OPINION/COMMENTARY


California Focus: Another enviro-scare campaign

Is water vapor is a "pollutant"? Yes, according to the California Climate Action Team Report. Prepared in support of pending state "global warming" legislation, it recommends 45 emission-reduction measures intended to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions toward 1990 levels by 2020. Amazingly, the report fails to tell us the predicted reduction in future temperatures if 1990-level emissions are achieved. So we have done that analysis here. If California were to achieve the carbon-dioxide reductions, the predicted decline in world temperatures in the year 2100 would be thirteen one-thousandths of a degree Celsius. If the entire U.S. were to achieve those reductions, the decline would be sixteen one-hundredths of a degree Celsius. The figure for the 34 most-developed economies would be one-third of one degree Celsius. If we add China, the figure is forty-five one-hundredths of a degree Celsius. Such changes are far too small to matter. The global-warming horror stories in the CCAT report – flooding, fires, heat waves, drought, insects – truly are biblical, but its proposals never would be approved for such tiny effects. Moreover, the CCAT free-lunch claim that the regulations would impose no economic costs is preposterous. The real question is: What does the science actually tell us? A paper published in the journal Science last summer showed that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is losing mass, while the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (three times as large) is gaining mass. Another paper published in Science last fall reported that the ongoing trend for the Greenland ice sheet is an increase of 5.4 centimeter per year, almost all of which is at elevations above 5000 feet. Other research yields different findings because there is great uncertainty about new measurement techniques. But there is no dispute that Greenland was warmer in the 1930s than it is today and was much warmer 1,000 years ago....


'Renewable' Electricity: Creating Jobs and Destroying Wealth

Twenty states have set standards that require utilities to obtain some of their power from "renewable" resources like windmills and solar panels. California wants 20% renewable power by 2017 and New York 24% by 2013. California will succeed by conveniently defining hydroelectric dams as renewable. New York's less inclusive definition gives it 0.2% renewable capacity today. Texas is ahead of schedule in getting to 2,000 megawatts (2% of capacity) by 2009. Ask most people about renewables and you will probably hear about solar power and fuel cells. In reality renewables generate only 2.2% of America's electricity. Thirty years of work on solar power and it still produces only 1% of that 2.2%. California has geothermal resources and Maine has wood chips, but almost everywhere else renewables mean windmills, helped along by substantial federal subsidies. Of course, even if renewables are expensive they might reduce some of the global warming caused by CO2 emitted by fossil-fuel powerplants. There are uncertainties about whether warming will really be bad (think longer growing seasons) but let's assume it actually will get several degrees hotter (choose your own figure). The nations that signed the Kyoto Protocols on global warming agreed to cut their emissions over the future. If each of them made the sacrifices of full compliance (the betting is that few will even come close), the world would end up only a tenth of a degree cooler. And if that big an effort gets no results, state and local government policies can only be empty gestures. Economic activity will shift away from them toward other areas or nations -- remember that China and India are exempt from the agreement....


Katrina Anniversary Highlights Need To End Destructive Subsidies To Coastal Development

As the nation remembers the tragedy of Katrina and the destruction of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, an expert with the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) suggests government should heed the lessons of Katrina and end destructive subsidies to coastal development. "What could have been merely a very bad weather event turned into a catastrophic human tragedy due to unwise development," said H. Sterling Burnett, senior fellow with the NCPA. "The government should not foster, let alone finance, development in environmentally-sensitive, highly disaster-prone areas. Yet government is subsidizing, and therefore encouraging, building on coastal wetlands and beaches." Burnett noted that the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' flood control and beach restoration projects subsidize and encourage coastal development by shifting the cost of insurance and physical protection against floods from property owners to taxpayers. From 1928 through 2001, the Corps spent $123 billion (adjusted for inflation) on flood control projects nationwide....


U.S. SUPREME COURT SHOULD ORDER EPA: OBEY SUPERFUND RULES

The U.S. Supreme Court should agree to determine if a federal appellate court violated the national Superfund law when it upheld a multimillion dollar assessment against a company, a public interest law firm urged in a friend of the court brief filed today. Mountain States Legal Foundation, which has appeared often at the Court, advised the Court that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit undermined the clearly express intent of Congress when it ruled in favor of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regarding Superfund operations in Libby, Montana, as a result of actions by W.R. Grace & Company and its predecessors in the mining, processing, and use of a product later discovered to be hazardous. “When Congress wrote Superfund, it made a distinction between ‘removal’ actions that prevent imminent harm and ‘remedial’ actions and allowed responsible parties to dispute EPA’s action to prevent the EPA from writing itself a blank check,” said William Perry Pendley, president and chief legal officer of Mountain States Legal Foundation. “Given media stories of the waste and abuse perpetrated by FEMA in response to Hurricane Katrina, it makes sense to demand that bureaucrats obey the law and only receive repayment for expenses that are legal, legitimate, and justified.” From the 1920s until 1990, W.R. Grace & Co. and its predecessors mined and processed vermiculite—a mineral containing a type of asbestos called tremolite—at a mine seven miles northeast of Libby, Montana. Processed ore was trucked to screening plants and expansion/export plants from which materials were exported nationwide. Vermiculite was also available for Grace’s employees to take home for their personal use, and Grace donated vermiculite to the local schools. In 1990, Grace ended its Libby operations. In 1999, the EPA began a Superfund investigation, which led to various, massive cleanup and removal efforts. In March 2001, the United States filed suit against Grace for reimbursement of the EPA’s recovery costs. In August 2003, the Montana federal district court ordered Grace to pay $54.53 million, including $11.32 million in indirect costs. On appeal, Grace acknowledged that it was obligated financially for “removal” but was not obligated for “remedial” action or total cleanup because the EPA did not obey required federal safeguards. In December 2005, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rejected Grace’s appeal....


LESSONS FROM BRITISH COLUMBIA: PUBLIC FOREST MANAGEMENT

Although the forests of British Columbia, Canada, are 96 percent government-owned, the management of the forests is far more market-driven than in the U.S. Forest Service, according to a new report by Alison Berry, a research fellow with the Property and Environment Research Center.

For example:

* The government of the province transfers management responsibilities for most of its forests to the private sector through long-term agreements called tenures, some of which extend for 25 years or more.
* Some of these tenures resemble private property, and provide incentives for reforestation, investment in silviculture and environmental protection.

This experience with secure, long-term tenures offers valuable lessons for the United States, says Berry.

"It would be unnecessary to adopt the British Columbia tenure system as it exists," she explains, "but the United States could use the timber tenure system as a model for creating a more flexible timber program that addresses multiple resources such as recreation." Berry notes that the U.S. Forest Service suffers detrimental effects from its short-term timber sales program. Her new paper also includes case studies illustrating how some British Columbia tenures operate.

Source: Alison Berry, "Lessons from British Columbia: Public Forest Management," Property and Environment Research Center, August 2006.

For text:

http://www.perc.org/perc.php?id=815

For study text:

http://www.perc.org/pdf/pl5.pdf