Now before Greenpeace hones a quill for a sharply worded reprimand, let me clarify: I am not dismissing concerns over anthropogenic carbon emissions (or nineteenth-century wolf-phobias for that matter), but wondering aloud whether or not our policy choices will have similar long-term unintended consequences. The amateur historian in me thinks it highly likely that we will come to regret large-scale managed “solutions” to what ails us, whether the dragons we slay come slavering at night or quietly in the air.

Battling grievous menaces to public welfare ought, by all reason, to be supported at public expense. Or so the prevailing wisdom goes. Take wolves for instance. The long-running nationwide government wolf extirpation program has lasted for longer than our history as a nation. It continued for well over a century after Lincoln’s firsthand experience, and Jefferson himself had recalled state wolf bounty programs more than a century earlier. By 1914 the program really got down to business, and Congress gave the U.S. Biological Survey primary responsibility for wolf eradication, insisting that a third of its budget be used to kill wolves and their ilk (“survey” apparently had a different connotation in Great War America). Federal trappers killed the last two wolf pups in Yellowstone National Park in 1926, and wolf killing was being done from the air by Fish & Wildlife rangers as late as 1948.

And no, it wasn’t for lack of romantic attachment that wolves were removed from the habitable continent. Ernest Thompson Seton wrote with vivid prose lingering and sympathetic accounts of wolf trapping from the turn of the century. (Who can forget “Lobo” and “Blanca”?) Aldo Leopold writes with some dismay in Thinking Like a Mountain of his experience killing wolves as a forest ranger in Arizona in 1909. Qualms or not, however, wolves were a threat to progress. Government, clearly in the business of promoting progress by this time, was harnessed to do the dirty work and was, not surprisingly, rather successful at it.

Obviously Kevin Costner films weren’t yet in vogue. Or perhaps wolf imagery hadn’t quite made it onto the t-shirt scene. Either way, government bureaucrats weren’t privy to the sort of enlightened ecological sensitivity that even a grade-schooler possesses today.

Well of course, you say, that was a darker, dumber era now firmly behind us. We ought now to rest easier, allowing officials license to focus their efforts on solutions to today’s clearly pressing concerns—like carbon pollution. Since the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has deemed carbon emissions a “clear and unmistakable threat to the public welfare” and since an awful lot of experts seem to agree on this point, why buck the facts? Oh sure, there are a few misgivings by a few cranky troglodytes, but there are always some crackpots who won’t get with the program. I mean, when was the last time a panel of experts was wrong? Ignore for the moment eighteenth-century European naturalists on the new world’s “stunted” growth, the Royal Society’s views on geologic superposition, the science of eugenics, socialism as a masterpiece of human happiness, the Population Bomb and Snowball Earth madness of the 1970s, and more. There were probably even some skeptics who claimed that killing all the wolves was a bad idea in 1816. Imagine.

Plans to reduce carbon dioxide emissions are not all that different from the plans to reduce (and eventually eliminate) wolf populations. A reward, of sorts, is given for each unit of reduction—be it a cash bounty for wolf heads or a “credit” to keep a carbon emitter from having to pay a stiff fine. These credits, under a veneer of “free-marketism,” can be traded or sold to someone else who wasn’t as successful at reducing emissions. In Lincoln’s era, it was optional to hunt wolves, but today we are approaching a point where we are all coerced into the hunt for carbon credits. Even if you don’t happen to be a large-scale carbon emitter yourself, your consumption of things (electricity anyone?) will inevitably draw you into the chase.

Whether wolves or carbon, activity is being driven by central decision-makers as to what constitutes the proper way to handle things.

Again, it is not my intention to argue that carbon emissions aren’t important, or even to question whether or not they represent a public menace. (They may well be as threatening as wolves!) My only purpose is to cast a jaundiced eye on the proposed solutions to the crisis du jour. The Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, now has the power to regulate carbon emissions and by all indications appears intent on restricting the output of the dangerous stuff. Does anyone else feel another “survey” coming on?

Society’s tastes and mores are in constant flux, driving the inexorable drift of the tectonic structures we erect to “improve things.” And while norms can change radically and quickly (smoking? birth control?), the plans, programs, bureaus, and institutions generally do not. In fact they generally continue along their predetermined paths, creating errors of Himalayan proportions. If we believe the myopic shortsightedness that nearly extinguished Canis lupus has been corrected, we are fooling ourselves. We know many more things, to be sure, and particularly in the fields of natural science and ecology. But to believe that we can remotely grasp, let alone master, the intricacies of global climate is surely hubris at its best.

When you ask government to get things done it generally does. And that’s precisely the danger. What is an unambiguously brilliant notion for one generation may not sit so well with the next. The apex of Progressive Era thinking in the 1930s gave us the magnificent damming projects of the arid west, projects now roundly decried (oddly enough) by heirs of the Progressive Left who now wish us to demolish these projects at taxpayer—oops—“government” expense. This sort of policy pendulum is inevitable in a world marked by a less-than-perfect grasp on information.

The only way to mitigate this effect is to ensure that action keeps pace with the values and knowledge of the day. This can only be accomplished through the diffusion of power to an individual level, where actors with firsthand observations can react to dynamically changing situations.

I know we’re worried about global warming today. Nobody wishes to see Vanuatu slip under the Pacific. And maybe, for the first time in history, human-caused climate change represents “The Big Problem” that we need “The Big Fix” for. But I doubt it. Something tells me, deep inside, that managed overreaction to carbon emissions will lead just as surely to the kind of devastating policies that made wolves an endangered species.

In fact, writing as I do from ground zero in the gray wolf reintroduction zone, I’d be willing to bet as much: One hundred years from now (if carbon emissions are “solved” by the authorities), I give it better than even odds that governments will be requiring carbon emissions. Lincoln probably wouldn’t take the bet.

Apparently that is not the case. Ron Bailey of Reason reports on a study showing that the more familiar people become with the scientific literature, the more firmly they hold the position they started with — no matter which position it is! And what tends to determine people’s position? Their general values orientation.

“Confirmation bias is everywhere,” Bailey writes.

HT: Shikha Dalmia

This splendid volume, which had been in the works before Barry’s death, contains one essay by him and 11 others by scholars who knew him and appreciated his work. Their writings all deal with topics that were of great interest to Barry.

Taken as a whole, the book amounts to a wonderful coda to Barry’s intellectual symphony: his demonstration that a free society with a minimal, “night watchman” State is vastly preferable to all of the megastate alternatives. In contrast with many modern academics who settle into a narrow subfield and exhaust its every nook and cranny, Barry worked on a large number of issues regarding classical liberalism. The essays in the book similarly address an array of related topics, each making important contributions. Alas, in a short review there isn’t enough space to discuss them all.

One of Barry’s foremost concerns was the inevitable tendency for the State, whenever empowered to “solve” perceived social problems, to expand and crowd out voluntary action. Professor Martin Ricketts drives that point home, writing, “In the place of charities, churches, trade unions, clubs, mutual cooperatives, families, friendly societies, public companies, private companies, partnerships and a host of variants structured by individuals to meet local circumstances, state action imposes regulatory conformity. This is capable of making financial systems less stable, the environment less protected and social capital more vulnerable to erosion as life ebbs away from the very spontaneous institutions that nurtured it.” That is to say, there is an opportunity cost to State action.

Barry tried to combat the childish notion that our choices are between government control and doing nothing. In recent years that false dilemma has most clearly been illustrated by the debate over environmental policy. The book contains two essays presenting classical-liberal stances on environmental protection.

First, Colin Robinson argues that it’s a mistake to adopt an “atheistic” position in the face of the questionable science cited by climate-change alarmists (flatly denying there is any climate problem); rather we should instead be “agnostics” who argue that even if there is such a problem, relying on State coercion to deal with it will turn out badly. Robinson observes, “Such actions, by governments or international organizations, concentrate on consensus views (which have frequently been wrong in the past) creating informational monopolies and suppressing dissenting opinions. It suffers from the same problems as does the now discredited central planning.” He presents a strong case that we’ll do far better by relying on market institutions rather than government mandates and prohibitions.

Julian Morris follows with an essay exploring common-law remedies for environmental degradation. He suggests that organizations dedicated to environmental problems should rethink their overwhelming reliance on lobbying and legislation, pointing to the success of groups like the Anglers’ Conservation Association.

Another essay I find particularly appealing is Elaine Sternberg’s on the topic of business ethics and corporate social responsibility. She argues that those notions are subversive because they “undermine the negative freedom that is intrinsic to classical liberalism and to ethical conduct.” For years we have been hearing the claim that businesses have “social obligations” and must consider the well-being of all “stakeholders,” but Sternberg sees such demands as a way of browbeating business executives into substituting other people’s goals for what ought to be their focus, namely efficiency and profit maximization.

I also strongly recommend Terence Kealey’s essay, “Science Is Not a Public Good.” Kealey offers a bracing, iconoclastic argument against the prevalent notion that basic science is a “public good” that would be underproduced without government funding. Contrary to popular belief, it does pay for companies to invest in basic science because doing so helps them learn from others who are doing research and capitalize on it through “second-mover” advantages. When government steps in, scientific research is not increased or enhanced. On the contrary, political funding diverts resources into research that pleases politicians and their supporters.

Another Freeman contributor, Stephen Davies, has an essay on Barry’s contributions to modern classical-liberal thought. Davies covers the four main areas Barry concentrated on (constitutionalism, business ethics, welfarism and communitarianism, and spontaneous order) and finishes with the observation that, despite the appearance that classical liberalism gained ground during the 1980s and 1990s, Barry was pessimistic. Communism and central planning may have been discredited, but statist welfare thinking continued to dominate political discussions.

This excellent book is a fitting tribute.

Written in clear prose with only a hint of cynicism, Climate of Extremes provides an excellent source of scientific data for anyone more interested in climate-related facts than the usual partisan propaganda. Michaels and Balling present a comprehensive picture of earth’s ever-changing climate, with a keen eye toward historical facts. Their research-rich conclusion: Global warming is not a harbinger of doom, but rather the latest in a long history of natural, mostly innocuous, climatic shifts.

The authors begin with a primer on global-warming science, explaining that data indicate two pronounced periods of warming over the last century. The first lasted from about 1910 through 1945 and the second from 1975 through the available 2005 data. Crucially, there’s been no significant warming since a record-hot 1998.

But considerable problems arise when scientists try to project this global climate data forward. The vertical distribution of temperatures from the earth’s surface to the stratosphere above resides at the center of any projection. If the upper temperatures are consistently cooler—and recent measurements show they are—that means more clouds and rain, which in turn means less warming.

Citing a 2007 study, Michaels and Balling say all climate models, including those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), have very real and quite pronounced discrepancies in vertical distribution. These invariably lead to a sizable overestimation of future warming.

“What’s more,” they write, “the fact that none of the IPCC’s midrange models generates a warming-free 15-year period in the 21st century, which is happening right now, is very disturbing.”

Climate of Extremes proceeds in subsequent chapters to explore the weather phenomena most cited by global-warming alarmists as indicative of future disasters. From hurricanes to sea-level rise, and from floods to heat waves, Michaels and Balling methodically challenge one climate claim after another.

In one particularly persuasive chapter, the authors analyze the “climate of death” hysteria following the record 2003 European heat wave. They cite a study that pegged the probability of such an event at a surprisingly high 1 in 333. Given the earth’s massive size, summer 2003 in France and Germany was then more a tragically bad roll of the dice than a precursor of doom.

Michaels and Balling then cite the European heat wave of 2006 as evidence that global warming—and our response to it—might actually save lives. People learned from the 2003 anomaly, they explain, and were better prepared in 2006 with air conditioning and action plans. A study in the Journal of Epidemiology confirmed this theory, finding the death toll from summer 2006 was much lower than models predicted.

Furthermore, studies have consistently shown that climate-related death rates are higher in cold climates than in warm. So as temperatures continue to rise slowly, it’s easy to see how an aging population might fare better with fewer bitterly cold nights and more moderate temperatures. Again, global warming might save lives.

Not that such good news is ever reported, say Michaels and Balling. More likely, because it challenges the global-warming status quo, it is ignored or buried. On writing for a copy of IPCC data used to calculate their temperature history, Australian researcher Warwick Hughes received this curt reply from IPCC-affiliated scientist Phil Jones, who in December stepped down as head of the Climate Research Unit while the University of East Anglia investigated the “climategate” email affair: “We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”

Most people believe science only works through the free exchange of theories and ideas. Climate of Extremes demonstrates this is clearly not the case with scientists and bureaucrats who have a vested interest in propagating global-warming hysteria and for whom fact suppression to further a predetermined agenda is paramount.

Michaels and Balling show global warming has become a sacred cow, the growing body of dissenting evidence be damned. That should be enough to prompt any concerned person to seek out the facts, even if it means getting a little hot under the collar in the process.

If we substitute “the federal government” or “the United Nations Environment Programme” or “the European Union” for “you” and change the email to a proposed law, however, we discover that politicians from Washington to Brussels are embracing measures to “green” the economy and create “green jobs” with an almost religious fervor, despite weak empirical support for these proposals. The Obama administration included billions of spending and tax incentives for green initiatives in its budget, and last spring’s “stimulus” bill poured $62 billion in transfers plus $20 billion in tax cuts into “green initiatives.”

Unfortunately, the rhetoric about “greening the economy” or creating “green jobs” is just political window-dressing for some of the same central-planning measures proposed by the left for years. Behind that rhetoric are proposals built around government subsidies for favored technologies, measures to limit trade, and a great deal of wishful thinking about alternative energy measures not quite ready for prime time.

What Counts as Green?

The first problem in untangling the claims made by green-economy proponents is determining what counts as a “green” job or technology. Many times no definition at all is provided; even when the term is defined, different groups pick quite different definitions. For example, the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ report Current and Potential Green Jobs in the U.S. Economy defines a green job as

any activity that generates electricity using renewable or nuclear fuels, agriculture jobs supplying corn or soy for transportation fuels, manufacturing jobs producing goods used in renewable power generation, equipment dealers and wholesalers specializing in renewable energy or energy-efficiency products, construction and installation of energy and pollution management systems, government administration of environmental programs, and supporting jobs in the engineering, legal, research and consulting fields.

Interestingly, the mayors count jobs in existing nuclear power plants but not in new ones.

In contrast the United Nations Environment Programme’s Green Jobs: Towards Decent Work in a Sustainable, Low-Carbon World excludes all nuclear jobs, but includes all jobs said to “contribute substantially to preserving or restoring environmental quality.”

If we take politics into account we can explain these definitions. The Conference of Mayors is concerned with building a coalition for spending to benefit its members. Those mayors with nuclear power plants in their cities want to claim credit for greening their economy through nuclear plants (which also pay lots of local taxes). The U.N. report, on the other hand, was aimed at gaining support from an international environmental movement that detests nuclear power, which explains why it didn’t count any nuclear jobs.

Neither applies any objective criteria to the problem of defining which industries will gain and which will lose. For example, both define as “green” any jobs related to nonfossil-fuel technology, even if these energy sources (such as wood) release as much carbon dioxide per BTU of energy generated as fossil-fuel sources—or more. (Wood is much less efficient in terms of carbon emissions than either natural gas or gasoline on a per-BTU basis.) Moreover, burning many renewable fuels produces considerable particulate pollution, both inside homes and outside—a serious problem particularly for women and children in developing countries.

Green-economy proponents also disagree about how green hydroelectric plants are. Many who advocate government spending on alternative energy also want to dismantle existing hydro projects to restore rivers and improve fish habitats. (And many of those dams were built with subsidies by the Bureau of Reclamation and Army Corps of Engineers and would have flunked any serious cost-benefit analysis.) But small hydro, their preferred alternative, is by definition “small.” As a result, it would take quite a few small hydro plants to produce sufficient energy to replace even a single large dam or coal-fired power plant. Not surprisingly, there is no evidence of a large-scale building boom in small hydro projects or even a serious effort to identify where such projects might be located.

Even more interestingly, both definitions are expansive enough to include “supporting jobs in the engineering, legal, research, and consulting fields.” Indeed, the Conference of Mayors found that the top two U.S. jurisdictions for current green jobs are New York City and Washington, D.C., suggesting that the investment in green technology so far is producing a lot of consultants, lawyers, and lobbyists rather than engineers or factory workers. Another estimate found more secretaries, management analysts, bookkeepers, and janitors among “green jobs” than environmental scientists.

Defining terms is essential to a rational policy debate; without clarity we end up with a division between favored and disfavored technologies driven by interest groups rather than by either market forces or logical thinking. Unfortunately, so far the green-economy literature has mostly produced lists of “technologies we like” and “technologies we don’t like” based on politics. We certainly shouldn’t be spending billions of dollars promoting what we can’t define.

Where Do Estimates Come From?

Even if we don’t quite know what a green economy looks like, its advocates assure us there will be lots of jobs and other benefits from converting to it. Not surprisingly, most green-economy proposals predict huge benefits at low cost, making them politically appealing. Jobs will appear in economically depressed areas, and energy efficiency will soar, saving firms, consumers, and governments billions. Unfortunately these benefits are largely due to inappropriate economic forecasting methods. In particular, most estimates are produced via “input-output analysis,” the same technique used to produce outlandish claims for the benefits of municipal stadium projects.

In an input-output analysis a vast matrix is calculated from economic data as they exist today, tracing connections between firms in different industries. For example, an automobile plant uses steel, aluminum, plastic, batteries, paint, tires, and other materials to produce cars with a particular amount of labor per car under current technology. If we thought that the plant would begin producing more cars, the input-output matrix could be used to calculate how much more steel, aluminum, and other inputs would be demanded by the car industry and how many more workers would be hired to work in it.

There is a role for such calculations in industry forecasts (predicting steel demand from auto production helps steel plants decide about investing in new capacity, for example). But using them to predict the impact of government programs to green the economy is problematic because the method rests on two assumptions that green proposals violate: constant prices and constant technology.

By definition, efforts to change energy technology are going to change technology and prices. The relationships in an input-output matrix based on using coal to generate electricity and gasoline to fuel cars simply aren’t applicable to an economy where substantial amounts of energy come from high-cost sources like wind and solar and the cars are hybrids or run on ethanol.

Worse, the green-economy predictions rest on extremely optimistic estimates of the impact of spending on new technologies. Almost no advocates of these policies deduct the jobs lost from replacing existing technologies with the new, green ones. Refinery workers, coal miners, fossil-fuel power plant workers, and many others will all lose their jobs if the proposed shift to nonfossil fuels takes place. Some of those workers may find jobs insulating public buildings or bolting together windmills, but many will not. Because all that public spending to produce these new technologies comes from taxes (whether today or in the future), it reduces private spending and so eliminates the jobs that would have been created by the higher private spending displaced by the taxes.

Any estimates of major changes are likely to be imprecise even if all these factors are taken into account because of the considerable uncertainty surrounding these relationships. Ignoring all the downsides, as green-economy proponents do, suggests that they are less interested in accurate predictions than in creating political pressure for policies regardless of their impact.

Labor Productivity

Even if we set aside these technical issues, however, there are still some serious problems with green-economy plans. Perhaps most important, the literature mistakenly glorifies low-productivity jobs on grounds that more employment is better. For example, the UN Environment Programme criticizes modern agriculture because “labor is extruded from all points in the system,” argues wind and solar are better technologies because producing each BTU of energy requires more labor than in fossil-fuel industries, and argues that the steel industry has evolved to use too little labor.

To see why this is a problem, let’s consider ethanol. Although even many environmentalists now recognize ethanol’s problems, it was the darling of alternative-energy proponents for many years, and hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies have produced a substantial corn-based ethanol industry in the United States. (Despite these subsidies, the fuel remains uncompetitive with gasoline at current gas prices.) Corn-based ethanol requires more labor to produce than gasoline does, largely because growing and processing corn is more labor-intensive than pumping and refining oil. As a result, green-economy advocates score ethanol higher than gasoline since each BTU of energy in ethanol takes more labor to make than a BTU of gasoline.

But lower labor productivity is a bad thing not a benefit. Not only does more labor mean higher costs, but higher-productivity jobs (generally those that involve working with greater amounts of capital) can pay higher wages precisely because they are more productive. Low-productivity jobs are low-paying jobs because employers cannot afford to pay their employees more than the employees generate. If more labor were the metric, we’d all be better off using quills and parchment in place of computers.

Rejecting Trade

The advocates for greening the economy reject more than basic labor economics. They also believe that a green economy is one with relatively little trade. The literature emphasizes buying locally produced goods over those from other areas, both to save the transportation costs and to promote self-sufficiency. Not surprisingly, the UN Environment Programme criticizes Walmart for its global supply chain:

Companies like Wal-Mart (with its policy of global sourcing and especially its policy of searching for cheap products, with potential negative impacts for labor and the environment) are major drivers and symptoms of [increased global trade]. . . . Ultimately a more sustainable economic system will have to be based on shorter distances and thus reduced transportation needs. This is not so much a technical challenge as a fundamental systemic challenge.

To be fair, the benefits of trade are sometimes hard to understand. Nobel Prize-winner Paul Samuelson said the theory of comparative advantage was a contribution of economic theory that was both “nonobvious and nontrivial,” and generations of Econ 101 instructors have proved his point by struggling to get students to understand it. But the libertarian case for trade is remarkably simple and clear: Voluntary exchanges must make people better off or they wouldn’t occur, so a world with more voluntary exchange is preferable to one with less. Even the person most confused by trade theory can understand that autarky (producing everything locally) is a recipe for disaster by examining the record of Albania under communist dictator Enver Hoxha or North Korea today, two examples of societies where the rulers reject virtually all trade.

Moreover, the idea of locally grown food (a key component of the green economy) is hard to accept for those of us living far enough north to lack a year-round growing season. From my home in rural Illinois, I can see miles of soybean and corn fields. I am delighted that my neighbors can trade their corn and soybeans to people living elsewhere and that people in countries from France to Honduras to Israel to New Zealand send agricultural products here in return. I can buy French wine, Honduran bananas, Israeli citrus, and New Zealand lamb in my local grocery store because of trade, enriching both the variety and healthfulness of my diet. Even if it didn’t make us better off, the freedom to trade would be an important liberty. Since it does, it is indispensable to the vastly better lives we live today compared to our ancestors.

Ignoring Incentives

Those advocating for a green economy often appear to believe that no one will undertake any measures to improve environmental quality or conserve resources without a government program to show them the way. We know this is false because we have over a hundred years of experience with market incentives for both providing environmental quality and reducing resource use.

Studies of income levels and environmental quality have found what is termed the “environmental Kuznets curve,” a U-shaped relationship between national income and environmental quality. As very poor countries begin to develop, environmental quality often falls as energy production and use increase, factories appear, and people begin to consume more. But once per capita gross domestic product (GDP) reaches about $5,000, people can afford to spend more on improving the environment. Not surprisingly they do, and environmental quality improves after that point with respect to most pollutants for which we have data. In short, richer is greener.

The Environmental Kuznets Curve

Environmental quality also improves because market incentives spur firms to reduce energy and resource use. Any firm that cuts its energy use can devote the savings to undercutting its competitors’ prices. This has happened on an economy-wide basis. For example, from the 1970s to 2000, energy use per dollar of real GDP fell by 36 percent as firms economized on energy without reducing output.
Each unit of energy input yielded four times as much useful heat, moved people 550 times farther, provided 50 times more illumination, and produced 12 times as much electricity in 2000 compared to 1900—a stunning success story. Major energy-using industries like steel, aluminum, and paper have all become more energy- and resource-efficient, while consumer goods like refrigerators have become larger, more feature-rich, and cheaper to operate. It doesn’t take a government program to make firms more efficient, but it does take a market economy.

According to its proponents, the green economy will run on biofuels, wind, and solar power, ushering in a new age of clean energy. Unfortunately, this is mostly wishful thinking. The Department of Energy (DOE) says wind currently contributes less than 0.6 percent of total U.S. energy production. (Usually green-energy advocates note that it contributes 7 percent of renewable electricity generation, ignoring the less flattering total energy numbers.) Moreover, wind is both expensive and unreliable, as wind turbines produce energy only when the wind blows. Plus the massive wind farms green-energy advocates envision would require building what DOE estimates are $60 billion of new transmission lines (which many environmentalists oppose) and offshore wind farms like the Cape Wind project (blocked for years by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, who objected to its impact on the view from his sailboat). There are also important questions about wind turbines’ effects on bird populations and the impact of “shadow flicker” from the turbine blades on neighbors. Similarly, solar power (mostly solar thermal and hot-water production) currently produces only 0.05 percent of U.S. energy consumption and is projected by DOE to rise to just 0.13 percent by 2030. Solar panel arrays take a great deal of land, usually in sensitive desert environments where endangered-species issues have already blocked some proposed photovoltaic sites. And both solar and wind power require expensive backup plants for when weather conditions aren’t right (such as at night and on days without wind).

None of these problems are insurmountable, and it is quite possible (and perhaps likely) that as the prices of natural gas and oil rise in the future, an entrepreneurial inventor will find ways to make these technologies viable. The problem is that they are not viable today and will not become so in an environment of subsidies.

(a) there are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and the fictitious atmospheric greenhouse effects, (b) there are no calculations to determine an average surface temperature of a planet, (c) the frequently mentioned difference of 33 degrees Celsius is a meaningless number calculated wrongly, (d) the formulas of cavity radiation are used inappropriately, (e) the assumption of a radiative balance is unphysical, (f) thermal conductivity and friction must not be set to zero, the atmospheric greenhouse conjecture is falsified.

HT: Brad SpanglerUpdate:I have been informed that this paper is crank-work that was debunked long ago. I don’t know. Here are the links that were provided me:http://rabett.blogspot.com/2008/02/all-you-never-wanted-to-know-about.htmlhttp://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/03/07/open-thread-11/In particular this comment:http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/03/07/open-thread-11/#comment-29463http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/03/gerlich_and_tscheuschner_oh_my.phpand, what may end up being a peer-reviewed rebuttal:http://rabett.blogspot.com/2009/04/reading-assignments-rabett-run-labs-has.html

I would have been convinced by 10 or so.

FEE Timely Classic:
“Environmentalism: The Triumph of Politics” by Doug Bandow

“China, which last month for the first time publicly announced a target for reducing the rate of growth of its greenhouse gas emissions, is refusing to accept any kind of international monitoring of its emissions levels, according to negotiators and observers here. The United States is insisting that without stringent verification of China’s actions, it cannot support any deal.” (New York Times, Tuesday)

Could China save the world from global governance?

FEE Timely Classic:
“Global Politics, Political Warming” by Doug Bandow

Just call it the Global CO2 Slush Fund.

FEE Timely Classic:
“The International Monetary Fund” by Kevin S. Ewert

EPA’s endangerment finding endangers the U.S. economy. Whether dealt with by the brute force of command-and-control regulation or through cap-and-trade legislation, avoiding endangerment imposes high cost with little benefit on a people caught in the throes of the Great Recession.  Unfortunately for those who seek a meaningful reductions in total greenhouse gas emissions, reductions taken unilaterally by richer nations will quickly be replaced by expanding emissions from the developing world.  Wishing it were not so will not make it so.  There is a better “no regrets” path that should be considered.  Let’s now consider these points.

Paving the way to Copenhagen

Orchestrated in ways that would make a Shakespearean play director green with envy, the EPA announcement was perfectly timed to coincide with the start of the Copenhagen Conference on climate change.  The proclamation armed President Obama with much needed rhetoric for his Copenhagen soliloquy.

Frank O’Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch, enthusiastically described the news this way: “This means the US can go to Copenhagen and negotiate from a position of strength. It shows the world that the Obama administration is serious about tackling the climate problem even if legislation in the Senate falls flat.”  And then, Mr. O’Donnell unveiled the political knife beneath the robe: “It’s also a reminder to the Senate that if they sit on their hands, the Obama EPA is going to do something to regulate these emissions.”

Even though the U.S. Congress is the constitutionally ordained body that makes laws in this country, Mr. Obama will be able to point to the EPA ruling and say something like this:  “We are serious about change. Here’s what we are doing to lead in the fight to save our threatened planet.”

While paving the way for some high-sounding speech making and reams of green publicity, the endangerment finding endangers the U.S. economy by forming one side of a green regulatory/legislative vise that will transfer wealth to powerful political interest groups while environmental angels sing the praises of the party in power.

As Senator John Kerry, sponsor of the Senate cap-and-trade bill, so deftly described the outcome: “The message to Congress is clear: get moving.  If Congress does not pass legislation dealing with climate change, the administration is more than justified to use the EPA to impose new regulations. Those who now aim to grind the legislative process to a halt would later come running to Congress to secure the kinds of incentives that we can pass today.”

The jaws of the vise are set to tighten.  And the sellers of political favors will have a heyday.

Money for Nothing Meets Bootleggers and Baptists

Endangerment marries Professor Fred S. McChesney’s “Money for Nothing” theory of regulation with my “Bootleggers and Baptists” story.  And this unholy matrimony will produce the most toxic regulatory process witnessed since Franklin Delano Roosevelt cartelized the U.S. economy when he established the National Recovery Administration in 1933.  How so?  Let’s consider the theories, their interaction, and the sorry forecast they produce.  I’ll then offer a no-regrets policy.

McChesney’s theory is described in his 1997 Harvard University Press book, Money for Nothing: Politicians, Rent Extraction, and Political Extortion.  The book builds a strong and elegant political economy theory that is used, for among other things, to explain the prevalence of “milker” or “juice” bills that politicians write.  These bills have as their purpose milking funds from the industry or group about to be regulated or squeezing as much juice as possible from those who previously gained a political advantage by regulations written by the same politicians. In economist’s jargon, the extracted juice or milk is called “rent.” Thus the term “rent extraction.”

With no intention of guiding a bill to final law, but with no certainty that the laws might not become final, the deft politician can auction his or her promise not to act to the highest bidder.  With campaign contributions in the drawer, the threatening legislation can quietly be ushered to the coffin to rest till it rises again in a future legislative session, a perennial annuity producer for the canny politicians.

Endangerment-based command-and-control regulation poses a threat to every industry, small and large, in America.  Since all human activity produces carbon emissions, just how far the regulations might reach is unknown, and unknowable.  It is clear that automobiles, all other forms of transportation, and coal- and petroleum-burning industries are targets.  It is not as clear that large restaurants, hospitals, enclosed football stadiums, large cattle operations and other heat-generating, and greenhouse gas-producing, enterprises will be caught in the regulatory net.

If the regulatory remedy becomes the path to carbon-emission reductions, payments will flow from targeted industries that seek solace from the regulatory process.  They will be willing to pay money for nothing.  Here nothing means not being listed in the Federal Register when the rules are written.

“Bootleggers and Baptists” ride next to “Money for Nothing” in the toxic endangerment mix. Tens of thousands are making the pilgrimage to Copenhagen to demand penance and payment from the unwashed engaged in producing food, clothing, medicines, medical care, and other sources of life’s pleasures in a carbon-consuming world.  These “Baptists” seem to be taking the moral high ground when they claim the Copenhagen meeting is mankind’s last chance to reclaim the globe from the pending horrors of disappearing island nations, lost species, and the rising devastation of increased hurricanes, tornadoes, and droughts.

The environmental Baptists are joined by “bootleggers,” who may be producers of wind-driven turbines, solar cells, electric automobiles, clean-burning natural gas, and even nuclear energy producers.  Together, they lobby for limits on carbon emissions from the industrialized nations that raise competitors’ costs, give advantage in markets, and subsidize favored operations.  Special friends and interest groups will be showered with exceptions to rules that fall on the politically weak.  For example, the Senate version of cap-and-trade contains free allowances for a wide range of steel, cement, aluminum producers, gas companies, oil refineries, and gas and home heating oil consumers.

But can actions embraced by the developed world really deliver emission reductions for all the world?

Presbyterian College economist Jody Lipford and I have just completed a research project on carbon emissions from a sample of industrialized and developing world economies.  Our latest data indicate that carbon emissions to produce another dollar of per capita income vary widely across countries.  For example, China emits 2,173,000 metric tons of carbon to yield a $1 increase in per capita income. The U.S. emits 204,000 metric tons to get a dollar, and France emits just 2,470 metric tons to yield a dollar increase. China has just indicated a deep commitment to continuing economic growth while also taking steps to increase production of clean energy.  But any meaningful reduction in emissions from the United States or France will quickly be offset by expanding GDP in China.

A No-Regrets Policy Proposal

Given this insurmountable collective action problem and the prevalence of Bootleggers, Baptists and Money for Nothing in an endangered world, is there nothing that might be done to improve environmental quality?  Clearly there is.  And that has to do with creating wealth.

A no-regrets policy involves doing things that will pay off even if global climate change is found to be a passing phenomenon as opposed to being a permanent life threat. Environmental quality as defined by features of life that people value improves systematically over long periods of time when income per capita rises.  Hundreds of studies involving everything from forests to clean drinking water to lower concentrations of sulfur dioxide and suspended particulates show this to be the case.  Once people are threatened and have the income to take action, actions are taken.  Freeing people to produce and conserve more wealth is the longer run solution.

A no-regrets climate change policy calls for elimination of capital gains taxes so that investment in new (and therefore cleaner) capital is accelerated.  It calls for elimination of all subsidies or taxes on alternate forms of energy, so that people will make energy decisions on the basis of cost that reflect scarcity.  The policy calls for the elimination of all tariffs and non-tariff barriers that lead nations to engage in higher cost, lower value activities.  And the policy calls for opening the gates for the migration of capital and people, with accountability, so that all forms of wealth can move to preferred environmental- and economic-wealth creating locations. Freeing up economies so that income rises more readily seems to be the no-regrets policy.

The new EPA endangerment finding has endangered the U.S. economy.  This is the time for no regrets.