One of the things that irritates me about environmental pundits and activists (or get's up my nose as Charlie might say) is that they greet improved analyses with disappointment. Two studies out today — one on energy trends, one on climate as a security issue — bode poorly for those seeking to prevent global warming from passing dangerous thresholds. Coal and oil use climb relentlessly, at a rate similar to that for growth in wind, solar, and nuclear power, but in vastly larger quantities. . . As I wrote the other day, it looks like countries are going to remain focused on addressing real-time problems related to energy security (most notably high oil prices) for the time being, even as evidence builds that global warming could fuel turmoil, particularly in already-troubled places like sub-Saharan Africa, in the long run. Why would anyone be disappointed that people all over the world deal with first things first? We assess that climate...

Charlie is a writer. One of the aspects of the present-day environmental movement that gets up my nose is the tendency towards magical thinking that many of its followers engage in; notably, the belief that because doing something about climate change (and environmental degradation and peak oil and the whole dismal litany) is better than doing nothing, any particular something they can point to clearly must be done, however irrelevant it might be to dealing with the underlying problem. It generates make-work, an annoying wheel-spinning tail-chasing pursuit of distractions, at the cost of grappling with the very real and very serious problems we face. I think that I've said all of these things, but not with equal economy of expression....

Lynne Kiesling at Knowledge Problem considers some of the issues facing environmentalism. Harvard economist Ed Glaeser has a nice column in today's Boston Globe in which he proposes a "road map for environmentalism" (HT to Greg Mankiw). I think it's a thoughtful and substantially correct analysis and pragmatic set of proposals; in particular, his emphasis on the importance of rethinking current policies and the extent to which they fail to meet our objectives: But smart environmentalism doesn't just mean more government programs, it also means rethinking current policies. Our emissions policy, which requires regular emissions tests for newer vehicles, is expensive to operate and poorly designed to fight climate change. After all, it does nothing to induce less driving. Even more problematically, by letting owners of older cars off the hook, the current system imposes costs on the Prius driver but exempts the drivers of the vintage gas guzzlers that create the most emissions. We should require different emissions...

I think it's worth examining the ethical failures of enviro-fundamentalists further. . . . although over-simplistic and obsolete belief systems are a comfort given the threats and potential catastrophes that we are constantly browbeaten with in our 24/7 media environment, they are not just inadequate but unethical. One of the ethical failures is a sort of sociopathy, a free-rider problem where a few profit at the expense of many by failing to carry their share of the social load, allowing others to do all the work while the shirkers lounge about. What! - you shriek - environmentalists are all about ethics, justice and, and, well, being only ever good. But that's merely a pose, a cover for some truly hard hearted sociopathy, one of the primary characteristics of fundamentalists. Consider this bit about energy by the late Marty Bender: Since any solar technology exposed to the weather will slowly deteriorate whether or not it is used, there would be...

I've been reading Brad Allenby again. I once recommended that you just blow off my stuff and read Prometheus on science policy issues. And for soil science skip this drivel and read Transect Points. etc., you get the idea, there are better places to read competent and focused writings on these issues than here. I have another to add to that list of better reads: for analysis of the defects of paleo-environmentalism and prescriptions for more useful approaches read Brad Allenby. I'm comfortable directing you to my betters. Farmers aren't specialists, they are jacks-of-many-trades and masters of none, though perhaps still useful since some of the more interesting insights of life span disciplines or nestle in the cracks between them, and farmers are some of the ones who may notice and call out. Allenby has an interesting cv. Brad Allenby is professor of civil and environmental engineering at Arizona State University, a fellow at the University of Virginia's Darden...

Marcelino Fuentes at Biopolitical makes a point that punctuates the previous post on "The risks of faith based science". From the Asian tsunami to Katrina, the message should be obvious: where they still exist, we must protect our coastal ecosystems; where they do not (as in much of our Gulf coast) we must reconstruct them. The message is not obvious because we don't have a quantitative measure of the benefits and the costs, including foregone opportunities, of maintaining and reconstructing all coastal ecosystems. One can advocate the preservation or reconstruction of coastal ecosystems - all of them, and regardless of costs - only by assuming that they have effectively infinite benefits. If protection against disasters has infinite value we should not stop at maintaining and reconstructing coastal ecosystems. We should invest enormous (just a little less of infinite) resources in designing and erecting protections that are even more effective than natural ecosystems. Actually, protection against disasters has, like everything...

I've said all this before, but not as well. The economic, biological and climatological arguments--about global warming, species extinction, pollution, and the like--are sometimes right, sometimes wrong. But the driving force, for a lot of those making those arguments, is the essentially religious belief that natural is good. As evidence, consider how few in the environmental movement are willing to support nuclear power. Nuclear reactors are the one source of power that provides a plausible alternative to fossil fuels—a way of generating electricity almost anywhere without producing CO2 or consuming fossil fuels, and doing it at a cost not wildly higher than the cost of coal fueled generators. They thus provide at least a partial solution to what environmentalists claim are two of the big problems—depletable resources and global warming. A few environmentalists accept that argument—most, by casual observation, don’t. The reason is clear. Nuclear reactors are as unnatural as you can get—a symbol of the evils of high...

Environmentalism may not be dead yet, but it is diseased and dying. The kerfuffle over the past few months as the "environmental movement" has suffered many blows and public humiliations continues to spark commentary. A significant part of the disease is association with the Democratic party and its drift into irrelevance over the past few decades as it abandoned its populist roots and became a rag tag collection of special interests with no governing philosophy or ethical credibility. See Left Out for more on that. The "environmental movement" was just one of the special interest groups clinging to that sinking raft. In Response to "Death": Part II Ken Ward attempts to spin his way out of the whirlpool drawing Democrats into the depths. [via The Uneasy Chair] Rather than give up our identity as environmentalists, as proposed by S&N, we should reaffirm green values and, however difficult it may seem today, remember that our mission is to win the...

The difficulty lies not in new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones -- John Maynard Keynes That's how this article urging a coordinated environmental policy for the western US ends. The problem noted is that the west is split into two parts, one government owned and managed and the other privately owned and operated. [via Nature Noted] By any yardstick -- watershed acres, animal species, ecological processes -- conservation success on private land has been small. While many environmentalists correctly note that half of the West is publicly owned and thus held in trust for the public good, they rarely mention the other part of that equation: Half of the West is in private hands. This is significant because, as many researchers have written, private lands contain the most productive soils, are located at lower elevations and often include key riparian areas. Wildlife biologist Rick Knight, who teaches at Colorado State University, put it this way: "We...

Some in the environmental movement are squealing about the hits they are taking about the tsunami. The wave had barely receded before the wacko fringe began beating the climate change drum and linking it to the tsunami, claiming that it is a taste of what is to come as a consequence of climate change or that it was even caused by climate change. Every interest group from mangrove and reef advocates to multinational reinsurance companies used the tsunami as a platform to advance their agenda. The backlash against their opportunism has apparently stung a bit. At a time when all good people were laser focused on the need for relief efforts and the longer term rebuilding that would continue for the better part of a decade the jackals and carrion eaters on the fringe of the environmental movement gorged themselves. The defense some use is that they didn't profiteer on the disaster, that it was just some fringe wackos...

Groups of politicians and lawyers have recruited Inuit people as plaintiffs in a suit they'd like to lodge against the US for causing global warming. Many have pointed out the irony of the suit which cites the heartbreaking problems the Inuit now face: Large sections of the [ACIA] report deal with problems faced by indigenous Arctic people, who tell of hunters falling through melting sea ice, declining reindeer herds and difficulty traveling in roadless regions with no snow for their snowmobiles and sleds. Snowmobiles? Hunting with guns? Indigenous? What is it that these people are claiming? It clearly is not that their traditional way of life is being altered since that has been going on for a long time and has been enthusiastically embraced. After all, they are happy to shoot off lawyers, politicians and activists as well as guns to make their lives easier and make money. The Inuit live in houses not igloos. They build their houses...

Pseudo - a person who makes deceitful pretenses. This article, an example of the histrionics pointed out elsewhere regarding the reversal of a Clinton Administration restriction on road building on federal lands, demonstrates the deceitfulness of a destructive segment of the environmental community. The roadless rule, implemented in the final month of the Clinton administration, protects the last remaining untouched wilderness in the American national-forest system -- roughly 60 million of the 190 million acres of national forest -- from mining, drilling, and development. But it doesn't protect the forests from fire - a far, far more dire and immanent threat. The concept of "untouched wilderness" is a simple minded social construction that is both historically and ecologically deluded. This isn't an innocent or harmless quirk of an indifferently educated though vocal political group. It is an intentional deceit for political gain by groups willing to destroy the forests to gain power. They are politicians posing as environmentalists, pseudo-environmentalists....

There's an interesting dialectic between two articles in the same issue of the Wilson Quarterly. One, a Hayek intellectual biography, and the other an article by Stacy D. VanDeveer lamenting the demise of environmental summitry. The Hayekian thesis: The problem with socialism, Hayek argued, is that it seeks to replace the dispersed knowledge of those myriad actors with that of a single, omniscient planner. Socialist central planning cannot work because it attempts the impossible: using a static equilibrium model to capture unfathomably complex inputs and outputs characterized by dynamic, constantly shifting equilibria. In market economies, by contrast, the price mechanism provides information about preferences and relative scarcities to thousands of agents, whose continual exchanges produce a socially beneficial if unplanned outcome... One can never fully model and predict complex phenomena such as the spontaneous orders produced by the interactions of simpler agents. These orders include the human brain, whose higher functions cannot possibly be inferred from its physical substratum,...

There are fundamental disagreements between schools of ecological thought. One school, referred to in earlier posts 1,2, argues that humans should control nature according to either predictive models or prescriptive 'vision'. Another school, referred to earlier1 argues that humans must engage with nature and participate rather than control. In the past the control school, represented here by Donnela Meadows, stated that natural systems could be modelled and manipulated to achieve desired outcomes. A string of failures has prompted them to regroup slightly. The future can't be predicted, but it can be envisioned and brought lovingly into being. Systems can't be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned. The engagement school, represented here by Wendell Berry, states that outcomes aren't predictable or controllable but have faith that intimate engagement will result in acceptable outcomes. If we want the land to be cared for, then we must have people living on and from the land who are able and willing...

In the previous post, Mouse-based Monitoring, methods for evaluating the effectiveness of large environmental organizations were discussed. Smaller scale efforts have the same kinds of problems but don't have support organizations that could be reformed to provide better systems. They are too small to use such methods but there are a lot of them so that their aggregate efforts are large and seemingly unmanageable. A poignant example of this was documented a few years ago in an article in Whole Earth Magazine, Nice Boulders, but Where's the Fish?. It's an account by Seth Zuckerman of the efforts of local environmental interventions to restore streams and fisheries. These spawner surveys have become an annual ritual for two dozen or so residents of the Mattole watershed on California's North Coast, where citizens have worked to revive faltering salmon runs since 1979. A spiderwork of nonprofit groups has arisen to learn more about the fish and their habitat, to communicate to our...