Category Archives: Environment

Beepocamyth: Neonics Don’t Kill the Buzz

08 Saturday Feb 2020

Posted by in Agriculture, Biodiversity, Environment, Risk

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False claims that a certain class of pesticides threaten the world’s bee populations are commonplace, and we hear the same more recently about various species of birds. The origins of the “beepocalypse” rumor were not based on scientific evidence, but on a narrative that developed among environmental activists in response to a phenomenon called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) that began around 2006, roughly a decade after neonicotinoid pesticides (so-called neonics) replaced earlier, more toxic compounds as the pesticides of choice. But Jon Entine writes at The Genetic Literacy Project:

“What causes CCD? It still remains a mystery, in part. But researchers turned up historical examples of CCD-like bee die offs across the globe over hundreds of years, well before the introduction of pesticides, but activist groups would have none of it.”

CCD essentially tapered off by 2009, according to Entine, and the number of honeybee colonies are higher now that before the introduction of neonics. See Entine’s charts at the link showing changes in honeybee populations over time. In Australia, where the use of neonics has been especially heavy, bee populations have grown steadily and remain quite healthy.

Entine’s article provides a nice summary of the real and imagined threats to the world’s bee populations as well as distorted claims associated with normal winter die-offs. He provides a number of useful links on these subjects, and he summarizes research showing the lack of any real threat to bees from neonics:

“Over the past seven years, there have been a flood of studies about the potential impact of neonics on bees. Many small-scale, forced-feeding studies that generally overdosed bees with neonics found various negative effects; not a surprise, many entomologists have said, as they do not replicate real world impacts.

In contrast, a multitude of large-population field studies—the ‘gold-standard’ of bee research—have consistently demonstrated there are no serious adverse effects of neonic insecticides on honeybees at the colony level from field-realistic neonic exposure. …

By last year, even the Sierra Club—for years one of the leading proponents of the honeybee Armageddon narrative—was backpeddling, writing: ‘Honeybees are at no risk of dying off. While diseases, parasites and other threats are certainly real problems for beekeepers, the total number of managed honeybees worldwide has risen 45% over the last half century.'”

Then Entine turns his attention to another front in the war on pesticides: a Canadian study in which white-crowned sparrows were force-fed a mixture of seeds and pesticide via gavage — ie, through a tube:

“Only sparrows force-fed the highest dosage were affected, and then only temporarily. They stopped eating, quickly lost body weight and fat, became disoriented and paused their migratory flight—all after tube full of chemicals was forced down their throat and into their stomach. … That said, within a few days of what was likely a trauma-inducing experience, all recovered completely and continued their migration normally.”

Yet the authors reported that the very existence of some wild birds is threatened by neonics, and the media, always eager to report a crisis, ran with it.

Paul Driessen also describes the junk science underlying misleading narratives regarding pesticide use. It is a driving force behind legislation in the House and Senate that would ban the use of neonics in National Wildlife Refuges, where the Fish & Wildlife Service permits farmers to grow various crops. Driessen has some advice for Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-NY), a sponsor of the legislation:

“She should also recognize potentially serious threats to bees, wildlife, soils, waters and plants in refuges from sources that she, her colleagues and their environmentalist and media allies routinely ignore: solar panels, for instance. Not only do they blanket many thousands of acres, allowing little to grow beneath or between them. They can also leach cadmium and other metals into soils and waters. They should no longer be built near wildlife refuges.

Finally, it’s not just bees. It’s also birds, and bats – which are already being killed and even eradicated in many areas by America’s 56,000 wind turbines. Imagine what Green New Deal turbine numbers would do.”

More perspective is offered in this excellent six-part (and growing?) “Pesticides and Food” series (all at the link) by Kayleen Schreiber:

  1. Has pesticide use decreased? Yes, dramatically in per capita and per unit of output.
  2. Have pesticides improved?  Yes, with dramatically lower toxicity, improved biodegradability, and lower use rates.
  3. How dangerous is glyphosate (a herbicide)? Not very. Covered in my last post. Glyphosate is only 1/10th as toxic as caffeine.
  4. How do organic pesticides compare to synthetic pesticides? It’s a mixed bag, with great variability across both classes. Organics are more toxic in some applications, and synthetics are more toxic in others.
  5. Soil health: Are synthetic pesticides more sustainable than “natural” organics?  Organics require more tillage, which creates sustainability problems.
  6. Pesticide residues — Something to worry about? The USDA finds little residue in its testing, with extremely low detection rates for both organics and synthetics.

 

 

EPA Concedes Puddles, Ditches to Owners

30 Thursday Jan 2020

Posted by in Environment, Federalism, Regulation

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Those who like their government served-up intrusive are reacting hysterically to the Environmental Protection Agency’s new Navigable Waters Protection Rule, which forbids the federal government from regulating waters that are not interstate waters or waters that aren’t or cannot be used in any way related to interstate commerce. The federal government will no longer have jurisdiction over normally dry, “ephemeral”  creek beds, private lakes and ponds unconnected to interstate waters, and most ground areas where rainwater pools, such as ditches on private property. This is a very good thing!

The emphasis of the new rule on interstate waters hews more closely to the constitutional limits of federal power than did the rescinded rule that had been imposed by the Obama Administration in 2015, which some called the Waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule (really an interpretation of “navigable waters”, or WOTUS as defined by the 1972 Clean Water Act). Christian Britschgi writes at Reason.com:

“The Obama-era rule was controversial from the get-go, with multiple Red states filing legal challenges claiming it exceeded the federal government’s authority to regulate water pollution. A slew of federal court rulings stayed the implementation of the rule in over half the states.”

Some of the straightforward differences between the new rule and WOTUS were mentioned above, but Anthony K. Francois of the Property and Environment Research Center gets into a bit more detail in his nice summary of these changes in federal authority.

In many cases, state and local governments already have regulatory authority over waters placed off-limits to the EPA. In fact, as Jonathan Adler wrote last summer, some of those state regulations are more stringent than the federal oversight now rescinded. That flies in the face of assertions by activists that states will be patsies in their dealings with property owners (the activists would call them “polluters”). So those who claim that the new rule will cause damage to the environment are really saying they only trust the EPA’s authority in these matters. They are also saying that no private citizen who owns property should be presumed to have rights over the industrial, commercial, or residential use of that property without review by the federal government. Under WOTUS, this represented such a severe abrogation of rights that it interfered with both productive activity and private enjoyment, not to mention the considerable confusion and costly litigation it prompted.

Weighing the costs and benefits of regulatory actions is a difficult undertaking. However, it is far too easy for regulators, with an imbalance of coercive power in their favor, to impose costly standards in locales where there may be little or no net benefit, and where individual property owners have no recourse. Regulators get no reward for protecting individual liberty and property rights, which skews their view of the tradeoff against potential environmental damage. Federal regulatory power is best kept within strict limits. The same goes for state and local regulatory power, but authority at those levels is at least more accountable to local interests on behalf of consumer, business and environmental concerns.

The UN’s Mass Extinction Fiction

20 Monday May 2019

Posted by in Biodiversity, Central Planning, Environment

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A big story early this month warned of mass extinctions and a collapse of the planet’s biodiversity. This was based on a report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). A high-level presentation of the data by IPBES was constructed in a way that is easily revealed as misleading (see below). But the first thing to ask about bombastic reports like this is whether the authors are self-interested. There is big money in promoting apocalyptic scenarios and public programs to avert them. Large government grants are at stake for like-minded scientists, and political power is at stake for biodiversity activists worldwide. Like many other scare stories reported as “news”, this one feeds into the statist political agenda of the environmental Left.

Exaggerated claims of species endangerment are not a new phenomenon. We’ve heard grossly erroneous forecasts of polar bear extinctions, frightening but false warnings of a “beepocalyse”, and faulty claims about declines in the population of African elephants. These are headline-grabbing and more thrilling to report than mourning the prospective loss of an obscure species of cave lichen. But a mass extinction is something else! Dan Hannon reminds us of the following:

“In 1980, for example, the Jimmy Carter administration distributed to foreign governments a report claiming that, by the year 2000, 2 million species would be wiped out. In fact, by 2010, there had been 872 documented extinctions.” 

Of course, that figure does not account for the multitude of new species discovered. There are many. Recent examples just gruesome enough to garner attention are the three new species of bird eater tarantulas discovered in 2017.

In the more general mass-extinction context of the IPBES report, the blame for the extremely pessimistic outlook is placed squarely on human activity. The authors allege CO2 emissions as the primary culprit, which is at best a theory and one at odds with the chief driver of extinctions during the industrial era. That is the introduction of non-native species into environments having flora or fauna unable to withstand new competitors. Matt Ridley elaborates:

“The introduction by people of predators, parasites and pests, especially to islands, has been and continues to be far and away the greatest cause of local and global extinction of native fauna.”

There is no question that the IPBES report on extinctions was intended to create alarm. As Gary Wrightstone demonstrates, the lack of rigor and misleading expositional techniques used in the report are a tell:

“… the data were lumped together by century rather than shorter time frames, which, as we shall see accentuates the supposed increase in extinctions. … The base data were derived from the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) Red List, which catalogues every known species that has gone the way of the dodo and the carrier pigeon. Review of the full data set reveals a much different view of extinction and what has been happening recently.”

The more granular charts Wrightstone presents are indeed contrary to the narrative in the IPBES report. And Wrightstone also highlights the following in a postscript:

“In an incredibly ironic twist that poses a difficult conundrum for those who are intent on saving the planet from our carbon dioxide excesses, the new study reports that the number one cause of predicted extinctions is habitat loss. Yet their solution is to pave over vast stretches of land for industrial scale solar factories and to construct immense wind factories that will cover forests and   grasslands, killing the endangered birds and other species they claim to want to save.”

The enduring extinction racket is one among other fronts in the war on capitalism. The IPBES report must use the term “transformative” a thousand times, as it recommends “steering away from the current limited paradigm of economic growth“. Matt Ridley highlights the faulty attribution of alleged declines in biodiversity to “western values and capitalism”:

“On the whole what really diminishes biodiversity is a large but poor population trying to live off the land. As countries get richer and join the market economy they generally reverse deforestation, slow species loss and reverse some species declines.”

And Ridley also says this:

“A favourite nostrum of many environmentalists is that you cannot have infinite growth with finite resources. But this is plain wrong, because economic growth comes from doing more with less. So if I invent a new car engine that gets twice as many miles per gallon, I’ve caused economic growth but we’ll use less fuel. Likewise if I increase the yield of a crop, I need less land and probably less fuel too.”

It’s no coincidence that future extinctions foretold by IPBES are predicted to have drastic impacts on less-developed countries. It thus appears that IPBES exists in a happy synergy with the UN’s climate Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as well as proponents of the Paris Accord and the entire climate lobby. An objective that helps them garner support around the globe is to redistribute existing wealth to less-developed countries in the name of environmental salvation. That would prove a poor substitute for the kinds of free-market policies that would truly enhance prospects for economic growth in those nations.

The threat of mass extinctions is greatly exaggerated by the UN, IPBES, climate change activists, and members of the media who can’t resist promoting a crisis. Any diminished biodiversity we might experience going forward won’t be solved by limiting economic growth, as the IPBES report claims. Instead, advances in productivity, particularly in agriculture, can allow expansion of native habitat, as recent experience with reforestation and global greening demonstrates. This principle is as applicable to under-developed countries as anywhere else.

The kinds of centrally planned limits on human activity contemplated by the IPBES report are likely to backfire by making us poorer. Those limits would impose costs by misallocating resources away from things that people value most highly. They would also force people to forego the adoption of innovative production techniques, leading to the substitution of other resources, such as inefficient land use. And those limits would deny basic freedoms, including the unfettered use of private property.

A Carbon Tax Would Be Fine, If Only …

01 Friday Mar 2019

Posted by in Environment, Global Warming, Taxes

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I’ve opposed carbon taxes on several grounds, but I admit that it might well be less costly as a substitute for the present mess that is U.S. climate policy. Today, we incur enormous costs from a morass of energy regulations and mandates, prohibitions on development of zero-carbon nuclear power, and subsidies to politically-connected industrialists investing in corn ethanol, electric cars, and land- and wildlife-devouring wind and solar farms. (For more on these costly and ineffective efforts, see Michael Shellenberger’s “Why Renewables Can’t Save the Planet” in Quillette.) Incidentally, the so-called Green New Deal calls for a complete conversion to renewables in unrealistically short order, but with very little emphasis on a carbon tax.

The Carbon Tax

Many economists support the carbon tax precisely because it’s viewed as an attractive substitute for many other costly policies. Some support using revenue from the tax to pay a flat rebate or “carbon dividend” to everyone each year (essentially a universal basic income). Others have pitched the tax as a revenue-neutral replacement for other taxes that are damaging to economic growth, such as payroll taxes or taxes on capital. Economic growth would improve under the carbon tax, or so the story goes, because the carbon tax is a tax on a “bad”, as opposed to taxes on “good” factors of production. I view these ideas as politically naive. If we ever get the tax, we’ll be lucky to get much regulatory relief in the bargain, and the revenue is not likely to be offset by reductions in other taxes.

But let’s look a little closer at the concept of the carbon tax, and I beg my climate-skeptic friends to stick with me for a few moments and keep a straight face. The tax is a way to attach an explicit price to the use of fuels that create carbon emissions. The emissions are said to inflict social or external costs on other parties, costs which are otherwise ignored by consumers and businesses in their many decisions involving energy use. The carbon tax is a so-called Pigouvian tax: a way to “internalize the externality” by making fossil fuels more expensive to burn. The tax itself involves no prohibitions on behavior of any kind. Certain behaviors are taxed to encourage more “desirable” behavior.

Setting the Tax

But what is the appropriate level of the tax? At what level will it approximate the true “social cost of carbon”? Any departure from that cost would be sub-optimal. Robert P. Murphy contrasts William D. Nordhaus’ optimal carbon tax with more radical levels, which Nordhaus believes would be needed to meet the goals of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Nordhaus won the 2018 Nobel Prize in economics for his work on climate change. Whatever one might think of the real risks of climate change, Nordhaus’ clearly recognizes the economic downsides to mitigating against those risks.

Nordhaus has estimated that the social cost of carbon will be $44/ton in 2025 (about $0.39 per gallon of gas). He claims that a carbon tax at that level would limit increases in global temperature to 3.5º Celsius by 2100. He purports to show that the costs of a $44 carbon tax in terms of reduced economic output would be balanced by the gains from limiting climate warming. Less warming would require a higher tax with fewer incremental rewards, and even more incremental lost output. The costs of the tax would then outweigh benefits. For perspective, according to Nordhaus, a stricter limit of 2.5º C implies a carbon tax equivalent to $2.50 per gallon of gas. The IPCC, however, prescribes an even more radical limit of 1.5º C. That would inflict a huge cost on humanity far outweighing the potential benefits of less warming.

A Carbon Tax, If…

Many economists have come down in favor of a carbon tax under certain qualifications: revenue-neutrality, a “carbon dividend”, or as a pre-condition to deregulation of carbon sources and de-subsidization of alternatives. John Cochrane discusses a carbon tax in the context of the “Economists’ Statement on Carbon Dividends” (Cochrane’s more recent thoughts are here):

“It’s short, sweet, and signed by, as far as I can tell, every living CEA chair, every living Fed Chair, both Democrat and Republican, and most of the living Nobel Prize winners. … It offers four principles 1. A carbon tax, initially $40 per ton. 2. The carbon tax substitutes for regulations and subsidies and (my words) the vast crony-capitalist green boondoggle swamp, which is chewing up money and not saving carbon. 3. Border adjustment like VAT have [sic] 4. ‘All the revenue should be returned directly to U.S. citizens through equal lump-sum rebates.'”

Rather than a carbon dividend, Warren Meyer proposes that a carbon tax be accompanied by a reduction in the payroll tax, an elimination of all subsidies, mandates, and prohibitions, development of more nuclear power-generating capacity, and contributions to a cleanup of Chinese and Asian coal-power generation. That’s a lot of stuff, and I think it exceeds Meyer’s normal realism with respect to policy issues.

My Opposition

Again, I oppose the adoption of a carbon tax for several reasons, despite my sympathy for the logic of Pigouvian taxation of externalities. At the risk of repeating myself, here I elaborate on my reasons for opposition:

Government Guesswork: First, Nordhaus’ estimates notwithstanding, we do not and cannot know the climate/economic tradeoffs with any precision. We can barely measure global climate, and the history of what measures we have are short and heavily manipulated. Models purporting to show the relationship between carbon forcing and global climate climate change are notoriously unreliable. So even if we can agree on the goal (1.5º, 2.5º, 3.5º), and we won’t, the government will get the tradeoffs wrong. I took the following from a comment on Cochrane’s blog, a quote from A.C. Pigou himself:

“It is not sufficient to contrast the imperfect adjustments of unfettered enterprise with the best adjustment that economists in their studies can imagine. For we cannot expect that any State authority will attain, or even wholeheartedly seek, that ideal. Such authorities are liable alike to ignorance, to sectional pressure, and to personal corruption by private interest. A loud-voiced part of their constituents, if organized for votes, may easily outweigh the whole.”

Political Hazards: Second, we won’t get the hoped-for political horse trade made explicit in the “Economists’ Statement …” discussed above. As a political matter, the setting of the carbon tax rate will almost assuredly get us a rate that’s too high. Experiences with carbon taxes in Australia, British Columbia, and France have been terrible thus far, sowing widespread dissatisfaction with the resultant escalation of energy prices.

Economic Growth: Neither is it a foregone conclusion that a revenue-neutral carbon tax will stimulate economic growth, and it might actually reduce output. As Robert P. Murphy explains in another post, the outcome depends on the structure of taxes prior to the change. The substitution of the carbon tax will increase output only if it replaces taxes on a factor of production (labor or capital) that is overtaxed prior to the change. That undermines a key selling point: that the carbon tax would necessarily produce a “double dividend”: a reduction in carbon emissions and higher economic growth. Nevertheless, I’d allow that revenue neutrality combined with elimination of carbon regulation and “green” subsidies would be a good bet from an economic growth perspective.

Overstated Risks: Finally, I oppose carbon taxes because I’m unconvinced that the risk and danger of global warming are as great as even Nordhaus would have it. In other words, the external costs of carbon don’t amount to much. Our recorded temperature history is extremely short and is therefore not a reliable guide to the long-term nature of the systemic relationships at issue. Even worse, temperature records are manipulated to exaggerate the trend in temperatures (also see here, here and here). There is no evidence of an uptrend in severe weather events, and the dangers of sea level rise associated with increasing carbon concentrations also have been greatly exaggerated. Really, at some point one must take notice of the number of alarming predictions and doomsday headlines from the past that have not been borne out even remotely. Furthermore, higher carbon concentrations and even warming itself would be of some benefit to humanity. In addition to a greener environment, the benefits include more rapid economic growth, improved agricultural yields, and a reduction in the salient danger of cold-weather deaths.

Economic Development: The use of fossil fuels has helped to enable strong growth in incomes in developed economies. It has also given us energy alternatives such as nuclear power as well as research into other alternatives, albeit with very mixed success thus far. And while a carbon tax would create an additional incentive to develop such alternatives, a U.S. tax would not accomplish much if any global temperature reduction. Such a tax would have to be applied on a global scale. Talk about a political long-shot! Increasing the price of carbon emissions also has enormous downsides for the less developed world. These fragile economies would benefit greatly from development of fossil fuel energy, enabling reductions in poverty and the income growth necessary to someday join in the prosperity of the developed economies. This, along with liberalization of markets, is the affordable way to bring economic success to these countries, which in turn will enable them to consider the energy alternatives that might come to fruition by that time. Fighting the war on fossil fuels in the underdeveloped world is nothing if not cruel.

 

Climate Change and Disorders of the Mind

13 Sunday Jan 2019

Posted by in Environment, Global Warming, Socialism

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Let’s hear from an environmentalist and radical animal-rights activist:

“… the extinction of Homo Sapiens would mean survival for millions if not billions, of Earth-dwelling species. Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.”

Okay then, you first! That is an actual quote of Ingrid Newkirk, the misanthropic president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), as documented by Tom Harris and Tim Ball in “Extreme Environmentalists Are Anti-Human“. I’m no psychologist, but I believe most shrinks would categorize misanthropy as a condition of general dislike for humanity that usually poses no real threat to others. Not always, however, and by my reckoning the sentiments expressed by Newkirk are the ramblings of a disturbed individual. But she’s not alone in her psychosis, by any means.

The sheer lunacy of the environmental Left is nowhere more evident than in the call for mankind’s extinction, and it is not unusual to hear it these days. Here’s a similarly deranged and tyrannical statement from the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement:

“Phasing out the human race by voluntarily ceasing to breed will allow Earth’s biosphere to return to good health … the hopeful alternative to the extinction of millions of species of plants and animals is the voluntary extinction of one species: Homo sapiens … us.“

The policies advocated by many environmentalists don’t go quite that far, but they nevertheless tend to be anti-human, as Harris and Ball demonstrate. In particular, the emphasis on eliminating the use of fossil fuels over the next three decades would consign most people , but especially those in developing countries, to ongoing lives of penury. Here are Harris and Ball:

“Of course, the poor and disadvantaged would be most affected by the inevitable huge rise in energy costs that would accompany the end of fossil fuels. … By promoting the idea that CO2 emissions must be reduced, climate mitigation activists are supporting the expanded use of biofuels. This is resulting in vast quantities of the world’s grain being diverted to fuel instead of food, causing food prices to rise — also causing the most pain among the world’s poor.“

I am highly skeptical of the risks presented by climate change. The magnitude of climate changes on both global and regional scales, even to the present, are subject to so much uncertainty in measurement as to be largely unworthy of policy action. Climate models based on “carbon forcings” have been increasingly in error, and the risks about which we are warned are based on forecasts from the same models far into the future — taking little account of the potential benefits of warming. The purported risks, and the benefits of mitigating actions, are translated into economic terms by models that are themselves subject to tremendous uncertainty. Then, the future calamitous outcomes and the benefits of mitigation are discounted so lightly as to make the lives of future human beings… and plants and animals, and their hypothetical preferences, almost just as important as those of actual human beings who, in the present, are asked to bear the very certain costs of mitigation. The entire pursuit is madness.

Last spring I had a brief discussion with an economist engaged in research on the economics of climate change at the University of Missouri. I mentioned the uncertainties in measuring and aggregating temperatures over time and place (here is one example). He said, with a straight face, that those uncertainties should be disregarded or else “we can’t say anything”. Well yes, as a matter of scientific principle, a high variance always means a greater likelihood that one must accept the null hypothesis! Yet the perspective adopted by the alarmist community is that a disastrous outcome is the null hypothesis — the sky is falling! If it weren’t for government grant money, I’m sure the sense of impending doom would be psychologically debilitating.

And now we are presented with a “Green New Deal” (GND), courtesy of a certain congressional freshman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose apparent media appeal is disproportionately greater than her intellectual acumen. The GND would eliminate fossil fuels and nuclear power (which emits zero carbon) from the U.S. energy mix by the impossibly early 2035. That would require the replacement of 88% of U.S. energy sources in about 17 years, which would cripple the U.S. economy and real incomes. The poor would suffer the most, but of course the GND promises much more than a makeover of our energy sources. In fact, it would mandate the replacement of “non-essential individual means of transport with high-quality and modern mass transit”. Welcome to the new authoritarian paradise! All transportation and anything else requiring power would be electrified, a massive infrastructural investment. Oh, and the proposal calls for a slew of socialist programs: a federal job guarantee, a living wage, universal health care, and of course income redistribution. Interestingly, this proposal is consistent with the agenda described in the most widely-reported climate paper in 2018, which Michael Bastasch describes as a call for global socialism.

Cortez’s desperate hope is that all this can be paid for via reductions in defense spending, high taxes on the rich, and “Modern Monetary Theory”. She really doesn’t understand the latter except that it sounds expedient. Like many other leftist numbskulls, she undoubtedly thinks that printing money offers society a free lunch. But printing money simply cannot be transformed into real resources, and such attempts generally have destructive consequences. So the GND might not reflect mental illness so much as sheer stupidity. Anyone familiar with the history of socialism and the realities of public finance knows that the GND would have punishing consequences for everyday people. The so-called Yellow Vests in France should serve to warn of the affront taken by those oppressed by over-reaching government: their protests were originally motivated by a proposed increase in the fuel tax on top of already high energy taxes and other policies that artificially increase the cost of energy.

The environmental lobby has long promoted doomsday scenarios: population growth would outstrip the globe’s capacity for producing food, and resources would become increasingly scarce. In fact, the opposite has occurred. This is demonstrated by Gale L. Pooley and Marian L. Tupy in “The Simon Abundance Index: A New Way to Measure Availability of Resources“. The index is named after the brilliant Julian Simon, who famously made a bet with the doomsayer Paul Erlich on the likely course of prices for five metals. Simon was correct in predicting that markets and human ingenuity would lead to greater abundance, and that prices would fall. But the deep paranoia of the environmental Left continues today. They are oblivious to the lessons of history and the plain market solutions that lie before them. Indeed, those solutions are rejected because they rely on positive action by the presumed villains in their delusional tale: free people. The demonization of mankind, private action, and markets is not just symptomatic of misanthropy; it reflects a deeply paranoid and manipulative psychological state. These would-be tyrants are a real danger to the human race.

The Disastrous Boomerang Effect of Fire Suppression

15 Thursday Nov 2018

Posted by in Environment, Wildfires

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We can lament the tragic forest fires burning in California, but a discussion of contributing hazards and causes is urgent if we are to minimize future conflagrations. The Left points the finger at climate change. Donald Trump, along with many forestry experts, point at forest mismanagement. Whether you believe in climate change or not, Trump is correct on this point. However, he blames the state of California when in fact a good deal of the responsibility falls on the federal government. And as usual, Trump has inflamed passions with unnecessarily aggressive rhetoric and threats:

“There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor. Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now or no more Fed payments.”

Trump was condemned for his tone, of course, but also for the mere temerity to discuss the relationship between policy and fire hazards at such a tragic moment. Apparently, it’s a fine time to allege causes that conform to the accepted wisdom of the environmental Left, but misguided forest management strategy is off-limits.

The image at the top of this post is from the cover of a book by wildlife biologist George E. Gruell, published in 2001. The author includes hundreds of historical photos of forests in the Sierra Nevada range from as early as 1849. He pairs them with photos of the same views in the late 20th century, such as the photo inset on the cover shown above. The remarkable thing is that the old forests were quite thin by comparison. The following quote is from a review of the book on Amazon:

“Even the famed floor of Yosemite is now mostly forested with conifers. I myself love conifers but George makes an interesting point that these forests are “man made” and in many ways are unhealthy from the standpoint that they lead to canopy firestorms that normally don’t exsist when fires are allowed to naturally burn themselves out. Fire ecology is important and our fear of forest fires has led to an ever worsening situation in the Sierra Nevada.”

I posted this piece on forest fires and climate change three months ago. There is ample reason to attribute the recent magnitude of wildfires to conditions influenced by forest management policy. The contribution of a relatively modest change in average temperatures over the past several decades (but primarily during the 1990s) is rather doubtful. And the evidence that warming-induced drought is the real problem is weakened considerably by the fact that the 20th century was wetter than normal in California. In other words, recent dry conditions represent something of a return to normal, making today’s policy-induced overgrowth untenable.

Wildfires are a natural phenomenon and have occurred historically from various causes such as lightning strikes and even spontaneous combustion of dry biomass. They are also caused by human activity, both accidental and intentional. In centuries past, Native Americans used so-called controlled or prescribed burns to preserve and restore grazing areas used by game. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, fire suppression became official U.S. policy, leading to an unhealthy accumulation of overgrowth and debris in American forests over several decades. This trend, combined with a hot, dry spell in the 1930s, led to sprawling wildfires. However, Warren Meyer says the data on burnt acreage during that era was exaggerated because the U.S. Forest Service insisted on counting acres burned by prescribed burns in states that did not follow its guidance against the practice.

The total acreage burned by wildfires in the U.S. was minimal from the late 1950s to the end of the century, when a modest uptrend began. In California, while the number of fires continued to decline over the past 30 years, the trend in burnt acreage has been slightly positive. Certainly this year’s mega-fires will reinforce that trend. So the state is experiencing fewer but larger fires.

The prior success in containing fires was due in part to active logging and other good forest management policies, including prescribed burns. However, the timber harvest declined through most of this period under federal fire suppression policies, California state policies that increased harvesting fees, and pressure from environmentalists. The last link shows that the annual “fuel removed” from forests in the state has declined by 80% since the 1950s. But attitudes could be changing, as both the state government and environmentalists (WSJ, link could be gated) are beginning to praise biomass harvesting as a way to reduce wildfire risk. Well, yes!

The reason wildfire control ever became a priority is the presence of people in forest lands, and human infrastructure as well. Otherwise, the fires would burn as they always have. Needless to say, homes or communities surrounded by overgrown forests are at great risk. In fact, it’s been reported that the massive Camp Fire in Northern California was caused by a PG&E power line. If so, it’s possible that the existing right-of-way was not properly maintained by PG&E, but it may also be that rights-of-way are of insufficient width to prevent electrical sparks from blowing into adjacent forests, and that’s an especially dangerous situation if those forests are overgrown.

Apparently Donald Trump is under the impression that state policies are largely responsible for overgrown and debris-choked forests. In fact, both federal and state environmental regulations have played a major role in discouraging timber harvesting and prescribed burns. After all, the federal government owns about 57% of the forested land in California. Much of the rest is owned privately or is tribal land. Trump’s threat to withhold federal dollars was his way of attempting to influence state policy, but the vast bulk of federal funds devoted to forest management is dedicated to national forests. A relatively small share subsidizes state and community efforts. Disaster-related funding is and should be a separate matter, but Trump made the unfortunate suggestion that those funds are at issue. Nevertheless, he was correct to identify the tremendous fire hazard posed by overgrown forests and excessive debris on the forest floor. Changes to both federal and state policy must address these conditions.

For additional reading, I found this article to give a balanced treatment of the issues.

Pruitt Out At EPA; So Is Eco-Absolutism

13 Friday Jul 2018

Posted by in Environment, Regulation

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Green munchkins celebrated the fall of a house of cronyism earlier this month when it crashed right on top of EPA chief Scott Pruitt. Not that the Environmental Protection Agency has ever been free of cronyism and wicked warlocks, but Pruitt stumbled into an awkward appearance of coziness with industry representatives and was seemingly too fond of his expense account. The munchkins, however, will be sorely disappointed to learn that Andrew Wheeler, Pruitt’s replacement on at least an interim basis, will press forward with the same deregulatory agenda. They might imagine Wheeler as the surviving Warlock of the West, but the munchkins are incapable of understanding the deeper nature of wickedness at the EPA.

The agency took an expansive role during the Obama Administration (see this note on “environmental justice”, and this on the use of the “social cost of carbon” in rulemaking, and this on water regulation). Aggressive action was directed at emissions of carbon, a trace greenhouse gas (four parts per 10,000), but one that is necessary for life. In 2009, the EPA reached its “endangerment finding” that greenhouse gases, including carbon, pose a threat to humanity that must be addressed under the powers conferred upon the agency by the Clean Air Act. The Obama Administration viewed this finding as a regulatory carte blanche, ushering in a series of draconian, high-cost measures to reduce U.S. carbon emissions. Unfortunately, the environmental lobby is notorious for its inability to see beyond first-order effects. It cannot come to grips with the fact that green policies often waste more resources than they save, undermine the economy, infringe on liberty, and have their greatest negative impact on the poor.

President Obama also pushed for American participation in the Paris Climate Accord, which would have required transfers of billions of dollars of wealth to the often-corrupt governments of less developed countries for alternative energy projects. Beyond green energy objectives, this was presumably restitution for our past carbon sins. Whatever shortcomings Pruitt might have had, I valued his leadership in opposition to the Paris Accord and his role in dismantling the EPA’s overzealous regulatory model.

Pruitt might have earned praise from the green lobby in at least one area. He placed particular emphasis on streamlining Superfund site remediation, including a radioactive waste site in the St. Louis area. It is one of the so-called “top-10” sites that have been given high priority by the EPA. But there are 1,300 Superfund sites across the country, so Andrew Wheeler will have to be creative to succeed with more than just a few of these cleanups.

Ledyard King discusses the likely course of Scott Pruitt’s legacy under Wheeler, including continued opposition to the Paris Accord, reversing or deemphasizing renewable power mandates, reduced staffing and fewer enforcement actions. The Clean Power Plan is slated for replacement with rules that are not prohibitive to coal-fired power. Emissions from coal-burning are already heavily regulated, and CO2 and its unproven harms do not offer a valid pretext for a wholesale shutdown of the coal industry. Actions under the endangerment finding, if there are any, are likely to be more circumspect going forward. However, there are disconcerting reports that the Trump Administration may seek to subsidize or protect coal interests from more cost-effective alternatives, like natural gas.

According to King, Wheeler will continue Pruitt’s effort to balance representation on EPA advisory boards between academicians and business and state interests, include more geographic diversity on these boards, and end grant awards to members. Wheeler will continue to push for EPA rule-making based on fully-transparent science, rather than studies relying on private data. There are also likely to be efforts to stop “sue-and-settle” actions used by partisans to gain court-ordered consent decrees, which subvert public participation in the regulatory process.

The endangerment finding combined with the dubious and notoriously uncertain “social cost of carbon” gave EPA regulators almost unbridled power to control private activity. This ranged from questionable efficiency standards, uneconomic mandates on energy sources, and prohibitive emissions standards. The EPA also promulgated an expansive definition of “navigable waters” as an excuse to regulate virtually any puddle, or sometimes puddle, as wetland under the Clean Water Act. This overzealousness is a consequence of over-application of the precautionary principle, under which any prospective risk to humanity or the environment provides a rationale for regulation, taxation, or prohibition of an activity. It is also a consequence of refusing to recognize that government regulation, when it offers any benefit, has diminishing returns. The compliance costs of EPA regulations have been estimated to exceed $350 billion annually, a substantial impediment to economic growth that imposes cruel penalties on business, workers, and consumers. It is all the worse that these effects are strongly regressive in their impacts across income levels. Scott Pruitt may have been his own worst enemy, but his departure at this point might well advance the much-needed deregulatory agenda, as it is now that it is in the competent hands of Andrew Wheeler.

Electric Cars: EPA Serves Up Green Kool-Aid To Pair With Subsidies

03 Tuesday Oct 2017

Posted by in Environment, Subsidies, Technology

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Electric cars don’t save much energy over gas-burners if at all, at least for now. Warren Meyer’s recent Coyote Blog post on this topic is aptly titled “Why Is It So Hard To Get Even Smart People To Think Clearly On Electric Vehicle Efficiency“. Meyer begins by quoting the following tweet from Google smarty Eric Schmidt, which typifies the general level of public awareness regarding the supposed energy savings from electric cars produced by Tesla and many others:

“Electric motors are the unsung hero of clean energy – the latest are 97% efficient, vs. 45% for internal combustion.“

Meyer emphasizes these major points:

  1. the efficiency with which source fuels are converted to physical work via electric and gas-burning cars is more comparable than Schmidt’s tweet suggests;
  2. differences in energy density weigh heavily in favor of fuel-burning vehicles.
  3. the so-called miles-per-gallon equivalent (MPGe) calculated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is a sham.

First, Schmidt’s tweet is accurate only if the discussion is confined to simple conversion of energy to physical work performed by the respective engines. The tweet ignores energy losses that occur prior to that conversion: electricity must be generated with far less than 100% efficiency, mainly by burning coal and natural gas. In an earlier Forbes article, Meyer compares this situation to a distorted comparison of two refrigerator installers:

“In both cases the customer lives in a fourth floor walkup. The first installer finds the refrigerator has been left on the street. He has to … haul the appliance up four flights of stairs. After that, relatively speaking, the installation is a breeze. The second installer finds his refrigerator has thoughtfully been delivered right to the customer’s door on the fourth floor. He quickly brings the unit inside and completes the installation. So who is a better installer?“

The fact is that both gas-burning and electric vehicles rely heavily on fossil fuels. And, in addition to losses in the generation process, there are other losses of energy attributable to electric cars: transmission of power involves a significant energy loss, as does charging batteries and storage itself. Meyer considers only the extra losses from production and transmission of electricity in the following comparison:

“We take 97% times 90% transmission efficiency times 50% electricity production efficiency equals 43.6%.  This is actually less than his 45% figure.  By his own numbers, the electric motor is worse….“

Meyer qualifies this comparison, as some of his assumptions are of the “best outcome” variety, but contrary to Schmidt’s assertion, gasoline and electric engines are reasonably comparable in terms of energy efficiency.

Some contend, however, that power losses in electricity transmission are much larger than the 10% Meyer assumes (see the comments on his post). Battery charging involves a loss of perhaps 20%. And a replacement for a Tesla battery, post 8-year warranty, is $8,000 – $12,000, an additional storage “cost” that is virtually non-existent for gas-powered vehicles. Beyond a certain point in its life, that cost will have an impact on a Tesla’s resale value. Moreover, some contend that the production of electric vehicles is more energy-intensive, putting them in an energy efficiency hole right from the get-go.

Meyer then takes up the notion of storage density as an explanation for why early experiments with electric cars were essentially abandoned:

“15 gallons of gasoline weighs 90 pounds and takes up 2 cubic feet. This will carry a 40 mpg car 600 miles. The Tesla Model S 85kwh battery pack weighs 1200 pounds and will carry the car 265 miles (from this article the cells themselves occupy about 4 cubic feet if packed perfectly but in this video the whole pack looks much larger). We can see that even with what Musk claims is twice the energy density of other batteries, the Tesla gets  0.22 miles per pound of fuel/battery while the regular car can get 6.7. More than an order of magnitude, that is simply an enormous difference…“

Meyer notes in the Forbes article that the EPA calculates its MPG conversion factor for electric vehicles by dividing BTU’s in a gallon of gas by the BTUs in a kilowatt hour: 33.7 KwH per gallon. Thus, the EPA multiplies an electric car’s miles per KwH by 33.7 to arrive at the so-called MPG equivalent: MPGe. But as we’ve seen above, the conversion factor ignores the generation and transmission of electricity required at the front end, and the associated energy losses that occur before a single KwH is released by a Tesla battery.

Despite what we hear from the EPA, Tesla, and other interests today, electric cars have not really overcome these disadvantages, at least not yet. The EPA’s MPGe estimates are vastly inflated. Perhaps if they were accurate, these vehicles would not have to rely so heavily on taxpayer subsidies to be competitive. By extension, the presumed environmental benefits of electric cars are nonexistent at this stage of development. I’m certain that Eric Schmidt and many other smart people are capable of understanding these nuances, but they might be too busy tripping over their politics to bother.

The Taxing Logic of Carbon Cost Guesswork

11 Saturday Mar 2017

Posted by in Environment, Taxes, Uncategorized

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An article by three prominent economists* in the New York Times this week summarized the Climate Leadership Council’s Conservative Case for Climate Action“. The “four pillars” of this climate plan include (1) a revenue-neutral tax on carbon emissions, which are used to fund… (2) quarterly “carbon dividend” payments to all Americans; (3) border tax adjustments to account for carbon emissions and carbon taxes abroad; (4) eliminating all other regulations on emissions of carbon. The “Case” is thus a shift from traditional environmental regulation to a policy based on tax incentives, then wrapped around a redistributive universal income mechanism.

I’ll dispense with the latter “feature” by referencing my recent post on the universal basic income: bad idea! The economists advocate for the carbon dividend sincerely, but also perhaps as a political inducement to the left and confused centrists.

The Limits of Our Knowledge

The most interesting aspect of the “Case” is how it demonstrates uncertainty around the wisdom of carbon restrictions of any kind: traditional regulations, market-oriented trading, or tax incentives. Those all involve assumptions about the extent to which carbon emissions should be restricted, and it’s not clear that any one form of restriction is more ham-handed than another. Traditional regulation may restrict output in various ways. For example, standards on fuel efficiency are an indirect way of restricting output. A carbon market, with private trading in assigned “rights” to emit carbon, is more economically efficient in the sense that a tradeoff is involved for any decision having carbon implications at the margin. However, the establishment of a carbon market ultimately means that a limit must be imposed on the total quantity of rights available for trading.

A carbon tax imputes a cost of carbon emissions to society. It also imposes tradeoffs, so it is similar to carbon trading in being more economically efficient than traditional regulation. A producer can attempt to adjust a production process such that it emits less carbon, and the incidence of the tax falls partly on final consumers, who adjust the carbon intensity of their behavior accordingly. For our purposes here, a tax is more illuminating in the sense that we can assess inputs to the cost imputation. Even a cursory examination shows that the cost estimate can vary widely given reasonable differences in the inputs. So, in a sense, a tax helps to reveal the weakness of the case against carbon and the carbon-based rationale for allowing a coercive environmental authority to sclerose the arteries of the market system.

The three economists propose an initial tax of $40 per metric ton of emitted carbon. The basis for that figure is the so-called “social cost of carbon” (SCC), a theoretical construct that is not readily measured. Economists have long subscribed to the theory of social costs, or negative externalities, and to the legitimacy of government action to force cost causers to internalize social costs via corrective taxation. However, the wisdom of allowing the state to intrude upon markets in this way depends on our ability to actually measure specific external costs.

Fatuous Forecasts

The SCC is based on the presumed long-run costs of an incremental ton of carbon in the environment. I do not use the word “presumed” lightly. The $40 estimate subsumes a variety of speculative assumptions about the climate’s response to carbon emissions, the future economic impact of that response, and the rate at which society should be willing to trade those future costs against present costs. The figure only counts costs, without considering the huge potential benefits of warming, should it actually occur.

Ronald Bailey at Reason illustrates the many controversies surrounding the calculation of the SCC. He notes the tremendous uncertainty surrounding an Obama Administration estimate of $36 a ton in 2007 dollars. It used an outdated climate sensitivity figure much higher than more recent estimates, which would bring the calculated SCC down to just $16.

A discount rate of 3% was applied to projected future carbon costs to produce an SCC in present value terms. The idea is that today’s “collective” would be indifferent between paying this cost today and suffering the burden of future costs inflicted by carbon emissions. This presumes that 3% is the expected return society can earn for the future by investing resources today. Unfortunately, the SCC is tremendously sensitive to the discount rate. Together with the more realistic estimate of climate sensitivity, a discount rate of 7% (the Office of Management and Budget’s regulatory guidance) would actually make the SCC negative!

Another U.S. regulatory standard, according to Bailey, is that calculations of social cost are confined to costs borne domestically. However, the SCC attempts to encompass global costs, inflating the estimate by a factor of 4 to 14 times. The justification for the global calculation is apparent righteousness in owning up to the costs we cause as a nation, and also for the example it sets for other countries in crafting their own carbon policies. Unfortunately, it also magnifies the great uncertainties inherent in this messy calculation.

Lack of Evidence

This guest essay on the Watts Up With That? web site by Paul Driessen and Roger Bezdek takes a less gracious view of the SCC than Bailey, if that is possible. As they note, in addition to climate sensitivity, the SCC must come to grips with the challenge of measuring the economic damage caused by each degree of warming. This includes factors far into the future that simply cannot be projected with any confidence. We are expected to place faith in distant cost estimates of heat-related deaths, widespread crop failures, severe storm damage, coastal flooding, and many other calamities that are little more than scare stories. For example, the widely reported connection between atmospheric carbon concentration and severe weather is demonstrably false, as are reports that Pacific islands have been swallowed by the sea due to global warming.

Ignoring the Benefits

The SCC makes no allowance for the real benefits of burning fossil fuels, which have been a powerful engine of economic growth and still hold the potential to lift the underdeveloped world out of poverty and environmental  distress. The benefits of carbon also include fewer cold-related deaths, higher agricultural output, and a greener environment. It isn’t surprising that these benefits are ignored in the SCC calculation, as any recognition of that promise would undermine the narrative that fossil fuels are unambiguously evil. Indeed, an effort to calculate only the net costs of carbon emissions would likely expose the entire exercise as a sham.

The “four pillars” of the Climate Leadership Council‘s case for climate action rest upon an incredibly flimsy foundation. Like anthropomorphic climate change itself, appropriate measurement of a social cost of carbon is an unsettled issue. Its magnitude is far too uncertain to use as a tool of public policy: as either a tax or a rationale for carbon regulation of any kind. And let’s face it, taxation and regulation are coercive acts that better be undertaken with respect for the distortions they create. In this case, it’s not even clear that carbon emissions should be treated as an external cost in many applications, as opposed to an external benefit. So much for the corrective wisdom of authorities. The government is not well-equipped to centrally plan the economy, let alone the environment.

  • The three economists are Martin Feldstein, Ted Halstead and Greg Mankiw.

Markets, Ingenuity and Genuine Sustainability

22 Thursday Dec 2016

Posted by in Environment, Markets, Scarcity

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Will mankind drain the world of resources and ruin the environment? Must we curtail economic growth in order to ensure our long-term survival? Only if we give up on markets and give-in to central economic direction and control. Ronald Bailey at Reason.com covers the technical assumptions underlying a recent piece of neo-Malthusian “research” purporting to demonstrate the impossibility of environmentally-sustainable economic growth. Bailey’s article makes a great follow-up to my last post, “The Greening-Carbon Nexus“, in which I discussed the bloom in vegetation taking place around the globe attributable to greater levels of atmospheric CO2.

Bailey describes the concept of “decoupling” resource use from economic growth as fundamental to long-term environmental sustainability. This is another twist on good old-fashioned growth in factor productivity. In the new research cited by Bailey, Australian hydrologist James Ward and his co-authors assert that population growth and consumption will eventually overwhelm technological advance. However, it has long been recognized by demographers that freedom from need and growth in material comfort reduces fertility. Bailey notes that world population growth has been decelerating for many years, and the global population is likely to stabilize within a couple of decades.

Ward, et al lean heavily on assumptions about how various classes of resources are not substitutable, and that mankind will run-up against hard production requirements for minimum resource use, a point at which many tradeoffs become impossible. Bailey summarizes their results:

“They crank the notion that there are nonsubstitutable physical limits on material and energy resources through their equations until 2100, and they find that eventually consumption of both rise at the same rate as economic growth. QED: Economic growth is unsustainable. Or as they report, ‘Permanent decoupling (absolute or relative) is impossible for essential, non-substitutable resources because the efficiency gains are ultimately governed by physical limits.’“

Bailey proceeds to pick apart the assumptions made by Ward and his co-authors. First, even if true, those assumptions would apply with much more force to physical outputs, as opposed to service outputs. The latter are likely to continue on a path garnering an increasing share of world output over time. More fundamentally, Ward, et al give short-shrift to the limitless potential of human ingenuity. A few specific examples of the physical limits they contemplate are already verifiably false, having been overcome by technological breakthroughs. This includes agricultural productivity related to enhancements in plant photosynthesis, new manufacturing methods requiring dramatically fewer raw materials, and methods of energy production that are already available, if not yet heavily relied upon. A glaring assumption made by Ward, et al is that the use of fossil fuels will continue to grow through at least the year 2100. In fact, existing alternatives such as nuclear power might well be more economical. Ironically, greater adoption of nuclear power is held hostage by the political resistance of groups who oppose the burning of fossil fuels.

Bailey also cites the work of Jesse Ausubel, whom I cited at length in a post on “rewilding” in 2015. Ausubel’s work shows that Americans’ use of a variety of productive inputs already has “decoupled absolutely” from production, or is approaching that point. That includes farmland, water, timber, plastics, aluminum and steel. Our use of all of those things has peaked and is now in decline. Ausubel’s work implies that “decoupling” is just a matter of time for many other resources for which use is growing at rates declining relative to production. These trends will spread overseas with continued economic development.

Efficiencies like these are a direct effect of technological advance, but the process of technical change is dependent on incentives, which are, in turn, dependent on market prices, profit opportunities, and secure property rights. First, the funding of research into new techniques and methods is driven in large part by market incentives. That’s the real mechanism at play when we marvel that “necessity is the mother of invention”. Necessity, of course, is often manifest in scarcity of existing productive inputs and high input prices.

New technologies present profit opportunities by promising lower input costs, greater production, or other competitive advantages. The adoption of a new technology nearly always entails short-run costs and long-term rewards, both of which are driven by market prices. As the pace of adoption accelerates, the costs of new technologies tend to decrease along with scale economies and sheer experience, reinforcing the process of diffusion. The driving force in all cases is the competitive market and freedom to trade for one’s own benefit. The increasing efficiency of resource use embodied in the “decoupling” phenomena is dependent on the existence of accurate market incentives and secure rights to the rewards that efficiencies in production can bring.

And what if government responds to political pressure by imposing bureaucratically-established production limits, market quotas, efficiency standards, process rules, regulatory reporting, and tax penalties. Apart from direct confiscation and the additional confiscatory risk these actions entail, compliance requires producers to ignore market incentives to one degree or another. These measures force adoption of  less efficient technologies than the market would dictate and add resource costs that would otherwise be absent. The inescapable fact is that market incentives are blunted or destroyed in the process; the consequent waste of resources prevents the kind of natural improvements in factor productivity that lead to decoupling and sustainability.

Sadly, such regulatory actions are often borne out of private rent-seeking efforts. Dominant market players believe that smaller competitors will struggle under the compliance burden created by regulation, so they work with government officials in an effort to have these rules promulgated. This adds a greater degree of market concentration and monopoly power, which implies an efficiency loss relative to competition. Under the protection of regulators, dominant players can survive for too long using wasteful techniques and inputs. Fortunately, with time, new technologies often outpace even these dominant players and the outmoded regulatory rules they rely upon.

Just as wasteful are authoritarian efforts to promote new technologies before the market is ready to adopt them. Picking technological winners and losers is fraught with peril for society. The government usually lacks the foresight possessed by the market, forcibly redirecting resources from one use to another with little consequence for failure except at the taxpayer’s expense. The premature investment is prone to burdening society with stale or defective early versions of new technology. This is not a reliable way to achieve efficiency in resource use. One of the sure signs that such efforts entail waste is the propensity for insiders to be awarded subsidies for promoting politically-favored technologies. Government is invariably drawn to such opportunities for graft.

I conclude with a quote of my earlier post on Ausubel’s work (linked above):

“It’s worth emphasizing that the nature rebound already taking place in the developed world is largely a product of free market capitalism and the growth in wealth and technology they have made possible. A great benefit of secure property rights for society, and for the environment, is that owners have powerful incentives to husband their resources. Likewise, the profit motive gives producers strong incentives to reduce waste and improve productivity. As economic development becomes more widespread, these incentives are promoting a healthier balance between man and nature.“