Global Warming Is Least Worry of Vanuatu Island’s Poor

(p. A19) In a warning often repeated by environmental campaigners, the Vanuatuan president told the United Nations that entire island nations could be submerged. “If such a tragedy does happen,” he said, “then the United Nations and its members would have failed in their first and most basic duty to a member nation and its innocent people.”

Torethy Frank, a 39-year-old woman carving out a subsistence lifestyle on Vanuatu’s Nguna Island, is one of those “innocent people.” Yet, she has never heard of the problem that her government rates as a top priority. “What is global warming?” she asks a researcher for the Copenhagen Consensus Center.
. . .
Torethy and her family of six live in a small house made of concrete and brick with no running water. As a toilet, they use a hole dug in the ground. They have no shower and there is no fixed electricity supply. Torethy’s family was given a battery-powered DVD player but cannot afford to use it.
. . .
What would change her life? Having a boat in the village to use for fishing, transporting goods to sell, and to get to hospital in emergencies. She doesn’t want more aid money because, “there is too much corruption in the government and it goes in people’s pockets,” but she would like microfinance schemes instead. “Give the money directly to the people for businesses so we can support ourselves without having to rely on the government.”
Vanuatu’s politicians speak with a loud voice on the world stage. But the inhabitants of Vanuatu, like Torethy Frank, tell a very different story.

For the full commentary, see:

BJøRN LOMBORG. “The View from Vanuatu on Climate Change; Torethy Frank had never heard of global warming. She is worried about power and running water.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., OCTOBER 23, 2009): A19.

(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version is dated Thurs., Oct. 22.)

Biofuels Fail to Meet Fed Industrial Policy Goal

(p. B10) In 2007, Congress set a national goal of creating an advanced biofuel industry, and established a quota for gasoline marketers to blend a modest 100 million gallons of such fuel into gasoline by 2010.
. . .

The industry is likely to miss Congress’s initial quota of 100 million gallons next year, acknowledging that it will make a few million gallons of the advanced fuel, at most. It could fall even further behind the 2011 quota, 250 million gallons. The quota eventually rises to 16 billion gallons by 2022.
The industry partly blames the credit crisis for its slow pace, but acknowledges that getting the conversion techniques to work is the biggest problem.
“It’s certainly turned out to be more complicated technically than people thought it would be,” said Brian Foody, the president and chief executive of Iogen, which hopes to build a large-scale facility.

For the full story, see:
MATTHEW L. WALD. “Industry Built From Scratch.” The New York Times (Thurs., October 15, 2009): B1 & B10.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article is dated October 14th.)

Feds Spent $850,000 to “Green” Buildings, and then Tore Them Down

(p. 4A) WASHINGTON — The four drafty buildings had been fix­tures of the Energy Depart­ment complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., for more than half a cen­tury. They burned energy like 1950s sedans.

The buildings seemed like perfect candidates for a federal conservation retrofit program that relies on private contrac­tors that receive a percentage of the money they save. A deal was struck in 2001. The con­tractor reworked lighting and heating systems, among other things, and began collecting payments.

The project was count­ed among the department’s “green” successes — until auditors discovered that the buildings had been torn down several years ago, and the gov­ernment had paid $850,000 for energy savings at facilities that no longer existed.

The audit findings show the potential for waste and abuse at a time when the department is poised to launch billions of dollars more in stimulus spend­ing on an unprecedented welter of green projects across the country.
. . .
The problems are not exclu­sive to Oak Ridge. The audi­tors, from the department’s inspector general’s office, also determined that $565,000 had been paid over six years un­der the same arrangement to a contractor in Texas for a high­efficiency laundry that was no longer in use.

The department also paid out $3.4 million on another project without checking whether the conservation measures worked — and $160,000 for measure­ments that were never taken.

For the full story, see:
THE WASHINGTON POST. “Audit finds ‘green’ projects resulted in waste, abuse; The findings point to a need for oversight as the government readies stimulus projects.” Omaha World-Herald (Sun., Sept. 27, 2009): 4A.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Adaptation Greatly Reduces Negative Effects from Global Warming

One of the advantages of flexible economic systems, such as capitalism, is that they can adapt to unexpected or exogenous changes in the environment (e.g., changes in the weather). In the empirical analysis quoted from below, the primary finding is that roughly half of the short-term negative effects on income from rising temperatures, “are offset in the long run through adaptation.”
Almost all of the countries in the sample of 12 deviate substantially from the ideal of entrepreneurial capitalism. So the reduction by half is probably a much smaller amount of adaptation than would occur in a sample of countries that had adopted policies that allowed a flourishing of entrepreneurship.

(p. 203) Using subnational data from 12 countries in the Americas, we show that the negative crosssectional relationship between temperature and income exists within countries, as well as across countries. We then provide a theoretical framework for reconciling the substantial, negative association between temperature and income in cross section with the even stronger short-run effects of temperature shown in panel models. The theoretical framework suggests that half of the negative short-term effects of temperature are offset in the long run through adaptation.

Source:
Dell, Melissa, Benjamin F. Jones, and Benjamin A. Olken. “Temperature and Income: Reconciling New Cross-Sectional and Panel Estimates.” American Economic Review 99, no. 2 (May 2009): 198-204.

Global Warming Creates Benefit of Arctic Shipping Shortcut

GermanShipArtcticPassage.jpg “A German ship, following a Russian icebreaker, is about to complete a shipment from Asia to Europe via Arctic waters.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) MOSCOW — For hundreds of years, mariners have dreamed of an Arctic shortcut that would allow them to speed trade between Asia and the West. Two German ships are poised to complete that transit for the first time, aided by the retreat of Arctic ice that scientists have linked to global warming.

The ships started their voyage in South Korea in late July and will begin the last leg of the trip this week, leaving a Siberian port for Rotterdam in the Netherlands carrying 3,500 tons of construction materials.
Russian ships have long moved goods along the country’s sprawling Arctic coastline. And two tankers, one Finnish and the other Latvian, hauled fuel between Russian ports using the route, which is variously called the Northern Sea Route or the Northeast Passage.
But the Russians hope that the transit of the German ships will inaugurate the passage as a reliable shipping route, and that the combination of the melting ice and the economic benefits of the shortcut — it is thousands of miles shorter than various southerly routes — will eventually make the Arctic passage a summer competitor with the Suez Canal.
“It is global warming that enables us to think about using that route,” Verena Beckhusen, a spokeswoman for the shipping company, the Beluga Group of Bremen, Germany, said in a telephone interview.

For the full story, see:

ANDREW E. KRAMER and ANDREW C. REVKIN. “Arctic Shortcut Beckons Shippers as Ice Thaws.” The New York Times (Fri., September 10, 2009): A1 & A3.

NortheastPassageMap2009-09-26.jpg “A Shortcut Across the Top of the World.” Source of caption and map: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Feds Ignore Birds Killed by Windmills

(p. A19) On Aug. 13, ExxonMobil pleaded guilty in federal court to killing 85 birds that had come into contact with crude oil or other pollutants in uncovered tanks or waste-water facilities on its properties. The birds were protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which dates back to 1918. The company agreed to pay $600,000 in fines and fees.

ExxonMobil is hardly alone in running afoul of this law. Over the past two decades, federal officials have brought hundreds of similar cases against energy companies. In July, for example, the Oregon-based electric utility PacifiCorp paid $1.4 million in fines and restitution for killing 232 eagles in Wyoming over the past two years. The birds were electrocuted by poorly-designed power lines.
Yet there is one group of energy producers that are not being prosecuted for killing birds: wind-power companies. And wind-powered turbines are killing a vast number of birds every year.
A July 2008 study of the wind farm at Altamont Pass, Calif., estimated that its turbines kill an average of 80 golden eagles per year. The study, funded by the Alameda County Community Development Agency, also estimated that about 10,000 birds–nearly all protected by the migratory bird act–are being whacked every year at Altamont.
Altamont’s turbines, located about 30 miles east of Oakland, Calif., kill more than 100 times as many birds as Exxon’s tanks, and they do so every year. But the Altamont Pass wind farm does not face the same threat of prosecution, even though the bird kills at Altamont have been repeatedly documented by biologists since the mid-1990s.
. . .

This is a double standard that more people–and not just bird lovers–should be paying attention to. In protecting America’s wildlife, federal law-enforcement officials are turning a blind eye to the harm done by “green” energy.

For the full commentary, see:
ROBERT BRYCE. “Windmills Are Killing Our Birds; One standard for oil companies, another for green energy sources.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., SEPTEMBER 8, 2009): A19.
(Note: the online version of the commentary is dated September 7th.)
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Creator of Cap-and-Trade Now Says Plan is Ineffective and Inflexible

CrockerThomas2009-09-13.jpg

“When he was a graduate student in the 1960s working to reduce pollutants, Thomas Crocker devised a cap-and-trade system similar to one being considered in Congress.” Source of photo and caption: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A7) In the 1960s, a University of Wisconsin graduate student named Thomas Crocker came up with a novel solution for environmental problems: cap emissions of pollutants and then let firms trade permits that allow them to pollute within those limits.

Now legislation using cap-and-trade to limit greenhouse gases is working its way through Congress and could become the law of the land. But Mr. Crocker and other pioneers of the concept are doubtful about its chances of success. They aren’t abandoning efforts to curb emissions. But they are tiptoeing away from an idea they devised decades ago, doubting it can work on the grand scale now envisioned.
“I’m skeptical that cap-and-trade is the most effective way to go about regulating carbon,” says Mr. Crocker, 73 years old, a retired economist in Centennial, Wyo. He says he prefers an outright tax on emissions because it would be easier to enforce and provide needed flexibility to deal with the problem.
. . .
Mr. Crocker sees two modern-day problems in using a cap-and-trade system to address the global greenhouse-gas issue. The first is that carbon emissions are a global problem with myriad sources. Cap-and-trade, he says, is better suited for discrete, local pollution problems. “It is not clear to me how you would enforce a permit system internationally,” he says. “There are no institutions right now that have that power.”
Europe has embraced cap-and-trade rules. Emissions initially rose there because industries were given more permits than they needed, and regulators have since tightened the caps. Meanwhile China, India and other developing markets are reluctant to go along, fearing limits would curb their growth. If they don’t participate, there is little assurance that global carbon emissions will slow much even if the U.S. goes forward with its own plan. And even if everyone signs up, Mr. Crocker says, it isn’t clear the limits will be properly enforced across nations and industries.
The other problem, Mr. Crocker says, is that quantifying the economic damage of climate change — from floods to failing crops — is fraught with uncertainty. One estimate puts it at anywhere between 5% and 20% of global gross domestic product. Without knowing how costly climate change is, nobody knows how tight a grip to put on emissions.
In this case, he says Washington needs to come up with an approach that will be flexible and easy to adjust over a long stretch of time as more becomes known about damages from greenhouse-gas emissions. Mr. Crocker says cap-and-trade is better suited for problems where the damages are clear — like acid rain in the 1990s — and a hard limit is needed quickly.
“Once a cap is in place,” he warns, “it is very difficult to adjust.” For example, buyers of emissions permits would see their value reduced if the government decided in the future to loosen the caps.

For the full story, see:
JON HILSENRATH. “Cap-and-Trade’s Unlikely Critics: Its Creators; Economists Behind Original Concept Question the System’s Large-Scale Usefulness, and Recommend Emissions Taxes Instead.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., AUGUST 13, 2009): A7.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Noble Savages Were Not So Noble

(p. A20) The idea that primitive hunter-gatherers lived in harmony with the landscape has long been challenged by researchers, who say Stone Age humans in fact wiped out many animal species in places as varied as the mountains of New Zealand and the plains of North America. Now scientists are proposing a new arena of ancient depredation: the coast.

In an article in Friday’s issue of the journal Science, anthropologists at the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Oregon cite evidence of sometimes serious damage by early inhabitants along the coasts of the Aleutian Islands, New England, the Gulf of Mexico, South Africa and California’s Channel Islands, where the researchers do fieldwork.
“Human influence is pretty pervasive,” one of the authors, Torben C. Rick of the National Museum of Natural History, part of the Smithsonian Institution, said in an interview. “Hunter-gatherers with fairly simple technology were actively degrading some marine ecosystems” tens of thousands of years ago.

For the full story, see:

CORNELIA DEAN. “Ancient Man Hurt Coasts, Paper Says.” The New York Times (Fri., August 21, 2009): A20.

Global Warming Laws May Increase Food Prices

(p. A5) Some of the nation’s biggest food and agriculture companies are planning to release a flurry of studies in coming weeks that scrutinize the potential impact of climate-change legislation, warning that it could lead to higher food prices.
. . .
In a letter sent last month to Sens. Barbara Boxer, the California Democrat, and Republican James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the coalition said the House bill “will increase food and feed prices and reduce the international competitiveness of our businesses.”
The letter said Congress “must take extreme care to avoid adverse impacts on food security, prices, safety, and accessibility to necessary consumer products.” The letter also criticized the House bill for failing to provide transitional assistance to “low-income households struggling with rising food prices.”
When the group’s studies are released, possibly by the end of August, they are likely to reignite tensions between food and ethanol producers that have raged since 2007 when Congress passed energy legislation that gave a big boost to the corn-ethanol industry.
The food industry has complained that the energy bill pushed up prices for corn and other key food ingredients that resulted in higher consumer prices as the ethanol industry siphoned more corn to make ethanol.

For the full story, see:
LAUREN ETTER. “Food Firms Fret Over Potential Impact of Climate Bill; Coalition, Including Agricultural Giants, Plans to Draw Attention to Concerns That Legislation Could Lead to Higher Food Prices.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., Aug. 13, 2009): A5.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Omaha’s MidAmerican Energy “Is Ready to Assist BYD’s Foray into the U.S. Auto Market”

WangChuanfuBYDchairman2009--09-7.jpg “Wang Chuanfu, the chairman of Chinese auto maker BYD, with one of the company’s cars at the automobile show in Detroit in January.” Source of photo and caption: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. B5) XIAN, China — BYD Co., the Chinese auto maker part-owned by Warren Buffett’s company, is finalizing plans for an all-electric battery car that would be sold in the U.S. next year, ahead of the original schedule, Chairman Wang Chuanfu said.
. . .
One source of Mr. Wang’s confidence in attacking the U.S. car market is BYD’s ties with MidAmerican Energy Holding Co., the unit of Mr. Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. that paid about $230 million for a 9.9% stake in BYD.
MidAmerican Chairman David Sokol, who was also interviewed in Xian, said MidAmerican is ready to assist BYD’s foray into the U.S. auto market in “any way we could be helpful.” MidAmerican also might invest in BYD’s new initiatives in the U.S., which, in addition to automobiles, could involve solar panels and battery technology for power utilities.
Mr. Sokol also said MidAmerican hopes to boost its BYD stake if the chance arises. “If in the future there is an opportunity for us to continue to invest in BYD, we will be happy to increase our stake over time, but we will do it in cooperation with BYD,” he said. Mr. Wang said an increase is “negotiable.”

For the full story, see:
NORIHIKO SHIROUZU. “BYD to Sell Electric Car in U.S. Market Next Year.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., AUGUST 22, 2009): B5.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Environmental Hypocrites

(p. C14) KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — European consumer groups and nongovernmental organizations have said they want environmentally friendly palm oil. Malaysian producers of palm oil that have made the switch are discovering that it is still a hard sell.

The price premium for palm oil certified as produced through sustainable plantation practices has been shrinking since the first eco-friendly palm oil was shipped to European markets last November, and producers say it may need to disappear if they are to regain business in the key European Union market.
Producers say the difficulty in selling higher-priced sustainable palm oils highlights the double standards of those who criticize the industry but buy the cheaper, uncertified oil that they say is harming the environment.

For the full story, see:
SHIE-LYNN LIM. “Backers Don’t Buy ‘Friendly’ Palm Oil.” Wall Street Journal (Weds., JULY 15, 2009): C14.