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.
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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.)
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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!
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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:
“Rather than questioning global warming, many of this island’s 60,000 inhabitants seem to be racing to cash in. The tiny capital of Nuuk is bracing for record numbers of visitors this year; the retreating sea ice means a longer tourist season and more cruise ships . . . Hunters are boasting of more and bigger caribou, and the annual cod migration is starting earlier and lasting longer. In the far south, farmers are trying their hand at an exotic form of agriculture: growing vegetables. ‘Before, the growing season was too short for vegetables,’ . . .‘Now it is getting longer each year.’”
Since 2009, the Environmental Protection Agency has sought to regulate greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (which we breathe out and plants consume) because they supposedly threaten public health in the United States by causing global warming. President Obama has backed a corporate welfare-filled global-warming bill that would increase electricity bills. Obama admitted to the San Francisco Chronicle in 2008 that under his “cap and trade” plan to address global warming, ”electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”
But even if greenhouse gas emissions are the principal cause of global warming (as opposed to natural causes), it’s not clear why such warming would harm public health in a non-tropical country like America. After all, people in America’s warmer cities have lower mortality rates, and higher life expectancies, than people in its colder cities.
Warmer climates may be particularly helpful for racial minorities in Canada. Most non-white Canadians suffer from Vitamin D deficiency, putting them at risk of cancer, osteoporosis, and diabetes, according to the Toronto Globe and Mail. Lack of exposure to the sun is a big part of the problem. More than 50,000 people die every year in the United States every year as a result of inadequate sun exposure. While milk is Vitamin D enriched, many non-whites are lactose intolerant. Sunlight is the most potent source of Vitamin D. But in northern regions like Canada, sunlight alone does not provide enough Vitamin D for many people who work indoors. There, the sunlight is too feeble in winter and fall for people’s bodies to turn sunlight into Vitamin D. To get enough Vitamin D from the sun, people have to go outside a lot during spring and summer to offset the weak sunlight in fall and winter. But increasingly sedentary lifestyles and office jobs have reduced outdoor activity. And cold temperatures in spring discourage warmth-loving people from going outside, even when the light is strong enough to produce Vitamin D. Thus, cold climates can be bad for their health.
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.
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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.
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Have a listen here.
Energy Policy Analyst William Yeatman looks over the EPA’s recent decision to deny a mining permit in Logan County, West Virginia that would have created 250 jobs. William believes the EPA has overestimated the proposed mine’s environmental effects. Jobs, he contends, are being treated as less important than bugs. The decision has also set up a heated political conflict between West Virginia and Washington, D.C.
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