Comments sindark has made

I have had lots of lengthy arguments with climate change deniers on my website. They can be exhausting, but it is always necessary to counter disinformation. You can see them here, and perhaps get some tips for responding to common denier arguments.

Ships are actually even worse, at least if they look anything like current cruise or cargo ships:

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c20/page_133.shtml

“For a time, I thought that the way to solve the long-distance-transport problem was to revert to the way it was done before planes: ocean liners. Then I looked at the numbers. The sad truth is that ocean liners use more energy per passenger-km than jumbo jets. The QE2 uses four times as much energy per passenger-km as a jumbo. OK, it’s a luxury vessel; can we do better with slower tourist-class liners? From 1952 to 1968, the economical way to cross the Atlantic was in two Dutch-built liners known as “The Economy Twins,” the Maasdam and the Rijnsdam. These travelled at 16.5 knots (30.5 km/h), so the crossing from Britain to New York took eight days. Their energy consumption, if they carried a full load of 893 passengers, was 103 kWh per 100 p-km. At a typical 85% occupancy, the energy consumption was 121 kWh per 100 pkm – more than twice that of the jumbo jet. To be fair to the boats, they are not only providing trans- portation: they also provide the passengers and crew with hot air, hot water, light, and entertainment for several days; but the energy saved back home from being cooped up on the boat is dwarfed by the boat’s energy consumption, which, in the case of the QE2, is about 3000 kWh per day per passenger.”

It does seem like the best hope for near-term US climate policy is that the W-M bill gets passed and progressively improved. It is encouraging to see that Waxman has experience doing this with environmental legislation.

Are the ice cubes really a good idea? How much energy gets used in freezing them, compared with getting the same amount of cooling with air conditioning?

Thermodynamically, may take more energy to cool room temperature water towards zero degrees than it takes to cool air from the ambient temperature outside to an acceptable one inside, though the ice-air current might be a lot more targeted than universal AC...

In temperate latitudes, you have about 100 watts of harvestable sunlight per square metre. Plants, however, are inefficient at turning sunlight into carbohydrates. For energy crops, efficiency is apparently about 0.5 watts per square metre. Over a year, that is about 4380 watt-hours per metre, turning sunlight into carbohydrates. Even with a 100% efficient biomass-to-fuel process, that’s the upper bound.

Apparently, a barrel of oil has about 6.1 gigajoules (GJ) of energy in it. This site (http://bioenergy.ornl.gov/papers/misc/energy_conv.html) says that one gigajoule is akin to 278 kWh. Getting 6.1 gigajoules thus requires something like 1696 kWh of energy – 1,696,000 watt-hours, equivalent to 387 square metres of sun-lit area. That’s 0.000387 square kilometres per barrel per year, with my extremely generous assumptions.

Every year, the United States imports about 4.8 billion barrels of oil (13.15 million barrels per day). Covert that to space (assuming a perfect plant-to-fuel conversion process) and you get a land area of about 1,857,000 square kilometres: about 19.1% of the landmass of the United States. Possible, perhaps, but a massive undertaking. We are also ignoring what I understand to be the two biggest hurdles: the energy requirements of biomass-to-fuel conversion, and the capital costs of the equipment you do it with.

So far, this seems like a ploy to get extra support from the federal government. The real fate of nuclear in Ontario probably won't be determined until the feds decide what (if anything) to offer in subsidies and guarantees.

Unfortunately, fuel cells really aren't a technology with much of a future. See Joseph Romm's book "The Hype About Hydrogen" for a good explanation of why.

Indeed, we have no reason to believe that all future technological improvements will help, rather than hurt the environment. We need policies, like carbon pricing, to make sure appropriate technologies are adopted.

(Aside: To appreciate how technology doesn't always improve, just look at Grist. Unfortunately, everything that was changed about the site recently was for the worse. It is a lot clunkier and more awkward now.)

There is a lot of talk about reproductive choice in the developing world, and it is extremely important. All human beings have the right to engage in sexual activity on the basis of their free choices and have children only when it is their will to do so. It is an important role of the state to ensure that those rights are not violated.

That being said, there seems to be a disjuncture between concern about rising populations in the developing world and environmental problems. All else being equal, more humans tends to mean more threats to the ecosystems that sustain us. Of course, not all else is equal. People in rich states consume dramatically more resources than those in poor ones. This is true in terms of energy resources (oil, coal, gas, uranium), food resources (especially meat), and climatic impact.

Certainly, we should work to give reproductive control to people (especially women) living in developing states. However, given the concerning destruction of the natural world, does it not make sense to reduce policies that encourage reproduction in rich states? I am not advocating mandatory limits on bearing children. I am simply suggesting that it may be prudent to reduce the degree to which taxpayers in general subsidize those who choose to breed. Even with ample fossil fuels, the world is groaning and straining because of the current human population – especially those who live especially unsustainable lives in rich states. When we reach the point where those fuels are depleted – or when we refrain from using them due to climate concerns – energy intensive lifestyles will become even more unsustainable.

Increasing the cost of children may be an important mechanism for improving the welfare of future generations. No child deserves to live in poverty, but parents who choose to reproduce deserve to bear the great majority of the costs of doing so.

More

It is widely acknowledged that developing countries will suffer a great deal from climate change. They are vulnerable to effects like rising sea levels and increased frequency and severity of extreme weather. They also have more limited means available to respond, as well as other serious problems to deal with. Providing adaptation funding is therefore seen as an important means of getting them on-side for climate change mitigation. It could be offered as an incentive to cut emissions.

That being said, there is a strong case to be made that developing countries should not need to do anything in exchange for adaptation funding. Making them do so is essentially akin to injuring someone, then demanding something in return for the damages they win against you in court. The historical emissions of developed states have primarily induced the climate change problem; as such, developing states suffering from its effects have a right to demand compensation.

Very roughly, the developed world as a whole is responsible for about 70% of emissions to date. The United States has produced about 22% of the anthropogenic greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere; Western Europe is responsible for about 17%; Canada represents something like 2% of the total. It can be argued that - by rights - states like Bangladesh and Ghana should be dividing their total costs for adaptation and sending the bill to other states, on the basis of historical emissions.

That being said, it is only fair to say that developed states are only culpable for a portion of their total emissions, on account of how the science of climate change was not well understood until fairly recently. Exactly where to draw the line is unclear, but that doesn’t especially matter since developing states simply don’t have the power to demand adaptation transfers on the basis of past harms. States that developed through the extensive use of fossil fuels will continue to use the influence they acquired through that course of military and economic strengthening to make others bear most of the costs for their pollution.

More on ships versus planes

"For a time, I thought that the way to solve the long-distance-transport
problem was to revert to the way it was done before planes: ocean liners.
Then I looked at the numbers. The sad truth is that ocean liners use more
energy per passenger-km than jumbo jets. The QE2 uses four times as
much energy per passenger-km as a jumbo. OK, it’s a luxury vessel; can
we do better with slower tourist-class liners? From 1952 to 1968, the eco-
nomical way to cross the Atlantic was in two Dutch-built liners known as
“The Economy Twins,” the Maasdam and the Rijnsdam. These travelled
at 16.5 knots (30.5 km/h), so the crossing from Britain to New York took
eight days. Their energy consumption, if they carried a full load of 893
passengers, was 103 kWh per 100 p-km. At a typical 85% occupancy, the
energy consumption was 121 kWh per 100 pkm – more than twice that of
the jumbo jet. To be fair to the boats, they are not only providing trans-
portation: they also provide the passengers and crew with hot air, hot
water, light, and entertainment for several days; but the energy saved back
home from being cooped up on the boat is dwarfed by the boat’s energy
consumption, which, in the case of the QE2, is about 3000 kWh per day per
passenger."

"The reality is people around the world are simply not going to stop flying."

Unless huge advances are made in biofuels, the point will come before too long when it is simply far too expensive for most people. That is, if we implement the kind of mitigation policies necessary for dealing with climate change. The last thing we can allow is coal-to-liquids fuels for air travel.

I have been a participant in a long and wide-ranging debate about the ethics of flying, given climate change.

The basic conclusion is that doing so is morally unacceptable, unless there is an overwhelmingly important reason to do so:

"Imagining a world stabilized at 500 ppm, with reasonably similar per-capita emissions for all states, it seems quite impossible that there can be air travel at anything like contemporary levels. It is possible that some miracle technology will allow high-speed flights to occur without significant greenhouse gas consequences, but no such technology is even within the realm of imagination today.

As someone who has long aspired to travel the world, this is a very difficult conclusion to reach. It now seems possible that air travel bears some moral similarities to slavery. Before people become overly agitated about the comparison, allow me to explain. Just as slavery was once a critical component of some economies, air travel is essential to the present world economy. Of course, economic dependency does not equate to moral acceptability. If our use of air travel imperils future generations - and we are capable of anticipating that harm - then flying falls into the general moral category of intentional harm directed against the defenceless. After all, future generations are the very definition of helplessness, in comparison to us. We can worsen their prospects by fouling the air and turning the seas to acid, but they will never be able to retaliate in any way.

While I personally fervently hope that some solution will be found that can make continued air travel compatible with the ethical treatment of the planet, nature, and future generations, I must also acknowledge the possibility that people in fifty or one hundred years will look upon us as sharing some moral similarities with plantation owners in the United States, prior to the civil war.

More"

As for ships, they might actually be worse. Consider some figures from this discussion:

"From the Queen Elizabeth II website we find that at 28.5 knots it burns 380 tons of fuel per day which is 50 feet per gallon. If you divide that up among 1900 passengers, it works out to about 18 miles per gallon for each passenger.

So:

Cruise ship = 18 miles per gallon
Auto = 25 miles per gallon
747 = 80 miles per gallon"

If you absolutely must be in Copenhagen, flying may be the best way to do it. The best advice for most people is to stay away, unless your being there will really make a difference in the outcome.

Does anyone have a video link for those outside the US?

It seems like the most probable path to de-carbonized transport is the conversion of all short and medium-range vehicles to electric power, with liquid fuels reserved for vehicles that must travel long distances, aircraft, and vehicles operated in remote areas. Producing energy from biomass has another potential advantage, if carbon capture and storage (CCS) proves viable. By adding CCS to biomass-fueled power plants, net reductions in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide could be achieved.

In time, it seems likely that the many government policies promoting the widespread use of biofuels were an ineffective response to both concerns about climate change and about energy security. In particular, ‘mandates’ that a certain fraction of vehicle fuels be biofuels do not necessarily do a good job of aligning outcomes with climate change objectives, since they are insensitive to both the lifecycle emissions associated with the fuels and to the economics of producing them.

There is a good article about this in Newsweek: http://www.newsweek.com/id/195692?from=rss

It says, in part:

“This virus has been evolving for a long time, no doubt aided in its transformation by the ecology of industrial-scale pig farming in North America. Some scientists say there are genetic elements in the virus that date back to an Indiana pig farm in 1987. In that sense, it is similar to the “bird flu,” or H5N1, which surfaced in wild migratory water birds in southern China some time in the early 1990s and infected people in Hong Kong in 1997. As that virus has evolved over the past 12 years, it has taken advantage of large poultry farms, and major bird-migration centers, to spread rapidly and absorb new genetic material along the way. In 2005, as H5N1 spread to Siberia and Europe, the United Nations and the Bush administration mobilized cash, scientific expertise and the needed infrastructure to find and contain outbreaks, primarily by slaughtering infected chicken flocks."

Even if it turns out that this flu has nothing to do with factory farming, it still makes sense as a thing to investigate when mysterious new diseases emerge. Not every new illness comes from factory farms, clearly, but enough have done to warrant their place on the list of suspects.

Not checking, because it isn’t certain to be the cause, doesn’t strike me as a sensible approach. That being said, we should obviously make it clearly known that the cause was not factory farming, in those cases where it is determined to be so.

When it comes to public relations, having the general link between factory farming and human disease known seems important. While some people get worked up about the health and comfort of the animals themselves, I think most people are only concerned with the impacts our agricultural practices have on human beings.

The fact that not a single Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee is considered likely to support the bill demonstrates what a dinosaur party they really are. The world is finally starting to move on climate change mitigation, with the United States playing a critical role in that development. To simply make themselves into obstacles - denying the science and obstructing the political process - demonstrates that the Republican leadership just doesn’t have a handle on what is arguably the most critical issue of the contemporary era.

A mechanism to economically encourage lower carbon fuels is an important part of an overall climate strategy. By all means, if someone can come up with biofuels that are genuinely less carbon-intensive than other fuels, while remaining economically viable, they should be able to market and sell them.

That being said, the evidence so far suggests that corn ethanol, and perhaps other biofuels, have caused more environmental harm than they have prevented so far.

One small suggestion:

You should get a favicon. It makes it easier to identify which tabs are which, when someone has many of them open in a browser. The same goes for quickly identifying bookmarks in some situations.

For a number of reasons, the American political system is a very expensive entity (among them, the continuing opinion of courts that spending money is a form of free speech). In some ways, the $200M figure represents just how active and important the dialogue is, though I agree that it is somewhat offputting given the urgent need to invest in low-carbon technologies.

Some of the corporate greenwashing has certainly been absurd. For instance, this Lockheed ad.

The degree to which the Republican party has become anti-science and ensnared by the religious right is truly remarkable, and quite depressing.

Also, they can tame the system requirements for Windows and Office.

It's absurd that Word on a 2GHz system runs about as quickly as it used to on a 300MHz system or even a 486. With leaner code, much less powerful machines would be required to do the same things, and they would not need to be replaced as often.

They could alter their operating systems so that computers can be completely shut down and still boot quickly.

That way, people will be less inclined to leave their computers perpetually in standby mode.

I am definitely skeptical about the economics of this. Would it really be better than spending the money on ground-based concentrating solar facilities and energy storage systems like pumped hydroelectric?

Rockets are expensive, after all.

The case being made here is extremely strong. Hopefully, Obama and other climate progressives will start making it publically and vocally.

One of the scariest things about all this is the massive amounts of methane that exist in permafrost and clathrates.

If a significant amount of that starts getting into the atmosphere, curtailing human emissions may no longer be sufficient to prevent dangerous climate change.

Thanks for the response.

Given that the rich text editor has built-in spellchecking, I suppose there is no need to go from WordPad to Word to the comment box.

One other thing to be aware of is how 'dolphin safe' tuna is arguably far less sustainable than the conventional sort.

One of the most reliable ways of locating tuna stocks is by following dolphins. Once you find dolphins feeding on the fish, you set your nets around and catch them. Of course, this method will sometimes lead to you catching dolphins as well. In eighteen years of dolphin set tuna fishing in the United States, 18 dolphins were recorded as caught, along with 34 tonnes of sharks and rays and 295 tons of other fish. Such by-catch is virtually always discarded. In an equivalent period of dolphin safe fishing (where electronic Fish Aggregation Devices are used instead), no dolphins were caught, but 237 tonnes of sharks and rays were, along with 15,500 tonnes of other fish. Again, this was discarded.

Dolphin safe fishing is also disproportionately likely to catch immature tuna, which have not yet reached their full size and which have contributed very little to reproducing the species, since tuna generally take a long time to reach sexual maturity.

This only makes sense if you strongly privilege dolphins over other forms of marine life.

I think it is critical to put this back in place, with the old permalink structure.

I have linked to the skeptic series on literally dozens of other sites.

Sorry about that horrible stuff above my comment. Is there any way to opt out of the new 'rich text' editor?

I think this issue is especially difficult for the GOP because of the degree to which it reveals economic libertarianism to be unsuited to our world.

The idea that one should be free to behave as one wishes - as long as it doesn’t harm others - seems to provide a decent balance between allowing people to pursue their own purposes and stopping that pursuit from harming the general interest. That being said, the degree to which libertarianism can be liberating is diminishing with time. This is basically because of both the growing fact of interconnectedness and because of our growing awareness of it.

At one point in time, it would have been considered reasonable to argue that economic activity on one side of the world has no morally relevant effect on the other. Now that markets are more linked, products and capital flow, and awareness of linkages exist, that becomes very difficult to argue. Before, it is as though the chooser was alone in a room with a light switch. It is of no particular moral consequence whether they choose to have it on or not. Now, it is more as though that light switch also reduces the function of the equipment in a hospital across town when it is pulled. Whereas libertarianism previously permitted free choice, the inter-linked example includes a moral obligation to act in a certain way.

Climate change may be the ultimate force diminishing how liberating libertarianism can be. Not only do nearly all of our life and economic choices impact innocent third parties around the world, they also contribute to a problem that will have a huge long-term impact on future generations and the natural world. Arguably, this makes the doctrine of “do what you like but do no harm” impossible to follow in practice.

One suggestion I would make to improve this system would be to include an optional component for cyclists. Those willing to cycle around with a transponder would be credited at a modest rate for distance travelled. This would be in recognition of the non-market advantages of cycling, such as the value of physical fitness as a component in preventative medicine. In 1998, Health Canada estimated the total cost of cardiovascular diseases on the health sector of the Canadian economy to be $18,472.9 million (11.6% of the total cost of all illnesses). Cardiovascular disease is also responsible for 36% of deaths. As such, a subsidy of a few cents a kilometre makes economic sense, as well as potentially generating some good publicity for a system that is likely to be highly unpopular with commuters.

There are also network benefits to be had from increasing the number of cyclists. The emergence of suburbs was made possible by automobiles, at the same time as such urban trends made them increasingly necessary. A more positive version of such feedback effects can be brought about for cycling: as higher numbers justify a more cycle friendly infrastructure which, in turn, encourages more people to cycle. In particular, the creation of designated bike lanes and routes, the provision of cycle parking facilities, and integration of bike carrying capabilities into public transport seem sensible.

Climate and pessimism

Most of my friends are deeply environmentally-minded, and most of them are also extremely pessimistic about the future state of the world. Those who are best informed are disinclined to have children, largely because they fear the kind of world they might grow up in.

Being seriously concerned about climate certainly takes a personal psychological toll.

a sibilant intake of breath

Short-term thinking?

It is hard to reconcile this will the apparently high probability of more nuclear plants being built (or having their lives extended) in the US.

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Extortion

"Why are we doing them this multi-trillion-dollar favor without them paying us for it?"

I just realized something. People are walking all around the city I live with money in their pockets. By not getting a gun and robbing them, I am obviously doing them a considerable favour. Why aren't they paying me for my restraint?

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Figure conversion

"14 percent under 2005 levels by 2020"

Incidentally, if you use the EIA figures, this is the same as saying "a return to 1990 levels by 2020."

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Unclear

I can see why they excluded this chart, as it is very hard to derive a clear meaning from it.

It would be better if they had provided clearer guidance about how the darkening red bars related to actual events and probabilities.

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Related post

This is quite similar to a previous post on beef tallow:

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2009/1/29/15305/7969

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Credibility

Of course, that is self-serving when it comes from those who have done the most to increase emissions.

"Whoa! Forget about our profligate past energy usage and lack of efficiency. We need to think about the future now. As such, states that never had our prosperity need to sacrifice at the same time."

Unfortunately, the last part of that is true. At the same time, the USA lacks credibility to say so. Only Canada and Australia have done worse, when it comes to using energy well.

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Radio spectrum

One thing to consider is that by opening up some fresh radio spectrum for use - say, with long-distance wireless internet - the digital TV conversion will actually reduce waste in the long run.

The environmental impacts associated with wired versus wireless networking really need to be considered, as well.On Umbra on the digital conversion posted 9 months, 1 week ago 4 Responses

Source

"The Wonk Room has acquired Morano's email list, and we can now reveal the pack of climate skeptics, conservative bloggers, and corporate hacks who feed the misinformation machine."

Does anybody know how they got the list?

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People to meet

If you get the chance, try to meet with some of the people who work at the Sea Around Us Project at the University of British Columbia.

They do good work.

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Encouraging statements

After the deluded attitude of the last American administration, it is a relief to see that the new energy secretary, has grasped the magnitude of the climate challenge.

Talking candidly about the ramifications of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations to around 1000 parts per million, and increasing global temperatures by well over 5ºC, is an important part of making the case for action. That is especially true when a few people still foolishly believe that climate change mitigation is about protecting endangered species, rather than averting major damage to human welfare worldwide.

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Offsets

I would rather see them make strenuous efforts to reduce the emissions associated with the games themselves, rather than trust that paying for reductions elsewhere is equivalent.

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Economics

What will really determine the future of coal with CCS is how much the plants actually cost. FutureGen isn't a promising example, for those who hope CCS will make a major contribution to climate change mitigation.

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Climate change undermines libertarianism

The idea that one should be free to behave as one wishes - as long as it doesn't harm others - seems to provide a decent balance between allowing people to pursue their own purposes and stopping that pursuit from harming the general interest. That being said, the degree to which libertarianism can be liberating is diminishing with time. This is basically because of both the growing fact of interconnectedness and because of our growing awareness of it.

Climate change may be the ultimate force diminishing how liberating libertarianism can be. Not only do nearly all of our life and economic choices impact innocent third parties around the world, they also contribute to a problem that will have a huge long-term impact on future generations and the natural world. Arguably, this makes the doctrine of "do what you like but do no harm" impossible to follow in practice.

It is not clear if or how the appealing aspects of libertarianism can be maintained in a world full of important material interconnections.

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Good advice

All that is very useful, though I take issue with one element. Wesabe is awfully interested in gaining access to your electronic banking information. Given the poor information security at a lot of websites, and the potentially huge value of all that banking information, it seems sensible to run your own spreadsheet rather than count on a website like that to keep your information safe.

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Emissions versus concentrations versus temperature

If only this was more broadly understood...

As this speech demonstrates, even some very senior officials do not appreciate that stabilizing climate actually requires:

http://www.ec.gc.ca/default.asp?lang=En&n=6F2DE1CA-1& ...

More discussion of this is here:

http://www.sindark.com/2009/01/22/what-it-means-to-stabil ...

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BUilding support

The critical flaw in thinking we can achieve a technocratic solution to climate change is a failure to appreciate the influence of those who will be harmed by effective climate change mitigation efforts (such as coal and oil sands producers), as well as their willingness to manipulate the public into demanding inaction. In order to counter the influence of such status quo powers, there does need to be a political constituency for effective climate change action. I think Roberts is basically correct in asserting that it will be through changing the public perception of risk and opportunity that such a constituency might best be constructed.

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Public engagement

There is a lot of talk about engaging people in the fight against climate change. In the spirit of prompting thought and discussion, I propose the opposite.

Rather than trying to raise awareness and encourage voluntary changes in behaviour we should simply build a society with stable greenhouse gas emissions and do so in a way that requires little input and effort from almost everyone.

Critically, that society should emerge and exist without the need for most people in it to think about climate change at all. For the most part, it should occur by means of changes that aren't particularly noticed by those not paying attention. In places where change is noticed, it is because the legal and economic structure of society now requires people to behave differently, without ever asking them to consider more than their own short term interests.

To do this, you need to make two big changes: decarbonize our infrastructure and price carbon. Both can be done at such a high level that the awareness of the average memeber of society about the science of climate change is unimportant. What is necessary (and very tricky) is finding the high-level political will to do either thing.

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Predictable industry complaints

Detroit is complaining about the proposals. This is probably a good sign. If Detroit wasn't complaining, it would be pretty good evidence that the new standards are absurdly lax. They don't seem to understand that building inefficient dinosaur cars is one of the reasons for which they are now in such bad shape.

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Green stimulus

An attractive green stimulus option is to help finance the up-front costs of projects that both save money and mitigate emissions. This includes all kinds of unglamorous things, such as improving insulation and the efficiency of boilers, capturing waste heat in hot flue gasses, and replacing windows. Such an approach might be especially effective if directed towards public buildings such as schools, hospitals, government offices, and military facilities. That way, the government is investing in something that will improve its own medium-term financial position (important if existing debts are to be repaid, and future crises are to be managed), while also making a start towards a serious greening of government operations.

In the end, a lot of the most effective tools governments can employ cost very little. Improving building codes, requiring that vehicles be more efficient, and implementing carbon taxes all require only modest government expenditures - though they may cause other actors to incur major expenses. Approaches that are light on regulation and heavy on government spending are probably more likely to be wasteful than those based on compulsion through prices and regulation but, given the inevitability of additional fiscal stimulus in much of the world, it seems sensible to devote some of that directly to mitigation activities, while ensuring that spending not directly motivated by climate change doesn't contradict climate change mitigation goals.

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High cost

"Cost was from $650 per kWh for small-scale systems to as a little as $300 per kWh for large-scale systems."

Electricity costs about $0.05 cents per kWh in a lot of places, meaning you could buy 6000 hours worth of power for the price of 1 kWh worth of storage capacity, even at the lower price.

It's not too surprising that peaker plants remain more economical than battery storage.

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Ethanol

Even if you can produce ethanol in an efficient and environmentally benign way, it is still a problematic fuel.

1. While oil and water are famously difficult to mix, water mixes easily with ethanol. This makes it more difficult and expensive to store and transport. Pipelines are especially afflicted by this issue. Ethanol that has been blended with gasoline can seperate when it comes into contact with water.

2. Moving through pipelines and sloshing around in storage tanks, ethanol is also prone to collect various sorts of crud and impurities. These must then be filtered out at a later stage.

3. Ethanol is corrosive to both metals and rubber compounds. As such, it can increase the level of maintenance required in all of the machinery that comes into contact with it, as well as diminishing the lifetime of that equipment.

4. Ethanol has a lower energy density than conventional liquid fossil fuels. That means less distance travelled for any particular volume, as well as a larger ratio of fuel weight to total weight for vehicles with a particular range.

5. The volatility of ethanol is also problematic. The fact that it turns to gas easily (and has high vapour pressure) can be problematic in hot environments.

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Wall-E

Wall-E is definitely well done: engaging and entertaining, emotive without being sappy. Some of the messages are indisputable: that resilience is a virtue (Wall-E has learned self-repair), that the planet is vulnerable, and that technology can isolate us from natural processes, making us unaware of the impacts we are collectively producing. Others are more dubious: that people ignore their environmental impacts because they are half-hypnotized by machines, rather than because it is convenient to do so, or that a simple imposition of will is sufficient to turn things around. The danger is less that robots will mutiny, and much more that we will be willing to make exceptional ecological sacrifices in order to keep our favourite machines running. It's not that our creations will defy our will, it's that we will refuse to temper our desires, whatever the long-term costs associated. Wall-E does make the second point (largely though the vehicle of the floating, near-helpless humans), but it gives a bit too much of a free pass on the first.

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Refreshing

It's good to see someone in the media standing up against the nonsense.

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Equilibrium

In the long run, the only way to stabilize the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gasses is to reach a point of zero net emissions.

For a while, techniques like biochar may allow us to offset our emissions but, in the end, it will be necessary to cut those emissions to zero, if we are to maintain a stable climate indefinitely.

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Fahrenheit and Celsius

68 Fahrenheit = 20 degrees Celsius
58 Fahrenheit = 14.4 degrees Celsius
50 Fahrenheit  = 10 degrees Celsius

Personally, it has always seemed more sensible to have a temperature scale where zero is the freezing point of water, not the temperature at which a frigorific mixture of ice, water, and ammonium chloride stabilizes.

Wikipedia has this on the origins of the Fahrenheit scale:

"According to a letter Fahrenheit wrote to his friend Herman Boerhaave, his scale built on the work of Ole Rømer, whom he had met earlier. In Rømer's scale, the two fixed reference points are that brine also freezes at 0 degrees and water boils at 60 degrees. He observed that, on this scale, water freezes at 7.5 degrees. Fahrenheit multiplied each value by four in order to eliminate the fractions and increase the granularity of the scale (resulting in 30 and 240 degrees). He then re-calibrated his scale between the freezing point of water and normal human body temperature (which he observed to be 96 degrees); he adjusted the scale so that the melting point of ice would be 32 degrees, so that 64 intervals would separate the two, allowing him to mark degree lines on his instruments by simply bisecting the interval six times (since 64 is 2 to the sixth power)."

I also recall it being gently mocked in an episode of James Burke's "Connections."On Umbra on turning down the heat posted 12 months ago 21 Responses

Who pays?

"Things like this left very bad taste for GM crops in the mouths of many."

These are good and very understandable points.

I think the private sector has done a poor job of focusing GM efforts. It would be a lot better if the research was government supported. That way, it would be more aligned with the general interest and less with the profit interests of aspiring monopolists.

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C3 and C4 crops

The European perspective on the genetic modification of foods generally seems like an unrelentingly negative one. While the dangers inherent to tinkering with nature are real and should be discussed, there are nonetheless a lot of appealing uses for the technology.

One significant example has to do with photosynthesis: the process whereby plants produce sugars from carbon dioxide and sunlight, generating oxygen as a by-product. Some plants use enzymes to turn CO2 into sugars composed of three carbon atoms (these are called C3 plants) while others have an enzyme (PEP Carboxylase) that allows them to produce four carbon sugars (C4 plants). The latter variety are much better at turning solar energy into sugars at temperatures above 25 degrees Celsius. The evolution of the C4 process has apparently taken place more than fifty times, in nineteen families of plant. Helping a few more important plants make the transition seems like it could be very beneficial.

C4 plants can be up to 50% more efficient than C3 ones in hot climates, while also using less water and nitrogen. Maize, a C4 plant, can yield a harvest of 12 tonnes per acre, while rice, a C3 plant, does no better than eight. If we could genetically modify rice to be a G4 plant, we could simultaneously increase crop yields, reduce the water and fertilizer needs of farmers in hot areas, and produce crops that would be less vulnerable to global warming. While there could certainly be some nasty unintended consequence of doing so, that does not seem like sufficient cause not to try.

The idea that the foods we eat now are `natural' is not one that meshes very well with the fact that they have been ceaselessly modified, over thousands of years, through selective breeding. While there may be special dangers involved in mixing genes in the lab rather than out in the fields, there are also special opportunities, like the one listed above. It will be interesting to see if someone manages to pull it off.

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No crime to gobble

In the United States, there is a Presidential tradition of pardoning turkeys. Of course, it is dubious whether the turkeys had committed any capital offenses requiring a pardon beforehand.

There is something a bit sick about "representatives of the turkey industry" presenting one bird to be spared in this way, while raising millions more in utterly degraded conditions and slaughtering them.

Official White House turkey pardon photo gallery

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Accessible but dirty energy

The situation is a complicated one, particularly given tensions between climate change mitigation objectives and aspirations for energy security. A further complication arises because of overlapping jurisdictions. US states, Canadian provinces, and regional initiatives are all working on climate change mitigation. To some extent, this federal government-to-government bid seems designed to supplant that. Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon has expressed the hope that a Canada-US deal could "provide uniformity and supplant the patchwork of plans that are being implemented in various states and provinces." While uniformly good policies would certainly be a step forward, there is the distinct danger that more innovative and committed jurisdictions will be forced down towards mediocrity, and that time will be wasted as reorganization occurs.

In the end, the oil sands are both a huge financial temptation and a hugely sensitive regional issue. How they end up being treated will have a lot to do with the extent to which national governments are willing to consider overall societal welfare, as opposed to the more volatile interests of specific groups, as well as the degree to which either government is willing to bear political risks in order to achieve their existing mitigation targets. I don't think it can be realistically argued that current oil sands policy is anything other than selfish and reckless. That is on account of both the near-term ecological damage arising from oil sands extraction and refining, as well as the long-term climatic threats associated with using such dirty fuels.

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Making the best of the bailout

Perhaps the best way this situation can be turned somewhat positive is to mandate tougher efficiency standards for vehicles, as partial public recompense for the funds. The biggest gains can be made in improving the least fuel efficient vehicles. According to calculations posted on Gristmill, improving the fuel efficiency of dire vehicles like the Hummer H3 (15 mpg), Yukon Denali (14 mpg), and Chevy Trailblazer (13 mpg) is a more promising initial strategy than trying to push the efficiency of cars like Honda Civics (29 mpg) upward.

This strategy is likely to be politically problematic. For one thing, it impinges on the flawed notion that people have a right to drive whatever they want and can afford. For another, the production of highly inefficient, high-margin vehicles is concentrated in North America. Nonetheless, if this is to be a one-off rehabilitation, rather than a temporary reprieve from systemic problems, the North American auto industry needs to shed much of its past philosophy and approach. It is remarkable that no automobile assembled in North America meets China's fuel-efficiency standard. Along with the structural financial problems in the industry, that is a situation that will need to change.

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Energy security and climate change

If you listen to the speeches being made by presidential candidates in the United States, you constantly hear two ideas equated that are really quite independent: `energy security' and climate change mitigation. The former has to do with being able to access different kinds of energy (natural gas, transportation fuels, electricity) in a manner consistent with the national interest of a particular state. The latter is about reducing the amount of greenhouse gasses emitted in the course of generating and using that energy.

Some policies do achieve both goals: most notably, building renewable energy systems and the infrastructure that supports them. When the United Kingdom builds offshore wind farms, it serves both to reduce dependence on hydrocarbon imports from Russia and elsewhere and to reduce the link between British energy production and greenhouse gasses. Arguably, building new nuclear plants also serves both aims (though it has other associated problems).

There are plenty of policies that serve energy security without helping the problem of climate change at all. Indeed, many probably exacerbate it. A key example is Canada's oil sands: they reduce North American dependence on oil imports, but at a very considerable climatic and ecological cost. Corn ethanol is probably an example of the same phenomenon, given all the emissions associated with intensive and mechanized modern farming.

More:

Energy security and climate change
Coal and climate change

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Canada

The Canadian government is already trying to strike a special deal to protect the dirty oil sands industry in Alberta:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.200811 ...

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Rail revival needed

This applies to Canada as well, especially along the east coast.

It is crazy that there are people who fly between Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal.

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Family travel

Quite possibly a more important piece of advice would be to live near your family, provided you visit them regularly.

Air travel emissions associated with Christmas, Thanksgiving, and the like probably exceed those associated with romantically motivated voyages.

That being said, the general suggestion to live a life involving minimal long-distance travel is a good one.

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Terminology

As an aside, lies that are "flat out denials of settled, documented fact" may be more appropriately called 'blatant' or 'shameless' than 'odd.'

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Source for more info

Joseph Romm's book "Hell or High Water" talks a lot about California, and contains some interesting information on the policies that helped to keep demand from rising along with wealth and population.

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Emission reductions under all economic conditions

In order to begin a sustained transition to a low-carbon global economy, the following things need to occur:

• Political parties and the public at large must accept that stabilizing climate means eventually eliminating net emissions.

• They must understand what the on-the-ground ramifications of this are.

• A price for carbon must be established, with mechanisms for international trading.

• Climate policies must become more rigorous over time, regardless of who is in power.

• Climatic stability must become an axiom of all political ideologies accepted by parties likely to gain power in major emitting states.

• Emissions reductions must take place both during times of strong economic growth and during times of economic difficulty.

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Electioneering

It's a shame that people running for office sometimes need to bend the truth to get elected, but it's a situation we will simply need to tolerate in this case.

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Lacking seriousness

As with the tundra feedback, this is terrifying stuff.

Even politicians who take climate change relatively seriously don't treat it as anywhere near as threatening as it really is. Faced with existential threats to civilization, the balance between promoting economic growth and protecting climatic stability should be tilted heavily in the direction of the latter.

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Impacts must be concrete in voters' thinking

The point above is a clever one, well made both here and in "Hell and Hot Water."

What is required for it to achieve mainstream acceptance is a significantly increased public awareness about what the concrete consequences of climate change will be, and when they will emerge.

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Not good enough

The study found that fisheries "that switched to individual quotas were only half as likely to collapse."

While that is certainly a big improvement, it clearly isn't a solution. Even with ITQs, half the fisheries that would have failed before still do.

If we are going to maintain viable marine environments, we need to do better.

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Related quotes

Some quotations on scientific communication:

"Unlike the search for knowledge, which is accepted as a legitimate practice, the search for
allies must be disguised by other professional activities. Ultimately, this necessity is rooted in
the larger belief that science is objective and value-free, while political life is ideological and
value-driven."

-Karen Litfin

Take notice, this ["rash treatment of the truth"] is not due to primary research in the
environmental field: this generally appears to be professionally competent and well balanced. It
is due, however, to the communication of environmental knowledge, which taps deeply into
our doomsday beliefs. Such propaganda is presented by many environmental organizations... and
is readily picked up by the media.

-Bjorn Lomborg

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Vocabulary

If we are being picky about vocabulary, aren't heirlooms also hybrids? At some point in the past, they were selectively bred by people.

That is not to say that all hybrids can be legitimately called heirlooms - just that the two categories aren't mutually exclusive.

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Pessimist

While those of us appalled by factory farming may cheer this in the short term, it doesn't seem likely to produce a real shift towards sustainable agriculture.

These firms will just find the next financial mechanism for optimizing profits, with no real concerns for health, animal welfare, or the environment.

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Needs to change from rising to falling

This is highly disturbing. Keeping temperatures from increasing by more than 2°C requires the deep and rapid reduction of global emissions, so as to achieve stabilization at a relatively low concentration of greenhouse gasses. Using IPCC models, it can be estimated that the chances of avoiding a rise of over 2°C if atmospheric concentrations stabilize at 550 ppm are 15%. Even with stabilization at 450 ppm, the chances are only 50%. Stabilizing at 450 ppm would require that global emissions peak by 2010 and fall by 7% per year thereafter, falling to 70% below 2005 values by 2050. Stabilization scenarios with a lower probability of exceeding the 2°C require even more rapid cuts. The climatic effect of emissions reductions is the product of both their depth and their duration; delaying the timing of emissions reductions significantly increases the depth they must have, in order to produce the same climatic outcome.

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Lacking boldness

Backing off does suggest a lack of courage. It also seems like giving up on the message that this is an investment rather than a sacrifice.

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Electoral stock market

For those wanting to keep track of the probable outcome of the election, the University of British Columbia has established an electoral stock market:

http://esm.ubc.ca/CA08/index.php

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Another Meier quote

Another quote from Walt Meier, a scientist at the American National Snow and Ice Data Center explained the situation:

"I think this summer has been more remarkable than last year, in fact, because last year we had really optimal conditions to melt a lot of ice. We had clear skies with the Sun blazing down, we had warm temperatures, and winds that pushed the ice edge northwards. We didn't have any of this this year, and yet we still came within 10% of the record; so people might be tempted to call it a recovery, but I don't think that's a good term, we're still on a downwards trend towards ice-free Arctic summers."

In short, the Arctic ice is probably already locked into a death spiral. Here's hoping that doesn't lead to widespread melting of the permafrost, since the results of that would be catastrophic for humanity. The the Arctic permafrost contains about 36 trillion tonnes (teratonnes) of carbon dioxide equivalent. By comparison, annual human emissions are in the neighbourhood of 29 billion tonnes (gigatonnes) of CO2 equivalent. That means that the permafrost as a whole contains as much greenhouse gas as over 1,200 years of human emissions at the present rate. Thought about another way, that means that annual melting of 0.08% of the permafrost would have as much impact on climate change as every vehicle, power plant, farm, and burned forest around the world.

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Source

To see what I mean, read David Fromkin's "A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East."

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Climate change deniers

Wow there are a lot of trolls in this thread...

The facts described in this post certainly raise some disturbing questions about how committed McCain really is to the cap-and-trade plan in his platform.

The Obama plan is certainly a lot more detailed, and contains some key policy differences. For instance, auctioning of permits rather than free allocation.

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Conservatism and science

One of the most regrettable things about contemporary conservatism - aside from forgetting Edmund Burke's notion of humanity as stewards of the natural world - is the unwillingness to acknowledge basic scientific realities. Sometimes, this is because of ideological conflicts; acknowledging the immense danger posed by climate change basically means admitting that government regulation is required. Sometimes, it is because of religious beliefs at odds with the basic knowledge we now have about the universe. It is simply embarrassing that there are still people in developed countries who do not understand evolution, or who believe the Earth to be a few thousand years old.

More:

http://www.sindark.com/2008/09/03/conservativism-and-scie ...

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Suggestion for future 'slide category' posts

For this kind of data, a PNG file would be preferable to a JPEG. Even better would be a file where the text can still be edited, the graphics are vector rather than raster, and any photos are high quality compressed images.

That way, they can be easily modified and incorporated into presentations being made with any software. I presume that is the reasoning behind creating this category in the first place.

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Inferior fuel

Simply put, hydrogen is an inferior fuel. It takes lots of energy to convert into an energy-dense state, and it is hard to store. Fuel cells are delicate and expensive. Most importantly, hydrogen can only be produced by using up better fuels: either hydrocarbons or electricity. If we have either of those for use in making hydrogen, we are generally better off just using them directly.

One exception might be renewable generating stations in locations too remote to link to the grid. For instance, wind turbines very far offshore might best be used to electrolyze hydrogen.

That said, it seems destined to remain a niche technology, at best.

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Canada

Climate change and the limits of Canadian sovereignty
August 20th, 2008

Canada is free to enact more stringent climate policies than the United States, but not free to enact less stringent ones.

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Alas

This is especially disappointing, given how much they have both done to aid charitable causes.

It is a bit crazy to give billions of dollars to help treat AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis in the developing world, then support the expansion of fuels that especially threaten people in less developed states.

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Barrels

"This platform we are at today sits above a field of 160 million barrels of oil, and is capable of producing on a daily basis 55,000 barrels of oil and 72 million cubic feet of natural gas."

The United States imports more than 10 million barrels of oil per day. Even if all the offshore rigs being proposed could be built instantly, they would only provide a short-term solution to America's energy problems.

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Hydrogen

We can only wonder how long it will be before car companies and governments accept that hydrogen is a pipe dream and move on to more promising technologies like battery-powered electric vehicles.

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Escalating tax

The best approach would be a carbon tax that rises in a predictable manner: say, from $30 per tonne of CO2 this year to $50 in 2010 and $100 by 2020.

That would allow for advance planning and it would also raise the price of the right thing: not driving, per se, but emitting greenhouse gasses.

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Herbs

Fresh herbs do seem to be a good option for those living in small places. They take little space to grow and can be used to produce improve a decent amount of food.

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Military greenery

'Green' fuels for military jets are mostly about symbolically reducing dependence on petroleum imports, not about protecting the environment. The German and Japanese governments did the same thing during the Second World War, when their access to oil was restricted. Furthermore, it is worth stressing that efforts by militaries to be greener are virtually always going to be window dressing. The operation of armed forces is inevitably hugely environmentally destructive: from munitions factories to test ranges to the wanton fuel inefficiency of aircraft afterburners, the whole military complex is about as anti-green as you can get.

People should be unwilling to accept superficial claims that installing some solar panels and building hybrid tanks is going to change that.

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Trends

Last summer's Arctic sea ice minimum was a major record-breaker. It sparked serious thinking about whether the Arctic summer could be ice-free within a decade. This summer's melt now seems likely to be less severe. Does this mean our level of worry should diminish, or is this simply oscillation around a worrying downward trend? It certainly gives ammunition to those who would like to deny that there is a trend at all. In the long run, it probably doesn't matter enormously whether the Arctic melts in ten years or thirty. Where it may matter considerably is insofar as awareness of Arctic melting either prompts the emergence of strong climatic policies or provides fodder for those who want to continue to delay.

Whether it is ice or energy under consideration, the general lesson of shifting baselines is pertinent. We need to see past short term trends and our focus on how the recent past and the present compare, looking onwards to fundamental forces and long-term developments. Of course, when it comes to systems as massive and complex as the global climatic and economic systems, doing so is enormously difficult.

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Externalities

That is absolutely insane. Governments are meant to subsidize activities that have benefits that extend to people who don't pay for them (lighthouses, etc). To subsidize a technology as environmentally destructive as coal-to-liquids is pretty despicable.

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Scientific notation

For those not familiar with scientific notation 6.02 x 10^23 is the same as:

602,000,000,000,000,000,000,000On Umbra on calculating CO2 weight posted 1 year, 3 months ago 19 Responses

Carless

Having chosen not to get a car - partly for environmental reasons - it is a bit rich to hear people saying that I should head way out of town to farmer's markets.

Middlemen who make local food available to those dependent on bikes and public transport thus play a valuable role.

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Worldy goods

Another thing to consider might be the treatment of your wordly possessions.

It is better for working possessions to go to people who will use them, rather than landfills. As for anything toxic, ensuring a mechanism for proper disposal after your death might avert some environmental contamination.On How to green your funeral posted 1 year, 4 months ago 4 Responses

Skepticism, but no automatic rejection

People are right to be dubious about claims that coal can be made clean. That being said, the development of relatively cheap and effective CCS would probably be a huge boon for climate change mitigation - especially in coal rich states like China and the United States.

The moral is: hold proponents of clean coal to account. Don't let them trumpet the technology before it has been shown to work, and that it can do so at a lower cost and with more benefits than a comparable investment in renewables would.

For now, we have no good reason to believe that coal can be made clean. If commercial-scale demonstration plants suggest otherwise over the course of the next few years, all the better.On Umbra on clean coal posted 1 year, 4 months ago 17 Responses

Rail and power

Article on combining the next generation grid with electric railroads.

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Water and ice

"I'm confused. In high school biology I learned that water is one of the few liquids that actually expands when frozen."

Frozen water floats on liquid water because hydrogen bonds line up molecules in a less tightly packed way that exists in the liquid state.

That being said, warmer water is less dense than cooler water.On Umbra on sea-level rise posted 1 year, 4 months ago 7 Responses

Scrumping

Collecting some apples as a community and then making cider would be both ecological and a lot of fun.

Does anyone know if it has been done by any community organizations recently?

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Incentives and economics

This is very interesting. I look forward to the next post in the series.

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Air mattresses - often a bad sign

One thing largely unrelated to the above, but still worth knowing:

When a hostel has air mattresses instead of the ordinary sort, it is sometimes an indication that they are infested with bedbugs or other vermin. Any time I see them, I make sure to check around the beds for bugs or blood speckles, as well as poll people who have stayed a few nights about any bites or other unpleasant effects.On Umbra on air mattresses posted 1 year, 4 months ago 9 Responses

Gene explanation dubious

I agree that the 'obesity is caused by genetics' argument is difficult to square with rising rates of obesity and diabetes. Arguably, this is especially true in situations where people eating traditional diets have suddently been exposed to supermarkets and 'fast food.'

It isn't their genes that have changed, but their health outcomes certainly do.

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Economics

"If humans don't change their selfish, materialistic priorities from money to the natural world, there is no hope of ever solving and [sic] serious environmental issue."

If environmentalists don't take economics seriously, they have no hope of helping to solve major environmental problems. Economics obviously doesn't eliminate the need to think about things like law or ethics. What it does do is provide empirical data for ethical debates, as well as effective tools for achieving whatever outcomes you desire.

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Priorities

"So what should a state biologist do? Pull the plug? Are 132 salmon better than none?"

The question is what alternatives are possible. If there is something that will achieve a better outcome - for salmon elsewhere or for another species - perhaps these efforts should be discontinued.

After all, doctors in hospitals do not devote the bulk of their attention to terminal patients. It is the ones where effort can yield recovery that are worth focusing on.

Of course, it is also vital to tell the story of failure in relation to these particular fish. If people forget that they used to exist, it becomes to easy to believe that humans are always a fairly benign force in the world.

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Almonds and bees

Recently, I was surprised to learn that 80% of the world's almonds are grown in a 600,000-acre section of California's Central Valley. Since almonds need to be pollinated by honey bees (apini apis) and there is only nectar available in that area when almonds are in bloom, the bees need to be trucked in from elsewhere. Every February, more than a million hives - containing 40,000 bees - get trucked in. By 2005, it proved necessary to import a 747 full of bees from Australia for the `pollination event.'

The mutual exposure of those two distantly separated bee populations results in the exchange of microbes and parasites. Therein may lie the cause of the North American Colony Collapse Disorder outbreak that began in 2006. Honey bees are also used to pollinate peaches, soybeans, apples, pears, cherries, raspberries, blackberries, cranberries, watermelons, cantaloupes, cucumbers and strawberries. There are dozens of others, ranging from those that simply benefit from the availability of pollinating bees to those (such as squash and vanilla) where the bees are absolutely indispensable..

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Finance

It is good to see that some people who work in finance have come to grips with the magnitude of the problem.

Hopefully, they can shame their friends into not funding and more coal plants.

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Price differentials

"Some folks see opportunity for reform in this situation: As prices for industrially produced food rise, the playing field will level for more sustainably produced food."

Won't the factors driving price increases in industrially produced foods also impact food produced in more sustainable ways? Even if their input prices do not rise significantly, people might be expected to bid up the value of their products.

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Subsidy

It cannot be accepted that any form of modern transportation competes in an environment of 'neutrality.' That simply isn't possible when the infrastructure demands are so great. At least until we have universal by-the-kilometre billing for road-using vehicles, we need to acknowledge that the question is one of relative subsidies, rather than subsidized transport on one side and 'free market' private vehicles on the other.

A good book that touches on some of this is Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City by Peter D. Norton.

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Masks

Thanks for the information.

Is there any justification for the filter masks some cyclists wear in urban areas? Do they appreciably reduce pollution inhalation?On Umbra on exerting yourself in traffic posted 1 year, 5 months ago 5 Responses

350?

Will 350ppm ever be politically possible?

Is it ecologically necessary?

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GRLCowan

"Therapeutic radon spa?

I certainly hope this is some kind of weird joke.

Radon-222 has been classified by International Agency for Research on Cancer as being carcinogenic to humans. Radon is the second most frequent cause of lung cancer, after cigarette smoking, and radon-induced lung cancer is thought to be the 6th leading cause of cancer death overall.

"rays from uranium daughters that don't really affect anything in the environment"

See Ionizing radiation, radiation poisoning, cancer. All living things can be damaged by alpha and beta particles, gamma rays, and free neutrons.

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Shocking

That is insane.

How could anyone possible consider a moratorium on solar - for environmental reasons, no less - while the country continues to plow ahead with more coal and nuclear plans?

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Expectations

While it may be tactically appropriate to highlight how energy efficiency is a gain, rather than a loss, it further conditions people to feel entitled to their present lifestyles. In many cases, such lifestyles will need to be rendered economically impossible, if we are actually to curb emissions as rapidly and thoroughly as is required.

Now may not be the time to reveal the full character of what needs to be done, but the risk must be borne in mind that people who make token sacrifices will see themselves as having done their share.

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Legalities

DarthPetrol,

No, but there are general legal obligations not to despoil the commons. Massachusetts vs. EPA and other legal judgements have affirmed that those general obligations apply to greenhouse gasses.

Obligations to refrain from polluting in ways that harm other states also exist under international law.

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Good idea

It would send a good message for the White House to be able to serve extremely local food to foreign visitors, as well. Quite probably, it would set them thinking about the virtues of localized agriculture.

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Bacillus thuringiensis

I would also ask them how they feel about genetically modified crops that use Bt toxin (a naturally occurring pesticide permitted in many organic regimes).

Are they concerned that huge monocultures of Bt crops will breed pests resistant to the chemical? In what ways do they generally see organic agriculture threatened by the mainstream variety.

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Butanol

Does butanol have the same fundamental problems as ethanol, namely that it is made from food crops using hydrocarbon-dependent agricultural techniques?

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Plant size and efficiency

Is it not the case that large power plants (of any type) are fundamentally more efficient?

Because they are large and specialized, they can capture economies of scale. They can also employ personnel specifically to keep them running as well as possible. Rooftop solar panels and the like can't do this. Big power plants are also built as 40-50 year investments: the kind of planning and capital-raising that home owners cannot do.

While there are definitely losses associated with transmission, high voltage direct current infrastructure should help to cut them. If so, it may be that big plants continue to dominate the grid, even once the long-term shift to renewables is well under way.

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Level playing field for whom?

What other alcohol fuels are out there to compete with corn ethanol?

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Nuclear and climate change

Well said.

Too many people see nuclear as an 'easy answer' to climate change - one that lets us cut our GHG emissions without making many substantial changes to our lives.

Deeper thinking is probably required.

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Paying for what?

The high prices people are paying now have to do with:

1. Funding new exploration
   
2. Funding the extraction of expensive marginal oil, such as from oil sands
   
3. Outbidding other people who also want the fuel.

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Ways to develop

When discussing global solutions to climate change, a constant distinction is drawn between three groups of states (two of which we sometimes pretend are the same). There are the `developed' states and a `developing' set which consists of those that are growing rapidly (India, China, Brazil, Russia) and those that are stagnant or even getting poorer (Zimbabwe, Sudan).

An alternative way of thinking about the situation is this. Imagine the states as human beings. The `developed' ones grew up in the very unusual situation of huge amounts of cheap, easy energy everywhere. As a consequence, they developed in a deformed way. Their economies can only keep going in their present form while that unusual situation continues. The rapidly developing states are following the same line of development, despite the certainty of climate change and the probability of energy prices rising in the long term.

The `developed' states may be all grown up, but they have developed into monsters. `Developing' states may want to muster the determination to mature more gracefully.

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Protecting antibiotics

Maintaining the effectiveness of antibiotics for the treatment of people is highly important for human welfare. Antibiotics are one of the major reasons why modern medicine is valuable: they help people die dramatically less often after childbirth and surgery than was the case before their development. They have also helped to make diseases that would formerly have been probable death sentences treatable. The fact that we are allowing farms to deplete their value so that they can produce meat more cheaply (by forcing more animals closer together in less clean conditions) seems profoundly unwise.

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Potentially good method for creating incentives

I could imagine this working very well:

For example, let's imagine a tax that starts at a relatively modest $20 per tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e). The mean Canadian produces about 23 tonnes of carbon a year, meaning they would pay $460 in carbon tax that year. That being said, the mean Canadian would also get back $460 as a dividend. A Canadian who is really trying (not flying, not eating meat, living in an efficient home, not driving, etc) might have much more modest emissions: say, 6 tonnes a year. They would pay $120 in carbon taxes and get back $460 - a nice 'thank you' for living a life that does less harm to others. Of course, someone who flies trans-Atlantically several times a year might end up paying significantly more in tax than they get back as a dividend.

Now say it is ten years on. The price of carbon has risen to $50 per tonne of CO2e and mean emissions per person have fallen by 25%. The break-even point is now 17.25 tonnes of carbon. As a result, someone who has not changed their lifestyle is now paying (23 - 17.25) * $50 or $287.50 a year in carbon taxes. If the 6 tonne person also managed a 25% cut, they would be earning (17.25 - 4.5) * $50 or $637.50 more in dividends than they paid in taxes.

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Per capita emissions

Also: Per capita emissions and fairness

"Everybody knows that emissions in the developed world are too high...

What is less often acknowledged is that emissions in the developing world are already too high. Chinese per capita emissions are 3.9 tonnes, while those in India are 1.8. The list of countries by per-capita greenhouse gas emissions on Wikipedia shows three states where per-capita emissions are below 750kg: Comoros, Kiribati, and Uruguay. Even the average level of emissions for sub-Saharan Africa is almost six times above the sustainable level for our current world population."On Umbra on carbon calculators posted 1 year, 5 months ago 11 Responses

Pipe dream

A "kilometer-wide band of geosynchronous Earth orbit" is enormous: 35,780 square kilometres. Even if the ring was very thin, it would be massively heavy, and thus massively expensive to build and launch.

The costs associated with the rocket launches could be more efficiently directed towards building more renewable power stations on the ground. The greenhouse gas emissions associated with all those launches also need to be considered.

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Last resort

As I have said in response to previous posts on geoengineering, it is absolutely not something we should do instead of mitigation.

That being said, it is something we should research in case we fail to mitigate quickly enough, causing runaway climate change. If that happened, geoengineering would be our only hope.

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Better than a Roomba

From what I have seen, goats and sheep do an excellent job of keeping grass neatly trimmed...

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Polar bears and the law

In a sense, declining to regulate GHGs because of polar bears is fair enough. Creating something as comprehensive as a greenhouse gas mitigation strategy in response to concern about a single species is definitely a backwards-seeming way to go about it. At the same time, one is reminded of how somewhat awkward justifications have sometimes been used in the past to secure legal outcomes: for instance, the use of the `interstate commerce' clause in the US Constitution to assert federal jurisdiction, or even the indictment of Al Capone on tax evasion charges, rather than those directly associated with organized crime.

The point here is less whether concern about polar bears does or does not create a legal obligation to act on climate change. Rather, this is another demonstration of how virtually all conservation planning now requires the consideration of climate change effects. This is just one of a thousand cuts through which federal reluctance to effectively regulate greenhouse gasses will need to be eliminated.

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Starting point

Stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations at an acceptable level probably requires more aggressive action. That being said, this is not a terrible place from which to begin negotiations: both between presidential candidates in the United States and between the United States and other countries. If the US was willing to commit to those targets unilaterally (and do so with a credible plan for actually achieving them), it might become a lot easier to get countries like China and India to begin making a more substantial contribution to the mitigation effort.

In exchange, the United States could adopt the kind of targets (and supplemental actions, like aid in preventing tropical deforestation) that are actually required to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions at a level around 450ppm, thus keeping total global temperature change in the realm of two degrees Celsius.

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Keenlyside et al.

While such studies are clearly important for increasing our understanding of the climate system, there is a big danger of misunderstanding them - whether wilfully or not. Plenty of people would interpret a decade of flat or falling temperatures as strong evidence that the climate change consensus is wrong. It provides new fodder for those intentionally seeking to confuse the issue, as well as new grounds for confusion among those who are genuinely trying to understand the situation. Of course, we cannot ask for science to always emerge in ways that help people deal with it appropriately. It would be pretty tragic if a brief but poorly timed deviation from the warming trend helped to undermine the case for action at the very time when we must begin the long and difficult task of building a low-carbon world.

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Perspective

It's amazing how huge swaths of landscape can get transformed from boreal forest to toxic ponds without a great deal of international media coverage but, when a few hundred ducks perish, suddenly it is front page news everywhere.

Human brains don't seem very well suited to comprehending the magnitude of what we are doing to the planet: from the Three Gorges Dam to climate change.

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Totally impractical

$90 a bulb? I would rather read in the dark.

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More stern

Nicholas Stern is quite a good speaker.

You can see a video of him presenting his findings at:

http://www.21school.ox.ac.uk/video/200702_stern.cfm

Notes taken at a talk he gave at Oxford University can also be accessed online.

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Priorities

Landfill space is really the least of our worries when it comes to environmental problems. As such, it seems that the biggest issue with plastic bags is making sure they end up being properly disposed of.

Incidentally, most kind of plastics never biodegrade, they just get physically broken into microscopic pieces. Those are still a threat to tiny organisms, if they are out in the environment.

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Smart sanctions

Targeting specific companies and CEOs can be a good strategy - akin to the 'smart sanctions' that get applied to members of the ruling regime in places like Sudan, North Korea, or Zimbabwe.

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PDF link above is broken

luntzspeak.com is no more.

PDF versions of Luntz's memo are here and here (the latter is hosted on my server).

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Pricing

Almost by definition, technology will not stop climate change as long as the costs associated with it are externalities. Even if it only cost a tiny proportion more to behave in a low-carbon way, people are unlikely to do it until the externality costs are made manifest through carbon pricing.

New technology is likely to reduce some of the costs of abatement, but it is certainly not sufficient in itself to address the problem.

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Don't forget about land

Higher land prices, resulting from increased biofuel cultivation, could also make new non-intensive farms more difficult to establish.

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Questioning the usefulness of Earth Hour

Telling people to turn out the lights for one hour one day has a trivial impact. Furthermore, it has nothing to do with approaches that actually would. Shutting down the lights in a brief symbolic gesture does nothing to change the energy basis of our society. Replacing one ordinary light bulb with a compact fluorescent one would have a bigger impact in the long term, and would at least suggest an understanding that brief voluntary abstinence from energy use is no solution whatsoever. Earth Hour is akin to choosing to fast for one hour and hoping that it will send a strong message to the factory farming industry.

More on this

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The usefulness of pigs

All this is disturbingly reminiscent of the 'pigoons' in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake: cloned and killed for the benefit of human health.

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Interim

This interim review is primarily meant as a means of starting the discussion. They will be holding public meetings and doing a lot more detailed work.

It will be very interesting to see the conclusions of the final report.

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Industry capture

Capture by industry seems to be a tragically common feature in environmentally relevant ministries in rich countries.

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Fresh water

Glaciers play a critical role in the fresh water cycle. They help to conserve winter snowfall, contributing to river flow in summer. They also affect patterns of downwind precipitation, especially past the Himalayas.

In his infamous address to the White House Press Corps, Stephen Colbert joked about how "your grandchildren will have no idea what a glacier is." If these trends persist, that might be an accurate prediction.

The BBC has more on this:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/7299561.stm

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The popularity of trains

According to the American Public Transit Association (APTA), ridership in 2007 was the highest for 50 years. Use rose 2.1% above 2006 levels and 32% above 1995 levels - a rate of increase twice that of the population as a whole. It also reflects a higher rate of increase than there was for vehicle miles travelled on highways.

The biggest gains were in rail ridership, with significantly lower increases in bus use, except in relatively small communities.

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Canadian version

The Red Dot Campaign is the equivalent for Canadians who are sick of unsolicited mail.

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Fish

It would be nice if restaurants also recognized that fish is meat. Too many 'vegetarian' dishes have fish stock in them.

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Ozone comparison

Karen Litfin's book "Ozone Discourses" does a great job of making this point in relation to phasing out CFCs. Before legislation, all sorts of industry-backed assessments held that it would be absurdly costly. Once the phase-out became inevitable, it was found that costs were far below the pessimistic projections.

More on how this relates to climate change

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Mercator

You young whipper-snappers do not remember when two-dimensional projections of the world (i.e., on flat wall-maps) for some weird reason (no doubt evil: racism?; colonialism?; imperialism?) made Alaska, Greenland and Arctic Canada look tremendous, while Africa and Brazil looked modest.

Actually, the distortion on the Mercator projection serves a pretty important purpose: it ensures that a straight line drawn on the map is also a straight line on the ground - pretty handy when you are trying to navigate.

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GDP and decision-making

What this highlights is how cost-benefit analysis is one tool for evaluating the relative appeal of different options. It is not, in itself, an adequate mechanism for decisions. Other sorts of moral and practical considerations must still be taken into account.

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The international air travel loophole

Preventing airport expansion is especially important given how unlikely it is that emissions from international flights will be included in the post-2012 sucessor agreement to Kyoto.

As it stands, it is very difficult under international law to add carbon taxes to fuel or oblige airlines to purchase credits through a cap-and-trade scheme.

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Concentrations and temperature changes

The European Union has a widely quoted objective of avoiding anthropogenic temperature rise of more than 2°C. That is to say, all the greenhouse gasses we have pumped into the atmosphere should, at no point, produce enough radiative forcing to increase mean global temperatures more than 2°C above their levels in 1750.

What is less commonly recognized is how ambitious a goal this is. The difficulty of the goal is closely connected to climate sensitivity: the "equilibrium change in global mean surface temperature following a doubling of the atmospheric (equivalent) CO2 concentration." According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, this is: "likely to be in the range 2 to 4.5°C with a best estimate of about 3°C, and is very unlikely to be less than 1.5°C. Values substantially higher than 4.5°C cannot be excluded, but agreement of models with observations is not as good for those values."

Taking their most likely value, 3°C, the implication is that we cannot allow the doubling of global greenhouse gas concentrations. Before the Industrial Revolution, carbon dioxide concentrations were about 280ppm. Today, they are about 380ppm.

Based on the IPCC's conclusions, stabilizing greenhouse gas levels at 450ppm only produces a 50% chance of staying below 2°C of warming. In order to have a relative high chance of success, levels need to be stabilized below 400ppm. The Stern Review's economic projections are based around stabilization between 450 and 500ppm. Stabilizing lower could be quite a lot more expensive.

Finally, there is considerable uncertainty about climate sensitivity itself. Largely, this is the consequence of feedback loops within the climate. If feedbacks are so strong that climate sensitivity is greater than 3°C, it is possible that current GHG concentrations are sufficient to breach the 2°C target for total warming. Some people argue that climatic sensitivity is so uncertain that temperature-based targets are useless.

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CCS

Some environmentalists are cheering the failure of FutureGen, which might make sense if it's just an example of a big taxpayer handout to industry being averted. Others, however, seem keen to see CCS undermined completely. It is true that it is an untested technology; only four installations in the world use anything like it. It is also true that it could perpetuate fossil fuel usage and slow the development of renewables. At the same time, it must be recognized that building renewables isn't a purpose in its own right. It is a means to low-carbon and reliable energy. If that can be achieved through a combination of coal and CCS, we should probably be happy - especially given the strong likelihood that many coal rich countries (the United States, China, etc) are likely to burn as much of the stuff as they can get out of the ground for the foreseable future, with potentially ruinous climatic effects.

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CCS

Wow. This is especially surprising given how many climate plans hinge on the widespread adoption of CCS.

To what degree is this decision an indictment of CCS in general and to what degree does it reflect the peculiarities of the FutureGen project?

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Allocating time well

As is often the case with these columns, the question arises of whether making these calculations is a sensible use of time. Even if you are willing to use 100% of your free time learning how to have a lower environmental impact, this may not be a good investment.

Time that would be spent researching paper plates could be used to research something with a much higher overall potential for harm reduction.On Umbra on paper plates posted 1 year, 10 months ago 15 Responses

WTO

This is sure to lead to a big fight at the World Trade Organization.

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Compared to transport

I wonder how that compares to man-made transportation emissions.

Road - 9.9%
Air - 1.6%
Other - 2.3%
Total - 13.5%

Source: World Resources Institute.

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Some figures

According to a study from 2000, tropical rainforest is heavily laden with carbon: between 155 and 187 tonnes for wet forest and between 27 and 63 tonnes for dry. That means that each square kilometre of rainforest is holding between 2,700 and 18,700 tonnes of carbon: with about 70% of that in trees, 20% in the soil, and the rest in roots, understory, and litter.

As a result of both land use change and forest burning, the World Resource Institute estimates that deforestation represents about 18.3% of all human greenhouse gas emissions. As such, tackling it is a priority.

Sources:

• Papdopol, C.S. "Impacts of climate warming on forests in Ontario: options for adaptation and mitigation." Forestry Chronicle. 76(1): 139-149 (2000).

• Livingston, Nigel and G. Cornelis van Kooten. "Terrestrial Carbon Sinks and Climate Change Mitigation." in Coward, Harold and Andrew Weaver eds. Hard Choices: Climate Change in Canada.

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Fact check

Forest fires already release nearly 300 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year in the United States.

Only 300 tonnes of CO2? That seems like an awfully low figure, given the average American personally emits 22.9 tonnes per year.

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FIshing out and fishing down

If you extract that individual for food, well, that actually frees up more resources.   It doesn't take away anything at all.   It would encourage growth and the population would happily rush to fill that slot.

"Unlike agriculture, where investment in technology and capital increases long-term yields, without regulation technological development in fishing can only lead to more rapid resource depletion. Fishing remains sustainable only when regeneration exceeds exploitation. That balance must be at the core of any sensible fisheries policy, like those emerging in Iceland and New Zealand. The comparative barrenness of the North Sea and the Grand Bank demonstrates that this balance has not been respected, even when the states that are involved are the richest, most technologically capable, and most scientifically advanced in the world. Dr. Daniel Pauly, of the UBC Fisheries Centre, equates the process of "fishing outwards" to a hole being burned through a piece of paper. At the center are the now depleted waters of Europe and much of the Atlantic. According to Charles Clover, Environment Editor of The Daily Telegraph, two-thirds of Europe's commercial fish stocks are already outside their biological safety limits, while cod stocks have collapsed from Canada to Sweden. These problems of depletion have spread to the coasts of Antarctica, Australia, New Zealand, Africa, and elsewhere. They have reached into trenches and onto sea-mounts that were previously inaccessible to fishermen. The global trade system conceals depletion by allowing access to ever more distant stocks, thereby perpetuating the process of fishing outwards while concealing its occurrence.

As well as fishing out, a process of "fishing down" to successively lower levels in the food web occurs, eventually yielding ecosystems containing nothing more than "jellyfish and plankton." Removing the top predators in an ecosystem does not, as earlier ecological science predicted, vastly increase the numbers of smaller animals. More often, it seems to destabilize food webs and populations. With a resource that is as important and as incompletely understood as the sea, it seems elementary to exercise caution when undertaking activities that have had tragic consequences in the past. When the states in question exist in far more dire circumstances than those of the developed world, such caution is doubly valid, especially as they have fewer means at their disposal to correct environmental mistakes.

Once a particular area, such as the Mediterranean or the North Sea, is depleted, its fishing capacity can no longer be used. The trawler fleets that once fished off of Naples or Plymouth must now travel ever farther afield to fill their holds. Disheartening evidence from depleted fisheries suggests that areas rendered barren may not soon recover, as they experience what is known in the ecological literature as the Allee Effect: a phenomenon whereby depleted resources are less productive and behave differently than healthy ones. This effect can drive species that are not eliminated by human activity to extinction regardless, as observed with the passenger pigeon."

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Relevant paper

"The Legality and Sustainability of European Union Fisheries Policy in West Africa." MIT International Review. Spring 2007. p. 32-41.

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Pigs

Incidentally, Pollan's book highlights a number of different fates for pigs: some far more desirable than others. A pig president would probably applaud much of what he says about that species and the conditions in which they live today.

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Actual effect

Is this likely to actually change the product mix sold at Walmart, or will it just allow them to market the 'greener' products more effectively?

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Great idea

Particularly when you include pumped hydro storage in the mix, maintaining a supply of renewable power that matches the minute-by-minute demand becomes feasible. With any luck, this undertaking will successfully highlight the possibility of moving to a climate-neutral and sustainable system of electricity generation at national scales and above.

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Apology offered

DeSmogBlog Apologizes to Barack Obama

"While we would always hope for better, we must acknowledge that Obama's position is a stunning improvement over the current standard and a clear notch up from the other serious contenders. We would like to apologize - to withdraw the award - and to wish him the best in continuing to refine and improve his position."

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Sea level rise maps

This clever Google Maps mashup lets you examine how coastlines worldwide would change in response to any sea level rise from 1m to 14.

If you want to see what that will do to some major international airports, have a look at the links in this entry of my site.

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Sources of error

Atmosfair does have a 23 page PDF laying out their methodology.

It says, in part:

"A compromise between accuracy and data volume was struck when designing
the Emissions Calculator. The most important factors are simulated, if at all
possible, without giving an exaggerated impression of accuracy."

It lists the following as major uncertainties:

Aircraft type
Seating
Seat occupancy rate
Engine type
Condition of aircraft and engines
Specific fuel consumption as a function of flight distance
Detours
Holding patterns
Weather
Current state of atmosphere
Scientific knowledge level to IPCC 1999

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A changing world

One thing we can expect from climate change eventually is abrupt shifts in the functioning of physical and biological processes. If such changes occur, the IPCC may be the ideal body for evaluating the literature that emerges about them, and coordinating authoritative summaries of that analysis.

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Primary politics

The American primary system is quite odd. Primaries in small states are overly important - as are some with very low voter turnout.

Until the parties have chosen their candidates, a lot of what is said on the campaign trail is likely to be strategically oriented towards navigating the strange waters of the American primary process.

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Anomaly map

That anomaly map is quite terrifying.

By the end of next summer, it seems likely that we will have a much better idea of who will win this bet. Lots of people have been saying that the exceptional melt produced a strengthening positive feedback. If so, we would expect things to continue to worsen at an increasing rate - barring the kind of shocks addressed through your volcano caveat.

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Externalities and aesthetics

It is refreshing to see these sound practical and economic arguments listed here. The widespread assumption within the environmental community that 'local is good' is a kind of mis-targeting. Once emissions related to transportation are captured in prices, the issue of whether it is more sustainable to produce in a disaggregated or aggregated way will sort itself out.

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Global carbon budget

It is quite right to say that a global carbon budget is the first step. The Stern Review says that the capacity of Earth's biological systems to absorb carbon dioxide is about five gigatonnes. In order for atmospheric concentrations of CO2 to stabilize, total global emissions must be cut to this level.

What the atmospheric concentration will be at stabilization depends on the amount of time it takes to cut emissions to five gigatonnes, as well as the shape of the reduction curve in the interim (big cuts early or late). That stabilization concentration will, in turn, determine the amount of temperature change the world will experience, as well as secondary impacts like oceanic acidification.

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Ecosystem health

While such initiatives are generally a good idea, there is some danger that they will propagate the idea that the oceans can be managed in terms of individual species. In the end, it is the integrity of entire ecosystems that is important. As such, we should be concerned about all activities that stress those - from toxins and eutrophication to cy-catch and ocean acidification.

Like arimoore, I find it easiest to avoid ethical problems by eating no fish (or other meat) whatsoever.

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Economic priorities

The Economist quite rightly criticized such plans a long time ago.

I have done so myself, as well. There certainly seem to be a lot of ways in which NASA could spend the money better: Some comprehensive temperature data for Antarctica, perhaps? Some RADAR analysis of the Greenland icecap? Some salaries for people studying climatic feedbacks?

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Urgency and level of threat

There are two elements of 'emergency' to consider. One is urgency and the other is the level of danger.

Starting with the second part, the possibility of runaway climate change certainly qualifies as extremely dangerous. If natural systems start releasing more carbon than they absorb, it could prove unstoppable.

There certainly seems to be less urgency associated with stabilizing concentrations than with winning a war. At the same time, the costs of action are a lot lower if we start sooner. The risk of catastrophic outcomes is also reduced.

While it may or may not be politically useful to describe climate change as an emergency, a reasonable case can be made that it justifies the same kind of effort normally directed at them.

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Details needed

How much does this membrane cost per square metre? And how much CO2 can it remove from a flue gas mixture per hour?On New membrane technology for capturing CO2 posted 2 years, 2 months ago 5 Responses

Larger images

Are there larger versions of these images available? I cannot find any on the linked site. A 1024x768ish version of the winner would make a nice desktop background.On The next generation puts us to shame posted 2 years, 2 months ago 2 Responses

Pumped storage

While it isn't available everywhere, Pumped-storage hydroelectricity seems like a much better option for storing energy from renewables.

The efficiency is comparable to the figure given above for batteries, and the up-front costs of installation are much lower.On American Electric Power to install large battery banks to store wind energy posted 2 years, 2 months ago 10 Responses

Wrong tone, but right ethical imperative

To me, it seems likely to be counterproductive. If you make people scared to the point where they become entirely defensive, they no longer listen to you at all.

Still, there may well be ways to use concern for intergenerational justice to spur action in the near term.On Greenpeace ad on climate change posted 2 years, 2 months ago 19 Responses

Summary quotation

The IPCC report says:

"Scenario studies indicate that the number of large point sources is projected to increase in the future, and that, by 2050, given expected technical limitations, around 20-40% of global fossil fuel CO2 emissions could be technically suitable for capture, including 30-60% of the CO2 emissions from electricity generation and 30-40% of those from industry. Emissions from large-scale biomass conversion facilities could also be technically suitable for capture. The proximity of future large point sources to potential storage sites has not been studied."

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The tiniest drop in the bucket

A few hybrids and solar panels will never offset the massive environmental damage created by the armed forces, even during peacetime. Weapons development, construction, and testing all involve the destruction and contamination of ecosystems - and just think about the kind of GHG emissions produced by all those vehicles, particularly supersonic jets.

The military also has the advantage that it can use arguments of secrecy and national security to prevent normal environmental oversight. Nobody knows, for instance, where or how the waste from Israeli nuclear reactors is being stored.

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Time, money, quantity

Singles are in a bit of a tricky spot when it comes to these food schemes. Speaking for myself, I have limited amounts of time to spend cooking or food shopping. As such, delivery is a very appealing option.

At the same time, I am sure I could not eat as many vegetables as the local schemes seem to provide each week, nor easily stomach the cost.

A smaller delivery at a price of about $10 a week would be ideal.On Umbra on singles and CSAs posted 2 years, 3 months ago 13 Responses

Elasticity of demand

The very wealthy are likely to be the hardest people in which to induce lifestyle change, if only because they are so insensitive to prices. As such, carbon taxes and similar instruments are likely to increase the cost of their purchases only slightly. Given that the whole point of such taxes would be to reduce consumption, this is a problem. Carbon taxes might stop Londoners from throwing stag parties in Prague, but they are unlikely to stop movie stars jetting to the Caribbean or even film studios shipping whole production efforts to far-flung places.

That said, it is arguably the case that the level of scrutiny directed at some members of the super-wealthy elite can be a lever through which to encourage more ecologically sound behaviour. Of course, relying on that approach creates the constant danger of glitzy, media friendly actions with marginal or non-existent benefits.

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Not worth the money or bother

In Ontario, 50 kWh is worth $2.65. Even if you don't take into account labour, maintenance, of the cost of capital, that vertical turbine will take about ten years to recoup its cost.

I suspect the $300 could be better spent, if energy efficiency or reduced GHG emissions are the aim.

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Books on climate feedback

"the only scientific book I could find on the subject was "Positive feedback in natural systems", Deangelis et al, from 1986."

Spencer Weart's book The discovery of global warming talks quite a bit about feedback effects. He, in turn, cites quite a number of sources.

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Should have looked more closely

Actually, I see that the linked article does discuss income effects. That makes the conclusion far more interesting.

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Design issue

Could they design nuclear plants to work with warmer water? No matter how hot the river water gets, it will be cooler than the reactor core.

Also, would it be possible to refit existing reactors to be more tolerant of warmer water?

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Trains and trucks

A renewal of freight shipment by train would definitely be environmentally welcome. Shipping freight by truck produces 180 grams of CO2 per kilometre, while doing so by train produces just 15. Clearly, switching freight transport modes offers considerable scope for emission reductions (as does reducing the total amount of freight shipped).On If buying locally isn't the answer, then what is? posted 2 years, 3 months ago 28 Responses

Wars and the environment

"Unnecessary and mismanaged wars ARE an environmental issue."

True, but mixing anti-war messages into a forum with an environmental story feeds the prejudice that environmentalism is exclusively a partisan left-wing undertaking.

If the environmental movement is to have any lasting success, the issue must become understood in non-partisan terms.On In a privatized war, mercenaries outnumber soldiers -- and bring home cash for their bosses posted 2 years, 3 months ago 8 Responses

Insurance

I agree that geo-engineering is a bad option. That said, it may still be worth investigating just in case we find ourselves in an accelerating climate change situation and no other options remain on the table.

If we cross a tipping point such that forests and oceans start emitting a lot more GHGs than they absorb, we may need some drastic options in reserve. Certainly, they will have adverse consequences - so does using electrical pulses to re-start someone's heart - but that doesn't mean there is no reason to investigate it.On To solving our global warming problem posted 2 years, 3 months ago 6 Responses

Costs

"We can profitably reduce carbon emissions."

While I certainly agree that climate change needs to be tackled, I do not think this is a realistic position. The Stern Review projects that mitigating climate change will cost about 1% of GDP per year. While a few companies - those making solar panels, for instance - will profit from the re-allocation of resources, it is unrealistic to expect that it will cause net growth in the economy.

This is especially true if we believe that deep cuts are required by 2020.

Arguing that mitigation will be low-cost and painless is also a strategy likely to come back and bite if and when it proves more costly than the most optimistic estimators expected.On Finally posted 2 years, 3 months ago 6 Responses

Temperature and crops

Another major consideration is the increase in both maximum and minimum temperatures.

Higher maximum temperatures increase the chances of crop failure, especially among plants that use C3 photosynthesis. Higher minimum temperatures in winter can assist the spread of pests, as the current situation in British Columbia's pine forests amply demonstrates.On High CO2 crops could be low on nutrition posted 2 years, 3 months ago 4 Responses