I’m from New Hampshire, and most of the time I’m proud of it. And then there are the other times, such as when I find out that every Republican candidate for Judd Gregg’s senate seat says that human-induced global warming has not been proven. Really?
What offends me here is not that some people might want to debate the human component of climate change – there has been quite a bit of that in the comments section of this blog. I think that intelligent, reasoned debate on this subject that is grounded in evidence is completely fair game for discussion, etc. Further, this sort of debate serves to push research forward, and refine what we know and do not know about climate change and its human impacts.
What bothers me here is that none of these candidates is grounding this stance in evidence in any way – this is pure politics, pandering to a lowest-common-denominator fear of change crowd. And New Hampshire has a hell of a lot to lose from this – climate change is increasing climate variability (hence the 100 year floods referenced in the link above) which presents challenges not only to people’s property and safety, but also to the economy of the state. New Hampshire is heavily driven by tourist dollars, and tourism is heavily driven by skiing. Skiing relies on sub-freezing weather and adequate precipitation (even I know that snowmakers do not make desirable snow), both of which are becoming less predictable. By failing to have a reasoned discussion about this issue, based on facts about what we do and do not know – and the likely outcomes for New Hampshire, all of these candidates have staked out an irresponsible position that calls into question their fitness to represent the state at the national level.
Category: Climate Change
Carbon-neutral consumption? Nah . . .
Well, the markets seem to have faith in biofuels – two companies working on this idea have filed for IPOs in the past week. Both are interesting, though for different reasons. Gevo is interesting not for its choice of source material (still using corn, wheat and sugarcane), but for the fact that it is turning these sources into isobutanol, which as Martin LaMonica notes
“can be used as a solvent, blended to make jet fuel or other liquid fuels, or used as a raw material for plastics or rubber.”
Diversifying the products that might come from cellulosic sources is very interesting, and hints at directions we might take toward a post-petroleum world. The big drawback: they are still stuck using food crops as their source material for fuel. Elsewhere on this blog I have noted that this sort of sourcing of our fuel has significant ramifications for the global food supply, taking out perhaps too much slack in a time of environmental uncertainty (let alone new economic tools in the commodities markets).
All this makes the other IPO filing, PetroAlgae, much more interesting. They are working with algae as a source material for their fuel. Algae doesn’t take up arable land, isn’t one of our current food crops, and can be grown in a wide range of environments. If they can make this work, we might have something interesting there.
Let’s all remember, though, that biofuels don’t really fix the greenhouse problems our current development pathways are generating. At best, biofuels are carbon neutral – carbon goes into the plant, is released when plant is converted to energy, rinse, repeat). However, to get the plant to a state that works as a fuel requires energy – that energy has to come from somewhere, and therefore has a carbon footprint. So biofuels may not be as bad as coal, but completely clean they are not. The days of the guilt-free consumption of carbon-neutral goods derived from algae are not yet here . . .
Advanced biofuels maker Gevo files to go public via CNET
Algae fuel maker PetroAlgae files to go public via CNET
Wired #Fail on clean coal
I’m a fan of Wired magazine – its a pretty amusing read, and every once in a while I see something that really makes me think or go do a bit more reading. However, I was a little chapped when reading the feature article in their most recent issue – a review of technologies we thought we would have by now, but don’t. On that list was clean coal (link here, scroll down to find the clean coal piece). While I appreciated the fact that Wired was willing to run a story that called clean coal an oxymoron, they got the barriers to its implementation wrong:
The good news is that we already have the technology to use [coal] without melting the polar ice caps. It’s called carbon capture and storage — sucking up the CO2 that results from burning fossil fuels, compressing it into liquid form, and pumping it into the ground.
Here’s my problem – we haven’t actually worked out how to keep it in the ground, which is an immense technical challenge. Liquefying CO2 isn’t all that hard – pressure or very low temperatures will get you CO2 in liquid form. But once we inject it deep underground, it gets a lot warmer and the pressure levels are likely to drop . . . meaning it returns to a gaseous state. It’s hard to trap gases underground (geology is tricky – lots of faults and cracks to worry about, not to mention earthquakes!) and even when we do, the CO2 might interact with water, creating carbonic acid which can dissolve (very slowly and inexorably) the stone that makes up the storage reservoir, potentially creating holes through which the CO2 might return to the atmosphere. We don’t have great fixes for these issues right now, though there are some technologies that might be promising down the road. So, to summarize, right now we can extract (scrub) a lot of the CO2 from the process of burning coal, liquefy that CO2 and pump it underground. But if we can’t keep it there, we have just created a very long, expensive and indirect route for those emissions to reach the atmosphere.
This is not to say that carbon capture will never happen. A lot of money is being poured into this idea (see a recent posting at the NYTimes). And this is certainly not to say that I don’t want to see it happen – finding a way to produce cheap electricity with minimal environmental impact is a dream that will work in everyone’s favor, both now and into the future. But the clean coal crowd needs to be honest, as do the wind and solar people – there are still barriers to the successful implementation of all of these technologies.
The Death of the Energy Bill: Who cares? Basically, everyone.
There is much flutter around Senate Democrats’ recent decision to give up on the Energy Bill that might have brought about a cap-and-trade system here in the US.
From the NYTimes:
Senate Democrats on Tuesday abandoned all hopes of passing even a slimmed-down energy bill before they adjourn for the summer recess, saying that they did not have sufficient votes even for legislation tailored narrowly to respond to the Gulf oil spill.
Although the majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, sought to blame Republicans for sinking the energy measure, the reality is that Democrats are also divided over how to proceed on the issue and had long ago given up hope of a comprehensive bill to address climate change.
There will be a lot of analysis of the biophysical impact of our continuing inability to act on the twinned issues of climate change and energy in the coming days, I am sure. But, early in the morning, I want to quickly point out the cascading disaster this will cause in the environment and development policy world. What most people don’t understand about the Copenhagen meetings, which ended in such confusion without a clear agreement, is that most of the key actors decided that it would be best to wait and see what the US managed to pass for its own internal purposes, and then try to work to that to ensure that the US joined the next major global climate agreement (remember, we never did sign Kyoto). Copenhagen wasn’t really a failure the way many people thought – indeed, had they plowed ahead with an agreement in absence of American climate and energy legislation, they would have set the stage for Kyoto II – where the US, once again, refused to sign on to standards that it had not already agreed to.
I have found exactly one piece of good coverage of this issue, via Lisa Friedman of ClimateWire: “Overseas Frustration Grows Over U.S. Domestic Impasse on Climate Policy”. The article nicely captures what is truly at stake here:
“Why is it that for the last 20 years the United States is unable to have a bill on climate change? What’s happening? What’s going on? It’s very complicated to understand,” said Brice Lalonde, France’s top negotiator.
“For a lot of us, we cannot wait for the United States. We have to go on. It’s like Kyoto,; we just go on” Lalonde said, referring to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol treaty that the U.S. joined but never ratified, leaving European countries to largely carry the weight of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Added Pa Ousman Jarju, lead negotiator for the small West African nation of Gambia, “We cannot rely on the U.S., because everything the U.S. is supposed to do depends on domestic policy. So we’re not going to get anything from the U.S. in terms of tangible commitment.”
He charged that the international community is “no longer hopeful” that America, the world’s biggest historic emitter of global warming pollution, will ever pass a bill to cut emissions. That, he said, leaves the global community with two options: “Either the rest of the world continues to do what they were doing before, or the whole multilateral system will collapse.”
What we were doing before was not good enough. I am not all that sure that the net outcome of business as usual is all that different from a complete collapse of the environmental component of the multilateral system as we understand it. The US simply has to be on board, or this is all for naught. UN Climate Chief Christiana Figueres put it this way:
“Whether the United States meets the pledge that it put on the Copenhagen Accord via legislation or whether it meets it via regulation is an internal domestic affair of the United States and one that they need to solve,” she said. “What is clear is that at an international level the United States needs to participate in a a meaningful way, and in a way that is commensurate with its responsibility.”
Credit to her for saying this clearly, and for suggesting that content (getting some sort of formal controls on emissions in place, whether through regulation or legislation) is a lot more important than form (insisting that everyone pass legislation to somehow bolster the legitimacy of these efforts). Now, let’s see if the Obama Administration is willing to really use the newly-empowered EPA as a blunt object in the fight to control greenhouse gas emissions – at this point, I see no other way forward for the US. Which means no other meaningful way forward for the rest of the world.
How to have a conversation?
Over the years, a number of people have hassled me for trying to find the good in reasonable, if doubtful, voices in the climate change debate. This was my motivation in writing the op-ed about Douthat’s column (link here, link to blog post here). Part of my motivation is that I am a person who inherently tries to build connections between disparate points of view to see what interesting and new things emerge from the conversation. The other part is the vitriol which I and those I work with who choose to have a public profile get to endure. I don’t mind the vitriol, actually, but it is really hard to build a conversation with someone who is screaming at you – so I try to build connections to people that preclude shouting and lead to something productive. This is a serious challenge.
To illustrate, let me excerpt two e-mails I received this morning, not long after the publication of my op-ed. In doing so, I have no intention of personally humiliating anyone or personally attacking anyone (though the messages were, as you will see, a bit personal). So, I have removed the addresses and names – though the subject lines are intact. The point here is to demonstrate what sorts of things are said to people like me on a pretty routine basis. I’m not sure if these count as Over the Cliff moments or not, but here they are:
Subject: Pseudo Intellectualism
Scanned your comments in the State. It is amazing to me how academia has changed over the years, but then, again, there was Ehrlic in the 70s. He has never been right about anything but is still revered by the leftist academia. He must be brilliant. This is not about conservatives and liberals (NYT conservative comments?????). It is not about green gasses, despite your beliefs. Imagine, the whole concern is about changes of a degree over a period of a hundred years when the error of any group of instruments is not accurate to a degree and the instruments have never been standardized. I highly recommend going to Dr. Roy Spencer’s web site. It is about water vapor and the temperature of the oceans. How can I recommend to you, the great specialist of humanistic global warming, while I am only a peon on the subject? I have watched this for a number of years. There is a much higher authority than man. While man can cause pollution and really screw up localities, the great academics (you) have not figured out this global warming thing. You have spent countless years on suppositions, aberrant computer models, and criticizing the political movement that you feel superior to. Yep, you are simply a pseudointellectual democrat. Remember, Al Gore is the intellectual leader of the left. Bow down often. Get a massage. The very intellectual morons on your side are against the very technology to reduce the use of hydrocarbons–nuclear energy and the use of Yucca mountain to store the waste. Even the French and Russians and Chinese have figured this out. Science is science.
[Name Redacted]
[Address Redacted]
Darlington, SC
To this individual’s credit, he actually signed his e-mail with a name, address and phone number. So he is certainly no coward. But I am completely unsure how to address this, as it is all over the map. More or less, this message ties a political stance (liberalism, however it is conceived here) with climate change and an implicit questioning of my religious beliefs. But this says a lot – the assumption here is that I am anti-nuclear power (not really – it may be our best medium-term option), worship Al Gore (I’ve complained about a number of things he has said), I have no religious faith, and that I live in a world of suppositions instead of a world of evidence. The fact is that I have not discussed any of this in the op-ed, or anywhere else – the author is resting on a lot of suppositions, some of which are a bit offensive, to say the least.
But there is something else important here – the tone of the writer when addressing me as “the great specialist of humanistic global warming, while I am only a peon on the subject” and “great academics (you)” belies a deep-seated insecurity that, to some extent, I think those of us working on this issue must acknowledge and take some responsibility for creating. Scientists and policy-makers must take seriously the complaint that we can sound elitist and arrogant in our pronunciations – especially because this is relatively easy to address. We need to do more community engagement, make ourselves more available, in person, to talk to people about what we do and what we know. It’s easy to shout at a caricature of someone, as this writer did at me, than it is to shout at a real person who wants to have a real conversation with you.
Then there was this. Even as this person was agreeing with some of my points, he gets in a rather personal shot about me being motivated by a “paycheck-pension drive”.
Subject: “DOUTHAT” — 2 ATTACHMENTS
I tried this on you several years ago. I can see that you have not progressed.
I probably agree more with you than Douthat, but in the end I do not fully agree with either of you. You both stay on the surface, within the range of the tips of your noses, and do not address the underlying cause and effect, including for this issue. Remember, you cannot fix a leaky faucet unless you first turn off the water.
The thought has occurred to me that a fundamental reason for this is that y’all are virtually completely captives of what I call the “paycheck-pension drive.”
This will take much more than nice words. It will take action.
Don’t pout — forward this up your flagpole and to some problem-solvers.
A key point here – I was not pouting. I was trying to make my colleagues and myself accountable for our failures of communication, and to encourage my colleagues to redouble their efforts as they are, in fact, starting to work.
This writer sent me two attachments promoting his ideas on population reduction, which he sees as the fundamental problem here (he is right to identify population size and growth as a major challenge). What bothers me here is the idea that his solution is the “right” one, and mine (or anyone else’s) is therefore “wrong”. It seems to me that these are linked challenges that could be addressed and discussed in concert – we go nowhere when we get absolutist in our thinking. I fear that those of us in the global change community come off as absolutist ourselves, contributing to this sort of problem.
In any case, the vitriol to which my intellectual community is exposed all the time is very real, and not some made-up fantasy created to demonize the right/anti-global warming crowd/whatever. It is something we deal with that most of our academic colleagues do not, and something we have to learn to address productively if we are to make positive change in the world.
Douthat Misses His Own Point
Sometimes I show up in the old media, too:
An op-ed via The State (Columbia, SC)
Douthat misses his own point on climate change
Ross Douthat’s Tuesday column “The right and the climate,” reveals just how far the global environmental change community has come in its efforts to educate the public on the real challenges posed by climate change — and how far we still have to go. After arguing that climate change is real and a problem (“Conservatives who dismiss climate change as a hoax are making a spectacle of their ignorance.”), the conservative New York Times columnist says we are probably better off doing nothing for now, and instead fostering economic growth that generates enough wealth to address the problem in the future.
Douthat has been pilloried for trotting out conservative talking points about climate change, but perhaps the problem lies with those of us whose job it is to connect the scientific evidence for climate change with its human impacts. Doing so quickly lays his argument to rest, and points to some of the real questions we must answer.
First, to argue that greater wealth will allow us to address climate change and its associated impacts fails to account for the fact that economic growth is one of the principal drivers of climate change. Even in the United States, where we are becoming more efficient in our use of fossil fuels and therefore in the amount of greenhouse gasses we emit as we grow, our absolute production continues to rise. Douthat’s so-called solution forces us into an ever-escalating race to grow wealth and the economy faster than the rate of climate change.
Several economic assessments of climate change suggest that we will lose this race. Logically, then, the real question about his proposal is how to generate economic growth and wealth without increasing greenhouse gas emissions.
Second, the idea that one day we will have enough wealth to address the impacts of climate change misunderstands a great deal of the environmental science that Douthat himself argues is too convincing to ignore. Simply put, people will not be impacted directly through warming temperatures — a few degrees Celsius is well within our tolerance as human beings. However, these temperature changes do have vast, complex effects on the ecosystems we rely on for food, our atmosphere, and amenities such as hiking, fishing and hunting. An extinct species is gone forever, and the loss of that species in an ecosystem will be felt forever in complex, unpredictable ways. No amount of money can fix that. It is willfully optimistic to assume that future wealth will allow us to address these permanent changes when we don’t even know what they will be. So here the real question is how we as a society should proceed into this era of uncertainty. What risks are we willing to take with our future?
Douthat’s column shows that we are halfway to a productive conversation about climate change, its impacts and how to address them. Now we must turn to serious, evidence-based discussions to identify productive, meaningful paths forward.
Edward R. Carr
Associate professor, USC Department of Geography
Columbia
This got a bit edited down from the original (to be expected), so I am a bit concerned that the central point here got muddy – Douthat fully acknowledges that climate change is a problem, and acknowledges the scientific basis on which we have established this. But he is still ignoring half of the equation – that the science, and a lot of research built on it, makes clear the fact that the costs of climate change will greatly outweigh any economic benefit from ignoring it now.
We are getting closer on our conversation, but we are not quite there – and it falls to those of us who work on this issue to do more to communicate these issues clearly.
So I guess it's for real now:
What does it say that it took the appearance of my forthcoming book on Amazon’s website to make the whole thing seem real?
Environmental Migration and the Immigration Debate
UPDATED 7-28
Scientific American has posted a news and commentary piece on a study, just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that links climate change to increased migration from Mexco to the US. The author, David Biello, sent me an embargoed copy of the study a few days ago and asked for my comments – which he was kind enough to draw from at length in his article.
In a general way, I am very supportive of work that examines the connection between climate change/environmental change and migration – mostly because so little work has been done on the topic, and the assumptions about the connections between migration and environment that drive policy are so often wildly incorrect. However, I am a bit leery of this study, as I feel like it is making a classic mistake in environment-migration studies: it is trying to identify the portion of the migration decision that is about environmental change. As I have argued elsewhere, there is little point in trying to isolate environmental factors from all of the factors that contribute to migration. Biello quoted me quite accurately:
“Migration decisions, like all livelihood decisions, are about much more than material quality of life,” argues geographer Edward Carr of the University of South Carolina, who studies human migration in countries such as Ghana and was not involved in the Mexico emigration research. “What I am seeing in sub-Saharan Africa are very complex patterns in which environmental change is but one of several causal factors.”
What I am worried about here is a sort of intellectual ambulance-chasing, where the research is driven by a sexy topic (the intersection of climate change and Latino migration, which is sure to bring out the crazies on all sides) regardless of whether or not the fundamental research question is all that sound. The fact that several researchers quoted in the piece (myself included) were able to quickly poke significant holes in the study suggests that this publication falls into this problematic category. First, the migration pattern examined and emphasized in this project is likely to be very, very small relative to other kinds of movement.
“Most often international migration is not an option and rural residents migrate to urban areas, contributing to urbanization and urban poverty in developing countries,” says sociologist Elizabeth Fussell of Washington State University.
That is certainly the case in Mexico, according to population and migration researcher Haydea Izazola of the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Xochimilco, also not part of Oppenheimer’s team for the new study. “The great majority of the rural population who grow maize—rain-fed agriculture—for their own consumption are the poorest of the poor and lack the means to invest in the very expensive and risky migration venture.”
Further, the very models that predicted the impact of climate change on Mexican agriculture were not applied to the economy of the US, where the migrants are supposed to be headed.
Crop yields in the U.S. will likely suffer as well. “People do not move blindly; they move to greater opportunity,” Carr notes. “So we should probably be using [these economic and climate] models to examine the impact of future climate change on various migrant-employing sectors of the southwestern U.S. economy.”
While the research team that published this study intends to examine this issue, it calls into question even this preliminary study. I’m honestly surprised this got through peer review . . . except, perhaps that it was too sexy to pass up.
UPDATE: I wrote this late last night, and so was a bit spacey – as a friend of mine reminded me, there is another huge problem with the study – a lot of the “Mexican” migration that people are talking about in the popular media, and indeed in this study, is in fact Latino migration from Central America more broadly. As these areas were not modeled in this study, we have yet another gaping hole to address. I repeat: how did this get though peer review?
UPDATE: Well, people are jumping all over this article. Pielke’s site has a review with a similar take to my own . . .
Availability isn't validity . . .
So, to clarify one one my points from my previous post, let me use an example to show why building an index of development (or an index of anything, really) on data based on its availability can lead to tremendous problems – and result in a situation where the index is actually so misleading as to be worse than having no index at all.
A few years ago, Nate Kettle, Andrew Hoskins and I wrote a piece examining poverty-environment indicators (link here, or check out chapter 9 of Delivering Development when it comes out in January) where we pointed out that the data used by one study to evaluate the relationship between poverty and the environment in Nigeria did not bear much relationship to the meaningful patterns of environment and livelihood in Nigeria. For example, one indicator of this relationship was ‘percentage of irrigated area in the total agricultural area’, an index whose interpretation rested on the assumption that a greater percentage of irrigated area will maximize the environment’s agricultural potential and lead to greater income and opportunity for those living in the area. While this seems like a reasonable interpretation, we argued that there were other, equally plausible interpretations:
“While this may be a relatively safe assumption in places where the irrigated area is a very large percentage of total agricultural area, it may not be as applicable in places where the irrigated area is relatively small and where the benefits of irrigation are not likely to reach the entire population. Indeed, in such settings those with access to irrigation might not only experience greater opportunities in an average year, but also have incomes that are much more resistant to environmental shocks that might drive other farmers to adopt severe measures to preserve their livelihoods, such as selling off household stocks or land to those whose incomes are secured by irrigation. In such situations, a small but rising percentage of area under irrigation is as likely to reflect a consolidation of wealth (and therefore declining incomes and opportunities for many) in a particular area as it does greater income and opportunity for the whole population.” (p.90)
The report we were critiquing made no effort to control for these alternative interpretations, at least in part because it had gathered data at the national scale for Nigeria. The problem here is that Nigeria contains seven broad agroecological zones (and really many more subzones) in which different crops and combinations of crops will be favored – averaging this across the country just homogenizes important differences in particular places into a general, but meaningless indicator. When we combined this environmental variability with broad patterns of land tenure (people’s access to land), we found that the country really had to be divided up into at least 13 different zones – in each zone, the interpretation of this poverty-environment indicator was likely to be consistent, but there was no guarantee that it would be consistent from zone to zone. In some zones, a rising area under irrigation would reflect a positive shift in poverty and environmental quality, while in others it might reflect declining human well-being.
To add to this complexity, we then mapped these zones against the smallest administrative units (states) of Nigeria at which meaningful data on poverty and the environment are most likely to be available. What resulted was this:
As you can see, there are several states with multiple zones inside their borders – which means a single indicator cannot be assumed to have the same interpretion across the state (let alone the entire country). So, while there might be data on poverty and environmental quality available at the state level such that we can identify indicators and build indexes with it, the likelihood is that the interpretation of that data will be, in many cases, incorrect, leading to problematic policies (like promoting irrigation in areas where it leads to land consolidation and the marginalization of the poor) – in other words, making things much worse than if there was no index or indicator at all.
Just because the data is available doesn’t mean that it is useful, or that it should be used.
On clean coal and optimism . . .
Mickie Glantz has an interesting musing about clean coal on his FragileEcologies blog today. What I like about it is his focus on how clean coal is a nice goal – that is, those of us working on issues of global environmental change should not reject coal as an energy source if there ever comes a day where it can be mined and burned in a manner that greatly diminishes, if not completely eliminates the horrible side effects, such as mountaintop removal and massive greenhouse gas emissions. Current energy regimes and costs are a critical limiting factor in global development today, and anything that might bring us cheap, abundant energy in a manner that does not decimate the environment should be taken seriously.
That said, I have been a harsh critic of the clean coal movement thus far . . . because it is completely disingenuous. Current marketing suggests that the technology is here, that coal is already clean, and that environmental concerns about coal are merely a mask for some sort of ill-defined, radical agenda. However, the technology is not here yet and coal remains a remarkably dirty source of energy, from mining to burning. So I give full support to Mickie’s idea – let’s talk about Clean Coal, where “clean” is not an adjective, but a verb – and a verb in the command tense. Clean that coal!