Archives for March, 2007
Craig Newmark on Trust
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Cragislist founder Craig Newmark has an interesting op ed in today’s Washington Examiner on ways in which voluntary collaboration will help resolve new issues of trust in the always-developing online world (and in some cases in the real world). He sees great promise in “neutral, independent reputation systems, like the ones in eBay or Amazon, but independent of any particular business,” and in “forms of collaborative filtering acting as BS screens, which will make it easy for people to figure when they’re getting scammed.” He notes:
Success in using digital technology to advance the science of establishing trust and reputation will have implications in countless fields, including, but not limited to, commerce, communications, national security and law enforcement, education, government and politics, personal development and financial planning.
And, most promisingly, in the scenarios he entertains, nowhere does Newmark call for government intervention.
Bandow on Unions’ new Global Strategy
What’s worse than trade protectionism and compulsory unionism? Trade protectionism and compulsory unionism that shred national sovereignty, as CEI adjunct fellow Doug Bandow writes in TCSDaily today. He notes that some Democrats in Congress seek “to empower a UN body, the International Labor Organization (ILO) — which promulgates rules on everything from child labor to union organizing — more than the U.S. government. This is what organized labor desires; American unions began taking labor controversies to the ILO years ago.” There is a good reason they’re doing this:
In theory, international agencies can help promote individual liberty and economic deregulation. In practice, global institutions are easily captured by professional staffs with their own agendas. That has been evident throughout the UN system.
If your agenda is to restrict economic freedom, global bodies of bureaucrats like the UN and ILO are your most promising venue.
Climate Alarmism for Fun and Profit
Via Roger Pielke Jr, we have the unedifying spectacle of at least one leading IPCC scientist engaged in selling alarmist predictions of what climate change might do to your property in a new venture called Climate Appraisal Services LLC. If you get a free report, you get temperature measurements for your address, some information about UV radiation and some chilling maps of how much of the USA will be under water if sea level rises 20 feet (and we can’t be bothered to build sea defenses, presumably).
Now, for $30 you can get a report that gives you all this and more:
- Will your home be submerged from climate change?
- How many hurricanes can you expect this season?
- How strong are the tornadoes near you?
- How close do you live to a fault line that may quake?
- What is your fire risk, and how long is your drought cycle?
- How much damage from flood has occurred in your area?
- Are Lyme and other vector diseases a factor in your area?
- How close are coal plants and superfund sites to you?
- How many rivers near you have turned red with blood?
- How much at risk are you from plagues of locusts?
- Can you protect your firstborn with a simple sign on your door?
Okay, I may have added the last three. But, as Roger says,
Call me a skeptic or a cynic but I’m pretty sure that the science of climate change hasn’t advanced to the point of providing such place-specific information. In fact, I’d go so far as to suggest that if such information were credible and available, it’d already be in the IPCC. The path from global consensus to snake oil seems pretty short.
Indeed, one would think that actuaries would be beating a path to their door.
An Idea So Good, It Must Be Mandated
Is there a special award for someone who lays out a lengthy argument in support of some law, and then yanks the rug out from under himself at the very end?
Consider this letter in today’s Wall St. Journal from Edgar Dworsky, head of Consumer World. Mr. Dworsky, a former Mass. assistant attorney general, defends a state law that requires groceries to mark prices on every individual item they sell. He devotes over 10 column-inches to explaining how convenient individually price-marked items are for shoppers, and how little it costs storekeepers.
Perhaps that’s true, perhaps not.
But then Mr. Dworsky concludes with this zinger: “Does it cost money to mark prices on goods? Certainly. The real question is whether consumers are willing to pay that price in return for the benefits that price stickers provide. In Massachusetts, the answer is a resounding ‘yes.’”
Well, if the real question is indeed consumer willingness to pay, then why does the state need to mandate price-marking? Wouldn’t some groceries price-mark on their own and thus cater to the hordes of Massachusetts shoppers who are supposedly happy to pay the higher prices entailed by price-marking?
I can understand arguing that something needs to be mandated because people won’t pay for it (though I’m often dubious about such laws). But arguing that government needs to mandate something involving personal convenience, that can be privately supplied and for which consumers are “resoundingly” willing to pay, strikes me as totally crazy.
It deserves a prize.
Global warming roundup
Lots of items you may have missed:
- Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) says U.S. emissions restrictions might only take effect if major developing countries also impose them
- My colleague on Marlo Lewis on how Congress is reverting to the thinking of the Byrd-Hagel resolution
- Al Gore’s Quebecois allies lose big in elections
- Only 24 percent of Americans consider Al Gore an expert on global warming
- … which leads Roger L Simon to ask whether Gore hurts his own cause
- British energy consumption booms and emissions rise
- European Union climate goals will cost €1 trillion
- Russian scientist dismisses idea of massive sea level rise within next thousand years
- Professor David Henderson on climate change, the Stern review and the IPCC
- Alarmist warns of “Carbon Dictatorship” if world fails to act
- EU asserts control over Polish and Czech economies
- More evidence that China will overtake the U.S. as the biggest emitter this year
- A profile of Arctic researcher Syun-Ichi Akasofu
- Indur Goklany says mankind has never been wealthier, healthier, or freer
- Snowball Earth theory looks less and less robust
- Britain’s global warming envoy has a carbon footprint 30 times that of the average Briton
- Germany abandons nuclear and builds coal-fired power stations
- Richard D. North was not impressed by The Great Global Warming Swindle
- The American Thinker on the argument that global warming is a moral matter
- Apparently it’s scientifically OK to be a Big Bang Denier
- IPCC scientists angry at allegations that their report was watered down by governments
- New research suggests very high greenhouse gas concentrations in recent history
- Millions in UK in “fuel poverty” trap
- EU’s new “open skies” policy will generate 26 million extra air journeys
Enough to be going on with?
Environmentalists Exult while Town Mourns
The private equity buyout of Texas Utilities that was brokered in such a way as to appease environmental groups has brought despair to one Texas town:
In Colorado City and surrounding Mitchell County, “there were lots of long faces,” Mayor Jim Baum says. “The plant would have been our salvation, even more so than the discovery of oil.”
Up to 3,000 workers would have poured in for three years of construction, spending their pay at local stores. The plant, once operating, would have provided more than 100 high-paying jobs and hundreds more in support businesses. Tax revenue from TXU’s estimated $1 billion investment could have cut local taxes in half, Baum says…
Soon after canceling the eight plants, TXU pledged to develop two facilities that would capture carbon dioxide instead of releasing it.
The eight Texas locations that lost their proposed plants hope to get one of those. “We might get the plant we lost in another form before this is all over,” says Mount Pleasant Mayor Jerry Boatner, who had expected a 30% boost in the city’s tax base.
Mitchell County and Colorado City want to be ready. Anticipating a conventional plant, the city had hurried up plans for $8 million in water and sewer improvements to handle housing that developers promised to build for an influx of newcomers. Schools were ready to acquire temporary classrooms for the children of construction workers.
Developers said they would build two motels on Interstate 20 through town. Cecilia Scott, director of Main Street revitalization, says new businesses would have filled most of the empty storefronts.
“So many people I know had made so many plans,” says Pat Taylor, a police officer here since 1982…
The city ran a campaign to get 1,000 signatures on a letter to TXU supporting the plant; 2,600 signed.
Before the utility withdrew the plants, Dallas Mayor Laura Miller lobbied Texas towns to oppose them.
Dallas is under pressure to clean its air or risk losing highway money.
Miller asked officials across the state to contribute to a fund to fight the plants. “She didn’t bother wasting the postage on me,” Baum says.
It is odd that decisions made in the name of the future so rarely take account of the real costs they impose right now.
Domenici reverts to Byrd-Hagel
The Kyoto crowd crowed when the Senate, on June 22, 2005, voted 54-43 in favor of a Sense of the Senate resolution on climate change drafted by Sens. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) and Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.).
The critical language appears below:
(b) Sense of the Senate.—It is the sense of the Senate that Congress should enact a comprehensive and effective national program of mandatory, market-based limits and incentives on emissions of greenhouse gases that slow, stop, and reverse the growth of such emissions at a rate and in a manner that—
(1) will not significantly harm the United States economy; and
(2) will encourage comparable action by other nations that are major trading partners and key contributors to global emissions.
Note that the GHG reduction program only has to “encourage” comparable action by other major trading partners and emitters; there is no need to wait until emerging industrial giants like China and India actually take such action or agree to do so.
This was widely hailed by Kyotoites as a repudiation of the July 25, 1997 Byrd-Hagel resolution (S. Res. 98). In Byrd-Hagel, the Senate voted 95-0 that the United States should not be a party to any climate treaty, like the Kyoto Protocol, that does not require “new specific scheduled commitments to limit or reduce greenhouse gas emissions for Developing Country Parties within the same compliance period.”
According to Greenwire, however, Sen. Domenici now says he won’t support a regulatory climate program, “unless and until we have brought the Chinese on board, or the Indians, or there is absolute assurance they are coming on.” Welcome back to Byrd-Hagel land, Sen. Domenici!
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT…
ENVIRONMENT AND ENERGY DAILY
Domenici Pledges to ‘Kill’ Warming Bill Absent China, India Accord
Darren Samuelsohn, E&E Daily senior reporter
Web link to full article (Subscription Required)
March 27, 2007
A key Senate Republican vowed yesterday to block global warming legislation if emerging industrial nations do not make similar commitments.
“My concerns are long enough that I would kill a bill if we haven’t taken some giant stride in the direction of getting China and/or India to join with this,” Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) said in an interview yesterday.
China’s emissions are on track to surpass the United States as early as this year, according to recent media reports, driving the Senate Energy Committee’s ranking member to express concern that a new U.S. program would do little to address climate change while simultaneously harming the domestic economy.
“It’s just grown on me in the past month, where I just can’t believe and will not support major legislation imposed upon the American economic system and jobs and everything else,” Domenici said. “I won’t support doing that .. unless and until we have brought the Chinese on board, or the Indians, or there is absolute assurance they are coming on.”…
In yesterday’s interview, Domenici cautioned that he was no closer to joining Bingaman, now the chairman of the Energy Committee.
“The more I go through all this, the further we get,” Domenici said.
Mitigating Factors
Roger Pielke Jr has posted a letter to his Prometheus website that he wrote in response to an op/ed by CEI Adjunct Fellow Dr Henry Miller, which commended Dr Pielke Jr for drawing attention to the benefits of adaptation to global warming. Dr Pielke Jr says:
Any effective approach to climate policy will require that we both mitigate and adapt. The urge to present adaptation and mitigation as somehow in opposition is a reflex shared by those on opposing sides of the debate over greenhouse gas emissions. On climate policy we must walk and chew gum at the same time.
Well, perhaps. Both adaptation and mitigation strategies have to be worth the effort to be worth doing. CEI actually strongly supports certain mitigation efforts, such as free flight or dynamic pricing of electricity. The thing these mitigation efforts have in common is that they are “no regrets” options - things worth doing anyway that just happen to have the effect of reducing emissions. When we get beyond that and if the policy options come with a price tag attached — whether that be in terms of jobs lost, increased emissions elsewhere because industries are forced overseas or simple opportunity cost — then we have to assess whether the benefits outweigh the costs. For mitigation policies, that means that the policy must actually be effective in reducing global warming - and Kyoto and all the other US-proposed policies are not - and also have a cost less than the costs of not reducing global warming by the amount that the policy would avert. We are not yet aware of any mitigation policy that passes both these tests. Adaptation policies, on the other hand, do appear to be beneficial, particularly in so far as they build resilience to events that might occur whether or not global warming exacerbates them. Taking measures to reduce the effects of malaria is a good example.
All of which suggests we should be undertaking the adaptation policies now while searching for genuinely cost-effective mitigation policies. We may indeed need to walk and chew gum at the same time eventually, but we need to get the gum out of the packet first. And we can do that while walking.
In case you missed it (notes on some recent climate hearings)
Capitol Hill is on a global warming hearing binge. Al Gore made the big splash in terms of media coverage, but several recent testimonies merit your attention. Continue reading this post »
BP’s Questionable Priorities
BP’s latest carbon emission reduction figures illustrate how easily carbon trading schemes, which rely on emissions reporting, cab be manipulated. According to the Sunday Times, the oil giant claims “a cut of 830 m tons in its annual carbon dioxide emissions — roughly equivalent to the entire output of Britain and the Netherlands combined.”
Environmental activists should be giddy over this engineering “marvel,” right? Wrong. Some of them blame “creative accounting” for this reduction. BP, reports the Times, “has decided to exclude the oil, gas and chemicals it buys on world markets from its emission figures, and now takes responsibility only for the hydrocarbons it has itself extracted.”
John Wells, BP’s vice president for environment, defended the change as a move towards greater accuracy, since the old method of counting emissions from oil and gas that the company traded but did not extract “overestimated the total greenhouse gases generated by BP.”
Confusing, but trying to appeal to green sensibilities should earn BP some slack from environmental extremists, no? Again, wrong.
Craig Bennett, Friends of the Earth’s senior campaigner on corporate issues, said BP’s “creative accounting” reflected a much wider deception.
“BP has spent millions rebranding itself as ‘Beyond Petroleum’ and this is yet another piece of greenwash to improve their image,” he said. “In reality they are still investing billions in finding new sources of oil and gas that will accelerate the destruction of the climate.”
Thoughts about McCarran-Ferguson
Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott, angry with the whole insurance industry over the situation in his home state of Mississippi, has announced that he wants to do away with the 1945 McCarran-Ferguson law. Friends on the Hill tell me he’s quietly gathering support. It won’t move forward for now, but I could see things changing.
Right now, the McCarran-Ferguson Act grants insurance companies a limited antitrust exemption. The law lets insurance companies share risk and rating data in a way that other private companies typically couldn’t. (The law also implicitly mandates state insurance regulation.) I’m skeptical of most antitrust law and, in the insurance industry in particular, there are real consumer benefits to allowing companies to share data on price and risk.
So how does this impact Mississippi and Trent Lott? Best as I can tell, it doesn’t. As I discuss in The Weekly Standard, Mississippi faces a complicated and thorny situation that leaves almost all players with a variety of bad short-term choices. There are, I think, long term solutions but ultimately, I can’t see how what Lott is proposing will help Mississippi in the short term.
The poor are always with us (and enviros mean to keep it that way)
In Scotland and Australia, two places as far apart on the globe as you can get, people are realizing that rationing carbon is a socially regressive move.
In Scotland:
An energy underclass could develop in Scotland if personal carbon trading is introduced in the fight against climate change, urban planning experts warned yesterday.The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors in Scotland voiced concerns that low-income households could be driven into an eat-or-heat situation if tradable allowances were introduced.
In Australia:
THE jobless would be hardest hit by carbon pricing, with new research showing low-income households would have to pay about $600 a year to fight climate change.
The research by academic Peter Brain found carbon pricing would disproportionately affect people on low incomes, especially the unemployed.
When they’re not suggesting that the poor and unemployed will find new, highly-paying jobs in the wind-farm construction and hybrid battery industries, the preferred solution of the greens is to advocate a vast new income-redistributing bureaucracy to provide energy welfare to the poor, because government has all the answers (particularly, it seems, to the problems it creates).
Commenting on GW — what can economists contribute?
The excellent classical liberal economics blog www.cafehayek.com had a short post Friday by Russell Roberts on Richard Lindzen’s podcast on Bloomberg. The posting generated a lot of interesting comments on global warming — and whether economists have anything to contribute on that issue.
Death by Regulation 2.0
A firefighter in the UK is facing suspension for breaking fire service regulations. His breach? Saving a drowning woman’s life:
The brigade’s rules state: “Personnel should not enter the water.” The fire crew should instead have tried to haul the woman out using poles and ropes.
Stephen Hunter, chief fire officer of Tayside Fire and Rescue, admitted that fire engines in Perth were not equipped with the correct poles and ropes, but insisted that Mr Brown had broken the rules.
He said: “Firefighter safety is of paramount importance to us. Although our duties include rescues from flooding, there is no statutory obligation to carry out rescues from moving water.”
Tim Worstall has more.
Give Us Some Decent Games
Last week, Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.)introduced H. R. 1531, the “Video Game Decency Act.” This bill is in response to the Hot Coffee controversy, which refers to the sexually explicit unlockable mini-game in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
Sen. Brownback (R-Kan.) has also introduced a bill to deal with this controversy (see my 2/15 post on Sen. Brownback’s bill). His bill would require the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) to play the “entire game,” a measure that shows Senator Brownback and his staff have never played a modern video game.
Unlike classics like Mario Brothers, modern games don’t play from left to right, level by level. Instead, they are worlds of infinite possibilities. You can no more play the “entire game” than you can play every game of football.
Rep. Upton’s bill avoids this pitfall by mandating that unlockable portions of games must be disclosed to the ESRB. Yet the ESRB has already included this in its contracts with game publishers:
Every publisher of a game rated by the ESRB is legally bound, by contract, to disclose all pertinent content during the rating process, including, as of July 2005, content that may not be playable but will exist in the code on the final game disc (i.e. “locked out”)…incomplete disclosure…could result in revocation of the original rating and the imposition of sanctions, including monetary fines.
Rep. Upton’s bill avoids the First Amendment violations and industry-paralyzing consequences of the the Brownback bill. However, Congress is lagging nearly two years behind the industry, which has already changed their policy to conform to changes in the technology, leaving one to wonder if this bill has any purpose at all. Certainly it’s already illegal to commit fraud or a break a contract. It seems as though Rep. Upton would like to claim credit for a policy change that the gaming industry has already made.
Raters such as the ESRB are concerned about accuracy, so their policies will continue to change to make sure that accuracy is maintained. Contracts, not Congress, have already solved this bug in the ratings system.
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