President Obama announced today that he has ordered the EPA to abandon new proposed smog regulations, basically saying that they would be burdensome to industry at a time when the US economy can’t afford to take the hit. Maybe the timing isn’t right. But this is exactly the kind of environmental regulation that we need, because the costs of the new regulation are easily outweighed by the benefits.

Breathing smog-filled air is dangerous. It can cause asthma attacks and exacerbate existing lung conditions (bronchitis, pneumonia, emphysema, lung cancer, etc.). In the long-run, smog can do similar damage to the lungs as smoking.

Moreover, that all costs money. Smog causes people to go to their doctors more often, it can cause otherwise mild lung conditions to require hospitalization, it can slow recoveries which in turn increases the prescription drug costs for people with lung conditions. Heck, in the long-run smog can cause people to exercise less by making it harder to breath on high-smog days, and thereby contribute to the obesity epidemic. Smog is expensive.

So yeah, as a result of this regulation, a few coal plants will remain open, some others will be able to avoid buying new equipment to clean their smoke-stacks, and thousands of jobs around the country will be saved, for the moment. And the cost will come from the thousands of kids who end up in the emergency room from preventable asthma attacks.

Good environmental regulation saves money and saves lives. Maybe Obama is right that this particular regulation can be delayed until the economy is better. But if the delay is too long, we’ll all pay for it with out lives, or health, and our wallets. And we can’t really afford that either.

 

How much money should a person make?

For most people, it’s a moot concept. For most white collar workers, the free market (in some loose sense) determines how much we get paid, perhaps marked up or down somewhat depending on a person’s negotiation skills. For most blue collar workers, their wages are determined by collectively bargained contracts. For the working poor, their wages are determined by the federal or state imposed minimum wage, or perhaps in some case by a minimum payment necessary to keep the employee fed and motivated.

But there are a lucky few people out there who get to set their own salaries, who don’t have to worry about the vagaries of the free market or collective bargaining. In particular, there are two news stories today that prompted the question I began with.
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Here’s a couple lessons from statistics that we would all do well to remember:

1) Anything that can happen, will happen, if given enough opportunity.

2) Most systems will, on average, converge to their “true” values if given long enough.

So, for instance, let’s think about climate change. Continue reading »

 

There is an extremely interesting (albeit long) article in the upcoming New York Times Magazine (they post their lead articles online a few days before the magazine itself comes out) about noted scientist and global warming skeptic, Freemon Dyson. The article makes note of the fact that Dyson is widely considered to be one of the most brilliant thinkers of the last century, and is widely credited with an ability to incorporate data from a wide array of scientific disciplines. Dyson is also widely noted for his intense aversion to common knowledge. Reading that article, it occurred to me that Dyson is wrong for all the right reasons.
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The EPA has just proposed a rule that would require medium and large companies in a variety of industries to report their emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants. This would allow the EPA to better track who is polluting and where. It’s a fabulous idea. It’s such a wonderful, not to mention obvious, idea that you have to wonder why we haven’t been doing this all along.
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