The EcoLibertarian

Here’s Maclean’s’s Paul Wells on the federal Green Party’s giving up hope and becoming an anti-Tory party rather than a positive force unto itself.

A bunch of senior federal Greens have quit their party posts; at least one in my neck of the woods, John Ogilvie, is refocusing on the provincial party instead.

Look, you want to be in electoral politics, you have to try to win something from time to time. Looks like the federal Green Party would rather be a lobby group.

I’m not saying anything about it till they actually spit it out.

This is a statement of general principles and the devil is always in the details, but it’s encouraging to see words like these from the Republican Party’s presumptive presidential nominee:

We will cap emissions according to specific goals, measuring progress by reference to past carbon emissions. By the year 2012, we will seek a return to 2005 levels of emission, by 2020, a return to 1990 levels, and so on until we have achieved at least a reduction of sixty percent below 1990 levels by the year 2050. In the course of time, it may be that new ideas and technologies will come along that we can hardly imagine today, allowing all industries to change with a speed that will surprise us. More likely, however, there will be some companies that need extra emissions rights, and they will be able to buy them. The system to meet these targets and timetables will give these companies extra time to adapt — and that is good economic policy. It is also a matter of simple fairness, because the cap-and-trade system will create jobs, improve livelihoods, and strengthen futures across our country.

The goal in all of this is to assure an energy supply that is safe, secure, diverse, and domestic. And in pursuit of these objectives, we cannot afford to take economic growth and job creation for granted. A strong and growing economy is essential to all of our goals, and especially the goal of finding alternatives to carbon-based technology. We want to turn the American economy toward cleaner and safer energy sources. And you can’t achieve that by imposing costs that the American economy cannot sustain.

As part of my cap-and-trade incentives, I will also propose to include the purchase of offsets from those outside the scope of the trading system. This will broaden the array of rewards for reduced emissions, while also lowering the costs of compliance with our new emissions standards. Through the sale of offsets — and with strict standards to assure that reductions are real — our agricultural sector alone can provide as much as forty percent of the overall reductions we will require in greenhouse gas emissions. And in the short term, farmers and ranchers can do it in some of the most cost-effective ways.

Here’s a bizarre story from the Toronto Star, on a union-led effort to get Ontario’s economy retooled for green industries. What’s weird about it is the apparently straight-faced conflation of environmental-friendliness with unionization and government-mandated wage standards.

If it were just reported as a standard organized-labour-wants-better-working-conditions story, it would make sense. But instead it’s headlined as if it were a story about green industry, and instead it’s on and on and on about minimum wages and regulating the marginal-work sections of the economy:

Statistics show parents are working and jobs are available, says the report, noting that Ontario’s unemployment rate was just 6.1 per cent in February. The problem is that stable, well-paying manufacturing jobs that helped build the province’s middle class over the past 30 years are disappearing and being replaced by low-wage service sector, temporary and contract work.

Of Ontario’s 345,000 poor kids, 41 per cent had a parent who was working full-time all year, the report says.

The report uses Statistics Canada’s pre-tax, low-income cut-off as a measure of the minimum salary of a good job. For a family of four in a large city like Toronto a “good-job” salary was $40,259 in 2007. For that same family in a smaller community, it was $34,671.

The average worker who loses a manufacturing job in Ontario experiences a 25 per cent cut in income when he or she finds new work, the report says. For Toronto parent Phuong Le, 48, who lost her $44,000-a-year job assembling light switches in 2005, the drop was even more dramatic. Today she works part time at a big box retailer earning just $14,000 annually.

“I would like to work more hours but all they will give me is part time,” says Le, who didn’t want her real name used for fear of retribution from her employer.

For Le and her husband, both immigrants who have lived and worked in Toronto for 28 and 35 years, respectively, factory work allowed them to raise their son and daughter in a stable middle-class home. But today, as work dwindles at the auto-parts plant where her 51-year-old husband works, Le fears for the future.

“If my husband gets laid off, I don’t know what we’ll do,” she says. “We are too old to retrain and too young to retire. Nobody wants us.”

I mean, yes, it’s a serious problem for Ontario that a combination of the high (oil-driven) Canadian dollar and competition from India and Asia are battering the long-established manufacturing sector. But this is just restating the problem again and again and again.

The truth is, the headline torques the actual report an awful lot for play on the Star’s front page. The report’s about the lousy state of the manufacturing economy: promoting green industry is only a small part of it.

Predictably and unfortunately, by the time we get to the actual recommendations, it’s the same old stuff: spend public dollars on domestic procurement, subsidize, regulate, etc.

Here’s a principle: if your nominally private-sector job depends on a straight cash public-sector handout and shows no signs of stopping, it’s not a good job.

Brutal work schedule this week. Every intention of resuming Monday.

It’s in the comments here.

Duh.

Marc Gunther updates entrepreneur Shai Agassi’s still-quite-plausible plan to bring electric vehicles to the masses:

How does the business work? Essentially, by exploiting what Agassi argues are the cost advantages of electric cars over vehicles powered by gasoline and, yes, you read that right—he says it’s significantly cheaper to operate an electric car than a gas-powered one, particularly with oil priced at more than $110 a barrel. (The economics work with much cheaper oil, too, he says.) The low-cost advantage for electric cars is even greater in Europe, he says, where gas prices are the equivalent of $7 to $9 a gallon.

His claim depends on a lot of assumptions—that a battery with a sufficient range can be produced for $10,000 or less, that he can bring the cost of renewable energy down by committing to buying lots of it, and that the costs of building distributed networks of recharging points and service stations will not spiral out of control.

If he’s right, the cost of powering the electric car will be about 5 cents a mile. As for a gas-powered car, you can do the math, but fuel costs for a car that gets 25 miles to the gallon with gas priced at $3.75 a gallon amount to 15 cents a mile.

Even so, there’s a problem—many people don’t want to pay an extra $10,000 up front for a battery, not knowing how long it will take for them to get their money back in the form of reduced fuel costs. So Agassi isn’t asking for that money up ront. Instead, he intends to sell his customers the cars for much less than they cost, provided that they agree to long-term service plans that will supply them with electricity, battery changes when needed, replacement batteries, etc. He estimates that he could afford to give people a free car if they agree to sign onto a service agreement for six years.

It’s too beautiful a day here to be indoors typing (and indeed I haven’t been — I’ve taken down a fence and painted some of a porch and I’m glad of both — but I’ll raise Tom Axworthy’s piece on Canada’s food policy in the Toronto Star …

We have not had a national policy to help the family farm since Eugene Whelan was minister of agriculture in the 1970s. Ever since, we have had a policy of industrial farming, consolidation, agribusiness and globalization. But this policy rests on the fatal flaw of cheap energy. That era is over. We must return to a policy of local food through the family farm…

With farmers squeezed by low prices and high costs, half of the farm families had one or both partners working off the farm to make ends meet, though farming is more than a full-time job. As a result, farmers are leaving their profession in droves: in 1991 there were 390,000 Canadians in farming but by 2006 there were only 327,000. In 1991, there were 78,000 young farmers taking over from their parents, in 2006 only 30,000. If the trend continues, who will be left to grow the food?

We need a national food policy that relies on the family farm to produce local supplies.

… just long enough to point out the built-in assumption that Canada requires a federal policy on where food comes from. Whatever we decide we want, government must act to get us there.

Note, also, two sleights-of-hand:

1. Only two alternatives are offered: large industrial farms run by corporations, and small locally oriented farms run by families. Supporting a family farm is not necessarily the same as supporting a small farm. Family-run businesses come with all kinds of challenges that public policy is not necessarily well suited to manage.
2. The absurd idea that because fewer people are growing food now than used to, the logical endpoint of this is that someday nobody will grow food, whereupon we all presumably starve.

Same-old-same-old prairie-leftie arguments, cloaked in environmentalism. Bleah.

Now, back outdoors.

I haven’t had very much time for the National Review since it devolved from Republican-oriented conservatism into full-throated Bushism a few years ago, but maybe its editors are looking ahead to a post-GWB America and realizing they’re going to have to stand for some principles again.

And this is a good one: mandating the consumption of ethanol and subsidizing its production is bad policy, for the United States and for the world.

Congress has created an artificial demand for ethanol to satisfy the farm lobby, which is one of the most powerful in Washington. To make matters worse, almost every major candidate for president in the last 20 years has supported ethanol subsidies because of the program’s importance in the capital of corn, Iowa, which holds the nation’s first presidential caucuses. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are not exceptions to this rule. Both voted for the 2007 energy bill, and both declared their support for ethanol while campaigning in Iowa. Obama, from the corn-growing state of Illinois, has been singing ethanol’s praises for a long time.

But John McCain somehow made it through the early primary gauntlet without going back on his long-held opposition to ethanol subsidies. To be sure, he took a lower profile on the issue and made some comments about how ethanol “makes sense” now that oil prices are so high, but when questioned about these pro-ethanol comments he reiterated his opposition to the federal government’s meddling in the market.

The Iowa caucuses are over, and McCain no longer has any reason to obscure his opposition to U.S. ethanol policy. In fact, he has several good reasons to voice his opposition to the ethanol mandate loud and clear. For one thing, he can point to it as a clear difference between himself and both remaining Democrats. They support a policy that is contributing to higher food prices for Americans. McCain opposes it.

Both Democrats (and McCain) appear to be in favour of doing all they can to make gasoline cheaper, too, even as all three paint themselves as greenies. It’s not what you’d call a consistent position, and it speaks to the difficulty that even a U.S. president who wants to tackle pollution and global warming will have in actually doing so.