From the Department of Self Promotion…

Here is an article on The Katoomba Group’s Ecosystem Marketplace, The Innovator: Can Lars Christian Smith Take Protected Areas to Market?

Prices, prices, prices

From BBC’s website,

The focus on reducing carbon emissions has blinded us to the real problem - unsustainable lifestyles, says Eamon O’Hara.[...]

We urgently need to think about the more fundamental concept of sustainability and how our lifestyles are threatening not only the environment, but developing countries and global peace and stability[...].

How many people are tired and weary of modern living? The endless cycle of earning and consumption can be exhausting and does not necessarily bring happiness and fulfillment. Can we do things differently, and better?

I don’t think an appeal to our better selves to change our lifestyles is going to work. And I certainly don’t want the government to tell me in detail what I can or can’t do.

What we need to do is to get the prices right. The enormous environmental problems in China and India show what happens if you don’t get prices for water, power, and pollution right. This is not at all simple and easy to do; rich OECD countries are also struggling to get to grips with it. But it is absolutely fundamental.

Gorillas murdered

The BBC reports from Congo’s Virunga National Park,

Conservationists have expressed concern over the “senseless and tragic” killing of four mountain gorillas in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The bodies of three females and one male were discovered by rangers earlier this week in the Virunga National Park.

Officials said the “executions” were not the work of poachers because they would have taken the bodies.[...]

Because poachers would have sold the bodies as food or trophies, conservationists think the apes were killed by a group that was trying to scare wardens out of the park.

Similar killings of mountain gorillas took place in Rwanda to get back at the late Dian Fossey, of Gorillas in the Mist fame. She was widely hated in the local community because of her outspoken racism and violence against local people. It makes one wonder if community relations in the Virunga National Park are as good as they should be. And do the benefits to the local population of Virunga National Park outweigh the opportunity costs of the park?

Update: National Geographic reports that “Virtually all the charcoal supplied to nearby Goma—worth an estimated U.S. $30 million a year—is made from wood harvested illegally inside Virunga National Park”.

The Cheney Vice Presidency

The Washington Post has a very good series of article on Vice President Cheney.

Here is Part 4 on Environmental Policy,

Dick Cheney steered some of the Bush administration’s most important environmental decisions — easing air pollution controls, opening public parks to snowmobiles and diverting river water from threatened salmon.

Bottled water

Bottled water is, as Felix Salmon writes, ridiculous. But if you live in an country where you can’t trust the state to tell you the truth about the quality of the piped water, and where there are strong bottled water brands, you are probably better off drinking bottled water. After all, strong, trusted brands are worth a lot, so the owners have a lot to loose if they don’t practice strict quality control.

In the US, it makes no sense to drink bottled water. In China, it makes no difference, you can’t trust either. But traditionally in Italy and France, drinking bottled water made sense.

Pleistocene Park

BBC has the story about Pleistocene Park, the recreation of an Ice Age ecosystem complete with megafauna, including horses, reindeer, bison, musk oxen, elk, wolves, Siberian tigers and possibly mammoths.

Here is an article in Science from 2005,

In the mammoth ecosystem, the collective behavior of millions of competitive herbivores maintained the grasslands. In the winter, the animals ate the grasses that grew the previous summer. All the while they fueled plant productivity by fertilizing the soil with their manure, and they trampled down moss and shrubs, preventing these plants from gaining a foothold. It is my contention that the northern grasslands would have remained viable in the Holocene had the great herds of Pleistocene animals remained in place to maintain the landscape.

So restocking the land with herbivores may allow grasslands to expand and be maintained, and create a Serengeti in Siberia. It is an interesting experiment. We wish them the best of luck!

The Nature Conservancy buys wilderness land

The Nature Conservancy buys a chunk of the Adirondacs in New York State, 161,000 acres to be more precise, with a loan from the Open Space Conservancy.

Story in New Your Times here. It is an impressive deal, and so is the speed with which it was done. The option of selling the land was first raised only six weeks ago.

Sustainable consumption

Below the fold, the second part of the report on sustainable consumption from Stratfor. The first part is here.

Dark Green Ideas

Here are some dark green ideas.

Human communities should be maintained in small population enclaves within linked wilderness ecosystems. No human community should be larger than 20,000 people and separated from other communities by wilderness areas. Communication systems can link the communities.[...]

We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion. [...]

All consumption should be local. No food products need to be transported over hundreds of miles to market. All commercial fishing should be abolished. If local communities need to fish the fish should be caught individually by hand.[...]

Who should have children? Those who are responsible and completely dedicated to the responsibility which is actually a very small percentage of humans. Being a parent should be a career. Whereas some people are engineers, musicians, or lawyers, others with the desire and the skills can be fathers and mothers. Schools can be eliminated if the professional parent is also the educator of the child.

This approach to parenting is radical but it is preferable to a system where everyone is expected to have children in order to keep the population of consumers up to keep the wheels of production moving. An economic and political system dependent on continuous growth cannot survive the ecological law of finite resources.

There is, of course, a complexity of problems in adjusting to a new design that will simply allow us to survive the consequences of our past ecological folly.

Curing a body of cancer requires radical and invasive therapy, and therefore, curing the biosphere of the human virus will also require a radical and invasive approach.

This vision belongs to Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (HT Tim Worstall).

Other quotes from Paul Watson,

“If you don’t know an answer, a fact, a statistic, then … make it up on the spot” (in Earthforce: An Earth Warrior’s Guide to Strategy).

“The fact is that we live in an extremely violent culture, and we all justify violence if it’s for what we believe in” (at the Animal Rights 2002 convention).

“There’s nothing wrong with being a terrorist, as long as you win. Then you write the history” (at the Animal Rights 2002 convention).

“We’re not a protest organization, we’re a policing organization” (on the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society).

Source of quotes here.

Bright Green Ideas

The GM Volt car “is a car with a fully-electric 161 horsepower engine, powered by Lithium-ion batteries. It can be charged via a 110 volt wall outlet and has a pure electric range of 40 miles. It has a small onboard gas/alt fuel motor that can charge the batteries on the fly allowing a range of up to 650 miles.”

If it is ever produced at prices we can afford, it and similar cars from other manufacturers will dramatically cut the dependence of cars on petrol and diesel. But will GM to get this one right?

From Wired Magazine, an article about China’s bright green metropolis, Dongtan. If it works right, it will serve as proof of concept for ideas that will be widely copied in other cities.

Buy ‘em, Trade ‘em, Protect ‘em

From the Dep’t of Self-Promotion: here is an article in Conservation Magazine about cap-and-trade for protected area visitor permits.

Protected areas can suffer from too much love. In the Galapagos Islands, tourism has brought invasive species and overuse. But it has also boosted the local economy. So the question is, how can we protect biodiversity without shutting down local tourism industries?

A new proposal based on the cap-and-trade concept now used to curb pollution emissions could help solve the problem. It would treat protected-area visitor permits as tradable commodities, limiting their number while raising capital through the sale of quotas.

The Privatization of the Oceans

Rögnvaldur Hannesson’s The Privatizations of the Oceans (MIT Press, 2006) is short, clear, and written with a certain wry humor.

It is the best exposition of the development of property rights in the world’s fisheries that I have seen, and it is a real pleasure to read.

Free riding and household appliances

Since 1997 the European household appliances industry has had voluntary agreements setting standards for energy efficiency of household appliances.

An average new European washing machine consumes 44% less energy and 62% less water compared to an average washing machine made in 1985, and today’s best refrigerators consume only a quarter of the energy used by a typical model made in 1990.

So, why is the industry organization, CECED, changing its approach radically and calling for legislative measures instead of voluntary agreements?

Lack of compliance with the voluntary agreements, and free riding by companies making false claims about the performance of their appliances.

“European manufacturers are as committed as ever to designing and marketing energy efficient appliances because it is the right thing to do and consumers expect that of us,” said CECED President, Magnus Yngen of Electrolux. “But governments must guarantee fair competition by enforcing the law and ensuring that product declarations are genuine–or our investment in high performing products is compromised. The next round of improvements needs to be driven by legislation that applies to all and is enforced on all.”…

“Too many governments are not stopping careless or unscrupulous operators from marketing products that claim better energy efficiency than they actually deliver,” says Yngen.“Free-riding must be strongly discouraged. Today we have a very worrisome situation where politicians set rules, expect companies to abide by them and then fail to invest the resources needed to stop the lawbreakers.”

CECED also praises the Italian system under which consumers get tax credits for buying new and more energy efficient appliances. This is of course what you would expect from an industry organization. It makes sense for CECED’s members; whether it makes sense for the rest of us is not clear.

CECED press release here (pdf), ht ENDS Europe Daily (subscription necessary).

The Potsdam Initiative

It looks like we will get another large, politicized report on the environment. The “Potsdam Initiative” – as the conclusions on biodiversity reached by G8+5 environment ministers have been labeled – states that an international scientific panel modeled on the Stern Report or the IPCC Report is needed for biodiversity.

“Biodiversity, like climate change, must move beyond the realm of experts and environment ministers to the domain of economics and heads of state,” German environment minister Sigmar Gabriel said on Friday. He was speaking at a meeting of environment ministers from the G8+5 countries in Potsdam, organised by Germany as current president of the G8.

Ministers from the world’s eight leading industrialised countries and top five emerging economies – China, India, Mexico, Brazil and South Africa – agreed to initiate the development of a “Stern report” for biodiversity, similar to the influential report on the economics of climate change commissioned by the UK government…

Additional funding for biodiversity protection could come from auctioning allowances in the European emission trading scheme in future, suggested Mr Gabriel. He proposed that revenues from mandatory auctioning of at least 10 per cent of allowances from 2012 should flow in part to biodiversity protection in developing countries.

From ENDS Europe Daily (subscription necessary).

Elephant hunting

Shooting an elephant with an .458 Winchester Magnum is about as heroic as shooting a barn, but trophy hunting can be a socially useful activity (via Café Hayek),

Peak fish

Source: FAO, The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture, 2006.

At the end of the Paleolithic our ancestors encountered “peak hunting and gathering” and started farming. The same is now happening with fisheries.

We are encountering “peak fish” now, and fish farming is taking off. Fish capture is stagnant or declining, but aquaculture is growing rapidly and is already or will soon provide more than half of the tonnage of fish caught in the wild.

Are farmed fish as tasty as wild fish? No, wild salmon is better that farmed salmon, just as wild boar is tastier than farmed pig. There is some decline in quality, but farming guarantees the survival of the farmed species and makes it possible for people who could not previously afford to consume them to do so.

New marine reserves

The (London) Telegraph reports (via Tim Worstall),

Eight large marine reserves where fishermen would be liable for damage to protected species are being proposed by the Government today in a new Marine Bill…

Ben Bradshaw, the environment minister, will announce a network of eight marine reserves, including different types of marine habitat from the sandbanks of the Dogger Bank and off North Norfolk to the Darwin Mounds, an area of deep-water coral 1,000 metres deep off north-west Scotland…

…fishing would be banned altogether in some of the reserves - so-called no-take zones - with public consultation being used to determine which…

Jean-Luc Solandt of the Marine Conservation Society said: “I don’t think the number of reserves the Government is proposing is big enough to comply with their international obligations. That would need 20-30 per cent of each habitat covered. It is all about the exchange of larvae between areas so species are resilient.”

What would a similar scheme cost worldwide? In the 2004 paper by Andrew Balmford et al. The worldwide costs of marine protected areas, the authors estimated that conserving 20-30% of the world’s seas would cost $5 to $19 billion per year, and would probably create around one million jobs.

Harmful subsidies leading to overfishing were estimated at $15 to $30 billion per year, with the annual global marine fish catch being worth $70-80 billion per year.

Chumbe Island Coral Park Ltd.

From the comments, Sibylle Riedmiller of www.chumbeisland.com replies to a comment on this post:

Answering Peter Gottesman: welcome to check out Chumbe Island Coral Park Ltd (CHICOP) in Zanzibar/Tanzania:… it took a lot of struggle and investment, but it works! See our website for details and a summary below…

Environmental “Control Frauds”

From the comments, William K. Black on this post:

“Control fraud” has specific implications useful to the study of conservation finance. Both public control frauds (”kleptocracies”) and some private control frauds pose special dangers to the environment. Kleptocrats loot “their” nation. The direct effects of kleptocracy on the environment are severe. The head of state (and often his cronies) will approve developments that enrich him regardless of the harm to the environment. The government he controls will help the cronies evade any domestic or international laws designed to protect the environment, e.g., by issuing false certificates of the origin/nature of products. Kleptocrats are also autocrats, so the leader will use the state to suppress environmental protests.

The indirect effects of kleptocracy also harm the environment. Kleptocrats’ policies lead to widespread poverty, endemic corruption among lower-level government officials and reduced social trust and cohesion. Indeed, kleptocrats often follow the old colonial practice of “divide and conquer” — favoring one ethnicity or region over others. This can produce chronic armed conflicts that harm the environment. Even if there is no armed conflict the indirect effects mean that there is no effective environmental protection and increased pressure by poor citizens to exploit resources even when doing so overwhelms resources that could have been renewable.

Private control frauds often target the environment. Whenever a company can gain a competitive advantage by acting in an unlawful manner, e.g., by disposing of toxic wastes in a river instead of in the appropriate (but far more expensive) toxic waste disposal center a “Gresham’s law” style dynamic arises. (Gresham’s law: “bad money drives good money out of circulation” during hyperinflation. Note: George Akerlof used this metaphor appropriately in his seminal explanation of “lemon’s markets.” Note that examples he gives in that article are all variants of another type of control fraud — those that target the consumer.) Thus, environmental control frauds have two victims — the public and honest competitors. Unless the government effectively detects and punishes environmental control frauds the dynamic can ultimately lead to environmental control fraud becoming endemic. In the case of international disposal of toxic wastes, companies search for nations with weak regulation or kleptocrats). National and international regulatory/enforcement efforts are essential to reduce this perverse economic incentive to engage in environmental control fraud.

William K. Black
Executive Director, Institute for Fraud Prevention
Associate Professor of Economics and Law, UMKC

Siemens: bribery, embezzlement, and lightbulbs

What on earth is going on with Siemens, one of the world largest electrical and telecommunications companies? On January 24th the company was fined €396.6 million (about $500 million) for illegal price fixing.

Siemens is also under investigation both in Europe and the U.S. for embezzlement, tax evasion, and a €420m ($543m) bribery scandal. Arrest warrants have been issued for current and former employees.

Now Siemens has created another public relations disaster for itself.

While Europe’s leaders were last week urging householders to fit energy-efficient light bulbs, several governments were busy attempting to block moves to cut their price.

A European summit agreed to toughen regulations against old-fashioned incandescent bulbs by 2009 as part of a bid to cut greenhouse gas emissions. But earlier in the week officials from trade ministries rebuffed attempts by the European Commission to end five-year-old surcharges on imports of energy-efficient bulbs from China.

The 66 per cent duty was imposed in 2002 after European manufacturers complained of dumping by the Chinese. It expires in October but Siemens of Germany, which owns the Osram brand, is pushing for an extension. The other big makers, Philips of the Netherlands, which pays a 33 per cent tariff, and GE of the US, disagree. Ending the duty would cut prices to the level of conventional bulbs [emphasis added].

From Financial Times.

There is obviously no need for politicians to strengthen regulations against conventional lightbulbs. Just get rid of the duty.