Thoughts for May 22, 2022
Hi all. This week’s topics are oil spills, economic outlook and partisan affiliation, ecofascism, and some information about the funeral.
Oil Spills
Oil spills are a fact of a petroleum-based economy. Our World in Data documents, however, that oil spills (from tankers at least) have become less common over time.
One should be careful with averages in this case because spill volume appears to roughly follow a power law distribution. A consequence is that a single data point can skew the average, and thus averaging spill volumes over a period of time can lead to deceptive results. For example, in the 2010s, about two thirds of the oil spilled for the decade resulted from a single event. This data also only incorporates spills from tankers. The Deepwater Horizon disaster of 2010 spilled more than twice as much oil as all tankers spills of the 2010s. See also a similar critique of Steven Pinker’s claim that war deaths are on a durable downward trajectory.
After the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989, Congress passed the Oil Pollution Act, which established cleanup standards and instituted an excise tax on oil produced for the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund to finance cleanup when responsible parties are unable to do so. However, the excise tax has lapsed intermittently, and there are ongoing concerns about whether the fund is adequate. It looks to me like the regime is similar to how the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act works: imposing responsibility for post-mining reclamation of coal mining lands and imposing an excise tax for the Abandoned Mine Reclamation Fund when responsible parties cannot reclaim.
According to this report, the OSLTF paid out about $1000 per spilled barrel of oil, though the disclaimers about power law distortions apply. That would suggest that the excise tax should be about 1 cent per barrel, taking into account the spills of the 2010s and Deepwater Horizon, though the actual value—when the excise tax is in effect—is much higher. There is a 9 cent/barrel liability now, and the Build Back Better Act would have also imposed an additional 16.4 cent/barrel superfund excise tax on petroleum products.
The price of the front month WTI contract is, as of this writing, about $110/barrel, so in any case we are looking at costs that are quite small relative to the cost of oil.
Economic Outlook and Partisan Affiliation
There are a few principles that I think everyone should understand, and this is one of them.
A person’s economic outlook depends very obviously on partisan affiliation. Having one’s own party in the White House appears to matter more than actual economic conditions in how people see the outlook of the economy. Fortunately we do see some responses to real events, such as the 2008 recession and the COVID-19 outbreak; otherwise the metric would be meaningless.
Partisanship is easy to measure and quantify, but I would fully expect this principle to appear in other circumstances. Does a person’s macroeconomic outlook respond to major life events, such as marriage, divorce, a new job or job loss, birth of a child, death of a loved one, or other such things? I haven’t seen data, but I’ll bet it does.
Nevertheless, there appears to be a deep gloom about the future that transcends both individual life stochasticity and partisan cyclicality, and this gloom calls for explanation. Unfortunately, the Our World in Data article linked here does not take the question seriously, instead choosing to dismiss pessimistic outlooks as being based in ignorance and media bias. My own sense is that panglossian views, such as that linked here, are selective in what data they want to show, focusing on those trends which support their views and ignoring those that don’t. There is, for instance, no discussion here of falling economic and scientific productivity, sub-replacement fertility, public debt, or democratic backsliding. They also fall into the trap of mood affiliation, debating not just data but how we ought to feel about it.
Ecofascism
Last week, Americans experienced another terrorist incident—this one in Buffalo—where the shooter identified with an ideology known as ecofascism. Ecofascism is a fusion of two collectivist ideologies: ecologism, which is a zero-sum form of environmentalism that views groups of people, or people and nature, as having interests that are irredeemably opposed; and fascism, which is (among other things) an extreme form of nationalism that is rooted in racial or ethnic identitarianism.
It may be worth reviewing Nils Gilman’s overview of what ecofascism is and what forms it takes, though I think his treatment is marred by overlooking some more constructive conservative responses to environmental challenges.
Many of us were introduced to the term after the Christchurch shooting—which killed 51 people at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand—where the terrorist openly identified with ecofascism. The ideology has also been connected with the El Paso massacre.
Obviously the term should be used with some care. Following World War II, the term “fascism” has taken a highly pejorative connotation and is rarely used as a self-description. Nevertheless, the environmental movement has some history with the concept for which it has not properly come to terms, most notably in the area of population control.
See, for instance, the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s profile of John Tanton, founder or major leader of anti-immigration groups FAIR, CIS, and NumbersUSA. Tanton was obsessed with what he saw as “overpopulation”. Tanton served on the board of the Sierra Club, an environmental organization which supported immigration restriction up to the 1990s on ecologic grounds (a recent Sierra Club article tries, unconvincingly, to dissociate these violent acts from environmentalism and their history of environmentalism in particular). He also served on the board of Planned Parenthood and supported abortion as a population control measure. Garrett Hardin was a major figure in the development of modern environmentalism and was also obsessed with population, developing concepts such as the tragedy of the commons and lifeboat ethics.
Environmentalists today talk much less about population control, perhaps because of falling birth rates and bad experiences with China’s One Child Policy, and they usually do so now with euphemisms such as “female empowerment”. But this is a bad idea that smolders like the hot coals after a campfire, ready to reignite at the first reappearance of conducive conditions.
An obvious problem with ecofascist ideas is their tendency to inspire violence, as we have seen with recent terrorist attacks, but the real problem is upstream of that. Ecologism views human beings as a burden—consumers of resources and competitors for a fixed pie—rather than minds that can contribute to society and souls with intrinsic value. Once this view is accepted, it matters less whether the dividing line between “good” and “bad” is drawn by race, nationality, or between the human and nonhuman world; either way, only evil can result.
Funeral Information
This is something that I intended to share last week but forgot. My wife’s funeral was held at St. Anthony Catholic Church in Forest Grove, Oregon on May 11. A recording of the funeral can be seen here [edit; link fixed]. My eulogy starts at about 1:04:24. I would like to thank Fr. Ben Tapia and the team at St. Anthony for their help and hospitality in arranging this event.