EclectEcon

The other day, Ms. Eclectic asked me what the best speed is to drive. As a good economist, I replied the same way all economists respond to all questions.
It all depends.
I said that I thought fuel usage declined the slower you went (turns out that was seriously wrong) but that it would take longer to reach our destination, so there would be a trade-off between our spending for gasoline, the risks of accidents and injuries at different speeds, and how much we value our time en route versus our time in its next best use.

My friend, Steve, says he used to do about 110 kmh all the time on highways (with speed limits of only 80kmh), but about two years ago he decided to reduce the risks of accidents and reduce his use of gasoline. He now rarely, if ever, goes over 90 kmh.

Most of the time on the highway I drive at speeds between 85 and 95 kmh (which, for the metricly challenged, is between about 53 and 60 mph). It turns out this speed is also roughly in the optimal range for fuel economy according to this item at Econobrowser. Here is a graph from that posting plotting average fuel mileage against speed for a sample of automobiles.
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Addendum: for more, see the ever-informative Political Calculations.

A recent article in Popular Mechanics says [h/t to Instapundit],

Sorry, folks, but the SUV is dead ...

Sorry, Pop-Mech, but it isn't.

After having spent the springs of 2006 - 07 in England, where the price of gasoline/petrol was then the equivalent of about $2/litre or very roughly $8/gallon, I could see that even at those prices, many people still bought and ran the big gas guzzlers. Probably not as many, proportionally, as in North America during that same time, but there were still lots of them.

So even if the price of gasoline in the US reaches $5 or $6, the SUV is not dead.... at least not if the market is allowed to work. Some people will still want to use their income to buy and feed the big SUVs.

But watch for the elitist interventionist enviro-nazis to try to ban SUVs as being socially irresponsible. Those folks will never understand, much less accept, the possible benefits of a Pigou tax on gasoline, should such a tax be appropriate.

Ethanol made from Rapeseed (or Canola) or maize (aka corn in the US) creates more greenhouse gases than gasoline. From the UKTimes [h/t to Brian Ferguson],

Measurements of emissions from the burning of biofuels derived from rapeseed and maize have been found to produce more greenhouse gas emissions than they save. ...

Rapeseed and maize biodiesels were calculated to produce up to 70 per cent and 50 per cent more greenhouse gases respectively than fossil fuels. The concerns were raised over the levels of emissions of nitrous oxide, which is 296 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Scientists found that the use of biofuels released twice as much as nitrous oxide as previously realised. The research team found that 3 to 5 per cent of the nitrogen in fertiliser was converted and emitted. In contrast, the figure used by the International Panel on Climate Change, which assesses the extent and impact of man-made global warming, was 2 per cent. The findings illustrated the importance, the researchers said, of ensuring that measures designed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions are assessed thoroughly before being hailed as a solution. ...

Maize for ethanol is the prime crop for biofuel in the US where production for the industry has recently overtaken the use of the plant as a food. In Europe the main crop is rapeseed, which accounts for 80 per cent of biofuel production.

Professor Smith told Chemistry World: “The significance of it is that the supposed benefits of biofuels are even more disputable than had been thought hitherto.”

It was accepted by the scientists that other factors, such as the use of fossil fuels to produce fertiliser, have yet to be fully analysed for their impact on overall figures. But they concluded that the biofuels “can contribute as much or more to global warming by N2 O emissions than cooling by fossil-fuel savings”.

The research is published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, where it has been placed for open review.

Tom Hanna has a great post about the use of dishwater, etc., to water lawns and gardens or to flush toilets. Sounds good, right? But maybe not in California:

A lesson that environmentalists should have learned about socialism after the Iron Curtain fell is now striking a bit closer to home. Liberty frees people to solve problems, including environmental problems. Bureaucracy entrenches problems, including environmental problems. Bottom line: Capitalism is better for the environment than socialism.

Nightline ran a piece on a group calling themselves the “Greywater Guerillas.” This is a group of environmental activists doing exactly the sort of voluntary action to conserve water that conservation minded conservatives and libertarians love. They’re revamping plumbing to recycle waste water from sinks and showers to water yards and gardens and flush toilets. One of the group’s founders estimates that she saves 100 gallons of water a day.

The problem…they’re in California.

This shouldn’t be a problem, after all California is ecologically minded and constantly suffering water shortages (in spite of being right next to 1/3 of the liquid water on earth). Ah, but you see, California is also one of the most regulated places on earth. ... And, in that California, you have to have a permit to install a greywater system (the technical term for what these folks are doing). A system that passes the requirements could exceed $10,000 in costs, not including the cost of the permit. The systems they are installing start at less than $100 for a system to divert sink water for flushing toilets.

Who else has a greywater system in his home? Not Al Gore, not John Kerry….George W. Bush.

Courtesy of Scoop, here's the link to the Snopes confirmation of this comparison of Al Gore's house with George Bush's house:

The Story of Two Houses

LOOK OVER THE DESCRIPTIONS OF THE FOLLOWING TWO HOUSES AND SEE IF YOU CAN TELL WHICH BELONGS TO AN ENVIRONMENTALIST.

HOUSE # 1:

A 20-room mansion (not including 8 bathrooms) heated by natural gas.
Add on a pool (and a pool house) and a separate guest house all heated by gas. In ONE MONTH ALONE this mansion consumes more energy than the average American household in an ENTIRE YEAR. The average bill for electricity and natural gas runs over $2,400.00 per month. In natural gas alone (which last time we checked was a fossil fuel), this property consumes more than 20 times the national average for an American home. This house is not in a northern or Midwestern "snow belt," either. It's in the South.


HOUSE # 2:

Designed by an architecture professor at a leading national university, This house incorporates every "green" feature current home construction can provide. The house contains only 4,000 square feet (4 bedrooms) and is nestled on arid high prairie in the American southwest. A central closet in the house holds geothermal heat pumps drawing ground water through pipes sunk 300 feet into the ground. The water (usually 67 degrees F.) heats the house in winter and cools it in summer. The system uses no fossil fuels such as oil or natural gas, and it consumes 25% of the electricity required for a conventional heating/cooling system. Rainwater from the roof is collected and funneled into a 25,000 gallon underground cistern. Wastewater from showers, sinks and toilets goes into underground purifying tanks and then into the cistern. The collected water then irrigates the land surrounding the house. Flowers and shrubs native to the area blend the property into the surrounding rural landscape.

So the answer is:


HOUSE # 1 (20 room energy guzzling mansion) is outside of Nashville, Tennessee. It is the abode of that renowned environmentalist and filmmaker) Al Gore.

HOUSE # 2 (model eco-friendly house) is on a ranch near Crawford, Texas. Also known as "the Texas White House," it is the private residence of the President of the United States, George W. Bush. So whose house is gentler on the environment? Yet another story you WON'T hear on CNN, CBS, ABC, NBC, MSNBC or read about in the New York Times or the Washington Post. Indeed, for Mr. Gore, it's truly "an inconvenient truth."

Russ Roberts at Cafe Hayek has posted an excellent Global Warming Quiz:

It's a one question quiz:

Suppose we discovered that the earth was cooling rather than warming due to a natural cycle. Would you encourage people to drive more and use more carbon-based energy as a way of warming the earth?

I know, and you know, too, that most people who fret and wring their hands about global warming would do no such thing.

Instead they would argue that it's the particulate matter of our human-created pollution that is cooling the earth (with plenty of historical references to the effects that volcanoes had on global cooling) and therefore we need to have public policies in place to limit the amount that people drive, especially gas-guzzling SUVs. Global warming? Global cooling? It doesn't matter: we should drive less and burn less fuel; we should repent and sin no more, or maybe a bit less anyway (and heaven forbid relying on the market system to provide this guidance!).

In other words, their insistence that we cut back on our use of fossil fuels has little or nothing to do with global warming and has much more to do with some sort of elitist paternalism, wanting to insist that the rest of us live more austere lives. Digressive rant: and yet they would oppose a value-added tax as being regressive — they not only want us to cut back on our consumption, they want to control us and tell us what to do.

This question about global warming reminds me of the 1960s criticism of then-popular Keynesian economics and fiscal policy. We were all taught that it was a good idea to increase gubmnt spending and cut taxes to get the economy out of a recession. Rarely however, did politicians propose cutting gubmnt spending across the board to reduce inflationary pressures. So much for using fiscal policy to offset the swings of the business cycle. And so much for some of the rants about global warming.

Update: Also see this, sent to me by both BenS and Brian Ferguson:

The alleged solutions have more potential for catastrophe than the putative problem. The conclusion of the late climate scientist Roger Revelle—Al Gore's supposed mentor—is worth pondering: the evidence for global warming thus far doesn't warrant any action unless it is justifiable on grounds that have nothing to do with climate.

From yesterday's London Free Press (aka "the Freeps"),

Mayors of Ontario's automotive cities are rallying to fight a recently announced tax on gas guzzlers they say will "decimate" the province's auto industry. ... Mayors from 13 Southern Ontario cities met in Woodstock to talk about how to help the province's auto industry.

... "This could decimate an entire industry," said Woodstock Mayor Michael Harding, who will co-chair a committee opposing the tax with Gray.

... The mayors oppose penalizing large fuel users, fearing Ontario will move toward adopting California standards for vehicles that, by 2012, would mean Ontarians would not be able to buy cars assembled here, Harding said.

... In its budget, Ottawa said some large gas users will be hit with a tax of up to $4,000, hurting primarily the traditional Big Three. Buyers of fuel-efficient vehicles will receive rebates of up to $2,000.

New cars contribute to only only one per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, yet the largest contributors, fossil fuel burned for electricity and the Alberta tar sands project, were ignored in the budget, the mayors point out.

... The only automaker to speak in favour of the federal government policy is Toyota, the company building a new assembly plant in Woodstock that will employ 2,000. Despite the fact Harding's hometown manufacturer supports the policy, it is still bad for the industry, he said.

"I appreciate that Toyota is green, but the Big Three are still the largest employers of auto workers. We cannot, as an industry, favour one automaker over another."

I had two reactions to this article:

• It seems like a clear case of NIMBY [Not In My Back Yard]. The mayors might all be in favour of reducing pollution or reducing carbon dioxide emissions, but at the same time they want policies that do not affect their constituents so directly.
• If, indeed, burning carbon fuels is so horrible, why tax the vehicles??? Why not just tax the fuel purchases directly (and reduce other taxes, so the programme would be revenue-neutral)? Then, if people want to burn a lot of fuel, they would be individually paying high taxes to do so. People who drive small cars a lot would be paying for all the negative externalities they generate, and people who drive humongous SUVs very little would be causing less total pollution and could easily end up paying less in total taxes, too.
  
  Taxing the vehicles is such an indirect way of doing this, involving ham-fisted taxes, when fuel taxes would be tied much more directly to the use of carbon-based fuels.

So while I am not at all thrilled with the mayors' position that the federal gubmnt shouldn't pursue policies that might hurt the auto industry, I agree that there is a better, more efficient way to pursue the same goal. I'm guessing the mayors' reactions to a big fuel tax would be less negative than would the reaction from the oil patch, even though it might have a similar (though smaller) effect on the demand for gas guzzlers. One reason is that it would appear to be a tax on oil, not on SUV manufacturers; another is that it would tax all fuel users according to how much fuel they use and would not be directed only to the purchasers and suppliers of gas guzzlers.

I have written several times that if the gubmnt is concerned about the burning of carbon-based fuels, then it should "tax the snot" out of them [see here, here, and here]. More formally, and along these same lines, Greg Mankiw has unofficially formed what he terms "The Pigou Club", which includes economists like me who recommend taxing things that generate negative externalities.

Alex Tabarrok recently challenged the Pigouvian approach, arguing that taxes will not reduce pollution much, at least not in the short run if the supply curves are highly inelastic. If so, then taxing the product will reduce the demand, sliding it down along a (nearly) vertical supply curve, and the total amount of the activity, in real terms, will not change much, if at all. Here is a graph that illustrates his position:

As you can see, I'm no wizard with drawing programmes, but the idea is clear. The tax on consumers shifts the demand curve downward from D to D', leading to a drop in the equilibrium price. In the very short run (some people refer to these very-short-run supply curves as "market-period" or "instantaneous" supply curves), when the demand drops, it is very difficult and costly to reduce the quantity supplied in response to a drop in the price. In the oil industry, for example, it is costly to stop and shut down or even cut back the refining process overnight. In that sense, and in similar situations, Alex's point is worthy of consideration.

In the longer run, however, as firms have the opportunity to adjust their capacity, their output, and their techniques and procedures, then the quantity supplied will indeed respond to the drop in price. And when that happens, people will engage in less of the offending activity. This makes sense. Long-run marginal cost curves tend to be flatter than short-run marginal cost curves for most firms; and long-run supply curves tend to be much flatter than short-run supply curves for competitive industries.

Notes:

• The point of this posting is to show that Pigouvian taxes can be [not necessarily will be] effective in reducing negative externalities.
• Pigouvian taxes are more likely to be effective in the long run than in the short run.
• Nobody really has any good or reliable idea as to how big the taxes should be.

I do not usually like ad hominem arguments.

Actually, to be honest, I usually do like them when they attack people with whom I disagree, but I do not find them persuasive. And sometimes they are just too much fun to resist. Here is a great one, attacking the integrity of noted Canadian geneticist and environmentalist, David Suzuki.

... Suzuki dismisses questions about the scientific integrity of Kyoto, characterizing as "a lot of baloney" [interviewer, John] Oakley’s observation that "a lot of scientists feel they're intimidated from speaking out…"

"2,500 scientists signed the IPCC (Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change) Report on February 2!" Suzuki exclaims. (To hear the audio clip click here.)

... I decided to check this out for myself – and discovered that, in fact, only 51 individuals signed the IPCC Report released on February 2.

... After Suzuki insinuates that scientists who disagree with him are "shilling" for big corporations, Oakley asks him where he gets his funding. Suzuki replies that his foundation takes no money from governments and complains that “corporations have not been interested in funding us."

... Actually, the David Suzuki Foundation’s annual report for 2005/2006 lists at least 52 corporate donors including: Bell Canada, Toyota, IBM, McGraw-Hill Ryerson, Microsoft, Scotia Capital, Warner Brothers, RBC, Canon and Bank of Montreal.

The David Suzuki Foundation also received donations from EnCana Corporation, a world leader in natural gas production and oil sands development, ATCO Gas, Alberta’s principle distributor of natural gas, and a number of pension funds including the OPG (Ontario Power Generation) Employees’ and Pensioners’ Charity Trust. OPG is one of the largest suppliers of electricity in the world operating 5 fossil fuel-burning generation plants and 3 nuclear plants... which begs the question – is Suzuki now pro-nuclear power?

This is a man who has his own television show on a network sponsored by Canadian taxpayers and then claims that he takes no money from gubmnt. Yeah, sure.

One of the very best criticisms I have read of ethical food positions appears in this/last? week's leader(editorial) in The Economist [$]. Here is an excerpt:

Buy organic, destroy the rainforest

Organic food, which is grown without man-made pesticides and fertilisers, is generally assumed to be more environmentally friendly than conventional intensive farming, which is heavily reliant on chemical inputs. But it all depends what you mean by “environmentally friendly”. Farming is inherently bad for the environment: since humans took it up around 11,000 years ago, the result has been deforestation on a massive scale. But following the “green revolution” of the 1960s greater use of chemical fertiliser has tripled grain yields with very little increase in the area of land under cultivation. Organic methods, which rely on crop rotation, manure and compost in place of fertiliser, are far less intensive. So producing the world's current agricultural output organically would require several times as much land as is currently cultivated. There wouldn't be much room left for the rainforest.

Fairtrade food is designed to raise poor farmers' incomes.
It is sold at a higher price than ordinary food, with a subsidy passed back to the farmer. But prices of agricultural commodities are low because of overproduction. By propping up the price, the Fairtrade system encourages farmers to produce more of these commodities rather than diversifying into other crops and so depresses prices—thus achieving, for most farmers, exactly the opposite of what the initiative is intended to do [EE: note the assumption the price elasticity of demand is less than one; and how is it possible for high prices to cause low prices? there must be some rationing of production quotas going on — ugh (Update: it is apparent from the article, linked below, that they are concerned that more farmers will raise coffee, hoping to receive the higher, FT, price but end up having to sell for the lower, regular, price -- still sounds odd to me and flies in the face of rational expectations)]. And since only a small fraction of the mark-up on Fairtrade foods actually goes to the farmer—most goes to the retailer—the system gives rich consumers an inflated impression of their largesse and makes alleviating poverty seem too easy [this is the key here].

Surely the case for local food, produced as close as possible to the consumer in order to minimise “food miles” and, by extension, carbon emissions, is clear? Surprisingly, it is not. A study of Britain's food system found that nearly half of food-vehicle miles (ie, miles travelled by vehicles carrying food) were driven by cars going to and from the shops. Most people live closer to a supermarket than a farmer's market, so more local food could mean more food-vehicle miles. Moving food around in big, carefully packed lorries, as supermarkets do, may in fact be the most efficient way to transport the stuff.

What's more, once the energy used in production as well as transport is taken into account, local food may turn out to be even less green. Producing lamb in New Zealand and shipping it to Britain uses less energy than producing British lamb, because farming in New Zealand is less energy-intensive. And the local-food movement's aims, of course, contradict those of the Fairtrade movement, by discouraging rich-country consumers from buying poor-country produce. But since the local-food movement looks suspiciously like old-fashioned protectionism masquerading as concern for the environment, helping poor countries is presumably not the point.

Here's a link to their special report, "Food Politics", appearing in the same issue and which is probably available on-line at no charge.

From the journal, CO2 Science (which clearly has an axe to grind, so do not accept this information as definitive; but do not ignore it either! [via Melanie Phillips]:

Reference: Wingham, D.J., Shepherd, A., Muir, A. and Marshall, G.J. 2006. Mass balance of the Antarctic ice sheet. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 364: 1627-1635.

What was done: The authors "analyzed 1.2 x 108 European remote sensing satellite altimeter echoes to determine the changes in volume of the Antarctic ice sheet from 1992 to 2003." This survey, in their words, "covers 85% of the East Antarctic ice sheet and 51% of the West Antarctic ice sheet," which together comprise "72% of the grounded ice sheet.""

What was learned: Wingham et al. report that "overall, the data, corrected for isostatic rebound, show the ice sheet growing at 5 ± 1 mm year-1." To calculate the ice sheet's change in mass, however, "requires knowledge of the density at which the volume changes have occurred," and when the researchers' best estimates of regional differences in this parameter are used, they find that "72% of the Antarctic ice sheet is gaining 27 ± 29 Gt year-1, a sink of ocean mass sufficient to lower [authors' italics] global sea levels by 0.08 mm year-1." This net extraction of water from the global ocean, according to Wingham et al., occurs because "mass gains from accumulating snow, particularly on the Antarctic Peninsula and within East Antarctica, exceed the ice dynamic mass loss from West Antarctica."

What it means: Contrary to all the horror stories one hears about global warming-induced mass wastage of the Antarctic ice sheet leading to rising sea levels that gobble up coastal lowlands worldwide, the most recent decade of pertinent real-world data suggest that forces leading to just the opposite effect are apparently prevailing, even in the face of what climate alarmists typically describe as the greatest warming of the world in the past two millennia or more. [emphasis added]
Reviewed 8 November 2006

Melanie Phillips goes on to say,

The mismatch between what the science actually tells us and what campaigners tell us the science tells us has become so extreme that the climate change lobby itself is starting to crack apart. One of its gurus, Mike Hulme, Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, has turned on his own side and denounced the current hysteria over global warming (singling out the Independent newspaper by name) as manipulation and group-think... [click here for her quotations from this source; this portion is near the end of her posting.]

Addendum 1: I am not fully persuaded by the arguments either way. My inclination is that the challengers are on fairly solid ground, but I'm not sure. For more on how nasty the debates can get, see this, to which Craig Newmark linked today.

Addendum 2: As Chris Essex wrote to me this morning, "The number 27 ± 29 Gt year-1 says a lot about what we really know or don't know." 8-)

There is a minor squabble in the economics blogosphere between those who favour raising taxes on gasoline and those who .... criticize them. Greg Mankiw has even begun a club called, "the Pigou Club" made up of those who favour imposing taxes on those activities which generate a negative externality.

The idea behind Pigouvian taxes is simple and straight-forward .... on the chalkboard: when marginal social costs exceed marginal private costs of an activity, (and ignore general equilibrium and second-best considerations) then it is efficient to impose a marginal tax on that activity equal to the divergence between the marginal private and marginal social costs [and a subsidy if the externality is positive].

I happily teach this stuff all the time, so I guess that makes me a member of Professor Mankiw's club. I even posted some things here in the past in which I said that if people are so worried about the greenhouse gas effect and if they believe it comes from burning carbon-based fuels, then they should favour increasing taxes on the use of all carbon-based fuels. That is straight-forward Pigouvianism at its very basic level.

That is easy to say. Now to operationalize it. How much should the tax be to promote efficiency? How big is the gap between marginal social and marginal private costs, and how do we know the level of taxation currently in place is not sufficient to promote efficiency?

Greg Mankiw guesses that a proper Pigouvian tax on gasoline would be $1 U.S. per gallon:

With the midterm election around the corner, here’s a wacky idea you won’t often hear from our elected leaders: We should raise the tax on gasoline. Not quickly, but substantially. I would like to see Congress increase the gas tax by $1 per gallon, phased in gradually by 10 cents per year over the next decade.

But how does he arrive at this precise amount for the tax? The simple answer is we don't know for sure. We have to guess. One would hope the guess is well-informed and documented by people who know what they are doing. And this is the heart of the criticism of Mankiw's Pigou club: it is easy to draw these things on the chalkboard, but measuring and identifying the externalities (not to mention the general equilibrium effects) precisely is probably not possible with today's knowledge and technology.

So where does that leave me? My best guess is that my children and grandchildren will be better off if we implement a higher Pigouvian tax on gasoline. I once wrote, "We should tax the snot out of gasoline." I suppose that puts me in the Pigou Club. But I do not hold these views very strongly, and I fully agree with the concerns of those who question whether such a tax could ever be revenue neutral or who question how much the tax should be. I am open to new information and arguments.

But let me emphasize that just because we don't know what the exact size of the optimal Pigouvian tax should be, that doesn't mean it is zero. We must choose some number, positive or negative, and my current best guess is that Professor Mankiw is probably not far off the mark.

For more, see the articles by Brian Ferguson at Canadian Econoview, by Gabriel Mihalache at Economic Investigations, and by Stephen Gordon at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative.

I am unable to find the link now, but when I suggested raising the tax on gasoline in a piece on The Western Standard's blog, many commmenters objected. Some were opposed to giving the gubmnt more money even though I had intended the tax to be revenue-neutral; others, from Alberta, just saw the proposal as another Easterner trying to grab their oil wealth. Pigouvian taxes are not as easy in the real world as they are on the chalkboard.

Last month, Greenpeace published a Guide to Greener Electronics.The following criticism of that publication from this site pulls no punches. It is certainly consistent with my priors.

Stephen Russell, a materials consultant to the IT sector, explained that the complete disconnect between what Greenpeace reported in their Guide and what they actually found in their lab tests “proves three things:

1. •that the criteria used by Greenpeace to award HP pole position in last month's Guide to Greener Electronics clearly didn't account for what is actually happening on the ground today.

2. •that other manufacturers' computers really don't contain toxic chemicals in concentrations that are of concern.

3. •that Greenpeace has an inexhaustible level of funds to burn on a chemical campaign the basic chemical principles of which they sadly don't appear to understand.”

... Yes, Greenpeace lied to sensationalize a report it spent a lot of money on, but which didn't provide data the group wanted to hear. While the group’s earlier press releases and information was mostly just incompetent and sloppy, the latest ‘poison Apple’ campaign was simply a malicious attack based upon lies.

...

Be sure to read the entire criticism (and some of the comments, which are also very informative).

He plagiarizes from people I respect.

For those who do not want to follow the link, it appears that Stephane Dion's statement on the environment was the same as that of David Suzuki, for whom I have little respect. Michael Ignatieff's was taken from the C.D. Howe Institute, for whom I have a great deal of respect.

And after all, being a good leader involves selecting good advisors.

I have long been perplexed by the growth in sales of bottled water. And yet I have bought it, in the rare instance, most notably when I wanted to buy a cold, caffeine-free, calorie-free drink.

Mostly, though, I just use a water bottle and refill it from the tap at home or from a water fountain at work. I confess to having a filter on our drinking-water tap, in part to reduce the amount of chlorine in our water, upped considerably since the Walkerton tragedy, an hour's drive north of here.

According to Lester Brown, [h/t to Jack]

"There are places in the world where safe bottled water is important," Brown notes. "The United States is not one of them." [EE note: neither are Canada or England]

"It's an example of conspicuous consumption," Brown says. "Reasonably well-educated people have been convinced that water in plastic bottles is better for them than water that's in their tap." In fact, most U.S. states regulate tap water much more stringently than they do bottled water, he adds.

Conspicuous consumption? Gee, when I refill a water bottle from the tap, I don't really feel the same way I would if I'm put cheap scotch in an empty bottle that once held expensive scotch; it sure isn't conspicuous consumption on my part, and it probably isn't some overbearing concern about the environmental impact of using too many plastic bottles.

Maybe it's just because I'm cheap.

From Peter Schweizer at the USA Today (h/t to Alex):

Public records reveal that as Gore lectures Americans on excessive consumption, he and his wife Tipper live in two properties: a 10,000-square-foot, 20-room, eight-bathroom home in Nashville, and a 4,000-square-foot home in Arlington, Va. (He also has a third home in Carthage, Tenn.) For someone rallying the planet to pursue a path of extreme personal sacrifice, Gore requires little from himself.

Then there is the troubling matter of his energy use. In the Washington, D.C., area, utility companies offer wind energy as an alternative to traditional energy. In Nashville, similar programs exist. Utility customers must simply pay a few extra pennies per kilowatt hour, and they can continue living their carbon-neutral lifestyles knowing that they are supporting wind energy. ...

But according to public records, there is no evidence that Gore has signed up to use green energy in either of his large residences. When contacted Wednesday, Gore's office confirmed as much but said the Gores were looking into making the switch at both homes. Talk about inconvenient truths.

... Gore has held these apocalyptic views about the environment for some time. So why, then, didn't Gore dump his family's large stock holdings in Occidental (Oxy) Petroleum? As executor of his family's trust, over the years Gore has controlled hundreds of thousands of dollars in Oxy stock. Oxy has been mired in controversy over oil drilling in ecologically sensitive areas.

Living carbon-neutral apparently doesn't mean living oil-stock free. Nor does it necessarily mean giving up a mining royalty either.

Humanity might be "sitting on a ticking time bomb," but Gore's home in Carthage is sitting on a zinc mine. Gore receives $20,000 a year in royalties from Pasminco Zinc, which operates a zinc concession on his property. Tennessee has cited the company for adding large quantities of barium, iron and zinc to the nearby Caney Fork River.

The issue here is not simply Gore's hypocrisy; it's a question of credibility.

What bothers me even more than Gore's hypocrisy or lack of credibility is his total lack of understanding of economics. If he really thinks we should burn less carbon-based fuel, he should advocate a strong carbon-fuel tax.

Remember Rachel Carson? She was the author of Silent Spring, a book which talked about, inter alia, the damage done by overuse of DDT to the thickness of eggshells of some birds.

Rebekah K, at Composite Drawlings (and many others who have looked at the results from a fresh perspective), thinks the damage done from NOT using DDT has been much more serious:

According to the Ecology Hall of Fame, Rachel Carson guaranteed that millions of Africans would die of Malaria because they can't use the much less harmful and eminently affordable DDT to kill mosquitoes...

Thanks to her, real progress has been slowed, and in many places reversed, as her superstitious followers burn medical laboratories. She helped to birth the Luddite brigades who wish to block the development of GM foods, as well as encouraging fanatic groups such as the Earth Liberation Front and their less blatantly yet still strongly anti-human counterparts like Greenpeace. Thanks to her, millions more will die as food production has become, as it was in the Dark Ages, mostly political. Thanks to her — and her faulty research, poetic nonsense, and general alarmist tactics, those who would truly give a damn about the ecosystem are stuck unable to trust the people we should be able to ask about how to best and most humanely conserve. Nobody will give an answer without socio-political filters, instead of straightforward science... because science and scientists can't be trusted, she said.

There is more at her site; I highly recommend it. Contrast her arguments with those, here, at Amazon.com.

Coyote Blog provides of the best summaries I have read recently, criticizing the positions of those worried about global warming. It is lengthy and detailed, but well worth reading. Here is an excerpt from the conclusion:

Many scientists are technocratic fascists at heart, and are convinced that if only they could run the economy or some part of it, instead of relying on this messy bottom-up spontaneous order we call the marketplace, things, well, would be better. The problem is that scientists, no matter how smart they are, miss with their bets because the economy, and thus the lowest cost approach to less CO2 production, is too complicated for anyone to understand or manage. And even if the scientists stumbled on the right approaches, the political process would just screw the solution up. Probably the number one alternative energy program in the US is ethanol subsidies, which are scientifically insane since ethanol actually increases rather than reduces fossil fuel consumption. Political subsidies almost always lead to investments tailored just to capture the subsidy, that do little to solve the underlying problem. In Arizona, we have thousands of cars with subsidized conversions to engines that burn multiple fuels but never burn anything but gasoline. In California, there are hundreds of massive windmills that never turn, having already served their purpose to capture a subsidy. In California, the state bent over backwards to encourage electric cars, but in fact a different technology, the hybrid, has taken off.

... If we must intervene to limit CO2, we should jack up the price of fossil fuels with taxes, or institute a cap and trade scheme which will result in about the same price increase, and the market through millions of individual efforts will find the lowest cost net way to reach whatever energy consumption level you want with the least possible cost. (The only real current alternative that is rapidly deploy-able to reduce CO2 emissions anyway is nuclear power, which could be a solution but was killed by...the very people now wailing about global warming.)

Conclusion

I would like to see some real quality discussion as to the relative merits of the path the world is on today vs. an interventionist world that is cooler but poorer, more populous, hungrier, and less politically stable. [links stripped by PowerBlogs]

Be sure to check out the disclaimer at the end of the piece.

For more on global warming see my earlier piece, "How Much of a Worry is Global Warming" and the references cited there.

Recall that Posner's view (here and here) is different.

From Melanie Phillips:

Consider this article on BBC OnLine by Professor Chris Rapley, Director of the British Antarctic Survey. ... The world’s population, he says, which currently stands at about 6.5 billion people, is heading towards eight billion or so by mid-century. The optimum number for sustainable life on the planet, he goes on, is 'perhaps 2-3 billion':

"With that number and a timescale as targets, a path to reach ‘Utopia’ from where we are now is, in principle, a straightforward matter of identifying options, choosing the approach and then planning and navigating the route from source to destination."

The only way to reduce the world’s population from 8 billion to 2-3 billion would appear to be by genocide, nuclear holocaust, famine or plague. Just which of these options might the Director of the British Antarctic Survey be recommending to navigate us to utopia? I think we should be told.

The recent mining disaster in West Virginia pales in comparison with the large number of mining deaths that occur every year in China.

Dave Friedman has these thoughts about coal mining tragedies and the opposition to nuclear energy:

Those who oppose nuclear power have blood on their hands; it is time for us to stop consigning poor West Virginians to an early death in the mines.

Of course, one of the environmentalists' creeds is that, so long as the environment remains pristine, all the disease and early death in the world be damned.

... Some intelligent thoughts on the benefits of nuclear power can be found here.

Also be sure to check the Becker-Posner blog for their thoughts on nuclear power (here, here, and here).

Here is a great reference on how the modern 1.6 gallon toilets work (courtesy of BenS; for earlier sources, see this). The article also addresses the problems involved with installing them in a house with older plumbing:

A number of plumbers warned me that installing a 1.6-gal. gravity-flush toilet in an old house could lead to clogs and backups. Often, older waste pipe is 4-in. or greater dia. cast iron, which is a lot rougher on the inside than modern plastic pipe. When the cast-iron pipe was installed, toilets flushed anywhere from 5 gal. to more than 7 gal. of water. But now that they're down to 1.6 gal., that's often not enough water to power the waste through.

"Houses that have 4-in. to 6-in. cast-iron drains are a problem," said Daugherty. "When you put a 1.6-gal. toilet in with that diameter pipe, it just barely makes the bottom of the pipe wet. As a retrofit in a house with old plumbing, it's lousy.

There is a misrepresentation here. Water in sewer pipes is not supposed to "power the waste through"; rather it is supposed to help float the waste along, down a very gradual slope. But that is difficult with rough pipes and low-water-usage toilets.

If you are remodeling, there are many alternatives available, listed in the article, that will likely work better than the economy models.

Perhaps David Friedman was referring to installations in older homes when he wrote,

Low volume toilets are supposed to save water. They also, at least in my experience, tend to get stopped up more than ordinary toilets. Someone should do a statistical study relating the fraction of low volume toilets in an area to both water usage and expenditures on plumbers. Assuming water is saved--the process of getting a toilet unstopped can require multiple flushes--it might turn out to be very expensive water.

And yes, this was written after yet another session applying a plumber's snake to a low flow toilet.

In our present money pit home, we replaced the cast iron sewage pipes with plastic. The toilet that was here was moderately low water-use, and we also installed a 1.6 gallon toilet. My experience has been that some uses require double-flushing, but we have not had any problems requiring use of a snake.

• To be explicit, the best strategy with 1.6 gallon toilets is to flush solid waste twice: once after depositing the solid waste, and then again after wiping (and maybe after after brushing streaks from the bowl).

But surely the best policy, if water use is a concern in society, is to raise the price of water and let people choose how they would like to conserve it. I, for one, would much rather wash my car fewer times or water the lawn a bit less in exchange for having more water in my toilet for flushes.

I have seen many 1.6 gallon toilets that seem quite artfully designed, though not like this [h/t to Dave Friedman].