GLOBAL WARMING: Do trees cause global warming?

Posted on May 26, 2011

U.S. Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican — naturally — from California’s 46th congressional district, doesn’t believe that anthropogenic global warming is occurring. However, he believes that if it is occurring, then governments should implement policies of deforestation to curb carbon dioxide emissions. He asks, “Is there some thought being given to subsidizing the clearing of rainforests in order for some countries to eliminate that production of greenhouse gases?” He continued, “Or would people be supportive of cutting down older trees in order to plant younger trees as a means to prevent this disaster from happening?” Of course, “the focus of global warming policy actually centers [and should center] on keeping the world’s trees standing, especially in places like the Amazon, Congo and Indonesia.” According to Politico, Rohrabacher’s comments are reminiscent of “Ronald Reagan’s much-lampooned statement that trees cause pollution.”

The issue of energy availability, which is connected to environmental degradation and climate change, is perhaps the most important issue facing the world’s governments and their citizens today. However, ignorant statements from politicians such as Rohrabacher will not take us forward or allow us to solve the most pressing problems facing the world today. Ignorant, uninformed, and dithering politicians, who fail to do their homework in order to educate themselves on the most pressing issues, only take us backward at our detriment. More via Politico:

Jay Gulledge, a senior scientist at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, said Rohrabacher is correct that 80 to 90 percent of gross greenhouse gas emissions do come from nature, with humans producing the rest. But it’s that small percentage that is changing the Earth’s climate — not to mention that trees help absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in huge quantities.

“How he’s using it is totally off the wall,” Gulledge said. “It’s beyond the pale. It makes no sense.”

And here’s a nugget from Bill McKibben:

Caution: It is vitally important not to make connections. When you see pictures of rubble like this week’s shots from Joplin, Mo., you should not wonder: Is this somehow related to the tornado outbreak three weeks ago in Tuscaloosa, Ala., or the enormous outbreak a couple of weeks before that (which, together, comprised the most active April for tornadoes in U.S. history). No, that doesn’t mean a thing.

It is far better to think of these as isolated, unpredictable, discrete events. It is not advisable to try to connect them in your mind with, say, the fires burning across Texas — fires that have burned more of America at this point this year than any wildfires have in previous years. Texas, and adjoining parts of Oklahoma and New Mexico, are drier than they’ve ever been — the drought is worse than that of the Dust Bowl. But do not wonder if they’re somehow connected.

If you did wonder, you see, you would also have to wonder about whether this year’s record snowfalls and rainfalls across the Midwest — resulting in record flooding along the Mississippi — could somehow be related. And then you might find your thoughts wandering to, oh, global warming, and to the fact that climatologists have been predicting for years that as we flood the atmosphere with carbon we will also start both drying and flooding the planet, since warm air holds more water vapor than cold air.

It’s far smarter to repeat to yourself the comforting mantra that no single weather event can ever be directly tied to climate change. There have been tornadoes before, and floods — that’s the important thing. Just be careful to make sure you don’t let yourself wonder why all these record-breaking events are happening in such proximity — that is, why there have been unprecedented megafloods in Australia, New Zealand and Pakistan in the past year. Why it’s just now that the Arctic has melted for the first time in thousands of years.

. . .

Better to join with the U.S. House of Representatives, which voted 240 to 184 this spring to defeat a resolution saying simply that “climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for public health and welfare.” Propose your own physics; ignore physics altogether. Just don’t start asking yourself whether there might be some relation among last year’s failed grain harvest from the Russian heat wave, and Queensland’s failed grain harvest from its record flood, and France’s and Germany’s current drought-related crop failures, and the death of the winter wheat crop in Texas, and the inability of Midwestern farmers to get corn planted in their sodden fields. Surely the record food prices are just freak outliers, not signs of anything systemic.

It’s very important to stay calm. If you got upset about any of this, you might forget how important it is not to disrupt the record profits of our fossil fuel companies. If worst ever did come to worst, it’s reassuring to remember what the U.S. Chamber of Commerce told the Environmental Protection Agency in a recent filing: that there’s no need to worry because “populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological, and technological adaptations.” I’m pretty sure that’s what residents are telling themselves in Joplin today.

CLIMATE CHANGE policy & politics

Posted on October 25, 2010

Image via Neubie on Flickr

Even with a Democratic majority, climate change legislation didn’t pass, but at least it was there. However, due to widespread climate change denialism within the Republican Party, a GOP win could mean the end of climate change policy altogether. Via NPR:

The more carbon that gets released into the atmosphere, the higher the average temperature rises.

That’s a scientific fact.

Human activities, such as driving, flying, building and even turning on the lights, are the biggest contributor to the release of carbon.

That too, is a fact.

And yet the majority of Republicans running for House and Senate seats this year disagree.

. . .

Bill McKibben, scholar in residence at Middlebury College in Vermont and the founder of 350.org, says it is a tragedy that conservatives are turning their back on the science behind climate change.

“On this issue maybe more than most, we need that interplay of liberal and conservative,” he says. “Liberals are good at sort of pointing the way forward in kind of progressive new directions and conservatives are good at providing the anchor that says human nature won’t go along with that. That back and forth has been very useful.”

If Republicans take control of the House this November, McKibben says, he doesn’t see a future for climate change policy.

“Look, the Democrats — with a huge majority — couldn’t pass climate change legislation even of a very, very weak variety this year, so I doubt there’ll be any action over the next two years.”

That is, unless conservatives decide to team up with liberals.

“We desperately need conservatives at the forefront of the fight,” McKibben says. “The sooner that conservatives are willing to accept the science, the reality, the sooner we can get to work with their very important help in figuring out what set of prescriptions, what combination of market and regulation will be required in order to deal with the most serious problem we’ve ever stumbled into.”

Despite the lack of merit in their own explanations for the nonexistence of climate change, Republicans reject years of peer-reviewed climate research and observations. Apparently, former Vice President Dick Cheney was the catalyst for the widespread climate change denialism within the Republican Party. Via the New York Times:

According to Congressional inquiries, White House officials, encouraged by Mr. Cheney’s office, forced the Environmental Protection Agency to remove sections on climate change from separate reports in 2002 and 2003. (Christine Todd Whitman, then the E.P.A. administrator, has since described the process as “brutal.”)

The administration also sought to control or censor Congressional testimony by federal employees and tampered with other reports in order to inject uncertainty into the climate debate and minimize threats to the environment.

Nothing, it seemed, could crack the administration’s denial — not Tony Blair of Britain and other leaders who took climate change seriously; not Mrs. Whitman (who eventually quit after being undercut by Mr. Cheney, who worked for the energy company Halliburton before he became vice president and received annual checks while in office); and certainly not the scientists.

In 2007, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its most definitive statement on the human contribution to climate change, Mr. Cheney insisted that there was not enough evidence to just “sort of run out and try to slap together some policy that’s going to try to solve the problem.” To which Mrs. Whitman, by then in private life, said: “I don’t see how he can say that with a straight face anymore.”

Nowadays, it is almost impossible to recall that in 2000, George W. Bush promised to cap carbon dioxide, encouraging some to believe that he would break through the partisan divide on global warming. Until the end of the 1990s, Republicans could be counted on to join bipartisan solutions to environmental problems. Now they’ve disappeared in a fog of disinformation, an entire political party parroting the Cheney line.

Since the Tea Party movement is rife in climate-change denialism, big polluters, which are corporations that acquire their profits from polluting the environment, are backing the Tea Party. Via the Guardian:

BP and several other big European companies are funding the midterm election campaigns of Tea Party favourites who deny the existence of global warming or oppose Barack Obama’s energy agenda, the Guardian has learned.

An analysis of campaign finance by Climate Action Network Europe (Cane) found nearly 80% of campaign donations from a number of major European firms were directed towards senators who blocked action on climate change. These included incumbents who have been embraced by the Tea Party such as Jim DeMint, a Republican from South Carolina, and the notorious climate change denier James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma.

The report, released tomorrow, used information on the Open Secrets.org database to track what it called a co-ordinated attempt by some of Europe’s biggest polluters to influence the US midterms. It said: “The European companies are funding almost exclusively Senate candidates who have been outspoken in their opposition to comprehensive climate policy in the US and candidates who actively deny the scientific consensus that climate change is happening and is caused by people.”

Obama and Democrats have accused corporate interests and anonymous donors of trying to hijack the midterms by funnelling money to the Chamber of Commerce and to conservative Tea Party groups. The Chamber of Commerce reportedly has raised $75m (£47m) for pro-business, mainly Republican candidates.

“Oil companies and the other special interests are spending millions on a campaign to gut clean-air standards and clean-energy standards, jeopardising the health and prosperity of this state,” Obama told a rally in California on Friday night.

Every cloud has a silver lining, and the silver lining in a big Republican win is the Environmental Protection Agency’s greenhouse gas tailoring rule. Via the Emerging Issues Law Blog:

The Tailoring Rule covers large industrial facilities like power plants and oil refineries that are responsible for 70 percent of the GHGs from stationary sources. The proposals announced are a critical component for implementing the Tailoring Rule and would ensure that GHG emissions from these large facilities are minimized in all 50 states and that local economies can continue to grow.

The Clean Air Act requires states to develop EPA-approved implementation plans that include requirements for issuing air permits. When federal permitting requirements change, as they did after EPA finalized the GHG Tailoring Rule, states may need to modify these plans.

In the first rule, EPA is proposing to require permitting programs in 13 states to make changes to their implementation plans to ensure that GHG emissions will be covered. All other states that implement an EPA-approved air permitting program must review their existing permitting authority and inform EPA if their programs do not address GHG emissions.

Because some states may not be able to develop and submit revisions to their plans before the Tailoring Rule becomes effective in 2011, in the second rule, EPA is proposing a federal implementation plan, which would allow EPA to issue permits for large GHG emitters located in these states. This would be a temporary measure that is in place until the state can revise its own plan and resume responsibility for GHG permitting.

States are best-suited to issue permits to sources of GHG emissions and have long-standing experience working together with industrial facilities. EPA will work closely and promptly with states to help them develop, submit, and approve necessary revisions to enable the affected states to issue air permits to GHG-emitting sources. Additionally, EPA will continue to provide guidance and act as a resource for the states as they make the various required permitting decisions for GHG emissions.

EPA will accept comment on the first proposal for updated state implementation plans for 30 days after publication in the Federal Register. A hearing on the second proposal for the federal implementation plan was held on August 25, 2010, and the EPA will accept comment for 30 days after that hearing. The agency is working to finalize these rules prior to January 2, 2011, the earliest GHG permitting requirements will be effective.

The author or licensor of this image does not endorse my work or me and their image is protected under an attribution license.

ENERGY POLICY: Will solar panels return to the White House roof?

Posted on September 14, 2010

Every act of energy conservation like this is more than just common sense — I tell you it is an act of patriotism.

— Former President Jimmy Carter

We often think of conservation only in terms of sacrifice. In fact, it is the most painless and immediate way of rebuilding our Nation’s strength. Every gallon of oil each one of us saves is a new form of production. It gives us more freedom, more confidence, that much more control over our own lives.

— Former President Jimmy Carter

Image via

Formerly, President Jimmy Carter had solar panels placed on the White House roof, but they were removed during the Reagan administration. Via Newsweek:

Jimmy Carter had a thing or two to say about energy. “We can’t go on consuming 40 percent more energy than we produce,” Carter said from the Oval Office in 1979. He warned that America’s energy dependence made us weaker to our enemies and urged Congress to act on clean domestic energy or face a future of rising prices and less international security. To drive home the point, he had a series of solar panels installed on the White House.

Sometime during the next eight years, they came down and never went back up. No one quite remembers why. There’s a rumor that President Reagan had the house repainted and never got around to reinstalling them.

Bill McKibben would like to have solar panels placed back onto the White House roof. Via Scientific American:

In 1979, President Jimmy Carter had 32 panels installed atop the White House to capture the sun’s heat. Thirty-odd years later, at least one of the panels still works, warming up in the Northeastern sunlight of Boston and sending steam heat out of a spigot on September 8, en route down the east coast from its temporary home at Unity College in Maine. By September 10, that panel had made it back to the White House, courtesy of dedicated Unity College students and environmental campaigner Bill McKibben.

However, Bill McKibben’s efforts to bring the solar panels back to the White House roof were recently rejected by White House officials. Via the NYTimes.com:

Mr. McKibben met with three midlevel White House officials Friday morning who told him, politely, no dice.

They explained that there were various reasons that the White House roof was not available for a gesture with very little energy-saving potential and that the Obama administration was doing more to promote renewable energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions than any previous government. The word “stunt” may have come up.

More via Andy Revkin at the DotEarth blog:

But because the goal of this effort is a high-profile event involving the White House roof itself, it’s destined to run up against an immovable hurdle: a combination of the incredibly intertwined bureaucracy involved in doing anything to the White House and the authority of the Secret Service over anything that happens on that fabled roof. If you think congressional gridlock is bad, consider a bureaucracy that ranges from the Office of the White House Chief Usher to the National Park Service and Secret Service.

The security issues involving the roof, particularly in the wake of the September 11th attacks, dominate. To get some input on such issues, I spoke with Steve Strong on Wednesday. He’s a solar pioneer who attended the installation of the panels in 1979 and whose company installed photovoltaic and hot water panels on other buildings in the White House complex in 2002. That project had its roots in the Clinton administration but was completed during the Bush administration “under the radar,” labeled by the supervising National Park Service team as a “maintenance operation,” Strong said. Strong said that there was never a question of doing something on the roof of the White House proper, given the anti-aircraft missiles and “spook stuff” there and the veto power of the Secret Service.

Former President Jimmy Carter outlines his prudent energy policy in his July 15th, 1979, speech to the nation. Carter’s ambitious but shrewd goals for energy independence weren’t implemented, but his vision is still a model or symbol for a future when the United States is once again energy independent. Furthermore, Carter’s domestic energy policy also included fossil-fuels in addition to renewable energy sources (emphasis added):

Energy will be the immediate test of our ability to unite this Nation, and it can also be the standard around which we rally. On the battlefield of energy we can win for our Nation a new confidence, and we can seize control again of our common destiny.

In little more than two decades we’ve gone from a position of energy independence to one in which almost half the oil we use comes from foreign countries, at prices that are going through the roof. Our excessive dependence on OPEC has already taken a tremendous tool on our economy and our people. This is the direct cause of the long lines which have made millions of you spend aggravating hours waiting for gasoline. It’s a cause of the increased inflation and unemployment that we now face. This intolerable dependence on foreign oil threatens our economic independence and the very security of our Nation.

The energy crisis is real. It is worldwide. It is a clear and present danger to our Nation. These are facts and we simply must face them.

What I have to say to you now about energy is simple and vitally important.

Point one: I am tonight setting a clear goal for the energy policy of the United States. Beginning this moment, this Nation will never use more foreign oil than we did in 1977 — never. From now on, every new addition to our demand for energy will be met from our own production and our own conservation. The generation-long growth in our dependence on foreign oil will be stopped dead in its tracks right now and then reversed as we move through the 1980′s, for I am tonight setting the further goal of cutting our dependence on foreign oil by one-half by the end of the next decade — a saving of over 4 1/2 million barrels of imported oil per day.

Point two: To ensure that we meet these targets, I will use my Presidential authority to set import quotas. I’m announcing tonight that for 1979 and 1980, I will forbid the entry into this country of one drop of foreign oil more than these goals allow. These quotas will ensure a reduction in imports even below the ambitious levels we set at the recent Tokyo summit.

Point three: To give us energy security, I am asking for the most massive peacetime commitment of funds and resources in our Nation’s history to develop America’s own alternative sources of fuel — from coal, from oil shale, from plant products for gasohol, from unconventional gas, from the Sun.

I propose the creation of an energy security corporation to lead this effort to replace 2 1/2 million barrels of imported oil per day by 1990. The corporation will issue up to $5 billion in energy bonds, and I especially want them to be in small denominations so that average Americans can invest directly in America’s energy security.

Just as a similar synthetic rubber corporation helped us win World War II, so will we mobilize American determination and ability to win the energy war. Moreover, I will soon submit legislation to Congress calling for the creation of this Nation’s first solar bank, which will help us achieve the crucial goal of 20 percent of our energy coming from solar power by the year 2000.

These efforts will cost money, a lot of money, and that is why Congress must enact the windfall profits tax without delay. It will be money well spent. Unlike the billions of dollars that we ship to foreign countries to pay for foreign oil, these funds will be paid by Americans to Americans. These funds will go to fight, not to increase, inflation and unemployment.

Point four: I’m asking Congress to mandate, to require as a matter of law, that our Nation’s utility companies cut their massive use of oil by 50 percent within the next decade and switch to other fuels, especially coal, our most abundant energy source.

Point five: To make absolutely certain that nothing stands in the way of achieving these goals, I will urge Congress to create an energy mobilization board which, like the War Production Board in World War II, will have the responsibility and authority to cut through the redtape, the delays, and the endless roadblocks to completing key energy projects.

We will protect our environment. But when this Nation critically needs a refinery or a pipeline, we will build it.

Point six: I’m proposing a bold conservation program to involve every State, county, and city and every average American in our energy battle. This effort will permit you to build conservation into your homes and your lives at a cost you can afford.

Video: Former President Jimmy Carter addresses the United States’ energy shortage by discussing how humanity is becoming more materialistic, more self-Indulgent, and too consumptive. He characterizes this shift as a “crisis of the American spirit“:

Video: Solar road tripper Jamie Nemecek of Unity College tells us why she thinks solar on the White House roof is a good idea:

ENVIRONMENTAL NEWS PICKS

Posted on October 24, 2009

Here are some interesting environmental news links I’ve come across recently:

Today, October 24, 2009, is International Day of Climate Action, organized by 350.org. Science Magazine has an interview with Bill McKibben—the founder of 350.org:

Writer Bill McKibben has built an international climate activism movement around a concentration: 350 ppm. Two years ago he launched 350.org after NASA climate scientist Jim Hansen told him that was the carbon dioxide concentration needed to prevent dangerous man-made warming (pdf). But the atmosphere already is around 390 ppm—and scientists expect the concentration to rise beyond 550 ppm if drastic measures aren’t taken soon to reduce humanity’s carbon emissions. So it’s an understatement to say that McKibben’s goal is a tough one.

. . .

Q: 350 a really hard goal. Do you wonder sometimes if you’ve chosen a goal that you’ll always be falling short of?

B.M.: I wonder all the time whether we’re going to get there. It’s definitely a tough number. But the point is aiming for another number isn’t useful. There’s the Tripati study out of UCLA [University of California, Los Angeles]: 390 parts per million, the last time we were there, 15 million years ago, we had 100 foot rise in sea level. If 390 melts the Arctic, there’s no point in doing our best to get to 450. Yes, we’re probably going to hit 450, but we need to bounce off it as fast as we possibly can and get back down. There are whole countries that are going to disappear this century unless we bring things under control. Island nations that are going to go beneath the waves, and African nations that are going to be so drought ridden no one’s going to live there. So this is incredibly pragmatic. It may not be easy, and it may not be at the moment politically realistic—but the negotiation that’s going on right now is between human beings on the one hand and physics and chemistry on the other. … Physics and chemistry have stated their bottom line: 350 parts per million if you want the world to work at all the way you’re used to it working. That’s a pretty hard number. I’m pretty confident it’s going to be easier to change the political reality than it is to change the laws of nature. One of the reasons this seems so difficult to do is that we’ve never built a political movement to demand that change happen. That’s what we’re doing now. The scientists have done their job—they’ve given us a robust number to work with.

Today’s awareness campaign of 350 ppm is global. Check out this video from downtown Manhattan:

You can learn more about what 350 ppm means and why it’s important here.
Groundwater overdrafting is a huge problem in many areas of the world. It occurs when groundwater is extracted and used faster than it’s replaced. In some areas, due to the geology, it’s very difficult to recharge groundwater. The consequences of recklessly using aquifers in Spain are causing peat bogs to dry out, self-combust, and consequently release tones of carbon dioxide. In some areas, the land above an overused aquifer sinks—a process known as land subsidence. From the guardian.co.uk:

They are meant to be Spain’s most important inland wetlands, but yesterday the lagoons at Las Tablas de Daimiel national park were not just dry, they were burning. Stilted walkways stood on baked earth and rowing boats lay stranded on the ground. Observation huts revealed no birds, just an endless stretch of reeds rooted in cracked mud.

Only 1% of the park’s surface remains wet, but the real catastrophe is happening underground. “If you see smoke it is because the dried-out peat under the ground has begun to self-combust,” a park worker warned visitors. Occasionally, the fire breaks to the surface, sending up puffs of white smoke.

Scientists warn the wetlands are losing the lining that once retained water, with deep cracks opening up in the worst areas. Park authorities worry the damage may prove irreversible.

. . .

Spain’s environment ministry, which runs the failing park, this week banned Ruiz from talking to the Guardian, but scientists who know the wetlands all agree on what is happening.

The aquifer which once fed the lagoons now lies 50ft below them. Farmers near the park have sunk thousands of wells, some 300ft deep, and have spent years pumping out more water than goes in. Furthermore, the Guadiana river, which used to flow into the Tablas de Daimiel, has disappeared.

“People have been warning that it was going to dry out for 20 years,” said Luís Moreno of Spain’s Geological and Mining Institute.

As the peat burns, an area that once trapped carbon dioxide has started releasing vast quantities of it. “We saw the first smoke in August but the fires must have been burning for a while,” said Moreno. “It is a very difficult thing to control. It could burn for months.”
Unfortunately, a research survey vessel recently collided with a blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus)—the largest living animal on the planet (and possibly that ever lived). More on the fatal blue whale ship strike from the Santa Rosa Press Democrat:

“This is a big deal,” said Thor Holmes, curator of the vertebrate museum at Humboldt State University and a member of the California Marine Mammal Stranding Network.

The 72-foot whale died after being struck by a research vessel, believed to be the 78-foot Pacific Star. Its crew is under contract to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to update maps of the ocean floor. The contractor is based in San Diego while the boat was leased from Washington, said Joe Cordaro, a NOAA biologist.

Crew members reported they were seven miles off the coast of Fort Bragg moving at about 5.5 knots when the ship shuddered, he said. They had not spotted a whale and didn’t immediately know what happened. Then a whale surfaced, bleeding profusely, Cordaro said.

A few hours later, a blue whale with huge gashes washed up along the rocky coast just south of Fort Bragg.

Cordaro said it’s hard to explain how a ship and whale would collide in the open ocean. But when whales are feeding, breeding or coming up for air, they aren’t paying attention to their surroundings, he said.

Just so history doesn’t repeat itself, it’s not wise to blow up a whale carcass with dynamite! Via NBC Bay Area:

To offset the terrible news of the blue whale ship strike, in May of this year, it was reported, “The voice of a male blue whale was tracked about 70 miles off the south shore of Long Island on January 10 and 11, 2009 . . . ‘This is a very important moment in the environmental history . . . [since] blue whales were almost hunted to extinction by the middle of the 20th century, and the fact that now we’re finding them migrating not far off our shores is truly remarkable.’”
There are consequences to testing nuclear weapons. These consequences are apparently represented by a rise in cancer amongst Americans that lived during testing events. From Politics Daily:

The winds carried Strontium-90, Iodine-129 and other lethal particles across a broad swath of the country. Infants who were bottle-fed, which was then considered the modern approach, were particularly vulnerable to the Strontium-90 that ended up in cows’ milk.

In 1961, as John Kennedy was poised to resume atmospheric testing after a two-year moratorium, he met with White House science adviser Jerome Wiesner in the Oval Office one rainy day. The president wondered how fallout reached the earth. Wiesner explained that it was washed out of the clouds by rain. “You mean,” Kennedy asked, “it’s in the rain out there?” As Wiesner tells it, the president then “looked out the window, looked very sad and didn’t say a word for several minutes.” Nonetheless JFK, fearful that the Soviet Union might score a nuclear breakthrough, authorized a new round of above-ground testing before negotiating the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963.

. . .

But a study released Tuesday documents the enhanced cancer risk that Baby Boomers face because of these long-ago atmospheric tests. Epidemiologist Joseph Mangano analyzed the lingering radiation in infant teeth (donated long ago by the parents of baby boys born in the St. Louis area between 1959 and 1961) and compared the results to contemporary cancer data from the subjects. “What we found out was shocking,” Mangano said. “Persons who had died of cancer had more than double the Strontium-90 in their (baby) teeth than did healthy persons.” The original variance in Strontium-90 levels among individuals, he explained, was caused by seemingly small factors such as how much milk expectant mothers drank, diet and the source of the municipal water supply.
Bugs, bugs, and more bugs: This video captures the fascinating flight patterns of bugs flying around a street light (the music is by Telefon Tel Aviv, “What’s The Use Of Feet If We Haven’t Got Legs”)
Via ClimateWire, scientists argue that the “combustion of fossil fuels is inherently inefficient,” so worldwide energy consumption would drop if “all energy consumption is converted to electricity.” From ClimateWire:

Mark Jacobson, an engineering professor at Stanford University, and Mark Delucchi, a researcher at University of California, Davis, in the article attempt to map out a plan for powering the entire planet with renewable sources of energy. Doing so, they say, is achievable and would cost less than fossil fuels or nuclear power.

The core of their argument is this: Combustion of fossil fuels is inherently inefficient, while running a vehicle on electricity conserves energy. When gasoline is used to power a standard car, 80 percent of the energy is lost through heat. Electric-powered vehicles, on the other hand, only lose about 20 percent, they say.

“If you make this transition to renewables and electricity, then you eliminate the need for 13,000 new or existing coal plants,” Jacobson said through the Stanford news service. “Just by changing our infrastructure, we have less power demand.”

Jacobsen and Delucchi estimated worldwide energy demand with the current mix of energy sources at 16.9 terawatts in 2030. But if virtually all energy consumption is converted to electricity, either for direct use or hydrogen production, that figure would drop to 11.5 terawatts, according to their prediction.

The long-term savings of converting to wind, geothermal, tidal, hydroelectric and solar power, they claim, would more than make up for the expense of replacing a fleet of plants fueled by coal, natural gas and nuclear. To get there, they argue for an unprecedented construction boom in transmission lines, among other measures.

In all, the scientists say about 1.3 percent of the Earth’s land surface would suffice to host the wind turbines and solar installations that would dominate in their theoretical clean energy system.
Biophysical economics combines economics, ecology, and thermodynamics (e.g., unlimited economic growth is impossible) to argue that “the neoclassical mantra of constant economic growth is ignoring the world’s diminishing supply of energy at humanity’s peril, failing to take account of the principle of net energy return on investment.” . . . [so is the world] headed toward a dramatic economic collapse as energy scarcity takes hold . . . [or can we] turn the ship around.” More from Scientific American (emphasis added):

Central to their argument is an understanding that the survival of all living creatures is limited by the concept of energy return on investment (EROI): that any living thing or living societies can survive only so long as they are capable of getting more net energy from any activity than they expend during the performance of that activity.

For instance, if a squirrel burns energy eating nuts, those nuts had better give the squirrel more energy back then it expended, or the squirrel will inevitably die. It is a rule that lies at the core of studying animal and plant behavior, and human society should be looked at no differently, as even technologically complex societies are still governed by EROI.

. . .

The sharpest difference between biophysical economics and the more widely held “Chicago School” approach is that biophysical economists readily accept the peak oil hypothesis: that society is fast approaching the point where global oil production will peak and then steadily decline.

The United States is held as the prime example. Though the United States is still the world’s third-largest producer of oil, its oil production stopped growing more than a decade ago and has flatlined or steadily fallen ever since. Other once-robust oil-producing countries have experienced similar production curves.

But the more important indicator, biophysical economists say, is the fact that the U.S. oil industry’s energy return on investment has been steadily sliding since the beginning of the century.

Through analyzing historical production data, experts say the petroleum sector’s EROI in this country was about 100-to-1 in 1930, meaning one had to burn approximately 1 barrel of oil’s worth of energy to get 100 barrels out of the ground. By the 1990s, it is thought, that number slid to less than 36-to-1, and further down to 19-to-1 by 2006.

“If you go from using a 20-to-1 energy return fuel down to a 3-to-1 fuel, economic collapse is guaranteed,” as nothing is left for other economic activity, said Nate Hagens, editor of the popular peak oil blog “The Oil Drum.”

“The main problem with neoclassical economics is that it treats energy as the same as any other commodity input into the production function,” Hagens said. “They parse it into dollar terms and treat it the same as they would mittens or earmuffs or eggs … but without energy, you can’t have any of that other stuff.”

—
Photo source for attribution here, here, and here. The authors or licensors of these images do not endorse my work or me and their images are protected under an attribution license.

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