Jefferson Policy Journal

What is Ag Stormwater & Is It Regulated?

Posted on May 25, 2016 by matt ohern

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Agriculture’s stormwater runoff is in the news almost every day. Des Moines, Iowa, has filed a major law suit against drainage districts (farmers) and counties alleging that runoff water from farmers’ fields discharged through farm tiles into local rivers must be regulated under the Clean Water Act (CWA). EPA has recently won a major case against the American Farm Bureau (AFBF) and claims it now has the authority to regulate agriculture stormwater runoff using the Clean Water Act’s authority to regulate Total Maximum Daily Loads (TMDLs) of pollutants which run off farmers’ fields and into waters of the state or the United States. This is a problem for tillage agriculture!
Agriculture’s stormwater runoff from fields is viewed as significant and pernicious cause of water pollution in the nation’s waters. Many opponents of agriculture claim state efforts to improve water quality impacted by agriculture have met with little or no success. EPA and its supporters constantly argue that present day agricultural practices cause serious adverse impacts to surface water and ground water.
Des Moines Water Works (DMWW) is claiming that the groundwater coming from farm fields carries high levels of nitrates. DMWW claims farmers’ agricultural stormwater runoff is harming its citizens’ drinking water.
Many of you may ask what is agricultural stormwater runoff and is it regulated?
The federal statute entitled “Clean Water Act” has addressed agricultural stormwater runoff since 1972. One would think defining agricultural stormwater runoff is pretty simple. I can assure you courts have wrestled with this issue for decades and in nearly every case have come to the correct conclusion declaring in every case there is an agriculture stormwater exemption and that farmers as of this date do not need a CWA federal permit to discharge water running off of their fields and from around their concentrated animal facilities.
Federal courts have written extensively on what constitutes agricultural stormwater runoff; what is exempted from federal permitting and what is not. The granddaddy of agricultural runoff cases occurred in 1994 involving a dairy farm in New York State in Concerned Area Residents for the Environment v. Southview Farm. This case involved the farmer applying dairy manure on a field shortly before a substantial rain. The Court ruled “We agree that agricultural runoff has always been considered nonpoint-source pollutants exempt from the Act.” In the Southview Farm case, some manure ran into surface waters while it was raining and some ran in while it was not raining. The Court looked at the common sense meaning of agricultural stormwater. The Court said quite simply that discharges of agricultural stormwater runoff caused by “precipitation” would be exempt from CWA permitting. So the Court clearly ruled that runoff from a farmer’s field “caused by” rainfall would be exempt from the permitting requirements of the CWA.
Another key decision in 2005 also came from the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York. That case also protected agriculture stormwater runoff from being regulated by EPA. It said “There is an impropriety of imposing liability for agriculture-related discharges triggered not by negligence or malfeasance, but by the weather – even when those discharges came from what would otherwise be point sources;” (The attorneys for DMWW might want to read this case carefully.)
Another decision in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals against Closter Farms ruled that “…agricultural stormwater discharge exemption applies to any discharges [that] were the result of precipitation.” It is clear federal courts have supported agriculture’s stormwater runoff exemption.
A second issue has arisen regarding stormwater runoff from around the buildings of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs). Many have argued runoff from the barnyard area surrounding CAFO buildings is from a point source and must be regulated by EPA or a state. EPA claims that it can regulate runoff from the production area and that includes the animal confinement area, manure storage area, raw materials’ storage area and waste containment areas. It is also clear that barnyard areas which are landscaped and surround the buildings constitute none of these activities, so the farmyard where stormwater runs off is also exempted under the agricultural stormwater runoff exemption.
EPA, in 2003, agreed that its regulations requiring a permit only regulated activities within the farm production area.
The issue appears simple but as you can see, it is not.
(This article first ran in Farm Futures on May 18, 2016)
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What is Ag Stormwater & Is It Regulated?

Posted on May 25, 2016 by matt ohern

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Platooning and Dedicated Truck Lanes

Posted on May 25, 2016 by matt ohern

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Interest continues to grow in making use of partial automation to enable big-rigs to travel close together in platoons on long-distance highways. In addition to reduced accidents from partial automation (lane-keeping and connected adaptive cruise control), platooning offers significant reductions in fuel consumption.

Two platooning demonstrations have been carried out recently in Europe. Daimler Trucks in March operated a three-truck platoon on an active German autobahn, with 15-meter (50-ft.) separation between them. The video showed that when a car cut in between platooning trucks, the automation system quickly increased the spacing to 165 ft. And in April, the first cross-border truck platooning took place, as six platoons from several countries converged on the port of Rotterdam.

In this country, the legislatures of Florida and Missouri have taken action on truck platooning so far this year. Florida’s new autonomous vehicle law allows testing of semi-autonomous platoons on the state’s highways, but a companion measure that would waive the current minimum following distance of 300 ft. failed to pass. The Missouri Senate gave unanimous support to a transportation bill that includes a truck platooning pilot program; it awaits a decision by the House. James Pflum of Missouri DOT points to I-70 in the state as the logical test-bed for truck platooning.

A Silicon Valley startup company, Peloton Technology, is working actively with truck fleets, manufacturers, and state DOTs to carry out pilot projects using its semi-automation technology in two-truck platoons. The company’s business model offers the system to operators at cost, plus a fee for every mile platooned. It is preparing for on-road tests with several fleets on Texas highways this year.

A recent study of autonomous trucking by consulting firm Roland Berger identified five potential stages of automation, with driver-on-board platooning as stage 3. The firm estimated the incremental cost of equipping trucks for each stage, and its estimate for stage 3 is $6,200 per vehicle, which it thinks could be recovered via savings in fuel use and reduced accidents (with the latter providing the largest share of cost savings).

Another recent study, by Princeton Consultants, found that only 28% of the industry people it surveyed expected automation to have a moderate to large near-term impact on trucking. But Princeton’s Steve Sashihara told Fleet Owner that the longer-term impact could be significant. That’s because the industry confronts an aging workforce and a chronic driver shortage. He thinks automation could transform long-distance trucking, especially when platooning can be done without driver intervention. Current regulations limit drivers to 11 hours per day, after which they must have an eight-hour break—but a fully autonomous truck could operate nearly 24 hours a day.

And that brings me back to the topic of dedicated truck lanes. The FHWA’s Freight Facts and Figures 2015 projects truck freight doubling (in dollar value) between 2007 and 2040. In Reason Foundation’s 2013 “Interstate 2.0” study, we reviewed detailed data from FHWA’s Freight Analysis Framework for every long-distance Interstate highway. Based on FAF’s corridor-by-corridor projections, we identified 11 major corridors in which 2040 truck vehicle miles of travel (VMT) would equal or exceed 40% of total VMT. Seven of these were multi-state corridors, including major portions of I-10, I-30, I-40, I-70, I-80, and I-81. Those would be obvious candidates for dedicated truck lanes, which would be welcomed by motorists and truckers alike.

The impact of those projections is starting to sink in. At an April hearing of the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee, Chairman Bill Shuster (R, PA) suggested that dedicated truck lanes (DTLs) might be needed to cope with this growth. Also that month, Georgia DOT announced plans for what could well be the nation’s first dedicated truck lanes—on I-75 between Macon and Atlanta’s southeastern suburbs. Those 40 miles of DTLs are estimated to cost $2 billion. The funding would come from federal and state fuel-tax funds. But that decision has already raised questions in Georgia. At the same time that nearly all planned widening of expressways in metro Atlanta will consist of express toll lanes for light vehicles, why is Georgia DOT planning to “give” the trucking industry this $2 billion worth of new lanes?

A different conclusion was reached in the four-state I-70 Corridors of the Future study last decade. That aging Interstate needs full reconstruction, and the preferred option is to rebuild it with two DTLs each way. But since the cost of doing that would be far beyond the capital budgets of the four states (MO, IL, IN, and OH), the preferred alternative called for toll financing of the entire project. Missouri has federal permission to do this (by having won one of the slots in a three-state pilot program), but currently lacks state tolling authority.

In the April T&I Committee hearing, the American Trucking Associations’ chief of national advocacy, Dave Osiecki, agreed with Shuster, in a statement worth quoting: “We do have a capacity problem. We don’t have enough funding for our system. I think we all know that. We need to figure out, as a country, as an industry, and as a Congress, a better way to fund our highway infrastructure, going forward.” I fully agree, and recommend customer-friendly toll financing as the best available option.

(This article first ran in the May 2016 edition of Surface Transportation Innovations)

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The Calm Reality of Climate Change Hysteria

Posted on May 25, 2016 by matt ohern

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Employing his college degree in fiction writing, White House communications strategist Ben Rhodes wrote deceitful talking points on the Benghazi attack and one-sided Iran nuclear deal – and later bragged about manipulating “clueless reporters.” Perhaps he’s also orchestrating administration climate spin.
Rising ocean tides will bring “waves of climate refugees” to America and Europe, President Obama has declared. “Environmental migrants” are already fleeing shrinking islands in the Pacific, and it is a “dereliction of duty” for military officers to “deny the reality” of dangerous man-made climate change.
Even if we act in accord with the Paris climate “accords” (none dare call it a treaty) and “can stem the increase” in global temperatures, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell insists, “very rapid” climate changes “are expected to force the relocation of hundreds of Alaskans from their homes.”
Man-made climate change is a “threat multiplier,” a Pentagon report asserts. It will “exacerbate” many of the challenges the United States faces today, including infectious diseases and terrorism, destructive extreme weather events, disputes over who has rights to dwindling land areas and basic resources like water and food, and intense disagreements over how to absorb millions of climate refugees.
Echo-chamber journalists disagree only over the identity of America’s first climate refugees: Alaskan Natives in Newtok being inundated by rising seas and melting ice and tundra – or 25 Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw families whose little island in the Mississippi Delta has been eroding away since 1950?
Not to be outdone, ultra-liberal radio talk show host Thom Hartmann told me, “You’ve got five million climate change refugees fleeing into Europe right now because of droughts in Syria.” When I called this nonsense and said they are trying to escape war and ISIS butchers who are beheading little children, for the tenth time in a ten-minute interview, he railed that I “should be in jail” as a “climate denier.”
Unfortunately for Rhodes & Company, inconvenient truths eviscerate manmade climate chaos claims.
Throughout Earth and human history, climate change has ranged from regional to hemispheric, from beneficial to harmful to destructive. It has included Roman and medieval warm periods, little ice ages, and five “mammoth” glacial epochs that buried continents under mile-high walls of ice. Natural climate change inflicted a Dust Bowl that sent millions of Americans scurrying in search of better lives, and decades- or centuries-long droughts that brought entire civilizations to their knees.Roman, Mayan, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Chinese and other cities and cultures prospered in warm periods and collapsed in cold and drought eras, climate historian Dennis Avery observes. This happened “over and over, in a centuries-long rhythm of affluence followed by long success, followed by long and utter failure.” Entire cities in the eastern Mediterranean were abandoned for centuries.
Storm activity rose by 85% in the second half of the 16th century, during the Maunder Sunspot Minimum, while the incidence of severe storms increased four-fold, writes historian Brian Fagan. British Navy logbooks show more than twice as many major land-falling Caribbean hurricanes during the cold decades of the 1700’s as during the warm years of 1950–2000.
Little ice ages and extended droughts brought crop failures and mass starvation, Avery notes. Rome shrank from a million inhabitants in its heyday to barely 30,000 a century later. The Mayan civilization plunged from perhaps 15 million to one million, as its cities were abandoned in a century-long drought.
Climate mood swings in the past 50 years have been far less dramatic than in previous millennia. Few people will have to flee the tiny portion of future climate change that might be attributable to humans.
The Climate Crisis Consortium ignores these eons, millennia and centuries of natural climate change. It wants us to believe Earth’s climate was stable and benign until the Industrial Age – and humans can now control climate and weather merely by controlling carbon dioxide levels. It’s all Hollywood nonsense.
Oceans have risen 400 feet since the last ice age glaciers melted. Pacific islands rose with them, as corals expanded their habitats with every new inch of sea water. Seas are now rising at seven inches per century – and EPA’s anti-coal Clean Power Plan would prevent barely 0.01 inches of rise over the next 100 years.
Greenland’s icecap is shrinking because of subterranean magmatic activity – not global warming. Arctic regions have long experienced warming and cooling cycles, as recorded by Francis McClintock and other whalers and explorers, dating back some 300 years. Polar bear populations are at an all-time high: 25,000.
Antarctic ice masses continue to grow, and the continent’s average annual temperature of minus-55 F means it would have to warm by 88 degrees year-round for that ice to melt. Even Al Gore in his wildest rants doesn’t say that is likely. So his beachfront home is safe from the 20-foot sea rise he has predicted.
Meteorologist Anthony Watts concludes that the only reliable long-term surface record comes from 400 official US rural thermometer stations that were never corrupted by location changes, airport heat or urban growth. Those stations show no significant warming for the past 80 years. The “record warming” we keep hearing about comes from data that have been “adjusted” or “homogenized” (ie, manipulated) upward to conform to computer model projections, IPCC proclamations and White House press releases.
Other studies have concluded there has been no increase in the severity or frequency of thunderstorms, tornadoes, hurricanes or winter blizzards for decades. Indeed, no Category 3-5 hurricane has struck the United States since October 2005 – a record lull that exceeds any hurricane hiatus since at least 1900.
Malaria was common in the USA, Europe and even Siberia until the 1950s, when window screens, DDT and better medical practices wiped it out. It has nothing to do with global warming or climate change. Its continued prevalence is due to incompetent health ministries that refuse to learn from past successes.
The notion that a warmer world with more atmospheric CO2 will bring crop failures and famines is sheer delusion. Higher carbon dioxide levels are actually “greening” the planet and making crops, forests and grasslands grow faster and better. New hybrid and biotech seeds, combined with modern fertilizers and farming practices, are yielding bigger harvests, even during droughts, as India is proving right now.There is no manmade climate crisis. Solar, galactic and oceanic cycles rule – not carbon dioxide. The biggest threat to agriculture and humans would come from another little ice age, not moderate warming.
In reality, the enormous amounts of energy packed into coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear fuels create the wealth, and power the wondrous technologies, that give us the greatest advantages mankind has ever enjoyed – to survive, adapt to and deal with climate changes and weather events.
The worst thing we could do is lock up that reliable, affordable, compact energy – and switch to expensive, heavily subsidized, wildly unpredictable wind and solar energy … and to biofuels that require millions of acres of land and billions of gallons of precious water.
Those who control energy control lives, livelihoods and living standards. Allowing climate alarmists and anti-energy zealots to dictate what energy sources we can use, and how much each of us is “permitted” to have, would put all of us at the mercy of their unaccountable whims, ideologies and fraudulent science.
Their callous policies are already killing millions of people every year in impoverished nations, by depriving them of the energy and technologies that we take for granted. Do we really want to be next? Shouldn’t we be helping the world’s poor take their rightful places among the healthy and prosperous?
The only “evidence” the alarmists have for a looming climate cataclysm are Al Gore movies, Mike Mann hockey sticks, computer “scenarios” that bear no resemblance to Real World events, and more spin and scare stories from White House novelist Ben Rhodes.
We need a president who will send the Paris climate treaty to the US Senate, where it can be properly vetted and rejected … overturn EPA and other regulations that are based on manipulated data and falsified pseudo-science … and lead the world back from the precipice of climate lunacy.

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Luckiest Generation In U.S. History?

Posted on May 25, 2016 by matt ohern

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In his annual letter to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett—the world’s third richest person—remarked on the state of the U.S. economy and current political fracas by writing:
It’s an election year, and candidates can’t stop speaking about our country’s problems (which, of course, only they can solve). As a result of this negative drumbeat, many Americans now believe that their children will not live as well as they themselves do. That view is dead wrong: The babies being born in America today are the luckiest crop in history.
Buffett went on to explain why he thinks this is so: the U.S. economy (measured in GDP) has been growing at 2% per year above the rate of inflation, while population has been growing at 0.8% per year. Based on these two figures, he calculates that America will enjoy 34% in real economic growth per person over the next 25 years.
While his data and math are sound, Buffett makes assumptions that stand a good chance of not materializing given current economic trends. He aptly notes that “nothing rivals the market system in producing what people want,” and thus:
For 240 years it’s been a terrible mistake to bet against America, and now is no time to start. America’s golden goose of commerce and innovation will continue to lay more and larger eggs.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that Americans have been choking this golden goose in unprecedented ways, and it is showing objective signs of decline. If this continues, today’s newborns could easily be the first generation of Americans to live materially worse than their parents. This is clear from the following graph, which displays the same calculation Buffet performed averaged over 10-year periods so that the long-term patterns are evident:

Granted, the Great Recession (2007-2009) occurred within the last decade. However, even when excluding these years, real GDP growth beyond population growth from 2010 to 2015 has been 39% below the average of the 25 years prior to the Great Recession.
Such weak growth is not only troublesome but odd, because the economy normally grows quickly after recessions. Indeed, renowned liberal economist Paul Krugman once argued that “the economic expansion under President Reagan did not validate his economic doctrine,” because “rapid growth is normal when an economy is bouncing back from a deep slump.” (Hat tip: Larry Elder)
Concurrent with America’s decay in economic growth per person, at least three factors with major effects on it have approached or surpassed unprecedented levels. These are federal debt, government social benefits, and regulations. Barring experimental data, it is often impossible to objectively isolate the effects of any single factor on an economy, but as detailed below, these three factors may explain a large portion of what has occurred and what may continue to occur unless the nation significantly changes course.
Government Debt
One of the surest ways to harm future generations is by running up government debt. In the words of the U.S. Government Accountability Office, “the costs of federal borrowing will be borne by tomorrow’s workers and taxpayers” and this can eat away at their “living standards.”
In recent years, federal debt has grown at a faster pace and to higher levels than at any time in U.S. history except World War II. Unlike the WWII debt—which quickly declined when the war ended—the Congressional Budget Office projects that current federal polices will increase debt to far beyond anything ever experienced in the history of the U.S.:
Such levels of government debt can cause many destructive effects, but one of the most common is a reduction in economic output. Contrary to what some have alleged, this outcome is widespread and substantial.
Moreover, it has real consequences for real people. Per the textbook Microeconomics for Today, countries with “slow growth in GDP per capita are less able to satisfy basic needs for food, shelter, clothing, education, and health.”
Social Benefits
In basic terms, GDP is defined by the equation: Hours worked × Labor productivity. Social welfare programs play an important role in this equation, because they reduce the first factor in it: hours worked.
As explained by the Congressional Budget Office, social benefits “create an incentive for some people to work less” by:

providing benefits that decline with rising income, “thus making work less attractive.”
allowing “some people to maintain the same standard of living while working less.”
increasing taxes, which “will ultimately induce some workers to supply less labor.”

Some have attempted to dispute these realities, but even Lawrence Summers—Obama’s former chief economist and Clinton’s Treasury Secretary—has acknowledged that government assistance programs provide “an incentive, and the means, not to work.”
For nearly a century, social benefit programs have consumed an increasing share of the U.S. economy, rising from 1% of GDP in 1930 to 14% in 2014. During the same period, they have also devoured a mounting portion of federal, state, and local government revenues, growing from 9% in 1930 to 50% in 2014.
The federal government projects that spending on several major social programs will increase substantially over the coming decades. This includes Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and the insurance exchanges created by Obamacare. Due to the design of these programs and the fact that life expectancies are increasing without comparable increases in program eligibility ages, much of these social benefits will flow to able-bodied adults. This will reduce their incentive to work, and with that, economic growth.
Rising social benefits, the aging of baby boomers, and other factors are already impacting the average time spent working by Americans. Since 1999, when the female labor force participation rate peaked, the total amount of hours worked in the U.S. divided by the number of adults in the U.S. has fallen by 11%. This does not bode well for the future of young Americans, for the burden of supporting these people will fall on their backs.
Regulations
Another key hindrance to economic growth that has reached new heights in recent years is regulatory burdens. Politicians and their subordinates enact regulations to provide benefits for society or segments of it, but to accomplish this, they typically force people to act in ways they normally would not. This often entails some form of economic tradeoff that impairs productivity by creating red tape or restricting people from using cost-effective means of production. For example:

federal tax laws and regulations require taxpayers to spend 6.1 billion hours per year filling out forms and performing other tax compliance tasks.
healthcare regulations require 40 layers of paperwork for a typical Medicare patient who arrives at an emergency room with a broken hip and receives treatment until recuperation.
greenhouse gas regulations, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, will add 30% to the price of electricity by 2022.

Productivity is the second variable in the GDP equation above, and it is hard to overstate its significance. As explained by Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen, “The most important factor determining living standards is productivity growth.” Likewise, the Congressional Budget Office has emphasized that “a small change in the growth of productivity” over an extended period can do more harm than recessions, because low productivity reduces economic “output by an ever-increasing amount.”
Ominously, average productivity growth for the past five years has been lower than any other five-year period on record, which extends back to 1947. In fact, it has been 82% below the average of the 50 years prior to the Great Recession. The blame for this cannot be laid solely at the feet of regulations, but regardless of the reasons for it, this situation poses another severe threat to the so-called luckiest generation.
Broken Families
There is another factor that does not play directly into GDP, but it does have a negative impact on living standards and is at all-time highs and trending higher. This is the disintegration of families, which spreads workers’ wages over an increasing number of households and thereby lowers their household income.
For example, when a couple gets divorced, their incomes often remain the same, but this money does not provide the same standard of living, because the couple must frequently bear the cost of maintaining two separate households. In cases where an income earner has custody of children, her (or his) earning power may decline due to the added responsibilities of single parenthood and the time it takes to do all of the tasks associated with running a household.
As shown in the graph below, the portion of unmarried or nonfamily households in the U.S. has risen from 24% in 1940 to 52% in 2015:
Beyond its effects on living standards, this familial breakdown is also the primary cause of rising household income inequality. Once again, this is not a promising development for the future of America’s children.
Conclusion
There is no way to know for certain if today’s newborns will live worse or better than their parents. However, to make an educated guess, one must look at trends instead of taking a snapshot in time, as Buffett did. Regrettably, the key trends examined herein are decidedly negative.
The good news is that none of these factors are outside the control of the American people. They can chose by the way they vote, work, and live to nurture the golden geese of commerce, financial responsibility, and family. This will give today’s youth real opportunities for economic progress that previous generations of Americans have enjoyed.
(This article first ran in Just Facts on May 3, 2016)

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Jefferson Policy Journal

What is Ag Stormwater & Is It Regulated?

What is Ag Stormwater & Is It Regulated?

Platooning and Dedicated Truck Lanes

The Calm Reality of Climate Change Hysteria

Luckiest Generation In U.S. History?

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