Global Warming Bleg

Does any faithful reader of Offsetting Behvaiour know enough physics to answer a question for me? I don't understand why NZ should be trying to reduce its methane emissions from cows as part of an anti-global-warming strategy.

This post is not about whether global warming is real and man-made, whether the benefits of reduced carbon emissions outweigh the benefits, or what role a small country like New Zealand should take as part of a global strategy. It is simply about the science of methane.

I am puzzled about why we should worry about methane emissions, given that they result from a circular process whereby carbon in grass is converted into methane by cows, but then carbon is reabsorbed from the atmosphere to re-grow the grass.

I understand that methane is considered to be twenty-times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. (A nice primer on the science of this is here: HT Marginal Revolution.)

But I also have read that methane quickly oxides into carbon dioxide, with a half-life of only seven years. Yes, increasing our number of cows would increase the steady-state levels of methane in the atmosphere, but once our cow numbers are in steady state, won't the on-going net flow of greenhouse gas emission from that stock of cows be zero?

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.

Fat taxes

Kiwiblog a few days ago pointed to a very nice British study looking at how much the Brit government spends on lobbying itself: funding advocacy groups or research reports whose main function is to "independently" demand that the government do something that the government would very much like to do anyways but needs to be seen to be being pushed to do. So where things like fat taxes would be opposed if they were proposed by the government, if they're proposed in an "independent" study the government can always say:

But look, this "independent" sciency research report says that we'll save billions of dollars and millions of lives! Unless you want to waste a month of your life digging through the report, unpaid, to show how it's wrong, just accept its conclusions! It's sciency! And sciency is almost as good as science!

And so yesterday's Christchurch Press and the New Zealand Herald report on work commissioned by the prior Labour government undertaken by, you guessed it, one of the usual suspects in the Department of Public Health at the University of Otago at Wellington's School of Medicine, showing the benefits of subsidizing healthy food options.

Lindsay Mitchell and Bernard Darnton have already nicely discussed the proposal. I won't be fisking this new O'Dea report, but I had gone through the prior O'Dea report on tobacco taxation here (ungated version here).

If Treasury ever pulls its thumb out and stops the Ministry of Health from commissioning reports the sole purpose of which is to lobby government, one wonders how BERL and the Wellington School of Medicine will earn their keep. Somebody ought to run a New Zealand replication of the UK Taxpayers' Alliance report linked-to above.

Integration failures

Google runs Blogger. Google wrote Chrome. I use Chrome to run Blogger. Comments on old posts are held for moderation. Viewing them in Chrome, I can only see the teaser first line; the spammy links usually only show up in the later lines. The drilldown arrow for opening the whole comment does not work in Chrome. But it does work in Internet Explorer. So I have to open another browser to moderate old comments. This should be an easy one for Google to fix. Come on, guys....

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.

Of trolley cars and health redistributions

Chris Worthington has an interesting piece on the Kiwi folic acid debate. (HT: Drinkwater) The outgoing Labour government apparently committed New Zealand to fortification of bread and flour with folic acid through a trade agreement with Australia; National, in response to public opposition to the move, fueled partially by overstated worries about links to prostate cancer, backed down.

Worthington likens the problem to the standard trolley car one. Is adding folic acid to bread more like pulling a lever to kill one where five would otherwise die, or is it more like pushing a bystander into the path of the trolley car to achieve the same end? Experiments suggest more folks are comfortable with the former than with the latter even though both cases have you being responsible for killing one innocent person to save five. I'd tend to think more the former, just because of the remoteness of consequences; nevertheless, the policy was opposed.

More interestingly, Worthington notes:

If the bread example seems too uncommon to warrant much thought, an earlier academic paper suggested a broader application. High-income groups in New Zealand have a lower mortality risk than low-income groups, although there are diminishing marginal returns to extra income. If the relationship is causal, redistributing money from rich to poor would also redistribute some of that mortality risk, producing a longer-lived society (on average).

Of course, the direct result of that policy intervention would be that some high-income people would die earlier than they would otherwise do so.

So, are such welfare interventions more or less palatable when phrased in terms of life and death as opposed to dollar signs?

Worthington here is almost surely talking about the paper by Blakely and Wilson, two of the public health folks at U Otago at Wellinton's School of Medicine. I'd previously discussed that paper during a guest stint at EconLog where I noted two big problems.

First, they ignore the deadweight costs of taxation, so it's very likely that their proposal for massive income transfers to increase average lifespan and reduce mortality inequalities would instead reduce average lifespan.

Second, they ignore that both health and income may be caused by an underlying variable, like IQ. If IQ determines both health and income, gains from their proposal are again overstated.

More fundamentally, though, I can't see any logical difference between a policy using forced income transfers to try and reduce mortality inequalities and a policy forcing healthy people to give kidneys to sick people. The risks of live kidney donation are very low and the policy would almost certainly save lives: I'd bet that it would be far more effective than Blakely and Wilson's income redistribution scheme. Would Blakely and Wilson find such a policy repugnant? If so, what usefully distinguishes stealing a man's income to aid someone else from stealing a man's kidney to do the same? Maybe the healthists have an easier time pulling the income lever than pushing somebody onto the operating table?