Climate Debate Daily

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The Nature Conservancy buys wilderness land

The Nature Conservancy buys a chunk of the Adirondacs in New York State, 161,000 acres to be more precise, with a loan from the Open Space Conservancy.

Story in New Your Times here. It is an impressive deal, and so is the speed with which it was done. The option of selling the land was first raised only six weeks ago.

Falkenstein on Taleb

Who looks well-fed, sports a beard, and has an exaggerated idea of his own contribution to intellectual life? No, I am not thinking about Salman Rushdie, the author of The Satanic Verses, but Nassim Taleb (The Black Swan).

Tyler Cowen wrote a generally positive review of The Black Swan. He did say,

Taleb is a talented writer, and often offers up a brilliant sentence or a clever, darting aphorism; he has a harder time developing a systematic message that is not only true but also original.

Taleb (over)reacted with a Brief Discussion of Empirical and Logical Mistakes in Tyler Cowen’s Review of The Black Swan in Slate (pdf).

Now on Mahalanobis, Eric Falkenstein sets out to demolish Taleb. As hatchet jobs go, it is pretty good.

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.

Ousmane Sembène is dead

Ousmane Sembène was one of the greatest writers and film directors in sub-Saharan Africa. He produced and directed the first sub-Saharan African feature film, La noire de…, released in 1966. His book God’s Bits of Wood, first published in French in 1960, is excellent and deserves to be much more widely read.

News!

Zimbabwe has been elected to head the UN’s commission on sustainable economic development.

Serbia is to take over the chairmanship of the Council of Europe, Europe’s leading body monitoring human rights and justice.

Should we laugh or cry?

New marine reserves

The (London) Telegraph reports (via Tim Worstall),

Eight large marine reserves where fishermen would be liable for damage to protected species are being proposed by the Government today in a new Marine Bill…

Ben Bradshaw, the environment minister, will announce a network of eight marine reserves, including different types of marine habitat from the sandbanks of the Dogger Bank and off North Norfolk to the Darwin Mounds, an area of deep-water coral 1,000 metres deep off north-west Scotland…

…fishing would be banned altogether in some of the reserves - so-called no-take zones - with public consultation being used to determine which…

Jean-Luc Solandt of the Marine Conservation Society said: “I don’t think the number of reserves the Government is proposing is big enough to comply with their international obligations. That would need 20-30 per cent of each habitat covered. It is all about the exchange of larvae between areas so species are resilient.”

What would a similar scheme cost worldwide? In the 2004 paper by Andrew Balmford et al. The worldwide costs of marine protected areas, the authors estimated that conserving 20-30% of the world’s seas would cost $5 to $19 billion per year, and would probably create around one million jobs.

Harmful subsidies leading to overfishing were estimated at $15 to $30 billion per year, with the annual global marine fish catch being worth $70-80 billion per year.

Fiona Harvey, Environment Correspondent

I have added Fiona Harvey, Environment Correspondent for the Financial Times, to the “People” sidebar. If you want the latest news about the environment, click on her name and you will get a list of her FT articles.

Links: foreign aid, global warming, greenhouse gasses

In Prospect magazine (UK), a debate between William Easterly and Hilary Benn, UK Secretary of State for International development, Is Foreign Aid Working?

Graphs illustrating global warming data in EcoWorld article.

The Economist writes about carbon emissions (subscription necessary),

AMERICA’S greenest governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, announced on October 16th that he was planning to set up an emissions-trading scheme between California and other states to try to curb the output of greenhouse gases. Given the complexity of designing and operating such schemes, it is fortunate for Mr Schwarzenegger that Europe already has one up and running; for it offers valuable lessons in what not to do. …

Europe’s Emissions-Trading Scheme (ETS) was one of the few substantial developments to emerge from the wreckage of the Kyoto Protocol. Its purpose was threefold: to cut emissions; the get polluters to pay for the damage they cause; and to get industry to invest in cleaner technology…

Unfortunately, the ETS has failed in all its three aims…

Emissions are flat…

Nor are polluters paying - rather the reverse. In order to get industry to swallow this scheme, allowances were handed out free to companies, rather than being (as economists wanted) auctioned… Britain’s power-generators alone made a profit of around £800m ($1.5 billion) from the scheme in its first year.

Lastly, the ETS is not leading companies to invest in greener technology. In power, for instance, there has been a boom in coal-fired generation - the dirtiest sort.

…the scheme needs to be redesigned.

U.S. Senator Inhofe’s Speech on Global Warming

The Rashomon Effect:

On Globalisation and the Environment Rob Elliott writes, “This speech is a quite astonishing example of what the world is up against. However, the speech does need to be read and considered although with Senators like this I suspect we may be doomed after all.”

On Mahalanobis Michael Stastny writes, “It is perhaps the more concise and fact-filled rebuttal to the global warming hysteria I have every read”.

Speech and videos here, pdf here.

The Coming Collapse of the Dollar

U.S. current account: Costs of foreign borrowing pile up reports the Economic Policy Institute. But don’t bet on the dollar’s eminent demise. As Adam Smith put it:

“There is a lot of ruin in a nation.”

Similarly, there is a lot of ruin in an international reserve currency.

The Coming Collapse of the Rand

Corruption charges against former South African Deputy President Jacob Zuma have been dismissed, boosting his chances of running for president. In reaction to this news, the Rand dropped by 1.2%.

The charges against Zuma are quite concrete, and Zuma’s former financial advisor Shabir Schaik was last year sentenced to 15 years for corruption and fraud and having a corrupt relationship with Zuma during an arms procurement deal.

During his recent trial for the rape of the daughter of a family friend Zuma demonstrated an old-fashioned view of women and an astonishing ignorance of HIV and AIDS, all the more surprising as he was in charge of both South Africa’s Moral Regeneration Campaign and the South African National AIDS Council. Zuma was acquitted of the rape charges.

Zuma’s name will forever be linked to his statement that a shower after sex can prevent AIDS.

He has never given up on his ambition to become President of South Africa.

Global Warming and Arctic Ice

The Arctic Ocean summer ice is melting rapidly, and Arctic ice cover had disappeared so much last month that a ship could sail unhindered from Europe’s most northerly outpost to the North Pole.

Governments are jockeying for position for the shipping lanes the are expected to open up. A journey through the North-East Passage from Europe to Japan is 7,000 nautical miles long and takes 22 days. A comparative trip through the Suez canal is 11,000 nautical miles and takes 35 days.

WWF reports that NASA data shows that arctic perennial sea ice, which normally survives the summer melt season and remains year-round, shrunk abruptly by 14 percent between 2004 and 2005.

Now an expedition to Peary Land in Greenland, lead by Danish geologist Svend Funder, has found that for 1500 years, from 9000 to 7500 years ago, there was no summer ice covering the Arctic Ocean.

“There is no reason to downplay the current greenhouse effect, but our research shows that the planet and humanity have been able to survive a previous greenhouse event. There is no reason to fear the worst, because future horror scenarios are a repetition of the past,” says Svend Funder.

Iran

BBC is presenting a series of radio programs, Uncovering Iran. Here is the first, a 30 minute program.

In this article, Martin van Creveld, the great Israeli military historian, discusses whether the United States should bomb Iran’s nuclear installations. He has previously been quoted as saying, “Obviously, we don’t want Iran to have nuclear weapons and I don’t know if they’re developing them, but if they’re not developing them, they’re crazy.”

€225 billion in subsidies for OECD farmers in 2005

An OECD press release,

21/06/2006 - Government support to farmers in OECD countries totalled € 225 billion in 2005, representing 29% of farm receipts. The proportion is unchanged from the previous year and only marginally lower than the 30% reported in 2003, according to a new OECD study.

Financial Times on Sustainable Banking

Today's Financial Times includes a supplement on Sustainable Banking. It quotes Sir Terry Leahy, chief executive of Tesco, UK's largest supermarket chain,

"The battle to win customers in the 21st century will be increasingly fought not just on value, choice and convenience but on being good neighbours, being active in the communities, seizing the environmental challenges, and on behaving responsibly, fairly, and honestly in all our actions."

Since Sir Terry's statement in May, other retail chains have been tripping over themselves to spell out their environmental and ethical credentials, according to the FT.