This is one of two posts today by CPR member scholars evaluating NY Gov. David Paterson's recent executive order on regulations; see also Sid Shapiro's post, "New York Governor Channels Ronald Reagan: Governor Paterson’s Flawed Plan to Review Regulations."
It is open season on environmental, health, and safety regulations in New York. Last Friday, August 7, Governor Paterson issued an Executive Order directing his public safety agencies to review all of their regulations with an eye toward eliminating any that are “unnecessary, unbalanced, unwise, duplicative or unduly burdensome.”
This language could have been lifted directly from anti-regulation lobbying groups. The Governor's press release actually touts: "Streamlined Regulations Will Better Protect the Health, Safety and Welfare of all New Yorkers." Nothing could be further from the truth.
The Order requires each agency to conduct a 60 day comment period and then select at least two regulations to designate for further review, the selection to be based on which regulations have generated the most widespread or substantive criticism and opposition.
Think about what this means.
Paterson’s Executive Order gives well-financed, well-organized business groups a second bite at the apple on a host of regulatory battles that they have already lost. Regulations that protect the people and the state of New York already go through extensive public comment and review. Now regulations that that have been duly enacted, sometimes after much struggle, will be on the chopping block. This process ensures that the most controversial regulations, often those dedicating resources to protecting the most vulnerable among us, will be cherry-picked for review.
Full textIn this month’s Atlantic, Gregg Easterbrook writes that privatizing the seas through use of individualized transferrable quotas (ITQs) is the solution to the grave problem of overfishing. Recently, NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco came out strongly in favor of ITQs (which the agency is calling “catch shares”), and has committed her agency to “ transitioning to catch shares ” as a solution to overfishing. Would that the solution to overfishing were so easy!
Today, fisheries managers set a "total allowable catch" (TAC) for open-access fisheries. A fishery is open until that TAC is reached. Not surprisingly, there is often a mad scramble to capture as large a share of fish as quickly as possible. Sometimes fisheries, like the pre-ITQ Alaskan halibut fishery, are only open for a few days, or even a few hours.
Catch shares work to eliminate this incentive to catch all of the fish today. Thus, Easterbrook contrasts the orderly halibut fishery in Alaska today with the free-for-all of the pre-ITQ days. And catch shares do make a fishery more orderly. When a boat has a right to a specified share of the TAC, it removes the incentive to catch each fish before someone else does, the so-called “fisherman’s dilemma.” ITQs seeks to solve this problem by enclosing the commons and creating clear private ownership rights.
I question the assumption, though, that private ownership will convert fisherfolk into stewards of the long-term health of the fishery. As the recent financial collapse has shown, merely having a market with clear private ownership rights does not protect against short-sightedness, misvaluation and greed—all of which come into play when we talk about overfishing. All ITQs do is remove the economic incentive to catch the full TAQ immediately—they do nothing to address the more structural problems that bedevil fisheries management decisions: the political aspect of nominally scientific resource management decisions and overcapacity in the fishing industry.
Full text