Pine Beetles and Climate Change

Listened to Marketplace last night on NPR.  I almost never listen to the radio anymore, as it is difficult to hear an entire story with small children present, and I don’t think the part where I yell at the kids not to interrupt is all that healthy.  So mostly I read.

But last night I happened to catch (most) of an article about how pine trees were dying in Montana due to global warming.  I was stunned — are temperatures really getting so high that pine trees are perishing in the heat??  Maybe I should take this problem more seriously.

No no, it’s that pine beetles are eating them.

Ah.  So, er, what do pine beetles have to do with global warming?  Well, our reporters contend that the 1.something degree rise in global temperature over the past fifty years has suddenly made the pine beetles not get killed off by winter freezes, and hence the attack.

Now if I lived in Montana, I might buy this.  But as it happens, I’m rather familiar with the *southern* pine beetle, which has been on a feeding frenzy for quite awhile now.  (Note to Montana: Start chopping.  Do not leave those dead trees standing there.)  And the thing is, the southeastern US hasn’t had a Montana-style winter in quite a while.  [Thousands of years? Millions? Some geologist please quick speak up.]  So apparently *our* pine beetles are much slower on the uptake than Montana’s . . .  Or else no one is blaming our beetles on global warming, and it’s just a coincidence that Montana gets climate-change beetles, while ours are extra hungry for some other reason.

My reaction?  Linking the pine beetle infestation to global warming is lousy science.  We may or may not be experiencing some kind of human-induced climate-warming.  Or maybe human activity is causing wider swings in weather patterns than in the past (hence, warming and cooling both.)  I’m doubtful, but it could be — I won’t dismiss the possibility out of hand.   But claiming anything and everything just must be due to global warming is silly, and ruins the credibility both of the scientists who make these claims, and the journalists who report on them.

That said, as I mentioned, I live with small children, and there’s a chance I missed some pivotal moment in the report when the Marketplace journalists displayed their healthy skepticism.  In which case, good for them.

About that international dateline . . .

I’m looking at my schedule for the weekend, and estimating that ‘Friday’ will show up on this blog sometime Monday afternoon.

Meanwhile, my thought for the weekend:

How ’bout a square-feet-per-occupant guideline on that housing bailout?  Not persuaded that the bailing-out is the best way to proceed.   (Said by a person who is very keen on affordable housing and owner-occupied housing.)  But I’m certainly sympathetic to those who were faced with the choice of ‘if you want to own a home, you have to buy at this ridiculous price’.   We were fortunate not to have needed to relocate during the big bubble.

So my thought is this: If I am going to be subsidizing your housing, I would like it to be reasonable housing.  Kind of rankles to imagine someone went out and mortgaged a McMansion, and I have to pay taxes to make sure the poor folks don’t have to downsize to a house like . . . mine.  Just envy speaking, don’t mind me.

Plus I’m curious to see what the government would come up with as a ‘normal’ home.

Ridiculously tired today, and as I’m finally getting around to writing tonight, my head is about as foggy as I’ve ever known it. So rather than try to put together a good article for you (lost cause), I’ll just let loose on something funny I read during the last weeks of the presidential election campaigns.

**

So the Wall Street Journal ran a series on the editorial page comparing the two major candidates’ stances on various topics. Shoehorned into the ‘education’ category was the topic of volunteering. Working from memory, here’s the executive summary:

McCain: Tells people they really ought to volunteer more.

Obama: Plans to expand the Peace Corps and launch a handful of similar government-run, tax-funded volunteer organizations to target other areas of need (education, local community service, etc.). Encourage mandatory ‘volunteering’ by tying certain federal education funding to community service requirements for students.

Not to jump all over our president-elect (really, if this were his only fault, I’d be a very happy person), but what?! It’s volunteering. I have never, ever, in all my long life, had difficulty finding an outlet for my freely-offered labor. Hard time finding a paying job? Yes. Yes indeed. Hard time finding people willing to hire me for no pay? Nope. Not once.

And here we are, a government in debt, with expensive wars and corporate bailouts going on, and we are going to spend more money on more programs . . . so people can work for no pay? Um, really, they can do that without a government program. If you have to pay people to do a given job, it is not actually volunteering. It is a federal program that pays a very low wage.

(–> Now if what you want is a low-wage jobs program, just come out and say so.)

I expect the origin of this particular plank of the campaign platform came from two bad habits we’ve gotten into. The first, is thinking that if our country has a problem, or a perceived problem in this case, the president ought to have a plan for how to fix it. When really, some of the time, the president ought to look us sternly in the face and say:

Well, get your act together.

But I suppose that is not very popular with voters, and we have thus trained our candidates to pretend they can fix us.

And then from there, it is only a matter of what kind of fix the candidate is used to tossing out. As a democrat, a shiny new program, or a beefed-up old program, is just the thing. If a republican felt the need to propose a fix, it would be a tax deduction, a tax credit, or maybe a special law allowing employers in certain altruistic industries to hire workers at lower-than-minimum wage.

[Republicans are at an advantage in this particular example, because we already have the tax deduction thing in place. Now they can just smile and tell their voter base to go start a 501(c)3 and be done with it. I agree. But don’t kid yourselves, if republican voters were still itching for more help in the ‘volunteering’ department, I am sure, just sure, there is a way to make a corporate subsidy for the purpose.]

**

What significance for the junior economist? Well, a couple summary points:

Our candidates can’t necessarily add, it isn’t your imagination. I think ‘economic platform’ ought to be read as a kind of form of poetry, one of those genres that you must not read literally. Luckily much of what they put on their economic platforms would never pass through congress anyhow, so in the off chance they really mean what they say (the policy-platform equivalent of discovering that someone really does have butterflies in their stomach, or that cats and dogs truly are falling from the sky), there is still hope that it won’t come to pass.

Really smart people can still come up with dumb ideas. (Just ask my children about their mother.) As I mentioned in my ‘why economics is so confusing’ post, sometimes when something doesn’t make any sense to you, it is because it doesn’t make any sense, period.

If we voters actually want ‘change’, we are some of the people who are going to have to change. We can’t be pushing for a federal program or a new law or some other government action every time we see a problem, and then be surprised that our politicians are always trying to come up with new programs and laws for us. Do you want a shorter tax form? Quit asking for so many tax credits.

–> And so long as we evaluate a candidate’s stance on a given issue based on whether they voted to fund this or that special program, or put into place this or that new law, we are going to keep getting the programs and laws. It is entirely possible to be, say, in favor of helping the poor, without necessarily voting in favor of every bill that is labeled ‘help for the poor’.

And this last bit is tricky. Because if your representative voted against this or that social justice bill, how do you know whether it was because of an anti-social-justice bias, or just a disagreement with that particular bill? It means you have to know the candidate much better, over a much longer term. Which is not easy.

Don’t Make Me Take You To Nebraska

Like something out The Onion, The Wall Street Journal is reporting today that parents — even those from out of state — are taking advantage of a loophole in Nebraska’s new Safe Haven law in order to drop off their teenagers. Apparently the legislature wants to close the loophole.

I’m a bit mystified. On the one hand, I understand that when you set up a law intending to protect newborns from abuse and infanticide, it is disconcerting to discover that all the ‘wrong’ people are taking advantage of your law. On the other hand, if you’ve just uncovered a serious societal problem, covering it back over hardly seems like the solution.

–> And frankly, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. The abuse, abandonment, and even murder by parents of older children is not exactly news. What is new, is that instead of waiting for the authorities to discover the abuse and take action after the fact, parents in Nebraska now have an option for coming forward for help before the problem reaches the danger point. I can see arguments for why the Safe Haven law is not the best mechanism for abuse-prevention of older children, but I don’t see why it is such a terrible thing. It seems to me that it is doing a valuable service.

The Journal reports that 19 children have been dropped off since the law went into place in July. Not an insignificant number [though nearly half of them apparently came from a single family – the father was feeling overwhelmed after the death of his wife – so take the total figure as not quite representative of the number of families involved], but given that the Nebraska foster care system is currently serving some 6,000 children, and the state is not reporting that the system is overloaded, this is hardly a dire emergency. It seems to me that rather calling a special session of the legislature to quick close the loophole, better to take the time to understand the situation and figure out how to best address the whole problem.