Adam Smith Institute

Jim Manzi has managed to get me to at least rethink one of my long held beliefs about climate chaange and what we should do about it. Rethink still, not quite change my mind.

My basic position has always been that climate change is indeed happening and that we now need to look at the economics of the situation: it's not, as many insist, either an immediate or catastrophic problem, rather a low level and chronic one. Thus I reject the Gore and other catastrophists (including the Stern Review) thoughts that we need swinging carbon taxes (or cap and trade agreements) now: I'm rather more inclined to the Nordhaus view that low carbon taxes now, with a road map for their gradual rise over the decades, will provide the incentives for the necessary changes. Such taxation being, of course, revenue neutral, so that other taxes should fall as they are imposed. One thing that rather underlies my complacency about such taxation is that on things like air travel and oil we already have the necessary levels of green taxation recommended: not just by Nordhaus, but by Stern. So we've already done what we needed to do, we just need to wait the time that such changes in relative prices will take to influence behaviour as the stock of cars, heating systems and the like is replaced.

I'm also aware of the Hayek point: that we can't actually know what, exactly, the correct level of such taxation should be, but again, low and gradually rising taxation doesn't worry me all that much, not over decades.

However, Manzi goes further and makes me think that quite possibly I'm wrong in all of the above. That is, that the political system is so disfunctional, so appallingly corrupted by special interest pleading, that it will never be possible to roll out such carbon taxation across the economy without the price soaring above any possible benefits. If he's right, and he is indeed very convincing, then that leaves only one path we can possibly logically follow.

Technological development and whatever adaptation we need to do to fill in the gaps. I can't say that that worries me either really: my day job is on the fringes of said technological development and the one thing we really do know about human beings is that we adapt pretty well.

All of that said, I do urge you to read Manzi's post. Perhaps this is another of these problems which is simply too important to be left to politics?

The unintended cosequences of climate change alarmism are growing clearer by the day. Prices for wheat are 60 percent higher than a year ago – resulting in soaring bread prices of around 36 percent per year. This is primarily due to agricultural land being used for biofuel production (which now takes up 30 percent of American agricultural capacity). Bread riots, a red light for every regime since time imemorial, toppled the government in Haiti a few days ago and are spreading across the world. Similar developments have triggered protests and riots in countries ranging from Africa, India, Indonesia and Afghanistan.

Alarmed by this, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, India, Inonesia, Vietnam and Argentina have restricted food exports in order to feed their own populaces. Even in the US, probably not much longer the bread basket of the world, rationing of food has begun over the last 6 weeks. Bloggers in New York are relating amazing stories:

I've heard that rice, flour, beans, and cooking oil are the main items being rationed at places like Pathmark, ShopRite, and Costco. One friend who lives in Flushing mentioned that she was not allowed to purchase more than one 25lb sack of rice in a local grocery. As far as I know, the main neighborhoods being rationed so far are all in the outer Boroughs (Queens, Bronx, Jersey City, parts of Brooklyn, and Harlem).

In silicon valley you could not buy more than one big sack of rice last week. With the growing media coverage of food shortages and related unrest abroad, the already protectionist mood among Americans has lead to calls for a moratorium on wheat exports. American bakery owners marched on Congress last month demanding to curtail wheat exports to give them some relief. Thanks to the collapse of the American dollar it's becoming cheaper for foreigners to buy out US supplies. Bread and butter issues are increasingly likely to become an issue in this November presidential election.

99. "We should switch all our energy to derive from renewable sources."

This is not a practical proposition from the standpoint of either cost or technology. Wind-power is uneconomic without subsidies, and involves huge energy expenditure in construction and maintenance of its wind farms. Rooftop windmills in urban areas, for example, take more energy to produce than they themselves generate. Since winds are unreliable, wind power necessitates huge back-up sources to be on standby.

Solar technology used to use the silicon rejected by the computer industry, but now high purity silicon is being manufactured specifically for power generation. However, this is a heavily energy intensive process, undermining the energy payback from the technology. Although great strides are being made here and it looks as if solar power could be price competitive in a decade, it still won't provide a steady flow of power, nor the concentrations of power needed for industry.

Biofuels currently use food crops such as wheat and maize, and drive up prices, affecting poor people most. The US and the EU have gone for them as an easy option that pleases the farm lobby, but they are not efficient. The crops it takes to fill the tank of a 4x4 with biofuels would feed someone for a year. Many also maintain (Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth amongst them) that they produce more emissions than they replace. If technology can obtain biofuels from plant waste and cellulose, they will be a more viable source, but this might be years away.

A more realistic approach would accompany research into efficient renewable sources with technology to use fossil fuel cleanly so that coal-fired power stations, for example, can capture the carbon produced. Clean fossil fuel technology can give abundant, secure and low-cost energy, which renewable sources currently cannot.
 

Have you seen the movie Happy Feet? It was a blockbuster last year, and with good reason. It’s very funny. Produced in Australia the film is set in Antarctic waters. But in political correct times there does of course have to be an issue with 'mystic beings' degrading the environment with marine debris.

Imagine what happens to the 6-pack ring carrier that holds cans of beer or coke, thrown away carelessly from a cruiser. In the movie little Lovelace, the young Rockhopper penguin, wears it around his neck as a souvenir. Alas! Poor little Lovelace is growing fast and the ring around his neck is getting tighter. So tight that later on a killer whale whose teeth got caught with the necklace thrashes Lovelace in and out of the Antarctic waters leaving him hanging on for dear life.

Well, now the other side of the story has been told by one of the major manufacturers of this ring carrier, Illinois-based ITW Hi-Cone. The ring is non-toxic and photodegradable within days and couldn’t strangle Lovelace at all. But nevertheless the ring carrier:

…has been in the environmental spotlight since the late 1970’s. People often associate it with animal entanglement. But it has been illegal under federal law to distribute non-degradable ring carriers since the (US) EPA crafted regulations in 1994 at the direction of Congress. All three major manufacturers of ring carriers currently produce them with 100 percent photodegradable plastic.

Photo-degradation means that the sun will break the bonds of the plastic polymers, because scientists have put weak links in place. Therefore the ring carriers lose 75 percent of their strength in a few days and fall apart completely in four weeks. The movie's Antarctic setting, with its thinning ozone layer, would expose Lovelace’s necklace to even more ultraviolet radiation and speed up the photodegradation. For all its entertainment value, Happy Feet is nonetheless another example of poor eco-science.

One major aspect of climate change scare mongering is epidemics. For example, the WHO and other scientists with a strong green bias claim that US energy policy is "indirectly exporting disease to other parts of the world" - causing probably 160,000 deaths per year.
 
However, infectious disease specialists from the Paris-based Pasteur Institute are defending the US against such claims. They demonstrate that Tiger mosquito-borne outbreaks, for which the WHO blames global warming, are actually caused by simple transportation. Malaria is not a tropical disease at all but simply one that affects the poor most .

The thing is that the WHO counts on ignorance and loss of memory to drive public opinion into climate scare scenarios. Malaria is one example of this. Most people have forgotten that Malaria was once quite common in Northern Europe – including Germany, Holland, and Britain – and was only completely eradicated there as late as the 1970s. The Pasteur doctors argue:

The globalization of vectors and pathogens is a serious problem. But it is not new. The Yellow Fever mosquito and virus were imported into North America from Africa during the slave trade. The dengue virus is distributed throughout the tropics and regularly jumps continents inside air passengers. West Nile virus likely arrived in the U.S. in shipments of wild birds. These diseases are spread by mosquitoes and therefore difficult to quarantine.

In the same way, that Malaria was probably slightly less active in Shakespeare’s England during the ‘Little Ice Age’ - although he mentions the disease in eight of his plays – it might well be slightly more active in our times due to mild warming. But this is by no means a decisive factor and people will always find ways to adapt to these new conditions.

85. "Curbs on budget airlines are needed to protect the environment."

Budget air flights emit a tiny fraction of the CO2 and other 'greenhouse gases' that are put out from all sources.  They are insignificant compared to the emissions of agriculture, road transport and power generation.  The problem is that these make very difficult targets for NGOs to pick upon because we cannot do without those big three, whereas they feel free to call budget air flights an unnecessary luxury.

NGO spokespersons usually gloss over the minor contribution of budget airlines to total pollution by describing the emissions from air transport as the "fastest growing" source.  If this is true it is only because they start from such a low base.  Even at the highest estimates for the growth of air traffic by the mid-century, analysts calculate their contribution might rise from 1.5 percent of the total to about 3 percent.

In fact budget airlines generally emit less per passenger than the established airlines.  This is because they typically fly with a higher load capacity, flying more people for the same fuel.  Even without the punitive taxes demanded by eco-lobbyists, airline passengers already pay very high taxes which in many cases cost more than the ticket itself does.

Budget airlines have made air travel no longer an exotic prerogative of the rich, but have made it accessible to ordinary people, with all of the opportunities this presents.  Critics deride 'holidays in the sun,' but neglect to point out the opportunities people now have to visit and explore foreign cities and to experience for a time the cultures of other nations.  The more that people know about other peoples and places, the more rich their own life is likely to be.

The responsible way forward is not to make air travel once again something only the rich can afford, but to develop the technologies that can make it cleaner and more efficient.

Yesterday morning I attended an exhibition of plans for the redevelopment of the Ram Brewery in Wandsworth, south-west London. I was impresssed – both by the plans themselves and by the amount of people the developers had there to discuss the project with local residents.

It's a long overdue scheme. Wandsworth is a great place to live: a lovely residential area with good links to central London and the lowest council tax in the country. But it's a town without a centre. The high street is run-down and full of speeding cars; on one side is a misguided sixties development, on the other the disused Ram Brewery. Minerva Plc's plans would renovate the brewery's historic buildings, and replace the rest with housing, retail space and a new public square – as well as opening the River Wandle up to pedestrians. More controversially, they are going to put up two 'skyscrapers' (29 and 39 storeys respectively) at the northern end of the development.

I love skyscrapers – they look fantastic and I can't understand why London doesn't have more of them, especially given its lack of space. Yet many local residents don't share my enthusiasm. Indeed, some would apparently prefer the town centre remained a dead space full of empty industrial buildings. This a peculiar (but common) sentiment I've never been able to get my head around – I once took part in a TV discussion about residents who wanted to preserve a disused, ugly and inaccessible coal-mine rather than have anything new built. Such resistance to change is perverse.

There is one legitimate worry about the new development: transport. The trains from Wandsworth Town station are already nightmarishly overcrowded at peak times (will Network Rail ever lengthen the platform?) and the roads are not much better. Yet it strikes me that the developers are doing their best on this front – after all, the people who are going to buy from them want decent infrastructure. Minerva have set aside room around the development for widening roads and junctions, and made substantial funding available to Transport for London.

So the private sector is doing its bit. The public sector is dragging its feet.

Dr Richard Pike, chief of the Royal Society of Chemistry, has said that biofuels are a "dead end" and "extremely inefficient", and that the government was wrong to impose a requirement for 5 per cent biofuel content in motor fuel by 2010.

71. "Business is polluting the environment, which we should all enjoy, just for the benefit of the rich."

Most people pollute the environment. Some do it with sewage, some with the smoke from fires or the fumes from petrol or diesel engines. Business which uses energy tends to pollute, and manufacturing tends to pollute more than service industries. For that matter, older industries tend to pollute more than the newer, high tech ones. It is not for the benefit of the rich, but in order that the products can be cheaper that a certain amount of pollution is tolerated.

Production could be totally clean, but it would make goods much more expensive if the clean-up costs were added to production. The rich would be relatively unaffected by this, and the poor would suffer most. Society has to balance the cost of a totally unaffected environment against the cost of producing necessary goods.

Even nature pollutes, with forest fires and natural contamination of air and water. A certain degree of pollution is tolerable in the sense that it lies within the regenerative capacity of the environment. As society grows richer, as a result of wealth-creating enterprise, it becomes more able to afford the luxury of a cleaner environment, and is able to insist on cleaner methods of production. One reason why less developed countries are taking a larger share of manufacturing is that for them, the advantages of prosperity outweigh the costs of pollution.

A clean environment is not something which costs the rich money; it costs everyone money in the increased cost of industrial processes, and the higher prices which have to be charged. As countries grow richer they become more able to afford that price and to produce cleanly. Although some urge us to cut back economic growth to secure a cleaner environment, it is only by becoming richer that more people will be able to afford a clean environment.

The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, which took place from March 2-4 in New York City, changed the momentum of man-made climate change scepticism. The groundbreaking event at Times Square, with 100 scientists and more than 500 attendees, exposed what were described as "absolute horror stories" with biased reporting, even in scientific journals. Science journalists were accused of "outrageous and unethical behaviour" with regard to the censoring or suppressing critical studies on climate research.

Among the many speakers in New York, three leading scientists presented solid, dramatic and verified new material completely refuting the myth that climate change was caused by mankind's production of carbon dioxide... The number of scientists attending the conference apparently well exceeded the number involved in the IPCC process... I felt touched by 100 scientists with the courage to put their convictions in writing to the United Nations' Bali climate summit. The scientists from 17 nations include internationally eminent climatologists – and authors of the scientific report prepared for the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) including some IPCC Lead Authors.

A new 'Manhattan Declaration on Climate Change' was initiated stating "that carbon dioxide (CO2) is not a pollutant but rather a necessity for all life." Senator Inhofe’s register, put together by the USA Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee, already contains more than 500 scientists who previously endorsed the IPCC views but have meanwhile changed their mind. The sceptics have reached a consensus on four key points:

1) The Earth is currently well within natural climate variability. 2) Almost all climate fear is generated by unproven computer model predictions. 3) An abundance of peer-reviewed studies continue to debunk rising CO2 fears and, 4) "Consensus" has been manufactured for political, not scientific purposes.

Contrary to expectations the media coverage was excellent – that’s the new momentum.

The ASI's latest publication, The Waste of Nations by Gordon Hector (reported here in the Daily Telegraph), calls for the introduction of pay-as-you-throw (PAYT) waste charges as the best way to encourage less waste and more recycling. Research from the US suggests a move to PAYT would reduce landfill by 16-17 percent, increase recycling by 50 percent, and lead to a source reduction in waste of around 16 percent. That would reduce the need for unpopular landfill sites and incinerators and could prompt emissions savings of millions of tonnes a year.

Importantly, the report stresses that PAYT must not be used as a 'bin tax' and that its introduction must be accompanied by a corresponding fall in council tax. Evidence from Holland, Ireland and Germany suggests that PAYT would not increase household bills – rather, it would offer an opportunity to reduce them.

The report also calls for the full liberalization of the refuse collection sector, so that private companies would have to compete for customers. Such a move would keep prices down and increase customer satisfaction. It would also lead to innovation and encourage refuse collectors to recycle more waste.

The final section of the report argues that recycling should be put on a commercial footing. Recycling facilities and providers should be allowed to merge and consolidate, and the free movement and trade of recyclables should be established. This would allow economies of scale to be established, bringing down the cost of recycling and recycled goods, and ensuring a market for commercially viable businesses in the long run.

In recent days, the government has pulled back from its earlier plans to hold widespread trials of PAYT. But the reason the government's proposals for variable waste charging have run into widespread opposition is that they are half-baked and ill thought out, relying on 'punishing' people who don't recycle. The proposals outlined in The Waste of Nations are very different: liberalizing refuse collection and introducing pay-as-you-throw charging would dramatically increase recycling and help the environment, but it would also be an opportunity to reduce taxes, save money, and increase the quality of a vital service.

Download the PDF here.

It is not well known that wind energy is less environmental friendly than most people like to believe. Not only are lovely views and unspoilt landscapes destroyed. More important is the death toll on some of the world's most precious and protected birds.

The problem is that the same locations that make wind turbines profitable, those were the wind blows strong and steadily, tend to be the major flyways of migratory birds. Sometimes they even attract birds with rats and other rodents, which use the turbine basis to build their nests. At one of these places at Altamont Pass in California, where thousands of wind mills have been installed, a lawsuit by the Golden Gate Audubon Society succeeded a year ago with a settlement aiming to reduce the number of bird deaths. But after a year scientist are reporting the measures failed.

In the lawsuit, environmentalists cited a 2004 California Energy Commission report estimating between 1,766 and 4,721 birds were killed by Altamont wind turbines each year, equalling 47,682 to 127,467 birds over the 27-year life of the wind farm. The Audubon Society…noted among the birds deaths are between 456 and 1,129 raptors and other birds at approximately the same pace as before the settlement.

So: Marks & Spencer says that it is going to make a 5p charge for plastic bags in its food stores. UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown is getting on the bandwagon, with a speech suggesting that such schemes should be compulsory. Two more examples of high-profile PR preening.

It's true that Britain's supermarkets use billions of plastic bags. Tesco alone dishes out about three billion of them each year (though they do give you a discount if you bring your own). But maybe you hadn't noticed – plastic shopping bags are incredibly thin these days. They actually take up far less landfill space than the waste food we throw out.

Indeed, go to developing countries – or remember back in the UK just a few decades – and look in people's dustbins. They're not full of packaging, like ours, but they're full. They're full of potato peelings, orange skins and much else that in the UK is recycled for animal feed and other useful purposes, without being transported to and thrown out by consumers.

I'd guess that plastic supermarket bags account for less than a hundredth of a percent of the UK's carbon emissions. It's things like cars and home heating that cause the damage. Mind you, on any realistic assessment, UK motorists pay many times more in taxes on their fuel than any damage that their driving causes the environment. While energy (even with oil at $100 a barrel) is sufficiently cheap that most ways of insulating your home wouldn't pay you back for decades.

So the Prime Minister's down on bags. It's gesture politics. More laws to curb free people, and more regulators and enviro-cops to burden the taxpayer. This policy should be wrapped up and thrown out.

Is the drive to biofuels prejudicing the food supply of the world's poorest people? That was the question addressed by Michael Jack MP, Chairman of the House of Commons Environment and Rural Affairs Committee, at an Adam Smith Institute Power Lunch in Westminster this week.

He pointed out that billions of the world's population live on less than $2 a day, but when people start to earn more than that, say up to $10 a day, their consumption of agricultural products increases – not surprisingly, perhaps. And the fact that increasing numbers of people are at last pulling themselves over that $2 threshold is the main reason why we are experiencing a huge increase in world food demand. Indeed, it's expected to double in just a few years.

Meanwhile, of course, there is concern about environmental issues. As in Brazil: wider agriculture can help satisfy food demand, but if it involved cutting down rainforest trees, a lot of people get worried. It's a paradox. Perhaps the clearest manifestation of it, in my view, is the US government subsidy programme which has prompted 20% of US maize production to go into the production of the biofuel ethanol. That (together with some rotten harvests in Australia) has raised food-maize prices, which in turn led to riots in Mexico, a poor country which is highly dependent on the crop for its staple foods.

It gets worse. Farmers use 70% of the world's fresh water, so if we are to meet the rapid rise in food demand, that resource too will be put under strain.

I'm not sure there are any instant answers to such paradoxes. But I am sure that relying on the market is better than relying on governments. People complain that food, water, oil, gas and so on are all getting more expensive to produce as world demand for them increases. I'd say that's a problem for us all in the short term, but just fine in the long term. The rise in prices will prompt people to use these scarce resources more carefully, look at new ways of producing them, or move to substitutes where they can. It will bring forward new technologies like GM crops and the next generation of cleaner nuclear power. Wait for government schemes to produce these changes, and you'll be waiting a long time.