Boulder’s “Climate Action Plan”: inefficient, ineffective

This was printed in the Boulder Daily Camera on Saturday, January 14, 2012.

The Boulder City Council’s website touts a “Climate Action Plan” as one of its primary goals. “The current goal is equivalent to the Kyoto Protocol target – to reduce emissions to a level seven percent below 1990 levels by 2012,” it says. With the city’s carbon tax set to end early next year, it’s worth asking: Is reducing carbon dioxide emissions the best way to respond to global warming?

Reviewing analysis by retired NCAR Senior Scientist Tom Wigley, Boulder’s University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) states that even if the “industrialized and nearly industrialized countries called upon to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the protocol … continued to abide by Kyoto’s limits” through 2100, global average temperatures would be at most 0.38 degrees Fahrenheit less than midpoint warming projections. Put in perspective, global temperatures decreased by this amount between 1900 and 1910, according to NASA.

Given this tiny effect, I’m not surprised that expert climate economists commissioned by the Copenhagen Consensus Center ranked emission reductions last among cost-effective responses to climate change. More efficient methods, listed at FixTheClimate.com, include adaptation, climate engineering, and carbon storage technologies.

With or without global warming, people — especially those in developing nations –face threats from extreme temperature, coastal flooding, hurricanes, malaria, poverty, starvation, and water stress. While global warming may increase these risks, scholars including Indur Goklany and Bjorn Lomborg convincingly argue that directly reducing these threats and promoting prosperity save more lives at lower cost than attempts involving emissions reductions.

Governments are poor stewards of forests

From New Scientist:

In the first study of its kind, Chhatre and Arun Agrawal of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor compared forest ownership with data on carbon sequestration, which is estimated from the size and number of trees in a forest. Hectare-for-hectare, they found that tropical forest under local management stored more carbon than government-owned forests. There are exceptions, says Chhatre, “but our findings show that we can increase carbon sequestration simply by transferring ownership of forests from governments to communities”.

The New Scientist article is gated, and I got the above quote from Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution. For more, see his post: The economics of local forest management (or another lesson in Elinor Ostrom).

In Reason magazine, Ronald Bailey writes:

Authors Ashwini Chhatre, a geographer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Arun Agrawal, a political scientist specializing in environmental policy at the University of Michigan, offer evidence that governments have a habit of licensing destructive logging and that they often fail to prevent resource rustling. In contrast, Chhatre and Agrawal found, forests owned by local communities are managed for the long term and store lots of carbon dioxide.

As Chhatre told New Scientist, “Our findings show that we can increase carbon sequestration simply by transferring ownership of forests from governments to communities.” Chhatre and Agrawal further suggest that locals are better at managing common pastures, coastal fisheries, and water supplies.

Read the whole article: Who owns the forests?.

Boulder “SmartRegs” a dumb idea

The Daily Camera reports:

Thousands of landlords who rent out homes in Boulder will be forced to invest a combined millions of dollars in upgrades — costs that could be passed on through higher rent — if the city approves new energy-efficiency standards.

On Thursday, the Boulder Planning Board will take up “SmartRegs,” a proposed point-based system designed to get rental properties — which make up about half of the city’s housing stock — to reduce their carbon footprint.

Read the rest of the article. The Camera published my comments on this in the April 24 edition:

“SmartRegs” is corporate welfare to finance a wasteful solution to a problem with debatable significance and causes.

“What happened to global warming?” asked a BBC headline last year. “One thing is for sure. It seems the debate about what is causing global warming is far from over,” the article concluded.

Warming aside, there are still problems to address. In “Breaking the Global Warming Gridlock,” CU Professor Roger Pielke, Jr. explains that instead of endlessly debating the science, “practical steps to reduce our vulnerability to today’s weather … would go a long way toward solving the problem of tomorrow’s climate.”

The most ethical step is to promote prosperity though economic liberty and free markets. Wealthy populations are less vulnerable to climate-related threats than poor ones.  As economist Indur Goklany observes, more people will die from hunger, unsafe drinking water, and malaria because of poverty than global warming.  In terms of human well-being, it’s better to be wealthier in a slightly warmer climate than poorer in a cooler one.

If you support actions to mitigate climate change, mandatory emissions reductions is not the best method. “Freakonomics” author Steven Levitt prefers geoengineering solutions. Unlike emission reductions, they take immediate effect. They are also reversible, and the cost is “literally thousands of times cheaper” than reducing carbon emissions, says Levitt.

Solutions promoting innovation and wealth probably offend religious strains of environmentalism as sinful hubris. After all, it celebrates human accomplishment rather than promoting self-denial, guilt for driving, and subservience to Gaia and big government.

Some useful references I either used or did not have room to mention given the word limit:

Colorado HB 1365: bad gas for Coloradans

How much would you pay for cleaner air?  Surely this depends on its current state, the proposed improvement, and if you could tell the difference. The EPA wants you to pay for cleaner air by mandating pollution limits on power plants. Colorado HB 1365 would legislate how electric utilities do it. Xcel Energy supports the bill, and estimates a 4-6 percent increase in utility bills, writes Vince Carroll in the Denver Post.

Since Coloradans have varying preferences for air quality and how much they’d pay to improve it, legislating a one-size-fits-all solution is not the best policy. As summarized in the book Free Market Environmentalism, courts heard common law nuisance cases concerning air pollution for years before the Clean Air Act. Polluters would compensate plaintiffs for demonstrated damages. Threats of costly lawsuits would encourage companies to reduce emissions.

If governments must legislate pollutants levels, they should let polluters find the most cost-effective ways to meet requirements. Otherwise, politicians will dictate political solutions that benefit their careers and favored lobbies at taxpayers’ expense.

House Bill 1365 smells like a political solution. It would require electric utilities using coal-fired power plants to submit “emission reduction plans.” The plan must give “primary consideration to replacing or repowering coal-fired electric generators with natural gas and to also consider other low-emitting resources.”

Indeed, politicians have subsidized the coal industry. But this does not justify subsidies or favors for their competitors. Instead, removing existing subsidies and let energy producers compete on their own merits.

This commentary was published in the Daily Camera (Boulder) on April 10, 2010.

The link to the Free Market Environmentalism book is to Google Books.  Most of the chapters are there, but the one on pollution , Chapter 10, is not.  Relevant references in the chapter include: Bruce Yandle, Bootleggers, Baptists, and Global Warming.  Check out his author page at the Property and Environment Research Center for more articles on common law and environmental issues. Also check out Indur Goklany’s work on air pollution and the Clean Air Act.

RTD’s “FasTracks” on the wrong track

The Daily Camera (Boulder) asked its Editorial Advisory Board members their views of different sales tax schemes for funding RTD’s “FasTracks.” My reply was published on Saturday, February 13:

Adaptable commuter transit routes, reducing traffic congestion with demand-sensitive road pricing, and minimizing both free-riders and forced funding. These goals should guide transportation policy. Taxing everyone to fund static commuter rail puts FasTracks on the wrong track.

RTD’s low-ball cost estimate is not surprising. In “16 Ways RTD Deceived Voters About FasTracks” economist Randal O’Toole notes that Southwest and Southeast light-rail lines costs 28% and 59% more than original estimates, respectively.

The controversy should not stop here, however. O’Toole shows how RTD has sold FasTracks with false advertising.

If FasTracks reduces traffic congestion, it would be negligible and short-lived given increasing vehicle traffic. It won’t reduce pollution, either. Denver’s light-rail trains emit more carbon dioxide per passenger mile than SUVs. “FasTracks adds almost six times as much nitrogen oxides into the air as all the cars it takes off the road,” O’Toole concludes.

The proposed Northwest rail corridor between Longmont, Boulder and Denver compares poorly to bus rapid transit. O’Toole summarizes RTD’s investment study: “Bus rapid transit was ten times more cost-effective at relieving congestion than commuter rail: it cost less than 60 percent as much to build, cost half as much to operate, and provided almost six times as much congestion relief.”

Bus rapid transit is just one alternative O’Toole discusses in his on-line “Mobility Plan for Denver” and new book Gridlock. Adding express toll lanes, coordinating traffic signals, and lifting restrictions on private transit services can also reduce traffic congestion and increase our mobility.

Proposed Boulder plastic bag ban: authoritarian environmentalism that suffocates freedom & creativity

Background from Daily Camera:

Shopping in Boulder could get greener if some local students have their way. Inspired in part by a ban that passed in San Francisco in 2007, New Vista High and University of Colorado students are drafting an ordinance that would prohibit businesses — such as grocery stores — from using petroleum-based plastic bags. What do you think of the students’ idea?

My response, published in the January 16 edition:

If plastic bags are banned, would stores provide paper bags instead? This wouldn’t be “green.”  The Washington Post reports that compared to plastic bags, paper bags require “more than four times as much energy to manufacture,” generate “70 percent more air and 50 times more water pollutants,” and require 85 times more energy per pound to recycle.  In landfills, “plastic bags … take up so much less volume than paper bags,” says archeologist and landfill excavator William Rathje.

Or how about reusable canvas bags?  I use one from Vitamin Cottage, but should I?  Canada’s National Post reported that “two independent laboratories found unacceptably high levels of bacterial, yeast, mold and coliform counts in the reusable bags.” A nice “environment” for groceries. In addition to food poisoning, “significant risks include skin infections such as bacterial boils.”  Don’t forget, washing these bags consumes energy and resources.

And what about poor people?  No more free trash bags. Their grocery bills will go up, as stores will raise prices to cover costs of buying pricey paper bags. Those who use fabric bags would also spend more on laundry to keep them sanitary.

Most fundamentally, banning plastic bags is an intolerant strain of authoritarian environmentalism. It violates the rights of consumers and business owners to live as they please.

The students should promote creative voluntary ways to reuse plastic bags.  For example, as a college freshman in 2001, Tom Szaky founded TerraCycle, Inc. Its slogan: “Send us your trash! We’ll make it into cool products!”

* * *

Not included in the article:

TerraCycle’s totebag made from Target shopping bags.

Should we be forced to fund the “bag police” to stake out grocery stores to make sure they are not (gasp) giving away plastic bags? It would OK to sell them, though.

Other resources: