Peak Stuff has been and gone
One of the amusements I delight in about the environmental movement is that they're generals, always fighting the last war. We've still got doomongers warning about population when we already know the answer to that. Indeed, are implementing the answer to it. Population, birth rates, fall when places get rich (not least because rich places have more for women to do than endlessly pump out more babies) and as the world is getting rich we've solved that problem. We've similarly got doomongers telling us all that minerals are about to run out: without noting that we're recycling ever more of them and in many places co0nsumption of virgin material is falling as we replace it with recycled (the iron industry being an obvious example).
One that is similarly popular is that we're just simply using too much stuff, that on a limited planet we can't all just keep having more. But it appears that peak stuff has already been and gone:
In 2001, Goodall says, the UK's consumption of paper and cardboard finally started to decline. This was followed, in 2002, by a fall in our use of primary energy: the raw heat and power generated by all fossil fuels and other energy sources. The following year, 2003, saw the start of a decline in the amount of household waste (including recycling) generated by each person in the country – a downward trend that before long could also be observed in the commercial and construction waste sectors.
In 2004, our purchases of new cars started to fall – as did our consumption of water. The next year, 2005, saw our household energy consumption starting to slump (notwithstanding an uptick last year due to the cold winter). And in 2006 we seem to have got bored with roads and railways, with a decline in the average distance traveled on private and public transport. All of this while GDP – and population – went up.
The secret to this is that GDP is the "value of all goods and services produced". And we can, as we have been, increase GDP by increasing the value added rather than the quantity of goods and services. There's actually no great secret here at all: it's exactly what we would expect to happen in fact, if raw materials get more expensive (as those who insist they are running out would say they are) then we'll use less of them.
And note, no one planned this, insisted upon it, regulated for it or imposed it. Just happened quite naturally as the market response to higher raw material prices. As we've seen the quite natural market response to greater wealth being fewer children, prices encouraging recycling of metals and all the rest.
Great things markets, aren't they? If only more environmentalists would realize that they are the method of getting what we all desire, that cleaner, greener, richer, world.
Thank goodness for the European Union, Margot Wallstrom and REACH!
You remember how back in 2006 everyone was getting poisoned by all those nasty chemicals that industry was using? Sure you do, millions falling over every month. And how Margot Wallstrom was able to push through the REACH legislation? To make sure that we were all safe and that only chemicals that had been properly tested were available for use? Glory be, aren't we lucky little boys and girls, eh?
The thing is though, there's a bill to be paid for this. In my email this morning I got this:
In continuation to our earlier communication regarding this letter of access (LOA) cost for Sodium Iodide (EC no: 231-679-3) please be informed that the LOA cost calculated is 8500 Euros (for the 100 to 1000 tons per annum tonnage band); considering the present response in the SIEF.
Now, if I'm honest, a payment of € 8,500 to make sure that sodium iodide is safe to use doesn't seem like all that much.
Except that's not actually what this payment is. It's not one payment for someone to go through the scientific literature and say, well, yes, this appears to be safe. It's not even a payment for anyone to do any experiments. It's not even one payment.
Every single importer, manufacturer and or user (if you're a user and the manufacturer has done this you don't need to, but if you're a user and the manufacturer has not done this you do need to) has to pay this fee. This is after all of the importers, manufacturers and users have got together and agreed to share the costs. This is the cost each, not the total cost.
No! Wait! There's more! Every single chemical combination has to go through this process. OK, you don't have to deal with O and a couple of others but just about any possible combination of elements must go through this process. Given that there's 72 elements that we normally worry about (the radioactives and a few of the gases we tend not to) the number of possible combinations is 72! Which is, umm, 6.123445837688612e+103 or, at my level of maths, gazillions. Possibly even umpty elebenty billions.
So every single importer, manurfacturer and or user of a chemical combination has to, even after they band together to share the costs, pay this sort of sum for each and every chemical combination that can possibly be used in a complex economy of 500 million people and some billions of different products.
I suppose you could just about, possibly, make the case that this is worth it to make sure that we're not all poisoned in our beds. Maybe. But this isn't the cost of doing the testing or anything. No one is actually doing any work for all of this money.
This is the cost of filing the paperwork.
No, really, this is the fee that must be paid to the European Chemicals Agency just for the joy of having them look over the paperwork. We're not getting anything for this other than a bunch of bureaucrats in Helsinki reading a few .pdfs.
As I say, thank goodness for the European Union, Margot Wallstrom and REACH. Just think of the idiocies we would have spent all this moolah on if we'd had a choice. No one actually wanted to cure cancer, poverty or HIV anyway, did they?
On "ethical eating"
Last Saturday I attended a Battle of Ideas debate on whether or not food can be moral. It's an interesting question for libertarians, particularly when you try to consider the extent to which the non-aggression principle can apply to other animals. Some take a purist approach and consider all animal life to be inviolable. Others take the position that eating another animal is fine, so long as you didn't support the system that put it on your plate by buying it. This could have been a debate on exercising personal morality, using the power of the consumer to gradually change trends.
But the majority of this particular debating panel had other ideas. With the honourable exception of Kirk Leech, who put up a robust defence of the consumer, a bunch (or should the collective be 'a table'?) of food critics expounded their personal pet hates. Some raised valid environmental and ethical concerns, but an alarming consensus began to emerge on the inherent evils of cheap 'convenience' food. Apparently, the very cheapness and availability of food detracts from the moral worth we place on it.
The argument goes that these pre-packaged, processed foods mask the sources of other moral issues: instead of stuffing a tuna meal-deal sandwich into my face within seconds, I should first take the time to consider how that tuna was farmed, and who may or may not have been exploited in the process. All of this naturally leads to calls for more expensive food. One of the food critics went as far as saying we should artificially raise the price, even if it will impact lower income families. It's for their own good, you see.
I cannot think of a more snobbish, elitist and condescending attitude. The reality is that no matter how long I could contemplate the ingredients for a tuna sandwich (as that seems to be the implication of not having it pre-made), I probably wouldn't be any the wiser about its impact on the world. And that's the beauty of the free market: just like the short memoir of I, Pencil, the price mechanism allows countless buyers and sellers to co-ordinate their actions and limited knowledge, not even needing to all speak the same language let alone understand each others' industries.
As Kirk Leech pointed out, the economic revolutions of the birth of modernity saw the democratisation of gastronomy, with the emergence of meat, sugar and wider choice for everyone, not just the feudal few. But just like the absurdly resilient notion that capitalism makes the poor poorer, food paternalists have convinced us that eating and buying food is a morally sanctioned activity. Ethical eating has become a form of penance rather than a source of pleasure. But not everyone can afford it.
The unintended consequences of socialist architecture
An article in Planning in London makes a fascinating point about this summer’s London riots:
It has been suggested by others that there is a link between riot locations and the nearby presence of social housing. We think this can be more accurately defined.
Hillier’s earlier work suggests that the proximity of riot activity to large post-war housing estates may not be the result of social housing in itself but the type of social housing: most post-war estates have been designed in such a way that they create over-complex, and as a result, under-used spaces. These spaces are populated by large groups of unsupervised children and teenagers, where peer socialisation can occur between them without the influence of adults. This pattern of activity, and the segregation of user groups, is not found in non-estate street networks.
The trouble with so much architecture from the post-war period is that the state was the client – architects designed housing projects with little or no concern for the people who would actually live in them. The design of housing estates did not reflect the way people lived, worked and played. Rather, it reflected a utopian socialist ideology which central planners wished to impose upon them. Of course, that attempt failed miserably.
Opposition to post-war architecture tends to focus on aesthetic concerns. And, certainly, much of it is appalling ugly, almost to the point that merely looking at it fills you with despair. But its mostly deeply pernicious effect is surely the way in which it has affected people’s behaviour, by forcing them to live in an environment which is cold, desolate and practically inhuman. Naturally, I am not suggesting that post-war architecture caused the riots. But the idea that it was a contributory factor certainly has the ring of truth about it.
Incidentally, the picture I’ve used here is not actually from a post-war London housing estate. It is a photo of the Vele di Scampia estate near Naples, which was the setting for the stunning, shocking film Gomorrah. If you’re sceptical about the social consequences of bad architecture, I’d challenge you to watch that film and, bearing in mind that it is based on real events, ask yourself whether many of the things depicted would be possible in a traditional street layout. For me, it’s a shining example of brutalist by name, brutal by nature.
No they can't!
Pieces like this really do annoy me:
Airlines can be charged for their greenhouse gas emissions on flights to and from Europe, according to a landmark court ruling on Thursday.
You can't charge or tax a company. You must be, in the end, lifting money from the pocket of some live human being. So you can't charge some mysterious legal entity for carbon emissions: you must be charging some group of people. As, way down the piece, is finally admitted:
All of the costs are likely to be passed on to passengers, raising ticket prices.
Well quite. Which is where we want the taxes to be anyway. Assume that you're all onside in this climate change thing: what we want to do is thus change the incentives people face when they choose among certain actions. If there are emissions associated with one course of action and none with another then we'd like the price of the emitting one to include the future costs of those emissions. Thus such taxes to internalise the externality. This isn't quite rocket science, it's plain and basic economics.
But so also is the point that it's not the airline that is bearing these costs. OK, in this particular example it's not a particularly grievous sin but it does become so in other conversations.
For example, we're routinely told that "companies must pay more in tax": yet companies do not and cannot pay tax as above. To ignore this is to miss the subtleties of who actually does have their pockets lightened by the higher tax. Largely, in the UK experience, the workers of the country in lower wages.
Similarly, the Robin Hood or Financial Transactions Tax. You know, make the banks pay? But the banks won't pay, can't pay. It'll be largely the consumers of what banks provide (ie, us) and the workers in the banks who will have their pockets lightened. Not quite the rhetoric we're being bombarded with to get the tax passed, is it?
This whole subject is called tax incidence and if you don't pay attention to it the politicians will bamboozle you, telling you that it's just those companies over there being taxed while in fact it's your pocket that gets lighter.
Civil servant is righter than government minister shocker!
There's a row going on about energy price rises, as you know. This blog rather nicely lays out one view. Now, we all know that energy prices are going to rise in the future: the government's specifically taxing us all to make sure this is true. However, underlying that is another argument: does this mean that the average family will be paying more?
In one corner we've the DECC and the various environmentalists. No, the higher prices will encourage people to substitute. They'll insulate, wear woolly jumpers, use less energy anyway. In the other corner we've a political advisor called Ben Moxham who calls this all wet. People won't in fact change their behaviour all that much and the average energy bill is going to go way up.
It'sd a bit of a pity to get involved in such a lovely catfight really, should just get some popcorn and settle down to watch. However, there's a reasonable way of calling this argument, by using a little basic economics.
What the DEC is really saying is that energy demand is highly elastic to price: change the price and you'll get quite large changes in behaviour and demand. What Moxham is really saying is that this is tosh, energy has a low elasticity. We don't change our behaviour much when energy prices change. So, who is right?
Well, Moxham, obviously, for energy famously has a low elasticity of demand in relation to price. As every environmentalist bemoans when they see that rises in petrol taxes don't immediately have us all cycling to work. Because, you see, we don't change our behaviour very much when energy prices change.#
We shouldn't be all that surprised at the DECC's insistence though. They're not the first and won't be the last government department to shout, as if at the panto, "Oh Yes It Is" about one of their favoured policies. Sadly, they also won't be the last to be wrong while doing so.
Why big business just loves environmental regulations
Why big business just loves environmental regulations
Sometimes at least they do. This is part of a very interesting interview with Bruce Yandle, the guy who gave us the whole concept of Bootleggers and Baptists.
I was working on the White House staff reviewing newly proposed regulations during the end of the Ford administration and the first part of the Carter administration, in a unit of the Council on Wage and Price Stability. My beat was the EPA. I reviewed the copper smelter standards. I would get their big regulatory bundles and review them, and we would make comments in an attempt to try to reduce the cost of accomplishing the goal. EPA had an excellent economic analysis. The last section said when this regulation becomes final, there will never be another copper smelter built in the United States of America. How would you feel if you had a copper smelter?
You’d just been told you will never have any new competition.
This is a stage further than the more usual complaint, that large companies can afford the people to deal with new regulations that small ones cannot. This is about the way in which regulations can completely abolish any possibility of new upstart competition.
It's worth reading the whole thing: the way that the US regulated sulphur emissions from coal is a wonderful example of political lobbying. Western coal is low in sulphur, Eastern coal high. So, to reduce sulphur emissions all that was actually needed was a standard for emissions. Those who wanted to burn the cheaper Eastern coal would have to install a scrubber: those who would pay for the more expensive Western would not.
However, the Eastern miners (and owners) were more politically organised and managed to get the legislation changed to insisting that everyone had to have a scrubber. An entirely non-optimal solution to an admitted problem brought about by the exercise of political power and lobbying. Bismark was right on that law and sausage making thing.
Who pays the piper?
Late last month, without much fanfare, scientific titan CERN released new evidence that could dramatically alter the balance of the global warming debate. Potentially vindicating the Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark, new CERN research from their CLOUD project demonstrates that cosmic rays provide a seed for clouds. As a result tiny changes in the earth's cloud cover could account for the earth's variations in temperature. Such a revelation throws into question whether anthropogenic global warming is actually happening, or whether cosmic rays and the sun are the dominant controllers of the earth's climate.
Such an important discovery should surely be big news. However CERN's Director General has attempted to play down the study and it's potential conclusions in order to avoid "the highly political arena of the climate change debate." So, instead of what should be a debate concerning the causes of global warming we are struck by an entirely different debate, the autonomy of scientists who receive government funding. CERN receives millions of euros in funding from it's member states, the top three being Germany, France and UK, a list which is ever growing as more countries clamour to join the well-respected establishment. However such government funding undermines the very credibility that makes CERN the scientific goliath it claims to be. Nigel Calder makes a similar point, arguing that:
"CERN has joined a long line of lesser institutions obliged to remain politically correct about the man-made global warming hypothesis. It’s OK to enter “the highly political arena of the climate change debate” provided your results endorse man-made warming, but not if they support Svensmark’s heresy that the Sun alters the climate by influencing the cosmic ray influx and cloud formation. The once illustrious CERN laboratory ceases to be a truly scientific institute when its Director General forbids its physicists and visiting experimenters to draw the obvious scientific conclusions from their results."
The scientists behind the CLOUD experiment have been in a battle for over a decade to continue and publish the results of the project due to their state-funded position. Jasper Kirby, a CERN scientist, postulated back in 1998 that the cosmic ray theory would "probably be able to account for somewhere between a half and the whole of the increase in the Earth’s temperature that we have seen in the last century." This admittance of a hypothetical alternative to anthropogenic theories was apparently a step too far for global warming activists who pressured the Western governments that control CERN's funding to suspend the project. It is only after a decade of negotiation that the project was allowed to continue, and even now it's results are being stifled by a need to placate political influences. As a result last week's CLOUD paper perhaps reveals more about the distortion of science by government intervention than it highlights any real scientific breakthrough.
Is home ownership past its peak?
Back in 2001, over 72% of Britons owned their own home. In the subsequent decade, this figure has fallen back to 67% and, by 2021, is expected by the National Housing Federation (NHF) to decline further to below 64%. The NHF also expects that, by next year, more Londoners will be renting homes rather than actually owning them. Does this trend matter – and why is it taking place?
Part of the explanation for the latter lies in the increased level of renting, due mainly to financial reasons but also due to more enlightened rental legislation. However, it is the far lower level of new house-build that is of major importance to the housing market. Compared with the previous Labour government’s ambitious target of 250,000 new houses per year, just 105,000 new houses were built in England during the last financial year; this was the lowest figure since the 1920s when ‘the land fit for heroes’ pledge proved to be illusory.
Britain’s leading house-builders are still struggling, most noticeably the highly indebted Barratt Developments and Wimpey. But for them and others, including market leader Persimmon, it is the challenge facing potential buyers to secure mortgages that is pivotal. Having lived though the era of high Loan-to-Value mortgages – epitomised by Northern Rock’s 125% much-maligned Together promotion – banks are understandably implementing far more cautious lending policies especially as property prices – outside London - are not expected to rise appreciably.
In all probability, it will take many years for the property market to recover fully although the NHF’s figures suggest a long-term decline in property ownership despite the popularity of the 1980s ‘right-to-buy policy’. Given the undoubted freedom that property ownership - within sensible financial limits - confers, this would be a retrograde development in furthering the concept of the property owning democracy – a policy that MPs from across the political spectrum have endorsed for decades.