BCA on the EPA

The House Republicans plan to cut more than $3 billion dollars from EPA funding (about one third of their budget) would have a major impact on the agency's plans to reduce carbon emissions and limit water pollution. EPA administrator Lisa Jackson said that, “Big polluters would flout legal restrictions on dumping contaminants into the air, into rivers, and onto the ground, […] There would be no EPA grant money to fix or replace broken water treatment systems. And the standards that EPA is set to establish for harmful air pollutants from smokestacks and tailpipes would remain missing." Without the regulations to control pollution and money to fix these plants, people are at a greater risk to contaminated drinking water. Many Republicans feel that the EPA regulations go to far and make it very difficult for people to make a living. However, the regulations are in place to help protect people. The cost-benefit of enacting the 1990 Clean Air Act would be about $2 trillion by 2020 but it would save about 230,000 lives. So I guess the question is: Is the cut to the EPA’s budget worth it to save that money if there is a greater risk to public health? I personally do not think it is. I realize that the country is in a great deal of debt, but citizens lives should not be put in greater danger in order to save some money.
--Sara Poe

Big Action Down Under

In addition to implementing a carbon tax, Australia is proposing a law that would force cigarettes to be packaged in plain boxes. About 75% of the new boxes would be covered with graphic warnings about the effects of smoking, leaving much less space for trademarks and such. Unsurprisingly, the tobacco industry intends to sue.

Nearly 100 years ago US law established a doctrine of "clear and present danger" to describe the situations in which the right to free speech might be abrogated. My best reading of Wikipedia tells me that in 1969 the standard was changed to ban only incitements to "imminent lawless action." Obviously Australian legal proceedings will proceed from a different background, but the question is intriguing: if tobacco consumption is legal but expensive to the state, can governments limit advertising?

Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap

Business Week seems to have forgotten the second half of the title of the iconic AC/DC song in this long but interesting article on the changing face of the American work force. The new heavy-handed restrictions on immigrants in Alabama have a variety of problems, but one of them is that the Alabama economy still relies to a large extent on cheap labor. They aren't the only ones- agriculture and aquaculture operations all over the US, including crab pickers on the Eastern Shore of our home state- will take advantage of the availability of Latin American workers who are able to come north to work for low wages as "guest workers" doing jobs the natives don't want.

I confess that I stopped reading the article when they started talking to a sociologist about the stigma associated with doing dirty job, and how once a job goes to immigrants it doesn't go back. No doubt I'm blinded by my training as an economist, but the issue here isn't that the job is "dirty," whether by association with dirt itself or by a despised group of people. The issue is that the jobs don't pay enough for people to put up with the physical punishment associated with doing the job. Americans do some nasty, nasty jobs, and they do them because they pay. The aquaculturist in the article complains that he "can't pay people $13 an hour" because of overseas competition.

I hate to be cold-hearted, but if you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen. Find a niche, dude- try raising your catfish on organic meal and then charge a premium price when you sell them. Then maybe you could afford to pay your workers a decent wage, and you wouldn't have to go try to convince people to come work for you out of the goodness of their hearts. (The employer hasn't bothered to learn the language of his workers, but that's another story.) Try switching to shrimp, which is also a product with heavy international competition, but one that still goes for a good price.

I can't say I like the means by which this end was achieved: the racially-tinged regulations make me sick to my stomach. But if it brings an end to the economy of serfdom, that would be a lotus flower: a beautiful thing rooted in muck.

Menhaden Restrictions... for real!

The headline has it as, "Menhaden harvest limit sharply cut," but is 5% really a "sharp" cut? I'd call it more of a trim, but I'm not that up on the science behind this one. Anyway, people seem pretty happy about this, so I guess I'll take it for what it's worth. Hopefully this will mean more, healthier stripers and osprey up and down the coast, and maybe even less algae clogging up the Bay, creating fewer dead zones. It could also cost some Virginians their jobs, if Omega Protein needs fewer employees. Time will tell.

Sharing the costs

In 1995 and 1996, conservationists' lawsuits to bring back wolves in the Yellowstone Park area (in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming) succeeded: wolves were reintroduced after having been poisoned and trapped almost out of existence. The species thrived, paring back excessive growth in elk and coyote populations, but also paring back growth in nearby ranchers' herds. Today, ranchers contend that, "People who want it here should share the costs" and are in some cases taking money from conservation groups to pay for measures like electric fences and mounted riders. However, such measures are often inadequate, and other times, ranchers have taken conservationists' money and put it to other uses, such as hiring helicopter-riding wolf hunters.

A complicated problem with no easy solution; at least sharing the costs seems like a good way to start.

Menhaden Restrictions Again Considered

Nice story in the Sun over the weekend on some restrictions being suggested for menhaden. Everyone who has studied the subject is in favor of restricting catches, except for basically one group: industry. Shocker, I know. Actually, Omega Protein continues to surprise me. That one firm harvests 80% of the menhaden catch, and they don't have any competitors, so you'd think that they would be interested in maximizing their long-term return by getting the population to a level that would allow them to have a large, sustained catch. Instead, they seem determined to drive themselves out of business by sucking up all the fish as quickly as possible. The only way this approach makes sense is if they're strategically competing against someone else- say, environmentalists- and they sense that their true best outcome will be achieved in a balance when they are inevitably forced to compromise. If they can pull that off, then they get the best of both worlds! I just don't know why they have to get to their optimal outcome that way- why not just accept reality (i.e. the work of these scientists) and go to that best place sooner?

Fracking Water in Niagara Falls

With New York State looking into potentially allowing hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, as a means of obtaining natural gas, Niagara Falls is attempting to position itself as a town on the cutting edge of this new industry. Fracking involves pushing millions of gallons of water deep into the bed rock where there is shale. This water fractures the shale, allowing the natural gas that is trapped underneath to exit via the well. The water that was used comes out extremely salty and laced with poisonous elements including barium, strontium, and radium. This water needs to meet EPA standards, which are currently being reworked, before it can be sent to municipal water treatment plants to be released back into regular water supplies. Niagara Falls has a water treatment plant, which was originally designed for the area’s chemical industry, that can handle the waste water, and clean it to where it meets EPA standards. Since the chemical industry has pulled out of Niagara Falls, the plant has been operating at a fraction of what it can handle, prompting the plant owner and local government to look into the economic possibility of using the plant as a site to clean fracking water.

Currently Niagara Falls is a city of only 50,000 residents, which has been, and is continuing to decline. Also, the current per capita income of the city is only $19,000 compared to the rest of New York's average of $30,000 income. These factors have led to a push for the use of Niagara Falls’s plant. Opponents point to the Love Canal incident of the 1970s, when the Hooker Chemicals and Plastics Corp. dumped waste chemicals into the abandoned Love Canal. These chemicals were found seeping into backyards and basements throughout Niagara Falls. The situation got so bad that President Jimmy Carter declared the area a federal emergency in 1978, and the Superfund Cleanup Act was passed in 1980. This recent environmental disaster is the reason why many are uneasy about bringing in more potentially dangerous waste products.

The problem in Niagara Falls is an interesting one. On one side we have a city that was once a popular destination for honeymoons and family vacations declining at a staggering rate. And on the other side, we have the potential for another environmental disaster that could rock a town already struck by one in recent memory. Personally, I too have mixed feelings about it for the same reasons that are listed above; however, I do believe that the situation is much safer now than it was with the Hooker Corp. The EPA has already begun legislation to prevent toxic waste water from re-entering the water supply. The major downfall of this proposal that I see is the current condition of the Niagara Falls plant. It does not say how new the plant is and how much, if any, retrofitting the plant will cost. This is the major unknown. If the plant is up to code, or perhaps even above standards, I think that this would be a good idea; though, if the plant needed extensive retrofitting, or if the plant just barely met standards, I would think that the plan should be scrapped.
--Colin Alban