Carbon will kill us all

This article from Peter Huber is fantastically bleak and makes great reading. It is refreshing to see someone talking about the reality of climate change and just how hard (and expensive) it will be to do anything about it.

This is the dismal science at its most dismal. It is hard to get away from the conclusion that we are all inevitably doomed.

This article is long but unmissable,

We Cannot Make a Dent in Global Carbon Emissions [Opposing views]

Like medieval priests, today’s carbon brokers will sell you an indulgence that forgives your carbon sins. It will run you about $500 for 5 tons of forgiveness—about how much the typical American needs every year. Or about $2,000 a year for a typical four-person household. Your broker will spend the money on such things as reducing methane emissions from hog farms in Brazil.

But if you really want to make a difference, you must send a check large enough to forgive the carbon emitted by four poor Brazilian households, too—because they’re not going to do it themselves. To cover all five households, then, send $4,000. And you probably forgot to send in a check last year, and you might forget again in the future, so you’d best make it an even $40,000, to take care of a decade right now. If you decline to write your own check while insisting that to save the world we must ditch the carbon, you are just burdening your already sooty soul with another ton of self-righteous hypocrisy. And you can’t possibly afford what it will cost to forgive that.

If making carbon this personal seems rude, then think globally instead. During the presidential race, Barack Obama was heard to remark that he would bankrupt the coal industry. No one can doubt Washington’s power to bankrupt almost anything—in the United States. But China is adding 100 gigawatts of coal-fired electrical capacity a year. That’s another whole United States’ worth of coal consumption added every three years, with no stopping point in sight. Much of the rest of the developing world is on a similar path.

Cut to the chase. We rich people can’t stop the world’s 5 billion poor people from burning the couple of trillion tons of cheap carbon that they have within easy reach. We can’t even make any durable dent in global emissions—because emissions from the developing world are growing too fast, because the other 80 percent of humanity desperately needs cheap energy, and because we and they are now part of the same global economy. What we can do, if we’re foolish enough, is let carbon worries send our jobs and industries to their shores, making them grow even faster, and their carbon emissions faster still.

We don’t control the global supply of carbon.

Ten countries ruled by nasty people control 80 percent of the planet’s oil reserves—about 1 trillion barrels, currently worth about $40 trillion. If $40 trillion worth of gold were located where most of the oil is, one could only scoff at any suggestion that we might somehow persuade the nasty people to leave the wealth buried. They can lift most of their oil at a cost well under $10 a barrel. They will drill. They will pump. And they will find buyers. Oil is all they’ve got.

Poor countries all around the planet are sitting on a second, even bigger source of carbon—almost a trillion tons of cheap, easily accessible coal. They also control most of the planet’s third great carbon reservoir—the rain forests and soil. They will keep squeezing the carbon out of cheap coal, and cheap forest, and cheap soil, because that’s all they’ve got. Unless they can find something even cheaper. But they won’t—not any time in the foreseeable future.

We no longer control the demand for carbon, either. The 5 billion poor—the other 80 percent—are already the main problem, not us. Collectively, they emit 20 percent more greenhouse gas than we do. We burn a lot more carbon individually, but they have a lot more children. Their fecundity has eclipsed our gluttony, and the gap is now widening fast. China, not the United States, is now the planet’s largest emitter. Brazil, India, Indonesia, South Africa, and others are in hot pursuit. And these countries have all made it clear that they aren’t interested in spending what money they have on low-carb diets. It is idle to argue, as some have done, that global warming can be solved—decades hence—at a cost of 1 to 2 percent of the global economy. Eighty percent of the global population hasn’t signed on to pay more than 0 percent.

Accepting this last, self-evident fact, the Kyoto Protocol divides the world into two groups. The roughly 1.2 billion citizens of industrialized countries are expected to reduce their emissions. The other 5 billion—including both China and India, each of which is about as populous as the entire Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development—aren’t. These numbers alone guarantee that humanity isn’t going to reduce global emissions at any point in the foreseeable future—unless it does it the old-fashioned way, by getting poorer. But the current recession won’t last forever, and the long-term trend is clear. Their populations and per-capita emissions are rising far faster than ours could fall under any remotely plausible carbon-reduction scheme.

Might we simply buy their cooperation? Various plans have circulated for having the rich pay the poor to stop burning down rain forests and to lower greenhouse-gas emissions from primitive agricultural practices. But taking control of what belongs to someone else ultimately means buying it. Over the long term, we would in effect have to buy up a large fraction of all the world’s forests, soil, coal, and oil—and then post guards to make sure that poor people didn’t sneak in and grab all the carbon anyway. Buying off people just doesn’t fly when they outnumber you four to one.

Might we instead manage to give the world something cheaper than carbon? The moon-shot law of economics says yes, of course we can. If we just put our minds to it, it will happen. Atom bomb, moon landing, ultracheap energy—all it takes is a triumph of political will.

Really? For the very poorest, this would mean beating the price of the free rain forest that they burn down to clear land to plant a subsistence crop. For the slightly less poor, it would mean beating the price of coal used to generate electricity at under 3 cents per kilowatt-hour.

And with one important exception, which we will return to shortly, no carbon-free fuel or technology comes remotely close to being able to do that. Fossil fuels are extremely cheap because geological forces happen to have created large deposits of these dense forms of energy in accessible places. Find a mountain of coal, and you can just shovel gargantuan amounts of energy into the boxcars.

Shoveling wind and sun is much, much harder. Windmills are now 50-story skyscrapers. Yet one windmill generates a piddling 2 to 3 megawatts. A jumbo jet needs 100 megawatts to get off the ground; Google is building 100-megawatt server farms. Meeting New York City’s total energy demand would require 13,000 of those skyscrapers spinning at top speed, which would require scattering about 50,000 of them across the state, to make sure that you always hit enough windy spots. To answer the howls of green protest that inevitably greet realistic engineering estimates like these, note that real-world systems must be able to meet peak, not average, demand; that reserve margins are essential; and that converting electric power into liquid or gaseous fuels to power the existing transportation and heating systems would entail substantial losses. What was Mayor Bloomberg thinking when he suggested that he might just tuck windmills into Manhattan? Such thoughts betray a deep ignorance about how difficult it is to get a lot of energy out of sources as thin and dilute as wind and sun.

It’s often suggested that technology improvements and mass production will sharply lower the cost of wind and solar. But engineers have pursued these technologies for decades, and while costs of some components have fallen, there is no serious prospect of costs plummeting and performance soaring as they have in our laptops and cell phones. When you replace conventional with renewable energy, everything gets bigger, not smaller—and bigger costs more, not less. Even if solar cells themselves were free, solar power would remain very expensive because of the huge structures and support systems required to extract large amounts of electricity from a source so weak that it takes hours to deliver a tan.

This is why the (few) greens ready to accept engineering and economic reality have suddenly emerged as avid proponents of nuclear power. In the aftermath of the Three Mile Island accident—which didn’t harm anyone, and wouldn’t even have damaged the reactor core if the operators had simply kept their hands off the switches and let the automatic safety systems do their job—ostensibly green antinuclear activists unwittingly boosted U.S. coal consumption by about 400 million tons per year. The United States would be in compliance with the Kyoto Protocol today if we could simply undo their handiwork and conjure back into existence the nuclear plants that were in the pipeline in nuclear power’s heyday. Nuclear power is fantastically compact, and—as America’s nuclear navy, several commercial U.S. operators, France, Japan, and a handful of other countries have convincingly established—it’s both safe and cheap wherever engineers are allowed to get on with it.

But getting on with it briskly is essential, because costs hinge on the huge, up-front capital investment in the power plant. Years of delay between the capital investment and when it starts earning a return are ruinous. Most of the developed world has made nuclear power unaffordable by surrounding it with a regulatory process so sluggish and unpredictable that no one will pour a couple of billion dollars into a new plant, for the good reason that no one knows when (or even if) the investment will be allowed to start making money.

And countries that don’t trust nuclear power on their own soil must hesitate to share the technology with countries where you never know who will be in charge next year, or what he might decide to do with his nuclear toys. So much for the possibility that cheap nuclear power might replace carbon-spewing sources of energy in the developing world. Moreover, even India and China, which have mastered nuclear technologies, are deploying far more new coal capacity.

Remember, finally, that most of the cost of carbon-based energy resides not in the fuels but in the gigantic infrastructure of furnaces, turbines, and engines. Those costs are sunk, which means that carbon-free alternatives—with their own huge, attendant, front-end capital costs—must be cheap enough to beat carbon fuels that already have their infrastructure in place. That won’t happen in our lifetimes.

Another argument commonly advanced is that getting over carbon will, nevertheless, be comparatively cheap, because it will get us over oil, too—which will impoverish our enemies and save us a bundle at the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security. But uranium aside, the most economical substitute for oil is, in fact, electricity generated with coal. Cheap coal-fired electricity has been, is, and will continue to be a substitute for oil, or a substitute for natural gas, which can in turn substitute for oil. By sharply boosting the cost of coal electricity, the war on carbon will make us more dependent on oil, not less.

The first place where coal displaces oil is in the electric power plant itself. When oil prices spiked in the early 1980s, U.S. utilities quickly switched to other fuels, with coal leading the pack; the coal-fired plants now being built in China, India, and other developing countries are displacing diesel generators. More power plants burning coal to produce cheap electricity can also mean less natural gas used to generate electricity. And less used for industrial, commercial, and residential heating, welding, and chemical processing, as these users switch to electrically powered alternatives. The gas that’s freed up this way can then substitute for diesel fuel in heavy trucks, delivery vehicles, and buses. And coal-fired electricity will eventually begin displacing gasoline, too, as soon as plug-in hybrid cars start recharging their batteries directly from the grid.

To top it all, using electricity generated in large part by coal to power our passenger cars would lower carbon emissions—even in Indiana, which generates 75 percent of its electricity with coal. Big power plants are so much more efficient than the gasoline engines in our cars that a plug-in hybrid car running on electricity supplied by Indiana’s current grid still ends up more carbon-frugal than comparable cars burning gasoline in a conventional engine under the hood. Old-guard energy types have been saying this for decades. In a major report released last March, the World Wildlife Fund finally concluded that they were right all along.

But true carbon zealots won’t settle for modest reductions in carbon emissions when fat targets beckon. They see coal-fired electricity as the dragon to slay first. Huge, stationary sources can’t run or hide, and the cost of doing without them doesn’t get rung up in plain view at the gas pump. California, Pennsylvania, and other greener-than-thou states have made flatlining electricity consumption the linchpin of their war on carbon. That is the one certain way to halt the displacement of foreign oil by cheap, domestic electricity.

The oil-coal economics come down to this. Per unit of energy delivered, coal costs about one-fifth as much as oil—but contains one-third more carbon. High carbon taxes (or tradable permits, or any other economic equivalent) sharply narrow the price gap between oil and the one fuel that can displace it worldwide, here and now. The oil nasties will celebrate the green war on carbon as enthusiastically as the coal industry celebrated the green war on uranium 30 years ago.

The other 5 billion are too poor to deny these economic realities. For them, the price to beat is 3-cent coal-fired electricity. China and India won’t trade 3-cent coal for 15-cent wind or 30-cent solar. As for us, if we embrace those economically frivolous alternatives on our own, we will certainly end up doing more harm than good.

By pouring money into anything-but-carbon fuels, we will lower demand for carbon, making it even cheaper for the rest of the world to buy and burn. The rest will use cheaper energy to accelerate their own economic growth. Jobs will go where energy is cheap, just as they go where labor is cheap. Manufacturing and heavy industry require a great deal of energy, and in a global economy, no competitor can survive while paying substantially more for an essential input. The carbon police acknowledge the problem and talk vaguely of using tariffs and such to address it. But carbon is far too deeply embedded in the global economy, and materials, goods, and services move and intermingle far too freely, for the customs agents to track.

Consider your next Google search. As noted in a recent article in Harper’s, “Google . . . and its rivals now head abroad for cheaper, often dirtier power.” Google itself (the “don’t be evil” company) is looking to set up one of its electrically voracious server farms at a site in Lithuania, “disingenuously described as being near a hydroelectric dam.” But Lithuania’s grid is 0.5 percent hydroelectric and 78 percent nuclear. Perhaps the company’s next huge farm will be “near” the Three Gorges Dam in China, built to generate over three times as much power as our own Grand Coulee Dam in Washington State. China will be happy to play along, while it quietly plugs another coal plant into its grid a few pylons down the line. All the while, of course, Google will maintain its low-energy headquarters in California, a state that often boasts of the wise regulatory policies—centered, one is told, on efficiency and conservation—that have made it such a frugal energy user. But in fact, sky-high prices have played the key role, curbing internal demand and propelling the flight from California of power plants, heavy industries, chip fabs, server farms, and much else (see “California’s Potemkin Environmentalism,” Spring 2008).

So the suggestion that we can lift ourselves out of the economic doldrums by spending lavishly on exceptionally expensive new sources of energy is absurd. “Green jobs” means Americans paying other Americans to chase carbon while the rest of the world builds new power plants and factories. And the environmental consequences of outsourcing jobs, industries, and carbon to developing countries are beyond dispute. They use energy far less efficiently than we do, and they remain almost completely oblivious to environmental impacts, just as we were in our own first century of industrialization. A massive transfer of carbon, industry, and jobs from us to them will raise carbon emissions, not lower them.

The grand theory for how the developed world can unilaterally save the planet seems to run like this. We buy time for the planet by rapidly slashing our own emissions. We do so by developing carbon-free alternatives even cheaper than carbon. The rest of the world will then quickly adopt these alternatives, leaving most of its trillion barrels of oil and trillion tons of coal safely buried, most of the rain forests standing, and most of the planet’s carbon-rich soil undisturbed. From end to end, however, this vision strains credulity.

Perhaps it’s the recognition of that inconvenient truth that has made the anti-carbon rhetoric increasingly apocalyptic. Coal trains have been analogized to boxcars headed for Auschwitz. There is talk of the extinction of all humanity. But then, we have heard such things before. It is indeed quite routine, in environmental discourse, to frame choices as involving potentially infinite costs on the green side of the ledger. If they really are infinite, no reasonable person can quibble about spending mere billions, or even trillions, on the dollar side, to dodge the apocalyptic bullet.

Thirty years ago, the case against nuclear power was framed as the “Zero-Infinity Dilemma.” The risks of a meltdown might be vanishingly small, but if it happened, the costs would be infinitely large, so we should forget about uranium. Computer models demonstrated that meltdowns were highly unlikely and that the costs of a meltdown, should one occur, would be manageable—but greens scoffed: huge computer models couldn’t be trusted. So we ended up burning much more coal. The software shoe is on the other foot now; the machines that said nukes wouldn’t melt now say that the ice caps will. Warming skeptics scoff in turn, and can quite plausibly argue that a planet is harder to model than a nuclear reactor. But that’s a detail. From a rhetorical perspective, any claim that the infinite, the apocalypse, or the Almighty supports your side of the argument shuts down all further discussion.

To judge by actions rather than words, however, few people and almost no national governments actually believe in the infinite rewards of exorcising carbon from economic life. Kyoto has hurt the anti-carbon mission far more than carbon zealots seem to grasp. It has proved only that with carbon, governments will say and sign anything—and then do less than nothing. The United States should steer well clear of such treaties because they are unenforceable, routinely ignored, and therefore worthless.

If we’re truly worried about carbon, we must instead approach it as if the emissions originated in an annual eruption of Mount Krakatoa. Don’t try to persuade the volcano to sign a treaty promising to stop. Focus instead on what might be done to protect and promote the planet’s carbon sinks—the systems that suck carbon back out of the air and bury it. Green plants currently pump 15 to 20 times as much carbon out of the atmosphere as humanity releases into it—that’s the pump that put all that carbon underground in the first place, millions of years ago. At present, almost all of that plant-captured carbon is released back into the atmosphere within a year or so by animal consumers. North America, however, is currently sinking almost two-thirds of its carbon emissions back into prairies and forests that were originally leveled in the 1800s but are now recovering. For the next 50 years or so, we should focus on promoting better land use and reforestation worldwide. Beyond that, weather and the oceans naturally sink about one-fifth of total fossil-fuel emissions. We should also investigate large-scale options for accelerating the process of ocean sequestration.

Carbon zealots despise carbon-sinking schemes because, they insist, nobody can be sure that the sunk carbon will stay sunk. Yet everything they propose hinges on the assumption that carbon already sunk by nature in what are now hugely valuable deposits of oil and coal can be kept sunk by treaty and imaginary cheaper-than-carbon alternatives. This, yet again, gets things backward. We certainly know how to improve agriculture to protect soil, and how to grow new trees, and how to maintain existing forests, and we can almost certainly learn how to mummify carbon and bury it back in the earth or the depths of the oceans, in ways that neither man nor nature will disturb. It’s keeping nature’s black gold sequestered from humanity that’s impossible.

If we do need to do something serious about carbon, the sequestration of carbon after it’s burned is the one approach that accepts the growth of carbon emissions as an inescapable fact of the twenty-first century. And it’s the one approach that the rest of the world can embrace, too, here and now, because it begins with improving land use, which can lead directly and quickly to greater prosperity. If, on the other hand, we persist in building green bridges to nowhere, we will make things worse, not better. Good intentions aren’t enough. Turned into ineffectual action, they can cost the earth and accelerate its ruin at the same time.

Use Energy, Get Rich and Save the Planet (OR DIE TRYING)

Good to see the much maligned Kuznets curve getting its annual airing on earth day from none other than the New York Times.

Use Energy, Get Rich and Save the Planet [New York Times]

When the first Earth Day took place in 1970, American environmentalists had good reason to feel guilty. The nation's affluence and advanced technology seemed so obviously bad for the planet that they were featured in a famous equation developed by the ecologist Paul Ehrlich and the physicist John P. Holdren, who is now President Obama's science adviser.

Their equation was I=PAT, which means that environmental impact is equal to population multiplied by affluence multiplied by technology. Protecting the planet seemed to require fewer people, less wealth and simpler technology - the same sort of social transformation and energy revolution that will be advocated at many Earth Day rallies on Wednesday.

But among researchers who analyze environmental data, a lot has changed since the 1970s. With the benefit of their hindsight and improved equations, I'll make a couple of predictions:

1. There will be no green revolution in energy or anything else. No leader or law or treaty will radically change the energy sources for people and industries in the United States or other countries. No recession or depression will make a lasting change in consumers' passions to use energy, make money and buy new technology - and that, believe it or not, is good news, because...

2. The richer everyone gets, the greener the planet will be in the long run.

I realize this second prediction seems hard to believe when you consider the carbon being dumped into the atmosphere today by Americans, and the projections for increasing emissions from India and China as they get richer.

Those projections make it easy to assume that affluence and technology inflict more harm on the environment. But while pollution can increase when a country starts industrializing, as people get wealthier they can afford cleaner water and air. They start using sources of energy that are less carbon-intensive - and not just because they're worried about global warming. The process of "decarbonization" started long before Al Gore was born.

The old wealth-is-bad IPAT theory may have made intuitive sense, but it didn't jibe with the data that has been analyzed since that first Earth Day. By the 1990s, researchers realized that graphs of environmental impact didn't produce a simple upward-sloping line as countries got richer. The line more often rose, flattened out and then reversed so that it sloped downward, forming the shape of a dome or an inverted U - what's called a Kuznets curve. (See nytimes.com/tierneylab for an example.)

In dozens of studies, researchers identified Kuznets curves for a variety of environmental problems. There are exceptions to the trend, especially in countries with inept governments and poor systems of property rights, but in general, richer is eventually greener. As incomes go up, people often focus first on cleaning up their drinking water, and then later on air pollutants like sulfur dioxide.

As their wealth grows, people consume more energy, but they move to more efficient and cleaner sources - from wood to coal and oil, and then to natural gas and nuclear power, progressively emitting less carbon per unit of energy. This global decarbonization trend has been proceeding at a remarkably steady rate since 1850, according to Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University and Paul Waggoner of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station.

"Once you have lots of high-rises filled with computers operating all the time, the energy delivered has to be very clean and compact," said Mr. Ausubel, the director of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller. "The long-term trend is toward natural gas and nuclear power, or conceivably solar power. If the energy system is left to its own devices, most of the carbon will be out of it by 2060 or 2070."

But what about all the carbon dioxide being spewed out today by Americans commuting to McMansions? Well, it's true that American suburbanites do emit more greenhouse gases than most other people in the world (although New Yorkers aren't much different from other affluent urbanites).

But the United States and other Western countries seem to be near the top of a Kuznets curve for carbon emissions and ready to start the happy downward slope. The amount of carbon emitted by the average American has remained fairly flat for the past couple of decades, and per capita carbon emissions have started declining in some countries, like France. Some researchers estimate that the turning point might come when a country's per capita income reaches $30,000, but it can vary widely, depending on what fuels are available. Meanwhile, more carbon is being taken out of the atmosphere by the expanding forests in America and other affluent countries.

Deforestation follows a Kuznets curve, too. In poor countries, forests are cleared to provide fuel and farmland, but as people gain wealth and better agricultural technology, the farm fields start reverting to forestland.
Of course, even if rich countries' greenhouse impact declines, there will still be an increase in carbon emissions from China, India and other countries ascending the Kuznets curve. While that prospect has environmentalists lobbying for global restrictions on greenhouse gases, some economists fear that a global treaty could ultimately hurt the atmosphere by slowing economic growth, thereby lengthening the time it takes for poor countries to reach the turning point on the curve.

But then, is there much reason to think that countries at different stages of the Kuznets curve could even agree to enforce tough restrictions? The Kyoto treaty didn't transform Europe's industries or consumers. While some American environmentalists hope that the combination of the economic crisis and a new president can start an era of energy austerity and green power, Mr. Ausubel says they're hoping against history.

Over the past century, he says, nothing has drastically altered the long-term trends in the way Americans produce or use energy - not the Great Depression, not the world wars, not the energy crisis of the 1970s or the grand programs to produce alternative energy.

"Energy systems evolve with a particular logic, gradually, and they don't suddenly morph into something different," Mr. Ausubel says. That doesn't make for a rousing speech on Earth Day. But in the long run, a Kuznets curve is more reliable than a revolution.

Further Reading

"Environmental Kuznets Curves." B. Yandle, M. Bhattarai, M. Vijayaraghavan. PERC, 2004.

"Dematerialization." J.H. Ausubel, P.E. Waggoner, PNAS, 2008

"Economic Growth and the Environment." A.B. Krueger, G. Grossman. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1995.

"Governance, Institutions and the Environment-Income Relationship." K. Dutt. Environment, Development and Sustainability, 2008.

"The Jack Rabbit of Depression, or Do economic slumps benefit environment?" (pdf). J. Ausubel, P.E. Waggoner. Working paper, 2009.

"The IPAT Equation and Its Variants." (pdf) M.R. Chertow. Journal of Industrial Ecology, 2001.

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The cost of climate change in Africa

The costs were always going to be larger than many predicted. Given these figures will never be paid the only point of this article is to get an idea of how bad things are going to get.

Africa Says Poor Need Billions To Fight Climate Fight [PlanetArk]

OSLO - Developing nations will need at least $267 billion a year by 2020 to fight climate change and adapt to droughts, heat waves and rising seas, according to African nations.

The figure, part of a new African text for negotiations on a U.N. climate treaty, is more than double current development aid from recession-hit rich nations which totaled a record $120 billion in 2008.

"Africa is one of the most vulnerable continents to climate change, with major development and poverty eradication challenges and limited capacity for adaptation," according to the text submitted to the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat.

It set a 2020 goal of $200 billion in investments to help all developing nations curb their rising greenhouse gas emissions -- for instance via energy efficiency or shifting from use of coal or oil toward renewable wind or solar power.

The African Group, comprising more than 50 nations, said those flows totaled about 0.5 percent of the gross domestic product of developed nations. Cash needed to help developing nations adapt to climate change, such as building stronger defenses against rising sea levels or developing drought-resistant crops, needs to be at least $67 billion a year by 2020.

The numbers are above levels of aid discussed by rich nations to curb greenhouse gas emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels.

A report by the European Commission in January said the worldwide costs of fighting climate change would be around 175 billion euros ($227.1 billion) a year by 2020.

"It shows the scale of what's needed," Kathrin Gutmann, head of policy of the WWF environmental group's global climate initiative, said of the African text. "We're not talking about tens of billions of dollars -- it's far more."

CHICKEN AND EGG

"There's a very strange chicken and egg situation," Gutmann said. Rich nations want the poor to lay out their plans for fighting climate change before promising cash. The poor want funds pledged first before deciding what is achievable.

The next U.N. climate talks, part of a series meant to end in Copenhagen in December with a new pact to succeed the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol, are set for June 1-12 in Bonn, Germany.

The African group also said developed nations should cut emissions by at least 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 and by 80-95 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. The numbers are beyond goals by almost all developed countries.

"At lower stabilization levels, the additional climate impacts are unacceptable to Africa," it said.

The U.N. Climate Panel projects that up to 250 million people in Africa could face greater stress on water supplies by 2020 and that yields from rain-fed agriculture could fall by up to 50 percent by 2020 in some African nations.

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Does greenwashing show the dirt?

I have written an increasing number of firm level "environmental economics" papers and this is an interesting twist on the story.

Why Greenwashing Hurts Even the Most Eco-Friendly Businesses[GreenBiz.com]

Your business has been designing more environmentally friendly products for the past 15 years. Your marketing team is trained to make accurate and truthful environmental claims about your products. Your company wholeheartedly believes in its sustainability efforts. Think you're immune to the effects of greenwashing? Guess again.

The fact of the matter is greenwashing affects all companies, including those that are making a concerted environmental effort, by degrading consumer confidence. The effort your company makes is hampered by competitors when they mislead the public.

According to the 2008 Eco Pulse survey conducted by the Shelton Group, when asked why most companies that adopt environmentally friendly practices do so, the most common response was "to make their company look better to the public." Only 13 percent of respondents answered "because their owners/shareholders care about the environment."

So what can you do to address this problem and increase the credibility of your company's environmental claims?

First, it's important to recognize that this is a broad problem, affecting every environmentally conscious company in every industry imaginable. The problem won't be solved overnight and it certainly won't be solved with a single company's efforts.

The somewhat newly revised Federal Trade Commission's "Guides for the Use of Environmental Marketing Claims" are a great starting point for at least creating a frame of reference, but unfortunately it is near impossible for the guides to be properly and broadly enforced. The ISO 14021 standard for self-declared environmental claims, along with newer efforts in development from associations such as ASTM are also great points of reference, but unfortunately these are voluntary standards. As a result, environmentally responsible companies follow these guides, while greenwashers continue to proliferate.

Transparency is the key to addressing the problem and restoring consumer confidence of environmental claims. Third-party certification of sustainable products and environmental claims adds an extra layer of credibility to a company's marketing.

For companies that are self-declaring environmental claims, even those that follow standard guidelines, consumer mistrust still looms. A 2008 PriceWaterhouse Coopers survey validated that only 16 percent of consumers trust the environmental claims from manufacturers.

There are dozens of efforts ongoing from standard developers, NGOs, third-party certifiers, industry associations and others that seek to create transparent standards to bring back consumer trust in environmental claims.

There are two critical pieces that must be in place in order for these to succeed:

• First, the standards need to be developed in an open consensus manner with a large and diverse group of stakeholders.
• Second, the standards need to be reliable, repeatable, rigorous, and balance stringent criteria with current technology and commercial feasibility.

As these standards proliferate and truly environmentally conscious businesses jump on-board, then consumers will regain trust in environmental claims and really put their purchasing power into green products.

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Soap Smugglers

If ever there was an example of why the planet is ultimately doomed one only has to look as far as Spokane in Washington.

I am sure it is not only Americans that are this environmentally selfish but it does feed the flames of discontent with America's apparent lack of enthusiasm of tackling climate change.

However, at the country level it is America's overall desire to have clean rivers and to be at the forefront of environmental regulation that caused the "soap smugglers" in the first place.

The dirty truth: They're smuggling soap in Spokane [LA Times]

Reporting from Spokane, Wash. -- By day, Patti Marcotte is a working mom -- dealing with the balancing act created by a 5-year-old daughter, a demanding job, a split-level house and a willful boxer puppy.

Come the post-dinner hour, however, Marcotte begins operating in the shadowy world of smuggled soap.

Spokane County in July adopted a near total ban on sales of water-softening phosphates in dishwasher detergent -- the first in the nation -- in an attempt to slow the flood of pollutants that is sucking oxygen out of the endangered Spokane River, smothering its fish.

The problem, Marcotte and many of her neighbors say, is that most low-phosphate detergents are wimps when it comes to fighting greasy pots and spaghetti-crusted plates. So she has become a detergent outlaw, driving 45 minutes across the Idaho state line to pick up secret stashes of the old, bad dish cleansers: the brutish Cascades, the muscular Electrasols.

"With the 'green' stuff, the dishes come out with a real slippery texture -- like somebody poured a cup of grease in some dishwater -- and a white film. Just really gross," Marcotte said. "And then the food gunk just mixes around the dishwasher and when it stops, it just settles on whatever's there. I mean, it's bad."

Retailers in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, say the sight of apologetic but defiant Washingtonians loading their carts with dishwasher detergent is becoming increasingly common. "We go, 'Are you coming from Spokane?' And they kind of chuckle and say, 'Yeah,' " said Donna Wilkinson, an assistant manager at Costco.

For those inclined to chuckle at the travails of distant, desperate people with dirty dishes, consider this: The detergent industry has pledged to make every automatic dishwashing soap sold in the U.S. and Canada nearly phosphate-free by mid-2010.

With 12 states -- including Washington -- phasing in low-phosphate laws by the end of next year and four others considering them, industry officials say they are gearing up to produce a new generation of products that will clean dishes while not harming lakes and streams. (The California Legislature passed a phosphate law last year, but Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed it.)

The pledge marks a significant turnaround for an industry that until recently not only opposed such laws but also warned that many phosphate-free dishwashing detergents didn't work the way consumers expected them to.

But plenty soon will be available, said Dennis Griesing, vice president of government affairs for the Washington, D.C.-based Soap and Detergent Assn.

"We sort of warned Spokane that things wouldn't be ready by 2008. We had told people it's not enough time to get our best products out there," Griesing said. "We have to do the R&D, restructure our chemical supply lines, maybe build some new plants.

"This is going to be a national changeover. I can't emphasize this enough."

Two major manufacturers have introduced nearly phosphate-free gels that work well in most water conditions, he said, and more are on the way.

At least some consumers in Spokane seem willing to give it a try.

"I'm not an automatic-dishwasher owner, I'm a hand washer, but I know from doing an unscientific poll among family members, they have no complaints," said state Rep. Timm Ormsby, a Democrat from Spokane who helped shepherd Washington's statewide ban -- which takes effect in July 2010 -- through the Legislature.

The transition echoes the elimination of most phosphates from laundry detergent several years ago, but represents an entirely different technological hurdle. Previous attempts to phase out dishwasher phosphates in Europe and a brief trial in Arizona met with implacable consumer resistance.

But Spokane County authorities say that since the law went into effect, they have reduced phosphate pollution from the county's main wastewater treatment plant by 14%.

Scientists say phosphorus -- a nutrient that is an essential component of living cells, as abundant in human waste and yard fertilizer as it is in detergent -- is one of the biggest threats to lakes and rivers whose waters take in a constant stream of phosphate-laden wastewater discharges, agricultural runoff and storm-water flows.

Acting as a fertilizer in the water, phosphates promote the uncontrolled growth of often-toxic algae blooms that, when they die back, nurture bacteria. That bacteria rapidly consume much of the oxygen in the water, leaving little for plants and fish.

The Spokane River is considered one of the nation's most endangered, threatened by mining pollution, sewage treatment plant outfalls and heavy drawdowns of river water that tend to concentrate pollutants.

In an attempt to turn things around, the state Department of Ecology imposed what appear to be the lowest phosphate limits in the nation on Spokane's main water-reclamation plant. And the county instituted its dishwasher detergent rules two years before the statewide low-phosphate law takes effect.

"We had the misfortune of having a lot of people in a fairly small area on a river that made America's 10 most-imperiled rivers list," said Michael F. Costner, operations manager at the water-reclamation plant.

The plant is spending $7 million to experiment with new technologies for cleaning up remaining phosphates in the wastewater. Spokane County will spend up to $250 million more to build a new treatment plant after that. The state is also looking to crack down on agricultural and industrial polluters, along with leaky septic systems.

The law allows dishwasher detergents to have no more than 0.5% phosphate content. The most popular brands contain about 8% phosphates in order to remove fats and hold food particles in suspension.

Most hand dish soap, which relies mainly on scrubbing to clean plates and pots, does not contain phosphates.

Marcotte says she's environmentally conscious, but the phosphate-free dishwasher detergents she has tried left the dishes so dirty she had to wash them twice, in much hotter water, or at least rinse them after washing them -- a waste of water and electricity, since she normally uses tepid water on the short cycle.

"I try to recycle and do my part," she said.

"The whole thing is, if they're going to take away something that works, they need to replace it with something that works."

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What makes a good environmental story? Suicides in trees?

I subscribe to PlanetArk alerts which are both interesting and a cheap way of finding material to blog about. However, I am sometimes perplexed as to their selection criteria for the "Home of World Environment News".

Today's lead article for example is titled:

Skeleton Found In Tree 29 Years After Suicide [PlanetArk]

BERLIN - The skeleton of a German retiree who tied himself to the top of a tree and shot himself to death nearly 30 years ago has been found by a hiker.

German police in the southern town of Landshut said on Monday the 69-year-old man disappeared in 1980 and had been classified as missing.

An 18-year-old hiker discovered a bone in the forest last week and brought it to police. They searched the area and spotted the skeleton hanging about 11 meters up, near the top of the spruce tree.

"After searching the area we found the skeleton up in the tree with the pistol hanging on a rope next to it," police spokesman Leonard Mayer said. Police were able to identify the man through DNA testing and an artificial hip.

Now I must say, this is an interesting story that I could not resist reading. I can only assume that the "environmental" angle is the fact that this poor chap was found in a tree. I am missing something?

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International Trade in Used Durable Goods: The Environmental Consequences of NAFTA

A catch up on some must read papers in the "globalisation and environment" arena.

The results of this paper appeal as they are exactly what I would expect although the final line of emission increases due to a second life for cars that would otherwise be scrapped is less convincing. Clearly it depends on what happens in Mexico and whether the alternative is merely to prolong the life of even more polluting cars.

International Trade in Used Durable Goods: The Environmental Consequences of NAFTA

Lucas W. Davis
University of Michigan at Ann Arbor - Department of Economics; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
Matthew E. Kahn
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)

December 2008

NBER Working Paper No. w14565

Abstract:
Previous studies of trade and the environment overwhelmingly focus on how trade affects where goods are produced. However, trade also affects where goods are consumed. In this paper we describe a model of trade with durable goods and non-homothetic preferences. In autarky, low-quality (used) goods are relatively inexpensive in high-income countries and free trade causes these goods to be exported to low-income countries. We then evaluate the environmental consequences of this pattern of trade using evidence from the North American Free Trade Agreement. Since trade restrictions were eliminated for used cars in 2005, over 2.5 million used cars have been exported from the United States to Mexico. Using a unique, vehicle-level dataset, we find that traded vehicles are dirtier than the stock of vehicles in the United States and cleaner than the stock in Mexico, so trade leads average vehicle emissions to decrease in both countries. Total greenhouse gas emissions increase, primarily because trade gives new life to vehicles that otherwise would have been scrapped.

JEL Classifications: F18
Working Paper Series

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The deer cost of condor protection in China

Any environmentally interesting play on words deserves a blog post in my opinion. Was I remiss enough to spell dear incorrectly or is this a strange mammal-bird related story?

Thankfully it is the latter. I am also keen on any story that includes the word "raptor" in context of which there are too few (stories and raptors).

An interesting case of unexpected consequences.

I particularly like the vision of condors putting up two feathers (or indeed flipping the bird) to the wardens who are trying to scare them and eating the deer anyway.

China Pays Deer Price For Condor Protection [PlanetArk]

BEIJING - Chinese conservationists are in a fix over endangered condors eating large numbers of a protected species of deer in a reserve in the north of the country, state media said on Friday.

More than 100 young spotted deer have been eaten by the condors so far this spring at the Luanhe River National Nature Reserve in Hebei province, near Beijing, the official Xinhua news agency said, becoming an "unanticipated" part of the food chain.

Nationally, the condor is considered far more endangered than the deer.

"The raptors are growing in number and threatening to catch larger animals, like elk, in the reserve," it quoted wildlife official Zhou Changhong as saying.

The reserve only has 600 or so deer and just 10 elk, the report added.

"An adult condor has a wingspan of more than two metres, and not even wardens can frighten it," Zhou said.

He added that wardens hoped to organise patrols to stop the condors from eating too many of the deer.

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How much can economists earn?

In the US academic economists are paid considerably more than their UK counterparts.

This breakdown of Larry Summers' pay last year goes some way to explaining why. The market decides.

With the hedge fund collapes I suspect this amount will be lower this year.

Financial Industry Paid Millions to Obama Aide [New York Times]

WASHINGTON — Lawrence H. Summers, the top economic adviser to President Obama, earned more than $5 million last year from the hedge fund D. E. Shaw and collected $2.7 million in speaking fees from Wall Street companies that received government bailout money, the White House disclosed Friday in releasing financial information about top officials.

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G20 and the environment II: Monbiot's return

Sadly I am too busy to comment at length on the G20-environment debate so I will let George take over.

On a purely "G20 save the world" note am I the only economist who believes the latest moves will do little to help? The way I see it is that the trillion dollars just allows those countries addicted to gambling to keep on gambling. Low interest rates encourage households to gamble on riskier investments instead of saving.

Capitalism is about capital - the lack of incentive to save means individuals taking even more risk.

After a party this size of the one the global economy has had over the last ten years the hangover was always going to be bad. The current solution may stop the very worst of it but may well mean that the hangover goes on for longer.

Still, there are some good idea and the tax haven solution is one of them but these are long term solutions to stop this happening again. There is no danger of that for a while.

Over to George on the environment who is as always spot on. A great piece on the current farce over bank bailouts.

Once we are well and truly past the planet's tipping point there can be no "planet bailout" however much money we throw at it assuming we return to our path of unstustainable growth.

G20 forgets the environment [Guardian]

Here is the text of the G20 communique, in compressed form.

"We, the Leaders of the Group of Twenty, will use every cent we don't possess to rescue corporate capitalism from its contradictions and set the world economy back onto the path of unsustainable growth. We have already spent trillions of dollars of your money on bailing out the banks, so that they can be returned to their proper functions of fleecing the poor and wrecking the Earth's living systems. Now we're going to spend another $1.1 trillion. As an exemplary punishment for their long record of promoting crises, we will give the IMF and the World Bank even more of your money. These actions constitute the greatest mobilisation of resources to support global financial flows in modern times.

Oh - and we nearly forgot. We must do something about the environment. We don't have any definite plans as yet, but we'll think of something in due course."

The G20's strategy for solving the financial and economic crisis, in other words, is detailed, innovative, fully costed and of vast scale and ambition. Its plans for solving the environmental crisis are brief, vague and uncosted. The environmental clauses - which contradict almost everything that goes before - have been tacked onto the end of the communique as an afterthought. No new money has been set aside. No new ideas are proposed; just the usual wishful thinking: let's call the whole package green and hope for the best.

So much for the pledge, expressed in different forms by most of the governments present at the talks, to put the environment at the heart of decision-making. Though the economy is merely a measure of our engagement with the environment; though, as most of the leaders acknowledge, continued prosperity is impossible without sustainability, the communique shows that the environment still comes last. No expense is spared in saving the banks. Every expense is spared in saving the biosphere.

This suggests to me that our leaders have learnt nothing from the financial crisis. It was caused by allowing powerful agents (the banks) to exploit a common resource (the global economy) without proper control or regulation. Governments deployed a form of magical thinking: that the boom would go on forever, that a bunch of predatory psychopaths would regulate themselves, that profits, dividends and share prices could grow indefinitely even though they bore no relation to actual value.

They treat the environmental crisis the same way. Climate breakdown, peak oil and resource depletion will all dwarf the current financial crisis, in both financial and humanitarian terms. But, just as they did with the banks, the G20 leaders appear to have decided to deal with these problems only when they have to - in other words, when it's too late. They persuade themselves that getting the economy back to where it was - infinite growth on a finite planet - can somehow be reconciled with the pledge "to address the threat of irreversible climate change".

Next time this magical thinking fails, there'll be no chance of a bail-out.

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G20 and the environment

Given that the world's leaders are gathering in London to discuss the current global crisis it will be interesting to see what publicity the "environment" gets. It will certainly be less than one might have expected given the unfolding crisis elsewhere.

Here is a round-up of some of the column inches dedicated to this topic:

America ‘can’t wave magic wand’ on climate change [Times online]

Expectations of what can be achieved by the United States in fighting global warming are unrealistic, climate change negotiators from more than 170 countries have been told.

Hopes raised by a new willingness in the White House to take action to control climate change must be balanced by a realisation that there are limits to what the US can do, they were told.

Todd Stern, President Obama’s special envoy on climate change, moved to play down hopes as the US joined UN talks on global warming in Bonn. These are designed to smooth the path to a summit in Copenhagen in December when it is hoped that international agreement on cutting greenhouse gas emissions can be reached.

Leaders to meet in summer for special climate change talks [Independent]

The new summit – which is being called on the initiative of President Barack Obama as part of a US drive to get a new international agreement on tackling global warming – is to take place alongside the annual G8 gathering of world leaders on the island of La Maddalena off Sardinia.

Scientists and environmentalists will hope that it will make up for a failure by the leaders at this week's meeting to do more than agree warm words about the need for a "green new deal" and the importance of building low-carbon economies. Every nation attending has flatly refused to discuss any commitment to devote an agreed percentage of its financial stimulus package to green measures, insisting instead on focusing on relatively short-term measures to tackle the immediate financial crisis.

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Why are environmental economists so wildly unpopular with the public?

If you want to know the answer to this interesting question read this post over at the new "energy collective" where John Whitehead presents his hypothesis.

Impressively, he manages to do this without reference to US college sports ;-)

His concluding paragraph, correctly in my opinion, hits the nail on the head.

Basically, the trouble is that most environmental economists are economists first and interested in the environment second (at least professionally). Environmental is the adjective that modifies economics. As such, we get grief from both sides of most environmental issues. Or maybe I’m just paranoid.

Environmental Economics? [Energy Collective]

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FT on Carbon Prices

Carbon is not immune from the vagaries of the free market capitalism.

If I was a ruthless investor I would been shorting the heck out of carbon for the last 6 months and making a tidy profit. It would be in poor taste though for an environmental economist to make lots of hard cash betting against the price of carbon.

However, the long term outlook is probably stronger than many now think. It could almost be time to put a couple of "long" bets on the price of carbon. The big unknown is regulation.

Carbon prices [FT - subscription required]

Idle factories, fewer fume-belching smokestacks. So it's no surprise prices of carbon emissions permits have plunged in line with prospects for the world economy. More surprising is their recent rally. In Europe, prices of permits that allow cement factories, power plants and other big polluters to spew greenhouse gases under the European Union's carbon cap-and- trade scheme have jumped 40 per cent from their mid-February nadir.

Over the same period, the FTSE Eurofirst 300 index of European stocks has shed about 7 per cent. Some perspective is required. In spite of their recent jump, at just under €12 per tonne, EU allowance prices remain near the all-time low of €8.20 reached last month - and well below the €30-per-tonne highs of last summer. Back then, forecasters were expecting only a mild economic slump. The outlook has darkened.

Does CO2 endanger public health?

In a news item that could change the face of the US climate change debate the EPA is claiming that CO2 endangers health.

EPA Raises Heat on Emissions Debate[Wall Street Journal]

WASHINGTON -- The Environmental Protection Agency has sent the White House a proposed finding that carbon dioxide is a danger to public health, a step that could trigger a clampdown on emissions of greenhouse gases across a wide swath of the economy.

If approved by the White House Office of Management and Budget, the endangerment finding could clear the way for the EPA to use the Clean Air Act to control emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases believed to contribute to climate change. In effect, the government would treat carbon dioxide as a pollutant. The EPA submitted the proposed rule to the White House on Friday, according to federal records published Monday.

Such a finding would raise pressure on Congress to enact a system that caps greenhouse gases -- which trap the sun's heat in the earth's atmosphere -- and creates a market for businesses to buy and sell the right to emit them, as President Barack Obama has proposed.

A White House representative said Monday that Mr. Obama's "strong preference is for Congress to pass energy security legislation that includes a cap on greenhouse-gas emissions. The Supreme Court ruled that the EPA must review whether greenhouse-gas emissions pose a threat to public health or welfare, and this is simply the next step in what will be a long process that engages stakeholders and the public."

The administration has proposed a cap-and-trade system that could raise $646 billion by 2019 through government auctions of emission allowances. Environmentalists want the administration to act on climate change before December, ahead of talks aimed at forging a successor to the Koyoto Protocol, the 1997 agreement that commits many industrialized countries to reducing their greenhouse-gas emissions.
Opinion

* Carbon Caps Are the Best Policy

EPA spokeswoman Cathy Milbourn declined to comment on the details of the endangerment proposal, saying it is "still [an] internal and deliberative" document. But in a move that indicated the potential scope of regulation, the agency earlier this month proposed a national system for reporting carbon-dioxide and other greenhouse-gas emissions by major emitters. The EPA has said about 13,000 facilities, accounting for about 85% to 90% of greenhouse gases emitted in the U.S., would be covered under the proposal.

Industry officials say it will still take months, possibly even years, for the administration to finalize rules for regulating greenhouse-gas emissions.

According to an internal document presented by the EPA to White House officials earlier this month, the EPA believes the health effects of elevated greenhouse-gas levels could cause "severe heat waves...with likely increases in mortality and morbidity, especially among the elderly, young and frail." The agency also said climate change caused by higher greenhouse-gas levels could result in more severe storms and more suffering related to "floods, storms, droughts and fires."

Business groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers warn that if the EPA moves forward on regulation of CO2 under the Clean Air Act -- instead of a measured legislative approach -- it could hobble the already weak economy.

Coal-fired power plants, oil refineries and domestic industries, such as energy-intensive paper, cement, fertilizer, steel, and glass manufacturers, worry that increased cost burdens imposed by climate-change laws will put them at a severe competitive disadvantage to their international peers that aren't bound by similar environmental rules.

Environmentalists have called for the endangerment finding, and say action by Congress or the Obama administration to curb greenhouse gases is necessary to halt the ill effects of climate change.

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Trade and the environment in action

How does the environment impact on trade? Another article that justifies this blogs existence.

The US steel industry "would say that wouldn't they".

It is interesting to note that US steel claim that "greening" their industry adds to significantly higher production costs. Is this via pollution abatement operating costs (PAOC) and pollution abatement capital expenditure (PAVE). The distinction as all good economists would know is crucial.

The Chinese counter-argument is correct though. Hence why a political solution to climate change is a long way off.

U.S. Big Steel pushes for carbon fees on China [Reuters]

NEW YORK (Reuters) - China's steel industry should face fees on its exports into the United States if Washington adopts greenhouse gas cuts and Beijing does not, U.S. steel industry officials and advocates said.

As President Barack Obama begins to form plants to regulate greenhouse gases, U.S. steelmakers are nervous they will lose market share if rapidly developing steelmaking countries, like China and India, do not commit to similar emissions goals.

U.S. steelmakers say they have already invested far more in pollution control on pollutants like particulates and components of acid rain, sharply boosting production costs.

"Chinese steelmakers enjoy an unfair advantage in global trade due to the lack of enforcement of exceptionally weak pollution standards," Scott Paul, the executive director of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, told reporters in a teleconference.

Paul said Chinese steelmaking emits two to three times as much carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, as U.S. industry does. Also, U.S. steel production has fallen during the global recession, while China's has held mostly steady.

Terry Straub, a senior vice president at U.S. Steel Corp, said the industry hopes the U.S. Congress does not rush greenhouse gas legislation without considering how the rest of the world will cut emissions.

"Let's take the time to do this right and not do it in a hasty fashion and end up with a disaster on our hands," Straub said.

He suggested leveling the playing field by putting carbon fees on imports of steel to the United States from any country that does not regulate greenhouse gas regulations.

U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu has said that if other countries do not impose a cost on carbon emissions once Washington does, the United States would be at a disadvantage. The tax idea on imports was just one proposal the Obama administration should evaluate, he said.

Xie Zhenhua, head of China's Climate Change and Coordinating Committee, during a visit to Washington last week rejected as protectionist the idea of tariffs on countries that do not place a price on carbon dioxide emissions.

Chinese climate officials have said countries that buy Chinese goods should be held responsible for the CO2 emitted by the factories that make them in any global plan to reduce greenhouse gases.

The debate comes as representatives from nearly 200 countries plan to meet in Copenhagen late this year in an attempt to agree a new global climate treaty. China recently surpassed the United States as the world's top emitter of planet-warming gases.

The United States never ratified the Kyoto Protocol, which runs out in 2012, in part because big developing countries like China were not required to cut emissions.

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Boy suspended for deliberate air pollution

It is Friday after all. All those that do not laugh when reading this story get extra marks.

Student, 15, Suspended For Passing Gas [Orlando ??]

LAKELAND, Fla. -- A Polk County teenage student has been suspended from school because he intentionally passed gas, according to school officials.

The Lakeland Ledger reported that 15-year-old Jonathon Locked Jr. was suspended from Bill Duncan Opportunity School under a school district rule against disruptive behavior.

School officials said the teen repeatedly passed gas to make other children laugh. They said the smell also made it difficult to breathe.

Locked's father said his son isn't perfect and they're appealing the suspension, saying the district went too far with its punishment.

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USA: Growth more important than the environment

Not surprisingly, following the onslaught of the recession people soon forget about the planet and care just about their own well being.

I suspect that it is not just Americans who feel this way. Most of Europe, if not the world would probably report similar figures.

The recent gallop results are no surprise but still make for interesting reading. Clean air has always been a luxury good. The link gives you the nice graphs.

Americans: Economy Takes Precedence Over Environment [gallop]

PRINCETON, NJ -- For the first time in Gallup's 25-year history of asking Americans about the trade-off between environmental protection and economic growth, a majority of Americans say economic growth should be given the priority, even if the environment suffers to some extent.

Gallup first asked Americans about this trade-off in 1984, at which time over 60% chose the environmental option. Support for the environment was particularly high in 1990-1991, and in the late 1990s and 2000, when the dot-com boom perhaps made economic growth more of a foregone conclusion.

The percentage of Americans choosing the environment slipped below 50% in 2003 and 2004, but was still higher than the percentage choosing the economy. Sentiments have moved up and down over the last several years, but this year, the percentage of Americans choosing the environment fell all the way to 42%, while the percentage choosing the economy jumped to 51%.

The reason for this shift in priorities almost certainly has to do with the current economic recession. The findings reflect many recent Gallup results showing how primary the economy is in Americans' minds, and help document the fact of life that in times of economic stress, the public can be persuaded to put off or ignore environmental concerns if need be in order to rejuvenate the economy.

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What does the saving of RAT island really teach us?

With a name like RAT ISLAND it was never going to take much to justify a blog post. ABC news do a good job of explaining the justification behind this "environmental experiment".

Scale up from Rat Island to the planet and tell me what it implies..... this is a 4 page good read.

Grand Quest to Rid Island of Rats [ABC news]

Centuries ago, Rat Island was believed to be a virtual paradise for seabirds -- a spongy redoubt for tufted puffins, whiskered auklets, and storm petrels. But then came the rats, which turned the fecund habitat into a near-dead zone. Now scientists are trying to return the uninhabited island to its original splendor – an experiment that environments believe could be a model for restoration but some critics say is a waste of money.

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Blogs are dead - long live the blog

Why do people blog? It is a good question. Recent advice from Wired magazine rings true. Most importanly, blogs ARE so 2004 as the design of this blog instantly gives away.

There is something faintly amusing about blogs being "old tech" when most academics are just about able to make the transition from chalk to overheads let alone the ability to use powerpoint slides.

I agree with almost everything written below. It is hard to compete with the "professional blogs" with many contriubters such as Gristmill or Treehugger. This blog does not attempt to compete but the average "reader" has only so much blog eyeball time and blogs like "globalisation and the environment" are likely to be squeezed out :-(

Many academic blogs have come and gone whilst other cling stubbornly to existence (like this one). As I have just taken on a senior management role I suspect my postal frequency will also fall. :-(

Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004 [WIRED]

Thinking about launching your own blog? Here's some friendly advice: Don't. And if you've already got one, pull the plug.

Writing a weblog today isn't the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It's almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

If you quit now, you're in good company. Notorious chatterbox Jason Calacanis made millions from his Weblogs network. But he flat-out retired his own blog in July. "Blogging is simply too big, too impersonal, and lacks the intimacy that drew me to it," he wrote in his final post.

Impersonal is correct: Scroll down Technorati's list of the top 100 blogs and you'll find personal sites have been shoved aside by professional ones. Most are essentially online magazines: The Huffington Post. Engadget. TreeHugger. A stand-alone commentator can't keep up with a team of pro writers cranking out up to 30 posts a day.

At least the editors of NATURE are still fans of the "academic blog" and this fits with the ethos behind Globalisation and the Environment.

It's good to blog [NATURE]

More researchers should engage with the blogosphere, including authors of papers in press.

Is blogging a part of science, journalism or public discourse? In fact it may be all of these — an ambiguity that can sometimes leave scientists feeling uncertain about the rules of the game.

Imagine, for example, a case in which Nature's blog The Great Beyond highlights new scientific results presented at a conference on climate. That blog entry then stimulates an online debate, with climate sceptics interpreting the results their way, and others firing off rebuttals. Imagine also that the work is described in a paper that had been accepted, but not published, by Nature. The authors of the paper want to enter the fray, but feel inhibited from doing so because of the embargo imposed by Nature and many other journals on communication by authors to the media ahead of publication. And why was Nature blogging their work anyway, ahead of its publication?

This scenario highlights a need for clarification about Nature publications' procedures, and about how embargoes apply to blogs. It also highlights more generally the potential importance of scientists engaging in the blogosphere.

H/T: Direction not destination.


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Monbiot's royal flush

As a poker player Monbiot has done a nice job. The fact that the Guardian newspaper supports him in his environmental rants is great.

Monbiot's royal flush: Cut out and keep climate change denier cards [Guardian]



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Lungs of the earth to collapse?

Dire predictions about the future of the Amazon makes for grim reading.

What will the land be used for? How big will the feedback loops be? Now we are past the tipping point (imo) things could start unravelling rather quickly.

Does this mean we should "speed up" deforestation in the Amazon? If the trees are going to die anyway why not chop them down quick and use the wood for something useful as part of a managed decline thus leaving in place trees in the world that would not die as the climate warms. I suspect this idea would not go down well with the green lobby.

Amazon could shrink by 85% due to climate change, scientists say [Guardian]

Global warming will wreck attempts to save the Amazon rainforest, according to a devastating new study which predicts that one-third of its trees will be killed by even modest temperature rises.

The research, by some of Britain's leading experts on climate change, shows that even severe cuts in deforestation and carbon emissions will fail to save the emblematic South American jungle, the destruction of which has become a powerful symbol of human impact on the planet. Up to 85% of the forest could be lost if spiralling greenhouse gas emissions are not brought under control, the experts said. But even under the most optimistic climate change scenarios, the destruction of large parts of the forest is "irreversible".

Vicky Pope, of the Met Office's Hadley Centre, which carried out the study, said: "The impacts of climate change on the Amazon are much worse than we thought. As temperatures rise quickly over the coming century the damage to the forest won't be obvious straight away, but we could be storing up trouble for the future."

Tim Lenton, a climate expert at the University of East Anglia, called the study, presented at a global warming conference in Copenhagen today , a "bombshell". He said: "When I was young I thought chopping down the trees would destroy the forest but now it seems that climate change will deliver the killer blow."

The study, which has been submitted to the journal Nature Geoscience, used computer models to investigate how the Amazon would respond to future temperature rises.

It found that a 2C rise above pre-industrial levels, widely considered the best case global warming scenario and the target for ambitious international plans to curb emissions, would still see 20-40% of the Amazon die off within 100 years. A 3C rise would see 75% of the forest destroyed by drought over the following century, while a 4C rise would kill 85%. "The forest as we know it would effectively be gone," Pope said.

Experts had previously predicted that global warming could cause significant "die-back" of the Amazon. The new research is the first to quantify the long-term effect.

Chris Jones, who led the research, told the conference: "A temperature rise of anything over 1C commits you to some future loss of Amazon forest. Even the commonly quoted 2C target already commits us to 20-40% loss. On any kind of pragmatic timescale, I think we should see loss of the Amazon forest as irreversible."

Peter Cox, professor of climate system dynamics at the University of Exeter, said the effects would be felt around the world. "Ecologically it would be a catastrophe and it would be taking a huge chance with our own climate. The tropics are drivers of the world's weather systems and killing the Amazon is likely to change them forever. We don't know exactly what would happen but we could expect more extreme weather." Massive Amazon loss would also amplify global warming "significantly" he said.

"Destroying the Amazon would also turn what is a significant carbon sink into a significant source."

Jones said the study showed that tree growth in high latitudes, such as Siberia, would increase, but would be unlikely to compensate for the carbon stocks lost from the Amazon. Even with drastic cuts in emissions in the next decade, scientists say that there will only be around a 50% chance of keeping global temperatures rises below 2C.

This best-case emissions scenario is based on emissions peaking in 2015 and quickly changing from an increase of 2-3% per year to a decrease of 3% per year. For every 10 years this action is delayed, the most likely temperature rise increases by 0.5C.

Environmental campaigners said they were alarmed by the predictions. "With a rise of over 2C you begin to see a large-scale change to savannah," said Beatrix Richards, head of forest policy and trade at WWF UK. "You also lose major ecosystem services, such as keeping carbon levels stable, providing indigenous people with goods and services, and balancing rainfall patterns globally from the US grain belt to as far away as Kazakhstan. A 4C [rise] is a nightmare scenario that would move us into uncharted territory."

"People have known about the links between climate and forests for some time, but the alarming thing now is the level of certainty because real world observations are feeding into the computer models," said Tony Juniper, an environmental campaigner and Green party candidate. "There really is no time for delay. Governments must cooperate to cut industrial emissions while at the same time halting deforestation, otherwise we'll have a mass extinction and a global warming catastrophe."

A separate study from the Met Office shows that, if temperatures do reach 2C, then there is a one-in-three chance they would stay that high for at least 100 years, whatever action was taken on carbon pollution.

The results were announced on the second day of a key climate science meeting in Copenhagen, which is intended to spur politicians into taking action to cut carbon pollution. It comes ahead of a UN summit in December, also in Copenhagen, where officials will try to agree a new global deal on climate to replace the Kyoto protocol. The results from the meeting will be published in the summer as a supplement to the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Positive feedback

Amazon dieback is one of the key positive feedbacks brought about by global warming. These are typically runaway processes in which global temperature rises lead to further releases of CO², which in turn brings about more global warming. In the Amazon this happens on a more localised scale but the result, increased forest death, also releases carbon into the atmosphere.

Experts predict that higher worldwide temperatures will reduce rainfall in the Amazon region, which will cause widespread local drought. With less water and tree growth, "homegrown" rainfall produced by the forest will reduce as well, as it depends on water passed into the atmosphere above the forests by the trees. The cycle continues, with even less rain causing more drought, and so on.

With no water, the root systems collapse and the trees fall over. The parched forest becomes tinderbox dry and more susceptible to fire, which can spread to destroy the still-healthy patches of forest.

Other positive feedback effects expected by scientists, are releases of carbon stored in frozen arctic ecosystems and an increase in the sun's energy absorbed by the planet as ice melts.

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Vampire found in Italy

I am finding it a little tough to work out the link between vampires and the environment as an excuse to post this article but have failed.

So unfortunately this is just for my own interest and the fact that it is kinda cool. Some could argue that the current financial crisis was fueled by those in the city sucking the lifeblood out of the average man in the street.


"Vampire" Unearthed In Venice Plague Grave [Planet Earth]

ROME - Italian researchers believe they have found the remains of a female "vampire" in Venice, buried with a brick jammed between her jaws to prevent her feeding on victims of a plague which swept the city in the 16th century.

Matteo Borrini, an anthropologist from the University of Florence, said the discovery on the small island of Lazzaretto Nuovo in the Venice lagoon supported the medieval belief that vampires were behind the spread of plagues like the Black Death.

"This is the first time that archaeology has succeeded in reconstructing the ritual of exorcism of a vampire," Borrini told Reuters by telephone. "This helps ... authenticate how the myth of vampires was born."

The skeleton was unearthed in a mass grave from the Venetian plague of 1576 -- in which the artist Titian died -- on Lazzaretto Nuovo, which lies around three km (2 miles) northeast of Venice and was used as a sanitorium for plague sufferers.

The succession of plagues which ravaged Europe between 1300 and 1700 fostered the belief in vampires, mainly because the decomposition of corpses was not well understood, Borrini said.

Gravediggers reopening mass graves would sometimes come across bodies bloated by gas, with hair still growing, and blood seeping from their mouths and believe them to be still alive.

The shrouds used to cover the faces of the dead were often decayed by bacteria in the mouth, revealing the corpse's teeth, and vampires became known as "shroud-eaters."

According to medieval medical and religious texts, the "undead" were believed to spread pestilence in order to suck the remaining life from corpses until they acquired the strength to return to the streets again.

"To kill the vampire you had to remove the shroud from its mouth, which was its food like the milk of a child, and put something uneatable in there," said Borrini. "It's possible that other corpses have been found with bricks in their mouths, but this is the first time the ritual has been recognized."

While legends about blood-drinking ghouls date back thousands of years, the modern figure of the vampire was encapsulated in the Irish author Bram Stoker's 1897 novel "Dracula," based on 18th century eastern European folktales.

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Stern words from Stern

When the Stern review first came out he was pilloried for "scare mongering" and over selling the environment.

Now Stern says he got it wrong on the downside. I tend to agree with Stern on this one. The devastation will have a global reach.

Global warming 'will be worse than expected' warns Stern [Guardian]

Politicians have failed to take on board the severe consequences of failing to cut world carbon emissions, Nicholas Stern, the economist who warned the government of the high cost of climate change, said today.

Stern told a meeting of climate change scientists in Copenhagen that the effects of global warming would be worse than he predicted in his seminal 2006 report on the economics of the problem. He said policy-makers needed to think more about the likely impact of severe temperature rises of 6C or more.

Speaking after a keynote speech at the conference, Stern said: "Do the politicians understand just how difficult it could be? Just how devastating 4, 5, 6 degrees centigrade would be? I think not yet. Looking back, the Stern review underestimated the risks and underestimated the damage from inaction."

His remarks echo concerns by other scientists at the meeting. Privately, many climate experts and officials say that the European target of limiting world temperature rise to 2C above pre-industrial levels is no longer realistic.

Steven Sherwood, a climate researcher at Yale university, will tell the conference later today that warming of 4C or more this century looks "increasingly likely".

Bob Watson, a former head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and chief scientist at the environment department, has already warned that governments need to prepare for a 4C rise.

The 2007 report of the IPCC said that average temperatures could rise by up to 6C this century if no action were taken to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Many scientists say this could be an underestimate, because world emissions have grown faster than expected.

According to the 2006 Stern report, a rise of 4C would put between seven million and 300 million more people at risk of coastal flooding each year, there would be a 30-50% reduction in water availability in southern Africa and the Mediterranean, agricultural yields would decline by 15%-35% in Africa, and 20%-50% of animal and plant species would face extinction. Yesterday, scientists announced at the conference that a 4C rise would lead to the loss of 85% of the Amazon rainforest.

A 5C rise would mean that major cities such as New York, London and Tokyo would be threatened by a rise in sea levels and increases in ocean acidity would severely disrupt marine ecosystems and fisheries. An increase of more than 5C — equivalent to the amount of warming that occurred between the last ice age and today — is, according to the Stern report, "likely to lead to major disruption and large-scale movement of population". It said the effects would be "catastrophic" and "far outside human experience".

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Financial Crisis and Climate Policy - conference

From the inbox.

It is good idea to bring together scientists from different areas to discuss the financial crisis and climate change. This is likely to be an interesting conference although I am not sure all bases are covered.

Financial Crisis and Climate Policy
A Science-Policy Debate

April 4, 2009
Ca' Foscari University - Venice, Italy

The European Climate Forum (ECF - http://ecf.pik-potsdam.de/) and the Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM - http://www.feem.it/) are pleased to announce the International Conference on “Financial Crisis and Climate Policy”, to be held on April 4th, 2009, at Ca' Foscari University (Mario Baratto Room), Venice, Italy. The conference has been organised in collaboration with the European Centre for Living Technology (ECLT - http://www.ecltech.org/).

"Europe must lead the world into a new, or maybe one should say, post-industrial revolution, the development of a low-carbon economy". This is the perspective offered by EU Commission President José Manuel Barroso when the EU declared its ambitious goals for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, increasing renewable energy use, and improving energy efficiency. In summer 2007, this step enabled the G-8 summit of Heiligendamm to declare the aim to halve global CO2 emissions by 2050, and at the end of the year, it kept the momentum in the global climate policy process at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali.

A year later, however, the biggest financial crisis since 1929 hit the world. That crisis made painfully clear how unsustainable the financial boom of the past decades had been. But the perspective of sustainable development has been largely absent in the haphazard way different European nations have tried to counter a global financial crisis that will shape the 21st century.

The possibility of this crisis had not been anticipated by the sophisticated computer models run by major central banks and leading institutions of economic research. And the scientists working on the risks of climate change and the options for climate policy had not taken such a possibility in consideration either.

It looks like both scientists and policy-makers have some homework to do. The science-policy debate organized by the European Climate Forum and the Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei aims to identify the tasks that need to be tackled and the means needed to do so.

Four distinguished panelists will look at the problem from four different perspectives: climate research, economic research, business, and the study of complex systems. With that background, researchers and stakeholders from a variety of fields are invited to engage in an open discussion. Main findings of the debate will be fed into the EU conference “Sustainable Development: A Challenge for European Research” that will take place on May 26-28 in Brussels.


Agenda

Saturday, April 4

9:00 Welcome
Prof. Klaus Hasselmann, Max Planck Institute of Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany

9:15 Science and Policy: Dialogue of the Deaf?
Prof. Antonio Navarra, Director of Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC), Bologna, Italy

9:45 What lessons from the financial crisis for climate policy?
Prof. Carlo Carraro, Director of the FEEM Sustainable Development Programme, University of Venice, CMCC, Venice, Italy

10:15 What Lessons from Climate Policy for the Financial Crisis?
Prof. Peter Hoeppe, Head of Munich Re's Geo Risks Research/ Corporate Climate Centre, Munich, Germany

10:45 Navigating Complexity: Financial Crisis and Climate Policy
Dr. John Finnigan, Director of the CSIRO Centre for Complex Systems Science, Canberra, Australia

11:15 Coffee break

11:30 Open Debate: Challenges for Research
Moderated by Prof. Carlo Jaeger, Chairman ECF

13:30 Lunch

This public debate follows a technical workshop on Agent-Based Modeling for Sustainable Development documented in the attached file. If you are interested in the workshop, please check the corresponding box on the registration form.

Contacts:
Aida Abdulah
European Climate Forum
E-mail: aida@european-climate-forum.net

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Roll up, roll up, CO2 credits going cheap, 3-5 Euros a tonne

Related to the previous plea by Stiglitz and Stern for a stable and strong carbon price comes news on what the market really thinks the price of carbon should be and who is buying.

Governments Keep Hunting For Cheap CO2 Credits [PlanetArk]

LONDON - The market for government-level emissions rights under the Kyoto Protocol is alive and well, mostly unfazed by the global economic downturn. Through the most opaque of the emissions trading schemes under the Kyoto climate change pact, nations comfortably below greenhouse gas targets can sell excess emissions rights to other countries in the form of credits called Assigned Amount Units (AAUs).

Critics call them "hot air", arguing that most were generated through restructuring in eastern Europe in the 1990s, when polluting industries in ex-communist countries were shutting anyway, rather than by new investment in clean energy.

Countries such as Austria and Japan are still hunting for these cheap AAU credits, despite the criticisms and the fact that United Nations clean energy project-based offsets, seen as having more environmental integrity, have also fallen in price.

"We started before the recession and we continue to negotiate with potential AAU sellers," said Sascha Eichberger of Kommunalkredit, which manages Austria's CO2 credit purchasing.

He said Austria plans to buy 5-10 million AAUs by 2012 but added that the dropping AAU price has prompted some countries to rethink sales. "The current price development is not what sellers expect to get for AAUs," he said.

The Czech Republic said earlier this month that it had again postponed an auction for 10 million AAUs as it needed to re-draw its sale strategy due to the drop in prices.

One broker told Reuters in January he had heard of AAU negotiations for as low as 3-5 euros a tonne (US$3.81-$6.36), or around half the value of the largest deals signed in 2008.

December AAU deals between seller Poland and buyers Ireland and the World Bank were reportedly done at around 10 euros a tonne, although no parties will confirm this.

Governments remain extremely guarded over AAU prices, despite the fact that the rights are bought with taxpayer money.

Eichberger would not comment on prices but said Austria is in talks with the Czech Republic, Poland, Latvia and Hungary.

A Romanian government official told Reuters he expects Romania to sell 10 million AAUs in the first half of 2009, but also would not comment on current talks or their asking price.

Buyers insist that AAU deals are "greened", meaning their proceeds are earmarked for investment in clean energy or energy efficiency.

Eichberger said Austria had no plans to speak with countries lacking clear greening plans. "Russian and Ukrainian markets at the moment are not interesting for us," he said.

Hungary, which has already sold AAUs to Spain and Belgium, said it may now use revenues to ease its national budget deficit, analysts Point Carbon reported on Tuesday.

JAPANESE BUYERS SCOUR MARKET

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PROJECT-BASED OFFSETS FAVOURED

Critics argue that increased scrutiny surrounding the environmental integrity of the projects, built in countries like China and India, makes project-based offsets, called Certified Emissions Reductions (CERs), a better alternative than AAUs.

The option for governments to use either CERs or AAUs to meet Kyoto targets has caused a correlation in their prices.

Cheap CER prices, concerns over the integrity of AAUs and the lack of accountability and transparency over where proceeds are spent may see governments opt to buy CERs over AAUs.

But the economic downturn may see an erosion in rich nations' emissions and their subsequent emission offset demand.

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Stiglitz and Stern on "Obama’s chance to lead the green recovery"

The FT reports on Obama’s chance to lead the green recovery. Stiglitz and Stern and to be commended for continuing to bang the climate drum in the face of the current financial crisis that is rapidly turning into a fully blown depression.

Green jobs are part of the solution but the effect should not be exaggerated.

The problem as the authors understand all too clearly is that the negative effects from climate change will occur is the relatively distant future. The financial crisis is happening now.

The article has some good environmental economics 101 material that is worth reading. The carbon price is what will let them down I am afraid. A strong price for carbon will be hard to achieve in the current recession.

Obama’s chance to lead the green recovery [FT]

We face two crises: a deep global financial crisis, caused by inadequate management of risk in the financial sector; and an even deeper climate crisis, the effects of which may seem more distant but will be determined by the actions we take now.

The scale of risk from climate change is altogether of a different and greater magnitude, as are the consequences of mismanaging or ignoring it. The US, in particular, has a window of opportunity to act on the financial crisis and, at the same time, lay the foundations for a new wave of growth based on the technologies for a low-carbon economy.

President Barack Obama, in his speech to Congress and budget last week, explained that we need to address both of these challenges, and outlined a broad approach. US leadership could generate a powerful response from across the world, making possible an agreement at the United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen in December on a scale necessary to manage the risks involved.

We will eventually emerge from the financial crisis, although mistakes in management can affect its depth and duration. However, mistakes in managing the risks of the climate crisis may be irreversible. As noted in Making Globalization Work*, if we had a thousand planets we might continue with the reckless experiment on which we are embarked, and if the likely disaster occurred we could move on to another. Unfortunately we do not have that luxury: we have only one planet.

The financial crisis originated from the housing market bubble and was preceded by the dotcom boom. We cannot replace these with yet another bubble. The investments necessary to convert our society to a low-carbon economy – investments that can change the way we live and work – would drive growth over the next two or three decades. They would ensure that growth, with accompanying improvements in standards of living, was sustainable. The path that we have been on is not.

The economic crisis will leave the US and other economies greatly weakened and it will be imperative to increase efficiency. One area in which there is ample room for improvement is in the energy efficiency of businesses, consumers and the government.

According to a recent paper by the Peterson Institute, spending $10bn (€7.9bn, £7.1bn) to insulate US homes and federal buildings could create and sustain up to 100,000 jobs between 2009 and 2011, while saving the economy from $1.4bn to $3.1bn a year between 2012 and 2020.

This type of investment and those in green technology and infrastructure would not only provide a short-term stimulus but also improve the US competitive position. As the world moves to a low-carbon economy, there will be a competitive advantage for those who embrace these technologies.

Private investments are driven by market signals. These signals are distorted because we have been pricing one of the world’s scarcest resources – a “good” atmosphere; or the societal costs of emissions, which lead to a “bad” atmosphere – at zero. Not surprisingly, this has led to inefficient outcomes, with emissions levels too high and too little effort devoted to energy conservation and research.

Providing a strong, stable carbon price is the single policy action that is likely to have the biggest effect in improving economic efficiency and tackling the climate crisis. Clarity on policy and prices is all the more important now, with companies facing such uncertainty because of the financial crisis: the two risks compound each other, damping investment. We may not be able fully to resolve the risks of the financial crisis quickly; but we can take actions now that will markedly reduce uncertainties about future carbon policies and prices.

As creative entrepreneurs turn their minds to the challenges posed by a low-carbon economy, the excitement and drive of innovation is evident. This can be the spur to real growth that has so long been missing. The problems of global warming cannot be attacked without the participation of all countries. The world has been waiting for the US: there is now reason to believe that it is ready to lead.

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Trees pay a high cost for soft toilet roll obsession

Forests are suffering at the hands of consumers who demand soft toilet rolls. Recycled toilet paper just isn't the same apparently.

Soft toilet roll could be seen as one of life's little luxuries. I expect that we need to get used to be bit of discomfort in the future. Luxury roll sales are down 7% in recent months as people learn to "rough it".

The New York Time (no less) reports:

Mr. Whipple Left It Out: Soft Is Rough on Forests [New York Times]

The national obsession with soft paper has driven the growth of brands like Cottonelle Ultra, Quilted Northern Ultra and Charmin Ultra — which in 2008 alone increased its sales by 40 percent in some markets, according to Information Resources, Inc., a marketing research firm.

But fluffiness comes at a price: millions of trees harvested in North America and in Latin American countries, including some percentage of trees from rare old-growth forests in Canada. Although toilet tissue can be made at similar cost from recycled material, it is the fiber taken from standing trees that help give it that plush feel, and most large manufacturers rely on them.

Customers “demand soft and comfortable,” said James Malone, a spokesman for Georgia Pacific, the maker of Quilted Northern. “Recycled fiber cannot do it.”

Grudge Match: "Grist vrs Env-Econ"

Ding ding, round one.

Its all kicking off over at the Gristmill and Environmental Economics Blog.

The problem as far as I can tell is over the definition of the word "snark" and the extent to which the said snark has substance or not.

As an economist I still like to see economists getting a good kicking and Dave Roberts does a decent job and raises some good points. Of course such abuse is like water of a ducks back to economists. I recommend all environmental economics students to read the Grist article by Dave Roberts and to formulate a defence (if there is one).


I particularly liked the first comment after the Grist article.

"economists are arrogant whores".

One certainly does not become an economist to be liked. TerraPass on the Env-Econ post suggests:

Greens also tend to oddly personalize the topic, dividing economists into “the good ones” and, I suppose, the hell-bound.

It would be interesting to know whether John and Tim and indeed myself are on a "highway to hell" or whether we sneak into the good category. I suspect Env-Econ have now been seen to have aligned themselves with the dark side.

High five anyone?

[Note: this post is entirely substance free]


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"Climate Policy and the Optimal Extraction of High- and Low-Carbon Fossil Fuels"

For my environmental economics students who were intimidated by the optimal extract path material this paper might either put these fears in perspective or make things a whole lot worse.

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"Climate Policy and the Optimal Extraction of High- and Low-Carbon Fossil Fuels"

Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique, Vol. 41, No. 4, pp. 1421-1444, November/novembre 2008

SJAK SMULDERS, Tilburg University - Center and Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, University of Calgary - Economics
Email: J.A.Smulders@uvt.nl
EDWIN VAN DER WERF, University of Oldenburg - Department of Economics and Statistics
Email: edwin.vanderwerf@uni-oldenburg.de

We study how restricting CO emissions affects resource prices and depletion over time. We use a Hotelling-style model with two non-renewable fossil fuels that differ in their carbon content (e.g., coal and natural gas) and in addition are imperfect substitutes in final good production. We show that an economy facing a CO flow-constraint may substitute towards the relatively dirty input. As the economy tries to maximize output per unit of emissions it is not only carbon content that matters: productivity matters as well. With an announced constraint the economy first substitutes towards the less productive input such that more of the productive input is available when constrained. Preliminary empirical results suggest that it is cost-effective to substitute away from dirty coal to cleaner oil or gas, but to substitute from natural gas towards the dirtier input oil.

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Debunking climate change deniers

Here are a series of small youtube videos for people who are less keen on reading.

The climate change denier claims rebuffed in style. H/T: Greenfyre

Happy viewing.


Medieval Warming?” (& the Hockey Stick).



Solar Schmolar: Debunking the “It’s the Sun” fable.



“Ice Area vs Volume“: Debunking the “Ice is back to 1979 levels” idiocy.



“It’s cold. So there’s no Climate Change“: Debunking the “It was cold in ….” Fable.

Laughing all the way to global disaster

CO2 is not the only greenhouse gas we need to be concerned about. The feedback mechanisms are kicking in now and it is no laughing matter.

Burp of Arctic laughing gas is no joke [New Scientist]

It seems the Arctic is belching out nitrous oxide – commonly known as laughing gas. Unfortunately, the punchline is that it is a powerful greenhouse gas.

Previously, emissions of N2O were thought to enter the atmosphere mainly from tropical forests and intensively managed farmland, with only a negligible amount from northerly environments.

Maija Repo and colleagues from the University of Kuopio, Finland, measured emissions from peat circles in northern Russia. These sit on peatland plateaux, which are widespread throughout the Arctic, covering 20% of the total land surface. The bare surfaces of peat circles develop because cycles of freezing and thawing churn up the peat, preventing plant growth.

During the snow-free season, they found the peat circles emitted 1.2 grams/m2 of N2O, which is just as much as tropical forests release in a year. The team reckons that a lack of plants decreases competition for the mineral nitrogen. This allows nitrate to accumulate in the soil which is then metabolised by bacteria to produce N2O.

Although this means N2O remains a small contributor to the greenhouse effect, compared with methane and carbon dioxide, the gas persists unaltered in the atmosphere for over 110 years, compared with around 10 years for methane – which is also periodically released by the tundra.

Unfortunately, global warming may promote churning, and expand bare areas. Since the flow of the gas from the peat circles is so high, even a small increase in bare surfaces would cause significant changes in N2O emissions, says Repo.

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"critical threshold" close according to Field

Already the IPCC report is out of date. Scientists are now warning that global warming is happening even more quickly than the IPCC report predicted. If true the current negotiations on the "new" Kyoto is the equivalent of rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic.

The arguments seem fine to me. If people thinks things are bad now with the global economic crisis just wait until half the UK is underwater.

This article is still based on a press release from the AAAS meeting so needs to be read with care. I expect Professor Field was not expecting such a big "splash" to be made of his speech.

Global warming nearing ‘critical threshold’ [Financial Times]

The world is warming far more quickly than scientists forecast just two years ago when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its last reports, according to a series of assessments presented over the weekend.

Chris Field of Stanford University, a senior member of the IPCC, told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that the unexpectedly rapid increase in the burning of fossil fuels, especially coal, since 2000 would have dire consequences because of “feedback loops” in the global ­climate.

“We are looking now at a future climate that’s beyond anything we’ve considered seriously in climate model simulations,” Prof Field said.

The IPCC’s fourth assessment in 2007 concluded that the average global temperature would increase by between 1.1°C and 6.4°C by 2100, depending how much carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases were released into the atmosphere over the coming decades. Prof Field said that seriously underestimated the potential severity of global warming, based on the new evidence.

Prof Field warned that there were early signs of melting in the Arctic tundra and increased fires in tropical forests – over and above deliberate deforestation – that could add billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

“There is a real risk that human-caused climate change will accelerate the release of carbon dioxide from forest and tundra ecosystems, which have been storing a lot of carbon for thousands of years,” Prof Field said.

“We don’t want to cross a critical threshold where this massive release of carbon starts to run on autopilot.”

Al Gore, the former US vice-president turned climate change campaigner, responded with a passionate plea to an audience of 1,600 scientists, urging them to become more politically active in the fight against global warming.

“Scientists can no longer in good conscience accept this division between the work you do and the civilisation in which you live. This is a historic struggle.”

Mr Gore focused particularly on the accelerating loss of Arctic ice and the global increase in coal burning.

However there was optimism at the AAAS meeting – based on the professed determination of the new US administration to promote effective action, both in its domestic energy policies and in taking a lead in international climate change negotiations.

James McCarthy, a climate change expert at Harvard University and this year’s AAAS president, said: “The scientific talent President [Barack] Obama has recruited is of extraordinary calibre. He could not have found anyone better to look after energy and the environment.”

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