Coyote Blog

Forget for a moment the real scientific questions about the future magnitude of anthropogenic global warming.  Just imagine the abuse of this new proposed statute, given that incredibly difficult nature of causality in a complex, chaotic system like climate:

An under-the-radar provision in a House climate bill would give plaintiffs who claim to be victims of global warming a way to sue the federal government or businesses, according to a report Friday in The Washington Times.

The Times reported that Democratic Reps. Henry Waxman of California and Edward Markey of Massachusetts added it into a bill they authored.

The provision, which was just released, reportedly would set grounds for plaintiffs who has "suffered" or expect to suffer "harm" attributable at least in part to government inaction. The provision defines "harm" as "any effect of air pollution (including climate change)," according to the Times. Plaintiffs could seek up to $75,000 in damages a year from the government, with $1.5 million being the maximum total payout.

Remember that it was just weeks ago that the President of the United States blamed flooding in North Dakota on global warming.  If flood damage that resulted from a colder-than-average winter and near record snowfall can be blamed on anthropogenic global warming, then anything can.

Somthing that all-too-seldom gets attention -- when it comes to water pollution, most of the worst private offenders were brought in line decades ago  (at least for point sources, like a particular factory;  agriculture and runoff are still issues in some areas).  Many or even most of the worst water pollution offenders in the US are actually municipal authorities, who dump raw sewage into open waters.  I remember that when I lived in Boston, there was this digusting spot in the bay where the sewer pipe ended.  They sort of fixed the problem ..  by making the pipe longer to dump further out into the bay.

Even in the Bay Area in these environmentally sensitized times, some egregious environmental practices remain in place, with little public scrutiny.

It's bad enough that there are cancer-causing chemicals in the bay. And Marin recently had a 500,000-gallon sewage leak into the body of water. But did you know that when it rains, the area's sewage treatment plants are designed to overflow into the bay?

The leaky pipes in drainage systems take in more than the system can handle. In last week's storms, Richmond loosed 890,000 gallons of untreated water into the Bay, about 10 percent of which"”or 8,900 gallons"”was pure, unadulterated sewage.

You mean government exempts itself from its own rules?  No way!

A while back, in relation to a company called Terrapass that sells carbon offset certificates (or smugness coupons, as I called them) I observed:

My guess is that TerraPass, when it sells the electricity from these
projects to customers, is selling it on the basis that it is
earth-friendly and causes no CO2 emissions.  This lack of emissions is
likely part of the "bundle" sold to electricity customers.  But note
that this would be selling the same lack of emissions twice -- once to
TerraPass certificate holders, and once to the electricity customers.
I am sure they are both told they are avoiding X tons of emissions, but
it is the same X tons, sold twice (at least).

We are starting to see this all over now.  From the WSJ, via Tom Nelson:

America's garbage dumps are reaping a windfall from the fight against
global warming. But their payday might not be doing much to reduce
greenhouse-gas emissions.

For more than a decade, the landfill
here has made extra profit simply by collecting methane given off by
rotting trash, and selling it as fuel. Last year, the landfill learned
that doing this also qualified it to earn hundreds of thousands of
dollars via a new program that pays companies to cut their
greenhouse-gas emissions.

Eliminating methane lets dumps sell
"carbon credits" to environmentally conscious people and companies. The
long-term goal of trading credits -- basically, vouchers representing
reductions in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases -- is to reduce
global pollution by encouraging others to cut emissions when the buyers
of the credits can't or won't cut their own.

"It seemed a little suspicious that we could get money for doing nothing,"
says Charles Norkis, executive director of the Cape May County
Municipal Utilities Authority, which has raised $427,475 selling
credits since February, or 3% of the authority's projected solid-waste
revenue for the year.

The sale of credits by these landfills
undermines a premise of the global fight against climate change. The
credit system was designed to encourage pollution cuts that wouldn't
have happened without a financial incentive. But the credits aren't helping the environment if they're merely providing extra profit for cleanups already made. And dumps already have an incentive to capture methane because selling it can be profitable.

More on this same carbon offset issue in the European / UN system here.

Why a carbon tax, if we really feel we must limit CO2, is better than cap-and-trade / offset system here.

There are a lot of incredibly good reasons to favor a carbon tax over cap-and-trade if we simply most reduce CO2 emissions.  Even a minor inspection of the inner workings of the California Air Resources Board under their AB32 cap-and-trade style program provides lists of examples of abuses, rent-seeking, inefficiency, etc. under cap-and-trade.  But Joe Nation, one of the California legislators who authored AB32, told me that he could not get even a 5-cent gasoline tax through a legislature that enthusiastically embraced the 100x (or more) expensive AB32.  Why?  Silly rabbit, because public costs of cap-and-trade can be fudged, hidden, ignored, and, when they absolutely have to be recognized, blamed on private companies.

Via a reader, here is our Arizona governor discussing the costs of cap-and-trade in Arizona:

Napolitano brushed aside questions of what effect the plan will have on utility rates.

"First of all, that it may increase electric bills doesn't mean it will increase them now," Napolitano said.

Brave, isn't she?  They are already preparing the story line to blame private industry for future price increases:

Napolitano said there is "lots of data" to suggest that utilities
eventually will be able to save money "by moving to a system of 'green'
energy."...

Fox said that, on a long-term basis, there may be cost savings.

You get that?  We smart government guys conducted a lot of really high-power circle jerks among graduate students and the consensus was that forcing the electrical industry to obsolete much of its current capacity and rebuild with some other uproven but more expensive technology would save them money in the long term.  If utilities raise prices, it's because they were not smart enough to figure out what we already know and they are just greedy capitalist pigs so blame them for the price increases, not use faithful public servants.  You see?  Cap-and-trade is like money laundering for taxes.  The tax is there, but its hidden well enough that a lazy media will not bother to trace it back to its owner.

But I wouldn't want you to take my assertion on faith (as Obama does with his 5 million green jobs promise), so lets look at what will have to happen.

The exact goals are hazy, but it appears our governor has committed the state to cutting CO2 emissions by 15% over the next 10 years.  One of the main ways that calling CO2 "pollution" is misleading is to imply it is some kind of combustion by-product, like soot or SO2, that could be scrubbed out.  But it is not.  It is fundamental to combustion.  So a 15% cut in CO2 emissions is 10-15% cut in power generation  (we likely get numbers lower than 15% by assuming cuts in production are preferentially from higher carbon sources like coal plants). 

So, basically this law requires the state's electrical utilities to obsolete 10% of its installed capacity, and either a) have tons of rolling blackouts; b) raise prices enough to force a large cut in demand  (remember, demand must be cut 10% AND all future growth must be halted); or c) the industry must spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build a ton of capacity in some other technology.  Option a will never fly politically.  Option c is almost sure to fail as well.  The permitting and construction processes can take decades.  From a cold start, I don't think its possible to rebuild 10+% of the states generation capacity in 10 years, either in nuclear or some other not-yet-ready technology.  The numbers simply don't work.  The only possible way I can imagine is maybe to install a zillion natural gas turbines, but to make the CO2 balance work out, you probably would have to rebuild 15% or more of the capacity, not just 10%, because there would still be some carbon emissions. 

Really, realistically, one is left with option b.  Prices are going to go up (just they would have to in option c to pay for replacement production capacity).  The price increases would be about as much as the carbon tax would have had to be to get the same effect, but price increases are corporation's fault while taxes are politicians' fault.  See?  The only good news is that the price increase will go to private players rather than the government.  That is until someone thinks to put in a windfall profits tax on utilities that are making lots of money on the government-enforced shortage.

For quite a while, I have been arguing that cap-and-trade schemes are inferior to straight carbon taxes because of their susceptibility to rent-seeking and manipulation.  At the top of the list of problems is the carbon offset issue, the notion that someone can create and sell an offset to cap limits by reducing CO2 emissions in some novel way.  The offset products that exist to day are tremendously suspicious, as I wrote here and here.  In particular, the ability to resell the same emission reduction multiple times is a real danger.

The Guardian has an interesting look at the offsets being created by that bastion of good governance and management science, the United Nations.

The world's biggest carbon offset market, the Kyoto Protocol's clean
development mechanism (CDM), is run by the UN, administered by the
World Bank, and is intended to reduce emissions by rewarding developing
countries that invest in clean technologies. In fact, evidence is
accumulating that it is increasing greenhouse gas emissions behind the
guise of promoting sustainable development. The misguided mechanism is
handing out billions of dollars to chemical, coal and oil corporations
and the developers of destructive dams - in many cases for projects
they would have built anyway.

According to David Victor, a
leading carbon trading analyst at Stanford University in the US, as
many as two-thirds of the supposed "emission reduction" credits being
produced by the CDM from projects in developing countries are not
backed by real reductions in pollution. Those pollution cuts that have
been generated by the CDM, he argues, have often been achieved at a
stunningly high cost: billions of pounds could have been saved by
cutting the emissions through international funds, rather than through
the CDM's supposedly efficient market mechanism.

The key problem, as I have pointed out before, is how do you know the reduction is truly incremental?  How do you know that it would not have occured anyway:

The world's biggest carbon offset market, the Kyoto Protocol's clean
development mechanism (CDM), is run by the UN, administered by the
World Bank, and is intended to reduce emissions by rewarding developing
countries that invest in clean technologies. In fact, evidence is
accumulating that it is increasing greenhouse gas emissions behind the
guise of promoting sustainable development. The misguided mechanism is
handing out billions of dollars to chemical, coal and oil corporations
and the developers of destructive dams - in many cases for projects
they would have built anyway.

According to David Victor, a
leading carbon trading analyst at Stanford University in the US, as
many as two-thirds of the supposed "emission reduction" credits being
produced by the CDM from projects in developing countries are not
backed by real reductions in pollution. Those pollution cuts that have
been generated by the CDM, he argues, have often been achieved at a
stunningly high cost: billions of pounds could have been saved by
cutting the emissions through international funds, rather than through
the CDM's supposedly efficient market mechanism....

One glaring signal that many of the projects being approved by the
CDM's executive board are non-additional is that almost three-quarters
of projects were already complete at the time of approval. It would
seem clear that a project that is already built cannot need extra
income in order to be built.

LOL, yes that might be a good indicator something is amiss.  The other problem, beyond the staggering amount of outright corruption one would expect from any UN-operated enterprise, is this oddity:

Any type of technology other than nuclear power can apply for credits.
Even new coal plants, if these can be shown to be even a marginal
improvement upon existing plants, can receive offset income. A massive
4,000MW coal plant on the coast of Gujarat, India, is expected soon to
apply for CERs. The plant will spew into the atmosphere 26m tonnes of
CO2 per year for at least 25 years. It will be India's third - and the
world's 16th - largest source of CO2 emissions.

So nuclear plants, the one proven economic and scalable power technology that is free of CO2 emissions is the one technology that is excluded from the program?  But 4,000MW coal plants that can proves they are marginally more efficient than they might have been are A-OK?

California is apparently trumpeting its "leadership in energy."  The centerpiece of its claims is its low per capita electricity use.  Arnold is making the claim now, but Kevin Drum was pushing this a while back when he said:

Anyway, it's a good article, and goes to show the kinds of things we
could be doing nationwide if conservative politicians could put their
Chicken Little campaign contributors on hold for a few minutes and take
a look at how it's possible to cut energy use dramatically "” and reduce
our dependence on foreign suppliers "” without ruining the economy. The
energy industry might not like the idea, but the rest of us would.

Max Schulz of the Manhattan Institute is not impressed:

California's proud claim to have kept per-capita energy consumption
flat while growing its economy is less impressive than it seems. The
state has some of the highest energy prices in the country "“ nearly
twice the national average "“ largely because of regulations and
government mandates to use expensive renewable sources of power. As a
result, heavy manufacturing and other energy-intensive industries have
been fleeing the Golden State in droves.

Neither am I.  I addressed this issue a while back in response to Drum's post, but since the meme is going around again, I will excerpt from that old post.

The consumption data is from here.
You can see that there are three components that matter - residential,
commercial, and industrial.  Residential and commercial electricity
consumption may or may not be fairly apples to apples comparable
between states (more in a minute).  Industrial consumption, however, will not be comparable, since the mix of industries will change radically state by state.....

Take two of the higher states on the list.  Wyoming, at the top of
the per capita consumption list, has industrial electricity consumption
as a whopping 58% of total state consumption.  KY, also near the top,
has industrial consumption at 50% of total demand.  The US average is
industrial consumption at 29% of total demand.  CA, NY, and NJ, all
near the bottom of the list in terms of per capital demand, have
industrial use as 20.6%, 15.1%, and 16% respectively.  So rather than
try to correlate electricity consumption to local energy regulations,
it is clear that the per capita consumption numbers by state are a much
better indicator of the presence of heavy industry. In other
words, the graph Drum shows is actually a better illustration of the
success of CA not in necessarily becoming more efficient, but in
exporting its pollution to other states.  No one in their
right mind would even attempt to build a heavy industrial plant in CA
in the last 30 years.  The graph is driven much more by the growth of
industrial electricity use outside CA relative to CA.

Now take the residential numbers.  Lets look again at the states at
the top of the per capita list:  Alabama, South Carolina, Louisiana,
Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas.  Can anyone tell me what these
states have in common?  They are hot and humid.  Yes, California has
its hot spots, but it has its mild spots too  (also, California hot
spots are dry, so they can use more energy efficient evaporative
cooling, something that does not work in the deep south).  These
southern states are hot all over in the summer.  So its
reasonable to assume that maybe, just maybe, some of these hot states
have higher residential per capita consumption because of air
conditioning load?  In fact, if one recast this list as
residential use per capita, you would see a direct correlation to
summer air conditioning loads.   This table of cooling degree days weighted for population location is a really good proxy for how much air conditioning is needed by state.  (Explanation of cooling degree days).
You can see that states like Alabama and Texas have two to four times
the number of cooling degree days than California, which should
directly correlate to about that much more per capita air conditioning
(and thus electricity) use....

OK, now I have saved the most obvious fisking for last.  Because
even when you correct for these numbers, California is pretty efficient
vs. the average on electricity consumption.  Drum attributes this,
without evidence, to government action.  The NY Times basically does
the same, positing in effect that CA has more energy laws than any
other state and it has the lowest consumption so therefore they must be
correlated.  But of course, correlation is not equal to causation.
Could there be another effect out there?

Well, here are the eight states in the data set above that the
California CEC shows as having the lowest per capita electricity use:
CA, RI, NY, HI, NH, AK, VT, MA.  All right, now here are the eight
states from the same data set that have the highest electricity prices:  CA, RI, NY, HI, NH, AK, VT, MA.  Woah!  It's the exact same eight states!  The 8 states with the highest prices are the eight states with the lowest per capita consumption.
Unbelievable.  No way that could have an effect, huh?  It must be all
those green building codes in CA.  I suspect Drum is sort of right,
just not in the way he means.  Stupid regulation in each state drives
up prices, which in turn provides incentives for lower demand.  It
achieves the goal, I guess, but very inefficiently.  A straight tax
would be much more efficient.

Of late, I have been getting the strongest sense that the global warming hysteria is sucking all the oxygen out of the rest of the environmental movement.  Quick, what is the last environment-related article you read that didn't mention global warming?

Here is an example:  I give a lot of my charity money to groups like The Nature Conservancy, because I personally value preservation of unique areas and habitats and I don't sit around waiting for the government to do it for me.  But it has become almost impossible of late to drum up enthusiasm from contributors for such causes, unless the land can be labeled a carbon-sink or something.  In fact, the global warming hysteria has really been a disaster for private land conservation because it has caused politicians to subsidize ethanol.  This subsidy is bringing much more wild land into cultivation in this country and has been the single biggest driver for deforestation in the Amazon over the last decade. 

Or take China.  China's cities are an unhealthy mess.  But focus on global warming has led environmentalists to take the position with China they have to stop coal combustion and growth in auto-miles entirely.  This is a non-starter.  There is no WAY they are going to do this.  But it is much more achievable to start getting China focused on a Clean-Air-Act type of attack on vehicle and coal plant emissions of real pollutants like SO2.   China could be made much more healthy, as the US has done over the last 30-60 years, but instead of working with China to get healthier, the focus is on getting them to shut down their growth altogether.

The UPI published a survey of people's environmental priorities:

1. drinking water
2. pollution of rivers, lakes, and ecosystems
3. smog
4. forest preservation
5. acid rain
6. tropical rain forests
7. national parks
8. greenhouse emissions
9. ozone layer
10. nature around "my" home
11. urban sprawl
12. extinction.

I feel like #1 is overblown based on a lot of media scare stories, but most of the top 6 or 7 would all be things I would rank well above global warming fears as well.  There are still real issues to be dealt with in these areas which can have far more of a positive impact on health and quality of living than CO2 abatement, but they are being suffocated by global warming hype.

I think that Arizona's decision not to go on DST is a great one.  Being outside in the summer sunshine in Phoenix can be miserable, but the desert cools very quickly once the sun goes down.  The earlier the sun goes down in the summer, the better as far as I am concerned.  Within an hour or two after sunset, it is pleasant to sit and eat and play outside.

A new study seems to show that DST increases electricity use, rather than reducing it.  DST was, if my memory serves, a WWII innovation to save electricity.  It does so quite well if electricity demand is driven mainly by lighting.  It lets one read and function by sunlight in the evening hours.   However, as air conditioning has become a larger element of electricity demand, that equation is changing.  DST can lead to higher air conditioning loads in the evenings.

Our main finding is that"”contrary to the policy's intent"”DST increases
residential electricity demand. Estimates of the overall increase range
from 1 to 4 percent, but we find that the effect is not constant
throughout the DST period. There is some evidence of electricity
savings during the spring, but the effect lessens, changes sign, and
appears to cause the greatest increase in consumption near the end of
the DST period in the fall. These findings are consistent with
simulation results that point to a tradeoff between reducing demand for
lighting and increasing demand for heating and cooling. Based on the
dates of DST practice before the 2007 extensions, we estimate a cost of
increased electricity bills to Indiana households of $8.6 million per
year. We also estimate social costs of increased pollution emissions
that range from $1.6 to $5.3 million per year.

Henry Payne has an interesting tidbit:  The government is now concerning itself with what cars its employees purchase.

Your tax dollars at work. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services last week sent an email urging its 67,000 employees not to buy SUVs, lecturing that fuel efficiency should be their "top priority" when buying a car.

 

"Every
new sport utility vehicle on the road produces 60 percent more climate
threatening CO2 emissions than a smaller vehicle," said Energy News,
a quarterly newsletter from a department that has nothing to do with
energy, but everything to do with energy morality apparently.

 

"The
toll that vehicles take on the environment includes air pollution, oil
spills, pollution of our water supplies, and damage to natural
habitats," continues the HHS sermon. "In order to really cut CO2
emissions, higher fuel efficiency in all vehicles will be essential."

American auto makers were not amused by the recommendation to buy Toyotas or Hondas. 

This surprises me not at all.  A few weeks ago, I had an EPA audit of a marina and store I operate in Colorado (the report in all its glory is here).  In that audit, the Environmental Protection Agency recommended that we begin selling fair trade coffee in our store.  What that has to do with emissions into the lake, I have no idea.  They also recommended that I put an environmental message on our shopping bags, replacing the current boating safety message.  The audit did say that they could not require these two things.  Well, give them some time, they will probably make it a requirement soon.

Best thing I have read in a long time:

Imagine an egalitarian world in which all food is organic and local,
the air is free of industrial pollution, and vigorous physical exertion
is guaranteed. Sound idyllic?

But hold on"¦ Life expectancy is 30 at most; many children die at or
soon after birth; life is constantly lived on the edge of starvation;
there are no doctors or dentists or modern toilets. If it is
egalitarian it is because everyone is dirt poor, and there is no
industrial pollution because there are no factories. Food is organic
because there are no pesticides or high technology farming methods. As
a result, producing food means long hours of back-breaking physical
work which may end up yielding little.

There is "“ or at least was "“ such a
place. It is called the past. And few of us, it seems, recognise the
enormous benefits to humanity of escaping from it. On the contrary,
there is a pervasive culture of complaint about the perils of affluence
and a common tendency to romanticise the simple life.

Via Hit and Run.  I made a fairly similar point here when I compared California "robber baron" Mark Hopkins mid-19th century house to one a friend of mine used to own in Seattle:

One house has hot and cold running water, central air conditioning,
electricity and flush toilets.  The other does not.  One owner has a a
computer, a high speed connection to the Internet, a DVD player with a
movie collection, and several television sets.  The other has none of
these things.  One owner has a refrigerator, a vacuum cleaner, a
toaster oven, an iPod, an alarm clock that plays music in the morning,
a coffee maker, and a decent car.  The other has none of these.  One
owner has ice cubes for his lemonade, while the other has to drink his
warm in the summer time.  One owner can pick up the telephone and do
business with anyone in the world, while the other had to travel by
train and ship for days (or weeks) to conduct business in real time.

Best thing I have read in a long time:

Imagine an egalitarian world in which all food is organic and local,
the air is free of industrial pollution, and vigorous physical exertion
is guaranteed. Sound idyllic?

But hold on"¦ Life expectancy is 30 at most; many children die at or
soon after birth; life is constantly lived on the edge of starvation;
there are no doctors or dentists or modern toilets. If it is
egalitarian it is because everyone is dirt poor, and there is no
industrial pollution because there are no factories. Food is organic
because there are no pesticides or high technology farming methods. As
a result, producing food means long hours of back-breaking physical
work which may end up yielding little.

There is "“ or at least was "“ such a
place. It is called the past. And few of us, it seems, recognise the
enormous benefits to humanity of escaping from it. On the contrary,
there is a pervasive culture of complaint about the perils of affluence
and a common tendency to romanticise the simple life.

Via Hit and Run.  I made a fairly similar point here when I compared California "robber baron" Mark Hopkins mid-19th century house to one a friend of mine used to own in Seattle:

One house has hot and cold running water, central air conditioning,
electricity and flush toilets.  The other does not.  One owner has a a
computer, a high speed connection to the Internet, a DVD player with a
movie collection, and several television sets.  The other has none of
these things.  One owner has a refrigerator, a vacuum cleaner, a
toaster oven, an iPod, an alarm clock that plays music in the morning,
a coffee maker, and a decent car.  The other has none of these.  One
owner has ice cubes for his lemonade, while the other has to drink his
warm in the summer time.  One owner can pick up the telephone and do
business with anyone in the world, while the other had to travel by
train and ship for days (or weeks) to conduct business in real time.

Don Surber writes:

The tax-exempt Environmental Integrity Project in Washington, D.C.,
issued its annual list of the 50 dirtiest power plants in America. This
is illustrated by a photo showing steam "” water vapor "” escaping from a
cooling tower. Sigh.

I made this same point long ago, laughing at the huge number of air pollution reports that are illustrated with pictures of steam plumes.  I also showed how photographers seemed to try to photograph the steam plumes at sunset, trying to turn them brown-looking to make it look like pollution.  Unfortunately for pollution-report illustrators, power plants have been cleaned up enough that they don't really emit visible smoke plumes any more.

Though it is nominally called an "energy" bill, the Senate just passed the largest farm-subsidy bill in history:

The legislation would require ethanol production for motor fuels to
grow to at least 36 billion gallons a year by 2022, a sevenfold
increase over the amount of ethanol processed last year. It also calls
for boosting auto fuel economy to a fleet average of 35 miles per
gallon by 2020, a 40 percent increase over current requirements for
cars, SUVs, vans and pickup trucks.

The evidence is absolutely unequivocal that corn-based ethanol doesn't reduce net energy use, since it takes at least as much energy to grow and produce as it provides.  It is even worse as environmental policy, since it almost certainly increases total pollution and CO2 production, particularly as ethanol is produced with Midwestern coal-powered electricity.   In addition, it is going to cause marginal lands and open space to be brought into corn production, reversing a 70-year trend in the US towards increases in wilderness and forested land.  It is going to increase fuel costs to no real purpose.  This is dumb, dumb, dumb.  So stupid that I can't even get the energy to criticize the new CAFE standards.  If they really wanted to meet their goals, a carbon tax would have been cheaper and more effective, but that would have taken political guts.

TJIC has a nice post on the arrogant paternalism inherent in urban planning.

The Party is making decisions about how we should live, and then, eventually, telling us about them.

The aim is to have 80 percent of new housing and new jobs in cities
and larger municipal centers such as Framingham, Peabody, Norwood, and
Marlborough. That would enable more people to walk or use mass transit
and thereby reduce traffic and pollution, according to the plan.

So, of the million possible variables, the ones they've chosen to
optimize are the minimization of the average distance one has to drive
to get to work.

Things they have implicitly then de-prioritized:

• open space per family
• privacy per family
• floor space per family
• minimal overall commute time per individual
• noise abatement
• etc.

I liked this bit:

The problem is, the statists don't really care about green space per
se. They care about government owned (or at least government
controlled) green space. Which is better? 20 acres of land lumped into
a government owned wetland sanctuary that no one ever visits, or 20
houses, each on 1 acre lots, covered with gardens, yards, trees, and
tree-houses? The government employee doesn't get to meddle in the
individual lots, so he's always going to say that the government owned
patch is better.

I have never been very excited about the concept of "net neutrality."  Various bills in Congress trying to enforce this strike me as Trojan horses for regulation of the Internet, and are at best the attempts by one segment of the population to enforce their vision of the Internet via the coercive power of the government. But more on this in a second.

The City of Boston has a free municipal Wi-Fi network  (I aired some of my objections to this here).  By using this "free" wi-fi network (which is free only in the sense that you paid for it via taxes rather than use fees) you apparently must accept government filtering of the content, which caused Boing-Boing to get blocked the other day, for some "arbitrary and capricious" reasons.  Readers may remember I already dinged Boston once when it used its government power to try to block free competitors.

So despite all the panic that evil capitalist broadband suppliers will somehow block or skew content from certain content suppliers, it turns out that the government, acting as broadband supplier, is the first to do so.  Fortunately, Bostonians have many free competitors to the municipal service that provide uncensored access to the Internet.  But without those private options, they would be enjoying the Chinese Internet experience.

Which gets us back to the issue of accountability.  In short, socialists distrust individual self-interest and the market as accountability tools, and believe the government is much more accountable, and therefore trustworthy, than any private institution.  What amazes be is that anyone with a working knowledge of history can continue to believe this.  Take any issue:

• Corruption?  Sure there was Enron and Worldcom, but any crimes at these institutions are trivial compared in both magnitude and frequency to the financial abuses of government.  Take pensions as one example.  Maybe 10-20 out of 500 of the companies in the DJIA have underfunded pensions, with some money put away but not enough.  But probably 99 out of every 100 municipalities you can name have underfunded pensions, and in most cases these not only have too little money put away, they have ZERO!
• Worker health?  Almost all private work environments are incredibly safe -- the very fact that we are worried about carpal tunnel syndrome should tell you something.  But what about in the past?  Well, take one of the highest profile cases of worker harm, that of long-term asbestos exposure.  A huge number of the worst asbestos cases are people exposed in government naval yards.  Government naval yards, for decades, eschewed basic worker protections from asbestos that were common in private industry.
• Environment?  One only has to look at the superfund site list and see that government sites are represented way out of proportion to their economic activity.  This is not to say their are not god-awful private sites, created either through ignorance or willful disregard, but you will find that the government was at least as active a polluter as even the worst private polluters.   Or look around today, at water quality.  The number of private contributors to water problems is nearly nil.  Most modern water pollution problems are caused by governments (Boston's "solution" to piping raw sewage into the harbor was to... lay a longer pipe and dump it further out in the ocean).
• Monopoly?  It is hard to find, in history, any stable private monopolies.  Perhaps the most famous, Standard Oil, was losing market share rapidly due to private forces at the time of its breakup.  Government monopolies, however, can last forever despite high prices and crappy services.  Just look at public education.
• Commerce?  Those who are frequent readers will know that I buy some product from the government, and they are by far my worst, hardest to deal with, and most abusive vendor.

Getting back to the issue of net neutrality, let's take a look at what accountability-enforcement tools a private individual has over a private vs. a public broadband supplier.  If I don't like my private broadband supplier, I can make a phone call and switch to one of several others.  Time elapsed:  About 30 minutes.  If I don't like my public broadband supplier, I could switch to a private company.  But this is really a libertarian end-around to the socialist problem.  To be fair, we need to look at a pure socialist system and evaluate the accountability tools in this system.  So, assuming the government entity has enforced a monopoly position for itself (like in education or the postal service), I would have to muster a grass roots campaign and likely millions of dollars to force any changes through an entrenched and brain-dead legislative body.  Time elapsed:  From 3 years to never.

I think most of us are familiar with the clever movie poster for An Invconvinient Truth, with the smoke from a factory swirling into a hurricane:

In fact, this same picture of a white plume coming from a factory or power plant stack is often used to illustrate articles on pollution.  Just searching the first page of images googling "air pollution" gives us these relatively similar images illustrating air pollution articles:

Here is a big Roseanne Rosanadana Emily Litella moment for all of you using these images:  The big white cloud coming out of all those stacks is steam.  Water vapor.  H2O.  Though actually a much more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2, no one has had the temerity to label water a pollutant (except in that great Bullshit! issue when Penn & Teller get environmentalists to sign a petition banning dihydrogen monoxide).  All of these guys are using big plumes of water vapor to panic people about pollution.  That is because most pollutants emitted by combustion are invisible.  Visible smoke was licked by most plants decades ago (here is the only "factory" picture in the google search I could find with actual smoke). 

Just to avoid being misunderstood, my point is not that pollution is OK because it is invisible.  My point is that these scare pictures are yet another example of how environmentalists feel its OK to ignore science to advance their agenda in public.  Sometimes they even go further, as Small Dead Animals points out, resorting to photo-shopping to make things seem worse, but the dreaded steam plumes are still there front and center.  (I noticed that several of the pictures above where photographed at sunset.  I thought at first this was to make them look prettier, but maybe they liked the effect because it made the steam look browner without photo-shopping).

I did not go too deep into the Google search, but I went far enough to award my personal favorite for a scare picture that has nothing to do with the point being made:

This one is a classic, with the sad-faced little girl and her asthma** inhaler super-imposed over a scene of "industrial pollution."  Except, the scene is from a nuclear power plant!  The unique shaped cooling tower is almost exclusively used on nuclear power plants, but the ultimate proof is the small nuclear reactor containment dome you can see to the right.  That plume, which is supposed to represent pollution, has to be 100% water.  There are no combustion products at a nuclear plant, and even if there were, given the way the cooling tower works, this can only be water vapor coming out of the cooling tower.  The really sad and pathetic thing is that this illustration is from the air pollution site at Battelle, which is a world-renowned private scientific and technical organization. 

What's my point?   I think that scientists and academics, in their increasing arrogance, have no respect for the general public.  The only way I can consistently interpret scientist's actions, for example around the global warming debate, is to hypothesize that they consider truth and facts important when talking to other scientists, but irrelevant when talking to the public because, in their mind, the public is stupid and its OK to tell them anything.  I will leave you with this
quote from National Center for Atmospheric Research (NOAA) climate researcher and global warming action promoter,
Steven Schneider:

[In talking to the public about the climate] We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements,
and make little mention of any doubts we have. Each of us has to decide what
the right balance is between being effective and being honest.

** By the way, there is growing evidence that increasing reported asthma rates are not correlated with outdoor air pollution. I wrote about this here, and hypothesized that the growth in asthma has coincided with the post-70s-energy-crisis steps everyone has taken to better insulate and seal up their houses and buildings, making indoor air pollution more of a problem.

Update: I started to think the dome I was calling a nuclear containment building might be telescope dome on the top of the building below.  It's not.

My post on the lack of correlation between air pollution (in the form of ozone and particulates) and asthma has led several people to ask me -- well, what else could possibly be causing the rise in asthma cases?

One "cause" for increases in measured disease rates that almost always plays a role in modern epidemiology is better diagnosis and reporting.  There have been a number of diseases where changes in definitions and better diagnosis have led to an increase in reported cases, while the actual occurance rate has remained constant.  The rise in asthma cases seems to go beyond this effect.

The best guess I have for the increase in
asthma in this country, and the strong positive correlation between
asthma and economic development, is that it has something to do with
indoor pollution.  The spike in asthma cases seems to parallel the rise
in energy prices.  Beginning in the 1970's, we began sealing up houses
tighter and tighter to conserve energy.  Increasing penetration of air
conditioning simultaneously caused people to close the windows.  The spread of office-type service work had brought more people indoors.  I am
convinced its something inside, not outside, that is causing the asthma spike.

Update:  More on the lack of correlation between air pollution and asthma here, this time in California.

On this blog, I have often felt the need to point out that correlation does not equal causation.  For example, if X increases at the same time Y increases, it is not necessarily true that X causes Y or Y causes X.  The correlation could be a coincidence, or it could be that both X and Y are related to a third variable Z that drives their movement.

Anyway, I see this mistake all the time.  What I did NOT expect to see was that someone would have to explain that non-correlation does not equal causation.  But that seems to be the wacky world that environmental science has descended into, via the Commons Blog:

EPA's new report "America's Children and the Environment" notes that
air pollution declined, but asthma prevalence continues to rise. One
possible conclusion from this is that air pollution is not actually a
cause of asthma. In fact, that's the most plausible conclusion. Every
pollutant we measure has been dropping for decades pretty much
everywhere, while asthma prevalence has been rising pretty much
everywhere. This is true throughout the entire western world, not just
the U.S. In fact, asthma incidence is highest in countries with the
lowest levels of air pollution. Asthma is rare in developing countries
with much more polluted air. Asthma incidence is simply unrelated to
air pollution. Asthma attacks are probably unrelated as well. But even
if air pollution can cause asthma attacks, it is a minor cause,
responsible for less than 1% of all asthma attacks.

Despite these two trends going in the opposite direction, environmental activists still insist that large increases in asthma rates are driven by pollution:

A report by E&E News
(subscription required) makes it clear that what's in EPA health
reports doesn't actually matter. The story opens with "While the number
of children living in areas violating ozone and particulate matter (PM)
standards has declined in recent years, adolescent asthma that results
from exposure to such pollutants continues to rise, according to new
U.S. EPA statistics." The journalistic goal is to raise health alarms,
whether warranted or not. Thus, the news story itself says air
pollution, the presumptive cause of asthma, went down and yet asthma
prevalence went up. However, the reporter claims air pollution is
responsible for rising asthma just the same.

Wow.  These guys could be the poster-children for refusing to adjust their beliefs in the face of actual facts.  They even acknowledge that pollution and asthma are going in opposite directions and still they insist on their causation theory.

Postscript:  I am willing to believe, maybe, that there is some unknown, unmeasured and unregulated pollutant out there that is increasing and is causing increases in asthma.  However, that is not the argument these folks are making - they are using asthma increases to lobby for tougher standards on known pollutants.

Update:  The best guess I have for the increase in asthma in this country, and the strong positive correlation between asthma and economic development, is that it has something to do with indoor pollution.  The spike in asthma cases seems to parallel the rise in energy prices.  Beginning in the 1970's, we began sealing up houses tighter and tighter to conserve energy.  Increasing penetration of air conditioning simultaneously caused people to close the windows.  I am convinced its something inside, not outside.

Kevin Drum, building on a story from the NY Times, uses data from the California Energy Commission to make the case that California is the most efficient user of electricity in the country and that this efficiency can be attributed sole to government intervention.  Drum, always on the lookout for an excuse for the government to take over some sector of the economy, concludes:

Anyway, it's a good article, and goes to show the kinds of things we
could be doing nationwide if conservative politicians could put their
Chicken Little campaign contributors on hold for a few minutes and take
a look at how it's possible to cut energy use dramatically "” and reduce
our dependence on foreign suppliers "” without ruining the economy. The
energy industry might not like the idea, but the rest of us would.

On its face, California's numbers are impressive.  The CEC's numbers show California to have the lowest per capita electricity use in the nation, using electricity at half the national rate and one quarter the "least efficient" states.

This would be really cool if it were true that a few simple public policy steps could cut per capital energy consumption in half.  Unfortunately, though I am willing to posit California is better than average (as any state would be with a mild climate and newer housing), the data doesn't say what Drum and the article are trying to make it say. 

The consumption data is from here.  You can see that there are three components that matter - residential, commercial, and industrial.  Residential and commercial electricity consumption may or may not be fairly apples to apples comparable between states (more in a minute).  Industrial consumption, however, will not be comparable, since the mix of industries will change radically state by state.  As an extreme example, states with high aluminum production or oil refining or steel making, which are electricity intensive, will have a higher per capita industrial electricity consumption, irrespective of public policy.  The graph Drum and the NY Times uses includes industrial consumption, which is a mistake -- it is more reflective of industry mix than true energy efficiency.

Take two of the higher states on the list.  Wyoming, at the top of the per capita consumption list, has industrial electricity consumption as a whopping 58% of total state consumption.  KY, also near the top, has industrial consumption at 50% of total demand.  The US average is industrial consumption at 29% of total demand.  CA, NY, and NJ, all near the bottom of the list in terms of per capital demand, have industrial use as 20.6%, 15.1%, and 16% respectively.  So rather than try to correlate electricity consumption to local energy regulations, it is clear that the per capita consumption numbers by state are a much better indicator of the presence of heavy industry. In other words, the graph Drum shows is actually a better illustration of the success of CA not in necessarily becoming more efficient, but in exporting its pollution to other states.  No one in their right mind would even attempt to build a heavy industrial plant in CA in the last 30 years.  The graph is driven much more by the growth of industrial electricity use outside CA relative to CA.

Now take the residential numbers.  Lets look again at the states at the top of the per capita list:  Alabama, South Carolina, Louisiana, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas.  Can anyone tell me what these states have in common?  They are hot and humid.  Yes, California has its hot spots, but it has its mild spots too  (also, California hot spots are dry, so they can use more energy efficient evaporative cooling, something that does not work in the deep south).  These southern states are hot all over in the summer.  So its reasonable to assume that maybe, just maybe, some of these hot states have higher residential per capita consumption because of air conditioning load?  In fact, if one recast this list as residential use per capita, you would see a direct correlation to summer air conditioning loads.   This table of cooling degree days weighted for population location is a really good proxy for how much air conditioning is needed by state.  (Explanation of cooling degree days). You can see that states like Alabama and Texas have two to four times the number of cooling degree days than California, which should directly correlate to about that much more per capita air conditioning (and thus electricity) use.

In fact, I have direct knowledge of both Alabama and Texas.  Both have seen a large increase in residential per capita electricity use vis a vis California over the last thirty years.  Granted.  But do you know why?  The number one reason for increased residential electricity use in the South is the increased access of the poor, particularly poor blacks, to air conditioning.  It is odd to see a liberal like Drum railing against this trend. Or is it that he just didn't bother to try to understand the numbers?

OK, now I have saved the most obvious fisking for last.  Because even when you correct for these numbers, California is pretty efficient vs. the average on electricity consumption.  Drum attributes this, without evidence, to government action.  The NY Times basically does the same, positing in effect that CA has more energy laws than any other state and it has the lowest consumption so therefore they must be correlated.  But of course, correlation is not equal to causation.  Could there be another effect out there?

Well, here are the eight states in the data set above that the California CEC shows as having the lowest per capita electricity use:  CA, RI, NY, HI, NH, AK, VT, MA.  All right, now here are the eight states from the same data set that have the highest electricity prices:  CA, RI, NY, HI, NH, AK, VT, MA.  Woah!  It's the exact same eight states!  The 8 states with the highest prices are the eight states with the lowest per capita consumption.  Unbelievable.  No way that could have an effect, huh?  It must be all those green building codes in CA.  I suspect Drum is sort of right, just not in the way he means.  Stupid regulation in each state drives up prices, which in turn provides incentives for lower demand.  It achieves the goal, I guess, but very inefficiently.  A straight tax would be much more efficient.

Please, is there anyone in the "reality-based community" that cares that their data really is saying what they think it is saying??

I hate the term "pro-business."  In my mind, it helps to define what is wrong with the political choices we are presented with in this country.  All of us in civics class were taught the statist "heads I win, tails you lose" political spectrum from left to right.  On this spectrum, everyone is in favor of government intervention and the sacrifice of one group of people to another.  The only thing that varies across the scale is who is the beneficiary of the plunder and the targeted areas of intervention.  For years, most of the politicians who have called themselves "pro-business" were not free market capitalists -- they spent much of their time in office sending their businessman-buddies slices of pork, zoning variations, special permission to trash other people's property (e.g. via pollution) etc.

Beyond the fact that we small government libertarians and anarcho-capitalists are given no spot on the civics class political spectrum, I have always been frustrated at being lumped together with "pro-business" politicians, and have been asked to defend (which I won't and can't) various subsidies and corporate welfare.  An example of my attacks on this type of corporate welfare crap are here and here.

So, without further comment, I present this great except from an article by Gary North of the Mises Institute:

The idea that businessmen are strong defenders of the free
enterprise system is one which is believed only by those who have never
studied the history of private enterprise in the Western, industrial
nations. What businessmen are paid to worry about is profit. The
problem for the survival of a market economy arises when the voters
permit or encourage the expansion of government power to such an extent
that private businesses can gain short-term profits through the
intervention into the competitive market by state officials. Offer the
typical businessman the opportunity to escape the constant pressures of
market competition, and few of them are able to withstand the
temptation. In fact, they are rewarded for taking the step of calling
in the civil government.

The government's officials approve, but more to the point, from the
point of view of the businessman's understanding of his role,
shareholders and new investors also approve, since the favored
enterprise is initially blessed with increased earnings per share. The
business leader has his decision confirmed by the crucial standards of
reference in the market, namely, rising profits and rising share prices
on the stock market. No one pays the entrepreneur to be ideologically
pure. Almost everyone pays him to turn a profit.

This being the case, those within the government possess an
extremely potent device for expanding political power. By a
comprehensive program of direct political intervention into the market,
government officials can steadily reduce the opposition of businessmen
to the transformation of the market into a bureaucratic, regulated, and
even centrally-directed organization. Bureaucracy replaces
entrepreneurship as the principal form of economic planning.
Bureaucrats can use the time-honored pair of motivational approaches:
the carrot and the stick. The carrot is by far the most effective
device when dealing with profit-seeking businessmen.

Those individual enterprises that are expected to benefit from some
new government program have every short-run financial incentive to
promote the intervention, while those whose interests are likely to be
affected adversely "” rival firms, foreign enterprises, and especially
consumers "” find it expensive to organize their opposition, since the
adverse effects are either not recognized as stemming from the
particular government program, or else the potential opponents are
scattered over too wide an area to be organized inexpensively. The
efforts of the potential short-run beneficiaries are concentrated and
immediately profitable; the efforts of the potential losers are
dispersed and usually ineffective.

Originally, the environmental movement counted many in its leadership with scientific backgrounds who were thoughtful advocates of improving the environment.  Unlike many "conservatives", as a libertarian that thinks more about being for property rights rather than just "pro-business", I understand that emissions guidelines are critical to the proper functioning of free markets:

In fact, environmental laws are as critical to a nation with strong
property rights as is contract law. Why? Imagine a world without any
environmental legislation but with strong property rights. What happens
when the first molecule of smoke from my iron furnace or from my farm
tractor crosses over on to your land. I have violated your property
rights, have I not, by sending unwanted substances onto your land, into
your water, or into your airspace. To stop me, you might sue me. And so
might the next guy downwind, etc. We would end up in an economic
gridlock with everyone slapping injunctions on each other. Since
economic activity is almost impossible without impacting surrounding
property owners, at least in small ways, we need a framework for
setting out maximums for this impact - e.g., environmental legislation.

Unfortunately, while many thoughtful people still call themselves an environmentalist, reasonable and scientific people no longer run the environmental movement.  Increasingly, the environmental movement has been taken over by
anti-growth and anti-technology Luddites as well as anti-free-market
socialists.

As evidence, I offer what has become an effective thirty-year moratorium on refinery construction. Forget for this post the obvious effect this has on gasoline supply stability, particularly with the EPA-mandated proliferation of special local gasoline blends.  Think instead about the true environmental implication:

The opposition to building new refineries ignores the dramatic
technological improvements that have been made since an oil refinery
was last constructed here in 1976. New, clean refineries emit far less
pollution than older refineries, with new scrubbers and design changes
that dramatically reduce sulfur and other emissions. And at the same
time our ability to model and map emission characteristics and
distribution lets us choose the best locations for new facilities "“
where they will have the least possible impact on people and the
environment.

Refineries are dirty places.  There are thousands of seals and flanges and safety valves that are going to leak some hydrocarbons.  But think on this:  Every single refinery in this country was built with at least 30 year old technology.  Sure there have been upgrades, but much of the core is still there.  I was an engineer at a refinery near Houston for 3 years and we had equipment still operating that was 50 years old, and that was twenty years ago and much of it is still there.

So what does this mean?  Imagine if every car in this country was over 30 years old.  Think of the improvements we have made in fuel efficiency and pollution control over the last 30 years- no cars would possess any of this technology.  The roads are full of cars with modern technology that are fuel efficient and relatively clean because we don't moronically prevent them from being replaced with new ones.

But this is exactly the case with refineries.  The single best, most intelligent thing we could do today for the environment, as far as refineries are concerned, is to let about 10 brand new ones be built with all modern technology, and let these newer refineries compete the older ones into closure.  And who is blocking this single most impactfull environmental step?  Environmentalists, of course.

This is not an unusual issue. I wrote about this same issue with new source review rules and Bush's Clear Skies initiative:

New source review is long and complicated, but basically
says that existing power plants don't have to upgrade to new
technologies, but new ones have to go through a very extensive
environmental review and permitting process and have a suite of
government mandated pollution control technologies installed.  OK, that
has all been clear for 3+ decades.  The rub comes when a company
considers upgrading or replacing a portion of a power plant.
For most of the life of the Clean Air Act, the government allowed
utilities to upgrade and modernize plants without having to install the
expensive suite of new controls.  The Clinton administration clamped
down on this, making it harder to upgrade existing plants.  All the
recent hullabaloo has occurred as GWB proposed to go back to the
pre-Clinton rules.

This issue is a great test for environmentalists, because
it separates them into those who really understand the issues and the
science and legitimately want improvement, and those who care more
about symbolism and politics.  Those who like symbolism have cast this
move as a roll-back, and are fighting it tooth and nail.  Those who
care about results know the following:

Experience under the Clinton rules has shown that most old
plants will never be upgraded if they have to go through the planning
process and install the new scrubbing and other technologies.  So, they
will just keep running inefficiently, as-is, until they are finally
shut down.  However, if allowed to be upgraded without review and new
scrubbers, etc., they will become much more efficient.  No, they won't
have the most modern scrubbing technology, but because they are more
efficient, they burn less fuel (coal) to make the same amount of
electricity and therefore will pollute less.  In some cases these rules
even prevent switching to cleaner fuels like natural gas. 

In other words, most scientists, including
scientific-oriented environmentalists, agree that GWB's proposal will
result in less pollution, but environmentalists still oppose it because
they don't like the symbolism of any pollution regulation appearing to
be rolled back.  You can read a lot more about New Source Review and how it actually increases pollution in practice here.

Technorati Tags:  Environment, Economics

Previously, I asked "why won't ethanol just go away", lamenting what a stupid program ethanol is and how much subsidy money is poured down that drain, not to mention the effect it seems to have on the Iowa primary every 4 years.  Yet another study has shown that ethanol consumes more energy to make than it actually produces. 

Turning plants such as corn, soybeans and sunflowers into fuel uses much more
energy than the resulting ethanol or biodiesel generates, according to a new
Cornell University and University of California-Berkeley study.

"There is just no energy benefit to using plant biomass for liquid fuel,"
says David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agriculture at Cornell. "These
strategies are not sustainable."

Pimentel and Tad W. Patzek, professor of civil and environmental engineering
at Berkeley, conducted a detailed analysis of the energy input-yield ratios of
producing ethanol from corn, switch grass and wood biomass as well as for
producing biodiesel from soybean and sunflower plants. Their report is published
in Natural Resources Research (Vol. 14:1, 65-76).

In terms of energy output compared with energy input for ethanol production,
the study found that:

• corn requires 29 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced;
• switch grass requires 45 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced;
  and
• wood biomass requires 57 percent more fossil energy than the fuel produced.

In terms of energy output compared with the energy input for biodiesel
production, the study found that:

• soybean plants requires 27 percent more fossil energy than the fuel
  produced, and
• sunflower plants requires 118 percent more fossil energy than the fuel
  produced.

In assessing inputs, the researchers considered such factors as the energy
used in producing the crop (including production of pesticides and fertilizer,
running farm machinery and irrigating, grinding and transporting the crop) and
in fermenting/distilling the ethanol from the water mix. Although additional
costs are incurred, such as federal and state subsidies that are passed on to
consumers and the costs associated with environmental pollution or degradation,
these figures were not included in the analysis.

As I wrote here, I think of environmental issues in two categories:

1. Regulation of pollution and emissions that affect other people's property.  These regulations are essential to the maintenance of a system of strong private property rights.  Without them, we would all be in court every day suing each other for damage to our property or water or air on our land from neighboring lands. Of course, we can all argue about whether set limits are reasonable, and we do.
2. Regulations of land use that effects only your own land.  This is a relatively new area of environmental law, ushered in by the Endangered Species act and various wetlands regulations.  These regulations say that even if your proposed land use doesn't create any emissions that affect anyone else, the government may still ban your land use for some other environmentally related goal (habitat, watershed, anti-sprawl, the list is endless). 

These land-use laws constitute by far the most distressing area to me in environmental law.  In the worst cases, these laws can result in what are effectively 100% takings of a person's land without any compensation. (Example:  you buy a lot on the ocean for $500,000 to build a beach house.  Before you can build it, new regulations are passed making it illegal for you to build a house on that land.  Yes, you still own the land, but it is now worthless to you since you cannot use or develop it).  Good article on this here (pdf) and a listing of Cato Institute articles on this topic here.

The government is of necessity involved in #1, though we can argue that some regulatory structures are more efficient than others (e.g. trading vs. command and control).  Government involvement in #2 is often a mess, and is one reason why private conservation groups and land trusts have made so much headway.

Reason has recently released a fairly comprehensive roundup of private conservation efforts that goes into much more detail on this topic.

Today (OK, its the 16th now, so yesterday) is apparently the start date for the Kyoto Treaty.  You can find examples of my skepticism about the costs and benefits of the Kyoto treaty here.  I won't go back over all that stuff here.

The Washington Post article linked above includes the usual misstatements about global warming, and is fisked here.  I particularly liked this line (emphasis mine):

...by uniting the vast majority of the world's nations, Kyoto could equally be the harbinger of an international model that rewards pollution-cutting innovation and pushes countries and companies to pursue cleaner forms of growth

The implication being that the US is the odd man out of a global consensus.  But then read further:

The pact, ratified by 141 nations, limits emissions from 35 industrialized countries

See the consensus problem?  Yes 141 nations ratified it, but only because 106 of them didn't have to do anything and were exempt.  In fact, they were exempted because the framers of the treaty knew that these countries would not ratify the treaty unless they were exempt. 

I also enjoyed the implication in the article that America's withdrawal from the treaty is solely based on the stand of President Bush.  You very seldom see any mention that the Senate voted 95-0 NOT to sign Kyoto until it was substantially amended, changes that have never been made to the treaty and never will be.  This occurred years before GWB became president.

Silflay Hraka has a nice post on Kyoto and Global warming.  I expressed many of the same thoughts here and here, though Hraka is much more concise and eloquent about it.  However, I missed this bit on Russia:

Europe as a whole may be able to meet its goals thanks to huge potential market in emissions trading brought about by the unprecedented collapse of heavy industry in the former nations of the Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union--graphically portrayed in this pdf from the Guardian--but actual levels of European CO2 output will not fall at all.

That's one reason it was so important for the EU for Russia to ratify Kyoto. Ratification of Kyoto allows that nation to enter into the emissions market, where the EU desperately needs it.

This makes a lot of sense.  I explained here how the Kyoto protocols, and particularly the 1990 date, were carefully structured to slam the US and make meeting targets relatively easy for Europe.  In short, 1990 was the beginning of a massive economic expansion for the US and a decade-long slump for Japan and Europe.  In addition, 1990 marked the date of German reunification and the fall of the Soviet Union -- since this time, thousands of horribly inefficient pollution-producing Soviet industries have shut down, giving Europe a huge reduction credit with no work.  Switch-over from coal to North Seas oil and gas has done the same for Britain.