TT's Lost in Tokyo — by TokyoTom

Daniel P. Aldrich is an up-and-coming political scientist who got interested in disaster recovery when New Orleans was hit by Hurricane Katrina a few months after he had moved there with his family.

He has also spent quite a bit of time living and studying in Japan; I ran across him recently in connection with my reading and blogging on post-earthquake, post-tsunami and post-Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster Japan; he’s mentioned prominently in the NYT article excerpted in my preceding post.

According to his bio at Purdue University, Aldrich:

received his Ph.D. and M.A. in political science from Harvard University, an M.A. from the University of California at Berkeley, and his B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Daniel has focused on the ways in which state agencies interact with contentious civil society over the siting of controversial facilities such as nuclear power plants, airports, and dams. His current research investigates how neighborhoods and communities recover from disasters. He has published a number of peer-reviewed articles along with research for general audiences. His research has been funded by grants from the Abe Foundation, IIE Fulbright Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Reischauer Institute at Harvard University, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, and Harvard’s Center for European Studies. He has been a visiting scholar at the Japanese Ministry of Finance, the Institute for Social Science at Tokyo University, Harvard University, the Tata Institute for Social Science in Mumbai, the Institut d’etudes politiques de Paris (Sciences Po), and the East West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii. He has spent more than three years conducting fieldwork in Japan, India and France.

His research and writing on disasters and resilience is very interesting and speaks to the importance of strong communities of the type that governments and their corprate agents frequently do their best to seek to erode. Here is his own description and set of links to that work:

Externalities of Strong Social Capital: Post Tsunami Recovery in Southeast Asia forthcoming in Journal of Civil Society

Much research has implied that social capital functions as an unqualified “public good,” enhancing governance, economic performance, and quality of life (Coleman 1988; Cohen and Arato 1992; Putnam 1993; Cohen and Rogers 1995). Scholars of disaster (Nakagawa and Shaw 2004; Adger et al. 2005; Dynes 2005; Tatsuki 2008) have extended this concept to posit that social capital provides nonexcludable benefits to whole communities after major crises. Using qualitative methods to analyze data from villages in Tamil Nadu, India following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, this paper demonstrates that high levels of social capital simultaneously provided strong benefits and equally strong negative externalities, especially to those already on the periphery of society. In these villages, high levels of social capital reduced barriers to collective action for members of the uur panchayats (hamlet councils) and parish councils, speeding up their recovery and connecting them to aid organizations, but at the same time reinforced obstacles to recovery for women, Dalits, migrants, and Muslims. These localized findings have important implications for academic studies of social capital and policy formation for future disasters and recovery schemes.

Social Science Perspectives on Disasters in Perspectives on Politics

In this extended review, I discuss three recent books on disaster: Governing after Crisis: The Politics of Investigation, Accountability, and Learning edited by Arjen Boin, Allan McConnell, and Paul ‘T Hart, Learning from Catastrophes: Strategies for Reaction and Response , edited by Howard Kunreuther and Micheel Useem, and The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters by Charles Perrow. All three books invoke the market and state as core forces at work in mitigation and disaster recovery, overlooking the critical role of social capital.

Separate and Unequal: Post-Tsunami Aid Distribution in Southern India published in Social Science Quarterly

Objective. Disasters are a regular occurrence throughout the world. Whether all eligible victims of a catastrophe receive similar amounts of aid from governments and donors following a crisis remains an open question. Methods. I use data on 62 similarly damaged inland fishing villages in five districts of southeastern India following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami to measure the causal influence of caste, location, wealth, and bridging social capital on the receipt of aid. Using two-limit tobit and negative binomial models, I investigate the factors that influence the time spent in refugee camps, receipt of an initial aid packet, and receipt of 4,000 rupees. Results. Caste, family status, and wealth proved to be powerful predictors of beneficiaries and nonbeneficiaries during the aid process. Conclusion. While many scholars and practitioners envision aid distribution as primarily a technocratic process, this research shows that discrimination and financial resources strongly affect the flow of disaster aid.

The Power of People: Social Capital’s Role in Recovery from the 1995 Kobe Earthquake forthcoming in Natural Hazards

Despite the regularity of disasters, social science has only begun to generate replicable knowledge about the factors which facilitate post-crisis recovery. Building on the broad variation in recovery rates within disaster-affected cities, I investigate the ability of Kobe’s nine wards to repopulate after the 1995 Kobe earthquake in Japan. This article uses case studies of neighborhoods in Kobe alongside new time-series, cross-sectional data set to test five variables thought to influence recovery along with the relatively untested factor of social capital. Controlling for damage, population density, economic conditions, inequality and other variables thought important in past research, social capital proves to be the strongest and most robust predictor of population recovery after catastrophe. This has important implications both for public policies focused on reconstruction and for social science more generally.

Fixing Recovery: Social Capital in Post-Crisis Resilience in The Journal of Homeland Security June 2010

Disasters remain among the most critical events which impact residents and their neighborhoods; they have killed far more individuals than high salience issues such as terrorism. Unfortunately, disaster recovery programs run by the United States and foreign governments have not been updated to reflect a new understanding of the essential nature of social capital and networks. I call for a re-orientation of disaster preparedness and recovery programs at all levels away from the standard fixes focused on physical infrastructure towards ones targeting social infrastructure. The reservoirs of social capital and the trust (or lack thereof) between citizens in disaster-affected communities can help us understand why some neighborhoods in cities like Kobe, Japan, Tamil Nadu, India, and New Orleans, Louisiana displayed resilience while others stagnated. Social capital – the engine for recovery – can be deepened both through local initiatives and interventions from foreign agencies.

Aldrich Presentation on 25 March 2010 BUILDING RESILIENCE conference

Despite the clear and present danger from disasters, social scientists have yet to provide strong, quantitative evidence about which factors influence the pace of recovery. Using data from four megadisasters over the 20th and 21st century – the 1923 Tokyo earthquake, the 1995 Kobe earthquake, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and the 2005 Hurricane Katrina – Aldrich argues that social infrastructure is the critical factor in recovery.

The Crucial Role of Civil Society in Disaster Recovery and Japan’s Preparedness for Emergencies in Japan aktuell 3/28

This article is concerned with the empirical puzzle of why certain neighborhoods and localities recover more quickly than others following disasters. It illuminates four mainstream theories of rehabilitation and resilience, and then investigates a neglected factor, namely the role of social networks and civil society. Initial analyses underscore the important role of trust and connectivity among local residents in the process of rebuilding. After examining the role of civil society in Japan’s preparedness for emergencies, the article concludes with some policy recommendations for governments and nongovernmental actors involved in disaster relief.

This paper, entitled the The Need for Comparative Research, was prepared for a conference at the Jamsetji Tata Centre for Disaster Management in February 2008, and sets out some initial ideas which have motivated this project.

Some of Aldrich’s newspaper articles are linked here.

I expect I’ll be commenting further on his work.

We can see the same phenomenon in extractive economies wherever governments own the resources, but locals own the risks – as in the Gulf of Mexico/BP (as I noted in a number of posts) accident, Nigeria, Ecuador/Texaco, etc.

We can also see this more generally with crony, corporation-based capitalism.

Japan’s version is more complicated and seductive: the locals get paid off – at the expense of electric power ratepayers who are subject to a government-supported monopoly – in a way that encourages them to abandon their own livelihoods and further dependent on handouts.

Below are excerpts from a May 31  article at the New York Times:  In Japan, a Culture That Promotes Nuclear Dependency

Excerpts:

When the Shimane nuclear plant was first proposed here more than 40 years ago, this rural port town put up such fierce resistance that the plant’s would-be operator, Chugoku Electric, almost scrapped the project. Angry fishermen vowed to defend areas where they had fished and harvested seaweed for generations.

Two decades later, when Chugoku Electric was considering whether to expand the plant with a third reactor, Kashima once again swung into action: this time, to rally in favor. Prodded by the local fishing cooperative, the town assembly voted 15 to 2 to make a public appeal for construction of the $4 billion reactor. …

As Kashima’s story suggests, Tokyo has been able to essentially buy the support, or at least the silent acquiescence, of communities by showering them with generous subsidies, payouts and jobs. In 2009 alone, Tokyo gave $1.15 billion for public works projects to communities that have electric plants, according to the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. Experts say the majority of that money goes to communities near nuclear plants.

And that is just the tip of the iceberg, experts say, as the communities also receive a host of subsidies, property and income tax revenues, compensation to individuals and even “anonymous” donations to local treasuries that are widely believed to come from plant operators. …

In a process that critics have likened to drug addiction, the flow of easy money and higher-paying jobs quickly replaces the communities’ original economic basis, usually farming or fishing.

Nor did planners offer alternatives to public works projects like nuclear plants. Keeping the spending spigots open became the only way to maintain newly elevated living standards.

… Towns become enmeshed in the same circle — which includes politicians, bureaucrats, judges and nuclear industry executives — that has relentlessly promoted the expansion of nuclear power over safety concerns. …

“This structure of dependency makes it impossible for communities to speak out against the plants or nuclear power,” said Shuji Shimizu, a professor of public finance at Fukushima University.  …

Much of this flow of cash was the product of the Three Power Source Development Laws, a sophisticated system of government subsidies created in 1974 by Kakuei Tanaka, the powerful prime minister who shaped Japan’s nuclear power landscape and used big public works projects to build postwar Japan’s most formidable political machine.

The law required all Japanese power consumers to pay, as part of their utility bills, a tax that was funneled to communities with nuclear plants. …

Political experts say the subsidies encourage not only acceptance of a plant but also, over time, its expansion. That is because subsidies are designed to peak soon after a plant or reactor becomes operational, and then decline.

“In many cases, what you’ll see is that a town that was depopulating and had very little tax base gets a tremendous insurge of money,” said Daniel P. Aldrich, a political scientist at Purdue University who has studied the laws.

As the subsidies continue to decline over the lifetime of a reactor, communities come under pressure to accept the construction of new ones, Mr. Aldrich said. “The local community gets used to the spending they got for the first reactor — and the second, third, fourth, and fifth reactors help them keep up,” he added.

Critics point to the case of Futaba, the town that includes Fukushima Daiichi’s No. 5 and No. 6 reactors, which began operating in 1978 and 1979, respectively.

According to Professor Shimizu of Fukushima University, Fukushima Daiichi and the nearby Fukushima Daini plants directly or indirectly employed some 11,000 people in communities that include Futaba — or about one person in every two households. Since 1974, communities in Fukushima Prefecture have received about $3.3 billion in subsidies for its electrical plants, most of it for the two nuclear power facilities, Mr. Shimizu said.

Despite these huge subsidies, most given in the 1970s, Futaba recently began to experience budget problems. As they did in Kashima, the subsidies dwindled along with other revenues related to the nuclear plant, including property taxes. By 2007, Futaba was one of the most fiscally troubled towns in Japan and nearly went bankrupt. Town officials blamed the upkeep costs of the public facilities built in the early days of flush subsidies and poor management stemming from the belief that the subsidies would remain generous.

Eisaku Sato, who served as the governor of Fukushima Prefecture from 1988 to 2006 and became a critic of the nuclear industry, said that 30 years after its first reactor started operating, the town of Futaba could no longer pay its mayor’s salary.

“With a nuclear reactor, in one generation, or about 30 years, it’s possible that you’ll become a community that won’t be able to survive,” Mr. Sato said.

Futaba’s solution to its fiscal crisis was to ask the government and Tokyo Electric, Fukushima Daiichi’s operator, to build two new reactors, which would have eventually increased the number of reactors at Fukushima Daiichi to eight. The request immediately earned Futaba new subsidies.

“Putting aside whether ‘drugs’ is the right expression,” Mr. Sato said, “if you take them one time, you’ll definitely want to take them again.”

Eiji Nakamura, the failed candidate for mayor of Kashima, said the town came to rely on the constant flow of subsidies for political as well as economic reasons. He said the prefectural and town leaders used the jobs and money from public works to secure the support of key voting blocs like the construction industry and the fishing cooperative, to which about a third of the town’s working population belongs.

“They call it a nuclear power plant, but it should actually be called a political power plant,” Mr. Nakamura joked.

I tried to leave a few thoughts with Jefrey Tucker in response to his June 2 post, Scrupulosity and the Condemnation of Every Existing Business, but it looks like my immoderate use of links has landed me in moderation, again.

So, here are my comments, which I have confidence Jeffrey will soon personally let through (I fixed a typo and added a link):

Sorry, Jeffrey, but weren’t YOU exemplifying the same “moral scrupulosity” you now protest when you and others somehow found a way a couple of weeks ago to fault efforts by those who love fish to use markets to put water back into overdrawn Western rivers and streams (by finding ways to connect buyers of water with those with absolute homesteaded water rights)?

Further, it seems to me that there are good explanations for the rise of the “moral scrupulosity” that you can’t seems to get around to puzzling out — could it be that there’s a massive rise in corporate statism, or at least in the feeling that corporate statism is out of control? And of the sense that now is an important time for libertarians to point out such statism and to suggest ways to roll it back?

You suggest that our new shibboleth ought to be to “ask ‘do you love commerce?’ to ferret out real defenders of real markets as versus those who just enjoy standing in moral judgement (sic) over the whole world as it really exists.” Besides that being itself a very neat trick of standing in moral judgment of others, I would suggest a different question: do you love corporations? Those state-created entities that institutionalize moral hazard via an absentee shareholder class that was ab initio absolved of residual responsibility for the acts of the the legal fiction they own, and whose CEOs and executives operate without responsibility to any owners?

We have a serious and growing rot at the core of capitalism, easily visible in TEPCO, BP, the entire banking/securities/rating sector, Enron, the auto industry, Big Ag, Big Pharma, you name it. But for you, the real problem is a lack of cheerleaders for our rotten free markets!

Kind regards, your friendly enviro-fascist,

TT

PS: A few recent and relevant posts:

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2011/05/12/immodest-thoughts-to-fix-capitalism-we-must-get-govt-out-of-corporate-risk-management-rent-selling-business-and-get-shareholders-to-stop-playing-39-victim-39-amp-start-paying-attention-to-risks.aspx

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2011/05/12/clear-sighted-myopia-a-fossil-fuel-funded-robert-bradley-quotes-ayn-rand-on-energy-but-ignores-that-the-industry-itself-undermines-market-morals.aspx

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2011/04/05/yes-the-economist-was-right-in-1999-that-industrial-capitalism-was-built-on-limited-liability-but-were-the-resulting-statism-bubbles-and-risk-shifting-really-necessary.aspx

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2011/04/05/do-contributions-by-corporations-to-39-progress-39-mean-we-ignore-sick-dynamics-set-in-motion-by-limited-liability.aspx

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2011/05/07/if-we-just-ignore-bp-and-government-39-s-ownership-of-oil-coal-and-other-natural-resources-we-can-see-clearly-that-enviros-just-want-to-destroy-civilization.aspx

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=%22moral+hazard%22

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2010/08/18/mises-on-bp-and-conocophillips.aspx

Rob Bradley has up a post at the fossil-fuel cheering “free-market” Master Resource energy blog on April 25 that shows Ayn Rand’s familiarity with the mis-regulation of the energy industry. The post itself is fairly apt, except that while it paints the energy producers as victims of erratic government regulations it ignores those whose health and property were damaged by the energy industry and gives little play to the role of major firms in pushing for and benefitting from regulation.

But the chief point I wish to make is that Bradley’s post ends with a quote from Rand that is intended to criticize government but actually resonates because of the statism and poor decision-making of the major industry players themselves: (emphasis added)

There is no “natural” or geological crisis; there is an enormous political one. It is in the nature of a mixed economy that its policies are rationally inexplicable, that there are no identifiable causes, no accountable initiators, no ascertainable villains — and that you are losing your jobs, giving up your automobiles, catching pneumonia in unheated bedrooms, not because some giant evildoers are plotting your destruction, but because some seedy hack wanted an unearned salary, and some crummy professor wanted an undeserved prestige, and some measly shyster wanted a chance to fish in muddy laws, and none of them cared to or could watch the state of the country’s economy, and the sum of such termite aspirations has eaten through the pillars of the structure so that one kick from a sheik was sufficient to make it crumble.

Hundreds of thousands of people’s livelihoods and thousands of businesses have been disrupted along the Gulf Coast and nearby TEPCO’s Fukushima nuclear power plants, and millions of power consumers in and around Tokyo have been and will be affected for several years, not because of “giant evildoers”, but because major energy firms –  protected by government from full liability and with weak shareholder classes – are themselves highly bureaucratized with no clear locus of responsibility, with executives who look out for their own  interests but have no personal responsibility or liability for the damages resulting from lightly considered but materialized risks.

As I noted in March, F.A. Hayek (in an essay that Jeffrey Tucker has since kindly tracked down and made available generally) noted that:

Where previously perhaps only the aristocracy and its servants were strangers to the rules of the market, the growth of large organisations in business, commerce, finance, and ultimately in government, increased the number of people who grew up without being taught the morals of the market which had been developed in the course of the preceding 2,000 years.  …

People are losing faith in the market because large energy firms themselves are partially insulated from the market and as a consequence are not fully subject to its “taut discipline” – and, as a result, are making decisions that are highly damaging.

One can rightly protest that such firms are creatures of government and have been cosseted by government, so that government is responsible for skewed decision-making. But pointing this does not address the problem posed by institutionalized moral hazard.

Only reforms that restore responsibility and market discipline will do that. Such reforms should include not simply increasing competition and ending government ownership of resources and oversight of corporate risk-managment, but finding ways to ensure that there are real principals who are incentivized to hold corporate agents accountable. Otherwise, pervasive moral hazard and risk-shifting will persist.

I discussed Callahan and Richman at some length previously.

Since I hope they are right, I bring you some comments I recently ran across:

1. Peter H. Gleick, A Cost of Denying Climate Change: Accelerating Climate Disruptions, Death, and Destruction, Huffington Post, April 28, 2011. Gleick is a Water and climate scientist; President of the Pacific Institute, and a MacArthur Fellow.

While I agree with much of what he says, I would note that his headline is off – given the thermal inertia of the oceans, the warming and climate change phenomena were are experiencing now are largely a result of CO2 emissions and other radiative forcings decades ago, and not a consequence of inaction over the last decade. Those consequences will be felt, but LATER. (I post his piece in its entirety, with his permission; emphasis added.)

Violent tornadoes throughout the southeastern U.S. must be a front-page reminder that no matter how successful climate deniers are in confusing the public or delaying action on climate change in Congress or globally, the science is clear: Our climate is worsening.

More extreme and violent climate is a direct consequence of human-caused climate change (whether or not we can determine if these particular tornado outbreaks were caused or worsened by climate change). There is a reason it isn’t called global warming anymore. Higher temperatures are only one — and not the most worrisome — of the consequences of a changing climate.

Climate science tells us unambiguously that we are changing the climate and trapping more energy on the planet. Trapping more energy will cause more extreme events and worsen extreme events that would otherwise happen.

In the climate community, we call this “loading the dice.” Rolling loaded dice weighted toward more extreme and energetic weather means more death and destruction. And it is only going to get worse and worse, faster and faster, the longer our politicians dither and delay and deny. Climate deniers who have stymied action in Congress and confused the public — like the tobacco industry did before them — need to be held accountable for their systematic misrepresentation of the science, their misuse and falsification of data, and their trickery.

The conservative (and economically driven) insurance industry understands the reality of data and observations: Munich Re (one of the world’s leading reinsurers) has said:

“The only plausible explanation for the rise in weather-related catastrophes is climate change. The view that weather extremes are more frequent and intense due to global warming coincides with the current state of scientific knowledge.”

The extreme nature of the ongoing severe weather is well described by Jeff Masters on his Weather Blog. The 3-day total of preliminary tornado reports from this week’s outbreak is nearing 300, close to the 323 preliminary tornado reports logged during the massive April 14 – 16 tornado outbreak. That outbreak has 155 confirmed tornadoes so far, making it the largest April tornado outbreak on record.

Of course, tornado outbreaks have occurred before. In 1974 and 1965, collections of tornados killed hundreds of people. But according to NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center, it is unprecedented to have two such massive tornado outbreaks occur so close together. Loading the dice. At least 11 of these tornadoes were killer tornadoes; deaths occurred in six states. (Wikipedia maintains an excellent and growing compilation of historical tornado outbreaks for those interested, and raw data can be obtained from NOAA.) Only two other tornado outbreaks have had as many as 150 twisters — the May 2004 outbreak (385), and the May 2003 outbreak (401).

And it is not just the devastating tornadoes: parts of the Mississippi River are about to experience record flooding. As spring rain joins with winter snowmelt, a massive pulse of floodwater is moving south. As it joins with the record water levels coming out of the Ohio River it is expected to create the highest flood heights ever recorded on the Mississippi, according to the latest forecasts from the National Weather Service.

Yet while we call this a “1-in-a-100 year” flood event, that term is losing its meaning. The August 1993 flood event was a “1-in-a-500 year” event. Yet in June 2008 there was another such event. Now, three years later, we see another massive flood on the Mississippi, and record floods elsewhere. Loading the dice. As FEMA’s director, Craig Fugate, noted in December, “The term ‘100-year event’ really lost its meaning this year.” And that was last year.

The science community knows that we’re affecting the climate; in turn, that will affect the weather; and that, in turn, will affect humans: with death, injury, and destruction. There is a cost to tackling climate change, but there is a real, growing, and far larger cost of continuing to deny it.

2.  Lou Grinzo has an edgier reaction to Peter Gelick at his blog, also on April 28. Grinzo is Writer and editor of the blog, The Cost of Energy, 2004-present. He was a software programmer, designer, tester, IBM, 1980-1989; is a programmer, writer, editor, and consultant, 1989-present. In addition, he is author of Zen of Windows 95 Programming, Columnist and Contributing Editor, Windows Magazine, Columnist, features author, and Reviews Editor, Linux Magazine and Editor, LinuxProgramming.com.

I don’t agree entirely with Grinzo, as I think much proposed climate policy has been counterproductive, inefficient and/or unprincipled. But I can sympathize with where he’s coming from, even as I think that his anger is more productive channelled into different approaches – such as at freeing energy markets specifically or reining in corporate statism arising from the grant of limited liaibility more generally.

Peter, whom I know somewhat from an e-mail group we both belong to, is far too decent a person to put the ragged and rusty edge on this issue that it deserves. Not being so burdened by politeness, I’ll do it.

Did you enjoy what happened yesterday in the US South, when blissful reality was shredded by the brute force physics of our atmosphere and hundreds of people died horrible deaths, many hundreds more were injured, and millions were terrified because they just happened to live too close this climatic ground zero? Did you like watching houses and businesses and possessions being ground into so many tons of rubble? Did you?

No, of course you didn’t enjoy it, because it was a sickening nightmare from which none of us could awake. What reasonable human being could have liked it? That unremarkable observation leads inexorably and directly to one question: If you’re not fighting as hard as you can to keep such situations — and hurricanes and crushing heat waves and floods and droughts and inundated coasts thanks to sea level rise — from happening much more often and with much more devastating effects in the coming decades, then you’re failing miserably as a responsible adult and member of society. You’re nothing more than the equivalent of an underage drunk driver who endangers everyone around him because he’s too selfish to stop doing what he wants in order to serve his own best interests as well as those of others around him.

You’re telling the world that rather than do your part you want to keep flying to vacation spots, keep driving your much larger than needed/less fuel efficient vehicle, keep running your home electronics for many hours a week when no one is even using them, keep refusing to change your bloody light bulbs because you claim you “don’t like the light from those new ones”, etc. The timing is different, the individual acts are different, but the lack of maturity, the toxic mix of ignorance and arrogance, and the utter insanity of such destructive behavior are the same.

So make sure the next time there’s a heat wave in Russia that kills tens of thousands of people, or a devastating flood in Pakistan, or tornadoes or hurricanes ripping up parts of the US or some other unlucky spot, or another country violently slips closer to or into being a failed state and suddenly becomes newsworthy, that you switch your immense screen TV from the latest reality show or NASCAR event for a few moments to watch the highlights on the news. It’s the least you could do.

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.

A little birdy Tweet by the Ayn Rand Center for Corporate Individual Rights told me that the ARCs Voices for Rent-Seekers Reason blog is “Gearing up for Earth Day”, so of course I had to go take a look.

Here’s some of what I found:

As Earth Day (April 22) approaches, the Ayn Rand Center wants to help you understand the destructive campaign environmentalists have pursued for decades against energy production.

… [It is] clear that environmentalists are not so concerned about carbon emissions—they fight against every form of practical, cheap energy regardless of whether it emits CO2 (like fossil fuels) or not (like nuclear and hydro).

As ARC fellow Dr. Keith Lockitch explains …

the basic moral premise at the root of environmentalism is the premise that nature is something to be left alone—to be preserved untouched by human activity.

… This moral animus against human “intrusion” upon nature creates a basic conflict between the goals of the environmentalist movement and the needs of human life.

The blog post ends with a promise that (emphasis added)

on Earth Day, which is on Friday, April 22, we will be hosting a live Q&A session from our headquarters in Irvine, CA, where resident fellows Keith Lockitch and Alex Epstein will answer any questions you have about Earth Day, environmentalism, the recent nuclear scare in Japan, and related issues.

Besides some inaugural encounters at Mises Daily and the Mises Blog with Objectivist Dr. George Reisman,  readers might like to note that I previously commented on some of Keith Lockitch’s work relating to aid and development.

It certainly should not surprise my regular readers for me to note that I find the gist of the ARC post to be largely irrelevant, and productive only in the sense of offering a self-deceptive defense of a profoundly corrupted and statist ‘free market’.  Citizens of all stripes have every right to want to fight with others over:

• how valuable government-owned resources (public lands, lakes and waters and marine resources) will be used or protected (as no private transactions to otherwise express preferences are possible);
• levels of air, land and water pollution that governments will license companies to emit (rather than enforcing rights to prevent trespassing by others to person and property);
• what energy sources that ‘the government-licensed and -regulated companies we call ‘pubilc utiities’ will invest in (at guaranteed rates) and what conservation measures they will embark on (as preferences can not be expressed via free transactions in competitive markets) – including nuclear power; and
• what risks to the public at large (and what political activities) we wiill allow those massive and politically powerful risk-shifting and commons-privatizing machines we call corporations.

While I strive for an optimism that self-described principled libertarians will aim for a constructive engagement with people who are understandly dissatisfied with a system profoundly skewed by government, sometime my cynicism gets the better of me.

I already regret the following note that I sent via the comment form to the ARC bloggers, but hey, who knows?

Sadly, it looks like far from a ‘principled’ examination of the very negative roles that government plays in the destruction of resources and the other environmental and human rights issues that concern environmentalists, ARC wants to attack motives.

Examine the role of govenment owership of resources in destruction of the Gulf of Mexico, in overfishing and in fostering political battles for control of use of ‘public lands’? Doesn’t seem ARC is interested.

Examine the role of government in licensing polluting coal plants, stripping govt-owned lands for coal, owning TVA and others which have large fly-ash pollution, and licensing mountain-top remval practices that destroy the rivers shared by others? Will ARC sympathize and point to government refusal to protect private property (thus leading to political battles over regulations), or simply bash enviros?

Will ARC examine the negative role of government in granting monopolies to utility companies, thereby leading to wasteful pricing and lack of choice -as well as costly crony capitalism in the case of nuclear power, which gets rate guarantees and liability waivers?

Will ARC examine the role played by government in creating corporations in the first place, in a form that embeds moral hazard and exacerbates ‘agency problems’, by legislatively telling shareholders they have no liability for the damages the legal fiction they own might cause to others? Will  ARC even notice how abuses arising from the corporate form have given rise to the modern, corrupt regulatory state?

I’m on pins and needles, just waiting to see how principled and productive ARC is going to be!

By the way, I had some comments for Keith a couple of years ago: Not #Climate Change Welfare, But Capitalism and Free Markets? A few thoughts: TT’s Lost in Tokyo http://bit.ly/h60o8O #tcot #p2

I AM hoping for productive comments that address the role of government (and of the commons-destroying corporations they’ve created) rather than the motives of those nasty ‘capitalism’-hating enviros.

Sincerely,

TT
—
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“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.”
Richard Feynman

This link plays a visualization of the size, location and depth of the quakes that we have been feeling in Japan.

Since March 11. the day of The Big One, we’ve had a phenomenal 850 quakes (as of March 30, Japan time), virtually all of 4.5 magnitude and greater (roughly half between 4.5 and 5.0, and half 5.0 and LARGER)!

http://www.japanquakemap.com/

The parameters can be adjusted so you can speed up or it slow down, and adjust the period of time and the magnitude of earthquakes shown:

You can zoom into the map with your cursor; the greatest tsunami hit all of the Tohoku coast, with horrific damage from monstrous tsunamis (three waves) funnelled into the narrow bays containing old fishing towns and once rich with abalone, scallop and seaweed farms. University researchers have discovered that in one port the incoming waves were as high as 30 meters or 97 FEET high!  (That’s up to the middle of the top floor of a 10-story building.) http://www3.nhk.or.jp/daily/english/30_03.html.

The damaged TEPCO nuclear reactors are along the Fukushima coast south of Sendai and north of Mito – and the physical damage and difficulties there are of course compounded by the ongoing quakes.

The link at the top of the page takes you to a “Daily Energy Release chart”, which show that the number of quakes has tailed off – though we are still getting around 15 quakes a day – with the strongest daily quake being about 6.0.

It is feared that 30,000 people lost their lives in these towns, which have been almost completely destroyed.

An official “sonification” of the first two days of quakes is below:

[View:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PJxUPvz9Oo:550:0]

[Apologies for the weird font sizes – guess I’m too old to figure out the html stuff that creeps in when I cut and paste!]

I wanted to post a few additional and somewhat scattered thoughts I have had relating to the 1986 essay of Hayek that I recently stumbled across, “The Moral Imperative of the Market”.

What morals do we end up with as “market morals” are eroded?  In larger communities, the morals of a cynical or self-deluded selfishness and self-justification, accompanied by growing tribalism, insularity, suspicion, hostility, avarice, prejudice, jingoism and intolerance.

As the market breaks down, so also do market dynamics of broad exchange and sophisticated institutions, and things become each man for himself, finding friend and families to hunker down with, a hardening towards and less concern for others – who indeed may be viewed as either a threat or as fair game.

IOW, it’s the same load of aggressive, selfish and narrowly tribal stuff that once was ESSENTIAL to bands of humans when when we lived in a state of Nature and life was brutish and short, and that I’ve been giving other members of this and other communities grief over ever since I was marooned on these fertile but once hostile shores:

Cooperation comes naturally to man – among those we feel we can trust – but within limits, as so too does suspicion come naturally as to “others” who look like they might pose a threat. In building extended markets, we are always struggling with our predilection to form “Bands of Brothers”. In doing this work, we are always making use of our sophisticated yet at times quite reflexive native endowment.

As I noted a couple years back (you know, in ancient times when Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize) in a comment to libertarian science correspondent Ron Bailey at Reason Online:

you forget what evolutionary psychology, Ostrom and Yandle have explained to us so well about how our innate moral sense drives and underpins mankind’s success as a species by enhancing our ability to cooperate and to overcome commons issues.
Ostrom: http://conservationcommons.org/media/document/docu-wyycyz.pdf
Yandle: http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=4064

Our long history of developed rules and institutions (informal and formal now overlapping) are based on our moral sense and the effectiveness of these rules depends critically on our moral investment in accepting their legitimacy – witness our views on murder, theft, lying and “not playing by the rules” – and in voluntarily complying with them.

Our moral sense reinforces our judgments about when rules/institutions are not working and the need to develop new ones in response to changing circumstances and new problems.  When we see a problem that we think requires change, it is unavoidable that we respond to the status quo, the behavior of people within it and the need for change with a moral sense. 

This is simply a part of our evolutionary endowment.  (Of course, other parts of our endowment accentuate our suspicions of smooth talkers and help us catch free riders and looters and to guard against threats from outsiders.)

Let all of us here at LvMI (and any strangers!) please be aware of our predilections, while we continue with the hard work of building strong, vibrant and open free societies.

I know, comrades, that you’re all dying for links to some of my relevant posts, which I certainly won’t begrudge to you :

Snicker-snack! We hold these truths to be self-evident: That WE’re right, and THEY are stoopid, deluded, evil AND cunning, out to destroy all that is good and holy

Bill Gates, Roger Pielke, Avatar & the Climate (of distrust); or, Can we move from a tribal questioning of motives to win-win policies?

I Can’t Stand Cant, Or, LeBron James and our Collectivist Scorn of “Collectivists”

Nick Kristof on politics: why we conclude that I’m right, and you’re evil (with a handy-dandy listing of a number of earlier fun posts!)

And a clip of a comment I made to Stephan Kinsella a little while back:

Austrians seem to act as if the love of reason requires a surrender of it in favor of the comforting distraction of a self-satisfied echo chamber of a type that would warm the cockles of any like-minded religious “alarmist” cult.

Mind Games: Bret Stephens of The Wall Street Journal panders to “skeptics” by abjuring science and declaring himself an expert on “mass neurosis”

I alerted readers in January to a blog post on libertarianism and the environment by Dr. Judith Curry, who heads the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and is known for her work on hurricanes, Arctic ice dynamics and other climate-related topics.

Scientific American  noted last October, in “Climate Heretic: Judith Curry Turns on Her Colleagues; Why can’t we have a civil conversation about climate?“, that:

over the past year or so she has become better known for something that annoys, even infuriates, many of her scientific colleagues. Curry has been engaging actively with the climate change skeptic community, largely by participating on outsider blogs such as Climate Audit, the Air Vent and the Black­board. Along the way, she has come to question how climatologists react to those who question the science, no matter how well established it is. Although many of the skeptics recycle critiques that have long since been disproved, others, she believes, bring up valid points—and by lumping the good with the bad, climate researchers not only miss out on a chance to improve their science, they come across to the public as haughty. “Yes, there’s a lot of crankology out there,” Curry says. “But not all of it is. If only 1 percent of it or 10 percent of what the skeptics say is right, that is time well spent because we have just been too encumbered by groupthink.”

While I recommend that interested readers review the whole thread, I copy below my comments and some related:

TokyoTom | January 7, 2011 at 2:52 am | Reply

Judith, a climate scientist friend kindly gave me gave me a head’s up to your post.

I have been blogging and commenting for quite some time on environmental and climate issues from a libertarian perspective, and have also spent considerable time on trying both to help libertarians engage productively on environmental issues and to help leftist-environmentalists understand where libertarians are coming from.

Sadly, it’s largely a messy tale, reflecting how fights over government policy tend toward zero-sum games that blunt cooperation, the success that fossil fuel and other corporate interests have had in gaming the system, and how our tribal human nature leads many to abandon critical thinking in favor of choosing and reflexively defending sides and positions.

I have been highly critical of many libertarians in perpetuating unproductive discord, and have been the resident environmentalist pain-in-the-neck at the Ludwig von Mises Institute (for libertarian economics), which kindly hosts my blog. In particular, even while try to build bridges I have been critical of the Cato Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Heartland Institute and MasterResource, which I view as being skewed by donations toward corporate agendas. There are of course some highly productive libertarians working on environmental and conservation matters; Terry Anderson and others at PERC (Properrty and Environment Research Center) have led the way on fisheries, water and other issues. (And then there are quasi-libertarians like Elinor Ostrom.)

Since you’ve expressed interest, allow me to load you up with a few links, to my exchanges with others such as John Quiggin, to my cajoling and castigating of libertarians, and to some of my views on climate/environment issues :

“Towards a productive libertarian approach on climate, energy and environmental issues ” http://bit.ly/ab3xJB

“John Quiggin plays Pin-the-tail-on-the-Donkey with “Libertarians and delusionism” ” http://bit.ly/8Zv5Y6

“A few more comments to John Quiggin on climate, libertarian principles and the enclosure of the commons ” http://bit.ly/eXaTKI

“A few more “delusional” thoughts to John Quiggin on partisan perceptions & libertarian opposition to collective action”http://bit.ly/f0FQ6K

“To John Quiggin: Reassuring climate “delusions” help us all to avoid engaging with “enemies” in exploring common ground ”http://bit.ly/eIFr4e

“The Cliff Notes version of my stilted enviro-fascist view of corporations and government ” http://bit.ly/9oBkC7

The Road Not Taken II: Austrians strive for a self-comforting irrelevancy on climate change, the greatest commons problem / rent-seeking game of our age http://bit.ly/14n6G0

For climate fever, take two open-air atom bombs & call me in the morning; “serious” libertarian suggestions from Kinsella & Reisman!?http://bit.ly/f2bRUr

Thanks, Dr. Reisman; or, How I Learned to Hate Enviros and Love Tantrums http://bit.ly/h4BI0B

“Escape from Reason: are Austrians conservatives, or neocons, on the environment? ” http://bit.ly/cJhov2

“The Road Not Taken V: Libertarian hatred of misanthropic “watermelons” and the productive love of aloof ad-homs”http://bit.ly/cqFlzh

OMG – those ecofascists hate statist corps, too, and even want to – GASP – end that oh-so-libertarian state grant of limited liability!http://bit.ly/gjJFnv

“Who are the misanthropes – “Malthusians” or those who hate them? Rob Bradley and others resist good faith engagement despite obvious institutional failures/absence of property rights ”http://bit.ly/hbONhd

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

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=bradley
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=manzi
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=michaels
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=lewis
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=horner
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=penn
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=bailey

On non-climate issues:

“Too Many or Too Few People? Does the market provide an answer? ” http://bit.ly/8zlecI
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=BP+oil
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=Avatar

Sincerely,

Tom

• curryja | January 7, 2011 at 7:32 am | Reply

  Tokyo Tom, thanks much for your input. your post originally went to moderation owing to the large number of links.

  • TokyoTom | January 7, 2011 at 10:15 am | Reply

    Dr. Curry, thanks for your indulgence on this; given the time differences (bedtime now!) and my schedule tomorrow, I thought throwing out a few links might be useful (though I may be mistaken!!).

    Tom

  • TokyoTom | January 7, 2011 at 10:24 am | Reply

    If I can add one further thought before I head off to bed, it would be that a key prerequisite (as Ostrom points out) for tackling commons issues like climate change that involves many players and countries is the need for TRUST, an element that is sadly lacking (a resource that libertarian analysis indicates is destroyed by squabbles over government) .

    Bill Gates, Roger Pielke, Avatar & the Climate (of distrust); or, Can we move from a tribal questioning of motives to win-win policies? http://bit.ly/912Xkj

    On climate, myopic progressives console themselves by pointing out fossil $ behind science “skeptics”; but miss the same from left and ignore middle ground http://bit.ly/arSX5G

    ‘Night.

    Tom

• Vaughan Pratt | January 8, 2011 at 6:04 am | Reply

  TokyoTom, take care that your fellow libertarians don’t label you a LINO: “Libertarian In Name Only.”

  Libertarians have a reputation for objecting to anyone messing with their access to fossil fuel . If you’re messing with it, the label “libertarian” may be working against you.

  Anyone undertaking to change the spots of the libertarian leopard may be biting off more than they can chew.

• gryposaurus | January 8, 2011 at 12:42 pm | Reply

  Tom, thanks for the links to your blog. It’s interesting to see Libertarians that are publicized outside of the corporate funded Beltway groups that have hijacked the movement. I’d love to point to you and think that there is still something useful with Libertarian thought, but you seem to have been relegated to a minority within a minority. Good luck and here’s hoping your message gets through to your fellows.

  • TokyoTom | January 8, 2011 at 8:27 pm | Reply

    Grypo and Vaughan:

    Let me note that though I don’t include myself among them, there are ‘left-libertarians’ and ‘anarcho-libertarians’ who are consistently quite critical of corporate statism and pro-environment (though they haven’t been too outspoken on climate.

    See, for example:

    http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2010/06/16/a-bp-reader-statist-corporations-quot-the-environment-quot-and-the-tragedy-of-the-government-owned-managed-commons.aspx

    http://aaeblog.com/2010/06/08/roundup-on-bp/comment-page-1/#comment-356997

    http://c4ss.org/content/2446

    On climate, I have linked to various sympathetic libertarian comments at “”Towards a productive libertarian approach on climate, energy and environmental issues ” http://bit.ly/ab3xJB

    Ron Bailey, science writer at Reason Online, is also worthy of mention:http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=bailey

    TT