Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Sunday, January 22, 2012
Green Libertarianism?
When I used to work at UCS, I spent a fair amount of time thinking about environmental regulations and the forever war waged against them by conservatives, libertarians and business groups. Since the start of the Great Recession, the conservative line against EPA regulations is that they supposedly kill jobs (even though they don't really) without mentioning that pollution actually kills people and that maybe we should do something about that. (Warning: long and wonky ahead.)
Cuyahoga River Fire, 1969
As a progressive (slash lefty slash liberal) the concept of environmental protection is pretty much a no-brainer. A clean and healthy environment is a common good and something that all humans benefit from. Environmental degradation therefore arises as a result of some variant of the tragedy of the commons (as described in Garrett Hardin's 1968 essay) where we are all, to some extent, the culprits of pollution as well as its victims. (Although the environmental justice movement has also shown that environmental burdens and benefits are never shared equally in society.)
At any rate, it makes sense that conserving and protecting the environment should be a collective responsibility -- something worked out through the democratic process with an eye toward fairness and effectiveness. And while it might be true that "free markets" are occasionally quite good at providing certain goods at a low price (iPods and blue jeans and whatnot), there's no reason to think that a healthy environment is one of them.
But of course, conservatives and libertarians don't really truck with the whole idea of "common" goods, instead preferring to talk about private property rights. Indeed the typical conservative response to the tragedy of the commons is to say that the commons should simply be privatized. Voilá! Tragedy solved! However, we don't actually need to invoke the idea of the commons to see that environmental degradation is harmful. For one, pollution directly harms the health and private property of people who live downstream or downwind.
In the language of economics, pollution is a negative externality. If pollution only affected the buyer or the seller in an economic transaction, it wouldn't be as big a deal since the seller would decide if the environmental risk was worth the price she was paying. But of course, pollution affects third-parties too, people living half a world away who had no involvement with whatever that factory was selling anyway. To give just one example, read this article about the outrageous harm done to our health and economy by coal power alone.
So you might think that the property rights issue might attract the attention of at least a few C/Ls, right? Don't Bangladeshi farmers have property rights too? Don't they deserve compensation when their land gets submerged? Or home-owners living next to the oil refinerey? Or is it just rich, politically-connected capitalists who get property rights? (Don't answer that one.)
As it turns out, the vast majority of conservative opinion on the subject is focused on minimizing and downplaying the problem, if not outright denying its existence. Which is kind of weird. Libertarians who think all taxes are a form of theft (or even partial slavery) should really be up in arms about this sort of thing. Past libertarian thinkers like Hayek understood that this was a problem that required government intervention, but it doesn't seem to be much on the radar these days.
Actually there is a traditional libertarian answer to these sort of questions, but it's not very good. The idea is that, instead of "burdensome" government regulation, people harmed by pollution should sue polluters in the court system ("courts and torts"). This makes a certain sort of sense until you think about it in detail. For one thing, the harm from pollution is usually statistical. We may know that exposure to, say, a carcinogen causes an excess of 100 cancer deaths in a population in a year, but cancer has a lot of different causes and it is well-nigh impossible to win a tort claim that cancer Y is directly caused by chemical X.
Even harder are situations like automobile pollution or electricity generation where we are all polluting and all suffering the consequences. Are we then all financially liable for the harm done (to ourselves)? What does that mean? Our clean, elegant solution has turned into a horrible mess. Why not just have the government set some science-based limits and be done with it?
All of which is an overly-long introduction to this post by James K over at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen. He makes the case that libertarians should care about the environment and even advocate for (limited) government action (see also here and here for similar thoughts):
I think it goes to show that some form of government regulation or taxation is really the only way of dealing with the problem of pollution. Sure it would be nice if some less intrusive fix was available, but it doesn't seem to be. It's worth the effort to make these regulations as simple as possible and its worth asking what the balance of costs and benefits might be. But it's always going to be cheaper to dump waste on your neighbor than to dispose of it properly, so there will basically always have to be some sort of cop there to prevent that.
At any rate, it makes sense that conserving and protecting the environment should be a collective responsibility -- something worked out through the democratic process with an eye toward fairness and effectiveness. And while it might be true that "free markets" are occasionally quite good at providing certain goods at a low price (iPods and blue jeans and whatnot), there's no reason to think that a healthy environment is one of them.
But of course, conservatives and libertarians don't really truck with the whole idea of "common" goods, instead preferring to talk about private property rights. Indeed the typical conservative response to the tragedy of the commons is to say that the commons should simply be privatized. Voilá! Tragedy solved! However, we don't actually need to invoke the idea of the commons to see that environmental degradation is harmful. For one, pollution directly harms the health and private property of people who live downstream or downwind.
In the language of economics, pollution is a negative externality. If pollution only affected the buyer or the seller in an economic transaction, it wouldn't be as big a deal since the seller would decide if the environmental risk was worth the price she was paying. But of course, pollution affects third-parties too, people living half a world away who had no involvement with whatever that factory was selling anyway. To give just one example, read this article about the outrageous harm done to our health and economy by coal power alone.
So you might think that the property rights issue might attract the attention of at least a few C/Ls, right? Don't Bangladeshi farmers have property rights too? Don't they deserve compensation when their land gets submerged? Or home-owners living next to the oil refinerey? Or is it just rich, politically-connected capitalists who get property rights? (Don't answer that one.)
As it turns out, the vast majority of conservative opinion on the subject is focused on minimizing and downplaying the problem, if not outright denying its existence. Which is kind of weird. Libertarians who think all taxes are a form of theft (or even partial slavery) should really be up in arms about this sort of thing. Past libertarian thinkers like Hayek understood that this was a problem that required government intervention, but it doesn't seem to be much on the radar these days.
Actually there is a traditional libertarian answer to these sort of questions, but it's not very good. The idea is that, instead of "burdensome" government regulation, people harmed by pollution should sue polluters in the court system ("courts and torts"). This makes a certain sort of sense until you think about it in detail. For one thing, the harm from pollution is usually statistical. We may know that exposure to, say, a carcinogen causes an excess of 100 cancer deaths in a population in a year, but cancer has a lot of different causes and it is well-nigh impossible to win a tort claim that cancer Y is directly caused by chemical X.
Even harder are situations like automobile pollution or electricity generation where we are all polluting and all suffering the consequences. Are we then all financially liable for the harm done (to ourselves)? What does that mean? Our clean, elegant solution has turned into a horrible mess. Why not just have the government set some science-based limits and be done with it?
All of which is an overly-long introduction to this post by James K over at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen. He makes the case that libertarians should care about the environment and even advocate for (limited) government action (see also here and here for similar thoughts):
"In many ways environmental issues are “ideologically inconvenient” for libertarians – life would be easier if they didn’t exist. Of course that’s not sufficient reason to actually act as if they didn’t exist, something I don’t think enough libertarians are willing to recognise."After a brief discussion, James winds-up proposing a tax on pollution "equal to the marginal cost to society of the pollution." So, on the one hand it's bold of him to use the t-word and it's great that he's even talking about the subject. On the other it's interesting that he's come around to an idea (a pollution tax) that progressives and environmentalists have been pushing for several decades now.
I think it goes to show that some form of government regulation or taxation is really the only way of dealing with the problem of pollution. Sure it would be nice if some less intrusive fix was available, but it doesn't seem to be. It's worth the effort to make these regulations as simple as possible and its worth asking what the balance of costs and benefits might be. But it's always going to be cheaper to dump waste on your neighbor than to dispose of it properly, so there will basically always have to be some sort of cop there to prevent that.
DC Metro Ads, Part 3
One of my occasional blog obsessions (see here and here) have been the absurd advertisements in the DC Metro system, which entice you to buy helicopters and troop transport planes and whatnot:
"At first my mind was boggled that a defense contractor would spend so much money just to subliminally pry the brains of (literally) a handful of people -- presumably congressional appropriation and DOD procurement staffers -- but then I realized that I have no conception of the type of money defense contractors routinely deal with."Anyway, Kevin Drum passes along a chart showing exactly what type of money we're talking about here -- an ad campaign two to four times more expensive than usual if you're shooting for either the Pentagon or the Capitol South metro stations.
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Tuesday, November 01, 2011
Climategate Was a Hoax
My hometown paper the other morning published an op-ed from Victor Davis Hanson crowing about how climate change was now a dead issue. Hanson is supposed to be this well-respected academic (Fresno State classics scholar, Hoover Institution, etc.) but this was amateur hour. Naturally he dredged up the canard about the earth cooling over the past ten years, which I ranted about previously. We also got complaints about how Al Gore has a big house. (Note to skeptics: no one cares about Al Gore. He's not the king of climate change.)
I wouldn't've commented on it except that Prof. Hanson also felt no qualms about continuing to slander honest scientists. Referencing Climategate, he claims that climate scientists were "manipulating scientific evidence" -- fighting words, basically, in the scientific community. But he makes no mention of the six (6!) independent investigations that cleared the scientists of any scientific misconduct. (Check out this extremely informative page from UCS which explains exactly what Climategate was all about and what the investigations found.)
Sometimes it seems like these fact-free memes will just continue to circle the globe for decades and we'll be reading the same thing in 2037. But this op-ed came out shortly after the Berkeley group's highly publicized re-analysis of the surface temperature records, one of the key pieces of evidence for global warming that had been under question thanks to the Climategate emails. For added drama the group's leader, Richard Muller, had been a pretty vocal skeptic of some parts of climate science. But clearly he let the data speak for themselves and reported a finding almost exactly identical to the previous 3 data reconstructions (NASA, NOAA, HadCRU).
It was a pretty big black eye for climate skeptics and anyone who really thinks that scientists were "manipulating" the data. Bad luck for Prof. Hanson, I guess, although I doubt he cares. The money quote from Dr. Muller: "the biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the US and the UK." And the money graph (via the BBC), comparing the new results with the older three:
The four curves are remarkably similar and they all go up. Maybe this will mark a turning point regarding the media's coverage of Climategate -- a talkingpoint of equal and opposite weight, as it were. We can only hope.
I wouldn't've commented on it except that Prof. Hanson also felt no qualms about continuing to slander honest scientists. Referencing Climategate, he claims that climate scientists were "manipulating scientific evidence" -- fighting words, basically, in the scientific community. But he makes no mention of the six (6!) independent investigations that cleared the scientists of any scientific misconduct. (Check out this extremely informative page from UCS which explains exactly what Climategate was all about and what the investigations found.)
Sometimes it seems like these fact-free memes will just continue to circle the globe for decades and we'll be reading the same thing in 2037. But this op-ed came out shortly after the Berkeley group's highly publicized re-analysis of the surface temperature records, one of the key pieces of evidence for global warming that had been under question thanks to the Climategate emails. For added drama the group's leader, Richard Muller, had been a pretty vocal skeptic of some parts of climate science. But clearly he let the data speak for themselves and reported a finding almost exactly identical to the previous 3 data reconstructions (NASA, NOAA, HadCRU).
It was a pretty big black eye for climate skeptics and anyone who really thinks that scientists were "manipulating" the data. Bad luck for Prof. Hanson, I guess, although I doubt he cares. The money quote from Dr. Muller: "the biggest surprise was that the new results agreed so closely with the warming values published previously by other teams in the US and the UK." And the money graph (via the BBC), comparing the new results with the older three:
The four curves are remarkably similar and they all go up. Maybe this will mark a turning point regarding the media's coverage of Climategate -- a talkingpoint of equal and opposite weight, as it were. We can only hope.
Friday, September 30, 2011
Fashionable Cynicism Never Won Us A Public Option
These Occupy Wall Street protests are cool, and they tie into a couple of interesting posts from Yglesias and TNC making the point that it is far more effective to organize for change rather than sit back and gripe about Obama. This is, I think, the main fact of our current political moment.
Prior to the 2008 election there was a ton of energy on the left, first in the anti-war movement and then channeled into Obama's election campaign. My perception is that after the election that energy largely dissipated when it really needed to keep surging forward. Some of that was simple exhaustion and a false belief that the battle had been won and that Obama could wave his magic Congress wand and pass his agenda. Partly it is psychologically easier to be fiercely unified against something than to be for something, particularly if that something (stimulus, health care bill, cap-and-trade, etc.) is the product of political compromises and not 100% to your liking. Human nature, I guess.
As an example, I think the Occupy Wall Street protests have been awesome and inspiring, but if they had taken place in early 2009 during the bailouts and (especially) during the Congressional debate over the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, I think we would have ended up both with better policies and a more accurate media narrative that put the blame for the Great Recession on the true culprits rather than the bizarre claims we now get about how the school teachers and cops are are to blame for high deficits (or whatever story it is this week). Same thing with the health-care bill.
I write this not to absolve Obama or the Dems from the mistakes they did make. Right this second I'm pretty peeved about Obama's recent cave on ozone regulations (bad policy, bad politics) and the fact that he may have just offed a U.S. citizen without any due process (a scary scary precedent). Still. The media loves to build narratives around the personage of the President, but in a democracy the buck ultimately stops with the people. We need to work to move public opinion in a progressive direction. The politicians will follow.
The energy just wasn't there in early 2009, and things were moving so fast that it was hard to get a bead on where to best apply popular pressure. But still, this is what we're supposed to be good at, and the sad fact is that post-2008 the left has simply been out-organized by the tea party -- a bunch of people who as a matter of principle don't really believe in collective action! Embarrassing!
Yglesias gives a couple recommendations of things to do apart from complaining about Obama on the internet. I would say it mainly comes down to grassroots organizing in a way that opens up space to Obama's left, and it is nice to see that some of the old energy is starting to return. I hope it continues.
Prior to the 2008 election there was a ton of energy on the left, first in the anti-war movement and then channeled into Obama's election campaign. My perception is that after the election that energy largely dissipated when it really needed to keep surging forward. Some of that was simple exhaustion and a false belief that the battle had been won and that Obama could wave his magic Congress wand and pass his agenda. Partly it is psychologically easier to be fiercely unified against something than to be for something, particularly if that something (stimulus, health care bill, cap-and-trade, etc.) is the product of political compromises and not 100% to your liking. Human nature, I guess.
As an example, I think the Occupy Wall Street protests have been awesome and inspiring, but if they had taken place in early 2009 during the bailouts and (especially) during the Congressional debate over the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, I think we would have ended up both with better policies and a more accurate media narrative that put the blame for the Great Recession on the true culprits rather than the bizarre claims we now get about how the school teachers and cops are are to blame for high deficits (or whatever story it is this week). Same thing with the health-care bill.
I write this not to absolve Obama or the Dems from the mistakes they did make. Right this second I'm pretty peeved about Obama's recent cave on ozone regulations (bad policy, bad politics) and the fact that he may have just offed a U.S. citizen without any due process (a scary scary precedent). Still. The media loves to build narratives around the personage of the President, but in a democracy the buck ultimately stops with the people. We need to work to move public opinion in a progressive direction. The politicians will follow.
The energy just wasn't there in early 2009, and things were moving so fast that it was hard to get a bead on where to best apply popular pressure. But still, this is what we're supposed to be good at, and the sad fact is that post-2008 the left has simply been out-organized by the tea party -- a bunch of people who as a matter of principle don't really believe in collective action! Embarrassing!
Yglesias gives a couple recommendations of things to do apart from complaining about Obama on the internet. I would say it mainly comes down to grassroots organizing in a way that opens up space to Obama's left, and it is nice to see that some of the old energy is starting to return. I hope it continues.
Thursday, September 15, 2011
Sunday, August 14, 2011
What Work Is
I see that Fresno's Phillip Levine was just named Poet Laureate. He's always been one of my favorites because his poems are really short stories about interesting people in difficult situations. He seems like the right poet for a time of 9 percent unemployment, although not one to help us forget our economic troubles. Andrew Sullivan excerpts one of his best poems -- "What Work Is":
We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is--if you're
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it's someone else's brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, "No,
we're not hiring today," for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who's not beside you or behind or
ahead because he's home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You've never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you're too young or too dumb,
not because you're jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don't know what work is.
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