• “Six challenges to the continued management of riverine flood risk are (1) many property owners don’t buy flood insurance, (2) people underestimate flood risk, (3) we need better flood maps, (4) we have a “love affair” with levees, (5) flood risk is increasing over time, and (6) we take deep pride in rebuilding after a disaster. long-term flood insurance contracts tied to long-term loans for risk-mitigating activities [can overcome] the six challenges.”
• “Even though most commodity markets respond rapidly to price differentials and reduce those differentials over time, water transfers out of agriculture into higher value uses are not occurring very rapidly. The existence of multiple rights of exclusion unbundled from the rights of use under the prior appropriation doctrine in the American West creates an anticommons that has impeded water transactions.” Put differently, trades don’t happen because so many interests can block them; see also review above.
• “Committee: A group of men who individually can do nothing, but as a group can decide nothing can be done.” — Fred Allen
• Two steps forward, one step back: “New laws in Colorado will allow many people to collect rainwater legally… [but] the state created a system of fines for rain catchers without a permit.” It only applies to people with wells. Better to toss out all laws restricting capture of rainwater and concentrate on streams, lakes and groundwater.
• “In this paper [gated] we consider how the dental industry responded to the addition of fluoride to public drinking water. We take advantage of the staggered introduction of fluoridation throughout the country to analyze the changes in numbers of within-county dentists relative to physicians in the years surrounding the change in fluoridation status… Our estimates imply that the 8 percentage point change in exposure to water fluoridation from 1974 to 1992 may have led to the loss of as many as 0.6 percent of dental establishments and 2.1 percent of dental employees, suggesting a substantial net impact of this public good on the dental profession since its inception.”
• Believe it or not, the EU’s biofuel policy is worse than the American’s ethanol policy! Why? Because they are IMPORTING biofuels grown on land where rainforests have been cut down. We are merely displacing one crop for another. Both sets of policies could be tossed if we just implemented a simple carbon tax…

hattip to JWT