Deep Thought

Off shore oil drilling can now be done in a environmentally safe way.

In other news, I’m not terribly sympathetic to residents of Cape Cod who complain the newly approved off-shore wind mills are eye sores. “Windmills are ugly” rings rather hollow compared to the devastation soon to visit residents of Port Sulfur, Louisiana whose coastline is about to be impacted by an oil spill worse than the Exxon Valdez.

Drill, baby, drill.

Popular environmentalism meets scientific ignorance

An AP story appearing in many newspapers today suggests that unusually bright blue skies seen across Europe in recent days were due to the lack of a “semi-permanent haze” caused by commercial airline traffic. Everyone knows that under certain atmospheric conditions, the water vapor emitted by airplanes can form thin clouds which can linger as long as a few hours. But the idea that aircraft emissions have noticably changed the color of the sky itself is just wrong.

The article first admits the pretty skies aren’t only due to the lack of airline traffic in the sixth paragraph, when it mentions a high pressure system in the region. But later on, it gets closest to the likely reason for a bluer hue when it notes “spectacular fiery sunsets caused by dusk light filtering through ash.”

Both the blueness of the daytime sky and the redness of a sunset are caused by Rayleigh scattering. Small particles in the atmosphere scatter sunlight, and blue light is scattered more than red light. The blue light scattering off the atmosphere makes the sky blue during the day, and when you look toward the sun at dusk, the “blue-less” light appears red. It stands to reason that the large quantities of particles added to the atmosphere by the Icelandic volcano have not only made sunsets redder, but the daytime sky bluer.

Google Invests in Enhanced Geothermal System

Google.org, the philanthropic wing of the company, announced last week that it will invest $10 million into Enhanced Geothermal Systems, a promising and overlooked alternative energy.

As far as what’s needed to make EGS a part of our energy infrastructure, $10M is peanuts, but that a for-profit organization like Google.org is willing to invest in it is good news. The proponents of EGS seem to be making the claim that the costs will greatly decrease if only they can put more of these in the ground, perhaps taking advantage of economies of scale. In turn, that might make energy costs for EGS competitive. What’s needed is an up-front funder who can afford to take the risk, e.g., Google.org.
This is a good example of how the private sector can find and support alternative energy innovations, though it should be no surprise that anyone with an idea for cheap and clean energy will attract investors. It does, however, conflict with the notion that the government should be the one leading us to technological salvation, most popularly illustrated in Thomas Friedman’s call for a Manhattan Project for alternative energy. In reality, what does such government funding get us? Ethanol. Or to pick an even less practical, go-nowhere technology, hydrogen fuel cells. Rich Sweeney puts it in perspective:

The fantastic MIT EGS Report estimates that a modest investment of $300 million over the next 10 years could lead to EGS contributing 10% of baseload electricity by 2050. According to Romm, we waste spend that amount on hydrogen fuel cell research every year.

How easy do you think it will be to take that $300M away from its current recipients? How easy will it be for Google.org to invest in someone else next year if EGS doesn’t pan out?

Real gas mileage for hybrid cars

Here’s a pretty cool web site for comparing the fuel economy of hybrid cars as driven by actual people under real-world conditions: GreenHybrid.com. As most of our readers are probably aware, the EPA recently changed the way they measure fuel economy for new cars, resulting in a drop in MPG for most models. The new EPA values* are certainly more accurate, but for the most realistic measure possible, what could be more relevant than a database made up of hundreds of drivers’ actual results? It’s just the sort of thing the Internet does best.
What about those of us with conventional cars? Looks like the DOE and EPA are trying to do the same thing on their web site, FuelEconomy.gov. So far, however, far fewer people have entered data on that site.
*note: the EPA values cited on GreenHybrid.com appear to be the old values.

Al Gore and the difference between right and left

When I read that Al Gore’s Tennessee mansion uses more than 20 times the amount of electricty as the average American home (the AP reports it’s more like 12 times the consumption of the average Nashville home) and more natural gas as well, I was hardly surprised. Like fellow Democrat John Edwards, Gore is successful and wealthy; it’s no surprise he owns a large home, and large homes consume large amounts of energy. Large does not necessarily imply wasteful, however. Being a public figure and former Vice President, Gore doesn’t have the option of living in a 2-bedroom ranch.
We may rightly ask, however, whether Gore’s mansion is energy-efficient. Based on the numbers in the AP article and an average American home size in 2004 of 2,349 square feet, Gore’s home uses 19.1 kWh per square foot per year, while the average American home uses roughly 4.5 kWh per square foot per year. Yikes! That’s pretty inefficient. Even if all that energy came from carbon-neutral renewable sources, it’s still a lot of usage–to say nothing of the $1,080 average monthly natural gas bill. It seems safe to say that Gore could do better.
What’s also interesting is how the left is reacting to this (unsurprising) revelation. Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon, in a post entitled “Al Gore is entitled to his extra farts,” quotes blogger Battlepanda:

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Save the Polar Bears!

It’s really hard to get a lot of people to pay attention to your pet issue, especially when it is technical, difficult, or otherwise unpleasant. One smashing way to capture the public’s imagination is to use cute, cuddly animals, what environmental scientists call “charismatic megafauna.” I predict that the plight of drowning polar bears will do more to spur action on global climate change than anything Al Gore says, writes, or produces.
But why should environmentalists have all the fun? Why can’t other policy advocates exploit the popularity of adorable critters? Here are my suggestions:

• Unless we repeal Medicare Part D, Bald Eagles will go extinct within the next decade.
• Thousands of kittens will perish in lava flows this year due to the ever-growing number of middle-class families who have to pay the Alternative Minimum Tax.
• Dolphins are deathly allergic to tariffs.
• Building a border fence will require the harvesting of over one million elephant tusks.
• Panda cub survival rates are highly correlated with school voucher availability in urban areas.
• The minimum wage causes disemployment effects and premature death among ponies.
• Every time a company lists on the London Stock Exchange instead of in NY due to the burden of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a Humpback Whale beaches itself.

How Quaint

So technological improvements can spare the environment, and developed countries are re-foresting. But if this op-ed is to be believed (it was also published in the WSJ) Germans are flocking to wood-burning fireplaces. Guess why.

The Reforestation Premium

Want a quick lesson in environmental economics? Well, here you go:

From the Wikipedia:

It is claimed that many environmental health indicators, such as water and air pollution, show the inverted U-shape: in the beginning of economic development, little weight is given to environmental concerns, raising pollution along with industrialization. After a threshold, when basic physical needs are met, interest in a clean environment rises, reversing the trend. Now society has the funds, as well as willingness to spend to reduce pollution.

And now for the case study:

A large and growing number of countries are reversing the longstanding trend toward destruction of their forests, a surprising new analysis has found . . .
A vast majority of the richer and more developed countries had more forest area and denser forests in 2005 than in 1990. In the United States and Western Europe the transition began decades ago, but it has increased rapidly in the last 15 years, the researchers found.

We’ve been over this before. But the fun part about environmental Kuznets curves is explaining them.
Environmental economist John Whitehead explains this by positing “that forests are normal goods (i.e., demand increases with income) and economic growth leads to reforestation.” This is probably largely true. Prosperous individuals are more likely to have the time and money to preserve forested tracts of land, reforest, or lobby the government to do these things on their behalf.
But I think the picture is more complicated. As a second explanation, it’s also likely that economic growth leads to superior substitutes for wood (as both building material and fuel) and better timber farming; third world consumers of wood probably lack tree farms and need more wood in the first place, especially for fuel. (However, if the reforestation the study found relies on these farms, which have low ecological value, the news isn’t nearly so good.)
A third explanation is that forests provide valuable ecological services (such as erosion control and carbon sinks) we are only recently beginning to realize. A richer society is more likely to tabulate these vales and incorporate them into planning.
A fourth explanation is a common criticism of environmental Kuznets curves: we are simply “exporting” our deforestation to developing countries. Why cut down our own forests when the third-world will cut down theirs?
I suppose that to round out the theories I can add a final, far-fetched one: every country will have a minority of Loraxes, but only prosperous ones will have the means (mass media, non-profits, marketing departments) by which they can convince (or hector) the rest of us to value forests.
The bigger question is whether pulling the third-world into greater prosperity will lead to a similar reversal to reforestation. Since all the really nice forests are found there, I certainly hope so.

Climate Engineering

The latest development in global climate change has been a new report headed by former World Bank economist Nicholas Stern, wherein he estimates the world could reduce greenhouse gases, and therefore avoid the effects of climate change, by expending around 1% of global GDP. This sounds huge until we raise the ever-pertinent question, Relative to what? Well, the Stern estimation is that doing nothing and suffering the consequences will cost between 5-20% of GDP, so sacrificing 1% clearly makes sense. That is, of course, if one accepts the numbers Stern throws around, which many of the economists I’ve been reading — and not just the free-marketeers — find hard to swallow.
Nevertheless, Arnold Kling takes them as given and asks the ever-pertinent question again. Reducing greenhouse gases incurs a cost that’s quite large in absolute terms, to wit, approximately $400 billion per year. But how big is that compared to the alternatives? And here he reaches far beyond his expertise and speculates that reducing greenhouse gases is not the only strategy for combating global climate change. He suggests that technological wizardry, which he admits he doesn’t know a fig about, could mitigate greenhouse gases at a cost much lower than $400B. He follows up with a couple of posts on his blog that list some speculative technologies, such as reflectors or sulfate seeding.
Despite my education, I’m not qualified to comment on the feasibility of these technologies, either, but I do think the speculation is illustrative of a larger divide in environmental policy. Kling represents the Cornucopian worldview at its most optimistic, that is, he belongs to a school that approaches environmental problems with great optimism about the power of human ingenuity to overcome current constraints through technological improvement. Countering this would be the Neo-Malthusians, of whom Jared Diamond has become the most recent face. I went to grad school with quite a few of his fellow travelers, and so feel comfortable generalizing that their reaction to suggestions of geoengineering will be lukewarm at best. Afterall, technology, in an abstract sense, can explain much of the mucking up we’ve done of the Earth so far. Are we to trust it to lead us out of our troubles as well?

Green Counter-revolution

Now that development interests officially trump property rights, I think it’s natural to wonder, “What trumps development interests?” Surveying the firestorm sweeping the blogosphere over Kelo, I had yet another of those Alice-through-the-looking-glass sensations when I realized who the enemy of my enemy is: environmental regulations.
If you would like to protect your home from encroaching development, try getting eco-friendly. Commenter “Leslie” at Wren’s Nest suggests using conservation easements to protect your property. Existing structures would probably be limited in their ability to qualify as environmentally important lands, but future residential developments could well take this into account. Perhaps the entire art of (sub)urban planning could be influenced by Kelo; subdivisions shielded by constructed wetlands, for example. Or if high quality ecosystems aren’t your thing, one Canadian libertarian has this suggestion, “My advice? Move next to a Superfund site. You may get cancer but no one will ever take your house.” Another artificial option, we may even see more instances of homeowners bringing endangered species onto their property to stop development. Once an onerous discovery, endangered species may herald the preservation of basic ownership with limited rights in the face of losing everything.
We shouldn’t be surprised if a perverse ruling has perverse consequences.