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January 17, 2012

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77 Percent of Americans Oppose Raising the Gas Tax, Reason-Rupe Transportation Poll Finds

Poll finds a majority of voters support tolls over taxes to pay for roads and favor using public-private partnerships to build critical infrastructure

A majority of Americans believe new transportation projects should be paid for with user-fees instead of tax increases, according to a new national Reason-Rupe poll of 1,200 adults on cell phones and land lines.

The Reason-Rupe poll finds 77 percent of Americans oppose increasing the federal gas tax, while just 19 percent favor raising the tax, which is currently 18.4 cents a gallon. The public thinks the government wastes the gas tax money it already receives. Sixty-five percent say the government spends transportation funding ineffectively, and just 23 say the money is spent effectively.

The survey shows Americans believe new roads and highways should be paid for by the people driving on them: 58 percent of Americans say new roads and highways should be funded by tolls paid by those driving on them. Twenty-eight percent say new road capacity should be paid for by tax increases.  

The Reason-Rupe poll finds broad support for user-fees. If a toll road would save drivers a “significant” amount of time, 59 percent of Americans say they would pay to use it. And 57 percent favor converting carpool lanes, or high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes, into high-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes. Voters are much-less supportive of variably-priced toll lanes, however. Half of those surveyed oppose, and 39 percent favor, variably-priced tolls that rise and fall with traffic levels.

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Banks Viewed Twice as Favorably as the Federal Government, Reason-Rupe Poll Finds

Survey examines how Ron Paul, Sarah Palin, Michael Bloomberg and Gary Johnson could do as third-party presidential candidates and asks Americans which federal agencies they�d cut

The Occupy Wall Street movement tapped into anger about bank bailouts, crony capitalism and corporate welfare, but it turns out that most Americans are mad at the federal government and not their banks. A new Reason-Rupe Poll finds 76 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of their banks and just 15 percent view them unfavorably.

In contrast, only 32 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of the federal government. Sixty-two percent of voters rate the federal government unfavorably, according to the national Reason-Rupe poll of 1,200 adults on cell phones and landlines.  

Forty-nine percent of Americans approve of the job President Obama is doing, with 47 percent disapproving. Only 13 percent approve of the job Congress is doing, 80 percent disapprove.

Fifty-four percent of Americans also say they are more worried that the federal government will do something to make the economy worse, while 40 percent are more worried that the government will fail to take action on the economy.

State governments are more popular than the feds, but only half of all Americans view them positively. As you get closer to home, 58 percent of Americans have positive views of their local governments and the same number look upon their local school districts favorably.

The survey finds people feel a lot better about private businesses. For example, 88 percent of Americans have a positive view of their grocery stores; 73 percent look favorably upon their cell phone makers; and 69 percent say they view their Internet service providers favorably.

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Risks and Rewards of Public-Private Partnerships for Highways

The reasons public-private partnerships are being used to fund infrastructure

Baruch Feigenbaum

Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) for infrastructure are contracts between public and private entities for the provision of facilities in areas such as power, water, transportation, education and health. Well-written public-private partnership agreements specify the allocation of risk, which should create incentives for the private provider to deliver more efficiently and in a timelier manner than would be the case if the project were undertaken by a state-controlled entity. States are increasingly using PPPs to deliver new transportation capacity, thereby improving road access without unduly increasing the burden on taxpayers. PPPs come in many forms, including both development of new infrastructure (“greenfield” projects) and maintenance and improvement of existing infrastructure.

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How the IPCC Reports Mislead the Public, Exaggerate the Negative Impacts of Climate Change and Ignore the Benefits of Economic Growth

Study finds climate change panel ignores its own findings and pushes plans that will prolong poverty for developing nations

By the year 2100, developing countries will be richer than the United States is today, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's worst-case temperature change scenario.  Moreover, the faster developing countries grow and the more emissions they produce, the wealthier they will be - even taking into account all the damage that is expected from climate changes caused by those emissions.

These surprising findings about developing countries and global warming are based on the very studies that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's own reports rely upon. But you wouldn't know it based on the IPCC's dire warnings. Instead of honestly explaining that people in the future will be better off regardless of climate change, the IPCC reports emphasize the potentially negative impacts of global warming while downplaying the benefits that come from economic growth and technological progress, a new Reason Foundation report finds. Worse yet, the Reason study shows that the IPCC recommends a course of action that its own set of global warming scenarios show would make developing countries poorer - both today and in the future.

With the current climate talks in Durban flailing, the new Reason Foundation study finds serious flaws and even contradictions in the climate change impacts reports and other studies used by governments to justify their involvement in those very climate talks.

The study by Indur M. Goklany, who has represented the United States at Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change negotiations in the past, details how studies on the impacts of climate change disregard the economic and technological advances that poor countries are expected to make - even under the IPCC's worst-case global warming scenario.

"Using the IPCC's own highest emission scenario, we show that by 2100 the Gross Domestic Product per capita of today's 'developing' countries will be double that of the U.S. in 2006, even taking into account any losses resulting from climate change. Thus developing countries will have significantly more resources and better technology to cope with climate change than even the U.S. does today," Goklany says. "But these advances in adaptive capacity and what they'll mean for our ability to cope with any potential warming are virtually ignored by the IPCC when it assesses the possible impact of global warming."

The study outlines three approaches to tackling climate change: cutting emissions of greenhouse gases; focused adaptation; and economic growth. "The best strategy by far to combat climate change is economic growth," says Julian Morris, the study's project director and vice president at Reason Foundation. "Economic growth is the best way to eliminate poverty; meanwhile, the resulting wealth and technological advances  will enable people better to address all the problems they face, including any challenges that global warming may present."

Full Report Online

"Misled on Climate Change: How the UN IPCC (and others) Exaggerate the Impacts of Global Warming" is online here and here (.pdf).

 

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Impacts of Transportation Policies on Greenhouse Gas Emissions in U.S. Regions

Comparing the cost and effectiveness transportation-related policies aimed at reducing CO2 emissions

David T. Hartgen, M. Gregory Fields, Adrian Moore

This report compares the cost and effectiveness of improved fuel economy, transportation system improvements and shifts in travel behavior on the reduction of man-made CO2 emissions in urban areas. We study in detail 48 major U.S. regions containing 41% of the U.S. population, 60% of transit use and 90% of congestion delay. This report quantifies how much CO2 cars, light trucks and commercial trucks currently emit (base year 2005) in each region, how much CO2 would have increased with prior CAFE standards, how much the new CAFE standards will reduce, and how much CO2 might be reduced by other commonly suggested policies. These policies include the new fuel economy standards, additional smaller-car sales, signal timing and speed controls, capacity increases, high-occupancy or priced lanes, travel reduction polices, transit use increases, carpooling, telecommuting and walking to work. We then assess the cost versus effectiveness of each policy for each region and recommend detailed regional strategies.

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Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions From Automobiles

Examining technological and compact development strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions

Wendell Cox, Adrian Moore

Federal, state and local governments are considering or have implemented policies that seek to reduce human emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs). 

This study seeks to assess the relative merits of specific policies intended to reduce GHGs from automobiles. (It does not consider whether or not reductions in GHGs are actually desirable.) Current policies and proposals for reducing GHGs from autos would require implementation of strong land use restrictions (compact development). Technological alternatives for reducing GHG emissions have received considerably less attention. 

We estimated the costs of a range of such policies, beginning with government documents and reports prepared in cooperation with organizations advocating behavioral policies. Behavioral strategy costs and the costs of technological strategies were evaluated against the upper limit on acceptable costs for GHG emissions reductions as estimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (This upper limit, $50/ton of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2020–2030, is used because of its source, not because we endorse that value). 

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Weathering Global Warming in Agriculture

Population growth, world food supplies and minimizing climate change's impact on crops

Douglas Southgate, Julian Morris

Provided it is not a consequence of governmental interference with market forces, cheap food creates far-reaching benefits. People struggling to survive on a dollar or two a day, of whom there are more than two billion around the world, are better able to feed themselves. Diminished food scarcity also leads to increased expenditures on goods and services other than food, thereby accelerating the economic diversification that is an integral feature of development. Moreover, low prices facilitate the savings required for investment and economic growth. Declining food scarcity has helped drive overall economic progress for decades, even as the demand for edible goods has been increasing at a fast clip.

Since the middle of the twentieth century, when the population was slightly less than 2.5 billion, human numbers have shot up, surpassing 6.0 billion shortly before 2000 and currently approaching 7.0 billion. Adding to food demand have been pronounced improvements in living standards, especially in China and other Asian nations where much of the population could not afford adequate sustenance little more than a generation ago. Yet food supplies have more than kept pace—mainly thanks to technological advances during and since the Green Revolution that have caused global yields of cereals (which comprise at least 60 percent of the human diet if the grain consumed by livestock is taken into account) to rise by 150 percent since the early 1960s.

The general tendency of food supplies to overwhelm food demand has registered in the marketplace. Corrected for inflation, prices of corn, rice and wheat declined by approximately 75 percent between 1950 and the middle 1980s, and then remained at historically low levels for another two decades.3

Food prices spiked in 2007 and 2008 due to rising agricultural production costs resulting from higher energy prices, expanded conversion of corn and other crops into biofuels, and export restrictions implemented by nations such as Argentina, Ukraine and Vietnam. However, markets soon returned to normal, with prices in late 2008 a little above what they had been before the spike. Occasional upswings like those of 2007 and 2008 notwithstanding, food prices can remain at current levels or even decline further in the years to come. For example, the World Bank anticipates a deceleration of demand growth, mainly because population increases will dwindle as human fertility continues to decline and because the rate of growth for grain consumption per capita promises to slow down in emerging economies. In addition, ample opportunities remain for boosting production. Under the Bank’s baseline scenario, real food prices should be slightly below current levels in 2050, when human numbers will be at around nine billion and close to stabilizing.6 But there are caveats.

If governments continue to subsidize and mandate biofuel production, midcentury prices of crops could be 30 percent above current levels.

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The World's Population Reaches 7 Billion, But Don't Let the UN Scare You

UN is wrong on food shortages and climate change

Julian Morris

According to the United Nations, the World's population reached 7 billion people on October 31st. Well, maybe not exactly on Monday; the US Census Bureau estimates that it will happen sometime in March next year. But let's not quibble over the date: the UN has never been very good at forecasts, especially of the future. For decades, it has claimed that the rising tide of humanity would overwhelm the environment and lead to food shortages - unless urgent action is taken to stem the tide. And for decades it has been wrong:Per capita food production has been rising and the environment generally improving. 

Meanwhile, when "urgent action" has been taken, in the form of forced sterilisations, for example, or China's one child policy, the result has been grotesque violations of human rights. 

But still the UN persists. The most recent version of its apocalyptic story goes like this - Population growth and rising wealth will result in a perfect storm of increasing demand for food and increased emissions of carbon dioxide, which in turn will cause climate change that will reduce agricultural productivity, making food more scarce. To address these combined threats, it says we need to control population growth and reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The UN claims that if we follow its advice humanity will "thrive," but it is much more likely that the opposite would be the case. 

Let's give the UN its due: it is correct that demand for food is likely to rise as the population rises and people become wealthier. More people naturally need more food and wealthier people tend to eat more meat, which requires more grasses, grains and pulses as feed than if we were ourselves herbivores. 

The UN is wrong on every other count, as Professor Douglas Southgate shows in a new Reason Foundation study.

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