Beattie on Closeup [updated]

Kiwi viewers should tune in tomorrow night (Tuesday) to Close Up on TV1 for a piece on Roger Beattie's weka farming and, I'm told, a debate between Roger and a DoC staffer on the merits of the commercial farming of endangered species. I'm guessing the clip will wind up on the Close Up site sometime after broadcast.

For more on Roger's work in saving the weka (for tasty eating sometime down the track), check my prior post here; for more on saving endangered species by farming and eating them, here and here.

Update: it looks like DoC has pulled out, so it's delayed for now....

Nobel lie?

From the Daily Mail:

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

Option One: They lied about this, so they've likely lied about other stuff in a lengthy opaque technical document that cannot be independently replicated because much of the data is not in the public domain.

Option Two: They're truth seekers, they're convinced that warming is going to be awful, and they know that only outrageous claims will work in mobilizing political support for change.

If you lean towards option two... Did I remember to tell you that that free markets cure cancer and cause ponies to miraculously appear in your back yard, just waiting to be patted and fed apples? Just look at Singapore and Hong Kong - top two in the economic freedom indices. Free ponies and no cancer - all the time. In fact, ponies are now the biggest export of both countries since ponies on the balconies of small apartments tend to be inconvenient.

Now, do you think I'm just a liar, or does my lying strengthen your confidence in other claims I might make about the merits of markets given that I've demonstrated the strength of my beliefs by my willingness to lie?

Nobels oughtn't be awarded for noble lies.

Talking sense on recycling

My back-of-the-envelope calculation for Christchurch, back when we were paying $1.20 per black bag for garbage pick up but the city completely subsidized recycling, was that the city paid roughly twice as much per tonne for disposal of recycling after counting the money they made from on-selling the recycling bits that were of any value: the most conservative estimates I could make had regular trash costing about $42/tonne and recycling about $75/tonne; midpoint estimates were more like $31/tonne on landfill and $110/tonne on recycling (depending on how you want to allocated fixed costs across disposal types given how the City Council reports spending on refuse).

We've since moved to a bin system where we don't pay directly either for landfill or recycling, so the price disparity will likely have narrowed somewhat, mostly by increasing the amount by which the Council subsidizes landfill use from rates. I wouldn't say that paying for trash pickup from rates rather than paying per piece is inefficient: the best evidence suggests that the transactions costs of running a per-unit payment system outweigh any distortions caused by lump-sum pricing. But it will make recycling look relatively less costly.

Kevin Libin in the National Post lays out some hard facts on recycling.

“People say you can’t recycle too much. It turns out you can,” says Mr. Porter, president of the environmental consulting firm, the Waste Policy Center, near Washington, D.C. “If you spend enough money, you can recycle anything. That doesn’t mean you should.”
...

A 2003 study by Enviros Environmental Consultants UK found that “from a global warming perspective, there is limited environmental benefit to using recycled glass” but continuing with the exercise of recycling was “an important part of the UK meeting its overall glass recycling targets.” That is, so politicians could meet their set goals, even if there was no environmental point to it.

...

San Francisco’s Department of Waste recently calculated it paid $4,000 a tonne to recycle plastic bags. Its resale price for the recycled product? $32. “Nobody wants it. There’s no value. It doesn’t make sense,” says Joseph Gho, CEO of EPI Environmental Products Inc., a Vancouver manufacturer of biodegradable plastics. “Besides the financial, the economic cost, you’ve got the environmental cost” of recycling unwanted material. “The trucks running out there, burning fuel … you have to use energy, you’ve got CO2 emissions.”

That’s why curbside recycling requires, wherever it’s implemented, millions of tax dollars to stay afloat: the inputs required are greater than the savings. Even in New York City, where area land is some of the most expensive on the continent, it costs $240 to deal with a ton of recyclables, compared to the $130 a ton of landfills, says Angela Logomasini, Director of Risk and Environmental Policy at Washington, D.C.’s Competitive Enterprise Institute.

...

A 2000 study by the London-based environmental group Friends of the Earth found that collecting yard waste for recycling (ie, making mulch) emitted 264 more pounds of CO2 than burying it in a landfill. In 2002, two of Sweden’s leading environmental authorities argued that recycling’s benefits were usually undone by the resources required to collect and process it.

...

A study out of Washington’s Gonzaga University calculated that all the garbage produced by Americans over the next 1,000 years would fit into a landfill just 44 miles square and 100 feet deep—less than one-tenth of one-percent of American real estate.

I like the last bit. In my lecture on environmental economics, I note that if Christchurch went through a landfill the size of our current Kate Valley facility every year instead of every thirty years, and if we were building new landfills on prime irrigated dairy land instead of scrub wasteland, the cost of buying land for landfill would still be only about $2 per person per year. Absolutely trivial.

My students tell me that the stuff they hear in my Economics and Current Policy Issues course is ... somewhat different from what they hear in their management or accounting courses. I enjoy providing diversity.

NZIER report rocks

NZIER has released a report on sustainability and the environment in New Zealand. Excellent. Were I teaching Econ 224 again next year, it would be on the syllabus for my week on environment and sustainability. Long story short, the report reminds us that resources for use in improving the environment are scarce and we're wasting many of them on initiatives that will provide little benefit. Consequently, we ought to reallocate resources away from carbon abatement and waste minimization and towards addressing air and water pollution. Very sensible.

The last government put in place some surcharges for landfill uses predicated on an "all landfill is bad" philosophy. Says NZIER

Waste policy in New Zealand has achieved much over the past decade but further extensions for sustainability purposes are questionable. The new Act’s levy on wastes disposed to landfill bears no relation to measurable externalities coming from landfills, most of which are now relatively new and managed to high standards, and as a revenue raising device it is simply inefficient. It has no appreciable benefit in reducing the depletion of environmental stocks or their contributions to economic welfare. Pursuing targets for waste minimisation and maximising material recovery, reuse and recycling, without explicit consideration of the costs and benefits, will itself be wasteful of non-material resources such as labour, energy and capital, diverting them from other activities of value to the community.

Which is pretty much what I say in lecture as well.

View the report as being Lomborg's Copenhagen Consensus applied to New Zealand. It could be better, of course: tied for top priority is reducing pressure on biodiversity, but no mention is made of policies that currently hinder private efforts to breed endangered species (Roger Beattie's excellent work case in point). But it's a great start.

For students: 224 is off next year. I'm on sabbatical first half of 2010 and first half of 2011, with a half teaching load in the second semester of each year (with some parental leave added in for 2010). So I'm teaching the second half of intermediate micro theory next year, with Erskine Visitor Max Stearns covering my 336 class, and then likely 224 and 336 in 2011.

Further difficulties in environmentalist calculation

Absent comprehensive Pigovean taxes, it ain't easy being green.

BoingBoing highlights the difficulties facing an environmentalist trying to decide between LED lights and compact fluorescents. LEDs are highly energy efficient in theory, but less energy efficient than compact fluorescent in actual implementation, at least for now.

Again, I want to stress that LEDs don't suck. And where they do suck, they're getting better. But I don't want you to get burned by hype. And right now the amount of hype surrounding these things would make Flava Flav blush.

*Yes, fluorescent lamps contain mercury. But so does the pollution from coal-fired power plants. This is part of what makes the green-ness of LEDs so complicated right now. If you get your energy clean, it might well be more green to buy an LED over a fluorescent, even if it uses more energy to produce the same amount of light. But if your energy comes from coal, that could change the equation, especially when you consider the fact that a lot of cities have good fluorescent recycling programs.

And what about the manufacturing processes for both LEDs and fluorescents? And the manufacturing processes for the inputs for those plants, both machines and raw materials? And the manufacturing processes for those?

Prices remain a miracle.

Morning roundup

• Germany's push for renewable energies comes at a cost: carbon abatement costs from home based photovoltaics is $1000/ton, heavily subsidised


• Bootleggers, Baptists and climate


• South African land reforms driving productive farmers to the Congo as a hedge.


• The healthists advance (pt 1): Doug Sellman claims he doesn't want to return to prohibition but wants a "middle ground" between extremes; of course, alcohol is already heavily regulated. If every year we move to the midpoint between the "extreme" of the status quo and the "extreme" of prohibition, in how many years do we reach prohibition? Ok, it asymptotes, but you get the picture.


• The healthists advance (pt 2): Christchurch City Council advocates:
  • minimum drinking age of 16 (not unreasonable)
  • split purchase age limit of 18/20 for on and off license purchase (will make the hospitality industry very happy; they've been lobbying for it to knock out the "drink at home" competition)
  • A national closing time for bars of 2 am that councils can adjust (ugh)
  • Health warning labels on alcohol (ugh, and serves as a non tariff barrier against imported drinks just as the "standard drink" labeling requirement did.)
  • "Powers to force bars to offer standard measures of wine, beer and spirits" -- a standard drink has 10 grams alcohol. Will bars have to have different sized glasses for different strengths of beer? Double ugh.
  • Higher taxes on alcohol -- but the McLeod Tax Review, Barker's Treasury analysis, and my work all show no case for increasing the excise tax
  • Restricting discounting by supermarkets (cartel price fixing)
  • Controls on liquor advertising, zero blood alcohol limit for under-20s.
  The article goes on to quote a Christchurch bar owner upset at the 2 am limit while most alcohol sales remain off-license. My impression is that the hospitality industry association has been pushing hard for a split age limit that would mean 18-19 year olds could only drink in bars; a cynic might think they're doing this to restrict competition for that age group. And a cynic might have a lot less sympathy for bar owners who lobby for restrictions that hurt their competitors and then complain when restrictions also are imposed on them.

Borlaug and afternoon roundup [updated]

• Norman Borlaug dies at age 95. An environmentalist and humanitarian who won the Nobel Peace Prize back when it meant something. Reason's 2000 interview with him remains the best summary of his work. Obit at Reuters. Other blog roundups: BK Drinkwater, Radley Balko; Update: NotPC has a better compilation of obits and write-ups than I have.


• Anti-immigrant stupidity in New Zealand. HT: LibScott


• Andrew Coyne over at Canada's National Post occasionally lauds the merits of PR systems, sometimes making note of NZ's MMP system. Turns out the Kiwis don't much like it anyway. Or, rather, as many folks like it as don't. Which I suppose isn't a bad result for MMP, given that folks can choose whatever their preferred system is for the "not" option. It's still hardly overwhelming support though. Rather, it's a strong meh.

Morning roundup

• Leeson and Pirates in the New Yorker (HT: Marginal Revolution)


• Alex Tabarrok's theory on why Latvian women are beautiful. Note the position of New Zealand on the chart!


• New Zealand's property market recovers


• Ezra Levant will be pleased: Canada's Supreme Court strikes down hate speech law (or at least the penalty provisions) as contrary to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Readers unfamiliar with Levant's battles with Canada's speech censors really ought to read his blog or pick up his book.


• And peak oil keeps moving farther off into the distance. HT: Hickey.

Afternoon roundup

• Stephen Franks on preemptive habitat destruction in New Zealand: be careful about planting native trees!


• Esquire on the merits of drug legalization

  One cop straight out of The Wire crunches the numbers with Esquire.com's political columnist to discover that America's prohibition of narcotics may be costing more lives than Mexico's — and nearly enough dollars for universal health care. So why not repeal our drug laws? Because cops are making money off them, too.



• There's only so much altruism to go round, so careful how you spend it!

  Consumer choices not only reflect price and quality preferences but also social and moral values as witnessed in the remarkable growth of the global market for organic and environmentally friendly products. Building on recent research on behavioral priming and moral regulation, we find that mere exposure to green products and the purchase of them lead to markedly different behavioral consequences. In line with the halo associated with green consumerism, people act more altruistically after mere exposure to green than conventional products. However, people act less altruistically and are more likely to cheat and steal after purchasing green products as opposed to conventional products. Together, the studies show that consumption is more tightly connected to our social and ethical behaviors in directions and domains other than previously thought.



• "Fat taxes" on soft drinks: might folks substitute away to other high-calorie drinks? Turns out, yes!

  Childhood and adolescent obesity is associated with serious lifetime health consequences and has seen a recent rapid increase in prevalence. Soft drink consumption has also expanded rapidly, so much so that soft drinks are currently the largest single contributors to energy intake. In this paper, we investigate the potential for soft drink taxes to combat rising levels of adolescent obesity through a reduction in consumption. Our results, based on state soft drink sales and excise tax information between 1988 and 2006 and the National Health Examination and Nutrition Survey, suggest that soft drink taxation, as currently practiced in the United States, leads to a moderate reduction in soft drink consumption by children and adolescents. However, we show that this reduction in soda consumption is completely offset by increases in consumption of other high calorie drinks.

  I've only given the full paper a cursory glance as yet, but it's well above expectations for a public health piece.

Separating equilibria

Doctorow at BoingBoing points to this piece of awesomeness. Apparently there are organic food folks who take things a little too seriously.

The source, environmental scientist Jennifer Jacquet, gives this as a litmus test for figuring out whether you're an "Eco-Douchebag". The comments thread is great fun; "Rob" there wonders whether dietary restrictions of this sort, that take on far more the air of religion than science, serve to enforce a separating equilibrium:

I've been saying for year that the more uptight kind of veganism (and even vegetarianism, if your talking about folks who won't throw their veggies on a grill that's had meat cooked on it. "That thar's CONTAMINATED carbon!") ... is an effective way to isolate its practitioners from the rest of the population, since they can't even sit down and eat with nonbelievers.
...
In the case of the eco-douchebags, the isolation helps them avoid interacting with folks who might question their dogma. They also get to feel more pure and saintly the more uptight they are about their ascetic trip.

The comments section goes on to point out that regulations require this kind of signage because organic foods that touch non-organic foods cannot be sold as organic. But a lot of other commentators seem genuinely offended to be considered an eco-douchebag for wanting to avoid bread that has touched other bread.

Save them by eating them

Boing Boing today points to the heartening story of the Mangalica pig, saved from the brink of extinction by a breeder rightly convinced that they could become a delicacy.

If you like ham, the Spanish food company La Tienda is betting you'll just love the meat from the Hungarian Mangalica pig, a rare breed that almost disappeared less than 20 years ago.

The distinctive Mangalica pig—known as much for its curly hair as for its fatty flesh—was saved so it can be sold and eaten.

At one time, only 198 purebred pigs remained in the world. Farmers preferred other breeds. "The corpulent Mangalica grows very slowly and cannot be kept in closed quarters. It is therefore poorly suited to modern industrial pig farms, and it has been gradually replaced by modern breeds," according to the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity in Florence, Italy.

The resurrection of the Mangalica has been the mission of Juan Vicente Olmos, the head of Spain's Monte Nevado ham company, and geneticist Peter Tóth, who tracked and purchased the last pigs from farms scattered throughout Hungary. After less than two decades of intense breeding, the Mangalica population has now increased one-hundred-fold, with 20,000 pigs living in Spain and Hungary.

If you're hungry for Mangalica ham, it’ll cost you, though. A nine-pound ham goes for $490.

Any endangered species that can easily be farmed and that tastes good seems up for salvation this way. I look forward to the day that New Zealand's Department of Conservation wakes up and allows weka farming. They look delicious.

It's not easy being green

Art Carden recently released a paper basically applying the socialist calculation debate argument to environmental calculation. In a world without comprehensive Pigovean taxes on environmental externalities at their sources, it's well-neigh impossible for the green consumer to know whether he's helping or hurting the environment through his consumption decisions. It's the Mises argument in reverse. In the socialist calculation debate, Mises says socialism fails because we can't impute prices to capital goods without prices for consumer goods and consequently we can't rationally allocate capital across sectors. In the environmentalist calculation debate, we can't rationally allocate an environmental price to a consumer good without having environmental prices on capital goods.

In the fully Pigovean world, prices fully convey information about costs including environmental costs. Outside of that world, we probably still do best by looking only to prices as the best potential aggregation of knowable costs.

And so Patri Friedman today points us to a rather nice article on the fallacy of locally-grown produce.

Locally grown produce is rarely efficient. Apply a little mathematics to the problem, and you’ll find that the ugly alternative of giant suburban distribution centers accomplishes the same thing - fresh produce into stores on the same day it’s picked - but with much less fuel burned.

This even extends to local farmers’ markets like you may have in your town, where all the family farmers personally bring their produce to the market to sell. Imagine a map with the market in the center, and the round-trip routes driven by all ~20 vendors radiating out from the market, like the arms of a starfish. Applying our Traveling Salesman model to this map, it’s clear that the farmers’ market is the least efficient model possible, if you are measuring efficiency in terms of delivery miles driven and gallons of diesel burned. To properly restructure this model to be as efficient as its proponents believe it to be, you’d drive a single truck in a calculated route to visit each farm in the morning, sell all the goods in a single store, and then discard or donate the leftover food (why double the driving miles to return perishable goods to the farmers?).

Don’t get me wrong, I love farmers’ markets. We go to our local one sometimes and it’s a fun family event for us. We love the giant, wonderful tomatoes and strawberries that you can’t get at the supermarket. I’d hate to see the experience replaced by the efficient alternative I just described, but then, I understand that farmers’ markets are more of a premium boutique community experience than an efficient (or “green”) way to buy food. The real reasons to enjoy your farmers’ market have nothing to do with it being somehow magically environmentally friendly. It’s the opposite.

Too often, environmentalists are satisfied with the mere appearance and accoutrements of environmentalism, without regard for the underlying facts. Apply some mathematics and some economics, and you’ll find that a smaller environmental footprint is the natural result of improved efficiency.

To a first approximation, we do best simply by using existing price signals about relative scarcity and ignoring worries about food miles or other such considerations. Firms in private markets have every incentive to economize on costs. So long as external costs are positively correlated with internal costs - like how carbon emissions correlate with how much you spend on petrol - it's risky to second-guess prices.

I still frequent the farmers' markets in Christchurch (Lyttelton or Riccarton Bush on Saturdays, Riccarton Market on Sundays), but only because we tend to get better produce there than we do at the supermarket. Of course, if I were in Winnipeg, I'd be going to the rather nice market at the corner of Waverly and Bishop Grandin instead and would especially be trying out their new ice cream shoppe. Information contained in the price of airline tickets is sufficient to keep me shopping at Lyttelton, New Zealand instead -- the carbon costs of flying to Winnipeg are pretty second order considerations.