Indur Goklany

National Security Risks of Biofuel Mandates — Corrected*

by Marlo Lewis on August 24, 2010 · 1 comment

in Ethanol, Global Warming

Those amazing Idsos who run the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change review a paper recently published in AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment by Mulder et al. (2010), who assess the energy return on water invested (EROWI) of several renewable and non-renewable fuels.

In the paper, provocatively titled “Burning Water,” the Mulder team find that “the most water-efficient, fossil-based technologies have an EROWI one to two orders of magnitude [10 to 100 times] greater than the most water-efficient biomass technologies, implying that the development of biomass energy technologies in scale sufficient to be a significant source of energy may produce or exacerbate water shortages around the globe and be limited by the availability of fresh water.”

The Idsos note that these findings “will not be welcomed” by those who promote biofuels as a means of combating the alleged national security risks of global climate change.

We often hear, for example, that climate change will increase the risk of “water wars” by intensifying summer heat and drought. There’s not much evidence to support this alarm. About 90% of global fresh water consumption is for agriculture. As British scientist Wendy Barnaby found to her surprise when she set out to research a book about the coming “century of water wars,” nations in water-stressed regions typically do not come to blows but instead cooperate and import “virtual water” in the form of grain, leaving more water available for drinking and bathing. Even in the water-stressed, conflict-prone, Middle East, nations do not go to war over water. Nonetheless, to the extent that water stress undermines stability and peace, government policies ramping up biofuel production are likely a “cure” worse than the supposed disease.

In addition, some biofuel policies can increase food prices and world hunger, fostering instability and strife, especially if scaled up enough to make a meaningful difference in global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.  

Princeton researchers Stephen Pacella and Robert Socolow estimate that avoiding 1 gigaton (gt) of carbon emissions per year by 2050, by replacing gasoline with biofuels, would require 250 million hectares of high-yield energy crop planations, “an area equal to about one-sixth of the world’s current cropland.”

Let’s put this in perspective. One gigaton of carbon = 3.67 gt of CO2. Achieving the EU/UN emission stabilization target of 450 parts per million would require global CO2 emissions to decline roughly 38 gt below the baseline (business as usual) projection by 2050. In other words, the 3.67 gt reduction in CO2 that Pacala and Socolow say we can get via biofuels would achieve less than 10% of the reduction required to meet the target. Not a whole lot of environmental bang for all that land area buck. Indeed, dedicating 250 million hectares to energy crop production would likely squeeze many species out of their habitats.

eule-50-compared-to-bau

Source: Stephen Eule, Scale and Scope of the Challenge to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Institute for 21st Century Energy, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, February 2009

Note also that significant research indicates that converting grassland and forest land into biofuel plantations increases net greenhouse gas emissions over many decades by releasing the carbon stored in forests and soils. Growing biofuel on 250 million hectares of land might very well emit more CO2 than the gasoline it replaces.

The larger point, though, as Dennis Avery explains, is that the world is not well-fed now, and the demand for food and feed on farmlands is expected to more than double by 2050. Requiring biofuel production on 250 million hectares would be a recipe for disaster. Putting the equivalent of one-sixth of current cropland off limits to food production represents a much bigger decline in global agricultural productivity than is anticipated from drought in high-end global warming scenarios. 

Warmists warn that climate change is a “threat multiplier” or “instability accelerant.” However, the national security risks of climate change policy likely exceed those of climate change itself. 

For further discussion, see my CEI paper, DOD Should Consider the National Security Risks of Global Warming Policies, and economist Indur Goklany’s comprehensive study, Trapped Between the Falling Sky and the Rising Seas: The Imagined Terrors of the Impacts of Climate Change.

* When I first posted this, I failed to notice that Pacala and Socolow were measuring emission reductions in tons carbon whereas Stephen Eule was measuring reductions in tons CO2.

Primer on Extreme Weather Mortality

by Marlo Lewis on August 16, 2010 · 1 comment

in Global Warming

The indomitable Indur Goklany — “Goks” to his friends — has just posted a primer on extreme weather-related mortality entitled, Global Death Toll From Extreme Weather Events Declining. 

If you are one of the hapless millions who watched Al Gore’s scare-you-mentary, An Inconvenient Truth, with its ad nauseum footage of hurricanes, tornadoes, drought, and floods, you might think that carbon dioxide emissions are making the world a more dangerous place.

Goks’ primer demolishes this falsehood. It also reaches the heretical conclusion that restrictions on carbon-based energy would actually impede progress in reducing deaths and death rates related to extreme weather.

Herewith a few excerpts:

Mortality Risk Declining

Based on 2000–08 data, extreme weather events are responsible for about 0.05% of all global deaths (31,700 deaths vs. 58.8 million, annually). That is, despite the media attention to such events, extreme weather events have a minor impact on global public health.

Long term (1900–2008) data show that average annual deaths and death rates from all such events declined by 93% and 98%, respectively, since cresting in the 1920s. These declines occurred despite a vast increase in the populations at risk and more complete coverage of extreme weather events.

Deaths and death rates from droughts were responsible for the majority (58%) of all deaths due to extreme weather events from 1900–2008. They also peaked in the 1920s. Since then, they have been reduced by 99.97% and 99.99%, respectively.

For floods, responsible for another 34% of aggregate deaths, deaths and death rates have declined by 98.7%–99.6% since the 1930s.

For storms (including hurricanes, cyclones, tornadoes, typhoons), responsible for 7% of extreme weather event deaths from 1900–2008, deaths and death rates declined by 47.0%–70.4% since the 1970s. 

“Blame” Fossil Fuels for Improving Safety

First, the decline in the death toll from droughts, in particular, is that global food production has never been higher than it is today (Goklany 1998, 2007). This is largely due to improved seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation, and farm machinery. This entire suite of technologies also enabled the Green Revolution.  But fertilizers and pesticides are manufactured from fossil fuels, and energy is necessary to run irrigation pumps and machinery. Without them, the benefits of improved seeds would be for naught. And in today’s world, like it or not, energy for the most part is synonymous with fossil fuels.

Additional CO2 in the atmosphere has also contributed to higher yields and food production (IPCC 2001: 254–257, 285) because it provides carbon, the basic building block of life, and also increases the efficiency with which plants use water helping offset declines in water availability, if any.

Another factor critical to reining food prices and reducing hunger worldwide is trade within and between countries which enables food surpluses to be moved to food deficit areas (Goklany 1995, 1998).  But it takes fossil fuels to move food around in the quantities and the speed necessary for such trade to be an integral part of the global food system, as it indeed is.  Moreover, fossil fuel dependant technologies such as refrigeration, rapid transport, and plastic packaging, ensure that more of the crop that is produced is actually eaten by the consumer. That is, they increase the overall efficiency of the food production system, which helps lower food prices and contain hunger worldwide.

The second important factor is better disaster preparedness, and more rapid response and delivery of humanitarian aid when disaster strikes.  Timely preparations and response are major factors that have contributed to the reduction in death and disease that traditionally were caused by or accompanied disasters from extreme weather events (Goklany 2007b).  Their success hinges on the availability of fossil fuels to move people, food, medicine and critical humanitarian supplies before and after events strike. 

Economic development also allowed the US (and other developed countries) to offer humanitarian aid to developing countries in times of famine, drought, floods, cyclones, and other natural disasters, weather related or not. Such aid, too, would have been virtually impossible to deliver in large quantities or in a timely fashion absent fossil fuel fired transportation.

Carbon Rationing Is Counter-Productive

Currently many advocate spending trillions of dollars to reduce anthropogenic greenhouse gases, in part to forestall hypothetical future increases in mortality from global warming induced increases in extreme weather events.  Spending even a fraction of such sums on the numerous higher priority health and safety problems plaguing humanity would provide greater returns for human well-being (Goklany 2009a, 2009b).

No less important, efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would slow, if not retard, economic development and/or make fossil fuels scarcer and more expensive thereby militating against the very factors that have reduced deaths and death rates from extreme weather events.

Data deflates threat-multiplier hype

by Marlo Lewis on October 21, 2009 · 1 comment

in Features, Global Warming, Zeitgeist

“Climate change is a threat multiplier” is the new trendy rationale for Kyoto-style energy rationing. One hears little these days about Al Gore’s nightmare vision of death and destruction from ever more powerful and frequent hurricanes, catastrophic sea-level rise, or a warming-induced climate shift into a new ice age. This story line is too implausible for most grownups to swallow or patronize, no matter how desperate they are to look green.

The new, more ‘nuanced’ rationale for energy rationing is that global warming will aggravate several pre-existing environmental and health threats that cause or contribute to instability and conflict. We’re supposed to fear that a warming world will be much more violent and dangerous. Supposedly, “even the generals are worried” that U.S. security forces will be overstretched, even overwhelmed, by crisis after crisis after crisis. Unless, of course, Congress comes through with bigger and bigger appropriations for DOD! 

This is bunkum, as I discuss here, here, and here. Today, I want to pour more cold water on threat-multiplier hype, courtesy of my colleague, environmental researcher Indur Goklany.

Goklany (“Goks” to his friends) recently responded to an article in the Economist arguing that global warming exacerbates conditions (drought, flooding, hunger, insect-borne disease) in poor countries that already impede their development. From which it follows (although the article doesn’t spell it out) that climate change increases the likelihood of state failure, violence, and war.

Chief among the conditions that will allegedly become worse in a warming world are drought and flooding. ”Regardless of whether this is the case,”  Goks writes in his letter to the Economist, “deaths from droughts have declined 99.9% since the 1920s, and 99% from floods since the 1930s” [1]. Yet alarmists tell us that the warming of the latter half of the 20th century was unprecedented in the past 1300 years.

In view of the long-established and overwhelming trends towards greater safety, despite allegedly unprecedented warming, it is difficult to believe that droughts and floods will be a major cause of violent conflict in coming decades. That is especially the case when, as noted previously, nations faced with water shortages typically cooperate and trade, not come to blows.

More broadly, Goks points out, all the long-term trends in environmental factors affecting development are positive:

In fact, access to safe water, improved sanitation, crop yields, and life expectancy has never been higher in the history of mankind.[2] This is true for both the developing and developed worlds. Much of this has been enabled, directly or indirectly, by economic surpluses generated by the use of fossil fuels and other greenhouse gas generating activities such as fertilizer usage, pumping water for irrigation, and use of farm machinery. And crop yields, in particular, are also higher today than ever partly because of higher concentrations of CO2, without which yields would be zero.

Some day — who knows when?– “even the generals” will outgrow climate hysteria and get back to worrying about threats they actually know how to do something about.