OPINION/COMMENTARY

The High Price of Land-Use Planning

Most people know that the San Francisco Bay Area has one of the most expensive housing markets in the nation. However, not everyone realizes that, as recently as 1970, Bay Area housing was as affordable as housing in many other parts of the country. Data from the 1970 census shows that a median-income Bay Area family could dedicate a quarter of their income to housing and pay off their mortgage on a median-priced home in just 13 years. By 1980, a family had to spend 40 percent of their income to pay off a home mortgage in 30 years; today, it requires 50 percent. What happened in the 1970s to make Bay Area housing so unaffordable? In a nutshell: land-use planning. During the 1970s, Bay Area cities and counties imposed a variety of land-use restrictions intended to make the region more livable. These restrictions included urban-growth boundaries, purchases of regional parks and open spaces and various limits on building permits. These regulations created artificial land shortages that drove housing prices to extreme levels. Today, residents of Houston, Texas, can buy a brand-new four-bedroom, two-and-one-half bath home on a quarter-acre lot for less than $160,000. That same house would cost you more than five times as much in Marin or Contra Costa counties, seven times as much in Alameda County, and eight to nine times as much in Santa Clara, San Mateo, or San Francisco counties. In fact, planning-induced housing shortages added $30 billion to the cost of homes that Bay Area homebuyers purchased in 2005. This dwarfs any benefits from land-use restrictions; after all, how livable is a place if you can't afford to live there? The benefits of protecting open space are particularly questionable. The 2000 census found that nearly 95 percent of Californians live in cities and towns that occupy just 5 percent of its land. Many San Francisco Bay Area counties have permanently protected more acres as open space than they have made available for urban development. When such actions make it impossible for middle-class families, much less low-income families, to afford their own homes, they represent a sad distortion of social priorities....

Al Gore's New Film

Al Gore's new film on climate change, "An Inconvenient Truth," hit theaters on May 24. We can almost guarantee that the media will go crazy over it. Most of the media share Gore's view that man-made global warming is real, and that the federal government and the United Nations should do something drastic about it. Some seem to think the film could propel Gore into the White House in 2008. But we have found skeptics of the Gore theory as far away as Australia. In response to my last commentary on how the media act as if there are no critics of the theory worth paying any attention to, I received a note from a scientist in Australia, Bob Carter, who wrote, "Congratulations on your column on April 21 regarding global warming. Your call for more balanced reporting is strongly needed, and I do encourage you to continue with it." Carter, who is a geologist at James Cook University, in Queensland, engaged in paleoclimate research, directed me to an article of his from the Telegraph in England, in which he points out that though there was in fact some warming between 1970 and 1998, there has been none since then. Here is his website, where you can read a number of articles challenging the conventional wisdom, and find a list of 40 other scientists who agree with him. In effect, Carter is pleading for balance from the media. But the media don't seem to care. A Washington Post article earlier this month by Doug Struck continued the media onslaught to convince us that global warming is rapidly destroying the world, in this case contributing to disease and pestilence....

Does Al Gore Need to Go on an Energy Diet?

As former Vice President Al Gore’s documentary on global warming fears debuts today, a new video from the Competitive Enterprise Institute tracks Gore’s own “carbon footprint.” CEI’s 70-second video points out that Gore himself is a big user of the hydrocarbon fuels that produce carbon dioxide when combusted. Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” asks, "Are you willing to change the way you live?" The Gore documentary and new book of the same name go on to suggest ways that people can reduce their carbon footprint, yet Mr. Gore has clearly not taken his own message to heart. He even says in the documentary that he has given his global warming Power Point slide show more than 1,000 times all around the world. The CEI video, which may be viewed at: http://streams.cei.org/, includes footage of Gore and his constant air travel with two CO2 meters running at the bottom of the page that compare Gore’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions with those of an average person. "All the evidence suggests that Mr. Gore is an elitist who passionately believes that the people of the world must drastically reduce their energy use but that it doesn't apply to him,” said Myron Ebell, CEI's director of energy and global warming policy and the creator of the video. "While the CEI video pokes fun at Mr. Gore's profligate consumption of the world's petroleum resources, we don't begrudge his lifestyle that requires using as much energy as a small village in America or a medium-sized town in Africa,” Ebell explained. “The mobility that jet fuel and gasoline provide is a good thing and the benefits of abundant energy should be available to all people, not just the elite. CEI calls on Mr. Gore to stop preaching against the petroleum products he uses so lavishly and instead join us in promoting access to energy," Ebell concluded....

Inconvenient Truths Indeed

Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" opens around the country this week. In the film Gore pulls together evidence from every corner of the globe to convince us that climate change is happening fast, we are to blame, and if we don't act immediately, our Earth will be all but ruined. However, as you sit through the film, consider the following inconvenient truths: (1) Near the beginning of the film, Gore pays respects to his Harvard mentor and inspiration, Dr. Roger Revelle. Gore praises Revelle for his discovery that atmospheric CO2 levels were rising and could potentially contribute to higher temperatures at a global scale. There is no mention of Revelle's article published in the early 1990s concluding that the science is "too uncertain to justify drastic action." (S.F. Singer, C. Starr, and R. Revelle, "What to do about Greenhouse Warming: Look Before You Leap. Cosmos 1 (1993) 28-33.) (2) Gore discusses glacial and snowpack retreats atop Mt. Kilimanjaro, implying that human induced global warming is to blame. But Gore fails to mention that the snows of Kilimanjaro have been retreating for more than 100 years, largely due to declining atmospheric moisture, not global warming. Gore does not acknowledge the two major articles on the subject published in 2004 in the International Journal of Climatology and the Journal of Geophysical Research showing that modern glacier retreat on Kilimanjaro was initiated by a reduction in precipitation at the end of the nineteenth century and not by local or global warming....

Don't Be Very Worried

Since 1970, the year of the first Earth Day, America's population has increased by 42%, the country's inflation-adjusted gross domestic product has grown 195%, the number of cars and trucks in the United States has more than doubled, and the total number of miles driven has increased by 178%. But during these 35 years of growing population, employment, and industrial production, the Environmental Protection Agency reports, the environment has substantially improved. Emissions of the six principal air pollutants have decreased by 53%. Carbon monoxide emissions have dropped from 197 million tons per year to 89 million; nitrogen oxides from 27 million tons to 19 million, and sulfur dioxide from 31 million to 15 million. Particulates are down 80%, and lead emissions have declined by more than 98%. But now comes the carbon dioxide alarm. CO2 is not a pollutant--indeed it is vital for plant growth--but the annual amount released into the atmosphere has increased 40% since 1970. This increase is blamed by global warming alarmists for a great many evil things. The Web site for Al Gore's new film, "An Inconvenient Truth," claims that because of CO2's impact on our atmosphere, sea levels may rise by 20 feet, the Arctic and Antarctic ice will likely melt, heat waves will be "more frequent and more intense," and "deaths from global warming will double in just 25 years--to 300,000 people a year." So what is the reality about global warming and its impact on the world? A new study released this week by the National Center for Policy Analysis, "Climate Science: Climate Change and Its Impacts" (www.ncpa.org/pub/st/st285) looks at a wide variety of climate matters, from global warming and hurricanes to rain and drought, sea levels, arctic temperatures and solar radiation. It concludes that "the science does not support claims of drastic increases in global temperatures over the 21rst century, nor does it support claims of human influence on weather events and other secondary effects of climate change." There are substantial differences in climate models--some 30 of them looked at by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change--but the Climate Science study concludes that "computer models consistently project a rise in temperatures over the past century that is more than twice as high as the measured increase." The National Center for Atmospheric Research's prediction of 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit warming is more accurate. In short, the world is not warming as much as environmentalists think it is. What warming there is turns out to be caused by solar radiation rather than human pollution. The Climate Change study concluded "half the observed 20th century warming occurred before 1940 and cannot be attributed to human causes," and changes in solar radiation can "account for 71 percent of the variation in global surface air temperature from 1880 to 1993."....

The Rhetoric of the Environmental Movement

What I hope to do is to explore certain traits common to the rhetoric of the environmental movement that I find particularly inimical to rational discourse and that serve only to support untenable and fallacious conclusions and recommendations that, if accepted, would prove devastating to civilization. These center, first, around a profound misuse of the term "rights"; second, around the notion that men in primitive pre-technological societies live in harmony with the environment while modern man is antagonistic and destructive of nature's resources; and, finally, that technology itself is, by its very nature, toxic. One of the more distasteful features of environmental rhetoric is the terminological confusion with which it is riddled, whereby certain grants of privilege are constantly confused with rights. The rights to which serious political discourse has traditionally referred are negatively conceived and refer to limitations on how governments may act towards their citizens or how citizens may act toward each other. This conception of rights is the one put forward in, among other documents, the Declaration of Independence, the American Bill of Rights and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.[2] Rights so conceived do not require that others be forced to act in specific ways if I am to exercise my rights but only that they refrain from intervening in certain areas without my consent. Thus, my right to life does not entail that others are obligated to do everything within their power to keep me alive but only that they cannot kill me. Unfortunately, environmentalists have a tendency to employ the term "rights," not in this negative manner but in its far more vulgar sense, to refer to some privilege that entails that others not refrain from acting, but positively act in certain ways. They are, of course, not alone in this. The last hundred years have witnessed a serious erosion in political discourse as politicians have increasingly invoked such terms as "liberty" and "rights" solely to elicit certain emotional responses in their hearers. This deterioration in political language has reached a point where it is now not uncommon to hear people speak of their "rights" to "higher education," to "quality health care," even to "truth in airline scheduling," and so on.[3] Environmental discourse, far from being immune to such imprecision, has embraced it. And environmentalists, especially those employed as government functionaries of one kind or another, regularly use the term to refer to privileges that entail an obligation on others to provide certain services....

Dutch told to return land they won from the sea

A photograph of a grinning boy, riding a toy tractor, has pride of place in the kitchen of Aarnout and Magda de Feijter, the owners of a 148-acre farm in the Dutch province of Zeeland. The picture is of their first grandson, Louis, and the de Feijters have always dreamed that he will one day take over the expanse of wind-rippled flax fields that has been in their family since 1835. But there are other plans. In the name of European Union environmental directives, their farm is earmarked for flooding - the first time in Holland's centuries-long battle against water that a substantial piece of land is to be deliberately returned to the sea. Some 230 years after its flat pastures were wrested from the waters, the de Feijters' farm - their home for 33 years - is to be re-flooded to reverse the disappearance of Zeeland's mudflats and salt marshes. For the family - raised in a province that owes its very existence to dyke systems dating from the Middle Ages - the plan is "un-Dutch". Breaching dykes is behaviour associated with invading armies, noted Mr de Feijter. Flooding a "polder", as land enclosed by a dyke is known, "has always been an act of war", he said. The couple have planted chestnut trees and apple orchards and resent hearing that it is ecologically less important than salt marshes. "Isn't this landscape beautiful?" said Mrs de Feijter. "There are birds, there are flowers. It's green." The final decision must be ratified by parliament next year, but chances of a reprieve look slim. Dutch officials support the project, part of a scheme to re-flood 1,500 acres of land on the banks of the Western Schelde estuary. The re-flooding has been imposed by the EU Habitats directive, and the EU Birds directive. The end will be quick. Engineers will build a new dyke behind the de Feijters' land and demolish their 150-year-old farmhouse. Then they will breach the high, grass-sided dyke at the bottom of their drive and the sea will rush in....