I generally admire the work of Roger Pielke Jr., a political scientist in the University of Colorado-Boulder’s Center for Science and Technology Policy Research. His new book on climate change is refreshingly honest and non-ideological, if a bit overly technophilic. His broader work offers the important insight that science alone cannot direct public policy, but rather it can only lay out possible results of different policy choices.

Given the quality of his work, I was disappointed by Pielke’s op-ed in today’s NYT defending Congress’s legislated obsolescence of the incandescent light bulb. He argues that government standard-setting is an important contribution to human welfare, and the light bulb standard is just part of that standard-setting (though he does suggest some minor policy tweaks to allow limited future availability of incandescents). 

To justify his argument, Pielke points out the great benefit of government-established standard measures, as well as quality standards:

Indeed, [in the United States of the late 19th century] the lack of standards for everything from weights and measures to electricity — even the gallon, for example, had eight definitions — threatened to overwhelm industry and consumers with a confusing array of incompatible choices.

This wasn’t the case everywhere. Germany’s standards agency, established in 1887, was busy setting rules for everything from the content of dyes to the process for making porcelain; other European countries soon followed suit. Higher-quality products, in turn, helped the growth in Germany’s trade exceed that of the United States in the 1890s.

America finally got its act together in 1894, when Congress standardized the meaning of what are today common scientific measures, including the ohm, the volt, the watt and the henry, in line with international metrics. And, in 1901, the United States became the last major economic power to establish an agency to set technological standards.

 Alas, this argument doesn’t support Pielke’s light bulb standard.

The weights-and-measures and product standards that he cites are examples of government response to market failures—instances where private action is unable to reach efficient results. Concerning weights and measures, a type of market failure known as the collective action problem can make it difficult to establish standard measures privately. Getting everyone to agree can be like herding cats, and there is ample incentive to secretly defect from that standard — e.g., a gas station would love to sell you a 120-ounce “gallon” that you assume is a standard 128 ounces. (OTOH, there are plenty of examples of private action overcoming this problem, such as the standardization of railroad track gauges in the late 19th century.) Likewise, quality standards can be understood as a response to a kind of market failure known as the information asymmetry problem— e.g., a producer of low-quality goods may knowingly try to pass them off as high-quality goods. (Again, there are plenty of examples of private action overcoming this problem.)

As libertarians, we recognize that there are market failures, and that government can sometimes mitigate them. (That’s why we’re not anarchists.) Also as libertarians, we recognize that government intervention can result in outcomes even less efficient than the original market failure. (That’s why we’re not run-of-the-mill Democrats or Republicans.)

But where is the market failure with incandescent bulbs? After nearly 125 years of use, people know the drawbacks and advantages of incandescents—that they use more electricity than other types of bulbs and have a shorter lifespan, but they cost very little and work much better in certain applications—from dimmer switches to Easy-Bake Ovens—than other bulbs. Besides, CFL bulbs were widely available before Congress’s 2007 legislation, and LED lights were already in the R&D pipeline.

Perhaps Pielke would argue that there is a market failure with incandescents: the negative externality of air pollution, including greenhouse gas emissions. But incandescent lighting is only one of many, many electricity-using devices, and electricity generation is just one of many, many sources of air pollution. So why the focus on just this one externality source instead of advocating a policy that broadly addresses emissions? And why devote his op-ed to discussing technology standards, and make no mention of air pollution?

Pielke’s Problem is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The other day, The Wall Street Journal provided a public service by lambasting Newt Gingrich for his absurd speech to the ethanol lobby in Des Moines last month (money line:  ”Obviously big urban newspapers want to kill it because it’s working, and you wonder, ‘What are their values?’”).  Today, Gingrich and fellow ethanol-maven James Woolsey struck back in those very same pages.  In doing so, Gingrich provided yet more evidence that he’s intellectually unfit for office.

“It is in this country’s long-term best interest,” he said, ”to stop the flow of $1 billion a day overseas.”  Really?  So money sent overseas is gone forever.  News to me.  The only thing you can buy with dollars earned from oil sales to the U.S. is to buy things denominated in dollars or to exchange them so that someone else can.  And we sell a lot of stuff to foreigners that are denominated in dollars (treasury bills for one) and that money comes right back to the good old U.S. of A.

But put that aside.  If Gingrich really believes this, then why not just ban all imports all together?  Is that what the GOP is about these days – rank gooberism on trade?

And one other thing; the U.S. does not spend $1 billion a day on foreign oil.  It spends about half that; $530 million a day (in 2009 anyway).

Gingrich & Woolsey on Energy is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

 I’ve decided the time has come to become an entrepreneur — as a black market operator.

Come next January, 100-watt incandescent light bulbs will be illegal, courtesy of Congress and President George W. Bush.  Lower wattages will be banned the following year.  As usual, politicians in Washington believe they know best and are determined to inconvenience the public in the name of saving energy.

No matter that incandescent lights offer a softer light and are a better value than fluorescent bulbs if turned on only briefly.  And no matter that breaking a fluorescent light will spill mercury, creating what in any other circumstance would be considered to be a biohazard.

There are other consequences of the coming prohibition.  Notes Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner:

• Citing this law, GE has closed its incandescent light plant in Virginia. For the coming years, while they’re still legal, Americans will be buying their GE incandescents from Mexico. This probably means less efficient manufacturing and more shipping.
• GE makes its CFLs in China. The factories are likely dirtier and less efficient, and certainly there will be more shipping costs.
• Because of the warm-up time for CFLs and the knowledge that they use less energy, people are more likely to leave them on for longer, I imagine.
• In northern latitudes, incandescents’ inefficiency is not wasted. Think about it: in Alaska, summer nights are very short and winter nights are very long. That means a vast majority of light-bulb time happens in the winter. The incandescents waste energy in the form of heat, but if it’s cold, that added heat slightly reduces your need to use a furnace.

And why stop there?  I could become an incandescent bulb pusher once the prohibition takes effect.  I don’t think drug prohibition makes any sense, but I have no desire to get into that market.  Customers and competitors are an ugly lot and I really don’t want to go to prison.  But selling light bulbs — now there’s something I could do!

I’d be even happier, however, if the new Congress dropped the coming prohibition.  Fluorescent bulbs often are a wise choice, but not always.  A supposedly free society should leave at least a few choices to people — like deciding which light bulbs to use.

Preparing for Life as a Light Bulb Black Marketeer is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I see that my colleague Sallie James has already blogged on the inherent protectionism in the Senate’s long-awaited cap-and-tax bill.  A summary was leaked last night by The Hill.

Well, we now have the real “discussion draft” of  “The American Power Act” [APA], sponsored by John Kerry (D-NH) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT).  Lindsay Graham (R-SC) used to be on the earlier drafts, but excused himself to have a temper tantrum.

So, while Sallie talked about the trade aspects of the bill, I’d like to blather about the mechanics, costs, and climate effects. If you don’t want to read the excruciating details, stop here and note that it mandates the impossible, will not produce any meaningful reduction of planetary warming, and it will subsidize just about every form of power that is too inefficient to compete today.

APA reduces emissions to the same levels that were in the Waxman-Markey bill passed by the House last June 26.  Remember that one — snuck through on a Friday evening, just so no one would notice?  Well, people did, and it, not health care, started the angry townhall meetings last summer.  No accident, either, that Obama’s approval ratings immediately tanked.

Just like Waxman-Markey, APA will allow the average American the carbon dioxide emissions of the average citizen back in 1867, a mere 39 years from today.  Just like Waxman-Markey, the sponsors have absolutely no idea how to accomplish this.  Instead they wave magic wands for noncompetitive technologies like “Carbon Capture and Sequestration” (“CCS”, aka “clean coal”), solar energy and windmills, and ethanol (“renewable energy”), among many others.

Just like Waxman-Markey, no one knows the (enormous) cost.  How do you put a price on something that doesn’t exist?  We simply don’t know how to reduce emissions by 83%.  Consequently, APA is yet another scheme to make carbon-based energy so expensive that you won’t use it.

This will be popular!  At $4.00 a gallon, Americans reduced their consumption of gasoline by a whopping 4%.  Go figure out how high it has to get to drop by 83%.

Oh, I know. Plug-in hybrid cars will replace gasoline powered ones. Did I mention that the government-produced Chevrolet Volt is, at first, only going to be sold to governments and where it is warm because even the Obama Administration fears that the car will not be very popular where most of us live.  Did I mention that the electric power that charges the battery most likely comes from the combustion of a carbon-based fuel? Getting to that 83% requires getting rid of carbon emissions from power production.  Period.  In 39 years. Got a replacement handy?

Don’t trot out natural gas.  It burns to carbon dioxide and water, just like coal.  True, it’s about 55% of the carbon dioxide that comes from coal per unit energy, but we’ll also use a lot more more electricity over the next forty years.  In other words, switching to natural gas will keep adding emissions to the atmosphere.

Anyway, just for fun, I plugged the APA emissions reduction schedule into the Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse-gas Induced Climate Change (MAGICC — I am not making this up), which is what the United Nations uses to estimate the climatic effects of various greenhouse-gas scenarios.

I’ve included two charts with three scenarios. One is for 2050 and the other for 2100.  They assume that the “sensitivity” of temperature to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide is 2.5°C, a number that many scientists think is too high, given the pokey greenhouse-effect warming of the planet that has occurred as we have effectively gone half way to a doubling already. The charts show prospective warming given by MAGICC.

The first scenario is “business-as-usual”, the perhaps too-optimistic way of saying a nation without APA.  The second assumes that only the US does APA, and the third assumes that each and every nation that has “obligations” under the UN’s Kyoto Protocol on global warming does the same.

As you can plainly see,  APA does nothing, even if all the Kyoto-signatories meet its impossible mandates.  The amount of warming “saved” by 2100 is 7% of the total for Business-as-Usual, or two-tenths of a degree Celsius. That amount will be barely detectable above the year-to-year normal fluctuations.  Put another way, if we believe in MAGICC, APA — if adopted by us, Europe, Canada, and the rest of the Kyotos — will reduce the prospective temperature in 2100 to what it would be in 2093.

That’s a big if.  Of course, we could go it alone. In that case, the temperature reduction would in fact be too small to measure reliably.

I’m hoping these numbers surface in the “debate” over APA.

So there you have it, the new American Power Act, a bill that doesn’t know how to achieve its mandates, has a completely unknown but astronomical cost, and doesn’t do a darned thing about global warming.  Such a deal!

Kerry and Lieberman Unveil Their Climate Bill: Such a Deal! is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Today is the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, a time to highlight and discuss ways to work toward a cleaner planet. Cato’s energy and environment research promotes policies that would help protect the environment without sacrificing economic liberty, goals that are mutually supporting, not mutually exclusive.

• Why we should thank capitalism for environmental gains: “It is businessmen — not bureaucrats or environmental activists — who deserve most of the credit for the environmental gains over the past century and who represent the best hope for a Greener tomorrow.”

• Finding the right balance: “Today, America’s environment is cleaner—and Earth Day has indeed helped ensure that. …We should renew our promise to keep the environment clean—without adding to human misery or stalling improvements in the human condition.”

• Want clean air? Try this.

• Is high-speed rail really an environmentally friendly alternative to driving and air travel? “Planners have predicted that a proposed line in Florida would use more energy and emit more of some pollutants than all of the cars it would take off the road.”

Earth Day Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Washington Post launches a new weekly today, Capital Business, covering business in the Washington area. The cover of the first edition is striking:

As the cover line exults, “There’s a wave of government money headed our way — bringing opportunities in health care, green energy, cybersecurity and education.” Of course, it’s not actually “government money” — it’s money taxed or borrowed from those who produce it in the 50 states and then sprinkled liberally around the Washington area, which now contains 6 of the 10 richest counties in America.

If the Capital Business cover image had a few more arms, it would look like the logo for this year’s Cato University, “Confronting Grasping Government“:

Washington Rakes in the Money is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Last week I was on John Stossel’s (most excellent) new show on Fox Business News to discuss energy policy — in particular, popular myths that Republicans have about energy markets.  One of the topics I touched upon was nuclear power.  My argument was the same that I have offered in print: Nuclear power is a swell technology but, given the high construction costs associated with building nuclear reactors, it’s a technology that cannot compete in free markets without a massive amount of government support.  If one believes in free markets, then one should look askance at such policies. 

As expected, the atomic cult has taken offense. 

Now, it is reasonable to argue that excessive regulatory oversight has driven up the cost of nuclear power and that a “better” regulatory regime would reduce costs.  Perhaps.  But I have yet to see any concrete accounting of exactly which regulations are “bad” along with associated price tags for the same.  If anyone out there in Internet-land has access to a good, credible accounting like that, please, send it my way.  But until I see something tangible, what we have here is assertion masquerading as fact.

Most of those who consider themselves “pro-nuke” are unaware of the fact that the current federal regulatory regime was thoroughly reformed in the late 1990s to comport with the industry’s model of what a “good” federal regulatory regime would look like.  As Oliver Kingsley Jr., the President of Exelon Nuclear, put it in Senate testimony back in 2001:

The current regulatory environment has become more stable, timely, and predictable, and is an important contributor to improved performance of nuclear plants in the United States.  This means that operators can focus more on achieving operational efficiencies and regulators can focus more on issues of safety significance.  It is important to note that safety is being maintained and, in fact enhanced, as these benefits of regulatory reform are being realized.  The Nuclear Regulatory Commission — and this Subcommittee — can claim a number of successes in their efforts to improve the nuclear regulatory environment.  These include successful implementation of the NRC Reactor Oversight Process, the timely extension of operating licenses at Calvert Cliffs and Oconee, the establishment of a one-step licensing process for advanced reactors, the streamlining of the license transfer process, and the increased efficiency in processing licensing actions.

It’s certainly possible that the industry left some desirable reforms undone, but it seems relevant to me that the Nuclear Energy Institute — the trade association for the nuclear energy industry and a fervent supporter of all these government assistance programs — does not complain that they’re being unfairly hammered by costly red-tape.

For the most part, however, the push-back against the arguments I offered last week has little to do with this.  It has to do with bias.  According to a post by Rod Adams over at “Atomic Insights Blog,” I am guilty of ignoring subsidies doled-out to nuclear’s biggest competitor — natural gas — and because Cato gets money from Koch Industries, it’s clear that my convenient neglect of that matter is part of a corporate-funded attack on nuclear power.  Indeed, Mr. Adams claims that he has unearthed a “smoking gun” with this observation.

Normally, I would ignore attacks like this.  This particular post, however, offers the proverbial “teachable moment” that should not be allowed to go to waste.

First, let’s look at the substance of the argument.  Did I “give natural gas a pass” as Mr. Adams contends? Well, yes and no; the show was about the cost of nuclear power, not the cost of natural gas.  I did note that natural gas-fired electricity was more attractive in this economic environment than nuclear power, something that happens to be true.  Had John Stossel asked me about whether gas’ economic advantage was due to subsidy, I would have told him that I am against natural gas subsidies as well — a position I have staked-out time and time again in other venues (while there are plenty of examples, this piece I co-authored with Daniel Becker — then of the Sierra Club — for The Los Angeles Times represents my thinking on energy subsidies across the board.  A blog post a while back about the Democratic assault on oil and gas subsidies found me arguing that the D’s should actually go further!  Dozens of other similar arguments against fossil fuel subsidies can be found on my publications page).  So let’s dispose of Mr. Adams’ implicit suggestion that I am some sort of tool for the oil and gas industry, arguing against subsidies here but not against subsidies there.

Second, let’s consider the implicit assertion that Mr. Adams makes — that natural gas-fired electricity is more attractive than nuclear power primarily because of subsidy.  The most recent and thorough assessment of this matter comes from Prof. Gilbert Metcalf, an economist at Tufts University.  Prof. Metcalf agrees with a 2004 report from the Energy Information Administration which contended that preferences for natural gas production in the tax code do little to increase natural gas production and thus do little to make natural gas less expensive than it might otherwise be.  They are wealth transfers for sure, but they do not do much to change natural gas supply or demand curves and thus do not affect consumer prices.  Prof. Metcalf argues that if we had truly level regulatory playing field without any tax distortions, natural gas-fired electricity would actually go down, not up!  Government intervention in energy markets does indeed distort gas-fired electricity prices.  It makes those prices higher than they otherwise would be!

The Energy Information Administration (EIA) identified five natural gas subsidies in 2007 that were relevant to the electricity sector (table 5).  Only two are of particular consequence.  They are:

• Expensing of Exploration and Development Costs – Gas producers are allowed to expense exploration and development expenditures rather than capitalize and depreciate those costs over time.  Oil and gas producers (combined) took advantage of this tax break to the tune of $860 million per year.  How much goes to gas production rather than to oil production is unclear.
• Excess of Percentage over Cost Depletion Deferral – Under cost depletion, producers are allowed to make an annual deduction equal to the non-recovered cost of acquisition and development of the resource times the proportion of the resource removed that year.  Under percentage depletion, producers deduct a percentage of gross income from resource production.  Oil and gas producers (combined) take advantage of this tax break to the tune of $790 million per year.  How much goes to gas production rather than to oil production is unclear. 

Even if we put aside the fact that these subsidies don’t impact final consumer prices in any significant manner, it’s useful to keep in mind the fact that the subsidy per unit of gas-fired electricity production — as calculated by EIA — works out to 25 cents per megawatt hour (table 35).  Subsidy per unit of nuclear-fired electricity production works out to $1.59 per megawatt hour.  Hence, the argument that nuclear subsidies are relatively small in comparison with natural gas subsidies is simply incorrect.

Some would argue that the Foreign Tax Credit — a generally applicable credit available to corporations doing business overseas that allows firms to treat royalty payments to foreign governments as a tax that can be deducted from domestic corporate income taxes — should likewise be on the subsidy list.  The Environmental Law Institute calculates that this credit saves the fossil fuel industry an additional $15.3 billion.  There is room for debate about the wisdom of that credit, but regardless, it doesn’t appear as if the Foreign Tax Credit affects domestic U.S. prices for gas-fired electricity.     

The bigger point is that without government help, few doubt that the natural gas industry would still be humming and electricity would still be produced in large quantities from gas-fired generators.  But without government production subsidies, without loan guarantees, and without liability protection via the Price-Anderson Act, even the nuclear power industry concedes that they would disappear.

Now, to be fair, Prof. Metcalf reports that nuclear power is cheaper than gas-fired power under both current law and under a no-subsidy, no-tax regime.  His calculations, however, were made at a time when natural gas prices were at near historic highs that were thought to be the new norm in energy markets and were governed by fairly optimistic assumptions about nuclear power plant construction costs.  Those assumptions have not held-up well with time.  For a more recent assessment, see my review of this issue in Reasonalong with this study from MIT, which warns that if more government help isn’t forthcoming, “nuclear power will diminish as a practical and timely option for deployment at a scale that would constitute a material contribution to climate change risk mitigation.”

Third, Mr. Adams argues that federal nuclear loan guarantee program is a self-evidently good deal and implies that only an anti-industry agitprop specialist (like me) could possibly refuse to see that.  “That program, with its carefully designed and implemented due diligence requirements for project viability, should actually produce revenue for the government.”  Funny, but when private investors perform those due diligence exercises, they come to a very different conclusion … which is why we have a federal loan guarantee program in the first place. 

Who do you trust to watch over your money — investment bankers or Uncle Sam?  The former don’t have the best track record in the world these days, but note that the popular indictment of that crowd is that investment banks weren’t tight fisted enough when it came to lending.  If even these guys were saying no to nuclear power — and at a time when money was flowing free and easy — what makes Mr. Adams think that a bunch of politicians are right about the glorious promise of nuclear power, particularly given the “too cheap to meter” rhetoric we’ve heard from the political world now for the better part of five decades? 

Anyway, for what it’s worth, the Congressional Budget Office has taken a close look at this alleged bonanza for the taxpayer and judged the risk of default on these loan guarantees to be around 50 percent.  They may be wrong of course, but the risks are there, something Moody’s acknowledged last year in a published analysis warning that they were likely to downgrade the credit-worthiness of nuclear power plant construction loans.

Fourth and finally, Mr. Adams cites Cato’s skepticism about “end-is-near” climate alarmism as yet more evidence that we are on the take from the fossil fuels industry.  I don’t know if Mr. Adams has been following current events lately, but I would think that we’re looking pretty good right now on that front.  Der Spiegel — no hot-bed of “Big Oil” agitprop — sums up the state of the debate rather nicely in the wake of the ongoing collapse of IPCC credibility.  Matt Ridley — another former devotee of climate alarmism — likewise sifts through the rubble that is now the infamous Michael Mann “hockey stick” analysis (which allegedly demonstrated an unprecedented degree of warming in the 20th Century) and finds thorough and total rot at the heart of the alarmist argument.  Mr. Adams is perhaps unaware that our own Pat Michaels has been making these arguments for years and Cato has no apologies to make on that score. 

Regardless, ad hominem is the sign of a man running out of arguments.  There aren’t many here to rebut, but the form of the complaints offered by Mr. Adams speaks volumes about how little the pro-nuclear camp has to offer right now in defense of nuclear power subsidies.

I have no animus towards nuclear power per se.  If nuclear power could compete without government help, I would be as happy as Mr. Adams or the next MIT nuclear engineer.  But I am no more “pro” nuclear power than I am “pro” any power.  It is not for me to pick winners in the market place.  That’s the invisible hand’s job.  If there is bad regulation out there harming the industry, then by all means, let’s see a list of said bad regulations and amend them accordingly.  But once those regulations are amended (if there are indeed any that need amending), nuclear power should still be subject to an unbiased market test.  Unlike Mr. Adams, I don’t want to see that test rigged.

Atomic Dreams is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• A few things you might not know about rail travel: “Automobiles in intercity travel are as energy efficient as Amtrak. Cars are getting more energy efficient, while boosting Amtrak trains to higher speeds will make them less energy efficient.” The list goes on…

• Quiz Time! Which was the only country in the 27-nation European Union to register economic growth without going through a recession last year? The answer might surprise you.

• Unionized teachers refuse to work 25 minutes more a day, so Rhode Island town fires all of them.

• Arnold Kling on Haiti, poverty, and capitalism.

• Podcast: This is what happens to American jobs when you have one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world.

Thursday Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• Is there a place for gay people in conservative politics? We’ll be discussing it today at Cato. Watch here live at 12 PM EST.

• President Obama announces $8 billion in loan guarantees to build a new nuclear power plant in Georgia. But are government subsidies for pet energy projects a good idea?

• Are there loopholes in Obama’s ban on torture?

• What happens when the Olympics don’t go completely according to plan.

• Podcast: “Lessig, Schumer and Citizens United” featuring John Samples.

Wednesday Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In Soviet times people used to say that if the Communists took over the Sahara desert, there’d soon be a shortage of sand.

Which I guess explains why there’s an energy crisis in energy-rich Venezuela.

A Shortage of Sand? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In a post at the Enterprise Blog two days ago, economist Mark Perry deftly parodies a typical mainstream media account of trade protectionism by editing the story in redline to contrast its original presentation with its true significance. I recommend reading the whole thing, but here’s the first paragraph:

WASHINGTON POST (Reuters) – A U.S. trade panel gave final approval on Wednesday to duties taxes ranging from 10 to 16 percent on cost-conscious firms in the U.S. who purchase low-priced Chinese-made steel pipe rather than high-price domestic pipe, in the biggest U.S. trade case to date against China American companies (and their shareholders, employees, and customers) who shop globally for their inputs and find the best value in China.

Perry’s point—and I share his frustration—is that the mainstream media typically fail to convey even a sense of the costs of U.S. protectionism to U.S. interests even though Americans (and non-Americans living in the U.S.) bear the greatest burden of that protectionism. When the U.S. government imposes duties on Chinese steel, it is imposing taxes on U.S. consuming industries, their employees, their shareholders, and their customers.

Considering that more than half of the value of all U.S. imports in a typical year is raw materials and intermediate goods (i.e., inputs for producers operating in the United States, who employ people, transact with other businesses, and pay taxes in the United States), the number of U.S. victims of U.S. import taxes is much larger than one can ever glean from a typical media account. Taxes on Chinese-made ”Oil Country Tubular Goods” or OCTG (the subject in the article Perry edits), which are used for oil exploration and transport, will raise costs in the energy industry, which are likely to be passed onto consumers in the form of higher energy prices.

As described in this paper, trade is no longer a competition between “Us and Them.” There is competition between entities that—because of the proliferation of cross-border investment and transnational production and supply chains—often defy any meaningful national identification. But that competition is preceded by collaboration and cooperation between entities in different countries. The factory floor has broken through its walls and now spans borders and oceans—a fact that renders U.S. workers and workers in other countries complementary in more and more cases, and a fact that amplifies the cost of trade barriers.

But media—chained to the false “Us versus Them” paradigm—describe protectionist policies as actions taken by one national monolith against another, and convey the impression that American readers should be cheering for Team America. It is a worldview that conflates the well-being of “our producers” with some homogenized conception of “the national interest.” It is the same misguided scoreboard mentality that colors reporting of the trade account, where exports are deemed “good” and imports “bad.”  And, it is this simplistic, misleading characterization that, in my opinion, is most responsible for withering public opinion about trade and globalization over the past decade.

I look forward to more of Dr. Perry’s editing projects.

Mainstream Media’s Trade Gap is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Huge deficit spending, a supposed stimulus bill, and financial bailouts by the Bush administration failed to stave off a deep recession. President Obama continued his predecessor’s policies with an even bigger stimulus, which helped push the deficit over the unimaginable trillion dollar mark. Prosperity hasn’t returned, but the president is persistent in his interventionist beliefs. In his speech yesterday, he told the country that we must “spend our way out of this recession.”

While a dedicated segment of the intelligentsia continues to believe in simplistic Kindergarten Keynesianism, average Americans are increasingly leery. Businesses and entrepreneurs are hesitant to invest and hire because of the uncertainty surrounding the President’s agenda for higher taxes, higher energy costs, health care mandates, and greater regulation. The economy will eventually recover despite the government’s intervention, but as the debt mounts, today’s profligacy will more likely do long-term damage to the nation’s prosperity.

Some leaders in Congress want a new round of stimulus spending of $150 billion or more. The following are some of the ways that money might be spent from the president’s speech:

• Extend unemployment insurance. When you subsidize something you get more it, so increasing unemployment benefits will push up the unemployment rate, as Alan Reynolds notes.”

• More infrastructure spending. This will lead to misallocation of resources since only markets can allocate resources efficiently. Governments allocate capital on the basis of politics instead of economics.

• “Cash for Caulkers.” This would be like Cash for Clunkers except people would get tax credits to make their homes more energy efficient. Any program modeled off “the dumbest government program ever” should be put back on the shelf. 

• More Small Business Administration lending. A little noticed SBA program created by the stimulus bill offered banks an “unprecedented” 100 percent guarantee on loans to small businesses. The program has an anticipated default rate of 60 percent. Small businesses need lower taxes and fewer regulations, not a government program that perpetuates more moral hazard.

• More aid to state and local governments. State and local government should be using the recession to implement reforms that will prevent them from going on another unsustainable spending spree when the economy recovers. Also, we need fewer state and local government employees – not more – as they’re becoming an increasing burden on taxpayers.

The president said his administration was “forced to take those steps largely without the help of an opposition party which, unfortunately, after having presided over the decision-making that led to the crisis, decided to hand it to others to solve.” Mr. President, nobody has forced you to do anything. You’ve chosen to embrace – and expand upon – the big spending policies that were a hallmark of your predecessor’s administration.

Spending Our Way Into More Debt is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

There are two different stories coming from the same political party on global warming, leading to only one conclusion: President Obama is about to (or has) ordered the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to mandate some type of cap on U.S. carbon dioxide emissions.

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.

The Long Road to Copenhagen is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

A basic contention of developing countries (DCs) and various UN bureaucracies and multilateral groups during the course of International negotiations on climate change is that industrialized countries (ICs) have a historical responsibility for global warming.  This contention underlies much of the justification for insisting not only that industrialized countries reduce their greenhouse gas emissions even as developing countries are given a bye on emission reductions, but that they also subsidize clean energy development and adaptation in developing countries. [It is also part of the rationale that industrialized countries should pay reparations for presumed damages from climate change.]

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.

Are Industrialized Countries Responsible for Reducing the Well Being of Developing Countries? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In the debate over health care reform, advocates of expanded government health insurance suggest we can pay for this by making Medicare and Medicaid more efficient.

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

Climate Change and Health Care: Free Lunches? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

“My critics say that I’m taking over every sector of the economy,” President Obama sighed to George Stephanopoulos during his Sunday media blitz.

Not every sector. Just

• health care
• energy
• local schools
• banks
• insurance companies
• automobile companies
• compensation at financial firms
• newspapers
• the internet

This president and his Ivy League advisers believe that they know how an economy should develop better than hundreds of millions of market participants spending their own money every day. That is what F. A. Hayek called the “fatal conceit,” the idea that smart people can design a real economy on the basis of their abstract ideas.

This is not quite socialism. In most of these cases, President Obama doesn’t propose to actually nationalize the means of production. (In the case of the automobile companies, he clearly did.) He just wants to use government money and government regulations to extend political control over all these sectors of the economy. And the more political control achieves, the more we can expect political favoritism, corruption, uneconomic decisions, and slower economic growth.

Taking Over Everything is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

This is from the Reagan administration’s deregulatory 1981 energy plan: “All Americans are involved in making energy policy. When individual choices are made with a maximum of personal understanding and a minimum of government restraints, the result is the most appropriate energy policy.”

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.

Bob McDonnell: The Modern Republican is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Thomas Friedman’s New York Times column today would be astonishing in its incoherence if only Friedman hadn’t long ago sapped us of our ability to be astonished by his incoherence. Like many capital-’d’ Democrats, Friedman has soured on democracy for failing to deliver on his policy wish list.

Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.

Why does Friedman say the United States has one-party democracy? Because the Republican Party is effectively opposing the Democratic Party’s agenda! Not even kidding. Get this:

The fact is, on both the energy/climate legislation and health care legislation, only the Democrats are really playing. With a few notable exceptions, the Republican Party is standing, arms folded and saying “no.” Many of them just want President Obama to fail. Such a waste. Mr. Obama is not a socialist; he’s a centrist. But if he’s forced to depend entirely on his own party to pass legislation, he will be whipsawed by its different factions.

Only the Democrats are really playing! You might think that would mean they can do whatever they darn well please. But no! The Democrats can’t do anything! Because the other party‘s opposition is so effective! So it’s exactly as if there’s just one party: nothing gets done!

My hunch is that the Times’ editors see Friedman aiming the gun at his foot, but watching a man stupid enough to actually pull the trigger is so fun they hate to intervene. That or they’re trying to explode the myth of American meritocracy.

So where were we? Oh, yes: one-party democracy is aggravating because sometimes one party can’t do what it wants because the other party gets in the way. Sooo frustrating!!! Why have democracy at all when all you end up with is a single party stymied by the other one! And so it is that Friedman comes to wax romantic about communist central planning:

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power.

Nikita Kruschev, the enlightened leader of a now-defunct one-party autocracy, was also committed to overtaking the United States in technology and so much more. “We will bury you” is how he put it. At the time, more than a few left-leaning American opinionmakers suspected he was right. After all, how can inefficiently squabbling democracies possibly keep pace with undivided regimes wholly devoted to scientifically centrally planning their way into the brighter, better future? And that, children, is why we speak Russian today.

Thomas Friedman’s New Math of Democracy is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Since the June House vote on the Waxman-Markey “cap-and-trade” bill, lawmakers from both chambers have backed significantly away from the legislation. The first raucous “town hall” meetings occurred during the July 4 recess, before health care. Voters in swing districts were mad as heck then, and they’re even more angry now. Had the energy bill not all but disappeared from the Democrats’ fall agenda, imagine the decibel level if members were called to defend it and Obamacare.

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.

The Post and Times Push for Cap and Trade is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Last week Conor Clarke at The Atlantic blog , apparently as part of a running argument with Jim Manzi, raised four substantive issues with my study, “What to Do About Climate Change,” that Cato published last year. Mr. Clarke deserves a response, and I apologize for not getting to this sooner. Today, I’ll address the first part of his first comment. I’ll address the rest of his comments over the next few days.

Conor Clarke: 

(1) Goklany’s analysis does not extend beyond the 21st century. This is a problem for two reasons. First, climate change has no plans to close shop in 2100. Even if you believe GDP will be higher in 2100 with unfettered global warming than without, it’s not obvious that GDP would be higher in the year 2200 or 2300 or 3758. (This depends crucially on the rate of technological progress, and as Goklany’s paper acknowledges, that’s difficult to model.) Second, the possibility of “catastrophic” climate change events — those with low probability but extremely high cost — becomes real after 2100.

Response:  First, I wouldn’t put too much stock in analyses purporting to extend out to the end of the 21st century, let alone beyond that, for numerous reasons, some of which are laid out on pp. 2-3 of the Cato study. As noted there, according to a paper commissioned for the Stern Review, “changes in socioeconomic systems cannot be projected semi-realistically for more than 5–10 years at a time.”

Second, regarding Mr. Clarke’s statement that, “Even if you believe GDP will be higher in 2100 with unfettered global warming than without, it’s not obvious that GDP would be higher in the year 2200 or 2300 or 3758,” I should note that the conclusion that net welfare for 2100 (measured by net GDP per capita) is not based on a belief.  It follows inexorably from Stern’s own analysis.

Third, despite my skepticism of long term estimates, I have, for the sake of argument, extended the calculation to 2200. See here. Once again, I used the Stern Review’s estimates, not because I think they are particularly credible (see below), but for the sake of argument. Specifically, I assumed that losses in welfare due to climate change under the IPCC’s warmest scenario would, per the Stern Review’s 95th percentile estimate, be equivalent to 35.2 percent of GDP in 2200. [Recall that Stern’s estimates account for losses due to market impacts, non-market (i.e., environmental and public health) impacts and the risk of catastrophe, so one can’t argue that only market impacts were considered.]

The results, summarized in the following figure, indicate that even if one uses the Stern Review’s inflated impact estimates under the warmest IPCC scenario, net GDP in 2200 ought to be higher in the warmest world than in cooler worlds for both developing and industrialized countries.

Source: Indur M. Goklany, “Discounting the Future,” Regulation 32: 36-40 (Spring 2009).

The costs of climate change used to develop the above figure are, most likely, overestimated because they do not properly account for increases in future adaptive capacity consistent with the level of net economic development resulting from Stern’s own estimates (as shown in the above figure).  This figure shows that even after accounting for losses in GDP per capita due to climate change – and inflating these losses — net GDP per capita in 2200 would be between 16 and 85 times higher in 2200 that it was in the baseline year (1990).  No less important, Stern’s estimate of the costs of climate change neglect secular technological change that ought to occur during the 210-year period extending from the base year (1990) to 2200. In fact, as shown here, empirical data show that for most environmental indicators that have a critical effect on human well-being, technology has, over decades-long time frames reduced impacts by one or more orders of magnitude.

As a gedanken experiment, compare technology (and civilization’s adaptive capacity) in 1799 versus 2009. How credible would a projection for 2009 have been if it didn’t account for technological change from 1799 to 2009?

I should note that some people tend to dismiss the above estimates of GDP on the grounds that it is unlikely that economic development, particularly in today’s developing countries, will be as high as indicated in the figure.  My response to this is that they are based on the very assumptions that drive the IPCC and the Stern Review’s emissions and climate change scenarios. So if one disbelieves the above GDP estimates, then one should also disbelieve the IPCC and the Stern Review’s projection for the future.

Fourth, even if analysis that appropriately accounted for increases in adaptive capacity had shown that in 2200 people would be worse off in the richest-but-warmest world than in cooler worlds, I wouldn’t get too excited just yet. Even assuming a 100-year lag time between the initiation of emission reductions and a reduction in global temperature because of a combination of the inertia of the climate system and the turnover time for the energy infrastructure, we don’t need to do anything drastic till after 2100 (=2200 minus 100 years), unless monitoring shows before then that matters are actually becoming worse (as opposing merely changing), in which case we should certainly mobilize our responses. [Note that change doesn’t necessarily equate to worsening. One has to show that a change would be for the worse.  Unfortunately, much of the climate change literature skips this crucial step.]

In fact, waiting-and-preparing-while-we-watch (AKA watch-and-wait) makes most sense, just as it does for many problems (e.g., some cancers) where the cost of action is currently high relative to its benefit, benefits are uncertain, and technological change could relatively rapidly improve the cost-benefit ratio of controls. Within the next few decades, we should have a much better understanding of climate change and its impacts, and the cost of controls ought to decline in the future, particularly if we invest in research and development for mitigation.  In the meantime we should spend our resources on solving today’s first order problems – and climate change simply doesn’t make that list, as shown by the only exercises that have ever bothered to compare the importance of climate change relative to other global problems.  See here and here.  As is shown in the Cato paper (and elsewhere), this also ought to reduce vulnerability and increase resiliency to climate change.

In the next installment, I’ll address the second point in Mr. Clarke’s first point, namely, the fear that “the possibility of ‘catastrophic’ climate change events — those with low probability but extremely high cost — becomes real after 2100.”

Response to Conor Clarke, Part I is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog