Irrational environmentalism caused California's environmental disaster. Chuck DeVore writes:
Much of California's southern coast is covered by brush known as chaparral. As the Wikipedia entry on chaparral correctly notes: "In its natural state, chaparral is characterized by infrequent fires, with intervals ranging between 10–15 years and over a hundred years … These plants are highly flammable during the late summer and autumn months when conditions are characteristically hot and dry." [...]
The flammable nature of California's coastal chaparral brush lands is a well-known threat. California's Department of Forestry and Fire Protection even publishes a fire hazard map for Malibu and other areas. [...]
But celebrities love their privacy. Dense vegetation shields them from the paparazzi's prying eyes. Low-hanging branches hugging a house can look charming, but in the chaparral region, they're also a source of deadly ignition. To mitigate the danger of an intense brushfire in the chaparral, fire authorities must conduct controlled burns and homeowners must take the defensible space clearance seriously. Unfortunately, both requirements are often neglected.
Fire officials do try. When fire authorities announce their intentions to conduct a prescribed burn, many times the burn is thwarted by environmental lawsuits, air quality concerns, or complaints from vocal homeowners. Without a controlled burn, the fuel load rises every day as plants use sunlight to convert carbon dioxide and water to flammable cellulose.
Meanwhile, in southern California, even before the tragic Camp Fire wiped out the town of Paradise, some homeowners were finding it hard to get fire insurance. Insured damages in California will likely exceed $15 billion this year. Without fire insurance, a mortgage is impossible to obtain, significantly reducing the value of property in areas near now high-risk forestland.
For many environmentalists, this is not a bug, but a feature of forest management practices that have discouraged timber harvesting in the West. The fire danger has grown as harvests on federal land fell from 10-12 billion board feet per year in the 30 years before 1990 to 2.5 billion feet in 2013.
[Chuck DeVore, "Don't Blame Climate Change for California's Fires," The Federalist, November 21]
How environmental laws turned forests into tinderboxes. Richard Epstein writes:
[The National Environmental Policy Act] was originally conceived as a device to encourage collaboration among government officials and various public and private groups to achieve its ends. But in 1971, Judge J. Skelly Wright of the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals added a new dimension to the equation in Calvert Cliffs' Coordinating Committee v. United States Atomic Energy Commission, which held that, in light of NEPA's strong environmental mission, any private party could bring an action in federal court to review any administrative approval of a proposed project. He then celebrated this development in no uncertain terms: "These cases are only the beginning of what promises to become a flood of new litigation—litigation seeking judicial assistance in protecting our natural environment."
That judicial maneuver transformed the statute. Most parties did not want to sue to block projects. It was only the activist environmental groups with the strongest commitment that came forward. And when they did, there was no longer a collaborative process that involved parties on all parts of the political spectrum. Now the sole party before the court was the group most determined to see the project or activity stopped. [...]
The successful management of any complex environmental system requires complicated tradeoffs between various objectives like the preservation of diverse species, fire prevention, the construction of dams and waterways, and the harvesting of valuable timber. But any tempered approach of balancing costs and benefits of environmental regulations was effectively scuttled by the Supreme Court in Tennessee Valley Authority v. Hill (1978), which took the position that the recent discovery of a new endangered species, the snail darter, took priority over the completion of the Tellico dam, which was in the final stages of construction. The notion of tradeoffs was pushed emphatically to the back burner.
The combination of [the Endangered Species Act] and NEPA shifted the environmental movement in the wrong direction. One result was, as Congressman McClintock noted, an 80 percent reduction in the number of trees that were harvested and sold on public lands in California reducing the number of operating saw mills there from 149 in 1981 to 27 in 2017.
[Richard A. Epstein, "California's Forest Fire Tragedy," Hoover Institution, November 19]
Europe wants to help an enemy. Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and China are working on creating a "Special Purpose Vehicle" that would facilitate trade between Iran and other states and avoid U.S. sanctions. It will work only to feed Iran's ambitions, writes James Phillips:
By colluding with Russia and China to evade U.S. sanctions, the EU seeks to appease Iran, keep it in the flawed 2015 nuclear deal , and deliver a symbolic diplomatic slap to the Trump administration.
But the SVP [Special Purpose Vehicle] and other measures such as EU's updated Blocking Statute are not likely to meet Iran's demands for remaining in the nuclear agreement. These measures may marginally reduce the impact of U.S. sanctions on trade, but they will not satisfy Tehran's need for substantial foreign investment and technology transfer.
Iran's Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Sajjadpour signaled Tehran's frustration with the limited progress made on EU efforts to bypass U.S. sanctions: "What is lacking is both speed and efficiency."
Iran's distrust of EU bureaucrats is shared by many European businessmen, who are unwilling to risk being targeted by U.S. sanctions that would impose concrete economic penalties in order to enable EU officials to take a symbolic stand against Washington.
To make matters worse, the SPV will be open to non-European firms, meaning that the EU will be enabling Russia and China to advance their own economic and geopolitical interests regarding Iran.
The EU's misguided efforts to appease Iran not only facilitate Iran's hegemonic ambitions, but they also could jeopardize the security of EU citizens.
Tehran recently was caught red-handed in foiled plots to bomb an Iranian exile rally in France in June 2018 and an effort to assassinate the exiled leaders of a separatist Arab Iranian opposition group in Denmark in October.
[James Phillips, "EU Risks Dangerous Blowback by Undermining Iran Sanctions," The Daily Signal, November 16]
Anti-vaping policy may undermine anti-smoking efforts. Jacob Sullum writes:
In the midst of a federal campaign against underage vaping, a new study finds that downward trends in smoking among teenagers and young adults accelerated as e-cigarette use rose. The findings, based on data from five national surveys, suggest that the official panic about the "epidemic" of e-cigarette use by minors, which has led to restrictions that affect adult access to vaping products and government-sponsored propaganda that exaggerates their hazards, is fatally misguided.
"A long-term decline in smoking prevalence among US youth accelerated after 2013 when vaping became more widespread," Georgetown public health researcher David T. Levy and his co-authors report in the journal Tobacco Control. "These findings were also observed for US young adults, especially those ages 18–21. We also found that the decline in more established smoking, as measured by daily smoking, smoking half pack a day or having smoked at least 100 cigarettes and currently smoking some days or every day, markedly accelerated when vaping increased." While "it is premature to conclude that the observed increased rate of decline in smoking is due to vaping diverting youth from smoking," Levy et al. say, "it is a plausible explanation."
[Jacob Sullum, "Declines in Adolescent Smoking Accelerated as Vaping Rose, Suggesting the FDA's Campaign is Fatally Misguided," Reason, November 21]
More economic freedom, more democracy. Evangelos Andreou:
The Democracy Index is an annual report by the Economist Intelligence Unit that ranks 167 countries according to their commitment to democratic values such as electoral process, pluralism, civil liberties, the functioning of government, political participation, and political culture.
Out of those 167 countries, only 19 countries are classified as "full democracies," most of which are found among the top 30 countries in the Economic Freedom of the World Report (with the exception of Sweden and Iceland, which rank 43th and 59th respectively and are both still market-oriented economies with strong rule of law). This correlation works both ways: Most authoritarian countries (with the exception of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates) are also economically unfree, belonging either in the third or fourth economic freedom quartile. So, sorry friends of the left: greater economic freedom is empirically associated with more political rights and civil liberties, and vice versa.
Why? Milton Friedman offers an explanation in his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom: "In order for men to advocate anything, they must in the first place be able to earn a living. This already raises a problem in a socialist society since all jobs are under the direct control of political authorities."
There cannot be political freedom without economic freedom. This argument is not controversial, even on the left. Leon Trotsky wrote in The Revolution Betrayed that "in a country where the sole employer is the state, opposition means death by slow starvation. The old principle, who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat."
[Evangelos Andreou, "Why Poor People in the Freest Nations Have Incomes 8x Higher Than Poor People in the Least Free," Foundation for Economic Education, November 19]
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