Polluted Thinking

It's a rather striking irony that, as our air grows cleaner, environmentalists' complaints grow louder. Since 2001, they've been screaming that President Bush is "rolling back the Clean Air Act," and that the resulting increase in air pollution will kill people by the thousands. Instead, every category of air pollution has fallen during the Bush years, with 2003, 2004, and 2005 showing the lowest levels of harmful ozone and particulates in the air since the monitoring of air pollution began in the 1960s. What exactly is going on?

A little background in is order. In the late 1990s, the Clinton administration sued dozens of electric utilities under a new and aggressive interpretation of the Clean Air Act's arcane New Source Review (NSR) regulations. NSR was the epitome of the complicated, costly, and counterproductive regulatory regime. It required existing sources of pollution, such as power plants, to meet stringent new regulations if they made any substantial operating changes. This had the consequence of freezing old technology in place: Many plants avoided small upgrades that would have lowered their emissions and increased their electricity output, for fear that doing so would drag them into the NSR morass. Even the Progressive Policy Institute saw that NSR was a mess, calling in 2000 for it to be scrapped entirely and replaced with a market-oriented "cap and trade" system, in which firms able to reduce their emissions to lower-than-required levels could sell their "leftover" emissions allotments to other companies. Cap-and-trade systems have the virtue of concentrating emissions reductions among the firms able to undertake them most efficiently. And because firms can sell any emissions "credits" they don't use, they have a strong market incentive to pollute less. A similar emissions-trading program has worked successfully to reduce acid rain in the northeast since 1990.

When the incoming Bush administration proposed to simplify NSR and adopt cap-and-trade, the environmental lobby went nuts, successfully blocking the administration's "Clear Skies" legislation in Congress. So the White House decided to implement its new approach administratively through the EPA's "Clean Air Interstate Rule," which applied a cap-and-trade program to the midwestern and northeastern states where most of the nation's coal-fired pollution originates.

That program has been in effect long enough for us to see the results, and they should fill any environmentalist with joy. A new report from the National Academy of Science concludes that the Bush system will likely prove just as effective in lowering air pollution as the regulation- and lawsuit-happy Clinton approach - and it will do so at a much lower cost. That should of course put an end to claims that the Bush administration is filling our air with deadly pollutants.

But don't hold your breath. The environmental movement has proved time and again that it can't take yes for an answer. Reducing air pollution has been the single greatest environmental-policy success of our time. Emissions are falling fast, and are going to keep falling. Despite more cars on the road and more drivers per capita, automobile emissions are falling 8 percent a year, and EPA models predict a further 80-percent reduction in car and truck emissions over the next 20 years. Power-plant emissions are going to follow a similar trajectory - and they'll fall even faster if greens relax their reflexive opposition to nuclear power.

Yet the environmental lobby continues to act as though catastrophe were about to befall us, and has been especially shrill in condemning Bush's record. Their intellectual bankruptcy is perhaps most strikingly illustrated by the fact that their current favorite idea for cutting greenhouse-gas emissions is nothing other than . . . cap and trade. But when Bush applies the same policy to air pollutants, he is a despoiler of Mother Earth. It's hard not to conclude that their real problem with the president is that he is a Republican.

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THE HUGE COSTS OF RESTRICTIVE GREENIE LAND USE POLICIES

The radio interview below is with Wendell Cox -- the world's best known critic of urban consolidation. He's looked at housing prices relative to income in six countries, and says Australia has some of the highest there are. In fact there's a strong link between high house prices and land rationing, which forms the basis of urban consolidation. And if that isn't radical enough, Cox also says public transport almost never lives up to the claims made for it, and we should be building more freeways.

Michael Duffy: One of the policies we've been pursuing in Counterpoint is that of urban consolidation which is affecting the way so many of us live, and this interests us strangely for a number of reasons; it's the last bastion of attitudes that were once associated with socialism, such as a distain for private property (in this case, cars) and also what I think is an unwarranted faith in central planning. Perhaps its best-known international critic is Wendell Cox who runs a US consultancy called Demographia and they've got a very interesting website that I'll give you later on. Wendell has done work for many public and private organisations, including in Australia, he's been here before and he'll be here again next month on a speaking tour, but I thought we'd catch up with him first. Wendell, welcome to the program. You have done something very interesting called a Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey. Tell us about that.

Wendell Cox: That's right. We looked at housing affordability in 100 markets in six nations. My great interest in that has to do with the recognition that home ownership is the principal driver of economic growth. What we found is that in Australia things are pretty bad. As I think most Australians know, housing affordability has been greatly lost. The great Australian dream, I would argue, is in the process of being destroyed for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of future households. As you think, for example, in the Sydney area, housing prices relative to incomes are three times what they should be, three times what they are in Atlanta or Houston. In places like Brisbane, Adelaide, Melbourne and Perth, housing prices relative to incomes are about double what they should be, and this is being caused principally by the kind of regulations you've mentioned and that's the extreme regulation of land going under the name urban consolidation, anti-sprawl, et cetera, and it is doing to have, I believe, very serious impacts on the Australian economy in the long run.

Michael Duffy: Wendell, let's break that down, because you've just given us quite a good summary but let's take it step by step. First of all, which countries did you actually look at?

Wendell Cox: We looked at Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada, the UK and Ireland.

Michael Duffy: What was the measure? You said you compared house prices with income.

Wendell Cox: That's right. What we did is we looked at median house price and compared it to median household income in each of the countries. Essentially, historically, whether we talk about Australia or the United States or the UK, that measure is normally about three where the market is allowed to operate. What has happened in Australia and in some US west coast urban areas such as Los Angeles and Portland and Vancouver and Canada is these kinds of restrictive land rationing policies have been implemented and have driven the price of land through the ceiling.

Michael Duffy: But talking about the measure for the moment so our listeners understand what's going on here; you're looking at the average house price as a multiple of average individual income, household income?

Wendell Cox: Of median household income, middle household income.

Michael Duffy: So that is a pretty good measure, isn't it, because it gives you some sense of the pressure that an individual family or an individual might be under in any of those different markets.

Wendell Cox: Precisely.

Michael Duffy: Has this sort of thing been done before?

Wendell Cox: Not really at this scale. Most of these kinds of affordability measures have been done only inside countries and this is one of the things that sort of surprised the Australian and the New Zealand media a couple of years ago when we did our first study where there was an assumption that the same things that had gone wrong with the housing markets in Australia had occurred elsewhere...yet if you look in the US, for example, where Atlanta, Dallas, Fort Worth and Houston are the three fastest-growing large urban areas in the first world, housing affordability...with the huge demand those guys have got, housing affordability is down in the three range instead of the eight-and-a-half range or the six range for the median multiple that you find in the other capital cities.

Michael Duffy: So where did...you obviously must have ranked a lot of cities, a lot of housing markets...where did places like Sydney and Melbourne end up on your latest list?

Wendell Cox: Sydney ends up as one of...I think there are about eight worst, I forgot to check, but the worst are actually in California at the moment. Melbourne and the other three large capital cities are in the top 20 or the top 22 or something like that, they all tend to have multiples of about six. What we find is the only place where you find multiples of greater than four is where the kind of unwise policies that have been implemented, especially in Sydney and Melbourne, have been implemented.

Michael Duffy: I'd like to talk about those policies in a moment, but just before we do that, do you know if there is a trend over time? Do you know if things used to be better, in terms of that multiple, in places like Sydney and Melbourne?

Wendell Cox: Far better. If you just look at what has happened in housing prices relative to income in the last five years in Sydney, the average household that is going to buy a house today is going to pay an extra $200,000 at least including interest because of what's happened to those prices, and that is $200,000 that isn't going to go into buying other products and creating jobs.

Michael Duffy: Obviously you've got a lot of data because you looked at a lot of housing markets, something like 100...

Wendell Cox: Right, 100.

Michael Duffy: Is there a common pattern here? Is there a common cause you've been able to come up with to explain why some of these cities are worse than others?

Wendell Cox: Well, it all comes down to land regulation. In the urban areas, especially in the US and Canada where there's a fairly liberal regime that allows the market to deliver as many houses as people want to buy...places, again, like Atlanta, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Calgary, Edmonton and Winnipeg et cetera, we find really no problem whatsoever with housing affordability, a little increase but not much. But of course where we find the real problems are in places like Australia and New Zealand especially, where they have all fallen for this really false doctrine of urban consolidation without ever even having looked at the economic impacts.

Michael Duffy: What is it about urban consolidation that pushes up house prices?

Wendell Cox: What it is, it basically rations land. If tomorrow...if OPEC were to decide it would produce as much oil as it can, we would find gasoline prices, petrol prices, probably dropping by half, but because they've created a shortage of oil, the price is driven up. The cost of production has not gone up. If you look at Australia, over the last 20 years the actual cost of building a house has declined relative to inflation. What has happened is that the land prices have exploded due to the rationing of land, the scarcity of land that has been created by policies, which is really crazy when you think about the fact that something like one-quarter of 1% of Australia is in urban development.

Michael Duffy: Wendell, you said that some American cities (not that many but some) are very expensive, in fact more expensive than Sydney, so have they also adopted these same policies?

Wendell Cox: Precisely. There are differences...for example, the big problem in Sydney is a combination of taking land off the development rolls and creating unbelievable excessive infrastructure charges that one of your former guests, Patrick Troy, has roundly and rightly criticised. In California, principally it is very large infrastructure charges on new housing that bear no resemblance to reality. In Portland and Vancouver and Toronto you have urban growth boundaries, which you also have in Melbourne with their soon to be failing Melbourne 2030 plan, and that kind of thing.

Michael Duffy: Wendell, given the outcomes that you've just been talking about, why do you think urban consolidation was and still is so popular?

Wendell Cox: It is principally popular among a group of planners for whom what the city looks like aesthetically is the most important thing. They have done all sorts of research that's largely wrong, you hear them complaining about land being taken out of agricultural production because of urbanisation when in fact, for example, in Australia all of the land taken out of agricultural production for the last quarter century exceeds the size of the state of Victoria because you've gotten better at producing agricultural products. So a lot of it is based upon a sort of theory that we are ruining the land and that mankind is a scourge on the land.

Michael Duffy: So this is something of an outgrowth of the tremendous boom in the environmental movement, is it, over the last couple of decades?

Wendell Cox: Exactly, and it is based upon the most unsound environmental research you can imagine. The fact is we need to improve and protect the environment, we're doing an awful lot of good things, but we do not need to force people to live in downtown Sydney high-rises to accomplish that.

Michael Duffy: It's curious, there does seem to be a lot of data coming out just in the last year or so that I've noticed acknowledging that the promise of urban consolidation isn't always fulfilled. For example, in Sydney recently they discovered...I think it was water use in high-rises was as great or greater than in free-standing houses, which would appear to be counter intuitive, but that's been found by reputable experts.

Wendell Cox: And there's also the claim always made, especially by your academics in Australia, that suburbanisation creates traffic congestion when in fact it doesn't. Suburbanisation dilutes traffic congestion and makes traffic flow more freely. So that, for example, in our less dense urban areas of the US, we get to work on average 20 minutes faster every day, round trip, than Canadians do. So the point is, a lot of the claims...almost any claim you see made by the proponents of urban consolidation fails to stand the test of scrutiny.

Michael Duffy: Let's talk a bit more about transport because I know Demographia has done a lot of interesting work here, and one of the things you've looked at is the amount of freeways that cities have in relation to their population size. How do Australian cities come out of that?

Wendell Cox: Pretty much dreadfully. Melbourne and Brisbane are not bad, Perth is not bad, but the real losers are Sydney and Adelaide. Adelaide has fewer freeways per capita in terms of lane kilometres than any place, except perhaps Winnipeg. But if you look at Sydney, it comes out near the bottom of the list.

Michael Duffy: In a sense I suppose that lack of freeways creates some of the problems, and then the urban consolidators put forward their theories as if they're going to solve them. I know that they're very keen on things like light rail and public transport. Looking around the world at all the cities you've studied, is there any evidence you can actually shift people out of cars and onto things like light rail?

Wendell Cox: Not a shred. For example, when they built the Portland Oregon light rail line they found a reduction of traffic congestion along the adjacent freeway for a matter of about 30 days. The fact is that the basic problem with public transport, while we all love it, is that it only gets you to one place. If you go to any city, I don't care if it's Sydney or Portland or Perth or Paris, what you will find is public transport gets you to the core but is absolutely useless and uncompetitive in terms of getting you around the urban area otherwise. You think about Sydney, for example, only 13% of employment is downtown. That means 87% of the employment can't reasonably be reached by public transport. And, for example, you can see the light loads on that bus-way that you've built as indicative of this. The fact is that no urban area in the world has any plans for any public transport system that will draw very many people out of cars, and there's good reason for that; no urban area could afford it.

Michael Duffy: There's a certain religious element to this anti-car feeling I've found in people I talk to. One of the things I'm often told here is that if you build more freeways it will just encourage more people to use cars. There's a sort of anti-choice philosophy at the background of all this, isn't there?

Wendell Cox: There is, and in fact what happens when you build more freeways is people do drive a little bit longer in terms of distance but they drive shorter in terms of time because we're not all sitting around waiting so that we can drive 36 hours a day or something. The fact is that a situation like Sydney where there are insufficient freeways and there's no way you're ever going to have sufficient freeways because you'd have to tear up too much of the city, you've got more intense air pollution emissions because the cars are going slower and because they're in more stop-and-go traffic. This whole idea that building freeways creates traffic is sort of like the assumption that building maternity wards would raise the birth rate.

Michael Duffy: I once gave a lecture, not that long ago, at a university on urban planning and at the end one of the horrified students in the class said to me, 'But you can't just let people do what they want!'

Wendell Cox: Yes, but the interesting thing is all sorts of economic studies around the world show that economic growth and affluence happen where people are allowed to do what they want, and that's what is really at risk here. I don't know what the impact is going to be but it is not a good impact when you significantly increase the price of housing for no good reason.

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CALIFORNIA: GLOBAL WARMING A POLITICAL PROBLEM

Thirty-one years ago, Newsweek magazine published an extensive account of what it described as a growing scientific consensus of global climate change. "There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production," Newsweek said, adding, "The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it" and "to scientists these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world's weather."

Global warming? Not quite. The Newsweek article about the emerging scientific consensus was about global cooling and the potential onset of a mini-ice age, akin to the one that chilled the Northern Hemisphere between 1600 and 1900. Now we are told, of course, that there's a growing scientific consensus about global warming, with hydrocarbon emissions from humankind's economic activities the chief culprit, although there's a significant body of contrary opinion.

Whether global warming is a scientific fact or, alternatively, a theory being propagandized for ideological reasons is still an open question. But it clearly is a political fact and in politics, perceptions are always more powerful than reality, whatever it may be. The potency of global warming as a political issue is underscored in a new poll by the Public Policy Institute of California, which found that most Californians are alarmed and want the state to take steps to deal with it regardless of what happens at the national or international levels. "Californians now rank global warming as more important than at any time since we first started asking about it in June of 2000," said PPIC's polling director, Mark Baldassare. The poll was taken even before California was slammed by a record-breaking and deadly heat wave in mid-July, so it would be a safe assumption that the attitudes found in the PPIC poll have hardened since then.

Not to be punny, but it's a hot potato for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger as he tries to balance the evident voter interest in doing something about global warming against his very close, mutually beneficial political alliance with business executives. The latter are leery about strict regulations on hydrocarbon emissions, as proposed in legislation, Assembly Bill 32, being advanced by Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez.

The California Chamber of Commerce and other business groups have labeled AB 32 a "job killer" that "increases costs for California businesses, makes them less competitive and discourages economic growth with little or no proven environmental benefit by adopting an arbitrary cap on carbon emissions." Schwarzenegger needs business support in his re-election campaign but has said he wants to push global warming actions, has already undertaken some steps by decree, and is at least a semi-sponsor of the Nunez bill.

As currently written, AB 32 labels global warming a "serious threat" and directs the state Air Resources Board, over a period of years, to monitor greenhouse gas emissions and set standards for reducing them. Having the ARB become the greenhouse gas czar is a key element of the legislation, one that environmentalists like because of its history of aggressive action on smog, and one that business leaders dislike for the same reason. They envision every business project becoming a battleground, much as occurs now under the California Environmental Quality Act, forcing corporations to buy up emission credits to operate.

Schwarzenegger is now suggesting that the ARB be taken out of the picture and that the power to set and enforce greenhouse gas emissions be given to a new agency directly under the control of a governor and his appointees -- including the power to nix any regulations deemed to be economically harmful. And that's raising the hackles of environmentalists, who see having a governor directly control enforcement as an invitation for business to wield influence through the Governor's Office.

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BEFORE THE WHITE MAN CAME? WAR

We've deluded ourselves into believing in the myth of the noble and peaceful primitive

By MARK STEYN

Nicholas Wade's 'Before The Dawn' is one of those books full of eye-catching details. For example, did you know the Inuit have the largest brains of any modern humans? Something to do with the cold climate. Presumably, if this global warming hooey ever takes off, their brains will be shrinking with the ice caps.

But the passage that really stopped me short was this:

"Both Keeley and LeBlanc believe that for a variety of reasons anthropologists and their fellow archaeologists have seriously underreported the prevalence of warfare among primitive societies.... 'I realized that archaeologists of the postwar period had artificially "pacified the past" and shared a pervasive bias against the possibility of prehistoric warfare,' says Keeley."

That's Lawrence Keeley, a professor at the University of Illinois. And the phrase that stuck was that bit about artificially pacifying the past. We've grown used to the biases of popular culture. If a British officer meets a native -- African, Indian, whatever -- in any movie, play or novel of the last 30 years, the Englishman will be a sneering supercilious sadist and the native will be a dignified man of peace in perfect harmony with his environment in whose tribal language there is not even a word for "war" or "killing" or "weapons of mass destruction." A few years ago, I asked Tim Rice, who'd just written the lyrics for Disney's Aladdin and The Lion King, why he wasn't doing Pocahontas. "Well, the minute they mentioned it," he said, "I knew the Brits would be the bad guys. I felt it was my patriotic duty to decline." Sure enough, when the film came out, John Smith and his men were the bringers of environmental devastation to the New World. "They prowl the earth like ravenous wolves," warns the medicine man, whereas Chief Powhatan wants everyone to be "guided to a place of peace." Fortunately, Captain Smith comes to learn from Pocahontas how to "paint with all the colours of the wind."

In reality, Pocahontas's fellow Algonquin Indians were preyed on by the Iroquois, "who took captives home to torture them before death," observes Nicholas Wade en passant. The Iroquois? Surely not. Only a year or two back, the ethnic grievance lobby managed to persuade Congress to pass a resolution that the United States Constitution was modelled on the principles of the Iroquois Confederation -- which would have been news to the dead white males who wrote it. With Disney movies, one assumes it's just the modishness of showbiz ignoramuses and whatever multiculti theorists they've put on the payroll as consultants. But professor Keeley and Steven LeBlanc of Harvard disclose almost as an aside that, in fact, their scientific colleagues were equally invested in the notion of the noble primitive living in peace with nature and his fellow man, even though no such creature appears to have existed. "Most archaeologists," says LeBlanc, "ignored the fortifications around Mayan cities and viewed the Mayan elite as peaceful priests. But over the last 20 years Mayan records have been deciphered. Contrary to archaeologists' wishful thinking, they show the allegedly peaceful elite was heavily into war, conquest and the sanguinary sacrifice of beaten opponents.... The large number of copper and bronze axes found in Late Neolithic and Bronze Age burials were held to be not battle axes but a form of money."

And on, and on. Do you remember that fabulously preserved 5,000-year-old man they found in a glacier in 1991? He had one of those copper axes the experts assured us were an early unit of currency. Unfortunately for this theory, he had it hafted in a manner that suggested he wasn't asking, "Can you break a twenty?" "He also had with him," notes professor Keeley, "a dagger, a bow, and some arrows; presumably these were his small change." Nonetheless, anthropologists concluded that he was a shepherd who had fallen asleep and frozen peacefully to death in a snowstorm. Then the X-ray results came back and showed he had an arrowhead in him.

Not for the first time, the experts turn out to be playing what children call "Opposite Land." There's more truth in Cole Porter's couplet from Find Me A Primitive Man:

I don't mean the kind that belongs to a club But the kind that has a club that belongs to him.

Although Porter was the kind that belongs to a club, the second line accurately conveys his own taste in men. He'd have been very annoyed if Mister Primitive had turned out to be some mellow colours-of-your-windiness hippy-dippy granola-cruncher.

Lawrence Keeley calculates that 87 per cent of primitive societies were at war more than once per year, and some 65 per cent of them were fighting continuously. "Had the same casualty rate been suffered by the population of the twentieth century," writes Wade, "its war deaths would have totaled two billion people." Two billion! In other words, we're the aberration: after 50,000 years of continuous human slaughter, you, me, Bush, Cheney, Blair, Harper, Rummy, Condi, we're the nancy-boy peacenik crowd. "The common impression that primitive peoples, by comparison, were peaceful and their occasional fighting of no serious consequence is incorrect. Warfare between pre-state societies was incessant, merciless, and conducted with the general purpose, often achieved, of annihilating the opponent."

Why then, against all the evidence, do we venerate the primitive? And to the point of pretending a bunch of torturing marauders devised the separation of powers in the U.S. Constitution. We do it for the same reason we indulge behaviour like that at Caledonia, Ont. We want to believe that the yard, the cul-de-sac, the morning commute, the mall are merely the bland veneer of our lives, and that underneath we are still that noble primitive living in harmony with the great spirits of the forest and the mountain. The reality is that "civilization" -- Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian -- worked very hard to stamp out the primitive within us, and for good reason.

I was interested to read Wade's book after a month in which men raised in suburban Ontario were charged with a terrorist plot that included plans to behead the Prime Minister, and the actual heads of three decapitated police officers were found in the Tijuana River. The Mexican drug gangs weren't Muslim last time I checked, but evidently decapitation isn't just for jihadists anymore: if you want to get ahead, get a head. A couple of years back, I came across a column in The East African by Charles Onyango-Obbo musing on the return of cannibalism to the Dark Continent. Ugandan-backed rebels in the Congo (four million dead but, as they haven't found a way to pin it on Bush, nobody cares) had been making victims' relatives eat the body parts of their loved ones. You'll recall that, when Samuel Doe was toppled as Liberia's leader, he was served a last meal of his own ears. His killers kept his genitals for themselves, under the belief that if you eat a man's penis you acquire his powers. One swallow doesn't make a summer, of course, but I wonder sometimes if we're not heading toward a long night of re-primitivization. In his shrewd book Civilization And Its Enemies, Lee Harris writes:

"Forgetfulness occurs when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe. . . . That, before 9/11, was what had happened to us. The very concept of the enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary."

It's worse than Harris thinks. We're not merely "forgetful." We've constructed a fantasy past in which primitive societies lived in peace and security with nary a fear that their crops would be stolen or their children enslaved. War has been the natural condition of mankind for thousands of years, and our civilization is a very fragile exception to that. What does it say about us that so many of our elites believe exactly the opposite -- that we are a monstrous violent rupture with our primitive pacifist ancestors? It's never a good idea to put reality up for grabs. You can bet your highest-denomination axe on that.

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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

Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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