Climate Change

It is 2009 and we are still not taking the neccessary actions to mitigate the very real effects of Climate Change that are occuring now and will clearly occur in the future. For a full economic analysis of the effects of Climate Change in the US, read this. Another informative document, can be found by clicking here, and is a report that was completed for the European Commission.

The files are long but were made so that skimming is easy to do.

Both are pdf files, some computers do not have the neccessary software.

Change for the better, Politicizing for the worse

With the US government taking climate change as a serious threat politicians and lobbyists now step in to ruin a good intention. The deffinition of "renewable" is now being lobbied. Lobbyists for energy companies that ruin our environment are trying to get federal money for doing what they have always been doing like burning spent coal or capturing methane and re-using it or for burning food waste. The point of subsidizing renewable energy is to help wind and solar and wave to gain a footing in the energy market. Certainly we want companies to do things like capture their waste and re-use it but a federal subsidy is not needed to encourage this. We will see how watered down this vital effort gets.

The world business summit on climate change will occur next weekend and companies like shell are using the rhetoric of change while changing little. Shell's big plan is to just wait for carbon capture technology to develop in the next 10-20years and then use it when it is cheap enough for them to want to use it. Climate Change has a time line and waiting that long to reduce emissions is ineffective in mitigating Climate Change. This summit should be amusing as businesses come together to explain why we should do something about Climate Change while they do very little.

Steven Chu is the US Energy Secretary and he is making some contentious decisions. First, Chu is favoring the building of new coal fired power plants. This is unacceptable because every coal plant built today will burn coal until at least 2050. The understanding of environmentalists was that Chu would not allow another to be built under his watch, Chu is not gung-ho about coal plants, but is giving the nod to build more. Chu is also trying to get some reactors going that turn spent nuclear waste into a form that has a drastically smaller radioactive half-life. By doing this Chu would be making the spent nuclear fuel storage facility planned for mountains in Nevada unneeded. Finally, Chu is reducing the government funding of the hydrogen car, many are mad about this but hydrogen is a nowhere technology that was loved by GM and Bush because they could talk about it all day without the risk of having to make a single hydrogen car because there are too many obstacles for this technology. Also, to get fuel for these cars is so energy intensive it makes the car not the environmental thing that people want it to be.

Restructuring our infrastructure to be more "environmental" creates a lot of jobs!

Pollution damages our bodies we all know, but a study that is highlighted by National Geographic explains some of the newest research on the subject.

Canada is pulling oil out of a thing called the Alberta Tar Sands. It is drastically more energy intensive to get oil from sand fields then from tar deposits. The Alberta Tar Sands have 350 years of extraction left but it is expensive to extract and very costly to the environment as these sands lay below a forest and multiple meters of soil. In the Pacific NW of the US 10% of all oil comes from these sands, this topic is very important and you should research it more.

The US Climate Change Bill

Many are calling this Climate Change Bill a monumental piece of legislation that will change America for ever. Surely it puts the US on a path of regulating CO2 emissions from large industries in America, but there is one very large flaw. As it is negotiated currently, 85% of the permits, which is a certificate saying you can pollute x amount, are being given to companies for free. The argument is that if companies had to all-of-a-sudden start paying for the damage they are doing to our environment and society they could not make as much profit as they currently do. That argument has some validacy, but the problem is that by giving away 85% of the permits for free we are giving companies money for being large pollutors. The money generated from selling permits was going to help makeup for the large US deficit that so many people are worried about.

Arguing that giving permtis for free will allow companies to keep their prices low and this will benefit the consumer is false because the consumer is also the taxpayer that is giving these permits for free. It is all just pushing around money and if Americans weren't so fear ridden when they heard the word tax we could just use a simple tax scheme to tax large emitters of CO2, instead of the complex cap and trade system that takes a permit trading bank, regulators for the market and bank, and regulators that make sure that claims of permanent reductions in emissions are honest.

The Gaurdian covers this story

As well as the Christian Science Monitor

And the economist seems to be the only one that understands what is going on, but maybe that is because they know more about economics

For all of the possible environmental catastrophies that we forsee due to our resource use, if technology advances fast enough many of our problems will dissapear into the past. Australian researchers figured out how to put 10 terabytes onto a single cd, that is 2,000 times the space that a DVD currently holds

The Russians are not doing so bad during this downturn because of their natural gas and oil stock that they sell to Europe. Where will Russia be in 50 years when they have sold off most of their oil and gas reserves and have made no grand effort to adapt to a post fossil fuel dependent world?, if we get there.

The world tries to change

Obama is raising the fuel efficiency standards (called CAFE) and as usual the car industry and many others say that it will cost the consumer too much, much of the car industry is not fighting the plan though. A suprising fact is that economists don't talk with industry much. So we get big business making business claims that sound like economics, really they are just saying that they do not want to be forced to change, but constant change is what keeps an economy healthy. Business is not Economics.

This piece from Greenpeace explains the ideal path to dealing with climat change, according to them. They are deffinitely one end of the political spectrum, but their rhetoric is more favorable to our environment than many of our politicians in the US Congress.

Poverty in Africa increased greatly in the last several years, this press release from UNEP address the agricultural needs of Africa.

The United Nations just held a chemical conference that functions to get world governments to produce less toxic and harmful products.

Apparently Bush II held private talks with China about reducing green house gas emissions. Does this change your view of Bush II?

Climate Science Correction and US Climate Bill Changes

Apparently scientists are not perfect. These two articles explain how sea levels will not rise as much as expected from melting ice, one is from the Canada Broadcasting Corporation and the other from the Christian Science Monitor.

Harvesting methane from cows is a double win for environmentalism and the economy, Resources for the Future explains.

Obama's climate change bill is watered down by industry. They always complain about environmental legislation reducing their profits, but their profits are found on degrading the environment, yet it is further complicated because human welfare has been made temporarily dependent on degrading the environment.

The CATO insitute has a short article on "Buy Local," it is an incomplete analysis for sure but opposing beliefs are worth our time.

Moving Forward

China burns the most coal out of any country and is taking steps to reduce their CO2 emissions while continuing to be crutched on coal energy. Their performance is not ideal, but it will be impactful.

One of Obama's budget cuts will be the hydrogen energy project. Bush II supported a hydrogen economy without acknowledging the obstacles, Obama is now stepping away from it to focus on more likely alternative fuels.

Solar energy harvesting technology is advancing, making it cheaper; cheaper than oil. This the point at which alternative fuels can overtake fossil fuels, when the market signals via price people respond, and in this case they stop using oil.

The Pika (a cute little mammal) might be listed as endangered due to global warming.

Technology leads the way

Later this year a very important UN Kyoto Meeting of the Parties will occur and many feel that this is our last chance to negotiate a global Climate Change agreement before it is too late and positive feed back mechanisms take over the global ecosystem, changing the earth's climate more than humans would like. Sweden is taking the lead as president of the European Union and will be the lead in the Climate Change negotiations.

The CATO institute is a libertarian organization and is void of a lot of Democrat Republican rhetoric so I enjoy their analyses, their commentary is sometimes disagreeable but their numbers are often spot-on. This article is about the economics of Obama's spending on increasing rail in the US. One note about this article, it states that electrical trains are a poor idea because we have coal fired power plants in America, but we are currently working on phasing out coal fired power plants and equipping them with carbon capture technologies, so i find their argument shallow.

This link is to a pdf so if you do not have the right software the link may not work. This report is made by the Oil Solutions Initiative and is titled "A Framework for Breaking US Oil Dependence."

Increasing energy efficiency for our appliances is being pushed right now and many do not like increased efficiency because it means more overall resource use. I would say that this is no condemnation of increasing energy efficiency because plenty of humans are still poor and want to use more energy, but already rich people using increases in energy efficiencies to use more is a problem.

The Economist provides a good commentary on energy grids in American and how they are changing.

Economic Localization?

I found this great website that helps you obtain a better understanding of where our food comes from. With the effort to localize agriculutre in the USA there has been some unsubstantiated rhetoric about "food miles," just because your food travelled more miles does not mean the environmental impact was worse. The inputs into the equation for the environmental impact of food transporation are: miles travlled by the food, efficiency and scale of transportation, the vehicle used for transportation and how many miles you traveled to purchase your food. In large scale agriculture food is shipped in large amounts and the fuel cost of shipping most products is 1% of the price of that product. There are other issues though that are not intrinsic to food miles, such as packaging, political context, the storage of food and the types of products that can be found on the global market.

This article titled "Avoiding the Local Trap" explains scale as a means not an end, and explores the validity of the food localization rhetoric. I support increased performance in our food system, and sometimes localization accomplishes that.

This article from Micheal Shuman highlights localization and is a primer for his book "Going Local."

I wish there was ample research on the "buy local" concept that was not a promotion or an attack and was simply an assessment of when localization increases some type of performance (environmental, social, etc) and in what situations localization has no effect or a negative effect.

This website is a local food advocacy organization and provides "buy local" information and resources, as well as the neccessary rhetoric to decorate their position.

Buying local is not an assurance of doing more for you community or environment, but it is often better then buying a highly packaged product made using toxic chemicals (check out the book "Body Toxic"). Since our economy is so globalized most efforts to localize will be better for society and the environment, but only because of the minimal scale of the effort and the fact that many large companies sell you products that do not have the full cost (negative externalities) of the product included in the price.