www.JoeCobb.com

by Joe Cobb

Last month, the California legislature faced a stalemate over its FY 2007-08 budget, and a number of service providers had to cope with late payments. It was a form of political theater and it repeats every year. The newspapers and commentators on television decried the “irresponsibility��? of lawmakers, who were deadlocked again over whether to raise your taxes or slow down their increases in spending.

News reports are now coming out of Washington, D.C. about a stalemate in Congress over the same issue. The federal lawmakers are even more behind schedule this year than in the past. They haven’t passed necessary appropriations bills. Some commentators are worrying about another government shutdown in October, when the federal fiscal year for 2008 begins.

Why do we need a government budget? Before 1900, governments didn’t do business with an annual budget. Back then, they had low taxes and still had a surplus in the treasury. Since adopting the modern “budget forecasting��? system, financial planning by governments has gotten worse every year.

Governments pass laws to spend money. Households and businesses don’t. Those laws make it much more difficult to change if they get things wrong.

Whereas households and businesses can predict wages and sales, governments have a difficult time predicting tax revenues when inflation and tax brackets have a large effect on actual revenues collected the following year. In California a large part of the state income tax depends on capital gains income. Former governor Gray Davis well remembers how the stock market slump of 2000-02, which reduced capital gains for most investors, affected his budgets, and his career.

Government revenue forecasts are unreliable (just look at recent history), but there is a more realistic way that governments can manage money. It is the same way governments did it before 1900.

Congress established a system of appropriations committees and separate “authorization��? committees over 200 years ago. Unfortunately, the appropriations committees, which decide how much money each program should receive each year, are no longer looking at how much money to spend based on actual tax collections; they spend money based on unreliable forecasts.

A year or two later, the programs are audited and someone says, “This program has cost more than we forecast.��? Another sad excuse is, “Revenues are less than we forecast.��?

Why not look directly at how much something actually costs and how much revenue is actually being collected, and match these debits and credits directly on a monthly basis? This practical idea, which is how every household and private business does the job, is dismissed because “experts��? say government would not be able to plan.

Government Planning

Government planning? Anyone who actually works in government is now laughing at you. Government planning is an idea that was popular a hundred years ago, when socialism was seen as the wave of the future. After the failure of the Soviet experiment, we should know better.

Government agencies never downsize; government agencies never discover more efficient or productive ways to deliver services. Government agencies never want to save money, because that might mean a smaller budget next year. Incentives are not oriented toward cutting costs, which is why governments cannot be organized “like a business.��?

In a few weeks, Congress will pass “continuing resolutions��? to keep spending after the fiscal year ends. A practical idea would be to make those “continuing resolutions��? not for one or two months, but for 12 months. The protest against this simple idea is that some government agencies and programs will run out of money next April or May if they cannot get an increase in their appropriations.

But this is not a valid protest, because some government agencies and programs will run out of money next April or May even if they do get an increase from some “forecast��? budget. Lawmakers always vote for supplemental appropriations bills when this happens. It happens every year.

This is a “look back��? method of controlling spending, and it is actually how households and private businesses control spending. Government really needs a new method to control spending. It is as simple as giving up the bad habit of trying to forecast the future.

“Reality Based” Budgeting

Between now and next April or May, let the appropriations committees perform oversight and audit the costs of programs. Let the treasury monitor the actual tax revenues. If there is enough money for an increase in spending, it can be considered. If there is not enough money, let the programs be cut. This is “reality based��? budgeting. Those founding fathers in Congress 200 years ago knew how to do it right in the first place.

by Patrick Moore

Despite the anti-forestry scare tactics of celebrity movies, trees are the most powerful concentrators of carbon on Earth.

It seems like there’s a new doomsday documentary every month. But seldom does one receive the coverage that Hollywood activist Leonardo DiCaprio’s latest climate-change rant, “The 11th Hour,” is getting.

When we’re bombarded anew with theatrical images of our earth’s ecosystems when the film opens [in theaters] across [British Columbia] this Friday, I’m concerned that we’re losing sight of some indisputable facts.

Here’s a key piece of information DiCaprio, his collaborator and long-time activist Tzeporah Berman, and the leadership of my old organization Greenpeace are ignoring when it comes to forests and carbon:

• For British Columbians, living among the largest area of temperate rainforest in the world, managing our forests will be a key to reducing greenhouse gases.

As a lifelong environmentalist, I say trees can solve many of the world’s sustainability challenges. Forestry is the most sustainable of all the primary industries that provide us with energy and materials. Rather than cutting fewer trees and using less wood, DiCaprio and Berman ought to promote the growth of more trees and the use of more wood.

Trees are the most powerful concentrators of carbon on Earth. Through photosynthesis, they absorb CO2 from the atmosphere and store it in their wood, which is nearly 50 per cent carbon by weight. Trees contain about 250 kilograms of carbon per cubic metre.

North Americans are the world’s largest per-capita wood consumers and yet our forests cover approximately the same area of land as they did 100 years ago. According to the United Nations, our forests have expanded nearly 100 million acres over the past decade.

The relationship between trees and greenhouse gases is simple enough on the surface. Trees grow by taking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and, through photosynthesis, converting it into sugars. The sugars are then used as energy and materials to build cellulose and lignin, the main constituents of wood.

There is a misconception that cutting down an old tree will result in a net release of carbon. Yet wooden furniture made in the Elizabethan era still holds the carbon fixed hundreds of years ago.

Berman, a veteran of the forestry protest movement, should by now have learned that young forests outperform old growth in carbon sequestration.

Although old trees contain huge amounts of carbon, their rate of sequestration has slowed to a near halt. A young tree, although it contains little fixed carbon, pulls CO2 from the atmosphere at a much faster rate.

When a tree rots or burns, the carbon contained in the wood is released back to the atmosphere. Since combustion releases carbon, active forest management — such as removing dead trees and clearing debris from the forest floor — will be imperative in reducing the number and intensity of fires.

The role of forests in the global carbon cycle can be boiled down to these key points:

• Deforestation, primarily in tropical forests, is responsible for about 20 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions. This is occurring where forests are permanently cleared and converted to agriculture and urban settlement.
• In many countries with temperate forests, there has been an increase in carbon stored in trees in recent years. This includes the United States, Canada, New Zealand and Sweden.
• The most important factors influencing the carbon cycle are deforestation on the negative side, and the use of wood, from sustainably managed forests, as a substitute for non-renewable materials and fuels, on the positive side.

To address climate change, we must use more wood, not less. Using wood sends a signal to the marketplace to grow more trees and to produce more wood. That means we can then use less concrete, steel and plastic — heavy carbon emitters through their production. Trees are the only abundant, biodegradable and renewable global resource.

DiCaprio’s movie, “The 11th Hour,” is another example of anti-forestry scare tactics, this time said to be “brilliant and terrifying” by James Christopher of the London Times.

Maybe so, but instead of surrendering to the terror, keep in mind that there are solutions to the challenges of climate, and our forests are among them.

This film should be a good, clear reminder for us to put the science before the Hollywood hype.

Wednesday, August 29, 2007
______________________________

Dr. Patrick Moore is a co-founder of Greenpeace and chairman and chief scientist of Greenspirit Strategies Ltd. in Vancouver.

Special to The Sun
© The Vancouver Sun 2007 and CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.

Comments sent to the Orange County (Ca.) Register’s
Opinion editor for publication:

Mark Steyn (“There were two creeps in the men’s room,” Sept.1) is correct that police officer Sgt. Dave Karsnia is the truly creepy man. Like the reputedly closeted J.Edgar Hoover, the fascination of some strong male personalities with homosexuality, particularly in repressing and persecuting it, is very strange behavior indeed.

Former Congressman Bob Barr has made a new career after losing his re-election a few years ago. He was best known for his role in the Clinton Senate impeachment trial. He also was able to ban the District of Columbia from counting the votes in favor of medical marijuana (a vote count a year later showed the referendum passed). Now Bob Barr is on the Board of the Marijuana Policy Project and a national committeeman of the Libertarian Party.

Senator Larry Craig is a very intelligant man. I worked with him in the 1980s in Congress. He was elected to Congress as a social conservative, so he had to play that role to get re-elected. Term limits might have helped him discover his libertarian principles, which he seems to have practiced in private.

Larry Craig, you can make big money and become a genuine new leader if you follow Bob Barr and become an outspoken advocate of freedom and privacy. Cut government spending on salaries for men’s room police patrol and send Sgt. Karsnia out to write traffic tickets instead.