Archive for the Environment Category

Peter Orszag Was A Blogger

Posted in Barack Obama, Economic Statistics, Environment, Health Care with tags , , , , on November 25, 2008 by John Stodder
Peter Orszag (first the s then the z)

Peter Orszag (first the 's' then the 'z')

The newly-announced director of the Office of Management and Budget, Peter Orszag, blogged while he was director of the Congressional Budget Office, I found out today.   So, quick, before it’s scrubbed, go read it.

Here is a link from the blog to Orszag’s slide presentation on climate change.  He’s not a skeptic, but he doesn’t sugarcoat the costs of addressing it, and thus buttresses the skeptics’ case.  If you’ve got about a half-hour, it’s worth your time to follow how he attacks the problem.  He recognizes the cost burden will inevitably fall upon those least able to afford it, so his attempt is to see what formula would spread the burden more fairly.  The conclusion I take away is, we need to be very sure that increasing CO2 emissions are a serious problem for future generations before imposing these kinds of costs on people alive today.

Here is a link to the slides from a talk he gave at Harvard called “New Ideas on Human Behavior in Economics and Medicine.” He’s very taken with the placebo effect.  Wonder if he thinks the placebo effect would be useful in alleviating global warming.

And here is an interesting observation about the tendency of people to overinvest their 401 (k) savings in company stock:

Many participants in retirement plans appear to be taking on unnecessary risk by investing in individual stocks rather than a diversified portfolio. The result is that those workers assume excessive risk for which they do not receive a higher expected return. (Those workers may feel they have inside information or insights that will allow them to outperform the market with particular investment choices, but the evidence suggests that unless you’re Warren Buffett, trying to outguess the market usually doesn’t work.)  Investing excessively in one stock that also happens to be your employer’s stock is even riskier — if the company runs into trouble, both your retirement assets and your job may be in danger.

In Orszag’s world, we are ridden with misperceptions. Some hurt us, and some work in our favor.  The role of government is to clarify matters for some, but use psychology  He’s going to be an important intellectual force in the Obama Administration.

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Food for Political Thought

Posted in Agriculture, Environment, Health Care, Lobbying with tags , , , , , , on October 25, 2008 by John Stodder
Thanks, taxpayers. Were enjoying the corn syrup.

"Thanks, taxpayers. We're enjoying the corn syrup."

The next president can’t deal with energy, climate change or health care unless he’s willing to talk about food, according to author and activist Michael Pollan, quoted in Tara Parker-Pope’s Well blog.

It’s a political issue because of the U.S.’s massive agricultural subsidies.

Mr. Pollan notes that food is a bipartisan issue, and that both parties have dismal track records on agricultural policy. Food, he argues, is the ultimate “solar” product, but the current food system, with its focus on the monocultures of soy, wheat and corn, is heavily dependent on natural gas and oil to make fertilizers and pesticides as well as to import and transport food.

One of Mr. Pollan’s concerns is that national policies subsidize the least healthful calories that we eat. He notes that the “building blocks” of fast food are soy and corn, used to make hydrogenated soy oil, the protein and starch in cattle and chicken feed, and high-fructose corn syrup used in sodas and sweets.

“That’s what we’ve been heavily subsidizing, encouraging farmers to grow more of, and that’s what makes fast food so cheap,” he said. “Meanwhile over in the produce section, the head of broccoli costs more than a fast-food hamburger. Why is that? We do very little to encourage farmers to grow what are called specialty crops, which is actual food you can eat. We need to level the playing field between the unhealthy and healthy calories.”

Among the many great questions neither candidate is ever asked:  Why should taxpayers pay to make their fellow Americans overweight?

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Governor Palin Takes On California Greens Over Port Fees

Posted in Environment, Sarah Palin, Trade Policy, transportation with tags , , , on September 12, 2008 by John Stodder
$60 Per Container

$60 Per Container

Fresh off her foreign policy lesson from ABC’s Charles “Charlie” Gibson, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has run smack-dab into another controversy, this one concerning the environment and trade.

The Los Angeles Times reports that Palin wants her California counterpart, Arnold Schwarzenegger to veto a bill that would charge shippers $60 per cargo container that moves through the ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach and Oakland.

She sent the letter one day before her selection as John McCain’s VP nominee, so it’s a hangover from her immersion in micro-level state politics. According to the Cunningham Report, a shipping trade newsletter, Palin’s letter was coordinated with similar letters from Hawaii’s governor, and the two states’ members of congress. Another shipping trade journal, Traffic World Online, reports that Palin was involved in a similar campaign against a container fee in the state of Washington.

California environmentalist want the fee to create a fund for port pollution improvements.  The state’s busy ports are its biggest sources of air pollution and air toxics, but California and local pollution authorities have little regulatory leverage over them.  The fee would fund mitigation projects such as subsidizing cleaner truck engines and building roads to relieve gridlock at the ports, which worsens pollution due to extended periods of truck idling.

But Palin sees harm to her Alaska constituency from raising the cost of shipping:

“Enactment of Senate Bill 974 will have negative impacts on both Alaska and California,” Palin wrote. “For Alaskans, a very large percentage of goods [90% or more] shipped to Alaska arrive as marine cargo in a container.”

Palin said many Alaskan communities lack road access and depend entirely on goods shipped by container, something that has significantly increased in cost in recent years. Many of those containers pass through the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports before arriving in Alaska, and Palin argues that the fee will add even more to the cost of goods shipped to her state.

“This tax makes the situation worse,” Palin wrote. “Similarly, the tax may harm California by driving port business away from its ports.”

In a follow-up story from AP, California legislators promoting the bill say they’ve agreed to a cleanup bill that would help alleviate Palin’s concern by cutting the fee in half for containers merely being redistributed from one ship to another at the ports. However, the basic message of bill proponents to Palin is: Butt out.

“The air is wonderful in Alaska and, frankly, they don’t have roads that go many places, so they don’t have the asthma or pollution problem we have in California,” said (State Sen. Sheila) Kuehl, a Democrat from Santa Monica. “It’s clear to me she has no clue about the health problems we face because of the ports in Southern California.”

Schwarzenegger has not yet said whether he will sign the bill.

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