Archives for the 'Global Warming' Category
When burning gas is good for the planet
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OK, so say we accept the premise that CO2 causes global warming, is there any case where energy use will be beneficial for the planet? Yes, according to New Scientist:
They say the use of biogas plants, which store the decomposing manure and capture the natural gas it releases, could improve rural farmers’ livelihoods, while protecting the environment.
Biogas digesters are used across the Indian subcontinent, Africa, and Latin America, but few rigorous studies have been done of their overall costs and benefits. So Govindasamy Agoramoorthy of Tajen University and Minna Hsu of National Sun Yat-sen University, both in Taiwan, surveyed 125 rural households in India that use biogas plants.
How ethanol producers see the world
From The Onion. (Yes, it’s ironic. )
Why I Empathize with Hillary Clinton (and Think Tim Russert Is Full of It)
The media is supposed to watch the government, but who monitors the media?
That’s what I was asking myself this morning, after I had fully digested Tim Russert’s shocking midnight announcement on Tuesday that the Democratic Party’s primary was over. Russert is the host of the most prestigious Sunday morning news talkie, Meet the Press, so he is a big player in the world of political coverage, and his word is paramount.
The establishment took its cue. Twenty-four hours later, every commentator of note had declared the race over. Today, Time Magazine is releasing a cover story titled “And the Winner Is…” accompanied by a glamour shot of the anointed nominee, Senator Barack Obama.
But there’s a problem: the race isn’t over! Senator Obama doesn’t have the requisite number of delegates to win the nomination outright. In fact, he doesn’t even have a majority. What is more, he hasn’t been all that effective in the states that the Dems need to win if they are to beat Senator John McCain, the presumed Republican nominee.
The Wednesday morning headlines should have read: “Candidates Split; Race Goes On.” Instead, Senator Clinton was buried by the media. Who would support her campaign now that every new political story touches upon the fact that a “deluded” Clinton is doomed? And without money, the lifeblood of politics, there can be no campaign.
Yogi Berra could probably say it best, but I’ll give it a try: This one’s over, not because it’s over, but because they say it’s over.
To be sure, I am no fan of Senator Clinton. Her style of politics repulses me. But I am even more disgusted by a media establishment that thinks it knows best.
You see, I am a global warming “denier” because energy poverty frightens me more than rising temperatures. So I empathize with Hillary, because all too often, the media decides to take the ball out of my hands, too.
Take Arianna Huffington, whose hugely popular website, the Huffington Post, dominates the policy blogosphere. While promoting her new book, she has been telling reporters that the media should not report both sides of the global warming debate. Her rationale? According to Huffington, it doesn’t serve the public’s interest. In effect, she is admitting that she thinks she knows what’s best for the public.
Huffington and Russert both labor under the misapprehension that what they believe is what we should believe. Unfortunately, they are indicative of their peers. The media’s inability to separate reporting from preaching has cost the Democratic Party a fair primary, and it is robbing American voters of honest debate on global warming.
A tale of Wikipedia woes and highly politicized issues
As a science writer with a liberal arts/ social studies background, I frequently run into brick walls where I do not have detailed enough knowledge about the subject. Physics will be one of those subjects where I gladly admit to being more ignorant than I ought to. Messages from my friend Miranda Hvinden frequently sends me looking for definitions as well (she is a microbiologist and a smart cookie) because she sometimes delves into details beyond my scope of knowledge. I frequently turn to Wikipedia to get the scope of scientific theories and definitions of technical terms.
I used to love the online edition of Encyclopedia Britannica when I was in undergraduate school. I studied comparative religion and intellectual history, and the trusty old Britannica gave me run downs and overviews that got me into the subject matter quicker. The science journal Nature published a study where the accuracy of these two encyclopedic giants where ranked as pretty even when it came to the number of inaccuracies, to the chagrin of subscription based Encyclopedia Britannica.
I write quite a bit about politicized science issues, such as global warming and stem cells and plant biotechnology. And I can tell you that I never turn to Wikipedia on any of these issues. If it is an issue in the political arena, Wikipedia is not your friend. EVER! One of the columnists at the Financial Post has discovered this, because he actually spends some time editing articles on Wikipedia.
The columnist updated some incorrect information about one of the scientists who has involved himself in the global warming debate, but found out that his edits where immediately removed over and over again. The same person always did the removal.
Someone called Tabletop was undoing my edits, and, following what I suppose is Wikietiquette, also explained why. “Note that Peiser has retracted this critique and admits that he was wrong!” Tabletop said.
I undid Tabletop’s undoing of my edits, thinking I had an unassailable response: “Tabletop’s changes claim to represent Peiser’s views. I have checked with Peiser and he disputes Tabletop’s version.”
Tabletop undid my undid, claiming I could not speak for Peiser.
Why can Tabletop speak for Peiser but not I, who have his permission?, I thought. I redid Tabletop’s undid and protested: “Tabletop is distorting Peiser. She does not speak for him. Peiser has approved my description of events concerning him.”
Tabletop parried: “We have a reliable source to this. What Peiser has said to *you* is irrelevant.”
The columnist, whose name is Lawrence Solomon, ran into another mischaracterization of the views of a scientist that is active in the global warming debate. This time, politically correct Wikipedia entries where removing serious accounts of this person’s scientific track record and insinuating that he believes in Martians. Solomon has obviously given up contributing to Wikipedia by now, so he recounts the man’s science credentials in the Financial Post column instead of wasting his time on work that will be tossed out by less accurate writers with an angle.
By now, his columns and his edits have actually riled up some of the zealots that use Wikipedia as a political propaganda tool. Solomon posts another column where he shares the advice he has gotten from experienced Wikipedians, they all tell him not to write under his real name. This is counter intuitive for someone who writes for a living:
But how odd a thought that a writer would want anonymity. Or maybe not so odd. In the real world, those who want anonymity are either ashamed of their conduct — say, poison pen writers– or fear for their safety — say, writers inside China criticizing their government. In the world of Wicked Pedia, the same two reasons rule.
The world of online socializing can get ugly fast, because people feel anonymous behind their computers in their own homes. Anyone who has spent time on the Paleolithic bulletin board systems and UseNet can tell the tale that it always was so, and always will be so. Wikipedia is no different.
Solomon is not the only person who has run into pranksters and zealots with too much time on their hands on Wikipedia. Participants in the public debate have been declared dead, implied as participants in assignations and other criminal activities, and it is a problem that Wikipedia recognizes as a major obstacle to the quality of the Wikipedia brand. However, since Jimmy Wales proclaimed that he would operate with “stable” and audited entries in 2005, little has changed. We still have these issues.
I will continue to use Wikipedia for technical stuff, such as double checking the definitions of enzymes and ribosomes. I will also continue the rule that my professors at the Missouri School of Journalism drilled into my head, always verify the information from one source with another source. In the meantime know that Wikipedia is not a reliable source for information about political issues, or people that are involved in public debate about political issues.
Is it Still Global Warming if the Planet isn’t Warming?
Not only has the planet not warmed over the last decade, but new peer-reviewed research suggests that it might not warm over the coming decade. Reports the Daily Telegraph:
Researchers studying long-term changes in sea temperatures said they now expect a “lull” for up to a decade while natural variations in climate cancel out the increases caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions.
The average temperature of the sea around Europe and North America is expected to cool slightly over the decade while the tropical Pacific remains unchanged.
This would mean that the 0.3°C global average temperature rise which has been predicted for the next decade by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change may not happen, according to the paper published in the scientific journal Nature.
However, the effect of rising fossil fuel emissions will mean that warming will accelerate again after 2015 when natural trends in the oceans veer back towards warming, according to the computer model.
Noel Keenlyside of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences, Kiel, Germany, said: “The IPCC would predict a 0.3°C warming over the next decade. Our prediction is that there will be no warming until 2015 but it will pick up after that.”
This creates an exquisite philosophical dilemma: can the planet be warming if it isn’t warming? I’m sure the Goracle will be able to enlighten us.
Of course, the computer models tell us that warming will eventually restart. But didn’t those same models tells us that we would be warming now? Hmm …
Greenhouse Sinners Repent!
Airplanes emit CO2. Ergo people shouldn’t fly. To do otherwise is, well, sinful in the view of some people Reports ABC News:
Moral authorities of varied stripes have weighed in. In 2006, London’s Anglican Bishop John Chartres said flying abroad to vacation is a “symptom of sin” because it ignores “an overriding imperative to walk more lightly upon the earth.” Environmentalists have also framed flying as a moral issue since it allegedly causes harm in pursuit of unnecessary ends. “You can be an environmental saint – drive a hybrid car, recycle, conserve your water – and if you take one air flight, it actually blows your carbon budget right out of the water,” says Elle Morrell, director of a green-lifestyle program at the Australian Conservation Foundation. One round-trip flight from Sydney to New York City, she says, generates as much in carbon-dioxide emissions per passenger as an average Australian would generate in an entire flightless year.
Of course, this ignores the value of travel. Even some environmentalists recognize that tourism sustains the environment in some countries.
Airlines aren’t alone in making an ethics-based case for flying. Another defender is Martha Honey, executive director of The Center on Ecotourism and Sustainable Development, a Washington, D.C.-based research organization. She notes that nature preserves in many developing countries can sustain their missions only with support from foreign visitors who fly there.
“Of everything involved in tourism, airplane travel is doing the most damage in terms of climate change. That’s absolutely true,” Honey says. “But the movement in Europe saying, ‘Stay home; don’t get on a plane’ is disastrous for poor countries … whose most important source of income is from nature-based tourism. It’s also disastrous for us as a human race to not travel and see the world. The question is, ‘How do you do it, and do it smartly?’ “
It might be worth serious effort to reduce CO2 emissions. But to stop doing what makes life worth living would rather miss the most basic point of life.
Eat a Kangaroo to Save the Environment?
A story in the Wall Street Journal suggests it is time to once again eat kangaroos, to protect the environment, and cope with Kangaroo overpopulation problems. “Greenpeace has recommended that Australians substitute kangaroo meat for consumption of other red meats to reduce land clearing and the release of methane gas from flatulent cattle and sheep. Kangaroo meat is a sought-after meal in Australian restaurants and charcuteries. Recipes like kangaroo escalopes with spinach and anchovy butter, kangaroo tail soup, or kangaroo strip loin pan roasted on balsamic mash are not unusual on the menus of fine restaurants.”
Of course, as Doug Bandow noted earlier today, eating animals can also save endangered species by giving people an incentive to harvest them rather than destroying their habitat or exterminating them. People owning animals helps ensure their survival, too: that’s part of why there are a heck of a lot more chickens than passenger pigeons (a now extinct species which were once as numerous in America as chickens are today), and far more cattle than buffalo.
Eating locally, touted as good for the environment, often isn’t: one study found it was better for the environment for English people to eat lamb that was imported from New Zealand rather than raised in England. And culinary prejudices often keep people from eating local foods that truly do tax the environment less, like cicadas, which are very tasty when microwaved for just a short time, but which few people eat despite the fact that they can easily be collected in large quantities when they periodically emerge from the earth. (In the Washington, D.C. suburbs, they come out in huge numbers once every 17 years).
The Children’s Crusade
Steven Dubner asks whether children are responsible for the recent explosion of environmental concern.
He’s got a point. As well as the decidedly non-secular holiday of Earth Day, which appears to be celebrated at every public school in the US, my daughter’s Brownie troop was assigned a project recently to learn about a foreign country. As well as learning about famous people, landmarks and so on, they had to tell the other Brownies “how they are green.” Hmmmm.
Yet this example of pester power at work would also help explain one phenomenon that is infuriating to the environmental movement. Consistently, Americans have said they are concerned about global warming, but when asked to rank it among urgent issues that action must be taken on, they rank it next to or right at the bottom. For instance, a Pew Research Center for the People and the Press poll in January found it ranked right at the bottom, tied with “making the Bush tax cuts permanent.” Even a minority of Democrat supporters called it a “top priority.” I suspect this is compatible with an agenda in the household set by people who don’t have to make the hard decisions.
What will be interesting is how this translates as these children leave school and start having to square living a “sustainable” life with working for a living and having to satisfy other needs. Perhaps they will put a higher value on the environment than their parents (and if prosperity continues to increase, I think this is going to happen in any event), but if times get hard as a direct result of environmental policy, then the choices made will be very interesting.
Cross-posted from The Really Inconvenient Blog.
Drill for Oil to Save the Environment
In the Washington Post, Robert Samuelson’s column “Start Drilling“ points out that ethanol production is far worse for the environment than drilling for oil in Alaska’s Arctic tundra, yet Congress promotes ethanol subsidies to reduce our reliance on foreign oil, even as it blocks drilling in the Arctic and ”the Atlantic and Pacific coasts” that would do far more to reduce our reliance on foreign oil. “What keeps these areas closed are exaggerated environmental fears, strong prejudice against oil companies and sheer stupidity,” he writes.
A news story today in the Post describes how ethanol production is devouring our food supply, even though a study shows that “greenhouse-gas emissions from corn and even cellulosic ethanol ‘exceed or match those from fossil fuels and therefore produce no greenhouse benefits.’ By encouraging an expansion of acreage, the study added, the use of U.S. cropland for ethanol could make climate conditions dramatically worse. And the runoff from increased use of fertilizers on expanded acreage would compound damage to waterways all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.”
In the American Spectator, Iain Murray notes that ethanol production has caused “food shortages and massive increases in food prices around the world. There have been food riots in Indonesia, Mexico, Egypt, and most recently, Haiti — where the poor have been reduced to eating cakes made with bleach and are on the verge of bringing the government down. Even in America, some grocery stores have begun to institute a form of rationing. Meanwhile, massive tracts of rainforest are being cleared in Indonesia to produce biodiesel, threatening the orangutan and other magnificent animals with extinction. In Brazil, the growth of sugar cultivation for ethanol is forcing food producers into the Amazon.”
By contrast, one of the Audubon Society’s chief bird sanctuaries (the Paul J. Rainey Wildlife Refuge in Louisiana), has 37 oil wells on site, and has produced natural gas for 50 years without harming the environment. Drilling for oil hasn’t harmed the birds a bit. But ethanol production causes environmental destruction, mass hunger, starvation, and rioting worldwide.
Disclosure: like many Americans, I have a retirement plan (both a 401(K) and an IRA). Like most retirement plans, it contains mutual funds. And most of those mutual funds own some stock in oil companies. So when politicians demand that the government impose a “windfall profits tax” on oil companies, what they are really trying to do is take money from my retirement plan — and your retirement plan, too, if you have one. That’s not going to encourage exploration for new sources of oil, or reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
Heritage Speech
I’ve just got back from delivering a speech at the Heritage Foundation on the subject of my book. I think it went well and the audience certainly seemed enthusiastic about it. You’ll be able to watch it here when the webcast gets properly archived within a day or so. Thanks to ever-excellent John Hilboldt and his team for putting it on and to Ben Lieberman for hosting it.
The Rhetorical Impact of the Global Warming Bandwagon
Cellulosic ethanol—derived from wood scraps and other forms of inedible plant mass– may or may not turn out to be a real technological breakthrough. On the one hand, it could reduce the ruinous impacts of grain-based ethanol on food prices. On the other hand, the extensive set of federal mandates and subsidies for cellulosic ethanol is not a good omen—good technologies rarely need federal help, and the existence of federal aid is often a tip-off that a new technology is a loser.
But here’s another question: if cellulosic ethanol does take off, what impact would that have on the clichés we use? Would we have to scrap the old saying about separating the wheat from the chaff, and instead talk about separating the chaff from the wheat?
Global warming policies can cost jobs – says EU steel industry
Though a bit late in figuring things out, the steel industry in the European Union and a steel workers’ union have said that the EU’s proposals to cut CO2 emissions will have a devastating effect on their industry. According to a Reuters article today,
Europe’s steel industry joined forces with a workers’ union on Monday to warn that European Union efforts to curb climate change could put tens of thousands of steel industry jobs at risk.
The EU aims to cut CO2 emissions by at least one fifth by 2020 from 1990 levels, but several energy intensive industries say the cost of curbing emissions will make them uncompetitive against rivals from outside the bloc.
Check out what CEI was saying — way back in 1996 — about the costs of global warming policies. And one of the major costs projected was – jobs. Also check out CEI’s global warming website for up-to-date information.
More on Deadly Ethanol Subsidies
Nate Beeler has an an excellent editorial cartoon, “Food for Thought,” that captures the deadly and costly consequences of ethanol subsidies, in today’s Washington Examiner. Many go hungry because of the greed of a few. We wrote earlier about how ethanol subsidies are causing hunger and starvation worldwide. Rioting and violent protests have occurred in many countries, including Mexico, Pakistan, Egypt, Indonesia, Haiti, El Salvador, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Senegal, Ethiopia, Mauritania, Madagascar, and the Philippines. Ethanol subsidies are also contributing to environmental destruction.
The Windy Denmark Question
Yesterday, a listener on the Michael Medved show challenged me that (I paraphrase), “Denmark has adopted wind power at no cost.” I said that I was no expert on Denmark but that there were significant subsidies involved. As this Economist article makes clear, it is certainly not correct to say that Denmark has adopted wind power at no cost:
Researchers in Denmark have gone a step further and put a value on this effect. They believe that wind power shaved 1 billion kroner ($167m) off Danish electricity bills in 2005. On the other hand, Danish consumers also paid 1.4 billion kroner in subsidies for wind power.
The Danish government cut wind power subsidies that year. The result:
The building of wind turbines has virtually ground to a halt since subsidies were cut back. Meanwhile, compared with others in the European Union, Danes remain above-average emitters of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. For all its wind turbines, a large proportion of the rest of Denmark’s power is generated by plants that burn imported coal.
Moreover, because you cannot store any wind power that is generated when no-one wants to use it, Denmark has to sell excess wind-power to Sweden at a price of 0c per KWh. This has caused some trouble:
Much has been written about Denmark’s success as the world’s wind power pioneer. But the regularly repeated claim – that Denmark generates 20 percent of its electricity demand from wind sources – is highly misleading. That 20 percent of electricity is not supplied continuously from wind power. Denmark’s wind supply is so variable that it relies heavily on neighbors Norway and Sweden, taking their excess production. In 2003 its export figure for wind power electricity production was as high as 84 percent, as Denmark found it could not absorb its own highly variable wind output capacity into its domestic system. The scale of Denmark’s subsidies was such that in 2006-07 the government increasingly came under scrutiny from the Danish media, which claimed the subsidies were out of control.
Overall, Denmark, a small, flat, windy country of about 5.5 million souls cannot be a model for the US to follow, even if they had succeeded in making wind power work efficiently.
“Cap and trade is a tax”
Thus spoke CEI’s Myron Ebell at yesterday’s launch of the Hot Air Tour, sponsored by Americans for Prosperity, in time for Earth Day. For more, please see the video below.
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