The Wealth of Planets

Ecocide in the Gulf of Mexico: Fact-checking the ABC Roundtable

2010-05-02T18:01:00.000-07:00

The massive oil spill flooding the Gulf of Mexico at this moment provides a timely, if grim, example of the failure of modern economic theory to take true costs into account. In economic parlance, the spill is an "externality" - something that is the result of a transaction between two parties, but which is largely paid for by others. The oil company (BP) rented the oil drilling rig from a company (Transocean) and hired another party to cement off the well (Halliburton), with the intention of either selling the crude oil to a refinery or refining itself, and then selling the resulting product, gasoline or diesel, to the consumer (you and me). Don't own a car, you say? How does your food get from the field to the store?

However, the economic costs of the spill will be borne by the residents of the Gulf of Mexico (and perhaps also the Florida Keys and the southern Eastern Seaboard). The ecological costs are the reason there are economic costs - a massive marine die-off and contamination of the entire fishery system is expected, with migrating birds and marine mammals taking another huge hit. Is ecocide too strong of a word? I seriously doubt it.

Now, if these costs were included in the price of oil, in the rig rental, in the offshore oil lease, you wouldn't see any oil drilling at all - instead, you'd see the investments move into wind and solar and photosynthetic biofuels, which have very low externality costs. However, academic economists have tended to avoid discussing this issue - because it would mean taking economics out of the 'business schools' and making it a branch of physics and ecology - and economists aren't required to learn basic science in college - look at any curriculum. Thermodynamics? Ecosystem structure? Even energy sciences, or engineering? Forget about it. This would require something of an academic revolution, I do believe.

Now, let's do our fact-check of the ABC roundtable - keeping this issue of 'externalities' in mind:

-begin transcript-

ABC: Here are few moments from last night's White House Correspondent's Dinner. The President donned his tux , took time out from his day job, and played comedian.

President Obama: It's been quite a year since I've spoken here last. Lots of ups, lots of downs. I happen to know that my approval ratings are still very high in the country of my birth [laughter]. I'm also glad that I'm speaking first, because we've all seen what happens when somebody takes the time slot after Leno's [laughter]... Even as we enjoy each other's company tonight, we're also mindful of the incredible struggles of our fellow citizens in the Gulf Coast. Both those leading the efforts to stem this crisis, and those along the coast whose livelihoods are in jeopardy. ..

ABC: An we're now joined by a powerhouse roundtable as always, George F. Will, from the National Action Network, the Reverend Al Sharpton, from HBO's Real Time, with Bill Maher, former Bush adviser Matthew Dowd, and Katrina vanden Heuvel, from The Nation, thanks one and all.

George, I've heard some conservative critics say that this oil slick is President Obama's Katrina. Is it?

GEORGE WILL: No, and it may come as a news bulletin to the president himself, but he's not responsible for everything - bad things happen. This is a reality check for a nation that's ravenous for energy, and has to be and always has been. Getting our source of energy has risks. The Exxon Valdez called our attention to the fact that it's very dangerous shipping oil across the surface of the oceans. Since the Exxon Valdez, there have been seven larger tanker spills. You can go up to West Virginia where twenty-nine miners are being mourned today, and they will tell you about the risks in mining coal. No one says, "Stop mining coal because of this."

WEALTH OF PLANETS: The fact is that the Minerals Management Service(MMS), the section of Ken Salazar's Department of the Interior that oversees all offshore drilling in the outer continental shelf and the Gulf of Mexico, could have issued regulations that forced offshore oil rigs to install expensive safety devices, as required by Norway and Brazil. Apparently, the MMS caved to pressure by oil companies (including BP and Halliburton, which have a huge lobbying arm in Washington) and decided not to require those safety devices on offshore wellheads. This is indeed similar to the Katrina-linked disaster in New Orleans, which could have been prevented if the needed improvements in levees had been made - and if the Louisiana National Guard's equipment hadn't been shipped off to the marshes of Iraq. However, Bush wanted to play down the dangers of global warming-fueled hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, and Obama wanted to play down the dangers of offshore oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico - so yes, there are clear similarities.

As far as the Exxon Valdez, we've seen how Exxon lobbied against tighter regulations on oil shipping - for example, the requirement for expensive double-hulled vessels for shipping oil - as well as against paying the $5 billion settlement - which was cut by a federal appeals court in 2006 to $2.5 billion, and again by the Supreme Court to only $0.5 billion, in 2008. This is comparable to the cost of building a single supertanker today - and this is a company that has pulled down $40 billion in quarterly profits at one go. Exxon and the other oil majors have decided that rather than spend billions on upgrading their infrastructure to prevent spills, they'll just pay a few hundred million in fines from time to time - it's cheaper, isn't it? I'm not sure what point George Will is trying to make here, actually - more regulations are needed?

With the coal mine disaster, were are talking about Massey Coal, which have a long record of mine safety violations - again, they refuse to follow the laws because that would undercut their profits. What's another common theme here? The energy companies have tried to pack the courts - from the Supreme Court on down - with judges who will overturn jury awards and strip legislative bodies of the power to regulate them. Massey is a much smaller energy company than any oil major, but they all operate on the same wavelength.

One interesting issue on BP's past drilling operations:

The Tana Exploration Company, LLC was fined $190,000 after BP employees, working as contractors, bypassed the safety valves on a Tana rig. Investigators found that the rig failed to shut down in an emergency because the safety devices had been bypassed. As a result, "The pipeline experienced overpressure and the flange gasket ruptured allowing gas/condensate to escape," according to MMS records.

*http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/5899/exploding_rig_company_has_history_of_safety_violations/

George Will's punchline is a standard PR gimmick - coal mine disasters are inevitable, and so are offshore oil drilling disasters, so just deal with it. However, the coal mine disasters aren't on the same scale - the ecological and economic effects of a major offshore oil blowout are far more severe in both time and space, as we can now see (and the same thing happened offshore California in 1969). Clearly, George Will is running a propaganda game here - what a performance!

ABC: Reverend, some critics, not just from the right - are saying that the Obama Administration was slow - the New York Times editorial board faulted the administration - is that unfair criticism?

AL SHARPTON: Well, I don't think so. I think that when you look at the fact that first of all this has been an evolving crisis, this did not happen, unlike Katrina, where you had a natural disaster that immediately blanketed a whole area, and we were watching it live on television, this got worse over time and I think that there's evidence that the White House has put out - I have not talked to them, but I've read this on their websites - of how they met each rising crisis with personnel there Cabinet members there, now the President going. Unlike George Bush, that said he didn't see the crisis and we sat there four or five days and watched it live on television - so I think any analogy is absolutely ridiculous.

WEALTH OF PLANETS: Having already pointed out that the failure of Obama's Minerals Management Service to require expensive safety devices on these offshore oil rigs parallels the failure of Bush's Army Corps of Engineers to install modern levees around New Orleans (as in the Low Countries of Europe*), let's take a look at the immediate response.

*http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/17-01/ff_dutch_delta

Al Sharpton claims that this has been an 'evolving crisis' - and the same was true in New Orleans. Initially, the reports were that New Orleans had escaped a major disaster - and then the levees were breached. The scale of the flooding was initially underestimated, and resources were only slowly put in place. The Bush Administration's FEMA response was entirely inadequate (Heck of a job!) - all hat, no cattle, as the saying goes - and much avoidable death and destruction ensued.

Now, the first press report of the Deepwater Horizon explosion came through on April 21, at 1:20 am. While boats were trying to put out the fire with water, I've seen no pictures of any aerial bombardment efforts to douse the flames. There was no rapid-response team in place - indeed, the Coast Guard was primarily focused on rescuing oil workers, not on preventing a blowout or stopping the rig from sinking

*http://www.wwl.com/Oil-rig-explosion-off-Plaquemines-has-big-rescue-e/6854700

The first comments from the Coast Guard press officer, Mike O'Berry?

"It's burning pretty good and there's no estimate on when the fire will be put out... We're hoping everyone's in a life raft.. Our focus right now is on taking care of the people....It appears there is no oil coming out of the well at this time...We're not out of the woods yet but that is some positive news..."

Coast Guard Rear Admiral Landry repeated the PR line: "We are only seeing minor sheening on the water," she said. "We do not see a major spill emanating from this incident."*

In Washington, President Barack Obama said in a statement that the federal response to the disastrous spill "was being treated as the number one priority." Doing a heck of a job, Coast Guard!

At this point, could steps have been taken to secure the riser? Was there anything they could have done? I don't know - but they clearly seem to have ignored that issue. Notice also that at this point, they had calm seas and low winds*, so a perhaps a lot could have been accomplished.

*http://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2010/04/search_for_survivors_of_oil_ri.html

However, the only "rapid response" that the industry kick-started was the propaganda effort, led by their crisis management team:

American Petroleum Institute Pres. Jack N. Gerard, April 21, first thing in the morning: “Every time an incident happens, we ask ourselves what we can do better,” Gerard said. “We’re working for a zero-injury, zero-fatality effort.”*

Republican governor Bobby Jindall also chimed in: "Officials at the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority are also working with the state's oil spill coordinator's office to monitor any potential environmental impact."*

Transocean (Geneva, Switzerland) spokesman Adrian Rose, on Halliburton's cementing off job: "This was conducted according to plan, with appropriate testing completed, with no indication of any problems. We don't know what caused the incident. Our efforts have firstly concentrated on caring for the people, and secondly securing the rig... There was undoubtedly some abnormal pressure buildup. As oil or gas came up, it expanded rapidly and ignited. This is an assumption. We still don’t know exactly the cause.”*

*http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-04-21/transocean-says-blowout-may-have-caused-rig-fire-update1-.html

Larry Goldstein, director of the fossil fuel funded Energy Policy Research Foundation: “It’s a tragedy, but at the end of the day we are not going to stop doing things that need to be done."* George Will echoed those comments, did he not?

*http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/us/23offshore.html

Here is where the failure to put the remotely operated acoustic switch on the wellhead blowout prevention device comes into play. Assuming the device worked, they could have staunched the flow immediately, put out the fire, and kept the rig from sinking. However, as the fire progressed on April 21, the rig began leaning over on its side. Regardless, no concerns about an oil spill had been raised - in fact, Coast Guard officials had been actively downplaying such concerns.

So - did the industry and the federal government know about the risks?

"Explorers began work on 17 new Gulf of Mexico wells last week in waters deeper than 1,000 feet (305 meters), spurred in part by a tripling in crude prices in the past decade. The threat of pressure surges, or blowouts, that can smash steel equipment and create gushing columns of fire increases as drillers probe deeper, Neal Dingmann, an analyst at Wunderlich Securities, said.*

*http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-04-23/oil-producers-risk-blowouts-blazes-in-search-for-deeper-fields.html

Then, on April 23, the rig sank to the bottom -with 700,000 gallons of diesel fuel onboard! An almost unremarked point. By April 24, the Coast Guard had stopped claiming that it there was no spill, and had publicized the 1,000 barrel per day number.

By April 25, they had finally gotten around to sending underwater vehicles down to the wellhead to attempt to active the blowout preventer - again, no remote acoustic triggering mechanism had been installed, due to BP's fierce lobbying efforts at the Minerals Management Service. Time elapsed: four days. Time elapsed in Katrina before a major response? Five days, wasn't it?

Doug Suttles, chief operating officer of BP Exploration & Production: "The blowout preventer -- which weighs about 450 tons and sits on the sea floor next to the well -- could take 24-36 hours to activate"*

*http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE63O27L20100425

By this time, the calm weather at the time of the accident was gone, and seven-foot seas were rolling in, closing the window of opportunity for a rapid response. Now, we're into April 26-28, and the robotic effort to seal the well - using untested methods - was faltering, and ultimately failed. Finally, on April 29, 2010, we get the first realistic statement from the federal government of the scale of the disaster: "Gulf Coast oil spill could eclipse Exxon Valdez"*

*http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2010/04/29/new_oil_leak_in_well_of_sunken_drilling_rig/

"It is of grave concern," David Kennedy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told The Associated Press. "I am frightened. This is a very, very big thing. And the efforts that are going to be required to do anything about it, especially if it continues on, are just mind-boggling."

The oil slick could become the nation's worst environmental disaster in decades, threatening hundreds of species of fish, birds and other wildlife along the Gulf Coast, one of the world's richest seafood grounds, teeming with shrimp, oysters and other marine life. Thicker oil was in waters south and east of the Mississippi delta about five miles offshore.

The leak from the ocean floor proved to be far bigger than initially reported, contributing to a growing sense among many in Louisiana that the government failed them again, just as it did during Hurricane Katrina. President Barack Obama dispatched Cabinet officials to deal with the crisis." "Cade Thomas, a fishing guide in Venice, worried that his livelihood will be destroyed. He said he did not know whether to blame the Coast Guard, the federal government or oil company BP PLC. "They lied to us. They came out and said it was leaking 1,000 barrels when I think they knew it was more. And they weren't proactive," he said. "As soon as it blew up, they should have started wrapping it with booms."

So - eight days later...Is the Katrina analogy appropriate? There are certain undeniable similarities, are there not?

Deputy Interior Secretary David Hayes: "The U.S. Minerals Management Service, the U.S. agency that oversees offshore drilling and its parent, the Department of the Interior, and the Coast Guard will investigate the cause of the explosion."

Now, can we trust them to investigate the cause in any detail? We'll see.

ABC: Bill, I was watching your show Friday night, and you said, in language more suitable for premium cable...

BILL MAHER: I promise I won't here. They're so nervous about that.

ABC: ...that you're surprised that President Obama isn't getting more, shall we say, "guff" for this crisis?

BILL MAHER: "Guff" - exactly. I think he should. He owns this issue now, because it was only a few weeks ago that he came out for offshore drilling, and I would say philosophically, you know, the problem I think a lot of people on the left have with this country, and have had for many years, is that there's no one who really represents our point of view. There's two parties who want to fight the war on terror with an army in Afghanistan, there's two parties who want to drill offshore - where is the other side on this? So, I could certainly criticize oil companies, and I could criticize America in general for not attacking this problem in the seventies, I mean, Brazil got off oil in the last thirty years, and we certainly could have. But it is very disappointing, I think, for this president to be taking a position as he has - and I guess he's backpedaling now on it, I hope - I mean, I hope there's a flip-flop I can believe in there, but...

ABC: There's a slogan for you. "Flip flops you can believe in."

BILL MAHER: Yeah, I could believe in that one, and I hope he does.

WEALTH OF PLANETS: Maher is correct that Brazil has diversified their energy system - renewables provide a remarkable 45.1% of their energy mix, whereas OECD countries (industrialized nations) only get 6.2% of their energy from renewables. In 2008 sugarcane ethanol overtook gasoline as the most used transportation fuel in Brazil. Sugarcane, incidentally, is not a driver of deforestation in the Amazon - that's mostly due to soy and cattle production for export to OECD countries.

However, as a developing country with limited resources, Brazil has been slower to adopt solar and wind, despite the vast potential. It could earn foreign exchange by selling sugarcane ethanol to the U.S. - but, at the behest of the oil refiners in the U.S., our government has slapped high import tariffs on Brazilian sugarcane ethanol - in direct opposition to the "free-trade" mantra that the U.S. government will chant at the drop of a hat. George Will is silent on this as well.

The one point I'd make with Maher is that energy and ecology are not "left-right" issues, in that everyone requires energy services (light, heat, cooling, transportation), and everyone requires ecosystem services (food, clean water, clean air, and, yes, biodiversity). People are part of the ecosystem - like it or not, left or right, top or bottom, that's the reality. To think otherwise is sheer insanity - but that's a common illness among modern economists - on both the left and the right.

ABC: Matt, where's the public on this issue?

MATTHEW DOWD: Well I think the public - first of all, the public doesn't think there's any equal nature to Katrina and this. I mean, Katrina obviously evacuated an entire area, and what that issue was was such a different issue than this - but I think where the public is on this, I think if you put this in the context of what happened in West Virginia in the mine disaster, and this in context of Katrina, even though it was different, and this in context of many things, I think the public sits there and says, "Who is in charge? Who is accounatable and who - what governmental entity can actually be effective in doing anything?" And I think that ultimately is where the public is - just another example of the fact that we cannot trust the government to do anything that we need them to do. From mines - even I believe on health care, to the oil spill - it's a loss of faith, again I think, in the government.

WEALTH OF PLANETS: While this may or may not be true, public opinon wise (polls?), Dowd ignores the underlying reason why the government can't be trusted with these issues - it's because the financial interests that benefit from fossil fuels have too much influence over government decisions - it's a corruption issue. The legislative, the judicial, and the executive branches of government no longer view the public interest as their top priority, but rather the private interests - the ones who finance their political campaigns, the ones who provide lucrative executive positions for compliant government bureaucrats after they exit government, and the ones who blacklist any government employee with the guts to stand up to their agenda.

These private interests also exert great control over corporate media outlets in the U.S. - which is why people like Dennis Kucinich always get smeared by the press, blocked out of political debates, and so on. Stating that people don't trust the government, while not explaining the root sources of that distrust, is nothing but a shady propaganda device aimed at smearing the current government - when, the other party would run government exactly the same way. Matthew Dowd and Al Sharpton do come across as political hacks for their respective parties, in this sense.

KATRINA VANDEN HEUVAL: What we've seen are the risks are too great - offshore drilling is the problem not the solution, this is not Katrina, 1500 dead, hundreds of thousands homeless - I think more important is to understand that we now need a government that is going to regulate a company, BP, which was a serial abuser of workers and of safety regulations, just like Massey, we need regulations - tough enforcement -

ABC: Massey - with the West Virginia mine?

KATRINA VANDEN HEUVAL: The mine. We need a government that understands that. I would also point out that this was the week, that for the first time an offshore wind farm was approved. And George Will may not see a future in that, but I believe we need a Manhattan Project and an Apollo Alliance to ramp up public and private investment - at the moment, energy companies spend one quarter of one percent of their budget on R&D. We can do better. We are a nation which should do better, George, and not rely on dirty energy which just compounds the problem effecting this country and the planet.

WEALTH OF PLANETS: So close, and yet so far off the mark! I've already pointed out the Katrina analogies, which are really seen in the run-up to both events - years of neglect lead to both disasters, and then there was a rush to play down the severity, followed by a shameful admission of "Oops, we screwed up again, but we're doing the best we can. Everyone is behaving splendidly" - and then the statistics - "we have (x) people working around the clock on this, and so on."

Heuval ducks the reason why there aren't regulations, however, and also the reason the regulations aren't enforced - it's cheaper for the corporate interest to pay the fine, rather than to invest billions in better, safer infrastructure. This won't end until criminal penalties are put in place, as well as severe financial penalities - which is why I think the assets of BP and Halliburton in the U.S. should be frozen, so that they'll be there to pay for the massive damages to the regional economy. The damages to the ecosystem cannot be counted in dollars alone - here's where the academic economists and I part ways - and that's why ecocide should be a criminal offense.

Heuval also is ignorant of the facts on renewable energy technology - the Manhattan Project for solar was done in the 1950s at Bell Labs, when the technology was devised. The Apollo Alliance might be a little closer, but getting to the moon is much more difficult than building and installing silicon photovoltaic panels.

Most importantly, she neglects the fact that renewable energy, in the eyes of OECD energy corporations, is an inherently disruptive technology. What is a "disruptive technology" you ask? It's like an "emerging technology", but there's a key difference - rather than simply creating a new consumer market, it also destroys an older consumer market. Computers were an emerging technology, in that there was nothing like them - but solar cells, also based on silicon chips, would have undermined coal, oil and gas sales on a massive scale. Hence, solar cell use was initially limited to remote installations (satellites, Coast Guard buoys, etc.) and the financial centers refused to invest in them. On the other hand, billions were dumped into computers, and huge fortunes were made along the way. (Although the computer industry is now facing new disruptive technology, like Linux operating systems, which threaten those profits).

Wind energy, for example, relies on a free commodity - so if you build and operate a wind turbine, and then shut down a natural gas, coal or nuclear plant, you also disrupt the sales of gas, coal and enriched uranium. Since our major banks, from Goldman Sachs to Bank of America, are also big-time commodity traders in natural gas, oil, coal and uranium - well, do you think they're going to invest in technologies that seriously undermine their business plans?

So, to change this you'd have to first reform the federal government's research budget and their regulatory rules and incentives in the energy sector. That means a major overhaul at the Department of Energy - but has The Nation every ran an analysis of the DOE budget in the context of energy research? They might be shocked at what they find - which is that the DOE's research budget for solar and wind energy is a good deal smaller than "one quarter of one percent." In fact, most goes to nuclear weapons-related research and nuclear waste cleanup, followed by fossil fuel research. The cause? The bureaucratic revolving door - the private contractors - aka, "corruption in government."

We also need a new set of guidelines for electric utilities - such as a nationwide renewable energy portfolio standard, feed-in tariffs that guarantee prices for renewable energy providers, and the elimination of subsidies for non-renewable energy sources. Both Obama and Bush are opposed to such efforts - not too surprising, considering that Obama and his closest advisors (Axelrod and Emmanuel) all owe their positions largely to the largesse of the energy and finance sectors, particularly coal, nuclear and utilities. This is slightly different from Bush, who was more closely associated with global oil and natural gas concerns - but only slightly. If Obama switches course, he'll be abandoning the very interests who've been his prime backers from the beginning - that's hard to do.

ABC: Mr Will, your name has been invoked.

GEORGE WILL: Well, one in five steps of the approval process has now been taken for the wind farm vigorously opposed by people who are all in favor of renewable energy elsewhere - because they think it will spoil their view.

ABC: This is the wind farm of the coast of...

GEORGE WILL: The wind farm off the coast of...

ABC: Massachusetts, that a lot of people including the Kennedy family were fighting tooth and nail.

GEORGE WILL: Right, and by the way, wind farms kill a lot more birds daily than are probably going to be killed in this oil spill in the South - but I'd like to get back to Bill. Could you just explain to me in what sense Brazil got off oil?

WEALTH OF PLANETS: Oh, good work George Will! You get your PR lines in and then switch topics before they can be challenged. First, the coalition opposing the wind farm has plenty of members with vast holdings in fossil fuels - see the above comments on disruptive technologies. If you own oil wells, you're probably not going to be too happy about wind farms.

Second, the comments on more birds being killed daily than in the oil spill is pure nonsense - and of course George Will doesn't want that one answered. Offshore wind turbines have massive blades that rotate at slow speeds - birds easily avoid them, as studies undertaken using infrared monitoring cameras show.

George Will is a real impresario - he spews some nonsense, then switches topics to Brazil (see above).

BILL MAHER: I believe they did. I believe in the seventies, they had a program to use sugarcane ethanol, and I believe that is what fuels their country.

GEORGE WILL: I think they still burn a lot of oil and have a lot of it offshore.

WEALTH OF PLANETS: See above - and recall again that in 2008, sugarcane ethanol surpassed gasoline as the top motor fuel in Brazil. There's no reason that the U.S. could not have done the same - and does George Will support lifting the import tariffs on Brazilian ethanol? Furthermore, who are the top investors in Brazilian offshore drilling? Perhaps he wants to take a look at the Obama Administration:

"The U.S. is going to lend billions of dollars to Brazil's state-owned oil company, Petrobras, to finance exploration of the huge offshore discovery in Brazil's Tupi oil field in the Santos Basin near Rio de Janeiro. Brazil's planning minister confirmed that White House National Security Adviser James Jones met this month with Brazilian officials to talk about the loan. "*

*http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203863204574346610120524166.html

Is Obama interested in lifting the tariff on sugarcane ethanol? He's not saying...

KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEN: But George, you are a man who understands that there are always alternatives in politics and in science. Why should we be relying on what we are now seeing the risks of? And by the way - we can do better with existing oilfields. We can get as much from existing oilfields, which the oil companies, for profit reasons, aren't doing much with. So I just think we have seen the risks, and we need to take action. It is just too much to look at what is going on in the Gulf, and what will happen if it moves into the Arctic, and I agree with Bill. I think President Obama was pandering when he moved to this offshore drilling, but I think this White House has the ability, unlike previous White Houses, to understand and see the light, and take a different stance.

WEALTH OF PLANETS: I'm not so sure that using enhanced recovery technology on old oilfields will really do much to lower oil prices by increasing supply - it usually means pumping a lot of water or CO2 from coal plants or natural gas plants down into the well, which means more drilling with a lower chance of return. It's just as messy and dirty as any other approach.

Second, the Gulf Coast from Texas to Florida is drenched in sunshine - not as much as the American Southwest, on a yearly average, but enough to make it prime real estate for locating gigawatt-scale solar panel systems for feeding the entire Southeastern electricity grid.

Photosynthetic fuels, in addition, are a real possibility for replacing oil - and for the U.S., the best option is likely going to be algal biofuels, which can go right into oil refineries and come out as gasoline, and more technologically advanced systems that use solar and wind energy to split water, produce hydrogen, and then combine that hydrogen with atmospheric CO2 to produce methanol and longer-chain hydrocarbons (this is the fossil fuel-free version of Fischer-Tropsch condensation, which usually begins with hydrogen from natural gas and/or coal steam, and carbon monoxide from coal).

BILL MAHER: Can we have the judges fact check this on Brazil? [cross-talk] I don't think I dreamed that.

WEALTH OF PLANETS: See above. Brazil is running 48% of its energy system on renewables, in the face of opposition from OECD countries including the U.S. - there are no trade restrictions on importing Brazil's oil, soybeans, sugar or beef - just on their ethanol. Likewise, the U.S. is not financing solar and wind farms in Brazil - just offshore oil drilling and perhaps a few more dams. New dams in the Amazon are ecological and humanitarian disasters, however - ask James Cameron and Sigourney Weaver about that.* Solar and wind don't have such problems.

*http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2010/04/12/cameron_amazon__dam_dispute__real_life_avatar/

AL SHARPTON: While Bill and George are in Brazil, let's get back to the United States. I think that Katrina is right. I think that there is a challenge here, and I think that the President and the Congress has to deal with the reality that we're facing. And I think that the reality is - usually it's not about who's going to speak for the left or the right. It's whose going to be right on these issues. We see what can happen here. Now, what do we do about it? And I think that clearly a failure to stand up and lead at this point is something that all of us would criticize, but I'm not convinced that this president won't, I think he's going down there, I think he's going to reassess, and I think we've got to see where that goes, and if he goes right, then support him - and I think he will. But I think to act like this is Katrina, I think this is to step beyond the realms of a sane discussion.

- end transcript-

Well, I've said my piece on the Katrina comparison - but let's just note that during the Bush Administration, there was a clear effort to play down the dangers of global warming, such as unusually strong (if relatively infrequent) hurricanes fueled by warming Gulf of Mexico waters. If they had responded to the threat, they would have given credence to what they called "global warming alarmism" - so they insisted that building new levees was unnecessary. Likewise, the Obama Administration attempted to play down the risks of offshore drilling, and a vigorous effort to include more safety devices on those rigs and wells might have upset that effort. In both cases, you have this obsession with the image, not with the reality - and that's dangerous. Otherwise, Al Sharpton is correct - it's not about the left and the right, it's about getting the right solutions in place...

On that note, I will leave you, gentle reader, with two short excerpts from one of my favorite authors, Joseph Conrad, from the introduction to his short story, "An Outpost of Progress."

"The two men watched the steamer round the bend, then, ascending arm in arm the slope of the bank, returned to the station. They had been in this vast and dark country only a very short time, and as yet always in the midst of other white men, under the eye and guidance of their superiors. And now, dull as they were to the subtle influences of surroundings, they felt themselves very much alone, when suddenly left unassisted to face the wilderness; a wilderness rendered more strange, more incomprehensible by the mysterious glimpses of the vigorous life it contained. They were two perfectly insignificant and incapable individuals, whose existence is only rendered possible through the high organization of civilized crowds. Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence; the emotions and principles; every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd: to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and of its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion. But the contact with pure unmitigated savagery, with primitive nature and primitive man, brings sudden and profound trouble into the heart. To the sentiment of being alone of one's kind, to the clear perception of the loneliness of one's thoughts, of one's sensations--to the negation of the habitual, which is safe, there is added the affirmation of the unusual, which is dangerous; a suggestion of things vague, uncontrollable, and repulsive, whose discomposing intrusion excites the imagination and tries the civilized nerves of the foolish and the wise alike...."

"To grapple effectually with even purely material problems requires more serenity of mind and more lofty courage than people generally imagine. No two beings could have been more unfitted for such a struggle. Society, not from any tenderness, but because of its strange needs, had taken care of those two men, forbidding them all independent thought, all initiative, all departure from routine; and forbidding it under pain of death. They could only live on condition of being machines. And now, released from the fostering care of men with pens behind the ears, or of men with gold lace on the sleeves, they were like those lifelong prisoners who, liberated after many years, do not know what use to make of their freedom. They did not know what use to make of their faculties, being both, through want of practice, incapable of independent thought."

Joseph Conrad - the prophet of these times? Revamping the global energy system will require a great deal of independent thought, certainly... and that perhaps is the central challenge.

California's Energy Gamble: The shadiest PBS NOVA special ever?

2010-04-26T07:48:00.000-07:00

A week or so ago, PBS NOVA decided to run a program (funded by Koch Industries - a top financier of the noted Senate anti-science advocate James Inhofe - as well as by ExxonMobile) attacking California's renewable energy programs. Incidentally, the blog CleanTechnica brought this to my attention - they're worth following.

The whole thing is pretty hard to stomach, but here's a typical extract:

NOVA: Is California taking dangerous risks with its new energy policies?

Marlo Lewis: [Competitive Enterprise Institute] The policies that we're seeing in California make me nervous for California's future. You often hear the advocates of these policies say, "Oh, how can we gamble with the only climate we have?" I would say to them, "How can you gamble with the only economy we have?"

If you don't recall, the Competitive Enterprise Institute claimed that carbon dioxide produced from fossil fuel was "a life-giving gas" - which is kind of like pumping raw sewage into your neighbor's back yard and telling them it's really just a beneficial fertilizer - and that they should be thanking you, not screaming at you.

Equally troubling, however, was Energy Secretary Steven Chu's dismissive comments on non-fossil energy sources:

NOVA: Should we reduce our energy use or turn to alternative sources of energy that don't emit carbon?

Steven Chu: You have to do both. You can't conserve your way out of this problem. Nor can you rely on magical new sources of carbon-free energy to get out of this problem.

This is troubling because Dr. Chu doesn't distinguish between fossil carbon, which was produced millions of years ago (and is thus devoid of 14-carbon, which is produced in the upper atmosphere from cosmic ray collisions with nitrogen molecules), and biological carbon, which was recently fixed from the atmosphere, and which, when digested or combusted, returns to the atmosphere with no net effect on the overall concentration. Of course, the phrase "magical" is in itself dismissive, is it not?

In fact, Steven Chu is entirely wrong on this issue, which goes to show that expertise in one area of science, such as nuclear physics, doesn't lead to any particular expertise in a separate area of science, such as solar energy conversion or photosynthetic carbon fixation - Nobel Prizes notwithstanding. Many studies have shown that you can indeed eliminate fossil fuels from the energy mix - as well as nuclear fuels - and still have all the energy you need.

However, doing this will be no easier than creating the global fossil fuel infrastructure that the world relies on - and estimates of the cost of that global infrastructure are very rough, but $10 trillion is not a bad benchmark figure. 500 coal-burning megaplants, constructed at a cost of $300 million each, adds up to $150 billion, for example - the cost of the AIG bailout, wasn't it?

A modern solar cell manufacturing facility might run from $100 million to $200 million, say...so, yes, for the cost of the AIG bailout, we could have been well on our way to outfitting every home in the United States with renewable energy technology of various sorts. Instead, it all went to pay off Wall Street debts run up by corrupt bankers - amazing, isn't it?

Here's another stinker from the program:

NOVA: Won't some people lose their jobs?

Vijay Vaitheeswaran: There'll be some job losses, particularly if you're a coal miner, let's say. But then again, if clean-coal technologies take off, there might be a boom in coal, where you get a job doing carbon sequestration.

First of all, nobody in California mines coal - and secondly, lost coal jobs will be replaced by renewable energy sector manufacturing jobs (although so far, most solar manufacturing is not done in the United States) and various other infrastructure work.

Secondly, why are they asking an economist with no scientific or engineering background about the plausibility of clean coal and carbon capture? In reality, this is one of the biggest frauds being perpetrated on the American public - and who is behind this PR stunt? Steven Chu's Department of Energy and their private contractor Battelle Memorial Institute - the biggest private "non-profit" research corporation in the United States, and one of the most secretive companies around.

One small problem – it takes more energy to capture and store the emissions from coal than you can generate by burning the fuel. Most of the “demonstration projects” (as well as enhanced oil recovery systems for oil well CO2 injection) only capture about 1% of the emissions from the fossil fuel plant, at an energy cost of greater than 1% of the power output.

Even if you can capture the carbon emissions - at astronomical energy expense - what do you do with them afterwards? A recent paper also (see this Guardian UK report) indicates that subsurface storage is far less plausible than is claimed.

There is zero transparency in this program, because private interests control the patents to the technology - even though the funds come from the taxpayer. The chief DOE contractor on this, as well as the overall manager of the "flagship" DOE-funded zero-emissions coal plant (FutureGen, in Illinois), is also Battelle Memorial Institute, which has promoted the following claims:

FutureGen will demonstrate advanced coal-based technologies to generate electricity for families and businesses, and also produce hydrogen to power fuel cells for transportation and other energy needs. The technology also will integrate the capture of carbon emissions with carbon sequestration, helping to address the issue of climate change as energy demand continues to grow worldwide.

The 275 megawatt plant will be developed through a public-private partnership led by the seven founding FutureGen Industrial Alliance members that include:

American Electric Power
BHP Billiton
CONSOL Energy Inc.
Foundation Coal Corporation
Kennecott Energy Company, a member of the Rio Tinto group
Peabody Energy
Southern Company

Formation of FutureGen Alliance was coordinated by Battelle, a non-profit research and development institution. The Alliance is working with DOE to secure a final agreement for FutureGen. Once an agreement is reached, the process would proceed to site selection and plant design.

What might really be going on here is the construction of a coal-to-gasoline project. The DOE states that once the "demonstration project" is constructed, it will be handed over to the private sector - but the coal-to-gasoline systems look identical to this "zero-emission" system - both rely on coal gasification technology. Furthermore, the coal industry has for years been trying to break into the gasoline markets - but have been blocked by environmental regulations, which Obama and Chu seem determined to overturn as they embark on a new program of coal-to-gasoline plant construction in Virgina, Texas, Illinois and elsewhere.

Notice also that Obama delivered $8 billion in subsidies to the Southern Company, an ardent enemy of renewable energy in the southeastern United States, and a member of the Battelle Energy Alliance that's behind FutureGen. California has implemented a renewable energy portfolio standard, for example - but Southern has a huge lobbying budget committed to defeating such standards in its own operating area.

The bizarre spin that PBS NOVA put on this story doesn't end there - see this quote from their interview with UC Berkeley "media expert" and professor of nuclear engineering, Daniel Kammen:

NOVA: But that is not the only problem. Coal can be burnt to release energy when you need it, but what do you do if the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow?

DANIEL KAMMEN: Renewables aren’t the easy we’re-just-going-to-do-it solution. There are issues. One of the big issues is that for solar and wind, in particular, they are intermittent. They’re on some of the time, off other times, and it’s not consistent. You cannot always predict it.

NOVA: (almost whining) But grid managers have to predict it. They need power on demand. And when they can’t get it, it raises one alarming specter.

Disaster! Hospitals without power, cars smashing into one another as street lights go out, people unable to get their lifesaving medications - yes, they pile it on pretty thick...

What Professor Daniel Kammen (who surprisingly enough is also the director of Berkeley's "Renewable Energy and Appropriate Energy") doesn't mention is that there are many methods for storing wind and solar energy for use at some later point.... but maybe it's not so surprising, considering Berkeley's close ties with BP - which is bent on selling tar sand syncrude to California energy markets (they also were operating the rig that just blew up and sank in the Gulf of Mexico, leading to a massive oil leak, and they have a similarly atrocious record of spills in Alaska).

Consider my own favorite method of solar energy storage, as just one example. That's the conversion of sunlight to stored chemical energy via the conversion of CO2 and H2O to hydrocarbons, say. This creates an easily trasportable energy commodity that you can use yourself or sell to others - all with no climate effect.

Technically, you would use solar energy to covert atmospheric CO2 to carbon monoxide and then mix that with solar-generated hydrogen from water, and you get methanol - CH3OH. You can also do this starting with coal - and Obama has backed this very same technology in West Virgina, for their coal-to-gasoline plant - which will produce two or three times the amount of CO2 per gallon of gasoline as does traditional crude oil distillation and cracking. Obama's climate program? Who is he trying to fool? You?

Getting back to the solar process, if you have methanol, then futher CO additions create longer-chain hydrocarbons. If you can get this process going at an appreciable rate, you can fill up a oil storage tank with the product - and since all the CO2 came out of the atmosphere, when you burn the fuel you simply return the CO2 to the atmosphere, zero sum gain. Another benefit is that you aren't adding sulfur, mercury, selenium, or arsenic, so the fuel is going to be far cleaner than anything dug out of the ground.

These notions also will play a key role in future space travel - the recent discovery of water on the moon means you could feasibly set up solar panels on the moon, extract that water, generate hydrogen and oxygen, and voila - rocket fuel for exploration of the solar system. Instead, Obama cut the manned space program while also increasing the DOE nuclear weapons budget by 10%! That's the same kind of trick Bush pulled, when he proposed "hydrogen cars" while cutting the National Renewable Energy Lab budget! This is from the ABC Denver news, 2007:

Colorado's Democratic lawmakers criticized Bush's proposed budget, delivered to Congress on Monday, for increasing spending on fossil fuel and nuclear development while cutting the Energy Department's renewable research lab by 3 percent.

Some ten years ago I was a PhD student in the chemistry department at UC Santa Cruz, and was looking for funding for this general kind of work - and what I discovered was that there is zero funding from the DOE for non-fossil fuel carbon capture and conversion efforts.

Neither biological methods (algal production of biofuels being the most promising) nor chemical methods (as described above) get any funding from the DOE - in contrast to the billions they give to the coal interests. Shocking? Not when you look at the revolving door between DOE managerial staff and fossil fuel interests, which mimics the revolving door between the military brass and the corporate boards of weapons manufacturers.

There are many other methods for storing and releasing solar & wind energy - this latest one seems pretty innovative:

Giant gravel batteries could make renewable energy more reliable, Guardian UK Mon Apr 26

So, given that state of affairs, it's hard to have any faith in the federal government on energy reform - they seem to be firmly in the grip of fossil fuel interests, which is why many people (myself included) started asking California state politicians and California businesses to take the lead on kick-starting a state-wide renewable energy economy - and this has created a massive backlash, complete with wildly dishonest propaganda spewed out by national media outlets - even PBS NOVA has hopped on this bandwagon, astonishingly enough. This is tragic, since PBS NOVA used to be one of the better science journalism programs on television - and now, they're running ExxonMobil and Koch Industries PR programs as "independent journalism." What a shame.

For the latest on the fossil fuel world, in contrast:

An oil slick covering 400sq miles is threatening a slow-motion catastrophe for the Gulf of Mexico’s delicate marine life, with 42,000 gallons (160,000 litres) a day now gushing from an uncapped well after a rig explosion.

Two days after declaring that there was no leak and that oil on the surface was residue from on board the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform that burst into a fireball on Tuesday, officials revealed that the slick was coming from the seabed and was now 25 times the size it was on Friday. - Times Online UK, Apr 26

The fact of the matter is that we already have the energy technology required to convert California's economy to renewables and eliminate all fossil fuel imports to the state - as well as all offshore drilling. This will actually be a great boon to California's economy, which has largely fallen into debt due to the energy-price rigging brought about by Pete Wilson's deregulation and Enron's shady market manipulation practices. As it is, dependence on external energy sources is slowly bleeding California to death - but large-scale renewable energy projects will put a permanent end to such schemes.

I haven't even mentioned the many beneficial health effects of a clean energy economy, either - so clearly, this is smart thing to do, both ecologically and economically.

Some commentary on the Colbert-hosted Bastadi-Ekwurzel debate

2010-04-14T14:06:00.000-07:00

On April 6 2010, Stephen Colbert hosted a very interesting scientific debate between Accuweather's Joe Bastardi (of Accuweather.com) and Brenda Ekwurzel (of the Union of Concerned Scientists).

I went ahead and transcribed it, and added a little commentary. The segment referenced a March 29, 2010 New York Times article titled "Among Forecasters, Doubt on Warming," which featured Joe Bastardi as the expert weather forecaster. Accuweather, however, is a curious outfit - for example, they got together with Senator Rick Santorum in 2005 to promote a bill that would prevent the National Weather Service from releasing its forecasts to the public - see the report by Timothy Noah at Slate. Accuweather also has a bad habit of Google search optimization-manipulation - these are tactics that direct Web searches for "nationalweatherservice.org" to Accuweather's home page. Hence, this outfit is not exactly speaking for weather forecasters everywhere - but, more importantly, how do they handle the science?

Transcript begins:

Colbert: Why talk about a science catfight, when you can instigate one? Please welcome, for meteorologists, the chief forecaster for Accuweather, yeah, that Accuweather, and 2006 NABB bodybuilding champion, Joe Bastardi. Joe, thanks so much for coming on. And, here to be crushed beneath the heel of common sense, please welcome climatologist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, Brenda Ekwurzel. Brenda, thank you so much for coming on. Alright, guys - I want a nice clean fight here tonight. Okay, I'll start with you, Joe. First of all, what do you bench?

Bastardi: I have benched over 400 pounds. I'm not doing that right now.

Colbert: Alright, Brenda, what do you bench?

Ekwurzel: Science.

Colbert: Science? I'm going to go with 400 pounds. Now - Joe, let's get down to it. Do you believe that global warming is manmade?

Bastardi: I think that there is some argument that climate - in the climate science - that CO2 may have a part of this, but we're going to find out very very soon, and why? The drivers that we believe have been pushing the temperature up and down over the last twenty to thirty years, the Pacific Ocean being warm, the Atlantic Ocean being warm, they're all going to come off, as CO2 continues to rise, the temperature which has flattened out over the last five to ten years, starts falling - we'll know. It's a simple answer.

The basic issue is that CO2 absorbs infrared radiation but is transparent to visible radiation. More fossil CO2 in the atmosphere means more absorption of radiant energy that would otherwise escape into space, meaning a warmer atmosphere. A warmer atmosphere, on our wet ocean planet, means more moisture in the atmosphere. Water, H2O, also absorbs infrared energy – resulting in more warming. A warm atmosphere slowly leads to a warmer ocean, and together that causes ice sheets to start melting, leading to rising sea levels.

This is why the temperature will continue to rise as the amounts of atmospheric CO2 and H2O continue to increase. The predictions are that the most rapid warming will occur in the Arctic, and that continental interiors will warm more than ocean surfaces will. This in turn results in shifts in atmospheric circulation, which makes dry areas drier and we areas wetter. That accounts for the record droughts and floods seen all over the planet.

Colbert: I am asking you to make a forecast, sir.

Bastardi: I did.

Colbert: Are you a forecaster? Will we find out that global warming is manmade or not? Yes or no? Put them on the table.

Bastardi: I think we're going to find out that global warming is basically natural and will reverse.

Human beings are natural, and human technology is also natural. It’s natural that people, having developed technology, would exploit deeply buried fossil fuel supplies as an energy resource. So, global warming is all-natural – and fossil fuels? They’re just one of nature’s products.

Infectious diseases are also quite natural – but it doesn’t mean we should encourage their spread. It’s also natural for people to change their behavior once they understand the long-term risks.

Colbert: Alright, it’s a fraud. Thank you. Brenda - why do you think - and I assume you do - you believe that global warming is manmade?

Ekwurzel: The weight of the evidence is clear...

Colbert: What evidence, young lady?

Ekwurzel: Glaciers are shrinking, sea levels are rising, the deserts are drying out...

Colbert: The sea levels rising - could that just be because humans, specifically Americans, are getting fatter and going swimming? It's like a bathtub when you get in it.

Ekwurzel: The ocean does expand because it's warming, and the glaciers melting add to that.

Colbert: I don't see any glaciers melting around here, do you? Joe?

Bastardi: As a matter of fact the glaciers have been increasing the past couple of years...

Well, let’s look at it region by region.

In South America, the Andean glaciers are rapidly retreating, with many smaller ones having lost half their mass in the past two decades. Chalcaltaya lost 2/3 of its volume in one decade, and is a typical eastern Andes glacier. These glaciers are critical sources of water in the summer and fall.

In Africa, Kilimanjaro has been steadily losing ice volume throughout the 20th century. Ice mass has dropped by some 25% since 2000 alone.

In North America, there’s well documented glacier retreat all along the Rockies. Two more glaciers just vanished from Glacier National Park, and that trend is not reversing. Alaska has seen large losses since 1960, especially with marine-terminating glaciers.

In Europe, the Alps have experienced a major meltdown, destabilizing entire mountain faces and threatening the future of the ski industry. The Alps have lost half their mass in the past century, 20% of that since the 1980s (note the accelerating trend), and Swiss glaciers have lost another 20% of their surface area since 1995 measurements.

The Himalayas, the highest mountain range, are slower to melt, but the lower altitude glaciers have seen loss rates comparable to those in other regions.

The major ice sheets, Greenland and Antarctica, have marine-terminating glaciers. The breakup of Antarctic ice shelves is a prelude to faster glacier loss, which has already been seen in Greenland - The fjord waters are warming up, and this makes the marine-terminating glaciers melt faster, and so move faster.

Bastardi is clearly ignorant of the facts on this issue.

Colbert: How about that, Brenda? The glaciers are getting bigger!

Ekwurzel: The glaciers are...

Bastardi: The Pacific Decadal Oscillation is...

Colbert: Hang on a second, Brenda, the adults are talking.

Bastardi: The Pacific has changed its phase, it's going into the cool phase, all I'm arguing is we have fifteen to twenty years, we will find our answer. I believe the Earth...

This is a quasi-scientific claim that ignores a basic fact: the fluctuations in the Pacific (such as El Nino) are not really drivers, but rather responses, at best modifiers. Claims that they are as predictable as “the phases of the moon” are ludicrous – that’s certainly not true for El Nino and La Nina.

In fact, Bastardi’s “Pacific phases” were initially based on records of salmon catches by fishermen - fisheries scientist Steven Hare coined the term "Pacific Decadal Oscillation" (PDO) in 1996 while researching connections between Alaska salmon production cycles and Pacific climate. It’s barely substantiated, but it has become useful fodder for climate change denialists – a decade ago, they said the same thing about the “cooling solar cycle” – and they also said that the 2000-2010 decade would be much cooler than the 1990s were. Bastardi has now conveniently forgotten this argument, as have its original proponents – except for the “do nothing for then next 15 years” bit.

The solar cycle argument and the ocean cycle argument are both bogus – that’s not what’s driving global average temperatures.

Colbert: Your projections say that we will cool? A cooler spell?

Bastardi: By 2030 the Earth will be back down to where it was in the late 1970s, when we started measuring with satellites. Mark my words.

Colbert: [Brenda], you've been to the Arctic, what's going on there?

Ekwurzel: The Arctic is rapidly shrinking, it is beyond doubt that we have the ten warmest years on record since 1880, and the oceans last summer were the warmest on record.

Again, its worth pointing out that Bastardi’s predecessors (Willie Soon, Sallie Baliunas, et al.) all predicted that the 2000s would be cooler than the 1990s because of the cooling solar cycle. What were they saying in 1995? “Just wait 15 years, and you’ll see – mark my words!”

Colbert: Okay, that's the Arctic, though. This isn't the Arctic - that's global Arctic - this is global America. And here in a global America, things are getting colder. In Houston this year, we had the earliest snowfall on record. Help me out here, Joe.

Bastardi: The Arctic, by the way, has just returned to normal. The "death spiral" so to speak, if you look at today's Arctic Ice Sheet, it's back to where it was three, four, five years ago - back to 2003, as a matter of fact.

It’s hard to say what Bastardi is talking about – the Greenland ice sheet, or the Arctic sea ice?

As far as Arctic sea ice, nuclear submarine data collected over the latter half of the 20th century recorded sea ice thickness of from 2-5 meters (depending on location), and by the late 1990s that fell to 0.5 to 2.5 meters – about a 50% reduction in thickness. Ten years later, the ice is so thin that the wind can pile it up, creating giant expanses of open water in the summer. When the ice gets thin enough, the year-to-year variability is modified by the Arctic Fluctuation, which results in varying winds and currents.

With respect to the Arctic ice sheets (Greenland and the other smaller regional islands), they’ve been dumping mass into the oceans at ever-increasing speeds. This was confined to the southern regions of Greenland, but the most recent reports indicate that the northwest is heading the same way.

Colbert: Now, I don't know if that's true, and I don't care. What do you say about that Brenda?

Ekwurzel: Well, meteorologists are focusing on the short term, and climate scientists look at the long term. These are like natural cycles...

Colbert: What's the long term for you?

Ekwurzel: These are cycles going up and down just like the stock market, and we know it's going up. Global warming is rising.

Not a bad analogy, since the “cycles” in the stock market are about as predictable as those in the oceans and atmosphere... semi-periodic fluctuations is a more accurate way of putting it.

Colbert: You talk about climate science, and you [Joe] talk about weather science - what's the difference between climate and weather? Is not climate just made up of thousands of little weathers?

Bastardi: No, what happens is, you have to have a fundamental knowledge of climatology to be a good meteorologist, because to look forward you have to look back. How were you measuring those temperatures back in the 1930s, 40s and 50s...

Bastardi really shows his ignorance here – this is the Farmer’s Almanac method of weather forecasting, or in geek-speak, synoptic forecasting. When you read about a “1 in 100 year drought” or a “1 in 500 year flood”, they’re comparing it to the historical record – back when the climate was fairly stable. However, what Bastardi doesn’t understand is that when the climate changes, those odds also change. If you start having 100-year floods and droughts every few years, as we have been, then that’s good evidence that global warming is very real.

This is a statistical issue – as an example, imagine you’re in Vegas, playing the slots, and you start hitting the jackpot every third try, when you’re only supposed to hit it once in a thousand times. Do you think the casino manager would accept “just a natural cycle, sir” as an explanation?

Colbert: Yeah, Brenda, how are you doing that? Joe and I want to know.

Bastadi: You weren't measuring them by satellite. Or how about at the time of Caesar you were harvesting figs twice a year in Italy?

No, they were using thermometers... and of course, you have the ice thickness record as a useful proxy that generally confirms that trend. As far as Caesar’s figs? Erik the Red’s grapes? King Henry’s melons? Someone’s getting desperate...

Colbert: I've got this one Joe - Brenda?

Bastardi: I thought this was my show.

Ekwurzel: Well, we all know that the American Meteorological Society has issued as statement that humans are primarily the cause of global warming, so meteorologists agree.

Let’s take a look at that statement’s conclusions:

“Final remarks: Despite the uncertainties noted above, there is adequate evidence from observations and interpretations of climate simulations to conclude that the atmosphere, ocean, and land surface are warming; that humans have significantly contributed to this change; and that further climate change will continue to have important impacts on human societies, on economies, on ecosystems, and on wildlife through the 21st century and beyond.... This statement is considered in force until February 2012 unless superseded by a new statement issued by the AMS Council before this date.”

Curiously, Bastardi makes no effort to answer this, and the New York Times barely mentions this conclusion, choosing instead to put Bastardi at the top of the expert list.

Colbert: Joe, you believe that there should be a Lincoln-Douglas style debate about global warming.

Bastardi: Yes, I do.

Colbert: Now, what was that original debate about?

Bastardi: What? Lincoln and Douglas? About many things.

Colbert: It was actually about slavery. Brenda, I agree with Joe here. There should be a Lincoln-Douglas style debate here - why are you pro-slavery? Why do you want to keep the glaciers chained to the North Pole? When Joe and I want to free them into the North Atlantic?

[laughter]

Colbert: Alright, we'll have to pick up that answer next time. Brenda Ekwurzel, Joe Bastardi, thank you so much, we'll be right back.

-end segment-

Let's continue with this theme...is there some big difference between owning slaves and burning fossil fuels? It's the net effect, isn't it? If you're claiming that dumping pollutants into the air, water and soil is a "victimless crime", well, that clearly doesn't make any sense. You are doing harm to any individuals who have to deal with the results. What about the inhabitants of the drowning Pacific islands, Bangaldesh, etc.? They certainly can claim personal injury, can't they? Why shouldn't they be able to bring criminal and or civil cases against the major emitters of greenhouse gases, the ones who put them in that bind?

Some would say that the fossil fuel problem is more like drug addiction. Everyone knows heroin addiction has social costs, ranging from increased crime to increased medical costs. Fossil fuel addiction creates similar problems... but is anyone proposing market-based methods for reducing drug addiction (like high taxes on heroin?). Instead, the "regulatory approach" is used.

Even in areas where 'market-based' methods have been adopted (tobacco smoking, say) the overall effect on smoking rates has been minimal at best. While one could argue that a heroin or tobacco addict really does little harm to others (as long as they don’t run out, and go on a crime spree to get more), that argument doesn’t work very well for fossil fuel combustion - since the combustion products are dumped into the atmosphere, which we all share.

Nevertheless, there are those (such as George Will) who oppose any efforts to replace fossil fuels with renewables on the basis that such efforts would “severely limit our personal freedoms” – regardless of the damage done to others. One might expect that argument from a four-year old – but from adults?

Some economic questions for Paul Krugman and the New York Times

2010-01-08T08:19:00.000-08:00

It's my opinion that some fundamental issues have been glossed over in the ongoing U.S. media discussions of the economic collapse of a year ago. It's hard, however, to get the media's economic analysts to discuss these issues - and the only real way to raise these points is in the comments sections of their opinion columns.

However, every time I try to raise these points on the New York Times website, they are mysteriously blocked. I first considered whether my language was too provocative, too aggressive, or something like that - so I strove to be more and more polite. For example, take Paul Krugman's recent column on Banks and Bubbles.

I submitted the following comment, and just for proof, took a screen shot once the comment was "accepted for moderation" - something I started doing regularly since so many of my comments get blocked, and that's the image above. Here's the entire comment in more readable format:

There are some missing factors in this equation - first of all, there was also a manufactured oil price bubble, wasn't there? That large increase - to $140 a barrel at peak - was largely due to the destabilization of the Middle East, and efforts by traders in London and New York to drive the price through the ceiling.

These large pools of cash were then re-invested in the U.S. housing market - a shift from traditional petrodollar recycling schemes, which historically revolved around arms sales (no this is not the mythical "free market") - and the investments offering the highest rate on return were tied to sub-prime speculation and securitization, correct? At least, that's what the banks and rating agencies claimed.

This lead to a crash when it became clear that the combination of high oil prices and high home debt were wiping out the purchasing power of consumers and leading to massive default on home loans, small business loans and so on - which triggered a panic and a collapse.

The bailout money was then pumped in to rescue the banks - but rather than having strings attached to that large pile of cash, the very institutions that played such a central role in the collapse were given carte blanche. They were not required to refinance home loans or take novel steps like investing in wind and solar, which would have helped get the U.S. off the petrodollar recycling merry-go-round - not that many Wall Street traders wanted to see the oil price drop even lower than $40.

If the banks had been required to make large-scale investments in real renewables and energy efficiency, than the oil price would have fallen even lower than $40 - due to dropping demand. Wind and solar powered grids and electric vehicle initiatives would have had such an effect - but that would also have undermined the bank's investments in coal mines, rail transport and coal-fired utilities.

Thus, rather than invoking the kind of change the American public wants to see (75% polling for renewables would indicate), the politicians allowed the banks to keep playing manipulative games with oil and coal. Banks are still refusing to put money into renewables, and the signals from the political class are that they are going to keep backing the entrenched fossil fuel interests both at home and abroad - and any rational look at the resulting balance-of-payments issues - the outgoing flux of petrodollars due to energy imports - would indicate that the economy is going to keep sliding towards a new collapse.

A new focus on renewable-based energy independence is certainly needed - but with Democrats in the pocket of Big Coal and Republicans in the pocket of Big Oil, how is that going to happen?

It's hard to understand why any censor at the NYT would find this comment to be objectionable based on their comment guidelines. However, I can tell you that multiple comments of this type, that discuss the reliance of the U.S on foreign oil deals and petrodollar recycling, and which point to the backwards behavior of politicians from both parties on energy matters, have been blocked by the NYT comment section people.

I'll see if I can get an explanation - but it's kind of strange that they feel the need to limit the discussion in this manner...

[Addendum] So, curiously enough, a little while after I posted this, the number of comments at the NYT web site jumped from 52 to 122... and there was mine! So maybe it was simply a result of a backlog of comments that the NYT had not yet had a chance to moderate.

Regardless, I'll leave this post up in the hope that Krugman and other economists will start analyzing the role of the oil price bubble in the economic collapse - something that they've completely failed to do.

Why does government climate and energy policy need to be based on science?

2009-06-15T16:11:00.001-07:00

For many pressing social problems, there are no scientific solutions - let's put that out there first. Religious conflicts, for example, cannot be scientifically settled, and neither can most court cases, with the exceptions being one where very narrow questions are being asked - and note, "settled" here includes the role of the judge and jury in assigning the sentence.

If we want to apply science to economics, we have to begin with ecology, more specifically the ecology of human civilizations. It turns out that in preventing many forms of societal collapse, science can play a very important role - in combating disease, in helping out with agricultural and industrial production and waste management, in collecting information about the physical (or 'natural') world, and (for our purposes) in differentiating between scientific claims on energy technologies and global warming trajectories.

The kind of 'societal collapse' I'm talking about is the kind that is often preceded by food and fuel riots, and which sometimes leads to genocidal conflict. This is the basic concern about global warming and resource exhaustion - that it will lead to a hundred or more new Rwandan-type events, which could easily become larger-scale nuclear conflicts. Societal collapse plus nuclear and/or biological weapons is a bad combination, best avoided if at all possible. In order to avoid such outcomes, people of all persuasions must base their decisions on accurate information.

That's one evolutionary argument behind big brains, is that they allow their possessors to more comprehensively and efficiently process information about the world around them (as well as retain that information) thereby creating a survival advantage for both themselves and their social group.

The other side of that coin is that big brains may easily be deluded by false information into truly disastrous but quite complicated behaviors, involving stratagems that little brains (like those of lizards, say) would find impossible to carry out (or even remember). In this cheerless worldview, humans are just too smart for their own good, and sooner or later, that will result in evolutionary termination.

A truly bleak perspective, isn't it? However, we still are here, even though we've apparently wiped out many of our planetary co-inhabitant species, all within the geological blink of an eye. I'm still betting that the generalized benefits of larger brains will win out - but it all depends on the ability to discriminate between accurate and bogus information.

In our society, the employees of academic and media institutions are the ones charged with supplying the rest of the social sphere with accurate information - don't laugh, now, that really is the job description, no matter how distorted the whole thing has become. The same job description was posted in the Cold War nation of East Germany, as well as under Lysenko and Beria in the Soviet Union, and of course we have the example of Germany, 1933-1945. No one ever calls their own media and academic institutions "part of a propaganda machine" - it is always sold as the truth, regardless of circumstances.

How then, is the observer to distinguish between accurate and misleading information? It is a fundamental problem, and not just for humans - consider the camouflaged insect, whether predator or prey, as just one of many examples of misinformation in nature. Even in nature, we can see that misinformation also confers a survival advantage on the deceiver - proof, if any was needed, that evolution is no guide for moral behavior, much to the dismay of Social Darwinists everywhere. "Perhaps", says the true believer, "we need to redefine 'morality' to bring it in line with our more natural and evolutionarily determined impulses?" That, by the way, is what gets a lot of religious philosophers annoyed at Darwin and Dawkins - and they have a pretty good point, which is that the Nazis based their Holocaust on just such arguments of 'scientific morality'. The curious thing there is that eugenics was all built on flawed assumptions about how genetic inheritance really worked (not that a modern knowledge of genetics forms any moral basis for slaughtering people, either).

So: accurate information matters. Differentiating accurate from inaccurate information - that's the problem. If we can't do that, we are lost.

Back to the issue at hand:

When it comes to climate and energy issues (among others), the world has been faced with an epic snow job, misinformation on a grand scale - and the easiest and most reliable way to track such misinformation to its real source is to look at how the funding works.

In the case of the U.S. energy supply, the agency of interest is the Department of Energy, a section of the executive branch of government, headed by a chief who is appointed by the elected President and who also must be confirmed by Congress. If we want to know what their agenda is, we should first ignore everything but their budget:

So, rather than go through all that again, I'll just repost something I put up on the NYT Web Site a while ago:

Dec 11th 2008: The Department of Energy

December 11th, 2008
7:03 am

Fundamental changes at the DOE will be needed to really develop more renewable energy technology. This isn't just a technological problem, since a pool of trained scientists and engineers is needed to work in industry. That means that many programs will be needed, not just one isolated one.

At the very least, they'd have to set up something like the National Institute of Health at the Department of Health and Human Services, specifically for funding and developing renewable energy technology research.

As it is, there is is almost no money at DOE for renewable energy research today. There are several public-private partnerships like FutureGen, now in private hands, and the privately managed National Renewable Energy Lab, managed by a joint consortium between Battelle and Bechtel. Battelle is also the primary backer of FutureGen, and the owner of the secret proprietary coal carbon-capture technology involved - which doesn't work. Basic arguments show it can't work, certainly not at a scale needed to go on burning coal at current rates, but that didn't stop the project from going forward.

It's hard to imagine the DOE and the National Laboratories dropping their mostly military-related research and focusing instead on clean energy. The DOE budget would have to be radically transformed, for one thing.

The most recent DOE budget request had the following numbers:

Nuclear Security: $9.385 billion
Environmental Responsibility: $6.344 billion
Scientific Discovery: $4.398 billion
Energy Security: $3.123 billion
Management Excellence: $0.629 billion

This is fairly vague, but it's almost all devoted to nuclear weapons research and cleaning up the waste from nuclear weapons production.

Here is the entire DOE budget for the real renewables, under Energy Security, subsection "Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy":

Biomass and biorefinery systems R&D... $0.179 billion
Solar energy...$0.148 billion
Wind energy... $0.040 billion

I think that works out to about 1.5% of the DOE budget. The National Science Foundation doesn't fund applied energy research, so that's about it. Even that money is tightly controlled by "industry partners" - so there is almost nothing for fundamental research.

By comparison, the National Insitute of Health has a $28 billion budget, delivered to medical research institutions and universities all across the country.

That's why every single research school in the U.S. has some kind of pharmaceutical / medical device research program, while you won't find a single large-scale renewable energy research program at any university - just a handful of projects at a few of the DOE-based National Laboratories - which are all now government-owned, contractor-operated institutions.

Will we see a radically transformed DOE budget? Will the DOE budget be fundamentally altered? The only way to do that would be to abandon all new nuclear weapon development programs, and instead devote those billions to a wide-ranging renewable energy development program, involving massive federal investment. $10 billion a year would be a reasonable amount - our nukes work fine.

It's been done before - after the Manhattan Project, there was a huge expansion of nuclear weapons production, involving dozens of giant facilities scattered all over the country, all within a few years.

If the government and business actually WANTED to halt the use of fossil fuels and build a renewable-based energy system, it could be done - but please note, those are separate tasks. Either approach will infuriate everyone who is invested in coal-fired electricity generation and gasoline and diesel-based transportation, meaning well over 50% of what remains of Wall Street, a lot of sovereign wealth funds, the entire memberships of the American Petroleum Institue and the Coal-fired, I mean Edison, Electric Institute. Not to mention the railroads, who still rely heavily on shipping coal from mine to power plant for their profits.

However, it would also create a huge new job base, and would mean that the concept of "energy independence" at the national, state, local and even personal level would be a real possibility. That notion makes the electricity and fuel cartels very nervous indeed, but they shouldn't worry - the vast majority of people will still want to pay someone else to deal with it for them.

P.S. There is an old mantra about nuclear fusion solving all energy problems for the future. This is true, but we already have the fusion reactor - the Sun. There's no need to attempt to build one here on Earth - any such reactor would need tritium, which must be produced in a normal nuclear reactor, with all the problems that entails.

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Did we see any kind of radical restructuring at the DOE? No, instead we saw an very large increase in funding for coal-based energy projects, as well as continuing support for tar sand development and other "unconventional fossil fuels". The carbon-capture plan is almost entirely mythical - essentially, FutureGen is a coal-to-gasoline plant posing as a zero-carbon power plant, and the effort to portray CO2-injection-based oil well recovery enhancement as "carbon burial" is equally dishonest.

What this really means is that the DOE is not a reliable source of information on energy technology, even though they are given an annual budget of $25 billion plus to do just that. For example, one result of this massive information failure is that the United States now has among the worst energy policies of any nation on Earth - policies that are a recipe for economic as well as ecological disaster. For example, the 2010 DOE Budget includes a massive increase in public-private government partnerships along the lines of the FutureGen Alliance, a coal industry front group run by private 'non-profit' DOE contractor Battelle Memorial Institute, who also is the owner of the 'proprietary FutureGen technology', which has yet to be seen by the public.

This is the wrong way to run a science program, and there is no escaping the conclusion that the Department of Energy is under disastrous leadership and is headed in the wrong direction - away from scientifically informed decision-making.

Adam Smith would have agreed about the fundamental role that good information plays in good economic decision-making, by the way.

Does the inability of models to predict El Nino invalidate long-term climate projections?

2009-06-09T10:05:00.000-07:00

If you've been following the global predictions of La Nina and El Nino, you may have noticed some interesting shifts recently. It is still unclear what will happen over the next year with ENSO, but the indicators now point towards El Nino:

Forecasters say El Nino may be developing June 8, 2009

Computer models that forecast climate differ, the agency noted, with some predicting arrival of El Nino while others expect continued neutral conditions.

Compare that estimate to predictions from Jan 2009:

La Niña Returns, NASA Watches Sea Surface Indicators
01.26.09

La Niña conditions are likely to continue in the Northern Hemisphere during the spring of 2009. That's the forecast from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Climate Prediction Center, National Center for Environmental Prediction and National Weather Service in their official statement on January 8, 2009

The inability of models to forecast EL Nino variability does not, in fact, invalidate long-term climate predictions based on the atmospheric accumulation of long-lived greenhouse gases, namely CO2, CH4 and N2O. Why not? For the same reason that climate models don't predict hurricanes. El Nino is an example of ocean weather, much as hurricanes are a case of atmospheric weather. That means chaotic instability and sensitive dependence on initial conditions play large roles in the development of the phenomenon, just as in weather forecasting.

However, predictions of more extreme weather events as warming proceeds are viewed as robust, even though climate models don't specifically forecast such events. What is going on here? Are these predictions that the models are missing, and why?

For an interesting take, see this:

Response of ENSO to global warming: A perspective from the global heat balance, Sun, D

I will review progress that has been made in understanding the role of ENSO in the global heat balance. In particular, I will highlight the research leading to the view that averaged over the decadal or longer time- scales, ENSO acts as a basin-scale heat mixer in the tropical Pacific.

Here the notion is that external forcing that increases surface-subsurface differences (for example, warming of surface waters by increased GHGs) is counteracted by ENSO activity, which mixes in that extra warmth. Thus, El Nino seems like conversion of oceanic potential energy into global kinetic energy - or, an equatorial belch that affects global climate.

In this view, the level of ENSO activity is controlled not only by tropical heating, but also by extra-tropical cooling. It suggests that we shall see an elevated level of ENSO activity in the initial stages of global warming, but a reduced level of ENSO activity (or even a permanent El Nino state) when global warming is full-blown.

The large 1997-98 El Nino may have been an example of that. By increasing temperature differentials (vertically or horizontally) in the short term, you spawn more intense weather systems. Over the long term, an entirely new, stable climate regime will set in - one radically different from what the Earth has seen in 3 million plus years. Full-blown global warming is thus the equilibration stage, when the atmosphere is no longer acting to increase ocean temperature. It's highly unlikely that anyone now alive will live to see a new stable climate, however, as the response time to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 by 2050 is at least hundreds of years, possibly exacerbated by a permafrost methane pulse.

Once CO2 levels stabilize, how long does it take the oceans and atmosphere to reach a new thermal equilibrium? Around a thousand years? with the rate of ocean mixing being the main variable. At that point, the earth would again be in radiative equilibrium.

Study: CO2 impacts could last centuries - Rising levels could lock in droughts, sea level increases, January 27, 2009

What this emphasizes is that the oceans are going to play the dominant role as global warming progresses - and a major factor is going to be the how the deep ocean interacts with the surface layer. It's far harder to measure oceanic temperature profiles than atmospheric ones, so this is a data-limited area of research in many respects.

The effects of fossil CO2 pollution are not as irreversible as species extinction, but they are certainly not reversible under short time periods, despite recent claims by Yale researchers. It is a nice idea - the 'resiliency of nature' - but it really means very little. Easter Island was also 'resilient' - the grass didn't stop growing, did it? What if the climate had also radically changed, however?

If people and nations can't even sustainably manage resources under conditions of climatic stability, they will face certain disaster as global warming and instability progresses. Nations incapable of providing their own populations with basic resources like food and fuel will likely face violent collapse under such scenarios - it's been seen before, even without drastic climate change. The nations most at risk are those that rely heavily on trade for their provisions of basic commodities, and those with highly vulnerable water supplies. In all cases, reform of agriculture away from the fossil fuel-intensive "Green Model" is particularly important.

Google News search exercise: "fuel riots" OR "food riots" time period 2000-present

See any trends?

Here's another question for thought: what role are climatic factors and resource extraction factors playing in the current global economic downturn? Are Marxist and neoclassical economists capable of taking such factors into account in their 'econometric models'?

A Lesson in Unsustainable Practices

2008-09-24T04:51:00.000-07:00

The Wealth of Planets

Once upon a time there was a society of people who came from a long and noble lineage, whose roots were buried in the mists of time. For thousands of years they had been born, had lived rich lives, and had been buried with their wealth in ornate tombs that stretched in orderly processions over the hills. Life was a slower, more careful affair in those days, and while a rich life was possible, it was never easy. Nevertheless, the people prospered, for a while.

Eventually a time came when the people came upon great difficulties: a drought, a famine or an epidemic of disease. The people vanished, scattered to the four directions, and only their tombs remained amidst the ruins of their great cities.

Many years later, a village grew up near the site of one of these abandoned cities. The villagers scratched out an existence by farming and raising livestock, using the surrounding forests for hunting and gathering purposes. Then one day they discovered the graveyards and tombs of the ancient city. Each tomb they found held a wealth of gold.

They begin to break into and loot more and more tombs, beginning with the most recently constructed. Over time, this became integrated into the social and economic fabric of the people. Every year a few tombs were exhumed, and a priesthood blessed the entire business, thanking the ancestors for their gifts to the living.

They celebrated their newfound wealth, and began to trade with their poorer neighbors, exchanging buried treasure for food, clothing, and all manner of luxuries. Eventually, the trade in the ancient wealth became the most lucrative in the whole area, and other neighboring tribes travelled long distances to barter with them.

As they grew and expanded, they excavated tomb after tomb, hauling the plenty away. More children were born and the village grew to be a small city. Every day, lines of men would go to dig in the ancient graveyards, returning with all the wealth they could ever need. The villagers now built lavish homes and temples, some of them dedicated to the people of the ancient city who had stored up such wealth. People viewed the ancient artifacts with awe and coveted them, for they did not have the skills required to produce such things themselves.

As the easily discovered graveyards were plundered faster and faster, men moved farther out in the search for new graves. However, these older, poorer graves had less gold in them, and were also difficult to find. Conflict broke out between neighboring tribes over the last of the tombs, sparked by secret raids on each other’s graveyards. As their economy collapsed, the citizens of the new city, now swollen in numbers, found that they had nothing to trade with other villages for food.

Waves of bloody warfare over control of the last of the buried treasures soon led to the destruction and degradation of the people. One day, the last grave was dug up, and the last sack of gold was carried off. Faced with starvation, the people took to fighting with one another for what wealth remained, and to raiding their neighboring tribes for food and slaves. Few could remember the skills of their great-grandparents, who had known how to coax crops from the land and how to raise livestock, and their society soon descended into chaos and warfare.

All of their neighbors feared them, calling them 'the damned'. Finally, upset by the taking of slaves and the murderous raids, the neighboring villages joined together and wiped the gravediggers out in a bloody invasion. They burned the city down to the ground and left, saying the place was cursed by the dead.

It is in this way that people learned to leave the graves of the dead alone.