Current estimates of the social and environmental costs of the automobile ignore the benefits and tax revenues generated, while demanding higher taxes and fees from auto users. However, auto users are already overpaying their way.
Inflated estimates of the external costs imposed on society by autos range from $60 billion to $700 billion, but they include such hypothetical costs as those from global warming and ozone depletion. However, in terms of known costs and benefits, the automobile comes out ahead.
Eighty-seven percent of American households depend on the automobile for most of their mobility, and there is little evidence that the remaining 13 percent of households would enjoy any benefits as a result of overpricing personal transportation.
Source: Kenneth Green, "Defending Automobility: A Critical Examination of the Environmental and Social Costs of Auto Use," Policy Study No. 198, December 1995, Reason Foundation, 3415 S. Supulveda Boulevard, Suite 400, Los Angeles, CA 90034, (310) 391-2245.
Some Latin American officials are holding American environmental groups and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) responsible for the recent cholera epidemic that has killed 10,000 people in Peru and 12 other South American nations.
It seems that the countries bought in to the EPA's campaign to reduce the chlorination of drinking water, even though chlorine is the most effective killer of bacteria -- including strains that cause cholera.
This campaign has had limited effect in the U.S. so far. But Peru bought the rhetoric wholesale and greatly reduced the chlorine pumped into its water supply.
This set the stage for the horrible epidemic. Pan American Health Organization officials suspect that a Chinese freighter released its cholera-contaminated bilge water into the harbor at Lima. The bacteria made its way into open wells that hadn't been chlorinated at all and into other fresh water supplies in which chlorine levels had fallen too low to kill the germ.
Nevertheless, the EPA has proposed requiring US water systems to eliminate the process known as pre-disinfection as a means of controlling "disinfection byproducts." According to some officials, the added cost might force small water systems to turn to less effective treatments and abandon chlorination completely.
Source: Michael Fumento (Reason magazine), "The EPA vs. Safe Water," Investor's Business Daily, February 6, 1996.
By almost any measure, private companies outperform governmental entities when it comes to cleaning up the environment, according to many policy experts.
The environment has gotten cleaner over the past quarter century, with most of the gains made in the private sector. But further progress will be more costly, with hard-to-find benefits. Critics suggest that government now address the pollution problems it has created.
Here are some examples of the progress that has been made against air pollution:
With regard to water pollution:
Considering these advancements, experts now believe future progress depends upon government getting its own environmental act together.
The cleanup program known as Superfund is commonly considered the federal government's most egregious failure:
Source: Daniel J. Murphy, "Cleaning Up After Government," Investor's Business Daily, February 7, 1996.
The primary mission of the Science and Environmental Policy Project is to study how Federal environmental policies use or misuse science, then expose the most egregious examples of environmental malfeasance.
For 1995, there were so many examples of misuse -- including Superfund, asbestos, Alar, acid rain -- that the organization decided to concentrate on just five to demonstrate distortion or misuse of science in policy-making.
Source: S. Fred singer (The Science and Environmental Policy Project), "Anthology of 1995's Environmental Myths," Washington Times, February 11, 1996.
Some environmentalists are calling for further increases in Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards for cars -- to 45 miles per gallon. This, at a time when evidence is mounting that federal mandates which forced American auto manufacturers to produce smaller, lighter cars has led to increased traffic injuries and fatalities.
Source: Joel Bucher (Citizens for a Sound Economy Foundation), "Smaller, More Fuel Efficient But Deadlier Cars," Washington Times, February 13, 1996.
The federal government currently owns 47 percent of the land in the 11 westernmost of the lower 48 states. Much of this land in under the control of the Bureau of Land Management, and a recent study by a former Interior Department official suggests these lands should be turned over to the states.
Political opposition to such land transfers could be overcome, the study's author suggests, by giving ranchers holding grazing permits a property right in their permits, block-granting funds now spent on the BLM to the states (to be phased out over a number of years) and requiring the states to continue conforming to federal environmental regulations.
Source: Robert H. Nelson, "How and Why to Transfer BLM Lands to the States," January 1996, Competitive Enterprise Institute, 1001 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Suite 1250, Washington, DC 20036, (202) 331-1010.
In a recent address to the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, Vice President Al Gore warned that carbon emissions are damaging the atmosphere and only tighter controls on industry can save the planet. He took his evidence from a series of articles published earlier this year which suggested that global warming could help incubate and spread killer germs. (One study found infection listed as the fatal factor 58 percent more frequently in 1992 than 1980.) In other words, heat up the air, and infectious diseases will be on the rise.
However, most scientists believe the global warming crowd is simply practicing bad science.
It would seem, therefore, that AIDS and longer life spans are brought about by global warming, a concept for which there are conflicting data. Indeed, if the government wants to save lives, it ought to consider reforming its own Food and Drug Administration.
Source: Tony Snow, "Global Warming Plague Looming? Wrong," USA Today, February 19, 1996. [Tony Snow is a Senior Fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas, Texas.]
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is considering imposing a new air quality standard requiring lower levels of ozone measured over a longer time. A stricter standard would increase the cost of complying with the Clean Air Act, but the health benefits, if any, are unknown.
However, the Clean Air Act prohibits policymakers from considering economic costs versus benefits when setting air quality standards. Instead, the act requires that the standards for ground-level ozone ensure an "adequate margin of safety" against "any adverse health effects," regardless of cost or whether the ozone is natural or manmade.
The number of days that cities are in violation of the current ozone standard has declined over the last decade by 57 percent. But under the proposed standard of 0.08 ppm measured over eight hours, the EPA estimates 67 additional cities would be defined as having dirty air and one-third would record 10 or more violations of the standard each year.
The EPA reports 71 areas (excluding California) currently fail to meet the standard. However, their figures include data from 1988, an unusually hot summer. If the EPA used 1991-93 data, only 28 of those areas would have failed to achieve the standard.
Source: Kenneth Chilton and Christopher Boerner, "Smog in America: The High Cost of Hysteria," Policy Study No. 128, January 1996, Center for the Study of American Business, Washington University, Campus Box 1208, One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO 63130, (314) 935-5630.
While the federal government is spending billions on expensive dredging, biological and filtration techniques to remove radioactive and other toxic metals from soil and water, a small New Jersey company is combating the problem with -- sunflowers.
In a report presented at a scientific meeting yesterday, the president of Phytotech, Inc. said it used special strains of sunflowers it developed to remove as much as 95 percent of some of the most toxic contaminants in 24 hours.
Among his other revelations:
The process is based on a technology called phytoremediation and has been tested near Chernobyl. There, Phytotech scientists grew the plants on a styrofoam raft at one end of a contaminated pond. They reported that in 12 days, the roots had cesium in concentrations 8,000 times that in the water, and strontium in concentrations 2,000 times that of the water.
Source: Amil Kumar Naj, "Sunflowers Bloom in Tests to Remove Radioactive Metals From Soil, Water," Wall Street Journal, February 29, 1996.