Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Why is oil policy so wrongheaded?

Michael O'Hare has a great post on that topic:

As a piece of social policy, one has to wonder about the wisdom of slapping a big tax on the only people who are providing any of this oil we want so badly. One doesn't even have to wonder about the whole concept of all the schemes to make oil less expensive; did the demand curve for petroleum suddenly tilt the other way while we weren't looking? One more time, what's the logic of subsidizing domestic production and exploration: is there some prize for being the first country to use up its petroleum?

When I did wind tunnel research on how tall buildings affect the street-level winds around them, the architects always asked whether some sort of canopy over the door would help, and we had to explain that the wind is very big, and so is the building, so anything that would change the way the wind blows also has to be very big. The oil system is very big, and poking at it with tiny instruments like deposits to the strategic oil reserve, or rushing to slurp out the two years' worth of oil imports in ANWR, are not going to make any important difference. Actually, no bullet is silver, even though we desperately want to think wind power, or biofuels, or nuclear, or turning off the lights more carefully, will "solve" the energy crisis. Lots of these will be incrementally helpful, but none of them is as big as the oil flow we've become habituated to, and every one has a really sobering social price of one kind or another.

Petroleum is not like solar energy. Fossil fuels are a stock, not a flow, of sunlight that was stored up over millions of years when no-one needed to drive kids to the soccer game. We've had a nice century drawing down that bank account, and it's over. Maybe, as Rick says, not right away, but soon. "Soon" in policy earthquake terms is a few decades. There's lots of coal, but if we start really playing that game with current technology (that is, burning it into CO2 that goes into the air), a lot if it will be used up (for example) keeping Europeans warm in a subarctic climate when the Gulf Stream stops. Of course the beach will much easier to drive to as it moves inland.

What will make a difference is to use a lot less, and using less oil means real behavioral change on a broad, retail level. It absolutely doesn't mean making gasoline cheaper! We're talking about things like living in smaller houses, close enough together to get people out on their feet and bicycles, and into trains and trams.

. . .

e're not talking about those things, though; we're talking (praying, actually) about making it not so, please. Our politics have a long, toxic tradition of candidates' and voters' mutual infantilization. The politicians treat an election, or an office, as the worst thing one can lose, and promise to fix everything with a trick that won't require any actual work by us; we vote for people who tell us fairy tales that would excuse us from any heavy lifting if they were true, and excuse us from confronting downers and grownup responsibilities if we pretend to believe. This game is being played at a really frenzied level around gas prices, and the mix of ignorance and plain mendacity both parties are wallowing in is--this is really amazing--neck and neck with the immigration performance in the theater next door.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Cross purposes

Whole Foods is switching to wind power--not, the CEO emphasizes, because he is some sort of airy-fairy hippie using his shareholders' money to further his ideals, but because it makes good business sense:

"It's a sales driver rather than a cost," he said. "All of those things we do related to our core values: help drive sales, help convince a customer to drive past three or four other supermarkets on the way to Whole Foods."

Wouldn't all those extra miles driven negate any environmental value of using wind power? Just askin', is all.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Finally, clear talk about Global Warming

Absolutely terrific article on global warming from The New Scientist. It's level-headed and carefully explains what the actual disagreements between scientists are about global warming, carefully explaining what sorts of scientific evidence and tests they use, rather than falling back on the tired journalistic "The majority of scientists agree . . . "

Here's a sample:

First, the basic physics. It is beyond doubt that certain gases in the atmosphere, most importantly water vapour and carbon dioxide, trap infrared radiation emitted by the Earth's surface and so have a greenhouse effect. This in itself is no bad thing. Indeed, without them the planet would freeze. There is also no doubt that human activity is pumping CO2 into the atmosphere, and that this has caused a sustained year-on-year rise in CO2 concentrations. For almost 60 years, measurements at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii have charted this rise, and it is largely uncontested that today's concentrations are about 35 per cent above pre-industrial levels (see Graph).

The effect this has on the planet is also measurable. In 2000, researchers based at Imperial College London examined satellite data covering almost three decades to plot changes in the amount of infrared radiation escaping from the atmosphere into space - an indirect measure of how much heat is being trapped. In the part of the infrared spectrum trapped by CO2 - wavelengths between 13 and 19 micrometres - they found that between 1970 and 1997 less and less radiation was escaping. They concluded that the increasing quantity of atmospheric CO2 was trapping energy that used to escape, and storing it in the atmosphere as heat. The results for the other greenhouse gases were similar.

These uncontested facts are enough to establish that "anthropogenic" greenhouse gas emissions are tending to make the atmosphere warmer. What's more, there is little doubt that the climate is changing right now. Temperature records from around the world going back 150 years suggest that 19 of the 20 warmest years - measured in terms of average global temperature, which takes account of all available thermometer data - have occurred since 1980, and that four of these occurred in the past seven years (see Graph).

The only serious question mark over this record is the possibility that measurements have been biased by the growth of cities near the sites where temperatures are measured, as cities retain more heat than rural areas. But some new research suggests there is no such bias. David Parker of the UK's Met Office divided the historical temperature data into two sets: one taken in calm weather and the other in windy weather. He reasoned that any effect due to nearby cities would be more pronounced in calm conditions, when the wind could not disperse the heat. There was no difference.

. . . In the face of such evidence, the vast majority of scientists, even sceptical ones, now agree that our activities are making the planet warmer, and that we can expect more warming as we release more CO2 into the atmosphere. This leaves two critical questions. How much warming can we expect? And how much should we care about it? Here the uncertainties begin in earnest.

The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere now stands at around 375 parts per million. A doubling of CO2 from pre-industrial levels of 280 parts per million, which could happen as early as 2050, will add only about 1 °C to average global temperatures, other things being equal. But if there's one thing we can count on, it is that other things will not be equal; some important things will change.

All experts agree that the planet is likely to respond in a variety of ways, some of which will dampen down the warming (negative feedback) while others will amplify it (positive feedback). Assessing the impacts of these feedbacks has been a central task of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a co-operative agency set up 17 years ago that has harnessed the work of thousands of scientists. Having spent countless hours of supercomputer time creating and refining models to simulate the planet's climate system, the IPCC concludes that the feedbacks will be overwhelmingly positive. The only question, it says, is just how big this positive feedback will be.

The latest IPCC assessment is that doubling CO2 levels will warm the world by anything from 1.4 to 5.8 °C. In other words, this predicts a rise in global temperature from pre-industrial levels of around 14.8 °C to between 16.2 and 20.6 °C. Even at the low end, this is probably the biggest fluctuation in temperature that has occurred in the history of human civilisation. But uncertainties within the IPCC models remain, and the sceptics charge that they are so great that this conclusion is not worth the paper it is written on. So what are the positive feedbacks and how much uncertainty surrounds them?

Melting of polar ice is almost certainly one. Where the ice melts, the new, darker surface absorbs more heat from the sun, and so warms the planet. This is already happening. The second major source of positive feedback is water vapour. As this is responsible for a bigger slice of today's greenhouse effect than any other gas, including CO2, any change in the amount of moisture in the atmosphere is critical. A warmer world will evaporate more water from the oceans, giving an extra push to warming. But there is a complication. Some of the water vapour will turn to cloud, and the net effect of cloudier skies on heat coming in and going out is far from clear. Clouds reflect energy from the sun back into space, but they also trap heat radiated from the surface, especially at night. Whether warming or cooling predominates depends on the type and height of clouds. The IPCC calculates that the combined effect of extra water vapour and clouds will increase warming, but accepts that clouds are the biggest source of uncertainty in the models.

. . . But even if you accept this sceptical view of how science is done, it doesn't mean the orthodoxy is always wrong. We know for sure that human activity is influencing the global environment, even if we don't know by how much. We might still get away with it: the sceptics could be right, and the majority of the world's climate scientists wrong. It would be a lucky break. But how lucky do you feel?

My take: we're playing with fire when we make huge changes to a complex system that we don't understand, as we seem to be doing with the various substances we're pumping into our atmosphere. I'm not quite sure what to do with this, however, since India and China will overtake us as world's biggest emitters in the not-so-distant future, and like the rest of the developing world, have shown no interest in leaning into the strike zone and taking one for the team. Also, environmentalists, to my disgust, continue to block the nuclear power plants that seem to me to be the only realistic hope for conversion to a hydrogen economy. And the general green fascination with downgrading our lifestyle, rather than, say, converting to a nice clean energy source like nuclear, has always seemed to me to show a remarkable lack of basic understanding of how an economy works. So there's a lot of blame to go around on what I'd say should be a slam dunk.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Precautionary principles

Arnold Kling talks about Social Security ostriches:

Mankiw is arguing against those who say, "Leave Social Security alone. It's not broken yet." The fact that anyone would make such an argument is a sign of desperation, in my opinion. I cannot believe that someone would seriously suggest that we should wait until there is a huge shortfall in Social Security funds before we do anything about it. It seems to me that if you are going to reduce people's retirement benefits, you ought to give them fair warning while they are young, rather than wait until the last minute.

I find it interesting to note that if you replaced "social security crisis" with "global warming", you'd find that most liberals and conservatives had neatly switched positions. Why? Because addressing each crisis requires cutting into something that one side values; free enterprise, on the one hand, and the progressive structure of social security, on the other.

Easy for me to say, of course; I'm one of those rare cats who thinks that we should do something sooner rather than later about both global warming and social security, so it's fun for me to sit on the sidelines with my "Tu Quoque!" sign. But I'm trying to make a serious point, which is that all of us look for ways to defer unpleasant decisions into the future; we differ only on which decisions strike us as unpleasant.

Deferral is not a good strategy for problems of these potential magnitudes. Time gets rid of some problems, but it makes others, like demographic crises and cumulative environmental damage, worse, and as most of us know from our own experience, ignoring problems in the hope that they'll go away generally results in a full scale disaster rather than a manageable inconvenience.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Kill Kyoto?

Italy's environment minister is calling for Kyoto compliance to end after 2012, saying that "continuing Kyoto in its current form would be useless without the agreement of some of the world's biggest polluters". The minister calls for voluntary controls that might attract the US, China and India to participate.

This is madness, of course. If you're going to give up your Kyoto compliance after six years, why bother doing it at all? To delay the onset of global warming by two days? And with per-capita GDP in the sub-$1000 range, it's going to be a long, long time before India or China agrees to any sort of pollution controls, voluntary or otherwise.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Environmentalists, get your guns

The WSJ has an article arguing that the increasing population of deer, and decreasing population of hunters, is destroying the forests, as the overpopulated deer eat all the nuts, shoots, and saplings that should be turning into trees, but aren't.

Not only is the deer population out of control, the management model of control "is broken," he says. "Deer density is increasing. Hunter density is decreasing. Hunters are aging -- we're losing 75,000 a year. Mentors [to recruit young hunters] are going. We're pretty much headed for a train wreck."

Animal-rights groups such as the Washington, D.C.-based Fund for Animals applaud hunting's decline. That group wants hunting outlawed, and advocates non-lethal methods, such as birth control, to decrease deer overpopulations. But birth control, so far, doesn't really work, say most wildlife managers.

A general rule of thumb among deer biologists is that hunters need to kill 35% to 45% of the females annually to stabilize the population. But in most places, they aren't killing even half that percentage, according to state tallies.

Who's to blame for the whitetail population boom? Hunters, mainly. But, increasingly, non-hunters and anti-hunters are sharing the blame.

For decades, says Mr. Alt, the Pennsylvania biologist, vocal hunters have pressured state wildlife managers to maximize deer populations. Many still do. State wildlife agencies, which collect income from the sale of hunting licenses, obliged by restricting hunting-season lengths and the number of deer a hunter could kill.

By the 1930s, most states had adopted rules banning the killing of does. Bucks are serial breeders, so more females mean more fawns and a bigger herd. These so-called buck laws became a part of the deer-hunter creed.

Now states are pushing doe killing to create smaller, healthier herds, but many older hunters are loath to kill females. When Pennsylvania put more than a million doe-killing permits up for sale this year, one group of hunters, the Unified Sportsmen of Pennsylvania, launched a "Stop the Slaughter" boycott. Doe killing, they argue, is causing deer shortages -- a notion the state disputes.

In recent years, states have lengthened hunting seasons, increased the number of deer each hunter can kill and made it easier to get "nuisance" permits, which allow farmers to kill deer causing damage anytime. Southern South Carolina's lengthened season, for example, opens on Aug. 15 and closes Jan. 1. Hunters can kill as many bucks as they want, and doe permits are easy to get. Still, by most accounts, the state's whitetail population is growing.

If you love nature, get out your gun and shoot some of it.

(Full disclosure: I'm too squeamish to hunt. But I'm ideologically in favour of it, and I think everyone who eats meat should, at least once, kill something so that they can see just exactly what their culinary enjoyment entails.)

From the desk of Jane Galt:

It's all about oiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiil

Kevin Drum has a piece on peak oil production that crystallized a niggling difficulty I've always had with environmentalists, and various other sorts of energy activists such as the "end our dependance on foreign oil" crowd -- they seem to take "We are the World" a little too literally.

When they talk about the Greenhouse effect, for example, the subtext of the conversation is that the US is the major problem, and if we seriously reduce our carbon output, the problem will be mostly licked. While the US is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases (and, not coincidentally, the largest producer of goods and services), China and India are hot on our tail, and China has a lot of nasty, carbon emitting, air polluting coal to burn. To a large extent, any cut in oil consumption by us is going to give growth a fillip in the developing world, but is not going to lessen the amount of stuff being consumed.

They also talk about alternative energy research as if we had the only research plant in the world, and the provision of federal funds is the difference between no research being done, and finding a way to turn the natural gas content in political speeches into clean, renewable energy. But the EU has more people than us, and with its ferocious energy taxes, has both countries and companies highly incented to find alternative energy sources. The result has been . . . Danish wind farms. This is not to say that more money might not make the difference, but the system is not binary, and we could well just be pouring more US money down a bottomless rathole.

Similarly, the "end our dependance on foriegn oil" crowd seem to be working on one of those simplistic economist's models they publicly deplore. In this model, there are only two countries, which we'll call Country A and Country S. Country A has a lot of money and not enough oil. Country S has a lot of oil, and not enough money. If Country A decides to stop buying Country S's oil, terrorism will stop and we can get our troops off the Arabian peninsula.

In the real world, of course, there is this global geopolitical system thing, filled with lots of trading partners and allies who don't have any oil. Even if the United States collectively decides to turn the thermostat down, carpool, and cut our consumption by 30% in order to get oil's role in our economy down to a more geopolitically manageable level, our trading partners will be just as dependant on Saudi oil as before -- more, in some cases, because our withdrawal from the market will alter the supply curve, allowing them to consume more. And as long as our trading partners, and might I add the holders of a huge portion of our debt, are dependant on Saudi oil, our fate will be nearly as tied to the Arabian peninsula as if we were importing the stuff ourselves.

Magic bullets only work in horror novels. Which our environmental policy isn't quite, yet.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Why doesn't the government do something?

Mark Kleiman has an interesting post on Jared Diamond, the author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, which I reviewed here.

Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel and of a forthcoming book on why some societies do, and some don't, deal effectively with potentially catastrophic environmental problems, gave today's Jacob Marschak Memorial Lecture on the topic of the new book.

The structure of the analysis of failure was straightforward: problems aren't anticipated in time, or they aren't perceived after they arise, or no serious attempt is made to deal with them, or they're just too hard. But the wealth of example was fascinating.

Diamond told the story of Easter Island, home to what were the largest palm trees in the world, settled sometime in the Ninth Century, increasingly prosperous until the beginning of the Seventeenth Century, and then abandoned within half a century of its peak as a result of deforestation.

Here's the "money quote," which I'm paraphrasing from memory:

"What was the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree thinking? Was he saying to himself, 'Jobs, not trees'? Or was it 'Down with Big Chieftainship'? Or maybe 'Those deforestation models haven't been validated'?"

RECKLESSNESS

As Diamond phrased the question above, it seemed to be about recklessness. How, in the face of oncoming disaster, could people just keep on doing what was sure to bring the disaster about? This isn't really a puzzle at an individual level, as he pointed out: something (overgrazing or overfishing, to choose two obvious examples) might be good for each individual but bad for the group. The puzzle is how governmental institutions might fail to respond appropriately.

One possible answer was provided by Thomas Schelling in an essay on organizational command and control. Reckless behavior by an organization need not be the product of reckless individuals. It might instead stem from individual cowardice, with each person afraid to be the one to tell his boss the likely result of some organizational policy.

This is, forgive me for saying so, what I think is the heart of the liberal error about government. You see it all the time in advocates of economic regulation. Liberals notice that the market can produce suboptimal, as well as optimal results. Their natural instinct is to make a law about it.

What they seem not to notice is that in a Democracy, the same people making the original error vote.

What were the folks on Easter Island thinking? By the point they noticed that deforestation was coming, they were thinking: "if we cut down fewer trees, some of our people will starve". Environmental degradation only becomes evident at the point when the population has passed the level that can survive with a smaller footprint. Any chieftan who told the people to stop cutting down the palm trees would have found himself ignored or deposed, just as any politician who tells senior citizens that they can't have everything they want, free, gets himself a one way ticket back to Peoria.

In fact, government can often make things worse, by introducing "market failures' peculiar to government, such as rent seeking and deadweight loss, while failing to solve the original problem.

Many, many of the arguments on this site seem to be very well meaning liberals saying fervently "But don't you see there's a problem?" and me saying, equally earnestly, "The fact that there is a problem does not mean that government is able to fix it."

And in fact when we get to the solutions to these types of problems, the ones where the government is supposed to step in and prevent the broad mass of people from doing something very bad for them, what we see is that liberals can recognize that the government is ill-equipped to handle them -- or at least the kind of government of which they are ostensibly in favor, which is to say representative, democratic government. So in the name of democracy, they agitate for agencies with the power to enact fiat rule with limited accountability, such as the EPA. This is profoundly anti-democratic, and can produce the worst of both worlds: a large deadweight loss, with little to show for it.

Take the arsenic standards flap that came up at the beginning of Bush's term. The major environmental issue right now, I think we can all agree, is global warming. Yet the EPA was fussing about standards for naturally occuring arsenic that had been in the local drinking water for as long as there had been towns there, without large crops of people dying off. The cost per life saved ran, if memory served, into the trillions; the new standard was going to save something like two people every fifty years. You could do much better, life wise, funding a service to provide free rides home from rural bars. Why were we wasting time arguing about this? Because the EPA is the Environmental Protection Agency, and it can't go around bothering people at bars; its business is the environment. And talking seriously about global warming meant telling everyone they were going to get a whole lot poorer, which would have brought unwelcome public scrutiny -- angry scrutiny -- to the EPA. So we argued about drinking water standards instead.

The liberal mantra is that the market fails. The free market mantra is that government fails worse. And I think the weight of empirical evidence is on our side.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

CAFE Standards

Kevin Drum asks a good question:

WHY ARE SUVs SO EXPENSIVE?....So I watched 60 Minutes tonight, and in the segment on SUVs I heard once again about how the profit margin on these vehicles is anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 or more. This compares with ordinary cars, which we are lead to believe are practically sold at a loss.

I've heard this so many times that it must be true, but what's the explanation for this? The same companies compete in both the car and the SUV market, so shouldn't competitive pressures force the profit margins to similar points? Isn't that how this whole free market thing is supposed to work?

Can anybody out there who works for a car company explain this?

I believe I can, in two words: CAFE standards.

CAFE stands for Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency. And what that means is that rather than setting a baseline below which no car can fall, the regulators examine the average efficiency of the entire fleet in order to see whether they're making their target.

There are several current ways to make cars more fuel efficient:

1) You can make the engine smaller. This makes the car hard to get up hills, reduces its carrying capacity, and decreases its safety, since averting accidents sometimes requires the ability to accelerate quickly.

2) You can make the car lighter without reducing its size. This is very hard and very expensive to do, and it makes the car much less safe, because less metal around you to absorb the kinetic energy of an impact means that that energy gets absorbed by you. Advocates like to argue that this is only because other people are driving heavy, inefficient SUVs, but this is a canard: lightening the car makes it less safe even in an accident with a car of similar weight. The problem is the velocity, not the weight of the other car.

3) You can make the car smaller. Americans don't like small cars, and they're also less safe. Compact and sub-compact cars are, as SUV-critic Gregg Easterbrook points out, death traps. However, they have the advantage of being cheaper to make than light big cars.

4) You can get creative with the design. The Honda Insight combines all teh abovementioned: it's smaller (two seater with no luggage space!), lighter, underpowered. It also has an innovative engine design. However, I've heard estimates that Honda's losing 20K on every model it sells (no one seems to know the true figure, as Honda and Toyota are very tight with their figures on their hybrids).

Basically, what it boils down to is that in order to get cars to consume less fuel, you have to sacrifice features that Americans like, like size, power, and safety. You can't just decree that everyone only make tiny underpowered cars, because that would not only focus the ire of the people on Washington instead of automakers; it would create problems for people who genuinely need the features you're eliminating, because for example they live on a ranch in Wyoming. So the regulators set an average (and also, I believe, a low floor), and told the automakers to figure it out.

Well, they've got the same problem that Washington does -- no one wants to buy a death trap with no luggage space. So they make small cars and sell them to people who wouldn't be able to afford a more powerful one. Flexible people who don't mind cramming eleven people in a Geo from New York to Maine. People without a lot of stuff to put in the trunk. People who don't care about safety because they think they're immortal. Your kids, in other words. The only problem with kids is that they can't afford cars. So the automakers lower the price to the point where a kid with a modest after-school job can make the payments.

Now we begin to see the perverse logic of fiat solutions. Have we lowered the total output of carbon emissions here? No, we've raised them, because in order to placate the customers who don't want less power & room, the automakers have increased the number of cars they sell. Now kids who would otherwise be riding the schoolbus are zooming around until all hours, merrily spewing carbon dioxide as they go. The fact that they consume less gas than a family sedan doesn't really matter, because in a lot of cases they're consuming gas that wouldn't have been consumed at all, as those of us who made it through high school without cars can attest that we were not given unlimited access to the family minivan to gallivant around the highways with.

(Actually, my family had a brown 1976 Chrysler Cordoba, and I was probably the only child in America who was offered the opportunity to borrow the car and refused it. It was not only radically uncool; parking it was like trying to parallel park the Love Boat.)

Anyway, in order to make up the money they're losing on the compact and sub-compact market, the automakers jack up the rates on the rest of us. Especially in the most price-insensitive part of the market: the SUV owners, who have proven that they're sufficiently oblivious to cost that they're willing to buy a car that costs $50 to fill the tank.

Note that if we raised fuel efficiency standards on SUV's, the price of compact cars would have to rise, because a chunk of the subsidy would disappear. I think that's fine, myself, but of course I live in Manhattan. The folks in the suburbs might feel a little differently. Depending, of course, on whether or not they have kids.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Stupid Inferences

Some time back I speculated that someone would soon refer to the recent cold snap as evidence against global warming (heat waves make lousy evidence for global warming, I might add). I swear to you I saw it on a tabloid as I walked by a newsstand, but was unable to find it on the web.

The first linkable instance comes from none other than the WSJ in
"Snow and Unilateralism". (quoted in full)

If only Joschka Fischer and Dominique de Villepin had stuck around New York City for the long holiday weekend after their Friday appearances at the United Nations. As the German and French foreign ministers observed cross-country skiers on Midtown Manhattan streets yesterday, they might have gained some insight into American "unilateralism" on another issue on which they differ from the U.S. -- that of global warming.

France and Germany like to complain about being "dictated to" by the U.S. on this subject. But who can blame Americans for being skeptical of the science behind global warming when the temperature stays well below freezing for days on end and the weatherman measures the snow in feet? Doesn't it still snow in Old Europe too?

It sure snowed in the U.S. this past weekend, when the Eastern Seaboard was pummeled with two feet or more of the white stuff. The weather system blasted in from the Plains, causing flooding and mudslides in the South and the Appalachians and ice and snow all up and down the East Coast. Airports closed, Amtrak curtailed service and driving advisories were issued. Parts of Maryland got a record 49 inches. In Washington, D.C., where admittedly they tend to exaggerate, some were calling it the storm of the century.

All this brings to mind a speech we read a couple of weeks ago by former Energy Secretary and all-round sage James Schlesinger. He recalled that 25 years ago, long before the term "global warming" became chic, plenty of smart people were more concerned about the prospect of a mini-Ice Age. The evidence at the time included such omens as summer frosts in the Upper Midwest that killed crops before they could be harvested. Amid this year's long, cold and snowy winter, who could say that prediction was wrong?

I understand, of course, that they are ultimately poking fun at this form of reasoning (with the "ice age" comparison), but the rules are the rules.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Holy Smokes, Ice on Manhattan's waterways! I haven't seen that in a long time.

Note to tabloids and others: Draw ridiculous inferences about global climate change.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

WWJD Redux

I've been somewhat bemused by the vehement reaction to the What Would Jesus Drive campaign by some on the right. Now, I'm not an evangelical Christian, but it seems pretty fair to say that Jesus, if he were here, would probably oppose contributing to global warming in order to gain a trivial benefit for yourself -- because, say, you feel more manly driving a Ford Expedition than a Toyota Corolla. The authors of the campaign that I saw didn't say you couldn't drive an SUV and be a good Christian -- they just said that as Christians, you should think about how much car you really need, and not drive one bigger than you have to have. That seems pretty reasonable to me.

On the other hand, in this excellent post Sasha Volokh points out that while in general it's a good idea to refrain from criticizing private activist movements as harshly as we criticize those who are agitating for government intervention, there are times when such campaigns are counterproductive -- that is, they work to the detriment of what we assume to be their founders' goals. He also points out, however, that you'd better be damned sure what those goals are before launching an attack on such grounds.

On a side note, if the Volokh Conspiracy doesn't stop making the rest of us look bad, I think a secondary boycott may be called for.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Low Hanging Fruit

Many people don't realize that much of the environmental "low hanging fruit" - the changes that make big differences in pollution with little differences in lifestyle -- have already been plucked. As population continues to grow, and people expect a rising standard of living, it's going to get harder and harder to keep reducing the footprint we leave on the earth. Fritz Schrank has one example: in Washington DC, vehicle pollution is presenting the politically impossible choices of intrusive mandated lifestyle change or no more transportation projects.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Newsflash: Environmental laws have costs,

Newsflash: Environmental laws have costs, just like everything else

This article suggests that the reason the WTC collapsed was that the columns were constructed without asbestos, due to new environmental regulations in effect at the time of construction.

While the article has a "see? Environmental laws are stupid!" tone that makes me wince a little, its facts sound plausible. The more interesting point to me is that I would bet that no one ever heard a public debate on whether it was better to have asbestos columns or the risk of collapse. My guess is that the answer would be "risk of collapse" -- no, don't shoot me, but at the time the building was built a fire fueled by that much avgas was an extremely unlikely (somewhere to the right of six sigma range, I'd guess) event, while asbestosis was a clear and present danger. Just as it is very possible that if we had a public debate about higher fuel efficiency vs. auto safety (increasing the mpg of cars results in a significant increase in auto deaths because they have to make the cars lighter, and therefore unable to sustain as much damage without injury to the occupant) we would come out on the side of fuel efficiency. My problem is that we never do have that debate -- whether because the auto makers are incompetent at PR, or because the media finds it easier to write stories from an "evil big corporation does it again" viewpoint, I do not know.