Yesterday, on Feel Sorry for BP Day (we all know that BP is just another victim of fishermen,other purported victims and Government, right?), the WSJ provided coverage of a Coast Guard report blasting Transocean, owner of Deepwater Horizon, a Marshall Islands flagship owner of the rig that blew up and sank last year, leaving an oil will that has greatly affected the Gulf of Mexico and the health and livelihoods of many thousands of people.

Somehow, both the Coast Guard and the WSJ reporters managed to overlook the 800 lb. gorilla in the room: namely, the role of Government as irresponsible resource owner. How convenient!

These days, even supposedly ‘capitalist’ new organizations don’t seem to have any grasp of how profoundly “non-capitalist” is our energy sector, which is heavily tied to government as resource owner and pollution-permit authorizer.

Here’s the link.

Gitchyer climate fun here, at this January 10 post by Anthony Watts at his skeptic climate blog, Watts Up With That: “Abandon all hope, ye who read this”!

Most of the post is a copy of the entire press release concerning an article slated to appear in Nature Geoscience: here is the sub-heading and the initial paragraph:

New paper in Nature Geoscience examines inertia of carbon dioxide emissions

New research indicates the impact of rising CO₂ levels in the Earth’s atmosphere will cause unstoppable effects to the climate for at least the next 1000 years, causing researchers to estimate a collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet by the year 3000, and an eventual rise in the global sea level of at least four metres.

The full article is now available online behind a paywall; the free first paragraph is here.

Wanting to share in the fun that Anthony and his fellow skeptics were having with the press release, I left the following comment (now in [out of] moderation):

January 10, 2011 at 1:17 am

I’ve addressed the poor health of the world’s oceans quite recently, in response to a flip comment  by Lew Rockwell about how the “ecosystem” is likely to “survive and thrive” regardless of environmental and/or political debacles. Further reports of an increasingly serious situation continue to appear.

Further to the information I provided there, I’d like to draw readers’s attention to a recent report in Science and to a recent article in The Economist:

1. Science, June 18, 2010

Here’s the blurb (emphasis added)

The Impact of Climate Change on the World’s Marine Ecosystems

Ove Hoegh-Guldberg^1,* and John F. Bruno^1,2

¹ Ocean and Coasts Program, Global Change Institute, University of Queensland, St. Lucia, QLD 4072, Australia.
² Department of Marine Sciences, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA.

^* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: [email protected]

McClatchy has good coverage (Les Blumenthal, Julky 4, 2010)(emphasis added)

A sobering new report warns that the oceans face a “fundamental and irreversible ecological transformation” not seen in millions of years as greenhouse gases and climate change already have affected temperature, acidity, sea and oxygen levels, the food chain and possibly major currents that could alter global weather.

The report, in Science magazine, brings together dozens of studies that collectively paint a dismal picture of deteriorating ocean health.

“This is further evidence we are well on our way to the next great extinction event,” said Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, the director of the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland in Australia and a co-author of the report.

John Bruno, an associate professor of marine sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the report’s other co-author, isn’t quite as alarmist, but he’s equally concerned.

“We are becoming increasingly certain that the world’s marine ecosystems are reaching tipping points,” Bruno said, adding, “We really have no power or model to foresee” the impact.

The oceans, which cover 71 percent of the Earth’s surface, have played a dominant role in regulating the planet’s climate. However, even as the understanding of what’s happening to terrestrial ecosystems as a result of climate change has grown, studies of marine ecosystems have lagged, the report says. The oceans are acting as a heat sink for rising temperatures and have absorbed about one-third of the carbon dioxide produced by human activities.

Among other things, the report notes:

 

• The average temperature of the upper level of the oceans has increased more than 1 degree Fahrenheit over the past 100 years, and global ocean surface temperatures in January were the second warmest ever recorded for that month.

 

• Though the increase in acidity is slight, it represents a “major departure” from the geochemical conditions that have existed in the oceans for hundred of thousands if not millions of years.

 

• Nutrient-poor “ocean deserts” in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans grew by 15 percent, or roughly 2.5 million square miles, from 1998 to 2006.

 

• Oxygen concentrations have been dropping off the Northwest U.S. coast and the coast of southern Africa, where dead zones are appearing regularly. There is paleontological evidence that declining oxygen levels in the oceans played a major role in at least four or five mass extinctions.

 

• Since the early 1980s, the production of phytoplankton, a crucial creature at the lower end of the food chain, has declined 6 percent, with 70 percent of the decline found in the northern parts of the oceans. Scientists also have found that phytoplankton are becoming smaller.

Volcanic activity and large meteorite strikes in the past have “resulted in hostile conditions that have increased extinction rates and driven ecosystem collapse,” the report says. “There is now overwhelming evidence human activities are driving rapid changes on a scale similar to these past events.

“Many of these changes are already occurring within the world’s oceans with serious consequences likely over the coming years.”

One of the consequences could be a disruption of major ocean currents, particularly those flowing north and south, circulating warm water from the equator to polar regions and cold water from the poles back to the equator. Higher temperatures in polar regions and a decrease in the salinity of surface water due to melting ice sheets could interrupt such circulation, the report says.

The change in currents could further affect such climate phenomena as the El Nino-Southern Oscillation, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the North Atlantic Oscillation. Scientists just now are starting to understand how these phenomena affect global weather patterns.

“Although our comprehension of how this variability will change over the coming decades remains uncertain, the steady increase in heat content in the ocean and atmosphere are likely to have profound influences on the strength, direction and behavior of the world’s major current systems,” the report says.

Kelp forests such as those off the Northwest U.S. coast, along with corals, sea grasses, mangroves and salt marsh grasses, are threatened by the changes the oceans are undergoing, the report says. All of them provide habitat for thousands of species.

The polar bear isn’t the only polar mammal that faces an escalating risk of extinction, the report says; penguin and seal populations also are declining.

“It’s a lot worse than the public thinks,” said Nate Mantua, an associate research professor at the University of Washington’s Climate Impacts Group.

Mantua, who’s read the report, said it was clear what was causing the oceans’ problems: greenhouse gases. “It is not a mystery,” he said.

There’s growing concern about low-oxygen or no-oxygen zones appearing more and more regularly off the Northwest coast, Mantua said. Scientists are studying the California Current along the West Coast to determine whether it could be affected, he added.

Richard Feely, a senior scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, said the report in Science seemed so direct because one of the authors was Australian.

“Australians come at you full-bore and lay it on the line,” Feely said.

Even so, he said, the condition of the oceans is indeed deteriorating.

“The combination of these impacts are tending to show they are additive,” he said. “They combine to make things worse.”

Asked what the oceans will be like in 50 years if trends aren’t reversed, Bruno, the UNC professor, said that all the problems would have accelerated and there’d be new ones. For instance, he said tens of thousands of species found only in the Pacific might migrate across the top of North America as the sea ice melts and enter the Atlantic, where they’ve never been.

Bruno said a 50-year time frame to consider changes in the ocean was way too short, however.

“I am a lot more worried about 200 to 300 years out,” he said

Yes, another BP post!

I was a bit critical in my last post of Ron Bailey’s suggestion that a gross “cost-benefit” analysis was a sufficient basis for supporting risky ocean drilling activities, without regard to the institutional structure (a government-managed commons) and incentives at play (profits accruing only to oil firms and royalties to government, but resource users facing downside risks with no rights to disapprove or exercise oversight).

Now I’m puzzled, because in a June 8 post at Reason Online Ron specifically acknowledges the very important research of Nobel Prizing winning political economist Elinor Ostrom (see my posts on the relevance of her work here) on the ability of communities of users to effectively manage commons resources and so to dodge the “tragedy of the commons” outlined by Garrett Hardin. Ron’s post makes particular note of the possibility of effective cooperative management of fisheries, in contrast to the tragically counterproductive  mismanagement by governments of collapsing fisheries and refers to an excellent study by libertarian law prof Jon Adler that is very relevant to the mismanagement by the federal government of marine resources in the Gulf. Here’s the salient port of Ron’s post (emphasis added):

The good news is that research shows that just talking can make Hardin’s logic of ruin anything but inevitable. In fact, historical research shows that Hardin’s overgrazed meadows are rare. For example, the tragedy of the commons didn’t occur in Medieval England because local herdsmen negotiated a set of rules (communication) and established enforcement mechanisms (punishment) to allocate access to scarce pasturage among themselves.

Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues have repeatedly found the same thing in their field work. All over the world, local people talked among themselves and worked out serviceable rules for protecting and benefiting from common pool resources, like streams, forests, and fisheries. Take the famous case of the harbor gangs among lobster fishers in Maine. Although the state government says that anyone is legally permitted to catch lobsters commercially, the harbor gangs restrict access by outsiders by cutting the buoy lines to the traps set by interlopers. This informal management results in a more sustainable fishery and boosts the incomes of the local fishers. A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last fall found that local communities are much better at managing forest commons than are governments. In contrast to government management, local communal ownership boosted incomes and forest sustainability.

Ostrom previously noted that large studies from “around the world challenge the presumption that governments always do a better job than users in organizing and protecting important resources.” In fact, a 2002 study correctly noted, “The overall state of the world’s fisheries is much worse today than 45 years ago, even though most fisheries have come under government regulation in this period.” By preventing local people from talking among themselves, it is often the case that governments actually create prisoner’s dilemmas over resources that result in the tragedy of the commons.

Here’s to hoping that Ron and other libertarians start recognizing and elucidating  the very negative role that the government has played in the Gulf crisis, by preventing fishermen, oystermen, shrimpers and the like from exercising control over the resources that sustain them, but has instead very tragically favored – and ineptly/corruptly overseen – oil companies, thereby skewing incentives, frustrating management between fishers and oil companies, and setting up directly the presently unfolding tragedy of the commons.

The problem that we see in the Gulf and other offshore drilling is very much akin to the “Avatar”-like problems of mineral exploitation elsewhere around the world: oil or other mineral extraction companies operate without extensive property rights but on the basis of government approvals, with the companies and governments/elites  reaping the rewards, but with non-consenting natives bearing all of the downside risks. Gulf coast fishermen and residents, meet the indigenous peoples of Ecuador, Nigeria, and New Guinea.

Another BP post!

I continue to scratch my head on the knee-jerk reactions by Austrian-libertarians on problems regarding management of common resources: are not our physical and electronic communities commons? Don’t commons support many people directly, and us all indirectly? Aren’t there huge and obvious commons-related problems that stem from government ownership and “management” of resources – be they federal lands, the seas, our fiat currency, or our financial institutions and publicly-listed companies?

Don’t we all know that government gets in the way, frustrating the ability of people with differing preferences to search for and reach mutual accommodations, and instead putting them at loggerheads in zero-sum situations?

The unbecoming reflexive hostility  indicates that even those who think they have their thinking caps on cannot see past the partisan conflict that government itself generates.

But I dither.  Allow me to gather here for interested readers some scraps of information regarding the state of our oceans.

1.  From my initial response to Lew Rockwell‘s “Feel Sorry for BP? ” post:

Lew: “the environmentalists went nuts yet again, using the occasion to flail a private corporation and wail about the plight of the “ecosystem,” which somehow managed to survive and thrive after the Exxon debacle.”

Me: Seems to me your “facts” about the damage done by Exxon Valdez to the “environment” – including the small segments used by by man – and recovery/compensation are basically counterfactual:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Valdez_oil_spill

http://www.alternet.org/environment/22260

Further, it seems you don’t have any real clue as to the escalating damage that man is doing to our shared ocean “commons”. These two TED talks might help open your eyes:

http://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_jackson.html

http://www.ted.com/talks/sylvia_earle_s_ted_prize_wish_to_protect_our_oceans.html

4.  I note that I have already posted extensively on oceans/fisheries management; for interested readers here are links to some of those posts:

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=ocean

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=fisheries

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=whale

5. Finally, one wonders whether, if fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico had clear “catch rights” or similar property rights, and had control over oil gas exploration and development decisions, they would not have done a good deal better in overseeing BP, and whether BP would not have been quite a bit more careful.( Likewise – if BP owned the Gulf, and received revenues from permitting fish harvests!)

Ron Bailey, science correspondent for ReasonOnline, on July 1 noted in a Hit & Run post that “Models Aren`t Always Right“.

I left the following comment, which I copy here since I didn`t see it post:

“Ron, of course models aren`t always right, but;

1. even Lindzen is arguing for net positive feedbacks;

2. even with the apparent recent temperature plateau, the climate system and oceans are very noticeably changing;

3. we know that there is tremendous inertia in the climate system and that our forcings will play out over centuries;

4. we know that the atmosphere and oceans are open-access commons that will require widespread agreement and cooperation to manage effectively; and

5. there are wide mismatches between those whose investments/activities generate climate risks and those who face the greatest risks.

While haste may make waste, none of these points counsels a do-nothing approach.

Running irreversible, planetary-wide experiments is hardly a conservative or libertarian endeavor.”

In the face of these factors and the rapid pace at which atmospheric levels of CO2 and other GHGs continue to grow, it is hardly reassuring that, as physicist Russell Seitz has noted, “variables as critical as the sensitivity of the climate to the doubling
of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have failed to converge on
uncontroversial values”. 

While MIT climate scientist Richard Lindzen may think that climate “sensitivity” (mean temperature response to CO2 doubling) is as low as 0.5 degrees centigrade only a month and a half ago all of his colleagues disagreed with him in a publication trumpeted by MIT:  “New projections, published this month in the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate, indicate a median probability of surface warming of 5.2 degrees Celsius [9 degrees F!] by 2100, with a 90% probability range of 3.5 to 7.4 degrees [6.3 to 13.2 degrees F!]. This can be compared to a median projected increase in the 2003 study of just 2.4 degrees [and the temps reported are averages, with many places warmer].”

Despite an 80% drop in populations of east Atlantic and Mediterranean bluefin tuna since  the mid-1970s, and continued massive overfishing above agreed quotas, the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), under pressure from fishermen in the European Community,  on November 25 approved tightened 2009 fishing quotas that nevertheless exceed the recommendations of ICCAT’s own scientists by 50%.  Quotas were cut from 28,500 tonnes in 2008 to 22,000 tonnes, and the ICCAT also approved other measures designed to bring illegal fishing under control, but it is unclear whether these measures will be sufficient – particularly as illegal fishing in the past has been at multiples of quota levels.  ICCAT scientists had recommended that the quota be cut to 15,000 tonnes.

The EC praised the results, in the face of opposition by the US, Canada and Norway, which had supported the quota recommended by scientists.  Environmental groups of course were disappointed and called for tuna boycotts and suggested that all the member nations to the CITES convention (on trade in endangered species) should consider listing bluefin tuna as an endangered species – which would bring all commercial exploitation to a halt.

I looks like the pressure is on – both on the valuable bluefin tuna resource and on the relevant national governments, fishermen and consumers to better manage it.  The west Atlantic stocks of bluefin have apparently already collapsed, due to mismanagement by the US government.

As I noted on the New York Times’ Dot Earth blog:

Andy, this is an ongoing shame, the roots of which are not human greed but, as indicated by your reference to a “tragedy of the commons”, a lack of any ownership of the resource by those fishing it. The result is wasteful investment by fisherman in a race to catch fish before others do, no incentive for fishermen to invest in managing stocks sustainably, pressure by fisherman on governments for higher quotas, catches that exceed quotas, and government subsidies to keep unprofitable fishermen from losing their livelihoods. If we managed our agriculture the same way, we’d have a race to harvest, but nobody planting. More here: http://mises.org…

The answer clearly lies in finding ways to link the interests of the fishermen more closely to the resource that they rely on; while this is difficult in the case of international fisheries, there have been a number of success stories for fisheries that are managed by various countries. Transferable fishing quotas (and an ability to keep track of catches) have been the key: http://www.ifqsforfisheries.org/.

Given all of the different governments involved it may be difficult to expect agreement tighter and more meaningfully enforced quotas, but a key possibility lies with Japan, which buys most of the bluefin tuna. As the chief purchaser (of course there are a variety of private purchasers involved), Japan is in a position to insist on purchasing only tuna caught by boats that properly record their catches and to unilaterally limit its own purchases to a sustainable level. Since the Japanese do not want to see the tuna fishery collapse, they have finally begun to support tightening quotas and finding other ways to improve management of the tuna stocks: http://www.seafoodsource.com/NST-3-50140600/ICCAT-Discusses-Sharp-Tuna-Quota-Cuts.aspx

Consumer boycotts and pressure on Mediterranean governments to end subsidies to fishermen (a problem George Monbiot has noted [see the Mises link above]) are other leverage points.

Is a semi-privatization of the fishery, by allowing fishermen to transfer the quotas they receive (including purchase by interested consumer and environmental groups), possible?  Can Japanese consumers (and other sushi eaters) in particular bring pressure to bear?

More on the science of the bluefin tuna stocks here and here (the Standing Committee on Research and Statistics).

In the context of the latest fuel strikes by European fishermen, George Monbiot has an excellent piece in the July 8th Guardian that explores the role of governments in subsidizing the destructive “tragedy of the commons” that is ocean fisheries.

It is, however, a shame that Monbiot makes no reference to what many observers are starting to realize:  that the solution to solving over-fishing lies in getting the government out of the business of political management of the resources that fishermen depend on, and putting responsibility, control and incentives to invest in resource management back in the hands of fishermen. 

Although government interference in resource markets has been a resounding failure (witness the destruction of the US salmon fisheries), a light at the end of the tunnel has appeared in the form of privatization through “ITQs” or Individual Transferable Quotas, as noted by:

Ron Bailey, science correspondent of Reason, in “How to Save New England’s Fishing Villages; If only the fishers will allow it” (September 28, 2005) and in”Pick Your Poissons; Economic and ecological diversity for fisheries“(August 25, 2006); and by

Birgir Runolfsson, in Cato’s Regulation, in “Fencing the Oceans A Rights-Based Approach to Privatizing Fisheries” (vol. 20, no. 3, 1997).

Further, Jonathan Adler, law prof at Case Western Reserve University, has a very interesting discussion of how the enforcement of antitrust laws have frustrated cooperative fishery management  (March 2002).

While these materials focus on domestic marine fisheries, similar strategies are needed at regional levels.

I am posting here a brief summary that I just sent to a Mises Blog contributor, in response to an inquiry I received:

Thanks for your email.