Harry Reid and other democratic leaders in the Senate have clearly indicated that cap-and-trade legislation will be put off at least, until what they call “spring”, which is long after the upcoming UN climate conference in Copenhagen next month. At the same time, President Obama has said that the U.S., along with China, will announce some type of emissions cap in Copenhagen. Obviously this cannot refer to legislation that has yet to be voted on in the Senate.

President Obama keeps using the language “operationally significant” when referring to what the U.S. will agree to in Copenhagen. The only way that he can get around the Senate and still have a credible position in Copenhagen is for the EPA to announce specific regulations for carbon dioxide emissions between now and the conclusion of the Copenhagen meeting in mid-December.

In 2007, supposedly fail-safe circuits in Metrorail’s train detection and control system began to “intermittently malfunction.” This contributed to at least one near miss before the fatal crash, and was the other major reason why nine people died in June.

Clearly, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation Authority is short of funds. It still has not begun to replace the 298 cars; instead, it is merely inserting them into the middle of trains so that, in the event of a crash, the will be buffered by newer (and hopefully stronger) cars.

According to the Federal Transit Administration, it will cost nearly $50 billion to bring rail lines in Washington and five other urban areas — New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, and San Francisco — up to a “state of good repair.” Current rates of spending are not even adequate to keep these systems in the miserable condition they are in today. As an official with New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority says with resignation, “there will never be enough money” to restore New York’s rail system to a state of good repair (see p. 15).

The problem, of course, is that rail transit does not come close to paying for itself out of transit fares. Fares cover about 60 percent of the cost of operating Washington’s Metrorail system, but none of the costs of building or maintaining it — and has one of the highest cost recovery ratios in the industry. Transit agencies have convinced most legislators that transit shouldn’t have to pay for itself — but that leaves them perennially short of funds and their patrons in danger of deadly accidents.

Legislators love to fund “ribbons, not brooms” — that is, new, highly visible projects such as the $5.2 billion silver line to Dulles Airport rather than the cost of maintaining the existing system.

So what’s the solution? How about federal regulation of transit agencies? That won’t solve any of the problems, but at least we’ll have a whole new layer of bureaucracy to blame the next time people are killed in a train crash.

The real solution is to stop building expensive rail transit lines that cities can’t afford to maintain. Transit should be privatized, which will lead transit companies to run vehicles — mostly buses — where people want to go, not where bureaucrats and politicians decide they ought to go.

The authors readily admit, quite early in the piece, that they are usually on opposing sides of the trade debate.  The Peterson Institute scholars are well-known and well-respected advocates of freer international trade. Global Trade Watch, and Wallach in particular? Not so much. She has called NAFTA a “disastrous experiment” and has a special section on her website calling on people to Take Action! on trade (example: by hosting a house party to celebrate the tenth anniversary of ” the historic 1999 Seattle protest victory of people power over corporate rule.”)

Yet here they are, claiming to agree on “a suprising number of aspects of the climate change debate and on the related need to overhaul global trade negotiations.” I am still trying to make sense of the op-ed, because it lurches around a bit, and to work out exactly how deep the agreement of these strange bedfellows really is. But for now, let me comment briefly on what I think is the main thrust of their op-ed: a proposal for launching a new round of trade talks.

The authors point out that a new treaty on global warming would “require new trade rules in intellectual property, services, government procurement and product standards.” So, hey, why not combine that into trade talks?The Obama Round (as if Obama-worship has not gone far enough) “would include, as a centerpiece, addressing these potential commercial and climate trade-offs and updating the negotiating agenda.”

That, quite frankly, would be fatal for the World Trade Organization. Developing countries, now in the majority in the WTO, are in general very resistant to the idea of bringing extraneous issues into its agenda (witness constant struggles over linking trade to labor and environment issues, to name just two). More to the point, we already have a round in progress. The Doha round has been struggling over old-fashioned trade concerns like tariffs and subsidies (remember them?)  since launching in 2001. The risks of overburdening the WTO agenda are, in my opinion, far greater than the possible benefits. It’s fairly clear to me why Wallach would advocate a new round full of poison pills, but not so clear why Bergsten would put his name to such a suggestion.

It’s not even clear to me that such an approach would “help the environment.” Why the optimism about the possibility of agreement under the auspices of the WTO when negotiations in forums designed explicitly and solely for the purpose of halting climate change have been unsuccessful?

( Speaking of which, expectations for a breakthrough at the upcoming Copenhagen conference on climate change are being rapidly scaled back, with talk of an “interim” agreement — likely some anodyne political statement — rather than the final deal that environmental groups had hoped for. The international diplomacy circus rolls on, though: conferences are planned for Mexico and South Africa — talk about a carbon footprint! — next year.)

For my take on the climate change and trade debate, the solution to which does not involve launching an Obama Round, see here.

Meanwhile, those concerned about the cost of climate change regulations may have lost an ally. Often, but not always, one can depend on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to defend free enterprise, or at least free trade. On climate change, however, they are a little more ambiguous. If anything, they appear to be getting more sympathetic to climate change legislation. Nothing to do with membership defections, they assure us, just good business practice. Maybe it is. I’m not a member of the Chamber so their strategy is not really any of my business.

What concerns me is the apparent shift in their position toward so-called carbon tariffs (also called “border adjustment measures,” and often spoken of in terms of “international competitiveness,” “negotiating leverage” and other terms that should raise the alarm). My friend, and former Catoite, Scott Lincicome does an excellent job here of parsing through the Chamber’s recent public letter in support of  the Kerry-Graham “framework” (outlined in this New York Times op-ed) and their strange silence on the framework’s inclusion of the need for carbon tariffs, so I won’t repeat his analysis here. Suffice to say, their non-comment on the issue of carbon tariffs is worrying. As Scott points out, they appear to endorse the concept, if in a coded manner.

Back in June, the Chamber explicitly opposed Waxman-Markey, in part because “It would also impose carbon tariffs on goods imported into the U.S., a move that would almost certainly spur retaliation from global trading partners.” (See here.) I would feel a lot more comfortable if a similarly explicit statement had been repeated in their letter.

There’s a saying that there are no atheists in foxholes. I think there’s something along that line happening here. I mean, there are still some people who refuse to believe it. But I think there’s been an erosion of that disbelief and it’s changed pretty dramatically.

Darned if he isn’t using terms like “atheists” and “disbelief” in a discussion of global warming. Almost as if he were, you know, a theologian.

Reporter Sarah Gardner, by the way, says that “in my own lifetime, average temperatures in this country have gone up more than 2 degrees.” That doesn’t sound like that much — maybe like moving from Washington to Richmond? But anyway, unless Sarah is about 200 years old, she seems to be exaggerating.

For a different view of global warming — not that of an atheist or even a skeptic, just a non-fundamentalist or non-apocalyptic — see this short paper or this book by climatologist Pat Michaels.

Based on the above contention, the Kyoto Protocol imposes no direct costs on developing countries and holds out the prospect of large amounts of transfer payments from industrialized to developing countries via the Clean Development Mechanism or an Adaptation Fund. Not surprisingly, virtually every developing country has ratified the Protocol and is adamant that these features be retained in any son-of-Kyoto.

For their part, UN and other multilateral agencies favor this approach because lacking any taxing authority or other ready mechanism for raising revenues, they see revenues in helping manage, facilitate or distribute the enormous amounts of money that, in theory, should be available from ICs to fund mitigation and adaptation in the DCs.

Continue reading here.

In just the latest example of government policies working at cross-purposes, the president buys a 60 percent stake in GM at a cost to taxpayers of $50 billion (conservatively), and simultaneously supports a mandate—in the rigid CAFE standard—that will severely handicap GM, while assisting the competition.

C4C gave consumers the opportunity to express their preferences in the high mileage vehicle market, and GM failed miserably. Consumers of high mileage vehicles prefer Toyotas, Hondas, Fords, Nissans and Hyundais, whose offerings comprise the top ten best sellers list under the program. Not a single GM (or Chrysler) product made the top ten under C4C.

GM’s competitive strength is in the luxury car, muscle car, SUV, and pick-up truck categories. But to sell those cars in 2016, GM will need to sell many, many more small cars than it does now to achieve an average fleet fuel efficiency of 35.5 mpg. So, while GM’s competitors are free to target the gas-guzzling market because there is already plenty of demand for their high-mileage vehicles, GM’s capacity to compete where it is strongest will be conditioned on its ability to cultivate an obviously very skeptical market for its small cars. And that bodes very poorly for GM’s future.

For more on GM’s future and the damage done to important U.S. institutions, like private property rights, the rule of law, the free enterprise system, and the proper separation of economy and state as a result of the Bush/Obama auto intervention, you are welcome to join us for a policy forum at Cato on October 15 at noon.

President Obama has said that he prefers a comprehensive legislative approach to regulating emissions and stemming global warming, not a piecemeal application of rules, and that he is deeply committed to passage of a climate bill this year.

But he has authorized the Environmental Protection Agency to begin moving toward regulation, which could goad lawmakers into reaching an agreement.

In the book that popularized the phrase “the Imperial Presidency,” historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. focused overwhelmingly on the vast growth of presidential power in foreign affairs. But as an inveterate New Dealer, Schlesinger had a blind spot where it came to the Emperor’s burgeoning powers at home.

The Supreme Court’s virtual abandonment of the nondelegation doctrine after 1935 paved the way for the modern administrative state, in which Congress all too eagerly cedes legislative power to the executive branch. As the Obama administration’s latest actions on global warming show, the Imperial Presidency comes in green, too. From my column in the Washington Examiner this week:

James Madison believed that there could be “no liberty where the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person.” And yet, here we are, with those powers united in the person of a president who has pledged to heal the planet and stop the oceans’ rise.

The Times article makes clear that Obama won’t push his authority under the Clean Air Act (or the Supreme Court’s interpretation thereof in Mass. v. EPA) as far as he might, yet: “By raising the standard to 25,000 tons, the new rule exempts millions of smaller sources of carbon dioxide emissions like bakeries, soft drink bottlers, dry cleaners and hospitals.” Instead, the administration plans to use its power under the CAA as a hammer to hold over Congress’s head, pushing it to act on cap and trade.

But eventually, Obama could push that authority even further. According to a comprehensive legal analysis issued by NYU Law School’s Center for Policy Integrity, “if Congress fails to act, President Obama has the power under the Clean Air Act to adopt a cap-and-trade system.” (Emphasis mine). (Note in the link above that Matt Yglesias, dedicated opponent of Bush’s war-on-terror executive power grabs, doesn’t seem exactly upset at the prospect of cap-and-trade via executive fiat.)

True, such a move would be litigated to death, and the forests of paperwork it would generate might result in a carbon footprint larger than whatever it abated. Nonetheless, we ought to be disturbed by the notion that in a democratic country the president could make such a move without an up or down vote from Congress. And, as I suggest in the Examiner piece, it ought to make conservatives question their longtime conviction that presidential control over administrative agencies is a reliable method for decreasing the country’s regulatory burden:

After 9/11, the phrase “unitary executive theory” (UET) came to stand for the idea that the president can do whatever he pleases in the national security arena. But it originally stood for a humbler proposition: UET’s architects in the Reagan administration argued that the Constitution’s grant of executive power to the president meant that he controlled the executive branch, and could therefore rein in aggressive regulatory agencies.

In an era when Republicans held a virtual lock on the Electoral College, that idea had some appeal. But as Elena Kagan, now President Obama’s Solicitor General, pointed out in a 2001 Harvard Law Review article, there’s little reason to think that “presidential supervision of administration inherently cuts in a deregulatory direction.”

… [A]s Kagan notes, after the Democrats lost control of Congress in 1994, President Clinton used his regulatory authority unilaterally to show progress, pushing “a distinctly activist and pro-regulatory agenda.” As Obama’s popularity erodes, he may come to like the idea of being the “decider.”

It seems to me that a government truly concerned about global warming–putting aside the merits of that position–would want to encourage the adoption of solar panels, including by keeping them as cheap as possible. Nor, I would have thought, is this the time to add more fuel to the fire that is starting to characterize the U.S. trade relationship with China. There’s plenty enough fuel for that already.

I’m under no illusion that this development had anything to do with my recommendations, but it seems that the 30 member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development are attempting a trade deal amongst themselves and China to expedite tariff reductions in “climate friendly” goods (more here).  Apparently it is designed to be an incentive to get Beijing on board for a global climate deal, but of course American consumers and businesses would gain from cheaper and better access to green technology, too.

I would, of course, prefer that U.S. lawmakers see the value in reducing tariffs on all goods without waiting for the other OECD members to catch on, but surely this development is better than the alternative.

In Paul Krugman’s most recent column, he makes a similar claim about reducing greenhouse gas emissions:

The evidence suggests that we’re wasting a lot of energy right now. That is, we’re burning large amounts of coal, oil and gas in ways that don’t actually enhance our standard of living — a phenomenon known in the research literature as the “energy-efficiency gap.” The existence of this gap suggests that policies promoting energy conservation could, up to a point, actually make consumers richer.

Both claims of a “free lunch” are heroic, at best.

In the case of health insurance, Medicare and Medicaid are inefficient, but to make them more efficient we have to reduce government subsidy for health insurance, not expand it.

In the case of energy efficiency, more energy-efficient practices exist (e.g., replacing incandescent light bulbs with CFLs), but they are expensive: if they actually made consumers richer, most would be using them already.

Now the fact that expanded government health insurance and increased energy efficiency would cost more, not less, does not prove they are bad ideas (that’s a separate discussion). But it means society must evaluate a tradeoff, not just assert we can have something for nothing.

C/P Libertarianism, from A to Z

Many modern Republicans claim devotion to Ronald Reagan’s ideas, but they often seem to forget about the “minimum of government” thing. The following points are from Republican Virginia gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell’s “More Energy, More Jobs” plan:

• “McDonnell was the chief sponsor of legislation creating the Virginia Hydrogen Energy Plan.”
• “McDonnell also supported grant programs for solar photovoltaic manufacturing, tax exemptions for solar energy and recycling property, and tax credits for solar energy equipment.”
• “In order to protect Virginia’s citizens from the skyrocketing wholesale prices of electricity seen in other states, McDonnell brought together all the necessary stake holders to re-regulate electricity in Virginia.”
• “Currently, Virginia is the second largest importer of electricity behind California.  This is unacceptable.”
• “Bob McDonnell will establish Virginia as a Green Jobs Zone to incentivize companies to create quality green jobs. Qualified businesses would be eligible to receive an income tax credit equal to $500 per position created per year for the first five years.”
• “The Virginia Alternative Fuels Revolving Fund was established to assist local governments that convert to alternative fuel systems . . . Bob McDonnell will expand the purpose of this fund to include infrastructure such as refueling stations, provide seed money and aggressively pursue additional grants.”
• “Bob McDonnell will make Southwest and Southside Virginia the nation’s hub for traditional and alternative energy research and development…To assist with the attraction, building and operation of major energy facilities in Southside and Southwest Virginia, we will also support the establishment of the Center for Energy.”
• “To help Virginia universities gain access to federal stimulus money, as Governor, Bob McDonnell will establish the Virginia Universities Clean Energy Development and Economic Stimulus Foundation.”
• “As Governor, Bob McDonnell will leverage stimulus funding to incentivize individuals and businesses to conduct energy audits and encourage public private partnerships between small businesses and government.”

It’s true that McDonnell’s plan has some free market elements, and also that Ronald Reagan supported some wasteful energy boondoggles. However, the degree to which the modern Republican wants to micromanage and manipulate the energy industry is remarkable. McDonnell is almost setting out a Soviet five-year plan for a substantial part of the Virginia economy. For goodness sakes, he wants to treat Virginia like a separate country and try to fix the supposed problem that it is “importing” too much energy from other states!

It’s not just energy. Look at the top-down central planning ideas that McDonnell has for “creating jobs”:

• “Expanding use of the Governor’s Opportunity Fund by roughly doubling the funding available and broadening Fund rules to allow companies that generate additional state and local tax revenue to qualify.”
• “Appointing Lieutenant Governor Bolling to serve as “Virginia’s Chief Job Creation Officer” in the McDonnell/Bolling Administration.”
• “Designating one Deputy Secretary of Commerce to Focus Solely on Rural Economic Development.”
• “Providing a $1,000 tax credit per job to businesses that create 50 new jobs, or 25 new jobs in economically distressed areas.”
• “Double the funding for the Virginia Tourism Corporation. Currently Virginia trails 14 states including West Virginia and Tennessee in tourism funding.”
• “Increase funding for the Governor’s Motion Picture Fund by $2 million.”
• “Providing a $1,000 tax credit per job to businesses that create 50 new jobs, or 25 new jobs in economically distressed areas.”

Again, McDonnell mixes some pro-market proposals in with these Big Government interventions. And his opponent, Creigh Deeds, is promoting his own interventionist schemes, many very similar to McDonnell’s.

In 1980, the difference between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan on economic policy was clear. But today, we seem to have arrived at a point where it’s virtually impossible to tell the difference in economic platforms between a self-proclaimed conservative Republican and a liberal Democrat.

By saving millions of people from starvation, green-revolution father Norman Borlaug arguably has done more for humanity than has any other human being of the past century (”Norman Borlaug, 95, Dies; Led Green Revolution,” Sept. 13). Yet unlike Sen. Kennedy’s, his death will go relatively unnoticed. He’ll certainly not be canonized in the popular mind.

Alas, in our world, melodramatic loud-mouths thunder to and fro in the foreground, doing little of any value while stealing most of the credit for civilization. Meanwhile, in the background, millions upon millions of decent, creative people work diligently at their specialties – welding, waiting tables, performing orthopedic surgery, designing shopping malls, researching plant genetics – each contributing to the prosperity of the rest. Some contributions are larger than others (as Dr. Borlaug’s certainly was), but even a contribution as colossal as his is quickly taken for granted, any notice of it submerged beneath the self-congratulation, swagger, and bellicosity of the politicians who pretend to be prosperity’s source. How wrong.

In 1992 the late Senator Kennedy said, “The ballot box is the place where all change begins in America.” I wrote a few years later that he was “conveniently forgetting the market process that has brought us such changes as the train, the skyscraper, the automobile, the personal computer, and charitable or self-help endeavors from settlement houses to Alcoholics Anonymous to Comic Relief.”

Some day a history book will describe Bill Clinton as “a scandal-ridden president in the age of Bill Gates.” Or maybe “in the age of the Green Revolution.” Either way, the biggest changes in our lives — certainly the biggest improvements — will have come from scientists, inventors, and businesses, not from politicians.

But that’s not the way journalists and historians see it. Just think of the people who have gone down in history as “the Great“: Alexander the Great, Catherine the Great, Charles the Great (Charlemagne), Frederick the Great, Peter the Great — despots and warmongers. Just once it would be nice to see the actual benefactors of humanity designated as “the Great”: Galileo the Great, Gutenberg the Great, Samuel Morse the Great, Alan Turing the Great.

So just for tonight, drink a toast to one of the great benefactors of the poorest people in the world, Borlaug the Great.

The Democrats were keen to pass a climate change bill in advance of the December meeting in Copenhagen designed to agree on a successor regime to the Kyoto protocol, which expires in 2012.  However, opposition from a number of quarters and the fear of health-care-town-halls-mark-II has cooled their heels. Senate leaders have pushed back the deadline for passing bills out of committees a number of times.

The reason why climate change legislation has become so controversial is that businesses and consumers are, quite understandably, fearful about any policies that threaten to increase their costs. I’ll leave it to others to blog about the effect of emissions-reductions policies on jobs and profits, but even the fear of losses has led to calls for special deals for “vulnerable industries”, in the form of free emission permits and/or protection from imports that are sourced from countries that purportedly take insufficient steps to limit emissions.

H.R. 2454, the so called Waxman-Markey bill passed by the House in June, contains both free permits and provisions for carbon tariffs. I’ve blogged before about the efforts of trade-skeptic senators to introduce the same kinds of protections in the senate bill. To that end, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D, OH) is reportedly meeting with Sen. Barbara Boxer, Chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee next week about trade protections for manufacturing industries.  As my paper makes clear, I think these efforts are misguidedly ineffective at best, and harmful at worst.

I’m looking forward to discussing these issues in more detail tomorrow at a Hill briefing in Washington DC. Registration for the event was closed very early because of overwhelming demand, but you can watch the event when the video becomes available on the Cato website.

The fire began in the Angeles National Forest, and Congress will no doubt respond by giving the Forest Service even more money to suppress such fires in the future. In fact, as I show in my Cato Policy Analysis, The Perfect Firestorm, the Forest Service has, in effect, a blank check to put out fires.

It freely uses that blank check. It has so far spent about $14 million fighting the Station Fire, which supposedly threatens 12,000 homes. But it has also spent $2.5 million on Oregon’s Canal Creek Fire, which is less than half a square mile in size and does not threaten any homes or other structures. Better safe than sorry — as long as you have a blank check.

Southern California forests are extremely fire prone — their natural fire regime is to completely burn over every 50 to 100 years. Building homes in such an area might seem foolish, so naturally there have been calls for “fire plain zoning,” similar to flood plain zoning, that would restrict such construction.

In fact, properly designed homes and landscaping can easily withstand such fires. Most homes destroyed by wildfires are ignited either by burning embers landing on flammable roofs or by the radiant heat from trees or   grasses burning nearby.  Building homes with nonflammable roofs and eves, and landscaping with well-tended lawns and a minimum of flammable trees essentially makes homes fireproof.

Most civilian deaths from wildfire take place during evacuations, not from the fire itself. Homes that are designed to withstand wildfires are known as “shelter-in-place” homes because the residents will be safer in the homes than trying to evacuate.

In 2007, CBS News reported that a fire swept through two San Diego suburbs built to shelter-in-place standards, and “not one home was even touched by flames.” Perversely, the reporter concluded that people should not be allowed to build to those standards because it would just encourage them to live in fire-prone areas.

In reality, the lesson is that it would be a lot less expensive to promote shelter-in-place construction standards and retrofitting and then simply let the fires burn at their normal frequencies. The homes would be safe, the forests would be “natural,” and fewer firefighters would be at risk.

Why doesn’t this happen?

Simple: money. The Forest Service gets a blank check for putting out fires, but almost no money for helping people fireproof their properties. So it continues to spend billions on fire suppression, mainly to protect people’s homes, when a lower-cost strategy is readily available.

Photo credit: MB Trama and DisneyKrazie on Flickr.

Lighting consultant Howard Brandston makes a plaintive plea for lighting that serves people rather than politics:

The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 will effectively phase out incandescent light bulbs by 2012-2014 in favor of compact fluorescent lamps, or CFLs. Other countries around the world have passed similar legislation to ban most incandescents.

Will some energy be saved? Probably. The problem is this benefit will be more than offset by rampant dissatisfaction with lighting. We are not talking about giving up a small luxury for the greater good. We are talking about compromising light. Light is fundamental. And light is obviously for people, not buildings. The primary objective in the design of any space is to make it comfortable and habitable. This is most critical in homes, where this law will impact our lives the most. And yet while energy conservation, a worthy cause, has strong advocacy in public policy, good lighting has very little.

He hopes for a congressional reversal of the ill-considered prohibition.  If that doesn’t work, people do have one more option:  stock-piling bulbs for future use.  Of course, that probably would lead to the creation of a federal light bulb police, tasked with wiping out the black market in incandescent bulbs.  “Use a bulb, go to jail” may become the newest law enforcement slogan!

As Washington Post writer Robert Samuelson observes, the Obama administration’s vision of high-speed rail is “a mirage. The costs of high-speed rail would be huge, and the public benefits meager.” Yet even Samuelson falls victim to the common assumption that high-speed rail “works in Europe and Asia” because population densities in those places are higher than in the United States.

The truth is that high-speed rail doesn’t work in Europe or Asia either. Japan and France have both spent about as much on high-speed rail as they have on their intercity freeway systems, yet the average residents of those countries travel by car 10 to 20 times as much as they travel by high-speed rail. They also fly domestically more than they take high-speed rail. While the highways and airlines pay for themselves out of gas taxes and other user fees, high-speed rail is heavily subsidized and serves only a tiny urban elite.

Obama uses the fact that France, Japan, and a few other countries are racing one another to have the fastest high-speed trains to argue that we need to join the race. That’s like saying we need to spend billions subsidizing buggy whip or horse collar manufacturers or some third-world country will beat us in those technologies. The fact is that high-speed trains will never be as fast as flying on long trips and never be as convenient as driving on short trips, and there is no medium-length trip in which high-speed rail can compete without heavy subsidies.

The rail advocates go ballistic whenever anyone questions their fantasies, mostly engaging in ad hominem attacks (”you must be paid by the oil companies!”) or accusing skeptics of lying about rail. The reality is that Glaeser (like me) “almost always prefer trains to driving.” If anything, he was too generous in many of his assumptions about high-speed rail.

For example, Glaeser built his case around a hypothetical high-speed line between Dallas-Ft. Worth and Houston, the nation’s fifth- and sixth-largest urban areas which together house close to 10 million people and are located about 240 miles apart, supposedly an ideal distance for high-speed trains. If the numbers don’t work for this market, how are they going to work for Eugene-Seattle, Tulsa-Oklahoma City, New Orleans-Mobile, St. Louis-Kansas City, or any of the other much smaller city pairs in the Obama high-speed rail plan?

The rail nuts don’t want to hear Glaeser’s (or Cato’s) numbers because they fantasize the Field of Dreams “build it and they will come” myth; that building rail will “create the demand for the rail lines.” That may have been true in nineteenth-century America, when no alternative forms of transportation could compete with rail. But it wasn’t true in twentieth-century France or Japan (where heavily subsidized high-speed rail carries only 4 to 6 percent of passenger travel), and it won’t be true in twenty-first-century America.

Building high-speed rail will be like standing in the chilly vestibule of an Amtrak train in mid-winter Chicago and burning million-dollar bills to keep warm. But that’s what happens when you base your transportation policies on a slogan from a Kevin Costner movie rather than on real data.

CONOR said:

I think Goklany is a bit picky and choosey with the evidence. … I also like the Goklany paper a lot. [THANK YOU!! I'll take whatever I get.] But in this case it’s hard to resist. [Emphasis in original.]

To take one example (of several), Goklany’s hunger estimates rely heavily on those published by Global Environmental Change (GEC), which he uses to make the argument that “the world will be better off in 2085 with respect to hunger than it was in 1990 despite any increase in population.” But the GEC produced two estimates of hunger and climate change — one that assumes the benefits of CO2 fertilization and one that does not. Goklany picks the former estimate (I have no idea why), despite the fact the GEC says the effects of climate change “will fall somewhere between” the two. … [I}f you embrace anything other than the most Pollyanish CO2 fertilization estimate -- the one that Goklany uses in his Cato paper -- we will be living in a world in which climate change puts tens of millions of additional people at risk of starvation by 2085.

My RESPONSE:

First, let me elaborate on my selection of the set of studies that I used in my paper.  Essentially, the selected set of studies (published in Global Environmental Change) was the only one that had estimated global impacts using detailed process models in conjunction with the IPCC’s latest scenarios, and were peer reviewed.  Moreover, they come with a provenance that people who may be unhappy with my results cannot impugn. [This is important only because many people arguing about global warming seem to be more concerned about who did the study and whether the results bolster their predilections, than how the study was done.]  Specifically, virtually all the authors were intimately connected with the IPCC. The senior author of the hunger study was also the co-chairman of the IPCC’s Work Group II, which was responsible for compiling the portion of the IPCC’s latest assessment that dealt with impacts, vulnerability and adaptation. The authors of the water resource and coastal flooding studies were the lead authors of corresponding chapters in that IPCC report. An earlier version of the same set of impact studies was the basis for the claim by Sir David King, erstwhile science advisor to Her Majesty’s Government, that global warming was a more serious threat than terrorism (see here). The Stern Review also drew quite heavily from these studies (see below).

Let’s now turn to Conor’s comments on the hunger study and why I assumed that the benefits of carbon fertilization would be realized in the future. Indeed, the hunger study (Parry et al.) produced two separate estimates — one assuming that carbon fertilization is a reality, and the other assuming zero carbon fertilization.  But the two estimates are not equally likely. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands of experimental studies that show carbon fertilization is a reality (see also here), that higher CO2 not only increases the rate of photosynthesis, but also increases the efficiency of water use by plants (i.e., it confers a degree of immunity to drought), among the many other benefits CO2 bestows on plants and other carbon based life, including all creatures – big and small — in the biosphere that depend directly or indirectly on photosynthesis.  The probability that direct CO2 effects on crop growth are zero or negative is virtually non-existent (IPCC, 2001b: 254–256). Second, the positive effect of carbon fertilization was based on the average of experimental studies; it’s not an upper bound estimate. On the other hand, the notion of “zero fertilization” is an assumption not supported by the vast majority of empirical data. So averaging results from the two estimates makes no sense and would understate the average benefits that would likely result from carbon fertilization.

Notably, the Stern Review, invoked a study by Long et al. (subscription required) to estimate future levels of hunger based on “zero fertilization” using precisely the same study (Parry et al.) that I  – and Conor, in his comments — used. But Long et al.’s results have been disputed by other scientists (also see here), including some contributors to the IPCC’s assessment.  More importantly, Long et al. only suggested that under field conditions, carbon fertilization may be a third to less than half of what is indicated by experiments using growth chambers, not that it would be zero. It also noted that fertilization may be stronger under drought conditions or if sufficient nitrogen is employed. But drought is one of the bogeymen of global warming, and increased use of nitrogen is precisely the kind of adaptation that would become more affordable in the future as countries become wealthier, as they should if the IPCC’s scenarios are to be given any credence.  Indeed, that is one of the adaptations allowed in Parry et al. Also, the fact that crop yields are higher in richer countries is partly because they can more easily afford nitrogen fertilizers (see here, p. 78). In fact, China’s nitrogen use per hectare is already among the world’s highest. For all these reasons, even if one accepts the Long et al. study as gospel, it is reasonable to assume that the effect of carbon fertilization will be closer to the “higher” estimate from the Parry et al. study than to the “zero fertilization” case.

But, more importantly, the uncertainties related to the magnitude of the CO2 fertilization effect is most likely swamped by a major source of overestimation of hunger in Parry et al.’s estimates.

Although Parry et al. allows for some secular (time-dependent) increases in agricultural productivity, increases in crop yield with economic growth due to greater application of fertilizer and irrigation in richer countries, decreases in hunger due to economic growth, and for some adaptive responses at the farm level to deal with global warming, Parry et al. itself acknowledged that these adaptive responses are based on the “current range” of available technologies, not on technologies that would be available in the future or any technologies developed to specifically cope with the negative impacts of global warming (Parry et al., p. 57).  The potential for future technologies to cope with global warming is large, especially if one considers bioengineered crops (see here, chapter 9), which Parry et al. admittedly didn’t consider. Moreover, an examination of the sources cited in Parry et al. indicates that the “current range” of technology is actually based on 1990s or earlier technology. That is, it is not quite current.

The approach used in Parry et al. to estimate the impacts of global warming decades from now is, in essence, tantamount to estimating today’s level of hunger (and agricultural production) based on the technology of 50 years ago. In fact, the major reason why Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb turned out to be a dud was that it underestimated or ignored future developments in agricultural technology.

As noted in Part I of this series of responses, ignoring technological change can, over decades, lead to overestimating adverse impacts by orders of magnitude. Notably, due to a combination of technological change and increasing affluence, U.S. death rates due to various water related diseases – dysentery, typhoid, paratyphoid, other gastrointestinal disease, and malaria – declined by 99%–100% from 1900 to 1970.  For the same reasons, during the twentieth century, global death rates from extreme weather events declined by over 95%.

This basic methodological shortcoming, however, is not unique to Parry et al. It is common to ALL global warming impact studies that I have read – and I have read plenty of them.

For all these reasons, the adverse impacts of global warming for hunger (as well as other aspects of human well-being, e.g., due to malaria and coastal flooding) that I used in my paper are, more likely than not, substantially overestimated. And by the same token, ignoring technological change (and not fully accounting for increases in wealth) also assures that the positive impacts of global warming are likely to be underestimated, further overestimating the net negative impacts of global warming.

Therefore, far from being Pollyanish, the estimates used in my paper most likely substantially exaggerate the net negative impacts of global warming. Despite that, those estimates cannot justify emissions cuts that go beyond no-regret actions at this time or through the foreseeable future.

But none of this has dissuaded the editorial boards of the The New York Times and Washington Post. Both newspapers featured uncharacteristically shrill editorials today demanding climate change legislation at any cost.

The Post, at least, notes the political realities facing cap-and-trade and resignedly confesses its favored approach to the warming menace: “Yes, we’re talking about a carbon tax.” The paper—motto: “If you don’t get it, you don’t get it”—argues that in contrast to the Boolean ball of twine that is cap-and-trade, a straight carbon tax will be less complicated to enforce, and that the cost to individuals and businesses “could be rebated…in a number of ways.”

Get it? While ostensibly tackling the all-encompassing peril of global warming, bureaucrats could rig the tax code in other ways to achieve a zero net loss in economic productivity or jobs. Right. Anyone who makes more than 50K, or any family at 100K who thinks they will get all their money back, please raise you hands.

The prescription offered by the Times, meanwhile, is chilling in its cynicism and extremity. It embraces the fringe—and heavily discredited—idea of “warning that global warming poses a serious threat to national security.” It bullies lawmakers with the threat that warming could induce resource shortages that would “unleash regional conflicts and draw in America’s armed forces.”

(Note to the Gray Lady: This is why we have markets. Not everyone produces everything, especially agriculturally. For example, it’s too cold in Canada to produce corn, so they buy it from us. They export their wheat to other places with different climates. Prices, supply, and demand change with weather, and will change with climate, too. Markets are always more efficient than Marines, and will doubtless work with or without climate change.)

Appallingly, the piece admits that “[t]his line of argument could also be pretty good politics — especially on Capitol Hill, where many politicians will do anything for the Pentagon. … One can only hope that these arguments turn the tide in the Senate.” In other words: the set of circumstances posited by the national-security strategy are not an object reality, but merely a winning political gambit.

There’s no way that people who see through cap-and-trade are going to buy the military card, but one must admire the Times’ stratagem for durability. Militarization of domestic issues is often the last refuge of the desperate. How many lives has this cost throughout history?

Nevertheless, one must wonder at the sudden and inexplicable urgency that underpins the positions of both these esteemed newspapers. Global surface temperatures haven’t budged significantly for 12 years, and it’s becoming obvious that the vaunted gloom-and-doom climate models are simply predicting too much warming.

Still, one must admire the Post and Times for their altruism. The economic distress caused by a carbon tax, militarization, or any other radical climatic policy certainly won’t be good for their already shaky finances, unless, of course, the price of their support is a bailout by the Obama Administration.

Now that’s cynical.

Two interesting critical analyses of the Cash for Clunkers program were published over the weekend. The first by New York Times reporter Matt Wald examines the energy savings that would result from the program.  If a clunker traveling 12,000 miles at 16 miles per gallon (consuming 750 gallons per year) were traded in for a new car getting 25 mpg while traveling the same distance (480 gallons a year), the the trade-in would save the driver 270 gallons per year. Multiply that by the roughly 245,000 vehicles that had been traded in under the program as of last Friday, before Congress extended the program, and you get 1.6 million barrels  saved each year. That sounds great until you realize it’s only about two hours’ worth of our daily consumption, which is about 18.6 million barrels per day so far in 2009.  But the savings is probably much less than that because old cars are not driven 12,000 miles per year.

The second critical analysis, examining the program’s effect on carbon emissions, appeared as a figure in the Outlook section of this weekend’s Washington Post.  Over 10 years, the new cars will reduce emissions by 7 million metric tons, which is about 0.04% of the 16 billion metric tons that U.S. cars will produce over that time. That is, taxpayers will pay $147 per ton of CO₂ reduction ($1.03 billion dollars divided by 7 million tons). In comparison, the economic literature estimates that the cost of the marginal damages of carbon emissions is between $15 and$50 per ton (see, e.g., this and this).

Goklany’s estimates are based on global aggregates that hide the unequal distribution of the climate change burden. Yes yes, I know Manzi will say that’s not decisive: As long as global GDP is higher, we can redistribute our way out of the problem more effectively tomorrow than we can today. I would be more comfortable with that debate if I thought vast international restributions of income in the name of global equity were more likely tomorrow than they are today.

RESPONSE:

Global greenhouse gas controls will also have uneven consequences. First, cost of controls will vary from country to country, and sector to sector. Second, because the impacts of climate change will also vary from area to area, the benefits of control will necessarily be uneven. They will also vary over time. In fact, for some sectors, some areas may benefit even under the IPCC’s warmest scenario, at least through the foreseeable future.  For example, through at least 2085, climate change would increase the global population at risk of water stress (see Figure 2, here).  Therefore controlling climate change would exacerbate the global population at risk of water stress. So both the costs and benefits of climate change controls will also be distributed unevenly. Third, as noted here, implementing climate change controls that go beyond no-regret actions requires that today’s poorer generations  delay solving the real problems they face here and now and instead put resources into solving the hypothetical problems that may (or may not) confront tomorrow’s far wealthier — and technologically better-endowed — populations. Nothing equitable about that.

Conor Clarke’s third comment was:

… I’m suspicious of the ethical calculus that says we should not focus on one large global problem because larger global problems might exist. [Emphasis in the original.] That kind of moral math rarely corresponds to the political reality. (Do you think the average congressperson opposed to Waxman-Markey has trouble sleeping at night over new cases of malaria or global hunger?) Nor does it correspond to the historical responsibility: Industrialized nations are more responsible for the global problems created by climate change than the problems of population growth.

RESPONSE:

I am puzzled as to why Conor suggests we should focus on one large global problem — presumably climate change — when larger global problems might exist. Why should we focus on any problem when other larger ones are unresolved?

Nevertheless, Conor is correct, political decisions are rarely based on ethical calculus — the more’s the pity.

In any case, my paper doesn’t advocate twiddling our thumbs when it comes to climate change. Yes, it doesn’t advocate aggressive action (going beyond no-regret actions) to control climate change in the near to medium term. Instead it focuses on increasing adaptive capacity, technological prowess, and sustainable economic development which would enable society to respond to whatever problems it may face in the future, including climate change. As the paper shows, aggressive mitigation would not be the best approach to advance human well-being and deal with today’s urgent problems while advancing the ability to address tomorrow’s problems (see Table 5, here).

Specifically, it would reduce vulnerability to today’s urgent climate-sensitive problems — e.g., malaria, hunger, water stress, flooding, and other extreme events — that might be exacerbated by climate change.  Second, it would strengthen or develop the institutions needed to advance and/or reduce barriers to economic growth, human capital, and the propensity for technological change. Together, these two elements would improve both adaptive and mitigative capacities, as well as the prospects for sustainable economic development. Third, my paper advocates implementing no-regret mitigation measures now, while expanding future no-regret options through research and development of mitigation technologies. Fourth, it would let the market pick winners and losers among the various no-regret options. Fifth, it would continue research into the science, impacts and policies related to climate change, and monitoring of impacts to provide early warning of any “dangerous” impacts were they to be manifested.

Although Conor is probably correct in suggesting that politicians rarely undertake any ethical calculus in arriving at their decisions, many have nevertheless asserted that reducing greenhouse gas emissions is a moral imperative. See, e.g., here. But what is the basis for this claim?

These claims are never accompanied by any analysis that compares the magnitude and urgency of climate change versus other problems that humanity faces today or in the foreseeable future. The only such comparative analyses that have been undertaken are those done as part of Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus exercise and my Cato paper [and their prior versions, see, e.g., “Potential Consequences of Increasing Atmospheric CO2 Concentration Compared to Other Environmental Problems.” Technology 7S (2000): 189-213 and Copenhagen Consensus 2004.].  And these provide no support for the oft-repeated but unsubstantiated claim that climate change is a moral imperative given the many other real problems that exist today.

Finally, Conor raises the issue of historical responsibility of industrialized nations for global warming.  As Henry Shue, an Oxford ethicist, notes, “Calls for historical responsibility in the context of climate change are mainly calls for the acceptance of accountability for the full consequences of industrialization that relied on fossil fuels.” [Emphasis added.] But a fundamental premise behind these calls is that the “full consequences of industrialization” are negative. This is one more unsubstantiated claim.

In fact, by virtually any objective measure of human well-being — e.g., life expectancy; infant, child and maternal mortality; prevalence of hunger and malnutrition; child labor; job opportunities for women; educational attainment; income — humanity is far better off today that it was before the start of industrialization, due to the cycle of progress and economic surpluses fueled for the most part by fossil fuels. In addition, hunger and child labor are as low — and job opportunities for women as high — as they are today partly due to the direct effect of fossil fuel powered labor saving technology.  This is clearly true for industrialized countries. Figure 1 shows that life expectancy — perhaps the single most important indicator of human well-being — increased for the U.S through the 20^th century, even as CO2 emissions, population, affluence, and material, metals, and organic chemical use increased. Matters have also improved in developing countries. And global life expectancy increased from 31 years in 1900 to 47 years in the early 1950s to 69 years today.

Notably, much of the improvement of human well-being in developing countries is due to the transfer of technology (including knowledge) from industrialized countries to developing countries. Moreover, a substantial share of the income of many developing countries comes directly or indirectly from trade, tourism, aid, and remittances from industrialized countries.  Consequently, developing countries are far ahead of today’s industrialized countries at equivalent levels of economic development.

For instance, as noted here (pp. 20-21):

in 2006, when GDP per capita for low income countries in PPP-adjusted terms was $1,327, their life expectancy was 60.4 years, a level that the U.S. first reached in 1921, when its GDP per capita was $5,300. Surprisingly even Sub-Saharan Africa, the world’s developmental laggard, is today ahead of where the U.S. used to be. In 2006, its per capita GDP was at the same level as the U.S. in 1820 but the U.S. did not reach Sub-Saharan Africa’s current infant mortality level until 1917 when, and life expectancy until 1902, by which time the U.S. was far wealthier. [All GDP figures are in terms of real 1990 dollars, adjusted for purchasing power.]

Thus, empirical data do not support the underlying premise that industrialization of today’s developed countries has caused net harm to developing countries.

So what is it that industrialized countries have a “historical responsibility” for?  For the diffusion of knowledge and technology that they developed and which helped developing countries improve their well-being, and for helping increase incomes in the latter through trade, aid, remittances, and tourism?

As noted at Reason on-line: “Who knows, in accounting for both benefits and damages [associated with greenhouse gas emissions], Bangladesh would not end up owing the United States!”

Seemingly unconcerned about the costs of green protectionism, ten Democratic senators crucial to the upcoming Senate vote (long-standing protectionists all, with the exception of newbie Al Franken) sent a letter to the White House yesterday, urging President Obama to rethink his (lukewarm) resistance to carbon tariffs. They argue that a dreaded “unlevel playing field” would result from saddling U.S. industries with higher carbon costs while, say, Chinese ones remain unencumbered.

You’ll have to wait for my paper for a full examination of those arguments, but in the meantime here’s some excellent analysis of the politics of it all by former Catoite, international trade lawyer, and friend of liberty Scott Lincicome. He assesses the scorecard as follows:

Pro carbon tariffs – Ten protectionist Senators, the US House of Representatives (in Waxman-Markey), France [link added], and Paul Krugman.

Anti carbon tariffs – the rest of the world.