I'VE HEARD IT ALL NOW

As I've often said: There's no such thing as a happy Greenie. This one certainly believes in the old ZPG slogan: "People are pollution"

It is healthier to walk along a busy road and breathe in exhaust fumes than to sit in the comfort of an airconditioned car, a U.S. researcher said on Wednesday. Robert Baker, president of the non-profit U.S. Indoor Air Quality Association, said American scientists have found the air inside cars to be more contaminated than the air outside, even in urban areas. This was due to unfiltered air from exhaust fumes and chemical smells from car seats, audio equipment and air fresheners. "The air in an indoor space does not clean itself, unlike the outdoors, where air travels," Baker told a news conference at the launch of a Singapore Web site on car cabin air quality.

The site, www.healthycarcabin.org.sg, says prolonged exposure to bad cabin air can cause cancer and respiratory diseases. Drivers often install air cleaning devices, such as airconditioner filters.

The biggest pollutants in indoor spaces, however, are people, said Baker. "We release gases, bacteria and fungi into the air. The more people there are in an enclosed area, the more harmful it is," he said. One solution was to open the car's windows, though the Web site recommends doing so only along country roads.

Source





The Fake Energy Crisis

(Post lifted from Cafe Hayek)

Twice in the last week I've seen mention of a new "crisis" in energy markets. The crisis? We may have reached the peak in oil production, meaning that in future years, the amount of oil available will dwindle. This story is the lead story on today's front page of USA Today. The headline:

Debate Brews: Has Oil Production Peaked?

The story begins:

Almost since the dawn of the oil age, people have worried about the taps running dry. So far, the worrywarts have been wrong. Oil men from John D. Rockefeller to T. Boone Pickens always manage to find new gushers.

But now, a vocal minority of experts says world oil production is at or near its peak. Existing wells are tiring. New discoveries have disappointed for a decade. And standard assessments of what remains in the biggest reservoirs in the Middle East, they argue, are little more than guesses.

The first expert is an investment banker:

"There isn't a middle argument. It's a finite resource. The only debate should be over when we peak" says Matthew Simmons, a Houston investment banker and author of a new book that questions Saudi Arabia's oil reserves.

In case you think this is no big deal, think again:

If the "peak oil" advocates are correct, however, today's transient shortages and high prices will soon become a permanent way of life. Just as individual oil fields inevitably reach a point at which it gets harder and more expensive to extract the oil before output declines, global oil production is about to crest, they say. Since 2000, the cost of finding and developing new sources of oil has risen about 15% annually, according to the John S. Herold consulting firm.

As global demand rises, American consumers will find themselves in a bidding war with others around the world for scarce oil supplies. That will send prices of gasoline, heating oil and all petroleum-related products soaring.

"The least-bad scenario is a hard landing, global recession worse than the 1930s, says Kenneth Deffeyes, a Princeton University professor emeritus of geosciences. "The worst-case borrows from the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: war, famine, pestilence and death".

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse? War, famine, pestilence and death?  They ought to put this quote in the next OED under "hyperbole". And I thought this guy was trying to really scare us (Ht: Alan Nemes) but it turns out he's a moderate.

"This fear that we're running out of oil or some other key resource is a steady feature of the worrying class.  The worriers have a bad track record. I understand that just because you're paranoid it doesn't mean people aren't chasing you and just because the worriers have always been wrong doesn't mean this won't be the time they get it right. But I still sleep well.

"There's nothing inherently worrisome about a peak in oil production. Such imagery preys on a quick emotional response--before the peak, we're going up. After the peak, it's all downhill.  But there's nothing significant about a world where we produce and consume less oil next year than this year. If that's because remaining oil stocks are increasingly costly to bring up from the ground, that increases the incentive to economize on oil usage and find cheaper ways to get it out of the ground. That mitigates the harm.

"The worriers like to say that we've had cheap oil in the past and now we're going to have expensive oil in the future. They make it sound like it's a geophysical relationship between production and prices.  As long as we're finding more oil, oil is cheap. When we're past the peak, it'll be expensive. Cheap oil means the good life. Expensive oil means misery. But prices aren't high or low. They move around. They are high or low relative to other prices. If oil becomes increasingly scarce, we'll do a thousand, (more like a billion) things to find other ways of doing what oil does.

"If it happened tomorrow, if tomorrow, there were no gas in the pumps and this persisted forever, it would be a very unpleasant adjustment.  It isn't going to happen tomorrow. If it happens gradually over the next 30 or 50 or 100 years, it will have little or no impact on our overall well-being.

"And wasn't it supposed to be good not to rely on fossil fuels? Why all this new worrying? I think the worriers are trying to exploit the recent spike in gasoline prices to push public policy in directions that won't happen otherwise.

"Meanwhile, read Julian Simon. Remember that human creativity is the ultimate resource. Remember that the geophysicists don't understand prices. Sleep well, despite the worriers' desire to keep you tossing and turning. And if you hear the sound of hoofbeats in the still small spaces of the night, it's probably just a horse.

For more on why the "peak oil" simpletons are wrong, see my own article on peak oil here




GREEN/LEFT REGULATIONS DRIVING U.S. HOUSING PRICES WAY UP

(Post lifted from Marginal Revolution)

The NYTimes Magazine has an excellent article on the housing market based around a discussion of the development firm Toll Brothers. Bob Toll the president of the firm is predicting that US housing prices will converge with those in Europe.

"In Britain you pay seven times your annual income for a home; in the U.S. you pay three and a half." The British get 330 square feet, per person, in their homes; in the U.S., we get 750 square feet. Not only does Toll say he believes the next generation of buyers will be paying twice as much of their annual incomes; in terms of space, he also seems to think they're going to get only half as much. "And that average, million-dollar insane home in the burbs? It's going to be $4 million."

Toll agrees with Glaeser et al. that the key force driving up prices is zoning and growth regulations. In New Jersey it now takes Toll Brothers up to two million dollars in legal fees and ten years in time to get the permits necessary to build.

Susan Wachter, a housing economist at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, has an interesting public choice insight about why zoning is worse in Europe.

European towns also have less incentive to encourage development, Wachter says, because they generally do not, unlike their American equivalents, depend on their local tax base to pay for education and services, which tend to be federalized.

This implies that towns in states that reduce their reliance on the property tax - often done, as in CA, in order to "equalize" school funding or other expenditure - will soon restrict development. Go to it graduate students.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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