Archive for the ‘Energy and Environment’ Category
Cap ‘n Trade: The Ultimate Pork-Fest
Some naive people might have been convinced that the U.S. House voted to wreck the American economy by endorsing cap and trade because it was the only way to save the world. But even many environmentalists had given up on the bill approved last Friday. It is truly a monstrosity: it would cost consumers plenty, while doing little to reduce global temperatures.
But the legislation had something far more important for legislators and special interests alike. It was a pork-fest that wouldn’t quit.
As the most ambitious energy and climate-change legislation ever introduced in Congress made its way to a floor vote last Friday, it grew fat with compromises, carve-outs, concessions and out-and-out gifts intended to win the votes of wavering lawmakers and the support of powerful industries.
The deal making continued right up until the final minutes, with the bill’s co-author Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, doling out billions of dollars in promises on the House floor to secure the final votes needed for passage.
The bill was freighted with hundreds of pages of special-interest favors, even as environmentalists lamented that its greenhouse-gas reduction targets had been whittled down.
Some of the prizes were relatively small, like the $50 million hurricane research center for a freshman lawmaker from Florida.
Others were huge and threatened to undermine the environmental goals of the bill, like a series of compromises reached with rural and farm-state members that would funnel billions of dollars in payments to agriculture and forestry interests.
Automakers, steel companies, natural gas drillers, refiners, universities and real estate agents all got in on the fast-moving action.
The biggest concessions went to utilities, which wanted assurances that they could continue to operate and build coal — burning power plants without shouldering new costs. The utilities received not only tens of billions of dollars worth of free pollution permits, but also billions for work on technology to capture carbon-dioxide emissions from coal combustion to help meet future pollution targets.
That deal, negotiated by Representative Rick Boucher, a conservative Democrat from Virginia’s coal country, won the support of the Edison Electric Institute, the utility industry lobby, and lawmakers from regions dependent on coal for electricity.
Liberal Democrats got a piece, too. Representative Bobby Rush, Democrat of Illinois, withheld his support for the bill until a last-minute accord was struck to provide nearly $1 billion for energy-related jobs and job training for low-income workers and new subsidies for making public housing more energy-efficient.
Representative Joe Barton, a Texas Republican staunchly opposed to the bill, marveled at the deal-cutting on Friday.
“It is unprecedented,” Mr. Barton said, “but at least it’s transparent.”
This shouldn’t surprise anyone who follows Washington. Still, the degree of special interest dealing was extraordinary. Anyone want to imagine what a health care “reform” bill is likely to look like when legislators finish with it?
Filed under: Energy and Environment; Government and Politics; Tax and Budget Policy
Charles Rangel Keeps a Cool Head
Pat Michaels and I have written an op-ed on the climate change bill due for a vote tomorrow in Congress, and our opinions on its provisions are summarized pretty well there. In short, the bill appears to offer very little in the way of reduced global warming in return for harm to the domestic economy and to international relations.
Yesterday’s New York Times energy and environment section (online) contains an article picking up on the increasingly harmful trade-related parts of the bill. Apparently the House Ways and Means Committee is trying to assert language that would make imposing carbon tariffs more likely than did the original Energy and Commerce Committee bill, bad enough that it was.
So what say you, Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and a powerful voice on trade?
[Rangel] downplayed the significance of his proposals. “I don’t think there will be many changes there,” he said. “There are just provisions in there that deal with trade and the poor. It’s not changes, it’s just vacuum.”
Assuming the quote was not taken out of context, for the leading House voice on trade to be so dismissive of important (if somewhat under-the-radar) provisions is irresponsible to say the least.
Washington Metro’s Problem: Too Much Money
The terrible Washington Metrorail crash that killed nine people has led to calls for more money for transit. Yet the real problem with Washington Metro, as with almost every other transit agency in this country, is that it has too much money — it just spends the money in the wrong places.
“More money” seems to be the solution to every transit issue. Is ridership down? Then transit agencies need more money to attract more riders. Is ridership up? Then agencies need more money because fares only cover a quarter of the costs.
Yet the truth is that urban transit is the most expensive form of transportation in the United States. Where the average auto user spends about 24 cents per passenger mile, transit costs more than 80 cents per passenger mile, three-fourths of which is subsidized by general taxpayers. Subsidies to auto driving average less than a penny per passenger mile. Where autos carry 85 percent of American passenger travel, transit carries about 1 percent.
When Congress began diverting highway user fees to transit in 1982, it gave transit agencies incentives to invest in high-cost transportation systems such as subways and light rail when lower-cost systems such as buses would often work just as well. Once they build the high-cost systems, the transit agencies never plan for the costs of reconstructing them, which is needed about every 30 years. The Washington Metro system, which was built as a “demonstration project” in the 1970s, is just a little ahead of the curve.
Now over 30 years old, Washington’s subways are beginning to break down. Before the recent accident, some of the symptoms were broken rails, smoke in the tunnels, and elevator and escalator outages.
Now we learn that the National Transportation Safety Board told Metro in 2006 to replace the cars that crashed on Monday because they were in danger of “telescoping,” which is what killed so many people in Monday’s accident. Also, the brakes were overdue for maintenance. Metro responded that it planned to eventually replace the obsolete cars, but didn’t have the money for it.
But it does have money to build an expensive new rail line to Tysons Corner and, eventually, Dulles Airport. Planners had originally recommended running bus-rapid transit along this route, but that wasn’t expensive enough so Metro decided to go with rails instead — at ten times the cost of the bus line.
The simple problem is that we have forgotten about the need to weigh revenues and costs. Instead, transit has become a favorite form of pork barrel and, for the slightly more idealistic, a method of social engineering, meaning a part of the Obama administration’s campaign to “coerce people out of their cars.”
That’s one more government program we can do without.
Turning Transportation Funding Upside-Down
House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chair James Oberstar (D-MN) has released more than 100 pages of documents describing how he wants to run federal transportation programs over the next six years. He proposes to spend $500 billion on highways and transit, which is a huge increase over the $338 billion authorized for the last six years.
Congress authorizes federal transportation spending in six-year cycles. In 1956, when Congress created the Interstate Highway System, it dedicated gas taxes and other highway user fees exclusively to highways. But in the 1982 reauthorization, it began diverting a small amount of gas taxes to transit.
Today, about 20 percent of the federal gas taxes you pay go to subsidize transit, while the other 80 percent supposedly go for highways — though much of that is wasted in planning and earmarks. Nationally, highway subsidies — mostly at the local level — average about a penny per passenger mile, while transit subsidies — much from your federal gas tax — average more than 60 cents per passenger mile.
Since 1982, transit has received hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies from highway users. Yet in 2008 — supposedly a boom year for transit because of high gas prices — per-capita transit ridership was lower than it was in 1990, though higher than in 2000.
Oberstar considers this to be a great success. Building on that “success,” he effectively wants to turn the formula around: 20 percent for highways and 80 percent for transit. The executive summary of his plan supposedly “provides $337.4 billion for highways.” But, in fact, only $100 billion of this is dedicated to highways; most of the rest is in “flexible funds” that states and cities can spend on either highways or transit. Nearly $100 billion goes for transit, and $50 billion goes for high-speed rail. The remaining $12.4 billion goes for safety programs.
Not So Free Love in San Francisco
Yet again the city of San Francisco is demonstrating its “love” for humanity. By threatening to fine them for getting their garbage wrong.
Trash collectors in San Francisco will soon be doing more than just gathering garbage: They’ll be keeping an eye out for people who toss food scraps out with their rubbish.
San Francisco this week passed a mandatory composting law that is believed to be the strictest such ordinance in the nation. Residents will be required to have three color-coded trash bins, including one for recycling, one for trash and a new one for compost — everything from banana peels to coffee grounds.
The law makes San Francisco the leader yet again in environmentally friendly measures, following up on other green initiatives such as banning plastic bags at supermarkets.
Food scraps sent to a landfill decompose fast and turn into methane gas, a potent greenhouse gas. Under the new system, collected scraps will be turned into compost that helps area farms and vineyards flourish. The city eventually wants to eliminate waste at landfills by 2020.
Chris Peck, the state’s Integrated Waste Management Board spokesman, said he wasn’t aware of an ordinance as tough as San Francisco’s. Many cities, including Pittsburgh and San Diego, require residents to recycle yard waste but not food scraps. Seattle requires households to put scraps in the compost bin or have a composting system, but those who don’t comply aren’t fined.
“The city has been progressive, and they’ve been leaders and it appears that they’re stepping out of the pack again,” he said.
San Francisco officials said they aren’t looking to punish violators harshly.
Waste collectors will not pick through anyone’s garbage, said Robert Reed, a spokesman for Sunset Scavenger Co., which handles the city’s recyclables. If the wrong kind of materials are noticed while a bin is being emptied, workers will leave what Reed called “a love note,” to let customers know they are not with the program.
“We’re not going to lock you up in jail if you don’t compost,” said Nathan Ballard, a spokesman for Mayor Gavin Newsom who proposed the measure that passed Tuesday. “We’re going to make it as easy as possible for San Franciscans to learn how to compost.”
A moratorium on imposing fines will end in 2010, after which repeat offenders like individuals and small businesses generating less than a cubic yard of refuse a week face fines of up to $100.
Businesses that don’t provide the proper containers face a $500 fine.
Most everyone wants to be loved. But this sort of government “love” we can all do without!
Cash for Clunkers Lesson: How to Use the $$ to Buy a Gas Guzzler
My son’s station car is an old Ford Explorer AWD which, despite being a V-6, was rated at about 15 mpg. Approaching 100,000 miles, the SUV’ s resale value is very low.
The House approved a bill to give him a $3,500 voucher to buy a car that is supposed to get only 18 mpg, or $4,500 if it gets 20 mpg. Only 18-20 mpg? That’s not moving us much closer to President Obama’s pie-in-the-sky 35.5 mpg goalpost is it?
Consider how easy it would be to game this giveaway program by using that $4,500 voucher to buy a big SUV or V-8 muscle car.
First of all, with Chrysler and GM dealerships folding, it should be easy to buy a mediocre Chevy Cobalt or Dodge Caliber for about $10,000 more than the voucher.
What you do next is sell that boring econobox, even if you end up with $1,000 less than you paid — that still leaves you with $3,500 of free money, courtesy of taxpayers.
As this process unfolds, the flood of resold small cars will make it even harder for GM, Chrysler and Ford dealers to get a decent price for small cars, because of added competition from new cars being resold as used.
That’s their problem, not yours.
So, take the $9,000 net from reselling the crummy little car plus the $4,500 from Uncle Sam. Then use that $13,500 to make a big down payment on a used Cadillac Escalade, Toyota Tundra pickup or Corvette.
File this under “unintended consequences” (my own file is running out of space).
Filed under: Energy and Environment; Government and Politics; Regulatory Studies; Tax and Budget Policy
Which Is Greener?
Which uses less energy and emits less pollution: a train, a bus, or a car? Advocates of rail transportation rely on the public’s willingness to take for granted the assumption that trains — whether light rail, subways, or high-speed intercity rail — are the most energy-efficient and cleanest forms of transportation. But there is plenty of evidence that this is far from true.
Rail advocates often reason like this: the average car has 1.1 people in it. Compare the BTUs or carbon emissions per passenger mile with those from a full train, and the train wins hands down.
The problem with such hypothetical examples is that the numbers are always wrong. As a recent study from the University of California (Davis) notes, the load factors are critical.
Americans Want Global Warming Action Now
Dana Milbank has the evidence:
For the past few years, liberal activists have gathered in Washington each spring for the Take Back America conference….
But now that Obama has actually taken back America, the activists at this year’s gathering feel a bit like the dog that finally caught up with the car. Organizers changed the name from Take Back America to America’s Future Now, but that didn’t prevent a sharp decline in participation. …
Hickey estimates attendance dropped from 2,500 last year to 1,500 this year, and even that may overstate things. At yesterday morning’s four concurrent “issue briefings,” 585 chairs were set out. Only 213 of them were occupied, including just 15 for the session on global warming.
Obama’s Energy Reading
The Washington Post writes about how President Obama became obsessed with grabbing our complex energy systems by the scruff of the neck and shaking them into something more appealing to Ivy League planners. I was struck by this vignette:
But even before the late-night session in July, Obama had begun to educate himself about energy and climate and to use those issues to define himself as a politician, say people who have advised him. He read a three-part New Yorker series on climate change, for instance, and mentioned it in three speeches.
It’s great that he read a three-part series in the New Yorker. But has the president ever actually read anything by a climate change skeptic? Actually, a better term would be “a climate change moderate.” Leading “skeptic” Patrick J. Michaels, for instance, of Cato and the University of Virginia, isn’t skeptical about the reality of global warming. His summary article in the Cato Handbook for Policymakers begins:
Global warming is indeed real, and human activity has been a contributor since 1975.
But he also notes that climate change is complex, and its policy implications are at best unclear. “Although there are many different legislative proposals for substantial reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, there is no operational or tested suite of technologies that can accomplish the goals of such legislation.” The flawed computer models on which activists rely cannot reliably predict the future course of world temperatures. The apocalyptic visions that dominate the media are not based on sound science. The best guess is that over the next century there will be very slight warming, without serious implications for our environment our society. Michaels’s closing appeal to members of Congress would also apply to President Obama and his advisers:
Members of Congress need to ask difficult questions about global warming.
Does the most recent science and climate data argue for precipitous action? (No.) Is there a suite of technologies that can dramatically cut emissions by, say, 2050? (No.) Would such actions take away capital, in a futile attempt to stop warming, that would best be invested in the future? (Yes.) Finally, do we not have the responsibility to communicate this information to our citizens, despite disconnections between perceptions of climate change and climate reality? The answer is surely yes. If not the U.S. Congress, then whom? If not now, when? After we have committed to expensive policies that do not work in response to a misperception of global warming?
Please, President Obama — in addition to the lyrical magazine articles on the apocalyptic vision that you read, please read at least one article by a moderate and widely published climatologist before rushing into disastrously expensive policies.
Secretary of Behavior Modification
George Will recently accused Obama’s token Republican, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, of being the “Secretary for Behavior Modification” because of his support for programs designed to coerce people into driving less. Speaking before the National Press Club on May 21, LaHood pleaded guilty as charged.
In the video of LaHood’s presentation, he was asked if the administration’s “livability initiative” is really “an effort to make driving more tortuous and to coerce people out of their cars.” His answer: “It is a way to coerce people out of their cars, yeah.”
The next question was, “Some conservative groups are wary of the livable communities program, saying it’s an example of government intrusion into people’s lives. How do you respond?” His complete answer: “About everything we do around here is government intrusion in people’s lives.”
The President’s New Cars
I had an op-ed yesterday in USA Today about President Obama’s proposed new fuel-economy standards. Don’t like ‘em. Unfortunately, an editing snafu over at the newspaper inadvertently left out the fact that there are four models at present that meet the proposed new standard — the 2010 Honda Insight (41 mpg) and the 2010 Ford Fusion Hybrid (39 mpg) were left off the list.
Space prohibited me from making an additional point. Even if there is no rebound effect, my colleague Pat Michaels finds that global temperatures will only be reduced by 0.005 degrees Celsius by 2050 and 0.0078 degrees Celsius by 2100 once you plug those emissions reductions into the computer models used by the IPCC. Of course, proponents contend that U.S. action on fuel efficiency will lead to like action abroad. Well, good luck with that. But even if all of the signatories to the Kyoto Protocol adopted Obama’s proposed fuel-economy standards, global temperatures would be reduced by only 0.038 degrees Celsius by 2050 and 0.071 degrees Celsius by 2100. If you tried to monetarize those benefits, you would be hard pressed to come up with an defensible number of consequence.
So what should be done instead? Nothing. At the risk of sounding politically irrelevant, there is no good case for the government to reduce U.S. gasoline consumption via fuel economy standards or fuel taxes; an argument I made at length in a study I co-authored almost two years ago with my colleague Peter Van Doren.
[Cross-posted at The Corner]
Obama’s Fuel-Economy Standards
If you like driving a big car or SUV, the good news about Obama’s new fuel-economy standards is that they won’t dictate what kind of car you will be able to buy in the future. If you want to buy a 15-mpg SUV, Detroit (or Aichi or Wolfsburg) will be free to make and sell you one.
The bad news is that the standards may make your car more expensive. Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards are actually calculated as the mean of gallons per mile, not miles per gallon. So, as of 2016, for every 15-mpg model made by an auto maker, that company will have to make five models of cars that can go 50 mpg in order for its fleet to meet Obama’s new target. Since bringing each new model to market can cost billions of dollars, if there are not enough people who want to buy those fuel-efficient cars to cover their design costs, the company will have to add a share of those costs to your SUV.
Simultaneously Destroying and Subsidizing the Auto Industry
The Obama Administration has announced new fuel-economy regulations and emissions rules that will boost the cost of new car by at least $1300. This is probably another nail in the coffin of the American automobile industry, but Jerry Taylor is the guy to provide thoughtful analysis. When I read about the new White House scheme, the first thing that came to my mind was this extremely clever video (yes, I am envious that my videos are not this creative) about the type of car we will all be driving if politicians continue to run amok:
Energy Mismanagment
Try as they might, supporters of big government spending cannot make federal programs work very well. The Department of Energy, for example, has been plagued by mismanagement, cost overruns, and scandals for decades.
Today, the Washington Post reports on the poor performance of DoE’s environmental clean-up programs. As I reviewed in the linked essay, these enormously costly programs have been plagued by mismanagement for at least 25 years. Last week, Lou Dobbs lambasted DOE’s National Ignition Facility in California for its huge cost overruns (Hat Tip: Harrison Moar).
I summarize these costly projects and other DoE boondoggles here. With bipartisan support for increases to energy subsidies, we can expect a raft of bipartisan boondoggles developing over coming months and years.
Filed under: Energy and Environment; Government and Politics
Obama the Planner
New Republic editor John Judis has a couple of insights about the Obama administration’s economic and social goals. He points out that, for more than a century, Progressive and free-market forces have gone through cycles of “reform and reaction.”
The Progressives — who my friend John Baden calls the “American counterrevolutionaries” — have repeatedly sought to increase the size and scope of government: railroad regulation, public land agencies, and the income tax in the 1900s; Social Security, low-interest home loans, and government ownership of power plants in the 1930s; Medicare, the war on poverty, and environmental laws in the 1960s.
In between, friends of free markets tried to roll back those reforms, but were never completely successful. Thus, each successive reform era has further increased government power and reduced free markets.
I Swear I’m Not Making This Up
From today’s Washington Post:
In another sign that the Department of Agriculture is embracing sustainable food, the agency today will unveil expanded plans for a People’s Garden that will include the entire six-acre grounds of the Whitten Building, the department’s neoclassic marble headquarters on the Mall.
The plans, to be announced at the agency’s Earth Day celebrations, include a 1,300-square-foot organic vegetable garden — slightly larger than the one at the White House — as well as ornamental flower gardens and bioswales, or mini-wetlands designed to reduce pollution and surface water runoff.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to find out exactly what a “bioswale” is, and why I should pay for one in our new “People’s Garden.”
Obama’s Recycled Moderate-Speed Rail Plan
The Obama administration believes in recycling, as shown by the so-called high-speed rail plan it announced last week. Below is a map of the plan, and below that is a map of the Federal Railroad Administration’s 2005 high-speed rail plan. As you can see, the proposed routes are identical. (The grey lines on the first map represent conventional Amtrak routes.)
Comments on Criticism of Cato Ad
Our friends at www.realclimate.org and www.ryanavent.com have been taking shots at the statements in our ad, so I’d like to offer a little commentary.
We make three factual assertions.
First, we say that “surface temperature changes over the past century have been episodic and modest”. We cite Brohan et al., Journal of Geophysical Research (2006 and updates) and Swanson and Tsonis, Geophysical Research Letters, 2009. The first is the latest update of the East Anglia temperature history, which long has been the IPCC staple. It is the one most cited over the years by the IPCC because it was the first long history that contained much more than simply World Weather Records data updated with local records at the end of a month. At any rate, both it and other global histories indeed show modest warming, about 0.8degC from 1900-2000, and indeed it is episodic. Everyone (well probably almost everyone…there are some real people who don’t believe it is right) pretty much agrees that there are two periods of warming, 1910-45 and 1977-98, with a slight cooling in between and no trend after. If that’s not “episodic”, I don’t know what is. The Swanson paper in fact specifically quantifies these episodes. The paragaph near the end of it that says this may mean that warming will be faster than we thought was pure speculation. It could just have easily been argued (as I do) that the lack of recent warming more likely indicates that 21st century warming will be lower than forecast by oceanic feedback because lack of warming simply delays any water vapor amplification. Pure and simple.
The second assertion is that, “after controlling for population growth and property values, there has been no increase in damages from severe weather events”. The citation is short — a note in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, by Pielke Jr. et al, 2005. The et al. numbers over ten other large-name scientists/analysts, and the reference list is the important part. There are a large number of citations on climate-related damages for various places and/or periods. We couldn’t list them all in this format, so we chose a single citation that could be consulted and an interested reader would find all the subsidiary supporting material.
Finally we state that “the computer models forecasting rapid temperature change abjectly fail to explain recent climate behavior”, citing Douglas et al., International Journal of Climatology, 2007, which showed the major disparity between forecasts of the upper tropospheric tropical “warm spot”, a hallmark of greenhouse projections, and observations in the radiosonde record. Yes it is true that Santer et al. have published a lengthy rebuttal, but it is extremely dense and marks just another go-round-and-round over this issue. Douglas et al. have a response but it hasn’t been published yet. The debate will go on and on. Further, it is quite apparent from comparing midrange multimodel estimates from the IPCC to observed temperatures, and those indeed projected for coming years, that there is a signficant disconnect developing between the models and surface temperature. They simply don’t anticipate multidecadal periods without warming. Oh yes, since this has happened, all of the sudden models can be forced to “explain” it, but that’s not prospective. Instead, it is retrospective adjustment. Such work wouldn’t be performed if there weren’t something wrong.
That’s more than enough to negate President-elect Obama’s statement that “The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear”!
Thursday Podcast: ‘It’s Not High Speed Rail’
President Obama’s stimulus plan included about $8 billion for “high-speed rail” projects throughout the country.
But what Obama has in mind isn’t anything like the Japanese trains that have been clocked at over 300 miles per hour, says Cato Senior Fellow Randal O’Toole in Thursday’s Cato Daily Podcast. At best, it’s “moderate-speed rail,” and won’t include an interconnected network that will allow passenger transportation from coast to coast.
For more on American rail projects, check out O’Toole’s Policy Analysis, High-Speed Rail: The Wrong Road for America.
Who’s Blogging about Cato
Here’s a few bloggers who are writing, citing and linking to Cato research and commentary:
- Blogging from the 2009 International Conference on Climate Change, The Foundry’s Nick Loris covers Patrick J. Michaels’s lecture on an EPA program that will “circumvent Congressional legislation to curb greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) and regulate carbon dioxide.”
- Natch Greyes pens his thoughts on Thursday’s book forum featuring Patrick J. Michaels’s new book, Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don’t Want You to Know.
- Dan Kenitz cites an article by David Lampo on gun control.
- David Kirkpatrick links to Richard W. Rahn’s op-ed in The Washington Times about the increasing loss of liberty in the United Kingdom.
- Free-market energy blogger Robert Bradley, editor of Master Resource, cites Cato’s recognition of the women who launched the libertarian movement: Ayn Rand, Rose Wilder Lane and Isabel Paterson.
- Scott Horton 0f Anti-War Radio interviews Doug Bandow about relations between the US and China.
Let us know if you’re blogging about Cato by emailing cmoody@cato.org or drop us a line on Twitter @catoinstitute.
Filed under: Energy and Environment; Foreign Policy and National Security; General; Government and Politics
Events This Week at Cato
Thursday, March 12
12:00 PM (Luncheon to Follow)
BOOK FORUM: Cato senior fellow in environmental studies Patrick J. Michaels will discuss his new book, Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don’t Want You to Know with David Legates, Delaware state climatologist and director of the Delaware Environmental Observing System.
The book illustrates the crucial unreported news about climate change: that changes in hurricanes will be small, that global warming is likely to be modest, and that contrary to daily headlines, there is no apocalypse on the horizon.
Free registration for this event is now open, and it will be simulcast live on Cato’s Web site.
Transportation Reauthorization: Looking Beyond the Recession
1:30 PM (Refreshments Provided)
CAPITOL HILL BRIEFING: Randal O’Toole, Cato senior fellow and author of The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future, will join Robert Poole, director of Transportation Studies at the Reason Foundation for a discussion on transportation reform during the recession.
Register here for this free event.
Friday, March 13
12:00 PM (Luncheon to Follow)
Most defense analysts agree: the Pentagon is in serious need of reform. Acquisition programs run above cost and behind schedule. The U.S. defense budget is higher than at any point during the Cold War, but capability has not kept pace. We field fewer ships, aircraft, and tanks than we did in the days of lower procurement spending. And our defense spending prepares us better for the conventional wars we imagine than the unconventional conflicts we fight.
Featuring Winslow Wheeler, director of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information; Colonel Douglas Macgregor, U.S. Army (Retired), Straus Military Reform Project adviser; Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight; Thomas Ricks, senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and special military correspondent for the Washington Post; and Benjamin Friedman, research fellow in defense and homeland security at the Cato Institute.
Please register for this free event or watch live online.
Filed under: Cato Publications; Energy and Environment; Foreign Policy and National Security
Obama Administration Agrees with Cato on Auto Fuel Efficiency
Well, sort of. The Obama administration signaled last week their belief that it would be better to have one national fuel efficiency standard than a multiplicity of different state fuel efficiency standards. Now, we have long maintained that fuel efficiency standards — federal or state — are a bad idea. Consumers should be free to buy whatever sort of car they want without government economic coercion. But if we must do violence to consumer sovereignty, better to do so via one national standard rather than via a hodge-podge of differing state standards.
This is the very argument I made late in January over at The New York Times when asked about California’s petition to establish its own fuel efficiency standard as a means of addressing greenhouse gas emissions. Alas, I was pilloried on the NYT comments board at that time for all sorts of sins against man and nature. Now it appears that President Obama has come over to the dark side. Welcome to my world, Mr. President.
FutureGen: Economic and Political Decisions
People who support expanded federal intervention into areas such as energy and health care naively assume that policymakers can make economically rational and efficient decisions to allocate resources. They cannot, as a Washington Post story today on FutureGen illustrates.
The story describes the political battle over the location of a $1.8 billion ”clean coal” plant. I don’t know where the most efficient place to site such a plant is, or if such a plant makes any sense in the first place. But the story illustrates that as soon as such decisions are moved from the private sector to the political arena, millions of dollars are spent to lobby the decisionmakers, and members of Congress are hopelessly biased in favor of home-state spending regardless of what might be best for the national economy as a whole.
President Obama has promised to ramp up spending on such green projects. So get ready for some huge political fights over the big-dollar spoils, and get ready for some monsterous energy boondoggles.
Filed under: Energy and Environment; Government and Politics; Tax and Budget Policy
New Podcast: ‘Climate of Extremes’
With a polarized debate among the scientific community over climate change, what about experts who admit that climate change is real, but don’t think it’s the end of the world?
In today’s Cato Daily Podcast, Cato Senior Fellow in Environmental Studies Patrick J. Michaels explains the problem with the global warming debate.
Either it seems you think the world is coming to an end from climate change, and pronto, or you say there is no such thing as climate change.…Now it’s gotten to the point where if you say climate change is real, but it’s not the end of the world, both poles of the debate get angry at you.…But, in fact, that is the truth: climate change is real; it’s modest. It’s proceeding at a rate that is below the statistical rates predicted by the climate models; in other words, those models are in the process of failing.
Crédit Mobilier as a Model for High-Speed Rail
“History reminds us that at every moment of economic upheaval and transformation, this nation has responded with bold action and big ideas,” President Obama told Congress on February 24. “In the midst of civil war, we laid railroad tracks from one coast to another that spurred commerce and industry.”
Obama, who wants to make the construction of a national high-speed rail network his “signature issue,” no doubt sees this as a model. It was a poor choice.
Aside from the simple factual issue that most of the first transcontinental railroad was built after, not during, the war, most of Obama’s audience would have forgotten that its construction caused for one of the first and biggest financial swindles of the nineteenth century. That scandal was the result of a simple fact: such a railroad made no economic sense in the late 1860s.
China in Africa
Tom Ricks used to cover the Pentagon for the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. He wrote terrific books about the Marines and the war in Iraq. Now among other gigs, he is a blogger for Foreign Policy. It’s great when top-notch reporters write for blogs, even when they are overly enthusiastic about counterinsurgency warfare. That is an issue we will take up with Ricks when he visits Cato on March 13 for a forum on military reform.
I have a smaller bone to pick now. Ricks, like many Pentagon types, is worried about Chinese activities in Africa. He links to a story about a bridge-building project in Mali and suggests that the Chinese are doing something clever that we will someday realize has harmed us.
I hear variants of this all the time — China is doing stuff in Africa, so we must imitate them. It doesn’t make sense. Even if you think the United States has a zero-sum relationship with China where their gain is our loss (I don’t), you should worry about something else. There is little that China can do in Africa to make it stronger or to damage U.S. interests.
There are basically three things Americans worry about China doing in Africa: gaining influence from aid and diplomacy that it will use against us, gaining wealth from investments that it will use against us, or somehow screwing up our access to oil.
On the first concern, you have to ask what influence in Africa gets you, other than a happy feeling. Traditionally, as in World War II or the start of the Cold War, we worried about hostile states gaining industrial might by conquest that they could harness against us in a war. Whether or not that was a valid concern is open to academic debate, but there was never much reason to worry about Soviet efforts to buy support in poor countries during the Cold War. There was little to gain there in a geopolitical sense, outside of raw materials rare enough that they might be blocked from the market in a war. It makes even less sense to worry about China gaining influence in Africa now. If Mali likes China because it builds bridges there, so what? We are not poorer or less safe for it.
What about investments? Chinese investments in Mali are more useful to Mali and China than government aid, assuming the investments are sensible ones. If they are wise investments, however, U.S. companies won’t be far behind, and our national income will rise as a result. If they are not economically sensible, they will not enhance Chinese power, and we should not imitate them.
The biggest worry is that China is locking up energy supply in Africa. This concern is born of a failure to understand that oil is a global commodity. If the Chinese tap more of it, American consumers pay less too. If they own production facilities, that matters not at all if the oil is going to market. If the Chinese have a mercantilist energy policy, that is their problem. For more on energy alarmism, see here, here and here.
There is nothing sinister or clever about Chinese activity in Africa. Americans shouldn’t worry about it.
While we’re talking about Foreign Policy bloggers and developing countries, be sure to check Stephen Walt’s attack on his employers’ vacuous cover story: “The Axis of Upheaval.” Great stuff.
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