Category - Environment

Jonathan Teller-Elsberg, CPE Staff Economist

A few weeks ago, CPE Staff Economist Jerry Friedman wrote an Econ-Atrocity reviewing Bill McKibben’s new book, Deep Economy. Though he says McKibben “has written a clear attack on much of what ails us,” Friedman nonetheless criticizes McKibben for approaching the environmental and social problems of the day from an individualist perspective. For all that McKibben wants to promote and revive “community,” he has the attitude (says Friedman) of a “personal Salvationist . . . [who thinks that] the enemy [is] ourselves: we use too much, waste too much, want too much; and the only salvation for the environment is to change our preferences, use less, recycle more, and choose to live simply.” What McKibben misunderstands or ignores, Friedman argues, is the power of social institutions to drive behavior, regardless of the desires and seemingly free choices of individuals.

I think that Friedman will find solace in Peter Barnes’ recent book, Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons, since Barnes’ approach is definitively institutional. The problem, according to Barnes, is that the structure of the economy and society leave too much power in the hands of corporate capitalism. Even if all the CEOs and boards of directors and politicians were replaced with kind-hearted souls like McKibben, we would still face pretty much the same issues of environmental decay, economic inequality, and other social ills—the logic of capitalism and the legal structure of private property rights force the leaders of corporations to do what they currently do. He learned this from personal experience as co-owner and manager of several business ventures, most famously Working Assets (a telephone and credit card company that donates one percent of gross revenues to progressive charitable organizations). “I’d tested the system for twenty years, pushing it toward multiple bottom lines [that consider social and environmental impacts in addition to profit concerns] as far as I possibly could. I’d dealt with executives and investors who truly cared about nature, employees, and communities. Yet in the end, I’d come to see that all these well-intentioned people, even as their numbers grew, couldn’t shake the larger system loose from its dominant bottom line of profit.” (Ironically, Bill McKibben is quoted on the front cover of Capitalism 3.0 helping to promote Barnes’ book.)

By Gerald Friedman, CPE Staff Economist

At the time of the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, the Environmental Movement straddled two approaches to addressing environmental problems, approaches rooted in two alternative theories. Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin proposed the first Earth Day to “force this issue onto the political agenda,” to promote changed government policy to protect the environment. But many of the 20 million Americans who took part in this first Earth Day were deeply suspicious of organized politics or state action. “Personal salvationists,” they blamed environmental troubles on our weaknesses as individuals. Instead of failed social policy, the enemy was ourselves: we use too much, waste too much, want too much; and the only salvation for the environment is to change our preferences, use less, recycle more, and choose to live simply.

Twenty seven years later, the Environmental Movement confronts the same division between personal salvation and political action, a division nicely illustrated by a new book, Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy. A prominent environmentalist, McKibben has written a clear attack on much of what ails us; but he misses the underlying cause of these ills and, therefore, his prescription for remedial action is necessarily off. In many ways, a pleasure to read, the book also left me so frustrated that I threatened to throw it against the wall.

Two weeks ago, after complaining to my daughter about how much I would dislike it, I bought Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy (New York, Henry Holt: 2007) from my local Amherst book store. Already familiar with his ideas from his various other writings (including The End of Nature; Staying Human in an Engineered Age; and various New Yorker articles), I suspected that his new book would be well written, an effective attack on much that ails us as a society, and would miss the point. It is this last that led me to threaten to throw the book against the wall in frustration. And that frustration led me to write this note. (Actually, it was my wife who wanted me to write this so that I would stop ranting to her.)

What could be wrong with a book that criticizes the Bush Administration, big oil, Cargill, Monsanto, and the Economics profession (among many many other villains)? Especially when the author has such good heroes: including farmers’ markets, urban gardens, organic farmers, Heifer International, and the Indian state of Kerala. Among economists, environmentalists like Herman Daly and Bob Costanza get most of the Kudos but a few, like Amartya Sen, make friendly cameo appearances. Individualism is bad; society is productive; and I agree that would all be better off, and the world a lot better off, if we listened to Bill McKibben.

The problem I have is that McKibben not only reads orthodox economists but believes them.

By Hasan Tekguc

What are honeybees, the favorite economic textbook example of a positive externality, doing nowadays? The short answer is: they are vanishing in droves, in billions.

Let’s take a step back and see what economics textbooks tell us. In many economics textbooks and introductory classes honeybees are referred to as the perfect example of a positive externality. A positive externality is the benefit from economic activity that falls on a party ‘external’ to the activity. Economics textbooks and professors explain that when honeybees visit flower after flower to collect nectar, they help flowers to pollinate. However, honeybee keepers are not paid by orchard owners for honeybees’ services and hence the pollination service is underprovided. The market-based solution offered in textbooks is to expand the market to include the positive externalities; in plain language if the orchard owners start to pay the beekeepers for bees’ services, the beekeepers will keep more honeybees, more flowers will be pollinated, and the trees will bear more fruit.

What will happen? Maybe not much. What could happen? Something big.

Top Court: EPA Can Control Emissions

By MARK SHERMAN Associated Press Writer
© 2007 The Associated Press

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ordered the federal government on Monday to take a fresh look at regulating carbon dioxide emissions from cars, a rebuke to Bush administration policy on global warming.

In a 5-4 decision, the court said the Clean Air Act gives the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from cars.

Greenhouse gases are air pollutants under the landmark environmental law, Justice John Paul Stevens said in his majority opinion.

[cont’d]

And in quick response, words to the wise from the auto industry:

Automakers urge economy-wide approach to global warming
POSTED: 12:56 p.m. EDT, April 2, 2007

WASHINGTON (AP) — Automakers called for an economy-wide approach to global warming in reaction to a Supreme Court decision Monday that could give the government the authority to regulate the emissions of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases from cars.

The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, an industry trade group representing General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co., DaimlerChrysler AG, Toyota Motor Corp. and five others, said in a statement that “there needs to be a national, federal, economy-wide approach to addressing greenhouse gases.”

Of course, don’t expect things to work out all rosy…. The auto industry plans to be the first among equals at the negotiating table:

Dave McCurdy, the alliance’s president and chief executive, said automakers would work with lawmakers and federal agencies to help develop a national approach.

[cont’d]

But even still, the idea is right. Cap and trade? A carbon tax? Good old fashioned rationing? Banning the worst offenders (as in, no new fossil fuel powered electricity plants, followed by a phase-out of existing plants; mandatory efficient building materials and techniques; minimal acceptable auto fuel efficiency; etc)? There are lots of options for economy wide approaches to dealing with carbon pollution, and no time like the present to start trying them out.

Having said that, what the Supreme Court has ruled looks to be restricted to auto emissions (thus the auto industry’s insistence on economy-wide action, so they aren’t made the only ones to deal with the greenhouse gas problem). This is based on

§202(a)(1) of the Clean Air Act, which requires that the EPA“shall by regulation prescribe . . . standards applicable to the emission of any air pollutant from any class . . . of new motor vehicles . . . which in [the EPA Administrator’s] judgment cause[s], or contrib-ute[s] to, air pollution . . . reasonably . . . anticipated to endangerpublic health or welfare,” 42 U. S. C. §7521(a)(1).

Become an expert: read the Court’s actual decision in “Massachusetts et al v. Environmental Protection Agency et al.” [pdf]

P.S.–Don’t confuse this decision with the other environmental decision also released today, “Environmental Defense v. Duke Energy Corp.” That one rules that the EPA should be more rigorous in enforcing the Clean Air Act when power companies alter existing plants to ensure that no more pollution is released than before the alteration.

The CBC reports

Alberta carbon dioxide pipeline could cost $5B
Last Updated: Thursday, March 15, 2007 | 12:19 PM MT
CBC News

A plan to pipe carbon dioxide from Alberta’s oilsands and store it underground could cost as much as $5 billion, says Alberta’s environment minister.

The province wants to capture carbon dioxide and send it through a 400-kilometre pipeline. Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Guy Boutilier said earlier this month that the pipeline would cost $1.5 billion and the carbon dioxide would be used to help get more oil out of low-producing wells.

He was pushing for the federal government and industry to split the cost of the project.

But Environment Minister Rob Renner suggested Wednesday it could cost much more.

“The number of $1.5 billion has been floated,” Renner said. “I suspect that the number — all costs included — will be significantly higher than that.

“I’ve seen estimates as high as $5 billion by the time it has taken into account the cost to industry to implement the [carbon] capture facilities.”

[cont’d]

Wow. Just a thought here, and ignoring that the carbon dioxide would be sequestered (for how long and how securely?) in an effort to bring yet more fossil fuel to the surface so it can be burned and converted to carbon dioxide, most of which won’t be captured but will add to the greenhouse mix; so my thought is, just how much energy conservation technology could be implemented with $5 billion (even if it is Canadian dollars), or even the lower estimate of $1.5 billion? I’d definitely bet a dollar that it’d be enough to cancel out way more CO2 emissions than the pipeline would help sequester (and I repeat, for how long, and how securely?).

By Heidi Garrett-Peltier, CPE Staff Economist

You are what you eat. And according to Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, that means we’re corn. Corn has now made its way into our diet in the form of fillers, sweeteners, oils, alcohols, pills, and breakfast cereals, not to mention of course the indirect path it takes through animal feed. Why should we care? Because cheap corn has been linked to obesity, and obesity will soon overtake tobacco as the leading cause of preventable death.

By Matthew Riddle, CPE Staff Economist

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI, grabbed headlines in Massachusetts recently when Governor Deval Patrick signed onto it, committing Massachusetts to a cut in its emissions of greenhouse gasses from power plants, and reversing Mitt Romney’s decision to abandon the agreement. In addition to rejoining RGGI, Patrick also outlined some proposals for its implementation, which may prove to be even more significant than his decision to join.

I don’t think that Tim Haab at Environmental Economics subscribes to the Econ-Atrocities, but by happy coincidence he’s written a blog post that would fit perfectly in the series. His topic is the Mexican government’s response to serious inflation in the cost of tortillas, which are a primary staple of the Mexican diet, and poor Mexicans (of which there are plenty) are getting hit by these price hikes like a punch to the gut. Should the Mexican government pursue a policy of price caps for tortialls? The “Theory of the Second Best” offers an interesting angle of analysis. I’ll let Tim explain it himself, but as a teaser here’s a bit of his conclusion:

If the price cap is a response to another inefficient policy, then the price cap may actually improve efficiency. The first best solution would be to remove the policies creating the inefficiently high corn prices. The second best solution might be to create a new policy to counteract the effects of bad policy. That’s the Theory of Second Best.

This all makes best sense as part of his full post, so go read it (it’s not long, so it won’t hurt).

By Jonathan Teller-Elsberg, CPE Staff Economist

With Al Gore on Oprah giving his “inconvenient” PowerPoint presentation, new reports of melting ice sheets and rising sea levels, and the release of the British government’s Stern Review, which is the latest major estimate of the economic costs of climate change, the issue of global warming is becoming a part of mainstream politics and kitchen-table conversations. Since the burning of fossil fuels (oil, natural gas, and coal) is the main source of human-caused warming, the need for alternative forms of energy is clear.

For all that social sciences are able to figure out patterns of behavior, there’s one thing that guarantees a continuing need for old fashioned history analysis: the existence of totally unpredictable twists and turns in culture and politics.

Now I can’t say with any confidence that the recent fall from grace of Rev. Ted Haggard, until this past Thursday the president of the huge and hugely influential National Association of Evangelicals and leader of a megachurch in Colorado Springs, will be one of those surprisingly pivotal events. But there’s a distinct possibility that his outing as a repeat customer of male prostitution could lead to major changes in US policy and cultural attention towards global warming.

By Jonathan Teller-Elsberg, CPE Staff Economist

In the U.S., talk of tax reform usually means debates about taxes on income and wealth. A little less common are discussions of flat taxes and a shift from payroll, income, investment, or property taxes to consumption taxes—that is, a federal sales tax.

We’ve seen the miserable results of lowering taxes on the rich, and we’ll be dealing with the massive government debts for decades to come. Flat taxes are simply another way to lower taxes on the rich, under the guise of simplifying the tax system. (To be sure, simplifying taxes is not exactly something to dismiss out of hand—the system is far more intimidating than it should be.) The supposed advantage of a shift to consumption taxes is that the shift away from payroll and/or other taxes should lead to more jobs. This is because a payroll tax makes it “expensive” for a business to have an employee. If the payroll tax is reduced or eliminated, the business will have more money available to hire additional workers. The problem with consumption taxes is that they tend to be regressive—meaning that they fall hardest on lower-income members of society.

Another type of tax reform that deserves more attention is the environmental tax shift (ETS), also known as the green or ecological tax shift. The idea here is to increase taxes on activities that result in environmental damage and use the money generated to reduce other taxes by the same amount. As with the consumption tax idea, most proposals center around reducing payroll taxes.

By Heidi Garrett-Peltier, CPE Staff Economist

In 1810, 84 percent of the U.S. workforce was employed in agriculture. Today, it’s down to two percent. Thanks to dramatic increases in productivity resulting from advances in technology and the mechanization of agriculture, we can produce a great deal more food with far fewer people than we could 200 years ago. But does this progress come at a cost?

Large-scale corporate farms are able to out-compete small-scale (often family-owned) farms and drive them out of business. Economies of scale (the competitive edge gained by being bigger) enable large corporate farms to produce more cheaply than smaller farms. These large farms are able to invest in expensive machinery and buy their inputs (fertilizer, seed, etc.) more cheaply than small farms, which in turn makes it difficult for small farms to compete. One might think that corporate farming is better for the consumer – large farms, producing more efficiently, can offer products at lower prices. In addition, the vast network of global agriculture allows consumers access to many varieties of foods throughout the year that can not be produced locally.

By Jonathan Elsberg, CPE Staff Economist

One of the more attention-grabbing ideas that has crossed academic disciplinary boundaries, as well as entered into everyday language, is the notion of the “tragedy of the commons.” Made most famous by late Professor of Human Ecology Garrett Hardin in an essay by that name, the idea is not too complicated, very powerful–and rather alarming.

The tragedy describes a situation in which there is public access to a resource. It is to the advantage of each individual to use a little bit extra of the resource, but when all individuals do this simultaneously, the resource is ruined for everyone. Dozens of references to the “tragedy” can be found in newspapers in just the last year, dealing with issues such as depleted fisheries, email spam, risky growth in hedge-fund investing, and worker migration and associated destruction of local communities.

While resources available “in common” sometimes have been tragically exploited, reality is (happily) more complicated, and tragedy is not destiny. One aspect sometimes overlooked by pessimistic analysts is that there are different kinds of common property resources. Some resources are totally open to any and all users, and are properly called “open access” rather than “commons”. These are the ones that are most likely to suffer tragic overuse. The earth’s atmosphere, and its ability to absorb global warming pollution, is one example.

Often, the “cure” recommended for these tragic commons is either strict government control or the conversion of the resource into pure private property. Under the ruling ideology of our times, it is the latter that gets the most promotion.

However, many resources are held in common by a group which is able to sustainably use the resource without resorting to the use of strict private property. The members of the group, be it a local community, professional organization, or national society, control and share access to the resource, yet establish and follow rules of behavior that override greedy urges and keep individual’s use of the resource to an acceptable level. These successful cases of working social rules and norms are arguments against the call for knee-jerk privatization of common properties, or for total government control.

Some examples include the sharing of fishing zones in Alanya, Turkey, maintenance of acequia irrigation systems around New Mexico, U.S.A., and the Ozone Transport Commission NOx Budget established among eight northeastern U.S. states to reduce smog-related air pollution.

These are important lessons, because some potentially tragic commons cannot be fully privatized or put entirely into the hands of the government. For example, avoiding global warming will require extensive international cooperation (there is disagreement on whether this cooperation can be built from the ground up, or must be imposed by a powerful, central world power). Not only will the citizens and businesses of each country have to take responsibility for their CO2 emissions, but each government will have to help establish a working institutional framework for such responsibility within its borders. However, each government, business and individual faces the tragic temptation - allow all the others to control their CO2, while we fake compliance and reap the economic advantages.

No international treaty will hold if the signers don’t want to follow it. Only through combined dedication to the well-being of the whole along with creative, yet feasible, new institutions to guard against cheating will the individual community members make triumphant rather than tragic choices. It is through the study of past common property success and failures that we can learn to succeed more often.

Sources:

Herman Daly, “Logic that leads to a plundered world,” The Guardian (London, England), September 1, 2003, pg. 25. www.guardian.co.uk/wto/article/0,2763,1033054,00.html

Nives Dolšak and Elinor Ostrom, eds., The Commons in the New Millennium: Challenges and Adaptations, MIT Press, 2003. (I especially recommend the chapter by Einar Eythórsson on Icelandic fisheries. It is an excellent analysis of a privatization scheme with mixed positive and negative results.)

Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science, Vol. 162, No. 3859, Issue of 13 Dec 1968, pp. 1243-1248. (Also available online at www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_tragedy_of_the_commons.html.)

Tor Hundloe and Daryl McPhee, “No reason why we can’t have our fishcake and eat it,” Courier Mail (Queensland, Australia), August 25, 2003, pg. 11.

Barney Jopson, “Don’t turn to hedge funds when depressed,” Financial Times (London, England), March 31, 2003, pg. 25.

Las Vegas (New Mexico) Citizens’ Committee for Historic Preservation, “Historic Acequias of Las Vegas, New Mexico” web-brochure. www.nmhu.edu/research/cchp/tours/acequias/default.htm.

Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Jonathan Turley, “Uncle Sam and spam,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, (Wisconsin, USA), April 28, 2003, pg. 13A.

(c) 2003 Center for Popular Economics

Econ-Atrocities are a periodic publication of the Center for Popular Economics. They are the work of their authors and reflect their author’s opinions and analyses. CPE does not necessarily endorse any particular idea expressed in these articles.

By Liz Stanton, CPE Staff Economist

1. You’ve Been Psychologically Conditioned To Want a Diamond. The diamond engagement ring is a 63-year-old invention of N.W.Ayer advertising agency. The De Beers diamond cartel contracted N.W.Ayer to create a demand for what are, essentially, useless hunks of rock.
2. Diamonds are Priced Well Above Their Value. The De Beers cartel has systematically held diamond prices at levels far greater than their abundance would generate under anything even remotely resembling perfect competition. All diamonds not already under its control are bought by the cartel, and then the De Beers cartel carefully managed world diamond supply in order to keep prices steadily high.

By James Boyce, Professor of Economics, UMass-Amherst

In a state-of-the-art forecast on the impacts of global warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported this month that low-income countries in Africa and Asia will suffer the greatest harm from the build-up of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere. The distribution of the long-term costs of fossil fuel consumption is therefore a mirror image of distribution of its short-term benefits: while the transitory pleasures of rapacious fossil fuel consumption are concentrated among the world’s affluent classes, the brunt of the long-term costs will fall on people who have never ridden in an automobile, much less owned one.
The IPCC projects that average surface temperatures will rise by 2.5 to 10 degrees Farenheit in this century, following a one-degree rise in the 20th century. Even if the costs of climate change were distributed equally across humankind, the poorest would suffer the most because they are starting from an abysmally low base. But ironically, many of the worst-hit places will be precisely where they live, notably by virtue of worsening droughts in Africa and increased flooding and cyclones in low-lying regions of tropical Asia. For both reasons, the IPCC report concludes, ‘The effects climate change are expected to be greatest in developing countries in terms of loss of life and relative effects on investment and the economy.’

Meanwhile, international negotiations aiming to reach a treaty on steps to combat global warming remain stymied by the U.S. insistence that developing countries agree to do more to limit their emissions of greenhouse gases.

Sources:

IPCC, ‘Climate Change 2001: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability: Summary for Policymakers,’ approved by IPCC Working Group II in Geneva, 13-16 February 2001.

‘Global Warming’s Big Losers: Poor Countries and Island Nations,’ The International Herald Tribune, 19 February 2001, p. 4. (www.iht.com/articles/11061.html)

Web resources:

For the IPCC report, go to: www.ipcc.ch.

For more on greenhouse injustice, see the excellent website of India’s Centre for Science and the Environment: www.cseindia.org/html/cmp/cmp33.htm.

The Environmental Protection Agency has a Global Warming links page at www.epa.gov/ebtpages/airairpoglobalwarming.html.

Econ-Atrocities are a periodic publication of the Center for Popular Economics. They are the work of their authors and reflect their author’s opinions and analyses. CPE does not necessarily endorse any particular idea expressed in these articles.

Heading for the beach this summer? Take your water-quality-testing kit. A new report from the National Resources Defense Council shows a 50% increase in pollution-related beach closings and advisories from 1997 to 1999. The report explains that few states have comprehensively monitored water quality in the past. Those that have begun doing so, like California, are often finding unacceptably high bacteria counts.

Four states qualified as “beach bums” because of limited or zero monitoring and public notification efforts: Louisiana, Oregon, Texas, and Washington.

For more information, including ratings for beaches you might know and love, check out the National Resources Defense Council web site at www.nrdc.org.

Sources:

Barbara Whitaker, “U.S. Beach Closings Soar With Focus on Pollution,” New York Times, 8/4/000

National Resources Defense Council, “Testing the Waters, 2000.”