The French Environment Ministry has announced a plan for feebates on new cars, according to the UK’s Guardian newspaper. Coming on top of Canada’s consideration of feebates, this marks an important breakthrough for the underutilized tool.
Standards and the Poor
The U.S. poverty line is a notoriously bad measure of economic hardship. First, it’s stingy: in 2003 a family of four could earn as little as $18,401 and still not be considered impoverished. Obviously, many families who are well above the poverty line still find it impossible to make ends meet. Second, it’s inflexible: the poverty line is the same in Spokane as it is in Manhattan, even though the cost of living differs considerably between the two places.
Helter Smelter
Looks like a BC smelter has been dumping mercury into the Columbia River for decades. The most damning sentences:
In 1994 and 1995, the discharges exceeded the cumulative totals for all U.S. companies for copper and zinc. Mercury discharges were less than the U.S. total, but they were equivalent to 40 percent, 20 percent and 57 percent of all the U.S. releases to water in 1995, 1996 and 1997, the report notes.
Because the pollution crossed from Canada into the US, it apparently escaped the notice of the regulators in both countries. All the more reason to believe that the real boundaries that matter aren’t political ones, but instead are the ones defined by the landscape itself.
Overexposed
Just about wherever scientists look these days, they find a commercial flame retardant chemical known as PBDE. The compounds are disturbingly similar to PCBs and dioxins, two compounds known to cause health effects ranging from learning deficits to sexual hormone disruption to cancer. PBDEs themselves have been linked to learning and memory deficits in laboratory animals, even after a single dose. The LA Times has the latest, including this:
The flame retardants have been detected in virtually every person and animal tested, even newborns and fetuses, around the world, including Australia, Arctic Canada and Svalbard, Norway, near the North Pole. Amounts in people and wildlife are doubling in North America every four to six years, a pace unmatched for any contaminant in at least 50 years.
That’s certainly borne out by our experience: we found PBDEs in each of the 9 breastmilk samples we tested from Puget Sound-area women. (We’ll have more complete results for elsewhere in the Northwest, and for dioxins and PCBs as well as PBDEs, later this year.)
Perhaps more disturbingly, according to Swedish researcher Ake Bergman, one of the pioneers of PBDE detection, “There is more or less a continuous exposure, and there is absolutely no way to really control it. You have almost a 24-hour exposure, except for the time you are outside.”
The good news is that, provided that US PBDE manufacturers follow through with their commitments, they’ll stop manufacturing the two most troublesome forms of the compounds by the end of this year. The bad news is that there are still millions of pounds of the substances in people’s homes throughout North America, and some forms of PBDE (known as “deca-PBDE” because it contains 10 bromine atoms) are still being used. The bromine industry correctly points out that even though deca is more widely used than other forms of PBDE, it is not as prevalent in tests of wildlife and people. But what they don’t mention is that it appears that deca-PBDE also breaks down into other forms of PBDE that accumulate more readily in people, and that may be more toxic than deca itself.
Fuel's Progress
Here’s yet another graph of gas prices, adjusted for inflation, taken from an article in the Sacramento Bee. In nominal dollars (the bottom line in the graph), prices are at their highest levels ever. But in inflation-adjusted dollars, gas is far less expensive than it was during the late 1970s and early 1980s, and also less expensive than it was during most of the first half of the 20th century.
The Economics of Un-happiness
Most physical health trends have improved over the past half century. But mental health trends have diverged radically, according to this article (pdf) (Summarized in my previous post.)
For reasons that no one really understands (social isolation? pollution? competitive individualism? media saturation? secularism? modern conveniences?), as societies around the world have grown richer at a galloping pace, their mental health has plummeted. Depression rates in the United States have climbed perhaps tenfold in the span of 50 years, and the incidence of anxiety disorders has also skyrocketed. Authors Ed Diener and Martin Seligman write, “the average American child in the 1980s reported greater anxiety than the average child receiving psychiatric treatment in the 1950s.” Mental illness is striking at earlier ages, as well. The average age of depression’s first onset is now in the already-vulnerable adolescent years.
Economics of Happiness, II
Further to last week’s post . . .
Ed Diener, of the University of Illinois and the Gallup Organization, and Martin Seligman, of the University of Pennsylvania have assembled a stunningly complete review of the disparities between economic indicators, on the one hand, and trends in how happy and satisfied in life people are, on the other. An uncorrected proof of their article, which is slated for publication later this year, is posted here in pdf.
This field of research has exploded in the dozen years since I wrote about it in How Much Is Enough? It’s exciting to see all the new research.
“Over the past 50 years, income has climbed steadily in the United States, with the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita tripling, and yet life satisfaction has been virtually flat,” as you can see in the graph below. Similar trends are evident in other industrial nations. Depression and mental illness have also soared, on which I’ll post separately.
Brief Outbreaks of Sanity
Oregon’s counterproductive tax system briefly experienced some serious discussion in the state legislature, according to today’s Oregonian. Gridlocked returned quickly, of course, but there were a few shining moments of light. There’s little sign yet that tax shifting-taxing pollution rather than paychecks-is about to catch on in the Beaver State. The idea remains too novel, and dramatic tax reforms almost always come during large political crises when one party controls both legislative and executive branches. But serious discussion is something. And eventually, the rock-ribbed conservative notion of aligning our incentives with our objectives will break through.
Fiscal conservatives and environmental liberals banded together, for example, in the U.S. House of Representatives this week, as the Anchorage Daily News reports (registration required). They eliminated $35 million of subsidies to logging road construction in southeast Alaska’s Tongass National Forest. (We discussed these subsidies here.) As in Salem, the outbreak of sanity may abate quickly. The Senate and White House are unlikely to follow the House’s lead. But it’s something. And the largest federal budget deficits in American history will eventually focus the Congressional mind.
No, We're Not Tired of Writing About Gas Prices
Global oil prices have receded somewhat in recent weeks, and with them the price of gasoline in the Northwest. Still, gasoline is far more expensive than it was last year at this time.
But just how expensive is gasoline in historical terms? Certainly, the nominal price today—the one posted by a typical gas station—is just about as high as it’s ever been. During the last period of high prices, in 1981, a gallon of gas in the United States sold for $1.35. However, adjusted for inflation (or, more accurately, the Consumer Price Index, or CPI) and put into 2000 dollars, that was the same as US $2.55—considerably higher than today’s prices.
Of course, consumer prices are just one way of comparing costs over time. As this page points out, there are several different ways of comparing the costs of goods over time, many of which make gasoline seem even more expensive in the past than the CPI would suggest. For example, adjusting for the typical hourly wage of an unskilled worker, a gallon of gasoline cost the equivalent of $3.25 in 1949. Adjusting for per capita economic output, a gallon of gas cost the equivalent of $5.24 in 1949. (Both of those figures are in 2000 dollars)
Christmas for Energy Geeks
It’s like Christmas for energy geeks today. The BP Statistical Review of World Energy came out this morning, replete with new numbers on energy production and consumption from around the world. Oh, boy!
To be truthful, annual updates such as this don’t tell us much that we don’t already know. Global energy consumption, particularly of fossil fuels (oil, gas, coal) is still on the rise. The U.S. and Canada still consume about a quarter of the world’s energy, even though they account for only five percent of the globe’s population. And renewables (with the exception of hydroelectric dams) still represent the barest fraction of total energy production—no more than a rounding error, really.
