Red vs. Green

There's an interesting conflict brewing in Ecuador these days. In December, the Correa government moved to dissolve an environmental group, the Pachamama Foundation, after accusing them of participating in a violent protest against oil extraction in the Amazon region (which the group denies). Although staffed by Ecuadoreans, the Pachamama Foundation is a group founded by U.S. citizens with considerable funding from foreign donors (including, allegedly, from USAID), and so some have defended the Correa government's move as a legitimate defense of Ecuador's sovereignty. NACLA has a good summary here presenting the two sides of the issue. The Morales government in Bolivia also expelled all USAID funded groups, and USAID voluntarily pulled out of Ecuador around the same time.

But that may not be the end of the story. Amazon Watch passes along the recent news that the Correa government is also cracking down on Ecuadorean indigenous groups opposed to increased oil extraction:

The Secretary of Hydrocarbons has filed a formal complaint against eight indigenous leaders who have dedicated their lives to defending the Amazon, including Franco Viteri (President of GONOAE), the presidents of the Achuar & Zapara nationalities, the president and vice president of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) and pioneering female leaders Patricia Gualinga from Sarayaku and Gloria Ushigua of the Zapara.

If carried out, this would be a much more serious crack-down on democracy and dissenting voices.

Naturally there is a long history here. As we saw on our trip in 2009, certain parts of Ecuador have been quite heavily polluted by decades of oil extraction, while untouched areas have fought to avoid the same fate. The Correa government had previously put forth a creative plan to avoid having to extract oil from pristine parts of the Amazon. The plan was for wealthy governments who care about climate and the environment to pay Ecuador to leave the oil in the ground. Despite some hopeful signs, the plan failed to gain nearly enough pledges. So the Correa government has decided to go ahead with at least some oil development in Yasuni over the objections of some (but not all) of the indigenous residents of region. Upsidedownworld has a long analysis here of the plan and its fallout.

All this highlights what may be an emerging trend in Latin America, that of a Red vs. Green split. The last decade has seen a number of left governments come to power: Chavez in Venezuela, Correa in Ecuador, Morales in Bolivia, Ortega in Nicaragua, Lula and Roussef in Brazil and others. Add Pope Francis to the list and you've got a region moving to the left on economic issues. Traditionally green groups have been part of the left coalitions that support these governments, but there have been tensions and conflicts.

Here in Nicaragua, Ortega is planning a trans-oceanic canal which looks to bring him into conflict with environmentalists. Bolivia's Morales has had his own conflicts with indigenous groups over environmental issues, and even Chavez's Bolivarian revolution was fueled by massive oil revenues. The environment poses a problem for all forms of extractive societies, no matter how they distribute the profits after the fact (see Jacobin for more thoughts on this). So I kind of expect these tensions to keep simmering in the future. Something to keep an eye on.

Cap'n Dividend

Since I was very recently complaining about how conservatives and libertarians really should care more about the environment, it was great to see this article by Jonathan Adler on a conservative approach to combating climate change:

It is a well established principle in the Anglo-American legal tradition that one does not have the right to use one's own property in a manner that causes harm to one's neighbor. There are common law cases gong back 400 years establishing this principle and international law has long embraced a similar norm. As I argued at length in this paper, if we accept this principle, even non-catastrophic warming should be a serious concern, as even non-catastrophic warming will produce the sorts of consequences that have long been recognized as property rights violations, such as the flooding of the land of others.

My argument is that the same general principles that lead libertarians and conservatives to call for greater protection of property rights should lead them to call for greater attention to the most likely effects of climate change. It is a well recognized principle of common law that if company A is flooding the land of person B, it is irrelevant whether company A generates lots of economic prosperity for the local community (including B). A's action would still violate B's property rights, and B would be entitled to relief of some sort. By the same token, if the land of a farmer in Bangladesh is flooded, due in measurable and provable part to human-induced climate change, why would he be any less entitled to redress than a farmer who has his land flooded by his neighbor's land-use changes? Property rights should not be sacrificed as part of some utilitarian calculus. Libertarians readily accept this principle when government planners violate property rights in the name of economic development (see e.g., Kelo v. New London). Yet they seem to abandon their commitment to property rights when it comes to global warming.

Here begins the path of wisdom!  I would quibble with a lot in the article, but mainly I'm just happy to read a conservative who's not convinced it's all a giant hoax. And really, quibbles aside, it's striking how similar his solutions are to what you might hear from a dirty-hippie liberal environmentalist.

In particular, I was glad to see him hype a cap-and-dividend plan (also known as a revenue-neutral carbon tax), since I've always been a fan of that particular policy. You can read the details of the plan here, but the basic idea is that we implement an economy-wide cap on carbon emissions, where energy producers or importers must buy a permit for each ton of carbon. This will naturally lead to higher prices for dirty energy from coal and petroleum (in contrast with clean energy sources, who will not need permits), but the proceeds from the permit auction are automatically refunded back to the public in equal shares (the dividend), rather than going into the general fund of the federal government.

This means that if you emit exactly the national average of carbon emissions, your rebate will exactly cancel out those higher energy costs.  If you use less than the national average you get a cash bonus, and if you use more than your share you pay a price. What's more, when the cap gets slowly lowered (to slowly reduce national emissions), the size of the rebate will rise with energy costs. This gives everyone an incentive to switch to cleaner energy. A cap-and-dividend plan is also more politically feasible since it is clean and simple and everyone likes getting a monthly check in the mail.  By contrast a regular cap-and-trade plan (e.g. Waxman-Markey) is easily demonized as an economy-killing tax on the working man.

Now we just need a Congress who will pass it.

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):

"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.

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.

Eating Animals

No, not the book by Jonathan Safran Foer. Rather, over the past six months or so, I've started eating meat again after 15 or so years of being vegetarian.

The impetus, as you might guess, is moving to Nicaragua. The way we figure it, eating a strict vegetarian diet may end up being harder in Nicaragua than it is here. I expect we'll continue to be largely veggie when cooking at home, but if we're eating out there may be a lack of options and if we're guests in someone's house we don't want to be rude. Hence, we are starting to eat a little meat a few times a week ... basically to prep the stomach for the transition.

It's a pragmatic choice, although honestly I've been slowly reassessing my food philosophy for a few years now and I'm not entirely sure what I think these days. Basically, my central reason for being vegetarian has been that meat in the U.S. is often not produced sustainably (e.g. overuse of antibiotics, gigantic lagoons of cow sh*t, etc) and requires a tremendous amount of resources (water, land acreage, fossil fuels) in comparison to other foods. Also, it has probably kept me a little healthier than otherwise.

But the problem is that I've replaced meat in my diet with other things--like fish (not always sustainably fished) or processed foods--that makes me wonder if I'm not really thinking consistently about the big picture. There are other ways of thinking about these issues, such as eating locally or eating less meat or simply enacting smart national policies so we're not all wasting time calculating carbon miles in the grocery store aisle.

So anyway. I expect Central America will give me a different take on this stuff--in addition to a different cuisine. A lot of the first-world problems I mentioned above just aren't as pertinent (or are very different) in a developing country. So we'll see. But for now: meat! At times, it does seem very ... strange, to be eating meat after so long abstaining. But also (more often than not) delicious.

Oil Spill Scenarios

This week NOAA released the results of some modeling (based on historical wind and water currents) that show where the oil is likely to end up. The average of all 500 scenarios looks like this:

Their models show that with some medium-ish probability some of the oil will enter the loop current and head up the east coast. For example, if the oil spill had occurred on April 17, 1997 that would have been the result, as this animation shows. Of course, other scenarios depict different results and NOAA says that currently "the Loop Current does not appear to be a major source of transport of Deepwater Horizon oil to the Florida Straits or Gulf Stream." But of course that could change if the thing keeps gushing.

Anyway, I thought they were interesting, if depressing, results. I also recommend this pretty cool website that lets you visualize the size of the oil spill by moving it to your hometown in Google Maps. Apparently, the oil slick now dwarfs the state of Maryland in size. Totally crazy.

Also, because if you have to cry you might as well also laugh...

Disaster Capitalism

This interesting Mother Jones article takes a look at how global warming is already changing the business climate, both by pushing some businesses to the brink and by creating new opportunities for others. The author also praises the 'bracing' clarity that a bottom line tends to bring to political debates:

If a firm's bottom line is going to be affected by a changing climate—say, when its supply chains dry up because of drought, or its real estate gets swamped by sea-level rise—then it doesn't particularly matter whether or not the executives want to believe in climate change. Railing at scientists for massaging tree-ring statistics won't stop the globe from warming if the globe is actually, you know, warming.

The article focuses on three fairly intuitive examples--arctic shipping, the ski industry and disaster insurance--but it seems likely that there will be others in the future.

The obvious corollary to this is that there are big investment opportunities here for climate skeptics. I mean, if you really thought that climate change is a hoax (as does Sen. Inhofe) and that everyone else is simply over-reacting, then there is clearly a lot of money to be made selling things like beachfront property or cheap storm insurance.

Building A Better City

Spring is here in DC and the city has seen fit to build a fantastic new bike path--called the Metropolitan Branch Trail--that runs about 2 miles, virtually from our house to downtown DC. It's lined with spiffy solar-powered street lights and they have grand plans to extend it all the way from Union Station to Silver Spring. The path has made my bike commute immeasurably more pleasant, not just because the trail avoids busy streets and buses and taxis, but also because it seems to have avoided all the steep hills.

I should back up. Our current house is nestled among a clutch of modest sized hills (DC is surprisingly hilly!) meaning that any reasonable path to work inevitably involved a sweaty uphill slog. (Yes, I'm lazy. But in my defense I'm usually biking before having coffee.) I even went so far as to consult topographic maps to find some sort of minimally vertical route to work, but it turned out that the optimal path actually ran right along the train tracks that snake through Northeast DC leading into Union Station. But then, cleverly, the city decided to route the new bike trail right alongside those tracks. Nice job DC!

Bike trails are one of those things that aren't super-expensive but that you can imagine stressed-out budget cutters eying skeptically. So yay for DC deciding to invest in a small thing that makes the city better, greener, safer, healthier, friendlier. (OK, obviously I'm selfishly invested in this one, but little by little the path is getting more and more use. You can see it from the metro tracks and I bet a lot of people crushed into a 9am train are thinking about buying a bike now.)

In that same vein, I should probably say something about the new gay marriage law. DC has now joined 5 states (and one Indian tribe!) in granting marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Our church scheduled its first such ceremony for the first available Sunday after the law went into effect. The two grooms in question were both pillars of the church community who had been together for three decades, and they chose a Sunday service to make it 'official.'

Church was packed and everyone was extremely psyched for the couple -- the pastor quipped that the turnout was even higher than Easter. In addition to wedding joyfulness I also remember feeling a distinct (and quite spring/Easter-like) sense of possibility. After all the struggle and frustration and gridlock of modern life, it is in fact possible for progress to happen. Usually change is so slow that it seems like it will never happen, but then all of a sudden, it is there. We can do things.

UCS on CSI

In which UCS pops up on an episode of CSI -- here's our nine (awesome) seconds of pop culture fame. You bet I'm concerned!

Crude

I just saw the new documentary, Crude, directed by Joe Berlinger about the lawsuit brought against Chevron on behalf of 30,000 indigenous Ecuadoreans over contamination from oil exploration. The film is quite good, probably the best and most accessible introduction to the issue that you will find, although I'm not sure in how many theaters it can be found.

The film focuses on the lawyers, particularly the American Stephen Donziger who has been pushing the suit for decades pro bono (although he stands to make a hefty sum if they win) and the Ecuadoreans Pablo Fajardo and Luis Yanza. Fajardo is the star, self-effacing but quietly charismatic -- he grew up impoverished in the oil fields, putting himself through law school at night to finally lead the legal team, in the process winning international environmental awards and getting profiled in glossy magazines. Donziger comes off as your stereotypical bossy American, although you have to admire the guy's tenacity and street smarts.

The filmmakers are clearly on the side of the locals, although they give Chevron plenty of space to (attempt to) defend their record and don't hesitate to question the motives and tactics of the plaintiffs. Their overall take on the situation is pretty similar to what we learned when we visited the region earlier this year, namely: Chevron is guilty as hell (although PetroEcuador is no angel either) and the prospect of a $27 billion payout has prompted them to pull every trick in the book to avoid it.

The highlight of the film are the on-site inspections of the waste oil pits performed by the court-appointed expert, which serve as a forum for the lawyers to go toe-to-toe. Fajardo presses his case amplified by testimony from a band of local residents, while Chevron is represented by a lawyer who might as well be straight from central casting. Great courtroom drama from the middle of a rainforest.

Anyway, well worth seeing. Here's the trailer.