To put it succinctly, the government’s “solution” for this “problem” was to mandate a new kind of inhaler, one that doesn’t contain CFCs and “cost twice as much and simply don’t work as well.”

Imagine that! Many doctors and the government insist they work just as well, but asthma sufferers such as Megan McArdle disagree.

ETA: A reader points out to me that it was not necessarily the American government mandating this change- it was actually an international treaty that America signed along with many other countries which forced the switchover to non-CFC inhalers. This is even more of a reason why many of the international treaties we agree to are completely worthless for what they’re meant for and should be avoided. The consequences are simply not adequately studied ahead of time, and are different than the intentions.

The movement is not just a modern one:

“Talking about secession has been a quasi-joking conversational saw since 1941, when five counties in the area started things by actually declaring themselves – briefly – to be the state of Jefferson. But now, with the economy in trouble and unemployment soaring, the idea of greater independence is getting its most serious consideration since World War II.

The residents of the 12 California and Oregon counties have legitimate gripes with big government and specific plans on how they could do it all better:

Locals complain that federal and state regulators have hampered the fishing and timber industries to protect forestlands and endangered species such as sucker fish and the spotted owl. Jobs are so scarce that the median income in the area is only two-thirds that of the rest of the state. Most water from the rainy Shasta region is shipped south, with little economic benefit to the area. Even the California sales tax draws sneers.

If they ran their own state, the reasoning goes, folks in Siskiyou, Modoc and the other potential Jefferson counties could whack the red tape from both federal and state officials and get rid of the sales tax.

In a statement that shows these counties are right on with their criticisms of the state governments being out of touch with their concerns, Gov. Schwarzenegger says he’s never heard of them before:

“‘Never heard of Jefferson,’ said Aaron McLear, spokesman for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. ‘We are going to decline comment.’”

To those who might think that the state of Jefferson will be another Puerto Rico, living off federal government handouts, one Jeffersonian assures:

“We aren’t looking for handouts. We want to utilize our resources wisely, especially the renewable ones. We have power; water, wood fueled, geothermal, solar wind, bio diesel and algea. We can make a living from good honest work, not by confiscating dollars through taxes, user fees etc.

Our government would be lean and mean; A government of by and for the people.”

That would certainly be a new concept for America today. Good luck to them.

Exactly how many trees will have to be cut down for all the dollars Helicopter Ben’s been ordering lately from his well-used printing press?

* Image courtesy of Don Luskin.

I present to you The Tree That Owns Itself, in Athens, Georgia.

One unfortunate aspect about The Tree That Owns Itself is that, while it is generally acknowledged to own itself, it is “accepted for care” by municipal authorities, which we all know means that it probably wouldn’t really be all that cared for (check out the trees and wildlife situation in the Soviet Union or Cuba, for extreme examples of this phenomenon). However, the local government has thankfully embraced libertarian ideas and has mostly turned the care of the tree over to locals: “… local government and the owners of the adjacent property jointly serve as ‘stewards’ for the care of the tree, while Athens’ Junior Ladies’ Garden Club serves as its ‘primary advocate.’”

Why would the Junior Ladies’ Garden Club be a better “primary advocate” than the Athens municipal government? This is the very heart of the libertarian views on how to save the environment. The club has a special affinity for and knowledge of gardening, it is a private group that must maintain its reputation in order to maintain membership (and therefore it would be highly unlikely it would let the tree die, for example). In addition, the local homeowners also have an interest in keeping the value of the tree as a tourist attraction that increases the value of their properties and the look of their neighborhood.

The history of the tree is a lesson in libertarianism as well. The marble marker describing the unique history of the tree (which is now the Son of the Tree That Owns Itself), the fence surrounding it, and the soil was donated by a philanthropist in 1906. Despite being in the city’s right of way, in the time between the death of the old tree and the planting of the new tree the lot was not cared for properly by the city– the nearby house at that time was vacant, with no homeowner to attend to the lot’s needs, and the city didn’t care that the lot had fallen into disrepair.

“Privatization” does not necessarily mean “corporations”; it often means private groups and individuals doing what is best for society by doing what they love to do at no cost to the taxpayer, and elements of nature which can be as content as The Tree That Owns Itself appears to be.

The Tree That Owns Itself, Son of the Tree That Owns Itself, libertarian environment, privatization

How is that? Well, the government causes more damage to the environment than any corporation, group, or entity in America, yet this same government regulates all others on how they can pollute — and environmental groups consistently want to expand that power. Honestly, what a scam the government has going here. Damage the environment more than anyone else, get people to want you to make laws protecting that environment– in fact, to beg you to take more power in protecting the environment, and then make yourself immune from those laws while polluting away the whole time.

Bureaucrats who pollute (and there are a lot of them, much more than CEOs or corporate underlings who do) have immunity from prosecution, either as a government entity or on an individual basis. That’s an injustice that a libertarian world would fix.

As Dr. Mary Ruwart writes:

“By turning to government for environmental protection, we’ve placed the fox in charge of the hen house…”

She goes on to detail some of the havoc that governments, federal, state and local, have wreaked on the environment:

“In 1988, for example, the EPA demanded that the Departments of Energy and Defense clean up 17 of their weapons plants which were leaking radioactive and toxic chemicals — enough contamination to cost $100 billion in clean-up costs over 50 years! The EPA was simply ignored. No bureaucrats went to jail or were sued for damages. Government departments have sovereign immunity.

In 1984, a Utah court ruled that the U.S. military was negligent in its nuclear testing, causing serious health problems (e.g. death) for the people exposed to radioactive fallout. The Court of Appeals dismissed the claims of the victims, because government employees have sovereign immunity.

Hooker Chemical begged the Niagara Falls School Board not to excavate the land where Hooker had safely stored toxic chemical waste. The school board ignored these warnings and taxpayers had to foot a $30 million relocation bill when health problems arose. The EPA filed suit, not against the reckless school board, but against Hooker Chemical! Government officials have sovereign immunity.”

Why did Blu-Ray win out? It’s a better product, with a better name, bought by more customers. It’s as simple as that. Free market capitalism in a pure form. There were no government subsidies for the inferior product of HD-DVD, no regulations set by the state that Blu-Ray couldn’t meet or that make it too expensive for consumers, and now that HD-DVD is dying, there will be no nationalization of HD-DVD. This is how it should be. Let the good products and companies win and let the bad ones die out, and don’t create so many regulations that new companies can’t spring up to take the place of dead or dying products and companies.

That’s why I’m troubled about what is usually called “the greatest challenge” of creating “alternative energies” to combat climate change. The goal is laudable, definitely. However, many well-intentioned people want to discourage reliance on foreign oil by using government funds to subsidize alternative energies, renewable fuels, and “clean” energy sources. Frankly, this is a disaster waiting to happen. The fat cats in Washington simply do not know more about what alternative energies will work and which won’t than the free market. The economist Bettina Greaves put it very simply: governments look to the past, while entrepreneurs must look to the future to survive. What if hydro-electricity is subsidized by lawmakers, but in the end, wind energy is the better product? Hydro would win out, because it doesn’t have to be the better product that people will actually pay for in the free market. Wind energy would not survive and would not be available for those who wanted it and knew it was better.

What if both (or all!) forms of energy are subsidized? That would mean that we would go bankrupt subsidizing the ones who are forced through taxes to subsidize other things. Even worse, it would mean that a new kind of energy– some form that hasn’t even been invented yet– would have to compete against those government subsidies and most likely wouldn’t be able to. Why would anyone create a new form of energy with their own money, even if it’s a better product, if it wouldn’t be able to compete against government-backed forms of energy, which may not be as efficient? It’s very, very difficult to compete against something that is subsidized by the government, which is why lobbyists in Washington are busy trying to get our legislators to subsidize anything and everything.

Unlike entrepreneurs, governments don’t have to look to the past to make accurate decisions about the future– they just have to look to the polls to see how to get elected this year. The government never would have recognized that two brothers who owned a bicycle shop in Ohio would be able to develop and build a flying airplane faster than anyone else, and why should we expect that the government can now figure out, in advance, who will create new environmental technologies and what exactly those should be? What environmentalists are trying to legislate is akin to the government of 100 years ago mandating what the design of the first airplane would be and who would build it– and they would not have been as successful, because only a free market of innovation could result in the Wright Brothers making their first plane. If the government was paying other people to create the kind of airplane the government had mandated would be able to fly, the Wright Brothers might never have tried to invent the plane in the first place. Perhaps we would have gotten a worse design for the first plane, much later.

You can see, then, why I’m always wary when I receive something in the mail about the environment and how it must be “saved” through government regulation. Our federal government (the same people that brought you cash in the freezer, FEMA’s bureaucracy, bought-and-paid-for legislators, Halliburton and all) is somehow thought by so-called environmentalists to be the ultimate beacon of knowledge for somehow creating a magic fuel that will run everything while having no cost to anyone or anything– your wallet or the environment. The same people who don’t trust the government to be able to clean up after a hurricane think that this same government can– with no missteps or kickbacks to contractors– develop and direct the creation of something as important as a complete alternative to oil. This is ridiculous.

Let’s take Great Britain as an example. The UK government’s “business secretary” said last month that the government’s own wind power mandates passed by Parliament created “an opportunity for this country to develop its own technology.” I ask you this. Did any government, UK or otherwise, have to pass a mandate to develop the car? Did the government develop the transistor, which allows most modern technology such as cell phones and computers to run, or pass a mandate to develop a transistor by a certain time period, or even have any idea that something called a “transistor” could be invented in the first place? Did the government mandate that someone they chose had to develop electricity by a certain date? Did the government even develop the dishwasher? The government didn’t have a hand in any of these technologies, and they were created in the free market as a benefit to everyone, quite successfully for everyone all around, precisely because the government was not involved. The government, in contrast, has created the nuclear bomb and taxes. How’s that for a track record? Why has the government earned the right to develop our new environmental technologies? Who is crazy enough to leave this job to them?

Personally, I can’t take seriously anyone who says anything about saving the environment unless they personally do the single best thing anyone can do for the environment and become a vegetarian.The latest plea I received in the mail from trendy environmentalists (who like to talk a good game but never manage to put their money where their mouth is) comes from Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, who beg me to contact Congress about the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act. The problem is, the act in question is nothing but massive corporate welfare to coal companies, as any type of carbon trading or cap-and-trade system will be and has been in the European Union– with these systems, you just end up using government money to pay companies to pollute.

It’s no surprise, really. Our politicians certainly don’t read bills before sponsoring or voting on them; why should celebrities, even a celebrity philanthropist like Paul Newman, read bills of Congress before sending out letters begging people to support them? The ultimate irony is that the organization Newman and Woodward are shilling for (the Environmental Defense Action Fund) claims in the same letter that it takes no money from corporations, while asking us to beg our legislators to hand over taxpayer dollars to coal companies through Lieberman and Warner’s bill.

Tags: environmental subsidies, environment, environment free market, government regulations environment, Paul Newman, wind power subsidies, alternative energies

“Downstate Illinois,” as it’s referred to by Chicago reporters, is abuzz because FutureGen, the state-of-the-art coal-fired-yet-environmentally-friendly power plant has found its home: Mattoon, Illinois beat out nearby Tuscola, Ilinois and two locations in Texas. Take that, Longhorns!

The now-$1.5 billion project is going to be paid for by the federal government (73%) and $80 million in cash and incentives from the state of Illinois, and of course the cost is ballooning. In what could turn out to be a catastrophic mistake, Illinois lawmakers have agreed that taxpayers will pay for the plant’s insurance policy and cover any liability losses it incurs. (!)

The spokesman for Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, Joe Shoemaker, “dismissed [Department of Energy official James] Slutz’s statement [on FutureGen] as posturing.”

What did the “posturing” Slutz say? Spokesman Shoemaker paraphrases:

“This was a priority for the previous secretary of energy… He was willing to go along with some increase in the cost without making much fuss. Now, his successor has inherited it. The secretary of energy is now saying ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa — I’ve got a problem on my hands. I’ve budgeted X, and I’m going to be paying out Y.’”

And the problem with that is….? It’s now considered “posturing” to question why cost estimates for a taxpayer-funded project can go up 25% in a few years? The Secretary of Energy should be a good steward of what he or she is spending, since the money is not theirs, but the taxpayer’s. Apparently no one notified Senator Durbin’s office of this– weird, because Durbin could use a bit of the same attitude, rather than simply focusing on shoveling the pork home.

The DOE isn’t the only one with second thoughts: “Congress has already balked at FutureGen costs…” Wow, Congress (especially this Congress) has never balked at anything, so the situation must really be bad as far as FutureGen’s costs go. The 111th Congress did appropriate $75 million in pork for the plant in the last spending bill they just passed, though.

Tags: FutureGen, FutureGen coal, FutureGen costs, FutureGen Mattoon, Dick Durbin, Dick Durbin pork

The obvious solution is to legalize marijuana.

Why legalize marijuana? Why not just make it illegal and attempt to arrest all these renegade marijuana growers and throw them in prison? Well, since that’s the status quo, and it doesn’t solve anything and in fact makes it worse, the only suitable alternative is to legalize marijuana. Reasons?

• With illegal marijuana, the taxpayers get hit multiple times–
  • no taxes on a product sold,
  • millions spent on police to combat that product,
  • harm to society with the crimes that are not prevented or solved while police instead chase marijuana users and growers,
  • millions on prison systems to hold those who sell this product,
  • and as the above article details, huge amounts in taxpayer dollars wasted to clean up the remnants of the diesel generators from these illegal growing sites–
  • not to mention the health effects suffered by those drinking the diesel-contaminated groundwater.

Illegal marijuana (and the black market that currently comes with it) also carries a risk of violence for the public; California’s large-scale ad hoc marijuana fields are built by Mexican drug cartels who helicopter Mexican migrants in to take care of them and depend on the profits from the marijuana to do God knows what back in Mexico. When a product is relegated to the black market only, it’s going to attract loathsome types to its black market profits. Those in pursuit of black market profits are not going to care about any sideline damage, of humans, animals, or the environment, but responsible marijuana growers (as most would be in a society with legalized marijuana) do. The Sheriff of Mendocino County, California realizes this:

“There is a serious distinction to be made. Many medical [legal] marijuana growers are some of the most responsible citizens around. They buy soil in bulk, use rat traps instead of poison, water with timers and drip systems. They have very little physical impact on the land. I’m not up against legal growers. The ones I’m concerned with are the ones polluting the environment in the name of huge profits. The plants are seasonal, but the environmental damage lasts forever.”

With legal marijuana, the public would benefit so much.

• Mexican drug cartels would have no reason to bring their violence and tactics to our country, because the entrepreneur down the street would be able to sell legal marijuana at the local drugstore.
• I’m no fan of taxes, but think of the billions in taxes that would be generated from a free market of marijuana users– and what education, health care, roads and bridges that those billions (currently going to drug cartels) could provide under our current system of providing these types of things.
• Police officers could stop searching for minor drugs and focus more on, for example, investigating the 30% of murders that go unsolved in the US.
• We wouldn’t have overcrowded prisons and the spiraling costs for construction and AIDS treatment that result from them.
• Our court systems would be freed up from all these petty criminals and able to better tackle more important cases for public safety, such as prosecutions of murder and rape.

Good results for the environment would just be icing on the cake.

Tags: marijuana, legalize marijuana, marijuana environment, illegal marijuana, decriminalize marijuana, legalise marijuana, decriminalise marijuana, help the environment, help environment, environment

The Daily Tarheel noted that UNC’s current search for a replacement chancellor involves many such trips– all the candidates will fly to Chapel Hill to be interviewed. I found the reaction of the head of the chancellor search committee (and former Chair of the UNC Board of Trustees), Nelson Schwab, interesting. He said the chancellor search doesn’t necessarily have to be environmentally friendly because it’s so important to the university: “We’ve got to find the right candidate, and I’m not letting anything get in the way of that.”

I admit, a chancellor is important for UNC, and flights on airplanes are a fact of modern life.

However, isn’t this the same argument given by the business owner who doesn’t want environmental regulation? Isn’t the economy and a person’s business very important to him/her and the employees of that business?

Aren’t SUVs important to soccer moms who want to pick up all their kids and their friends? Isn’t it important that people be happy with their choice of car?

Isn’t the environment important to future generations?

In other words, everyone else in the world and at UNC must sacrifice everything that’s important to them for the good of the environment, but this chancellor search apparently goes above and beyond any other possible priority and simply must proceed without debating the consequences, come hell or high water.

The head of UNC’s Institute for the Environment, Douglas Crawford-Brown, agrees with me, noting that almost all environmental damage is done in the name of a good reason, so that can’t be an excuse, or everyone would have that excuse.

Tags: UNC, UNC-Chapel Hill, UNC Chancellor search, UNC Chancellor, environment, university impact on environment, UNC environment

The panel found that transportation was the third-highest cause of global warming gases. Second on the list is manufacturing and industrial infrastructure, no surprise there. But the number one cause of global warming is…

Livestock.

Livestock?!?!? As in, food livestock? As in, what we eat? The food that magically appears on our table? Yes, it turns out that it’s not carbon emissions that are the problem, but methane. And livestock (cows and pigs especially) releases methane gas into the atmosphere at high levels, a primary factor in our global warming problem.

This makes it all the more amazing that Al Gore can win a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on global warming without once mentioning the word “vegetarian.”

Tags: Global warming, Environment, methane, true cause of global warming, vegetarian, livestock global warming