterday’s Washington Post, Carol Leonnig and Joe Stephens report that the Obama Administration “has poured roughly $5 billion dollars in taxpayer funds into the electric car industry, offering incentives to manufacturers, their suppliers and even car buyers who might want to go green.” This included $2.4 billion in Stimulus support to develop advanced batteries for all-electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles.
How’s it all working out — will America have million electric vehicles on the road by 2015? It’s doubtful we’ll see anything close to that. [click to continue…]
There have been a few news stories out of Durban suggesting that China (the worlds largest CO2 emitter) has turned a corner on carbon emissions and has tentatively agreed to limit them, with Bloomberg running an article titled “China Climate Plan Makes ‘Excited Buzz’ as U.S. Lags: UN Envoy.” What did China actually say?
Ron Bailey, Reason magazine science correspondent reports:
So here’s what China apparently wants the rest of the world to do: (1) agree that China’s greenhouse gas targets can be different from those imposed on rich countries, (2) agree that for the next 9 years rich countries will continue to cut their greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol while China’s continue to grow, (3) agree that no negotiations take place on targets until a scientific review is finished in 2015, and (4) agree that rich countries begin showering poor countries with $100 billion in climate reparations annually. If the rich countries will just do that, China will consent to begin negotiating some kind of “legally binding” treaty after 2020. Frankly, with these preconditions, it seems that China’s current position actually remains pretty much what it has always been: It will accept legally binding limits on its greenhouse gas emissions when Hell freezes over.
China’s best offer is to consider limiting emissions after 2020, still almost a decade away, and only if all the other countries continue to play this game until then. Who can blame them — they are rapidly industrializing and getting wealthier, which requires massive amounts of fossil fuels.
What if future negotiations aren’t successful? China is currently ‘negotiating’ with other countries regarding their annual emissions, it just so happens they are offering zero emissions reductions. Where is the evidence that they will agree to anything sufficient in 2020, when their per capita incomes will still be markedly lower than other developed countries?
“Wall Street and corporations have corrupted the political process,” says one Occupy Wall Street sign. It’s a common refrain from progressives, but their criticism is one-directional. The accusation is only leveled when Giant Corporations oppose government intervention. When big business supports the intervention, because it stands to reap windfall profits, industry reports are suddenly valid sources for information about the legislation. During the debate about the incandescent light bulb ban, this attitude was rampant, and still is. Consider this excerpt from a recent piece by Washington Times’ Blogger Catherine Poe. She writes:
[W]hile sitting on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, [Rand] Paul railed against government plans to transition from the incandescent light bulb to more energy saving light bulbs, citing Rand’s 1937 novel Anthem. The similarity, according to Paul, is that “individual choice is banned and the collective basically runs society.”Just for the record: The companies making light bulbs were all for this change. [Emphasis added]
Her closing comment is remarkable because it demonstrates complete deference to corporate interests on this issue. It’s not just Poe. The Washington Post editorialized in favor of the light bulb ban in July, citing a study by light bulb manufacturer Phillips that said the ban “would save a household $160 in energy costs over its life.” According to the Post, “The law has had an impressive effect: Light bulb manufacturers have invested heavily in developing new bulbs that use much less electricity, turn on immediately, work with dimmers and produce soft white light.” It’s like reading the back of a GE box.
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In Monday’s excerpt, Julian Simon argued that pollution has been in steady decline and living standards have improved over time if you include the ancient pollutants like bacteria and viruses spread by polluted water. In Tuesday’s post, Wilfred Beckerman echoed the point. He argued that economic development improves standards of living, even today. Today’s post from Daniel Yergin’s new book The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World demonstrates how the post-Soviet Russian state rediscovered energy privatization and market forces improved the lives of average Russians.
Natural resources–particularly oil and natural gas–were as critical to the new Russian state as they had been to the former Soviet Union. By the middle 1990s, oil export revenues accounted for as much as two thirds of the Russian government’s hard currency earnings…. Yet the oil sector was swept up in the same anarchy as the rest of the economy. Workers, who were not being paid, went on strike, shutting down the oil fields. Production and supply across the country were disrupted. Oil was being commandeered or stolen and sold for hard currency in the West.
No one even knew who really owned the oil. Individual production organizations in various parts of West Siberia and elsewhere were busily trying to go into business for themselves. The industry was suddenly being run by “nearly 2000 uncoordinated associations, enterprises, and organizations belonging to the former Soviet industry ministry.” Amid such disruption and starved for investment, Russian oil output started to slip, and then collapse. In little more than half a decade, Russian production plummeted by almost 50 percent–an astonishing loss of more than 5 million barrels a day.
One person with clearly thought-through ideas about what to do was Vagit Alekperov… deputy oil minister. On trips to the West, Alekperov visited a number of petroleum companies. He saw a dramatically different way of operating an oil business. “It was a revelation,” he said. “Here was a type of organization that was flexible and capable, a company that was tackling all the issues at the same time–exploration, production, and engineering–and everybody pursuing the common goal, and not each branch operating separately.”
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Reason’s science correspondent Ronald Bailey titles his first dispatch from the UN Climate Conference “Delusional in Durban.” He reports that one of the “more moderate” proposals making the rounds demands that industrial countries reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions 50% below 1990 levels by 2020. To help clarify the scale of effort required, Bailey links to EPA’s April 2011 report, Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks: 1990-2009.
Here’s the relevant table, from p. 18 of the report:
Let’s give Durban’s ‘moderates’ the benefit of the doubt and assume they’re talking about a 50% reduction in net emissions, taking into account emissions sequestered by sinks such as forests and soils.
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In yesterday’s excerpt, Julian Simon pointed out that “the worst pollutions of the past were diseases caused by microorganisms, and spread by contaminated drinking water and by airborne germs and insects.” Today’s excerpt from Wilfred Becherman’s Through Green-Colored Glasses: Environmentalism Reconsidered shows how this is still true today in the Third World, and why it should be ignored by so many environmentalists.
In the richer countries of the world, it is at least understandable that important sections of the community should question whether priority should be given to further increases in the output of goods and services. But for the vast majority of the world’s population it does not require much imagination of knowledge of their terrible poverty to rule out the question of whether further economic growth is desirable for them. Nevertheless, it is often argued that the developing countries should not make the same “mistakes” as were made by the now advanced countries. They are advised not to pursue economic growth in spite of its adverse social or environmental effects, and not to fall into the trap of “rising expectations.” Furthermore, we often hear that if the developing countries seek to achieve standards of living comparable with those now enjoyed by the advanced countries there simply will not be enough resources to go around.
One conclusion that might appear to follow from these pessimistic doctrines is that, because the rich countries of the world can hardly be expected to reduce their levels of material prosperity, the poor countries must not be encouraged to believe that they too can aspire to such levels of prosperity. They must therefore accustom themselves to the idea of giving priority to environmental preservation rather than economic growth. Of course, it is bad luck for them that the point at which economic growth has to stop should just have arrived near the end of the 20th century, when other countries have already achieved a certain affluence but before they have had the opportunity to do likewise themselves.
This view, not surprisingly, has always been rejected by the developing countries. As far back as 1972, the so-called “Founex report,” drawn up by a group of experts convened by the United Nations to prepare a report on Development and the Environment for the 1972 UN World Conference on the Human Environment, pointed out that, although “the developing countries would clearly wish to avoid, as far as is feasible, the mistakes and distortions that have characterized the patterns of developmental problems in the industrialized nations… the major environmental problem of developing countries are essentially of a different kind: they are predominantly problems that reflect the poverty and very lack of development of their societies. They are problems, in other words, of both rural and urban poverty. In both the towns and in the countryside, not merely the ‘quality of life’ but life itself is endangered by poor water, housing, sanitation, and nutrition, by sickness and disease.”
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It’s now all but certain that the ethanol tax credit will expire at the end of the year, and the ethanol producers continue to claim credit for “giving it up” despite that it was obviously lost due to larger political considerations, and the fact that they lobbied initially for its extension and then eventually for a substitute which would have still funneled money into their industry. The tariff on ethanol imports also expires at the end of the year, and is likely to expire, though a bill was just introduced to extend it. It has no chance of passing through normal legislative means but its not impossible for it to be attached to larger omnibus bills in order to appease ethanol interests.
There are a few problems here. First, restrictions on trade are not normally good, but the fact that much of ethanol consumption is due to the renewable fuel standard mandate (and not market forces) complicates things. If imports of sugarcane ethanol are merely going to cut down on corn ethanol consumption/production, then it seems that the removal of the trade barrier would be a neutral/good thing. However, if imports of sugarcane ethanol require that Americans purchase additional ethanol relative to a baseline with the tariff, then an argument could be made for keeping the tariff. There are also other longer term political considerations: if sugarcane ethanol is kept out, the corn ethanol folks might lobby to lift the cap on corn ethanol and allow it to qualify as an advanced biofuel. Or, Congress might scrap the advanced biofuel RFS altogether as cellulosic ethanol is yet to exist.
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For years the Endangered Species Act (ESA) has been used to block development and economic growth. But on December 1, 2011, people and jobs were given a small victory.
Midday, Thursday, December 1, the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) announced a 6-month extension for the final determination for the proposed listing of the dunes sagebrush lizard (also known as the sand dune lizard). This may sound insignificant to those not impacted by previous ESA listing decisions or those not engaged in this fight, but it is surely something to cheer about in an era of bad economic news. (In this case, the proposed ESA listing of the dunes sagebursh lizard has the potential to “decimate” a large percentage of America’s oil and gas production.) Additionally, it represents a rare instance of bipartisan action and Congress doing the right thing.
One year ago, the FWS published their intention to consider the proposed listing of the dunes sagebrush lizard as an endangered species under the ESA. This set into place a year-long process of public hearings, data gathering, and citizen rallies.
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A rare moment of common sense rang supreme in the bill markup with the bipartisan approval of Kristi Noem’s (R-SD) Farm Dust Regulation Prevention Act of 2011 (H.R. 1633) by the House Energy and Commerce committee on 33 to 16 vote. This bill prevents EPA from regulating particulate matter (PM) with an aerodynamic diameter greater than 2.5 micrometers under section 109 of the Clean Air Act, limited to one year starting from the date the bill is passed. EPA’s regulation would be exempt where this PM standard is already regulated by the state or local government. The agency would have to prove coarse particulate matter poses a serious health risk; if EPA were to initiate a new PM standard related to farm dust, it would have to pass a cost-benefit test.
However, leading up to this triumph in the interest of rural America, several of the Democrats’ platforms were armed with ironic and ignorant castigation, regardless of the amendment made in the name of the “overly broad” term of “farm dust,” or “nuisance dust.”
From the genesis of the bill’s introduction, Democrats have had issue with the definition of “farm dust.” In the Section 3(c) of the initial bill, “nuisance dust” is defined as particulate matter “(1) generated from natural sources, unpaved roads, agricultural activities, earth moving, or other activities typically conducted in rural areas; or (2) consisting primarily of soil, other natural or biological materials, windblown dust, or some combination thereof.” To appease the concern over the vague language, an amendment was successfully passed, sharpening the term so that nuisance dust “(3) is not emitted directly into the ambient air from combustion, such as exhaust from combustion engines and emissions from stationary combustion processes.” This addition clearly excludes fossil fuel combustions such as coal combustion residuals from the definition of farm dust.
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In this excerpt from The Ultimate Resource 2, brilliant resource economist Julian Simon explains why environmental degradation is not a continuous process. Rather, he demonstrates why prosperity protects the environment.
On April 19, 1970, at the time of the first Earth Day demonstrations, the top-of-page headline story in the Chicago Tribune was “The Pollution of Earth: ‘I’m Scared,'” with the subheadline “Air, Sea and Land–All Being Strangled.” The story was typical of headlines all across the country: “‘I’m scared,’ said Joseph Sauris, 16, a sophomore at Maine East Township High School, Park Ridge…. ‘I don’t like the idea of leaving a dead world to my children. That might sound like a cliche, but it may be the truth someday.’”
Today, a quarter-century later, people still believe that the earth is being strangled. But what are these deadly substances that are supposedly killing the planet? Almost without exception, the purported pollutions that have most scared the public in the past few decades – Alar, dioxin, acid rain, and a large number of others ranging back to DDT – have turned out to be destructive false alarms. Yet the alarms have been much louder than the later all-clears; this contributes to the public’s impression that pollution is becoming worse rather than improving.
The worst pollutions of the past were diseases caused by microorganisms, and spread by contaminated drinking water and by airborne germs and insects…. Pollution used to mean such phenomena as human excrement floating in rivers everywhere, as it still does in India and Thailand (and I’m sure many other countries), and as it did in the Hudson River off Manhattan when I was a young man. When I was in the Navy in the 1950s, there were few harbors in the world that were not completely foul, and it was always disgusting to see native kids diving into that mess to fetch the coins the sailors and tourists would throw near the docks for amusement.
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