Today the Wall Street Journal editorial page praises California Senator Barbara Boxer (link for $ubscribers) for proposing that the federal government set an example in promoting energy efficiency.
Stop the presses: Senator Barbara Boxer of California has a good idea. Ms. Boxer, who heads the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, suggested last week that a first step in reducing greenhouse gases would be to require that federal buildings use more efficient light bulbs, and ask federal bureaucrats to turn off their computers at night.Of course, the WSJ also can't resist going Senator Boxer one better, proposing that the federal government reduce its energy use even further by shuttering unnecessary agencies."Don't you think it's time the federal government were a model of energy efficiency?" she asks. We warmly agree, not least since the United States Government is the largest single consumer of energy in the United States.
It's also one of the most inefficient energy users. According to a 1999 report by the Alliance to Save Energy, the "federal government, consumes about 32% more energy per square foot than the nation's building stock at large." This inefficiency costs taxpayers an estimated $1 billion a year. In Al Gore's phrase, Uncle Sam's leaving one giant "carbon footprint."
For myself, I've long advocated a federal environmental policy of "First, do no harm." Many federal programs cause, contribute to, or subsidize various environmental problems, and this is tremendously wasteful. It makes no sense fo the federal government to spend taxpayer dollars to subsidize problems that it will then regulate citizens to ameliorate after the fact. Where possible, it is better not to create or exacerbate the problem in the first place.
I don’t doubt that’s true and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was actually dragged out over several executive orders to maximize the number of times the President can talk about how the executive branch is trying to conserve energy.
But even if it weren’t true, why should any politician be “praised” for doing things that they should already be doing or for going after the lowest hanging fruit in order to create the illusion that they “dealing with the problem”?
Talk about a mean-spirited editorial page. For some reason I can not imagine the NYT treating a United States Senator with this amount of general disrespect and mockery. Even those of us on the "left" do not treat those on the "right" as if they were completely devoid of sensible ideas...
This, of course, is an irrational point of view. I think translating harms and benefits into money is overrated, but I think doing so now will illustrate my point.
Basically, what Adler is saying is that he is biased against beneficial action.
If we follow his maxim, we would have to reject the following policy. Say we adopt policy X, and it does harm, h. Let us say it also produces benefits, b.
These harms might be on different dimension, making them difficult to compare. But for convenience, let us put monetary values onto these two variables, h and b.
Say:
h = $50
b = $1,000
Apparently, according to Adler, we shouldn't do it. Because guess what, there is harm being done. And you wonder why he likes AEI research so much.
The most important thing the Feds can do is not set themselves up as a (puny) example of energy efficiency, but to create laws, regulations, and incentives (e.g. tax breaks) to promote efficiency and reduce consumption throughout the entire country. If Boxer leads the charge on that, she will actually be worthy of praise.
Instead, Professor Adler (and Senator Boxer) seems to be making an eminiently sensible statement -- that the government should consider acting environmentally responsible itself before it later tries to clean up the mess which it otherwise creates -- a principle which should apply to more than just the sphere of environmental concerns. I find it difficult to see how anyone could disagree with the desirabilty of reasoned government, as opposed to govenment by impulse.
I disagree. The Feds can to tremendous good by setting an example. The reason we DON"T have such laws is precisely because they are fought. And why are they fought? Because people -- mostly conservatives, mind you -- claim that the costs are too high, it's too much a sacrifice, too much work, too much intrusion, they don't work, and so on.
By proving these objections as not valid, the federal government weakens their arguments, making it much easier to get such laws passed. Of course, it's not the final answer to our probloems, but it's an important part of the puzzle.
and of course the best retort is: why not?
First:
Adler said what he said. He said, "First, do no harm." If he meant to say something more intelligent, he should have done so. Obviously, he is free to make any clarifications that he likes. But on its face, the idea "First, do no harm" means exactly what I suggested.
I am certainly not dogmatic in this regard. I recognize that people may assign different meaning to words than I do, or even may not have said exactly what they meant.
Second, your example illustrates my point:
First of all, obviously not all environmental problems are caused by the government. Presumably, what Adler meant is that government should not regulate others before it cleans up its own act. And it illustrates the foolishness of the idea that Adler appears to advocate. Perhaps the government should consider doing both simultaneously, rather than doing one before the other. There is no logical contradiction between the government acting in an environmentally efficient manner itself and ensuring that others do so as well.
This is not to say that ordering (doing one thing completely, before starting to do something else) is never beneficial, only that it is not always beneficial.
As an example:
Let us say that as a result of the delay caused by the dogmatic application of your ordering principle, others inflict upon the environment a cost c of $100,000. Let us suppose that government resources focused solely on mitigating its own impact, before regulating. Let us suppose that those resources, if applied to mitigating the governments impact on the environment produce a benefit b of $500. But if those resources were diverted to preventing others from damaging the environment, it could reduce the damage they do by half, so they only do $50,000. Then obviously, application of the principle that the government should mitigate the harm it itself does before focusing on regulating others has done more harm than good.
(As a side note, even gathering information imposes costs that should be taken into consideration. It is not as if perfect information will always be available and delays while formulating a response are a sort of cost that should be considered.)
So, no matter how you slice it, whether it is a dogmatic adherence to the emphasize on ordering or not doing harm, none of this works as a general principle.
A significant problem in implementing such a policy is that among the agencies of the federal government with the biggest environmental footprints are the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy's military-related operations. This is not to say that the military is intentionally environmentally destructive: rather, large industrial-type facilities are simply more likely to have significant direct effects on the environment than, say, Social Security, whose operations have a tiny footprint relative to the size of that federal program.
Nor does it seem likely that DOD can be made environmentally friendly across the board: in some cases, DOD's purposes are more important than environmental issues; in other cases, not so. (For example, we can't slow down our fighter jets to make them more environmentally friendly, but there is no military reason that motor pool gas storage tanks at domestic military facilities can't be up to code.) Making sure that someone makes that judgment call has proved, in practice, to be quite difficult.
No, but there is certainly a contradiction between the government mandating that everyone else do one thing, while the feds themsselves do another. That is the current state of affairs, and it greatly undermines any respect I, or apparently many others, have for the feds' mandates that we should all do as they say, not as they do.
Do you mean the same NYT that prints Maureen Dowd's references to the President as "Shrub"?
Thanks for exposing the fraud that had thus far eluded the rest of us.
Did I change the subject? Sorry, while I believe that government can provide some impetus for change, let's be realistic, they're not spending capital, they're spending your taxes. In fact I'm wondering why the government is not already "green", at least as "green" as their budgets allow.;)
FWIW
I do not care what you make of Adler's position, as long you acknowledge the correctness of my position. This, you apparently do. Thanks.
Obviously, I agree and Senator Boxer agrees and everyone agrees that the government should be as efficient as possible. But, like all human institutions, including private corporations, private individuals, and the like, the government is not perfect.
To expect it to be perfect to avoid charges of hypocrisy is to make the perfect the enemy of the good.
As if harm (esp. enviromental harm) can be equated with green pieces of paper...
Should have clarified... I was primarily referring to the mannerisms of editorial pieces written by members of the editorial boards, and not those of columnists or op-ed contributers. But even then, I doubt that even Dowd would go as far as the WSJ did. Her disrespect and mockery is almost always specific (not general) and is virtually always comical or whimsical in nature and intent (your out of context "shrub" reference, for example, in the past was used to highlight the Bush Sr./Bush Jr. contrast). Even then I have not seen a single instant where she or anyone else at the Times stooped to crass sarcasm in order to make a point.
"there's no harm in your example"
First, you are assuming that the recipients of the $9950 benefit are the same as those who face the $50 of harm or that the benefits and burdens are equally apportioned. That assumptions is rarely met in real life. Indeed, there can be a net social benefit, even when there is a net harm to particular individuals or institutions.
I tend to agree with this. As I said initially, "I think translating harms and benefits into money is overrated, but..."
The reason one might want to so translate is not because in the real world all harms and benefits exist on the same dimension, and thus can be compared to each other objectively. Rather, it is to illustrate the abstract point. Money is convenient because it is one a single dimension, and thus makes comparisons manageable. Obviously, any translation that exists in the real world to a single dimensionally unit will be inevitably subjective and involve controversial value judgments.
The general principle here is correct. That we have to undergo some harms to get benefits. So that the principle, "First, do no harm" is blatantly wrong. That is not to say that the process at which we attach weights to harms and benefits so that we can compare them is objective or free of value judgments.
This is not to say that there are not some downsides to this sort of communication. Some people really do think that, for example, a human life can have a particular monetary value fixed to it, and that we can decide, for example, the "true, correct, and optimal" amount of safety precautions we should take to save a human life. Obviously, such thinking is nonsense. But you would be suprised at the otherwise intelligent people who take this sort of morally confused and unintelligent point of view (Judge Richard Posner comes to mind...)
So I agree. Not everything can be equated to money, and we shouldn't pretend otherwise. To say that a human life, for example, is worth $10 million is nothing more than a value judgment. And you are absolutely correct regarding the environment as well.
This good is insignificant (not tremendous) compared to what they could and should be doing.
The reason we DON"T have such laws is precisely because they are fought. And why are they fought? Because people -- mostly conservatives, mind you -- claim that the costs are too high, it's too much a sacrifice, too much work, too much intrusion, they don't work, and so on. By proving these objections as not valid, the federal government weakens their arguments, making it much easier to get such laws passed. Of course, it's not the final answer to our probloems, but it's an important part of the puzzle.
Making Federal buildings energy efficient does not prove these objections invalid and will not defuse conservative or other criticism. This is akin to Jimmy Carter bundling himself in a sweater and telling Federal workers to turn down the thermostat in the winter. Nobody will notice, care, or emulate this action. It is the non-binding resolution in the war on energy consumption - a way to seem to do something without really doing anything.
and of course the best retort is: why not?
That is obvious - because making the Feds energy efficient allows politicians like Boxer to preen and pretend they have actually done something, when in fact they have done nothing very significant ("there, see, problem solved, everybody go back to bed!").
You have a good point, but a general intellectual disagreement still is dramatically different than a blanket ideological dismissal. And saying that this story ("Barbara Boxer Has A Good Idea") is so newsworthy that it deserves shutting down the newspaper press during a print run, costing tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars (depending on the circulation) in order to revamp and reprint the newspaper to include a last minute article with an accompanying top-fold, front-page (bold font) header with the title of the new story seems, at least to me, to fall squarely in the category of the latter.
The phrase "Stop the presses" is much more charged and significant than you give it credit. And if blatant sarcasm of this type translates into general disrespect, than I don't quite see how the opening sentence could be interpreted as being anything but.
Except that Boxer never said or implied that by having the federal buildings become energy efficient the problem is solved and that nothing more needs to be done. In fact, she acknowledged that this is just the beginning of solution.
When Jimmy Carter lowered the thermostat, I recall that businesses and homes across America did the same thing. Sales of sweaters went up, and I recall everyone having to wear warmer clothes in buildings. So in fact, that's a perfect example of a notable official setting an example for the rest of the country. If you choose not to follow the example, no one is arguing, but the fact is that his example saved quite a bit of energy all across America. It didn't last, of course, but you still haven't given a good reason why the federal government should NOT be a leader in energy efficiency.
There is some debate in IT circles over turning off the CPU (vs just the monitor) as a money-saving activity. Primarily you balance the cost of electricity used by a desktop computer during off hours with the wear-and-tear on the components from the on/off cycle. Mean time between failure rates are shorter for machines cycled off and on more often. How much energy and waste is created by purchasing more electronics vs burned in electricity by leaving the machine on longer? In addition, LCD monitors and newer, energy efficient CPUs are lowering the always-on cost.
That said, power off your monitor when you leave at night and power off the whole rig if you'll be away more than a day.
If, like me, your home PC is on 24/7, you can reduce energy guilt by switching two incandecent bulbs in your home to compact fluorescent or LED. (High-end PC's burn about the same as a 300-watt bulb, with that rate reducing if your graphics card isn't gamer-quality and if you're using new power-managed CPUs like the Intel Core 2 Duo.)
For gadget-freaks, the new crop of LED lightbulbs are cool. Check them out. Unlike compact fluorescents, they supposedly can be dimmed with a standard dimmer switch. They cost less than fluorescents to use and have a lifespan measured close to a decade with normal use.)
It is also a function, no doubt, of the fact that federal facilities tend to be among the oldest out there, as it is an old organization. The question should be, can federal facilities reduce energy costs for an affordable renovation price? I don't care if the Capitol or the White House or the Supreme Court courthouse suck up gross amounts of energy, you can't replace historic monuments like those because you'd save a few bucks in utility bills.