Category: environment

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

Posted on by Ed 0

The new job looms . . .

and I know it, because news stories like this one about the flooding in Niger hit me a completely different way now – previously, I would have thought about how this could be teachable, and even how it might relate to some research ideas . . . now, I recall interviews from April with people in my new Bureau at USAID where we discussed the looming food crisis in Niger.  In mid-September, this won’t be a teachable moment – this will be a fire drill for which I have some degree of responsibility.  Sobering.
Incidentally, this is another example of the challenges that face those of us working at the intersection of environment and development.  The long-term (last four-five decades) signal for precipitation is in steady decline.  It is hard to say if this is a visible outcome of climate change, mostly because we have a lot of trouble understanding the mechanics of the West African climate (for those so inclined, there are some issues with the teleconnections from ENSO and the influence of the NAO).

Dunkwa (Ghana) weather station precipitation figures 1963-2000 (source: Ghana Meteorological Service)

This figure (from my upcoming book) illustrates the real problem, though – the long-term decline is clear at this weather station (the closest one to my research area that is not parked right on the beach), but more striking is the variability around the centerline.  While this station is not showing any real trend toward greater variability, many other places in West Africa are – hence the massive, surprising flooding we are seeing in Niger, despite a long-term trend toward less precipitation in the region.  People forget that there are two key variables that shape precipitation outcomes – amount and timing.
This is probably the hardest part of the job – thinking about how to plan for increasing unpredictability and variability.  Trends are easy, assuming their mechanics are understood and therefore somewhat predictable.  If I know there will be 10% less rainfall in a particular place by a particular year, I can go about figuring out what the biophysical, economic and social impacts of that change might be.  However, it is a hell of a lot harder to plan for 10% more variability by a given year (assuming we could even quantify rising variability in such a manner).  Well, if it was easy, it wouldn’t be interesting . . . and someone else would have solved it already.

Posted on by Ed 0

Hoo, boy – fun with "background pharmaceuticals"

A remarkably underreported story here in the US, and indeed in most advanced economies, is the increasing presence of pharmaceuticals in our water supplies.  No, this is not some grand conspiracy to dumb us down or make us passive (please remove the tinfoil helmet’s, y’all) . . . it’s what happens when we overprescribe drugs in dosages larger than can be completely taken up by our bodies.  These drugs are expelled in our waste, and enter the surrounding ecosystem.  This scares the hell out of me, and is almost enough to make me buy bottled water . . . and then I remember that bottled water is likely coming from a similarly contaminated source and has all sorts of horrific impacts on the environment.
NPR is running another story that references this issue today – a story about shrimp on measurable amounts of Prozac (which they are taking up from their surrounding environments).  The story focuses on the impact of the Prozac on the shrimp, which head for light and therefore become more vulnerable to predators.  What I find boggling is that the story stops there.
There is a huge implication here – WE EAT THOSE SHRIMP.  And chemicals like fluoxetine concentrate as they move up the food chain – which means that when we eat shrimp on miniscule amounts of Prozac, we are dosing ourselves with Prozac.  Eat enough shrimp, and you can get a dose that actually affects you.  And this is not the only edible animal or plant taking up pharmaceutical chemicals from the environment – lots of them do.  Just as mercury becomes a problem as it moves up the food chain, so too these chemicals become a problem – we are approaching a situation where it will be difficult to eat without getting an unprescribed dose of pharmaceutical.  This cannot be good for us.
And people wonder why puberty is coming earlier and earlier for girls in our society.  There is a reason my daughter drinks organic milk . . .
The point here is that the environment is not a bottomless sink into which we can dump things like chemicals and expect that we will never see them again.  Yes, most people know this – yet we, as a society, seem surprised every time a new type of chemical surfaces in our food or water.  We spend a lot of time and energy hollering about things like deforestation in the developing world, while we chew up our own environment in much more subtle ways that might be much more difficult to reverse . . . perhaps we need to get our own house in order before commenting on the behavior of others.

Posted on by Ed 5

Development and Not-Quite-Zero-Sum Growth . . .

It seems to me that one of the more interesting debates to be had around global environmental change and development is that of the nature of growth in the modern world.  There are those that argue (or at least implicitly argue) that growth is effectively unlimited by the biophysical world – the real barriers to growth around the world are capacity, governance, etc.  Operating from this assumption (or something near to it), the logical decision is to foster growth everywhere in the world, and to assume that the absence of growth is a symptom of problems with human capacity, attitudes and institutions that can and should be rectified.  At another pole are those that argue that our growth is fundamentally pinned to the biophysical world – this is the implicit assumption behind ecological footprint calculators, that we draw upon natural resource for growth in a manner that is fixed and measurable -and the measurements suggest, rather strongly, that growth is highly constrained by the biophysical world.
Like most people, I exist somewhere in the middle of this continuum.  Ecological footprint calculators, imperfect though they may be (for example, converting our resource use into acres of land is a problematic and weak process/proxy), demonstrate rather clearly that if we are to get everyone in the world up to the average standard of living in the United States, we would need the natural resources from around three Earths.  Many of the arguments about future policy built on these footprint calculations end up discussing rather steep resource and wealth redistribution curves if we want to see a more equal world.  However, there is a significant flaw in this reasoning – these measures (let’s just assume that they are reasonably accurate for the purposes of this argument) and the resultant policy prescriptions assume the per capita intensity of use to be a constant going forward into the future.  This discounts future technological developments that will, no doubt, lower the per capita resource use of those in the advanced economies, such as the US.
On the other hand, the news here isn’t all good – while the intensity of use might decrease over time, such decreases typically translate into the market in the form of reduced prices, which tend to spur increased production.  Put another way, 5 years in the future we may only use 75% of the resources we do today to make a shirt, thus lowering the footprint of that shirt and the person who buys that shirt.  However, the price of that shirt will likely decrease to remain competitive in the market, encouraging consumers to buy more shirts than they used to.  If the price drop of the shirt is such that the consumer who typically buys four shirts a year decides to buy five, we’ve already lost the decreased footprint created by increased efficiency to a larger footprint created by greater consumption.  In other words, improved resource efficiency related to growth won’t do us much good if it spurs the growth of consumption such that the per capita resource uptake remains constant or rises.
There is another bit of bad news here – even if those of us living in the advanced economies decided to freeze our amount of consumption, locking in our current standard of living while allowing increased resource use efficiency to translate into greater availability of goods and services in the Global South, I don’t see a point any time in the near future where these benefits will be of a scope that will allow for a real closing of the gap in the material standard of living between the developing and the developed.  We’re looking at differences of orders of magnitude right now, accrued over several centuries of differential political economic activity when the Earth’s population and total resource uptake was much, much smaller.  So if we want a truly equal world, those of us in the advanced economies are going to have to give something up.
While I am an indefatigable optimist (hey, I am writing this post but I still work in development), this doesn’t absolve me from a serious consideration of reality – so maybe I am a constrained optimist.  The size of the global population today, coupled with our current regimes of resource use, have taken most, if not all of the slack out of the global resource/growth equation.  No, we are not yet at a zero-sum world where growth in China means loss somewhere else, like the US – it is still possible to see growth in multiple sites, as technological advances create a bit more space for growth via increased efficiency.  But there will come a day where we will cross this curve – where our inability to make things more efficient as quickly as our increased demand on resources rises will finally come to a point where the resources themselves become the restrictor plate on growth – the world will effectively become a zero-sum economy.
In my work on the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, I saw trends that make the math above a lot more pressing.  The rates of resource degradation around the world are astonishing.  Not everything is getting worse, of course – temperate forests, for example, are doing pretty well – but an astonishing percentage of the resources we rely upon for our standard of living are under threat right now, not in some distant future.  So our current use of the environment (much of this use in the name of growth, incidentally), with its various impacts, is hastening the day when we cross the curve into a zero-sum economy.  Some might argue (or hope?) that we will generate enough wealth and capacity between now and then as to come up with some sort of a solution for this – or to put back the damage that we have done to our environment, thus uncrossing the curve for a while longer.  This strikes me as a hell of a gamble*, where the stakes on a bad bet are getting larger and larger.  Meanwhile, the nature of this bet has been shifting from betting one’s house on red to betting one’s house on red 16 . . .
No, we are not there yet.  But, barring a remarkable revolution in our ability to generate energy and food (I won’t rule these out, but the sort of revolution we need is on the order of fusion, which isn’t all that close right now), zero-sum is coming.  But what should we call this not-quite-zero-sum world we are living in?  Surely someone has a name for this already . . .
*in the case of extinctions, this is a pointless gamble – there is no putting back extinct, and anything that goes extinct will have effects (some obvious, others difficult to discern) throughout ecosystems . . . and often there will be one or more impact parts of that ecosystem that humans see as useful. or necessary.

Posted on by Ed 3

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.

Posted on by Ed 3

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.

Posted on by Ed 8

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.

Posted on by Ed 2

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.

Posted on by Ed 3

Religion is not the enemy of the environment . . .

PRI’s The World (can you tell what I listen to regularly?) ran a nice story on the efforts of some Islamic scholars to emphasize the religion’s emphasis on conservation.  This runs parallel to similar efforts among Catholics and the American evangelical community.  I’ve often pointed out to my students that I cannot identify a major religion that encourages its adherents to crap on the poor.  Seems I can extend that argument to say that most religions, in some way or other, encourage their adherents to use the world wisely*.
*There are significant objections to environmentalism in some parts of the evangelical community, but most of these objections are not pitched against the idea that we should use the environment wisely.  Instead, they are political arguments concerned that a focus on environmental issues will draw people away from an attention to core theological ideas.

Posted on by Ed 2