Nothing green about fake meat

Caring for the environment is the latest and most trendy reason to go vegetarian (or...*gasp*...vegan!), but apparently if you're making up for meat by eating a lot of fake meat, you might be hurting Mother Earth more than if you'd stuck to chicken and fish:

In general, Eshel says, it's true that raw veggies are an excellent nutritional bargain: For every 100 calories of energy put into producing conventional beef, from farm to supermarket shelf, you get only six calories back to eat. Compare that with apples, which yield 110 calories, or raw soy: an amazing 415. In terms of greenhouse gases, switching from a diet that includes red meat to a plants-only one is roughly equivalent to trading in your SUV for a Camry.

But a girl can only eat so much roasted kale before she starts craving protein: tofu, veggie burgers, and the (okay, creepy) occasional piece of fakin' bacon. But coaxing soy into a red-and-white rectangular strip takes work—which is why Eshel believes most veggie burgers are the caloric equivalent of "shooting yourself in the foot." A 2009 study by the Swedish Institute for Food and Biotechnology found that while producing a plate of peas requires a fraction of the energy needed to produce the same number of calories of pork, the energy costs of a pea-burger and a pork chop are about equal.

That's not the only issue with fake meat. Consider the process that keeps your veggie burgers low in fat: The cheapest way to remove fatty soybean oil is with hexane, an EPA-registered air pollutant and suspected neurotoxin. A 2009 study by the Cornucopia Institute, a sustainable-farming nonprofit, found that Boca, Morningstar Farms, and Gardenburger (among others) market products made with hexane. The finding was enough to turn Cornucopia researcher Charlotte Vallaeys off of fake meat. "I can't think of a single meat-alternative product where I could explain how every ingredient is made," she says. "With a grass-fed burger, well, there's one ingredient. And with grass-fed burgers I actually might be doing something good for the environment."

Why drilling in American waters is good for the environment

As much as I despise big oil survives for it reliance on government transportation policies and not market forces, all things equal, I think it's best for the environment to drill in American waters. Why? Because if you don't, things like this happen:

BP will start deep-water drilling off the coast of Libya within weeks in spite of concerns about the UK group’s environmental and safety record after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster. [...]

Barack Obama’s imposition of a moratorium on deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico has highlighted the growing importance of new exploration across the Mediterranean. Diamond Offshore, a US deep-water driller, is moving a rig from the Gulf of Mexico to Egypt, while Australia’s APX started drilling last week between Tunisia and Italy. Shell plans to start exploring soon off western Sicily.

Italy has speeded up its procedures and granted 21 new exploration permits. New limits imposed on near-shore drilling in response to the Gulf of Mexico spill apply only to future operations and barely affect the most promising areas off Sicily.

With cash-strapped governments courting Libya’s oil-fuelled sovereign wealth funds, countries such as Italy, Greece and Malta – all within a radius of 500km (310 miles) of the Gulf of Sirte – have refrained from commenting on Libya’s plans.

However, environmentalists and politicians have expressed concerns. A proposal by Günther Oettinger, Europe’s energy commissioner, for a moratorium on deep-water drilling in European Union waters failed to get a response from Mediterranean states.

If a rig like Deepwater Horizon exploded and started spewing oil off the coast of Libya, I doubt it would be contained within three months. Apparently oil has been leaking into the Niger Delta for decades and shows no signs of slowing. It's possible that environmentally-minded northern EU countries would step in and force Gaddafi and Berlusconi to take an oil spill seriously, but if BP thought that way, I'm not sure they would have bothered moving.

Saving the earth by destroying it

The NYT has an article about the horrible environmental damage done by the mining of rare earth elements used in the manufacture of "green tech":

Some of the greenest technologies of the age, from electric cars to efficient light bulbs to very large wind turbines, are made possible by an unusual group of elements called rare earths. The world’s dependence on these substances is rising fast.

Just one problem: These elements come almost entirely from China, from some of the most environmentally damaging mines in the country, in an industry dominated by criminal gangs.

In the past I've discussed ecologically degrading components used in cheap solar panels.

Obama's genius high-speed rail plan

Just in case you were under the impression that Obama's high-speed rail commitment was genuine, the Boston Globe would like to disabuse you of that notion:

The railroad tracks from Boston to Washington - the busiest rail artery in the nation, and one that also carries America’s only high-speed train, the Acela - have been virtually shut out of $8 billion worth of federal stimulus money set aside for high-speed rail projects because of a strict environmental review required by the Obama administration.

Because such a review would take years, states along the Northeast rail corridor are not able to pursue stimulus money for a variety of crucial upgrades.

Instead, the $8 billion is going to be split up to ten ways amongst other regions, such as California, the Gulf Coast, and the "Chicago Hub."

I love the irony of environmental standards stopping the Obama administration from making the one high-speed rail investment that has any chance of getting people out of their cars.

Global warming started with farming

I read about this theory somewhere a few months ago, but had no real basis for assessing its validity. And just now, via Megan McArdle, I find that it's been written up in the Economist:

The ice-core record shows that the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere made an anomalous upturn about 7,000 years ago, and that methane levels, which were also falling, began to increase about 5,000 years ago (see chart). These numbers correspond well with the rise of farming in Europe and Asia.

I can't find the quote now, but I remember reading that someone hypothesized that this human-driven global warming might have staved off an ice age.

50 reasons why Waxman-Markey is a bad, bad, bad idea

I can't recommend this article enough for those looking for all the arguments against the Waxman-Markey climate change bill.

Bottom line: the law may very well do nothing to reduce carbon emissions, and even make the problem worse, all while adding tons of cruft and handouts to an already-byzantine system of energy/agriculture regulation.

There are literally 50 reasons on that list why Waxman-Markey is a bad idea, and it's really hard to pick just a few to excerpt, but seeing as how I've been working at a lobbying firm this summer and so that's what's on my mind, let's do this one:

3. With its rich menu of corporate subsidies and special set-asides for politically connected industries, Waxman-Markey has inspired a new corporate interest group, USCAP, the United States Climate Action Partnership — the group largely responsible for the fact that carbon permits are being given away like candy at Christmas rather than auctioned. And who is lined up to receive a piece of the massive wealth transfer that Waxman-Markey will mandate? Canada Free Press lists:

Alcoa, American International Group (AIG) which withdrew after accepting government bailout money, Boston Scientific Corporation, BP America Inc., Caterpillar Inc., Chrysler LLC (which continues to lobby with taxpayer dollars), ConocoPhillips, Deere & Company, The Dow Chemical Company, Duke Energy, DuPont, Environmental Defense, Exelon Corporation, Ford Motor Company, FPL Group, Inc., General Electric, General Motors Corp. (now owned by the Obama administration), Johnson & Johnson, Marsh, Inc., National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council, The Nature Conservancy, NRG Energy, Inc., Pepsico, Pew Center on Global Climate Change, PG&E Corporation, PNM Resources, Rio Tinto, Shell, Siemens Corporation, World Resources Institute, Xerox Corporation.

Pew, NRDC, and the Environmental Defense Fund are what stood out to me. I guess you can cross those off your list of organizations you can trust on environmental and energy issues.

One thing that I would like to have seen in that article, though, are some more links. For example, can anyone at the National Review explain to me the lack of citation here (number 11 on the list)?

Two peer-reviewed scientific papers suggest that no-till either does nothing to decrease carbon dioxide or actually increases the level of greenhouse-gas emissions by upping emissions of nitrous oxide — a much more powerful greenhouse gas.

More on the second-generation biofuel scam

Counterpunch has more on what I think ought to be a bigger story: the ongoing failure of subsidized "green" energy sources. This one's about cellulosic ethanol, an "advanced" or "second-generation" biofuel, which promises all the energy independence and environmental cred that the first ethanol (corn ethanol) boasted (of course, it had neither), with the added benefit that it's not produced from food crops so it won't cause food prices to spike across the world (also not entirely true). Anyway, here is the article, and here is an earlier article in Counterpunch about basically the same thing (though I think the more recent one is better).

Here's a pretty long excerpt about the eternal promise that commercially viable non-food biofuels are "just around the corner":

Of all the people on that list, Lovins has been the longest – and the most consistently wrong – cheerleader for cellulosic fuels. His boosterism began with his 1976 article in Foreign Affairs, a piece which arguably made his career in the energy field. In that article, called “Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?” Lovins argued that American energy policy was all wrong. What America needed was “soft” energy resources to replace the “hard” ones (namely fossil fuels and nuclear power plants.) Lovins argued that the U.S. should be working to replace those sources with other, “greener” energy sources that were decentralized, small, and renewable. Regarding biofuels, he wrote that there are “exciting developments in the conversion of agricultural, forestry and urban wastes to methanol and other liquid and gaseous fuels now offer practical, economically interesting technologies sufficient to run an efficient U.S. transport sector.”

Lovins went on “Some bacterial and enzymatic routes under study look even more promising, but presently proved processes already offer sizable contributions without the inevitable climatic constraints of fossil-fuel combustion.” He even claims that given enough efficiency in automobiles, and a large enough bank of cellulosic ethanol distilleries, “the whole of the transport needs could be met by organic conversion.”

In other words, Lovins was making the exact same claim that Midgley made 45 years earlier: Given enough money – that’s always the catch isn’t it? – cellulosic ethanol would provide all of America’s transportation fuel needs.

The funny thing about Lovins is that between 1976 and 2004 -- despite the fact that the U.S. still did not have a single commercial producer of cellulosic ethanol -- he lost none of his skepticism. In his 2004 book Winning the Oil Endgame, Lovins again declared that advances in biotechnology will make cellulosic ethanol viable and that it “will strengthen rural America, boost net farm income by tens of billions of dollars a year, and create more than 750,000 new jobs.”

Lovins continued his unquestioning boosterism in 2006, when during testimony before the U.S. Senate, he claimed that “advanced biofuels (chiefly cellulosic ethanol)” could be produced for an average cost of just $18 per barrel.

The trade-off between passenger and freight rail

Normally Robert Poole at the Reason Foundation makes my blood curdle, but his blog post at the Reason Foundation brings up a very good point, if it is indeed true: because of Europe's emphasis on passenger rail, they only ship 10% of freight by rail, compared to a figure of 41% in the United States. I'm not entirely sure of the significance of this when all is said and done, but it's a fascinating fact.

So in fact, what the new federal funding will mostly be used for is upgrades to the existing shared passenger/freight tracks, aiming to get Amtrak trains up to speeds of 90 to 100 mph rather than today’s 60 or 70 mph. But that raises the question of getting the best use out of America’s existing railroad infrastructure. While it’s possible, with lots of passing sidings and expensive signaling systems, to operate both fast passenger trains and slower (and much longer) freight trains on the same trackage, the performance of both is hindered. U.S. freight railroads still have serious difficulties attracting time-sensitive freight, because rail freight takes so long (an intermodal trip from Tacoma to Columbus or Cincinnati takes 7 to 12 days) and is so uncertain (i.e., from 7 to 12 days!). Today’s high-tech, just-in-time logistics system cannot operate with such long times or with large schedule uncertainty, which is why so much freight moves by truck instead of rail.

In contrast with the United States, European countries over the last 50 years have opted to use their railroad networks primarily for passenger service (except for the new, separate HSR lines). If you compare goods-movement in Europe (the 27 EU countries) and the United States, you find that as of 2005, rail carried only 10% of all freight ton-miles in Europe, compared with 41% in the USA. Trucks in Europe handled 45% of ton-miles, compared with 30% here. That different mix of goods transport (other categories include pipeline, inland waterway, air freight, and coastwise shipping) has consequences for GHG emissions. In response to my query, Wendell Cox pulled together preliminary estimates of goods-movement GHGs for Europe and the United States and posted them here. (These are preliminary estimates, and Cox welcomes feedback.) What they show is that the GHG intensity of goods movement in Europe averages 193 grams/ton-mile compared with 155 grams/ton-mile in the United States. In other words, the current U.S. policy of using its railroad network mostly for freight is “greener” than the European policy of using its network primarily for passenger service.

Thus, by putting more 100 mph passenger trains on existing railroads, we risk thwarting the hoped-for shift of more freight from truck to rail.

William Tucker debunks the notion that a "smart grid" will save America

William Tucker at The Infrastructurist (perhaps my new favorite blog) has an article up in which he debunks the myth that the "smart grid" is going to alleviate America's energy woes.

First of all, he points out that a smart grid and a grid capable of distributing solar and wind power from the states with (i.e., the interior) to the states without (i.e., the coasts) are two totally different projects, and that any effort to conflate the two arrises either out of ignorance of willful deception:

The second premise is that the smart grid will help integrate wind and solar energy - the two balky “renewables” that have the disadvantage of not being dispatchable when we want them. With the smart grid, wind and solar generation will always be available somewhere and so can be conveyed to where it’s needed.

But these are different things. The true “smart grid” will be a digitalized distribution system that conveys real-time information. Incorporating remote wind and solar, on the other hand, will require an upgraded grid, something entirely different. Our present 345-kilovolt AC transmission wires can’t do it without unacceptable line losses. We will need to rebuild to 765-kilovolt DC system – something that could take decades and easily cost several trillion dollars.

And then he makes this point, which explains why all you ever hear about are how you're going to do your dishes and laundry at night instead of during the day:

It’s fitting that the girl is standing in front of a clothes dryer because that and washing dishes are the only examples anyone has ever been able to come up with about how residential users are going to “redistribute” their energy consumption.

What else can they do? Are they going to wait until after midnight to watch television? Are they going to heat up dinner at 4 a.m.? Are they going to turn on lights at sunrise instead of when it gets dark? And how about air conditioning, that most voracious consumer of electricity? One suggestion floated by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) in “The Green Grid,” a study published last June, is that people might “pre-cool” their homes by running the air conditioning in the morning in anticipation of hot afternoons. This may indeed level peak loads. But it will also consume more energy, since some of the pre-cooling will obviously dissipate.

The same author also has another good article on the same blog about nuclear power, in which he argues that it's a lot safer than people think, though I wish he'd spent a bit more time on the economics of nuclear power regulation. Namely, I'd like to know: could nuclear power be cost competitive with coal- and oil-fired power plants and still be just as safe? (Though he does touch on it when he points out that environmental controls on nuclear are much stricter than on coal-fired plants, despite the fact that the latter spew more radioactive substances than their nuclear counterparts.)

How some tariffs can actually be pro-free trade

Here's something you don't see every day: anti-protectionist tariffs. The European Commission is reportedly considering tacking import tariffs on biodiesel from the US in order to counter the subsidies that American producers receive from their own government. The tariffs will be tailored to, among other things, the amount of subsidies that the fuel receives back in the US:

The level of tariffs would be tailored to individual companies to reflect the types and amounts of the fuel they produce, and the amount of subsidies and other support they receive from American authorities, the diplomats said.

While this action would cancel out the effects of some of the American subsidies, there's still the matter of the European subsidies. The obvious reason for the encouragement of biodiesel is that it's more environmentally-friendly than fossil fuels, though I wonder if this is really the case.

People catching on to the second-generation biofuel scam

Obama had so much fun getting burned for his misguided support of state subsidies to corn ethanol producers that he's decided to do it again, this time with "next generation" biofuels that use things like prairie grasses to fuel SUVs instead of food. The thinking behind it is that despite the fact that corn-based ethanol caused massive increases in the price of food around the world, these "newer" and "greener" biofuels will use "marginal land" instead of crop land, and so will not be as harmful. This, of course, is bullshit, as I've written about earlier. Others are beginning to come around to this fact, and Counterpunch has a great article on the dangers of biofuels.

So far, Obama's energy plan has featured, as a cornerstone, tons of subsidization of "green" energy – first in corn ethanol, and later in advanced biofuels, wind, solar, geothermal, and some various other technologies. It's only been a few years since Obama's risen to prominence and taken a definitive stand on energy issues, but his record ain't too hot: corn-based ethanol and "advanced" biolfuels are looking like definite failures, wind is looking not too great, and the production of regulated solar panels has the nasty side effect of releasing a chemical which is much better at warming the planet than carbon dioxide.

The American government spends a lot of money making sure that Americans have access to cheap energy, so it's odd Obama wouldn't look into cutting subsidies for un-environmentally friendly suburban sprawl and automobiles rather than trying to play master scientist and build a perpetual motion machine.

Government-sponsored earthquakes

The Telegraph is running a story that claims that scientists in the US and China have concluded that the massively destructive 7.9 magnitude earthquake that hit Sichuan Province in China last May was caused by the Communist Party's insistence on building the Zipingpu dam in 2004. The earthquake killed 80,000, displaced a million, and has had reverberating political repercussions in China.

Unlike global warming, where there's a collective action problem, in a free market there would be ample incentive for entrepreneurs to not build damns that burst at the seams, undoing all their work after only five years of operation.

Evidently the US is not immune to the problem of massive public works projects causing earthquakes, though not on the magnitude of China:

There is a history of earthquakes triggered by dams, including several caused by the construction of the Hoover dam in the US, but none of such a magnitude.

Reforestation outpacing deforestation?

While most people associate cities with pollution and the material and ecological excess of late capitalism, I've long believed that urbanization has the potential to be a great environmental savior. The NYT has a fascinating article that confirms what I said about cities attracting people who would otherwise live more environmentally profligate lives: the amount of total rain forest is likely growing, due to the reforestation of towns and villages abandoned by people in Latin America and Asia who are moving to cities. Elisabeth Rosenthal, the article's author, explains the reasons that people are abandoning land at a growing pace:

In Latin America and Asia, birthrates have dropped drastically; most people have two or three children. New jobs tied to global industry, as well as improved transportation, are luring a rural population to fast-growing cities. Better farming techniques and access to seed and fertilizer mean that marginal lands are no longer farmed because it takes fewer farmers to feed a growing population.

By some estimates, these demographic and technological shifts mean that forests are growing back far faster than they're being cut down:

These new “secondary” forests are emerging in Latin America, Asia and other tropical regions at such a fast pace that the trend has set off a serious debate about whether saving primeval rain forest – an iconic environmental cause – may be less urgent than once thought. By one estimate, for every acre of rain forest cut down each year, more than 50 acres of new forest are growing in the tropics on land that was once farmed, logged or ravaged by natural disaster.

There are two problems, though, with the new forests: they aren't "old growth" forests, and they aren't necessarily able to support many endangered species. The first part – the fact that they are "secondary" forests and not primeval – might be important in that it means the ecosystem is not as dense and complex as it would be in, say, a rain forest that hasn't been touched since pre-Colombian times. Scientists haven't reached a consensus on how significant this is, though it's comforting to note that as time passes, the now-secondary forests will become denser and older. As for the endangered species, it's a combination of the first point (new growth) and the fact that these new jungles are growing in different places than the forests which are being cut down, and are not reachable by the animals that are endangered within the old growth.

Reading this makes me think of a Wired article from a few years back about the Mayans and the rain forest, and how much of the Yucatán jungles are likely to be feral gardens of the ancient Mayans.

Ethanol fallout: East Africa edition

Thanks to the run-up in world food prices widely attributed to ethanol subsidies in the US and the UK – and the subsequent crash – farmers all over the world have likely made unrealistic calculations about food prices. Prices of course rise and fall all the time, but generally only huge technological leaps or demographic shifts (of which there have been none) will cause prices to vary so much that the majority of entrepreneurs will fail miserably in their investments. The exception to this is government action, which can in an instant blow apart or liberate markets, with the awesome power of the state's legitimacy and implicit threat of violence.

The New York Times documents this phenomenon in Senegal, where ethanol subsidies in the US and Europe indirectly drove the price of rice above its historical level, and now that it's set to fall back down, many small farmers are going to fail miserably.

Something interesting to note is that a previous government malinvestment exacerbated the flight to rice farming:

But the crisis also presented an opportunity to millions of farmers across Africa: high prices could finally make their crops competitive.

In Senegal, farmers eyed the long-neglected Senegal River valley, which snakes along the country’s northern border with Mauritania. A government project in the 1970s built irrigation canals that made more than 600,000 acres of land ready to produce rice, but farmers were too poor to afford the materials to farm the land on a large scale. The project was largely abandoned.

Nevertheless, the dream of creating a rice basket here never really died.

The "dream" never died, and neither did the fixed cost of the investment, unfortunately. Here we have an efficient market mechanism – a large fixed cost in the form of irrigation canals which normally would have prevented the irrational malinvestment in rice – that was destroyed by a government, exacerbating the effects of a bubble.

Also interesting to note is that the proximate government failure – that of America's corn ethanol subsidies – was one that was championed by Barack Obama when he was in the Senate. He later had the good sense to step back from his support of ethanol subsidies, though he's understandably reluctant to mention this failure when he discusses the industries that America's new green energy plan is going to subsidize. Unfortunately, we're already hearing ways that his post-ethanol energy agenda could go horribly wrong for the environment and the world's poorest countries.

Uncomfortable truths about the progressive legacy

Yesterday I was listening to the pre-inaugural concert at the Lincoln Memorial on the radio, and one of the speakers said something that struck me as emblematic of the challenges that Barack Obama faces, though I doubt she realized the ironic significance. She was praising Theodore Roosevelt's conservationist legacy as a model for Obama, though she only touched on a small sliver of Roosevelt's environmental legacy. He definitely did cherish the environment; a timeline of his life shows that in early April 1903 he "communes with deer while writing letters in Yellowstone, WY." He was indeed a conservationist, as were many progressives at the time.

But the progressives were also something else – something that today's progressives would do well to remember: ardent planners whose plans often had grave unforeseen consequences. Just after his time communing with the deer at Yellowstone, Roosevelt traveled to St. Louis to address the 1903 Good Roads Convention. The "good roads" movement dated back to before the automobile rose to prominence, and was formed to agitate for improved roads for bicyclists and farmers. But around the time of Roosevelt's speech, the movement was hijacked by the automobile industry. Unwilling or unable to compete on their own against mass transit, the automakers sought for the government to clear and pave the roads they needed in order to sell their cars – an advantage the streetcars and railroads did not generally have. Not wanting to appear to be too blatant in their rent seeking, the automobile industry lobbied the government indirectly, giving organizations like the AAA money in exchange for influence and seats on their boards.

The nascent auto industry was not the only booster of subsidized roads – even the private railroads were not immune to the siren song of the great new progressive future. They joined the cause in the 1890s with the idea that improved roads would mean more business for railroads, unaware of the threat that the long-haul trucking industry would come to pose to their business. This new semi-public, semi-private corporatist transportation model suited the progressives as well, who believed in a statist future where "private" enterprise was directed and controlled, though not outright owned, by the government.

In the years since the 1903 Good Roads Convention, the idea that government ought to be providing "good roads" has fundamentally altered the landscape of the country in ways that Theodore Roosevelt never could have imagined. The highway lobby gathered strength throughout the early half of the 20th century, eventually culminating in the Interstate Highway System, the widespread suburbanization of America, and the deterioration of once-great American cities. Urban planners like Robert Moses razed neighborhoods and blighted the remaining barren expanses with highways that have become increasingly congested ever since. In order to stave off this inevitable overuse, planners flattened America with zoning laws and parking regulations that forced America to sprawl ever farther from its city centers, to areas reachable only by cars and trucks. A century later it's hard to imagine it happening any other way, and it's often forgotten that there was a workable free market urbanism before there was unsustainable sprawl.

Theodore Roosevelt might be more commonly remembered for his conservationist work, but it's important for people today to remember the unforeseen consequences of the progressives' other grand plans. The "good roads" path that he helped put America on has shown itself to be an enabler of global climate change and belligerent petrostates, encouraging Americans to live farther apart, travel longer distances each day, have bigger houses, and fill those houses with more things. The common telling of the roading of America is that it greased the wheels of commerce and is an integral part of the "American dream," but it's impossible to know what sort of advances in mass transit technology would have come about and how we'd be living had the government not favored the automobile and the truck over the streetcar and the train. Theodore Roosevelt's conservationist efforts are indeed praiseworthy, but might both the environment and the economy be in better shape today had the progressives not interrupted the rail-based urbanization of turn-of-the-century America and put us on the car-based sprawling sub- and exurbanization that characterizes America today?

In calling for the government to fund mass transit and urban projects, Barack Obama has shown that he recognizes the problems of America's land use configuration. But in doing so, he shows himself to be ignorant of the root causes of the crisis: government meddling in the transportation and land use industries. Just as the progressives and futurists failed to use the government to direct a more efficient transportation scheme, Obama will likely fail in using the government to fix America's energy problems. Unless he renounces the legacy of the progressives and admits to America that it needs to return to its market-based roots – at least with respect to transportation and land use policy – his campaign promises of reversing our unsustainable ways will go unfulfilled.

Coal's causing global warming – and we're about to run out of coal?

I'm a few days late on this, but Wired has two articles up that challenge popular conceptions of where global warming is coming from, and how likely exogenous factors are to put a sudden halt to it.

The first article's idea is well summed-up in the headline: "Oil Is Not the Climate Change Culprit – It's All About Coal." Evidently this idea is pretty popular among scientists, who argue that oil consumption is not causing global warming:

While both Kharecha and Caldeira stopped short of saying that the world's oil usage didn't matter, Caldeira seemed to capture their joint sentiment when he called the combustion of oil a "second-order effect."

The second article takes this fact and turns it into an argument that global warming might come to an abrupt end: "World Coal Reserves Could Be a Fraction of Previous Estimates." This is based on a study done by Dave Rutledge, chair of Caltech's engineering and applied sciences division, who argues that the discrepancy between his estimates and other estimates is that countries were often interested in inflating their coal reserves rather than accurately measuring them, though he doesn't explain why non-governmental experts haven't produced surveys coming to similar conclusions.

If "peak coal" really is coming soon, this means that many climate change models are way too pessimistic:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change uses economic models that assume that the world will not run out of coal. Some IPCC scenarios show 3.4 billion tons of coal being burned just through 2100. That's more than five times what Rutledge thinks will be possible — and a good deal higher than the WEC's estimate for recoverable coal reserves, too.

But, as a scientist notes at the end of the article, the end of coal doesn't necessarily mean the end of global warming – a lot depends on what coal is replaced with:

"Peak Oil and peak gas and peak coal could really go either way for the climate," Kharecha said. "It all depends on choices for subsequent energy sources."

Bad government incentives make solar panels not so green

As with all things, I think Obama's big push for alternative fuels will result in a lot of bad choices for the environment, as economic efficiency is often tied to energetic efficiency – simply put, it's hard and expensive to extract fuels in inefficient ways. This argument would seem to fall apart in the face of the dominance of dirty coal and oil, but if you look at the goods that use or energy or otherwise affect its consumption (i.e., all of them), the market is heavily skewed in favor of big, dense buildings that require lots of energy for construction, temperature control, transportation to and from, and furnishings/decoration/the stuff you put inside.

Anyway, I've noticed this theory borne out recently – with corn ethanol, non-food biofuels, and some wind power – and tonight I read an article in Foreign Policy about a potentially ecologically destructive compound used in the production of photovoltaic solar panels.

Think switching to solar energy will make you green? Think again. Many of the newest solar panels are manufactured with a gas that is 17,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide in contributing to global warming. [...]

Nitrogen trifluoride, or NF3, is used for cleaning microcircuits during the manufacture of a host of modern electronics, including flat-screen TVs, iPhones, computer chips—and thin-film solar panels, the latest (and cheapest) generation of solar photovoltaics. [...] For the past decade, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has actively encouraged its use. NF3 also wasn’t deemed dangerous enough to be covered by the Kyoto Protocol, making it an attractive substitute for companies and signatory countries eager to lower their emissions footprints.

It turns out that NF3 might not be so green after all. “NF3 has a potential greenhouse impact larger than … even that of the world’s largest coal-fired power plants,” according to a June 2008 study by researchers at the University of California, Irvine. Because NF3 isn’t covered by Kyoto, few attempts have been made to measure it in the atmosphere. But last October, scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography reported that four times more NF3 is present in the atmosphere than industry estimates suggest, and its concentration is rising 11 percent a year.

Compared with the damage caused by CO2 emissions, NF3 remains a blip because far less of it is emitted. But Ray Weiss, who led the Scripps team, thinks that, unless regulations require more complete greenhouse gas measurements, more unpleasant surprises will be in store. With NF3, he says, “We’re finding considerably more in the atmosphere than was expected. This [gas] won’t be the only example of that.”

Three important things in here: first, NF3 is apparently responsible for much of the price drop in PV panels. Secondly, the EPA has been encouraging the use of this potentially dangerous compound above the market equilibrium. And thirdly, these scientists fully expect to find more compounds that are more dangerous than scientists and regulators thought. Meaning, this isn't going to be the only regulatory mistake that encourages pollutants in the air.

Non-food biofuels could increase the risk of invasive species and (wild?)fires

Here's another downside to non-food biofuels, which Obama has made part of his alternative energy subsidization plan: the crops used to make the biofuel are often invasive species, and some raise the risk of fires. Researchers from the Nature Conservancy and the Global Invasive Species Programme give the huge and slightly unbelievable number of 5% global GDP as the current cost of invasive species, for some perspective on the impact of invasive species.

There are other downsides to non-food biofuels. Environmentalists have concerns that these non-food biocrops will crowd out farmland and otherwise natural land in the global south, and I have concerns that the cultivation of non-food grasses will further degrade the Praire Pothole Region.

Farm subsidies and ecological destruction, how government conservation can be libertarian, and how Obama's energy plan could make it all much worse

I was reading a pretty sad article in the Washington Post about how federal government subsidies are destroying what would otherwise be more-or-less wild prairie lands, and two things in particular stuck out to me: federal ownership and conservation of land might actually be a more libertarian arrangement on net, and that this sort of creeping ecological destruction could get a lot worse with Obama's plans to subsidize non-food biofuels.

Regarding federal lands: the most obvious libertarian position on federal land ownership is that it's a bad idea, though when you consider the bigger picture, Kevin Carson's distinction between atomistic and dialectic libertarianism comes to mind:

Fighting the trend is an array of hunting and conservation groups. The political circumstances in the West have forced them to try to protect the grassland without making it a national park or a federal preserve. "There is still strong resistance in the West to extending federal ownership of land," said Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group.

Scott Stephens, director of conservation planning for Ducks Unlimited, estimates that the Prairie Pothole Region of the Dakotas and Montana could lose an additional 3.3 million acres of native grassland to farming over the next five years if prices stay high and federal policy does not change.

The situation is not ideal – theoretically you'd want to do away with the farm subsidies and the federal ownership, leaving the land's development as an product of its actual productivity – but if federal control will achieve an outcome closer to the free market equilibrium, it's hard to argue that selling the land on the unfree market is a step in the right direction.

Regarding non-food biofuels: this one's a lot scarier. Last month I wrote about an environmental group's warning that non-food biofuels could end up being just as environmentally and economically destructive as corn-based ethanol, and that the definition of "marginal lands" is subjective and prone to exaggeration. And here we have a perfect example of that: this land is land that would not be productive without crop insurance subsidies, because of its inhospitable growing conditions. The WaPo article even uses the same word that the ETC Group told us to look out for: "fragile land that is of marginal use for farming."

These Great Plains climates are exactly the kind that biofuel boosters like Obama intend to use to grow crops like switchgrass. And while switchgrass might be more native to the area than corn and other crops that subsidized farmers are planting now, you can bet that the farming techniques that are eventually used to cultivate the non-food biofuels won't in any way approximate the natural environmental equilibrium or the free market economic equilibrium. The Great Plains might not be the Amazon rainforest, but just because a place looks desolate doesn't mean that it isn't important to the greater ecological balance. I hope that Obama's biofuel investment plan will properly weigh the costs of subsidization of these sorts of non-food fuels against their benefits, though I fear that the chances of this happening are slim to none.

The inanity of mandates

The Washington Post last week had an interested article about a congressional mandate for federal agencies to buy ever-increasing amounts of vehicles capable of running on alternative fuels, such as ethanol, propane, and compressed natural gas. The only problem is that while there was a mandate in place to buy flex-fuel vehicles, there was no corresponding mandate to use the supposedly "green" capabilities of these cars, and as a result, "more than 92 percent of the fuel used in the government's alternative-fuel fleet continues to be standard gasoline." (And obviously mandating that government or private agencies build vast distribution networks is entirely unfeasible, and in the case of ethanol, we know in retrospect that it wouldn't have been a good idea, anyway). The Postal Service – an agency that you'd think, because of its large car and truck fleets, would be in a good position to demand and use alternative fuels, failed just as badly (if not worse) than other agencies:

The Postal Service illustrates the problem. It estimates that its 37,000 newer alternative-fuel delivery vans, which can run on high-grade ethanol, consumed 1.5 million additional gallons of gasoline last fiscal year because of the larger engines.

These alternative fuel vehicles tend to have larger engines than the sorts of cars and trucks that these agencies would purchase without the mandate, and so in the end, these mandates have had a negative environmental impact, not to mention costing federal agencies more money:

"They were bigger, they ran on gas, and they weren't fuel-efficient,'' said Mark Gaffigan, director of natural resources and environment with the Government Accountability Office, which completed a program audit last month. "If they had just bought regular vehicles that were more fuel-efficient, they would be better off."

It's scary to think of all of the ways that environmentalism could go wrong again during the coming years. I discussed the potentially disastrous consequences of non-food biofuels two weeks again.