Recent Reasons for Optimism Reloaded

I know "Reloaded" was the second movie, and this is my third Recent Reasons for Optimism entry, but... yeah, I don't have a good reason, so on to the optimism! Space news dominated the week, but there are also reasons to be optimistic about agriculture, health and the economy.

1. For starters, Joshua at PostLibertarian has his own list of reasons for optimism, including SpaceX's success with the Falcon 9, Cubify's new 3D printer and the lowering of legal hurdles for driverless cars. Also check out his previous reasons for optimism, including lower child mortality and improving technologies, among others.

2 Speaking of space, SpaceX has also just signed their first commercial contract for the Falcon Heavy rocket. The Falcon Heavy is basically three Falcon 9's strapped together. When completed, it will be able to take 58.5 tons into orbit, more than double the shuttle's 26.8 tons at less than a quarter of the cost.

3. SpaceX isn't the only good news in space. A company in the UK has announced plans (ht One Per Cent) to launch nanosatellites that, once in orbit, can dock with each other in novel configurations. One of the benefits would be easier in-orbit upgrades to satellites equipped with the technology. In a perfect example of the Matt Ridley quote in the sidebar here, the nanosatellites would use Kinect cameras to sense each other and make docking possible. "The more we invent, the more inventions become possible."

4. Just one more about space: Virgin Galactic has been granted an FAA permit for the first rocket-powered tests of SpaceShipTwo, which will eventually carry tourists into space. They plan to begin those tests this year, with an eye to actual tourist flights starting in 2013-2014.

5. The Free Exchange blog at The Economist reviews two recent books, one painting a picture of an America in decline, the other the opposite. In blogger R.A.'s words, "To spin a story of decline, one has to demonstrate that policies are considerably worse than they used to be, and that they're unlikely to improve. It's actually quite difficult to do this." While there are looming problems, R.A. says, "these issues, and other worries as well, are not being ignored or greeted with complacency," and "American innovation is proving as impressive as ever."

6. Two studies covered at World Climate Report (ht @mattwridley) portend good news for crop yields. Increased atmospheric carbon dioxide helps rice out-compete weeds and encourages more photosynthesis in wheat. Higher temperatures also improve wheat water use efficiency. The scientists predicted that by 2050, global warming would raise wheat yields by about 5.8% in lower altitudes and more than 10% in higher altitudes.

7. A ten-year-old girl, Sammie Hicks, was until recently only able to hear with a hearing aid. In April, she was given a cochlear implant and recorded for Youtube the moment it was finally turned on in May. She jumps as the sounds come in, and adjusts to hearing herself breathe for the first time. In the video, she starts crying, and later said, "It was overwhelming. But the reason I really cried? I couldn’t believe all the stuff I was missing." In a later video, she talks about hearing pencils writing at school, and the wind on her way home.

8. Paralyzed rats with "severe spinal injuries" were effectively cured of their paralysis, regaining the ability to walk after 2-3 weeks and achieving "100% recuperation" after 5-6 weeks of treatment, including a special stimulating device and the ratty equivalent of physical therapy. A similar treatment for humans could be available within just a year or two.

9. The plural of anecdotes is not data. However, anecdotally, in my little corner of the world, the economy seems to be improving. People I know who have been unemployed, some for a very long time, over the last few weeks have been finding jobs. Walking down the street this past week, I've seen "Now Hiring" signs in the windows of local businesses. There are fresh faces working at businesses I frequent, and even the local mall is expanding.

10. With Friday's disappointing employment numbers from the establishment survey, you'd be forgiven for thinking the economic data is all doom and gloom. However, the household survey told a different story. While the establishment survey measured only 69k new jobs, the more-accurate household survey picked up 422k.  Even the establishment survey looks better when you look at the private sector, which is where we want the growth to happen anyway. And while the unemployment rate ticked up from 8.1% to 8.2%, this was because the labor force grew by 642k as the long-term non-employed start looking for work again. That's not a bad thing!

11. Finally, a note on optimism itself. The CultureLab blog at New Scientist interviews Elaine Fox, author of the book Rainy Brain, Sunny Brain. Fox believes that we can retrain our brains to become more optimistic. She also cites research on the benefits of optimism, saying, "The research shows that, as long as they are realists too, people who have an optimistic mindset and feel like they are able to cope when things do go wrong benefit in all sorts of ways. The evidence is also quite strong now that an optimistic mindset is beneficial for our health. People with optimistic mindsets are also more successful in business, and seem to live longer."

Jon Huntsman and the Price of Gas

Things have been busy around here, so I haven't finished my evaluation of the fourth Republican debate yet. However, one point was raised by Jon Huntsman in the first third of the debate that required some research.

Huntsman says that, according to the Milken Institute, the actual price per gallon of gasoline that we pay is $13, once you include troop deployments and the cost of keeping sea lanes open. Where does that money come from? Well I certainly don't pay $13 at the gas pump, and if the oil companies were paying $13 in costs for every $4 gallon of gas they sell me, they'd have gone out of business long ago. Clearly, he's implying that government is paying the extra cost.

Who knows what the government pays for, so I thought I'd take a closer look at those numbers. The United States uses about 3.3 billion barrels of finished motor gasoline per year according to the US Energy Information Administration. A petroleum barrel is 42 gallons, so that's about 138.6 billion gallons of gasoline. If gas is about $4, Huntsman is talking about an extra $9 per gallon, or an extra $1.25 trillion. (This rises to $2.3 trillion if you assume he's talking about all finished petroleum products rather than just motor gasoline.)

It sounds like he thinks the extra costs come from military activities that ensure access to oil, but the entire military budget in 2010 was about $0.8 trillion, less than two-thirds of the extra $1.25 trillion. Even if every single penny of military spending was used to secure oil resources, it still doesn't cover the extra $1.25 trillion that Huntsman claims we're spending.

In fact, total federal discretionary spending in 2010 was $1.3 trillion. For Huntsman to be right, more than 96% of the federal discretionary budget would have to somehow be rerouted towards paying for gasoline without anyone except Huntsman and the Milken Institute knowing what was going on. If this was the case, it would deserve a hell of a lot more than a passing mention in a debate. If this is what he actually believes, he shouldn't be talking about anything else!

So what about that Milken Institute? Can they shed any light on how their numbers add up? Well, I'm not even sure that Huntsman's number actually comes from the Milken Institute. Here's their website; a sitewide search for "$13" doesn't yield anything about $13 gas, and none of their publications seem to relate to gas prices. If they have an explanation for Huntsman's number, I sure couldn't find it. I have contacted both the Huntsman campaign and the Milken Institute for clarification, so we'll see if either can explain what he meant.

In the meantime, however, I was able to find this Scientific American article from July, which cites a report from a group called the Economics for Equity and the Environment (E3) Network. According to E3, the extra $9 per gallon doesn't come from sea lane costs or troop deployments or anything like that. Rather, it comes from the unaccounted-for social cost of carbon emissions, caused by environmental damage, which they claim is $900 per ton of emissions. The Obama Administration's working estimate, published in 2010, is significantly lower, at $21 per ton.

Now the Obama Administration has been wrong before, so maybe E3 is right and $21 is too low. According to this brief (PDF), the UK estimated the social cost as somewhere between $41 and $124/ton. Still, even the higher $124/ton is less than 14% of the $900/ton necessary to reach the extra $9 per gallon that Huntsman claims we're paying. This 18-page report (PDF) from E3 details why they believe $21/ton is too low, but I've yet to find any report from E3 on why the appropriate number is 43 times higher. From the reports that are available, it's clear that in order to reach $900/ton, you have to make extremely pessimistic assumptions about our ability to adapt to climate change, about the possible benefits of warmer climate in some areas, and about future economic growth. However, even if Huntsman is extremely pessimistic on climate change, that still has nothing to do with troop deployments or sea lanes.

Now I'm not saying Huntsman was deliberately misleading about where his number came from or what it meant. I'm just saying the number he gave doesn't make sense on its face, that I couldn't find the number he claimed at the source he gave, and that the only source I could find that gave the same number used a completely different explanation. Oh, and their explanation requires assuming a social cost to carbon emissions about 43 times higher than the Obama Administration assumes.