Reason Magazine - Topics > Environment

Beware, He's Possessed to Skate

info@reason.com (Damon W. Root) — Wed, 14 May 2008 15:42:00 EDT

It isn't easy being green. Just ask Al Gore. But for one eco-friendly Canadian, the price is 15 hots and a cot. Via Breitbart:

Lee Breen, 25, was ticketed in August 2007 for skateboarding on Fredericton City streets in easternmost Canada, but refused to pay the fine, and so a judge ordered him jailed for five days.

[...]

"The city says it wants its citizens to find alternative forms of transportation, and so I did," Breen said by telephone from outside Fredericton city hall, prior to his arrest.

"I completely bought into the 'green lifestyle.' I run a gas-free lawn care company and I don't drive. And now, they're putting me in jail for actually embracing an alternative form of transportation that cuts down on (CO2) emissions."

Whole thing here.

As Many as 14,000 Dead in Myanmar

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 06 May 2008 07:34:00 EDT

Myanmar officials said on Tuesday the death toll could continue to climb higher than the 14,000 already feared dead from the Southeast Asian nation's devastating cyclone as the international community prepared to rush in aid.
In the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis, state radio reported that the government was delaying a constitutional referendum in areas hit hardest.
Myanmar's Information Minister Maj. Gen. Kyaw Hsan confirmed at a news conference that some 4,000 people had died in Yangon and the low-lying Irrawaddy delta region. He added that another 10,000 people could be dead in the delta.
Kyaw said tidal waves killed most of the victims in that region.

More AP account here.

reason on Burma here.

Cathy Young on the last mega-storm in the region.

Underground Eco-Vandal Arrested

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 08:33:00 EDT

The Cincinnati Enquirer is reporting the capture of an Environmental Liberation Front member charged with causing $1.1 million of damage to Michigan State University buildings and facilities in 1999:

[Marie Jeanette] Mason is accused of going...on Dec. 31, 1999, to Agriculture Hall on the Michigan State University campus in East Lansing. The indictment says [the group] intended to destroy federally funded plant genetic research being conducted by university employees.
They are accused of getting into the area where the research was stored and setting it on fire. Mason is accused of spray painting "No Genetically Modified Organisms" on building walls just before the fire.
The fire caused $1.1 million damage.
"It was an assault on a core value of free and open inquiry at a research university," MSU President Lou Anna Simon told the Detroit Free Press on Tuesday. "Once you chill the academic climate from doing this kind of work, the cost to society is enormous."...
Mason and the others also are accused of setting fire to commercial logging equipment in Michigan the next day, causing $18,000 in damage while spray painting "ELF" and "Log in Hell." She and the others are charged with arson and conspiracy to commit arson.

More here. This story reminds me of older tales of '60s and '70s radicals popping up years later. And that this sort of stupid, specifically luddite behavior has generally disappeared from the scene. In 2006, reason reported on one bizarre reason why that might be.

Oil Price Bubble?

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Oil prices climbed to their highest level ever, reaching over $108 per barrel this week. And Americans are feeling this price spike at the pump, with gasoline averaging $3.22 per gallon. An analysis released by the investment firm Goldman Sachs suggested that oil prices might soar to $200 per barrel. Does this make sense?

Not really. Although U.S. crude oil inventories have fallen, gasoline inventories are at their highest since March, 1993, notes Tim Evans, an energy futures analyst at Citigroup's Futures Perspective. World oil production was up 2.5 percent in the first quarter of 2008 over the same period in 2007 while world oil consumption rose by just 2 percent. In fact, world production is projected to be 3.3 percent higher in the second quarter and 4.1 percent higher in the third quarter than the same periods a year ago. On the other hand, world demand is projected to rise by just 1.6 percent over the next six months.

In fact, demand is falling in some countries. According to economist John Kemp at the commodities firm Sempra Metals, the U.S. consumed 4 percent less petroleum in January 2008 than it did the year before. Evans agrees, noting that the U.S. demand for petroleum products began falling off last July. Interestingly, this drop in U.S. oil consumption began before crude prices turned vertical and before we began to see weakness in the broader economy. Even China's thirst for oil is abating somewhat. Its demand for oil, which once rose at 10 percent per year, has now dropped to 6 percent per year. In addition, world surplus oil production capacity has gone from a very tight 1.5 million barrels per day a couple of years ago to more than 3 million barrels today, says petroleum economist Michael Lynch.

So supply is up; relative demand is down and yet, the price of oil is soaring. What's going on? Last week, Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson blamed a third of the recent run up in oil prices on the weak dollar, another third on geopolitical uncertainty, and the rest on market speculation.

Let's start with geopolitical uncertainties. Last year, oil consumers watched warily as unrest in Nigeria's oil fields, the possibility of war between the U.S. and Iran, and the antics of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez threatened to disrupt oil supplies. That analysis may have once made sense, but most of those tensions have abated in recent months. Nevertheless, it remains true that most of the world's oil is produced in volatile regions and by erratic governments, so the price of crude must still include some kind of political risk premium.

What effect does the falling dollar have on the price of crude? Most oil price contracts are denominated in dollars. The dollar has fallen in value by more than 30 percent against a Federal Reserve index of major currencies since 2002. This means that the price of imports, including oil, have gone up. To some extent, the chief of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) Chakib Khelil was correct when he said earlier this week, "What's happening in the oil market is due to the mismanagement of the U.S. economy." Continuing U.S. trade and fiscal deficits along with lower interest rates are stoking inflationary fears.

That brings us to speculation. Evans observes that since September 2003, the total number of open crude oil futures and options contracts rose by 364 percent. Meanwhile the global demand for petroleum rose by just 8.2 percent. "So the futures and options market has become more important than the physical supplies in driving the price," concludes Evans. "We are seeing investment flows into the oil market that don't have anything to do with the demand and supply of oil."

Investors are treating oil as a hedge against inflation and a falling dollar. Oil markets are part of a ~~negative~~ positive feedback loop in which higher oil prices contribute to higher inflation, which in turn lowers the value of the dollar, which boosts oil prices, and so forth. In other words, the oil market is coming to resemble the gold market (which has also been soaring). Evans notes that most gold traders don't even ask the question of how much gold was mined last year or how much spare gold mining capacity there is.

In the short run, oil prices are very inelastic: A large change in price produces only a small change in demand. If the price of gas goes up a dollar per gallon overnight, you still have to fill your tank to get to work. However, over the long run, consumers and producers respond to higher oil prices. For example, Americans are driving less and have switched to buying more fuel efficient cars.

Higher prices also encourage innovation. Economist Richard Rahn from the Institute for Global Economic Growth believes battery technologies are improving so rapidly that the majority of cars sold in 10 years will be all-electric. This would certainly help drive down the price of oil. Supply is also inelastic—it takes a long time to do the exploration, drilling, and refining necessary to boost production in response to higher prices. This inelasticity of demand and supply means that petroleum prices are very sensitive to relatively small changes in either. This means that prices can fall as steeply has they rose.

Whenever you begin to hear market gurus decree that "this time it's different," as we did during the dot-com bubble and the housing bubble, that's a sure sign of danger in the market. Naturally, proponents of the peak oil theory claim that the recent run up in prices is evidence that the end is nigh. Evans responds, "Fears of peak oil are what this market has in common with the 1980s, not what is different." Recall that during the "oil crisis" of the 1970s when oil prices were as high as they are today, U.S. oil consumption declined by 13 percent between 1973 and 1983. The higher prices of the 1970s led eventually to an oil glut and prices fell to about $10 a barrel by 1986.

So what will happen to oil prices over the next few years? No one is predicting $10 per barrel oil. However, once the current bubble bursts, both Evans and Lynch believe that the price of crude will settle at around $60 to $70 per barrel in the next couple of years. "It's very hard to pinpoint just how long a bubble can expand before it breaks. Getting the timing right is not an easy matter," says Evans. But he adds, "I think that this is the riskiest time to be long in crude oil since 1980."

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His most recent book, Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution, is available from Prometheus Books.

Who Is Might Be Killing the Whooping Cranes of North America?

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 07:36:00 EST

There are 266 wild whooping cranes in North America (up from just 16 in 1941). They are a protected species that migrates from Canada down Mexico way every year. The biggest threat to cranes these days comes not from trigger-happy hunters with troglodytic tendencies but from an element within the broadly defined environmentalist movement that helped save them in the first place: Wind farms.

Wind energy has gained such traction, whooping cranes could again be at risk—either from crashing into the towering wind turbines and transmission lines or because of habitat lost to the wind farms.
"Basically you can overlay the strongest, best areas for wind turbine development with the whooping crane migration corridor," said Tom Stehn, whooping crane coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
The service estimates as many as 40,000 turbines will be erected in the U.S. section of the whooping cranes' 200-mile wide migration corridor.
"Even if they avoid killing the cranes, the wind farms would be taking hundreds of square miles of migration stopover habitat away from the cranes," Stehn said.

The birds stop every night during their migration and apparently that's when they get snagged in the towers and transmission lines.

An old Winston ad used to ask, What do you want, good grammar or good taste?, thus extending Manichean dualism to tobacco products. Whether such things are actually mutually exclusive, we might ask, what do you want, whooping cranes or renewable wind power? Tradeoffs. Everything is tradeoffs.

More here.

Krugman Hates Ethanol!

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 10:56:00 EST

From Paul Krugman's NY Times blog:

I'm almost never censored at the Times. However, I was told that I couldn't use the lede I originally wrote for my column following the 2007 State of the Union address, in which Bush made ethanol the centerpiece of his energy strategy: "Before the State of the Union address, there had been hints and hopes that President Bush would offer a serious plan to reduce our dependence on imported oil. Instead, however, he took refuge in alcohol."
Well, anyway - the news on ethanol just keeps getting worse. Bad for the economy, bad for consumers, bad for the planet - what's not to love?

Whole bit here.

reason's Ronald Bailey on ethanol here.

Hat tip: Film critic and blogger extraordinaire Alan Vanneman

Are Farmers Stupid, or Deluded, or Both?

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 15:00:00 EST

Last week, the ideological environmentalist group Friends of the Earth (FOE) launched another attack in its misinformation campaign against biotech crops. FOE's latest salvo is its report "Who Benefits from GM Crops?," issued explicitly to counter the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications' (ISAAA) annual global assessment of biotech crops. FOE claims biotech crops yield less than conventional crops, harm the environment, are technologically stagnant, have done nothing to help poor farmers, and are monopolized by a few giant corporations.

The ISAAA 2007 report on the global status paints a far different picture. The ISAAA notes that farmers around the world continue their rapid adoption of biotech crop varieties. In 2007 the global planting of biotech crops rose to an all time high of 282 million acres, a 12 percent increase over 2006. In addition, the number of farmers choosing to grow biotech crops rose from 10.3 million in 2006 to over 12 million in 2007. The ISAAA report notes that 11 million of the biotech growers are resource poor farmers in developing countries, the majority of whom cultivate insect-resistant cotton. Biotech crops are now planted in 23 countries, and 29 others have approved the import of biotech food and feed.

Let's look at FOE's claims about the alleged faults of biotech crops.

Do biotech crops yield less than conventional crops? FOE is artful in its use of data. Some biotech varieties did initially impose slight yield penalties when compared to conventional varieties. This occurred because breeders improved conventional varieties during the years it took biotech crops to be approved by regulatory agencies. Even so, farmers adopted slightly lower yielding biotech crops because they were cheaper to grow. Biotech crops need fewer pesticide applications and require less plowing. A 2006 study by the British agricutural and food economics consultancy, PG Economics, found no impact from biotech on soy yields while cotton and corn enjoyed higher yields. Even though biotech seeds cost more, overall lower production costs more than make up for the initial expense. The PG Economics report estimates that biotech crops have increased farm incomes by $27 billion since 1996.

Do biotech crops harm the environment? FOE claims that biotech crops use more pesticides than conventional varieties and it identifies crops resistant to the herbicide glyphosate (aka Roundup) as the chief offenders. Farmers kill weeds without harming their biotech crops by spraying with glyphosate. The PG Economics study found that the adoption of biotech crops reduced the use of pesticides since 1996 by 224 million kilograms (493 million pounds), or just about 7 percent.

In addition, herbicide resistant crops enable farmers to switch to no-till farming which dramatically reduces soil erosion. In fact, an August 2007 study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that "no-till farming can build soil fertility even with intensive farming methods." However, some regions experienced an increased use of glyphosate as farmers shifted to no-till agriculture. So if glyphosate applications are going up, is it harmful to the environment or human health? Not even the hyper-cautious Pesticide Action Network puts glyphosate on its list of "bad actors." Nor does glyphosate linger in the environment—it is rapidly degraded by soil microbes with a half-life of a week to several months, which is shorter than many of the herbicides that it replaces.

FOE also claims that spraying biotech crops with herbicides is forcing the faster evolution of herbicide resistant superweeds. Just as bacteria eventually evolve to resist antibiotics, so too do weeds evolve to resist herbicides. This process started with the introduction of modern herbicides after World War II, well before the advent of modern biotech varieties. Fortunately, biotechnology is a fine tool for developing new ways to control weeds.

FOE argues that crop biotechnology has stagnated and correctly points out that the vast majority of biotech crop varieties incorporate just two traits: insect resistance and herbicide tolerance. These traits are valuable to farmers though they don't not offer obvious benefits to consumers. If few new biotech crops have yet to make it to the tables of consumers, FOE can take a good bit of the credit. FOE and other ideological environmentalists have campaigned tirelessly to block the development and spread of new beneficial biotech crop traits. FOE does its best to stop biotech in its tracks and then turns around to assert that researchers have developed nothing new.

However, FOE will soon not be able to make that hypocritical claim. Biotech researchers are now incorporating traits for drought resistance, salt tolerance, and one which enables plants to thrive on half a dose of nitrogen fertilizer. Crops with these traits will be particularly valuable for poor farmers in developing countries. Despite FOE's opposition, "Golden Rice," which has been genetically improved to help prevent vitamin A deficiency, which blinds 300,000 to 500,000 poor children each year, should become available by 2011. In addition, researchers are creating crops that provide enhanced nutrition such as tomatoes with increased folate.

Anti-biotech campaigns by activist groups like FOE have succeeded in frightening the governments of many developing countries into banning biotech crops. Nevertheless, biotech crops have been embraced by poor farmers around the world—whenever their governments will let them. The World Banks's World Development Report 2008 (WDR) notes that second-generation biotech crops are now making their way to the market. The WDR reports, "Transgenic rice, eggplant, mustard, cassava, banana, potato, sweet potato, lentil, and lupin have been approved for field testing in one or more countries. Many of those technologies promise substantial benefits to poor producers and consumers."

And finally, FOE complains that biotech seeds are monopolized by a few large companies. Again, FOE activists should look in the mirror to find the culprits behind this industry consolidation. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the number of startup and well-established seed companies that aimed to develop agricultural biotech exploded. But, as we've seen, crop biotech ran into a buzz saw of environmentalist opposition, especially in Europe. Consequently, since biotech seeds are relatively low in value compared to biomedical treatments, small crop biotech companies withered and the industry consolidated into fairly large companies, chiefly Monsanto, Dupont, Syngenta and Bayer. St. Louis, Missouri-based Monsanto dominates the market for biotech seed. Some 60 percent of all biotech improved seeds contain traits developed by Monsanto. FOE is certainly responsible, in part, for Monsanto's exploding profits.

Finally, let's revisit the title of FOE's new report: "Who Benefits from GM Crops?" As the ISAAA report clearly shows, millions of farmers around the world think that they benefit from biotech crops. Since this is so, FOE can only conclude that these farmers are either stupid or deluded or both. If biotech crops did not deliver their promised benefits, farmers around the world would not be adopting them at exponential rates. Not even FOE's most determined efforts to spread anti-biotech misinformation can obscure this plain fact.

Disclosure: I used to own some Monsanto shares years ago. It looks as though I should have held onto them. I don't own any other crop biotech stocks. I grew up on a farm and I can tell you that plowing and weeding are not all that much fun.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His most recent book, Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution, is available from Prometheus Books.

A 10-Year Energy Plan?

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 15:00:00 EST

In November, I commended techno-optimistic environmentalists Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus for pointing out the intellectual exhaustion of traditional ideological environmentalism. Shellenberger and Nordhaus outlined their scathing critique of special-interest environmentalism in their new book, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility (2007). They pointed out that environmentalism's doomsday predictions and limits-to-growth policy recommendations are political dead ends.

In a world in which billions of people remain mired in poverty and lack access to modern sources of energy, a positive environmental program stressing technological innovation and economic growth is far more politically viable. However, Shellenberger and Nordhaus argue that the threat of potentially catastrophic man-made climate change can only be addressed by massive government research and development initiatives that aim to create low-carbon energy supplies. How massive? To the tune of $300 billion per year over the next 10 years.

Now in a new New Republic article Shellenberger and Nordhaus are calling out "conservatives" for not supporting such initiatives. They note:

At the libertarian reason magazine, Ronald Bailey endorsed our critique of nature-centered environmentalism--which sees regulation as the best solution--but then concluded, "Shellenberger's and Nordhaus' naïve trust in wise government bureaucrats guiding technological innovation is problematic, to say the least." For conservatives to be taken seriously, they'll need to ditch their knee-jerk opposition to government intervention in the economy and recognize that government has long played a critical role in investing in transformational technologies.

Conservative? No. Opposition, yes. Knee-jerk, hardly. What transformational technologies do Shellenberger and Nordhaus claim that the federal government has brought about? They point to the railways in the 19th century, the Manhattan Project during World War II, the Interstate highway system in 20th century, the Apollo moon shots, and the Internet. Most of the technologies they cite were subsidized by government for military reasons, not for reasons of technological or commercial development, much less out of concern for the environment.

In 1862, Congress justified passing the Pacific Railroad Act as a way to forestall a secessionist movement in California during the Civil War. The government subsidized the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads at $16,000 per mile over an easy grade and up to $48,000 in the mountains. In addition, the government offered substantial land grants along the right-of-way. Despite these government subsidies, both companies were bankrupt in the early 1870s.

As an example of how government subsidies distort incentives, both railroad construction crews worked past each other building an extra 200 miles of parallel rail ~~lines~~ grades (and some parallel tracks) instead of linking up so their companies could earn more subsidy payments and land grants. The fact that government subsidies were not necessary for building a transcontinental railroad was proved when James J. Hill built the highly profitable Great Northern Railway from Minnesota to Seattle completely without them or land grants.

The Manhattan Project was launched because President Franklin Roosevelt feared that the Nazis were developing their own atomic weaponry. The project was a great success in developing the technologies needed to produce atomic bombs. In the 1950s, President Dwight Eisenhower promoted the "Atoms for Peace" program which aimed to develop civilian uses for nuclear technologies. Under the Power Demonstration Reactor Program, private/public partnerships to build power-generating nuclear reactors began. In 1957, the first nuclear large-scale power reactor began operation at Shippingport, Pa. Two years later, the first nuclear power station built completely without government funding was fired up in Illinois. Today, 109 nuclear power plants produce about 16 percent of all the electricity used in the United States. On the other hand, no new nuclear power plants have been ordered in the last 30 years. Since 1972, orders for 117 nuclear plants have been cancelled. The growth of nuclear power stopped because of regulation, not technical issues. It may yet turn out to be a great commercial success and part of the answer to abating greenhouse gas emissions, but only if regulatory issues are resolved.

Even the Interstate highway system was justified on national defense grounds. As a young military officer, Eisenhower had led an army convoy of 300 men from Washington, D.C. to the West Coast in 1919. The convoy took 62 days to cross the country. He was also impressed by the German Autobahn system. So in 1956, Eisenhower championed the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act. The Interstate highway system was originally estimated to take 12 years and cost $25 billion to construct. It actually took 35 years and cost $114 billion (over $800 billion in current dollars). Building the Interstate system remains the largest public works project ever undertaken in the United States. By most accounts, Interstate highways lowered transportation costs and boosted American productivity. On the other hand, subsidizing highway construction doesn't seem to be a good analogy to subsidizing energy research and development.

The motivation behind the Apollo moon shot program was largely geopolitical. The Soviets had launched the first artificial satellite in 1957 and orbited the first man around the planet in 1961. As a NASA history explains, "First, and probably most important, the Apollo program was successful in accomplishing the political goals for which it had been created. Kennedy had been dealing with a Cold War crisis in 1961 brought on by several separate factors—the Soviet orbiting of Yuri Gagarin and the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion only two of them—that Apollo was designed to combat." The Apollo program cost $25.4 billion (about $150 billion in current dollars) to land just 12 astronauts on the moon. It is curious that Shellenberger and Nordhaus cite the Apollo program as an example of transformative technologies since it was basically a technological dead end.

Shellenberger and Nordhaus argue, "The fact that some past public investments in energy failed is no more an argument against public investment than the failure of private firms to deliver cheap, clean energy is an argument against markets. It is true that government has made some lousy investments—but it has also made remarkable ones." In fact, with the possible exception of nuclear power, just where are the "remarkable" government-financed energy production breakthroughs? Consider the case of the Synfuels Corporation, which was authorized to spend up to $88 billion dollars on developing energy sources as alternatives to imported oil. It was supposed to be an energy "Manhattan Project" that would produce the equivalent to 500,000 barrels of oil by 1987. Instead, Congress shut it down in 1986. And that's not to mention one failed public/private partnership after another that were supposed to produce automobiles that run on something besides refined petroleum. Just last week, the Bush Administration pulled the plug on its flagship FutureGen demonstration project for capturing and burying carbon dioxide produced by coal-fired electric power plants.

Shellenberger and Nordhaus of course cite the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) famous support for communications technology network research that evolved into the Internet. The ARPANET was established as a way to link the defense research community. In the 1980s, the National Science Foundation funded the NSFNET as a way to increase the linkage among a broader community of scholars. The Internet evolved into an open research and commercial environment. That wasn't the way some technosavants preferred things 20 years ago. Remember the Minitel? Minitels were videotext terminals distributed by the millions by the French national telephone company. "The Minitel craze is one case where government intervention, frequently derided as an obstacle to economic change, seems to have helped technological innovation," declared the Washington Post in December, 1986. By 1992, there were 6 million Minitel terminals offering 1,800 information sources. However, the bottom-up Internet handily beat the top-down Minitel. I suspect that the new government-financed energy research would result in technologies more like Minitel and less like the Internet.

Shellenberger and Nordhaus's techno-optimistic environmentalism is still shackled by old style top-down thinking when it comes to technological development. Energy production, especially electricity generation, is one of the least technologically innovative industrial sectors, not least because it is one of the most heavily regulated sectors. The way forward is to encourage bottom up distributed creativity, not top down bureaucratic management. To give them their due, Shellenberger and Nordhaus recognize that throwing government money at energy research and development does not guarantee success. "To be sure, many of these technologies will fail," they write. "But any venture capitalist will tell you that multiple failures are required to reap a single success, and that you can't win if you don't play." The problem with Manhattan or Apollo Projects is that they were "silver bullet" programs aimed at a single technically difficult goal. The problem of developing low-carbon energy is a far more diffuse problem.

Since the problem is diffuse, a far better strategy would be to encourage venture capitalists and other entrepreneurs to finance new low-carbon energy development, rather than a centralized top-down crash research program directed by Department of Energy bureaucrats. One promising technique is to offer substantial prizes for energy production or utilization breakthroughs. A private example of how such prizes might work is the $10 million Automotive X Prize, which aims to promote the development of production-ready vehicles that get 100 miles per gallon of gas. One can imagine big government-financed prizes for various clean energy technologies such as long-lasting powerful rechargeable batteries, super-efficient solar power systems, or bacteria that eat sewage and excrete gasoline. However, the more narrowly the goal of a prize is defined, the more it will constrain the ingenuity of future innovators. In other words, bureaucrats could so narrowly define prizes that they would be engaging in top-down research management by other means.

Shellenberger and Nordhaus are absolutely right in a major way: People simply will not accept limits to growth. So the question is how best to harness human creativity to address the problem of man-made global warming? The simplest and best way to encourage the development of low-carbon energy technologies is to set a price on carbon emissions. Thousands of inventors and entrepreneurs would then have a huge incentive to develop cheap low-carbon energy technologies. The history of government-financed research and development, especially in the area of energy production, is not at all promising. Although Shellenberger and Nordhaus dismiss setting a price on carbon emissions as "a tired old trope," it's a lot less tired than yet another call for a "new Manhattan Project." What's next, an energy policy that's the "moral equivalent of war"?

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His most recent book, Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution, is available from Prometheus Books.

Dihydrogen Monoxide Kills Again

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 12:12:00 EST

A fatality involving an unusual kind of drinking problem vividly illustrates the frequently ignored maxim that the dose makes the poison.

The Size of the Climate Problem

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 09:17:00 EST

Nusa Dua, Bali - Assume man-made global warming is a big problem. In fact, you are persuaded that unless something is done soon, the world will warm up on average between 2 and 3 degrees Celsius over the next century and that this is a really bad idea. What will it take to address climate change in technical terms?

At a side event on Wednesday, held at the Bali Grand Hyatt, James Connaughton, one of the lead U.S. climate negotiators and the director of President Bush's Council on Environmental Quality, offered some insight on this issue. First, Connaughton assured the audience that the U.S. accepts that the world must slow, stop and then reverse greenhouse gas emissions. He declared that U.S. seeks to establish "a shared long-term global goal in reducing greenhouse gas emissions in absolute terms." Although Connaughton was not specific, such a goal might be an agreement to cut global emissions by 50 percent by 2050. Setting a long-term goal, Connaughton added, would let everyone know the reductions curve they face ahead, enabling them to plan accordingly.

So what is the size of the problem confronting the world? Connaughton pointed out that the largest increases in GHG emissions will come from new coal-fired electric generation plants, more people driving more cars, and land use changes. Therefore, the world must figure out how to capture and sequester CO2 emissions from coal, devise carbon-neutral transport fuels and reverse deforestation.

Connaughton cited estimates that by 2020 there will be as many cars in China as there are today in the United States. One of his fellow panelists, William Hohenstein of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, highlighted that deforestation is responsible to 20 percent of GHG emissions and agriculture adds 15 percent more. This means that 35 percent of GHG emissions are the result of land use changes. In fact, one-third of the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations over pre-industrial levels is the result of deforestation and other land use changes. Interestingly, U.S. forests are now absorbing about 10 percent of the country's annual emissions (of course, a lot of carbon was released when one-third of the original forest area was cut as the country developed economically).

Connaughton offered an interesting thought experiment. The major economies emit 22 gigatons (1 billion tons) of CO2 annually. In one reference case, those emissions would rise to 37 gigatons by 2050. So, Connaughton says, assume that we need to reduce current emissions by half from current emission—by 11 gigatons—to stabilize CO2 atmospheric concentrations. That means that the world would have to find the equivalent energy that producing 25 gigatons of emissions would have produced in 2050.

To get a handle on what this might mean, Connaughton asked, "How big is a gigaton?" One gigaton is equivalent to 273 coal-fired electric generation plants with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). Of course, there are only a few demonstration plants now, and 273 plants represent 7 percent of the world's current coal-fired generation capacity. Estimates of how much CCS might cost range between $150 to $250 per ton of carbon (or $50 to $80 per ton of CO2). By one estimate CCS would raise the cost of electricity to 25 to 40 percent; others suggest that the increase could be as much as 85 percent.

Connaughton also pointed out that avoiding the emission of a gigaton of CO2 implies building 135 new nuclear power plants. The world has 400 now. In addition, a gigaton is equivalent to 270,000 windmills which is 4-times more than are currently operating. Growing enough biofuels to reduce a gigaton of emissions would take an area twice the size of the United Kingdom. Of course, such projections rely on the deployment of near-term technologies. It's impossible to tell what new technologies a higher price on carbon fuels might call forth from the world's laboratories.

Clearly, as Indonesia's President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono noted when he opened the Bali conference, "We are embarking on the greatest project in the history of human civilization."

Disclosure: I would like to express my deep appreciation to the Atlas Economic Research Foundation for providing a grant to pay for my travel expenses to cover the COP-13 meeting.

Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His most recent book, Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution, is available from Prometheus Books.

Energy-Free by 2017!

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 09:20:00 EST

Mike Huckabee's ambitious energy plan:

I think we ought to be out there talking about ways to reduce energy consumption and waste. And we ought to declare that we will be free of energy consumption in this country within a decade, bold as that is.

Ron Paul on the Environment

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 12:37:00 EST

I've noticed a disconnect between the seeming cultural hugeness of global warming anxiety and how comparatively absent it has been from presidential politics this season. Ron Paul, who totally avoids this stuff in his standard stump speeches, is called on to explain free-market approaches to environmental problems in this Salon interview (which originally ran last month at the enviro mag Grist.)

Interviewer Amanda Griscom Little sums him up, with a bit more respect than I would have expected:

Some of those ideas arguably have environmental merit. Paul is known for his zealous opposition to the Iraq war, which he duly notes causes pollution and the "burning of fuel for no good purpose." He wants to yank all subsidies and R&D funding from the energy sector, which many believe would benefit the growth of renewables. A cyclist himself, he has cosponsored bills that would offer tax breaks to Americans who commute by bicycle and use public transportation. Still, his libertarian presidency would, among other things, allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, boost the use of coal, and embrace nuclear power. Moreover, it wouldn't do diddly about global warming because, Paul reasons, "we're not going to be very good at regulating the weather."

Excerpt from Paul's own comments, sounding like a classic old-school Rothbardian:

Imagine that everyone living in one suburb, rather than using regular trash service, were taking their household trash to the next town over and simply tossing it in the yards of those living in the nearby town. Is there any question that legal mechanisms are in place to remedy this action? In principle, your concerns are no different, except that, for a good number of years, legislatures and courts have failed to enforce the property rights of those being dumped on with respect to certain forms of pollution. This form of government failure has persisted since the industrial revolution when, in the name of so-called progress, certain forms of pollution were legally tolerated or ignored to benefit some popular regional employer or politically popular entity.
When all forms of physical trespass, be that smoke, particulate matter, etc., are legally recognized for what they are -- a physical trespass upon the property and rights of another -- concerns about difficulty in suing the offending party will be largely diminished. When any such cases are known to be slam-dunk wins for the person whose property is being polluted, those doing the polluting will no longer persist in doing so. Against a backdrop of property rights actually enforced, contingency and class-action cases are additional legal mechanisms that resolve this concern.
........
To the extent property rights are strictly enforced against those who would pollute the land or air of another, the costs of any environmental harm associated with an energy source would be imposed upon the producer of that energy source, and, in so doing, the cheap sources that pollute are not so cheap anymore.

And global warming? Maybe we've got more immediate concerns, Paul says:

If you study the history, we've had a lot of climate changes. We've had hot spells and cold spells. They come and go. If there are weather changes, we're not going to be very good at regulating the weather.
To assume we have to close down everything in this country and in the world because there's a fear that we're going to have this global warming and that we're going to be swallowed up by the oceans, I think that's extreme. I don't buy into that. Yet, I think it's a worthy discussion....I think war and financial crises and big governments marching into our homes and elimination of habeas corpus -- those are immediate threats. We're about to lose our whole country and whole republic! If we can be declared an enemy combatant and put away without a trial, then that's going to affect a lot of us a lot sooner than the temperature going up.

Adaptation in Action

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 13:59:00 EST

In the aftermath of Cyclone Sidr, Reuters finds some good news amid all the death and destruction:

The death toll from the monster cyclone that has struck Bangladesh is already in the hundreds. But just 16 years ago a similar cyclone killed over 140,000 people. And another one in 1970 killed around 500,000....

Cyclones are not getting any less powerful, so what has changed?

"In the 1970s Bangladesh did not have the capacity to face such calamities," says Akbar. "Now in every district there are disaster preparedness volunteers. They are out in the field talking to people, asking them to move to safer places."

As Cyclone Sidr raged up the Bay of Bengal this week, tens of thousands of volunteers went out to tell villagers how to protect themselves and help evacuate those in danger's path.

Announcements were broadcast over mosque loudspeakers to alert communities to the impending disaster, says Ahmed, ActionAid's emergencies co-ordinator in Bangladesh.

Bangladesh has also set up several thousand cyclone shelters in recent years. And all new schools are designed to double up as flood shelters. They are built from reinforced concrete and elevated from the ground.

Akbar says factors such as wind speed are taken into account when constructing new hospitals, clinics and schools to ensure they could withstand cyclones.

Another important factor: advances in meteorology. "This time," one aid worker told Reuters, "the weather forecasting system and regional preparations worked very well....Ten years ago, weather forecasting systems were not so good."

The one major barrier to further improvements is poverty:

[W]hile death tolls are falling the damage to people's houses remains the same and that seems unlikely to change.

"We cannot make our houses stronger. The poor people only have bamboo," Akbar says.

There's a lesson there for other environmental threats. The best reforms will make communities richer and more resilient. The worst ones will make them more poor and brittle.

$23,000-a-Barrel Oil

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 06:55:00 EDT

When does oil cost $13,000 a barrel? When you spill it in Prince William Sound. That's how much Exxon paid after one of its tankers ran aground on Bligh Reef near the southern coast of Alaska in 1989, spilling 258,000 barrels of oil.

The company spent more than $3.4 billion on clean-up costs, fines, and compensation payments. Yet in 1994 a federal jury in Anchorage said Exxon should cough up another $5 billion in punitive damages, a number that an appeals court eventually cut in half.

Now the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to decide whether that punitive damage award, by far the largest ever upheld by an appeals court, is consistent with maritime law. In addition to raising that question, the gargantuan judgment casts doubt on the very concept of punitive damages.

The case was a class action brought on behalf of some 33,000 fishermen and other individuals who argued that they had not been adequately compensated by Exxon's voluntary payments after the accident. The jury put their compensatory damages at $287 million, an award that came to about $20 million after the earlier payments were subtracted. The $5 billion punitive award was 250 times as high.

The legal wrangling that followed the trial focused on whether that eye-popping award was so disproportionate that it violated the constitutional right to due process. The litigation took 13 years, mainly because the Supreme Court was simultaneously issuing rulings that said the Due Process Clause places limits on punitive damages but did not clarify what those limits are.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit said Exxon's employment of Joseph Hazelwood, the tanker captain who precipitated the accident by leaving the bridge during a crucial maneuver, was "reckless," since management knew he was "a relapsed alcoholic." Yet the court also emphasized that the damage caused by the crash was not intentional and that Exxon acted quickly to mitigate and repair it.

Finding that the "reprehensibility" of Exxon's conduct was neither low nor high, the 9th Circuit figured a middling ratio of punitive to actual damages was appropriate. Based on a 5-to-1 ratio and a damage estimate of $500 million (almost twice the compensatory award), it calculated that $2.5 billion was an appropriate number.

The Supreme Court has said ratios in the single digits are "more likely to comport with due process." But it also has said that "when compensatory damages are substantial" even a 1-to-1 ratio "can reach the outermost limit of the due process guarantee." Combine this ambiguity with the various possible interpretations of what should count as actual damages, and a court can rationalize just about any number.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the Supreme Court has chosen not to wade once again into this due process thicket. Instead it will consider whether federal maritime law, a form of common law dealing with ships at sea, allows punitive damages in a case like this one and, if so, whether it imposes limits on them.

These questions illustrate the fundamental problem with punitive damages: They're not really damages at all; they're punishments. Like criminal penalties, they're supposed to serve the goals of deterrence and retribution. Exxon argues, pretty plausibly, that the $3.4 billion it already has paid is "more than enough to deter and punish anyone for anything."

Given the impact that the Prince William Sound disaster had on Exxon's reputation as well as its finances, oil companies have a strong incentive to avoid anything like it in the future. As for retribution, it's a tough concept to understand when it's applied not to culpable individuals such as Joseph Hazelwood but to corporations owned by shareholders who are innocent of any wrongdoing.

In any event, Exxon was already punished, paying the U.S. government a criminal fine prescribed by statute. It should not be punished again for the same conduct under rules that allow fines to be pulled out of thin air.

Nuclear Power: Celebrating 50 Years of Catastrophic Failure

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 16:17:00 EDT

Writing for CNN today, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, and Harvey Wasserman share some thoughts about nuclear power (Note: Don't think about that last sentence too hard. You'll hurt your head or bring on the apocalypse or something). They're worried that the siren song of cheap, clean energy will seduce us once again, when we should be rightfully seduced only by Bonnie's dulcet tones.

These "new" reactors are the same as the old ones, with a few bells and whistles, and a proven 50-year track record of catastrophic failure.
On the brink of winning a green-powered planet, we intend to do all we can to avoid another radioactive dead-end. We hope you will join us

I must have missed the first radioactive dead end for the planet--perhaps it happened before I was born and my parents survived in one of those backyard bunkers? Chernobyl was horrific, to be sure, but I think you need a few more catastrophic failures to get a gen-u-ine "track record" going. Anyway, we should take this warning seriously--it comes from TV's Most Trusted News Source.

Via Fark

Salon to Gore and Other Eco-Ghouls: Stop Your Sobbing

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 10:25:00 EDT

Salon excerpts Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility, by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, which attacks doomsayers of the Green persusasion in positively Ron Baileyean terms:

Environmentalist cautionary tales have had the opposite of their intended effect, provoking fatalism, conservatism, and survivalism among readers and the lay public, not the rational embrace of environmental policies. Constantly surprised and angered when people fail to behave as environmentalists would like them to, environment writers complain that the public is irrational, in denial, or just plain foolish. They presume that the failure of the public to heed their warnings says something meaningful about human nature itself, attributing humanity's disregard for Nature to desires like the lust for power and concluding that, in the end, we are all little more than reactive apes, insufficiently evolved to take the long view and understand the complexity and interconnectedness of the natural systems on which we depend....
Environmental tales of tragedy begin with Nature in harmony and almost always end in a quasi-authoritarian politics. Eco-tragic narratives diagnose human desire, aspiration, and striving to overcome the constraints of our world as illnesses to be cured or sins to be punished. They aim to short-circuit democratic values by establishing Nature as it is understood and interpreted by scientists as the ultimate authority that human societies must obey. And they insist that humanity's future is a zero-sum proposition -- that there is only so much prosperity, material comfort, and modernity to go around. The story told by these eco-tragedies is not that humankind cannot stand too much reality but rather that Nature cannot stand too much humanity.

Here's a great line that could have been ripped straight out of reason:

Not only have we survived, we've thrived. Today more and more of us are "free at last" -- free to say what we want to say, love whom we want to love, and live within a far larger universe of possibilities than any other generation of humans on earth.

Whole thing here.

I haven't read the whole book and am curious as to what sort of policy prescriptions the authors propose. But the attitude in this excerpt is a truly welcome relief from the human-hating animus behind much coming out of the Green community.

Hat Tip: Film critic extraordinaire Alan Vanneman.

Making Green Sausage

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 09:34:00 EDT

The Baltimore Sun's Rona Kobell explains how Maryland's open space preservation program works in practice:

[David] Sutherland's push to secure state funding for the Kudner farm prompted an outcry when it became public over the summer, particularly because of the high price he demanded for a relatively small piece of the farm. But a closer look at the deal reveals problems beyond the price.

It shows how a well-connected deal-maker seized upon a fleeting state interest in building sports complexes to persuade the government to buy his property. He persuaded county commissioners that they could put such a complex on a couple of hundred acres of land that mostly cannot be developed. And when that plan fell apart, state officials went ahead and bought the parcel anyhow.

For the details, go here.

(Full disclosure: Rona's my wife. As long as I'm promoting her work, I should mention that she is now among the contributors to her paper's Bay & Environment blog, where she writes about the Chesapeake Bay. If you're interested in the region you should check out her posts.)

No Word From Professor Teabag

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 10:57:00 EDT

Ah, bureaucrats:

Six years ago, Mantei said, an ordinary morning took a turn for the exotic when Filipetti was driving some of their six children to catch a school bus. Lying on the roadside was a white fawn, dappled with brown spots. She was weak, with deformed back legs and hooves that curved inward, cutting her when she tried to walk.
Filipetti scooped her up and brought her home. He took her to a veterinarian in Woodburn, who fitted her deformed legs with tiny casts to straighten them, changing the casts every 10 days. At home, they put carpet scraps on the wood floors to keep Snowball from slipping. And come holiday season, they let Snowball nibble their Christmas tree.
The doe lived in the house for almost a year, Mantei said. She slept at their bedside and picked up mannerisms from the family dog -- Tasha, a cocker spaniel -- pawing at people with a hoof when she wanted attention.

You know what happens next:

In March, police received a tip from an anonymous source -- Mantei believes it was an estranged family member -- that the couple were keeping deer on their property. State troopers inspected the grounds in early April.
Then, about 8:30 a.m. Wednesday, Mantei went to the front door to find the police had returned.
[...]
For more than eight hours Wednesday, a Molalla family pleaded with police and wildlife officers to take away their trailer and dart gun and let them keep two deer they'd raised as pets.
"These deer wouldn't even be alive without us," said Jim Filipetti, 43, who was working in Bend Wednesday and negotiating by phone. "I brought that deer (Snowball) to the vet every 10 days. We raised it in our house. And they want to take her away. It's ridiculous."
But after a day of tears, frantic phone calls and failed compromises, officers darted Snowball, a mottled 6-year-old doe, and Bucky, her yearling buck, and prepared to haul them away. The animals will be evaluated, with three possible outcomes: transfer to a licensed wildlife facility, release into the wild or euthanasia.

After nearly the entire state of Oregon flooded state offices with calls in protest, state officials are now promising that neither animal with be euthanized, and they may even allow the family to take Snowball back. Bucky will stay in state custody, or be released into the wild (where he isn't likely to survive).

Beyond Animal Rights: Animal Politics

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 11:56:00 EDT

Longtime Hit & Run readers know I have a running interest in encounters between human beings and organized animal communities: elephants, baboons, bees. (OK, the bees are a stretch.) I wouldn't say those animals are asserting rights -- or that they have a moral concept of rights in the first place -- but they do assert claims, which for much of human history was all we ever did ourselves. When those claims run up against the territories marked by human beings, the results look a lot like low-intensity warfare.

A recent case in point, as described by the BBC:

A troop of vervet monkeys is giving Kenyan villagers long days and sleepless nights, destroying crops and causing a food crisis....

They estimate there are close to 300 monkeys invading the farms at dawn. They eat the village's maize, potatoes, beans and other crops....In addition to stealing their crops, the monkeys also make sexually explicit gestures at the women, they claim....

The residents say the monkeys have killed livestock and guard dogs, which has also left the villagers living in fear, especially for the safety of their babies and children.

All the villagers' attempts to control the monkeys have failed -- the monkeys evade traps, have lookouts to warn the others of impending attacks and snub poisoned food put out by the residents.

"The troop has scouts which keep a lookout from a vantage point, and when they see us coming, they give warning signals to the ones in the farms to get away," said another area resident, Jacinta Wandaga.

In less Hobbesian times you get something that looks like a negotiated peace, or at least a rough mutual understanding. One reason the rise in human-elephant conflict is so notable, for example, is because it follows a period when such violence was rare. (I should probably add that it isn't always the beasts who are the aggressors.)

Discussions of animal rights and animal welfare usually focus on nonhuman captives in human societies. But aren't these boundary disputes at least as interesting as dogfighting or foie gras? Such micro-wars imply something about human-nonhuman relations, even if it can't be reduced to a simple moral principle. Readers are invited to debate just what that something is -- or, better still, to point me to any anthropologists or political scientists who are already studying these conflicts in a systematic way.

Hurricane Harbingers

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 12:48:00 EDT

New Orleans is only three-fifths the city it was before Hurricane Katrina hit. In 2005, the Big Easy was home to 455,000 people. Today just 273,000 dwell there. The city drowned and 1,300 people died because a Category 3 hurricane (wind speeds 111-130 miles per hour) overwhelmed poorly designed Army Corps of Engineers levees. Now, with Hurricane Dean churning its way across the Caribbean aiming for the Mexico's Yucatan peninsula, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) bureaucrats are rushing "federal assets" to south Texas just in case Dean veers northward.

The 2005 hurricane season was the most active on record. It started early and ran late, featuring 27 named storms, of which 15 were hurricanes. In May 2006, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency's (NOAA) National Hurricane Center predicted that "a very active hurricane season" was looming. According to NOAA's May 2006 forecast, the season would likely see 13 to 16 named storms, with eight to 10 becoming hurricanes, of which four to six could become "major" hurricanes of Category 3 strength or higher. On August 8, 2006, NOAA lowered the number of forecasted storms slightly to 12 to 15 named storms, with seven to nine becoming hurricanes, and three or four becoming major hurricanes. NOAA also predicted a high likelihood (75 percent chance) that 2006 would be an above-normal Atlantic hurricane season.

Fortunately for coastal residents, NOAA was way off the mark. In 2006, there were only 5 hurricanes, of which two were major, and just 4 named tropical storms. NOAA noted, "On average, the north Atlantic hurricane season produces 11 named storms, with six becoming hurricanes, including two major hurricanes." Basically, 2006 turned out to be a slightly below average year. What happened?

Several factors affect hurricane formation. Sea surface temperatures must be above 82 degrees Fahrenheit. During 2006, a number of factors combined to keep hurricanes at bay. Ocean temperatures were lower than in 2005 because of persistent easterly winds kept drawing up cooler water from the ocean's depths. In addition, recent research indicates that the numerous dust storms flowing off the Sahara in 2006 somehow contaminated the hurricane nurseries off the Cape Verde Islands. But probably the biggest factor was that the eastern Pacific Ocean flipped from La Nina to El Nino conditions. During an El Nino, water temperatures off the coast of South America warm up and this has global effects on climate. One important effect is that El Nino increases wind shear over the Caribbean which inhibits hurricane formation by decapitating them.

Controversial recent research suggests that man-made global warming will produce more and more intense hurricanes in the future. In August 2005, Massachusetts Institute of Technology tropical storm researcher, Kerry Emanuel published an analysis in Nature that claimed that Atlantic hurricanes had become much more powerful as a result of higher average sea surface temperatures (SSTs) since the mid-1970s. A month later, researchers including Peter Webster at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and Greg Holland at the Georgia Institute of Technology (GIT) published a study which also found that the number of category 4 and 5 hurricanes had increased over the past 35 years, mostly in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The study also noted that the overall number of hurricanes had actually decreased around the world, except in the north Atlantic. The researchers argued that tropical ocean SSTs rose by approximately 0.5 degrees celsius between1970 and 2004, fueling more intense hurricanes.

In July, Holland and Webster published a new study in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society which found that the number of tropical storms in the Atlantic have doubled over the past century due to global warming. The study claims that the number of tropical cyclones averaged six per year between 1905 and 1930, rose to 9.4 annually between 1931 and 1994, and jumped to 14.8 per year since 1994. In each period a bit more than half of the storms became hurricanes. The researchers find that the trend of more hurricanes results from an average sea surface temperature increase of 0.7 degrees Celsius in the eastern Atlantic of over the past century. They conclude, "[W]e are led to the confident conclusion that the recent upsurge in tropical cyclone frequency is due in part to greenhouse warming, and this is most likely the dominant effect."

On the other hand, National Hurricane Center researcher Chris Landsea is not so sure. He argues in the May 1 issue of the journal EOS that Holland and Webster have underestimated the number of hurricanes that occurred in the early part of this century. Why? Because many storms would have been missed since there were far fewer observers to note them earlier in the century. Landsea concludes that "improved monitoring in recent years is responsible for most, if not all, of the observed trend in increasing frequency of tropical storms." Landsea slices the frequency data differently, arguing that there have been alternating multi-decadal quiet and active periods, e.g., quiet up to 1925, active between 1925 and 1970, quiet from 1970 to 1994, and active since.

Paradoxically, man-made global warming might offer some relief from hurricane assaults. A study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters in April suggests that man-made global warming will increase wind shear over the Caribbean and Atlantic. If this finding is confirmed, such an increase in wind shear would tend to reduce the number and intensity of Atlantic hurricanes.

So what's up for this year? Until Dean spun up, the 2007 hurricane season had been pretty quiet. In May, NOAA predicted the Atlantic would experience 13 to 17 named storms, with seven to 10 becoming hurricanes, of which three to five could become major hurricanes of Category 3 strength or higher. On August 9, NOAA revised its forecast for the 2007 hurricane season downward slightly to 13 to 16 named storms, seven to nine hurricanes, and three to five major hurricanes. However, agency scientists boosted the chance that the 2007 Atlantic hurricane season would be above normal from a 75 percent chance to 85 percent. Dean is expected to hit Mexico as a Category 5 storm with winds of over 155 miles per hour.

On top of any effects that global warming may have on the future intensity and number of hurricanes, many researchers believe that we have also entered into a multi-decadal period in which hurricane activity is naturally higher. The bad news is that this period of higher activity could persist for the next four decades. So more people and their property will be at risk simply because they have chosen to move into and build in harm's way. Between 1960 and 1994 the populations of the eight most hurricane prone states—North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas—increased by 80 percent. Even worse, coastal populations of these states rose by 103 percent.

Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that despite the tremendous violence of hurricanes, they have killed only about 15,000 Americans since 1900 and 8,000 of those died in the great Galveston storm on September 8 of that year. After 1985, the number of Americans who died as a result of hurricanes averaged 16 per year (in comparison, about 67 people are killed by lightning and 65 by tornadoes each year). While hurricanes kill relatively few people (with the horrific recent exception of Katrina), the damage they do to property is escalating. "There is a huge upward trend in hurricane damage in the U.S., but all or almost all of this is due to increasing coastal population and building in hurricane-prone areas," notes MIT researcher Kerry Emanuel.

A new study in the journal Natural Hazards Review normalized storm damage by estimating how much damage a past storm would cause if it struck the same area now. The normalization procedure attempts to take into account increased wealth, population and an inflation factor, though not everyone agrees that it succeeds in doing so. In one example, the researchers compared the damage caused by the 1979 Hurricane Frederic which came ashore in Alabama. In 1979, the storm caused $2.3 billion in damages and would cause more than $10 billion today. As the study notes, "Unless action is taken to address the growing concentration of people and properties in coastal areas where hurricanes strike, damage will increase, and by a great deal, as more and wealthier people increasingly inhabit these coastal locations."

But what action should be taken? Well, one idea is to eliminate incentives like the Federal government's National Flood Insurance Program. Since 1968, the NFIP collected $1.1 billion in premiums and paid out an average of $1 billion to cover flood losses annually. So far, so good—until Katrina. The NFIP borrowed $18.5 billion to pay off Katrina claims and, according the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the program has no prospect of ever collecting enough in premiums to pay it back. As the GAO notes, "Because of the catastrophic nature of flooding and the inability to adequately predict flood risks, private insurance companies have largely been unwilling to underwrite and bear the risk of flood insurance." One sensible way to discourage people from living and building in hurricane prone areas would be to eliminate federal flood insurance.

Nevertheless, the coasts will remain population and development magnets and a richer society will be able to afford better hurricane defenses, such as, stronger buildings, higher levees, and protective surge barriers. But what's the best way to pay for them? One proposal would be instead of depending on "federal assets," local jurisdictions should be pushed to pay for and maintain their own hurricane defenses. If New Orleans needs new and better levees, then the city's citizens should pay for them. If New Orleans residents refuse to tax themselves enough to do so that means that it doesn't make economic sense to live and work there. One proof of the adequacy of their levees would be the willingness of private insurers to offer flood policies to residents. The same logic applies to all coastal counties. Ultimately, instead of retreating from the shore, I believe that we will instead learn how to live with stronger storms.

Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Texas-Sized Automobile Subsidies

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 14:01:00 EDT

Down in the Lone Star State, officials in the Dallas-Fort Worth area have come up with a Texas-sized subsidy to spur folks to retire old cars and buy cleaner new ones:

In an effort to improve air quality in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, the state will offer up to a $3,500 bounty of sorts on vehicles that are more than 10 years old - pre-1996 cars and trucks that emit up to 30 times as much pollution as late-model vehicles.
Owners who agree to "retire" their vehicles will get $3,000 vouchers that can be used toward buying a new car or truck or a late-model used vehicle. If they opt to buy a hybrid, they can get $3,500. The program is strictly voluntary.

It's "strictly voluntary"--except that the funds to pay for it come from mandatory fees. This strikes me as a fairly clever way to line the pockets of relatively wealthy people, who will both be more likely to buy new cars and to work the system in the first place.

More to the point, the program apparently won't bring the area into compliance:

If half of the 40,000 vehicles come from the Dallas area, it could have a fairly substantial impact on air quality.
"Let's say emission amounts for old vehicles are 10 times as high as new vehicles," said Mr. Marston of Environmental Defense. "You multiply that 40,000 by 10 times and that starts to be a real number. In Dallas, that would be equivalent to about 10 percent of the vehicles on the road."
That alone is not enough to bring Dallas into compliance, but every step counts.

There has been a program in place, which offered $1,000 to "low-income" drivers to retire their cars ("low-income" was not defined in the story). It went widely unused and accumulated some $100 million in non-disbursed funds. So now more money will be available to more people:

"The old bill just didn't have juice. It was ineffective. We restructured the program to make it available to a wider population and to make it more enticing. EPA deadlines are looming, and we want to make our program as effective as we can," [state Sen. Kip Averitt (R-Waco) said.]

Hey wait a second: Me thought steroids bad!

The full Dallas Morning News story lays out most of the reasons why this program won't be any more successful than the one it's replacing. The weird incentives regarding dealers are pretty interesting. And there's the question of people with a serviceable beater that's paid for deciding to pay $20,000 for a new car.

Hat tip: Michelle Shinghal.

No discussion of Texas-sized anything is complete without former Dallas Cowboys Roger Staubach's most bizarre moment so far:

Plastic Bag Panic Grips the Nation

jsamuel@reason.com (Juliet Samuel) — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 08:08:00 EDT

Boston, Portland, Santa Cruz, Oakland, Annapolis, Baltimore, New Haven—all are currently considering some form of plastic-bag ban, most of them total bans, on the grounds of environmental harm. The bans would cajole all stores to give up the convenience of 2-cent, water-resistant, cheaply recyclable plastic in favor of 5-cent, soggy, handle-less, expensively recyclable paper.

The initiative follows from San Francisco’s ban on plastic for all supermarkets and big-chain pharmacies (the ban currently exempts all small, independent retailers and thus passes on costs mostly to the poorest consumers). Apparently, plastic bags are an environmental nuisance because people insist on throwing them into the sea, where they kill fish and other marine life. And they won’t rot away for a millennium.

The anti-plastic movement has also inspired a fashion craze: ugly hemp bags (greener than plastic AND paper!). Most recently the fad saw hordes of “light greens” lining up around the block at Whole Foods to buy $15 designer bags emblazoned with the statement, “I’m NOT a plastic bag”:

The greatest irony of the morning was as a result of the ongoing torrential rain. Upon leaving the store, after hours in the downpour, proud owners placed their prized new bags into Whole Foods plastic bags to keep them dry.

Enter the Progressive Bag Alliance, an organization of three plastic bag manufacturers founded to promote responsible plastic bag use (that is, in favor of no plastic bag use). The Alliance claims that the anti-plastic movement has ignored some important facts about the beloved paper they will require stores to supply. So they've started selling their own rival to the hemp craze on eBay: "I AM a plastic bag and I'm 100% recyclable":

Myth: Paper grocery bags are a better environmental choice than plastic bags.
Fact: Plastic bags use 40% less energy to produce and generate 70% less emissions & 80% less solid waste than paper. (U.S. EPA website, www.epa.gov/region1/communities/shopbags.html)
Myth: Plastic grocery bags take 1,000 years to decompose in landfills.
Fact: Today’s landfills are designed to prevent decomposition of anything. Chances are your orange peel, milk carton and even last year’s newspaper won’t breakdown. Research by William Rathje, who runs the Garbage Project, has shown that when excavated from a landfill, newspapers from the 1960s can be intact and readable.

"Food Confused"

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 15:34:00 EDT

Brit writer Lucas Hollwegtries joins me in the ranks of the "food confused":

Some choices are straightforward. Processed food clearly puts you on the fast track to hell. As for animal welfare, I won’t eat anything that hasn’t had weekly spa treatments. But organic? I used to think it was a no-brainer: good for the planet (no energy wasted on fertilisers and pesticides); good for the soil (it works with nature, rather than against it); good for the creatures that inhabit furrow and field (livestock, wildlife, farmers). It is also, arguably, good for us.
But when food miles enter the equation, organic quickly loses its halo.

More about the various demands on your stomach and your planet from Ron Bailey, who says organic farming could kill billions.

Remembering the Gores and the PMRC

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 16:03:00 EDT

Matt Kibbe of FreedomWorks recalls some of the ironies of Al and Tipper Gore, who crusaded against what passed for raunchy pop muisc (e.g. Prince's "Darling Nikki") back in the 1980s, sharing Live Earth stages with the likes of Madonna (a leading indicator of the decline of Western civilzation, according to Tipper-led Parents Music Resource Center) and Snoop Dog:

Remember the Parents Music Resource Center, co-founded by Tipper Gore a few years before her husband ran for president in 1988? The PMRC was the perfect political platform for the Gores to establish their deep concern for "the children" being exposed to suggestive lyrics in popular music. Madonna, today's environmental crusader and Live Earth star, was then branded one of the "Filthy Fifteen" by Tipper and the PMRC. Congressional hearings were scheduled, and Senators' hands were wrung. The quote printed above was in fact Senator Al Gore's opening statement at the 1985 Senate hearing, excoriating music industry executives for pedaling dirty music to kids. In the process, he established his bonafides as a "New Democrat" right in time for his first national campaign.
Today, Al Gore gets along famously with the music industry, and has apparently gotten over his earlier concerns about lyrical content. "Music," he now says, "is a universal language that can reach people in ways that no other medium can." I agree with that, and humbly suggest that Tipper download Hamburg Live Earth headliner Snoop Dogg's "Gin and Juice." She probably won't like it, but hey, we all have to make sacrifices for the environment.

More here.

Tipper on Prince, last seen hiding behind a sheet at the Super Bowl halftime show:

Like many parents of my generation, I grew up listening to rock music and loving it, watching television and being entertained by it. I still enjoy both. But something has happened since the days of "Twist and Shout" and "I Love Lucy."...
Prince peddled more than ten million copies of Purple Rain, which included a song about a young girl masturbating in a hotel lobby.
This kind of rock music is only part of an escalating trend toward the use of more explicit sex and graphic violence in entertainment industry offerings, from movies and videos to jeans and perfume ads. Music is the most unexpected medium, and rock music has shown perhaps the least willingness to exercise self-restraint.

More from Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society (1987) here.

Here's a list of the original "Filthy Fifteen," the songs the PMRC found particularly appalling. Of special note: Two of the tunes are cited for referencing the "occult."

#	Artist	Song title	Lyrical content
1	Prince	"Darling Nikki"	Sex/Masturbation
2	Sheena Easton	"Sugar Walls"	Sex
3	Judas Priest	"Eat Me Alive"	Sex
4	Vanity	"Strap on Robbie Baby"	Sex
5	Mötley Crüe	"Bastard"	Violence
6	AC/DC	"Let Me Put My Love into You"	Sex
7	Twisted Sister	"We're Not Gonna Take It"	Violence
8	Madonna	"Dress You Up"	Sex
9	W.A.S.P.	"Animal (Fuck Like a Beast)"	Sex/Language
10	Def Leppard	"High 'n' Dry (Saturday Night)"	Drug and Alcohol Use
11	Mercyful Fate	"Into the Coven"	Occult
12	Black Sabbath	"Trashed"	Drug and Alcohol Use
13	Mary Jane Girls	"In My House"	Sex
14	Venom	"Possessed"	Occult
15	Cyndi Lauper	"She Bop"	Sex/Masturbation

Green to be Seen

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 11:59:00 EDT

The Times wonders why the Toyota Prius is so much more successful than its hybrid competitors:

A riddle: Why has the Toyota Prius enjoyed such success, with sales of more than 400,000 in the United States, when most other hybrid models struggle to find buyer. One answer may be that buyers of the Prius want everyone to know they are driving a hybrid.
The Prius, after all, was built from the ground up as a hybrid, and is sold only as a hybrid. By contrast, the main way to tell that a Honda Civic, Ford Escape or Saturn Vue is a hybrid version is a small badge on the trunk or side panel.
The Prius has become, in a sense, the four-wheel equivalent of those popular rubber “issue bracelets” in yellow and other colors — it shows the world that its owner cares.

In fact, more than half of the Prius buyers surveyed this spring by CNW Marketing Research of Bandon, Ore., said the main reason they purchased their car was that “it makes a statement about me.”

...
“I really want people to know that I care about the environment,” said Joy Feasley of Philadelphia, owner of a green 2006 Prius. “I like that people stop and ask me how I like my car.”
Mary Gatch of Charleston, S.C., chose the car over a hybrid version of the Toyota Camry after trading in a Lexus sedan.
“I felt like the Camry Hybrid was too subtle for the message I wanted to put out there,” Ms. Gatch said. “I wanted to have the biggest impact that I could, and the Prius puts out a clearer message.

But who needs CNW Marketing's research data when we have Matt Stone and Trey Parker?

In other news, not everyone desires to be seen when driving a Prius—especially when in possession of a Chris Benoit-load of pharmaceuticals.