OPINION/COMMENTARY

Negotiating at Gunpoint

Indianapolis Mayor Bart Peterson wants to dispel "innacuracies and stereotypes" about the use of eminent domain for economic development, a practice the U.S. Supreme Court upheld in last year's notorious Kelo v. New London decision. Last fall Peterson told a Senate subcommittee that when the government threatens to condemn people's property because it thinks someone else can make better use of it, "a majority of the time, most people agree to sell." Interesting. Given the choice between selling and fighting an expensive legal battle they will almost certainly lose, after which they will have to give up their land anyway, probably on less advantageous terms, most people "agree" to sell. "Cities use eminent domain most often as a negotiating tool with property owners," explained Peterson, who was speaking for the National League of Cities. "Just having the tool available makes it possible to negotiate with landowners." Sure it does—in the same way just having a gun available makes it possible for a bank robber to negotiate with a teller. As the February 22 anniversary of the oral arguments in Kelo approaches, state legislatures across the country are considering bills to rein in the use of Peterson's "negotiating tool." They should not fall for the false assurances of local politicians, city planners, and developers—a powerful triumvirate determined to block meaningful eminent domain reform....

A Long Row To Hoe

Proposals for an alcohol-fueled end to dependence on foreign oil do not sit lightly on the American landscape. Can they fit within our borders at all? State Of The Union speeches tend to cross using figures with speaking figuratively, and this hybrid rhetoric can bear strange fruit, like the switchgrass mania spreading up K Street like kudzu. Math has never been the Beltway's strongest suit, and it will take a while for many in DC to realize that biofuel, like the solar and wind energy franchises already on offer, suffers from sheer lack of real estate. Solar ranching translates into paving areas the size of Massachusetts with silicon panels. But farming out the fuel supply means putting multiples of Texas under the plough. Even corn as tall as an elephant's eye yields less than half a gallon of ethanol per acre per day. And biotech might, at best, wring another quart out of fertile farmland. That's just not enough -- it takes hundreds of millions of gallons of gas a day to run America's cars, trucks and tractors. A switch grass combine's mileage makes an Escalade look like a Prius rolling downhill. It would take upwards of a billion extra acres -- a million square miles -- to fuel the nation's transport. A billion mile furrow is a long row to hoe -- decades of Green evangelism have failed to make alternative fuel crops a reality. A Federal subsidy program could command their planting, but the President's SOTU proposal amounts to reducing oil imports by less than 0.7% a year. Before we're taken for a rimde on the switch grass hay wagon, let's reexamine another sort of American biofuel -- the fossil biomass underfoot. It contains millions of times the solar energy agriculture can store in a year, and vastly more hydrogen than the nation's oil and gas reserves, ANWR included. It is called coal, and we can get energy out of it and into our gas tanks....

Bush Should Apply the Ownership Society to Environmental Issues

Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, little mention was made concerning environmental issues in President Bush's State of the Union address. Critics will say this is because the President had nothing new to offer on the environment, but they’d be wrong. Indeed, President Bush has touted the "ownership society" as a solution to a variety of policy problems, including health care, education and retirement. He has yet, however, to extend the ownership ideal to environmental issues. This is an oversight in need of correction. Government programs and policies, some begun over a century ago, have created perverse incentives that cause environmental harm. If these distortions were removed, the environment would improve. Take, for example, one of the few environmental issues that the President did mention in his address: Rebuilding New Orleans. Sadly, the Feds seem hell-bent not to learn from their mistakes. The President has promised to rebuild New Orleans "bigger and better" -- bringing all of the people home at the federal government’s expense. This is foolish. Federal policies, including subsidized flood insurance and Army Corp of Engineers flood control efforts, turned what could have been a bad weather event into a catastrophic human tragedy by both encouraging people to build in flood prone areas and by contributing to the demise of thousands of acres of wetlands off the Louisiana coast which would have otherwise reduced the impact of Katrina....

Government Water Agencies Support Michigan Man in U.S. Supreme Court Case

The nation’s largest urban water district and groups representing hundreds of water agencies have joined Pacific Legal Foundation in supporting a Michigan grandfather in his 18-year struggle against federal officials who have sought to control his property using a law intended to protect navigable waterways. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the Western Urban Water Coalition, the Association of California Water Agencies, the San Diego County Water Authority, and the Central Arizona Water Conservation District are among those urging the United States Supreme Court to rein in federal officials who have exceeded their authority under the law. At issue is federal officials’ move to control virtually every bit of water in the entire country, contrary to a 1972 law that only gives the federal government authority over navigable waterways and adjacent wetlands. In this case, a Michigan man, John Rapanos, refused to pay the federal government for permission to alter wetlands on his property some 20 miles from any navigable waterway. "This case is about the federal government overstepping its authority, not about whether our water will be clean," said Reed Hopper, a principal attorney with Pacific Legal Foundation, which is representing Mr. Rapanos. "If the federal government properly followed the law, wetlands would continue to be subject to vigorous protections imposed by states." "The agencies on the front lines of providing clean water for tens of millions of Americans support Mr. Rapanos because they have seen first-hand the abuse of the law by the federal government," Mr. Hopper said....

Playing God And Stealing Land

What could possibly be more arrogant than to think that humans should determine which specie continues and which goes extinct? Or that humans can, in fact, keep a specie from going extinct? A news item in the February 20 edition of U.S. News & World Report noted, “Citing concerns over climate change, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service last week began reviewing whether polar bears should be declared a threatened species. If they are, federal regulations would be required to considered the impact on the animals before ruling on such matters as industrial emissions or fuel economy standards.” I submit that is such madness and idiocy that the mere stating of the notion polar bears are going extinct or threatened by the alleged melting of the Arctic is too bizarre for rational people to contemplate. That said, the USFW will dispatch people “to collect data on polar bear population, distribution, the effects of climate change, and threats from development, contaminants, and poaching.” Guess who set this nonsense in motion? If you said the Center for Biological Diversity of Tucson, Arizona, you’d be right. Not exactly a hotbed of polar bear activity, the Center asserts that, “Arctic melting could cause polar bears to become extinct by century’s end.” “Could” is the key word here. This is a splendid example of the way the environmental movement is forever cozying up to the federal government to get it to spend your tax dollars on projects of such dubious merit that a school child would dismiss it out of hand. Polar bears going extinct? The whole of the Arctic melting? The last time I checked, the State of Alaska offered the wandering polar bears some 571,951 square miles, surrounded by 91,316 square miles of water in which to frolic. Alaska is the largest of all the U.S. States. Room enough for plenty of polar bears, scads of caribou, all manner of wildlife, and even the occasional oilrig or two with which to extract millions of barrels of oil from ANWR. Could it be all the worrying about polar bears has nothing to do with polar bears and everything to do with thwarting the effort to reduce our dependence on the Middle East for the oil we consume?....

"PUBLIC" LANDS DON’T BELONG TO US

In the wake of the Bush Administration’s reported decision to sell off a pretty large portion of what are misleadingly called “public” lands—including 85,000 acres of national forest land in California—many who speak out in behalf of the special interest groups championing keeping these lands under government control are protesting. The Los Angeles Times reports, for examples, that Professor of environmental history, Char Miller of Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, chimed in with the this tidbit in response to the Bush Administration’s initiative: "This is a fire sale of public lands. It is utterly unprecedented." He added that "[i]t signals that the lands and the agency that manages them are in deep trouble. For the American public, it is an awful way to understand that it no longer controls its public land." What is worth special attention in this comment is the unselfconscious way that idea of “public land” is conflated with land that the American public controls. In point of fact, the only land members of the American public control is their own, their private property. The so called public lands are the farthest things from what the American public controls. Here is an example. I live in Silverado Canyon, in Orange County, California, which is adjacent to the Cleveland National Forest—the canyon community consists of a population of about 3000 people who all own their own pieces of land ranging in size from as small as 3500 square feet to several acres and some few larger parcels, including a church and a horse ranch. But next to this oasis of pieces of private property stands the huge national forest and it is controlled not by the American public at all but by some bureaucrats, including rangers, who do with it what they choose. Most often, for example, the forest is shut down—“Gate closed”—so no one may enter either on foot or by vehicle. One reason given recently is that some toad that’s deemed to be endangered might get crushed if people were to amble about there. Anyone who would like to take a walk there is shut out, period. Those who might use the dirt road and climb up to the crest of the Santa Ana Mountain, maybe descend down into Riverside County, are without any control of these “public” lands....

Kyoto's Anniversary: Little Reason to Celebrate

February 16 marks the Kyoto Protocol's first anniversary -- it's been one year since the UN global warming agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions went into effect. But don't plan on uncorking the bubbly any time soon. In spite of claims by the European Union's top brass that the targets for reducing energy use are easily in reach-and their nagging pressure on the United States to sign the treaty-the glaring failure of Europe's nations to meet the treaty's targets has put the partying on hold. The Kyoto Protocol requires industrialized countries to cut carbon dioxide emissions by an average 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-2012. But 13 of the 15 original members of the European Union have increased their emissions since 1990, not reduced them. New data by the EU's own European Environmental Agency show that by 2010, the 15 nations' emissions collectively will exceed 1990 levels by seven percent.1 And while leaders within the EU are pushing for even more stringent caps beyond 2012, the year the Kyoto Protocol expires, other key players believe Kyoto has no future. The UN climate talks in Montreal last December was telling. There, member countries failed to agree on binding emissions cuts for post-2012, and the climate shifted toward a discussion of clean energy and new technology development as a policy alternative to Kyoto. Handicapping Kyoto's future is the fact that the treaty is economic suicide, and most European nations know it. According to the Brussels economic research organization International Council for Capital Formation (ICCF), the UK's gross domestic product will fall more than 1 percent in 2010 from what it otherwise would be, Italy's by more than 2 percent, and Spain's by more than 3 percent as a result of Kyoto's emissions targets. The UK, Italy, and Germany each would lose at least 200,000 jobs; Spain would lose 800,000.2....

Global Warming Fever Over Glacier Thaw

Greenland’s glaciers are either growing or shrinking, depending on which study you read. The media took global warming off the back burner this week to hype an isolated study showing glaciers in Greenland are melting faster than previously thought. But in reporting the story, they ignored another October 2005 study showing Greenland’s glaciers are increasing in thickness at higher elevations. They also ignored cyclical temperature patterns in the North Atlantic, which may explain increased glacier melting in southern Greenland. Leading off his February 17 front-page story, The Washington Post’s Shankar Vedantam wrote that “Greenland’s glaciers are melting into the sea twice as fast as previously believed, the result of a warming trend that renders obsolete predictions of how quickly Earth’s oceans will rise over the next century.” The previous evening, ABC’s Bill Blakemore raised the specter of the world’s beaches slowly being swallowed. “Greenland’s ice sheet holds enough water to raise the world's sea level by 21 feet, if it were all to melt,” the science reporter gloomily warned, adding that scientists “currently believe that would take centuries, but warn if global warming does not stop, it will happen.” Neither report consulted any expert who didn’t believe global warming was to “blame,” and neither reporter noted that an October 2005 study report in the journal Science found that Greenland’s glaciers were thickening at higher elevations while melting at lower elevations. Myron Ebell, director of global warming and international environmental policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told the Free Market Project that “predictions for rapid melting ... are based on exploiting the public’s lack of understanding of the time scales involved,” adding, “we’re not talking about a few years but one or two thousand years....

Terry Anderson on Conservative Conservation: Taking the High Road

Can you be a conservative and an environmentalist? How to reconcile the two positions, that some see as conflicted, was the topic of Hoover fellow Terry Anderson's presentation "Conservative Conservation: Taking the High Road" at a Hoover Institution Breakfast Briefing on January 18. Anderson, the John and Jean DeNault Senior Fellow, is executive director of the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), a think tank focusing on market solutions to environmental problems, and professor of economics at Montana State University. Anderson challenged stereotypes associated with conservatism that lead people to assume that one cannot be a conservative and an environmentalist. Although conservatives are seen as primarily concerned with human welfare, they are also concerned about the environment, Anderson said. Another stereotype, Anderson said, is that because conservatives are seen as individualistic and opposed to big government, they are seen as believing that people should be able to do whatever they want, regardless of consequences. The last stereotype he dismissed is that of conservatives being sanguine about human ingenuity, which leads them to adopt an attitude of "be happy, don't worry." "How well are we doing as human beings," Anderson asked, "which means how well are treating the environment and other species?" He believes, like the title of his recent book You Have to Admit It's Getting Better (Hoover Institution Press, 2004), that things are getting better. Although there are hotspots that require attention, he said, there is good news. First, he pointed out, we are not overpopulating the planet as once predicted; in some areas, such as Europe, there is negative growth in population. As a result of advances in agricultural productivity, he said, we aren't starving. We aren't fouling our nest, he said, as new information on pollution levels indicates improvements. Finally, he added, we aren't running out of resources thanks to new incentives. All these developments lead Anderson to be optimistic....

Stewardship and Economics: Two Sides of the Same Coin

A group of evangelical leaders made headlines last week when they announced the formation of the Evangelical Climate Initative (ECI), a movement is intended to bring to bear the moral authority of these leaders on the question of global warming and climate change. Indeed, these Christians see their position tied up with a great responsibility: “Climate change is the latest evidence of our failure to exercise proper stewardship, and constitutes a critical opportunity for us to do better.” For many who talk about the biblical concept of stewardship of the earth—or “creation care”— the practice of environmental responsibility is antithetical to the concerns of economics. Eugene Dykema, for example, writing for the Evangelical Environmental Network (EEN), one of the groups behind the formation of the ECI, talks of a view of creation in which “everything is related to everything else.” He continues, “Everything in relationship, everything in context is familiar to the field of ecology, but quite alien to the field of economics.” Whether or not his characterization of economics is accurate, his contrasting of environmental and economic concerns is clear. But this picture is misleading in a number of ways. Perhaps the most important point to recognize is the common foundation for our respective understandings of stewardship and economics. The two are related linguistically by their common Greek origins, and related theologically by their biblical usage. The English word economics is derived from the Greek word οικονομία, which is a compound term literally meaning “house” (οικο) “order” (νομία), and it refers to the administration of a household. The person who ruled the household was called an οικονόμος, and this is usually rendered in English as “steward” or “manager.”....