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Zoning vs. Eminent Domain: How Ventura County Shut Down The Pine Mountain Inn

Wed, 30 May 2012 09:00:00 EDT

In the northernmost reaches of California's Ventura County, a two-lane rural road called Highway 33 runs into the rugged and mostly undeveloped Transverse Mountain Range. Though it's mostly raw wilderness, a few businesses catering to adventurous explorers have long existed there, some for more than a century.

But now the local government is shutting those businesses down, one by one, using arcane zoning and building-code laws to get the job done.

"If there isn't someone complaining, and there isn't really a serious public health and safety issue, why do they spend so much of their time pursuing these kinds of cases?" asks Lynne Jensen, executive director of the Ventura County Coalition of Labor and Business (COLAB).

Tom Wolf owns the Pine Mountain Inn, a restaurant that's been serving biker groups and local community organizations since the 1930s. Wolf temporarily had to shut the doors when he suffered a heart attack in 2002, and he was never able to reopen when the county informed him that his property had been rezoned as an "Open Space" back in the 1980s without his knowledge.

"[The county] wanted everybody out of here," says Wolf. "And they wanted a complete open space with nothing but deer and frogs... and no people."

No matter how hard Wolf tried to comply with the ever-changing codes, the county just wouldn't relent, at one time even ordering him to remove a chicken coop that had never actually existed on the property.

Wolf isn't alone, says Jensen. Several other small businesses along Highway 33 have been hit by multiple county agencies for no apparent reason.

"They had every department hit us with violations to make sure that they shut us down," says April Hope, who, along with her husband Bob, owns a bed and breakfast called The Wheel, which has existed in the area since the 1890s.

Since the Hopes purchased The Wheel in early 2000, they've never been able to open it to the public. While officials from the county supervisor's office and the planning department refused to speak with ReasonTV for this story, Jensen says that the county is using code enforcement to drive these businesses off the land without compensation.

"This rezoning is really a way to get around eminent domain, because eminent domain means you give up your entire property. And here, you only give up part of your rights," says Jensen.

Invoking eminent domain to seize private property would not only require the county to compensate landowners, but also to demonstrate that the taking served a "public use."

"They have been very successful in taking people's property in a number of different ways without compensation as long as they don't take ownership of it," says Jensen.

About 5.30 minutes.

Written and Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Camera by Alex Manning, Tracy Oppenheimer, and Weissmueller.

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Why The Future Is Better Than You Think

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 00:00:00 EDT

Can a Masai Warrior in Africa today communicate better than Ronald Reagan could? If he's on a cell phone, Peter Diamandis says he can.

Peter Diamandis is the founder and chairman of the X Prize Foundation, which offers big cash prizes "to bring about radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity." Reason's Tim Cavanaugh sat down to talk with Peter about his new book Abundance and why he think we live in an "incredible time", but no one realizes it. Peter thinks that there are some powerful human forces combined with technological advancements that are transforming the world for the better.

"The challenge is that the rate of innovation is so fast..." Peter says, "the government can't keep up with it." If the government tries to play "catch up" with regulations and policy, the technology with just go overseas. Certain inovations in "food, water, housing, health, education is getting better and better." Peter "hopes we are not going to be in a situation where, entrenched interests are preventing the consumer from having better health care."

Filmed by Sharif Matar and Tracy Oppenheimer. Edited by Sharif Matar

About 15 minutes

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Sackett v. EPA: How One Couple's Battle Against the Feds Might Protect Your Land

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 08:00:00 EST

The decision in the Supreme Court case Sackett v. EPA, due later this spring, could very well affect the meaning of property rights and due process in the United States. So how did a small-town couple from Northern Idaho ever become the center of such a momentous case? Reason.tv talked with the Sacketts and their attorney to find out.

Mike Sackett dreamed of building a home on Idaho's Priest Lake ever since he camped there with friends in high school.

"I remember coming home, told my mom and dad that I was going to move to Priest Lake, and they just said, 'Oh, no you're not.' And I said, 'Oh yeah. Yeah I am,'" Sackett said.

Years later, Sackett realized that dream when he and his wife, Chantelle Sackett, bought a plot of land near Priest Lake and started to build. After securing the necessary permits from local authorities, the Sacketts were only three days into the process of clearing the land when officials from the EPA showed up and put their dreams on hold.

The EPA informed the Sacketts that they suspected they were building on wetlands and had to cease work immediately. The Sacketts were stunned because their property was a completely landlocked lot within an existing subdivision. When Chantelle Sackett asked for evidence, the EPA pointed her to the National Fish and Wildlife Wetlands Inventory, which showed them that their lot... was not on an existing wetland.

The EPA responded issued what's known as a compliance order, which said that the Sacketts were in violation of the Clean Water Act and subject to fines of up to $37,500 a day.

"You go to bed with that on your mind every night," said Mike Sackett, who owns a contracting company. "It's been painful personally. It's been painful on our business."

The EPA refused to offer any documentation or evidence for its position, even after the Sacketts hired their own scientists to refute the wetlands claim. Feeling they had no other choice, they tried to take the EPA to court. Unfortunately, not even this was an option, because the EPA maintained that a compliance order is nothing more than a warning and that they cannot be challenged until they actually enforce the fines, which were racking up by the day.

"The only way the Sacketts could get judicial review that way, was by ignoring the compliance order," said Damien Schiff, attorney for the Pacific Legal Foundation, which took up the Sacketts' case. "EPA still might just sit on its hands and let the possible fines pile up."

Schiff and the Pacific Legal Foundation lost to the EPA in lower courts, but this afforded them the opportunity to take the case to the Supreme Court, which heard arguments in early January 2012. Schiff and the Sacketts both felt heartened by what transpired there.

"I was surprised by some of the questions that came from the justices," said Mike Sackett. "They were questions that we would've asked."

If the Sacketts do win in the Supreme Court, they will then have the opportunity to actually challenge the EPA's compliance order in the lower courts. Just having the opportunity to challenge that, says Schiff, would be a major victory for property rights and for due process of law.

"The agency says it doesn't want to go into court, it shouldn't have to go into court," said Schiff. "The chutzpah, the arrogance, is, frankly, almost unimaginable."

About 7.30 minutes. Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Camera by Sharif Matar. Additional camera by Paul Detrick, Tracy Oppenheimer, and Weissmueller. Additional footage courtesy of the Pacific Legal Foundation. Music: "Water" by Big Blood, "City Night Line" by Cobra avec Panther, "The River Who Drinks All I've Had" by Makunouchi Bento, "Film 1" by Torture Super Sonic.

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Damon Root Talks EPA's Restriction of Couple Building on Own Land on Freedom Watch

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 11:00:00 EST

Reason's Damon W. Root appeared on Fox News’ Freedom Watch with Judge Andrew Napolitano to discuss the EPA’s use of administrative compliance orders, which are government commands that allow the agency to control the use of private property. Root discusses a specific situation in Idaho where a couple was barred from building a house on their own land.

Original airdate: 01-05-2012

Approximately 2:46

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The Truth About Fracking

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 12:00:00 EDT

Hydraulic fracturing - or "fracking" - is a fast-growing source of natural gas used to create electricity, heat homes, and more. It involves forcing water, sand, and chemicals into super-deep wells and then recovering the gas released during the process.

Fracking is also highly controversial, with viral video hits such as "The Fracking Song" and the 2010 documentary Gasland contending that the process leads to polluted drinking water, home explosions, and worse.

Fracking has been around for more than 60 years and over 100,000 gas wells are dug per year, most of them in sparsely populated areas in the western U.S. With the discovery of the Marcellus Shale in the eastern part of the country, fracking is increasingly common in populated parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York, leading to heightened tensions between drillers and environmentalists. Indeed, the attorney general of New York has called for a moratorium on the practice in the Empire State.

Is fracking safe? And what are the potential benefits that will be forfeited if the practice is ended? Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with science correspondent Ronald Bailey to learn the truth about fracking. Bailey reports that the cases of contaminated water supplies were the result of poorly designed wells that had nothing to do with fracking itself. As important, he notes that the gas generated by fracking would not only massively increase American energy supply, it would do so with a relatively clean and cheap fuel.

Shot by Jim Epstein and Josh Swain; Edited by Swain.

Approximately 5:34 minutes.

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Governments vs. Markets: Julian Morris on Environmental Protection

Tue, 10 May 2011 00:00:00 EDT

Which does a better job of protecting the environment: governments or markets?

Reason Foundation’s Vice President of Research Julian Morris spoke at Reason Foundation's annual Reason Weekend and challenged the idea that regulations and energy subsidies will save us from environmental disasters. In fact, they help cause them.

When people are driven by profits and protected by property rights, Morris argues, environmentally friendly products will develop naturally.

Morris is the author of dozens of scholarly articles on issues ranging from the morality of free trade to the relationship between institutions, economic development and environmental protection.

Approximately 28 minutes.

Filmed by Alex Manning and Paul Detrick; Editded by Joshua Swain

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The Top Five Environmental Disasters that Didn't Happen

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 09:00:00 EDT

For this year's Earth Day celebration, Reason.tv is proud to present "The Top Five Environmental Disasters that Didn't Happen." The environmental movement began in 1962 when Rachel Carson published her best-selling book Silent Spring. And ever since, chicken littles have warned us about imminent environmental disasters that ultimately didn't happen.

We all worried needlessly about acid rain, expanding deserts and global cooling, but these failed predictions weren't quite dire enough to make our list. To find out which prophecies of doom did make our list, you'll need to watch Reason.tv's "Top Five Environmental Disasters that Didn't Happen."

Approximately 7 minutes.

Produced by Feine, Manning, Jensen, Bragg, Swain, Epstein and Gillespie. Narrated by Melissa Palmer. Special thanks to Ron Bailey and Julian Morris.

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Veronique de Rugy Discusses The Truth About Nuclear Power on Bloomberg

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 00:00:00 EDT

Editor’s Note: Reason columnist Veronique de Rugy appears weekly on Bloomberg TV to separate economic fact from economic myth.

Myth 1: Nuclear power is a cheap alternative to fossil fuels.

Fact 1: It isn’t.

As Jerry Taylor of the Cato Institute wrote in Reason magazine in 2009, “Nuclear energy is to the Right what solar energy is to the Left: Religious devotion in practice, a wonderful technology in theory, but an economic white elephant in fact (some crossovers on both sides notwithstanding). When the day comes that the electricity from solar or nuclear power plants is worth more than the costs associated with generating it, I will be as happy as the next Greenpeace member (in the case of the former) or MIT graduate (in the case of the latter) to support either technology.”

Until that time comes, producing nuclear energy remains a very costly business.

The chart above uses data from a 2009 interdisciplinary study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to compare the costs of generating a kilowatt hour of electricity using nuclear, coal, and gas power. Looking at this data, the cost differential is clear—nuclear-powered energy costs 14 percent more than gas to produce a unit of electricity, and it costs 30 percent more than coal. Furthermore, according to Gilbert Metcaf’s recent National Bureau of Economic Research paper on energy, this increased cost of nuclear energy includes a baked-in taxpayer subsidy of nearly 50 percent of nuclear power’s operating costs.

While the nuclear industry in the United States has seen continued improvements in operating performance over time, it remains uncompetitive with coal and natural gas on the basis of price. This cost differential is primarily the result of high capital costs and long construction times. Indeed, building a nuclear power plant in the United States has cost, on average, three times as was originally estimated.

The United States Energy Information Administration estimates that these cost trends will continue for the near future.

This chart compares the projected costs of generating electricity in the year 2016 using various sources. As you can see, nuclear power remains more expensive than other conventional forms of power.

As Taylor notes, this is why nuclear power has only flourished in countries where the government has intervened on its behalf.

Myth 2: Risk is the main problem with nuclear power.

Fact 2: Cost is the main problem, not risk.

Radiation is terrifying to most people. And like most things, the less you actually know about it, the more frightening it can be.

Safety is certainly a critical issue, as the tragedy in Japan makes clear. However, so far the death toll from the current nuclear crisis in Japan is zero.

The chart above uses data compiled from various sources to compare the deaths per terawatt of energy produced. Deaths resulting from the production of nuclear power are over 4000 times less than the rate of death resulting from the production of energy from coal.

Writing in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, Bernard Cohen, a physics professor at the University of Pittsburgh, puts the risk from nuclear power into context, comparing the relative risk of nuclear power to other activities. He used a one-in-a-million chance of increased risk of premature death as a standard. His calculations indicate that if one lived at the boundary of a nuclear power plant for five years, there would be an increased risk of premature death from nuclear radiation of one in a million. That risk would decline significantly as one moved further away from the plant.

Put differently, Cohen found that the risk of living next to a nuclear power plant is comparable to the risk incurred from riding 10 miles on a bicycle, riding 300 miles in an automobile, or riding 1,000 miles in an airplane.

In fact, Steven Chu, President Barack Obama’s energy secretary, has made it clear he doesn’t think nuclear power is dangerous per se. When asked to compare coal and nuclear energy in 2009, Chu responded: “I’d rather be living near a nuclear power plant.”

That being said, what happened in Japan reminds us that while nuclear doesn’t kill people on a yearly basis, it has the potential to be very lethal under certain circumstances. However, the idea of risk-free world is unrealistic because unanticipated vulnerabilities are inevitable in any complex system. Future technologies may reduce the chance of some terrible disaster but it won’t ever eliminate it completely. Like all other sources of energy, nuclear power entails some risk.

Myth 3: The spread of nuclear power has stalled in the U.S. due to a hostile regulatory environment.

Fact 3: Nuclear power has stalled because it is simply not profitable.

Many Americans argue that government regulations are the real reason why nuclear power is so expensive. As evidence, they point out that in France, where there is more opportunity to build nuclear power plants, nuclear power is safe and affordable.

It is true that France gets about 75 percent of its electricity from nuclear power. It is also true that the country has avoided a large-scale disaster due to the many safety regulations it has imposed, most of which are similar to regulations enacted in the U.S.

However, producing nuclear energy in France is not any cheaper than it is here. The chart above shows, in U.S. dollars, the parity between the costs of generating nuclear power in the United States (which has a relatively strict regulatory regime) and France (which has a relatively loose one).

The chart presents a range of estimates of the costs of nuclear reactors in the two countries gathered by Mark Cooper, a senior research fellow for economic analysis at the Institute for Energy and the Environment at the Vermont Law School. As Cooper found, the ranges overlap: France’s estimated cost of a kilowatt of power is between $4,500 and $5,000; the United States’ estimated cost for this unit of power is between $4,000 and $6,000.

From the start of commercial nuclear reactor construction in the mid-1960s through the 1980s, capital costs (dollars per kilowatt of capacity) for building nuclear reactors rose dramatically. Although unit costs for technology usually decrease with volume of production because of scale factors and technological learning, nuclear power has gone in the opposite direction. This exception to the rule is usually attributed to the idiosyncrasies of the nuclear regulatory environment as public opposition grew, laws were tightened, and construction times increased.

As a result, no new nuclear power plants have been built in the United States in 29 years. Nuclear has proven to be a poor investment, producing far more expensive electricity than originally promised.

Myth 4: Nuclear power is the key to energy independence.

Fact 4: More nuclear doesn’t mean less oil.

On last Sunday’s Meet the Press, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) cited America’s need to get off of foreign oil as a strong reason for pursuing nuclear power.

Setting aside the misguided goal of so-called energy independence, Schumer is still wrong. Oil is primarily used in vehicles and in industrial production. Nuclear power is primarily used for electricity.

As the chart below illustrates, data from the United States Energy Information Administration shows that the vast majority of our electricity comes from non-oil sources.

Interestingly, according Michael Levi, a senior fellow and director of the program on energy security and climate change at the Council on Foreign Relations, it wasn’t always the case. “During the heyday of nuclear power, the early 1970s (45 plants broke ground between 1970 and 1975),” Levi writes, “oil was a big electricity source, and boosting nuclear power was a real way to squeeze petroleum out of the economy. Alas, we’ve already replaced pretty much all the petroleum in the power sector; the opportunity to substitute oil with nuclear power is gone.”

Perhaps more importantly, less than 1 percent of the oil used in the United States today goes to generate electricity while 70 percent is consumed by the transportation sector, with roughly 30 percent of oil being used by the residential and industrial sectors.

The bottom line is that more nuclear power would mean less coal, less natural gas, less hydroelectric power, and less wind energy. But more nuclear won’t mean less oil.

Am I against nuclear power? It certainly looks like nuclear can never be a sustainable source of energy because it is just too expensive. And while it is a safe source of energy overall, there are tremendous risks in those instances where something goes disastrously wrong. The probability of such a dire scenario may be low, but the need to build-in protections against it will always raise the cost of producing nuclear power.

But more importantly, what I am against is the government deciding that nuclear power must be encouraged and then subsidizing the industry. On that point, I leave the last word to Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey.

“The main problem with energy supply systems is that for the last 100 years, governments have insisted on meddling with them, using subsidies, setting rates, and picking technologies,” Bailey observes. “Consequently, entrepreneurs, consumers, and especially policymakers have no idea which power supply technologies actually provide the best balance between cost-effectiveness and safety. In any case, let’s hope that the current nuclear disaster will not substantially add to the terrible woes the Japanese must bear as a result of nature’s fickle cruelty.”

Contributing Editor Veronique de Rugy is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

How to Save a Dying Ocean

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 04:00:00 EDT

The Gulf of Mexico continues to gush oil just as a whaling controversy threatens to land Australia and Japan in international court for killing protected species. Meanwhile, another less-publicized but arguably more cataclysmic oceanic disaster continues to worsen.

Overfishing threatens to destroy most of the world's fisheries within a matter of decades. But while it's proven difficult to save the gulf or save the whales, we know how to save the fish: Stop treating the ocean like a public bathroom, says Christopher Costello, a professor of natural resource economics at UC Santa Barbara.

Director Louis Psihoyos and his team of filmmakers embarked on an elaborate sting operation to expose Japan's illegal dolphin hunters. The result is a documentary called The Cove, which took home the Oscar for best documentary. And days after the Academy Awards Psihoyos was back stirring things up.

Using the same cameras that were used to expose illegal dolphin hunters, Psihoyos and his team busted The Hump, a Santa Monica, California restaurant that had secretly been serving sushi made from the endangered sei whale.

"Everything in the ocean from the great whales to dolphins to plankton is being jeopardized," Psihoyos tells Reason.tv. "We're raping and harvesting the ocean unsustainably."

Overfishing "could mean the end of certain species," agrees UC-Santa Barbara's Costello. He points out that about a third of the world's fisheries have already collapsed, and many more are heading toward the same fate. Costello says the world's fisheries are in such bad shape because of the same reason public restrooms are typically foul places: "Nobody owns them. Nobody has the incentive to keep them up."

One proven solution is a system called "catch share," in which fishermen have the right to a certain share of the total catch of a type of fish. This form of ownership gives fishermen an incentive to make sure fish populations grow, and according to Costello's worldwide research, it's the only thing that seems to work.

Environmentalists are often suspicious of the profit motive, but from Alaska to New Zealand, market forces have been harnessed not for plunder but for preservation. Fishermen like the system because they make money, and environmentalists like it because it supports sustainable practices. Expanding the catch share system may well be the best way to save a dying ocean.

"How to Save a Dying Ocean" is written and produced by Ted Balaker, who also hosts. The associate producer is Paul Detrick, the cameramen are Hawk Jensen and Alex Manning; Zach Weissmueller also helped to produce the segment. Animation by Hawk Jensen.

Approximately six minutes.

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