Wednesday’s Philadelphia Inquirer published this very funny commentary about snow-control legislation. It begins:
As the mid-Atlantic region faces yet another massive blizzard, the problem of unregulated snow can no longer be ignored. It’s time for Congress to set limits on the crystalline mayhem descending through the atmosphere and disrupting the lives of hardworking Americans.Certainly, snow-control legislation would require political will and bipartisan support. But if today’s policymakers don’t put an end to snowstorms, these boom-and-bust blizzards will continue to undermine our nation’s growth and prosperity.
Thanks to troll_dc2 for the link.
Nick says:
Regulatory capture, by snow, will undermine the good-faith effort this author intends. Reforms dating back a hundred years suggest that regulation is acquired by the industry and is designed and operated primarily for its benefit. Big snow is no exception. Small blizzards will be regulated out of the market.
February 12, 2010, 4:12 amTomG says:
What a snow-job! Just call it like it is – call out the big blizzard in the room so no
February 12, 2010, 5:17 amone will notice the 1 and 2-inchers … ya right, not snowing this half-piker! Take a
shovel and move a little – it’ll do the heart some good … gotta go now, my sciatica is
starting …
adam says:
this years more snow all countries )))
February 12, 2010, 7:40 amRusty Bill says:
“A law was made a distant moon ago here
February 12, 2010, 8:08 amJuly and August cannot be too hot
And there’s a legal limit to the snow here
In Camelot…”
Anderson says:
A: Obama’s failed policies have caused the snow.
B: Actually, 90% of this snow is left over from the Bush administration.
Sarah: My experience as governor of Alaska makes me uniquely prepared to deal with the snowy menace to American values!
February 12, 2010, 8:20 amRyan says:
Maybe a bit premature, but Rusty Bill takes the thread in my opinion… Although Anderson made a strong showing as well.
February 12, 2010, 9:17 amAaron says:
I thought there already legal limits on purchases of crystalline precursors?
Oops, sorry, wrong crystal control.
February 12, 2010, 9:20 amcboldt says:
– And there’s a legal limit to the snow here In Camelot… –
February 12, 2010, 9:25 amA grand musical production that I heard frequently as a child. Thanks for the reminder!
Kazinski says:
Just passing a law isn’t going to do anything. We’ll need a new federal agency to administer it.
February 12, 2010, 10:04 amef says:
I’m sick of the snowstorms getting the blame. Clearly they are just responding to the demands of the market. If we really want to get things under control, the government should make way for snowstorm providers to supply their goods across inter-seasonal lines. Artificially restricting the entire year’s snow to one quarter of the calendar is exactly what got us into this mess. The competition with the thunderstorm, drought, tornado and other weather markets will be good for us too.
February 12, 2010, 10:14 amzuch says:
This does highlight the absurdity of treating AGW as a political question/issue/chance-for-attack, rather than the scientific question it is.
Once we do the work as best we can, and come to agreement on the science, then we should decide whether those results comment various policy options to us.
Saying “the science can’t be right because we can’t afford it” can’t be correct. The sooner we cease doing this, the better off, I’d say.
Cheers,
February 12, 2010, 10:22 amZubon says:
If we had banned dihydrogen monoxide to begin with, we never would have had this problem.
February 12, 2010, 10:50 amDjDiverDan says:
I suggest that we put former FEMA Adminstrator “Brownie” in charge.
February 12, 2010, 11:18 amLTEC says:
My co-blogger Dan Simon makes a similar point about snow here:
February 12, 2010, 11:28 amegd says:
I’ll bet the author of this proposal never even considered the unintended side effects of banning snow in the United States.
If we ban snow here, it will just “vote with its feet” and move elsewhere, most likely to Canada or Mexico. Is this going to seriously affect our trade relations with Canada when they have to call out the army every weekend to deal with this menace?
What we need to do is deal with the base causes of snow, rather than trying to regulate the effects at their most inconvenient. Sunlight, like with campaign finance reform, is the best solution. Since sunlight is an intrastate effect, the Federal Government should leave it to the states to regulate the amount of sunlight within their borders.
February 12, 2010, 11:42 amJavert says:
Obvious rent seeking by the sun lobby.
February 12, 2010, 11:44 amSuperSkeptic says:
Every individual snowflake has a right to existence. Fight the ban!
A snowflake’s life begins at the first conglomeration of ice crystals.
February 12, 2010, 11:48 amyankee says:
Snow control supporters say they just support “reasonable regulation” of “assault snow,” but their idea of “reasonable regulation” is a near-total ban to be followed up by confiscation. The real effect will be to leave law-abiding Americans defenseless against snowball-armed criminals. Someone who’s willing to commit robbery and murder isn’t going to be deterred by a snow ban.
You don’t hear about it in the liberal media, but thousands of crimes are prevented every year when the intended victim simply brandishes a snowball, without ever needing to throw it. Even Americans without snow are protected because criminals know the victim might be carrying. Snow control will completely ruin this deterrent effect, putting all Americans at risk.
Moreover, desnowmament is almost always one of the first steps taken by would-be tyrants. Once desnowed, critics of the government will be completely unable to resist as the government kidnaps and imprisons them in its snow forts.
February 12, 2010, 12:13 pmFub says:
Don’t worry. The “new professionalism” of police forces has led to effective methods for dealing with snowball-armed criminals.
February 12, 2010, 1:16 pmgeokstr says:
Hah! Already been done. Another perfect example of how effective it can be to just get the government out of the way and let the free market loose:
SUMMER PRACTICE ON ARTIFICIAL SNOW
Exactly. I lived in Beverly Hills for 20 years, and they’ve proven how effective government regulation can be. Clouds, cold weather (especially snow), earthquakes, and even inconvenience and conservatism were all banned by law there. There was an underground where conservatives met in secret however, but we were always in fear of imprisonment and being waterboarded by Barbra herself if we were caught.
Why, zuch, that’s the first reasonable thing you’ve said about the entire AGW issue in the several hundred thousand comments you’ve made here about it in the last two months alone.
And I even agree with you about figuring out which policy options make the most sense in the event the planet is warming, man-caused or not. Problem is, I’ve never once seen you even make grudging concession to the possibility that warming is not only better than cooling where life is concerned, but that there may be a host of very nice benefits from warming, like the opening of vast tundras to farming, as happened in Greenland in the MWP. (I’ll wager there are even massive, easily recoverable deposits of minerals, metals, and fossil fuels now under several miles of ice that would dwarf the current proven reserves, but I realize that for you and other radical environmentalists, that’s not a feature but a very nasty, evil bug.)
Instead the only policy options you seem to favor are the ones being promoted by algore, the IPCC and Hansen – the Collectivization of power worldwide over every decision involving energy at every level from macro down to micro (i.e., every decision of any kind whatsoever), with the left in charge.
February 12, 2010, 1:17 pmtheobromophile says:
I’m sorry… all I can think of is that scene in “Enchanted” where the princess lands in New York, sings her working song, gets all of the gross New York animals to help her clean up, and, at the end, a pigeon looks down and eats a cockroach.
Because that’s what nature, unmolested from human influence, looks like. “Nasty, brutish, and short” is coming to mind.
February 12, 2010, 1:38 pmzuch says:
We know the planet is reasonably livable as is (we have some 6 billion data points to that effect).
Feel free to show that we’ll get more motherhood and apple pie if it warms. Show your work.
Cheers,
February 12, 2010, 1:56 pmzuch says:
Huh?!?!? They barely were able to support some hundreds of people (and not by grain farming; by livestock that could [barely] survive on the plants that would grow in coastal areas). The icecap that covers essentially all of Greenland has been there for a hundred thousand years….
When you look at the “facts” to decide what to do, best to avoid making sh*te up.
Cheers,
February 12, 2010, 2:04 pmChrisIowa says:
They can have my snow when they can pry it from my cold dead hands!
Or maybe this afternoon would be ok.
February 12, 2010, 2:18 pmJKB says:
Not to mention the diet impacts of snow with “healthly” fresh ingredient restaurants discriminately impacted more than those that utilize food altered for preservation.
And as Megan McCardle observered “Apparently, when DC gets snowed in, it wants to do so with diet soda, Ritz crackers, six pounds of shredded cheddar, and a lifetime supply of stew meat.”
If snow can cause such detrimental behavior in the “enlightened” neighborhoods of DC, think what it does to the unwashed masses.
February 12, 2010, 2:26 pmPintler says:
Well, yes, plants compete for sunlight, herbivores eat the plants, and carnivores eat the herbivores. Life is nasty and brutish in that context.
But another way to look at ‘nature, unmolested from human influence’ is to think of a pristine
February 12, 2010, 2:53 pmalpine lake, surrounded by rampant wildflowers and bird song. While I grant you the trout and birds are rapaciously hunting poor innocent insects, on at least some level that little bit of nature, unmolested from human influence, seems to have some advantages when viewed next to other, human modified, landscapes, e.g. an LA freeway at rush hour.
geokstr says:
Really? Best tell William Connolly to rewrite that wikipedia page on Greenland then, so at least your side’s “sh*te” will be consistent. He must not have gotten to that one yet when he was caught editting the other 5,300 pages in order to protect the “consensus”:
Just to be certain, I looked up the 70th degree. It goes through central Greenland, Baffin Island and the Yukon in Canada, Alaska, and Siberia. And do I need remind you, AGW proponents are claiming that the MWP wasn’t all that warm at all? A few more degrees and it’s pineapples and mangoes.
Your side is also the one claiming that the arctic will be ice-free sometime in next couple years as well. So the entire mainland of Greenland, as well as the Yukon and Russian tundras will still be under miles of ice when Hawaiian Tropic opens their first distributorship in Barrow, eh? Is it your contention that the temperate to tropical zones will be the only ones heating up under AGW, with the Arctic seas being ice-free except for all the northern landmasses, which will remain buried under miles of ice? Seems to me you can’t have such a neat trifurcation of the hot and cold parts of the planets, but not being a highly trained climate scientist like yourself, I could be wrong.
But how about your policy preferences if global warming is a fact? Do you think it is reasonable to also consider simply adapting to the changes, instead of radically restructuring both the economic and political landscapes in the direction of collectivism, as your side is proposing?
Non? Thought not.
February 12, 2010, 3:06 pmegd says:
She forgot lettuce. Can’t forget the salad greens.
February 12, 2010, 3:19 pmgeokstr says:
I would simply point you to the epochs where the dominant lifeforms ruled the planet for 170 million years in a row, not the measly 10,000 – 50,000 we’ve got going for us. During that 170M years, the temperature was considerably warmer than it it is now, and the CO2 in the atmosphere was several hundred times greater than today. Since these diminant lifeforms depended on a lush vegetative ecosystem to begin the food chain, it would seem that it was pretty nice back then for all life. Do you have any evidence that such a climate would be bad for humans? Feel free to show your work.
But, then again, given your political opinions as I’ve been able to divine them in your hundreds of thousands of comments, I doubt you would be in favor of any increase in either “motherhood” or “apple pie”, anyway.
February 12, 2010, 3:24 pmjcm says:
King Canuto ,when his kingdom faced a flood , ordered the sea to stop.
February 12, 2010, 5:01 pmSo there is nothing original in the joke
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February 12, 2010, 6:18 pmzuch says:
There’s “dominant life forms” that rule the deep-ocean hydrogen sulfide vents and that probably have done so for millions of years. Hint: It’s not us.
Huh?!?!? 0.0004 * 250 = 10% CO₂!!! No way in hell did we have 10% CO₂ back then … not even in Hell. Stop making sh*te up, m’kay?
Cheers,
February 12, 2010, 9:05 pmSandy MacHoots says:
I’d be interested to see the cite for this. Wikipedia says that the colonies were 3000-5000, with 400 farms, the settlers raised barley up to latitude 70, and exported hides. Wikipedia can, of course, be completely wrong, but I assume you have a link to the true situation.
It is warmer than it used to be, and there are a lot more people living a whole lot better than the did in the Little Ice Age. Feel free to explain why the current temperature is the exact perfect temperature for human life to flourish, and that another degree will result is catastrophe, when he last few degree increases have only made life better. Show your work.
I’d be interested in a link to someone who actually says this. Attacking arguments that I suspect no one has made suggests either that (1) you don’t want to address the actual arguments, or (2) you’re a speechwriter for Obama.
February 12, 2010, 9:05 pmJeff Walden says:
As depressing as it is to imagine such excessively busybodying regulation as that of snowfall, there seems to me to be a semi-plausible case (under some Supreme Court precedents, Gibbons v. Ogden, 22 U.S. 1 (1824), for one) for the constitutionality of federal regulation of snow, insofar as that snow interferes with interstate commerce (say through falling upon interstate highways), even “[c]ommerce…introduced into the interior”. Ibid, at 194. (Presumably there are also more recent precedents to dredge up if necessary, particularly if one considered post-New Deal decisions, but I haven’t read those decisions yet.)
February 13, 2010, 7:01 amEli Rabett says:
then there is this one posted on climate science watch
February 13, 2010, 9:39 amMartyA says:
Isn’t “unregulated snow” purely an international issue and, therefore, within the exclusive purview of the United Nations? I believe some of their experimental work has resulted in the prohibition of unregulated snow below elevations of 3700 feet in a number of sub-Saharan nations.
February 14, 2010, 12:45 pmThe weather ministers from these nations and the UN members of their directorate can be contacted at their offices on the French Riviera. You’ll have to look up the contact information. Also, give Al Gore a call; I think he’s got an IPO coming out on this.