Month: November 2015

Recycling Is Costly “Religious Ritual”

John Tierney penned another eye-opening commentary, this one as a cover-story for the SundayReview Section of The New York Times. A few of the best passages are quoted below.

(p. 1) In 1996, I wrote a long article for The New York Times Magazine arguing that the recycling process as we carried it out was wasteful.

. . .
So, what’s happened since then? While it’s true that the recycling message has reached more people than ever, when it comes to the bottom line, both economically and environmentally, not much has changed at all.
Despite decades of exhortations and man-(p. 4)dates, it’s still typically more expensive for municipalities to recycle household waste than to send it to a landfill. Prices for recyclable materials have plummeted because of lower oil prices and reduced demand for them overseas. The slump has forced some recycling companies to shut plants and cancel plans for new technologies.
. . .
One of the original goals of the recycling movement was to avert a supposed crisis because there was no room left in the nation’s landfills. But that media-inspired fear was never realistic in a country with so much open space. In reporting the 1996 article I found that all the trash generated by Americans for the next 1,000 years would fit on one-tenth of 1 percent of the land available for grazing. And that tiny amount of land wouldn’t be lost forever, because landfills are typically covered with grass and converted to parkland, like the Freshkills Park being created on Staten Island.
. . .
Last week the National Institutes of Health announced that it had prematurely ended a large national study of how best to treat people with high blood pressure because of its exceptional results.
In this trial of more than 9,000 people age 50 and older with high blood pressure, an aggressive treatment strategy to keep systolic blood pressure below 120 was compared with a conventional one aimed at keeping it below 140. The subjects all had a high risk of heart attacks, stroke and heart failure. The N.I.H. concluded, six years into a planned eight-year study, that for these patients, pushing blood pressure down far below currently recommended levels was very beneficial.
. . .
As a business, recycling is on the wrong side of two long-term global economic trends. For centuries, the real cost of labor has been increasing while the real cost of raw materials has been declining. That’s why we can afford to buy so much more stuff than our ancestors could. As a labor-intensive activity, recycling is an increasingly expensive way to produce materials that are less and less valuable.
Recyclers have tried to improve the economics by automating the sorting process, but they’ve been frustrated by politicians eager to increase recycling rates by adding new materials of little value. The more types of trash that are recycled, the more difficult it becomes to sort the valuable from the worthless.
In New York City, the net cost of recycling a ton of trash is now $300 more than it would cost to bury the trash instead. That adds up to millions of extra dollars per year — about half the budget of the parks department — that New Yorkers are spending for the privilege of recycling. That money could buy far more valuable benefits, including more significant reductions in greenhouse emissions.
So what is a socially conscious, sensible person to do?
It would be much simpler and more effective to impose the equivalent of a carbon tax on garbage, as Thomas C. Kinnaman has proposed after conducting what is probably the most thorough comparison of the social costs of recycling, landfilling and incineration. Dr. Kinnaman, an economist at Bucknell University, considered everything from environmental damage to the pleasure that some people take in recycling (the “warm glow” that makes them willing to pay extra to do it).
He concludes that the social good would be optimized by subsidizing the recycling of some metals, and by imposing a $15 tax on each ton of trash that goes to the landfill. That tax would offset the environmental costs, chiefly the greenhouse impact, and allow each municipality to make a guilt-free choice based on local economics and its citizens’ wishes. The result, Dr. Kinnaman predicts, would be a lot less recycling than there is today.
Then why do so many public officials keep vowing to do more of it? Special-interest politics is one reason — pressure from green groups — but it’s also because recycling intuitively appeals to many voters: It makes people feel virtuous, especially affluent people who feel guilty about their enormous environmental footprint. It is less an ethical activity than a religious ritual, like the ones performed by Catholics to obtain indulgences for their sins.
Religious rituals don’t need any practical justification for the believers who perform them voluntarily. But many recyclers want more than just the freedom to practice their religion. They want to make these rituals mandatory for everyone else, too, with stiff fines for sinners who don’t sort properly. Seattle has become so aggressive that the city is being sued by residents who maintain that the inspectors rooting through their trash are violating their constitutional right to privacy.

For the full commentary, see:
JOHN TIERNEY. “The Reign of Recycling.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., OCT. 4, 2015): 1 & 4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date OCT. 3, 2015.)

The Kinnaman paper mentioned above, is:
Kinnaman, Thomas C., Takayoshi Shinkuma, and Masashi Yamamoto. “The Socially Optimal Recycling Rate: Evidence from Japan.” Journal of Environmental Economics & Management 68, no. 1 (July 2014): 54-70.

Biography of Muhammad Documents Oldest and Youngest of His 12 Wives

(p. C6) The Prophet Muhammad might justly be described as the Jekyll and Hyde of historical biography. For centuries, he has been “alternately revered and reviled,” as Kecia Ali, an associate professor of religion at Boston University, notes in her excellent overview of the abundant literature. As a result, Muhammad presents two violently incompatible faces to the historian. For devout Muslims, relying both on the Quran and the vast corpus of sacred traditions, the hadith, he serves as the unimpeachable model for human behavior, not only in matters of faith and ritual but in the most humdrum aspects of daily life, from marital and business relations to personal hygiene, including even the proper use of the toothpick. For non-Muslims, drawing on the same sources, he has been viewed from the earliest times as lustful and barbarous, as a raving impostor aping the ancient prophets; nowadays he is further charged with misogyny and pedophilia. The contrast is so stark as to appear irreconcilable.
. . .
Two of the book’s best chapters deal with the most prominent of Muhammad’s 12 or so wives: the saintly Khadija, a Meccan businesswoman 15 years older than he; and the more spirited–and controversial–Aisha, the child-bride who became Muhammad’s “favorite wife” in later years. For both Muslim and non-Muslim biographers, Khadija represents a model wife. She is Muhammad’s comforter in moments of doubt or distress–an “angel of mercy,” according to the modern Egyptian biographer Muhammad Husayn Haykal–and their household is an abode of domestic felicity. Much is made of the fact that Muhammad took other wives only after Khadija’s death.
His marriage to Aisha is another matter altogether. She was only 6 years old when she became engaged to Muhammad, but he considerately postponed consummation of the marriage until she was 9. Though earlier critics said surprisingly little about this marriage–they seemed not even to note the anomaly of the couple’s ages–modern commentators have denounced it roundly, accusing Muhammad of pedophilia. Muslim biographers squirm to defend it, and some quibble over whether the bride was in fact only 9 when she was ushered into the marriage bed (to which she also brought her childhood toys, according to traditional accounts). A recent biography by one Abdul Hameed Siddiqui even goes so far as to praise the union with the fatuous remark that by marrying an older man, “the bride is immediately introduced and accustomed to moderate sexual intercourse.” For pious Muslims, the marriage raises a painful dilemma. For non-Muslim polemicists, Ms. Ali says, the marriage and its presumed consummation are reasons to vilify Islam generally–to believe that “all of Islam and every Muslim is tainted.”

For the full review, see:
ERIC ORMSBY. “Ways of Looking at the Prophet; Devout Muslims see him as the model for human behavior. Non-Muslims have seen him as lustful, barbarous or worse.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Jan. 10, 2015): C6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Jan. 9, 2015.)

The book under review, is:
Ali, Kecia. The Lives of Muhammad. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.

Lives Lost Due to Peer Review Delays

(p. A25) In this age of instant information, medicine remains anchored in the practice of releasing new knowledge at a deliberate pace. It’s time for medical scientists to think differently about how quickly they alert the public to breakthrough findings.
Last week the National Institutes of Health announced that it had prematurely ended a large national study of how best to treat people with high blood pressure because of its exceptional results.
In this trial of more than 9,000 people age 50 and older with high blood pressure, an aggressive treatment strategy to keep systolic blood pressure below 120 was compared with a conventional one aimed at keeping it below 140. The subjects all had a high risk of heart attacks, stroke and heart failure. The N.I.H. concluded, six years into a planned eight-year study, that for these patients, pushing blood pressure down far below currently recommended levels was very beneficial.
. . .

The new information may justify a more vigorous strategy for treating blood pressure, but for now doctors and patients have been left with incomplete results, some headlines and considerable uncertainty about whether to modify current treatments.
Medicine needs to change its approach to releasing new, important information. Throughout science we are seeing more rapid modes of communication. The traditional approach was not to publish until everything was finalized and ready to be chiseled in stone. But these sorts of delays are unnecessary with the Internet. Moreover, although all the trial data has yet to be tabulated, an analysis was considered sufficiently definitive to lead independent experts to stop the multimillion-dollar study.
We believe that when there is such strong evidence for a major public health condition, there should be rapid release of the information that led to the decision to stop the trial. This approach could easily be accomplished by placing the data on the N.I.H. website or publishing the data on such platforms as bioRxiv.org, which enables fast, open review by the medical community.
. . .
Kudos to the scientists who conducted such a large, complex and important study with what will be likely to have lifesaving consequences for a condition that can be treated easily in most patients. Now the medical community needs to adopt a new approach in situations like this one to disseminate lifesaving results in a timely, comprehensive and transparent way. Lives depend on it.

For the full commentary, see:
ERIC J. TOPOL and HARLAN M. KRUMHOLZ. “Don’t Sit on Medical Breakthroughs.” The New York Times (Fri., SEPT. 17, 2015): A25.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date SEPT. 17, 2015, and the title “Don’t Delay News of Medical Breakthroughs.”)

Newly Found, Early Human Species, Respected Their Dead

(p. A1) [A] . . . new hominin species was announced on Thursday, [September 10, 2015] by an international team of more than 60 scientists led by Lee R. Berger, an American paleoanthropologist who is a professor of human evolution studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. The species name, H. naledi, refers to the cave where the bones lay undisturbed for so long; “naledi” means “star” in the local Sesotho language.
In two papers published this week in the open-access journal eLife, the researchers said that the more than 1,550 fossil elements documenting the discovery constituted the largest sample for any hominin species in a single African site, and one of the largest anywhere in the world.
. . .
The finding, like so many others in science, was the result of pure luck followed by considerable effort.
Two local cavers, Rick Hunter and Steven Tucker, found the narrow entrance to the chamber, measuring no more than seven and a half inches wide. They were skinny enough to squeeze through, and in the light of their headlamps they saw the bones all around them. When they showed the fossil pictures to Pedro Boshoff, a caver who is also a geologist, he alerted Dr. Berger, who organized an investigation.
. . .
(p. A3) Besides introducing a new member of the prehuman family, the discovery suggests that some early hominins intentionally deposited bodies of their dead in a remote and largely inaccessible cave chamber, a behavior previously considered limited to modern humans. Some of the scientists referred to the practice as a ritualized treatment of their dead, but by “ritual” they said they meant a deliberate and repeated practice, not necessarily a kind of religious rite.
. . .
At the news conference in South Africa on Thursday, [September 10, 2015] announcing the findings, Dr. Berger said: “I do believe that the field of paleoanthropology had convinced itself, as much as 15 years ago, that we had found everything, that we were not going to make major discoveries and had this story of our origins figured out. I think many people quit exploring, thought it was safer to conduct science inside a lab or behind a computer.” What the new species Naledi says, Dr. Berger concluded, “is that there is no substitute for exploration.”

For the full story, see:
JOHN NOBLE WILFORD. “Cave Yields Addition to Human Family Tree.”The New York Times (Fri., SEPT. 11, 2015): A1 & A3.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed word and date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date SEPT. 10, 2015, and has the title “Homo Naledi, New Species in Human Lineage, Is Found in South African Cave,”)

Seven Times More Trees in World than Previous Estimate

(p. A9) There are slightly more than three trillion trees in the world, a figure that dwarfs previous estimates, according to the most comprehensive census yet of global forestation.
Using satellite imagery as well as ground-based measurements from around the world, a team led by researchers at Yale University created the first globally comprehensive map of tree density. Their findings were published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.
A previous study that drew on satellite imagery estimated that the total number of trees was about 400 billion. The new estimate of 3.04 trillion is multiple times that number, bringing the ratio of trees per person to 422 to 1.
. . .
The map was generated using 429,775 ground-based measurements in more than 50 countries, collected from a variety of sources, including the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, the National Forest Inventory and several peer-reviewed studies, said Henry Glick, co-director of the Ucross High Plains Stewardship Initiative, a research program within the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.
The effort paired existing tree-count data, in which a person either counted or estimated the number of trees in a given area, with environmental characteristics such as temperature and elevation. This enabled them to get a more accurate count than the rough forest-cover estimates via satellite. To fill in the gaps where there were no field measurements, they made estimates based on tree-density trends in regions with similar environmental characteristics, Mr. Glick said.

For the full story, see:
MARK ARMAO. “World Has Many More Trees Than Previously Thought, New Report Says.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., Sept. 3, 2015): A9.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the title “World Has Many More Trees Than Previously Thought, New Report Says.”)

Top-Down Aid “Hasn’t Worked in Africa”

(p. 2) John Mackey is the co-founder and co-chief executive officer of Whole Foods Market, the nation’s largest chain of natural foods supermarkets.
READING . . .
. . . “The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty,” by Nina Munk. Sachs is an economist and I’m sure he doesn’t like the book because it points out that his top-down aid type of approach hasn’t worked in Africa. A more bottom-up approach through entrepreneurship and boot strapping seems to be more effective, which is the approach we take at our Whole Planet Foundation.

For the full interview, see:
KATE MURPHY, interviewer. “Download; John Mackey.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., NOV. 23, 2014): 2.
(Note: bold in original; ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date NOV. 22, 2014.)

The book praised in the interview is:
Munk, Nina. The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty. New York: Doubleday, 2013.

Federal Agency Director Collects $750,000 for Lobbying

(p. A1) WASHINGTON — In this city with a grand tradition of government officials who pass through the revolving door into a world of big paychecks, Jeffrey Farrow stands apart.
While earning more than $100,000 a year as executive director of a tiny federal agency called the Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad, which has only one full-time federal employee, Mr. Farrow has simultaneously helped collect as much as $750,000 a year in lobbying fees. His clients have included the governments of Puerto Rico and the Republic of Palau, a tiny island nation in the western Pacific.
Mr. Farrow was at once a federal government bureaucrat and lobbyist. The revolving door did not even have to spin.
He managed this feat while running one of dozens of agencies that can get lost in the vast United States government — this one responsible for identifying and helping preserve cemeteries and historic buildings in Eastern and Central Europe that are important to American Jews and others, including Orthodox Christians from Kosovo.
. . .
(p. A16) “A bizarre tale,” said Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin and chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, in a letter he sent last month to Lesley Weiss, the chairwoman of the 30-year-old commission, asking her to explain Mr. Farrow’s dual roles. “This lobbyist used federal personnel and resources to run a profitable personal business advancing the interest of foreign agents.”.
. . .
Mr. Johnson, the Wisconsin senator, in a statement released by his office Friday, said the commission, despite its worthwhile mission, was an example of what is wrong with government.
“This relatively tiny agency is a classic example of the dysfunction and waste that typify far too much of the federal government,” he said. “Established with the best of intentions to memorialize the horrors of 20th-century genocides, the Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad did little to accomplish that goal but was instead used to enrich a lobbyist.”

For the full story, see:
ERIC LIPTON. “The Lobbyist With a Six-Figure Government Job.”The New York Times (Fri., SEPT. 15, 2015): A1 & A16.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date SEPT. 14, 2015.)

Political Freedom Depends on Economic Freedom–Hayek Was Right

(p. A12) The Commercial Press bookstore does not carry the banned political books. Instead, the collected speeches of China’s president, Xi Jinping, are prominently displayed, as are at least four biographies of Lee Kuan Yew, the late Singaporean leader who was widely admired by Chinese officials.
It is the same pattern in 13 other Hong Kong stores owned by the parent company of Commercial Press, Sino United Publishing, the biggest bookseller and publisher in the city. Despite the interest from mainland tourists, books that paint Chinese politicians in a bad light are either not available or tucked out of sight on shelves far from heavily trafficked areas.
. . .
According to Hong Kong corporate records and one of the company’s top executives, Sino United is owned, through a series of holding companies, by the Chinese government.
The company’s dominant position in the city’s publishing and bookselling industry is a major breach in the wall between the communist mainland and Hong Kong, a former British colony whose civil liberties — including freedom of the press — were guaranteed by treaty for half a century after it returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. It also illustrates how the central government in Beijing wields influence here not through force, but through its financial clout.
That influence has become even more apparent in the nearly three years since Mr. Xi became the top leader in China.

For the full story, see:
MICHAEL FORSYTHE and CRYSTAL TSE. “Hong Kong Bookstores Display Beijing’s Clout.” The New York Times (Tues., OCT. 20, 2015): A12.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date OCT. 19, 2015,)