"Some good news is that, using government-scientists’ maximum estimate of the amount of oil spilled daily (25,000 barrels) into the Gulf of Mexico from BP Deepwater, this spill today ranks as only the ninth largest accidental oil spill in world history. To become the largest accidental oil spill in world history, it would have to continue spilling unabated, at this maximum-estimated rate of spillage, for another 94 days. (Using the mid-range estimate of daily spillage – 18,500 barrels daily – BP Deepwater would have to spill unabated for another six days [as of May 29] even to break into the top ten, and then another 134 days beyond that to become the world’s largest accidental spill.) Yet how frequently is news of this fact, which gives necessary context, spread by the mainstream media?

Even better news is the declining frequency of major oil spills. Some evidence of this healthy trend is the fact that the average time that elapsed between each of history’s top ten accidental oil spills prior to BP Deepwater was 26 months. But the amount of time between the most recent of these top-ten spills (which occurred in September 1994) and the BP Deepwater spill is 187 months. How many Americans today hear of this happy trend?"

From Don Boudreaux.... Cafe Hayek.

As is common with "movements" fired up by what is apparently "common sense" and driven by collateral motives, the recycle your rubbish and your guilt trip movement is based on flawed premises.... here's the why and how. This is important in NZ because of the myriad local authorities who are increasingly spending more and more ratepayer funds on these detrimental activities - and deluding people that there are durable long term jobs in all this.

Recycling (from Library of Liberty and Economics)
by Jane S. Shaw

Recycling is the process of converting waste products into reusable materials. Recycling differs from reuse, which simply means using a product again. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), about 30 percent of U.S. solid waste (i.e., the waste that is normally handled through residential and commercial garbage-collection systems) is recycled. About 15 percent is incinerated and about 55 percent goes into landfills.

Recycling is appealing because it seems to offer a way to simultaneously reduce the amount of waste disposed in landfills and save natural resources. During the late 1980s, as environmental concerns grew, public opinion focused on recycling as a prime way to protect the environment. Governments, businesses, and the public made strenuous efforts to recycle. By 2000, the recycling rate had nearly doubled the 1990 rate of 16 percent. A big portion of the increase has been in yard trimmings and food scraps collected for composting.

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A difficulty in getting people to fully understand why apparently "obvious" and "common sense" solutions frequently fail miserably and end up imposing further costs is the failure to look beyond step one... nowhere is this more apparent than in dealing with environmental issues where people do do not ask "and then what."

By Terry L. Anderson

In the early days of the ivory trade ban in the 1980s, TIME magazine showed a picture of Kenyan government officials burning tons of ivory to demonstrate their commitment to the ban as a way of stopping elephant poaching. My 12- year-old daughter saw the picture and declared, “That’s stupid!”

At that moment I agreed with her, but, as a student of political economy and a cynic, the first of which leads to the second, I should have known that it wasn’t stupid for the bureaucrats. While touring Kenya several years later, I learned why.

The rest of the story begins...

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Prof Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek has a great series on the impact of capitalism on cleaning up the environment... here is the rationale:

Here’s how the American Heritage Science Dictionary defines “pollution”:

The contamination of air, water, or soil by substances that are harmful to living organisms. Pollution can occur naturally, for example through volcanic eruptions, or as the result of human activities, such as the spilling of oil or disposal of industrial waste.


I don’t, however, wish to argue over semantics. My “Cleaned by Capitalism” series is meant to show the countless familar devices and processes that keep us modern folk cleaner and healthier than were our pre-industrial ancestors (and, in many cases, cleaner and healthier than were our ancestors from even just a generation or two back). It’s important to reflect on these mundane, familiar things in our lives precisely because, to us, they are mundane and familiar. We forget how unusual our lives are compared to those of the vast majority of human beings who’ve ever lived — how much cleaner, healthier, less-hazardous, and more pleasant our lives are compared to theirs.

The chief reason people worry about pollution is because they fear that it will degrade their quality of life by making life more dangerous and more unpleasant. My point is that, while it’s true that industrial and commercial processes emit into the environment contaminants that are harmful, the net effect of modern industrial and commercial processes is to make our lives cleaner and healthier.

None of this is to say that we ought, therefore, ignore pollution caused by industrial and commercial processes. But it is to say that we ought to be more aware than we are of the great sanitization of our lives that capitalism and modernity have achieved lest the degree to which we hamstring these processes in an attempt to make our world cleaner makes our world less clean.

There is a good deal of worry mongering about plastic bags in N.Z. and Environment Minister Nick Smith managed to get himself in a mess over the whole business recently. The following from the NZ Herald sets the factual record straight....

"The news that South Australia is to ban plastic shopping bags in a few months will probably excite deluded Greens in New Zealand. They should get their environmental priorities right. It's a backward step.

One of Paul Keating's finest legacies was the Australian Productivity Commission. It provides state and federal Governments with impartial information on matters and stops them before being stampeded into stupidity by noisy pressure groups and political zealots.

The Productivity Commission did a fine report on Waste Management in Australia (December 2006). According to the commission the case for regulating plastic shopping bags rested on three points.

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The first round of reforms of the RMA may be thought of as so far so good.... assuming the proposals survive the drafting filter and the Select Committee process then pass into law. Good points have to be:

- cutting a bunch of duplicative processes which impose costs to no one's particular advantage relative to the objectives of the Act,

- (re) establishing an improved basis for "standing" tied to some sort of interest greater than the public at large,

- (re) establishing cost penalties for unjustified indulgence at the expense of others,

- getting a more realistic order of magnitude into sanctions and remedies for breaches.

The devil is in the detail in making these work - not least in trying to stop rent seekers using RMA based strategies to avoid competition. The tough part here is that at bottom it goes to motive - what some party is thinking or intends - the law is always stronger with evidence and logic than it is with motive.

But - best will in the world these reforms largely (competition issues aside) deal with transaction costs. The heavy lifting has yet to be done and it is there that the real gains might be made.

Here is at least part of that agenda.....

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Terry Anderson was one of the first to explicitly advocate the use of property rights to specifically improve environmental outcomes. He is always easy to read and to the point.... (pointer from David Haarmeyer)

ON TARGET
By Terry L. Anderson

It is impossible to read a newspaper or magazine, turn on the radio or television, or engage in a cocktail party conversation without the words “green” or “eco” popping up. There are green television stations, green termite killers, green cars, eco-moms, eco-fashion, eco-tours, and the list goes on. Everyone insists on being Greener Than Thou (the title of a new book by Laura Huggins and me available from the Hoover Institution Press).



The drive to be greener than others begs two questions. Why is everyone so green here and now, and what really constitutes being green?

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As the "debate" about climate change grinds boringly toward a politco religious farce screeched from the trenches of all camps against the background din of scientifc and pseudo scientific disagreement two things become clear:

1. what once might have been a rational settling of the "science" by scientists followed by a consideration of policy by policy analysts is now no longer a possibility. The process of rational analysis undertaken in a detached manner is probably no longer achievable as a means for dealing with the issue; and,


2. the ratio of noise to signal has become so great that the vast majority of those affected by any policy spawned through this inevitably appalling process have no obvious or workable way of sorting reasonable from unreasonable, denial from concession, confession from assertion, data from dross, naivety from sophistication and thus have no clear way to judge policy propositions.

Here is an alternative:

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In this column from the Pittsburgh Tribune, various intuitive misgivings about current green fads are summarised and explained in simple terms - a skill Prof Boudreaux is an expert at.

Made blue by green initiatives

By Donald J. Boudreaux
Friday, May 23, 2008

My wife, Karol, shares my deep appreciation for the creative powers of people operating in free markets as well as my skepticism of politics. She and I see very much eye to eye.

On some matters, though, we disagree -- not fundamentally, but more as a matter of emphasis or, perhaps, just taste.

Karol applauds private efforts to encourage consumers to "be green." In contrast, I wince at most of these efforts.

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Bjorn Lomborg is now well known for his detailed and penetrating research showing that many claims made by environmentalists are false, overstated and interpreted in ways which are unhelpful. At the time of the publication of his first book the Economist wrote this summary.....



Aug 2nd 2001

Environmentalists tend to believe that, ecologically speaking, things are getting worse and worse. Bjorn Lomborg, once deep green himself, argues that they are wrong in almost every particular.

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