More Environmental Economics...

Art Carden comments on discounting the future with respect to environmental and economic policy. He comes to a fairly radical conclusion:

At first glance, the goal of recycling more and conserving more seems appropriate, even desirable. As Landsburg's example shows, however, advocates of conservation do not have the information they need to make the right decision if property rights aren't clearly defined. Further, as Block's example shows, if we really are to care about future generations and sacrifice on their behalf by not discounting the future, the inevitable destruction of the Earth when the sun dies out suggests a radically different approach. If we are really as concerned about our multi-great grandchildren who will presumably inhabit the earth in several billion years, we shouldn't be worried about recycling paper. We should be worried about building Battlestar Galactica.

OK, so I didn't actually find the article all that interesting. It just gives me the excuse to make a point with respect to the whole recycling/save the forest argument. Wouldn't we have MORE trees if we used MORE paper? Think about it. Whether we like it or not, or even whether we know about it or not, most of the forest land of the US is actually used for lumber. I know, because I used to hunt such areas. The land is allowed to grow for ~20 years or so, then it is clearcut in patchwork, harvesting the trees for their wood and planting new, young trees for harvesting in ~20 years or so. You wouldn't know it to drive through, or even walk through, with all the wildlife and the natural beauty, but most forestland in the US is actually serving as "treefarms." So by reducing demand for paper, we should be reducing the value of those trees, and therefore, the acreage of land dedicated to producing lumber. In my opinion, if you want more forestland in the US, use MORE paper, not less. But that's just my opinion.

Another Take on Capitalism and the Environment

In my last "environmentalist post," I basically laid out the reason I don't believe in global warming. It was a pretty dismissive post, yes, but I simply do not believe in it. That does not mean, however, that there are no serious environmental issues out there, or that I'm a complete "pave-the-Earth-capitalist-whackjob." OK, so I am a capitalist whackjob. Which leads me to the actual content of the post.... Its easy to walk through an American city and not feel that pollution is too big a problem. As long as you are not in an industrial area, you won't really see smokestacks or the like, although you might see some litter. But for the most part, America is a pretty clean place. The cars and smog probably don't get to you all that much, and certainly there's little evidence that our lifespans are shortened by environmental insults. However, if you've ever visited a city like Beijing or Mexico city, you will see a very big difference. This from the NY Times:

Pollution has made cancer China’s leading cause of death, the Ministry of Health says. Ambient air pollution alone is blamed for hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. Nearly 500 million people lack access to safe drinking water.

My point here is not to bash China or Mexico. They have their problems; we have ours. And a further note: 500 million people is more than a third of China's population. We don't have anything near China's environmental problems. But consider this: China may be polluted, but they have also lifted more people out of poverty in a shorter period of time than any other nation in human history. And you know what? The Chinese people I know are very grateful for their new-found prosperity, even with the hefty environmental price tag. They don't like the pollution, but they didn't like being hungry either. Which brings me precisely to my point: people will begin to worry about the environment when they can worry about the environment. When people are hungry, they worry about getting enough to eat. When they are dodging bullets trying to stay alive, they worry about their safety. When they don't have anything else to worry about, they worry about things like proper gender roles and the environment. Which means they have it pretty good. America's environment, as well as the rest of the industrialized West, is relatively clean because we are relatively well off. We can afford things like catalytic converters on cars and chemical pollution scrubbers on power plants and factories. China is still trying to meet basic needs. Capitalism and economic growth is helping it do that. When basic needs are met, you can bet China will begin to clean up. Mexico City, on the other hand, will probably always be dirty so long as Mexico does not develop economically. Capitalism, free markets and economic growth are not enemies of the environment. The wealthier we become, the cleaner we can afford to make the world that we live in. But when we don't have the money to do it, we usually don't bother keeping things neat and tidy. Those are just the facts of life. And as I have said before, the more ethically we behave, the wealthier our societies become. If the environment has an economic enemy, it most assuredly must be socialism. Ask a Russian about a place called Chernobyl or the Aral Sea if you don't believe me. So, be a good moral Christian and go out there and make a few bucks! You'll be making the world a better place!

Why I Do Not Believe in Global Warming

I was going to write a post about why I do not believe in global warming. I was going to write about how I did not think the phenomenon was even physically possible. I was going to say that of the various wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation that can be absorbed by carbon dioxide, only the IR absorbance was important, and that even at the low present concentrations, these absorbances would be completely saturated. Therefore, since the atmosphere is completely opaque to these wavelengths at this point anyway, any increase in carbon dioxide, even a drastic increase, would have little to no effect on the temperature of the atmosphere. I was going to say these things, and write a really cool post about the various bond stretches, bends and rotations, and a bit about the physical phenomena of how they work, when I went online to look up the values so I could write up the post and make a few back-of-the-envelope calculations. There I found that somebody has already beaten me to it. (For a look at the physics of the process, see here.) Fantastic analysis. Probably too many big words for most folks, but very thorough and convincing nonetheless, without getting into all the overbearing and naseatingly overdone academic language that makes me want to vomit. He found exactly what I was expecting from Beer's Law: the energy absorbance would increase rapidly, then flatten out as carbon dioxide concentrations increased, and present conditions would indicate that we are already so far up the curve that the energy response is flat. So it doesn't matter how much carbon dioxide we put out there. The effect is already saturated. I would also make another note: many anti-environmentalist types like to argue that carbon dioxide is so small a fraction of the atmosphere, that doubling it would still be a tiny change in concentration so it wouldn't matter. This is actually backwards! The lower the concentration, the larger the effect that results from a change. This is one reason that gasses like methane actually would matter a lot: their present concentration is so very small, that some of that radiation can still escape without being converted to kinetic (thermal) energy. Increasing the concentration would keep some fraction of this energy from escaping. So they were really arguing for the other side, its just that neither side really understood the physical phenomenon. At any rate, eventually we would suffocate ourselves with too much carbon dioxide, but that threshold is a very long way away. We are actually quite safe. Global warming is not real folks. Let's move on to the next manufactured crisis.