Adam Smith Institute

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.

It seems the likelihood is growing that the Green-House-Gas (GHG) alarmists' political lobbying may result in final overkill. One of the more serious indications of this is the defection of big business, who had previously sought new opportunities in eco-business but not expected stubborn fundamentalism.

With eco-lobbyists raising the carbon cut targets relentlessly, investment in the mitigation industry looks increasingly risky or outright futile. That’s why even some of the most committed international companies behind the scenes are looking for alternatives to mitigation. When ten of the largest US companies and four environmental groups had formed the U.S. Climate Change Partnership (USCAP) early last year it “was seen as a watershed in corporate environmentalism.” Now it seems some of these are getting disenchanted and place investments in policies that clearly undermine carbon cutting efforts:

Three high-profile USCAP members—General Electric, Caterpillar (CAT), and Alcoa (AA)—also sit on the board of the Center for Energy & Economic Development (CEED), an Alexandria (Va.) group formed in 1992 that opposes regulations on greenhouse-gas emissions. In April, 2007, CEED's board unanimously signed a position paper that, in part, described as "draconian" one federal climate bill that would require a 65% reduction in emissions by 2050.

Too much politicization, as has been the case in global warming regulation stampede, rarely pays off:

Other business groups are also stepping up opposition to global warming regulations. At the end of 2007, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce launched a television commercial that lampooned carbon reductions, depicting a family sleeping in full winter garb, a man cooking eggs over candles, and people jogging to work in business suits, while the narrator intoned: "Climate legislation being considered by Congress could make it too expensive to heat our homes, power our lives, and drive our cars."

43. "The market cannot protect the environment."

The Stern Report described climate change as "the greatest case of market failure" the world has seen. In fact the market has not failed – there is no market at all. There is no market in war, either, which some think more devastating then climate change. Markets deal with transactions, not with human behaviour in general. Where there are no exchanges, there are no markets.

Markets can prompt and regulate human activity by signals they send about scarcity and prices. They allocate scarce resources in ways that encourage people to consume less of them and produce more of them. When some resources, such as air, water, and ocean fish stocks have no price on them, there are few restraints on their use. Sometimes production causes 'externalities,' such things as pollution and noise disturbance, and the depletion of resources.

The way to have markets protect the environment is to put markets into place. If some activities contribute to climate change, there should be a price to pay for doing them. The habit of environmental campaigners of picking out relatively trivial symbolic targets such as "food miles" or budget air travel obscures the fact that agriculture, industry, and power production are among the greatest emitters of "greenhouse gases."

Markets can be introduced by putting a price on previously unowned resources. Fish quotas can be set and then traded, giving the buyer ownership of the fish and an incentive to conserve them. Tradable emission permits can discourage emission by raising the price of doing it. They raise production costs to those who emit more, and reward efficient, cleaner producers.

Markets can be used to promote the development of clean technologies by giving them a price advantage, encouraging people to produce more cleanly by making it more attractive financially to do so. Markets can protect the environment if they're properly introduced.

Genetically modified (GM) plants are helping to adapt to climate change. This is mostly because of drastically minimizing water use compared to non-GM plants. Worldwide 1.4 billion acres are already cultivated with DNA-modified crop varieties in 22 countries. However the same agency that took the lead in climate change alarmism is now seriously considering a moratorium on all field-testing and commercialisation of GM tress. This comes on top of already extant heavy-handed over-regulation that stifles innovation in biotechnology. According to a new paper from the Hoover Institution the UN may actually be worsening the global environment with its policy:

Irrigation for agriculture accounts for approximately 70 per cent of the world’s fresh water consumption… so the introduction of plants that grow with less water would allow vast amounts to be freed up for other uses. Especially during drought conditions…even a small percentage reduction in the use of water for irrigation could result in huge benefits, both economic and humanitarian.

I was interviewed on Sky News yesterday morning, giving my take on the European Parliament's plan to prohibit the sale patio heaters. Unlike the other guest, Friends of the Earth's Tony Juniper, I thought this was a ridiculous idea.

First of all, the only reason so many people are using patio heaters is the smoking ban. Attempting to outlaw patio heaters is a classic example of one ill-conceived and illiberal piece of legislation having to follow another, with little thought for the unintended consequences. In this case, the pub industry thinks it could lose as much as £250 million pounds a year in lost trade if outdoor heaters were banned.

My second point was that no one actually believes banning patio heaters would make the slightest bit of difference to the global climate anyway. Yes, these heaters are inefficient, but their emissions are miniscule in the grand scheme of things. Tony Juniper said we should lead the world by example, but it didn't think our banning patio heaters would really make much difference to the Chinese. They're going to build a coal-fired power station every week for the next ten years anyway.

Patio heaters are just the latest symbolic thing for environmentalists to get worked up about, like food miles or budget airlines. It's not about being practical, or actually improving the environment, it is just another way to tell people that they should stop being so wicked and 'live more simply'.

I suggested that instead of banning outdoor heaters, the EU should focus on reforming its emissions trading scheme so that it actually works, encouraging the development of clean technologies. And since agriculture contributes 17 percent of global emissions, they might like to abolish the common agricultural policy too. The developing world would certainly thank them for it.