Archives for February, 2007
More Evidence that Fish is Healthy and Politics Isn’t
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Yesterday’s New York Times reports on a new study published in the Lancet, which questions those who advise pregnant women to cut back on fish consumption for fear of poisoning their babies with methylmercury. According to the Times, “the researchers found that the children whose mothers ate less than 12 ounces of seafood a week were about 45 percent more likely to fall into the lowest 25 percent in I.Q.” Says study author Joseph R. Hibbeln of the U.S. Public Health Service, “The risks of methylmercury in seafood, many scientists think, have been radically overestimated in an effort to protect children. … The problem with the formulation of the advisory is that there was no calculation of the benefits of seafood.” The bottom line is that “higher maternal seafood consumption during pregnancy results in children showing better neurological function than children whose mothers eat low amounts or no seafood during pregnancy,” according to the Lancet article.
This comes on the heels of an October 2006 article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that found more or less the same thing. According to that study, the benefits to both newborn children and to adults of eating fish vastly outweigh any theoretical impacts on health that may result from extant levels of methylmercury. And, Walter Willett, professor of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, told the Washington Post in August of last year that the benefits of eating seafood “are likely to be at least 100-fold greater than the estimates of harm, which may not exist at all.”
Unfortunately, neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post seemed much interested in reporting on these phenomena at the time it may have mattered most, when the Bush Administration was pushing its Clear Skies Initiative, which, despite all its warts, would at least have changed the way mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants were regulated. Back then, the mainstream media couldn’t get enough of stories about how mercury in fish was slowly turning us into a nation of imbeciles — even though the best scientific evidence indicated that was untrue. Still, at least spreading the truth now is better late than never.
Let Them Eat Cornish Pasties
Prince Charles made headlines earlier this week when he suggested to the staff of a diabetes clinic in Abu Dhabi that McDonald’s fast food should be banned for health reasons. It turns out Charles knows a little something about selling food - he sells his own retail line of packaged organic foods. One interesting item is a Cornish pasty, which, as it turns out, has more fat, salt and calories than a Big Mac. The Evening Standard’s graphic design people break it down for us:
Apparently the aura of hereditary monarchy makes the pasty fine for consumers, while the proletarian fare of McDonald’s is designated a public health menace.
Gore’s award hurts integrity of documentary category
In selecting Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” as the winner for best documentary, the Academy Awards sent a disturbing message to aspiring documentary makers. The message they sent is: “Don’t bother doing the hard work of capturing events as they happen and gathering a range of interivews. Your work will be trumped for recognition should a politician decide to make a slide show with some fancy cartoons.”
I’m not taking issue so much with the politics of “An Inconvenient Truth,” but with its techniques and treatment of the facts. Many documentary nominees this year had liberal viewpoints. Some were very critical of the war in Iraq. But they adhered to traditional fact-based documentary standards to tell their stories. An Inconvenient Truth, on the other hand, with its use of frightening and speculative cartoons, was more appropriate for the animation category with this year’s Oscar winner “Happy Feet.”
In the past, the Academy had been very strict that documentaries not rely too heavily on techniques such as animation and reenactments. Its current rules still specify that such non-traditional documentary techniques must be based “on fact and not on fiction.”
But in Gore’s film, the famous computerized cartoon of the polar bear drowning does not come close to approximating the reality of the study from which it is based, noted an article in CNSNews.com that cites me.
While Gore refers to “significant numbers” of polar bear drownings, the study only reported four bears’ bodies floating in the sea. And the study attributed these deaths to an abrupt windstorm, not to lack of ice due to global warming. Yet nowhere in An Inconvenient Truth’s polar bear sequence is there a citing or a mention of a storm.
In the article, I compared the polar bear cartoons to other manipulated animal scenes in now-discredited nature documentaries such as Disney’s “White Wilderness” and that in past years, I noted, the Academy has applied “very strong standards against the manipulation of animal scenes in film.” The CNSNews.com report cites prominent film experts, including an Oscar-nominated documentarian, that “An Inconvenient Truth” runs afoul of the Academy’s documentary rules.
For CEI scholars’ takes on other misleading element of Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” I recommend reading Marlo Lewis’ “A Skeptics Guide to An Inconvenient Truth, Christopher Horner’s new bestelling book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming, and my recent book, Eco-Freaks: Environmentalism Is Hazardous to Your Health.
Prince Charles brain flash - Let’s just ban McDonald’s!
In the news today, a brilliant idea by Prince Charles — Let’s just ban McDonald’s so that people eat healther! This is what happens to a man with no gainful employment. He runs around pushing his la-la notions of what the little people ought to be doing. Myself, I’m no fan of Mickey Dee cuisine, but I know a lot of parents who look to the burger chain as a fast, efficient, pleasing way of feeding the kids (who clamor for “McDonald’s!”). Even when Chuck’s children were in grade school, come on– he had nannies! It’s not like his family was in a huge time or budget crunch
All pain, no gain?
The issue of global warming has attracted much attention over the past decade. CEI analysts such as Marlo Lewis have argued that regulations aimed at greenhouse gases tend to be all economic pain and no environmental gain, costing the economy trillions while having little effect on greenhouse gases (much less overall climate change).
The public also seems to be skeptical of imposing taxes on activities that result in greenhouse gas emissions. In a poll by the Washington Post Express newspaper (the version of the Washington Post distributed free to Metrorail commuters) found that even among this relatively pro-regulation demographic (which includes people who work at government regulatory agencies), 75 percent of respondents said that they would not be willing to “pay a tax to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions.”
The results of the poll are reprinted on pg. 36 of the February 28 edition of the Express. Some reader comments can be found at the following link.
Lead Paint Travesty
On February 26, a Rhode Island court ruled that the paint industry is liable for a statewide “public nuisance” because long ago, paint companies sold lead paint in Rhode Island, at a time when doing so was perfectly legal.
The paint companies have been collectively held liable based on their share of lead paint sales in America as a whole, not Rhode Island in particular. Under the court’s decision, an out-of-state paint manufacturer is liable even if there was no proof that any building in Rhode Island actually contains paint that it sold. Moreover, the trial court specifically instructed the jurors who held the paint companies liable that “the act or failure to act by a Defendant need not be intentional or negligent to impose liability.”
The paint companies’ lack of wrongdoing didn’t stop former Rhode Island attorney general Sheldon Whitehouse from hiring greedy trial lawyers, who contributed to his political campaigns, to sue the paint companies in exchange for a lucrative contingency fee. Their suit alleged the presence of lead paint in thousands of old homes and buildings in Rhode Island. Getting rid of lead paint in all those buildings could cost billions, and the more it costs, the more money is likely to end up in lawyers’ pockets.
(Overlawyered has an interesting discussion of the case, complete with a link to the court’s opinion).
Rationing in action
Apparently Al Gore now uses Green Power to light and heat his home, so he isn’t entirely hypocritical.
However, the issue here is that if we want to mitigate carbon emissions, we have to institute rationing of some sort. Al is living by this principle. Carbon-free energy in Nashville costs $4 extra per 150 kw, so if you can afford to pay that, you get to live the lifestyle you want. Gore will pay approximately $6,000 extra this year for the privilege. A drop in the bucket for him, of course.
Other people, however, who cannot afford to increase their electricity bills overall (by about $300 for the average household, which is probably currently spending around $750 per year on electricity) will therefore have to decrease their electricity use by the equivalent amount - about 4,000 kwh at current (non-green power) prices. That’s equivalent to not using an air conditioner all summer. Or you could offset your household’s emissions at $99 or thereabouts and not use your air conditioner for 2 months. (NB, these are hurried back-of-the-envelope calculations.)
Rationing energy has consequences. The price mechanism means that the rich can enjoy their lifestyles and the poor have to make sacrifices. Those sacrifices come with social costs of their own.
What price the planet?
When I read about sainted Al’s massive power demands I immediately thought, “Surely he must use Green Power from windmills or something like that.”
Apparently not:
Gore could not dispute the findings of the group as they come directly from public records. Kalee Kreider, a spokesperson for the Gores, instead pointed out that both Al and Tipper Gore work out of their home and she argued that “the bottom line is that every family has a different carbon footprint. And what Vice President Gore has asked is for families to calculate that footprint and take steps to reduce and offset it. (And) they are in the midst of installing solar panels on their home, which will enable them to use less power,” Kreider added.
Why doesn’t the World’s Greatest Scientist use Nashville Electric’s Green Power Switch? At only $4 extra per 150 kwh it sounds like a bargain.
Except that with Al using 221,000 kwh of energy last year, it’d cost him $5,893 more.
Now this might sound like chicken feed for someone as wealthy as Al, but there you have it - even to the world’s most impassioned climate crusader, $6,000 a year is to much to pay to save the planet.
Food-or-fuel hits home(s)
Well, the food-or-fuel debate has now been recognized by the mainstream media, previously salivating over the wonderful tax benefits and subsidies for corn ethanol production to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Earlier, there were articles about the high prices for Mexican tortillas; then, features about hog and poultry producers facing skyrocketing prices for corn feedstock.
Now, just about all food producers are realizing that – hey – high prices for corn translate into high costs for manufacturing such foodstuff as cereals, canned fruits and vegetables, snacks, juices and sodas that use high fructose corn syrup, etc., etc.
And, guess what – those higher costs are gonna have to be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. But don’t worry, elite proponents of government-funded ethanol production — the poor will suffer the most, since they pay a larger proportion of their incomes on food.
Environmental heretic sees Simon’s lesson
John Tierney does it again. In Tierney’s profile today of Stewart Brand – a staunch environmentalist and the man who gave us the Whole Earth Catalog – readers learn that Brand is now a staunch proponent of genetic engineering and nuclear energy.
Here is Brand’s view of agricultural biotechnology – a scourge on the earth, according to many environmental groups:
“He sees genetic engineering as a tool for environmental protection: crops designed to grow on less land with less pesticide; new microbes that protect ecosystems against invasive species, produce new fuels and maybe sequester carbon.”
And here’s Brand’s take on nuclear energy:
“Alternative energy and conservation are fine steps to reduce carbon emissions, he says, but now nuclear power is a proven technology working on a scale to make a serious difference.”
What I particularly like about the article, though, are the insights that Brand framed from the results of the famous Ehrlich-Simon bet:
Mr. Brand is the first to admit his own futurism isn’t always prescient. In 1969, he was so worried by population growth that he organized the Hunger Show, a weeklong fast in a parking lot to dramatize the coming global famine predicted by Paul Ehrlich, one of his mentors at Stanford.
The famine never arrived, and Professor Ehrlich’s theories of the coming “age of scarcity” were subsequently challenged by the economist Julian Sinon, who bet Mr. Ehrlich that the prices of natural resources would fall during the 1980s despite the growth in population. The prices fell, just as predicted by Professor Simon’s cornucopian theories.
Professor Ehrlich dismissed Professor Simon’s victory as a fluke, but Mr. Brand saw something his mentor didn’t. He considered the bet a useful lesson about the adaptability of humans — and the dangers of apocalyptic thinking.
“It is one of the great revelatory bets,” he now says. “Any time that people are forced to acknowledge publicly that they’re wrong, it’s really good for the commonweal. I love to be busted for apocalyptic proclamations that turned out to be 180 degrees wrong. In 1973 I thought the energy crisis was so intolerable that we’d have police on the streets by Christmas. The times I’ve been wrong is when I assume there’s a brittleness in a complex system that turns out to be way more resilient than I thought.”
Resiliency and adaptability are two of the features that mark mankind as the “ultimate resource” of Julian Simon. That’s a good lesson to learn.
(Note: Check out TierneyLab, where this science journalist will be checking out conventional wisdom about science issues. Shades of Aaron Wildavsky.)
Global Warming Round-up
Some global-warming related stories you may have missed:
- The EU’s rapidly rising transport emissions mean that they won’t meet their Kyoto targets “without additional measures.”
- Ireland is in a particular pickle with its ransport emissions.
- British government Ministers are contributing to the problem.
- Hedge funds are rapidly retreating from investment in renewable energy technologies, which is showing signs of being a classic bubble market.
- Sen. Feinstein says mandatory caps on emissions will not pass the Senate for “years.”
- Scientist Roy Spencer points out the serious deficiencies of global climate models.
Finally, here’s what a European Environment Energy official has to say about the transport issue:
Technical advances, such as cleaner, more fuel efficient engines are very important but we cannot innovate our way out of the emissions problem from transport.
In other words, European bureaucrats can’t see how scientists might develop radical new solutions, so have decided they will have to impose rationing instead.
Al Gore - energy conservation is for the little people?
Does Al Gore believe energy conservation is for the little people, the hoi polloi?
The Tennessee Center for Policy Research, as reported by the Drudge Report today, says that Al Gore’s home electricity use is 20x that of the average US household.
Gore’s mansion, [20-room, eight-bathroom] located in the posh Belle Meade area of Nashville, consumes more electricity every month than the average American household uses in an entire year, according to the Nashville Electric Service (NES).
Seems that the average household consumers 10,656 kilowatt hours, compared to Gore’s 221,000 kWh use.
Reminds me of the time Barbara Streisand urged all the little people to forego clothes dryers and line dry their wash, instead. And then her spokesperson was aghast at the suggestion that Babs might do the same.
Green Grass and High Times
“As part of the sale agreement, Environmental Defense helped negotiate an aggressive environmental platform that will, among other things:
- Terminate plans for the construction of 8 of 11 coal-fired power plants TXU had hoped to build;
- Stop TXU’s plans to expand coal operations in other states;
- Endorse the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP) platform, including the call for a mandatory federal cap on carbon emissions; and
- Reduce the company’s carbon dioxide emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.”
Of course, Duke Energy endorses the CAP’s objectives, and is meanwhile building an enormous coal-fired power plant. And we won’t hold our breath for the other, less publicized terms of the deal to emerge, but it is fair to say that not even our green friends engage in acts that are not in their enlightened self-interest. Which brings to mind past precedent with such canoodling.
Decoupling Selling from Profit
This idea—supported by the Natural Resources Defense Council, Amory Lovins, and many within the utility industry—is strange. Imagine if grocery stores were regulated utilities, each enjoying a regional monopoly over the selling of food and other basic needs, and were guaranteed revenue regardless of whether they sold anything or not. One can imagine stores promoting diet classes, raising food prices (California’s electricity is among the highest priced in the nation), becoming ever less sensitive to the quality and variety of foods displayed, downsizing portions of food, and so forth. And, of course, they would then be far less concerned about the challenges of organic food, the trans-fat battles, sugar subsidy programs, and the like. What twisted webs we humans weave, when first we elect to regulate!
“Social” Housing?
On C-SPAN last night, I was watching “Prime Minister’s Questions”—the wonderful British institution in which the Prime Minister answers questions, both from his sometimes supporters and from the opposition. One question dealt with the adequacy of housing in Britain—the questioner arguing that far more money must be spent to provide housing for the poor. Prime Minister Blair responded by arguing that a balance was needed between private housing and “social housing.”
Frederick Hayek once noted that the growing use of “social” as an adjective had lowered the quality of communication. “Social,” he argued, was a weasel word—it connoted some element of morality while conveying no substantive meaning at all. Ah, but in the political world connotations may well be more meaningful than substance. Consider “social justice,” “social security,” “social costs,” “welfare state,” and the host of other terms that are now so domiant in today’s world. Hayek listed many terms of this sort. Our challenge is to show that the underlying value that is implied by this term—the egalitarian value of justice, of fairness—is rarely advanced by such “social” programs, that only the institutions of freedom can advance fairness.
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