A Musing Environment

The price of gasoline is rising rapidly while Republicans in power, so we hear Democrats attacking. What could bring down the price of gasoline?

A rapid decrease in gasoline consumption, because supplies are inelastic, would lead to decrease in prices. Oops, forget that option. A rapid decrease in tensions with Iran and decrease in hostilities in Iraq and more confidence that the government and the people in various oil supplying countries will find a way to get along. Not on the table for the immediate future.
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For a fascinating look at the history of water conflict, check out the Pacific Institute’s 5000 year chronology.

Peter Gleick was one of the speakers at today’s BioForum presentation at the Oakland Museum. I will post more about what was said when I get a chunk of time.

Comments that go beyond nays and praise

Pat reacts to a post on biofuels by suggesting a book, “All Flesh is Grass,” by Gene Logsdon, which apparently addresses land use.

After Emily Messner at The Debate linked to one of mine on radioactivity, two people left comments. Dr. Amme said more about hormesis. He also said something about hydrogen for fuel cells being made from nuclear power — it’s not the electricity but the heat that can be expected to create hydrogen molecules. I asked him for more information, and he left it as a comment to another post.

I don’t know enough about this subject to know if people are very sure or somewhat sure or cautiously optimistic about the role nuclear power can play. I do know that some people are cautiously optimistic on the mid-term (decades) role of fuel cells, while some are pessimistic. Creating the hydrogen is just one of the obstacles to overcome.

Jim also left a comment on the radioactivity post. He believes that US testing of nuclear weapons in the Pacific Islands led to “jellyfish” babies. I have heard this before, but it would be surprising if true. All attempts to find birth defects resulting from the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombing have not succeeded, and their exposures were much higher. There may be many reasons why the US should not have tested weapons in the Pacific Islands, without creating extra reasons.

Radioactivity at high doses can kill. Evidence that it kills at low doses has not been strong.

Tori said on the My Life Without a Car guest post that she wants more sidewalks and train stations. I’ve heard that many new suburban developments don’t have sidewalks, is that true?

Emily Messner, who hosted a washingtonpost.com discussion of climate change a while back, is devoting this week’s discussion to nuclear power.

In tomorrow’s Washington Post, Patrick Moore makes the case for going nuclear.

Basically, the choices for baseload plants [those on most of the time, contrasted to peak load plants, turned on when the air conditioning and electric stoves are being cranked up] are hydroelectric, coal, and nuclear. Hydroelectric power is maxed out [and may decrease due to climate change over the lifetime of power plants being built today].

Moore’s other arguments:
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In today’s Washington Post article, the heartrending Dying for Water in Somalia’s Drought, Emily Wax describes conflict over water in a country lacking an effective government, conflict that has left 250 dead in 2 years. (See the related photographs as well.)

A USAID site lists these facts about water:

• The lack of clean water kills almost 4,500 children per day

• Every day in Africa, women and girls especially, walk as many as 6 miles to fetch water

• Rapid urbanization is leading to increased pressure on water resources

• The world will require 55 percent more food by 2030, increasing the demand for irrigation which already accounts for 70 percent of all freshwater used by humans.

Water problems will worsen in the immediate future. First, few countries are tackling their water problems, even in the first world. California has an enormous investment in agriculture, yet salinity is increasing and groundwater is being depleted.

Additionally, climate change may increase precipitation in some areas, increasing floods, but in most areas the soil will be dryer, and within decades, irrigation will be introduced into areas that have grown food without for hundreds of years (the US breadbasket, east of the Missouri) or longer. And climate change may shift us into quasi-permanent El Nino conditions, which will increase drought in Africa and Australia. In many areas, precipitation patterns may include more intense rain on fewer days.

There are some promising water trends in some areas of the world, but the overall direction is discouraging.

Update The death of 250 Somalis in the last two years is from the fights over just one well. (Thanks, Ruth.)

Tuesdays 1 – 3 PM, April 25 – June 7

A free 7-week class will examine questions on how important and rapid climate change will be, what kinds of policy changes are needed, and how quickly we must respond. First we’ll begin with the science and the expected impacts in many regions of the world. Then we’ll look at our own behavior in order to understand policy options. This short class will give an overview sufficient to understand the various aspects of an enormous problem facing us.

April 25 Building a greenhouse, what’s in store for California?
May 2 Working with spectroscopes, warming in the Arctic
May 9 What are scientists saying about climate change? Changes in the oceans
May 16 Looking at our own carbon emissions in order to understand policy, beginning the policy discussion
May 23 Policy continued
May 30 Many scientists are warning that big changes are imminent: what changes, how soon, and what can be done
June 7 Changes in the rain forest, Wrap up

North Berkeley Senior Center 1901 Hearst Ave at ML King in Berkeley
Tuesdays 1 – 3 PM
Call 981-5190 for more information

If you have a question, leave it as a comment

What good curriculum can you recommend?

One high school assignment assigns a newspaper article (there are four) on the connection between global warming and hurricanes, and asks questions to help students sort through what is said, how valid it is, and what information is missing.

I heard second hand from a second grade teacher who is looking for climate change material. What can you recommend? My experience is with preteens to adults.

Would students that age be interested in looking up information on animals (and plants?). What is happening to the polar bear and to coral reefs, and why did the golden toad go extinct?

I’ve been asked this a couple of times, and my answer is best summed up as “I don’t know.”

First: is this incessant rain (by northern California standards) climate change? While many areas in northern California broke March records for numbers of days of rain or/and the amount of rain (and it’s still raining), would the rain have looked less impressive if we had compared 31 day periods that center on March, such as February 25 to March 28? Dunno

If this is climate change, is it because of global warming?

Another dunno. Climate models predict that the type of weather we call normal will shift, or in some cases, change precipitously (Alaska’s several degree warming in the last 50 years almost all occurred in 1977). These models also predict that deviations from the new normal will be more extreme than has been true in recent years.

Does anyone know more about this?

Do any of the readers live in areas where the climate definitely is changing?

A recent report from Natural Resources Defense Council and Union of Concerned Scientists, Nathanael Greene’s Growing Energy: How Biofuels Can Help End America’s Oil Dependence (pdf), shows both the excitement of a new technology and how easy it is to overestimate the advantages.
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Raising the Corporate Average Fleet Economy (CAFE) standards appears to have a 10 – 20% rebound effect – as gas mileage improves, some of the fuel and greenhouse gas savings is lost to increased driving. (See Effectiveness and Impact of Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) Standards)

The rebound effect in Europe is 20 – 30%.

That’s the figure obtained when trying to separate out various different effects across a continent. Diesel cars in Europe get better mileage than gasoline cars, and diesel is cheaper than gasoline there. (Back in the 1970s, the price of oil went up quickly, what with OPEC and Iran. When the price of oil came down, the Europeans left the prices of gasoline and diesel high, taxing them became a major source of revenue. The price of diesel did come down some to please the truckers. Today, diesel is about $1/gallon cheaper than gasoline.)

Lee Schipper, et al, found that diesel drivers use more fuel and emit more greenhouse gases than do drivers of gasoline cars. As noted, 20 – 30% is because of the rebound effect, perhaps a larger portion can be attributed to lower diesel prices, some because long distance drivers self-select for diesel, and some because people with two or more vehicles will use the cheapest for long distance trips.

It’s like treading water. How about if we improve gas mileage and increase fuel taxes? We’re going to have to raise taxes anyway, so why not raise taxes on fuels?

Your suggestions?

More explanation There are two rebound effects: buying a more or less fuel efficient car as fuel prices change, and driving more or fewer miles after buying the new car. The 20 – 30% figure is the change in driving behavior with the new car if only the improved mileage is taken into account. Europeans, from a number of countries with a number of pricing schemes, switching from petrol to diesel increased their yearly distances from 16,000 km to 19,500 km, a 22% increase. People switching from diesel to petrol reduced driving distances from 21,000 km to 15,000 km, a 29% decrease. These changes appear to correlate with the change in fuel costs, including better fuel mileage, as few simultaneously made other changes such as moving to or from the city. The diesel gets about 26% better fuel mileage than does the petrol car, so the shift in behavior to diesel cuts the reductions in fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions by 85%. Of that 85%, some 20 – 30% appears to come from improved mileage and the rest from the lower prices of diesel. The price of diesel is being raised across Europe.

The assumption is that Europeans show a greater change in behavior with changing efficiency because they have public transit as an option—Americans are choosing between one car and another, while Europeans are choosing between public transit and cars with a range of fuel economies.

In December 2005, the California EPA sent an Energy Policy Report to the Governor and Legislature. This plan, now being discussed, recommends

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I was struggling to summarize the seven articles and one editorial on melting glaciers in this week’s Science magazine, when RealClimate did it for me. This summary of their summary contains some background and extra material.
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I never thought parental sacrifice would mean losing transportation, at least for a period of time. However, for the last few months, three college age children and a spouse, who absolutely needs a car, have rendered me “carless.” Now you may say why must three young adults need to have cars while their mother sits at home without one. Well, lets just say what they have as cars are really four wheeled wonders of machinery. To be more specific, one drives a 10-year old van, the other drives a 7-year old Saturn, with all the parts of the engine having been replaced at least once. The other drives a newer car but has to keep a job to make the payments.

With my economic misfortune set aside, I have learned a lot about surviving without a car in a car dependent city. I have some knowledge of mass transit living because I moved from a small town to the big city of Chicago in 1979. This was the time of the gasoline crisis, when long lines of cars formed at gas stations across the country and the cost of gasoline hovered around $.80 cents a gallon. But my meager salary was still too little to fill up my gas-guzzler Dodge. Fortunately though, I didn’t need to drive. I had the luxury of living close enough to my job so that I could walk to work, and the school my husband attended provided shuttle transportation from the campus where we lived to the downtown campus.
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Many others have important perspectives that need to be brought to the table. Ellen wrote me to say that she was citing the Making Transit Work blog, and forwarded her piece to me. I like it because Ellen is considering how to live with fewer cars, and why. So read what reducing the number of family cars entails for one person in Austin.

If you have a contribution on changes in the environment or changes in ourselves, please leave a comment letting me know.

Comments that go beyond praise and nays Both comments to the previous post on war and oil point out wars and conflicts larger than the Iran-Iraq war that led to extended to conflict over oil. Important additions.

Re peak oil: I discussed this in previous blogs, basically, oil production is still rising, absent shutdowns due to oil conflict, and almost everyone in energy policy or climatology or biology or other –gies is considerably more worried about the carbon emissions than the peak of oil production, as alternatives exist to oil.

One person’s ministry in Meeting for Worship this last Sunday included a reference to wars over resource needs: food, oil, and water. He mentioned Jared Diamond’s Collapse. This book includes a large section on the high population density in Rwanda preceding the genocide. The population increased dramatically during a time of good harvests; then came drought and genocide. Diamond is careful to avoid claiming strict causality, but he provides a convincing link between lack of resources and calamitous solutions.

I have frequently heard people mention oil conflicts when discussing resource scarcity, and even give it precedence of place, but these seem to me to resemble more the conflicts in Angola and Sierra Leone over diamonds or gang wars over drugs. Whenever there is a valuable resource, some of the locals will covet it.

The most important oil war was the Iran-Iraq war, over territorial disagreements. Iraq’s grievances included Iran’s possession (since the end of the Ottoman empire) of oil-rich Khuzestan and Iran’s control (since the 1970s) of the Shatt al-Arab waterway, which both countries used for oil exports. The country with the world’s third-largest oil reserves attacked the country with the second-largest reserves. Estimates of casualties vary — the Wikipedia site gives a casualty range from 450,000 – 950,000 Iranis, from 450,000 — 650,000 Iraqis.
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On PBS’s The News Hour some months ago, the guests included a man from industry speaking in favor of real time pricing of electricity, charging companies different prices for electricity, depending on the costs to produce electricity in real time. Speaking against this idea were several self-declared environmentalists/representatives of the public. There was no way for a listener to ascertain that the “industry” solution is actually the policy solution recommended by experts in economics and energy policy. PBS was able to influence the way the message was heard by labeling mainstream thinking as “industry”.

This seems to be the pattern for discussions on nuclear power. PBS obtained an “expert” on nuclear power from The Economist; he spoke rapidly, articulately, and erroneously. Representing nuclear power were two people from industry, no one from academia or energy policy. Occasionally one of the industry people would break in and correct what the journalist was saying, but it is difficult to correct people who get so much information wrong in such a short time.

I was struck in earlier decades by the journalistic technique of interviewing an extreme right winger and an extreme left winger so as to get “both sides”. The practice today too often includes an interview with someone knowledgeable paid by the industry, and someone unknowledgeable from outside the field.

And jeez, when are journalists going to stop saying, “some scientists believe that greenhouse gases cause climate change”. Uh, that’s not in doubt. There is some doubt as to how much damage climate change will cause, with the bulk of scientists saying it looks bad, and a small number, make that a tiny number, who advocate addressing climate change slowly, just in case the overwhelming majority is overstating the possible consequences.

Comments that go beyond nays and praise Bob supplemented his comment to a post on biofuels with another comment to the previous post. His point is important to talk about: does focusing on technology take energy away from changing behavior?

For people who may have forgotten how much we need to cut back on carbon emissions, we’re talking 65 – 85% in the next few decades, even as population and per capita consumption continue to rise. For climate justice, so that people in Cambodia can some day emit carbon while Americans begin to emit only their share, cutbacks would have to be much more than 90% in the first world, and even larger in the US.

Your thinking on the policy changes vs technology changes vs voluntary simplicity even without policy changes?

I have received one question and two comments since I last posted.

What is ppm C?

I am sorry for abbreviating, this should be spelled out at least once/blog, and it’s been a while. ppm C is an abbreviation for ppmv C which means parts per million volume carbon. The current level of atmospheric carbon is 380 ppmv C — out of every million units of air, 380 units are carbon dioxide. Doesn’t sound like much to be having such a great effect?

Methane is measured in even smaller units, ppb, or parts per billion.

Comments that go beyond nays and praise Thanks to Susan for her comments on the previous post on how we talk, and how we think about issues. Please read her comment!

Thanks as well to Bob for his comments on biofuels. He points out (in a longish comment, read the whole thing) that we need to look at behavior as well. This is absolutely true, but go to the post on Making Transit Work to see how difficult it is to effect behavior change. For those who missed it, this is a National Academy of Science examination of how to double transit use in the US from 2% to 4%. This modest goal, which will likely take decades to achieve, will be a small blip in the upward exponential use of airplane and automobile.

In reality, we need both technology and policy changes and behavior changes on top of those. Policy changes will lead to behavior changes, but we need behavior to change more rapidly.

There are two reasons for this. First, there is reason to doubt that policy and technology changes will be fast or deep enough to confront climate change and other environmental disasters. And second, people who look at their own flying and driving, who look at how far their food travels and the environmental impact of where they live, are more likely to push the issues with the general public and with legislators.

In the past, I’ve asked Friends (Quakers) in interest groups, what makes addressing climate change difficult? I’ve heard about fears and guilt, a sense of being overwhelmed. People talked of resentment that we need to change, and a feeling that living with less means deprivation.

I recently asked two Quaker lists why WE aren’t talking about climate change though James Hansen and so many other climatologists give stark warnings about the consequences of failing to act rapidly and radically.

I appreciate how much people opened up about this. The same ideas, different wordings, apply to struggling in our religious and public lives, in our families, with our legislators.

We must find ways to talk about climate change, as a group, or we won’t find ourselves on the paths to serve God, won’t find ways to address the largest challenges of our lifetime.

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More on biofuels from the January 27 Science (also see post on net benefits from ethanol): the US, EU, and India expect that 5% of their fuels will be bioderived within 5 years. Up to 30% of (today’s? future?) global fuels can be supplied “in an environmentally responsible manner without affecting food reduction,” according to Steven Koonin (BP). The rest of this post comes from The Path Forward for Biofuels and Biomaterials, same issue.

Currently, about 2% of the US fuel mix comes from ethanol, 0.01% from biodiesel. The US Department of Energy goal is to replace 30% of liquid petroleum transportation fuel with biofuels, and 25% of organic chemicals (dyes, synthetic fibers, solvents, etc) with biomass-derived chemicals, all by 2025.

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According to a short piece in the January 27 Science (p 437), not only do tests assess student learning and encourage student learning, but they help students remember the material. Students studied for a test (TOEFL, Test of English as a Foreign Language), then were either tested or allowed to study again. They were then tested on how well they remembered the material. The study-study people remembered more initially, but the study-test group did better after a week.

So welcome those midterms!