Category: Government

NOAA New Estimates Show Increase Since 1880 of Only 1.65 Degrees Fahrenheit

(p. A10) Scientists have long labored to explain what appeared to be a slowdown in global warming that began at the start of this century as, at the same time, heat-trapping emissions of carbon dioxide were soaring. The slowdown, sometimes inaccurately described as a halt or hiatus, became a major talking point for people critical of climate science.
Now, new research suggests the whole thing may have been based on incorrect data.
When adjustments are made to compensate for recently discovered problems in the way global temperatures were measured, the slowdown largely disappears, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared in a scientific paper published Thursday. And when the particularly warm temperatures of 2013 and 2014 are averaged in, the slowdown goes away entirely, the agency said.
. . .
The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington that is critical of climate science, issued a statement condemning the changes and questioning the agency’s methodology.
“The main claim by the authors that they have uncovered a significant recent warming trend is dubious,” said the statement, attributed to three contrarian climate scientists: Richard S. Lindzen, Patrick J. Michaels and Paul C. Knappenberger.
However, Russell S. Vose, chief of the climate science division at NOAA’s Asheville center, pointed out in an interview that while the corrections do eliminate the recent warming slowdown, the overall effect of the agency’s adjustments has long been to raise the reported global temperatures in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by a substantial margin. That makes the temperature increase of the past century appear less severe than it does in the raw data.
“If you just wanted to release to the American public our uncorrected data set, it would say that the world has warmed up about 2.071 degrees Fahrenheit since 1880,” Dr. Vose said. “Our corrected data set says things have warmed up about 1.65 degrees Fahrenheit. Our corrections lower the rate of warming on a global scale.”

For the full story, see:
JUSTIN GILLIS. “Global Warming ‘Hiatus’ Challenged by NOAA Research.” The New York Times (Fri., JUNE 5, 2015): A10.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date JUNE 4, 2015.)

The scientific article mentioned in the passages quoted above, is:
Karl, Thomas R., Anthony Arguez, Boyin Huang, Jay H. Lawrimore, James R. McMahon, Matthew J. Menne, Thomas C. Peterson, Russell S. Vose, and Zhang Huai-Min. “Possible Artifacts of Data Biases in the Recent Global Surface Warming Hiatus.” Science 348, no. 6242 (June 26, 2015): 1469-72.

Plant Breeders Use Old Sloppy “Natural” Process to Avoid Regulatory Stasis

(p. A11) What’s in a name?
A lot, if the name is genetically modified organism, or G.M.O., which many people are dead set against. But what if scientists used the precise techniques of today’s molecular biology to give back to plants genes that had long ago been bred out of them? And what if that process were called “rewilding?”
That is the idea being floated by a group at the University of Copenhagen, which is proposing the name for the process that would result if scientists took a gene or two from an ancient plant variety and melded it with more modern species to promote greater resistant to drought, for example.
“I consider this something worth discussing,” said Michael B. Palmgren, a plant biologist at the Danish university who headed a group, including scientists, ethicists and lawyers, that is funded by the university and the Danish National Research Foundation.
They pondered the problem of fragile plants in organic farming, came up with the rewilding idea, and published their proposal Thursday in the journal Trends in Plant Science.
. . .
The idea of restoring long-lost genes to plants is not new, said Julian I. Schroeder, a plant researcher at the University of California, Davis. But, wary of the taint of genetic engineering, scientists have used traditional breeding methods to cross modern plants with ancient ones until they have the gene they want in a crop plant that needs it. The tedious process inevitably drags other genes along with the one that is targeted. But the older process is “natural,” Dr. Schroeder said.
. . .
Researchers have previously crossbred wheat plants with traits found in ancient varieties, noted Maarten Van Ginkel, who headed such a program in Mexico at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center.
“We selected for disease resistance, drought tolerance,” he said. “This method works but it has drawbacks. You prefer to move only the genes you want.”
When Dr. Van Ginkel crossbred for traits, he did not look for the specific genes conferring those traits. But with the flood-resistant rice plants, researchers knew exactly which gene they wanted. Nonetheless, they crossbred and did not use precision breeding to alter the plants.
Asked why not, Dr. Schroeder had a simple answer — a complex maze of regulations governing genetically engineered crops. With crossbreeding, he said, “the first varieties hit the fields in a couple of years.”
And if the researchers had used precision breeding to get the gene into the rice?
“They would still be stuck in the regulatory process,” Dr. Schroeder said.

For the full story, see:
GINA KOLATA. “A Proposal to Modify Plants Gives G.M.O. Debate New Life.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., MAY 29, 2015): A11.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date MAY 28, 2015.)

Tesla Cars Are Built on Government Subsidies

(p. A13) Nowhere in Mr. Vance’s book, . . . , does the figure $7,500 appear–the direct taxpayer rebate to each U.S. buyer of Mr. Musk’s car. You wouldn’t know that 10% of all Model S cars have been sold in Norway–though Tesla’s own 10-K lists the possible loss of generous Norwegian tax benefits as a substantial risk to the company.
Barely developed in passing is that Tesla likely might not exist without a former State Department official whom Mr. Musk hired to explore “what types of tax credits and rebates Tesla might be able to drum up around its electric vehicles,” which eventually would include a $465 million government-backed loan.
And how Tesla came by its ex-Toyota factory in California “for free,” via a “string of fortunate turns” that allowed Tesla to float its IPO a few weeks later, is just a thing that happens in Mr. Vance’s book, not the full-bore political intrigue it actually was.
The fact is, Mr. Musk has yet to show that Tesla’s stock market value (currently $32 billion) is anything but a modest fraction of the discounted value of its expected future subsidies. In 2017, he plans to introduce his Model 3, a $35,000 car for the middle class. He expects to sell hundreds of thousands a year. Somehow we doubt he intends to make it easy for politicians to whip away the $7,500 tax credit just when somebody besides the rich can benefit from it–in which case the annual gift from taxpayers will quickly mount to several billion dollars each year.
Mother Jones, in a long piece about what Mr. Musk owes the taxpayer, suggested the wunderkind could be a “bit more grateful, a bit more humble.” Unmentioned was the shaky underpinning of this largess. Even today’s politicized climate modeling allows the possibility that climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide is far less than would justify incurring major expense to change the energy infrastructure of the world (and you certainly wouldn’t begin with luxury cars). Were this understanding to become widespread, the subliminal hum of government favoritism could overnight become Tesla’s biggest liability.

For the full commentary, see:
HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR. “BUSINESS WORLD; The Savior Elon Musk; Tesla’s impresario is right about one thing: Humanity’s preservation is a legitimate government interest.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., May 30, 2015): A13.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date May 29, 2015.)

The book discussed in the commentary is:
Vance, Ashlee. Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. New York: Ecco, 2015.

The Mother Jones article discussing government subsidies for Musk’s Tesla, is:
Harkinson, Josh. “Free Ride.” Mother Jones 38, no. 5 (Sept./Oct. 2013): 20-25.

Institutional Improvements Can Sometimes Be Designed, Rather than Only Spontaneous

A distinguished school of libertarian and neo-Austrian economic thought argues, following F.A. Hayek, that institutional improvements only arise from spontaneous order, and never from conscious design. There is something to their argument, but the designs of Alvin Roth provide counter-examples.

(p. A13) Mr. Roth’s work has been to discover the most efficient and equitable methods of matching and implement them in the world. He writes with verve and style, describing many market malfunctions–from aboriginal tribes in Australia arranging marriages for children not yet born to judges bending every rule in the book to hire law clerks years before they have graduated from law school–and how we ought to think about them.

Mr. Roth’s approach contrasts with standard debates over free markets versus government regulation. We want markets to be thick, quick, timely and trustworthy, but without careful design markets can become thin, slow, ill-timed and dangerous for the honest. The solution to these problems is unlikely to be regulation legislated from on high. Instead what Mr. Roth practices is nuanced market design created mostly by market participants. Mr. Roth found, for example, that even though the problems in the market for gastroenterologists and law clerks looked the same (hiring started years before schooling ended), the solutions had to be subtly different because of differences in culture, history and norms.

For the full review, see:
ALEX TABARROK. “BOOKSHELF; The Designer of Markets; In some markets, price isn’t the determining factor. You can choose to go to Harvard, but Harvard has to choose to accept you first.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., JUNE 16, 2015): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date JUNE 15, 2015, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; Matchmaker, Make Me a Market; In some markets, price isn’t the determining factor. You can choose to go to Harvard, but Harvard has to choose to accept you first.”)

The book under review is:
Roth, Alvin E. Who Gets What — and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co., 2015.

How Home Solar Panel Subsidies Increase Inequality

(p. A13) Well-meaning–but ill-conceived–federal, state and local tax incentives for rooftop solar give back between 30% and 40% of the installation costs to the owner as a tax credit. But more problematic are hidden rate subsidies, the most significant of which is called net metering, which is available in 44 states. Net metering allows solar-system owners to offset on a one-for-one basis the energy they receive from the electric grid with the solar power they generate on their roof.
While this might sound logical, it isn’t. An average California resident with solar, for example, generally pays about 17 cents per kilowatt-hour for electric service when the home’s solar panels aren’t operating. When they are operating, however, net metering requires the utility to pay that solar customer the same 17 cents per kilowatt-hour. But the solar customer still needs the grid to back up his intermittent solar panels, and the utility could have purchased that same solar power from a utility-scale solar power plant for about five cents per kilowatt-hour.
This 12-cents-per-kwh cost difference amounts to a wealth transfer from average electric customers to customers with rooftop solar systems (who also often have higher incomes). This is because utilities collect much of their fixed costs–the unavoidable costs of power plants, transmission lines, etc.–from residential customers through variable-use charges, in other words, charges based on how much energy they use. When a customer with rooftop solar purchases less electricity from the utility, he pays fewer variable-use charges and avoids contributing revenue to cover the utility’s fixed costs. The result is that all of the other customers have to pick up the difference.

For the full commentary, see:
BRIAN H. POTTS . “The Hole in the Rooftop Solar-Panel Craze; Large-scale plants make sense, but panels for houses simply transfer wealth from average electric customers.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., May 18, 2015): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date May 17, 2015.)

Army Corps of Engineers Blamed for Hurricane Katrina

(p. 13) NEW ORLEANS — Nearly 10 years on, one might assume that the case of Hurricane Katrina is closed.
That the catastrophic flooding of this city was caused not merely by a powerful storm but primarily by fatal engineering flaws in the city’s flood protection system has been proved by experts, acknowledged by the United States Army Corps of Engineers and underscored by residents here to anyone who might suggest otherwise.
But the efforts to establish responsibility with ever more precision — to ascertain just how many of those flaws were due to engineering, politics or money — have not stopped.

For the full story, see:
CAMPBELL ROBERTSON and JOHN SCHWARTZ. “Decade After Katrina, Pointing Finger Firmly at Army Corps.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., MAY 24, 2015): 13 & 16.
(Note: the date of the online version of the story is MAY 23, 2015, and has the title “Decade After Katrina, Pointing Finger More Firmly at Army Corps.”)

Feds Paid New York Journalist to Not Grow Crops in Oregon

(p. 11) As for the foolishness of agricultural subsidies, until recently, the federal government paid me, a New York journalist, $588 a year not to grow crops in Oregon. I rest my case.

For the full commentary, see:
Nicholas Kristof. “Our Water-Guzzling Food Factory.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., MAY 31, 2015): 11.
(Note: the date of the online version of the commentary is MAY 30, 2015.)

Drinking Water Not Harmed by Fracking

(p. A13) Fracking isn’t causing widespread damage to the nation’s drinking water, the Obama administration said in a long-awaited report released Thursday.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency–after a four-year study that is the U.S. government’s most comprehensive examination of the issue to date–concluded that hydraulic fracturing, as being carried out by industry and regulated by states, isn’t having “widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water.”

For the full story, see:
RUSSELL GOLD And AMY HARDER. “Fracking’s Harm to Water Not Widespread, EPA Says.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., June 5, 2015): A5.
(Note: the date of the online version of the story is June 4, 2015, and has the title “Fracking Has Had No ‘Widespread’ Impact on Drinking Water, EPA Finds.”)

Environment Experts Admit Obama Policies Are Expensive, Ineffective and May Make Environment Worse

(p. B1) Is the American approach to combating climate change going off the rails?
Last year, President Obama set a goal of reducing carbon emissions by as much as 28 percent from 2005 levels by 2025, only 10 years from now.
Now, environmental experts are suggesting that some parts of the strategy are, at best, a waste of money and time. At worst, they are setting the United States in the wrong direction entirely.
That is the view of some of the world’s top environmental organizations, including Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club. On Tuesday, they argued in a letter to the White House that allowing the burning of biomass to help reduce consumption of fossil fuels in the nation’s power plants, as proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency, would violate the Clean Air Act.
It’s also the view of economists from the University of Chicago and the University of California, Berkeley, who on Tuesday released the disappointing results of a field test of the federal Weatherization Assistance Program, the government’s largest effort to improve residential energy efficiency.
It turns out that burning biomass — wood, mainly — for power produces 50 percent more CO2 than burning coal. And even if new forest growth were to eventually suck all of it out of the atmosphere, it would take decades — perhaps more than a century — to make up the difference and break even with coal.
One study commissioned by the state of Massachusetts concluded that the climate impacts of burning wood were worse than those for coal for 45 years, and (p. B8) worse than for natural gas for about 90 years. Humans do not have that kind of time.
The energy efficiency push has a different problem: It is much too expensive. The weatherization improvements cost more than twice as much as households’ energy savings. Even after including the broad social benefits from less pollution, it was still a bad deal. Indeed, the program spent $329 per ton of CO2 it kept out of the air, some eight times as much as the administration’s estimate of the social cost of damages caused by carbon.
These are not small setbacks. Most of the scenarios that keep the rise in global temperatures under a 2 degree Celsius ceiling, the point at which scientists fear the risk of climate upheaval rises significantly, rely heavily on bioenergy, including biomass for power generation and other biofuels, which face similar problems.

For the full commentary, see:
Eduardo Porter. “ECONOMIC SCENE; Climate Change Calls for Science, Not Hope.” The New York Times (Sun., JUNE 24, 2015): B1 & B8.
(Note: the date of the online version of the commentary is JUNE 23, 2015, and has the title “ECONOMIC SCENE; Climate Change Calls for Science, Not Hope.”)

The letter to the Obama administration from many environmental organizations, including Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, is:
http://www.pfpi.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Groups-bioenergy-letter-to-OMB-6-23-15.pdf

The research mentioned above by economists from Berkeley and the University of Chicago, is:
Fowlie, Meredith, Michael Greenstone, and Catherine Wolfram. “Do Energy Efficiency Investments Deliver? Evidence from the Weatherization Assistance Program.” Working Paper, The Becker-Friedman Institute for Research in Economics, The University of Chicago, June 2015.

The research mentioned above that was commissioned by the state of Massachusetts, is:
Walker, Thomas , Dr. Peter Cardellichio, Andrea Colnes, Dr. John Gunn, Brian Kittler, Bob Perschel, Christopher Recchia, and Dr. David Saah. “Biomass Sustainability and Carbon Policy Study, Executive Summary.” Manomet, MA: Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences, June 2010.

Banks Used “Regulatory Arbitrage” to Rent Seek at Taxpayers’ Expense

(p. 21) Between 2009 and 2011, a group of economists at New York University’s Stern School of Business published an influential series of reports and books that sought to explain what, exactly, happened during the financial crisis. The depth of the inquiry was notable because the school is generally thought of as a Wall Street-friendly training ground for future bankers. One of the most striking findings was that between 1980 and 2000, the large banks in America had significantly moved away from productivity ­enhancement and toward rent-­seeking.
For the reports’ principal authors, Matthew Richardson and Viral Acharya, the evidence of this shift came from careful study of the various ways that banks have legally evaded regulation of their capital requirements. A fundamental tenet of bank regulation is that banks shouldn’t borrow too much, because being overleveraged makes them vulnerable to collapse. But banks can most easily make huge profits if they borrow huge amounts, and they tend to pursue unsafe levels of borrowing. Then, the authors observed, they use their power as essential tools in an economy to negotiate bailouts from the government, forcing taxpayers to guarantee their losses. Richardson and Acharya showed that it was precisely because our banking regulations were so extensive and complex that banks were able to seek rents. They called this “regulatory arbitrage,” a term that means banks have harnessed regulation and turned it into a powerful business tool.

For the full commentary, see:
ADAM DAVIDSON. “Wall Street Is Using the Power of Dodd-Frank Against Itself.” The New York Times Magazine (Sun., May 31, 2015): 18 & 20-21.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the date of the online version of the commentary is MAY 27, 2015, and has the title “Wall Street Is Using the Power of Dodd-Frank Against Itself.”)

One of the relevant papers by Acharya and Richardson is:
Acharya, Viral V., and Matthew Richardson. “Causes of the Financial Crisis.” Critical Review 21, no. 2-3 (2009): 195-210.

Canny Outlaws in Education and at Hogwarts

(p. 174) Interestingly, the union members in some of the schools run by Green Dot Public Schools, a charter school group with a solid educational track record, did not boycott the benchmark tests. The reason that they refused is revealing. Green Dot’s exams are created by a panel of teachers from its schools and are regularly reviewed for effectiveness and modified by the teachers. The tests have more credibility with the teachers than the tests for the rest of the district’s schools, which are written by an outside company, imposed from above, and don’t mesh with year-round schedules.
The quiet resistance of canny outlaws and the vocal protests of others are signs that teachers dedicated to preserving and encouraging discretion and wise judgment are not going quietly into the night. These teachers are not people who simply rebel at rules or who are just committed to their own ways of doing things. They are committed to the aims of teaching, a practice whose purpose is to educate students to be knowledgeable, thoughtful, reasonable, reflective, and humane. And they are brave enough to act on these commitments, taking the risks necessary to find ways around the rules. We suspect that many of our readers are canny outlaws themselves or know people who are: practitioners who have the know-how and courage to bend or sidestep for-(p. 175)mulaic procedures or rigid scripts or bureaucratic requirements in order to accomplish the aims of their practice. We admire canny outlaws in the stories we tell ourselves about such people and even in some of our children’s stories. We read the Harry Potter tales to them because Harry, Ron, and Hermione are canny outlaws who gain the guts and skill to break school rules and stand up to illegitimate power in order to do the right thing to achieve the aims of wizardry, indeed to save the practice itself.

Source:
Schwartz, Barry, and Kenneth Sharpe. Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing. New York: Riverhead Books, 2010.