Climate Debate Daily

Welcome to the new website Climate Debate Daily!

Bike commuting in Amsterdam

One of the nice things about living in Amsterdam is that I can ride to work on my bike. Compared to the Scandinavians, the Dutch are not very safety conscious. You see many people ride in the dark without lights, and not even children wear helmets. Maybe I have a vivid imagination, but accidents do happen.

Winter is coming, and it will be dark soon on the way to and from work, so I have fitted out my bike with a set of the excellent Reelights (no batteries), and I am thinking about buying a somewhat naf looking Illuminite jacket, and maybe a pair of their gloves. It is worth it, I bike along the Amstel river, and through a beautiful, green area. It is a nice way to start the day.

Review of Lomborg’s new book

In the Financial Times, Clive Crook reviews Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming,

One man who was not rooting for Al Gore to win the Nobel Prize was Bjorn Lomborg. The smiling Dane is the anti-Gore. Unimpressed with An Inconvenient Truth , his new book challenges many of that film’s alarming statements about global warming. Mr Gore and his admirers are paying no attention, needless to say, and that is a pity.

Lomborg’s capacity to anger his opponents is limitless. Of course, he disagrees with them, an outrageous affront in itself. He says that the state of the environment is not dire. He also argues that cutting greenhouse gas emissions should not be the world’s top priority, another scandalous provocation. He makes it worse by being pleasant and reasonable (not to mention Danish), turning up in T-shirt and jeans all the time, supporting his arguments with too many footnotes and acting in other ways designed to offend.

Prices, prices, prices

From BBC’s website,

The focus on reducing carbon emissions has blinded us to the real problem - unsustainable lifestyles, says Eamon O’Hara.[...]

We urgently need to think about the more fundamental concept of sustainability and how our lifestyles are threatening not only the environment, but developing countries and global peace and stability[...].

How many people are tired and weary of modern living? The endless cycle of earning and consumption can be exhausting and does not necessarily bring happiness and fulfillment. Can we do things differently, and better?

I don’t think an appeal to our better selves to change our lifestyles is going to work. And I certainly don’t want the government to tell me in detail what I can or can’t do.

What we need to do is to get the prices right. The enormous environmental problems in China and India show what happens if you don’t get prices for water, power, and pollution right. This is not at all simple and easy to do; rich OECD countries are also struggling to get to grips with it. But it is absolutely fundamental.

Is nuclear green?

Here is an article by Jesse Ausubel, Renewable and nuclear heresies (pdf),

Abstract: Renewables are not green. To reach the scale at which they would contribute importantly to meeting global energy demand, renewable sources of energy, such as wind, water and biomass, cause serious environmental harm. Measuring renewables in watts per square metre that each source could produce smashes these environmental idols. Nuclear energy is green.[...]

The article is discussed in New Scientist under the heading Renewable energy could ‘rape’ nature.

Environment and economy in China

From Washington Monthly,

Like other cities in China, Beijing has a daily weather report and a daily pollution report. On the increasingly crowded freeways, drivers can see only so far ahead; each car leaves a wake in the smog. The dank air creeps inside buildings, into cars, into hotel rooms, leaving you nowhere to escape the distinct smell and the feeling of a weight always on your chest. The sun looks like a flashlight wrapped in cotton gauze, and the sky remains beige no matter the time of day. Most days, the city has no discernible skyline. Most nights, no moonlight or starlight pierces the darkness.

To understand why Chinese officials are genuinely concerned about the country’s growing environmental problems, you must first remember that they live here.

That is obviously true, and it is one good reason why we can be hopeful about China’s future efforts to curb pollution.

Another article in Business Week, entitled Broken China, is skeptical about the sustainability of the Chinese economic boom.

Huge underground lake found

The BBC reports that a huge underground lake has been found in Sudan’s Darfur region, which scientists believe “could help end the conflict in the arid region”.

Presumably it is non-renewable fossil water, like the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System.

Why this should help bring about peace, rather that provide another example of the natural resource curse, it not clear.

There is not much water in Dafur. The is no oil in Somalia. If the Chinese state oil company, CNOOC, succeeds in finding oil in Somalia, will that bring about peace in Somalia?

What happens to any system depends not only on the inputs to the system, but also on the state of the system. Just adding an input, be it water or oil, is no guarantee that peace will be the result. The scientists quoted by BBC seem to have an overly simplistic model in mind.

The Cheney Vice Presidency

The Washington Post has a very good series of article on Vice President Cheney.

Here is Part 4 on Environmental Policy,

Dick Cheney steered some of the Bush administration’s most important environmental decisions — easing air pollution controls, opening public parks to snowmobiles and diverting river water from threatened salmon.

Biofuel myths

In the International Herald Tribune Eric Holt-Giménez writes that we need a public enquiry into the myths about biofuel:

 

• Biofuels are clean and green.
• Biofuels will not result in deforestation.
• Biofuels will bring rural development.
• Biofuels will not cause hunger.

Bottled water

Bottled water is, as Felix Salmon writes, ridiculous. But if you live in an country where you can’t trust the state to tell you the truth about the quality of the piped water, and where there are strong bottled water brands, you are probably better off drinking bottled water. After all, strong, trusted brands are worth a lot, so the owners have a lot to loose if they don’t practice strict quality control.

In the US, it makes no sense to drink bottled water. In China, it makes no difference, you can’t trust either. But traditionally in Italy and France, drinking bottled water made sense.

Summer travel in Europe

Summer is here. If you travel in Europe, one of the nicest way to get from one city to another is by high-speed train. The low-cost airlines are great, but for door-to door journeys of less than 4 or 5 hours, rail is better. When you fly your journey is interrupted; you have to get to the airport, check-in, go through security check, wait for take-off etc. Using trains you travel without interruptions from city center to city center.

One problem has been the lack of integration between the railways in different countries. Now, finally, the high-speed rail operators have decided to give the low-cost airlines a run for their money. They have started Railteam, which will provide seamless integration between different national high-speed train services.

It will not only be a pleasant way to travel, but if the rail operators are successful, they will shift a considerable amount of traffic from cars and airplanes to trains. That can only be good for the environment.

Update: The Economist writes about Railteam here.

Pleistocene Park

BBC has the story about Pleistocene Park, the recreation of an Ice Age ecosystem complete with megafauna, including horses, reindeer, bison, musk oxen, elk, wolves, Siberian tigers and possibly mammoths.

Here is an article in Science from 2005,

In the mammoth ecosystem, the collective behavior of millions of competitive herbivores maintained the grasslands. In the winter, the animals ate the grasses that grew the previous summer. All the while they fueled plant productivity by fertilizing the soil with their manure, and they trampled down moss and shrubs, preventing these plants from gaining a foothold. It is my contention that the northern grasslands would have remained viable in the Holocene had the great herds of Pleistocene animals remained in place to maintain the landscape.

So restocking the land with herbivores may allow grasslands to expand and be maintained, and create a Serengeti in Siberia. It is an interesting experiment. We wish them the best of luck!

The Myth of Inevitable Progress

A review of Indur M. Goklany’s The Improving State of the World: Why We’re Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives on a Cleaner Planet by James Surowiecki.

The core message of Goklany’s book is that economic growth and technological change are the keys to improving people’s lives. But the success of China and India suggests that no one really knows how to bring these achievements about, which makes Goklany’s wide-eyed optimism about the future seem misplaced.[...]

The fact that every country’s experience is different does not mean that there are not deeper truths to be uncovered by looking at the experience of the world as a whole. But the truths thus far uncovered are relatively few in number and often limited in impact. So, yes, free trade is a good thing, subsidies to agriculture and official corruption are bad things, and so on. And policymakers should be aggressive in implementing those practices and policies that there is a good reason to think will work. But they also need to be cautious about taking theoretical pronouncements for reality, and they should be pragmatists rather than evangelists. After decades of misplaced certainty, it may be time to recognize the limits of our own knowledge — at least if we want the state of the world to continue improving.

Terraforming Terra

What should scare us most, climate change or hubristic schemes to mitigate climate change?

The unintended negative consequences of e.g. biofuel production from food crops are large, and include tortilla riots in Mexico because of rising food prices, destruction of rainforests in Indonesia to make way for palm oil plantations, and a general expansion of land under cultivation.

Here is a harbinger of things to come. A company plans to dump iron particles into the ocean in a 100 by 100 kilometer area near the Galapagos Islands in order to stimulate the growth of plankton.

In this case it is not the action of some mad scientist, it is business. The company is peddling “carbon offsets”.

What will be next? Why not seed the stratosphere with sulphur particles and claim carbon credits for that?

The biofuel fiasco and other well-meaning attempts to improve nature - think of the introduction of rabbits in Australia - should make us vary of climate change interventions.

How should we experiment with our poorly understood, nonlinear planetary systems? Very, very carefully.

Climate change is not as scary as climate change mitigation schemes that are driven by the combination of a powerful rent-seeking lobby, investors’ feeding frenzy, opportunistic politicians, and political correctness. Biofuel from food crops is one such scheme. There will no doubt be other even more ambitious schemes in the future. The danger is that they will do more harm than good, and that they will be almost impossible to stop because of the groups that benefit from them.

Update: BBC: Galapagos experiment sparks alarm.

Let me add that I don’t think that dumping 100 tons of iron filings in a 10,000 square kilometer area in the ocean is a cause for alarm. It is not going to trigger a new ice age, destroy the Galapagos ecosystem, or end intelligent life on Planet Earth. The main effect will be to relieve some rather naive people of some of their cash when they pay for carbon offsets.

Free Review of Environmental Economics and Policy

I have just received the first issue of the new Review of Environmental Economics and Policy in the mail. This issue can also be downloaded free of charge here.

Tie carbon taxes to actual levels of warming?

Ross McKitrick has a proposal for harmonized carbon taxes tied to temperature. Note that if temperatures fell, this would turn into a carbon emissions subsidy. Somehow I don’t think that global-warming activists would buy into this. Why not?

Quote of the day

From this week’s survey of business and climate change in The Economist,

Climate change is fashionable, and although fashion has the virtue of being able to transform the dull and worthy into the hip and happening, it is, by definition, transitory. Hollywood stars will probably get bored of their Priuses, and executives may become weary of mouthing green platitudes and move on to whatever branch of corporate social responsibility next catches the popular imagination.

Sustainable consumption

Below the fold, the second part of the report on sustainable consumption from Stratfor. The first part is here.

Environmental Idealists versus Realists

The realists are winning. In the EU they have been greatly strengthened by the demonstrated willingness of Russia to use energy for political blackmail. The idealists are in the impossible position of simultaneously arguing that climate change represents the possible end of the world, but that the situation is not so dire that we need to turn to nuclear energy or “clean coal” technology.

Pretty good article from Stratfor below the fold.

Do fungi feast on radiation?

Fascinating. A major discovery, if confirmed.

A type of fungus can devour radiation and convert it to fuel, researchers say. [...]

Dark-coloured fungi use the same compound as people do, melanin, the pigment that makes both skin and truffles dark.

“Just as the pigment chlorophyll converts sunlight into chemical energy that allows green plants to live and grow, our research suggests that melanin can use a different portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, ionising radiation,” says Dr Ekaterina Dadachova of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.

From News in Science. Story in Scientific American here. The paper is here.