We live in a time of optimism about government’s ability to improve upon the unregulated state of affairs. From health insurance to financial markets to the types of fats we eat, cars we drive, and sources of energy we consume, there is a sense among our political, media, and academic elites that our privately ordered affairs are out of whack and can be improved by government rules. These elites rarely stop to ask whether the private ordering whose malfunctions they are seeking to correct is, in fact, private; in reality, it’s often not (see, e.g., the role of Fannie and Freddie in creating the housing bubble at the heart of the financial crisis, the role of the tax deduction for employer-provided health insurance in eviscerating the price competition that would constrain health care costs). Rather than asking how government meddling may have contributed to an undesirable situation, the elites usually look for a market failure — some systematic defect in the system of private ordering — and then invoke that failure as the rationale for a governmental fix.

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Global warming critics have taken two primary approaches. First, deny the facts based on the incentives for scientists to fudge the data to get prestige and research dollars (see, for example, the East Anglia emails), based on the inherent limitations of humans to build global weather models to predict the temperature 100 years from now, and based on humans’ Chicken-Little tendencies.

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I love our national parks as much as the next guy (probably more, having visited every major one and dozens of smaller ones, and loving every minute of nearly every visit), but can someone tell me why the federal government owns so much of our country? Some maps tell the story. See here and here. Now comes news from the Obama administration that there are plans to make more land off limits to economic uses. See here. I understand the temptation to think of nature as benign, aesthetically valuable, and like a piece of antiquity to be preserved, but I think we go too far when we sacrifice economic progress for desert plants, tall trees, fish, and other nonhuman things. Fundamentally the claims of favoring these things for some abstract goals of preservation are antihuman. They are also often ways for politicians to serve their own interests and those of favored constituents over the general welfare.

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That’s the punchline of a recent paper by Pierre Desrochers (U Toronto). Pierre has written some interesting papers on a range of topics related to economic development, technological innovation, and the intersection of business and the environment.   He argues that it is governmental (regulatory) failures that distort the environmental consequences of corporate behavior, not market failures. Should be an interesting read.

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Today the SEC voted 3-2 to approve an interpretive release offering guidance to companies on disclosure obligations as they relate to climate change.  Commissioners Casey and Paredes voted to reject the proposed guidance.

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The lesson from Jones, see my post below, is that law untamed can be very costly, and with little benefit. This is, of course, not a new idea. In a critical essay of “Southey’s Colloquies on Society,” Lord Thomas Macaulay wrote eloquently about the cost of law and government…

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In his New York Times column, Thomas Friedman advocates “doing the Cheney-thing on climate — preparing for 1%.” He’s referring to Vice-President Cheney’s reported remark: “If there’s a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping Al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response.”

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It’s been interesting to observe the responses to the hacked emails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. The emails seem to show leading global warming scientists massaging data to generate the result they prefer (i.e., “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years … to hide the decline”), scheming to squelch opposing evidence (i.e., “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next I.P.C.C. report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow—even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”), admitting to a need to hide certain data from critics (“If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone”), and even confessing that they were “tempted to beat” up researchers with opposing viewpoints.

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Apparently the Obama administration is not very confident about getting its environmental climate change agenda passed through Congress. Given a legislative “solution” is off the table, at least for the foreseeable future, perhaps it is not surprising that today the EPA announced it’s ruling that greenhouse gases are “a danger to public health and welfare“.

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