Reason Magazine - Staff > Ronald Bailey

Is Crime Contagious?

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 15:00:00 EST

New York City was a mess in the 1980s. I know because I lived in the East Village for a good stretch of that decade. Fortunately, my apartment building was on the marijuana block (the crack block was two over), so things were relatively mellow. My building's first story was covered in graffiti. Bums (I mean homeless men) often curled up on the floor of the foyer to sleep when it got cold. A shanty town sheltering 100 homeless people established itself in nearby Tompkins Square Park. All of the cars on my block had signs in their windows reading, "Don't Bother. Radio Already Stolen."

Nearly every subway car was decorated with graffiti. (There was fun graffiti. Artist Keith Haring used chalk to draw his own urban hieroglyphics on the black paper used to cover up old advertisements in subway stations. If only I had managed to peel one off and take it home.) Of course, drivers in New York also had windshield cleaning services offered by legions of squeegee men. And we attended poetry slams in Alphabet City bars like the appropriately named Safety in Numbers. The crime rate was legendary, inspiring many New Yorkers to celebrate "subway vigilante" Bernhard Goetz for shooting four men he said were trying to rob him. Nevertheless, I loved New York (and still do).

But what explains the disorder in Gotham and other American cities? In 1982, two social scientists, George L. Kelling at Rutgers University and James Q. Wilson at Harvard University, proposed the "broken windows theory" to explain both how disorder spreads and how it is sustained. In The Atlantic Monthly, the two asserted that "disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence. Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken....one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing." Before I moved to the East Village, for instance, I was sleeping on a friend's couch in the north Bronx. Everyday, I took the train past miles of abandoned apartment buildings where the city had replaced thousands of broken windows with plywood painted to look like real windows. Some even featured silhouettes of people and potted plants. They fooled no one.

The idea behind the broken windows theory is that if people look around and see other people violating norms, they will tend to violate them as well. In the 1980s and 1990s, city governments and police departments stepped up their enforcement measures against petty crimes, such as painting graffiti, panhandling, littering, and subway fare jumping. The hope was that by minimizing public disorder, the police would help communities create crime-deterrent environments. Most of the evidence for the value of this kind of policing is based on studies of what happened to crime rates once police began to crack down on incivilities. In recent years, some analyses have questioned the broken windows theory as a strategy for effective policing.

Now, a new study (additional online info here) published in Science provides some strong experimental backing for the broken windows theory. Dutch researchers from the University of Groningen, led by social scientist Kees Keizer. conducted six experiments to see if signs of disorder would encourage people to engage in norm violation themselves. The short answer: Yes.

In the first study, the setting was an alley in Groningen near a shopping district that is commonly used to park bicycles. A prominent sign in the alley prohibits graffiti. The researchers used rubber bands to attach flyers to the handlebars of each bike wishing shoppers a happy holiday from a non-existent sportswear store. The researchers monitored what the bikers did with the flyers when the wall in the alley was free of graffiti and when it was covered with it. The result: only 33 percent littered when the alley was graffiti free whereas 69 percent did when graffiti was present.

In a second study, the researchers set up a temporary fence closing off the main entrance to a car park. But they left a 20-inch gap in the fence with two signs posted in the immediate vicinity—one sign forbade locking bicycles to the fence and the other prohibited the use of the closed entrance and directed people to another entrance about 200 yards away. When four bikes were parked but not locked to the fence, only 27 percent of people stepped through the gap to go to their cars. When the bikes were locked to the fence, 82 percent walked through the prohibited gap.

In a third study, the researchers set up a situation in which a grocery store posted a sign in a parking garage asking people to please return their shopping carts to the store. They then put the same holiday greeting flyers as in the first experiment under the windshield wipers of cars. When no shopping carts were in the garage, 30 percent littered and when shopping carts were present, 58 percent littered.

Do only visual cues trigger disorder? In the Netherlands, very strict laws forbid setting off fireworks in the weeks before New Year's Eve. So the researchers lit fire crackers out of view of people picking up their bikes from a busy parking shed near a train station. Once again, the bikes had those flyers attached to them. When no fire crackers were set off, 52 percent littered, but 80 percent did when they heard the bangs.

In the final two studies, the researchers wanted to see if signs of disorder would induce people to steal. They left an addressed envelope with a transparent window hanging out of a mail box with a five Euro note clearly visible inside. In one case, the mail box was graffiti free and the area around it was clear of litter. Only 13 percent of people stole the envelope. When the mailbox was covered with graffiti, 27 percent stole the money. When the area around the mailbox was littered, 25 percent took the envelope. The researchers report, "We found that when people observe that others violated a certain social norm or legitimate rule, they are more likely to violate even other norms or rules, which causes disorder to spread."

As a fairly frequent visitor to New York, I can attest that much of the city has been transformed in the past two decades. My old block in the East Village is now graffiti free and lined with trees, shops, and restaurants. How much credit to give to policing based on the insights of the broken window theory for lower crime rates is controversial, but this new study shows that the theory deserves some. As the Dutch researchers conclude: "There is a clear message for policy makers and police officers: Early disorder diagnosis and intervention are of vital importance when fighting the spread of disorder."

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.

The Oil Price Bubble Bursts

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 12:00:00 EST

Oil prices have dropped by 60 percent since July. And they fell without the benefit of a gasoline tax holiday, new anti-speculator regulations, or a windfall profits tax on oil companies. A year ago, crude oil was going for $88.00 per barrel and gasoline cost an average of $2.76 per gallon. Over the following months, the price soared, reaching an inflation-adjusted record high of just over $147 per barrel in July. Then the bottom fell out. Yesterday, the price was hovering around $58, up from a recent low of $53 per barrel. The result is gasoline prices plummeting from a national average of $4.11 per gallon in July to below $2.07 per gallon now. So what happened?

First, just as one would expect, higher prices led to lower demand. U.S. demand for petroleum in 2008 was 5.4 percent lower than in 2007, falling by 1.1 million barrels per day (bpd) from 20.7 million to 19.6 million barrels per day. As prices rose Americans curtailed their driving. The Federal Highway Administration reported that in August 2008, Americans drove 15 billion fewer miles, or 5.6 percent less, than they did in August 2007. On the other hand, recent high prices have called forth new sources of supply. For example, Canadian oil sands now produce 1.1 million barrels per day. And new deepwater offshore production rigs like the Thunder Horse (250,000 barrels per day) and Tahiti (125,000 barrels per day) platforms are coming online. Falling demand and increasing supply mean lower prices.

In addition, a good portion of the lower demand for oil is the result of the global economic slowdown. "This time the usual petroleum boom/bust cycle lined up on top of the business cycle," said Tim Evans, an energy futures analyst at Citigroup's Futures Perspective. In March 2008, Evans warned that we were in the midst of a bubble and that oil prices would drop. When the investment firm Goldman Sachs suggested the possibility of $200 per barrel oil, Evans predicted that prices would fall to $60 to $70 per barrel. He observed presciently that "this is the riskiest time to be long in crude oil since 1980."

So as prices drop will demand increase? Yes, but Evans believes that U.S. demand will rise slowly. Why? In part because various federal government policy responses to recent high oil prices are unlikely to be reversed. For example, the Federal government has mandated that Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards for automobiles rise from 27.5 miles per gallon now to 35 miles per gallon by 2020. Evans thinks that hybrid automobile technology may look economically attractive even at current prices. Plug-in hybrids like the Chevy Volt should use about 2 cents of electricity per mile compared to 12 cents per mile of gasoline. In addition, Evans says, "The biofuels initiatives aren't going to go away. Even if they are not economically smart, the votes are there to make sure that we stick with these programs." So subsidized biofuels will displace some demand for gasoline, putting downward pressure on the price of crude oil.

On the supply side, those "windfall profits" that oil companies have been earning in the last couple of years are paying for exploration and development of more oil supplies. It is true that the oil companies have been using their record profits to buy back stock and thus increase shareholder value. Some members of Congress believe that the oil companies should spend their profits on alternative energy projects that the companies don't believe can be justified economically. And if the oil companies don't stop enriching their shareholders, Congress will see to it that the "windfall profits" are taxed away and spent by government bureaucrats on alternative energy projects. It is possible that the members of Congress know better how to spend oil company profits than do their executives, but the Federal government's record in this area is not impressive.

Naturally, suppliers don't like lower prices, so the members in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) want to drive up prices by restricting supply. In October, OPEC members pledged to cut oil production by 1.5 million barrels per day beginning on November 1. They plan to hold another meeting later this month to discuss further reductions. Even as consumers enjoy lower prices at the gas pump now, analysts at the International Energy Agency fret that they will lead to underinvestment in oil production capacity, resulting in a crude oil supply crunch by the middle of the next decade. Disturbingly, 80 percent of the world's known oil reserves are owned by government oil companies whose revenues are looted rather than reinvested in production. In any case, lower prices and the credit crunch are already causing oil companies to shelve some projects. Alternative energy promoters also fear lower petroleum prices because they make their projects even less economically feasible. Some are advocating a higher gasoline tax in order to counteract the deleterious effects of lower crude oil prices on the glorious alternative energy future.

So what's next for oil prices? For the coming year, Evans thinks that the price of oil will bounce around in a trading range of $50 to $90 per barrel, averaging around $70 per barrel.

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: Yes, I still own those 50 shares of XOM that I bought with my own money. The shares are down 12 percent from their high this year.

No New Energy Czar

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 15:00:00 EST

According to rumor, President-elect Barack Obama is considering the creation of an Energy Security Council inside the White House. The council, modeled after the National Security Council, would be headed by a National Energy Advisor who would manage the country's energy transformation to a low-carbon economy. This idea is reminiscent of the appointment of "energy czars" in past administrations. This concept of a National Energy Advisor plays a big role in a Center for American Progress (CAP) white paper, "Capturing the Energy Opportunity: Creating a Low-Carbon Economy." CAP president and former Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta, who co-authored the paper, is now a co-chair of the Obama transition team.

During the election campaign, Obama outlined an ambitious plan to cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, chiefly carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels, by 80 percent by 2050. This would be accomplished by imposing a cap on carbon dioxide emissions and then auctioning permits to businesses for each ton of carbon dioxide emitted. Over time the cap drops until emissions are 80 percent lower than they were in 1990. The initial auction might raise as much $100 billion, of which Obama plans to spend $15 billion annually on low-carbon energy research and development. The remaining auction revenues will be used for relief and rebates to help families and communities to cope with higher energy costs.

Obama also promised to put one million plug-in hybrid cars—cars that can get up to 150 miles per gallon—on the road by 2015, by offering a $7,000 tax credit to purchasers. Obama also wants to provide $4 billion in retooling tax credits and loan guarantees to domestic automakers to help build the new fuel efficient cars in the U.S. In addition, Obama promised to ensure that 10 percent of our electricity comes from renewable sources by 2012, and 25 percent by 2025. These elements of Obama's energy and climate plans mirror proposals in the CAP's energy white paper. For example, the CAP suggested a $8,000 tax credit to the purchasers of the first one million plug-in hybrid cars and wants to require that 25 percent of electricity comes from renewable sources by 2025.

A National Energy Advisor heading up an Energy Security Council is supposed to coordinate all Federal efforts at transforming our energy economy. But we've been down this path before. During the "energy crisis" of the 1970s, President Richard Nixon appointed William Simon "energy czar." As Simon tells it, "President Nixon announced to the cabinet that I was to have ‘absolute authority' and compared the job he was giving me with the role that Albert Speer played in the Third Reich when he was put in charge of German armaments." Simon confessed to being a bit uncomfortable about being likened to the Nazi Minister of Armaments and War Production.

Nevertheless, Simon became the director of the Federal Energy Office and overseer of the Emergency Petroleum Allocation Act of 1973 which imposed price controls on oil. Thirty-five years ago this month Nixon launched Project Independence with the goal of achieving energy self-sufficiency by 1980. In 1974, Time magazine reported that experts estimated that cutting U.S. dependence on foreign oil in half by 1985 would cost $500 billion to $1 trillion over the next ten years ($2 to $4 trillion in today's dollars).

In April 1977, President Jimmy Carter declared the energy crisis "the moral equivalent of war." To prosecute this "war," Carter designated former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger as his "Energy Czar" and eventually persuaded Congress to authorize a new cabinet-level Department of Energy to centralize energy policy and research in August 1977. Carter too promised to cut our dependence on foreign oil, declaring in a nationally televised speech in 1979: "Beginning this moment, this nation will never use more foreign oil than we did in 1977—never." Despite Nixon's, Carter's, and subsequent presidential energy independence projects, we import two-thirds of our oil today.

So looking back, did the drive to elevate and centralize energy policy and research actually help? Not a lot, as Robert Fri, a former deputy administrator of both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Energy Research and Development Administration points out. Fri noted in the Fall 2006 Issues in Science and Technology that a National Research Council study of DOE research and development expenditures between 1978 and 2000 uncovered less than stellar results. It is true that the NRC report estimated that DOE generated some $40 billion in economic benefits for the roughly $13 billion it spent on energy conservation and fossil fuel R&D programs. However, as Fri notes, "A mere 0.1 percent of the expenditure accounted for three-quarters of the benefit." That amounts to $13 million spent on unsexy R&D programs that resulted in electronic ballasts for fluorescent lighting, energy-efficient windows, and better refrigerators. These three programs yielded $30 billion in benefits. Fri further observes, "Three-quarters of the expenditure—a little over $9 billion—produced no quantifiable economic benefit. Half of this money was applied to synthetic fuel projects that turned out to be at least a couple of decades premature."

As Fri told Chemical & Engineering News this week: "The government is very good at starting energy projects that it believes will solve energy problems, but it is not very good at generating the intended results." For example, had the Feds somehow managed to continue the synfuels program, the U.S. would now be turning coal into the equivalent of 2 million barrels of oil a day with the unintended consequence of producing huge amounts of greenhouse gases. So how sure can an Obama administration's National Energy Advisor be that plug-in hybrids, or photovoltaics, or carbon capture and sequestration of coal plant emissions are the answers to our energy security and climate change problems? Perhaps biofuels produced using microbes is how we should power our cars. Or maybe concentrated solar thermal is a better idea for renewable base load electric power and coal-fired plants should be phased out in favor of nuclear ones.

Given that President-elect Obama is going to try to address what he sees as the Janus-faced problems of climate change and energy security, adding another layer of bureaucracy is not the way to go. The incoming Obama administration needs only to deploy one tool—its plan to cap and auction carbon dioxide emission permits. The rest of the complicated energy plan, with its plethora of top-down mandates, amounts to counterproductive meddling.

Once a sufficiently high price is set on carbon dioxide emissions, tens of thousands of energy researchers and entrepreneurs will develop and test various new low-carbon technologies in the market. This means that no energy czar or council will have the opportunity to waste more billions by picking technology clunkers. Renewable energy production mandates won't be necessary. A high carbon dioxide price will stimulate the production of 25 percent of the country's energy using renewable sources. Tax credits for low-carbon automobiles aren't needed either. Higher gas prices will encourage drivers to switch to plug-in hybrid, hydrogen fuel cell, or bioethanol vehicles, whichever turns out to be cheapest. Imposing energy efficiency standards on household appliances or providing tax credits to weatherize houses will be superfluous as consumers seek to lower their electricity bills. And instead of rebates, the Obama administration could use the revenues raised by auctioning emission permits to cut federal taxes on individuals.

Instead of "change we can believe in," appointing a new energy czar would be a failed history repeating itself.

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.

Michael Crichton, R.I.P.

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 12:00:00 EST

Pop novelist, television producer, movie director, medical doctor, creator of the long-running hospital drama E.R., and sometime public-policy provocateur Michael Crichton has died of cancer at age 66 in Los Angeles.

Crichton's books have sold more than 150 million copies worldwide. His reputation rests chiefly on a prolific stream of techno-thriller novels exploiting the well-worn formula pioneered by Mary Shelley in Frankenstein: Scientific hubris leads to disaster. For example, in The Andromeda Strain (1969), Army scientists in search of biological-warfare agents endanger humanity by bringing back a space virus that infects a town. In The Terminal Man (1972), the epileptic protagonist goes on a murderous rampage under the influence of computerized mind control. Crichton makes the Frankenstein-reanimation theme even more explicit in Jurassic Park (1990), in which a paleontologist uses biotechnology to bring dinosaurs back to life. In his anti-nanotech tale Prey (2002), a greedy corporation inadvertently releases swarms of flesh-eating nanoparticles.

Crichton's villains were often corporations whose minions killed for profit. Crichton's anti-Japanese mystery/thriller Rising Sun (1992) stoked xenophobic fears of a new Yellow Peril buying up all of America. These nativist anxieties shortly afterwards melted away with the bursting of the Japanese-asset price bubble.

In recent years, Crichton turned his attention more explicitly toward public policy. In particular, he became highly skeptical of archly ideological environmentalism. His 2005 book State of Fear was actually the novelization of a speech he delivered at San Francisco's Commonwealth Club in 2003, arguing that environmentalism is essentially a religion, a belief system based on faith, not fact. State of Fear not only became a bestseller, but propelled its author into public-policy circles. Crichton was invited to make speeches around the country on science policy; in 2005 he even testified in front of a Senate committee about the politicization of climate-change science.

In his biogenetic tale, Next (2006), Crichton has a wicked corporation engaging, as usual, in all manner of skullduggery. However, he turns his customary Frankenstein formula on its head by ending with a vision of a happy trans-species blended family, including a multi-lingual African grey parrot and four-year old humanzee, as being pretty normal for the 21st century.

Despite his repeated success with scientific scare stories, that upbeat, though decidedly offbeat, ending was actually in keeping with Crichton's own temperament. Despite his worries about human technological hubris, he did confess in an interview back in 1993, "I am optimistic by nature. My prejudice is that we are sufficiently resourceful to see the road ahead, and that we have the capacity to change our behavior. I envision a long lifespan for the species. We've got a few million years ahead of us."

Over the years Crichton and I had a number of friendly interactions as our paths crossed at various conferences. In Next, Crichton even kindly mentioned my book Liberation Biology (2005), praising it as "the clearest and most complete response to religious objections to biotechnology." Nevertheless, I have long been annoyed by the Luddite and Frankensteinian themes of his novels. I was particularly exasperated by Jurassic Park's misguided portrayal of biotechnology as being inherently dangerous.

Eventually, over drinks at a conference at Cold Spring Harbor a couple years ago, I got to tell him how I thought he could have gotten the same narrative bang for his buck if he had instead celebrated the achievement of bringing dinosaurs back to life. In my alternative plot, a kindly old paleontologist, using the miracle of biotechnology, conjures dinosaurs back into existence to delight the world's children. Things go wrong only when a cadre of evil anti-biotechnologists led by Jeremy Rifkin break into the peaceful island zoo to kill the dinosaurs. This revised scenario would provide Crichton with all of the gunfire, gore, chase scenes, and satisfying explosions without the Luddite baggage of the original.

Crichton, slightly miffed at my presumption, asked why I preferred my alternative plot. I answered that I worried that his novels were helping to promote a technophobic attitude among the public that could unnecessarily slow the development of new technologies. He responded that I must be kidding. He doubted that anyone paid any attention to his novels other than to be momentarily entertained by them. I still think he was wrong. After all, two centuries later we're still reading Mary Shelley's thinly plotted potboiler and worrying about mad scientists.

Crichton fans (of which I am definitely one) can look forward to one more novel from HarperCollins. It will close out his published oeuvre but certainly not his presence, either in the world of letters or in public policy debates.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent.

The Food Miles Mistake

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:30:00 EST

I stopped by my favorite boutique grocery store to pick up a red onion today. The young clerk running the cash register wore a t-shirt with the slogan "Eat Local." Oddly, the shop's shelves and coolers were stuffed with cheeses, sausages, olives, jams, cookies, and crackers from California, France, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Germany, and many other exotic locales. As I walked home, I mused over the fact that I needed the onion to go with the organic Irish salmon and the Spanish capers my wife and I were having for dinner. The salmon was a gift from a visiting friend from Dublin. Now, I enjoy seeking out and eating locally produced foods. My wife and I make it a habit to shop at our town's weekly farmers market for fresh fruits and vegetables.

But for some activists, eating local foods is no longer just a pleasure—it is a moral obligation. Why? Because locally produced foods are supposed to be better for the planet than foods shipped thousands of miles across oceans and continents. According to these activists, shipping foods over long distances results in the unnecessary emission of the greenhouse gases that are warming the planet. This concern has given rise to the concept of "food miles," that is, the distance food travels from farm to plate. Activists particularly dislike air freighting foods because it uses relatively more energy than other forms of transportation. Food miles are supposed to be a simple way to gauge food's impact on climate change.

In their recent policy primer for the Mercatus Center at George University, however, economic geographer Pierre Desrochers and economic consultant Hiroko Shimizu challenge the notion that food miles are a good sustainability indicator. As Desrochers and Shimizu point out, the food trade has been historically driven by urbanization. As agriculture became more efficient, people were liberated from farms and able to develop other skills that helped raise general living standards. People freed from having to scrabble for food, for instance, could work in factories, write software, or become physicians. Modernization is a process in which people get further and further away from the farm.

Modern technologies like canning and refrigeration made it possible to extend the food trade from staple grains and spices to fruits, vegetables, and meats. As a result, world trade in fruits and vegetables—fresh and processed—doubled in the 1980s and increased by 30 percent between 1990 and 2001. Fruits and vegetables accounted for 22 percent of the exports of developing economies in 2001. If farmers, processors, shippers, and retailers did not profit from providing distant consumers with these foods, the foods wouldn't be on store shelves. And consumers, of course, benefit from being able to buy fresh foods year around.

So just how much carbon dioxide is emitted by transporting food from farm to fork? Desrochers and Shimizu cite a comprehensive study done by the United Kingdom's Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) which reported that 82 percent of food miles were generated within the U.K. Consumer shopping trips accounted for 48 percent and trucking for 31 percent of British food miles. Air freight amounted to less than 1 percent of food miles. In total, food transportation accounted for only 1.8 percent of Britain's carbon dioxide emissions.

In the United States, a 2007 analysis found that transporting food from producers to retailers accounted for only 4 percent of greenhouse emissions related to food. According to a 2000 study, agriculture was responsible for 7.7 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. In that study, food transport accounted for 14 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with agriculture, which means that food transport is responsible for about 1 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

Food miles advocates fail to grasp the simple idea that food should be grown where it is most economically advantageous to do so. Relevant advantages consist of various combinations of soil, climate, labor, capital, and other factors. It is possible to grow bananas in Iceland, but Costa Rica really has the better climate for that activity. Transporting food is just one relatively small cost of providing modern consumers with their daily bread, meat, cheese, and veggies. Desrochers and Shimizu argue that concentrating agricultural production in the most favorable regions is the best way to minimize human impacts on the environment.

Local food production does not always produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions. For example, the 2005 DEFRA study found that British tomato growers emit 2.4 metric tons of carbon dioxide for each ton of tomatoes grown compared to 0.6 tons of carbon dioxide for each ton of Spanish tomatoes. The difference is British tomatoes are produced in heated greenhouses. Another study found that cold storage of British apples produced more carbon dioxide than shipping New Zealand apples by sea to London. In addition, U.K. dairy farmers use twice as much energy to produce a metric ton of milk solids than do New Zealand farmers. Other researchers have determined that Kenyan cut rose growers emit 6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per 12,000 roses compared to the 35 tons of carbon dioxide emitted by their Dutch competitors. Kenyan roses grow in sunny fields whereas Dutch roses grow in heated greenhouses.

Nevertheless, organic food activists in Britain's Soil Association argued for lifting the organic certification from Kenyan food exports because they are brought into Britain on airplanes. Some high-end British retailers have begun slapping a label featuring an airplane on various food products to indicate that they have been air freighted. Kenyan growers cannily responded by launching their own "Grown Under the Sun" label, pointing out that their agricultural production methods emit far less greenhouse gases than many crops grown in Britain do.

A die-hard response to the above studies would be: Don't eat either British or Spanish tomatoes out of season; don't cold store apples, dry them in the sun instead; don't ever eat dairy products; and give your true love a bouquet of in-season root vegetables for Valentine's Day. In order to reduce your food miles, the National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service makes these recommendations: Eat foods that are in season; eat minimally processed, packaged, and marketed food; use public transportation when grocery shopping; can and dry fruits and vegetables yourself; and plant a garden and grow as much of your own food as possible. In other words, spend more time and effort finding, growing, and preparing food at the expense of other productive or leisure activities.

Desrochers and Shimizu demonstrate that the debate over food miles is a distraction from the real issues that confront global food production. For instance, rich country subsidies amounting to more than $300 billion per year are severely distorting global agricultural production and trade. If the subsidies were removed, far more agricultural goods would be produced in and imported from developing countries, helping lift millions of people out of poverty. They warn that the food miles campaign is "providing a new set of rhetorical tools to bolster protectionist interests that are fundamentally detrimental to most of humankind." Ultimately, Desrochers and Shimizu's analysis shows that "the concept of food miles is...a profoundly flawed sustainability indicator."

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.

Speculation, Innovation, Regulation

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 12:00:00 EST

The time is sometime between 1973 and 1980. Our man sits down to his telephone. It is a deluxe model, with a television screen, television camera, teletype outlet, electronic writing pad, copier, and, yes, a handset. He flips on the machine and speaks towards the television screen (there is a mike and speaker next to it). He identifies himself and asks for his “mail.” The computer checks his voiceprint and visual identity, and then displays the return address of the first “letter” on the screen, at the same time announcing it over the audio.

“No audio, please,” he demands of the computer. “And skip this letter for now. Do you have the one from Betty?”

“Yes,” the computer flashes, and displays a short handwritten note. He reads it and asks the computer to file it electronically under both her name and the date. The display fades and is replaced by a diagram sent by one of his engineers. He instructs the comp. to file it under name, date, and 3 cross-referencial subject headings after making a copy for himself. He finishes the rest of his mail, answering as he goes along, with the comp. automatically entering a “carbon” of each letter he writes into his file. Most letters he dictates to the comp. Some he types, and the note to Betty, he writes with the light pen.

Those visionary paragraphs appeared in the mimeographed September 1968 edition of reason. The date was a little optimistic and some of the details were off, but founding editor Lanny Friedlander basically described the world we live in today. Using computers, we communicate via electronic mail, viewing the messages on video monitors, and—in some cases—have them announced (“You’ve got mail!”). We can dictate emails and memos using voice input software such as Dragon Naturally Speaking, we can write them using a stylus on tablet computers, and, of course, we can type them. We routinely save “carbons” of our emails, files, and articles. And we often take security measures to protect their privacy.

Appreciating the liberating possibilities of technology and science is deeply inscribed in reason’s intellectual DNA. Though concrete predictions such as Friedlander’s have been rare, the magazine has concentrated on breaking the regulatory shackles that limit scientific research and hobble technological progress. In that effort, reason supplied intellectual ammunition that helped break up government-sanctioned monopolies controlling mail and telephony. We explained how government exacerbated various energy crises and killed people by slowing medical progress. We explored the failures of industrial policy, NASA’s death grip on space travel, and federal efforts to snoop on private citizens. And early on, we identified the statist strain within the environmental movement as a danger to technological progress.

Reading back through 40 years of reason also reveals, somewhat dishearteningly, that Luddites and technoconservatives never quit, and that no advance of technological progress is ever permanently secure. And yes, we occasionally got some things wrong.

Imagining the Web

Friedlander wasn’t the only reason writer to anticipate the communications and computer revolutions. In January 1977, the economist David Levy hailed the vinyl video disk as a way to break the stranglehold of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on television. “Freedom of speech entails the right to annoy people. Unregulated video disks will create the right of the producers and the purchasers of video message to annoy anyone they wish,” Levy wrote. “The production of television signals will be freed from the veto power of groups acting through the political process.” Though Levy’s dismissal of videotape as being too expensive for home use proved less accurate, his insight that consumer access to non-broadcast video would reduce the FCC’s power was right.

In October 1983’s “Hanging Up on Your Phone Company,” Peter Samuel noted that 15 years after AT&T had first applied for a license to build a cellular phone system, the FCC finally issued 25 permits to build networks in Chicago, New York, and other cities. “Within just a few years,” he predicted, “millions of cellular-radio subscribers will be placing calls with portable telephones like the Motorola Dyna TAC hand-held unit.” Described as the “world’s first truly portable phone,” the Dyna TAC weighed 1.8 pounds, measured 8 by 3 by 2 inches, and was good for 12 three-minute phone calls on a battery charge. By 2008, one-fifth of American adults had ditched their landlines altogether, and nearly everyone carries smaller, cheaper, and much more powerful cell phones in their pockets.

“‘Telecommuting’ is another phenomenon that modern telephony can make possible,” Samuel noted, explaining that “with portable terminals hooked via telephone to remote computers and data bases, people can draw information from their offices down the phone line and feed their work back down it again.” In fact, Samuel added, he wrote his article on a Tandy Radio Shack TRS-80 computer hooked to just such a phone line. The TRS-80 weighed 3.8 pounds, featured 8K of memory, and cost $599 (about $1,250 today). In 2005, a Reason Foundation study showed that telecommuters now outnumber mass transit commuters in most of America’s 50 biggest metropolitan areas.

Even as we use such technologies to liberate ourselves, the government seeks to use them to control us. The attorney Robert Corn began August 1985’s cover story with a confident prophecy: “Two-way wrist radios used to be a comicstrip fantasy; soon you’ll be able to buy them at the supermarket.” Today, of course, prepaid cellphones can be purchased for cash at many supermarkets, drug stores, or convenience stores—though most people refrain from wearing them on their wrists. But Corn was worried about the ability of the police to use cell signals to track citizens. To avoid this problem, he suggested that cell phone companies allow subscribers to “unlist” their phone’s locator functions or provide an on/off locator switch.

Corn observed, “Perhaps the most important measure would be for cellular-telephone companies to contract with their subscribers not to release information without the subscriber’s consent or a court order.” Unfortunately, as Americans recently discovered, AT&T and other telecoms have for years turned over the records of millions of private phone, email, and text messages to the National Security Agency, in defiance of the Fourth Amendment and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Distressingly, Congress approved legislation earlier this year granting retroactive legal immunity to companies that cooperated with the illegal spying.

In March 1989’s cover story, “Capital Flight,” the economist Richard McKenzie reported that portable computing was internationalizing capital. “As a consequence,” he argued, “the power of government to tax and regulate may be in its twilight years.” McKenzie, optimistically, suggested that the technology-enabled freer flow of capital explained the fall in income tax rates in most developed countries during the 1980s.

In July of the same year, Jerome Ellig of Citizens for a Sound Economy worried that regulatory hurdles were slowing the spread of videotext services into homes. “In the not-so-distant future, nearly every household with telephone service could reach out and touch, and be touched by, thousands of new consumer services through an inexpensive screen and keyboard plugged right into the phone outlet,” he wrote. If the Baby Bells were allowed to compete, he argued, they would supply home videotext services. Right idea, wrong competitors. Even as Ellig was writing, consumers were being brought online by CompuServe, Prodigy, and America Online.

In January 1991, the novelist and game designer Greg Costikyan described a Secret Service crackdown on hackers and pointed out the ways it imperiled free speech on the nascent Net. Costikyan argued that electronic bulletin board services should be legally treated as common carriers and that networks should not be viewed as criminal enterprises just because they may have once carried data used in or derived from fraudulent activity. Why? Because Costikyan lyrically foresaw a brilliant future for the Internet. His vision is worth quoting at length:

“The Net has the capacity to improve all our lives. A user of the Net can already find a wide variety of information, from encyclopedia entries to restaurant reviews. Someday the Net will be the first place citizens turn to when they need information. The morning paper will be a printout, tailored to our interests and specifications, of articles posted worldwide; job hunters will look first to the Net; millions will use it to telecommute to work; and serious discussion will be given to the abolition of representative government and the adoption of direct democracy via network voting.…[W]e can see that something remarkable is happening, something that will change the world, something that has the potential to transform our lives. To ensure that our lives are enriched and not diminished, we must ensure that the Net is free.”

The New Biology

From the beginning, reason has had a strong interest in the biotechnology revolution. The nuclear engineer Winston Duke hailed the advent of “The New Biology” on the cover of our August 1972 issue. Amazingly ahead of his time, Duke sounded very much like today’s transhumanists (or as they prefer to be called these days, bioprogressives). Here he is explaining how to make a clone: “Insert an adult diploid nucleus into [an] ovum and simultaneously…remove the maternal haploid nucleus,” then “test tube growth to blastocyst and uterus implant.” This is exactly the procedure that Scottish biologist Ian Wilmut followed when he produced the sheep named Dolly, the world’s first cloned mammal, in 1996. Duke even anticipated the possibility of producing genetically matched cloned tissues and organs for transplantation.

Duke also suggested that the British researchers Patrick Steptoe and Bob Edwards might succeed in producing the first “test-tube baby” within the year, if politicians and religious leaders didn’t get in the way. “Genetic engineering will soon make such conveniences as sex selection in offspring a trivial matter,” he predicted. He even speculated that biological research would eventually lead to physical immortality.

Nearly 40 years later, we know that Duke’s timeline for biological progress was a bit optimistic. The first test-tube baby was not born until 1978. Parents using in vitro fertilization (IVF) can now choose the sex of their children, but transplants derived from human embryonic stem cells have not yet been conducted (though the technique has been shown to work in animals). Immortality, alas, is not yet here.

In November 1985, I wrote a cover story about Jeremy Rifkin’s campaign to halt all biotechnology in its tracks. I opened the article with a pair of biotech scenarios slated for the 1990s, in which a patient is cured of colorectal cancer by means of a tumor vaccine and crops are protected from frost damage using genetically modified bacteria. Tumor vaccines are not yet available, and the project to develop ice-minus bacteria was dropped—in part because Rifkin’s opposition made it too expensive. On the other hand, I was correct in predicting crops genetically engineered to resist pests, hormones to boost milk production, and biotech hepatitis vaccines. Rifkin, meanwhile, has been an inspiration to the ongoing movements against genetically modified crops and human enhancement technologies.

In the December 1994 reason, the libertarian feminist Wendy McElroy reflected on recent headlines revealing that a 59-year-old British woman had borne two children using donated eggs. Instead of cheering a development that increased the range of women’s reproductive choices, a number of feminists had denounced it; they also attacked other emerging reproductive technologies, including sperm and egg donation, in vitro fertilization, embryo freezing, and surrogacy. Science and technology, they argued, were patriarchal tools to control women’s reproductive lives. McElroy reflected on the irony that feminist bans on new reproductive technologies would restrict rather than liberate the choices of women.

In November 1995, the physicist and science fiction writer Gregory Benford wrote a cover article titled “Biology: 2001.” He predicted that genetically engineered organisms would digest waste, biotech crops would resist pests and diseases, and drugs would be produced in “pharm” animals and plants. One of his more charming visions involved herds of genetically modified ants that would harvest corn and deposit each kernel in a granary while dispersing corn waste over the fields as fertilizer. Benford was confident that “mundane” measures with obvious market roles would encounter little social resistance. “This includes pollution policers, simple bathroom cleaners, crops that resist pests and herbicides, pharm animals, ‘designer’ plants (blue roses, low-cal fruit), bacterial mining, and the like,” he wrote. “Even correcting human inheritable diseases will probably go through without major opposition. All this, perhaps within the first two decades of the new century.”

We now know Benford was too optimistic. Activists oppose releasing genetically modified bacteria, even those designed to clean up pollution or assist in mining, and they vigorously fight biotech crops of any sort. And with regard to fixing inheritable diseases, the European Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine bans biotech interventions if their aim is “any modification in the genome of any descendants.”

After Dolly the cloned sheep was born, President Bill Clinton hastily called for a ban on human cloning. In the June 1998 reason, the California attorney Mark Eibert defended cloning research as a way for incurably infertile people to safely produce genetically related children. Eibert worried that the fear of cloning was already bearing bitter fruit in the form of “unprecedented extensions of government power, based either on unlikely nightmare scenarios or on an unreasoning fear that humans were ‘not meant’ to know or do certain things. Far from protecting the ‘sanctity’ of human life, such an attitude, if consistently applied, would doom the human race to a ‘natural’ state of misery.”

More recently, reason’s Kerry Howley took reporting on reproductive issues to a new and more personal level. In her October 2006 story “Ova for Sale,” Howley contracted with a fertility clinic in Chicago to sell her eggs for $10,000. “Opponents of IVF have long warned that the bond between mother and child will be eroded by further advances in assisted reproduction, the implication being that mothers will eschew the time and labor of traditional pregnancies once they can outsource to the lab,” she wrote. “In practice, IVF seems to demonstrate the opposite extreme: Women value pregnancy to such a degree that they will spend lavishly to approximate the experience, adding expense, discomfort, and ethical quandary to the already burdensome ordeal of childbirth. The desire to stick to the traditional script of family is surprisingly robust, and reproductive technologies allow potential parents to follow that script even when nature erects barriers.”

Apocalypse Then

reason has generally been skeptical of the often apocalyptic claims of ideological environmentalism. But the magazine didn’t start out that way. Our cover story in July 1971, by the systems theorist Jay Forrester, declared it “certain” that “resource shortage, pollution, crowding, food failure, or some other equally powerful force will limit population and industrialization if persuasion and psychological factors do not.” Forrester was the creator of the World Dynamics computer model, the source for the doomsday predictions of the 1972 Limits to Growth study. Nearly 20 years later I spent a day with Forrester asking him about his predictions of imminent resource depletion. “I think in retrospect,” he testily told me, “that Limits to Growth overemphasized the material resources side.”

The chemist Ronald Merrill warned against “The New Anti-Science Movement” in January 1973. “The mainstay of the modern attack on science is the claim that technology is destructive; that progress has such dangerous sideeffects that it should be abolished, or at least limited,” he asserted. “The political implementation of these claims is accomplished primarily by means of the ‘Environmentalist’ movement.” Merrill was a bit cavalier about the effects of air pollution and water pollution, but he was surely right when he wrote, “One of the unpleasant by-products of a technological society is the close interaction of science and politics, as technical issues become politically relevant.”

In August 1978, an economist at Texas A&M named Philip Gramm wrote an article for reason called “Debunking Doomsday.” Gramm’s chief argument was that the world was not about to run out of petroleum—a bold claim to make in the era of the “oil crisis” and The Limits to Growth. And he was right: By the early 1980s, the price of oil had fallen from by two-thirds. Gramm, incidentally, eventually became a Republican senator.

Samuel Blumenfeld was less prescient in January 1980, when he argued for a large-scale agri-fuel industry, writing that it would cut pollution, raise farm incomes, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and “increase individual freedom by undercutting the perceived need for the federal farm bureaucracy, the energy bureaucracy, fuel rationing, and the environmental protection bureaucracy.” Nearly 30 years later, inventors and entrepreneurs are still trying to commercialize cellulosic ethanol production. The bureaucracies in question have not been harmed in the process.

In January 1990, the futurist T.A. Heppenheimer tackled global warming, arguing that “the greenhouse effect is real, but that’s no reason to throw out industrial civilization.” Heppenheimer made the case that future prosperity would enable humanity to successfully adapt to the effects of higher global temperatures. “Carbon dioxide is a byproduct of industrial growth and of a prosperous economy,” he noted. “Ill-considered actions against this gas could give us the worst of both worlds: an imperfect reduction in its emissions that barely delays the warming and robs us of the prosperity that might allow us to cope with its effects.”

In November 1997, Gregory Benford argued that “if we treated global warming as a technical problem instead of a moral outrage, we could cool the world.” Benford examined a number of different proposals to use geo-engineering to lower the earth’s thermostat, among them planting forests to sequester extra carbon dioxide, fertilizing the oceans with iron to encourage algae growth to absorb carbon dioxide, and launching gigantic space screens to reflect sunlight back into space.

The Unfree Frontier

If there’s an area where reason’s writers have tended to be overoptimistic, it’s space exploration and exploitation. In April 1979, for example, then-editor Robert W. Poole Jr. predicted that the 1980s “will mark the dawning of the age of space industrialization—the time when man can start living in, working in, and exploiting outer space.” The development of the reusable space shuttle was going to make this possible by cutting launch costs from $1,000 per pound ($2,900 in today’s dollars) to $250 per pound ($750).

Instead, the cost to carry cargo into orbit aboard the space shuttle hovers around $25,000 per pound. Poole did wisely warn, “If there’s one thing to be learned from the history of technology, it’s that government support entails hidden perils. We can—and should—develop space without government ‘help.’ ”

In the same issue, NASA consultant Gary Hudson predicted that communications satellites would bring us hundreds of television channels, plus pocket phones that could transmit from any spot on the planet to any other spot. He also suggested, less accurately, that “by the 1990s, it should be possible to mine a nickel-iron asteroid and profitably return loads of cobalt, platinum, rhenium, vanadium, osmium, iridium, and gold to earth.”

In January 1985, the journalist Patrick Cox detailed how NASA’s bureaucrats were thwarting private competition, chiefly by subsidizing cheaper shuttle launches. Despite NASA’s efforts, the entrepreneurs did not disappear: In May 1988, Poole described efforts to build private space stations. They weren’t successful, but the government’s alternative wasn’t very impressive either. As T.A. Heppenheimer reported in May 1991, the space station was “rapidly evolving into something that is all too common in Washington: a program that promises to consume funds without limit, while never reaching completion or delivering useful services to the taxpayer.”

Since the astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt returned from the moon in December 1972, no person has visited any other extraterrestrial body. Frustrated by the slow progress, space aficionados have cast about for new ways to finance a trip beyond the atmosphere. In our February 1999 issue, The New York Times’ John Tierney outlined the idea of the Mars Prize, in which the government would award $20 billion to the first team to visit and return from the red planet. The best feature of such a prize: The government wouldn’t have to collect taxes to pay for it until the team returned.

In January 2007, reason’s Katherine Mangu-Ward profiled several entrepreneurs attempting to commercialize near-space travel. One startup, Bigelow Aerospace, has successfully launched two inflatable space habitat prototypes, the Genesis I and Genesis II, into orbit using Russian ICBMs. The British entrepreneur Richard Branson is working with Ansari X Prize winner Bert Rutan to develop a vehicle that can be used in suborbital space tourism industry. Who knows? Maybe those 1970s dreams of private space travel could still come true.

The Next 40 Years

Abject poverty is humanity’s natural state. As the Northwestern University economic historian Joel Mokyr demonstrates in his wonderful 2002 book The Gifts of Athena, it is only with the advent of free institutions in the West two centuries ago that sustained technological progress and rising prosperity became possible.

But as reason’s reporting has shown for four decades, the opponents of progress are legion. The battle over the future of technology is shaping up as the defining political conflict of the 21st century. “Activists, bureaucrats, and lawyers are hampering promising research and making it more costly,” writes Mokyr. “But the achievements made possible by new useful knowledge in terms of economic well-being and human capabilities have been unlike anything experienced before by the human race. The question remains, can this advance be sustained?”

Over the next 40 years, reason’s writers and editors will do their best to ensure that the answer is yes.

Ronald Bailey is reason’s science correspondent.

A Non-Socialist Alternative to Today's Capitalism

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 18:00:00 EDT

In the latest issue of The New Scientist, Yale University's Gus Speth says he seeks a non-socialist alternative to today's capitalism as a way to put a stop to economic growth. Speth is a contributor to the magazine's special issue detailing "The Folly of Growth." Economic growth is folly because "our economy is killing the planet." Speth outlines his vision of his "non-socialist alternative" in The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability (2008). Among other things, Speth argues that the "environmental agenda should expand to embrace a profound challenge to consumerism and commercialism and the lifestyles they offer" and "the democratization of wealth." The "alternative to endlessly pumping up an environmentally destructive economy" includes measures that "address the need for good jobs, income security, and social and medical insurance." To save the earth, Speth also advocates political reforms including "a minimum of free television and radio time for all federal candidates meeting basic requirements, reducing the perks of incumbency, bringing back the Fairness Doctrine requiring equal air time for competing political views and so forth."

Another contributor is Tim Jackson, a professor of sustainable development at the University of Surrey and the economics commissioner on the United Kingdom's Sustainable Development Commission. Jackson declares that we cannot rely on renewable technologies to help us avert climate change without sacrifices to our lifestyles. To show why sacrifices will be necessary, Jackson candidly calculates how much carbon dioxide human beings will be allowed to emit in 2050 to stabilize atmospheric greenhouse gases at 450 parts per million. According to Jackson, producing $1,000 worth of goods and services today emits half a metric ton of carbon dioxide. Adding it all up, some 28 billion tons are currently emitted and that must be reduced to only 5 billion tons by 2050.

Assuming 9 billion people by 2050, that means that each person can emit only 0.6 tons of carbon dioxide annually, which is lower than the average emissions in India today. In fact, if one divides the 1360 pounds of carbon dioxide annually allotted in 2050 to each person by 365 days per year that means each person would be allowed to emit only 3.6 pounds of carbon dioxide every day. That is the equivalent of burning less than a quart of gasoline or one-and-a-quarter pounds of coal per day. Burning that much coal would keep a single 60 watt light bulb lit for nearly 20 hours. According to some calculations, producing half a cheeseburger would exceed an individual's daily carbon dioxide quota. But in fact, Jackson says, it's much worse than that.

Assuming no economic growth for the next four decades, Jackson's calculations imply that people will be permitted to emit only 0.1 tons of carbon dioxide for every $1,000 of GDP in 2050. What if global economic growth proceeds at current rates? Jackson calculates that that would mean producing $1,000 of GDP emitting only 0.03 tons of carbon dioxide. That is equal to 66 pounds of carbon dioxide which is slightly more than burning 3 gallons of gasoline or 23 pounds of coal. Jackson calculates relentlessly on. Assuming that humanity wants to pursue the goal of global poverty eradication, he eventually reckons that "the carbon content of the economic output must be reduced to just 2 percent of the best currently achieved anywhere in the European Union." His upshot? "It is time to stop pretending that mindlessly chasing economic growth is compatible with sustainability." (Note that Jackson's carbon calculations are very similar to those reported in Russell Seitz' article "Carbon-Based Prohibition" in reason's August/September 2008 issue.)

An addtional contributor to The New Scientist special issue, Susan George, who is chair of the board of Amsterdam's Transnational Institute, advocates "ecological Keynesianism" as the solution to excessive economic growth. She specifically cites the U.S. war economy of the 1940s as a model for how to proceed globally. How would George pay for ecological Keynesianism? That's easy—tell the world's 10 million richest people who hold $40 trillion in "investable cash" and their banks that "they must devote X percent of their loan portfolios to environment-friendly products and processes at below market interest rates." George recognizes that that these eco-friendly investments will underperform, but she suggests that banks "can make up the difference by lending to big greenhouse gas polluters at 10 percent." George is even more ambitious, declaring, "The environmental crisis provides an ideal opportunity to get the global financial system under control. Taxing international currency transactions and other market operations needs only political determination and some software." As compensation for the expropriated, George suggests creating an Order of Carbon Conquerors and giving "them shiny green-gold silk rosettes for their buttonholes."

George evidently thinks that the $40 trillion in "investable cash" is being hoarded under Bill Gates' and Warren Buffett's mattresses, rather than being used to finance other productive activities. And just who would decide which environment-friendly products and processes should get George's concessionary loans? And how can she be so sure that "big polluters" will borrow at 10 percent anyway? Maybe they will just generate internal cash flows and self-finance while merrily continuing those activities that George dislikes.

Another anti-growth guru in the special issue is former World Bank ecological economist Herman Daly, who claims that "we are heading for environmental and economic disaster." Why? Because "the scale of the global economy is approaching the limits of what our planet can cope with." Daly discerns certain signs of these impending limits. "As the oceans are emptied, forests shrink from logging and levels of pollutants and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere rise, the environmental and social costs of further growth are likely to intensify until we reach a point at which the price we pay for each unit of extra growth becomes greater than the benefits we gain," writes Daly. Daly is right that the oceans are emptying, some forests are shrinking, and some pollution increasing, but he gets his diagnosis wrong. Those things are happening not just because of capitalism's rapacious urge for economic growth, but because those resources are unowned in open access commons available for anyone to grab or abuse. Capitalism is "blind to [these] environmental costs" because they have been excluded from its ambit.

For example, Science just published an article in September pointing out that private property in fisheries actually halts their collapse and promotes sustainable harvests. And what about shrinking forests? It is true that tropical forests are shrinking in poor countries in which such forests "belong" to the government. However, a 2006 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that "among 50 nations with extensive forests reported in the Food and Agriculture Organization's comprehensive Global Forest Resources Assessment 2005, no nation where annual per capita gross domestic product exceeded $4,600 had a negative rate of growing stock change." Daly blames deforestation on logging, but the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research points out that the "main threat to tropical forests" comes from slash-and-burn agriculture practiced by poor farmers who have no other option for feeding their families. The result is the loss or degradation of some 25 million acres of land per year. As Jesse Ausubel, the director of the program for the human environment at Rockefeller University says, "The last 15 to 20 years have seen a widespread reversal in forest trends." The chief exceptions are Indonesia and Brazil. And air pollution trends? They have been declining in developed countries for nearly three decades.

Capitalist economic growth is what has paid for both the technological progress and the compliance with regulations that have made environmental improvements possible. Daly is correct that greenhouse gases continue to accumulate, but can he be so sure that "each unit of extra growth becomes greater than the benefits we gain" from burning fossil fuels to produce energy?

So what might a "non-socialist alternative to today's capitalism" look like? Well, the New Scientist's editors describe how following Daly's economic prescriptions could set the developed countries on a path to a "sustainable society" by 2020. In the new society, "scientists set the rules." Growth is allowed, but "only as long as it doesn't breach the limits set by ecologists." In other words, ecological central planning. For example, during this transition, a new carbon tax makes "petrol-fueled travel prohibitively expensive."

In addition, in Daly's world, bank reserve ratios are raised substantially and commercial lending declines. Interest rates fall to very low levels. In Daly's 2020 ecological society, "we can't maintain full employment," but he tells us not to worry, because now "people work part time, generally as a co-owner of a business rather than as an employee. The whole pace of life is more relaxed. Incomes are lower but we are rich in something that many of us had never experienced before: time." Daly adds that we will have to stabilize our population, "and that includes immigration rates as well as birth rate." This will put pressure on the pensions system, but finally the economists have something to do; they are "busy working out what contributions will be needed to make it sustainable."

Daly, however, does accept that the value of goods can increase by means of technological innovation. But he fails to understand that this concession overthrows his assertion that humanity must settle for a steady-state economy. For example, Jesse Ausubel and Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station researcher Paul Waggoner show that technological progress is helping humanity to wring ever more value out of less physical stuff. For example, they report that the average global consumer, including those in China, increased affluence by 45 percent while using only 13 percent more energy in 2006 than in 1980. Without China, the average consumer increased affluence by 34 percent with little change to energy use. In addition, the average global consumer only consumed 22 percent more crops while richer consumers actually used 20 percent less wood. Between 1980 and 2005, the world's farmers nearly doubled crop production while increasing cropland only 7 percent. If farmers around the world produced crops as efficiently as American farmers, global cropland could be cut in half.

Technological progress and changes in consumer behavior are both offsetting the ecological impacts of population growth and increasing affluence. "An annual 2-3 percent progress in consumption and technology over many decades and sectors seems a robust, understandable, and workable benchmark for sustainability," concludes Ausubel and colleagues. In other words, human creativity is producing more wealth through economic growth by progressively decoupling it from physical resources and the natural environment.

Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki complains in the special issue that economists "believe humans are so creative and productive that the sky's the limit." As Ausubel and others have shown, there is considerable evidence on the side of the disparaged economists. Finally, the New Scientist contributors demand that we keep our hands off nature, while they are disturbingly eager to impose policies that would be the moral equivalent of bulldozing the world's economy.

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.

Heat on PBS Tonight

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 12:15:00 EDT

The new Frontline documentary, Heat, aims to investigate what big business is doing to address the climate change problem. "As I've traveled through America's energy landscape this past year, it's become increasingly clear that the big energy corporations are not about to tackle climate change on their own. It's going to take a big push from government," concludes Frontline correspondent Martin Smith. But in Heat, Smith details, without apparent irony, the failure of many past government "pushes," such as the Clinton administration's Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles and the Bush administration's corn-based ethanol subsidies. Given these fiascos, Smith fails to make clear why he thinks that a "big push" from government will succeed in dealing with climate change now. In fact, Heat ends up showing viewers that the energy policies of our two major party presidential candidates are in thrall to parochial interests, opinion polls, and the price of gasoline.

Heat opens with correspondent Smith recounting the litany of woes that man-made global warming may visit upon the planet. He travels with mountaineer David Brashears to the Himalayan Mountains, which lie between China and India, to gaze upon their rapidly shrinking mountain glaciers. The Rongbuk glacier photographed in 1921 by explorer George Mallory, for instance, has since lost 40 percent of its ice. Melting glaciers are a problem because they store water that is released every summer to the vast rivers that supply hundreds of millions of people in China, India, and Southeast Asia. Once the glaciers are gone, some rivers may not flow year round.

Smith reprises other dangers posed by man-made global warming as well, including rising sea levels, ocean acidification, more violent storms, and more frequent droughts. Interestingly, Smith interviews Joseph Romm, a former Clinton Administration Energy Department official and now a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, who says, "I think it's important for people to understand global warming is not the sole cause of everything that happens." Why interesting? Because Smith includes concerns such as failing fisheries and expanding deserts on his list of global warming horrors.

While global warming may contribute to the decline of some fisheries, the chief reason that fisheries fail is overfishing due to a lack of property rights. With regard to the expansion of deserts, the trends are not at all clear. In fact, recent reports find that the world's largest desert, the Sahara, has been shrinking. In addition, some climate models suggest that further global warming could turn much of the Sahara green by significantly increasing the amount of rainfall it receives. Despite his caveat, Romm clearly is alarmed by man-made global warming, arguing that it may push the climate over certain thresholds that will produce irreversible deleterious changes.

In order to avoid the damage caused by climate change, Heat reports that the vast majority of climate scientists warn that the world will have to "dramatically reduce its emissions of greenhouse gases, cutting them by 60 to 80 percent by mid-century." But can humanity actually reduce emissions that much? Smith travels to India and China, two countries whose rapidly expanding economies are using vast amounts of energy and producing increasing amounts of greenhouse gases. Chinese and Indian people want to enjoy the good life, including cars for increased mobility, electronics for work and entertainment, and climate-controlled houses.

Smith talks to the CEO of China's largest privately owned carmaker, Geely Automobile, who plans to more than quadruple production from 160,000 to 700,000 cars in just two years. The CEO of China's biggest electric utility, Shenhua Energy, forthrightly tells Smith that shareholder profits trump concerns about climate change. China builds two new coal-fired electric generation plants per week and is now the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. India will also be emitting significantly more greenhouse gases as it strives to bring electricity to its 350 million or so citizens who are still without it. Economic growth is the priority of poor countries, not dealing with climate change.

What about reducing emissions in the United States? Both major party presidential candidates, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) are promising to dramatically cut greenhouse gas emissions. And both are big enthusiasts for carbon capture and storage from coal-fired electric plants—so-called clean coal technologies. Why? "In order to run for President in this country in 2008, you have to be for clean coal," explains former Fortune managing editor Eric Pooley. "You can't go to Indiana and Ohio and say, you know, ‘I want to do away with coal.' There's an amazing correlation between being a swing state and being dependent on coal."

Heat points out that more than half of our electricity is generated by 600 coal-fired plants. What are the prospects that carbon dioxide produced by burning coal be captured and stored safely underground? For one, no utility currently does it. Why not? First, because many generating plants are not near places that are geologically suitable for sequestering it. Burying power plant carbon dioxide would require building a massive new pipeline system at least equivalent in size to the one used to ship petroleum products around the country. As Southern Company CEO David Ratcliffe notes, "We haven't come close to defining what will be required in storage, what are the legal liabilities and what are the permitting requirements." Legal liabilities? Well, yes. As Jeff Goodell, author of Big Coal, reminds Smith, "The problem is carbon dioxide is an asphyxiant." Leaking carbon dioxide kills people. How much would it cost to capture and store carbon dioxide? Mike Morris, CEO of American Electric Power, suggests capturing carbon dioxide would add 20 to 30 percent to the cost of energy. Smith notes that neither Obama nor McCain mentions how much of carbon capture and storage would boost their constituents' electric bills.

Besides power generation, transportation is the second biggest generator of greenhouse gases. Smith claims that America's cars generate more greenhouse gases than all the cars in Europe, Japan, China, and India combined. Heat then makes something of a hero out of California's Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who tried to mandate an average automobile fuel economy standard of 42.5 miles per gallon. The automobile companies furiously lobbied against it Washington, D.C. The details are murky, but the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency refused to grant California a waiver to vary its fuel economy standards from the new national fuel economy standard of 35 miles per gallon by 2020.

When someone criticizes cars, can Big Oil be far behind? Smith observes that the world's biggest publicly-traded oil company, Exxon Mobil, is "investing in less than one-tenth of one percent of its profits in renewable energy; much to the consternation of environmentalists." Why is that? Jeffrey Ball, The Wall Street Journal's environmental reporter, tells Smith that ExxonMobil and other oil companies "don't think that any of those [renewable energy] technologies have gotten to the point of economic viability." Another way to look at it is that oil companies are oil companies, not energy companies. Just as wagon companies did not generally become automobile companies, oil companies are unlikely to become wind or solar power companies. In the meantime, Ball gets it right when he says, "Exxon will do what Exxon knows best how to do, which is, run around the world trying to pull oil out of the ground." And why not? As Smith points out, Exxon Mobil made $40 billion in profits last year. Oil companies—and their record profits—will fade away if cheaper renewable energy sources are ever developed.

Smith goes after ExxonMobil's support for "climate change denier groups," specifically mentioning the Heartland Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. The hapless Exxon Mobil spokesperson squirms and apparently accepts Smith's characterization.

Throughout the documentary, Smith follows the twists and turns of how energy and climate issues are affecting this year's electoral politics. As gasoline prices soared earlier this year, Sen. McCain came out strongly in favor of offshore oil drilling. After initially resisting calls to "drill baby drill," Sen. Obama conceded that more domestic oil exploration should take place.

The failure of ExxonMobil and other oil companies to invest as much as Smith thinks they should in renewable energy sources is what provokes him to conclude only a "big push" from government will work. But as a good reporter, Smith did look at some earlier "pushes" and found them "instructive." For example, the Clinton administration subsidized the Big Three automakers in a program called the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles. At its inception, the head of General Motors declared, "We've made a commitment to have a hybrid vehicle in production by the year 2001." That didn't happen. Gas prices hovered around $1 per gallon and Americans chose to buy SUVs. A GM spokeswoman tells Smith that Toyota beat GM to the hybrid car because Toyota didn't mind losing money on it for a while whereas GM couldn't justify building hybrids as a business case.

Another example of where government energy policies produced unintended bad consequences is the push to subsidize corn ethanol for transport fuel. The documentary notes that ethanol is now a huge business garnering more than $7 billion in annual government subsidies. There are only a couple of problems: corn-based ethanol marginally reduces greenhouse gas emissions and its production has contributed to the recent run-up in world food prices. "The corn-based ethanol program is going to be considered one of the biggest follies ever implemented in energy policy anywhere in the world in the history of energy policy," says Amy Jaffe, an energy expert at Rice University. Smith points out that Sen. McCain opposed ethanol subsidies and Sen. Obama supported them. Why? It's simple, really—Arizona is not a corn producing state whereas Illinois most certainly is. Obama has recently softened his stance on corn-based ethanol.

On the other hand, Smith rather likes European subsidies of solar and wind power. He points out that Germany produces six times more electricity using solar power than does the United States. Sounds impressive until Smith reveals that solar power supplies 0.6 percent of Germany's electricity while wind power provides 7 percent. While Smith fails to mention it, viewers might be interested to learn that Germans pay about double what Americans do for electricity.

Smith next talks with legendary Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens about his scheme to build a gigantic wind farm in Texas involving 2,500 wind turbines rated to produce 4,000 megawatts of electricity. "He's expecting to gross hundreds of millions of dollars a year," says Smith. And a lot of that money would come from federal production tax credits worth 2.1 cents per kilowatt hour generated. Pickens also needs the government to open transmission corridors so that he can sell his power to distant markets. "You can't go in and invest a huge amount of money and not have a way to get your money back and make a profit," says Pickens. It surely helps if the government agrees to hand over taxpayer dollars to guarantee that one makes a profit.

Heat briefly considers nuclear power as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Smith hints that nuclear power is now hugely expensive due to over-regulation in the United States. By comparison, France, which produces 80 percent of its electricity using nuclear power, has some of the lowest electricity rates in Europe. I'm not suggesting that this is the proper model, but the French government owns most of the country's electrical generation capacity and thus makes sure that its own regulations don't get in the way.

Again, Smith points to the differences between the two major party candidates—McCain favors building 45 new nuclear power plants by 2030, whereas Obama worries about plant safety and wants the waste storage problem solved before allowing more nuclear plants to be constructed.

Heat ends with the Warner-Lieberman Climate Security Act debacle on Capitol Hill this past June. This legislation would have mandated that carbon dioxide emissions be cut by 60 percent from where they were in 2005 by 2050. The bill would have set up a cap-and-trade scheme to ration carbon dioxide emissions. Such rationing aims to increase the price of fossil fuels relative to carbon neutral sources of energy and thus encourage consumers and energy producers to shift to higher-priced climate-friendly energy. The bill's proponents had the bad luck to propose it just as gasoline prices were soaring to historic highs. Senators McCain and Obama did not show up to vote on procedural motions that aimed to push the bill forward. "The candidates were hiding. The candidates both support the concept of cap and trade, but neither of them showed up," says Eric Pooley.

Heat does a good job illustrating the interplay between politics and economics that drives and stymies global and domestic energy and climate policies. But there is one glaring flaw. Heat treats cutting greenhouse gases as the only way to deal with climate change. There is another strategy—adaptation. Adopting policies that encourage people to build better roads, erect more hospitals, supply sanitation, improve farming practices, raise sea walls, construct superior houses, provide access to electricity, and expand communication networks would make them less vulnerable to whatever weather disasters a changing climate might bring. The best way to do this is the old-fashioned way: encourage economic growth and free trade to alleviate poverty, illiteracy, maternal and infant mortality, and so forth. Heavy-handed government efforts to cut greenhouse gases could easily result in lowered economic growth and thus diminish humanity's ability to adapt to climate change. The big question that Heat does not attempt to answer is: Is global warming worse than what governments might try to do about it?

Heat airs this evening (Tuesday, October 21) at 9 p.m. on most PBS stations. Check your local listings.

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: I was interviewed for this documentary, but I ended up on the cutting room floor. I bear the producers no malice. Also, I have in the past been accused of being a climate change denier.

Medical Paternalism and Genetic Testing

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 16:30:00 EDT

Last week, the Icelandic company deCODE Genetics began offering a new breast cancer gene test that it claims measures genetic risk for the common forms of the disease. The new test assesses seven single-letter variations (a.k.a., single nucleotide polymorphisms) in the human genome that researchers have linked to higher risk of breast cancer. The average lifetime risk for women of European descent is 12 percent. The company claims that its new test can tell a woman if her lifetime risk of breast cancer is as low as 5 percent to as high as 48 percent (from 0.4-fold to 4-fold lifetime risk). deCODE notes that the test has not yet been validated for women of other ethnic backgrounds.

Not everyone is happy with deCODE's test. Some biomedical paternalists want the Food and Drug Administration to forbid deCODE from selling it. "Sadly, the tests deCODE and other companies are offering are more likely to empty family pocketbooks and leave women with a false sense of security than they are to prevent breast cancer," writes University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Arthur Caplan. "There is at least a significant chance this test will could falsely reassure some women and alarm others," said Eric Winer, a breast cancer expert at Harvard Medical School to the Washington Post. "I fear for many women the results could be quite misleading." The Post also reported that University of Washington geneticist and breast cancer expert Mary-Claire King said, "I wouldn't recommend to anyone that she have such a test. I certainly wouldn't want my daughter to have such a test." These opponents argue that the test has not been sufficiently validated and that it could result in more harm than good as women spooked by false positive tests seek invasive treatments.

deCODE Genetics claims that its new test can identify "the roughly 5 percent of women who are at a greater than 20 percent lifetime risk of the common forms of breast cancer (about twice the average risk in the general population), and the 1 percent of women whose lifetime risk is roughly 36 percent (about three-times average)." American Cancer Society guidelines recommend that women whose lifetime risk as currently measured by some standard risk assessment models is greater than 20 percent should be annually screened using more sensitive magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in addition to mammography. The idea is women who test as being at a higher risk will be more vigilant about detecting any cancer early on, enabling them to receive treatment before the cancer has spread. In addition, some higher risk women may choose to begin taking the drug tamoxifen, which clinical studies show can dramatically lower the risk of breast cancer.

The deCODE test is based on published scientific research that shows that certain variants of each of the seven SNPs confers a greater risk of breast cancer. While it is true that some of the research has not been replicated by other investigators, one should keep in mind that this is not a drug, but a risk assessment test. The test does not detect cancer; it is more like a test for cholesterol levels that are associated with higher risks for heart disease. For example, patients whose total blood cholesterol level is 240 mg/dl or more have double the risk of a heart attack as someone with a cholesterol level of 200 mg/dl or lower. Just as having higher cholesterol levels does not guarantee a heart attack, an indication of higher genetic risk does not presage breast cancer.

Diagnostic tests, however, do not have to be perfect to be useful. For example, the false positive rate in the widely used prostate specific antigen (PSA) test is between 15 and 30 percent, which means that for every four to six men who test positive for the disease only one will actually have cancer. However, since the advent of the PSA test, the death rate for prostate cancer has fallen from 39 per 100,000 men in 1990 to 27 per 100,000 in 2003. Although many attribute a good bit of this decline to PSA testing, it is still not known for sure that prostate cancer screening has actually resulted in a reduction of prostate cancer mortality. Yet the PSA test has been used for 22 years. As the limitations of the older PSA test became more evident, researchers have been competing to develop more accurate prostate cancer detection tests.

What about the claim that the deCODE breast cancer test could result in more harm? The chief concern is that women would be unnecessarily alarmed by a result suggesting higher risk. But how have women responded to other breast cancer tests, specifically the BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene tests? Women with an altered BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene are 3 to 7 times more likely to develop breast cancer than women without alterations in those genes. A recent study looked at how 215 women who had undergone BRCA gene testing reacted to their results. The study found that after four years none of the three groups—those who tested negative, positive, and inconclusive—had "adverse psychological consequences" from BRCA testing. In fact, the study found that "in all three groups, the women were less worried than before they were tested."

As the era of widespread genetic testing unfolds over the next decade, physicians and citizens will become increasingly familiar with how to interpret test results. Testing companies also have an interest in making the risk information they provide understandable and useful to their clients. "A lot of women are afraid of breast cancer. They just don't know what their risk is," said Kay Wissmann of the Breast Cancer Network of Strength, a Chicago-based advocacy group, to the Washington Post. "For those women who choose it, this test could provide information that could potentially help women make better decisions. It could empower them."

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.