Carlos Rafael owns over 40 fishing boats that work the waters off of New Bedford, Connecticut. One his boats recently caught an 881-pound bluefin tuna — one of the biggest catches ever made (the record is 1,496 pounds). Authorities quickly confiscated the fish.

Fishing is a heavily regulated industry, and Rafael took every precaution to make sure his giant catch was within the rules:

Rafael, who in the last four years purchased 15 tuna permits for his groundfish boats to cover just such an eventuality, imme­diately called a bluefin tuna hot line maintained by fishery regu­lators to report the catch.

When the weather offshore deteriorated, the Apollo decided to seek shelter in Provincetown Harbor on Nov. 12. Rafael imme­diately set off in a truck to meet the boat…

However, when Rafael rolled down the dock in Provincetown there was an unexpected and unwelcome development. The authorities were waiting.

So he had a permit, he let authorities know right away, let them know it was an accidental catch, and they still took it away. Why?

Because Rafael’s men caught it with a net. Bluefin tuna are only allowed to be caught with fishing rods.

A dejected Rafael told the Cape Cod Times, “We didn’t try to hide anything. We did everything by the book. Nobody ever told me we couldn’t catch it with a net.”

At this point, it appears that Rafael will not be charged with a crime. The government, however, will sell his fish and keep the money. Most people would call this stealing; the government calls it asset forfeiture.

Recently, Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives have proposed opening up more federal land and offshore areas to natural resource extraction. Such a move would both increase domestic energy production and raise government revenues through royalty payments. During the current economic slump and resulting fiscal crunch, anything that can increase the quantity of energy supplied and reduce government deficits should be lauded. But what some Republican members of Congress propose to spend these revenues on is far from laudable.

Led by House Speaker John Boehner, some in the Republican caucus wish to pour oil and natural gas lease revenues into the Highway Trust Fund, which has suffered from severe shortfalls for several years now. Right now, a six-year surface transportation reauthorization proposal (“the highway bill,” the previous multi-year reauthorization expired 777 days ago) from House Republicans needs to find an estimated $75-$100 billion in additional revenues in order to fully fund their bill, and proponents of such a funding mechanism argue that this will help close the gap. Many in the free market energy community are also applauding.

However, both groups fail to appreciate the long-run dangers of moving from the current (and longstanding) “user-pays” principle to a “taxpayer-pays” principle. They ought to pay more attention to the concerns of free market transportation scholars, such as the Reason Foundation’s Robert Poole and the Independent Institute’s Gabriel Roth. Since the Interstate program was established in 1956, federal highway spending relied on the “user-pays/user-benefits” principle. The idea was to tax road users (on fuel, tires, etc.) and then use the tax revenues to fund maintenance and capacity enhancements. This makes sense, as one would expect user tax revenue to approximately track user demand. Revenues were deposited into the Highway Trust Fund, which is partially shielded from the highly politicized appropriations battles that take place over most funding. This concept has long enjoyed broad bipartisan support.

It is well known that Highway Trust Fund revenues are no longer able to keep up with surface transportation spending. The federal excise taxes on gasoline and diesel have not been raised in nearly 20 years, and inflation has eroded a considerable amount of that purchasing power. Automobiles have also become more fuel efficient, which may save consumers some money at the pump, but this does not reduce wear and tear on the roads or reduce congestion costs. And other than a handful of limited exceptions, federal highway funds may not be used by the states to toll their Interstate segments.

Since the early 1980s, mass transit systems been receiving revenue generated by highway users. Through the Highway Trust Fund’s Mass Transit Account, as well as the Federal Highway Administration’s Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality Improvement Program and the Surface Transportation Program, transit now gobbles up about 20 percent of these revenues — robbing Peter the driver to pay for Paul’s train ticket. While transit users certainly pay far too little in fares to support the current systems, many arguably pay too much for the services they receive. Most municipalities prohibit flexible, smaller, private paratransit service, and states and municipalities have a strong political incentive to burn through as much federal grant money as possible and “invest” in the most expensive transit options available — which means underused high-capacity buses and extremely expensive and inflexible rail transit.

To put it simply, federal surface transportation policy is a complete mess. Earlier this year, House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman John Mica proposed major reforms to surface transportation in the U.S. — slashing current federal spending levels by more than one-third. This would have forced states, counties, and municipalities to make wiser investment decisions and to entertain novel funding mechanisms. Sadly, in the name of “jobs, jobs, jobs” (note: the mantra is never “growth, growth, growth”), it appears likely that members from both parties will continue much of the waste that characterizes government transportation spending.

The transportation system is already over-politicized. The myopic Republican plan to partially fund transportation improvements through oil and gas lease revenues — breaking with the long-established “user-pays” principle — will almost certainly increase political manipulation of transportation investments in the future, thereby increasing waste, fraud, and abuse. The U.S. cannot afford to go down this road.

While I’m all for “drill, baby, drill!” and reducing the deficit with oil and gas royalty revenues, these monies should be deposited elsewhere. Elsewhere as in, “anywhere but the Highway Trust Fund.”

Sometime today, the UN estimates that world population will hit 7 billion people. Some people are worried about how those 7 billion mouths will be fed. Here’s Paul Ehrlich in 1968′s The Population Bomb, when world population was not yet 4 billion:

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines – hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash program embarked upon now.

Not so much, thankfully. Ehrlich and other people who live in bed-wetting fear of their fellow man forget that people are more than stomachs; they are also brains. And brains have an increasing return to scale. The more of them there are, and the more they can interact and exchange with one another, the faster they can outpace the rumbling stomachs.

That’s why real world per capita GDP is 16 times higher than it was before the Industrial Revolution — even without correcting for the increased quality of goods. Including that omission would bring the increase to something like 100-fold, according to the economist Deirdre McCloskey. And this is per capita; remember, world population has increased about 7-fold since 1800.

The data are simply astonishing. Seven times as many of us are each at least 16 times and as much as 100 times better off than our great-great-great-great grandparents. This is the single most important event in human since the Agricultural Revolution. It is so important that McCloskey calls it the Great Fact.

And the data show no signs of the Great Fact reversing itself, or even slowing down. if anything, China and India’s recent partial embrace of liberalism has quickened the brain’s still-incomplete conquest over the stomach.

Former CEI Warren Brookes Fellow Ron Bailey has more at Reason. Elsewhere, Steven Landsburg thinks that current human population might be too small.

A couple of days ago, Talking Points Memo’s Jim Kozubek reported that the Food and Drug Administration had finally decided to approve AquaBounty’s genetically engineered salmon for human consumption, and that the “evaluation is now under review at the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.” I’d seen the TPM article, but didn’t write about it at the time because premature reports of FDA being on the brink of approval have been filtering out through the media for several years now. (I filmed a TV interview for Fox News’s “Your World With Neil Cavuto” way back in 2005, when it looked like an approval was right around the corner, for example. And I talked about it again on John Stossel’s show last year.) But a friend of mine asked today why an FDA approval decision would have to get a second look from the White House, so I thought that would be worth discussing.

As the TPM article mentions, the AquaBounty salmon has been hugely controversial. Wild Atlantic salmon grow to full adult size in about three years, in part because they only grow six or seven months per year. As water temperatures decline in the late autumn months, a genetic switch turns turns off the gene that produces growth hormone, so the salmon can conserve energy through the winter. Energy conservation isn’t as big a problem for farmed fish, though, because they have easy access to food all year and little exposure to predators. So, AquaBounty engineered Atlantic salmon with a promoter (the genetic switch) from an Arctic fish called the ocean pout, attached to the growth hormone gene from Pacific Chinook salmon. And, voila! The engineered salmon grows year round and reaches normal adult size in about 18 months, lowering the cost of raising them and lowering the price of fish in grocery stores. Here’s the packet of scientific information FDA prepared for its scientific advisory committee last year.

Environmentalists don’t like it, of course. In part because ocean pen-raised farmed fish are known to occasionally escape into the wild, meaning the AquaBounty salmon could theoretically interbreed with wild salmon, with potential impacts on the wild gene pool. And in part because they just don’t like biotechnology. To address the arguably legitimate concerns, the AquaBounty salmon will only be raised in contained, inland pools, not open water pens, and they”ll be farmed only in Panama, where, if they do escape, the ambient water temperatures will be too high for them to survive. AquaBounty also uses two other breeding techniques that, with a 98 percent degree of certainty, produces only female fish that have been rendered infertile. So, even if they were to escape and survive, nearly all of them would be incapable of successfully mating with wild fish. Also, because the AquaBounty fish will be searching for food during the early spring months when wild Atlantic salmon are breeding, it turns out that the engineered fish have an extraordinarily low mating instinct. (Insert ribald, ex-wife joke here.)

Pacific salmon fishermen don’t like the AquaBounty fish because farmed salmon are the competition, and anything that makes the competition more efficient makes them less competitive. That’s why a group of Republican and Democratic congressmen are supporting a bill that would forbid the FDA to approve it.

Which brings us back to the OMB review. My friend asked, “What’s up with that? Does OMB usually get to sign off on FDA approval decisions? Or is this a special case, since the fish are genetically engineered?”

Ordinarily, OMB has authority to review proposed new regulations and guidance documents issued by executive branch agencies, not individual approval decisions — whether they’re biotech product approvals, drug approvals, pesticide approvals, broadcast spectrum license approvals, or any other individualized decisions. However, because the FDA Commissioner is appointed by the president, she technically works for the President of the United States. Commissioner Margaret Hamburg may well just be cooperating with the White House on the AquaBounty salmon approval, knowing that it will be controversial. So, one possibility is that FDA is just having the OMB staff (possibly, a division of OMB called the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs) have a look at the decision documents in order to ensure that all the political bases are covered.

Another possibility is that FDA may be issuing a new regulation or guidance document in conjunction with the approval, and that would need OIRA clearance. FDA decided during the George W. Bush Administration to regulate the novel trait in genetically engineered animals as New Veterinary Drugs (a stupid decision, but that’s a story for another day). In January 2009, FDA issued a guidance document explaining its legal authority to do that, and laying out the steps through which animal breeders would seek NVD approval. Ordinarily, I would have expected that to be done through a rulemaking procedure, rather than through guidance. So, it’s possible that the proposed rule has now been drafted and that OIRA review is necessary to clear that proposed rule for promulgation.

These possibilities are pure speculation on my part, and I haven’t ruled out the possibility that TPM just got the story wrong. After all, as I wrote above, we’ve been hearing stories for the past six years about FDA being on the brink of approval. It’s long past time that FDA approve it, though. The application has been at FDA for 16 years. The science is pretty clear that the product is safe for both consumers and the environment. And there’s good reason to believe that it would convey substantial health benefits for consumers by lowering the price of a food product that is highly nutritious, not to mention good for the environment by taking pressure off wild fish stocks that are often over-harvested. Why the White House might stand in the way of an approval decision is beyond me.

The Maryland State Board of Education passed a new curriculum requirement on June 21, 2011. Instead of gaining competence in math or science, students are now required to graduate with a proficiency in “environmental literacy.” This is merely a euphemism for indoctrination into climate alarmism and a “green” agenda — both are tools the left uses to justify intervention into the market economy. As I write in The Washington Times:

According to the program’s curriculum, environmental literacy means turning children into central planners. For instance, it instructs students to “[d]evelop a strategy for fair distribution of a limited amount of energy available within a community,” and to create a “plan for the fair consumption of goods” and “eliminate…unnecessary consumption of goods.

Since the state is not providing funding for the requirement, it is very likely that the teaching materials will come from left-wing environmentalist groups such as the No Child Left Inside Coalition, which supports Maryland’s new curriculum and “environmental education” on the whole. If Maryland wanted to provide its children with a richer education, it ought to think about ways in which to improve reading, science, and math proficiencies instead of introducing politically driven environmentalism into schools.

In The Washington Times, I explain in more detail the threat that the new curriculum poses to Maryland’s young students.

Rick Manning of Americans for Limited Government notes here that one of the reasons the American economy is stuck in neutral is that investors in new projects are being stymied by environmental regulations. The example he gives is a huge proposed new copper and gold mine in Alaska called the Pebble Project that is being studied to death.

The co-owners of the Pebble Project are a British and a Canadian company. They want to invest billions of dollars in a mine that would probably create close to a thousand high-paying jobs for at least fifty years. It would also add tens of billions of dollars to the American economy and pay billions of dollars in royalties to the State of Alaska, which owns the land and subsurface rights.

The Pebble Project’s owners have reportedly already spent $125 million on the environmental research reports required to open the mine. But opponents have petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency to deny a Clean Water Act permit for the mine before the owners have even applied for an operating permit. Incredibly, the EPA is seriously considering this outrageous petition. And even more outrageously, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson this spring attended and spoke at a reception for opponents of the mine, which was hosted in the Supreme Court by retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor!

It’s not just the Pebble Project in Alaska. Daniel McGroarty of the American Resources Policy Network recently testified before the House Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources that the U. S. is ranked last among 25 nations surveyed for the length of its permitting process in an annual survey of mining investment opportunities. Hal Quinn, president of the National Mining Association, testified at the same hearing that U. S. mineral production is far below its potential because of over-regulation and federal land lock-ups.

And it’s not just mining. This is the kind of regulatory mischief that the Obama administration’s EPA is creating to stifle investment in all manufacturing and natural resource production industries. America once had the freest economy and most enterprising people in the world. It can regain that status, but not until we do something about regulatory overkill.

Alarmists have been decrying the effects of global warming on Greenland for years, even though Greenland was greenest during the Medieval Warm Period, and Greenland’s Vikings, who flourished during that warm period, died out when cold temperatures returned, reducing them to starvation. (It was warmer in the year 1003 than 2003.) Now, the residents of Greenland, the world’s largest island, are once again profiting from global warming, reports the Washington Post:

HRH the Prince of Wales delivered the keynote address at The Washington Post‘s “Future of Food” conference yesterday at Georgetown University. Tim Carman, from the Post’s Lifestyle section, offers some brief thoughts on the Post blog here. Carman calls the speech “inspiring”, quotes an organic advocate who was “really impressed” with it, and links to the prepared text, which you can find here. I thought it was a load of organic fertilizer, personally, so I submitted a lengthy comment, which I reproduce in full:

It’s not surprising that Samuel Fromartz, an organic farming advocate, would praise Prince Charles for a speech that advocates organic farming. But, while he’s condemning conventional agriculture for its use of “chemical pesticides” and “artificial fertilizers”, HRH might also want to acknowledge that organic farming has its own limitations.

Organic farmers also use plenty of chemicals — just ones that are lightly processed minerals such as copper sulfate, or ones derived from plants such as pyrethrum from chrysanthemum flowers. But, ounce for ounce, organic pesticides are just as toxic as modern synthetic pesticides. And in some cases, such as the organic fungicide copper sulfate, they are far more harmful to the environment. With only a few exceptions, organic pesticides control insects and plant diseases far less effectively than synthetic chemicals, so they must be used in much larger doses.

Furthermore, while organic farmers eschew synthesized fertilizers in favor of animal manure and so-called “green manures” — nitrogen-fixing legume crops like clover and alfalfa — plowing legume crops and animal wastes into the soil leads to nitrate leaching into groundwater and streams at rates similar to conventional agricultural practices. The chemical properties of soluble mineral fertilizers that are prohibited in organic farming are identical to those of that are released in uncontrolled quantities by the mineralization of organic matter.

It is also ironic that Prince Charles begins his speech noting that we will have to dramatically increase agricultural productivity over the coming decades to keep apace with population growth. Unfortunately, because organic crops generate lower yields, shifting away from conventional production will make it more difficult to reach this goal.

In any given growing season, the best organic fields can generate yields that are nearly on par with those of of average conventional farmers. Generally, though, organic crops yield from 5 to 10 percent lower than conventional ones, and as much as 30 to 40 percent lower for certain plants, such as potatoes, wheat, and rye. Even those yield figures can be misleading because soil nutrient replacement on organic farms requires lands to be fallowed with nitrogen-fixing plants for two or three years in every five or six, whereas conventional farming that incorporates soluble mineral fertilizers does not need to fallow land. Thus, conventional farms can achieve total yields per acre that are as much as 40 to 100 percent greater than organic farms.

Prince Charles would be well served by reading the UK Royal Society’s 2009 report, Reaping the Benefits: Science and the Sustainable Intensification of Global Agriculture. We currently use 1/3 of the world’s land area to grow food. The report explains clearly that we can not increase agricultural productivity AND save the environment without using the best science and innovative technologies in order to grow more food on less land.

 

The New York Times “Room for Debate” frets today about overpopulation (h/t Don Boudreaux). Julian Simon and liberty have long since come to the rescue, in case anybody’s listening. As Fred Smith at the Competitive Enterprise Institute points out, people are not just mouths and stomachs; they’re also hands and brains. So free them.

This “human achievement of the day” is a true example of why we at CEI and many others around the world choose to celebrate the ingenuity expressed when individuals can exploit resources. Apart from increasing personal wealth and improving the quality of life for humans around the globe, it is technology, not “conservation,” that results in more “environmentally friendly” technologies. The machine that turns plastic waste into oil is just one example of this.

The miracle of plastics: The invention of plastic is arguable one of the most important contributions to the improving quality of human life. Plastics are used in medicine, aeronautics, travel, construction, and electronics. In fact, if it wasn’t for plastic materials, one wonders if we’d have the satellites used to track the changes in Earth’s environment.

The problem with plastic: While plastics make much of modern human life possible, there are some who see the downsides of plastics. Making these synthetic materials accounts for 7 percent of the world’s annual petroleum usage, which increases demand and the price of oil. At the same time, disposing of plastic is environmentally tricky: it takes a while for plastics to biodegrade naturally — some say it takes between 500 and 1,000 years – and there is a fear that these materials will  fill our oceans and landfills. Several cities have banned or taxed the use of plastic bags, which some believe are polluting rivers, streams, and oceans.

Burning plastic is also not a very environmentally friendly way to dispose of the material, as it releases large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere.

Even recycling plastic comes with hazards, since you can’t commingle different types of plastic: they must be collected by trucks and sorted by hand at the recycling facility.

An inventive solution: While using less plastic is one way to reduce plastic-waste, Akinori Ito, CEO of the Japanese company Blest, has a better idea: turn it back into petroleum. Blest’s machines come in a variety of sizes for use, not only by commercial facilities, but at home.

The portable tabletop device uses a tank into which all types of plastic can be commingled, since it only extracts usable gases and oils.

Using heat and pressure, the machine can take this commingled plastic trash and in a few hours produce unrefined oil, composed of kerosene, diesel, gasoline, and heavy oils. A pipe running from the heating machine to a container of tap water puts the resulting gas through a filter and into the water, which breaks it down into H₂O and CO₂, so there isn’t really any smell and no release of CO₂ into the atmosphere.

One kilogram of plastic waste produces almost a liter of oil and uses about 1 kilowatt of electricity at a cost of about $0.20. The unrefined oil can be immediately used for industrial machinery, incinerators, and for other uses where refined gas is not required for operation. Blest also makes machines to refine the oil.

“People look at plastic trash and say, ‘It’s a waste, isn’t it?’” says Ito. “No, it’s a treasure…The home is the oil field of the future.”