Reason Magazine - Topics > Environment

The Rational Environmentalist

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Where in the world can we do the most good? That is the basic question addressed by the Copenhagen Consensus Center, a think tank founded six years ago by the Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg. To answer the question, the center periodically convenes panels of leading economists, who weigh and prioritize the solutions experts have proposed to the world's biggest problems.

Lomborg, a boyish 43-year-old, first burst onto the intellectual scene in 2001 with his best-selling book The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World. There the former Greenpeace member argued persuasively that most of the planetary doom scenarios imagined by ideological environmentalists were contradicted by the available ecological and economic data. The book provoked a furious green backlash, the low point of which was a 2003 ruling by the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty that "the publication of the work under consideration is deemed to fall within the concept of scientific dishonesty." Lomborg was vindicated later that year when the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation overturned the ruling, calling it "completely void of argumentation."

Lomborg's international reputation had already taken off by then, the odd activist cream pie to the face notwithstanding. In 2001 the World Economic Forum nominated him as one of the Global Leaders for Tomorrow; in 2004 Time named him one of the world's 100 most influential people; in 2005 Foreign Policy ranked him as the world's 14th most influential intellectual; and this year The Guardian dubbed him one of "50 people who could save the planet."

Saving the planet became a specific job description six years ago, when Lomborg was appointed director of the Danish National Environmental Assessment Institute, a group whose explicit aim is to "get the most environment for the money." In 2004, under Lomborg's guidance, the institute convened the first Copenhagen Consensus conference, in which eight leading economists, including four Nobel laureates, were asked to allocate a theoretical $50 billion to solve the world's biggest problems. The panel was presented with 30 proposals from other researchers for ranking and evaluation. The top four priorities left standing at the end of the conference were: controlling HIV/AIDS, providing micronutrients to children, liberalizing trade, and rolling back malaria. Addressing climate change ranked near the bottom. This infuriated many environmentalists, but overall the meeting garnered favorable attention around the world.

In 2007, following with the Copenhagen Consensus theme of sensible policy prioritization, Lomborg published Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming, in which he acknowledged that man-made global warming is a problem but challenged the notion that it is the biggest threat to human well-being. Instead of draconian and poverty-inducing cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, Lomborg argued, rich countries could more effectively tackle the problem through massive research and development into low-carbon energy technologies.

In May 2008, Lomborg convened the second Copenhagen Consensus Center conference. This time eight leading economists, including five Nobelists, considered how to allocate a theoretical $75 billion during the next four years to solve 10 of the world's largest problems. Would it be better, for example, to provide efficient stoves to poor people who are exposed to indoor cooking smoke, or supply middle-aged people in developing countries with cheap pills combining aspirin and cholesterol-reducing statins to prevent heart attacks? The panel's top four solutions: providing vitamin A and zinc supplements to poor children, liberalizing trade, fortifying salt and staple foods with the micronutrients iodine and iron, and expanding childhood immunization. Cutting greenhouse gases came in at the bottom, although another approach to global warming—R&D spending on low-carbon energy technologies—was a mid-list priority.

Ronald Bailey, reason's science correspondent, interviewed Lomborg in a gilt-edged room at the Moltkes Palace in Copenhagen during a lunch break at the 2008 Copenhagen Consensus Conference.

reason: How did you come up with the idea of the Copenhagen Consensus?

Bjorn Lomborg: It really started with my discussion of global warming. The advantages of doing the Kyoto Protocol are fairly small, but the cost of doing Kyoto for just one year is about what it would cost to give clean drinking water and sanitation to everyone.

We did some searches. I was sure somebody had done global priority setting before. We do it implicitly by the way we spend money, but apparently nobody's ever thought about it formally.

reason: What's been the reaction to the Copenhagen Consensus process around the world?

Lomborg: Most people who have no sort of preconceived notions about one thing or another think it's eminently sensible. They're a bit like, "You're telling me people didn't do this before?" But as soon as you get people participating in the public debate about this and that issue, it's incredibly hard for them to disassociate themselves from where their problem and especially their solution came on the list. I think most of the arguments against the Copenhagen Consensus boil down to "my area should also have been high on the priorities list," or "we should do all things" and implicitly therefore also my area.

I gave a presentation to Congress last year, and a congressman-I'll not mention his name or his affiliation-told me, "Bjorn, I understand why you're focusing on prioritization, because Denmark is a small country and you can't do all things." But honestly, even though America is vastly larger and you have done incredible amounts of good, you are also constrained by a bunch of restrictions. You have not fixed all the problems in the world in the last 50 years, and it seems reasonable to assume that you won't in the next 10 years. So for all societies, we have to ask ourselves, "What do we want to spend our money on?" If we spend it on something that does only a little good, it could be to the detriment of things that could've done even more good.

reason: Have the experts put things low on the list that you would've liked to see ranked higher?

Lomborg: These are some of the smartest people on the planet. I think of myself more as an intellectual entrepreneur bringing them all together and making sure they hear all the good arguments for and against and then make their informed decisions. I can conceivably imagine that I would end up disagreeing with them at some point, but these are really smart people and I'll probably defer to their judgment.

About half the proposals are kind of obvious. Yes, it's good to do malaria. Yes, it's good to do HIV/AIDS. But I think most of them are impressive because we don't usually think of them. One of the great examples from this session is heart medicine for the Third World. When we think about the Third World, we think about malnourished black children with incredibly distended bellies who we see with flies all over them. We think about malaria and AIDS, those kinds of problems. Those are important, but the death toll from malaria, TB, and HIV, even in the most stricken countries, is still less than the death toll from heart disease. And we have very cheap aspirins, statins, for dealing with heart disease that work very well. Spending $200 million a year could probably save about 300,000 people dying each year in the developing world, causing a benefit of $25 for every dollar spent.

Now, that's not a sexy proposal. It's not one that you usually hear, but isn't it something we ought to hear? The Copenhagen Consensus is not just about what's fashionable. It's not just about what looks good on TV. It's also about making sure we reveal lots of hidden, reclusive, not very publicized issues that we should also be listening to. Perhaps it's about being a little more rational.

One more thing that actually surprised me this time was air pollution. One environmental problem in the Third World that I've been harping on for some time is indoor air pollution. More than a million people die-maybe two and a half million each year. If we improve stoves, it will do some good; it'll probably get $3 back from the dollar. That's respectable, but it's a lot less than what I thought.

The essential thing is that this is a process that doesn't just make it easier for you to confirm your preconceived notions, but it gives you an opportunity to see what some of the best experts on all these issues come up with.

reason: Are there any things you've changed your mind about since you wrote The Skeptical Environmentalist?

Lomborg: I think the main point of that book was to challenge our notion that everything is going down the drain, and I don't see any reason to revise that. We are in general moving in the right direction, and it's important to say mankind solves a lot of problems. We also create new problems in the process of solving old problems, but typically they're smaller than the old ones we fix, which is why we move ahead on virtually all material indicators. My second point with the book was to say this means we need to start prioritizing; we need to be smart about the kinds of problems that we worry about.

People in the U.S. will worry about pesticides, which kill probably about 20 people a year, but care very little about particulate air pollution, which kills 110,000 people in the U.S. every year. We could probably do something dramatic about particulates at a much lower cost than the pesticides. It's much more about getting those orders of magnitude right, and that's, of course, what the Copenhagen Consensus is about.

I did, just like pretty much everyone else, predict that raw materials would go down in price pretty much indefinitely. They're clearly not right now. I think our long-run expectation is still that they will go down. But it was much easier to make that argument in the '90s than it is in the 2000s. So clearly we all become more knowledgeable, but I think the main point of the book was to say, in general, things are moving in the right direction. That message obviously still stands.

reason: You experienced some heartburn about that book when you were formally accused of scientific dishonesty. How did you react to that charge?

Lomborg: At first I was a little stunned, but I also thought it was going to be a fair process. I thought, yeah, it's a little ridiculous, but we'll take that to the committee and show that they are wrong. The lead guy who brought this in front of the committee explicitly said in his first paragraph of his first letter to the committee that he did this for political reasons. So there was never any doubt of what the motive was. I imagined that this was going to be somewhat of a walk in the park: He would come up with arguments, and I would counter them. The committee would go through all this in a fair and impartial way and find that you could have reasoned differences of opinion, but clearly this was nothing to do with scientific dishonesty. I certainly made very clear where I got my references from and what I based my arguments on.

Instead, the committee came out with what can only be described as an incredibly poorly argued, very obviously tainted point. The committee essentially summarized a critique that was commissioned by Scientific American, by four people, three of whom I criticized in my book. Not surprisingly, they were not particularly favorable towards my book. The committee summarized my answer to those critiques in one and a half lines of the document, about 10 words, and then went on to talk about how unreasonable it was that I was unwilling to accept all of their charges. To them that only underscored the point that I was probably being scientifically dishonest because I was unable to admit to my errors.

Unfortunately, I could only appeal the legality of the decision. I did so to the ministry, and they took a year for their lawyers to go through it. Fortunately, one of the main points of the Danish administrative law is that a decision has to be well argued. That doesn't seem like an unreasonable requirement, but that was the main thing that the ministry struck it down on. They said that the committee actually had no argument whatsoever for making their judgment, and that was why the original decision was annulled.

I'm still surprised by the number of people who will reference the first part, that I was condemned for scientific dishonesty, and ignore the fact that it was later overturned on the fact that there was absolutely no evidence. If anything, it seems to indicate that there was a strong wish without any good arguments to indict me.

reason: When I interviewed you before The Skeptical Environmentalist came out, you were describing yourself as a man of the left.

Lomborg: I still am.

reason: What does that mean?

Lomborg: Well, it means that I'll vote to the center-left, which probably in the U.S. would be extreme left. I support a strong welfare state. I support a strong redistribution from taxes. I think it's important that we have a somewhat egalitarian society.

I'm trying to recapture much of what the left stood for-when we believed in progress, when we believed that scientific understanding could lead us ahead and not just rely on tradition. I think that's the original sort of background for the left. Unfortunately, I find that a fair amount of the left has turned towards a romanticized view of the world.

reason: All of the economic evidence that is being presented here at the Copenhagen Consensus Conference suggests that trade liberalization, a policy that the left does not like, is a very good idea.

Lomborg: Yeah, that's certainly not a universally shared left-wing viewpoint. In the U.S. election, Barack Obama is less interested in free trade, or at least more vocally against it, than John McCain. In this case, it seems that the evidence is just simply against them.

A lot of left-wing parties, many social democratic parties or labor parties around Europe, would support free trade. They will have some caveats, and I understand why, though I think not all of those caveats are good. But the main point here is to say if you want to do a lot of good, you should realize that if the Doha Development Round trade negotiations were successfully concluded, you could probably imagine making the world about $3 trillion per year richer-about three times the size of the economy of India every year. And five-sixths of that $3 trillion would go to the developing world. Wouldn't that be worth following up on?

reason: You're strongly against proposals to cut greenhouse gases with carbon taxes or by capping carbon dioxide emissions and letting companies trade emissions permits, yes?

Lomborg: No. A $2 per ton carbon tax is probably a reasonable thing to do. Cap and trade that would be the equivalent of that would be virtually as good. I would say I'm against cap and trade, as I'm against carbon taxes, when they're excessive. But that's a little bit like saying I'm against speed limits. I'm against a speed limit of five miles an hour, but I'm not against a speed limit, for instance, of 100 miles an hour and possibly even lower. It's about finding the right speed limit.

reason: In Cool It, your main proposal to address climate change seems to be to spend $25 billion a year to develop new low-carbon energy sources. Recent economic research seems to show that government funding of research and development for this kind of applied research has not been very successful. For example, in the 1970s the U.S. government planned to spend $40 billion on developing synthetic fuels. Instead, we created the world's largest public works project, the Synfuels facility up in North Dakota. It was going to turn coal into natural gas and liquid fuels. The price of energy dropped, and the plant was sold eventually to a local utility for three cents on the dollar.

Every U.S. president since 1970 except Reagan has come up with a new car initiative of some sort, to give money to the Department of Energy to spend on research to create more fuel-efficient and alternatively fueled cars. There have been no real results after literally billions of dollars spent.

Lomborg: One important point I make is that if you're going to get technologies that are going to work 20 or 50 years from now, you can't expect private companies to do it. It's very hard to recoup most of the investment, because what you're going to be inventing is ideas that will later be used by others that'll then invent ideas that eventually will lead to something you can patent and actually recoup money from.

Most estimates show that you can only recoup about one-third of what is invested in basic science R&D. That is the standard argument for why you want public research and development. It's a little bit like in the medical sector where you have blue sky research; you have people figuring out what different things you can sell and then later on you have companies take that to market. It's incredibly important that governments do not go in and say, "We believe that you can have synfuels." I'm not even sure what synfuels is.

reason: Turning coal into natural gas or oil.

Lomborg: That's probably a very, very bad idea for so many different reasons, but primarily because, why on Earth would governments be good at making that sort of call? What governments should do is not focus on the production side but focus on getting lots and lots of people doing research.

The way I envision it is that you should have a lot of X Prizes: low-cost prizes that spur individual researchers to come up with slightly better technologies in a lot of different areas-for instance, solar cells. How can you improve this a little bit? How can you, for instance, make it water-tight? How you can make it wrap around so that it's more flexible? The Gates Foundation, I think, did a good job in actually asking researchers to sit down and say what are the 46 things we'd like to see proffers on, and then have people spend money on researchers, not on actual production but researchers to do these kinds of things. Ninety percent of these are going to be dead ends, but that doesn't matter, because they're very cheap and what matters is that we get the last 10 percent.

reason: Let me push you a little further on that. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development did a report in 2003 where economists looked at differential returns to research and development, specifically defense, private, and then public-sector research and development. To their surprise, they could not find that public-sector or defense R&D expenditures had any effect whatsoever on economic growth. In fact, government R&D spending seemed to produce a crowding-out phenomenon and may actually have slowed economic growth.

Lomborg: Your argument could be, well, if we know we almost always do it wrong, why do it time and again? I would say that depends a little bit on the way you think that it's possible to frame the debate. If no matter what you do you end up down the same track, yeah, maybe we shouldn't do it. But I was at the Copenhagen Consensus presentation by [McGill University economist] Christopher Green, who is saying that a big low-carbon energy R&D push is the only thing that will even enable us to be able to fix climate change in the medium and long term.

It takes some effort to get the politicians to understand that $25 billion of research and development doesn't mean that we should build one big factory to do something you like in a district where you need some votes. Instead it means getting a lot of researchers to do R&D.

We have good theoretical arguments why this might work. It might also be that it doesn't work. We'll have to see where the experts rank it.

reason: I listened to Green's presentation, and I read his perspective paper. To me he basically made a plea to economists to start thinking about how one can create ways to direct research without political interference. He was saying we don't know how to do that yet.

Lomborg: I would tend to disagree a little bit because we've done this for 50 years in the medical sector. We have lots and lots of people doing medical research, and I don't know whether there's good evidence whether that's paid off, but it seems to me that we've had quite a number of breakthroughs that came from public money that we wouldn't have had otherwise. These breakthroughs later on led to more or less obvious investments from private companies to make useful products. We would want something on a similar scale for low-carbon energy research.

It's very important to get people to realize that if we're going to fix climate change, we need to invest in a lot of cheap researchers having smart ideas rather than big projects that make the politicians feel comfortable when they cut the ribbon and say, "See, now we've done something about global warming."

reason: Has the Copenhagen Consensus had an effect on public policy? I know the Danish prime minister mentioned that his government shifted development aid to AIDS medicines in developing countries.

Lomborg: I was told by some of the people at the [U.S.] National Security Council that one of the reasons why President Bush gave $1.2 billion to malaria was because of the Copenhagen Consensus result.

Of course, it's always going to be very hard to say what specific outcome was caused by this list. I would argue that the much stronger benefit of the Copenhagen Consensus is that it pushes policy makers and philanthropists way before anything is ever decided. When the first committee meets in the bowels of a big organization to talk about what should be our next big push, somebody's going to have more likelihood of saying, "Why are we talking about No. 17 instead of No. 3 on the list of Copenhagen Consensus priorities?"

reason: The Copenhagen Consensus process does not take into account institutional factors, as far as I can tell. Why is that? After all, most of the problems of the world are the result of flaws in institutions.

Lomborg: It's very clear that money is not the only thing that works or that changes things in the world.

reason: For example, the development economist William Easterly points out that the West has spent $2.3 trillion on development aid for the last 50 years with virtually nothing to show for it.

Lomborg: Yeah. I tend to disagree with the "virtually nothing" claim, but it's very clear that it has been nowhere near as spectacular as many people would have hoped.

The main point is that one thing shouldn't necessarily be the opponent of another thing. The Copenhagen Consensus is one idea. It's only one of many good ideas that are going to bring the world forward, but I think it's an important part of that discussion. Clearly, with regard to the money that we spend, we at least want to think about how we can spend well. This is also one of the reasons why, for instance, corruption is no longer on the Copenhagen Consensus list. Yes, it's incredibly important, but there are no good solutions that the West can come up with and make sure that they implement in the Third World.

I'm perfectly aware that you should also engage people in thinking about institutional change or the setup of the international system, but what we focus on is, given where we are right now, what can you do with a little extra money? What can you marginally do? It's not the only relevant question in the world, but I would argue it's not an unimportant one.

reason: What's the next project?

Lomborg: We have a lot of projects. I'm doing Copenhagen Consensus for individual countries: for Ghana, for Zambia, for Chile, possibly for Peru, possibly for Mali. And then we're thinking of doing something towards the next climate conference in 2009 in Copenhagen. Maybe we should just do a Copenhagen Consensus for climate, where we get some of the world's top climate economists together and say, "There's a bunch of different packages on the table, what do you think?" And perhaps have some of the negotiators play around with what works best, so that we spend our money well, or better.

We're also thinking of doing one for the world's total environment-air pollution, clean drinking water, all the other things. There is a tendency right now in which global warming has subsumed all other environmental issues. While global warming is definitely an important environmental issue, there's a problem if it takes all of the time to the exclusion of everything else.

Teaching Men to Fish Sustainably

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 15:44:00 EDT

Reviewing the track records of 11,135 fisheries over half a century, three researchers conclude in the latest issue of Science that privatization promotes sustainable fishing practices. "Implementation of catch shares halts, and even reverses, the global trend toward widespread collapse," they write. "Institutional change has the potential for greatly altering the future of global fisheries." As The New York Times notes, the findings (which should not surprise anyone familiar with the tragedy of the commons) are consistent with earlier research in this area.

The Reason Foundation (which publishes reason and reason online) explained the advantages of transferable fishing rights in a 2004 paper. reason Science Correspondent Ron Bailey explored the subject in a 2006 column.

[Thanks to Paul Rako for the tip.]

My Other Bike is a Public Transportation System

info@reason.com (Greg Beato) — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 07:00:00 EDT

Gas prices are higher than Snoop Dogg at Mardi Gras. Tiny carbon footprints are the tongue piercings of the new millenium. Even diehard carburetor-huggers must get tired of the endless cruising it takes to find a parking space in the average American metropolis these days. Together, these forces create, if not the perfect storm, then at least a pretty strong tailwind: There has never been a better time to be a bicycle advocate.

So how are the nation's pedal pushers capitalizing on this propitious moment? Increasingly, by championing high-tech bike-sharing, that stylish European import that posits one-size-fits-some equipment, strict time limits on usage, and mandatory drop-off points as the best way to make cycling seem like a more viable mode of urban transit to people reluctant to abandon the convenience of their automobiles. Washington, D.C. has a shiny new bike-sharing system. Temporary bike-sharing programs at the Democratic National Convention in Denver and the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis gave elected officials from both parties a convenient way to make their requisite green photos ops carbon neutral. San Francisco, New York, and Chicago are just a few of the major American cities contemplating bike-sharing systems of their own.

Paris is the inspiration for them all. In July 2007, it introduced a bike-sharing program called Velib. Compared to earlier bike-sharing efforts, which mostly consisted of making a fleet of low-end cruisers available to anybody who wanted to ride one around for an hour and then dump it in a lake, Velib is a more closely monitored system. The bikes are locked in automated, self-service docking stations around the city; to use one you must purchase a subscription and establish an account. Because Velib knows when you take out a bike and when you return it, and bills you accordingly, its bikes have been much less likely to end up in the Seine.

Funded by the advertising company JCDecaux NA in return for the right to sell ad space on bus shelters, the Velib system now includes over 20,000 bikes and 1,450 docking stations, with no more than 900 feet between one station and the next. It employs 400 people full-time, and users made 27.5 million trips during Velib's first year of operation. "We conceived of this as a public-transportation system, so it operates as one," JCDecaux NA president Bernard Parisot recently told Time magazine.

To the average alternative transportation professional, this sentiment must be pure rhetorical catnip. Private transportation, after all, is the enemy! It's selfish, inefficient, it's organized enough. To the average solo driver idling in his SUV, however, the idea that bikes represent a new kind of public transportation is no doubt less compelling. There's a reason he's idling in his SUV, and it's not because he's such a huge fan of buses, subway trains, streetcars, and ferries. With a car, he can go precisely where he wants to go. He can adjust his route on the fly. He may get stuck in traffic, he may be a slave to the parking gods, but even so, his SUV gives him a strong sense of autonomy.

A bike delivers a strong sense of autonomy, too—stronger even than a car in many ways. It doesn't, for example, require a license, registration, insurance. You aren't beholden to routes or schedules. You go where you want, when you want. Unless the bike you're riding is part of a bike-sharing program. Then your usage is more proscribed. Take, for example, SmartBike D.C., America's first high-tech bike-sharing program. Launched in August, and, like Velib, funded by an advertising company (Clear Channel Outdoor in this case) in return for the right to advertise on the city's bus shelters, the program currently consists of 120 bikes and ten docking stations, all of which are clustered within a relatively small radius downtown.

For a $40 annual fee, users get a smart card that allows them to unlock a bike from its docking station and start contributing to America's energy independence. For three hours, that is—if you keep a bike out longer than that, you may get banned from the program. You're also not allowed to ride outside city limits or between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., when the program shuts down for the night. All in all, there are 13 clauses and 34 sub-clauses in the SmartBike user agreement. Can't you just feel the freedom and convenience of bike-sharing blowing against your face like a warm summer breeze?

Of course, in giving up some of the autonomy you'd enjoy if you simply rode your own bike, you get other significant benefits in return, right? Well, someday perhaps. One thing that makes bike-sharing programs attractive, in theory at least, is that the bikes aren't yours. Bike theft is rampant pretty much everywhere there are bikes, and secure places to lock your trusty steed, especially for hours at a time, are exceedingly rare.

Offloading the risk of theft to a bike-sharing program makes sense—but in the case of SmartBike D.C., there's only so much risk you can offload. When a bike is safely locked in a docking station, you aren't responsible for anything that happens to it. Unlike Paris, however, D.C.'s docking stations are far from ubiquitous and aren't likely to achieve that state any time soon. (And even in Paris, bike theft remains a problem. Approximately 3000 Velib bikes were stolen and another 3000 vandalized during the program's first year of operation—some Velib bikes have reportedly been spotted as far away as Casablanca.)

In the case of SmartBike, if you want to run an errand in a part of the city where there are no official docking stations—aka most parts of the city—you assume the liability when you lock up the bike. If someone steals it on your watch, you owe SmartBike $550. If someone vandalizes it, you owe SmartBike however much it decides to charge you for the necessary repairs.

In other words, it's like you own the bike, except you don't. You're not permitted to let someone else ride it. You're not permitted to put too much stuff in the front basket. (The baskets are for "light goods" only.) You aren't supposed to ride it in "inclement and dangerous weather." You have to return it to very specific places at very specific times. If something on your bike breaks while you're riding it, you aren't supposed to take it to the nearest bike shop or attempt to make the repair yourself. Instead, you have to call SmartBike's customer service line and wait for a repair person to respond to your request for help. At least when a bus breaks down, you can abandon ship and take destiny in your own hands.

Of course, SmartBike is still in its infancy. As it adds more docking stations, its rules and disclaimers will become less objectionable. But if a bike-sharing program's utility mostly lies in how much secure parking it offers—and it does—why bother with the bikes? And the sharing? Let users be responsible for obtaining their own bikes—that's the simple part of the solution. Let them enjoy the autonomy and flexibility that comes with ownership. Install enough reliably secure bike parking facilities around a city and the users will come, no perky commie three-speeds necessary. Without fleets of collectively shared vehicles, the bikes-are-public-transportation conceit fades, but is that really such a bad thing? For people reluctant to abandon the convenience and familiarity of their automobiles, "It's like a car, only better" is a much more persuasive proposition than "It's like a bus, only worse."

Contributing Editor Greg Beato is a writer living in San Francisco. Read his reason archive here.

Policy Lessons from Hurricane Katrina

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 07:34:00 EDT

As the big storm Gustav peters out and memories of Hurricane Katrina recede, it's a good time to recall reason's special December 2005 issue, which was dedicated to exploring policy failures related to that event.

Go here for the full table of contents.

Bad Air

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 14:00:00 EDT

One of the demonstration sports of this year's Olympics has been grousing about Beijing's pollution, speculating on what air quality will be like tomorrow, asking athletes about their breathing, and otherwise pondering particulates in the air.

There's certainly no doubt that Beijing's air is gross. Yesterday was a pretty good day, but according to the World Bank, the city's air quality is much worse than Athens or Barcelona on average, with about twice as much particulate matter in the air as both those former hosts of the Games. Pulmonologist Dr. Janis Schaeffer says Beijing's air quality is 30 percent worse than famously smoggy Los Angeles.

Even as they make grave faces about the problems air pollution has caused, commentators marvel at the efficiency and thoroughness of the preparation for this year's Games, unlike the nail-biting delays and general bumbling in Athens four years ago. How beautiful the Bird's Nest stadium is! What a tremendous effort for the opening ceremonies!

In the big cities, their skyscrapers and malls look just like ours—maybe a little better. In the industrial areas, things look like our country once did, when we were poor and burned coal to get the energy to build things and keep ourselves warm.

The millions who walk among skyscrapers, choking on the foul air but otherwise prospering, are part of the same system that includes Badui, a rural town in western China. "Badui is known locally as the ‘village of dunces,'" Nicholas Kristof wrote in a recent column. "That's because of the large number of mentally retarded people here—as well as the profusion of birth defects, skin rashes and physical deformities."

The defects are probably caused by drinking water contaminated by a nearby fertilizer factory. "Even if you're afraid, you have to drink," Zhou Genger, the mother of a 15-year-old girl who is mentally retarded and has a hunchback, told Kristof. (His description of the village brings to mind Ursula K. LeGuin's haunting—and much anthologized—short story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," which paints a picture of a hypothetical place where the happiness of an entire people rests on the wretchedness of a single blameless child, confined in a cellar broom closet.)

The fact is, the economic development that dirties China's air and occasionally pulls entire villages down into horrifying idiocy and squalor also lifts tens of millions of people a year out of poverty and into the middle class. A new study forecasts 30 to 40 million Chinese joining the ranks of those with incomes of between $6,000 and $30,000 every year for the next two decades.

In this, China looks like America once did. Growing fast, getting things done the quick and dirty way. While we may not be entirely comfortable gazing at this modern iteration of our industrial era selves, we should understand the tradeoffs, even if we're relieved not to have to make them anymore.

But every time things in China seemed reassuringly normal, or just pleasingly exotic, something comes across the wires that is so bafflingly far from our experience of the world that we can't quite comprehend it.

In China, the decisions that keep progress rolling are sometimes the same decisions that throw people off their land with little or no compensation. Wu Dianyuan, 79, and Wang Xiuying, 77, applied for permits to protest being evicted from the homes in 2001 during the Olympics. Instead of permits, the septuagenarian women won a year of "reeducation-through-labor" in one of China's infamous camps.

Or consider the stories behind the elegant and impressive opening ceremonies. After the broadcast was over, word trickled out about small dishonesties: perhaps the fireworks were tweaked for TV viewers, perhaps the angelic little girl singing "Ode to the Motherland" was really lip-synching to a slightly less attractive girl's voice. But these are small things, and easily forgiven in the name of showmanship.

Then there's this: Filmmaker Zhang Yimou, who directed the ceremony, recently told the Guangzhou weekly newspaper Southern Weekend that only communist North Korea could have done a better job.

"North Korea is No. 1 in the world when it comes to uniformity," he said. "They are uniform beyond belief! These kind of traditional synchronized movements result in a sense of beauty. We Chinese are able to achieve this as well. Through hard training and strict discipline."

Pyongyang holds mass games every year that include such pageantry as 100,000 people moving in lockstep.

From Zhang's perspective, envy of the North Koreans is only natural. After all, he had to settle for a barely adequate three months of 16-hour workdays from his troupe of 2,200 of some of China's best martial artists. He had a mere 900 performers crouching under 40-pound boxes for such long stretches of time that they had to wear adult diapers. He could only keep his cast of thousands on their feet for a mere 51 hours in the summer heat and a downpour during a two-day rehearsal.

All of which suggests another explanation for why we keep harping on China's dirty air. Human beings have long condemned other tribes as unclean (think Christians vs. Jews vs. Muslims, for a relatively recent example)—groups whose standards and rituals are different than ours make us profoundly uncomfortable and the language of contamination is handy for articulating that sense.

We're taught that it's unacceptable to make judgments about the superiority of one culture over another, so we fill that void with endless chatter about the filthy Beijing air. This is easier and more pleasant than grappling with what it means to be standing in a city that looks like New York but where the people have an utterly different conception of human rights.

At the same time, we're grateful for this one point of superiority. By nattering on about the filthy air, we're quietly reassuring ourselves that there are areas where we're still number one. Our model, which is blessedly free from the ingredient of North Korea-envy, is still better at some things. For now.

Katherine Mangu-Ward is an associate editor of reason.

Shill Here, Shill Now

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 15:00:00 EDT

“I taught in the second Earth Day,” Newt Gingrich recalled in Real Change, published in January, the most recent of his annual, not-quite-consistent handbooks for conservatives. As gas prices hovered around $3 per gallon, Gingrich told good men of either party to look at tax credits for companies that curb their pollution, or for homeowners who slap solar panels on their roofs, or for drivers who get rid of their gas-guzzlers. The former speaker of the House made a soft-focus ad for Al Gore’s WE campaign, sharing a weather-exposed sofa with Nancy Pelosi, fretting about our oh-so-fragile climate. “We have an obligation to be good stewards of God’s creation for future generations,” Gingrich wrote.

Gingrich had one more idea about energy independence, tossed into his book like an afterthought. “With appropriate safeguards to protect the environment,” he wrote, “we can build more refineries and drill oil offshore to lower the cost of gas and reduce dependence on foreign oil.” A 33 percent gas price spike later, that’s all Gingrich wants to talk about. Offshore drilling has grown from one part of an earth-hugging energy plan to a panacea for gas prices. His leadership group, American Solutions for Winning the Future, hit on a slogan for cutting energy costs: “Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less.”

It worked. On August 1, the majority party adjourned for five weeks, delaying a decision on legalizing new drilling or (more likely) expanding tax credits until September, when the 1990 ban on offshore drilling will expire. Republicans erupted, giving speeches to an empty (and dark) chamber demanding that they stick around until the ban could be repealed. Arizona Rep. John Shadegg “started typing random codes into the chamber's public address system and accidentally typed the correct code, allowing Republicans brief access to the microphone before it was turned off again.”

Suddenly, the GOP had a message that made Democrats quiver. “They refuse to let us drill here, drill now, and pay less for gasoline,” says endangered Rep. Randy Kuhl (R-NY) in a new ad. ”We need to drill here and we need to drill now,” says longtime anti-ANWR drilling advocate John McCain, flicking the pesky ghost of Teddy Roosevelt off his shoulder.

But what’s been more interesting is the spontaneous order that’s sprung up to support the GOP’s newfound drill-here-drill-now dogma. Because of technical limitations (no cameras are allowed on the House floor), Republican members and their supporters recorded their progress with text messages and Twitter.com. That was the impetus for supporters far outside D.C. to get organized. “I had been following Culberson and [Heritage Foundation web wizard] Rob Bluey on Twitter and was getting overwhelmed,” said Chicago media consultant Eric Odom. ”I started a hash tag, #dontgo, to follow the updates.” Voila: #dontgo took off like a V-2 rocket, spawning a website that drew 10,000 members and tens of thousands of hits within 24 hours.

And then…well, not much. I was out of town for the hottest week of the #dontgo protest, as doughty congressman after doughty congressman took to the House floor to demand a MacArthur-like return from Nancy Pelosi. It peaked on August 6, when Gingrich airlifted himself onto the Hill to praise the movement he’d sort of created. But when I arrived on the Hill this Tuesday, the movement was already dying down. One member was standing vigil; Democratic staffers and tourists didn’t realize the protest was still going on.

I asked a conservative think-tanker who’d been toiling over drill-here-drill-now messaging what, exactly, had happened. “Nancy caved,” he said. He was referring to Pelosi’s statement on CNN that she might allow a vote on drilling after all.

But was that a real victory, or just cagey Democratic politics? Pelosi has been telling Democrats to come out for offshore drilling if it will help them win their races, and the candidates have followed suit. The think-tanker nodded. “We don’t want to get everything this year,” he said. “We want an issue. The Democrats do something this year, just enough to protect their incumbents. They take over next year, and it’s an issue again next year, and in 2010, because they’re never going to do anything serious.”

The rest of the week only strengthened the sense of inertia about this movement: It had risen fast and then plateaued. “They’re not doing anything new,” GOP web consultant David All told me. “It feels like it’s slowed down.”

That was inevitable. It’s hard to keep anger up about high gas prices when they’re heading slightly downhill. In the past few weeks, as Pacific Research Institute scholar Tom Tanton points out, the dollar has strengthened against the Euro. Crude oil demand has plummeted, the biggest decline since the recession year of 1982. And future traders are already expecting Congress to soften up laws against oil exploration. The House protest—and Gingrich’s triumphant messaging—had some impact, but that’s already been priced in. “The ban’s going to expire if Congress simply does nothing,” Tanton says.

All of this—the opportunistic Gingrich slogan work (he’s running a “drill here, drill now, pay nothing!” contest), the Republican gamesmanship—has opened up #dontgo to mockery from the liberal blogs. “They call us ‘twitiots,’ Odom sighs. But I can see #dontgo, or its moveable parts, succeeding despite their origins. David All, who thinks the momentum has tapped out, points out that his fellow Gen X and Y tech consultants—Heritage’s Bluey, Patrick Ruffini—had collaborated for the first time. Odom, a Republican who voted for Ron Paul in the primaries and supports Bob Barr in the general election, is lining up new targets for his website and mailing list. One of them is T. Boone Pickens, the Texas billionaire currently flooding your airwaves with ads about America’s wind corridor and the need to get off foreign oil. (Go flick on the TV and wait a bit. You’ll see it.)

”I’m very skeptical of the T. Boone scheme,” Odom says. “It’s one thing to solve this problem by opening up new markets, like new areas for drilling. It’s quite another to lobby, as Pickens is doing, for tax incentives and public money to fund a pet project.” Speaker Pelosi, after all, holds shares in Pickens’ company Clean Energy. California’s Proposition 10, which she supports, would pour $5 billion into wind farms. It’s the sort of rent-seeking that’s awfully easy to sell politically. Evidence? Just look back at the pleasant-sounding tax incentives that Gingrich was pushing eight months ago, in his previous attempt at Republican branding.

The grassroots members of the movement aren't growing wildly at the moment: Odom says his list has added 5,000 members in the week since the initial burst. But they aren't as easily guided or bought. Odom wants #dontgo to be part of something as roiling and proactive as MoveOn.org (complete with dated name—"Yes, I understand the irony of a conservative cause that tells Congress not to go home"), focusing on earmarks, or entitlement spending. David All, the consultant who was skeptical about the House protest side of the movement, told me the same thing: The movement can grow it if it seeks out new political territory.

A populist small-government movement that sticks to principles instead of easy messaging, fads, and the whims of donors? Maybe here, maybe now.

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason.

The Public Choice Economics of T. Boone Pickens

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 09:09:00 EDT

Via blogger, writer, and critic extraordinaire Alan Vanneman comes this bit from Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum on T. Boone Pickens and the Texas bazillionaire's newfound enthusiasm for wind power (not to be confused with Psi Power, the vastly more interesting ability, at least according to the environmentally unconscious band Hawkwind, to "read your mind like a magazine"):

Pickens wants to build his electricity transmission facilities on a strip of land 250 feet wide and 250 miles long that starts at his farm in Roberts County, Texas, and terminates in Dallas. Why that particular strip? Because Pickens has been buying up massive water rights from the Ogallala Aquifer and he wants to pipe that water to Dallas at huge profit. Unfortunately, pipeline right-of-way is pretty hard to acquire, so Pickens figured out a way to get some help: he formed a little water district headed by his wife and a friend and then convinced the Texas legislature that water plus wind electricity was a good reason to use its power of eminent domain to hand over the land to him for a song. Wind power wasn't really the motivation for this land snatch, it was just a sweetener for a water deal.
Clever—and typically Texan, no? Still, why not just sell the electricity? Why the natural gas switcheroo [part of Pickens' plan is to fuel cars with natural gas after making conventional gas stations friendly to the new energy]? Turns out Pickens has a vested interest there too:
Along with being the country's biggest wind power developer, Pickens owns Clean Energy Fuels Corp., a natural gas fueling station company that is the sole backer of the stealthy Proposition 10 on California's November ballot.

Prop. 10 would kick $5 billion in public money toward incentives to switch toward alternative fuels for trucks and automobilies, the likely biggest winner being natural gas.

More here.

As reason's Ron Bailey has pointed out, Pickens has rarely met a subsidy he didn't like, as long as he was on the gettin' end.

The larger lesson? Always check ostensibly environmentally friendly plans for hidden agendas, regardless of who is pushing the plan, whether it's Al Gore or T. Boone Pickens or Jack London, for that matter.

Will California Steal From the Rich to, uh, Buy Oil Companies?

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 12:52:00 EDT

First the good news: This proposed California initiative probably wouldn't make the ballot until 2010, hopefully wouldn't pass, and even if it does I presume courts would overturn some or all of it.

The bad news: The Golden State's circular drain of a political culture is producing awful ideas like a 55% estate-seizure tax on those who own $20 million in assets, to be spent on purchasing a 30%-51% stake in ExxonMobil, Chevron, General Motors, Ford, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Citigroup. I shit you not.

The whole PDF file of the proposed ballot initiative is worth a read, particularly the gloriously Marxist Section 2. Thanks to the L.A. Times' Robert Greene for continuing to trawl through the zanjas of Californian democracy.

TEOTWAWKI!

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 16:30:00 EDT

Oxford, England—People have long been fascinated by the end of the world. Some interpretations of Hindu scripture suggest that the world will end with the imminent conclusion of the current Kali Yuga cycle. Some New Agers believe that the world will undergo apocalyptic changes as the Maya Long Count calendar comes to an end on December 21, 2012. Some Christian End Timers believe that the period preceding the Day of Judgment described in the Book of Revelation is now upon us. Religious believers are not alone in their fascination with doomsday. Secular catastrophists predict environmental doom or worry about calamity raining down on us from outer space.

This week the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, headed by bioprogressive philosopher Nick Bostrom, is convening a conference on Global Catastrophic Risks. The Institute's work focuses on how radical technological developments such as nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and life-extension treatments will affect the human condition. One of the Institute's research programs is global catastrophic risks which mulls questions like: What are the biggest threats to global civilization and human well-being? Will the human species survive the 21st century?

The savants gathered here in Oxford will consider a wide variety of potentially apocalyptic risks. For example, Michelangelo Mangano from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) will explore the possibility that certain scientific research—e.g., the Brookhaven Lab's high energy experiments that might produce a black hole—could inadvertently destroy the world. Mike Treder and Chris Phoenix from the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology will discuss how the advent of molecular manufacturing could lead to massive economic and social disruptions, including a new arms race, the spread of tyranny, and dangerous environmental degradation. At the cosmic level, the Technion Institute's Arnon Dar will look at the devastation that a nearby supernova could wreak, and astronomer and author William Napier will evaluate the chances that the earth might soon suffer an asteroid strike. Whether future advanced artificial intelligences will think of us as pets or pests will be pondered by Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence research fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky.

In addition to the more exotic risks noted above, the conferees will also be discussing the prospects for nuclear war and nuclear terrorism. More reassuringly, Princeton University Program on Science and Global Security fellow Ali Nouri is apparently set to argue that trends in biotechnology are making it less likely that bad guys could unleash a man-made plague. On an even happier note, technoprogressive bioethicist James Hughes will discuss how to avoid cognitive biases toward over-pessimism and over-optimism. And Steve Rayner, director of Oxford's James Martin Institute (which is co-sponsoring the conference), will point out that much contemporary doomsaying shares cultural characteristics with earlier superstitious predictions of imminent catastrophe.

The whole cheery conference kicks off this evening with a talk by Sir Crispin Tickell entitled, "Humans: Past, Present and Future." Apparently Tickell buys into the whole litany of environmentalist doom. However, he thinks that doom can be avoided if we "radically change our thinking on global governance" and pursue some "interesting" technological options.

This is the first dispatch from the Oxford conference on Global Catastrophic Risks. Since the conference runs through the weekend, future dispatches will report various gloomy presentations chiefly as blog posts at reason online. I will finish up coverage of the conference with my science column next Tuesday.

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.

Disclosure: The Future of Humanity Institute is covering my travel expenses for the conference; no restrictions or conditions were placed on my reporting.

Pope Down on This World; Favors Next

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 08:46:00 EDT

The leader of the Roman Catholic Church speaking at a youth conference in the country that produced Midnight Oil:

The world's natural resources are being squandered in the pursuit of "insatiable consumption," Pope Benedict XVI said Thursday in a speech urging followers to care more for the environment and reconnect with the principle of peace
Benedict, speaking to more than 200,000 pilgrims gathered for the Roman Catholic church's youth festival, expanded on a theme that has led him to be dubbed "the green pope." The crowd, massed on a disused wharf in Australia's largest city, regularly erupted in cheers that gave the event the feel of a sporting event.
"Some of you come from island nations whose very existence is threatened by rising water levels; others from nations suffering the effects of devastating drought," the pope said, referring to global warming.
He noted that during his more than 20-hour flight from Rome to Sydney he had a bird's eye view of a vast swath of the world that inspired awe and introspection.
"Perhaps reluctantly we come to acknowledge that there are also scars which mark the surface of our earth: erosion, deforestation, the squandering of the world's mineral and ocean resources in order to fuel an insatiable consumption," he said.
Types of "poison" are afflicting the world's social environment, he said, such as substance abuse, along with the exaltation of violence and sexual degradation, for which he blamed television and the Internet.

I'm sure there's nothing like a 20-hour first-class flight over the planet to give a fella real perspective about how much the Intertubes are degrading everything.

More here (not that you need it).

Pope Benedict slags gay marriage here.

Sen. Coal Says Corn-based Ethanol Overrated

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 08:17:00 EDT

The AP reports on a summer meeting of governors (think League of Villains) at which our duly elected officials catch up with the bandwagon that corn-based ethanol is a bad idea whose time has come—and hopefully is going, going, gone.

Here's a snapshot of reactions to the recognition that critics such as reason science correspondent Ronald Bailey have been right all along in noting that corn-based ethanol mandates distort markets, deliver questionable environmental benefits, and jack the price of food:

"I truly do not believe that a food-based product should be used for energy," said Gov. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, where almost all energy needs are met by coal. "It should be used for human consumption."
Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina called the EPA requirement "a totally bogus government mandate" at Sunday's energy forum.
The current buzz is cellulosic ethanol, or ethanol made from plant matter. Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm pitched the idea Sunday of using more wood products because of the large number of forests in her state.
Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania says his state "could be to cellulosic ethanol what Iowa was to corn-based ethanol." A new state law will require a minimum of a billion gallons of fuel annually pumped in Pennsylvania come from renewable fuels.

More here. And before you get all excited about cellulosic ethanol, read this.

It's About Zombies, Dummy, Not Global Warming

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 18:11:00 EDT

Critics are calling M. Night Shyamalan's new movie, The Happening--in which plants release toxins that cause Northeasterners to kill themselves--a dystopian vision of the consequences of global warming (as well as a terrible movie), but Shyamalan says that's not what The Happening is about:

CNN: So a lot of people are going to see this and say, "Is this an environment movie?" Are you sending an Al Gore-like message out here, or is it just a thriller?
Shyamalan: No. 1, it's a B movie. This is the best B movie you will ever see, that's it. That's what this is. If there's other things that stick to your ribs as you walk out, that's great, but it's supposed to be, you know, zombies eating flesh.
CNN: So when you say B, you don't mean honeybee?
Shyamalan: No, I meant like, you know, zombies and killer things running around.

James at Gone Elsewhere reviewed the script of The Happening in August 2007, calling it, "The Day after Tomorrow…with plants." Perhaps anticipating that moviegoers would interpret the movie as an enviro-film, Gone Elsewhere slammed The Happening's not-so-subtle approach to the possible consequences of humankind's footprint:

The Happening features the most moronic environmentalism in the history of cinema. It makes On Deadly Ground look like An Inconvenient Truth....The Kindergarten-level message of the film is that if Mankind continues to be cruel to nature…nature will eventually fight back. In case you miss this (despite having it sledge-hammered into your brain for two hours) don’t despair: Shyamalan has characters spell-it-out for us throughout the proceedings.

The talking head scene at the end of the movie, in which an environmental expert explains the event as nature's way of defending itself and warns that the event was only a "prelude" to a more catastrophic attack, reinforces the critical sentiment that The Happening is a really, really, bad environmental movie.

But there are some aspects of the plot that suggest the environmental aspects are only a means for scaring us for the sake of scaring us, and not a strategy for raising environmental awareness.

I submit as evidence one of the movie's more explicit ironies: The few characters in the movie who are modeled after green freaks die horrible deaths. The greenhouse owner, who is the first character to suggest that it's not terrorists releasing the toxin, but plants, shoots himself, as does his equally earth-friendly wife. And the old lady who lives off the grid, grows her own crops, and doesn't own a car, ends up being bat-shit insane, killing herself by repeatedly headbutting the side of her earth-friendly house.

The two Philadelphia survivors--Mark Wahlberg's and Zooey Deschanel's characters--on the other hand, live to pollute another day, and the second to last scene of the movie shows Deschanel optimistically sharing the results of her positive pregnancy test with an equally joyful Wahlberg--which suggests that the two are bringing more rabid consumers into being. As if this wasn't enough, the final scene of the movie depicts the toxin infiltrating France, a country known for its environmentally-friendly regulations.

Here's a classic literature class question (posed to me by reason's very own green guru, Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey): Does the movie mean what the director says it means, or is it up to the critics to tell us what to take away from The Happening?

Check out Bailey's debate on Global Warming here and Tim Cavanaugh's comprehensive look at zombie cinema here.

An Emergency Cooling System for the Planet

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:30:00 EDT

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.

Sell the Whales

mriggs@reason.com (Mike Riggs) — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 11:18:00 EDT

In keeping with Katherine Mangu-Ward's recent look at the plight of the lobster, here's an interesting dilemma involving another popular ocean critter:

[North Atlantic right whales] are among the most endangered species on the planet, with only about 300 of them still alive. But a measure aimed at protecting them is snarled and stalled in bureaucracy. [...]
That measure is a proposal from U.S. government scientists to require commercial ships to slow to 10 knots inside a 30-mile "bubble" near ports where and when these whales are migrating. [...]
"We think that more animals are being killed than are being born, and there are a couple of main sources of human-caused mortality that we are trying to reduce," said Jim Lecky, director of the Office of Protected Resources at the National Marine Fisheries Service. [...]
More than four years of NOAA research showed that speed kills whales. Above a speed of about 10 knots, a right whale's encounter with a large ship would probably be fatal. [...]
Many in the shipping industry oppose the speed limit, saying it would be too costly. A federal study concluded that slowing the ships near the whales will cost shipping companies about $112 million, or less than 1 percent of the $340 billion East Coast shipping industry income."

The response of the shipping industry shows just how differently the two groups think:

The World Shipping Council, an industry group representing more than two dozen global shipping companies, filed documents with the U.S. federal government opposing the speed limits, saying the change would cause "significant economic costs."
The group even suggested that if large ships went faster through the whales' habitat, the chance of a collision would be lower.
"A quickly moving vessel will pass through the area quickly, and exposure will be small," the shipping council wrote in a document challenging the limits. "A slowly moving vessel will take longer to pass through the area, exposure will be greater, and the whale will have longer to surface or move in a way that increases jeopardy."

Possible solution: Sell the whales. The new (presumably collective) owners could charge shipping companies for damages done to their mammalian property. Demanding just enough to hurt the industry but not enough to cripple it would provide shipping companies with an incentive to slow-down while in the whale's habitats without bringing goverment penalties into the equation. In addition, the new owners of the whales would take on the responsibility of raising the necessary funds for tracking a pod, or even individual whales.

More reason ocean chatter.

Cap and Trade = Tax and Spend

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 09:39:00 EDT

Shikha Dalmia, a policy analyst for Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website, writes in The New York Post:

Cap-and-trade is really just another name for tax-and-spend. Just as tobacco taxes haven't eliminated smoking, a cap-and-trade tax won't eliminate global warming. Even if the bill works exactly as promised, it would cut global CO2 concentration by only 4 percent, which wouldn't produce even a measurable drop in temperatures.

Whole thing here.

A few weeks back, Dalmia wrote about China and the Olympics for Business Week. Here's a snippet of that:

China-bashers believe that allowing China to own U.S. government debt is tantamount to putting a nuclear bomb in its hands: All that Beijing needs to do is dump U.S. bonds. This will crash the U.S. dollar, especially now, when it is already in a weakened state, making it useless as the world's reserve currency, the main source of America's status as the world's economic superpower.
But should China attempt to detonate this bomb, its own economy would be buried under debris long before America even heard the explosion.

More here.

Dalmia's reason archive here.

The Movie Trailers That Are Destroying America!

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 30 May 2008 14:31:00 EDT

From The Colbert Report, the "trailers that are destroying America," including one for The Incredible Hulk. Colbert reads the movie as a pro-Al Gore documentary, and notes in passing that the former VP, like the Hulk, "got huge after embracing the green agenda." About five minutes of fun, fun, fun.

Does Fashionable Beat Rational When It Comes to Solving the World's Biggest Problems?

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Wed, 28 May 2008 15:15:00 EDT

Copenhagen, May 27—Ranking proposed solutions to global warming, air pollution, disease control, and clean water were on the agenda today at the Copenhagen Consensus 2008 (CC08) conference. Leading public policy researchers proposed to a panel of experts, including five Nobel Prize-winning economics, what they would do with an "extra" $75 billion over five years to solve ten of the world's biggest challenges. The mantra of CC08 is "where in the world can we do the most good?"

Another maxim often heard at the conference is that the Copenhagen Consensus process "is not about doing what's fashionable, but doing what's rational." And what could be more fashionable than the problem of man-made global warming? The question to presenter and Economic and Social Research Institute economist Richard Tol was whether or not spending $75 billion over five years trying to fix man-made global warming would be rational?

Tol opened with a standard recitation from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) detailing the evidence for man-made global warming and climate model projections of future warming. Then Tol declared that spending $75 billion dollars over so short a period of time would do nothing to ameliorate any effects from global warming. Thus he and his colleagues decided to reinterpret the Copenhagen Consensus challenge by looking at spending the net present value of $15 billion dollars annually (roughly 0.05 percent of global GDP) addressing global warming for the next 100 years. That sum comes to around $800 billion. They ran this through some climate and econometric models (see their analysis here) in three different scenarios.

Spending $800 billion on just cutting (mitigating) greenhouse gas emissions would provide just $685 billion in benefits by 2100. Not very good. Their next scenario looked at devoting all the money toward low-carbon energy supply research and development. In this case spending $800 billion would result in $1717 billion in benefits by 2100. Their third scenario included a mix of energy R&D, a carbon tax of $20 per ton, and direct spending on efforts to control malaria and diarrhea which are projected to get worse as the world warms. The analysis places a tax on carbon as a way to motivate energy suppliers and users to adopt the new low-carbon technologies turned up by R&D. This portfolio approach would boost benefits to $2129 billion by 2100.

According to their calculations, this third scenario does not "solve the climate problem" since it only lowers future warming from 3.5 degrees Celsius in 2100 to about 3 degrees Celsius. At the end of his presentation, Tol told the Youth Forum that if he had to choose whether to spend $100 on global warming or malaria, he'd spend it on malaria. If he could allocate between malaria and global warming, he'd spend $90 on malaria and $10 on energy research.

McGill University economist Chris Green then offered a sobering perspective paper strongly dissenting from what he regards as the IPCC Working Group III's happy talk that the technologies needed to stabilize emissions are currently available or under development. In April, Green and his colleagues argued in a Nature article entitled, "Dangerous Assumptions," that IPCC future greenhouse gas emissions scenarios presuppose the development of low-carbon energy technologies, but those technologies don't exist. That means that cutting greenhouse gases is likely to be much harder to cut than many policymakers think.

Green noted that "on-the-shelf technologies" such as wind and solar power can be deployed now, but the problem is that they suffer from intermittency—the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine. To compensate for this failing, researchers need to develop some baseload utility-scale ways of storing electricity to tide us over when those renewable sources are offline. There are some ideas for technologies to do this, but none even close to being proven. In addition, carbon capture and sequestration technologies that would allow humanity to continue to burn coal while storing emissions safely underground are nowhere near commercialization. Furthermore, the U.S. has no capability for safely reprocessing and reusing spent nuclear fuel.

"My view is that economists should spend a lot less time talking about carbon taxes and much more time thinking about what an incentive compatible energy technology race would look like," declared Green. He added, "People in developing countries want to live the good life and it's going to take a large amount of energy for them to do that. There are not enough low carbon sources of energy to achieve that."

Tol later suggested that the world will get real results from energy technology R&D only if climate policy is perceived as being solid and credible in the long term. But how to achieve that? Before he stepped down, British Prime Minister Tony Blair established an escalating petrol tax as a climate change measure. This week British truckers, pinched by higher oil prices, are demanding that petrol taxes be cut or they'll block the country's refineries. The betting is that current Prime Minister Gordon Brown will blink. So much for credible long term climate policy.

Turning to less fashionable topics, let's briefly look at the costs and benefits of some of the proposed solutions to the global challenges of air pollution, disease control, and clean water. International development aid consultant Bjorn Larsen dealt with the challenges of indoor and outdoor air pollution. Larsen cited figures showing that more than 3 billion people are exposed to indoor air pollution from indoor fires using wood and coal for cooking and heating. Outdoor air pollution affects over 2 billion people living in cities. This air pollution causes 2.5 million deaths per year and is responsible for countless cases of respiratory disease. Over 90 percent of these deaths and illness occur in developing countries.

What to do? Replacing traditional open hearths with inexpensive rocket stoves could reduce indoor air pollution by 80 percent and perhaps cut fuel use by 50 percent. Providing these new stoves could save up to 700,000 lives annually. Solutions to outdoor air pollution, e.g., requiring the use of ultra-low sulfur diesel and diesel particulate control technologies on vehicles, are much more costly. Larsen calculated that for many poor people in developing countries their benefits do not outweigh the costs.

As an aside, a Youth Forum representative from China claimed that many electric power plants in her country are now required to have pollution control equipment. The problem is that pollution control uses up to 30 percent of the plant's output, so managers generally turn off pollution controls in order to supply more electricity. They turn the controls on when inspectors are about to show up.

Controlling diseases was the next global challenge considered. Dean Jamison, a public health professor from Harvard University, was the lead author of the Copenhagen Consensus challenge presentation on the topic. He began by noting the enormous progress made in improving human health globally in the past 50 years. To illustrate this, Jamison pointed out that in India the average life expectancy in 1950 was only 44 years. By 2005, this had risen to 64 years implying a rate of improvement of 4.4 years per decade. Jamison suggested that income and economic growth are not closely correlated with improvements in health arguing that "science has given us powerful, yet inexpensive tools for improving health." While infectious diseases remain the biggest killers in poor countries, Jamison did note that 29 percent of death in developing countries are caused by cardiovascular illnesses which is more than the total number of deaths caused by tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and malaria combined.

Jamison listed seven health interventions with benefit-cost ratios ranging from 30-to-1 to 12-to-1. These interventions are: (1) expanded tuberculosis treatments; (2) low cost "polypill" heart attack treatments; (3) malaria prevention and treatment; (4) expanded immunization against childhood diseases; (5) tobacco taxation; (6) combination strategies to prevent HIV transmission; and (7) increased surgical capacity at district level hospitals.

In his perspective presentation, Harvard public health economist David Canning asked if the benefit-cost ratios where so high for these interventions why then aren't people paying for them themselves? Perhaps they have other higher priorities. Or perhaps there is some kind of "market failures," so might it not be more effective to attack the market failures directly in order enable people to get access to these treatments? This might include policies to encourage insurance and micro-financing.

The last major challenge considered was the provision of clean water and sanitation presented by University of North Carolina public health professor Dale Whittington. He noted that about 1.1 billion people lacked improved water supplies, and more than 2.7 billion had no sanitation service. Whittington immediately disabused the audience of the notion that networks of piped water and sanitation were cost effective for many poor people in the world. He pointed out that "the incremental benefit of improved water supply may simply not cover the large cost of providing it, since by definition everyone has some access to water in order to live, and the willingness to pay for an improvement may be low." The full economic costs of such systems range between $40 and $80 per month which is vastly more than many people's monthly incomes. Networked sewage systems cost even more.

Whittington did offer some cost-effective solutions, including deep borehole wells combined with hand pumps. Such wells could supply water to 60 households. Until recently, even this was not considered economically feasible, but Whittington claimed that the costs of boreholes in Africa have now been halved to about $6,000 because of recently increased competition, especially from Chinese contractors active in the region. Adding up the capital costs implies a monthly cost of $2.26 per household.

With regard to sanitation, Whittington recommended financing Community-Led Total Sanitation (CTLS) campaigns. CLTS programs aim to ban open defecation by explaining disease transmission routes and mobilizing social pressure to encourage community members to use low-cost latrines. Whittington estimated that the overall monthly cost of CLTS per household is 32 cents.

The final three big global challenges—women and development, subsidies and trade barriers, and education—will be presented on Wednesday. The Youth Forum will announce its ranking of solutions on Thursday and the 2008 Copenhagen Consensus panel of experts will announce its rankings on Friday.

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.

Disclosure: Danish taxpayers are paying my travel expenses to attend CC08. There are no conditions placed upon my reporting.

Where in the World Can We Do the Most Good?

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Mon, 26 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Copenhagen, May 25—The opening press conference for the Copenhagen Consensus Center's 2008 conference took place in one of the gilt-edged ballrooms at the Moltkes Palace. The action unfolded beneath a bas-relief depicting heroic Danish burghers in top hats carrying a banner supplemented by bas-reliefs on pilasters portraying such everyday tools as hammers, pliers, squares, and drawing compasses. The PowerPoint question displayed on the screen behind the head table of notables was, "Where can we do the most good for the world?" Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen began, "The Copenhagen Consensus is a simple but powerful idea. The world faces a number of serious challenges. We only have limited means to solve them, so where do we start?"

That's the question that the Copenhagen Consensus Center conference for 2008 (CC08) will try to answer this week. The Copenhagen Consensus Center is the brainchild of "skeptical environmentalist" Bjorn Lomborg. Headquartered at the Copenhagen Business School, the CC08 is convening leading economic experts with the aim of ranking 10 of the world's biggest problems. The expert panel is supposed to figure out which ones should receive priority and which should be bumped further down the queue. To make the exercise concrete, the experts are notionally deciding what challenges should be allocated an "extra" $75 billion in foreign aid over the next four years.

Among the experts are Nobel Prize winners in economics Vernon Smith, Thomas Schelling, Douglass North, Robert Mundell, and Finn Kydland. Other expert panelists include economists Nancy Stokey from the University of Chicago, Jagdish Bhagwati from Columbia University, and Francois Bourguignon from the University of Paris. The experts are considering detailed reports by prominent international researchers regarding ten challenges, including air pollution, armed conflicts, diseases, education, global warming, malnutrition and hunger, sanitation and access to clean water, subsidies and trade barriers, terrorism, and women and development. In each area, the researchers define the problem, suggest options for solving the problem[*], and assign a benefit-to-cost ratio (BCR) to each solution. The higher the BCR, the more cost-effective the solution is.

Prime Minister Rasmussen concretized the value of the CC08 exercise by referring to the earlier version in 2004. He noted that in 2004, CC04 participants put controlling the HIV/AIDS epidemic in developing countries at the top of the list. Consequently, the Danish government began to devote a higher proportion of its overseas development aid to combating that disease, doubling the aid from $100 to $200 million per year by 2010.

Rasmussen got ahead of the 2008 deliberations a bit when he turned to the subject of climate change. He argued that the case for action is strong, and that the world needed to cut its greenhouse gas emissions. To address the problem, Rasmussen called for "a new Green industrial revolution and a new Green world economy." Interestingly, the 2004 Copenhagen Consensus report ranked measures to address climate change at the very bottom, finding that proposals for carbon taxes and implementing the Kyoto Protocol would have costs that "were likely to exceed the benefits."

Of course, the prime minister is likely making politic noises as he gears up to host the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference. At that meeting in Copenhagen, governments are expected to adopt a comprehensive new global warming treaty on climate change. Lomborg opposes stringent limits on greenhouse gas emissions as not being cost effective when it comes to helping poor people. At the end of the week, we'll see what the experts say this time.

Lomborg followed the prime minister, claiming that the Copenhagen Consensus is not about doing what's fashionable, but instead focuses on doing what's rational. He pointed out that politicians and activists often argue that we should solve all problems. But the fact is that in a world of scarce resources, a couple of big issues will get the bulk of the available resources. Trade-offs have to be made. When Lomborg is speaking of resources, he is basically talking about foreign development aid. What the Copenhagen Consensus hopes to do is help donors, both public and private, to spend their money is ways that solve the most urgent problems.

To illustrate how issues might be ranked, Lomborg cited some findings from a paper dealing with the challenge of disease. Spending $1 billion on controlling tuberculosis would save 1 million lives and result in estimated benefits of $30 billion for a benefit-cost ratio of 30 to 1. Spending $200 million on treating heart disease in poor countries (which accounts for 25 percent of deaths in those countries) with an inexpensive "polypill" combining aspirin and statins would produce $5 billion benefits implying a 25 to 1 benefit-cost ratio. And a $1 billion spent on malaria produces a benefit-cost ratio of 20 to 1.

During the question and answer period, I noted that the CC08 process looks to shower money on problems, but does not address many of the institutional impediments for making sure that the money would actually be spent effectively. In fact, I suggested, the reason poor countries are poor is because they do not have effective governance and economic institutions. Lomborg responded that of course institutions are important, but the Copenhagen Consensus was focusing chiefly on "what can money do to help." He pointed out that the Copenhagen Consensus conference in 2004 considered corruption as an issue, but couldn't figure out how spending money would be able to help fix that problem. Earlier Prime Minister Rasmussen correctly observed, "No problem has ever been solved only by throwing money at it. We must prioritize." Unfortunately, as New York University development economist William Easterly has documented, the West has thrown $2.3 trillion dollars in aid to poor countries during the past five decades without much to show for it.

Lomborg further suggested that institutional analysis could be implicit in deciding how to prioritize the challenges. For example, if the experts decide that corruption or lack of private property rights would get in the way of effectively deploying money to solve a specific problem, they could give it a lower priority.

The deliberations of the expert panel are private, but all of the research papers and respondents to them will present their work to a forum of 80 young people drawn from 37 different countries during the week. These presentations are public and I will be reporting on their findings in daily dispatches from Copenhagen.

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.

Disclosure: Danish taxpayers are paying my travel expenses to attend CC08. There are no conditions placed upon my reporting.

For live webcasts from CC08, go here.

[*]: Corrected from an earlier version that, due to an editing error, implied only two options were suggested.

Beware, He's Possessed to Skate

info@reason.com (Damon W. Root) — Wed, 14 May 2008 15:42:00 EDT

It isn't easy being green. Just ask Al Gore. But for one eco-friendly Canadian, the price is 15 hots and a cot. Via Breitbart:

Lee Breen, 25, was ticketed in August 2007 for skateboarding on Fredericton City streets in easternmost Canada, but refused to pay the fine, and so a judge ordered him jailed for five days.

[...]

"The city says it wants its citizens to find alternative forms of transportation, and so I did," Breen said by telephone from outside Fredericton city hall, prior to his arrest.

"I completely bought into the 'green lifestyle.' I run a gas-free lawn care company and I don't drive. And now, they're putting me in jail for actually embracing an alternative form of transportation that cuts down on (CO2) emissions."

Whole thing here.

As Many as 14,000 Dead in Myanmar

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 06 May 2008 07:34:00 EDT

Myanmar officials said on Tuesday the death toll could continue to climb higher than the 14,000 already feared dead from the Southeast Asian nation's devastating cyclone as the international community prepared to rush in aid.
In the aftermath of Cyclone Nargis, state radio reported that the government was delaying a constitutional referendum in areas hit hardest.
Myanmar's Information Minister Maj. Gen. Kyaw Hsan confirmed at a news conference that some 4,000 people had died in Yangon and the low-lying Irrawaddy delta region. He added that another 10,000 people could be dead in the delta.
Kyaw said tidal waves killed most of the victims in that region.

More AP account here.

reason on Burma here.

Cathy Young on the last mega-storm in the region.

Underground Eco-Vandal Arrested

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 08:33:00 EDT

The Cincinnati Enquirer is reporting the capture of an Environmental Liberation Front member charged with causing $1.1 million of damage to Michigan State University buildings and facilities in 1999:

[Marie Jeanette] Mason is accused of going...on Dec. 31, 1999, to Agriculture Hall on the Michigan State University campus in East Lansing. The indictment says [the group] intended to destroy federally funded plant genetic research being conducted by university employees.
They are accused of getting into the area where the research was stored and setting it on fire. Mason is accused of spray painting "No Genetically Modified Organisms" on building walls just before the fire.
The fire caused $1.1 million damage.
"It was an assault on a core value of free and open inquiry at a research university," MSU President Lou Anna Simon told the Detroit Free Press on Tuesday. "Once you chill the academic climate from doing this kind of work, the cost to society is enormous."...
Mason and the others also are accused of setting fire to commercial logging equipment in Michigan the next day, causing $18,000 in damage while spray painting "ELF" and "Log in Hell." She and the others are charged with arson and conspiracy to commit arson.

More here. This story reminds me of older tales of '60s and '70s radicals popping up years later. And that this sort of stupid, specifically luddite behavior has generally disappeared from the scene. In 2006, reason reported on one bizarre reason why that might be.