BOMBSHELL: Lead to blame for ADHD, urban crime and low IQ

I remember reading several years ago an article about the eerie correlation between the use of leaded gasoline and national crime rates (outside the U.S., too), with about a 20-year lag time, and thinking this was a real bombshell in social science research. 

But this discovery was dismissed even by the "lib'rul" mainstream media and never got a fair hearing. Why? Probably because this theory doesn't fit the traditional Right-Left / Nature v. Nurture debate about the causes of crime. This isn't about genes or upbringing, it's pure brain chemistry. It also deprives a lot of folks like the Rudy Giuliani's of the world a pet issue on which they made their careers. This is not to mention America's well-funded and lobbied prison-industrial complex that tells us that more prisons and tougher sentencing are to thank for lower crime rates.

Now MJ is back with more research that's been done in the meantime and it looks pretty legit. As journalist Kevin Drum points out, "econometrics consistently fails to explain most of the variation in crime rates."  Levels of lead -- specifically Pb(CH2CH3)4 -- however, do pass the econometrics test.

So if this is true -- and it looks like it still is borne out by the data -- then what are some of the implications?

1. Here we have a huge case of economic spillover or "negative externalities," as economists like to call it, for when an economic decision costs society more than its private or "market" cost does. Innocent children end up paying for it; and then later, their innocent crime victims. 

2. We have a lurking danger in our urban areas among populations least equipped to clean it up. The cost of a real, nationwide cleanup of houses with lead paint, lead pipes, and urban topsoil would be $20 billion per year for 20 years!  However, MJ argues that the benefits in lower crime rates could be $200 billion per year, or a 20-to-1 return on investment.

3. Trying to clean this stuff up in the wrong way can make it worse, spreading lead dust that is currently "locked" into lead-based paint or up to 6 inches of urban topsoil.

4. This theory explains, at least partially, why murder rates in cities are always higher than in smaller towns... but also why the crime rates in big cities everywhere have been going down, down since the 1990s.

UPDATE (01.07.2013): A buddy tipped me off that one American engineer/chemist, Thomas Midgley, Jr., was responsible for both leaded gasoline and many CFCs that cause the greenhouse effect. Thanks, dick!

America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

New research finds Pb is the hidden villain behind violent crime, lower IQs, and even the ADHD epidemic. And fixing the problem is a lot cheaper than doing nothing.

By Kevin Drum

January-February 2013 | Mother Jones

URL: http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link-gasoline

Krugman: GOP's jobs plan is to pollute more

Unfortunately, as Krugman noted elsewhere: "Today's American right doesn't believe in [negative] externalities, or correcting market failures; it believes that there are no market failures, that capitalism unregulated is always right. Faced with evidence that market prices are in fact wrong, they simply attack the science."

Oh, and the eventual GOP nominee Mitt Romney is flip-flopping once again.

Party of Pollution

By Paul Krugman

October 20, 2011 | New York Times

Last month President Obama finally unveiled a serious economic stimulus plan — far short of what I'd like to see, but a step in the right direction. Republicans, predictably, have blocked it. But the new plan, combined with the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, seems to have shifted the national conversation. We are, suddenly, focused on what we should have been talking about all along: jobs.

So what is the G.O.P. jobs plan? The answer, in large part, is to allow more pollution. So what you need to know is that weakening environmental regulations would do little to create jobs and would make us both poorer and sicker.

Now it would be wrong to say that all Republicans see increased pollution as the answer to unemployment. Herman Cain says that the unemployed are responsible for their own plight — a claim that, at Tuesday's presidential debate, was met with wild applause.

Both Rick Perry and Mitt Romney have, however, put weakened environmental protection at the core of their economic proposals, as have Senate Republicans. Mr. Perry has put out a specific number — 1.2 million jobs — that appears to be based on a study released by the American Petroleum Institute, a trade association, claiming favorable employment effects from removing restrictions on oil and gas extraction. The same study lies behind the claims of Senate Republicans.

But does this oil-industry-backed study actually make a serious case for weaker environmental protection as a job-creation strategy? No.

Part of the problem is that the study relies heavily on an assumed "multiplier" effect, in which every new job in energy leads indirectly to the creation of 2.5 jobs elsewhere. Republicans, you may recall, were scornful of claims that government aid that helps avoid layoffs of schoolteachers also indirectly helps save jobs in the private sector. But I guess the laws of economics change when it's an oil company rather than a school district doing the hiring.

Moreover, even if you take the study's claims at face value, it offers little reason to believe that dirtier air and water can solve our current employment crisis. All the big numbers in the report are projections for late this decade. The report predicts fewer than 200,000 jobs next year, and fewer than 700,000 even by 2015.

You might want to compare these numbers with a couple of other numbers: the 14 million Americans currently unemployed, and the one million to two million jobs that independent estimates suggest the Obama plan would create, not in the distant future, but in 2012.

More pollution, then, isn't the route to full employment. But is there a longer-term economic case for less environmental protection? No. Serious economic analysis actually says that we need more protection, not less.

The important thing to understand is that the case for pollution control isn't based on some kind of aesthetic distaste for industrial society. Pollution does real, measurable damage, especially to human health.

And policy makers should take that damage into account. We need more politicians like the courageous governor who supported environmental controls on a coal-fired power plant, despite warnings that the plant might be closed, because "I will not create jobs or hold jobs that kill people."

Actually, that was Mitt Romney, back in 2003 — the same politician who now demands that we use more coal.

How big are these damages? A new study by researchers at Yale and Middlebury College brings together data from a variety of sources to put a dollar value on the environmental damage various industries inflict. The estimates are far from comprehensive, since they only consider air pollution, and they make no effort to address longer-term issues such as climate change. Even so, the results are stunning.

For it turns out that there are a number of industries inflicting environmental damage that's worth more than the sum of the wages they pay and the profits they earn — which means, in effect, that they destroy value rather than create it. High on the list, by the way, is coal-fired electricity generation, which the Mitt Romney-that-was used to stand up to.

As the study's authors say, finding that an industry inflicts large environmental damage compared with its apparent economic return doesn't necessarily mean that the industry should be shut down. What it means, instead, is that "the regulated levels of emissions from the industry are too high." That is, environmental regulations aren't strict enough.

Republicans, of course, have strong incentives to claim otherwise: the big value-destroying industries are concentrated in the energy and natural resources sector, which overwhelmingly donates to the G.O.P. But the reality is that more pollution wouldn't solve our jobs problem. All it would do is make us poorer and sicker.

Fish getting high on our pee

I wonder if some fish became more dangerous when addicted to drugs, just like some people do? What if a junkie Jaws could smell when a swimmer was taking Prozac and decided to get an oral dose? Or, wouldn't it be sad if the easiest way to catch fish became pissing in an estuary?

Shrimps 'becoming hooked on Prozac that is flushed into the sea'

By Fiona Macrae

July 7, 2010 | Daily Mail

URL: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1292794/Shrimps-hooked-Prozac.html#ixzz0taCqZiCF

Study: Coal electricity hides $62 B in costs per year

Report finds massive hidden energy costs, mostly from coal
By David Roberts
October 20, 2009 Grist.org

A new report from the National Research Council on the "hidden costs of energy" is, frankly, stunning. In a sane world, it would be headline news.

Producing and using energy imposes all sorts of costs on public health, crop yields, ecosystems, recreation, educational performance ... the list goes on. Many of these costs don't end up reflected in the market price of energy; consumers don't see them or factor them into purchasing decisions. They are hidden, paid indirectly through, for example, health-care spending or environmental-remediation costs. Such costs are external to energy markets—externalities, as economists call them—and they represent an enormous subsidy to the dirtiest sources of energy.

I'm always left somewhat dissatisfied by discussions about externalities. People seem to imagine them as external in some sort of metaphysical way, as though the costs inhabit an immaterial and weightless ether. ("Social" costs, they're sometimes called.) But costs are costs. Someone pays them, with real money. They dampen economic productivity, like driving with one foot pressing the brake.

In 2005, Congress set about finding out just what these external costs of energy production and use amount to. It requested that the National Research Council (part of the National Academy of Science) attempt to place a number on them. On Monday, the NRC released its report: "Hidden Costs of Energy: Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production and Use."

First, note that the report did not attempt to quantify the damage to ecosystems and agriculture wrought by climate change. It did not attempt to quantify the national security costs of securing energy supplies. It did not attempt to quantify the land-use costs of biofuels. It didn't attempt to quantify the costs of mercury pollution, which as Bill Chameides documents, are substantial. It didn't attempt to quantify the impact on taxpayers that subsidies to the coal industry impose.

So a huge chunk of costs were written out, meaning the results are extremely small-c conservative. Nonetheless, the NRC found that hidden costs amounted to $120 billion in 2005.

Of that $120 billion, a whopping $62 billion—over half—came from one source: coal-fired electricity plants. And that's only a partial accounting, as Ken Ward Jr. reports:

Maureen L. Cropper, a panel member and professor of economics at the University of Maryland, noted that the study also did not examine "upstream" costs of coal-fired power—such as damage from mountaintop removal mining— or "harm to ecosystems" from other impacts, such as disposal of toxic power plant ash.

If MTR mining, ash disposal, mercury emissions, market-distorting subsidies, and climate damage were taken into account, how much farther do you think coal's costs would rise, in both absolute and relative terms?

Remember this report the next time you hear that "coal is cheap."

Carbon Disclosure Project

The Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) is a registered charity set up by 385 institutional investors managing more than $50 trillion in assets. In 2008, 1,550 companies from the S&P 500, Global 500, and FTSE 350 voluntarily reported to the CDP their CO2 emissions accounting, and emission-reduction strategies.

Why are they volunteering this information? According to PricewaterhouseCoopers: "Increasingly, [industry] analysts are placing a premium on information provided about environmental, social, and governance issues, expecting greater visibility into the performance of supply chains."

Moreover, smart companies are not waiting for gov't regulation on CO2 emissions. They are getting out ahead of regulation and their competition. They are measuring their emissions (and their suppliers' emissions) and finding ways to reduce them, and then reporting this data voluntarily to investors and other stakeholders. Emissions of any kind, after all, are wastes, which represent inefficiencies and hence opportunities to cut costs and/or increase productivity. Smart companies realize that belching gases into the air and spewing toxic liquids into our soil and waterways create hidden costs for society, which we are increasingly less willing to tolerate; but companies also recognize that these wastes represent direct costs to the company. Thanks to the "lean" movement in manufacturing and supply chains, we know that any kind of waste is a drain on profit.

Thus, when we do a proper accounting of costs and lost opportunities, we see that there is very little opposition between environmentalists who lobby for reduced emissions, and businessmen who strive for bigger profits. But if an industry is inherently, hopelessly inefficient, it will be overtaken by competitors using more more efficient processes and technologies.

U.S. trails China, EU in green investments

U.S. trailing China, EU in 'green' investments
By Ben Furnas
April 20, 2009 | Center for American Progress

A February analysis by HSBC Global Research in Hong Kong projects that nearly 40 percent of China's proposed $586 billion stimulus plan—$221 billion over two years—is going toward public investment in renewable energy, low-carbon vehicles, high-speed rail, an advanced electric grid, efficiency improvements, and other water-treatment and pollution controls. This stimulus is on top of historic levels of government spending and private investment in renewable technology, energy efficiency, and low-carbon growth all across China. The upshot: China, according to a recent analysis, is "the largest alternative energy producer in the world in terms of installed generating capacity."

 

This massive stimulus plan will spend over 3 percent of China's 2008 gross domestic product annually in 2009 and 2010 on green investments—more than six times America's green stimulus spending as a percentage of our respective economies. This is about $12.6 million every hour over the next two years. In the United States, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act invests $112 billion in comparable green priorities over the next two years, about half as much as China, according to HSBC. This represents less than half of one percent of our 2008 gross domestic product.

President Barack Obama has proposed additional public investment in renewable energy research of $15 billion annually, paid for by charging dirty energy corporations for their pollution. While this would amount to just one tenth of one percent of America's 2008 GDP, it would be a good start. With this money, the United States would finally join China and dozens of other nations across the world in providing public investment for renewable energy, including Japan, Germany, Canada, France, South Korea, Denmark, and Spain.

[By contrast,] in a series of energy bills in 2001, 2003, and 2005, the Bush administration plowed billions of dollars into dirty energy—oil, coal, and nuclear—while neglecting clean renewable energy industries. The 2001 energy bill gave 80 percent of its value to tax breaks for oil, gas, nuclear, and coal companies. The 2003 energy bill, drafted in secret with Vice President Dick Cheney and members of the oil, gas, coal, and electric industries, gave $23.5 billion to dirty energy and loosened environmental regulations. Finally, while the 2005 bill contained a token level of investment in renewable energy, it also provided even more support for dirty energy, offering $27 billion in subsidies for coal, oil, and nuclear energy.

 

But as the Bush administration doubled down on the energy of the past, nations across the world invested in the future. Japan, China, and European countries zoomed past the United States, with a combination of dirty energy regulations, public investments, and private market incentives.

In 2006, according to the most recent data from the Renewable Energy Policy Network, the United States, the world's largest economy, invested less in new capacity for renewable energy than either the EU-25 or China. In fact, according to the most recent data, the entire United States invests less in renewable energy per year than the country of Germany, which boasts less than one-third the population of the United States and an economy less than one-fourth our size.

 

The imperative for renewable sources of energy, energy efficiency, and green transportation and power infrastructure is clear. And yet, we continue to neglect these priorities while plowing tens of billions of dollars of subsidies into polluting and wildly profitable oil and gas companies that create far fewer jobs and exacerbate global warming.

President Obama's energy plan would eliminate $30 billion in giveaways to oil and gas companies and make polluting energy companies pay for their global warming pollution in order to invest in renewable energy infrastructure and cut taxes for 95 percent of working American families. This is the way to go.