Blue-green algal blooms are an increasingly common occurrence in water bodies around the state. The toxic algae cause significant ecological damage and pose health risks for humans. Blooms are caused by nutrient pollution — particularly in Lake Okeechobee. Decades of misguided infrastructure projects and water mismanagement require high-volume freshwater discharges from the lake to the coast through the St. Lucie and Caloosahatchee rivers. Nutrients are carried by these discharges, spreading algae throughout the state.

Agriculture, septic systems, wastewater treatment plants, and availability of data are among the major problems which the task force identified over the course of four meetings in the past few months. Their recommendations address these issues directly, including calls for strategic project selection and assessment of project effectiveness.

Agricultural Best Management Practices (BMPs) are the primary tool to reduce nutrient pollution from agricultural sources. BMPs include a variety of cost-effective measures producers can take to conserve water and prevent runoff into vulnerable water bodies. However, only 75 percent of producers in the Lake O watershed are enrolled in BMPs despite statutory requirements. Agricultural activity in environmentally-sensitive areas results in externalities that justify the mandatory implementation of BMPs. Enforcement has been more focused on the Everglades Agricultural Area south of the lake where BMPs have resulted in substantial nutrient reductions. The task force recommends increased enrollment in BMPs and the implementation of an onsite sampling program to assess the effectiveness of sector-specific BMPs.

Failing onsite sewage treatment and disposal systems, or septic systems, are a major source of urban nutrient pollution. The state Department of Health currently has regulatory oversight of septic systems and does not consider ecological risks. The task force recommends broader oversight by the Department of Environmental Protection and the prohibition of septic systems in environmentally-sensitive areas. Septic systems pose a unique challenge in a state like Florida, and restrictions in particular environmentally-sensitive areas may be appropriate. However, the existing regulatory framework is highly restrictive and is preventing the implementation of innovative septic systems that reduce nitrogen seepage. Regulation should be relaxed to allow systems like these in rural areas where the extension of sewer service is not feasible.

Public wastewater systems are also susceptible to failures that contribute to nutrient pollution. Over 1.6 billion gallons of sewage were spilled in Florida over the last decade — 980 million gallons of which entered the state’s waterways. The most common causes of spills are power outages and large storms. The task force recommends the identification of emergency backup power sources for all lift stations constructed prior to 2003 among other wastewater infrastructure investments. Florida’s growing population will continue to place pressure on public wastewater systems and infrastructure improvements will increasingly be necessary. Where possible, these improvements should be done through public-private partnerships to reduce public costs.

Finally, the task force made several recommendations involving improved monitoring, data collection, and project assessment. State and federal authorities have spent billions of dollars over recent decades on restoration projects, with limited assessment after completion. Restoration of Florida’s water bodies is critical to the environment, health and continued growth of the state. However, restoration should be accomplished as efficiently as possible. Improved monitoring and assessment are vital to achieving those goals. As the task force recommends, emphasis should be placed on high-impact, priority projects using a diverse portfolio of cost-efficient technologies.

The report was only the first draft of recommendations by the task force, but the repeated calls for cost-effective projects and science-based decision making were refreshing in the wake of decades of mismanagement. There was surprisingly little emphasis on the expansive set of infrastructure projects under the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Project (CERP) which was discussed extensively during the task force meetings. Future reports from the task force may address CERP more directly. While the task force’s recommendations were otherwise sound, they should not be interpreted by lawmakers as justification for excess regulation or spending.

This column originally appeared in the Palm Beach Post.

The post Florida Task Force Makes Good Start in Tackling Blue-Green Algae appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Open ocean aquaculture, also known as mariculture, offers a means of supplementing fish supplies to meet demand and reduce pressure on wild stocks. With new health guidelines recommending increased consumption of fish, many governments have facilitated an aquaculture industry as a means of providing inexpensive, high-quality, year-round protein, benefitting the health of those in low-income households in particular.

Projections for the global seafood industry assume that aquaculture accounts for practically all industry growth to 2030. Yet the United States lags far behind. Aquaculture currently represents 49 percent of global food fish production, of which the U.S. produces less than 1 percent.

The greatest impediment to a U.S. aquaculture industry is regulatory.

Federal agencies with tenuous claims to the disparate concerns of fish farming, as well as layers of state-level impediments, create a regulatory obstacle course that institutes a de facto ban on aquaculture in the U.S. With these impediments to viable aquaculture businesses, entrepreneurs find capital and insurance impossible to secure, preventing the development of an industry that otherwise might thrive and ensuring the U.S. continues to be a world-leading importer of seafood.

Objections to the development of open ocean aquaculture come from those who benefit from the status quo, such as the capture fishing industry and U.S. environmental groups.

While legitimate environmental concerns must be addressed—including water quality, fish escape, disease spread and habitat effects—aquaculture is generally considered to be a low-impact contributor to environmental problems.

For U.S. aquaculture to thrive, federal and state governments will have to remove these regulatory obstacles. Ideally, Congress would create a unified regulatory framework, vested in a single office. The model for this is Norway, whose one-stop permitting process facilitates an expansive marine aquaculture industry.

To avoid delays from environmental opposition, priority should be given to the designation of Aquaculture Management Areas in parts of the ocean where aquaculture is less likely to cause environmental harm, a practice advocated by the UN and currently used in New Zealand and Europe.

In many parts of the world, wild fish stocks are under pressure from growing demand and poor fisheries management. Aquaculture, which includes fish farming and underwater plant cultivation, offers a means of supplementing the supply of fish to meet demand and thereby reduce pressure on wild stocks.

While aquaculture already supplies a significant proportion of global fish demand, open ocean aquaculture—also known as mariculture—has grown far slower than inland aquaculture and currently represents only a small proportion of total aquaculture in the U.S.

This policy brief begins by reviewing the extent of the overfishing problem and analyzing aquaculture’s potential to address that problem.

Part 2 summarizes estimates of the economic potential of open ocean aquaculture in the U.S.

Part 3 considers the effects of open ocean aquaculture on water quality and other environmental considerations.

Part 4 details the regulatory barriers to expanding open ocean aquaculture in the U.S. and offers some possible changes that would reduce those barriers.

Attachments

• Full Study

The post Opportunities and Regulatory Challenges for U.S. Marine Aquaculture Development appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Even if you don’t use the common, convenient, lightweight plastic grocery bag, you should be concerned about the state ban.

Proponents of the ban claim it will benefit the environment. But a comprehensive analysis recently undertaken by Reason Foundation, which looked at the impact of plastic bag bans on the environment, found these claims don’t stand up to scrutiny. Indeed, the ban is likely to do more harm than good both to the environment and to people’s pocketbooks.

Lightweight plastic bags constitute less than 1 percent of all visible litter, represent only 0.4 percent of all municipal solid waste and are not a major cause of blocked storm drains. Banning them has practically no impact on the amount of litter generated, the amount Californians pay for waste disposal, or the risk of flooding. In fact, when plastic bags were banned in San Francisco, the county’s own studies showed that litter actually increased.

Lightweight plastic bags have not caused a giant “garbage patch” in the North Pacific, nor are they a significant threat to marine animals or birds. Rather, the real culprit of untimely marine animal death is cast-off fishing gear. A bag ban might catch a school of red herrings but it won’t save any real marine life.

For our study, we calculated that an average consumer using only lightweight plastic bags would be responsible for consuming less energy and water and generate fewer greenhouse gas emissions than someone using alternative bags. The main proposed alternative is five times heavier than the current bag and is responsible for the consumption of far more resources, energy and water. Paper bags also consume more resources, including five times more water over their lifecycle than lightweight plastic bags.

Further, the Department of Public Health has warned, “During the warmer months, the increased temperatures can promote the growth of bacteria that may be present on [reusable] bags.”

They encourage users to wash their reusable bags “frequently.” This of course consumes water – and if the advice were followed rigorously, “reusable” bags would consume as much as 40 times more water than lightweight plastic bags.

Some dismiss this advice, bragging that they never wash their bags. In those cases, they are putting themselves and other consumers at risk as bacteria spreads easily in shopping carts and at checkout counters.

Additionally, our research demonstrated enormous direct and indirect costs on California’s consumers. If California’s 12.4 million households spend five minutes each week cleaning their shopping bags to get rid of germs and bacteria, the annual opportunity cost would be more than $1.5 billion.

The bag ban is likely to disproportionately burden the working poor and those households on a tight budget. A dollar spent on 10 paper bags is a dollar not available for other purchases. And while it’s easy to place all the blame on the Legislature, grocery chains sponsored the plastic bag bill and may reap hundreds of millions of dollars charging the consumer more for a paper bag than it cost them to procure them wholesale.

Opponents of the bag ban say they’ll try to gather enough signatures to give voters the chance to repeal the plastic bag law.

In the meantime, it’s clear leaders in Sacramento passed another feel-good measure that hurts working people and the state economy.

Lance Christensen is director of the pension reform project at Reason Foundation. This column originally appeared in the Orange County Register.

The post Plastic Bag Ban Hurts California’s Economy appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Unfortunately, for those who see banning plastic grocery bags as a panacea, a recent report for the Reason Foundation shows that all these claims are false.

Authoritative studies show that plastic bags constitute less than 1 percent of visible litter in U.S. cities. The presence of plastic bags in trees and on the ground signifies that a community has a litter problem. The appropriate response is to reduce and ameliorate that problem through education and other initiatives – not to ban plastic bags.

Members of some pressure groups claim that plastic bags kill large numbers of marine animals. Even for bags distributed in coastal cities, that claim is simply false.

As David Santillo, a senior biologist with Greenpeace, told The Times of London: “It’s very unlikely that many animals are killed by plastic bags. The evidence shows just the opposite … . On a global basis, plastic bags aren’t an issue.”

Because they are so strong and light, plastic shopping bags can actually reduce the amount of waste that ends up in landfills.

About 80 percent of all grocery bags in the U.S. are made from lightweight plastic but constitute only 0.4 percent by weight of all waste sent to landfills.

Paper bags, which account for most of the remaining 20 percent of grocery bags used, generate the same amount of waste (0.4 percent of the total) because each bag is far heavier.

New Mexico’s plastic bag bans have likely increased the amount of waste produced as people switch to paper, which would actually increase the costs of municipal solid waste disposal.

Some alternative bags appear to be superior to lightweight plastic on some environmental measures, such as use of energy and emissions of greenhouse gases. But that is true only if those bags are reused a sufficient number of times (ranging from six to 30 or more, depending on the type of bag). In practice, households do not typically reuse their bags enough to achieve those gains.

At actual reuse rates, lightweight plastic bags result in about half the energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions of alternative bags, whether those alternatives are paper or reusable.

Likewise, at actual reuse rates, all alternative bags are associated with greater water use.

Reusable bags are the worst, resulting in the use of at least 10 times as much water as lightweight plastic bags – if households wash their bags regularly. And such washing is strongly advised: Studies show that about half of unwashed bags contain potentially dangerous germs; meanwhile, failure to clean reusable bags regularly has resulted in several instances of serious illness.

So, banning lightweight plastic bags likely increases energy use, water use and emissions of greenhouse gases, but does not substantially reduce waste or litter, or the cost of associated municipal waste and litter collection.

If communities are concerned about litter, the best solution is likely a campaign directly addressing that problem.

Advocates of banning plastic grocery bags, while perhaps well-intentioned, are actually harming the environment, raising consumer costs and reducing personal freedom.

That sounds like a bad deal to me.

Julian Morris is vice president of research at Reason Foundation. This article originally appeared in the Albuquerque Journal.

The post Plastic Bag Bans Are a Not a Panacea for Environmental Ills appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Murray Lloyd states, “The BBCC is science-based, landowner-driven, ethically-rooted and non-regulatory,” and as a result, “The BBCC became a model for successful conservation through a public-private-partnership throughout the country.”

Now for a reality-based look at the Black Bear Conservation Coalition, the conservation of the Louisiana black bear, and Candidate Conservation Agreements.

The initial work undertaken by the Black Bear Conservation Coalition over twenty years ago represents the prototype Candidate Conservation Agreement, an initiative under the Endangered Species Act that has become increasingly popular because it’s touted as a voluntary, non-regulatory way to prevent species from being listed under the Act. In reality, Candidate Conservation Agreements rely on the threat of the Endangered Species Act’s fearsome regulations to gain “voluntary” compliance, as Murray Lloyd admitted before Congress almost twenty years ago. But first some background on the Black Bear Conservation Coalition.

After the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed to list the Louisiana black bear in 1990 under the Endangered Species Act, the Black Bear Conservation Coalition initiated their prototype Candidate Conservation Agreement to try to prevent listing. (This is the same black bear subspecies that gave rise to the term “teddy bear” because when President Teddy Roosevelt was on a hunting trip in Mississippi in 1902 he refused to shoot a bear under what he thought were unsporting conditions.) Despite that Fish and Wildlife listed the bear in 1992, the Coalition, which is still going strong, continues to garner widespread praise as an example of innovative, win-win endangered species conservation, focused on finding practical solutions to the conflict-ridden Endangered Species Act that protect landowners’ property rights.

The Black Bear Conservation Coalition promotes itself as an effort to preempt Endangered Species Act regulation by formulating a proactive habitat management plan among all “stakeholders,” especially private forest owners because they have most of the bear’s habitat. The management plan combines elements of a Candidate Conservation Agreement and an informal Habitat Conservation Plan, another so-called voluntary initiative under the Endangered Species Act in which landowners agree to put off limits some of their land in exchange for the feds giving them the green-light to use the rest of their land; thereby turning the off limits private land into a defacto federal wildlife refuge, even though if the government wants to acquire private land for any purpose it is required to compensate landowners under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.

The Black Bear Conservation Coalition’s main accomplishments to date have been to write the management plan, which was adopted by the Fish and Wildlife Service as the official recovery plan, educate the public, and push federal and state agencies to conserve the bear. The Coalition’s proactive, landowner-friendly image has been hailed by the Mississippi Fish and Wildlife Foundation, Sand County Foundation, Wildlife Management Institute and others as an innovative, win-win solution preferable to the usual command-and-control property restrictions imposed by the Endangered Species Act. All of which sounds great.

In reality, beneath this feel-good veneer of cooperation, the Black Bear Conservation Coalition has relied on the threat of Endangered Species Act draconian penalties–$100,000 fine and/or 1 year in jail for harming a single bear or even its habitat–to force private landowners to participate and negotiate. Murray Lloyd admitted (while testifying at an August 3, 1995 hearing before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Subcommittee on Drinking Water, Fisheries and Wildlife–but unfortunately the testimony does not appear available online) the agreement reached by Coalition’s stakeholders only came about because of the threat of the Act’s punitive sanctions, which “served effectively as a cocked two-by-four to keep everyone at the table.”

Although the agreement was achieved with the threat of being whacked by the Endangered Species Act, during the same 1995 hearing at which he spilled the beans about the so-called voluntary agreement, Lloyd called the Black Bear Conservation Coalition “a model for natural resource conflict resolution.” Fast forward nineteen years and Murray Lloyd is still telling the same misleading and farcical tale. Unfortunately, others have swallowed this tale hook, line and sinker. Lloyd’s two-by-four analogy is very apt because it encapsulates how the Endangered Species Act often works; people are threatened and intimidated with getting clobbered by law in order to gain their “voluntary” compliance.

After separating myth from reality, there is one important lesson to be learned from efforts to conserve the teddy bear. The Endangered Species Act is the application of Teddy Roosevelt’s famous saying about how he conducted foreign policy–“speak softly and carry and big stick”–to conservation. Any reasonable person, upon learning of Murray Lloyd’s cocked two-by-four admission, or those knowledgeable about how the Endangered Species Act truly works, would not call this process voluntary, non-regulatory, or a model for conflict resolution and public-private partnerships to conserve endangered species.

The post Endangered Black Bear Baloney in Louisiana and the Reality of Candidate Conservation Agreements appeared first on Reason Foundation.

This study investigates all these claims using the best data available and finds:

1. The bans, fees and taxes on shopping bags have a minuscule impact on litter.
2. There is no evidence of a reduction in municipal litter or waste collection costs as a result of the introduction of bans, fees and taxes on shopping bags.
3. Other environmental impacts are not significantly reduced and some, including greenhouse gas emissions, may increase as a result especially of restrictions on the use of plastic (HDPE) shopping bags.
4. There is likely an adverse health effect from people failing to wash bacteria-ridden reusable bags, the use of which may increase as a result of restrictions on the distribution of other bag types.
5. Reusable bags are less convenient and, when taking into account the time and resources required to remove bacteria from bags, are very costly for consumers.
6. The costs of plastic bag bans fall disproportionately on the poor.

In sum, over the past 30 years, decisions by consumers and retailers have dramatically shifted consumption toward bags with superior environmental and cost characteristics, namely those made from high-density polyethylene (HDPE) plastic. By banning HDPE plastic bags, legislators have been reversing this trend, to the detriment of the environment and consumers.

Those people who are genuinely concerned about reducing litter and other environmental problems should focus their efforts on solutions that have been proven to work. In the case of litter, this means communicating the benefits of litter reduction and undertaking amelioration. In the case of protecting marine animals (a concern especially in coastal states), banning plastic bags won’t make a difference but shifting toward more rational fisheries policies would.

Attachments

• Appendix: Plastic Bag Bans in the United States and Other Countries
• Policy Study: How Green Is that Grocery Bag Ban?

The post How Green Is that Grocery Bag Ban? appeared first on Reason Foundation.

The bill, SB 405, along with companion bill AB 158 in the Assembly, would have prohibited grocery stores and convenience stores with at least $2 million in gross annual sales and 10,000 square feet of retail space from providing single-use plastic or paper bags, although stores would have been allowed to sell recycled paper bags for an unspecified amount. The bill fell just three votes short of passage in the Senate – with four Democratic senators not voting – and Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Los Angeles, who sponsored the measure, has indicated that he would like to bring it up again, so expect this fight to be recycled rather than trashed.

While public debate over plastic bag bans often devolves into emotional pleas to save the planet or preserve marine life (and, believe me, I love sea turtles as much as the next guy), a little reason and perspective is in order.

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, plastic bags, sacks, and wraps of all kinds (not just grocery bags) make up only about 1.6 percent of all municipal solid waste materials. High-density polyethylene (HDPE) bags, which are the most common kind of plastic grocery bags, make up just 0.3 percent of this total.

The claims that plastic bags are worse for the environment than paper bags or cotton reusable bags are dubious at best. In fact, compared to paper bags, plastic grocery bags produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions, require 70 percent less energy to make, generate 80 percent less waste, and utilize less than 4 percent of the amount of water needed to manufacture them. This makes sense because plastic bags are lighter and take up less space than paper bags.

Reusable bags come with their own set of problems. They, too, have a larger carbon footprint than plastic bags. Even more disconcerting are the findings of several studies that plastic bag bans lead to increased health problems due to food contamination from bacteria that remain in the reusable bags. A November 2012 statistical analysis by University of Pennsylvania law professor Jonathan Klick and George Mason University law professor and economist Joshua D. Wright found that San Francisco’s plastic bag ban in 2007 resulted in a subsequent spike in hospital emergency room visits due to E. coli, salmonella, and campylobacter-related intestinal infectious diseases. The authors conclude that the ban even accounts for several additional deaths in the city each year from such infections.

The description of plastic grocery bags as “single-use” bags is another misnomer. The vast majority of people use them more than once, whether for lining trash bins or picking up after their dogs. (And still other bags are recycled.) Since banning plastic bags also means preventing their additional uses as trash bags and pooper scoopers, one unintended consequence of the plastic bag ban would likely be an increase in plastic bag purchases for these other purposes. This is just what happened in Ireland in 2002 when a 15 Euro cent ($0.20) tax imposed on plastic shopping bags led to a 77 percent increase in the sale of plastic trash can liner bags.

And then there are the economic costs. The plastic bag ban would threaten the roughly 2,000 California jobs in the plastic bag manufacturing and recycling industry, although, as noted in the Irish example above, they might be able to weather the storm if they can successfully switch to producing other types of plastic bags. In addition, taxpayers will have to pony up for the added bureaucracy, and the higher regulatory costs foisted upon bag manufacturers and retailers will ultimately be borne by consumers in the form of price increases.

Notwithstanding the aforementioned reasons why plastic bags are not, in fact, evil incarnate, environmentalists have every right to try to convince people to adopt certain beliefs or lifestyles, but they do not have the right to use government force to compel people to live the way they think best. In a free society, we are able to live our lives as we please, so long as we do not infringe upon the rights of others. That includes the right to make such fundamental decisions as “Paper or plastic?”

Adam B. Summers is a senior policy analyst at Reason Foundation. This article originally appeared in the U-T San Diego.

The post Bag Ban Bad for Freedom and Environment appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Now CNN reports that almost all new drilling activity has been suspended for over two months. This includes shallow wells in less than 500 feet of water-despite Obama’s statement that such wells would not be affected by his orders to cease all deep-water (over 1,000 feet) drilling. After thousands of deep-water wells have been drilled successfully without spills, the Interior Department, under Secretary Ken Salazar, has so delayed permitting and continuing operations as to possibly bring financial ruin to countless smaller companies. It would be similar to shutting down all airlines after a single crash. It may be that Salazar and his gang are just so ignorant of business that they think the government can simply shut down the super-sophisticated flow of supplies and men and then later restart it like flipping an electric light switch. It’s already estimated that it will take two years or longer to get Gulf production back to its pre-suspension levels. Meanwhile, deep-water drilling rigs-which cost over half a million dollars per day to operate-are being sent away from the Gulf to work in Africa and Asia where they are wanted. It will take months, if not years, to bring them back. Some 100,000 high-paying jobs are now at risk. Already the number of deep-water rigs has dropped from 42 to 19.

Most startling is the news that large boat skimmers could have sucked up much of the spill and cleansed it long before the oil reached shore. At the outset of the spill the Dutch offered skimmer boats with experienced crews that could have handled most of the spill. As The Christian Science Monitor reported in “The Top Five Bottlenecks“:

Three days after the accident, the Dutch government offered advanced skimming equipment capable of sucking up oiled water, separating out most of the oil, and returning the cleaner water to the Gulf. But citing discharge regulations that demand that 99.9985 percent of the returned water is oil-free, the EPA initially turned down the offer. A month into the crisis, the EPA backed off those regulations, and the Dutch equipment was airlifted to the Gulf.

A giant Taiwanese oil skimming ship, The A Whale, is only now working on the spill. It can process 500,000 barrels of oily seawater per day, but it also needed the same waiver from the EPA which, expressed in another way, limits discharged water to trace amounts of less than 15 parts-per-million of oil residue. It also needed a waiver from the Jones Act, which prevents the use of specialized foreign ships from the North Sea oil fields because they use non-American crews. Previously, the skimmers had to return to port to offload almost pure seawater each time they filled up with water.

In his 6 month moratorium on deep-drilling, President Obama said he was setting up a special commission to issue a report on the safety of drilling. He’s certainly not rushing. It took almost two months to appoint the “experts,” yet they won’t even meet until mid-July. Also none of them are oil engineers; they are scientists and environmentalists. The Wall Street Journal detailed their backgrounds in its report, “The Antidrilling Commission.” We also know that Obama and Salazar lied when they claimed that the six month shutdown had been supported by their panel of experts.

In Europe the laws governing oil spills are distinct from ours. They are prepared for spills and handle them as national emergencies to be quickly resolved. In Congress, however, the extreme environmentalists are now urging impossibly severe “punishment” conditions and sky high uninsurable liability on individual companies that will almost certainly shutter all medium-sized oil companies, since they would be unable to acquire the needed insurance. In America it has been smaller companies which have led technological discoveries, such as the horizontal fracking which has now made natural gas abundant. Yet Obama’s energy advisor, Carol Brawner, says non-major oil companies could be excluded from Gulf drilling when they, of necessity, are much more careful since spills could ruin them and put them out of business.

In conclusion:

• We have learned that the oil could have been skimmed early on so that very little-if any-would have reached shore.

• BP failed to follow established industry procedures and made several consecutive major errors which caused the blowout. This was not a reason to stop all drilling.

• Revamping Minerals Management in the middle of a crisis has created a catastrophe in the Gulf that permitted the government to shut down continuing operations, even in the shallow waters where Obama previously said drilling would still be allowed.

Wanting-or creating-scarcity has always been a part of the leftist agenda, on the theory that scarcities create the need for government allocation and control. One of the greatest threats of the current situation is that environmental extremists will use it as a justification to further their misguided agenda.

Jon Basil Utley is associate publisher of The American Conservative. He was a foreign correspondent for Knight Ridder newspapers and former associate editor of The Times of the Americas. For 17 years, he was a commentator for the Voice of America. In the 1980s, he owned and operated a small oil drilling partnership in Pennsylvania. This column first appeared at Reason.com.

The post The Government’s Catastrophic Response to the Oil Disaster appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Wrong. If their opposition to the Klamath hydroelectric dams in the Pacific Northwest is any indication, the greens, it appears, are just as unwilling to sacrifice their pet causes as a Texas rancher is to sacrifice his pickup truck. If anything, the radicalization of the environmental movement is the bigger obstacle to addressing global warming than the allegedly gluttonous American way of life.

Once regarded as the symbol of national greatness, hydroelectric dams have now fallen into disrepute for many legitimate reasons. They are enormously expensive undertakings that would never have taken off but for hefty government subsidies. Worse, they typically involve changing the natural course of rivers, causing painful disruptions for towns and tribes.

But tearing down the Klamath dams, the last of which was completed in 1962, will do more harm than good at this stage. These dams provide cheap, renewable energy to 70,000 homes in Oregon and California. Replacing this energy with natural gas — the cleanest fossil-fuel source — would still pump 473,000 tons of additional carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. This is roughly equal to the annual emissions of 102,000 cars.

Given this alternative, one would think that environmentalists would form a human shield around the dams to protect them. Instead, they have been fighting tooth-and-nail to tear them down because the dams stand in the way of migrating salmon. Environmentalists don’t even let many states, including California, count hydro as renewable.

They have rejected all attempts by PacifiCorp, the company that owns the dams, to take mitigation steps such as installing $350 million fish ladders to create a salmon pathway. Klamath Riverkeeper, a group that is part of an environmental alliance headed by Robert Kennedy Jr., has sued a fish hatchery that the California Department of Fish and Wildlife runs — and PacifiCorp is required to fund — on grounds that it releases too many algae and toxic discharges. The hatchery produces at least 25% of the chinook salmon catch every year. Closing it will cause fish populations to drop further, making the demolition of the dams even more likely.

But the end of the Klamath won’t mean the end of the dam saga — it is the big prize that environmentalists are coveting to take their antidam crusade to the next level. “This would represent the largest and most ambitious dam removal project in the country, if not the world,” exults Steve Rothert of American Rivers. The other dams on the hit list include the O’Shaughnessy Dam in Yosemite’s Hetch Hetchy Valley that services San Francisco, Elwha River dam in Washington and the Matilija Dam in Southern California.

Large hydro dams supply about 20% of California’s power (and 10% of America’s). If they are destroyed, California won’t just have to find some other way to fulfill its energy needs. It will have to do so while reducing its carbon footprint to meet the ambitious CO2 emission-reduction targets that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has set. Mr. Schwarzenegger has committed the Golden State to cutting greenhouse gas emissions 80% below 1990 levels by 2050 — a more stringent requirement than even in the Kyoto Protocol.

The effect this might have on California’s erratic and overpriced energy supply has businesses running scared. Mike Naumes, owner of Naumes Inc., a fruit packing and processing business, last year moved his juice concentrate plant from Marysville, Calif., to Washington state and cut his energy bill in half. With hydropower under attack, he is considering shrinking his farming operations in the Golden State as well. “We can’t pay exorbitant energy prices and stay competitive with overseas businesses,” he says.

Bruce Hamilton, Sierra Club’s deputy executive director and a longtime proponent of such a mandate, refuses to even acknowledge that there is any conflict in closing hydro dams while fighting global warming. All California needs to do to square these twin objectives, he maintains, is become more energy efficient while embracing alternative fuels. “We don’t need to accept a Faustian bargain with hydropower to cut emissions,” he says.

This is easier done in the fantasy world of greens than in the real world. If cost-effective technologies to boost energy efficiency actually existed, industry would adopt them automatically, global warming or not.

As for alternative fuels, they are still far from economically viable. Gilbert Metcalf, an economist at Tufts University, has calculated that wind energy costs 6.64 cents per kWh and biomass 5.95 kWh — compared to 4.37 cents for clean coal. Robert Bradley Jr., president of the Institute for Energy Research, puts these costs even higher. “Although technological advances have lowered alternative fuel prices in recent years, these fuels still by and large cost twice as much as conventional fossil fuels,” he says.

But suppose these differentials disappeared. Would the Sierra Club and its eco-warriors actually embrace the fuels that Mr. Hamilton advocates? Not if their track record is any indication. Indeed, environmental groups have a history of opposing just about every energy source.

Their opposition to nuclear energy is well known. Wind power? Two years ago the Center for Biological Diversity sued California’s Altamont Pass Wind Farm for obstructing and shredding migrating birds. (“Cuisinarts of the sky” is what many greens call wind farms.) Solar? Worldwatch Institute’s Christopher Flavin has been decidedly lukewarm about solar farms because they involve placing acres of mirrors in pristine desert habitat. The Sierra Club and Wilderness Society once testified before Congress to keep California’s Mojave Desert — one of the prime solar sites in the country — off limits to all development. Geothermal energy? They are unlikely to get enviro blessings, because some of the best sites are located on protected federal lands.

Greens, it seems, always manage to find a problem for every environmental solution — and there is deep reason for this.

Since its inception, the American environmental movement has been torn between “conservationists” seeking to protect nature for man — and “preservationists” seeking to protect nature for its own sake. Although early environmental thinkers such as Aldo Leopold and John Muir were sympathetic to both themes, Leopold was more in the first camp and Muir in the second. Leopold regarded wilderness as a form of land use; he certainly wanted to limit the development of wild areas — but to “enlarge the range of individual experience.” Muir, on the other hand, saw wilderness as sacred territory worthy of protection regardless of human needs.

With the arrival on the scene of Deep Ecologists from Europe in the 1980s, Muir’s mystical preservationist side won the moral high ground. The emphasis of Deep Ecology on radical species equality made talk about solving environmental problems for human ends illicit within the American environmental community. Instead, Arne Naess, the revered founder of Deep Ecology, explicitly identified human beings as the big environmental problem. “The flourishing of nonhuman life requires a decrease in human population,” his eight-point platform to save Mother Earth serenely declared.

This ideological turn, notes Ramachandra Guha, a left-leaning Indian commentator and incisive critic of Deep Ecology, has made American environmentalism irrelevant at best and dangerous at worst for the Third World, where addressing environmental issues such as soil erosion, water pollution and deforestation still remains squarely about serving human needs. By turning wilderness preservation into a moral absolute — as opposed to simply another form of land use — Deep Ecology has justified wresting crucial resources out of the hands of India’s agrarian and tribal populations. “Specious nonsense about equal rights of all species cannot hide the plain fact that green imperialists . . . are dangerous,” Mr. Guha has written.

Besides hurting the Third World, such radicalism had made the environmental movement incapable of responding to its own self-proclaimed challenges. Since nature can’t speak for itself, the admonition to protect nature for nature’s sake offers not a guide to action, but an invitation to inaction. That’s because a non-anthropocentric view that treats nature as non-hierarchical collapses into incoherence when it becomes necessary to calculate trade-offs or set priorities between competing environmental goals.

Thus, even in the face of a supposedly calamitous threat like global warming, environmentalists can’t bring themselves to embrace any sacrifice — of salmons or birds or desert or protected wilderness. Its strategy comes down to pure obstructionism — on full display in the Klamath dam controversy.

Yet, if environmentalists themselves are unwilling to give up anything for global warming, how can they expect sacrifices from others? If Al Gore wants to do something, he should first move out of his 6,000 square-foot Nashville mansion and then make a movie titled: “Damn the salmon.”

The post Dam the Salmon appeared first on Reason Foundation.

The island chain of Hawaii is poised on the leading edge of the development of the legal and technical frameworks necessary for open-ocean cage fishfarming. One offshore farm is up and running, and another has all the permits and licenses and is just waiting for the final rounds of financing. As these operations and other potential operators mature and grow, and with the right legal and regulatory reforms, Hawaii has the potential to lead the nation in quality offshore oceanic fish cultivation. This could be a tremendous boon to both Hawaii’s economy and its general entrepreneurial climate.

Yet many obstacles remain. Despite studies that show no measurable impact to the environment of the aquaculture already in operation, misplaced fears based on other situations and technologies coupled with a stifling, extended bureaucratic process that allows individuals to contest the permit process with or without reasonable cause hampers Hawaii’s chance to develop offshore fishfarming and expand its shrunken economy. This report explores case studies of fishfarming in Hawaii and how the state could reap economic benefits while guarding local waters against environmental impact. With a streamlining of its bureaucracy, Hawaii could soon lead the nation in offshore oceanic fish cultivation, spelling success for its citizens as well as take pressure off of wild stocks of depleted fish populations. It would also powerfully demonstrate how human ingenuity, properly channeled through free enterprise, could sustainably feed people and maintain, or even enhance, a healthy environment.

The post Catching the Aquaculture Wave appeared first on Reason Foundation.

Marine reserves offer great promise, but they are incomplete without changing the nature of fisheries management.

In New Zealand, the creation of harvest rights to fish so self-interest lines up with conservation and the future health of fisheries resulted in something anathema to most fisheries in the United States: fishermen agreeing to catch less than they were allotted by the government.

From communal village tenure over coral reefs in the South Pacific to the offshore fisheries of New Zealand, owners of fishing rights or territories press for and enforce their own conservation measures, including marine reserves and multi-species management.

Marine reserves can only be as effective as the respect given to their boundaries, and as long as we manage fisheries to encourage rapacious behavior, fughettaboutit.

Michael De Alessi is director of natural resource policy at Reason Foundation

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The 16-member U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy just released a nearly 500-hundred page preliminary report, 2 1/2 years in the making, which is supposed to nurse our oceans back to health. Unfortunately, apart from making a timely acknowledgement of the environmental, commercial and recreational importance of the oceans, the report leaves much to be desired.

Instead of applying a comprehensive framework to oceans policy, the commission focuses on creating more administrative offices such as the National Ocean Council and Presidential Council of Advisers on Ocean Policy. Think Department of Homeland Security for our oceans. We’re on orange alert, or is it yellow today? As most taxpayers, especially fresh off tax day will attest, bureaucracy does not equal “coordination,” no matter how high it reaches or how small the minutiae it addresses.

In addition to layers and layers of added bureaucracy, the report recommends increasing federal research dollars and security for shipping and oil and gas activities (hardly surprising proposals considering the commission consists primarily of academics, federal agency representatives, and the oil and gas industry – all groups that would benefit).

At all levels, the heart of the problem is what is referred to in environmental circles as the “tragedy of the commons” – resources are depleted or damaged because they are free for the taking, whether fish, clean water or habitat.

The commission still doesn’t seem to realize that more regulation and more government agencies won’t beat man’s ingenuity and the tragedy of commons. Consider Alaska: the state thought its halibut stock was being overfished, so it slashed the halibut fishing season from almost 10 months to just 72 hours. The result? There was no significant decrease in the number of halibut caught because fishermen and companies packed 10 months worth of fishing into three days.

The key to rehabilitating and sustaining our oceans is stewardship and property rights. The Alaskan halibut fishery is now a success story, not because of new regulations, but because it is one of the few fisheries in the United States managed on a property rights model. Fishermen have Individual Fishing Quotas, which allocate the right to catch a specific percentage of the scientifically determined total allowable catch. The quotas give fishermen both the incentive and the means to care more about the health of our seas. Fishermen in New Zealand using this system have actually voluntarily reduced their catch levels because they know the long-term health of the oceans is in their best interests.

Traditional societies in the Pacific Northwest and the Hawaiian Islands used these concepts to protect marine resources. Native Americans often had complex arrangements within and between tribes to allow salmon to move up and downstream in order to maintain the spawning runs and ensure a future supply of fish. Native Hawaiians recognized triangular strips of property running from mountaintop out to sea and respected the boundaries. According to a Hawaii Sea Grant study, this system was set up “to sustain the pattern of Hawaiian life,” and included strict limits on harvests of “species, types, sizes and portions of fish.”

In the eyes of the commission, property rights are valuable tools for solving specific problems, but not as an overall framework for oceans policy. This is a mistake. Of course there is more to managing ocean resources than fishing, but the fishery dynamic applies to every facet of oceans management. After all, most Americans are far more concerned with the price and quality the fish at their local supermarket or the health of their favorite fishing holes than they are about deep-sea topography or federal agency hierarchies.

The health of our oceans deserves bold, forward-thinking policies that have proven highly successful across the world, not another government agency promising more research.

Michael De Alessi is director of natural resource policy at Reason Foundation

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For decades, U.S. federal fisheries policy has relied on direct regulations to prevent overfishing. Such an approach has not eliminated overfishing, nor has it prevented the enormous waste and hazards of fishing under a destructive race for fish. The good news is that there is a better way to manage our ocean fisheries. Individual fishing quotas (IFQs), also called individual transferable quotas (ITQs), have proven effective in restoring health and sanity in a host of fisheries around the globe.

In spite of these successes, there are a number of obstacles to IFQ implementation. To begin to address these, PERC, Reason Foundation, and Environmental Defense held a luncheon briefing on Capitol Hill on November 12, 2003, for federal policy makers and their staffs. The briefing, titled “Overcoming Hurdles to Implementing Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs) in U.S. Fisheries,” was well-attended and opening remarks were made by Congressman Wayne Gilchrist (R-MD), who plans to introduce legislation re-authorizing the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Management Act. Mr. Gilchrist assured everyone in attendance that fishery management legislation needs to be “as reasonable, as pragmatic as possible,” and needless to say, more effective than in the past.

The following discussion, based on the November 12 briefing, describes the problems in U.S. fisheries, the potential role of IFQs, and the three most contentious issues surrounding their implementation. These are the questions of whether a two-tiered system that includes both IFQs and individual processor quotas (IPQs) is needed, what restrictions, if any, to place on IFQs, and whether or not to place a sunset provision on IFQs.

Support for the briefing and this booklet is provided by the Alex C. Walker Educational & Charitable Foundation, the Bradley Fund for the Environment, and the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. It is produced by Dianna Rienhart and is available in hard copy from PERC, Reason Foundation, or Environmental Defense or online at www.ifqsforfisheries.org.

The post Overcoming Three Hurdles to IFQs in US Fisheries appeared first on Reason Foundation.

California’s answer to these problems was supposed to come in the form of 1999’s Marine Life Protection Act, which would create a system of marine reserves where fishing would be prohibited. But the massive deficit means the state does not have the funds needed to make the marine reserves a reality – at least not now.

While environmental groups lambasted California’s recent decision to suspend the reserves program, this fiscal crisis actually gives the state an opportunity to move towards a more effective long-term solution that stresses the cooperation of traditional foes – fisherman, both commercial and recreational, and environmental advocates.

California’s Marine Life legislation takes an unimaginative, typically unsuccessful approach to protecting marine resources; it assumes that fishing and fishermen are the problem, and attempts to either bar them from large areas or to change their behavior through command and control regulations and restrictions instead of cooperative efforts. In other parts of the world, however, where the rights to harvest fish are more secure, it is the fishermen themselves who press for conservation measures and who often even create their own marine reserves.

Marine reserves certainly offer great promise as one piece of California’s marine management puzzle. Numerous studies have shown that at least within the boundaries of marine reserves, marine life is more plentiful and diverse.

Jim Bohnsack, one of the leading marine reserve scientists at the National Marine Fisheries Service, has described reserves as “civilizing the oceans” by “putting fences in the oceans.” And he’s definitely on to something – good fences do make good neighbors. But the picture is incomplete and California’s solution misdirected as long as it remains unclear who has the right to fish, and where.

The greatest threat to the oceans is what is referred to as the “the tragedy of the commons,” when the race goes to the swift fisherman, all commercial fishermen have little choice but to deplete the seas because any fish they leave behind will simply be caught be someone else, rather than left to grow and reproduce for another year.

Marine reserves don’t solve this key part of the crisis; they simply force fishermen to relocate. And the problem is frequently compounded by state or federal regulations that attempt to restrict fishing, but fail to address the reasons fish are over-harvested in the first place.

Other states and countries have successfully tackled this dilemma by creating tradable fishing rights. These tradable rights establish who has the right to catch fish, and how much they can catch (normally a percentage of an annual, scientifically determined, total catch).

In New Zealand , rights to fish are the equivalent of certifiable property rights. Their system has spawned the growth of innovative quota-owning management groups that invest heavily in fisheries science and enhancement. The management groups also tend to fish conservatively, leaving fish to repopulate the seas, because they recognize healthy oceans are a valuable asset.

The cooperative effort in New Zealand is in stark contrast to environmental efforts here.

In California, one species of rockfish, the bocaccio, may be a candidate for endangered species listing. When officials in California began a state-wide closure of the bocaccio fishery, fishermen were outraged. In a Los Angeles Times article about the fishery closures last summer, one Central California fisherman declared that “There’s plenty of fish out there – The problem is, there’s even more regulators.” When the system of fishing rights was created in New Zealand, on the other hand, fishermen immediately criticized the government for actually setting some catch limits too high.

Marine reserves are only as effective as the respect given to their boundaries. The more financial hardships commercial fishermen endure, however, the more likely they are to skirt regulations, including restrictions on where they can and can’t fish. The current system encourages cheating by making it difficult for fishermen to make a living. Healthy fisheries would also mean lower enforcement costs for the state, as fishermen will become more self-enforcing as they become more profitable.

Once the boundaries of marine reserves and fishing areas are well established, ocean advocates of all stripes are far more likely to act like good neighbors instead of fighting over the scraps. And seafood lovers around the state might finally see an increase in the supply of such delectable local fish as snapper, rockfish, Petrale sole, starry flounder, and sand dabs.

Michael De Alessi is director of natural resource policy at Reason Foundation

The post California’s Fishy Fish Laws appeared first on Reason Foundation.

This will hurt not only Alaska and West Coast crabbers who ply the waters of Alaska but other fishermen as well. All along the West Coast, fishermen who go after bottom fish such as Dover sole and sablefish are in desperate need of IFQs to bring back their fisheries – but not at the daunting price of a very limited market to sell their fish. Yet this is what the powerful senator is offering crabbers – and it could set a chilling precedent.

Stevens has offered his deal to crabbers as a rider to the omnibus appropriations bill that Congress must approve by Jan. 31. It comes when Alaska’s crab fisheries and many other fisheries are in dire straits. Traditional approaches to managing U.S. fisheries – shortened seasons, restrictions on vessels and gear, and closed areas – have not stopped the buildup of excess capacity and overfishing in at least a third of commercially fished stocks in U.S. waters. And they often result in a dangerous race for fish, as Alaska crabbers can attest.

IFQs stop the race for fish by assigning individual fishermen specific shares of the total allowable catch set each season by managers. With IFQs each fisherman knows his or her allotted catch, so there is no need to race other fishermen for a share. In addition, managers can extend seasons beyond the four- to six-day openings common in Alaska crab fisheries since they know that the overall catch is capped by limits on individual catches.

An illustration of the effectiveness of IFQs is Alaska’s halibut fishery. In the early 1990s, halibut fishermen were limited to fishing during just three 24-hour fishing openings a year. Not only did profits fall and most of the catch have to be frozen, but halibut fishermen had to fish in bad weather, resulting in loss of life. When IFQs were adopted in 1995, fishery managers extended the season to 245 days. Fishing became more profitable and safer.

Indeed, studies of fisheries in New Zealand, Iceland, Australia and Canada show that those with IFQs register higher profits, better stock management, less bycatch, improved safety and greater cooperation with government officials than traditional regulatory regimes.

Unfortunately, only four federal fisheries in the United States use IFQs today. The last time the Magnuson-Stevens Act (the nation’s over-arching fishery legislation) was reauthorized, a temporary moratorium was imposed on new IFQs. The moratorium has expired, but politics have prevented more IFQs.

This situation is especially unfortunate for Alaska crab fishermen, who participate in one of the world’s most dangerous fisheries. Short seasons increase the danger by limiting options for fishermen in deciding when to fish. But IFQs will allow managers to extend seasons so crab fishermen can fish during safer weather.

For Stevens, there is another issue – how to compensate processors who invested in plant capacity to meet the needs of short fishing seasons. If IFQs are implemented and seasons extended, some processors will have lots of excess capacity (like extra freezer space) and less control over prices because fishermen will be able to choose when to fish. The rider would allow crab fishermen to have IFQs, but they will have to deliver 90 percent of their catch to a handful of processors.

This rider has drawn protests. The Justice Department argues that it is anti-competitive and would not stand up to antitrust law. And Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, have criticized Stevens for attaching a precedent-setting policy issue to an appropriations bill.

Surely, better options – like a stranded capital buyout program or simply including processors in the allocation of IFQs – exist for compensating processors who were steered by flawed government policy to invest in redundant capacity. Let’s save IFQs.

Donald R. Leal is a senior associate of the Property and Environment Research Center

Michael De Alessi is director of natural resource policy at Reason Foundation

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The California Appeals Court recently declared the commission unconstitutional due to its exposure to political influence. As a cosmetic fix to the court’s decision, Gov. Gray Davis signed a hurried bill creating four-year fixed terms for legislative appointees to the commission.

That isn’t a solution. Lawsuits will continue and more importantly, the commission is still in desperate need of a complete overhaul.

A 1987 U.S. Supreme Court ruling against the Coastal Commission described its demands for land in exchange for permits as an out-and-out plan of extortion. In 1992, former Commissioner Mark Nathanson was convicted for soliciting bribes in exchange for coastal building permits. And just last October, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Gov. Davis’ re-election campaign received $8.3 million from donors with business before the Coastal Commission, most of whom got their permits approved shortly thereafter.

The latest case against the commission arises over a marine environmentalist group’s plan to create kelp beds on the sandy ocean bottom using durable, recycled materials. Rodolphe Streichenberger, a French researcher, developed the plan with the help of the late Wheeler North, a CalTech marine biologist who specialized in replenishing depleted kelp forests.

Kelp forests are havens of biodiversity, great for countless species and a huge benefit to the overall health of our oceans. They are also in serious decline, according to the California Department of Fish and Game, especially in Southern California.

Recognizing the vast environmental benefits of kelp forests, Newport Beach officials approved the Marine Forest reef project and the site was leased from the Department of Fish and Game. Despite Newport’s enthusiasm, the Coastal Commission deemed the reef unpermitted development, and refused to issue a retroactive permit. Detractors claimed it was simply an excuse for ocean dumping but the marine life is there for all to see (although by mandate there is now no maintenance of the reef), and a simple dumping plan would hardly merit the designs of a Cal-Tech biologist.

As with everything it does, the commission’s problem with the Marine Forest project has more to do with jurisdiction and procedure than environmental effects. There are scientific, ecological questions that need to be asked, such as how reefs affect species composition, how durable the reefs are, and how they affect water quality, but these questions need to be asked in a less politically charged environment.

Peter Douglas, the Coastal Commission’s most prominent employee, recently wrote, “The coast is never finally saved. It is always being saved.”

He is right, but only because conservation and politics remain inextricably intertwined. The Nature Conservancy learned this long ago, which is why it originally turned to private conservation and respect for property rights to improve environmental quality.

Other states such as Alabama have experimented with privately built artificial reefs, and as a result, Alabama has seen a dramatic increase in offshore productivity. The Coastal Commission, on the other hand, has squashed any private innovators that have come its way.

The first target of the newly created commission in the early 1970s was the Sea Ranch, a visionary private development in northern Sonoma complete with its own set of even by today’s standards onerous building restrictions aimed at environmental sensitivity. By the time the commission was through with them, however, they could no longer afford those covenants and their vision was compromised.

If Gov. Davis and the Legislature are serious about improving the Coastal Commission, all appointments should be made by the governor and be subject to review by the Legislature. Performance measures, such as coastal acreage developed and marine pollutants reduced, should be adopted so that the commission’s mission is clear, and its predilection for granting favors to the well-connected limited.

Above all, entrepreneurs should be encouraged rather than discouraged from finding innovative solutions to environmental problems. With a restructured Coastal Commission, the state would reap the numerous benefits of a patchwork of biodiversity kelp forests and other environmentally sensitive developments that would actually improve the current condition of our coast.

Michael De Alessi is director of natural resource policy at Reason Foundation

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