NewsforDev | News for Development

Dossiers

ACP-EU

CTA

ICT

ICT4D

S&T

S&T4D

Trade

World News

Submit Source

New User

Analysis and Comment

	Sources:
	SciDev \| Latest news

	MIT \| Technology Review

	CABI \| Hand picked... and carefully sorted \| Web log

	AlterNet \| Environment \| News

	The Economist \| Science and technology \| News

	Discover \| Technology

	MSNBC \| Technology \| News

	Reason magazine \| Science

	The Future of Things \| Magazine

	CThings \| Technology and innovation \| News

	Science News \| Online edition

	The Scientist \| Life sciences \| News

	bioethics.net \| News

	FirstScience \| News

	FirstScience \| Technology \| News

	Issues in Science and Technology \| Magazine

	LiveScience \| Science, Technology, Health & Environmental News

	Science magazine \| News

	The Why Files \| Articles

	MIT Technology Review \| Top stories

SciDev / Latest news


Latest news on science, technology and the developing world

Uganda pilots scientist�'MP 'shadowing scheme'
08 07 2008 The Uganda National Academy of Science will trial a new pairing scheme where scientists shadow MPs and vice versa.

African 'wall of trees' gets underway
07 07 2008 Preparations are rife for Africa's 'Great Green Wall', a measure to prevent desertification, three years after it was first proposed.

Cuban kids 'leading the way in science and maths'
05 07 2008 Children in Cuba have achieved the highest scores in science and maths, according to a study of 16 countries in the region carried out by the UN.

More...

CABI / Hand picked... and carefully sorted / Web log

Beijing in Bloom
04 07 2008 The organizers of the Beijing Olympics have much to contend with at the moment �' including a massive bloom of blue-green algae that is currently engulfing the Qingdao coastline. The BBC, reporting from the region, say that more that 10,000...

Go with the flow
02 07 2008 This article in the Independent caught my imagination back in March. A company called Marine Current Turbines is using their SeaGen project (pictured) to generate electricity from the tidal movement of water in and out of Strangford Lough in Northern...

Nutrition at the extremes of life
02 07 2008 The Rank Prize lecture yesterday afternoon was a very interesting romp through the world of public health nutrition with Professor Ricardo Uauy. A difficult name to pronounce for many of us non-Spanish speakers (he’s originally from Chile), but a clear...

More...

AlterNet / Environment / News


AlterNet is a news magazine and online community that creates original journalism and amplifies the best of dozens of other independent media sources. AlterNet\'s aim is to inspire citizen action and advocacy on the environment, human rights and civil liberties, social justice, media, and health care issues.

McCain's Energy Plan Will Drill Us Into a Deeper Crisis
09 07 2008 Would more permits for oil drilling benefit U.S. consumers? McCain would like you to think so, but there's more to the story than he's telling.

Will Richmond, Calif., Be the First to Stand Up to Chevron?
08 07 2008 Richmond could be the first US city to decide to stand up to the Chevron oil company and impose a cap on its plans for further expansion.

Michael Pollan on What's Wrong with Environmentalism
08 07 2008 Michael Pollan talks about biofuels and the food crisis, the glories of grass-fed beef, and how environmentalists should think about sustainability.

More...

The Economist / Science and technology / News

A balance of risk
03 07 2008 Pesticides keep food edible and cheap. On the other hand they are, by definition, poisonous. Europe's legislators thus face a dilemma WHAT is the difference between risk and hazard? Quite a lot, it seems, if you make or use pesticides. Everybody hates them (dangerous, unnatural things). But everybody likes their benefits (cheap and unblemished food). Sensibly regulating their manufacture and use is thus a minefield--but one that Europe's politicians and bureaucrats are now attempting to cross without getting blown up. The difference between hazard and risk, in this context, is that hazard is something you measure in a laboratory by finding out how much of a substance you need to kill or injure an experimental animal. Risk is something you measure in the real world. Risk depends not just on how toxic a chemical is, but on how it is actually used, how much of it is used and how often it is used. At the moment, Europe's rules on pesticides are based on risk. However, a piece of legislation regulating plant-protection products, which is awaiting its final reading in the European Parliament later this year, will shift the basis of the law towards an assessment of hazard. ...

Up the garden path
03 07 2008 The latest results in the search for Martians "SPIT on the desert and a flower grows." That, at least, is the proverb on Earth. On Mars, however, you might hope for asparagus, green beans and turnips if the latest results from Phoenix are to be believed. An analysis carried out by the probe, which landed on May 25th, suggests the local regolith (the crushed rock that passes for soil on Mars) is slightly alkaline--which such vegetables prefer. That is a surprise. The regolith was expected to be very acid--probably too acid even for crops such as peanuts, potatoes and carrots that like their soils with low pH. Of course, no one is really interested in what crops could grow in it. If people ever do live on Mars they will rely on hydroponic farms for food. The actual question that hangs over every result from Mars is "what does it say about the chances of there being Martians?" ...

Of sommeliers and stomachs
03 07 2008 Red wine exercises its benefits before it enters the bloodstream FINE food sings on the palate, but pairing it with the right wine creates a chorus. Among those in the know, the plum, chocolate and spice flavours of Cabernet Sauvignons, Merlots, Pinot Noirs and Sangioveses best accentuate the rich flavours of red meats. Now, however, a group of researchers led by Joseph Kanner of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has discovered that pairing red wines like these with red meat appears to be more than just a matter of taste. If the two mix in the stomach, compounds in the wine thwart the formation of harmful chemicals that are released when meat is digested. The idea that red wine is actually good for your health is irresistible to the average tippler. But it appears to be true. In particular, red wines are rich in polyphenols, a group of powerful antioxidants that are thought to protect against cancer and heart disease by destroying molecules that would otherwise damage cells. How the polyphenols in wine exercise their beneficial effects, though, has been mysterious. That is because they do not seem to travel in any quantity from the stomach into the bloodstream. ...

More...

MSNBC / Technology / News

Mars lander breaks new ground
08 07 2008

NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander delivered a second sample of Martian dirt to its onboard wet chemistry laboratory, NASA officials said Monday.

Microsoft boosting online software
08 07 2008 Microsoft Corp. is strengthening its early-stage push to fend off competition by offering more Internet-based software, a change from its traditional method of selling programs that run on individual desktops or corporate servers.

What makes Earth so special?
08 07 2008

Understanding what's special about Earth is crucial for finding other planets out there and predicting what they might be like.

More...

Reason magazine / Science

Does the Invisible Hand Need a Helping Hand?
25 06 2008 Remember how you reacted to your micromanaging boss in a past job? He was forever looking over your shoulder, constantly kibitzing and threatening you. In return, you worked as little as you could get away with. On the other hand, perhaps you've had bosses who inspired you—pulling all-nighters in order to finish up a project so that you wouldn't disappoint her. You kept the first job only because you couldn't get another and because you needed the money; you stayed with the second one even though you might have earned more somewhere else. In the June 20 issue of Science, Samuel Bowles, director of the Behavioral Sciences Program at the Santa Fe Institute, looks at how market interactions can fail to optimize the rewards of participants—e.g., the micromanager who gets less than he wants from his employees. For Bowles, the key is that policies designed for self-interested citizens may undermine "the moral sentiments." His citation of the "moral sentiments" obviously references Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), in which Smith argued that people have an innate moral sense. This natural feeling of conscience and sympathy enables human beings to live and work together in mutually beneficial ways. To explore the interaction of moral sentiments and self-interest, Bowles begins with a case where six day care centers in Haifa, Israel imposed a fine on parents who picked their kids up late. The fine aimed to encourage parents to be more prompt. Instead, parents reacted to the fine by coming even later. Why? According to Bowles: "The fine seems to have undermined the parents' sense of ethical obligation to avoid inconveniencing the teachers and led them to think of lateness as just another commodity they could purchase." Bowles argues that conventional economics assumes that "policies that appeal to economic self-interest do not affect the salience of ethical, altruistic, and other social preferences." Consequently, material interests and ethics generally pull in the same direction, reinforcing one another. If that is the case, then how can one explain the experience of the day care centers and the micromanager? Bowles reviews 41 behavioral economics experiments to see when and how material and moral incentives diverge. For example, researchers set up an experiment involving rural Colombians who depend on commonly held forest resources. In the first experiment, the Colombians were asked to decide how much to anonymously withdraw from a beneficial common pool analogous to the forest. After eight rounds of play, the Colombians withdrew an amount that was halfway between individually self-interested and group-beneficial levels. Then experimenters allowed them to talk, thus boosting cooperation. Finally, the experimenters set up a condition analogous to "government regulation," one where players were fined for self-interestedly overexploiting the common resource. The result? The players looked at the fine as a cost and pursued their short-term interests at the expense of maximizing long-term gains. In this case, players apparently believed that they had satisfied their moral obligations by paying the fine. While this experiment illuminates how bad institutional designs can yield bad social results, I am puzzled about why Bowles thinks this experiment is so telling. What would have happened if the Colombians in the experiment were allocated exclusive rights to a portion of the common pool resources—e.g., private property? Oddly, Bowles himself recognizes this solution when he discusses how the incentives of sharecropping produced suboptimal results. He recommends either giving the sharecropper ownership or setting a fixed rent. In fact, Bowles recognizes that markets do not leave us selfish calculators. He cites the results of a 2002 study that looked at how members of 15 small-scale societies played various experimental economics games. In one game, a player split a day's pay with another player. If the second player didn't like the amount that the first player offered, he could reject it and both would get nothing. The findings would warm the hearts of market proponents. As Bowles notes, "[I]ndividuals from the more market-oriented societies were also more fair-minded in that they made more generous offers to their experimental partners and more often chose to receive nothing rather than accept an unfair offer. A plausible explanation is that this kind of fair-mindedness is essential to the exchange process and that in market-oriented societies individuals engaging in mutually beneficial exchanges with strangers represent models of successful behavior who are then copied by others." In other words, as people gain more experience with markets, morals and material incentives pull together. Interestingly, neuro-economics is also beginning to delve deeper into how we respond to various institutions. In one experiment done by Oregon University researchers, MRIs scanned the brains of students as they chose to give—or were required to give—some portion of $100 to a food bank. The first was a charitable act and the second analogous to a tax. In both cases, their reward centers "lit up," but much less so under the tax condition. As Oregon economist William Harbaugh told the New York Times, "We're showing that paying taxes does produce a neural reward. But we're showing that the neural reward is even higher when you have voluntary giving." Bowles, with some evident regret, observes, "Before the advent of economics in the 18th century, it was more common to appeal to civic virtues." Bowles does recognize that such appeals "are hardly adequate to avoid market failures." How to resolve these market failures was the subject of Smith's second great book, The Wealth of Nations (1776), where he explained: "By pursuing his own interest (the individual) frequently promotes that of society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it." Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

An Emergency Cooling System for the Planet
11 06 2008 Last week, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) held a conference that asked if geoengineering was a feasible solution to lower our planet's temperature, at least temporarily. The question is what to do if man-made global warming turns out to be a serious problem? At AEI, climatologist Tom Wigley from the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado defined geoengineering as the deliberate modification of the earth's short wave radiation budget in order to reduce the magnitude of climate change. In his presentation, Wigley looked mostly at two possible approaches to geoengineering: injecting sulfate or other aerosols into the stratosphere, and changing the reflectivity of clouds. Why consider geoengineering in the first place? As Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs wrote in Scientific American in April: "[O]ur current technologies cannot support both a decline in carbon dioxide emissions and an expanding global economy. If we try to restrain emissions without a fundamentally new set of technologies, we will end up stifling economic growth, including the development prospects for billions of people." So if we don't want to perpetuate poverty in the name of preventing climate change, geoengineering may be our way out. Why? Because geoengineering would provide more time for the world's economy to grow while inventors and entrepreneurs develop and deploy new carbon neutral energy sources to replace fossil fuels. Wigley also noted that cutting greenhouse gas emissions is a tremendous global collective action problem. It seems unlikely that fast-growing poor countries like India and China will agree cut back on their use of fossil fuels any time soon. If that's the case, then emissions reductions in rich countries would have almost no effect on future temperature trends. Geoengineering could give humanity more time to resolve this collective action problem, too. So let's take Wigley's second proposal first—changing the reflectivity of clouds. Researchers know that this can be done because it already happens with ship tracks. Ship exhaust over the oceans injects particles into the atmosphere that serve as cloud condensation nuclei, creating clouds in the wakes of ships. Ship exhaust produces and brightens clouds so that they cool the planet by reflecting sunlight back into space, but only by a little bit. However, recent modeling research by University of Edinburgh engineer Stephen Salter and his colleagues calculates that doubling the number of cloud condensation nuclei would more than compensate for any warming associated with a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This could be accomplished by having ships deliberately inject seawater into the atmosphere where salt particles would serve as extra cloud condensation nuclei. In 2006, Chemistry Nobelist Paul Crutzen proposed injecting sulfate particles into the stratosphere to reflect some sunlight back into space (an idea discussed by reason contributor Gregory Benford more than ten years ago). This might be done with giant cannons. Crutzen argues that it would cost between $25 and $50 billion per year to shoot enough sulfate particles into the stratosphere to reduce incoming sunlight by 1.8 percent. This would be enough to counter the predicted warming produced by doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide. An earlier study by Yale University economist William Nordhaus estimated that the sulfate injection proposal would cost about $8 billion per year. This compares nicely with the $125 billion per year Nordhaus calculated it would have cost the U.S. to implement the Kyoto Protocol. Wigley spent most of his time at AEI discussing the possible risks involved with the sulfate injection proposal. Wigley argued that sulfates injected into the stratosphere would be equal to only about 10 percent of those humanity already injects into the lower atmosphere, so this wouldn't greatly boost acid rain. In April, a study by some of Wigley's National Center for Atmospheric Research colleagues found that injecting sulfates would further deplete the ozone layer that shields the earth's surface from damaging ultraviolet light. Wigley simply noted in passing that even more recent research suggests that the damage to the ozone layer will be less than the April study estimated. Stratospheric sulfate injection might also change rainfall patterns, perhaps reducing precipitation from the monsoons on which millions of Asian farmers are dependent. In response to these worries, Wigley noted that stratospheric sulfates might reduce the intensity of monsoons by two to three percent which contrasts with a current monsoon variability of 30 percent. But one big problem that sulfate injection would not solve is the continuing acidification of the ocean that is occurring as extra carbon dioxide from the atmosphere dissolves into the seas. This acidification could eventually pose problems for creatures such as mollusks and corals that use calcium carbonate to grow their shells and skeletons. What is the safe level at which to stabilize carbon dioxide? The current greenhouse gas concentrations are equivalent to 385 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide, up 100 ppm over pre-industrial levels. In the past some researchers suggested that stabilizing concentrations at 550 ppm would avoid the most serious effects of global warming. Now other researchers are arguing that we have to get back to 350 ppm. Wigley sees no signs that humanity is on a track to stabilize carbon dioxide concentrations at 550 ppm. Consequently, he believes that we will have to resort to geoengineering as a way to buy the time humanity needs to figure out how to cut carbon dioxide emissions. He foresees an effort to ramp up stratospheric sulfate injection over 75 years to counter the climatic effects of rising carbon dioxide concentrations. Stabilization can only be achieved by cutting current carbon dioxide emissions by 80 percent. This means implementing highly unpopular policies of carbon rationing and higher energy prices. So some climate change researchers and environmental activists worry that the public and policymakers will see geoengineering as way to avoid making hard decisions. "If humans perceive an easy technological fix to global warming that allows for 'business as usual,' gathering the national (particularly in the United States and China) and international will to change consumption patterns and energy infrastructure will be even more difficult," writes Rutgers University environmental scientist Alan Robock. Perhaps. But that is not an argument against pushing ahead with a vigorous research program on geoengineering responses to climate change. Insisting on cuts in carbon dioxide emissions is like trying to require a healthy diet and exercise regimen to prevent heart disease. But when you have a heart attack, you are happy to have a bypass surgeon handy. Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Carbon: Tax, Trade, or Deregulate?
09 06 2008 On August 11, 2005, Ronald Bailey, reason’s science correspondent and the author of such enviro-skeptic books as Eco-Scam: The False Prophets of Environmental Apocalypse, wrote the following words at reason online: “Anyone still holding onto the idea that there is no global warming ought to hang it up. All data sets—satellite, surface, and balloon—have been pointing to rising global temperatures. In fact, they all have had upward-pointing arrows for nearly a decade.”

Although there are still plenty of free market thinkers who aren’t yet ready to “hang it up,” the center of the debate has shifted in recent years from contested science to proposed policy. And with the prospect of an anti–global warming crusader—either Barack Obama or John McCain—joining forces with a Democratic Congress carrying years of pent-up environmentalist frustration, significant new global warming regulation isn’t a matter of “if” but “how much.” Assuming that humanity is contributing to the carbon-fueled warming of the planet, what, if anything should governments do? That question, it turns out, is just as contested among skeptics of environmental hysteria as the famous “hockey stick” graphs in Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth. So we discovered last October, when we matched Bailey on a climate change panel with Lynne Kiesling, a senior economics lecturer at Northwestern University (and former director of economic policy at the Reason Foundation) and Fred L. Smith, president and founder of the pro-market Competitive Enterprise Institute, which in 2002 published a Bailey-edited book entitled Global Warming and Other Eco-Myths.

Bailey painfully concluded that climate change “is a real problem” and reluctantly favored a tax on carbon. Kiesling pointed to the difficulty of assigning property rights to the atmosphere and tentatively came out for a “cap and trade” system of creating a market for pollution credits above a government-imposed ceiling. Smith robustly rejected both ideas in favor of private innovation. The debate, held at a reason-sponsored conference in Washington, D.C., was moderated by Matt Welch.

Click here to watch Lynne Kiesling, Ronald Bailey and Fred L. Smith debate climate change at the at the Reason in DC conference.

Lynne Kiesling: From an economic perspective, the problem of climate change is twofold. First, there are incomplete and uncertain property rights in the air. It’s ludicrous to imagine us each walking around with a bubble over our heads so that we can only breathe and use the privatized air sphere around us. Second, there’s a large number of affected parties. In the limit, some would argue the entire planet is affected.

When a common-pool resource is shared by millions of diverse individuals, defining the use rights over that resource is really hard and costly. This is the kind of situation in which decentralized market processes have trouble even emerging. In this imperfect world, we’re considering two imperfect alternative policies: a carbon tax and cap and trade.

Our experience with common-pool resources, ranging from agreements to share the team of oxen in the medieval village to the development of the sulfur dioxide acid rain program in the 1990s, tells us that effective policy focuses on reducing transaction costs and better defining property rights so that private parties can engage in mutually beneficial exchange. That’s the logic behind the carbon cap-and-trade policy.

Like all policies in such a complex area, it’s got problems itself. How do you allocate carbon permits? There’s the knowledge problem: How do we know how many carbon permits is the right number? Also, as a policy instrument, it’s prone to political manipulation. Electric utilities are already seriously jockeying to make sure they’re playing a part in getting the rules written and that they’re involved in determining the allocation mechanisms if such a policy comes into place.

Another problem is that unlike with sulfur dioxide, the likely participants are really heterogeneous. When we were dealing with sulfur dioxide, it was mostly large-scale central-generation power plants, a pretty homogeneous bunch.

A carbon tax is also prone to some of these problems, particularly the knowledge problem and the political manipulation problem. The benefits to a permit market that have been shown in other situations are that defining property rights and reducing transaction costs does a better job of taking advantage of diffuse private knowledge. It’s also more likely to induce the process that’s at the foundation of economic growth, which is innovation. So I tend to come down on the side of cap and trade, although it’s not a ringing endorsement.

People are already doing this voluntarily. I encourage you to look up a group called the Chicago Climate Exchange, or CCX. CCX is a global carbon permit financial market, and it’s got a nice portfolio of instruments. They’ve got spot permit markets. They’ve starting to do futures now. The entrepreneur behind this, Richard Sandor, has also talked about doing funky derivatives. The participants got together voluntarily and negotiated to determine the number of permits that they were going to have. There were participants on both sides—carbon producers and carbon sinks—so you had this multilateral stakeholder negotiation to determine the number of permits in the market.

Finally, I think most people fail to realize that the abysmal job we do of pricing electricity contributes substantially to our energy use. The only resources that are priced as badly as electricity in our economy are highways and water.

Retail competition and choice for consumers would increase the offering of time-differentiated dynamic pricing, which shifts resource and electricity use across time. Research shows that this promotes conservation and more efficient use of electricity, increases offerings of green power to consumers who want to choose a green power option, and increases the incentives to develop and adopt technologies, such as price-responsive appliances, that enable private individuals to control their own energy use.

So the message from me is this: It’s a complicated, imperfect world, and the policies we can adopt that induce innovation and harness diffuse private knowledge will be the most effective for this long-term problem. Ronald Bailey: Before we began this session, Fred Smith asked me would it be all right if he referred to me as a commie symp. I think that might be a little harsh. I hope I can persuade you of that.

I stand before you as somebody who’s been reporting and writing on environmental issues for over 20 years. To the extent that I’m known at all, I’ve been known as someone very skeptical of all kinds of environmentalist dooms. My first book was called Ecoscam: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse. It pains me to have concluded, following the scientific data, that one of the dooms is a real problem.

As Lynne very ably pointed out, one of the problems with global warming is that it exists in a commons—that means the atmosphere is very hard to divide up and make into private property. When you have an environmental commons, we typically have two ways of handling that problem. One is that we privatize it. In many environmental issues, we’re moving in that direction. Fisheries, for example, are being privatized. Forests are being privatized. Water resources can be privatized as well.

The problem with air pollution—and global warming is a form of air pollution—is that I don’t see a good, easy way to privatize it. The transaction costs are too large. And if you can’t privatize it, you have to regulate it. So now the question is: What’s the least bad way to regulate? And that is why I’ve come out in favor of a carbon tax.

As a good libertarian, I thought I would like cap and trade. The problem is I’ve been watching the European attempt to do this, and it’s a complete disaster. The governments, not surprisingly, cheat constantly. Their carbon market collapsed a year ago because the governments allocated more permits for carbon emissions than were necessary to cover what was being emitted, so naturally the price went to zero. And if the Europeans can’t pull this off, how could you expect the world to pull this off?

I understand the diffuse knowledge problem—how markets can and, in fact, do marshal that kind of information in very good ways. The problem is that there’s no baseline for the rest of the world.
Idiotically, the Kyoto Protocol set it at 7 percent below what was emitted in 1990 for the 36 countries that signed the treaty. Well, how are you going to do that for China and India? We don’t know what they’re going to be emitting in 30 years. So I come out in favor of the tax because you have a baseline. You have a way of internationally monitoring that. The baseline is a zero tax and from that, you can build up. You could start the tax low and, as you gain more information about what the atmosphere is likely to do, you could adjust the tax over that time.

For consumers, for inventors, for innovators, a tax offers price stability in a way that the cap-and-trade markets don’t. For example, in the sulfur dioxide market, sulfur permits have ranged in price from $50 a ton to over $1,000 a ton. And for sulfur dioxide, it’s a smaller market. A carbon market would encompass the world.

Fred L. Smith: What’s the best way of addressing whatever risks there are in global warming? Should the risk of catastrophic global warming justify abandoning our general preference for freedom over coercion? Should we free market advocates champion carbon taxes or carbon rationing, some form of suppressing energy use, or should we favor economic liberalization? We’ve been working on that issue for two decades now. In that early period, I noticed that the catastrophists, the global warming alarmists, had to have answers to three questions positively. First: Does the science indicate significant evidence of imminent catastrophe? That is, is the earth warming significantly in a human-relevant way? Is the 0.7 degree centigrade increase over the last century offset or not by the 1,800 percent increase in wealth over that same period? Second: Is the warming impact negative or positive overall? I note in passing that more people seem to retire to Florida and Arizona than Lake Woebegone. Third: Can the political tools now available realistically restrict carbon use? We may endorse economic suicide. Europe may join us, but should we expect India and China to go back to the Stone Age just because of our political elites? Over the last decade, I think the evidence for all those questions has moved against the global warming catastrophists. There is evidence that there has been some warming, moderate amounts, but the idea that we’re facing imminent catastrophe has weakened. Our ability to do anything about CO2 increases for the next half-century is now obviously nonexistent. And the tensions we could create by pushing the world into some form of energy rationing, I think, are underestimated. Recall that in World War II, one of the incidents that pushed the war party into power in Japan was an energy boycott on that Asian nation. We are going to do that again with China. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Shouldn’t we be asking whether the risks of global warming are more or less than the risk of global warming policies? The costs of energy rationing are not trivial. Energy is what makes it possible to have mobility, to have labor-saving technology, to have lives that are comfortable, to have hope for the future. Energy rationing would lead to slower economic and technological growth, a darker, less human-friendly world. The trillions we’re talking about spending over the next generations on global warming could go to much better causes, could save lives and inspire hopes today. But we’ve been told—we’ve heard it from Ron, at least—that we must do something. Perhaps. But why must that something be the expansion of state power over our lives? Why do we limit ourselves to taxes or rationing? There are other alternatives out there. We could do some more R&D. We could mitigate. What about mirrors in space? What about fertilizing the oceans? Those of us who have looked at NASA and so forth are not overly enamored with government’s ability to underwrite those kind of policies, but we should be equally optimistic about government’s attempt to tax in this academic-blackboard economic way. Resiliency is what we should be talking about. Not whether taxes or quotas are the better way to suppress freedom, but how we can use the global warming concerns to advance an agenda of freedom. How do we find ways of accelerating economic and technological progress? How do we liberalize the economies of the world? How do we expand the institutions of liberty even into the air sheds? We can free biotechnology. I’m sure Ron and I both agree with that. If the world is hotter, colder, wetter, drier, we’re going to need the ability to modify our crops much more than we have today. Freeing biotechnology from the regulatory straitjacket it’s in today would be a way of doing that. As Lynne said, we could complete the job of freeing our electricity system, not just for pricing electricity but also for incentivizing the grid to be smarter and more robust so we can free the trapped electricity that sits idle throughout America. Move fire, storm, and other insurance out of the government subsidy range and put it back into the private sector so we can guide people away from living in high-risk areas. Unilateral free trade. Extend property rights to water. Liberalize energy exploration. Cuba can drill off the coast of Florida; why can’t America? Where is nuclear power? Certainly Al Gore hasn’t mentioned it. Eliminate the corporate income tax. Accelerate the turnover of capital goods and equipment. That would mean a much more efficient world to live in. Our agenda is the agenda of freedom, not the agenda of some form of a rational economic suicide pact. It is understandable that many people grow weary. I know people very close to me who have grown weary in this fight. We get a bit depressed when we realize that logic is for losers in the political process. It’s hard to be the dissident at the cocktail parties. Any of you who have had the situation where your friends look at you and shake their heads sadly and walk away know how hard it is, but our challenge remains to speak truth to power, to find ways to make good policy good politics. I chaired a global warming panel in Bucharest earlier this year. There are some European think tanks that have withdrawn from this battle also. It’s too costly, they say. It’s too difficult to resist the consensus. We have to give up a little bit. To them, I’ll argue as I do to you today, that we must fight; we must continue to risk. The loss of freedom in the global warming debate is far too great. That is our duty. That is our challenge. For events of this type have happened before. In August 1914, European nations found themselves trapped in a consensus, a set of entangling treaties that forced them to move in an inexorable way towards disaster, towards World War I. Edward Grey, the British foreign minister, noted, “The lamps are going out all across Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” Today, fears about global warming are pushing the world towards disaster. This time the threat is not just to the lamps of Europe but to the lamps of the world. Energy suppression, if it happens, might last for many lifetimes. Statist intellectuals still dominate the global warming debate. We economic liberals are few, but we few are the thin line resisting those who would return us to the Dark Ages. This is not any time to go wobbly. Matt Welch: Lynne, could you speak to Ron’s critique of cap and trade? Is it basically a great idea in theory that you’re wishing might work someday 20 years in the future? Is Europe really a catastrophe, and what’s keeping it from working? Kiesling: Just because Europe can’t implement this doesn’t mean the idea is bad. The E.U. carbon scheme is a poster child for what can happen when you have too centralized and too politically motivated a process for allocating the permits. The E.U. decided how many permits each country would have, then each country then got to allocate them among their industries as they saw fit. This was the most politicized process imaginable. With a good market design and good testing and good analysis, we could do better.

It does highlight the important fact that political manipulation is going to happen in whatever policy we choose. But I wouldn’t throw the idea out just because the E.U. can’t do it. There’s a lot of stuff the E.U. does really badly.

Smith: I have one strong procedural difference with both Ron and Lynne on this. The argument is that when you have a common property resource, your choices are either to privatize that resource, move towards institutions of liberty, or politicize it in some enlightened way as Lynne and Ron have talked about. But Ronald Coase said there’s always a third option, that the costs of transaction in that area are much higher than the failure to have transaction in that area and therefore we should allow evolution to proceed and see what creative solutions emerge. That is basically what we should be doing in the global warming area.

European taxes are just as bad as European cap and trade, and American taxes aren’t anything to write home about either. The idea that a tax policy will emerge through the political process unsullied is unlikely. Energy taxes in Europe and the United States are already a mess. If we raise them, they’ll be a bigger mess.

Bailey: One of the problems is that the new energy technologies are very unlikely, in my judgment, to arise merely because we ignore carbon dioxide. If it were already easy to create low-carbon energy, inventors would have done it. It would be here now. If you look at the projections from the International Energy Agency, the amount of energy the world will be using in the next 30 years or so is going to get much vaster. China is building one coal-fired plant a week, and they’re probably going to ramp it up to two a week. Those plants are going to be there for 50 years. If you think that carbon dioxide is a problem now—

Smith: And if you think energy rationing—

Bailey: Fred, when we privatize a forest, is that lumber rationing? When we privatize the fisheries, is that fish rationing? We have people pay for what it is that they use. If you could persuade me, which you have failed to do with your rhetoric, that we can in fact repair to markets to get this done, I would be more than happy to do that. I don’t want the lights of the world going out. But I also wonder, by the way—this is a question you’ve never answered when I’ve asked you several times—what temperature rise over the next century would in fact cause you to worry about humanity’s ability to adapt?

Smith: Over 20 degrees, certainly.
Bailey: How about—

Smith: Not 0.7.

Bailey: Not 0.7, but 6.

Welch: Ron, you mentioned at the beginning, sort of in jest, that it pains you to come to the conclusion that global warming is a problem. Is that a scientific approach, to be pained by the results? Has there been a mind-set to debunk when looking at this issue, and has that caused conclusions that were wrong?

Bailey: Yes, in some cases. I did not want this information to go in that direction. And I had good reason, given my career, to expect that it wouldn’t. The environmentalists have been wrong about the population problem. They were wrong about trace exposures to synthetic chemicals causing cancer. They were wrong about running out of natural resources. I’ve happily and joyfully reported this for years and annoyed a lot of people.

I, against my values, have decided that this is a problem. I would really like to be persuaded that classical liberalism and markets and so forth have a way of solving this problem. I’m still waiting for Fred’s proposal. I don’t think it can be done voluntarily around the world. The voluntary carbon markets are tiny—

Kiesling: It’s very unscaled.

Bailey: Right. And if you don’t have an economic incentive to participate in those carbon markets, like a tax or like a cap-and-trade permit, most people aren’t going to do it. Why would they? Why would they spend money that they don’t have to spend?

Kiesling: In this case of Chicago Climate Exchange, the biggest participants are Ford Motor and American Electric Power—the largest coal-fired generation owners in the country. So for them, it’s a strategic action. They’re hoping to forestall regulation but also it’s a P.R. and reputation capital building exercise.

Smith: I think one of the problems our movement has is we’re a think tank movement. We believe that if we just go out and talk to everybody for a few hours they’ll become libertarians. That’s not a wisely thought-through process, and it misses the whole point. Most people are—have to be—rationally ignorant. Our challenge is to make them understand that for their values, freedom is better than coercion. It’s why I think we have to recognize that where there are risks of global warming, there are also risks of global warming policies. I see nothing in Ron that represents any understanding of that balancing.

Welch: Following up on that, Fred, do you see some kind of political market value therefore in, for lack of a better word, Al Gore jokes? Is that a way to get the message across because at some point you realize you just want people to feel that they’re all part of the anti–Al Gore team more than being persuaded by your logic?

Smith: Ridicule is a very important tool. It’s one that has to be wielded very carefully. The difference between ridicule and being mean is very close, and I think sometimes libertarians are far too easily led into being mean. We win the debate and we lose the audience. I think ridicule by other people is damn useful. Every time liberals make fun of Gore, I love it. When we make fun of Al Gore, I get very nervous.

Bailey: And then you make fun of Al Gore.

Audience question: Ron, what entity would collect the carbon tax? Local government? Federal? The United Nations? And what would that money be spent on and how would it reduce actual CO2 usage?

Bailey: No, it would not be a U.N. tax. I’m channeling William Nordhouse, the Yale economist who does a lot of work in this area. Basically it would be a globally harmonized tax, but the money would be collected by each country and spent by the governments in each country.

In the ideal world, you would recycle that money by reducing other taxes, so the overall tax level in the country would not increase. What you would be doing is incentivizing people to conserve energy but also incentivizing people to innovate, to find new ways to produce energy that people would want using low-carbon technologies or carbon-sequestering technologies.

It’s a deep, dark secret, but back in the 1970s, during the glorious era of the Jimmy Carter administration, I was a regulator for three years.

Kiesling: You’ve seen the dark side.

Bailey: I’ve seen the dark side. I worked for the world’s most boring regulatory agency, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Kiesling: I knew he was going to say FERC when he said “boring.”

Bailey: And I think I understand some of the problems that go with regulation. My intellectual disdain for government was honed into a white-hot hatred after that experience. One of the things I got to regulate was the synfuels plant that you may all remember was being built in North Dakota. At the time, it was the world’s largest construction project. It cost $2.1 billion to build. It never produced any natural gas of any sort. That money, by the way, would have grown at 5 percent interest to $6.5 billion had it not been wasted.

Government does not innovate. So by creating a carbon tax you would encourage private people to marshal the information in response. So carbon tax is a price, to figure out better ways to make energy, low-carbon energy. I don’t know what those energies will be. I’m sure the government doesn’t know either, and I don’t want them wasting the money doing it.

Smith: I should point out that we have that experiment going on today. Europe—500 million people—experiences gasoline taxes in England of $8 a gallon. We experiment with $2.50, $3 a gallon. Yet one doesn’t find these new technologies rushing out of Europe. How high does—

Kiesling: Actually, that’s incorrect. All of the new diesel engines—

Smith: Oh, no. Diesel has nothing to do with the economics. Diesel has to do with the low tax of diesel and the fact that the air pollution laws don’t ban diesel in Europe. It’s not the energy taxes. It’s regulatory policy.

Bailey: So, Fred, are you saying that human beings are not clever enough to come up with low-carbon energy?

Smith: I’m saying that technocratic social engineering projects aren’t the best way to free the creative energies of mankind.

Bailey: Unfortunately, Fred, you haven’t shown a path for evolution to this. I’m sorry. I realize that you believe that somehow the invisible hand will take care of a commons problem always, but commons problems are solved by creating property.

Smith: Government.

Bailey: And the government helps create property, defends property. It’s an institution.
It’s not a great institution. Right now all the big emitters are coming to Washington and begging for free permits so they can get tons of money, basically, and extract it from our pockets—which is another reason I don’t like cap-and-trade systems. They want the government to create an asset for them worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

Welch: I have to impose my liberty here. The panel will be in the back alley after this, but the rest of us have to go to lunch now, which is next door.

More...

The Future of Things / Magazine


Online magazine dedicated to bringing original content on science, technology, and medicine from around the world. TFOT aims to provide comprehensive, accurate, and high quality coverage of emerging scientific and technological innovations.

Europe Votes on Anti-Piracy Laws
08 07 2008

Europeans suspected of putting movies and music on file-sharing networks could be thrown off the web under proposals before Brussels. The powers are in a raft of laws that aim to harmonise the regulations governing Europe's telecom markets. Other amendments added to the packet of laws allow governments to decide which software can be used on the web. Campaigners say the laws trample on personal privacy and turn net suppliers into copyright enforcers.

Anti-HIV Gels May Give Bigger Benefit to Men
08 07 2008

A new generation of microbicide gels designed to shield women from HIV could end up protecting men more than women, mathematical models suggest. The results, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA1, show how the emergence of drug-resistant strains of HIV in women would reduce the transmission of HIV from women to men. In this case, even if the gels lower the incidence of HIV overall, men would see the larger share of that benefit.

Is a Hands-Free Phone Safer?
08 07 2008

Since April 1 when Nova Scotia outlawed the use of hand-held cellphones while driving, sales of hands-free devices have gone through the roof. It seems everyone's driving-even walking-with tiny electronic devices tucked into their ears. Conventional wisdom says they're safer. With wireless technology such as Bluetooth becoming commonplace, you can still conduct business, order pizza or talk to mom while keeping both hands on the wheel.

More...

CThings / Technology and innovation / News


Changing the world

Mitsubishi Electric CEO: My most important business lessons
23 04 2008 I was browsing around google video this weekend and ran across this video by Tachi Kiuchi, ex-CEO of Mitsubishi Electric and now Founder of The Future 500.
The video covers a variety of topics including risk-taking, terrorism and accounting for the costs of using natural resources, all around the theme of “take risks and do what [...]

Changing the Google Ad colors.
23 04 2008 Due to popular demand on the admins community, we’ve finally implemented a much requested feature:
Change the color of those #$&*#! google ads!
Now you can.
Go into Admins Panel > Settings > Ads.
Hold the applause please. Thank you. Thank you.

More...