Quotulatiousness

September 17, 2019

“Clean” alternative energy sources are not free … in fact, they’re quite expensive

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Earlier this month in Foreign Policy, Jason Hickel wrote about the requirements for expanding current renewable energy generation (wind and solar):

The phrase “clean energy” normally conjures up happy, innocent images of warm sunshine and fresh wind. But while sunshine and wind is obviously clean, the infrastructure we need to capture it is not. Far from it. The transition to renewables is going to require a dramatic increase in the extraction of metals and rare-earth minerals, with real ecological and social costs.

We need a rapid transition to renewables, yes — but scientists warn that we can’t keep growing energy use at existing rates. No energy is innocent. The only truly clean energy is less energy.

In 2017, the World Bank released a little-noticed report that offered the first comprehensive look at this question. It models the increase in material extraction that would be required to build enough solar and wind utilities to produce an annual output of about 7 terawatts of electricity by 2050. That’s enough to power roughly half of the global economy. By doubling the World Bank figures, we can estimate what it will take to get all the way to zero emissions — and the results are staggering: 34 million metric tons of copper, 40 million tons of lead, 50 million tons of zinc, 162 million tons of aluminum, and no less than 4.8 billion tons of iron.

In some cases, the transition to renewables will require a massive increase over existing levels of extraction. For neodymium — an essential element in wind turbines — extraction will need to rise by nearly 35 percent over current levels. Higher-end estimates reported by the World Bank suggest it could double.

The same is true of silver, which is critical to solar panels. Silver extraction will go up 38 percent and perhaps as much as 105 percent. Demand for indium, also essential to solar technology, will more than triple and could end up skyrocketing by 920 percent.

And then there are all the batteries we’re going to need for power storage. To keep energy flowing when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing will require enormous batteries at the grid level. This means 40 million tons of lithium — an eye-watering 2,700 percent increase over current levels of extraction.

That’s just for electricity. We also need to think about vehicles. This year, a group of leading British scientists submitted a letter to the U.K. Committee on Climate Change outlining their concerns about the ecological impact of electric cars. They agree, of course, that we need to end the sale and use of combustion engines. But they pointed out that unless consumption habits change, replacing the world’s projected fleet of 2 billion vehicles is going to require an explosive increase in mining: Global annual extraction of neodymium and dysprosium will go up by another 70 percent, annual extraction of copper will need to more than double, and cobalt will need to increase by a factor of almost four — all for the entire period from now to 2050.

Wind turbines require a lot of concrete to stabilize them on site (hundreds of tons of it), and that concrete is very carbon-intensive to create in the first place (nearly 930 Kg of CO2 per 1,000 Kg of cement), but even those huge turbine blades have a limited working lifespan and can’t be easily recycled into anything economically, so they generally end up in landfills.

August 26, 2019

Australian fertilizer run-off and the (remains of the) Great Barrier Reef

Filed under: Australia, Environment, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Great Barrier Reef used to be one of the natural wonders of the world, but as we were told about ten years ago, unless Australians gave up fossil fuels (or was it electricity?), the reef had bare months to survive. As we’re years past that inflexible deadline, we have to assume that the reef is now dead, dead, dead. Yet there are apparently still state or federal regulations in place to protect the (former) reef that Australian farmers are struggling against:

Great Barrier Reef by James_W_Thompson
“IMG_5035-1” by James_W_Thompson is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Our man in Tolga (north Queensland) has written to the local press on the absurd green tape tying up farmers.

QUOTE
The ever-tightening regulatory stranglehold on farmers by governments “for the health of the Reef” (The Express, 21/8) is based on what Professor Peter Ridd has called “faulty science”.

Fertilisers are expensive and they aren’t used wastefully. They’re plant food; if the crops don’t consume them then the neighbouring vegetation, on land or in waterways, will – long before they get to the Reef.

If fertilisers were running off farms there’d be big green plumes leading downhill from them, easily visible on Google Earth. There aren’t. Likewise with herbicides and pesticides, there’d be big plumes of dead flora or fauna visible to drones. Again; there aren’t. It may have happened in the past, but these aren’t current problems.

Terrestrial silt run-off is a different matter to fertilisers and herbicides/pesticides. It has been pluming out from rivers since time began. The coastal reefs have always experienced it.

Just 15,000 years ago during the last ice-age the seas were 120 metres lower, the Reef’s current site was a coastal plain, and the Reef clung to the edge of the continental shelf. Everything that came out of the rivers washed over the whole Reef. And, yes, there was a lot of silt during the ice-age. CO2 was much lower due to the cooler seas (Henry’s Law), so plants were sparser. It was colder and drier so there was less rain to water what plants there were.

Aboriginal tribes were doing it tough, so they used firestick farming to get what small game there was. That left a lot of bare earth which blew as dust into valleys and was washed out to sea when the rains did come.

But it’s different now. Much of the main Reef area is 40 to 70 kilometres out to sea, and as Professor Ridd said, the prevailing south-easterly wind and currents keep terrestrial run-off much closer to shore. Professor Ridd also notes that more clean ocean water flows through the Reef each day than flows from our rivers each year.

Nonetheless, the mud-meme is being heavily promoted at present; “Earlier this year, a muddy plume of polluted water hit our Reef. It was so big you could see it from space.” Search the internet for “Muddy plume extends to Great Barrier Reef images from space” and there’s several alarmist websites (including “our” ABC) showing just one obviously-modified image.

July 16, 2019

Bitcoin mining’s massive carbon buttprint

Filed under: China, Economics, Environment, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Lincoln Swann explains why Bitcoin has become a huge environmental liability as its per-unit cost-to-mine has risen:

Bitcoin is more than a rather volatile imitation currency, it is also a huge energy monster.

The digital “mining” to create more Bitcoins and the recording of transactions uses up vast, crazy, amounts of electricity – something like 70TWh a year. That is about the same as Austria, say 20% of UK power consumption. As an added horror much if it is done in China where most of the power is coal generated.

All that adds up to a CO2 output from Bitcoin stuff of about 35mt a year. Planet friendly it definitely aint.

June 8, 2019

The sad economics of recycling

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Law, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Kim du Toit on the actual economic value of most recycling efforts:

Turns out that aluminum cans are actually worth recycling — in that they are 100% recyclable (requiring nothing other than melting and reformulating) and it costs less — much less — to recycle than to produce new aluminum.

That’s almost true of newsprint too, except that while pulping it is fine — hardly any energy is used for that — the pulp also has to be bleached, and in the pulping / bleaching process, about 15% of the original paper is lost. And as raw paper production (i.e. from logged wood) has become more efficient over the years, and as trees can be grown to replace those felled, the only real benefit from recycling paper is that overall paper production is less vulnerable to hiccups in supply of fresh wood — such as caused by forest fires, disease and drought.

And, he added, when it comes to recycling other stuff, glass is little better than plastic — which surprised me, but it actually costs much more to recycle glass than simply to produce it new. And the old “plastic into park benches” spiel is likewise stupid, because it costs so much to produce such stuff, and creates so much atmospheric pollution thereby, that it’s easier just to toss plastic into a properly-lined landfill and let nature take its course.

Knowing all that, I’ve always been skeptical of the benefits of recycling — it’s always been about feeewings rather than utility

May 13, 2019

QotD: The Church of Environmentalism

Filed under: Environment, Humour, Politics, Quotations, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Julian Simon, the economist who was legendarily skeptical about environmental doom, once posed a question at an environmental forum: “How many people here believe that the earth is increasingly polluted and that our natural resources are being exhausted?” Almost every hand shot up. He then said, “Is there any evidence that could dissuade you?” There was no response, so he asked again, “Is there any evidence I could give you — anything at all — that would lead you to reconsider these assumptions?” Again, no response. Simon concluded, “Well, excuse me. I’m not dressed for church.”

Jeremy Carl, “The Church of Environmentalism”, Claremont Review of Books, 2016-02-25.

April 29, 2019

Banning single-use plastics won’t make much (if any) difference

Filed under: China, Environment, India, Pacific — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

My local high school is suddenly all about the proposed ban on single-use plastics — where student-made posters used to proclaim their dedication to gender equality, they’re now all about the evils of plastics. It’s almost like it’s a co-ordinated campaign that originated somewhere else…

But despite the students’ new-found environmental awareness, the ban they favour would make little or no difference to plastic items ending up in the oceans, because the vast majority of the plastic there comes from only ten rivers, none of them in North America (this is from a World Economic Forum report). Jason Unrau reports on his trip up the Yangtze River in China twenty years ago that illustrates the breadth of the problem:

Beginning in Shanghai in the summer of 1999, I boarded a large flat-bottom boat with around 300 other passengers. It would be the first of about a dozen different vessels, that over two weeks ferried me 2500 kilometres to Chongqing.

After taking my first meal in the ferry’s mess hall, served in a Styrofoam box, I searched everywhere for a garbage can. There were none – passengers simply tossed their garbage overboard and without an alternative, I joined in the littering.

The banks of the Yangtze are home to more than 200 million Chinese who treat the waterway as commuter corridor and as I soon discovered, a dump. I took the trip to get a glimpse the fabled Three Gorges, before a hydro-electric project and dam would change the watershed forever. As my trip progressed, however, so did my treatment of this historic river as trash receptacle.

The closer I got to Chongqing, the narrower the river became and the smaller the ferries got. About 10 days into the trip, I exited the dining hall of a different vessel to engage in the daily ritual of reckless Styrofoam abandonment, but to my surprise there was a garbage bin.

Delighted at the prospect that my littering ways on the Yangtze were through, enthusiastically I added my box to a near overflowing bin. As if on cue a kitchenhand exited the dining hall, gathered up the bag and heaved the entire thing overboard.

Like I experienced and begrudgingly participated in creating, the World Economic Forum’s report describes “rivers of plastic” – its analyses of respective outputs and comparisons to garbage island and other samples, could be traced back to their source.

According to the economic forum eight of these rivers are in Asia: the Yangtze; Indus; Yellow; Hai He; Ganges; Pearl; Amur; Mekong; and two in Africa – the Nile and the Niger.

April 3, 2019

QotD: Veganism has its drawbacks

Filed under: Environment, Food, Health, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Evangelical vegans will tell you that following a purely ‘plant-based’ diet is not only morally commendable, it’s also much better for your health. But if my experience is anything to go by, the opposite is true.

I felt absolutely fine for the first few days. I didn’t miss meat at all, certainly not in terms of taste or flavour. The only thing I really felt an absence of was eggs. Since I embarked on my mammoth weight-loss project, eggs have become a dietary staple for me: nothing fills me up as well or gives me quite as much long-lasting energy as an egg.

I also found I had to eat larger portions to feel full — and I felt hungry again after a shorter period of time. But even that didn’t bother me, since what I was eating was so wholesome.

No, the real issue became apparent after the third or fourth day. Not to put too fine a point on it: wind.

My stomach was, quite literally, in ferment. All those legumes and pulses and generalised vegetable matter appeared to have turned into a giant internal compost heap. It wasn’t too bad in the mornings; but by early afternoon I was like a cow who had overdosed on clover.

At first, I palmed the outcome off on our three dogs. But after a while the problem became so severe that even they could not be expected to account for the frequency and potency of aromas emerging from my lower digestive tract.

One of the key arguments of vegans against livestock farming is the harm animals cause to the planet through the amount of methane they produce; if my experience was anything to go by, a vegan human is capable of producing just as much, if not more. I was a one-woman global warming hazard.

My children, of course, thought it was hilarious. But from my point of view, it was not only unpleasant and occasionally embarrassing, it was also incredibly uncomfortable. I felt bloated, soggy and sluggish, and began to dread meal times.

Following the advice of the nutritionist, I took to soaking nuts, oats and seeds overnight. But it made no difference. If anything, the problem began to get worse. The more healthy vegan food I put into my body, the worse my stomach problems became.

As for the much-vaunted ‘vegan glow’, no sign. Instead, my skin felt dry and dehydrated, and there was a distinctly greyish tinge to my complexion. But still, I persisted.

Sarah Vine, “Going vegan sent me off my trolley! Exhausted, irritable and don’t even start of the tummy troubles – SARAH VINE’s bid to join the health revolution left her VERY green around the gills”, Daily Mail, 2019-02-22.

November 27, 2018

Cutting back on ethanol makes financial and environmental sense

Craig Eyermann explains why President Trump’s push to expand the use of ethanol in cars is a bad call for many reasons:

For example, because ethanol packs less energy per gallon than gasoline does, vehicle owners can expect to get even lower fuel mileage from the expansion of E15 fuel (a blend of 15% ethanol with 85% gasoline) under the new mandate to include more ethanol in automotive fuels, which would be 4% to 5% less than they would achieve if they only filled their vehicles with 100% gasoline. Today’s vehicle owners already pay a fuel efficiency penalty of 3% to 4% lower gas mileage from the E10 ethanol-gasoline fuel blend mandated under the older ethanol content rules, where the new rules will require even more fill-ups.

Beyond that, to the extent that it diverts corn from food markets to fuel production, corn-based ethanol production also jacks up the price of food—the corn itself, plus everything that eats corn, like beef cattle. One review of multiple studies found that the U.S. government’s corn-based ethanol mandates added 14% to the cost of agricultural commodity prices from 2005 through 2015.

Last summer, the Environmental Protection Agency also found that burning increasing amounts of ethanol has made America’s air dirtier because it generates more ozone pollution, which contributes to smog formation. Worse, growing the additional corn to make more ethanol has also increased agricultural fertilizer runoff pollution in the nation’s rivers and waterways.

That runoff has been linked to the increased incidence of harmful algal blooms, which have been responsible for contaminating drinking water and contributing to red tide events in coastal regions, where fish and other aquatic organisms have been killed off.

There is a solution to these federal government-generated pollution problems: stop forcing corn-based ethanol to be used in the nation’s fuel supplies. There’s even a case study from Brazil, where the city of Sao Paulo found that its air became cleaner after it switched from ethanol-based fuels to gasoline in the years from 2009 to 2011.

October 13, 2018

It’s always TEOTWAWKI, and the demands are always the same

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sean Gabb on the message and tactics of the alarmists — whose chosen fixation shifts over time, but whose demands are always the same:

Once you cut through their verbiage, the enemies of bourgeois civilisation have two demands. These are:

  1. Put me and my friends in charge of preferably a one-world government with total power over life and property; or, until then, or failing that,
  2. Give us a lot of money.

When I was younger, the occasion for making these demands was something to do with poverty or economic instability, and the alleged need was for a bigger welfare state, or state ownership of the means of production, or playing about with money to “move the aggregate demand curve to the right.” The nice thing about these claims and their alleged solutions was that they all had to be debated within the subject area of Economics. Because most of us knew a lot about Economics, we could always win the debates.

By the end of the 1980s, winning was so easy, the debates had become boring. Since then, the alleged need has shifted to saving the planet from some environmental catastrophe. The resulting debates are now harder to win because most of us are not that learned in the relevant sciences. Though I am more than competent in Economics, my main expertise is in Ancient History and the Classical Languages. Much the same is true for most of my friends.

Take, for example, the latest occasion for making the two demands stated above. This is that the sea is filling up with waste plastic, and that this looks horrid, and is being eaten by the creatures who live in the sea, and that they are all at risk of dying – and that this will be a terrible thing of all of us. For the solution, see Annie Leonard, writing in The Guardian: “Recycling alone will never stem the flow of plastics into our ocean. We must address the problem at the source.” You can take her last sentence as shorthand for the usual demands.

What response have I to this? Not much directly. Give me half an hour, and I will explain with practised ease that the Phillips Curve is at best a loose correlation between past variables, and that there is no stable trade-off between unemployment and inflation. But search me how most plastics are made, how long they take to degrade, or what harm they do if eaten.

A short search on the Web has brought up some useful information. There is, for example, an essay by Kip Hansen, published in 2015 – “An Ocean of Plastic.” He says, among much else:

  • That the Great Garbage Patch said to be floating about the Pacific is a myth, and that the main alleged photographs of it were taken in Manila Bay after a storm had washed the rubbish out of the streets;
  • That the amount of plastic waste floating in the sea is very small per cubic metre of water, and that it is invisible to the uninformed eye in the places where this Garbage Patch is said to be floating;
  • That plastic waste quickly breaks down into tiny chunks that are then eaten by bacteria, who are not harmed by it;
  • That larger chunks eaten by fish and birds are easily handled by digestive systems that have evolved over many ages to cope with much worse than the occasional lump of polystyrene foam.

His conclusion:

    The “floating rafts of plastic garbage”-version of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a pernicious myth that needs to be dispelled at every opportunity.

August 7, 2018

Grasping at straws to virtue signal

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Government, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Richard Morrison points out just how banning plastic straws will not do anything meaningful to save the environment, but will definitely have a negative impact on consumers:

Of all the consumer products one might have expected to become a flashpoint for political controversy, the humble plastic drinking straw is an unlikely contender. Leap into the headlines it has, though, with communities like Seattle and San Francisco recently enacting bans on disposable straws. The city council of Santa Barbara, California, initially voted for a ban that would have punished restaurant workers with up to six months of jail time for giving out a disposable plastic straw, but city officials agreed to revisit the ordinance when it appeared to also ban the sale of straws at supermarkets.

[…] the case against the plastic straw is exceedingly weak. There aren’t as many plastic straws thrown away as claimed, and only a tiny portion of U.S. straws end up anywhere near the oceans — the vast majority of municipal solid waste in this country ends up either buried in landfills, recycled, or burned up in incinerators, far from any congested sea turtles.

The vast majority of plastic waste in oceans actually comes not from advanced countries like the U.S. but from countries like China and Indonesia that consume a large volume of plastic products but lack our modern waste collection infrastructure. Much of their plastic waste ends up washed into major river systems that empty into the oceans. A study published last year in the journal Environment Science & Technology by three German researchers found that 90 percent of the plastic debris found in the world’s oceans is dumped there by just ten of the world’s rivers — none of which are in the Western Hemisphere, much less the United States.

Beside the fact that U.S. consumers are contributing very little to the ostensible problem is the other side of the equation: the benefits of the straws themselves. I suspect many Americans who were initially receptive to the idea of a ban were genuinely surprised to learn that disposable drinking straws are very important to people with certain disabilities. British disability rights activist Penny Pepper recently commented in the Guardian about how she depends on plastic straws — and other single-use, disposable products like baby wipes — writing “I don’t have the luxury of a plastic-free life.” The durability, convenience, cleanliness, low price, and resistance to heat of disposable plastic straws make them irreplaceable to people with many different physical limitations.

Vancouver, as any Canadian would have guessed, was the first Canadian city to pick up on this particular variant of virtue signalling.

May 20, 2018

Vancouver is the latest jurisdiction to fall for bogus statistics originated by a 9-year-old

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Christian Britschgi at the Reason Hit & Run blog:

Plastic straw bans — much like the waste they target — are spreading across the globe, polluting city councils and national parliaments alike with environmentalist movement’s good intentions and undegradable bogus statistics.

The latest to fall is the Canadian city of Vancouver, which this week passed a prohibition on single-use plastic straws, as well as on foam cups and containers. The new law will forbid licensed food servers from giving away these items starting June 1, 2019.

The politicians who passed the latest straw ban are pretty pleased with their planet-saving efforts.

“This is a really important step forward to demonstrate how serious we are in phasing out plastics and making sure we are working aggressively towards zero waste,” said Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson in reference to the city’s goal of eliminating waste and litter by 2040.

Other stakeholders were less than celebratory about the new ban.

“The stifling effect of this ban on innovation is very serious,” Joe Hruska of the Canadian Plastic Industry Association announced in a press release. “This ban will do nothing to reduce the amount of material going to landfill or solve the public bin recycling and litter issues.”

[…]

In justifying Vancouver’s straw ban, city officials relied on the same discredited figures used to push similar prohibitions in the United States. The city’s “Single-Use Item Reduction Strategy” states that Canadians collectively throw away 57 million straws a day. A footnote explains that this number is based on the 500 million straws a day Americans use, adjusted for Canada’s population. The footnote provides a link to the recycling company Eco-Cycle, which has popularized this figure.

As Reason reported in January, Eco-Cycle itself got the 500 million straws a day figure from 9-year-old Milo Cress, who surveyed three straw manufacturers to get their estimations of the size of the straw market. Market analysts put daily straw usage in the United States closer to 175 million.

Assuming the same per capita consumption north of the border, that would mean that Canadians toss about 19 million straws a day.

Environmentalists might still find that figure too high, given how much plastic is dumped into the ocean each year. Still, it is worth noting that the vast majority of plastic waste getting into the world’s waterways is not coming from rich countries with well-developed waste control systems. It comes instead from the world’s poor, coastal countries. According to a 2015 study published in the journal Science, anywhere from 4.8 million to 12.7 million tons of plastic entered the ocean in 2010. China was the largest polluter, responsible for about 28 percent of all that waste. The United States was a distant 20th, responsible for about 1 percent of plastic marine debris in 2010. Canada, according to the study’s dataset, ranks 112th, sending about .02 percent of global marine debris into the ocean.

March 13, 2018

The economic argument for carbon taxes

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Tim Worstall explains what a carbon tax is supposed to do, as opposed to what many environmental activists want it to do:

The essential economic analysis is that carbon emissions are an “externality.” There are costs to third parties of the freely chosen activities of consenting adults. If there aren’t such third party costs then the adults get to consent – as long as your bedroom contains only those freely consenting adults then what goes on there is up to you. But if there are those third party costs – say, the noise from the enjoyments causes lost sleep among the neighbours – then some societal power to force an adjustment seems reasonable enough.

Again, economics analyses here by suggesting that we’ll get too much, or too many, of those third party costs if people aren’t paying for them. If we’ve not got to pay to soundproof the orgy then we’ll have more orgies than if we do. It’s fair that we insist upon such soundproofing perhaps. But sometimes we cannot insist upon such direct actions – then we’ve got to try and change the price system. Which is what the carbon tax does.

There are benefits to using fossil fuels – transport, heat, cooking and so on. Given current technological levels immediate banning would mean billions die – commonly thought to be a Bad Thing. But there are those costs imposed upon others as well in the climate change the emissions cause. The answer is that we look to that greatest good of the greatest number, the utilitarian answer. Where emissions produce more value than the damage they cause – including over time – then we want them to continue. Where they don’t then we want them to stop. That way we get the maximum possible value being created and thus all humans – over time – are as rich as we can be given current technologies.

Calculating what this number is, this tax rate, is also known as determining the social cost of carbon emissions. The Stern Review may or may not have exactly the right number but it’s a good enough starting point, $80 per tonne CO2. Say 50 cents or so per gallon of gas. Slap that tax on and we’ve corrected the price system. People who use gas are now paying the environmental costs of their use. So, anything they use it for must create greater value than the damage being caused. We’re copacetic at this point, we’ve the optimal level of emissions.

Note that this logic still works whatever you think of the rate. 1 cent or $100 a gallon, the logic is still the same, we’re only arguing over what is that social cost of carbon. Stick a tax on of whatever it is and we’re done.

Even if climate change isn’t a problem, or isn’t happening, we do still need some tax revenues somewhere. It’s also better to tax consumption than incomes or capital, better to tax things inelastic in demand with respect to price than those elastic. Fossil fuel consumption taxation is a consumption tax and the demand for fossil fuels is, in the short to medium term at least, inelastic. We’re fine with fuel taxation therefore.

For a quick backgrounder on the concept of externalities, MR University did a video on this a few years back. For reasons to worry that your government might not be quite as revenue-neutral in imposing a Pigouvian tax, Warren Meyer also has doubts.

December 7, 2017

Lawrence Solomon makes his pitch for “most hated by the bike mafia”

Filed under: Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

This was published last week, but I didn’t see it until it was linked from Instapundit:

Today the bicycle is a mixed bag, usually with more negatives than positives. In many cities, bike lanes now consume more road space than they free up, they add to pollution as well as reducing it, they hurt neighbourhoods and business districts alike, and they have become a drain on the public purse. The bicycle today — or rather the infrastructure that now supports it — exemplifies “inappropriate technology,” a good idea gone wrong through unsustainable, willy-nilly top-down planning.

London, where former mayor Boris Johnston began a “cycling revolution,” shows where the road to ruin can lead. Although criticism of biking remains largely taboo among the city’s elite, a bike backlash is underway, with many blaming the city’s worsening congestion on the proliferation of bike lanes. While bikes have the luxury of zipping through traffic using dedicated lanes that are vastly underused most of the day — these include what Transport for London (TfL) calls “cycle superhighways” — cars have been squeezed into narrowed spaces that slow traffic to a crawl.

As a City of London report acknowledged last year, “The most significant impact on the City’s road network in the last 12 months has been the construction and subsequent operation of TfL’s cycle super highway … areas of traffic congestion can frequently be found on those roads.” As Lord Nigel Lawson put it in a parliamentary debate on bicycles, cycle lanes have done more damage to London than “almost anything since the Blitz.”

As a consequence of the idling traffic, pollution levels have risen, contributing to what is now deemed a toxic stew. Ironically, cyclists are especially harmed, and not just because the bike lanes they speed upon are adjacent to tailpipes. According to a study by the London School of Medicine, cyclists have 2.3 times more inhaled soot than walkers because “cyclists breathe more deeply and at a quicker rate than pedestrians while in closer proximity to exhaust fumes … Our data strongly suggest that personal exposure to black carbon should be considered when planning cycling routes.” Cyclists have begun wearing facemasks as a consequence. A recent headline in The Independent helpfully featured “5 best anti-pollution masks for cycling.” Neighbourhoods endure extra pollution, too, with frustrated autos cutting through residential districts to avoid bike-bred congestion.

Health and safety costs aside — per kilometre travelled, cyclist fatalities are eight times that of motorists — the direct economic burden associated with cycling megaprojects is staggering. Paris, which boasts of its plan to become the “cycling capital of the world,” is in the midst of a 150-million-euro cycling scheme. Melbourne has a $100-million plan. Amsterdam — a flat, compact city well suited to cycling — is spending 120 million euros on 9,000 new bicycle parking spots alone. Where cold weather reigns for much of the year, as is the case in many of Canada’s cities, the cost-benefit case for cycling infrastructure is eviscerated further.

An answer might be dedicated bicycle-only routes, but the usual problem arises: the cost of the land necessary to build and maintain the routes will almost always be far higher than municipalities can afford to pay, and the benefits accrue more to upper-income users while the costs fall on the whole population. That’s just what we need: another way to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich.

March 18, 2017

Don’t just “fix” CAFE … eliminate it

Filed under: Business, Environment, Government, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Virginia Postrel on the best idea for fixing the Corporate Average Fuel Economy regulations:

Although Congress originally established the Corporate Average Fuel Economy, or CAFE, standards to conserve gasoline in 1975, the Obama administration justified its sharp hike as a way to curb greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. A reversal will almost certainly trigger legal challenges.

Fighting over the right level for fuel-economy mandates obscures the fundamental problem, however. The CAFE standards are lousy environmental policy. Instead of targeting the real issue — burning less gasoline — the mandates meddle in corporate strategy, impose enormous hidden costs, and encourage drivers to hang on to their old gas guzzlers. Republicans should scrap the standards altogether while they control the White House and Congress. The CAFE rules are a terrible way to achieve either fuel savings or lower carbon emissions.

For starters, measuring miles per gallon is a misleading way to think about fuel efficiency. What we need is the reverse: gallons per mile. That more clearly shows how much fuel a given improvement might save. Going from 3.3 gallons per 100 miles (better known as 30 mpg) to 2 gallons per 100 miles (50 mpg) presents a much tougher design challenge than getting from 6.7 gallons per 100 miles (15 mpg) to 4 gallons per 100 miles (25 mpg). Yet the more modest improvement saves more than twice as much gasoline. And that’s without considering the relative popularity of gas guzzlers or how better gas mileage can encourage people to drive more.

And, of course, CAFE standards affect only new vehicles, a tiny percentage of the total. Higher mandates don’t get old ones off the road and, in fact, they may very likely keep gas guzzlers driving longer. Research by economists Mark Jacobsen of the University of California-San Diego and Arthur van Benthem at the Wharton School finds that among vehicles more than nine years old, the least fuel-efficient ones stay on the road the longest. By raising the prices of new vehicles, tighter fuel regulations encourage drivers to buy used ones or simply keep what they already have.

March 5, 2017

The political Trojan Horse of “Pigouvian taxes”

Filed under: Business, Economics, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Warren Meyer used to be quite positive about the introduction of Pigouvian taxes, but recently his opinion has changed:

Here is the Wikipedia definition of a Pigovian tax:

    A Pigovian tax (also spelled Pigouvian tax) is a tax levied on any market activity that generates negative externalities (costs not internalized in the market price). The tax is intended to correct an inefficient market outcome, and does so by being set equal to the social cost of the negative externalities. In the presence of negative externalities, the social cost of a market activity is not covered by the private cost of the activity. In such a case, the market outcome is not efficient and may lead to over-consumption of the product. An often-cited example of such an externality is environmental pollution.

The Left often tries to justify new taxes based on their being Pigovian taxes. The classic example is a carbon tax — it is claimed there is a social cost to carbon-based fuel combustion (e.g. CO2 production and resulting global warming) that is not taken into account by market prices. By adding the tax, these other costs can be taken into account, likely raising the price of these fuels and thus both reducing their use and providing a higher price umbrella for alternatives.

For years, I accepted these arguments at face value. I might argue with them (for example, I think that the Left has tended to spot 10 of the last 2 true negative externalities), but I accepted that they really believed in the logic of the Pigovian tax. I am now becoming convinced that I was wrong, that the Left’s support of Pigovian taxes is frequently a front, a way of putting a more palatable face on what is really a naked grab for more taxpayer money by public officials.

Soon after discovering the concept of Pigouvian taxes, I suspected that — even if the economics were sound — no human government was going to implement such a tax in the pure form: there would always be “good reasons” to make the new tax non-revenue-neutral, because once a revenue stream has been established, it’s unlikely the government will actually shut it down afterwards. I have yet to be disappointed in this expectation.

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