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Environment

Vilsack, for reals this time

by Jacob Grier on December 16, 2008

On November 13 I lamented speculation that Obama would name corn-loving former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack as Secretary of Agriculture. On November 25 I mentioned that Vilsack said no, actually, that’s not going to happen. So for the sake of completeness, here’s today’s news:

President-elect Barack Obama, a backer of tighter farm subsidy rules and new-generation biofuels, selected Tom Vilsack from the major U.S. farm state of Iowa to be agriculture secretary, said a Democratic official on Tuesday.

I guess we can take comfort in the fact that subsidies will only go to “new-generation biofuels,” which won’t be wasteful and counterproductive like the old-generation biofuels of, say, right now.

[Via Maureen Ogle.]

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And out of hope, cynicism

by Jacob Grier on November 13, 2008

Ezra Klein notes disapprovingly that Obama will likely appoint former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack to Agriculture Secretary:

If the Department of Agriculture sees large farmers and farm producing states (like Iowa), rather than individual eaters, as their primary constituency, then we’ll have a farm policy geared towards those interests. But eaters have interests here too, as do taxpayers, and parents, and energy advocates, and the public health community. They, however, are not well represented in Iowa politics. The fact that Obama is already signaling that his chief agricultural appointment will hail from the land of corn, and whose agricultural experience will mainly have been keeping powerful corn interests happy with him, is not a good sign. Vilsack could surprise, of course. But the indication here is that Obama will not upend the ag subsidy apple cart.

This is not surprising. All you had to do was look at Obama’s consistent support for subsidies, his campaigning in the Midwest, or the prominent New York Times article discussing his advisors’ ties to the ethanol industry to know that his mantra of change is not going to extend to our wasteful agricultural policies. Klein, to his credit, was not unaware of this, though he hoped for better once the pressures of the election were removed. But why? The fact that Obama reads Michael Pollan and buys arugula at Whole Foods doesn’t mean he’s going to pursue the kinds of policies preferred by people who also read Michael Pollan and buy arugula at Whole Foods.

If Vilsack is indeed the nominee, that doesn’t bode well for Obama’s willingness to challenge conventional politics. A week after the election we’ve already seen signs of continued subsidies to corn growers, support for corporate welfare for automakers, and a more conservative approach to halting intelligence and civil liberties abuses than many were hoping for. I never had high hopes for Obama, but even I’m surprised at how quickly he’s managing to show that, however inspiring he may be, he’s still just another damn politician.

That said, I’ll forgive the rocky start if he throws us civil libertarians a big bone to chew on sometime soon.

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Taking the LEED on smoking bans

by Jacob Grier on October 14, 2008

My apartment hunt in downtown Portland yesterday brought unexpected frustration. As I strolled among modern high-rises with big balconies, surrounded by restaurants and coffee shops and independent specialty stores, I thought I’d found a perfect city for me. Yet time and again I was told that my kind are not welcome in these apartments: the residences are completely smokefree, inside and out.

I’m not a frequent smoker but I do think that enjoying a good cigar and a glass of whiskey with a close friend is one of life’s great pleasures. With Oregon’s ban on smoking in bars and restaurants coming into effect soon, my home will be one of the few places that I’m allowed to light up here. Being forbidden from enjoying a cigar or pipe even on my own deck or balcony is close to a deal breaker for me. Walking around the Pearl District yesterday, passing block after block of apartments where I would not be permitted to pursue my hobby, I felt for the first time what it’s like to be a minority facing discrimination. Admittedly I suffer for a lifestyle choice rather than for an immutable characteristic of my being, so I won’t pretend it compares to racial or sexual discrimination. But still, it was a new experience for this middle class white guy.

I assumed that these anti-smoking policies were how apartment buildings cater to West Coast nanny state types who have fantastically misinformed beliefs about the dangers of secondhand smoke. However much that might irk me, it would be hypocritical of me to deny them the right to live in the kinds of communities they prefer. I respect their rights of property and freedom of association, even if they won’t extend the same courtesy to smokers and business owners.

Then at one of these properties I learned that there’s actually another force at work. LEED certification, the seal of approval from the United States Green Building Council, now mandates that buildings be completely smokefree and ban smoking near doors and windows.

LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. In eco-conscious cities like Portland, it’s a marketing advantage to have a building LEED certified. Builders submit their designs to the USGBC, are given a checklist [pdf available here] of features the council looks for, and the number of items they can check off determines their LEED rating: Certified, Silver, Gold, or Platinum. Most of these items involve matters like energy efficiency, reusing materials, reducing water use, and other goals clearly related to environmental purposes. You might wonder what controlling residents’ smoking habits has to do with any of this. I certainly did.

It turns out that LEED certification considers six categories of evaluation, one of which is indoor environmental quality. If tobacco smoke is considered a pollutant, banning smoking is one way of addressing it. One could make a plausible case that LEED certified buildings shouldn’t allow smoking indoors, where habitual smokers could pump a lot of smoke into the ventilation systems. But in proximity to an exterior door? Or on a balcony? There’s absolutely no scientific justification for banning this. Walking by a smoker on the way into the lobby is not going to kill anyone. It’s annoying, perhaps, but it’s not a matter that needs to be addressed by green building codes.

Apparently LEED used to allow indoor smoking as long as adequate ventilation and filtering was provided. I’m not sure what led to the change, but an absolute prohibition on smoking is now a required item for certification. To put that into perspective, of the more than 70 items on the LEED checklist, only 7 are necessary prerequisites. In the indoor environmental quality category, increased ventilation, low-emitting materials use, thermal comfort, and outdoor air delivery monitoring are all optional. In other categories things like materials reuse, building with certified wood, managing refrigerants, using renewable energy, reducing water use, and minimizing the heat island effect are optional. For a project that’s primarily concerned with environmental protection, prioritizing outdoor smoking bans over these other concerns is strange indeed.

As I said before, I don’t object to leasing companies forbidding smoking if that’s what their customers want them to do. I do object, though, to the USGBC forcing bans onto anyone who wants to advertise their green building practices. Most people don’t know the details of what goes into the LEED checklist; they just want to know that a building is energy efficient, clean, and doesn’t waste resources. Banning smoking outdoors has nothing to do with that and muddles legitimate environmental concerns with restrictions on people’s personal behavior. Worse, it casts doubt on the merit of the USGBC’s other standards. If the organization has so little respect for scientific validity when it comes to smoking, it makes one wonder about the entire checklist. Is it guided by respectable science or by political correctness? Not being an expert in design, I have no way of knowing.

Update: In the comments, Matt D tracks down the full guidelines [pdf] and notes that LEED certification does allow for smoking in residential areas in certain proscribed circumstances:

OPTION 3 (For residential buildings only)
– Prohibit smoking in all common areas of the building.
– Locate any exterior designated smoking areas at least 25 feet away from entries, outdoor air intakes and operable windows opening to common areas.
– Minimize uncontrolled pathways for ETS transfer between individual residential units by sealing penetrations in walls, ceilings and floors in the residential units, and by sealing vertical chases adjacent to the units.
– All doors in the residential units leading to common hallways shall be weather-stripped to minimize air leakage into the hallway.
– If the common hallways are pressurized with respect to the residential units then doors to the residential units leading to the common hallways need not be weather-stripped provided that the positive differential pressure is demonstrated…

The third one seems like it might be the most restrictive, perhaps impractically so for high rise buildings with lots of shared ventilation. The priority given to anti-smoking measures by LEED standards still strikes me as out of touch with its mission. But it is in fact possible to get around a complete ban, and I thank Matt for the correction.

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Teach a man to fish

by Jacob Grier on September 19, 2008

A post last week touched on assigning property rights to overcome the tragedy of the commons issue that threatens to destroy world fisheries. Today’s New York Times reports on a new study explaining how this can work. John Tierney comments:

A global survey of more than 11,000 fisheries points to a profitable system to protect fisheries from collapsing. The bad news is that this system, called catch shares, is used in only 1 percent of the world’s fisheries and is still controversial, but the researchers hope the new evidence of its success will win over some opponents — a group has included both local fishermen and some environmentalists.

Under this system, a fisherman owns the right to a certain percentage of the annual allowable catch in a fishery. These shares, sometimes called Individual Transferable Quotas, can be bought and sold on the market, and their price goes down if the fish population declines. So fishermen have a direct incentive to protect the fishery along with their investment: that way their share will be worth more when they retire and sell it to someone else.

Neither of the articles mentions how valuable these shares can be or how big an effect they have on fishermen’s willingness to enforce rules against each other. They do have other positive side effects though:

One of the authors, Steven Gaines, a marine biologist at U.C. Santa Barbara, noted that after the system went into effect for sablefish in Alaska, the fishermen used many fewer hooks and therefore reduced the “bycatch” — the incidental killing of fish of other species. The traditional system, in which the catch was limited only by the legal length of the season, had encouraged a “race to fish” as fishermen flung down as many hooks to catch as many fish as fast as they could. But the catch-share system enabled them to work at a slower, more efficient pace until they reached their guaranteed quota.

Tierney has reported previously on research suggesting that the profit-maximizing fish population under private ownership is greater than that needed for sustainability for many species of fish, giving fishermen an incentive to restrict catches.

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Labels for everything

by Jacob Grier on September 10, 2008

This is a monumentally bad idea:

A universal system of food labelling which takes into account everything from nutritional information to the product’s impact on the environment should be established to guide consumers, according to a food policy analyst.

Tim Lang, of City University, London, said a set of “omni standards” for labels could overcome public confusion over food. The labels could provide information about such things as food miles – the distance an item has covered to reach the shops – and the amount of water used in its production, as well as health information on fat content and nutritional benefits.

It would help to overcome confusing recommendations to the public, such as the health advice to eat more fish, which conflicts with environmental concerns about declining stocks because of overfishing, Professor Lang told the British Association’s science festival at Liverpool University yesterday.

“Whilst governments continue to let the market take its course, ill-informed consumer choices are contributing to massive crises in human health, food security and environmental degradation,” he said.

“Evidence from water use alone suggests that we need to think more about ‘hidden’ impacts. Each bean from Kenya has four litres of potable water embedded – this from a water-stressed country.”

Where to even begin with this? Assuming it’s possible to get accurate numbers for all these things — a huge assumption — there is no way this would help “overcome public confusion over food.” Take the Kenyan coffee example. Yes, Kenya is water stressed. But Kenya is not one big desert. The parts of Kenya where they grow coffee are lush and tropical. That’s why they grow coffee there. A customer at Tesco is in no position to decide if Kenyan rainfall is best used to grow a valuable export or collected and transferred to the more arid parts of the country. So what’s the point in telling him how much water goes into a coffee bean? If the label works, supposedly, he will choose not to buy it. I don’t see how this would be helpful to Kenya.

The same goes for food miles. It’s actually possible to grow coffee in Cornwall. Researchers at the Eden Project managed to coax enough beans for 50 cups out of their greenhouse this year. Going solely by distance traveled, it would seem that British consumers should drop their African coffee and ramp up production at home. But of course that’s ridiculous. It would be far more resource intensive to grow coffee in England than it would be to simply have it shipped from a suitable climate. This an extreme example, but the same logic applies to countless other goods. Putting food miles on a label tells consumers just a very small part of what they would need to know to make an environmentally conscious purchasing decision.

Trying to bombard consumers with all the relevant information they need to make the right choices is a futile effort. There are far too many factors to balance. That’s what prices are for. Rather than putting ever more information on food labels and hoping buyers pay attention, we should try to make the prices better reflect the costs of the inputs. Is water underpriced in Kenya? If so, we can look for ways to improve water markets there. Are greenhouse gases your concern? Fine, tax CO2 emissions. This will be much more accurate than measuring food miles. Declining fish stocks? That’s a tragedy of the commons issue. Assign property rights or enforce caps on harvesting.

Putting all this information on labels might make people feel morally upright, but even if they pay attention to it they likely won’t make the decisions that are truly good for the environment. Markets and pricing get the job done without people even having to think about it. And perhaps that’s the problem: sometimes thinking about doing good is more pleasing than actually doing it.

[Via Coldmud.]

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Greener tax pastures?

by Jacob Grier on September 8, 2008

Ford has a new, fuel efficient diesel car going on the market called the Fiesta ECOnetic:

If ever there was a car made for the times, this would seem to be it: a sporty subcompact that seats five, offers a navigation system, and gets a whopping 65 miles to the gallon. Oh yes, and the car is made by Ford Motor, known widely for lumbering gas hogs.

The bad news? It’s only for sale in Europe, not the US. Though there are multiple reasons for this, the Business Week article claims that taxes are a big one:

Diesel vehicles now hitting the market with pollution-fighting technology are as clean or cleaner than gasoline and at least 30% more fuel-efficient.

Yet while half of all cars sold in Europe last year ran on diesel, the U.S. market remains relatively unfriendly to the fuel. Taxes aimed at commercial trucks mean diesel costs anywhere from 40 cents to $1 more per gallon than gasoline. Add to this the success of the Toyota Prius, and you can see why only 3% of cars in the U.S. use diesel. “Americans see hybrids as the darling,” says Global Insight auto analyst Philip Gott, “and diesel as old-tech.”

The New York Times’ Ideas blog repeats the part about taxes making diesel so much more expensive than regular gasoline. But do they? The American Petroleum Institute says that diesel excise taxes averaged only about 7 cents more per gallon than those on gas. The federal government’s Energy Information Administration suggests that a rise in global demand for diesel fuel and stricter environmental standards in the US have done more to contribute to the higher price:

Historically, the average price of diesel fuel has been lower than the average price of gasoline. However, this is not always the case. In some winters where the demand for distillate heating oil is high, the price of diesel fuel has risen above the gasoline price. Since September 2004, the price of diesel fuel has been generally higher than the price of regular gasoline all year round for several reasons. Worldwide demand for diesel fuel and other distillate fuel oils has been increasing steadily, with strong demand in China, Europe, and the United States, putting more pressure on the tight global refining capacity. In the United States, the transition to ultra-low-sulfur diesel fuel has affected diesel fuel production and distribution costs.

The Business Week article is correct to note that diesel taxes are higher than for gasoline and that the cost of the fuel is much higher. But it’s not clear that the first is causing the second. If there’s evidence for this, I haven’t found it.

It might be true that, given improvements in technology, cutting diesel taxes would be an excellent spur to green innovation. I’d certainly prefer that to the doling out of favors politicians usually engage in. However it looks like Ford’s decision not to sell the Fiesta ECOnetic here might have more to do with other business factors, not anti-diesel tax bias. Note also that Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, and Honda all plan to introduce diesel models to the US despite the higher tax.

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Think globally, eat globally

by Jacob Grier on June 19, 2008

Those of you who’ve been wanting more of a smackdown between Paul Roberts and I won’t find it in today’s exchange, where we agree that there are plenty of reasons to enjoy eating natural, locally grown food — as long as you’re not kidding yourself about the health and environmental benefits. Read it here.

Tomorrow’s topic is foods that need to be banned, so things could get a little more heated then.

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Beach bums

by Jacob Grier on June 6, 2008

Perhaps because I’ve always thought that beach roasting Seattle coffee is the coolest thing ever, this headline about beach bonfires being banned at two Seattle beaches caught my eye. I foolishly assumed that, however sad it might be to lose bonfires, there would be some plausible reason for it: safety, overcrowding, etc. But no:

According to a memo to the park board from the staff released Thursday, “The overall policy question for the Board is whether it is good policy for Seattle Parks to continue public beach fires when the carbon … emissions produced by thousands of beach fires per year contributes to global warming.”

Unless Seattlites build their bonfires with barrels of oil, this is the stupidest idea ever. Wood isn’t a fossil fuel. Its carbon isn’t sequestered deep in the earth. Trees live, they die, they rot and put CO2 into the air, and then new trees grow and turn the carbon back into wood. Over the long-term, burning wood is essentially carbon neutral.

Not precisely neutral, of course, but enough so that this guy is clearly facing a false dichotomy:

But at Alki, Nguyen said he’d be OK with banning bonfires. “By all means, I’d rather not have bonfires than have global warming,” he said.

The only way banning bonfires could significantly lower carbon emissions is by making a trip to the beach so much less enjoyable that nobody bothers to drive out to it.

Update: This reminds me of the Flanders, Belgium decision to tax backyard barbecuing because of the activity’s CO2 emissions. The difference is that the Flemish meant the idea as an April Fools Day joke.

Update 6/8/08: Devi points out in the comments that this plan didn’t last long.

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