Matthew Ridley on IPCC’s Global Lukewarming

The prolific scientist and author Matthew Ridley writes about the IPCC’s backsliding from alarmist anthropogenic global warming. (bold mine)

Yet read between the lines of yesterday’s report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and you see that even its authors are tiptoeing towards the moderate middle. They now admit there has been at least a 15-year standstill in temperatures, which they did not predict and cannot explain, something sceptics were denounced for claiming only two years ago. They concede, through gritted teeth, that over three decades, warming has been much slower than predicted. They have lowered their estimate of “transient” climate sensitivity, which tells you roughly how much the temperature will rise towards the end of this century, to 1-2.5C, up to a half of which has already happened.

They concede that sea level is rising at about one foot a century and showing no sign of acceleration. They admit there has been no measurable change in the frequency or severity of droughts, floods and storms. They are no longer predicting millions of climate refugees in the near future. They have had to give up on malaria getting worse, Antarctic ice caps collapsing, or a big methane burp from the Arctic (Lord Stern, who still talks about refugees, methane and ice caps, has obviously not got the memo). Talk of tipping points is gone.

Read the rest here

Global Cooling: Artic Ice Cap Grows 60% in One Year

The Daily Mail twits at the errors of BBC’s environmental scare mongering

The highlights:  

-Almost a million more square miles of ocean covered with ice than in 2012

-BBC reported in 2007 global warming would leave Arctic ice-free in summer by 2013

-Publication of UN climate change report suggesting global warming caused by humans pushed back to later this month

From the Daily Mail

A chilly Arctic summer has left nearly a million more square miles of ocean covered with ice than at the same time last year – an increase of 60 per cent.

The rebound from 2012’s record low comes six years after the BBC reported that global warming would leave the Arctic ice-free in summer by 2013.

Instead, days before the annual autumn re-freeze is due to begin, an unbroken ice sheet more than half the size of Europe already stretches from the Canadian islands to Russia’s northern shores.

Scare mongering based on flawed models

The pause – which has now been accepted as real by every major climate research centre – is important, because the models’ predictions of ever-increasing global temperatures have made many of the world’s economies divert billions of pounds into ‘green’ measures to counter  climate change.

Those predictions now appear gravely flawed.

The religion of environmental politics is being exposed for what they truly are.

Video: The great global warming swindle

Watch why environmentalism (the religion of misanthropists) is a huge swindle  (hat tip EPJ)

Matthew Ridley on the Myths of Fracking and Wind Power’s Environmental Harm

Prolific author Matthew Ridley rebuts the 5 myths (lies) of fracking.

Here is a snippet:

Here are five things that they keep saying which are just not true. First, that shale gas production has polluted aquifers in the United States. Second, that it releases more methane than other forms of gas production. Third, that it uses a worryingly large amount of water. Fourth, that it uses hundreds of toxic chemicals. Fifth, that it causes damaging earthquakes.

Mr. Ridley also says that Wind Power contributes to more environmental damage than fracking:

Spoiling God’s glorious creation: as Clive Hambler of Oxford University has documented, each year between 6m and 18m birds and bats are killed in Spain alone by wind turbines, including rare griffon vultures, 400 of which were killed in one year, and even rarer Egyptian vultures. In Tasmania wedge-tailed eagles are in danger of extinction because of wind turbines. Norwegian wind farms kill ten white-tailed eagles each year. German wind turbines kill 200,000 bats a year, many of which have migrated hundreds of miles.

The wind industry, which is immune from prosecution for wildlife crime, counters that far more birds are killed by cars and cats and likes to point to a spurious calculation that if the climate gets very warm and habitats change then the oil industry could one day be said to have killed off many birds. But when was the last time your cat brought home an Imperial Eagle or a needle-tailed swift? Says Dr Hambler: “Climate change won’t drive those species to extinction; well-meaning environmentalists might.”

[Here's a video of a vulture hitting a turbine blade in Crete.]

Wind turbines are not only far more conspicuous than gas drilling rigs, but cover vastly more area. Just ten hectares (25 acres) of oil or gas drilling pads can produce more energy that the entire British wind industry. Which does the greatest harm to God’s glorious creation, rev?

Read the rest of the explanation here.

Quote of the Day: Climate Change Without Humans and CO2

The volcanic ash emitted into the Earth’s atmosphere in just four days – yes, FOUR DAYS – by that volcano in Iceland has totally erased every single effort you have made to reduce the evil beast, carbon.   And there are around 200 active volcanoes on the planet spewing out this crud at any one time – EVERY DAY.

I don’t really want to rain on your parade too much, but I should mention that when the volcano Mt. Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines in 1991, it spewed out more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than the entire human race had emitted in all its years on earth.

Yes, folks, Mt Pinatubo was active for over one year – think about it.

Of course, I shouldn’t spoil this ‘touchy-feely tree-hugging’ moment and mention the effect of solar and cosmic activity and the well-recognized 800-year global heating and cooling cycle, which keeps happening despite our completely insignificant efforts to affect climate change.

And I do wish I had a silver lining to this volcanic ash cloud, but the fact of the matter is that the bush fire season across the western USA and Australia this year alone will negate your efforts to reduce carbon in our world for the next two to three years.   And it happens every year.

Just remember that your government just tried to impose a whopping carbon tax on you, on the basis of the bogus ‘human-caused’ climate-change scenario.

(UPPERCASE-original)

This is from Ian Rutherford Plimer, Australian geologist, professor emeritus of earth sciences at the University of Melbourne, professor of mining geology at the University of Adelaide, and the director of multiple mineral exploration and mining companies at Ruthfullyyours.com (hat tip Lance Vance Lew Rockwell Blog)

Bring on the Whale Markets

Prohibition frequently or almost always works in the opposite direction as what populist politics intends them to be. 

The policy failure from the longstanding ban on whale hunting has prompted proposals to commercialize ‘whaling’ as a means of conservation.

From Economist Tim Taylor:

The International Whaling Commission imposed a moratorium on commercial whaling in 1986, which is still in effect. However, the moratorium has effectively allowed "scientific" whaling (mainly Japan),  "subsistence" whaling (various aboriginal groups), and limited commercial whaling (mainly by Norway and Iceland).  The total number of whales caught has doubled since the 1990s to about 2,000 per year, which is a pace that many biologists consider to be unsustainably high. After watching the moratorium approach struggle and fail over the last quarter-century, it's time to think about alternatives. In the Spring 2013 edition of Issues in Science and Technology, Ben A. Minteer and Leah R. Gerber discuss the possibility of "Buying Whales to Save Them."

What Minteer and Gerber have in mind is that the International Whaling Commission or some similar body would set a quota for the number of whales that could be taken, based on estimates of sustainable catch from biologists. These quotas would be marketable; in particular, environmentalist groups could purchase the right to take a whale--but then not do so. As they describe it:

"Under this plan, quotas for hunting of whales would be traded in global markets. But again, and unlike most “catch share” programs in fisheries, the whale conservation market would not restrict participation in the market; both pro- and antiwhaling interests could own and trade quotas. The maximum potential harvest for any hunted species in any given year would be established in a conservative manner that ensures sustainability of the marketed species (that is, harvest levels would be established that would not permit taking more individuals than can be replaced) and maintains their functional roles in the ecosystem. The actual harvest, however, would depend on who owns the quotas. Conservation groups, for example, could choose to buy whale shares in order to protect populations that are currently threatened; they could also buy shares to protect populations that are not presently at risk but that conservationists fear might become threatened in the future."

As you might expect, this kind of proposals is controversial. Many environmentalists feel that putting a value on whales is unethical, a betrayal of the underlying values involved. Other environmentalists, especially those with an economic turn of mind, note that if those who would be catching whales sell their quota to those who do not wish to catch whales, both parties can be benefit from the exchange--and the result may be that fewer whales are killed.

Commercialization as means of environmental conservation has great examples. Markets has saved American alligators from extinction (Carpe Diem’s Mark Perry) and so with China’s private and public tiger farms as well as China's creation of “legal domestic market for some wild-life products” (Barun Mitra at PERC). 

So bring on the whale markets.

Chinese Government to Crack Down on Local Government Debt

China’s runaway credit financed property bubble will undergo scrutiny from Chinese national government, who will focus on reining debt levels of the local government

That’s according to a news from Bloomberg;

China will start a nationwide audit of government debt this week as the new Communist Party leadership investigates the threats to growth and the financial system from a record credit boom.

The State Council, under Premier Li Keqiang, requested the National Audit Office review, the office said in a statement yesterday without elaborating. The cabinet’s July 26 order was “urgent” and the office suspended other projects to work on the review and will send staff to provinces and cities this week, People’s Daily reported yesterday on its website, citing sources it didn’t identify.

The first full audit since an initial review two years ago underscores concern expressed by institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, which this month cited risks to the economy from borrowing by local governments and an expansion of non-traditional sources of credit. The new leadership oversaw a showdown with state-owned lenders last month as the People’s Bank of China engineered a cash squeeze to pressure banks to better manage their operations.

On the surface this looks impressive, but the question is how or on what basis will the national leadership apply controls? Will these be selective? Will the  political opposition bear the brunt of such crackdown?

The enormous leveraged exposure by local governments. From the same article:

The first audit of local-government debt found liabilities of 10.7 trillion yuan ($1.8 trillion) at the end of 2010, the National Audit Office said in June 2011…

Ding estimated China has at least 12 trillion yuan of local-government debt. The review may pave the way for future fiscal reforms, including changes to rules on local governments’ roles and responsibilities, Ding said.

I think that this goes beyond merely changing of rules, it is more likely that the problem lies, aside from the PBoC’s inflationary policies, on China’s top down political system and the command economy. 

China's centralized political framewok has previously used the statistical economy as a tool to promote the national political agenda. Moreover, the statistical economy has also been used as carrot and stick to manage the political careers of local government officials.

As explained by a paper from Cornell University (Derek Headey, Ravi Kanbur, Xiaobo Zhang) [bold mine]

Modern China has always had centralized merit‐based governance structure. In the planning economy era, the evaluation of cadres was largely based on political performance. However, since the China’s reforms initiated in 1978, political conformity gave way to economic performance and other competence‐related indicators as the new criteria for promotion. The promotion of China cadres’ is now largely based on yardstick competition in several key economic indicators, including economic and fiscal revenue growth rates, and some central mandates, such as family planning (Li and Zhou, 2005, Chapter 12, this volume). These indicators have been written into local leaders’ contracts. This creates tremendous pressure for local government personnel to compete with each other through superior regional performance.

In other words, the massive local government leverage has been a product of the political imperatives of the previous leaderships in generating high statistical economic growth regardless of the costs.

More. The Chinese government will allegedly cap spending…

Separately, China’s government has decided to cap the ratio of the fiscal deficit to gross domestic product at 3 percent in a bid to avert a downgrade of China’s credit rating by international rating companies, China Business News reported today, citing an unidentified person familiar with the matter.

So will the recently announced $85 billion railway stimulus be a limited one? This remains to be seen. I suspect that should China's economic slowdown intensify, spending caps may become an open spigot for stimulus. That's because a meltdown of the Chinese economy will likely jeopardize the power structure of the incumbent political system that would put to risks the grip on power by the incumbents.

Again chasing statistical growth at any cost by the local government has been previously powered by huge borrowing. 

As an aside, more than bubbles, as consequence from the politically driven growth strategy China suffers from a massive environmental degradation or pollution.

Again from the same Bloomberg article:

Local-government financing vehicles need to repay a record amount of debt this year, prompting Moody’s Investors Service to warn that Premier Li may set an example by allowing China’s first onshore bond default.

Regional governments set up more than 10,000 LGFVs to fund the construction of roads, sewage plants and subways after they were barred from directly issuing bonds under a 1994 budget law. A 4 trillion yuan stimulus plan during the 2008-09 financial crisis swelled loans to companies, which they have been rolling over or refinancing with new note sales.

LGFVs may hold more than 20 trillion yuan of debt, former Finance Minister Xiang Huaicheng said in April. Refinancing will be a challenge after corporate bond sales slumped to a two-year low in the second quarter and policy makers cracked down on shadow-banking activities that bypass regulatory limits on lending.

The obvious lesson here is that politically driven economic growth engenders massive imbalances. The boom of which are not only artificial and temporary, but eventually backfires.

Whether or not the national government pursues with tenacity the crackdown on local government and on the shadow banks, the above accounts appear as  deepening manifestations of the unfolding meaningful slowdown of the real (and not the inflated statistical) Chinese economy, the increasing hissing signs from China’s property bubbles and of the greater uncertainty over political direction and its ramifications.

In the face of a volatile global bond markets, these risks are likely to be amplified.

Interesting times indeed.

Quote of the Day: Capitalism Day (instead of Earth Day)

Of the estimated 1 billion people who will observe Earth Day worldwide this year, few will know about the progress that has been made. Fewer still will know how it was made. The media, uninterested in looking at the real story, will simply credit the environmental movement for the improvements.

We won't discount the movement's contribution. Four decades ago, it helped show the world the value of global stewardship. But that movement is no longer interested in a cleaner world.

Filled with extremists and anti-capitalist crusaders, its primary goals have changed. Topping the agenda of today's environmentalist groups is the pulling down of market economies, the raising up of central planning for egalitarian goals, forced lifestyle changes and the vilification — in hopes of the elimination — of signs of wealth.

None of these advance the planet's environmental health. But capitalism has. Through wealth generated by the free market, we have enough resources to move beyond the subsistence economies that damage the environment, enough disposable income to fund clean-up programs, enough wealth to scrub and polish industry.

Only in advanced economies can the technology needed to recycle hazardous waste or to replace dirty coal-fired power plants with cleaner gas or nuclear plants be developed. That technology cannot be produced in centrally planned economies where the profit motive is squelched and lives are marshalled by the state.

There's nothing wrong with setting aside a day to honor the Earth. In fairness, though, it should be complemented by Capitalism Day. It's important that the world be reminded of what has driven the environmental improvements since Earth Day began in 1970.

This is from 2009 Editorial of the Investor’s Business Daily (hat tip Professor Mark Perry)

Earth Hour: Keep Lights ON!

Many people will fall again for the demagoguery of celebrating “earth hour” purportedly for “saving” the environment. 

Most of them will simply follow “feel good” popular politically correct themes rather than understanding the real dynamics or “crony based” green energy politics behind them.  

This serves as example of the Bandwagon effects, not only in the marketplace, but also in the realm of the politics of environmentalism.

Earth Hour advocates avoid explaining the cost benefit tradeoffs between their populist pseudo-environmental interests (which are principally based on highly flawed computer simulations*) and the economic and social value of electricity to humanity. 

*people's lives are supposed to be determined by computer models which can't even predict economies and the markets! Queen Elizabeth even took to task the London School of Economics for failing to predict the 2008 crash.

They fail to take into account that “electricity is the backbone of modern life”. On the other hand, they elude discussing the costs of their themes from which life without electricity equals poverty and death.

North Korea or the medieval life are great examples of life without electricity.

So advocates of earth hour are basically misanthropists. They want people to suffer in the name of preserving the "environment" (ahem, promoting the interests of cronies and of the political class)

 

The following video from the Copenhagen Consensus eloquently showcases the benefits of electricity.

Danish environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg gives further explanations on the benefits of electricity at the Slate.com: (hat tip AEI’s Professor Mark Perry) [bold mine]

Electricity has given humanity huge benefits. Almost 3 billion people still burn dung, twigs, and other traditional fuels indoors to cook and keep warm, generating noxious fumes that kill an estimated 2 million people each year, mostly women and children. Likewise, just 100 years ago, the average American family spent six hours each week during cold months shoveling six tons of coal into the furnace (not to mention cleaning the coal dust from carpets, furniture, curtains, and bedclothes). In the developed world today, electric stoves and heaters have banished indoor air pollution.

Similarly, electricity has allowed us to mechanize much of our world, ending most backbreaking work. The washing machine liberated women from spending endless hours carrying water and beating clothing on scrub boards. The refrigerator made it possible for almost everyone to eat more fruits and vegetables, and to stop eating rotten food, which is the main reason why the most prevalent cancer for men in the United States in 1930, stomach cancer, is the least prevalent now.

Electricity has allowed us to irrigate fields and synthesize fertilizer from air. The light that it powers has enabled us to have active, productive lives past sunset. The electricity that people in rich countries consume is, on average, equivalent to the energy of 56 servants helping them. Even people in Sub-Saharan Africa have electricity equivalent to about three servants. They need more of it, not less.

This is relevant not only for the world’s poor. Because of rising energy prices from green subsidies, 800,000 German households can no longer pay their electricity bills. In the United Kingdom, there are now more than 5 million fuel-poor people, and the country’s electricity regulator now publicly worries that environmental targets could lead to blackouts in less than nine months.

Today, we produce only a small fraction of the energy that we need from solar and wind—0.7 percent from wind and just 0.1 percent from solar. These technologies currently are too expensive. They are also unreliable (we still have no idea what to do when the wind is not blowing). Even with optimistic assumptions, the International Energy Agency estimates that, by 2035, we will produce just 2.4 percent of our energy from wind and 0.8 percent from solar.

To green the world’s energy, we should abandon the old-fashioned policy of subsidizing unreliable solar and wind—a policy that has failed for 20 years, and that will fail for the next 22. Instead, we should focus on inventing new, more efficient green technologies to outcompete fossil fuels.

If we really want a sustainable future for all of humanity and our planet, we shouldn’t plunge ourselves back into darkness. Tackling climate change by turning off the lights and eating dinner by candlelight smacks of the “let them eat cake” approach to the world’s problems that appeals only to well-electrified, comfortable elites.

So we can’t discount of the "conspiracy theory" where one of the other possible subsidiary reasons for the massive printing of money by central banks could have been meant as subsidies for green energy via the pushing up or inflating prices of fossil fuels, which should make "unreliable" "inefficient" and "costly" green energy "competitive".

Unfortunately, markets know better. The free-market based Shale energy revolution has been proving to be the likely “environmental friendly” alternative more than the politically blessed “green energy” that has been founded on disinformation.

Regret Theory: Japanese Consumers on Electric Cars

Regret theory is the difference between the actual payoff and the payoff that would have been obtained if a different course of action had been chosen (Wikipedia.org) 

In short, regret over a decision made (opportunity loss)

A McKinsey Quarterly research reveals that many electric car buyers in Japan feel remorse or were disappointed over their decision to acquire electric cars:

If electric vehicles (EVs) are to develop from a niche into a mass market, carmakers should learn from early adopters who say they may not buy one again. Our recent research on such consumers in Japan finds that about one-third of them fall into this category. These buyers said they were “seduced” by low energy costs, attractive subsidies, and a good test drive. But they were less well informed about EVs than were environmentally conscious “green enthusiasts” (who love EV technology for its low energy costs and comfortable driving experience) and became less enthusiastic about their purchase when they faced issues such as higher electric bills and locating places to charge their cars.

Japan’s government heavily promotes electric cars through subsidizes and or through tax discounts.

Yet the study exhibits how the stereotyped politically induced projects hardly meets the taste of the consumers, which is the critical reason for their failures.

As the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises explained 

The real bosses, in the capitalist system of market economy, are the consumers. They, by their buying and by their abstention from buying, decide who should own the capital and run the plants. They determine what should be produced and in what quantity and quality. Their attitudes result either in profit or in loss for the enterpriser. They make poor men rich and rich men poor. They are no easy bosses. They are full of whims and fancies, changeable and unpredictable. They do not care a whit for past merit. As soon as something is offered to them that they like better or that is cheaper, they desert their old  purveyors. With them nothing counts more than their own satisfaction. They bother neither about the vested interests of capitalists nor about the fate of the workers who lose their jobs if as consumers they no longer buy what they used to buy.

Of course as I earlier posted, electric cars aren’t exactly "green" or environmental friendly as environmental zealots allege or want the public to believe.

Video: Matt Ridley: Fossil Fuels are Greening the Planet

In a talk hosted by reasonTV.com, prolific author Matt Ridley talks about how fossil fuels, contra popular wisdom, have been contributing to the greening of the planet.

Electric Cars Aren’t Really Green

Contra popular wisdom, and opposite to the thrust by governments, e.g. US and Indonesia, to promote green energy via electric cars; electric cars aren’t really green. 

AEI’s Mark Perry summarizes the Bjorn Lomborg’s explanation published at the Wall Street Journal, (bold original)

1. A 2012 comprehensive life-cycle analysis in the Journal of Industrial Ecology shows that almost half the lifetime carbon-dioxide emissions from an electric car come from the energy used to produce the car, especially the battery. The mining of lithium, for instance, is a less than green activity. When an electric car rolls off the production line, it has already been responsible for 30,000 pounds of carbon-dioxide emission.

2. By contrast, the manufacture of a gas-powered car accounts for 17% of its lifetime carbon-dioxide emissions. The amount for making a conventional car:14,000 pounds.

3. The life-cycle analysis shows that for every mile driven, the average electric car indirectly emits about six ounces of carbon-dioxide. This is still a lot better than a similar-size conventional car, which emits about 12 ounces per mile. But remember, the production of the electric car has already resulted in sizeable emissions—the equivalent of 80,000 miles of travel in the vehicle.

4. If a typical electric car is driven 50,000 miles over its lifetime, the huge initial emissions from its manufacture means the car will actually have put more carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere than a similar-size gasoline-powered car driven the same number of miles. Similarly, if the energy used to recharge the electric car comes mostly from coal-fired power plants, it will be responsible for the emission of almost 15 ounces of carbon-dioxide for every one of the 50,000 miles it is driven—three ounces more than a similar gas-powered car.

5. Even if the electric car is driven for 90,000 miles and the owner stays away from coal-powered electricity, the car will cause just 24% less carbon-dioxide emission than its gas-powered cousin. This is a far cry from “zero emissions.” Over its entire lifetime, the electric car will be responsible for 8.7 tons of carbon dioxide less than the average conventional car.

6. Those 8.7 tons may sound like a considerable amount, but it’s not. The current best estimate of the global warming damage of an extra ton of carbon-dioxide is about $5. This means an optimistic assessment of the avoided carbon-dioxide associated with an electric car will allow the owner to spare the world about $44 in climate damage. On the European emissions market, credit for 8.7 tons of carbon-dioxide costs $48.

7. Yet the U.S. federal government essentially subsidizes electric-car buyers with up to $7,500. In addition, more than $5.5 billion in federal grants and loans go directly to battery and electric-car manufacturers. This is a very poor deal for taxpayers.

The world of politics is about smoke and mirrors.

Chart of the Day: Odds of Death

The Economist writes,

ON FEBRUARY 15th DA14, an asteroid 45 metres across, will sail past the Earth at 7.8km a second (4.9 miles a second). At just 27,700km away, it is well within the range of communication satellites. It will be the closest encounter on record with an asteroid this big. In 1908 an asteroid estimated to be around 100 metres in diameter destroyed 2,000 km² of forest in Siberia. Thankfully, such events are rare. NASA has identified 9,600 "near-Earth objects" since 1995, but just 861 with a diameter of 1km or more. The greatest threat to Earth is the 140-metre wide AG5; but it has just a 1-in-625 chance of hitting Earth, and not until February 5th 2040. More prosaic things are far more dangerous. According to data from America's National Safety Council, 27 people died in 2008 in America from contact with dogs (a one in 11m chance of death). The chart below compares the odds of dying in any given year from choking, cycling, being struck by lightning or stung by a bee.

While the odds of dying from a heart disease (467:1) may seem greater than dying from an asteroid impact (74,817,414:1) may be true, the basic problem with extrapolating statistics is that we really can’t determine or we simply DON’T know when that big ONE will arrive in whatever form to claim us.

Thus we can be lulled into complacency by the use of statistics from the risks of false negative errors, or specifically, result/s that appears negative when it should not. 

This reminds me of what author Nassim Taleb calls as the Black Swan Theory: the extreme impact of certain kinds of rare and unpredictable events (outliers) and humans' tendency to find simplistic explanations for these events retrospectively.

For instance, the NASA suspects that DA14’s whizzing past earth may trigger tremors on some parts of the world. Has the impact from such event been incorporated in the computation of the above probabilities? 

A meteor blast in Russia caused 400 injuries a day before DA14. The meteor incident was denied by officials as having been connected with DA14.

If the authorities are right, then this simply reveals how the Russian meteor incident can be construed as an “unpredictable-outlier event” but with limited impact. In short, no one saw this coming.  Yet the incident does not satisfy the ‘extreme impact’ conditions of the black swan model.

On the other hand, if authorities could have been wrong, then the statistical odds of death may have been underestimated, since the likely methodology in arriving at such probability may have been seen only from a direct impact from a meteor/asteroid collision and not from the ancillary events, such as Russia's meteor shower (as defined by CNN), which could have been the advance party of DA14, or from other potential ramifications from meteor or asteroid flybys.

The bottom line is that people tend to overestimate their knowledge of the world and or of the universe to the point that environmental jeremiahs or ecological-phobes use scare tactics to impose social controls on us in order to shape the world according to their false ideals. 

As discussed before the world is much larger than us, where various forms of potential black swans abound: 

While we have been made aware by media of these apocalyptic scenarios through a variety of science fiction movies that could or may occur; such as huge asteroid/s crashing on earth, super volcano eruptions, alien invasion, robot uprising and many more, there are other factors such as the black hole, gamma rays from an imploding star or the unleashing of a mighty wave of solar flares from our sun, that could send our world into oblivion, unpredictably and instantaneously.

Speaking of black holes, a science or Astrophysical journal recently asserted that black holes have been growing faster than expected and have grown beyond the sphere of traditional assumptions where black holes require “galaxy collisions”. 

Our knowledge of the environment has been incomplete and keeps changing.

War on Plastic Bags: How Reusable Unwashed Grocery Bags Can Kill

Regulations must not be seen only by intentions, it has to be viewed from the perspective of incentives they create. 

The war on plastic bags is an example. The public, mesmerized by environmental political hysteria, don’t see people’s responses to such arbitrary proscriptions may end up with undesired consequences.

I discussed or posted about them earlier here and here.

Author, blogger and lecturer Timothy Taylor at the Conversable Economist blog points to a study which shows of the lethal side effects from unwashed reusable grocery bags

One recent local environmental cause, especially popular in California, has been to ban or tax plastic grocery bags. The expressed hope is that shoppers will instead carry reusable grocery bags back and forth to the grocery store, and that plastic bags will be less likely to end up in landfills, or blowing across hillsides, or floating in water. The problem is that almost no one ever washes their reusable grocery bags. Reusuable grocery bags often carry raw meat, unseparated from other foods, and are often stored for convenience in the trunk of cars that sit outside in the sun. In short, reusuable grocery bags can be a friendly breeding environment for E. coli bacteria, which can cause severe illness and even death.

Jonathan Klick and Joshua D. Wright tell this story in "Grocery Bag Bans and Foodborne Illness," published as a research paper by the Institute for Law and Economics at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. As their primary example, they look at E. coli infections in the San Francisco County after it adopted an ordinance severely limiting the use of plastic bags by grocery stores.

Read the rest here

Overciminalization from Environmental Laws

In the US, the rapid escalation of arbitrary environmental regulations has been prompting for growing accounts of needless political persecutions.

From Foxnews.com

The growing web of laws that can land unwitting violators in jail is commonly referred to as "overcriminalization." These are not laws prohibiting fundamentally wrong behavior like murder or rape. Critics say these laws create offenses that violators often don't realize are illegal until it's too late.

Punishment can range from a few hundred dollars in fees to lengthy prison terms. Some say the extraordinary expansion of the criminal code on federal, state and local levels leaves the public exposed to abuse at the hands of officials.

'You take away the incentive for somebody to do something bit by bit by bit. It’s like peeling the layers off an onion. You can only peel so much and then you don’t have any onion left'- FIshing boat Capt. Terrell Gould

When it comes to environmental laws, the states getting hit the hardest are the five that border the Gulf of Mexico -- Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. Among them, nearly 1,000 laws criminalizing activities along the coast have been put on the books, Texas Public Policy Foundation analyst Vikrant Reddy said. 

While there is no concrete figure, there are an estimated 300,000-400,000 environmental laws, statutes and mandates believed to be in circulation nationally. Many can land a person in prison, regardless of whether another person, plant or animal is harmed.

Gosh 300-400K laws! 

More steps towards the scenario forewarned by the great F. A. Hayek in his classic book, the Road to Serfdom, here is a snippet (p.86).

By giving the government unlimited powers the most arbitrary rule can be made legal: and in this way a democracy may set up the most complete despotism imaginable.

Biofuels Aggravates Food Price Inflation, Promotes Hunger

One product of environmental politics has been to promote the politically privileged taxpayer supported, green energy industry.  Biofuels is part of the renewable green energy.

Yet the unintended effects of biofuels has not only been cronyism, but importantly, biofuels contributes to the constrains in food supplies that has led to higher prices and thus food shortages.

Here is the New York Times,

In the tiny tortillerias of this city, people complain ceaselessly about the high price of corn. Just three years ago, one quetzal — about 15 cents — bought eight tortillas; today it buys only four. And eggs have tripled in price because chickens eat corn feed.

Meanwhile, in rural areas, subsistence farmers struggle to find a place to sow their seeds. On a recent morning, José Antonio Alvarado was harvesting his corn crop on the narrow median of Highway 2 as trucks zoomed by.

“We’re farming here because there is no other land, and I have to feed my family,” said Mr. Alvarado, pointing to his sons Alejandro and José, who are 4 and 6 but appear to be much younger, a sign of chronic malnutrition.

Recent laws in the United States and Europe that mandate the increasing use of biofuel in cars have had far-flung ripple effects, economists say, as land once devoted to growing food for humans is now sometimes more profitably used for churning out vehicle fuel.

In a globalized world, the expansion of the biofuels industry has contributed to spikes in food prices and a shortage of land for food-based agriculture in poor corners of Asia, Africa and Latin America because the raw material is grown wherever it is cheapest.

Nowhere, perhaps, is that squeeze more obvious than in Guatemala, which is “getting hit from both sides of the Atlantic,” in its fields and at its markets, said Timothy Wise, a Tufts University development expert who is studying the problem globally with Actionaid, a policy group based in Washington that focuses on poverty.

With its corn-based diet and proximity to the United States, Central America has long been vulnerable to economic riptides related to the United States’ corn policy. Now that the United States is using 40 percent of its crop to make biofuel, it is not surprising that tortilla prices have doubled in Guatemala, which imports nearly half of its corn.

At the same time, Guatemala’s lush land, owned by a handful of families, has proved ideal for producing raw materials for biofuels. Suchitepéquez Province, a major corn-producing region five years ago, is now carpeted with sugar cane and African palm. The field Mr. Alvarado used to rent for his personal corn crop now grows sugar cane for a company that exports bioethanol to Europe.

Aside from biofuels, on the supply side, agricultural subsidies, agricultural protectionism and various forms of (regulatory) interventionism have all contributed to higher prices.

On the demand, aside from demand from China and emerging markets, global central banking relentless pumping of money have also pumped up prices of food. 

And given the acceleration of balance sheet expansions by global centrals in order to "promote aggregate demand" (in reality buoy asset prices to save the distressed too big to fail politically connected banking system and insolvent welfare states), the risks of food crisis, from the cumulative effects of interventions, cannot be discounted.

Environmentalism Hysteria: Cats are Evil

The ultimate goal of environmentalism has been to restrain people’s activities. 

Not content with man-made global warming, environmental hysteria have now spread to targeting pet ownership in order to allegedly save wildlife.

From Slate.com

You know what animal makes a good pet? No animal.

Dogs will bite you to death and then eat your corpse. Snakes will asphyxiate you, escape, infest the Everglades, and eat all its mammals. Pet parrots perpetuate a trade that upends ecosystems, and hamsters pass you dangerous zoonotic diseases. But perhaps the worst pet of all, environmentally speaking, is a cat.

Domesticated cats started out as parasites on human civilization. Unlike other species, and admittedly to their credit, they domesticated themselves. When humans started growing grain, the crops attracted rodents that attracted cats. Wild cats evolved into housecats, and they were quite useful for thousands of years, killing disease-ridden rats and mice and protecting our food stockpiles. But now that we have industrial farming, reliable food storage, and mostly mouse-proof houses, cats are mere parasites again. Playful and often affectionate parasites, sure, and adorable when young, but a scourge on the landscape.

An economist in New Zealand named Gareth Morgan has made the logical and quite correct case that his island nation should eliminate its cats in order to protect its endangered birds. He means “elimination” in the most humane way possible: Existing pets should be spayed and neutered and allowed to live out their lives, but no new cats should be allowed to be born or imported. He is not advocating that people poison feral cats, as a former researcher at the Smithsonian National Zoo was convicted of doing a few years ago. Nor does he say people should shoot them, as particularly avid birdwatchers have done. That would be really wrong.

Morgan points out that your cat “is actually a friendly neighborhood serial killer.” He may sound like some wretched, obsessed Jonathan Franzen character, but his Cats To Go project isn’t meant as a caricature of environmentalism. He’s asking people to pledge to neuter their cats, keep them indoors, and not get any new ones.

Some people like or have pets, many don’t. 

For those who fancy non-commercial ownership of pets, the benefits are subjective, mostly psychological and emotional, perhaps manifested through desire for companionship, leisure or amusement or as outlet or from peer pressure or for many other reasons.

The global pet industry has been estimated at $49 billion in 2012 with pet food sales accounting for 37.8% according to Mintel. That’s how much some people will pay for products and services for their pets. Pet ownership thus is a human activity.

Of course, there are consequences to every action.

The article has framed pet ownership, particularly cats as threat to the ecosystem. Cats have been cited as having been responsible for some bird extinction in some areas, for instance. There are more. But these are referenced to stray cats.

The article has been quiet about the policy implications.

But the intent seems to be the implied use of force to make cat owners “pledge to neuter their cats, keep them indoors, and not get any new ones”.

Such environmental hysteria would eventually lead to social policies that will restrict cat ownership. Eventually this will spread to other forms of pets.

This translates to the expansion of the bureaucracy for the enforcement of these new legislations of keeping in check people’s pet activities.

Yet people will have to pay more taxes to sustain such bureaucracy.

Moreover, people will be fined or see prison terms for infringements of pet laws. Violence may even be an outcome from enforcing such rather seemingly trivial laws.

For me, the means (regulatory restrictions) to the attain the end (environment) is like using bazookas to kill rats, where the costs (financial, regulatory and civil liberties) to attain pet controls will largely exceed the supposed benefits (environment).

Ultimately the beneficiaries of environmental politics will be the government, who will now have despotic powers not only to pick more resources from people’s pockets, but importantly, to invade on people’s properties and privacies in order just to enforce pet laws.

This is socialism camouflaged as environmentalism

War on Plastic Bags: Debunking Three Popular Myths

I previously wrote about the unfounded claims on the supposed environmentally baneful effects from plastic bags.

Canada’s Fraser Institute offers their case by dealing with 3 popular myths: (bold and blue highlights mine)

The three central arguments used against plastic grocery bags are that plastic bags pollute the air and water, and pose a significant litter problem, clogging our lakes, rivers, and oceans.

Claim: Plastic bags pollute the air

According to most plastic bag critics, it takes roughly 12 million barrels of oil to produce the 100 billion plastic bags used in the US each year (Sierra Club, undated). 

Environmental activists note the production and decomposition of plastic bags emits greenhouse gases and other pollutants at every stage of a plastic bag’s life (New York Times, 2007). This, however, tells less than half of the story, as most analyses of bag impacts don’t consider the costs and benefits of plastic bags relative to alternatives. 

A study released in 2011 by the Environmental Agency of England helps put environmental impact claims in perspective. In Evidence: Life Cycle Assessment of Supermarket Carrier Bags, researchers offer a “cradle-to-grave” review of seven different types of grocery store bags: conventional lightweight plastic bags; plastic bags treated with a chemical to speed its degradation; a lightweight bag made from a biodegradable starch-polyester blend; a regular paper bag; a heavy-duty “bag for life” made from low-density polyethylene (LDPE); a heavier duty polypropylene bag; and a cotton bag (Edwards and Meyhoff Fry, 2011).

The researchers compared the environmental damage done by the bags using a number of indicators of environmental impact, including global warming potential, acidification, eutrophication, human toxicity, and others. They found that the conventional plastic bag had the lowest environmental impact of the lightweight bags in eight out of nine impact categories and that biodegradable plastic bags had even larger environmental impacts than the regular kind. Paper bags performed poorly on the environmental impact tests, and the study found that they must also be used four or more times to match the global warming potential of the plastic bags. In sum, cotton bags were found to have a greater environmental impact than the conventional bags in seven of nine categories, even when  used 173 times—the number of times needed for its global warming potential to be on par with that of a plastic bag

Claim: Plastic bags pollute the water

Another frequently recited argument in favour of banning plastic is that we face a crisis of plastic-encrusted waterways. Environmental groups paint horrific pictures of plastic pollution like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which purportedly spans twice the size of Texas (Oceanic Defense,  undated). Though it’s certainly true that plastic bags can be harmful to all things aquatic, it’s important, again, to put such claims in perspective. As assistant professor of Oceanography Angelicque White reports, the claims about the size of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch are simply wrong (2011). She explains, “The amount of plastic out there isn’t trivial, but using the highest concentrations ever reported by scientists produces a patch that is a small fraction of the state of Texas, not twice the size.” Moreover, “there is no doubt that the amount of plastics in the world’s oceans is troubling, but this kind of exaggeration undermines the credibility of scientists. We have data that allow us to make reasonable estimates; we don’t need the hyperbole.” And the contribution of plastic grocery bags to ocean plastic pollution is relatively small: environmental group Grow NYC estimates that only “7.5% of our waste stream consists of plastic film such as supermarket bags” (2012).

Dangers of alternatives

Alternatives, such as trendy cloth bags, pose a danger. A closer look proves cloth bags are not only less environmentally safe as described above, but they pose their own risks to human health. In June 2010, Charles Gerba and colleagues at the University of Arizona and Loma Linda University released a study on contamination of reusable bags. As they explain in Assessment of the Potential for Cross Contamination of Food Products by Reusable Shopping Bags:

“Large numbers of bacteria were found in almost all bags and coliform bacteria in half. Escherichia coli were identified in 12% of the bags and a wide range of enteric bacteria, including several opportunistic pathogens. When meat juices were added to bags and stored in the trunks of cars for two hours, the number of bacteria increased 10-fold indicating the potential for bacterial growth in the bags.”

While some critics dismissed the study due to its partial funding by the American Chemistry Council, real world examples corroborate Gerbera’s results (Huffington Post, 2012). In October 2010, for example, a teenaged soccer player in Oregon fell mysteriously ill, kicking off a nasty strain of norovirus that quickly spread to her teammates and left scientists puzzled. Epidemiologists ultimately uncovered the bizarre yet treacherous culprit: a contaminated cloth grocery bag from the soccer player’s hotel room. An NBC report explains, “The girl had been very ill in the hotel bathroom, spreading an aerosol of norovirus that landed everywhere, including on the reusable grocery bag hanging in the room. When scientists checked the bag, it tested positive for the bug, even two weeks later” (Aleccia, 2012)

To avoid such dangers, epidemiologist Kimberly K. Repp (whose report on the mystery above appears in the Journal of Infectious Diseases) rightly advises that, “we wash our clothes when they’re dirty; we should wash our bags too.” Unfortunately, however Gerbera et al found that “reusable bags are seldom if ever washed and often used for multiple purposes” (2012).

Economic Impacts

Finally, many proponents of the plastic bag ban spend the majority of their time on environmental benefits, and offer little substantive analysis as to the economic impacts of a plastic bag ban or tax. As it turns out, the economic case for plastic bag bans and /or taxes is less than airtight. A report released in January 2011 by the Suffolk University’s Beacon Hill Institute conjectures that Washington, DC’s bag tax, by making purchases more inconvenient, will lead consumers to reduce how much they buy in the District, which “will eliminate a net of 101 local jobs. The job losses will cause annual wages to fall by $18 per worker and aggregate real disposable income to fall by $5.64 million. The wage and income losses will combine to lower income tax collections.” A recent study from the National Center for Policy Analysis also found that plastic bags cost jobs:

“The NCPA surveyed store managers in Los Angeles County where a ban of thin-film bags took effect in July 2011, to determine the ban’s impact on revenues and employment. Over a one year period before and after the ban, stores that fell under the bag ban experienced a 10 percent reduction in  employment, while employment in stores outside of the ban slightly increased (2012)."

Conclusion

The panic surrounding plastic grocery bags is largely unfounded. Despite continued demonization of plastic bags, the  evidence shows that they’re less likely to be contaminated, typically save more energy than paper or cloth alternatives, and are less hazardous to marine life than is commonly conjectured 

Populist environmental politics has mostly been about misanthropic and atavistic social controls, backed by specious theories, which yearns to bring back society to the medieval age. 

The unseen factor has been the transfer of resources or the promotion vested interest groups, using the environment as cover, such as taxpayer funded green energy industry which has continued to bleed taxpayers dry in the US and in the Philippines, green lobby and the logging interests.

Predicting the End of the World: The Mayan Calendar

Armageddon is upon us. That’s according to some people predicting the apocalypse based on the 5,000 year Mayan Calendar which ends today December 21 2012.

Yes doomsday predictions has always been with us.

From the Economist,

IT IS not only wild-eyed prognosticators, in lonely towers with an owl for company, who predict the exact date of the end of the world. It has been marked in the diaries of popes, preachers and reformers. It has shivered the blood of a navigator nearing the edge of the globe, a delicate painter of the rites of spring, a serial killer, and the great brooding scientist who uncovered the secrets of gravity and light. It has been calculated from the alignment of planets, the track of comets, the birth of Antichrist (variously identified), the rate of global warming, nuclear build-up, intriguing palindromes or symmetries in dates, or the ever-gathering entropy of wickedness in the world. Some forecasters place it safely in the far future; others expect it imminently. Some, forgetful of the old tale about crying wolf, put out a prediction regularly. The most terrifying give no date exactly, like the hen in Leeds, in northern England, whose owner wrote “Christ is coming” on her eggs and pushed them back up again. The date to squawk about? 1806.

In short the above represents a string of failed doomsday predictions.

As for the supposed Mayan holocaust, the Washington Blog notes that even modern day Mayan leaders dispels the "end of the world" predictions alluded to them  (bold and italics original)

But the truth is that the Mayans never said the world will end in 2012.

Archaeologists recently found a cache of Mayan calendars which goes thousands of years past 2012.

And current Mayan elders say that the world ain’t ending this year.

In addition, from the same source, Mayan leaders have turned the table suggesting that “the doomsday theories spring from Western, not Mayan ideas.”

Doomsday predictions sells because it rouses the base human emotions of fear or anxiety or insecurity.

And an even important point is that Armageddon forecasting has political implications. Vested interest groups sell fear in order to promote social policies, such as ecological or environmental agenda, which has had a poor track record.

Prediction is very hard, especially about the future a quote attributed to Yogi Berra a member of Major League Baseball's Hall of Fame. This applies to doom mongers as well.