Bjorn Lomborg Misreads Climate Change Economics in Washington Post Op-Ed
Bjorn Lomborg has seen the future of climate policy, and it doesn’t work. In his opinion, featured Friday in the Washington Post, a binding treaty to reduce carbon emissions – the goal that was pursued unsuccessfully at the Copenhagen conference in December – would have done more harm than good. Reducing emissions enough to stabilize the temperature would have astronomical costs, according to Lomborg, while the benefits would be small.
This is par for the course for Lomborg, a Danish political scientist who has gained international notoriety for his repeated attacks on environmental protection. His source for his climate policy skepticism is a very selective reading of economics, described grandly and inaccurately as what all economists think. For instance, do “all the major climate economic models” agree on a specific, extreme forecast of carbon taxes, as asserted by Lomborg? Not a chance; major models tend to disagree somewhat about such forecasts, and there is no consensus around anything like Lomborg’s claim. Do “most mainstream calculations” agree that global climate damages will be less than $1 trillion per year (a fraction of one percent of global output) by the end of the century, as he also alleges? Again, not even close …
This post is second in a series on the new CPR report Obama’s Regulators: A First-Year Report Card.
It’s only fair to note that when President Obama assumed office in January of 2009, he inherited a slate of dysfunctional protector agencies. Perhaps none were more dysfunctional than the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC)—the tiny agency charged with protecting all Americans from literally tens of thousands of different kinds of dangerous products, everything from backyard barbecues and electric drills to swimming pool slides and baby dolls. The Obama Administration had a lot of work to do if it was to make good on the president's promise of whipping agencies like CPSC into shape so that they could effectively protect public health and safety. As CPR found in its new report, CPSC’s performance fell short of achieving this goal, however.
Given the difficult challenges …
Over the weekend, the Associated Press ran a story on the results of its enterprising investigation into the toxic content of children’s jewelry imported from China. Pressed to abandon the use of toxic lead in toys and jewelry, manufacturers have apparently begun using an even more dangerous metal, cadmium, which can cause neurological damage – brain damage – to children and give them cancer. AP tested 103 pieces of jewelry bought in American stores within the last few months, and found that 12 percent contained at least 10 percent cadmium. One item, a cute little Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer trinket, was 91 percent cadmium.
Addressing the question that leaps to mind – How did these extraordinarily dangerous trinkets get onto store shelves in the first place? – reporter Justin Pritchard writes these utterly terrifying and completely truthful words:
A patchwork of federal consumer protection regulations does nothing to keep these …
My family has gotten a lot smaller lately. My mother died in 2004, my father in 2007, and my uncle in 2008.
I’ve done the five stages of grief, as introduced by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in 1969, but not exactly as she described. It’s true that I initially felt denial: “I’m a lucky person; this can't be happening.” Then I was angry and felt sorry for myself. Then, at least during my mother’s struggle with pancreatic cancer, I hit the bargaining table. Mom was a Sunday school teacher when I was little, so I pleaded with God: “Please let the diagnosis be wrong, please let the chemo work, please don’t let the good die young.” To hedge my bets, I occasionally promised, “if she can beat the odds, I’ll volunteer at the local cancer center and I’ll donate my life …
EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announced Monday that the agency will propose new rules to reduce pollution from runoff from urban and suburban areas and from concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). This announcement goes far in demonstrating that the EPA under President Obama is serious about its commitments to improve the quality of the nation’s waters, especially those waters that continue to be plagued by pollution from nonpoint and other unregulated sources.
The new rules would apply nationwide, but Administrator Jackson noted that more stringent requirements may apply to the states of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed and the District of Columbia as part of the new federal efforts to restore the Bay. The proposed rules would expand stormwater regulations to rapidly urbanizing areas and would apply regulations to existing, large impervious surfaces like parking lots. In addition, the proposed rules would designate more animal feeding operations as …
Cross-posted from Legal Planet.
Last Monday, EPA signed off on the Corps of Engineers’ issuance of a Clean Water Act § 404 permit to Hobet Mining for a mountaintop removal coal mining project in West Virginia. The decision is important because it’s the first product of the process announced last fall for joint EPA / Corps review of a large number of pending permit applications. It’s troubling for several reasons. First and most simply, it allows a major mountaintop mining project to go ahead, and suggests that more will follow. Second, despite EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson’s repeated public statements about bringing clarity to the process, this decision offers essentially no window into the principles EPA thinks should guide these decisions. Third, it promises an environmental outcome that can’t be assured through the adaptive management provisions included in the approval.
NRDC’s Rob Perks makes a …
As reported in a post Saturday, OMB has become the epicenter for industry efforts to head off an EPA regulation concerning coal ash. There have been 17 meetings between industry interests and OMB officials. When questioned about the large number of meetings, an OMB spokesman said, "This has been a very regular, very normal deliberative process on a very complex rule.” For progressives who had hoped that OMB in the Obama administration would not replicate OMB in the Bush administration, this is disappointing news.
Industry swarmed to OMB after EPA had submitted a draft rule on coal ash to OMB for its approval. Under a presidential order, agencies like EPA must submit significant new regulations, like the coal-ash rule, to the White House for review prior to the time that they are officially proposed. Unhappy that their efforts to persuade EPA to propose a different rule had …
"White House, EPA at Odds Over Coal-Waste Rules" reads a headline in Saturday's Wall Street Journal. It's worth a look.
The White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) has in fact continued to host meetings with outside groups regarding EPA’s work on a rule for controlling the disposal of hazardous coal ash waste. Since my last post on this topic, OIRA has hosted 10 more meetings on this topic. (These latest meetings were held between December 9 and January 4.) This brings the grand total of OIRA coal ash meetings to 21—all in a time span of less than 3 months!
The meetings are particularly significant since the industry is lobbying OIRA before EPA has even issued a proposed rule. By law, a proposed agency rule is followed by a public comment phase, where industry would have the full opportunity to …
A few months ago Rena Steinzor wrote skeptically here about state (as opposed to federal) regulation of hydraulic fracturing:
... the idea that after doing all this research, EPA should stand back and let the gas-producing states take the lead, stepping in only after much more delay, would amount to a rollback of environmental protection to the dark days of the 1950s and 1960s, before modern environmentalism and federal regulation began.
Last week ProPublica had a useful article on a key aspect of this ("State Oil and Gas Regulators Are Spread Too Thin to Do Their Jobs"). Reporter Abrahm Lustgarten put together the numbers and found:
While the number of new oil and gas wells being drilled in the 22 states each year has jumped 45 percent since 2004, most of the states have added only a few regulators.
It's a troubling read.
Cross-posted from Legal Planet.
As I pointed out three months ago, the federal government has awakened from its 8-year Bush administration slumber to notice that the SF Bay-Delta is an important environmental and economic resource whose management requires federal input. On December 22, the Obama administration issued an Interim Federal Action Plan for the California Bay-Delta.
The best news about the plan is simply that it was issued. It’s one more sign that the feds are serious about joining in the task of dealing with the Bay-Delta’s collapsing ecosystem and navigating the tricky intersections of water supply and environmental protection. That’s essential to any progress. Federal agencies are key players both on the water management side (the Bureau of Reclamation operates the Central Valley Project) and on the regulatory side (the Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service implement the federal Endangered …
