“It is essential that we stimulate the economy,” he says earnestly. “Keynes believed that, no matter how unproductive an action may appear, if it results in increased aggregate market activity we must do it.  We’ve let the government have a go with macroprudential stimulus and quantitative easing, but people just won’t spend.  So we’re giving them a reason to start building again by destroying their businesses, burning down their homes and stealing their stuff.”

“It’s quite clear,” says Reginald Graham Sacks, “I’ll quote Keynes: ‘”To dig holes in the ground”, paid for out of savings, will increase, not only employment, but the real national dividend of useful goods and services.’ So if people have a reason to buy things then that demand can improve the overall economy.”

I travelled to Clapham Junction, scenes of some of the rioting that took place over Monday night.  A Debenhams department store had been burned, including a floor of apartments above the store.  The streets are a mess of broken glass, bits of looted goods dropped behind, twisted metal, burned scraps and even more burned out shops and cars.

Hicks had introduced himself while I had been interviewing a sobbing old woman whose home had been destroyed and invited me to join his “Economic Posse” as they evaluated the events of the night before and planned for Tuesday.

“If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coal mines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it private enterprise on well-tried principals of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory),there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is,” reads a stout, pimply youth with shaggy blonde hair and yellowing teeth.

“That’s Krugman Paulson,” says Hicks, “but the problem is that, during a recession, consumers start to hoard their savings; what Krugman calls ‘the desire of individuals to hold liquid monetary assets’.  So quantitative easing isn’t sufficient.  We need to force people to start spending.”

“We tried simply pirating things off the internet,” says Sacks, “but we just couldn’t download enough free music, movies and porn to make an economic difference.” The others nod, looking mournful.

“We didn’t want to do this but we had no choice.  Look at all the work we’re creating.  Builders and glaziers are going to do well.  Everything we stole or destroyed will have to be replaced.  Shops will have to restock.  Factories will have to make more stuff to fill those empty shelves.”

Hicks’ face almost glows with riotousness: “We’re rebels for the cause of Keynesian multiplier effects.”

Paulson reads clearly from Keynes: “The social object of skilled investment should be to defeat the dark forces of time and ignorance which envelope our future.”

The others lower their heads in silent communion.

As a child turning teen in the late 1950s, the black-and-white RCA in the living room received only three channels … well, four, but we didn’t watch PBS. So I read. Newspapers, of course (after Dad finished sports and Mom finished news). And books. The library was only two blocks away, so I spent afternoons there sampling the stack. I was a small-town boy at the end of the idyllic “Father Knows Best” decade of Eisenhower placidity, a geeky kid feeling the first pangs of puberty.

I longed for adventure beyond being a Boy Scout or tossing a football with neighborhood pals. In the library I found adventure stories set in space, spun with well-chosen words and exquisitely crafted plots.

I discovered Arthur C. Clarke’s “Childhood’s End.” Then Robert A. Heinlein’s “Methuselah’s Children,” Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451,” and Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation and Empire.” Science fiction (or, in Clarke’s case, science prediction) captivated me. I became a sci-fi cognoscente.

Then, in 1957, came the shocker: Sputnik. Later, in April 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to fly in space. The Soviets appeared poised to dominate the Age of Space. Those early days of the Cold War meant little to me; I was barely in high school. But those nascent orbital flights stirred hope for adventures forecast by Clarke, Heinlein, Bradbury, and Asimov. They allowed me to imagine I would visit the Moon, maybe Mars, and defeat time and the speed of light to orbit Proxima Centauri in a warp-drive space ship.

I’ve been re-reading them because, a half century after dreaming of travel to other worlds, I remain grounded. I won’t leave footprints on the Moon, let alone orbit a star 4.2 light years away. Only 12 people have stood on the lunar surface, and I’m not one of them, and I never will be.

What the hell went wrong?

The American desire to conquer space began so grandly. Six weeks after Gagarin orbited the Earth in Vostok 1, President Kennedy stood in the well of the House and told the nation to prepare to mount the heavens:

I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important in the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.

Eight years later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto Mare Tranquillitatis while Michael Collins waited in the orbiting command module. The cost: 2 to 4 cents of every tax dollar, or about $136 billion in 2007 dollars, and the lives of three men: command pilot Virgil Grissom, senior pilot Edward H. White, and pilot Roger B. Chaffee, killed in the 1967 Apollo 1 fire.

More missions and more successes followed. NASA’s program of unmanned space explorations in and beyond the Solar System — Voyager, Pioneer, Magellan, Mariner, Galileo, and Cassini–Huygens, among them — over the decades returned to us data and images, especially images, that kept you and me enthralled with dreams of possibilities. For a while, science, math, and engineering ruled. Full-page science pages and even sections blossomed in dozens of American newspapers in the 1970s, my little 14,000-circulation daily among them, fueled in part by growing public interest in and demand for environmental protection of air, earth, and water.

NASA and its various programs represented, perhaps, a pinnacle of and consuming national belief in American exceptionalism (the theoretical view that the United States differs qualitatively from other nations).

Then so much about us and our collective national motivations began to change. And so did the bright beacon of American exceptionalism.

The nation literally enlarged. When Aldrin climbed down the ladder from the lunar lander, the American population was about 203 million. That has increased by a half to nearly 312 million over the past half century. Such growth in population inevitably altered social, cultural, economic, and political dynamics in America. We began to differ about what government should do, how it should do it, and how it should be paid for.

Government spending has been redirected from what we, the governed, might have wished for over the past half century. And we, the governed, share the blame with the government.

We went to war with credit cards, beginning with Kennedy, LBJ, and Nixon in Vietnam. Today we fight two wars (three? four?) half a world away. None has a definable “victory.” They are costly in time, treasure, and human life. One estimate pegs the cost of the Iraq war alone at $3 trillion (including impacts on the broader economy). The 10-year-old Afghanistan war is nearing the half-trillion-dollar mark in direct federal spending.

During the 1970s, the national gross public debt (the total dollar amount of public and private financial liability) as a percentage of gross domestic product hovered around 27 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The 1980s saw that percentage increase to 41 percent of GDP. In the Clinton decade, the 1990s, it rose to 50 percent before falling to 39 percent. In 2010, it hit 62 percent of GDP.

In February, based on President Obama’s fiscal 2012 budget proposal, The Washington Post noted this potential impact:

Starting in 2014, net interest payments will surpass the amount spent on education, transportation, energy and all other discretionary programs outside defense. In 2018, they will outstrip Medicare spending. Only the amounts spent on defense and Social Security would remain bigger under the president’s plan.

In the federal corridors of power, wrangling over the money the Republic owes continues without permanent resolution, beset by ideological bickering.

Over the past half century we became eager consumers, leading to what political pundit Kevin Phillips called “conspicuous opulence” — the Greed Is Good Decade of the 1980s. We bought cars, light pickups, minivans, and SUVs. America now ranks first in number of vehicles per capita (779 per 1,000 people). We bought TVs, owning nearly 750 sets per 1,000 people. And lately we’ve bought all things digital — computers, iPods, and cellphones. Sheesh — we bought 300,000 iPads on the first day they went on sale.

Wealth concentrated from the wallets of many to the offshore accounts of the few. For many, if not most, Americans, growth in family wealth stagnated or lost ground to inflation. Financially, life just got harder for the lower and middle classes, making it more difficult to dream of space flight. Making the monthly mortgage nut overrode all other considerations. Political power shifted from the many to the few as corporatism’s emergent role in politics shifted politicians’ attention from helping us to placating them.

As a nation, we stopped spending sufficiently on the foundations of the Republic that matter — roads, bridges, dams, refineries, airports, facilities to produce safe drinking water or treat wastewater, levees, and school facilities at every level. The national infrastructure needs at minimum a five-year investment of $2.2 trillion. No political will exists to fully repair or invest in the systemic needs of the nation’s infrastructure. State governments, facing scores of billions of dollars in budget deficits, are too broke to act. In Congress, talk is plentiful, but backing pricey infrastructure projects doesn’t win votes.

I can’t even begin to calculate the moral, economic, cultural, social, or political costs of the Cold War and its attendant arms race. That, and the financial drain of America’s self-assumed role as the world’s cop on the beat, have saddled the Republic with debts in the many trillions of dollars.

In the 1960s, NASA harnessed our national dream and goal of manned space flight to the best and most motivated scientific and engineering minds in the nation (and a few “borrowed” German minds). Science and math became cool for young people to study (I did). But that has changed. A 2002 RAND think tank study found that a young adult’s probability of obtaining a science or engineering degree has risen much less in the United States than abroad. The United States ranks 37th in spending on education as a percentage of GDP (5.7 percent), a figure just ahead of defense spending (FY2010) of 4.7 percent of GDP.

Our kids are leaving college today saddled with an uncertain future amid 9.2 percent unemployment and student loans averaging nearly $23,000. The class of 2011 has the dubious distinction of being the most indebted class in history. Yet federal loan support has grown insufficiently to give them a decent, less indebted start in life.

Our educational system from bottom to top has become ideologically charged, budget- and facility-challenged, and driven by a regimen of standardized tests. We graduate young people with fewer skills and bodies of knowledge than modern life demands. Dreaming of space flight is predicated on more than wishful thinking: It requires creative insight, a well-trained imagination, and the conceptual knowledge to see the impossible as possible. We did the impossible in the 1960s. When’s the last time we did so?

As manned space flight became routine (but not monthly, as NASA first promised, and not cheap, as NASA also promised), press attention drifted away — save for the focus following the Challenger and Columbia tragedies. As former CNN science reporter Miles O’Brien said Sunday on Reliable Sources, the press came to view the shuttle as a “space truck.” The press image of the astronauts, O’Brien said, was transformed from the Tom Wolfe superstars of the Mercury Seven to the bland “airline pilots” of the Space Shuttle era.

Television, O’Brien argued, became less enamored of science coverage. So did newspapers. Science pages and sections vanished — because they could not be supported by advertising. We, the public, no longer read about science. Our eyeballs went elsewhere — and the advertising dollars followed.

Budget stresses challenged NASA’s own flight path beyond the Shuttle era. The Shuttle’s intended successor, the Constellation program, has been axed. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does American enterprise. NASA’s lack of a clear, publicly supported and demanded mission of continued viable human spaceflight has been left to commercial entities. Cue the majestic, swelling musical overture, please, that disguises the profit motive.

Don’t misunderstand, please: Entrepreneurship has been an innovative engine and lies at the heart of my view of American exceptionalism. If Richard Branson and SpaceShipOne designer Burt Rutan want to make a buck with Virgin Galactic at $200,000 a seat, by all means, let them. May they live long and prosper.

But those among us who lived through the 1960s, even with its turmoil over an unpopular war, probably distinguish between the financial motivation of commercial space flight today and the broad, eyes-on-the-stars nationalism standing firmly behind the mission of Apollo. NASA, not necessarily or entirely through its own fault, is now adrift without that national consensus, let alone clear congressional or presidential direction. We are standing still. We have not built exceptionally on the promise that took us to the Moon in less than a decade. I do not expect to see in my remaining years an American man or woman planting a flag in the dust of Luna. And been there, done that.

This depiction of the last half century and its relationship with a dream of extra-planetary space flight lies wide open to challenge or ridicule. Cherry-picking of facts and observations is not formal analysis, but this has become my view of unpleasant-to-contemplate change in American exceptionalism and its consequences on that dream. The view of America as qualitatively superior may still be seen in many aspects of American domestic and foreign affairs … but that exceptionalism has been eroded.

However, part of American exceptionalism is the constitutional expectation that the governed challenge the governors. It is that civic duty of questioning government performance and authority that helps fuel our exceptionalism. But it should also mean that we turn an introspective lens on ourselves, the governed. What have we wrought in the last half century?

It is difficult to imagine American successes in space — or any other important exploratory arena — in the near or distant future because we have yet to resolve our diminished present.

I would have liked to have flown in space. Returning, after a half a century, to reading Clarke, Heinlein, Bradbury, and Asimov has been enjoyable. They have been exceptional storytellers, and I teach storytelling for a living. Their stories are brilliantly conceived human comedy and drama. But more than five decades ago Clarke, Heinlein, Bradbury, and Asimov wrote with the assumption of successful human exploration of space. For them, humanity among the stars was a given.

Re-reading these marvelous writers, however, has been tinged with melancholy — because we can no longer make that assumption of success. That is a tragedy, among others, of a flawed American exceptionalism.

In our urban centers, if you look hard enough, you can find the the keys to the kingdom for how diverse and yet complementary cultures, values, and priorities all came to be entwined in our broader American experience. The design of our cities reflects that which we value in our culture. And by advancing our values and our priorities at the municipal level, we can begin to move the mountain in the direction we want it to face.

Once you add in emerging technologies, the possibilities are both exciting and endless. Among those emerging technologies are mobile applications, putting the potential for restoration and renewal at our collective finger tips.

From one perspective, mobile apps aren’t new. I’m certain many of you reading this are familiar with The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy. In that wonderful series of books by the late Douglas Adams the protagonist carries a computerized device (the ‘Hitchhikers’ Guide’) which can instantaneously tap into the universe’s collected knowledge.

I was blown away by that notion. And I don’t think it would be a bridge too far to refer to our iPhones, Android phones, iPads and Honeycomb tablets as our living, present equivalents of the Hitchhikers’ Guide: small, portable devices that can, at a moment’s notice, tap into our collected knowledge of the world we live in, helping us gain the agency to improve our surroundings.

In keeping with that philosophy, I noticed that IBM has now released mobile applications through its Smarter Planet initiative (City Forward is a smarter planet initiative) that help illustrate how our world’s systems — everything from cities and buildings to our energy grid, transportation networks, our healthcare and our food supply  – are becoming more interconnected and intelligent.

The apps are available for the iPhone (iTMS link), Android (Amazon App Store link) and Blackberry (AppWorld link). Best of all, they’re free. If, like me, you deeply care about urban centers and our ability to–unlike a certain 1980s President–genuinely create that “shining city on a hill,” I highly urge you to check em out, download them and become better acquainted with how cities are helping to build a smarter planet.

Lower

Middle

Upper

Finally…the 7:25 under Lyndon.

Eight dam sections made of inflatable rubber constrained the lake, four at each end. The $4.4 million dam began receiving water from the Central Arizona Project in 1999. In 2002, one of the 40-foot-long, foot-thick rubber bladders (covered by a 10-year warranty from Bridgestone Industrial Products) failed, requiring a repair. Tempe and Bridgestone officials have disagreed on how to prevent deflation and enlarging buffer zones around the dam. UPI reported that “[a] design flaw made it impossible to use sprinklers to keep the rubber cool and wet, which likely hastened its deterioration.” Also, said UPI:

Mayor Hugh Hallman told the Arizona Republic that work had been scheduled to start Wednesday on replacing the dam. He added the maintenance crew could have been killed if the collapse had occurred while the work was under way.

This dam was small and young. The average age of tens of thousands of dams tracked by a national database is 51 years old. Because state and federal budgets are fiscally challenged, dams in America are not inspected as often as law and common sense requires. That must change.

Dams have many often overlapping functions — flood control, water supply, irrigation, hydroelectric power, and recreation. They may also restrain materials other than water, such as tailings and mining slurries. Because they are static structures often in place for decades, we give little thought or budgetary attention to their potential for failure.

But, although failure is rare, such events represent extraordinary risk to life and property. On Saturday, the dam holding back 10-mile-long Lake Delhi in eastern Iowa failed, abetted by 15 inches of rain in 48 hours. Two years ago, repeated flooding had done an estimated $500,000 damage to this 83-year-old earthen dam. The latest flooding caused a breach about 125 feet wide and 40 feet deep, officials said. About 8,000 people were affected downstream with considerable property damage, officials said, but no deaths or injuries were reported.

This dam, like the majority of dams in the United States, was not owned by a government. A recreation association and a hydroelectric dam owned it. In 2008, the state of Iowa had 3,325 dams, of which 276 had high or significant damage potential. Iowa had the equivalent of 1.25 dam inspectors, operating with a budget of $20,000. But residents and businesses downstream of Lake Delhi could easily confirm whether the dam was listed as one with such damage potential.

The National Inventory of Dams, maintained by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, contains more than 85,000 dams. The inventory is limited to dams of high or significant hazard that would result in loss of life or significant property damage in the event of failure.

But not all the information about these NID dams can be viewed by the public. That’s because, presumably, of concerns that would-be terrorists might attack high-hazard dams. According to the Center for Public Integrity:

Upon recommendation of the security-conscious National Dam Safety Review Board in 2007, the Corps blocked public access to key fields such as the downstream hazard potential and the city nearest the dam. Moreover, the public can no longer download the entire database, a tool long favored by journalists interested in assessing dam safety in their communities. … Because of the Corps-imposed restrictions, however, there’s no way for the public to know which downstream areas were classified as high-hazard in, say, 2008 or 2009.

That makes it difficult to decide, for example, if buying or building a house, let alone a factory, downstream of a particular dam is a good idea.

The dams listed in the NID are at least 25 feet high or exceed 50 acre-feet of storage. Dams are regulated, but that burden falls mainly on the states. The Association of State Dam Safety Officials provides a state-by-state database of dam safety regulations.

But do states have sufficient inspectors for their dams? The dam safety group says no. According to the association:

Laws governing dam regulation are essential to reduce the threat of dam failures. Regulation of dams in the USA rests almost entirely with the States. States regulate about 86% of the approximately 83,000 dams inventoried nationally. While the majority of states have been working to improve their programs in the last 25 years, most are still struggling with minimum budgets and staff. A handful do not even have adequate programs in place to regulate the safety of dams in those states. [Ed. note: Different sources provide differing estimates of dams in the NID.]

State budgets for fiscal 2010 had a shortfall of nearly $200 billion, said the Wall Street Journal. So dam safety inspections, let alone repair, replacement, or rehabilitation, have a low priority.

In 2008, New York state, in which I live, had 5,624 state-regulated dams. Of these, 1,140 were listed as having high- or significant-hazard potential. The state had the equivalent of 13.35 dam inspectors, working with a budget of $1.6 million. (Check your state’s dam safety program here.)

But those 85,000 dams in the corps’ national inventory do not represent all of America’s dams. By definition, the Tempe Town Lake dam would not be on it. (An S&R request to the Corps about the dam’s NID status remains unanswered.)

The privately owned Forge Pond Dam in Freetown, Mass., might not be, either. It is an 8-foot-high, 260-foot-long, 200-year-old earthen, stone, and concrete structure holding back 140 acre-feet of water.

This dam was owned by Andre Fournier of New Bedford, who, according to a state official, had not responded to numerous recommendations and orders issued by the Office of Dam safety dating back to 1999. Nor did he pay any of numerous fines levied on him. Fournier died in January 2009, leaving his dam a neglected orphan.

The dam partially breached in February, and state officials have decided to remove the dam. Its complete failure would have threatened two downstream dams as well.

Dam failures can have grave public consequences. Decades ago, on a rock-climbing trip west, I stood next to Teton Dam in Idaho with an engineer taking pictures of the dam. At at 11:57 a.m. the next day, June 5, 1976, the 305-foot-high, 3,100-foot-wide dam collapsed, allowing more than 80 billion gallons of stored water to race through the towns of Wilford, Sugar City, Salem, Hibbard and Rexburg. Officials attributed 11 deaths to the dam’s failure. The flood damaged more than 4,000 homes, killed more than 13,000 cattle, and tore up 32 miles of Union Pacific Railroad track. Damage totaled $2 billion.

The federal Bureau of Reclamation, which built the dam for $100 million, paid $200 million in damage claims. The bureau’s portfolio has “457 dams and dikes of which 362 have the potential to endanger people if a failure occurred. Fifty percent of these structures were built before 1950.” (The bureau’s role, especially under director Floyd E. Dominy, as the nation’s principal builder of big dams, the reasons for it, the benefits incurred, and the environmental costs exacted, is another subject for another time.)

Failures of small dams, like Forge Pond and Tempe Town Lake dams, have grave consequences as well. Not all dams are thought of as dams, for example. Consider coal slag heaps that might restrict the flow of water and create impounded lakes. In 1972, such a coal slag dam on Buffalo Creek in West Virginia breached, killing at least 92 people and injuring more than 1,100, destroying 1,500 homes and leaving 4,000 people homeless.

In December 2008, about 5.4 million cubic yards of wet coal ash spilled In Kingston, Tenn., when an earthen retaining wall breached, forcing the evacuation of 22 residents. Dams can fail, and they restrain more than water — in this case, a thick slurry. Soon after, the Environmental Protection Agency identified 44 such coal ash dams and storage ponds in 10 states that had high-hazard potential in the event of failure.

What about dams that do not meet the criteria for inclusion in the National Inventory of Dams?

The Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering at Stanford University operates the National Performance of Dams Program. It offers a chronology of major events in dam safety that led to the regulatory forces extant today. It has a database of American dams that includes dams not in the NID. A search for dams of all types between 3 and 24 feet high produced a list of more than 39,000 dams. Many, if not most, of these, presumably, are not in the NID.

That means the United States has at least about 120,000 dams that need to be inspected, regulated, and maintained.

More than half of America’s dams — 56 percent — are privately owned, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The rest: local governments, about 20 percent; state and federal governments, a little less than 5 percent each; and public utilities, less than 3 percent. About 12 percent of dam ownership is undetermined.

Federal guidelines for dam safety were established in 1979. To grasp how disparate responsibility is for federal dams’ safety, consider this: FEMA coordinates the National Dam Safety Program with two partners, the National Dam Safety Review Board and the Interagency Committee on Dam Safety.

Interagency. Is there a more frightening word in the lexicon of the federal bureaucracy? In the case of dams, nine federal departments (with associated bureaus, departments, and divisions of this and that) are involved in safeguarding just 5 percent of America’s dams. (True: Many of these dams are significant in size, function, cost, and political and economic importance.)

In its annual infrastructure report card, the American Society of Civil Engineers notes the cost of repairing the nation’s dams:

In 2009, the Association of State Dam Safety Officials (ASDSO) estimated that the total cost to repair the nation’s dams totaled $50 billion and the needed investment to repair high hazard potential dams totaled $16 billion. These estimates have increased significantly since ASDSO’s 2003 report, when the needed investment for all dams was $36 billion and the needed investment for high hazard potential dams was $10.1 billion.

The 2009 report noted an additional investment of $12 billion over 10 years will be needed to eliminate the existing backlog of 4,095 deficient dams. That means the number of high hazard potential dams repaired must be increased by 270 dams per year above the number now being repaired, at an additional annual cost of $850 million a year. To address the additional 2,276 deficient—but not high hazard—dams, an additional $335 million per year is required, totaling $3.4 billion over the next 10 years. [emphasis added]

States do not have — and will not have in the near future — the money to fully inspect and repair deficit dams. According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, 46 states face a total budget shortfall of $121 billion for fiscal 2011 and 39 states have projected gaps that total $102 billion for fiscal 2012.

Congress has done little. Parked since March 2009 in the Senate’s Committee on Environment and Public Works is S. 732, the Dam Rehabilitation and Repair Act of 2009. The House version, H.R.1770, is similarly parked in committee. An earlier version of the act, despite House passage, died in the 110th Congress.

Even if the act becomes law, it represents a pittance for dam safety. The act calls for spending up to $200 million over five years to address deficiencies in the nation’s publicly owned non-federal dams. That’s million, not billion.

Dams are extraordinary structures built to satisfy human needs. Many are indeed compellingly beautiful to view, such as Boulder Dam. (I refuse to call it Hoover Dam.) Many have played historically significant roles. In World War II Grand Coulee and Bonneville dams produced the electricity that smelted the aluminum that Boeing turned into tens of thousands of fighters and bombers.

But dams come with consequences — economic, cultural, environmental, and political. When dams fail, consequences become casualties — lives lost, property ruined.

Even through the nation is mired in a recession and two costly wars, inspection, repair, and replacement of deficient dams ought have a higher priority in Congress, statehouses, and federal agencies.

Reconsider the Tempe Town Lake dam that failed last week. No one was hurt; no property damaged. But if that dam had failed on Nov. 23, 2008, what would have been the fate of hundreds of competitors in the swim leg of the Arizona Ironman?

photo credits:

Lake Delhi dam breach: Justin Hayworth, Des Moines Register
Forge Pond Dam: George Rizer, Boston Globe
Breach of Teton Dam: U.S. Bureau of Reclamation
Kingston, Tenn., coal ash spill: J. Miles Carey, Knoxville News Sentinel
Ironman Arizona competitors in Tempe Town Lake: Robert Body

But you may not be as fortunate. You may need to drive across one or more of the 151,394 bridges the federal Department of Transportation lists as structurally deficient or functionally obsolete. That’s 25 percent of American bridges. But fear not: Bridges are becoming safer. There were 3,930 fewer such bridges in the United States in 2008 than in 2007.

Whew. That’s a relief. At this rate, America will have no unsafe or obsolete bridges in only 153 years.

The repair and replacement rate of deficient or obsolete U.S. bridges is rising, however. According to DOT statistics, the number of lousy bridges has been reduced by 14,087 since 2000, an average of only 1,565 a year. So maybe (you remember, of course, all that talk about those shovel-ready stimulus projects?) that repair rate will increase, and we will have licked our bad bridge problem in only 100 years.

That’s assuming, of course, Congress will shell out enough money to fix them, either in 10 years or 100 years.

I’m not expert on deciphering federal budgets, but, according to the DOT, a total of about $21 billion has been appropriated for the federal Highway Bridge Program from 2005 to 2009 to repair or replace deficient bridges, an annual average of just over $4 billion.

That’s a lot of money, I suppose. But it’s not enough. Here’s what the American Society of Civil Engineers says:

Simply maintaining the current overall level of bridge conditions—that is, not allowing the backlog of deficient bridges to grow—would require a combined investment from the public and private sectors of $650 billion over 50 years, according to AASHTO, for an average annual investment level of $13 billion. The cost of eliminating all existing bridge deficiencies as they arise over the next 50 years is estimated at $850 billion in 2006 dollars, equating to an average annual investment of $17 billion. [emphasis added]

But, at the moment, fixing bridges has fallen off the national radar — and that of politicians in Washington, D.C. They’re thinking about jobs, the economy, immigration, the Gulf oil spill and, of course, getting re-elected (but not necessarily in that order).

Fixing bridges is not high on President Obama’s agenda — unless repairs will directly create jobs. On the White House website, “transportation” is listed last on a separate page of “additional issues.” Improving the economy takes precedence over safety-driven bridges issues. Increasing jobs leads to re-election; merely fixing bridges because that saves lives is trumped.

Examining the website of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure finds no sense of urgency, either. In fact, the only bill before the committee that would deal with bridge reconstruction and repair — The Surface Transportation Authorization Act of 2009 — was unveiled 13 months ago and is still stuck in committee. It is sweeping in what it wishes to do; thus, it is sweeping in its cost. Despite its portentous listing in the executive summary of all the unsafe transportation entities in America, fixing the economy, not rendering the unsafe as safe, is paramount: “Together, this $500 billion investment will create or sustain approximately six million family-wage jobs.”

The economy, of course, is ill. (Well, for Main Street, it seems, not Wall Street.) Many argue that infrastructure spending would add desperately needed jobs.

So why’s that 775-page bill stuck in committee?

On the Senate side, a review of the past year’s press releases of the Committee on Science, Commerce & Transportation rarely reveals concern about the state of the nation’s bridges. Only a release touting Sen. John D. (Jay) Rockefeller, chair, praising the TIGER grant program appears. TIGER, short for Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery, received $1.5 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act for about 50 nationwide transportation projects. But … the senator notes that “the Department of Transportation (DOT) received 1,380 applications requesting $56.5 billion in funding for surface transportation projects.” Who will choose who gets what and how?

To be fair, let’s note that in May 2009 Rockefeller introduced S. 1036, the Federal Surface Transportation Policy and Planning Act of 2009. The goal? “To establish national purposes and goals for Federal surface transportation activities and programs and create a national surface transportation plan.” The bill still has only one sponsor — its author, Rockefeller. It has been parked in committee for 14 months.

Again, why is it stuck in committee?

Shall we wait for another I-35W collapse to motivate Congress to act on the nation’s bridges? That produced media coverage galore and plenty of presidential candidate rhetoric.

The picture at left shows an 8-foot hole on I-44 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. According to Tulsa World reporters Matt Barnard and Gavin Off, this is “the second time in three years [that] a section of an east Tulsa interstate bridge crumbled …, sending chunks of concrete to a slope below and damaging several vehicles.”

The paper reported:” The 122-foot steel span, built in 1958, is rated as structurally deficient, according to the Federal Highway Administration’s National Bridge Inventory database. Its deck is rated in serious condition.” Fortunately, the bridge is scheduled for replacement. One bad bridge down; 151,393 to go.

Some money in the president’s stimulus package was intended to deal with infrastructure repairs — such as that needed by bridges. One critic, however, believes that’s money ill spent, that the nation needs transformative economic investments to allow it to be more competitive in the global economy. Eighteen months ago, former governer and john turned CNN huckster Eliot Spitzer wrote in Slate, under the headline “Robots, Not Roads“:

The “off the shelf” infrastructure projects that can be funded immediately and provide immediate demand-side stimulus are almost by definition not the transformative investments we really need. Paving roads, repairing bridges that need refurbishing, and accelerating existing projects are all good and necessary, but not transformative. These projects by and large are building or patching the same economy with the same flaws that got us where we are.

He has a point, perhaps. But a transformed economy still needs to move people and material from point A to point B safely and efficiently. That transformed economy needs a healthy work force that drinks clean water, eats well from a safe and efficient food production and distribution system, and has effective, cost-efficient waste disposal systems and airport and port facilities that allow safe, effective transportation of people and materials. The nation’s energy infrastructure, too, needs considerable repair and replacement of key facilities.

This post focuses on bridges. But, in addition to these other deficiencies listed, we have dams, levees, pipelines, sewage systems and, of course, roads that must be transformed before they can contribute to Spitzer’s dreams of transformative investments in the American economy.

Most importantly, in what structurally sound public primary and secondary school buildings will teachers train those capable of fashioning Spitzer’s “transformative investments”?

Right now, the nation’s infrastructure is severely strained in any way imaginable. The bill is due, and it amounts to $2.2 trillion, according to ASCE.

Time for Congress to pay up.

photo credits:
Interstate-35W bridge collapse: Scott Cohen, Reuters
Tulsa bridge hole: Matt Barnard, Tulsa World

• Under TABOR, Colorado declined from 35th to 49th in the nation in K-12 spending as a percentage of personal income.
• Colorado’s average per-pupil funding fell by more than $400 relative to the national average.
• Colorado’s average teacher salary compared to average pay in other occupations declined from 30th to 50th in the nation.

Also,

• Under TABOR, higher education funding per resident student dropped by 31 percent after adjusting for inflation.
• College and university funding as a share of personal income declined from 35th to 48th in the nation.
• Tuitions have risen as a result. In the last four years, system-wide resident tuition increased by 21 percent (adjusting for inflation).

A report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities last year summed it up nicely: TABOR Has Hampered Economic Growth and Reduced Quality of Life in Colorado. Responding to some pro-TABOR silliness bubbling up in Maine, the Center lays out some inconvenient details:

TABOR has, however, harmed Colorado’s economy since 2001, when TABOR prevented the state from recovering adequately from the recession. Incomes grew more slowly in Colorado than in Maine during the first half of the decade. Coloradans voted to suspended TABOR in 2005, but the state still has had trouble recovering. Overall, per capital personal income growth has been higher in Maine than in Colorado since 2000 – both in the post-recession period during which Colorado’s TABOR was in effect, and after its suspension.

Oddly, while we’re near the bottom in national spending on public education, we lead the country in spending on prisons. I can’t imagine how those two factoids might be related, though. Can you?

Hang on to your hat, though. It just got better.

Welcome to Teabagger Paradise

It’s a shame about Colorado Springs. It’s a beautiful city, with spectacular mountain views, one of the finest liberal arts colleges in the nation and great microbreweries. Of course, it’s also home to Focus on the Family, the air wing of the Christian theocracy movement and one of the most notorious political pigfuckers in America, Douglas Bruce. It’s the kind of place where, if you don’t keep a close watch, the church down the street might kidnap your kids and baptize them without your permission.

Now, the Springs is also becoming the nation’s foremost case study on what happens when people decide that by god, they’re not going to put up with all those outrageous taxes anymore. Get a load of this:

This tax-averse city is about to learn what it looks and feels like when budget cuts slash services most Americans consider part of the urban fabric.More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops — dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled.

The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter.

Neighbors are encouraged to bring their own lawn mowers to local green spaces, because parks workers will mow them only once every two weeks. If that.

Water cutbacks mean most parks will be dead, brown turf by July; the flower and fertilizer budget is zero.

City recreation centers, indoor and outdoor pools, and a handful of museums will close for good March 31 unless they find private funding to stay open. Buses no longer run on evenings and weekends. The city won’t pay for any street paving, relying instead on a regional authority that can meet only about 10 percent of the need.

“I guess we’re going to find out what the tolerance level is for people,” said businessman Chuck Fowler, who is helping lead a private task force brainstorming for city budget fixes. “It’s a new day.”

Some residents are less sanguine, arguing that cuts to bus services, drug enforcement and treatment and job development are attacks on basic needs for the working class.

“How are people supposed to live? We’re not a ‘Mayberry R.F.D.’ anymore,” said Addy Hansen, a criminal justice student who has spoken out about safety cuts. “We’re the second-largest city, and growing, in Colorado. We’re in trouble. We’re in big trouble.”

Turn off the street lights and fire some cops, huh? Hard to imagine how that could go wrong.

I appreciate your concern, Addy, but the truth is that you’ve been in trouble since, oh, I don’t know, let’s call it 1992. That’s when the state let itself get Bruced. None of this is a surprise, though. It’s pretty much what smart folks have been warning you about since, oh, I don’t know, let’s call it 1992.

At the risk of sounding condescending or elitist, I can’t help thinking that this is the kind of thing that happens when a culture goes without education for too long. It’s kind of like when the fetus doesn’t get enough oxygen.

Teabagger paradise, indeed.

A Meaningless, Yet Emotionally Seductive Corrective

Here’s what I’d like to do. I want to get a microphone and a bat – maybe a nice 33-ounce Louisville Slugger – and head down to the fair city of Colorado Springs. I’ll go up to random people on the street and here’s how it will go:

Me: Excuse me, I’m conducting a man-in-the-street survey for FOX News. Do you have a moment?

Citizen: Of course! I get all my news about the world from FOX.

Me: First question. How do you feel about all your public services being discontinued?

[Option 1]
Citizen: I think it’s ridiculous that people are so stupidly anti-tax that they’re willing to let such a beautiful city go to hell like this.

Me: Thank you. Have a nice day.

[Option 2]
Citizen: I think it’s ridiculous. This is happening because of the liberals and their overpaid government bureaucracy.

Me: Next question. How did you vote on TABOR?

Citizen: I voted for it, of course.

At this point, I whip out the bat and club them like baby seals. (The microphone was just a prop, in case you haven’t figured that out already.)

Or not. When all is said and done, the most satisfying course of action will be to grab some popcorn, pull up a chair and enjoy the show. There are few things I enjoy more than watching stupid people reaping what they have sown (which explains my love of reality television, I suppose). What we’re seeing right now in the Springs are the first few scenes of a morality play. The question is whether or not the denizens of America’s foremost Anti-Tax Utopia are bright enough to figure out the moral: to wit, where taxes and services are concerned, 2 -2 = 0.

I doubt it. The smart money says that their solution will be to cut taxes. In fact, I’d put money on it.

Any takers?

I’m greatly troubled by the content of Chapter 5, but only partly because of the many factual errors that L&D made. What troubles me the most about Chapter 5 is its arrogant tone, fed partly by a group of smart Seattle-based entrepreneurs, and the major inconsistencies that arrogance engendered. It is one thing to believe that you know more about climate disruption than everyone else when you’ve studied the field for years. It’s something else entirely to believe you know more than everyone else without verifying it first. And not only did L&D fail to verify their own knowledge about climate, they also failed to determine whether the entrepreneurs they interviewed knew more about climate than the real experts. The result was a fatally flawed Chapter 5.

L&D set the tone of Chapter 5 in the first 11 pages. They give a six-page explanation of the economic concept of an “externality” (the effect of an action that benefits the actor, but the costs affects someone else) that could have been explained as well in a couple of paragraphs. They claim that driving isn’t as bad for the global climate as eating locally-ranched beef, allegedly disproving both the “drive less” and “eat locally” green memes at the same time. And L&D label climate disruption as a “religion,” complete with a high priest (James Lovelock), a patron saint (Al Gore), “true believers” and “heretics,” and a quote from the mayor of London saying

the fear of of climate change is like a religion in this vital sense, that it is veiled in mystery; and you can never tell whether your acts of propitiation or atonement have been in any way successful.

And L&D naturally set themselves apart from those suffering from what they label as religious zeal.

L&D go on to toot their own horns when they claim that economists like Levitt

are trained to be cold-blooded enough to sit around and calmly discuss the trade-offs involved in global catastrophe….

They might as well have said “we’re better than you are because you’re ‘excitable’ and prone to ‘believing’ in global warming. We’re better than that.”

But it’s when we’re introduced to the entrepreneurs of Bellevue, WA-based Intellectual Ventures (IV) that the arrogant tone of Chapter 5 gets turned up to 11.

L&D extensively interview IV co-founder Nathan Myhrvold and former astrophysicist (and IV employee) Lowell Wood, building both men up to be larger than life. Myhrvold is described as “so polymathic as to make an everyday polymath tremble with shame” and L&D quote Bill Gates as once saying that he didn’t “know anyone [he] would say is smarter than Nathan.” With such a glowing recommendation, L&D’s statement that “Myhrvold thinks Wood is one of the smartest men in the universe” lends Wood intellectual gravitas. So does the listing off of Wood’s achievements during the development of the Star Wars missile defense system and how Wood trained under renowned physicist Edward Teller. But just because both men are smart doesn’t mean that either has any credible expertise in the field of climate disruption – Myhrvold is the former chief technology officer for Microsoft, not a climate modeling expert. Wood is a former astrophysicist who worked on lasers, not a climatologist. Yet L&D elevate both men to being the equal of an actual climate expert like Stanford climatologist Ken Caldeira.

I mention Caldeira because he’s also an IV consultant, and he is presented by L&D as the climate expert that he actually is. But L&D’s purpose in interviewing Caldiera appears to have been to burnish of Myhrvold’s and Wood’s climate credentials. Caldeira’s work is only briefly mentioned , and in a way that either fails to provide the necessary context or, in some cases, even is applied to the wrong context. For example, Caldeira is quoted as saying that trees planted in the wrong place can increase climate disruption because tree leaves may be darker than the ground was. The context of this quote in Chapter 5 is that “many climate disruption memes are wrong,” but L&D didn’t bother to point out that planting trees in other places would reduce climate disruption. Doing so would have reduced the impact of L&D’s preferred, and opposing, frame.

The other way Caldeira’s reputation is used to burnish the qualifications of Myhrvold and Wood is by lending credibility to their climate engineering ideas. L&D point out that several years ago, Wood proposed pumping sulfur dioxide (SO₂)into the stratosphere as a way to cool the Earth, and after running simulations, Caldeira admitted that it might work and that additional research was warranted. L&D use this apparently unimpeachable recommendation as the jumping-off point for proclaiming throughout most of the rest of Chapter 5 that climate engineering is the wave of the future. What L&D neglect to mention is that Caldeira has actually come out against geoengineering using SO₂ at this time for reasons entirely unrelated to global temperatures – it only treats one of the symptoms (rising global temperatures), does nothing for ocean acidification and other carbon dioxide (CO₂) related problems, and is therefore too risky. And it doesn’t help that L&D baldly misrepresented Caldeira’s actual statements and beliefs regarding climate engineering, as the prior links illustrates.

But based on Caldeira’s presence at IV, L&D remake Myhrvold and Wood into experts on geoengineering and climate. And so Wood’s statements on climate modeling are given the same weight as Caldeira’s using guilt by association. Or rather in this case, expertise by association.

Wood is quoted by L&D as saying that climate models are

crude in space and they’re crude in time. So there’s an enormous amount of natural phenomena they can’t model. They can’t do even giant storms like hurricanes.

Wood also claims that the models are all tuned in a similar fashion in order to keep the research money flowing and that current models don’t know how to handle water vapor. Wood’s claims have several problems. They’re presented in a way that’s misleading, they’re not given any actual scientific context, or they’re outright wrong. And because Wood, the former astrophysicist, is a “climate expert by association,” we’re led to believe that these claims are reasonable.

First, while L&D point out that computing power limitations drive climate modelers to make simplifications including lower spatial and temporal resolution than the modelers would prefer, those limitations don’t make the models “crude.” Neither does the fact that the scientists doing the modeling admit that they don’t yet agree on the best ways to model clouds and aerosols (two areas that scientists have made significant advances in since the publication of the IPCC AR4 in 2007). But neither of these issues mean that the latest models are crude. In fact, a quick analysis of the models illustrates that, contrary to Wood’s claims, the existing state-of-the-art general circulation models (GCMs) are quite sophisticated given the computational limitations.

The spatial resolution of an average IPCC AR4 climate model is about 55,350 square kilometers, or a square 235 km on a side (the highest resolution models resolve areas as small as 100 km on a side). For comparison, this is about one fifth of the state of Colorado, which has at least two different climatic zones. Sampling theory (Shannon’s sampling theorem) says that, in order to perfectly reproduce a signal, you need to sample it at twice its frequency. Applied to an average GCM from the AR4, the smallest spatial pattern that could be accurately resolved without help would be 470 km or larger. While there are regions around the globe where you can move through multiple climatic zones over the course of 470 km, they’re not exactly common. And while the average GCM wouldn’t accurately model these areas, climatologists have developed what are called “parameterizations” to represent small scale effects like cloud formation, aerosol effects, and convection that vary locally within the model spatial cells. And generally speaking, it’s not the spatial resolution that presently limits the models’ accuracy (or increases the models’ uncertainty), but rather how the GCMs handle these intra-cell parameters.

The GCMs don’t yet have enough spatial resolution to handle multiple major climatic transitions in small areas, but the models are presently accurate enough to draw conclusions for large climatic regions like “the desert Southwest,” or “the Great Plains,” “the Indian subcontinent,” or “the African savanna.” And while it’s unlikely that any model will ever be able to predict microclimate variations that can change from one kilometer to the next, there is no reason to believe that such high spatial resolution would ever be required for a climate model. So from my perspective, the word “crude” applied to the models used in earlier IPCC Third assessment reports rather than to the latest generation of GCMs. The figure below illustrates how the latest models compare to earlier generations.

Furthermore, sampling theory suggests that Wood is also wrong with respect to the temporal resolution of climate models. Climate models attempt to project the climate, which is itself a long-term average taken over years or even decades. Sampling theory says that we only need to model at twice the frequency of the fastest changing event we care about. One of the fastest changing climate events is El Niño/La Niña, but even at its fastest, it takes weeks to change significantly. This suggests that that sampling once a week or so would be enough, but due to noise and other limitations on sampling, it is usually best to sample more often than the minimum rate. Most climate models sample every 12 hours. If El Niño/La Niña is one of the fastest major climate changes that climate models need to model, then sampling twice a day represents 28x oversampling (assuming that El Niño/La Niña doesn’t pop up any faster than over the course of two weeks). It’s unlikely that the temporal resolution of climate models will need to improve much beyond where it is today. As a result, it’s clear that GCMs are pretty refined with respect to their temporal resolution.

Second, climate models don’t need to model any single storm, not even a hurricane, in order to be broadly accurate. Any individual storm has such a short term effect, and the effects are so localized, that they’re essentially weather, not climate. Four years after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the city is recovering and the parts of Louisiana and Mississippi that were damaged are physically different, but not so much that it qualifies as a local change of climate. The aggregate energy transfer from all hurricanes is important to climate disruption, but no single storm is going to transfer so much energy from the tropics to the subtropics to be critical. Remember – climate is an average over decades, not years or months or weeks. So the fact that no climate model presently models even the largest hurricanes is a distraction, not a real criticism.

Finally, Wood’s claim that models are tuned alike for research funding reasons runs counter to a social dynamic in the scientific community that values original research and intellectual competitiveness over the “same old, same old.” Most scientists live for discovering something new and having the opportunity to research it. Most scientists also enjoy finding errors in another scientist’s work and correcting the error. This is especially true of scientists at the top of their fields. As a result of these dynamics, most scientists would be more likely to tune their models to be different in order to garner attention from their scientific peers – if there was a physically legitimate way to do it. Furthermore, given that climate disruption will very likely become a nightmare for billions of people, discovering that climatologists had got it all wrong would greatly boost the scientist’s, the host organization’s, and the host nation’s prestige. So climate modelers have an incentive to tweak their models as much as scientifically justified in order to generate something new, publishable, and in opposition to the prevailing scientific understanding of climate disruption. The fact that all the models function similarly and reach similar conclusions suggests that, even with this social dynamic at work, scientists and labs haven’t been able to find anything major wrong with the science embedded in each other’s models.

There’s an irony here, though. Myhrvold and Wood, “experts by association” with Ken Caldeira, don’t think that climate modeling is accurate enough. Yet Caldeira’s climate expertise is based significantly on his experience modeling the effects of CO₂ and other greenhouse gases on plants, the ocean, and global climate in general. L&D only implicitly acknowledge this fact:

Caldeira ran a climate model to test Wood’s claims [about geoengineering].
…
Caldeira’s study showed that doubling the amount of carbon dioxide while holding steady all other inputs – water, nutrients, and so forth – yields a 70 percent increase in plant growth, and obvious boon to agriculture.

It is, after all, Caldeira’s models of the effects of pumping tons of SO₂ into the stratosphere to cool the globe that forms the basis of L&D’s main focus in Chapter 5 – geoengineering as a cheaper alternative to slashing CO₂ emissions.

In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, geoengineering is essentially using a technological, engineering-based solution to solve climate problems that were created by human civilization. L&D believe that geoengineering is the cheapest and most effective method to addressing climate disruption, and it’s this belief that drove them to talk to Myhrvold and Wood at IV. The two IV men believe that, for less than a billion dollars, they can built a big straw that would deliver tons of SO₂ directly into the stratosphere. Once there, the SO₂ would chemically react to form aerosols that scatter and reflect solar energy back into space before it could be absorbed by the Earth. The basic science underlying this idea is pretty solid – large volcanic eruptions blast SO₂ into the stratosphere where the sulfur aerosols naturally cool the globe for a few years. So it’s reasonable to believe that it would work.

Except as Myhrvold and Wood point out, there are a few problems. Minor problems, if you believe L&D. For one, it’s not possible to know at this time what effect all that extra sulfur in the stratosphere would do. Myhrvold and Wood also worry that it would make people complacent about continuing to emit GHGs instead of using the sulfur straw as a short-term solution. And they are worried that the technological solution is so cheap that it would be a political problem – could a country with a straw hold the world hostage by threatening to turn it off, or could it get turned up higher in order to cool and dry the climate of another, rival nation? These are potentially serious issues, but L&D largely ignore the broader political implications, giving the problems only three paragraphs after spending ten pages building the case for geoengineering. And L&D don’t even mention a problem that a sulfur straw would do nothing to fix, and what Caldeira is perhaps best known for – ocean acidification and the associated damage to marine ecosystems.

The bulk of Chapter 5 is spent talking up geoengineering – how it’ll work, how it’s “harmless” because the climate would just revert to its prior state if the straw were turned off, how it’s cheap. But there’s another irony that L&D don’t appear to recognize, and this one cuts to the bone of the geoengineering argument. Myhrvold and Wood, and by extension L&D, are proposing that we pumps megatons of SO₂ into the stratosphere in order to cool the Earth, but the only way to make this plan politically viable would be to rely on projections from climate models – the very same climate models that have been dismissed by the authors and the IV crowd.

At this point, scientists don’t know what pumping hundreds of kilotons of SO₂ into the stratosphere continually for decades or even centuries would do to the atmosphere. With less energy falling on the Earth in general, the water cycle would change and as a result, rain and snowfall patterns would change and would create water winners and losers. Projecting how and who would fall to climate models.

Stratospheric chemistry isn’t a straightforward science – it relies on atmospheric concentrations of ozone, oxygen, hydroxyl radicals (which are also necessary to convert methane to CO₂, among other things), CO₂, nitrogen, the availability of solar radiation in various wavelengths, humidity, prevailing winds, and so on. Projecting how the atmosphere will react to all that SO₂ being dumped continuously into the stratosphere will fall to climate models.

A separate chemical effect that needs to be considered is the effect of SO₂ on ozone depletion around the world. Lower ozone levels in the stratosphere may result in more skin cancers, cataracts, and may result in higher incidence of certain diseases. In addition, more ultraviolet radiation reaching the surface will have an effect on ecosystems and species as well as agriculture around the world. Climate models would be necessary to determine how these effects will vary seasonally as well as regionally.

Even the claim that the sulfur straw would be “harmless” because it could be turned off requires verification – and the only way to verify this claim before turning the straw on is with climate models.

If the models truly are as bad as Myhrvold and Wood claim, then we can not rely on them to project the effects of geoengineering. And if the models are good enough to accurately model the effects of geoengineering, then perhaps we should trust what they tell us about addressing global climate disruption, namely that cutting greenhouse gas emissions is the best way to curtail overall climate disruption.

Finally, Myhrvold claims to be advocating for a go-slow approach to creating his sulfur straw, opting for more research and development. He claims that

it’s like having fire sprinklers in a building. On the one hand, you should make every effort not to have a fire. But you also need something to fall back on in case the fire occurs anyway.

The problem is that Myhrvold dismisses the GHG-emission cutting goals of climate disruption activists so vehemently that it’s hard to take seriously his claim that he just wants more research and development. He says that

[global warming activists] are seriously proposing a set of things that could have enormous impact – and we think probably negative impact – on human life. They want to divert a huge amount of economic value toward immediate and precipitous anti-carbon initiatives, without thinking things through. This will have a huge drag on the world economy. There are billions of poor people who will be greatly delayed, if not entirely precluded, from attaining a First World standard of living.

Myhrvold apparently hasn’t heard how seriously climate activists are pushing for technology transfers and direct financial assistance to poor countries so that they don’t have to use high-carbon energy sources to improve their standards of living. Nor has he apparently read about the many studies that say the costs of addressing climate disruption will not affect the global economy as much as he seems to believe. Myhrvold instead seems to be more motivated by money than by research. The fact that IV has been accused of being “patent trolls” doesn’t help his case – IV is Myhrvold’s company, after all, and L&D mention the “patent troll” issue themselves.

It’s clear that Levitt and Dubner are both smart men and that they found other smart men in Myhrvold and Wood. The problem is that all of them are so convinced that they’re the smartest people around that they can’t seem to realize that they’re mired in myopia. Levitt and Dubner are certain that Myhrvold and Wood have come up with “The Solution^TM” in the SO₂ geoengineering project that they don’t notice, or don’t care, that the arguments in favor aren’t logically consistent and don’t stand up to basic scrutiny. Myhrvold and Wood are so sure that they’re right about climate models and geoengineering that they seem to blow off the serious problems and ignore the experts who actually know what the hell they’re talking about – experts like Ken Caldeira and his fellow practicing climatologists. And none of the men – not Levitt, not Dubner, not Myhrvold, and not Wood – seem to realize that they’re making statements that are counter to the best available science and, in many cases, could have been detected as wrong with some simple and basic fact checking.

Climate disruption is a huge issue, and geoengineering can’t be ignored as a potential insurance policy. But it’s presented as the first line of defense against climate disruption instead of a fall-back plan. And as much as Levitt and Dubner try, their arrogance wrote checks that their intellects couldn’t cash.

“Trust us – we’re smarter than you” doesn’t work when you make it so abundantly clear that you’re not actually smarter after all.

———-

There are legions of critiques of the climate disruption chapter of Superfreakonomics on the Web. Here’s a short list of some of the better ones:

• Gavin Schmidt at RealClimate.org
• Paul Krugman at his NY Times blog has both a critique and an explanatory note, plus some additional links and commentary.
• All of economist Brad DeLong’s many posts on the subject
• Union of Concerned Scientists
• Raymond T. Pierrehumbert of RealClimate and the University of Chicago (Prof. Levitt is a professor at Chicago as well)
• The Union of Concerned Scientists lists a large number of general errors
• Tim Lambert’s 10 major errors
• Brad at Think Progress’ The Wonk Room has a bunch of posts about this, chronicling errors big and small
• A Siegel at GetEnergySmartNow has a number of good links.
• And the best compilation of all the sites criticizing the book I could find

Image Credits:
SSEC
Stanford
UCAR
Accuweather

Those 267,574 people who voted “no” — which would approve the same-sex marriage law — were not dissuaded by an anti-gay coalition of conservatives and churches wielding more than $3 million, including more than $2 million from out-of-state donors, according to a report by the National Institute On Money In State Politics.

Much of the sparring over the referendum was funded on both sides by groups outside the state of Maine. Given that gay marriage has been a wedge issue for years, that’s hardly surprising. But in Maine?

Those who backed the gay marriage law ponied up 12 to 1 over donors to the anti-gay donors and had more money — $5 million. But they lost. The institute’s report, written by Tyler Evilsizer, says:

The measure pitted conservative groups and churches against gay-rights groups, a few wealthy donors, and more than 10,000 smaller donors from Maine and around the country. Question 1 attracted over $9 million, or 72 cents of every dollar raised around Maine’s seven ballot measures. [emphasis added]

But press attention, money, and political capital focused on a wedge issue to divide people of good conscience and faith and divert their attention from far more pressing matters. Maine needs more attention to the condition of its roads, bridges and airports than it does in the bedrooms of loving, consenting adults who wish to make a lifelong commitment.

The blunt end of the money hammer used in Maine against gays was primarily wielded by a group called Stand For Marriage Maine. Like all political communicators and niche interest groups these days, it has a website. But its site is notably deficient. It does not have links such as “About Us” or “Who We Are.” Such links usually provide a list of financial supporters, coalition partners, and the names and contact data for organization officers and staff. Stand For Marriage Maine does not provide such information on its website.

Wading through the organization’s press releases and media stories is needed to learn that Marc Mutty is chairman of Stand for Marriage Maine, that Scott K. Fish is communications director (releases provide a phone number) and that Bob Emrich is a member of the group’s executive committee.

That lack of clear, easy-to-find disclosure makes it difficult for those interested in the issue to find out more about the bona fides of donors and supporters who worked to repeal Maine’s gay-marriage law.

Why not explain “Who We Are”? Only conjecture is possible. It is, perhaps, easier to operate in ideological shadows. According to Mr. Evilsizer’s report, here are the principal sources of money that drove the effort to repeal gays’ right to marry in Maine. A few groups are well known outside Maine.

StandForMarriageMaine.com | $2,650,052
Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland | $553,608
Focus On The Family Maine Marriage Committee | $114,500
Family Research Council Action | $25,000
Maine Marriage PAC | $11,539
Maine Grassroots Coalition | $9,410
Marriage Matters in Maine | $2,678
Maine4Marriage | $230
Proponents’ total $3,367,018

Fred Karger, founder of Californians Against Hate, asked Maine ethics officials to investigate the organization. He said it was laundering money. His August letter

contained allegations religious organizations are hiding contributions to the Stand for Marriage Maine campaign. The letter reports how the National Organization for Marriage, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland, the national office of the Knights of Columbus and Focus on the Family had contributors give the money to their organizations, and in turn gave the money to the Stand for Marriage Maine to hide the donors’ identity.

But a federal judge ruled on Oct. 29 that the “state can compel the National Organization for Marriage to disclose the identities of donors who contributed to its effort to repeal Maine’s gay-marriage law.” In that story, the Portland Press Herald said NOM — based in Washington, D.C. — had funneled $1.6 million to Stand For Marriage Maine. A resolution of the lawsuit was “months away,” the story said — well after the Nov. 3 referendum. Mr. Evilsizer’s report contains a breakdown of donors to Stand For Marriage Maine showing NOM’s $1,622,152 donation.

But his report notes that financial supporters of gay marriage in Maine “from Away” were also plentiful. Those who supported the gay-marriage law raised $5,678,579.

The Human Rights Campaign, which bills itself as “the largest national lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender civil rights organization,” donated $267,589 to the principal umbrella organization, No On 1 Protect Maine Equality. The National Gay & Lesbian Task Force gave $139,056. Esmond Harmsworth, a founding partner of the Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Literary Agency in Boston and New York, gave $100,000. Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders of Boston gave $91,258.

The website of No On 1 Protect Maine Equality also has a “Who We Are” page that lists its coalition partners. Its “Contact Us” page list its physical address, mailing address, phone number and e-mail address. Its campaign manager is clearly identified as Jesse Connolly.

The gay marriage caravan now moves on, it seems, to New York state. Gov. David Patterson wants a same-sex marriage bill, passed twice in the state Assembly, on the floor of the Senate for debate on Tuesday.

And the money, both for and against, will likely move on as well.

To quote from a recent BBC article:

Lee Ki-Churl, a corporation official, said he expected Tanzanians to benefit from the deal. “Some African countries export fruit and import fruit juice, or export olives and import olive oil, simply because their past colonialists did not teach them how to process food,” he told the AFP news agency. “We plan to set up an education centre for Tanzanian farmers in the food-processing zone in order to transfer agricultural know-how and irrigation expertise to them.”

I think it is both patronising and ignorant to assume that Africans don’t farm the way modern western farms operate because they are uneducated.  This almost seems to imply that Africans are too stupid to help themselves.

I’m not a purist when it comes to the “rationalism” of markets (the theory that every price includes all available information to reflect that price), but I do believe that in relatively unsophisticated African markets there are good reasons why farmers do not farm or invest in productive capacity:  weak rule of law, ineffective property rights, high taxes, bribery and corruption all add up to ensure that the cost exceeds the benefit of investment.

Anthony Mills, a soil scientist at the University of Stellenbosch contacted me regarding the difficulty of conducting development in Africa.  “The Zambian land tenure system is particularly problematic.  By law the land is owned by the President.  In practice it is owned by the chiefs.  The land is consequently probably even further from private ownership than in most developing countries.”

Yet, without any due acknowledgment of the political and legal environment standing in the way of growth and development, international projects duly waste cash on major interventions.  In 2004, the UN launched the Millennium Development Villages project in an effort to demonstrate how the goals for the Millennium Development Goals could be realised.

Promises of the Millennium

Millennium Promise was co-founded by the economist Jeffrey Sachs and the philanthropist Ray Chambers. The project work of the Millennium Villages are overseen by a Scientific Council composed of leading scientific and development authorities at the UN Millennium Project and The Earth Institute at Columbia University, both of which are headed by Sachs.

The project is a miserable example of the patronising and objectionable way in which development in Africa is imposed, as if like manna from a benevolent West.

The project hasn’t “failed” in the way a business would fail.  Jeffrey Sachs hasn’t been forced to live in a homeless shelter, and the villages themselves aren’t derelict.  My concerns have to do with the nature of the promises, and of the results.  My analysis is based using only their published information and claims (on their sites: http://www.unmillenniumproject.org/ and http://www.millenniumvillages.org/).

Their objectives are an overwhelming mish-mash of wants and desires:

“In its first 18 months, the MVP’s five main objectives were to: (i) Provide universal access and free distribution of long-lasting, insecticide treated bed nets to fight malaria; (ii) Achieve significant increases in staple crop yields; (iii) Ensure universal access to functioning health clinics; (iv) Increase primary school enrollments; and (v) Provide community access to improved and year-round water for consumption. In addition, the MVP emphasized cross-cutting interventions focused on addressing gender inequality; on community mobilization, participation and leadership; and on infrastructure for transport, energy, and information and communications technologies (ICT).”

“The Millennium Villages seek to end extreme poverty by working with the poorest of the poor, village by village throughout Africa, in partnership with governments and other committed stakeholders, providing affordable and science-based solutions to help people lift themselves out of extreme poverty.”

Ending extreme poverty is a known quantity.  Numerous countries have done it (from South Korea to Brazil) and what is required mostly boils down to accountable government and rule of law, plus sound economic principles premised on enforceable property rights.

So much for the background.  Let’s look at the viability of these projects themselves.

The region chosen

“Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania and Uganda.”

According to a quick check, the bottom 20% earn roughly $350 to $450 per annum in this region.  I’m being generous here, since the MDP aims to work with the absolute poorest which the UN usually defines as people earning less than $1/day.

“Between 1990 and 2001, the number of people in sub-Saharan Africa living on less than $1 a day rose from 227 million to 313 million, and the poverty rate rose from 45 percent to 46 percent. Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest rate of undernourishment in the world, with one-third of the population below the minimum level of nourishment.”

This implies a total of 62 – 63,000 villages (at their requirement of 5,000 people per village) who fall into the project scope.

The investment

“Each Millennium Village requires a donor investment of $300,000 per year for five years. This includes a cost of $250,000 per village per year (5,000 villagers per village multiplied by $50 per villager) and an additional $50,000 per village per year to cover logistical and operational costs associated with implementation, community training, and monitoring and evaluation. Note that this level of external support is fully consistent with the 2005 G8 commitments for official development assistance to Africa by 2010. The other $60 per villager per year will come from village members, local and national governments and partner organizations, making for total funding of $110 per person per year.”

This is a fudge.  Firstly, sure, the global community may have promised a grand total of $50billion in support, but that usually has strings attached, and includes a wide range of other bilateral investment.  So the full amount isn’t available.  Secondly, most African governments don’t spend their own money on internal development.  Thirdly, the villages have no money (since that is the reason they were chosen).  One way or another, all of that $110 will have to be donated.

That means we are investing $550k annually for each village over a five-year period (i.e. $2.75 million).  To reach all villages in the scope requires an investment of around $172 billion.

The return on investment

So much for the background.  One of the things I’m often asked on African tourism development projects is, “Does this town/area have good tourism potential for development?”  My answer is always this:  “Are there men and women by the side of the road selling curios?  If not, then no.”

People in Africa are not poor because they are ignorant of their own needs, or of how to earn a living.  Neither are they really victims of circumstances beyond their control.  Given the right environment, Africans are as capable of supporting themselves as is anyone else. When the Zimbabwe currency was worth less than spit, inflation was several trillion % and nothing was available for sale. A few months after the Zimbabwe government abandoned the Zimbabwe dollar in exchange for the US dollar everything is available, investment is happening and production is shooting up. Zimbabwe may even be entirely self-sufficient for food again by the end of next year. And that is without any major international intervention.

So, as far as the MDP villages are concerned, my first question is this:  “Are other villages visiting the MDP villages, becoming inspired, and copying this model?”

The answer is: No.  No-one is copying the villages.  No private investor has turned up and offered to do something similar.  Scratch that, George Soros turned up and made a spot donation of $50 million in 2006 to fund 33 villages.  But that is hardly investment.

There are a whole host of reasons that I can spot:

1. The investment changes nothing about the legal and economic situation in the country at hand; governments are still corrupt, infrastructure is still non-existent.  Even if the MDV were to produce a major food surplus, who would they sell it to and how would they get it to market?
2. The project makes a great deal of the village-based ownership structure.  This is a collectivist / communist system.  If no-one owns it, then there is little incentive for individuals to work harder, since everyone will get the same outcome.  Like most projects of this nature, the output will continue as long as the expensively-paid consultants are around, then it will return to its base level.  The only reason the Kibbutz system has lasted 100 years is the donations of both the Israeli government and of outside donors.  As soon as the Israeli government cut funding, then the Kibbutzim started to close.  Now only those most hardy (or the very few who have major industries earning revenue) are still functioning.  But at least the Kibbutzim were self-created.  The MDPs rely for their energy on do-gooder outsiders.
3. Who owns the investment?  If something intangible like a “village” owns the products of individual labour and investment, then what does a person with ambition do?  Can he/she sell their stake in the village and use the money to go to university, or buy a house?  Who decides on what the profits (should there be any) be spent on?

Even in the best-case scenario, all that you achieve is that a group of famished and unhealthy people are less famished and less unhealthy.  For an investment of $2.75 million.  Is it really sufficient to take people from earning $1/day to say $2/day?

What else could you achieve with that money?

You could build a nice, labour-intensive factory for $2.75 million.  Imagine the impact of 62,000 new factories on the central African economy?  And imagine all the things that would be required for such a thing to happen … roads, rule of law, healthcare, education.  All of which would be affordable if millions of people were earning proper salaries.

This isn’t happening.  There are no investors in Africa beyond a few resources and the inevitable mobile telephony.  Africa is 2% of the world economy.  To put the MDP investment in perspective ($110 per person), foreign direct investment in Africa is worth only $19 per person per year.

Whitey Basson of Shoprite, a major African retailer, put it best last week:  “It takes 15 inches of paper to cross a border in Africa.”  Africa’s countries are regularly ranked as the most appalling and corrupt places in which to do business.

The MDP villages do not change that situation.  The agricultural techniques behind the project may be sound, but the economics are a failure.

And, if the economics are a failure, then what is the point of the project?

In response, the ACCCE issued a bland statement that didn’t even mention Duke by name. It says, in part:

ACCCE is a broad and diverse coalition, composed of more than 40 members, who are working to advance the public policy dialogue on critical issues relating to energy, environmental, and economic policies. From time to time, individual coalition members may have different perspectives with regard to important policy positions.

Coming on the heels of letters forged by Bonner & Associates on the ACCCE’s behalf, a few websites have suggested that Duke’s departure was related to those letters. S&R put this question to Duke Energy spokesman Tom Williams, who said that the letters were not the cause. Instead, the official Williams claimed that it became clear that a number of other ACCCE members had no intention to support addressing climate change. Williams also said that he had himself observed this in some of the steering committee meetings that he attended.

Williams went out of his way to point out that not all of the remaining ACCCE members were against making progress in addressing climate change, only that, as the official talking points claim, certain “influential member companies who will not support passing climate change legislation in 2009 or 2010.”

Duke Energy remains part of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the business group that recently called for a “Scopes trial” hearing on the EPA’s finding that greenhouse gas emissions cause climate change and that climate change is a threat to human health. When asked about Duke’s membership in the Chamber, Williams responded that the Chamber was “not a single-issue organization.”

According to Williams, Duke supports climate change legislation before Congress and is asking the Department of Energy for some funding to assist in commercialization of carbon capture technology on the scale of an large coal plant. Duke is currently constructing a large integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) coal plant in Indiana, and it’s this plant for which Duke is applying for federal financial assistance. According to Williams, Duke has also asked Indiana utilities regulators to allow Duke to pass some of the research and development costs for carbon sequestration on to Duke’s customers.

According to Duke’s official talking points, “coal must continue to be part of our nation’s power generation mix,” even though carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technologies are, according to Williams, “clearly not” commercial yet.

Duke will now have to work on developing those technologies without the cover of the ACCCE.

Other relevant links around the Web:

The Sierra Club’s response to Duke’s withdrawal from ACCCE.
The Wonk Room at ThinkProgress discusses other companies who might have similar conflicts to Duke’s
DeSmogBlog’s Kevin Grandia at HuffPo
Alcoa quietly abandoned ACCCE sometime in the not too distant past
Pete Altman at the NRDC

But what most studies lack is a detailed analysis of the overall cradle-to-grave lifecycle of the transportation modes being compared. A new study by two University of California-Berkeley researchers has attempted to analyze the bulk of the lifecycle of multiple types of passenger vehicles, including fuel production, manufacturing and maintenance of the vehicles themselves, infrastructure construction and repair costs, all in addition to the basic fuel consumption. And the study also looks at three commonly regulated pollutants in addition to energy consumption and greenhouse gas (mostly carbon dioxide) emissions.

And the results are quite a bit different from purely fuel consumption-based analyses.

Transportation in the United States accounts for about 33% of all carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions, about 75% of carbon monoxide, about 5% of sulfur dioxide (SO₂), and around 57% of nitrogen oxides (NO_x). In addition, transportation accounts for about 28% of all energy consumed in the United States. Therefore, understanding how best to improve the fuel efficiency and lower the emissions created by the transportation sectors is a natural approach to improving overall air quality and slowing climate disruption.

But fuel consumption is only one part of the equation, and not necessarily the most important part. Not all pollutants are emitted in large amounts by vehicles. SO₂, the compound responsible for acid rain, is largely produced by coal fired power plants. But what happens if, in the future, most vehicles are plug-in hybrid and electric vehicles? Fuel consumption will go down, but SO₂ emissions will likely rise dramatically if coal plants remain the dominant source of electricity, and those increased emissions could reasonably be applied to the transportation sector.

In an attempt to estimate the real greenhouse gas (GHG) and pollutant emissions, the Berkeley study chose three “typical” automobiles, four “typical” rail lines, urban buses, and three “typical” aircraft. For each of those typical vehicles, the researchers collected data on the mining and processing of raw materials, fabrication of components, the shipping of components to the assembly factory, electricity used in the assembly process, how much energy was consumed in maintaining the vehicles, how much fuel was burned in shipping replacement parts from factories to the maintenance facilities, the pollution created in making infrastructure like roads, train tracks, or airports, the lifespan of the infrastructure, transportation to and from central depots like airports, the GHGs emitted in building parking lots, how often roads needed to be repaired, the amount of time spent idling vs traveling, and so on. And, of course, the direct consumption of fuel in order to move the vehicle from one place to another. Only the decomissioning of the vehicle itself was left out of the analysis due to complexities created by the many varied ways that vehicles can be scrapped – turned to scrap metal, picked over for individual parts, left to rust in the Mojave desert, etc.

In all cases, though, the emissions of GHGs and pollutants due to the vehicle’s lifecycle significantly boosted the overall emissions, in one case by a factor of 8 (800%). And as a result, the usual “airplanes terrible, cars bad, trains OK, buses best” analysis result was turned around some.

First off, when it comes to overall energy consumption, the lowest energy consuming transportation method is urban diesel bus with peak ridership while the highest consumption is the very same bus with off-peak ridership. And as you might expect, the sedan, SUV, and pickup are all worse than all the aircraft and mass transit option. But there’s already an interesting data point – on a pure energy consumption basis, all three commercial aircraft (small, midsize, and large) consume more energy than all the train options. But when the energy consumed during the rest of the lifecycle is included, large aircraft are actually more efficient on a passenger-kilometer traveled (PKT) basis than one of the two light rail systems profiled.

Looking at greenhouse gases reveals another change due to lifecycle GHG emissions. The highly electrified light rail systems in the Northeast not only emit more greenhouse gases than diesel-powered commuter rail and west coast light rail, it also emits more GHGs than midsize and large aircraft even though the Northeast light rail consumes the least overall energy. According to the paper, this is because “The San Francisco Bay Area’s electricity is 49% fossil fuel-based and Massachussetts’ is 82%.” This results in a reversal of one of the UCS study’s conclusions about rail travel – “Ride the rails in the Northeast to cut carbon and congestion.” (Chapter 4, page 20).

The problems with light rail powered by fossil fuel power plants become even more clear when you look beyond just GHGs into standard pollutants. SO₂ emissions were the worst for light rail due to coal’s high sulfur emissions. Urban diesel buses at peak ridership were still the best performers, but all three aircraft sizes were better than all of the rail options, and the lowest SO₂ rail option was actually the diesel commuter rail. And the three auto options were in the middle – worse than aircraft on a PKT basis, but better than all but one of the rail options.

57% of nitrogen oxides come from transportation, and the worst offender was again the off-peak urban bus. Commuter rail and pickups were tied for next worst, with electric rail having the lowest NO_x emissions. Aircraft were in the middle of the pack.

Finally, carbon monoxide pollution is mostly a result of autos, and nothing in the overall lifecycle changed that – the typical sedan (the best performer of the three autos) was still between five and six times worse than its nearest mass transit competitor, the off-peak urban bus. And while electric rail lines had an extremely low fuel emission profile for carbon monoxide, the construction of the rail lines themselves resulted in enough carbon monoxide emissions to make them worse overall than an urban bus at peak ridership – even though the bus was powered from a comparably highly polluting diesel engine.

As illuminating as the results of the lifecycle emissions estimates are, however, they aren’t the complete story.

The paper’s graphs illustrate that even if you were able to reduce the energy consumption, carbon emissions, and pollution to zero, the results are still counter-intuitive. As the table below shows, urban peak buses remain the overall best transportation, but large and medium size aircraft continue to perform extremely well. In fact, in energy consumption, GHG emissions, SO₂, and NO_x, air transportation performs as well as or better than all of the rail options. This is again because of the relative lack of infrastructure required for air vs. ground transportation.

Of course, we can’t reduce the effects of active vehicle operations (mostly fuel consumption) to zero, and aircraft are likely to have a greater problem with this than most other forms of transportation. But let’s assume that new research into low carbon aircraft fuels produce the 60-80% cuts in GHG emissions mentioned in this article, and let’s further assume that we can reduce GHG emissions for all the other forms of transportation by 90%. Again, GHG emissions of air travel continue to look good compared to rail travel due to the infrastructure costs of the train.

These thought experiments could go on forever, and I’m certain that there will be others who look at the paper’s results in far greater detail than I can by “eyeballing” the graphs. The overall point is this – the complete lifecycle of a form of transportation must be considered before we can reasonably judge whether one form of transportation is “better” than another. Replacing the pollution from personal cars and trucks with pollution from a coal plant may not, in fact, be a good tradeoff even if overall GHG emissions and energy consumption fall as a result. Similarly, ridership should also be considered before determining what the “best” solution for a given region will be. And finally, the mix of energy and infrastructure required for the “optimal” transportation scheme will be dramatically different from region to region, from urban to suburban to rural, and from short to long distance transportation.

As with renewable energy, one size will most definitely not fit all, and research and development in all of the main modes of transportation is well warranted.

Image Credits:
Vincent Laforet, NYTimes
Environmental Research Letters
S&R

William Forstchen’s brilliantly disturbing book, One Second After, takes place in a post-apocalyptic America. The country has been brought to its knees by three nuclear missiles launched by unknown foes. The power of the attack comes not from the blasts themselves but from the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) it emits.

An EMP, Forstchen points out, could completely knock out America’s electrical infrastructure. Miles and miles of high-tension wires would absorb the power of the EMP, magnifying it beyond the ability of virtually any circuit-breaker to stop. Electrical systems would overload. Anything with delicate electrical circuitry—like cars, computers, and even calculators—would be fried.

And in Forstchen’s world, America without power would be hell on earth.

“We’re back a hundred and fifty years,” one character says.

“No, not a hundred and fifty years,” says another. “Make it more like five hundred. People alive in 1860, they knew how to live in that time; they had the infrastructure. We don’t. Turn off the lights, stop the toilets from getting water to flush, empty the pharmacy, turn off the television to tell us what to do…. We were like sheep for slaughter then.”

One Second After is not a cheerful novel, nor should it be. Forstchen wrote the novel as a cautionary tale against the threat of an EMP attack. Nearly every desperate situation a reader could imagine—and many that readers couldn’t imagine—unfolds in the book.

Forstchen unveils one small horror after another. How do you keep the water in your swimming pool potable? What do you do with the family dog when you’ve run out of food to eat? What do you do with the thief you’ve shot dead in the middle of the kitchen? What do you do for your diabetic daughter when all the insulin is gone?

What do you do when the strong begin to prey on the weak? How do you maintain law and order when civilization becomes uncivilized?

Although many readers would like to think the better angels of our natures would shine through in a time of national crisis, Forstchen draws from past historical situations—like the sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad in World War Two—to show just how low mankind will sink in times of desperation.

The story never goes “Mad Max.” Forstchen wisely keeps events plausible, no matter how terrible they seem. He does create a nagging feeling, though, that things could get even worse than his story suggests.

The entire time, Forstchen beats the same drum: America is virtually unprepared to defend itself against an EMP attack. Communities are unprepared. Individuals are unprepared. Unprepared. Unprepared. Unprepared.

Although the book may be a warning first, it’s a compelling piece of fiction in its own right. The characters are well-crafted and add dramatic weight to the story. The novel’s protagonist, John Matherson, is a college history professor who works at a small, Christian liberal arts school in the western North Carolina mountains. He’s a fictionalized Forstchen who provides context and insights into events as they unfold, and he also serves as the moral foundation for the story, too.

Forstchen writes what he knows, so the entire community of Black Mountain, N.C., feels at once homey and heartbroken. He populates the community with people who could all be out of a Norman Rockwell painting—except Rod Serling starts to tinker with them as the story progresses.

The grim reality Forstchen shows in One Second After demonstrates the high cost of unpreparedness. He wants to spook readers into doing something—anything—whether they start stockpiling supplies just in case or they write to ask their Congressman to take an interest in the issue.

“This is an issue that doesn’t have a constituency,” Forstchen said. “What I hope I’ve done is put a voice to it.”

One Second After makes that voice, and that message, worth listening to.

William Forstchen has a bad dream—a really bad dream—that goes something like this:

A cataclysmic attack throws the United States back to the dark ages, with no electricity, no communication or transportation networks, and no medicines. The most vulnerable members of society—the very young and the very old—begin to die off first, but soon hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people, begin dying. Rogue bands of lawless predators, living by rule of force rather than by rule of law, prey on weakened communities. The government, crippled, can’t come to anyone’s rescue.

And all it takes is a single bomb detonated high in the atmosphere, two hundred miles above the continent.

“Welcome to my nightmare,” Forstchen says with the kind of grim chuckle usually reserved for gallows humor.

But this is no joke. “It sounds like it’s science fiction, Mayan-prophecy, end-of-the-world stuff,” Forstchen admits, “but it’s dead-on real.”

Forstchen is a professor of history at Montreat College, a small liberal arts school in the Great Smokey Mountains of North Carolina. He’s written some forty books, including a series of successful “alternative history” novels with former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.

His most recent novel, One Second After, outlines his nightmare in chilling detail.

At first thought, it might seem far-fetched to imagine a single bomb wiping out the entire country. But it wouldn’t be the power of the explosion, per se, that would cause the problem. Instead, the real problem would be the electro-magnetic pulse—the EMP—generated by the explosion.

Traveling at the speed of light, the EMP would act like an enormous ripple in the earth’s electromagnetic field. As that ripple hits electrical systems, it would get amplified way beyond anything a typical circuit breaker could handle.

“This energy surge will destroy all delicate electronics in your home, even as it destroys all the major components all the way back to the power company’s generators and the phone company’s main relays,” Forstchen writes. “In far less than a millisecond, the entire power grid of the United States, and all that it supports will be destroyed.”

And if the power goes, everything goes.

“Everyone remembers the aftermath of Katrina,” Forstchen says. “It covered fifty-thousand square miles, but it was basically a local event. An EMP would be a nation-wide Katrina-like event.”

Some experts predict the resulting casualty rate could be as high as ninety percent by the end of the first year.

“This will raise a lot of moral questions, too,” Forstchen says. “Are we going to let people out of maximum security prisons? Do we triage off the elderly?”

The scenarios Forstchen envisions in the book aren’t necessarily fictional, either. “I didn’t want to turn this into some kind of Mad Max thing,” he explains.

Forstchen drew on his background as a historian to look for scenarios of desolation and desperation that would fit his post-EMP world. The WWII sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad provided a terrible bounty of examples: tiered rationing, bread with sawdust baked into it to make it more filling, vicious bands of murderous thugs, communal graves.

His visit to the cemetery outside of Leningrad proved especially haunting. “There were six-hundred-thousand dead after the siege,” Forstchen says. “And the Russian have a tradition of putting laminated photos of the deceased on their tombstones. I will never be able to shake that.” That trauma, he says, is still on the Russian soul.

And, the novel argues, America would suffer trauma even worse if an EMP strike hit us.

“I imagined my daughter being in that (post-EMP) world,” says Forstchen, a single parent. “I imagined my daughter being ill in that world.”

As a result, he says, “it got really bad for me” writing novel. “I will never be able to shake that.” Other parents who’ve read the book have had similar reactions. “’I saw my kids in the middle of this,’ they’ve told me,” Forstchen says. “Any parent who reads this, it’s going to hit hard.”

But for most people, the threat of an EMP attack is so abstract and remote, it’s hard to get them to take an interest. “Some people look at it and think it’s too big: ‘I don’t want to think about it,’” Forstchen says. “Well, we have to think about it.”

Forstchen has worked with Reps. Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD) and Denny Thompson (D-Miss) to educate other lawmakers about the potential threat of EMPs, but he admits the going has been tough. Even the House Armed Services subcommittee that was studying EMPs was disbanded. “Unfortunately, this is an issue that doesn’t have a constituency,” Forstchen says.

One reason he wrote One Second After, he says, was to “put a voice” to the issue. So far, the strategy seems to be working. The book peaked at number eleven on the New York Times bestseller list and is being developed by Warner Brothers into a film.

“I’m more optimistic than I was six months or even a year ago, when I was working on the book,” Forstchen says. “Lawmakers are starting to get the word again.” In late June, Forstchen met with a group that included members of Congress and intellectuals from various political think tanks to again press his argument, which suddenly has new urgency because of missile testing in North Korea.

“Look at North Korea and Iran,” Forstchen says. “Why are they so interested in building small-scale nuclear missiles? Only one model fits.” It’s the fact that the U.S. is so vulnerable that our enemies are even contemplating such an attack, he adds.

But even beyond the national defense reasons, Forstchen points out that there are significant environmental reasons for protecting ourselves against EMPs. The biggest reason, he says, hangs high above us in the sky every day.

In late August of 1859, a series of solar flares erupted from the sun with such magnitude that they burned out telegraphy grids across Europe and North America. Similar solar storms have taken place in 1921 and 1960. According the Forstchen, research suggests that we’re heading into a period that could see another, similar upswing in solar activity.

“We built this delicate, elaborate infrastructure without thinking about how vulnerable it is,” Forstchen says. “We need to get off the stick and do something about our infrastructure.”

Just one percent of the money allocated in the recent bailout package could be enough to create a survival infrastructure, Forstchen says. “It wouldn’t save the entire system, but it could be used to create nodes of infrastructure that could be quickly built upon. Otherwise, what good is a bailout of there’s no country to bail out?”

Most importantly, Forstchen says, individuals should learn to prepare and protect themselves. “What’s the big lesson from Katrina: Don’t wait for the feds,” he says. His website offers a variety of simple, precautionary things people can do. It also offers tips on how to recognize an EMP should one occur.

“People need to think on three levels: on the level of citizens of America/citizens of the world, the personal level, and the community level,” Forstchen says. “Eight, ten, fifteen people thinking together can do a lot. We have to learn how to think together.”

Forstchen realizes he may sound like “a crazy old crank” for sounding alarmist. (During his first-ever radio interview on the book, the first caller rang it to accuse him of being a paranoid right-wing survivalist.) “I just want to see bipartisan action on this,” he says. “I don’t care who gets the credit. We’re all Americans. We need to get by the partisan bickering, at least on this. Otherwise, we’re all going to be on the same sinking boat the next day.”

Forstchen urges people to contact their congressmen about EMPs. “If enough people do, suddenly the issue has legs, and something can get done about it,” he says.

And that, Forstchen says, will definitely help him sleep easier.

S&R will feature a review of Forstchen’s book, One Second After, on Tuesday.

• Study says offsets make ACES carbon cap almost meaningless
• China rejects binding GHG cuts
• USGS study suggests peak coal may be closer than previously thought
• FutureGen coal CCS pilot project revived
• EU needs to upgrade its electricity transmission
• Deep water wind turbine undergoing testing
• More wind power means fewer hydroelectric dams?

Michael Shellenberger is one of environmentalism’s persona non grata de jour. He and Ted Nordhaus founded the Breakthrough Institute in order to push for technological solutions to environmental problems instead of policy solutions that both men have argued are doomed to failure from the word “Go.” This was not exactly a popular thing to say in the halls of Congress or around the water cooler at any number of large environmental organizations dedicated to creating policy solutions.

An analysis of the American Climate and Energy Security Act (ACES) by Shellenberger and Jesse Jenkins, Breakthrough’s Director of Energy and Climate Policy, found that the offset provisions of the legislation are so loose that they essentially make the carbon cap portion of the ACES-defined “cap-and-trade” system almost meaningless.

The problem, as illustrated in the image above, is that the Congressional Budget Office estimates that companies will buy more carbon offsets (such as reforestation credits) than carbon allowances under the cap-and-trade proposal. Not only will this suppress allowance prices by an estimated 70%, Breakthrough estimates that it will also result in reductions of “cumulative emissions in supposedly capped sectors of the economy by just 0.5% through 2020.” That’s 55.1 billion metric tons instead of 55.4 billion metric tons of carbon emissions. (UPDATE: A typo in the Breakthrough Institute’s analysis has been corrected and the cumulative emissions is now 2%.)

Offsets are a huge problem in general – they’re difficult to verify and thus prone to fraud and easy to game. And this analysis illustrates that the sheer number of offsets available in ACES undermines the bill’s goal of cutting carbon emissions, perhaps fatally.

I’m still personally ambivalent about ACES. But if the analysis is accurate (and not everyone agrees that the Breakthrough analysis is), it means that parts of ACES are in desperate need of repair. Unless problems like this are fixed or, at a minimum no more problems like this crop up, I could actually find myself hoping for ACES to fail. And that is just depressing.

———-

China rejects binding GHG cuts

In yet a further indication of “the more things change, the more they stay the same,” TerraDaily reports that China will not accept binding cuts in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

According to a quote from Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang:

China is still a developing country and the present task confronting China is to develop its economy and alleviate poverty, as well as raise the living standard of its people. Given that, it is natural for China to have some increase in its emissions, so it is not possible for China in that context to accept a binding or compulsory target.

This is bad, but it’s hardly news. China has been hiding behind the “we’re a developing nation” and “the U.S. and Europe have to cut first because they’re more responsible than we are” excuses for years now. The problem is that China and the U.S. combine to total more than 50% of all GHG emissions globally, especially carbon dioxide (CO₂), so no real progress can be made on cutting emissions without both nations going along. And without a binding national cap, China has essentially said that they’ll continue to emit GHGs as necessary to grow their economy.

China’s emissions will fall naturally due to the global recession just as U.S. emissions have fallen. China’s economy is overwhelming driven by exports, and other nations simply lack sufficient money to import all the Chinese goods that China can manufacture. But China’s electricity is overwhelming generated from burning coal, their coal plants aren’t particularly efficient, and they’re still building coal plants at an alarming rate. As such, smog is a serious problem throughout China. And because of government corruption and horrible living conditions, I suspect that popular pressures to reform government and clean the nation’s air and water will ultimately slow China’s economic growth and it’s related carbon emissions.

But if not, then there’s always a carbon tariff on imported Chinese goods. That would get China’s attention….

———-

USGS study suggests peak coal may be closer than previously thought

“The United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal.” “We have enough coal deposits in the U.S. for 250 years.” These kinds of claims are heard all over the place by proponents of coal power and coal-to-fuel conversion technologies. And the claims are technically correct – to a point. But what coal boosters fail to mention is that there’s “total coal,” and then there’s “coal that can be extracted economically using available technology.” And, as a Daily Green article about a United States Geological Survey (USGS) study from 2008 points out, the two are most definitely not the same.

According to the Daily Green article, the USGS studied the Powder River Basin coal deposit in Wyoming and found that the recoverable reserves were only 38% of the total demonstrated reserves of 201 billion short tons. This difference was due to rights of way, coal deposits under rivers and towns, and so on. But the USGS also estimated that the amount of coal that was economically viable to mine at 2008 prices was only 6% of the total, or just 10.1 billion short tons.

I looked up some Energy Information Administration (EIA) data on total coal reserves and consumption rate and did some quick calculations. The EIA estimates that there are 489 billion short tons of coal in demonstrated reserves nationwide. But if we cut that down to only 6% of the total using the economic arguments made in the USGS paper, that produces a total of 29.34 billion short tons of coal that can be extracted profitably. Assuming that coal consumption grows at an annual rate of only 0.86% (the average of the growth rates between 2002 and 2008), the U.S. would consume all of that available coal by 2032.

Now, there’s a lot of caveats to this quick estimate. First, as prices rise, more and more coal will become profitable to extract and better extraction technologies will be developed. Second, the USGS analysis was for one coal deposit in one region, but there are massive coal deposits in the interior of the U.S. and in Appalachia. Whether the Powder River analysis holds for those other regions is presently unknown, at least to me.

But if my quick estimate holds water over the entire country, then there’s a question I have to ask – does it make sense to spend billions of dollars developing carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technologies that might not even be ready for deployment until after we’ve passed peak coal?

———-

FutureGen coal CCS pilot project revived

Late in the Bush Administration, the FutureGen coal CCS pilot project was canceled because of supposed cost overruns – or because President Bush’s home state of Texas was rejected in favor of President Obama’s home state of Illinois. It later turned out that the overruns were erroneous, but the project wasn’t reinstated. According to the NYTimes last week, the Department of Energy (DoE) revived FutureGen. The DoE will supply $1 billion while the private energy and utility companies involved in the project will pay between $400 and $600 million total over several years.

———-

EU needs to upgrade its electricity transmission

Electricity transmission is likely to be one of the more difficult problems facing deployment of renewable energy. Most people don’t want high voltage power lines running near their property and environmentalists don’t generally like the idea of spoiling wilderness or habitat with the same. But under one renewable paradigm, more transmission lines are necessary if electricity will be moved from where it’s generated to where it’s consumed, such as moving wind power from the Midwest to the east coast of the U.S.

But there’s another, related problem that needs to be solved with transmission of renewable electricity – old transmission lines may be unable to carry the new electricity at all. According to an article in the Guardian, this is precisely what a new study of Europe’s transmission lines has found.

According to the article, the European Academies Science Advisory Council (Easac) electricity grid working group found that the 20% renewable electricity generated by 2020 could be “wasted unless it can be distributed properly.” Furthemore, the article says that the Easac report also found “[u]pgrading the grids in individual countries should be done to common standards, and eventually the movement of electricity across Europe might even be managed centrally.”

A report last year (and reported by the Carboholic) found that all of the EU’s electricity needs could be met by large solar farms located in the Sahara that then transmitted the electricity via high voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission lines to Europe around and across the Mediterranean Sea. The Guardian article says that the Easac report found the following:

In order to do that, you need to design the transmission system so it can cope with the large power flows through existing countries’ networks [but] Italy’s transmission system is not designed for that, nor is Spain’s.

No single country’s electricity grid is designed to carry half a continent’s electricity through its borders, which is essentially what would happen with Spain and Italy.

There is another renewable energy paradigm that might help alleviate the transmission bottleneck, at least enough to give the EU time to build out a whole new set of modern transmission lines – distributed generation of electricity. The question is whether or not solar and wind power could be made cheaply enough and deployed widely enough to make centralized renewable generation (like the Sahara proposal) largely unnecessary. Time will tell.

———-

Deep water wind turbine undergoing testing

According to an NYTimes GreenInc article last week, a deep water marine turbine is nearly ready for testing off the coast of Norway. The article and some background available on StatoilHydro’s website say that the turbine will float upon a tower that is anchored to the bottom with wires. The physics of a deep center of gravity (approximately 100 meters below the ocean’s surface) and some intelligent control systems will reduce the amount of bobbing that the floating turbine suffers as a result of wave action. The technology has been adapted from offshore oil drilling platforms, StatoilHydro’s area of expertise.

There are a number of reasons why deep water turbines are being developed. First, as the nearly eight year saga that is the Cape Wind project attests, environmentalism can run afoul of NIMBYism even in the most “liberal” of places – Nantucket Sound, Massachusetts. In this case, the wealthy homeowners along the Sound didn’t want white turbine towers spoiling their ocean view. But deep water turbines could be placed much farther out to sea, reducing the threat of NIMBY lawsuits.

Second, the American Wind Energy Association points out in their FAQ that winds tend to be stronger and blow more consistently farther offshore. This means that turbines will produce more electricity more consistently than near-shore or on-shore turbines will.

And third, according to the GreenInc article, not all regions of the world have shallow off-shore continental shelves that are suitable for shallow-water, near-shore wind turbines. In these situations, deep water turbines are the only offshore wind power option.

The turbine is slated to start generating electricity in July after the transmission line is laid from the turbine to the shore and will run for two years.

———-

More wind power means fewer hydroelectric dams?

Last week, the NYTimes had an article about the interaction between wind power and hydroelectric dams in the Pacific Northwest. The Bonneville Power Administration is building out large numbers of wind turbines along the Columbia and Snake rivers, but as the number of wind turbines goes up, environmentalists interested in restoring salmon habitat and spawning grounds have started to suggest that now is the time to remove the dams and return the rivers to a (more) wild state.

This provides yet another example of the tradeoffs and problems that environmentalists are going to have to face as their goals of wilderness protection, endangered species protection, renewable energy, sustainable agriculture, etc. come into conflict.

One of the problems facing this kind of a tradeoff is that the wind doesn’t blow all the time, and so standby electricity generation is necessary to fill in the gaps. In most parts of the country, that extra capacity is provide by natural gas or coal plants, but the Pacific Northwest is largely powered by hydroelectric. So removing too many dams and the electricity generation the dams provide will probably make the grid in the Northwest less stable, a point made by Bonneville in the NYTimes article.

In response, Bill Arthur, a Sierra Club representative for the Northwest, suggested in the article that Bonneville build more turbines scattered across a wider geographic area, with the idea being that the wind will probably be blowing somewhere and that the additional turbines would “smooth out” the wind power supply. And he pointed out that “dismantling [dams] could take six or more years, allowing plenty of time to plan the transition to new power sources.”

One of the problems with Arthur’s suggestion is that the list of alternative power sources that are likely to be available by the time the dams come down are the usual suspects: coal and natural gas, with possibly some solar power added into the mix. Is trading a hydroelectric dam that stresses salmon for a coal plant that poisons them or overheats their river (directly via cooling water discharges or indirectly via climate disruption) a good idea?

I don’t know. But I do know this – these tradeoffs aren’t going to go away. In fact, they’re going to get more common and become thornier different environmental projects collide head first more and more often over the coming years and decades. Ultimately, some hard decisions and difficult compromises will be necessary.

Image credits:
Breakthrough Institute
S&R
EIA
Solberg Production / StatoilHydro

• Port of Long Beach powers BP supertankers with electricity
• Most companies don’t mention climate change in annual reports
• Scotch distilleries to cut fossil fuel use
• Videos show human effects on Earth
• Dependence is dependence, be it energy or minerals

Maritime shipping is responsible for emitting 3% of global carbon emissions, roughly equal to air travel and more than most nations. Worse than that, however, is the fact that most oceangoing vessels burn heavy fuel oil (aka bunker fuel), the heavy sludge that’s left after every other useful product has been refined from petroleum. Bunker fuel emits a truly massive amount of nitrogen oxide compounds (NOx) and, due to its high sulfur content, a huge amount of sulfur dioxide (SO₂). According to the International Council on Clean Transportation, one of the ways to reduce emissions at port was to implement “shore-side electricity” in port. This enables a suitably equipped shipping vessel to operate off of comparably clean electricity instead of extremely dirty bunker fuel.

And according to an article last week in the Long Beach Press-Telegram , the first supertanker with a shore-side electricity retrofit pulled into the Port of Long Beach and plugged in.

According to the article, the British Petroleum supertanker Alaska Navigator had to be retrofitted to operate its oil pumps off electricity instead of the bunker fuel-burning auxiliary engines, and it cost the Port of Long Beach $24 million to produce the electrified pier. But the payoff is in the 10,000 gallons of bunker fuel per day that aren’t being burned while the supertanker is in port. The article claims that this saves the equivalent of 30 tons of NOx emissions (roughly equivalent to 187,000 cars) every time the Alaska Navigator – or the other electrified supertankers that will visit the port each month – puts in to offload its petroleum cargo.

And this is just the start – Long Beach is electrifying piers for other shipping vessels as well, as is the Port of Los Angeles. But as Long Beach Harbor Commission President Jim Hankla says in the article, “Ultimately, this all isn’t going to make much difference if the technology isn’t adopted on a global scale.”

Maybe national governments should consider regulations that require shipping vessels and ports to do just that.

———-

Most companies don’t mention climate change in annual reports

According to a new study by EDF, CERES, and CEES, most major companies don’t discuss climate change in their annual reports. According to the study, only 23.7% of companies in the S&P500 even mentioned climate change. Of the sectors that the study looked at, utilities discussed climate change the most often, followed by energy companies and then materials companies. The three worst sectors were financial, consumer products, with IT/telecommunications coming in dead last.

All of these sectors have their own impacts on climate change. Utilities generate our electricity and heat, energy companies drill and mine, materials companies make the plastics and metal that build our civilization. As such, these sectors have the most obvious exposure to climate risks. But telecommunications companies operate massive switching centers while IT companies have large data centers that each use as much electricity as 25,000 homes. Add a significant price per ton to carbon and the price for energy consumed by the data centers and central offices could skyrocket without a massive and simultaneous rollout of energy efficient servers and data storage.

There are other risks, though, to all of the sectors in the S&P500 study. The financial sector, composed of banks and insurers, has risks to investments made by banks and risks due to loss of property from extreme weather for insurers. Consumer products rely on natural resources that could become scarce or expensive, and many inexpensive goods rely on international shipping. Any number of industries that rely on access to water, energy, and raw materials will find themselves similarly at risk.

The ultimate conclusion of the study is that the “material” risks to companies as a result of climate change largely aren’t being disclosed. This prevents customers and investors from making intelligent decisions about what companies to support with their purchases and investment dollars.

There was one significant bright point in the study, however – the percentage of companies mentioning climate change in their latest annual report was the highest yet measured, and it nearly doubled between 2007 and 2008.

———-

Scotch distilleries to cut fossil fuel use

According to a BBC story, the Scotch Whisky Association distilleries have pledged to cut their fossil fuel use by 80% over the next 40 years. The story claims that most of the gains will be in the use of renewable electricity and energy efficiency.

The Association plans to make its industry more sustainable through a number of other measures as well. These include light-weight packaging and bottles, reduced landfill usage, water discharge management, and using sustainable oak for casks. As Richard Dixon of WWF Scotland pointed out in the article, “”Since the whisky industry relies on Scotland’s clean environment for its main ingredients it is important the industry takes steps to reduce its potential impacts.”

Sustainability – one more reason to enjoy your scotch.

———-

Videos show human effects on Earth

Last week, Wired put up a set of short videos taken by the NASA Earth Observatory, a cobbled-together but still very impressive camera system aboard the International Space Station. These videos show the effects of human activity on the Earth and range from the drying up of the Aral Sea and Lake Powell to the growth of urbanization of Dubai to the restoration of salt marshes in southern Iraq. They’re impressive for what they show about how much humans can do the Earth and how quickly things can change.

———-

Dependence is dependence, be it energy or minerals

According to an interesting NYTimes/Greenwire article, touting energy independence via renewable sources may trade one type of dependence for another, specifically imported minerals. Most renewable energy sources have some requirement for minerals that are either not widely available, or are not presently mined in any significant amount, in the United States.

The article points out that photovoltaic panels need minerals that are largely supplied by nations in Africa, China, and Russia. Most rare-earth minerals that are used in battery, efficient light bulb, and wind turbine manufacture are available, but not presently mined, in the US, but 97% of them come from China. The USGS has an old publication that discusses some of the issues with rare earth metals and their uses in technology.

“When you think about these dependencies — and think about hybrid vehicles as an example — the use of hybrid vehicles … is an attempt to minimize dependence on Middle Eastern crude oil,” Mark Smith, CEO of rare-earth miner Molycorp Minerals, said. “But think about what we’re doing here, if that’s the purpose. We’re trading one dependence for another.”

Is it wise to trade dependence on the Middle East for oil with dependence on Russia and China for the rare-earth minerals required for the creation of clean energy sources?

This adds another level of complexity to an already horrendously complex set of equations. And just as there will certainly be difficult trade-offs to be made between the conservation of species and wild lands vs. clean energy generation and transmission, there will also be tradeoffs between conservation and mining the very elements required for our technology.

Image credits:
Diandra Jay, Long Beach Press-Telegram
Standard & Poors
USGS

“China is more capitalistic than any capitalist country.”

Amy, an employee at a jewelry booth
in Beijing’s pearl market, strings
together a strand of pearls after
striking a bargain with a shopper.

Roger Perkins of Cooper Industries told us that early on our trip. You’d have to see it to believe it, perhaps—but I’ve seen that firsthand several times on the trip, most dramatically at the silk and pearl markets. It happens on the scale of global companies, too.

“China is pragmatic,” says John Chen of Prometric, a company that specializes in testing and surveying. “When it wants to be capitalistic, it’s capitalistic. When it wants to be communist, it’ll be communist.

Chen likens China’s approach to situational management: different situations require different management approaches.

China needs the influx of cash that capitalism provides in order to continue to fuel its burgeoning economy. But at times, the country’s top-down dictatorial style allows things to get done that otherwise couldn’t happen in a democracy.

“India, for instance, is the most democratic country in the world,” Chen points out by way of example. “Everything gets debated to death and nothing ever gets done.”

In China, the government might say, “This row of apartment buildings needs to get demolished so we can put in this new highway,” and then it gets done, no argument. “For the good of the many, the individual makes sacrifices,” Chen says.

That seems pretty heavy-handed to most Americans, but to the Chinese, it’s been that way for five thousand years. “Chinese history has always been ruled by people, not by laws,” Chen says. “When the emperor is wise, everyone benefits. When you have a bad emperor, everyone suffers.”

Chen is one of several business executives who’ve spoken to us since we’ve arrived in Beijing. Most of what we hear expands on the things we heard in Shanghai, but the extra depth sheds a lot of new light.

“Everything in China is difficult, but everything is possible,” Chen tells us. “While regulation exists, there’s also flexibility because so much is left to interpretation.” That’s the upside to the central role individuals play in running the country.

The Chinese even have a word for it: Guanxi. It means “connections.” In America, relationships come about as the result of business deals, but in China, businesses deals come about as a result of relationships.

The system, as one might expect, is ripe for abuse, which creates headaches for companies used to Western business practices. So says Derrick Reilly, a partner with financial services company PriceWaterhouseCooper.

“If you don’t find fraud, then you’ve gotten it wrong,” Reilly says. “Businesses have to plan for it.” PWC recommends to its clients that they address it in their risk management plans. Chen echoes a similar sentiment.

Jaime FlorCruz, CNN’s China correspondent and one of the most senior journalists in the country, says corruption has always been part of the government culture.

“It’s a matter of life and death for the Communist Party to curb corruption,” FlorCruz says. According to a survey done in December and February by the American Chamber of Commerce in China (ACCC), corruption remains one of the most significant problems facing foreign companies doing business in China.

Businesses also face the challenge of protecting their intellectual property (I.P.). The same ACCC study cited it as another top business challenge.

The widely held belief is that China is a nation of copiers, and it only takes a trip through the Silk Market and its booths of knock-off products to reinforce that stereotype. But FlorCruz says, “China aspires to be more than a nation of copiers.”

Seventy-two percent of the business surveyed in the ACCC study said China’s enforcement of I.P. laws is ineffective. And enforcement is the key, says Matt McKee of the law firm Lehman, Lee, and Xu. He contends that China actually has good I.P. laws that are, in many cases, better than international standards.

For many years, though, China was so desperate for economic activity that it looked the other way on I.P. issues. “A black market was better than no market,” McKee says.

“If you’re the mayor of a city, and there’s a factory pumping out copies of a pirated movie, what’s more important,” McKee asks: “the thousand jobs that the factory has created or protecting the intellectual property rights of a big Hollywood studio that’s not putting any money into the local economy?”

But recently, Chinese companies have been stung by I.P. infringements. As more Chinese companies have trouble, McKee predicts the Chinese government will take a more active role in enforcing its intellectual property laws. “Now that it’s in the Chinese interest to enforce the laws, we’ll see stricter enforcement,” he says.

My overall impression is that the Chinese business climate makes things chaotic for Westerners. “It’s difficult but not impossible,” McKee says.

The key, according to McKee, is for companies to “gain China-knowledge,” to learn about Chinese culture and how business gets done in the country. It seems like common-sense advice, but Western companies frequently underestimate its value—much to their regret.

“In the U.S., there are generally understood practices to protect profit margins,” Chen adds. “In international markets, the ground rules are different…. Because the market is so competitive and so open, it forces innovation.”

Most of that innovation comes from the foreign companies because that’s one thing the Chinese educational system doesn’t emphasize. However, Reilly says he’s begun to see a shift lately as more Chinese get educated abroad and then return home to China for work.

For now, U.S. companies that operate with flexibility are generally benefitting quite well from China’s competitive environment. “U.S. companies are winning in China,” Chen says.

China, too, is benefitting from the innovation boom.

China isn’t bound by legacy infrastructure, such as
highways, bridges, and power grids, as it expands.

In America, for instance, we’re bound by “legacy infrastructure.” We have to build on what already exists, whether it be the highway system or a type of technology.

Developing countries like China can leapfrog legacy infrastructure because the infrastructure didn’t exist in the first place. They can learn from the trials and errors of developed countries and put the best, newest ideas into place right from the start.

“Companies bring the newest technology when they come into China,” says Chen.

State-of-the-art infrastructure improves China’s ability to move goods and services throughout the country. Foreign and domestic manufacturers have an easier time moving products to and from new manufacturing bases and consumer markets.

“A lot of China’s achievements stand side by side with a lot of challenges,” says FlorCruz. “Many of those challenges are unintended consequences of their economic reforms.”

The reforms—a bottom-up approach—were launched by Communist Party Chairman Deng Xioping beginning in 1979. “In China, we will let a small group of people get rich first,” he said. Those people would then fuel economic growth through investments, job creation, and contact with the West.

China still struggles, generally with great success, to continue to master the learning curve.

From multinational corporations to small shops like
this one in Beijing near the Lama Temple to
individual street vendors, capitalism is alive and
well in China.

But as capitalistic as China is, it’s important not to forget China is also still a developing country, and it has lots of room—and energy and desire—for continued improvement. By 2025, some economists predict China will have the biggest economy in the world.

It seems that a good infusion of capitalism was just what communist China needed.

• California report recommends changes to adapt to rising sea level
• “Virtual” water exports a problem for Australia and the world
• An update on high voltage direct current transmission lines
• MIT develops new Li-ion battery that charges really, really fast
• New biodiesel stays liquid at colder temperatures

Limit development in low-lying coastal areas. Consider abandoning existing development in coastal areas likely to be affected by sea level rise. Require structures built along the coast to be able to adapt to higher sea levels. Discontinue federally subsidized flood insurance for existing property in low-lying coastal areas. Those are some of the recommendations made last week in the first report by California’s Climate Action Team and reported by the LA Times.

According to the LATimes article, the state of California has concluded that it’s best to plan now for rising sea levels in the future. And so the Climate Action Team is preparing 40 different studies into adaptation and mitigation strategies for the state, many of which are presently undergoing expert peer review, and plans on submitting a comprehensive report to the Governor later this year. The changes already proposed in this one report, however, are radical compared to what most states have been willing to consider to date. Most states have their heads in the sand over the issue of climate change, and while few states have as many different climates as California does (coastal, desert, mountains, etc.), all states will be affected sooner or later, to some greater or lesser extent.

Furthermore, if California is seriously considering abandoning coastal properties, shutting down and moving inland power plants and water treatment facilities and hospitals (like those shown in the image above), and forcing ports to build so that a meter or more of sea level rise is no big deal, then other states will begin to take this seriously as well. Some entire towns may have to be given to the Pacific, something that, until this report, I’d only seen seriously discussed in government circles by the English. And every time I’ve heard it suggested that maybe parts of New Orleans shouldn’t be rebuilt or that homes and towns in flood plains should be abandoned instead of rebuilt by taxpayer-funded federal flood insurance, people’s hackles rise in a hurry. Having the state of California suggesting these approaches as a “good” adaptation strategy truly is radical.

I have one major concern, however. The LATimes article points out that the Climate Action Team is using the IPCC 2007 Fourth Assessment Report as their baseline, but as I reported in the last week’s Carboholic, the IPCC predictions were overly conservative. So planning for a worst-case sea level rise from the IPCC estimates is already a case of too little, too late. So if the report proposes that 1100 miles of levees, built for $14 billion and with a yearly maintenance cost of $1.4 billion assumes 1.5 meters of sea level rise, what happens to the cost if that goes up by double, as several papers presented at the Climate Change Congress in Copenhagen say it will? If nearly half a million people will live in flood plains by 2100 at the IPCC estimate, how many more people will be affected?

The gist of the recommendations in the report are ultimately going to stand regardless. As Mary Nichols, chairwoman of California’s Air Resources Board, was quoted as saying:

“The recommendations are sensible: Defend what is worth protecting, move what can reasonably be moved, try to avoid doing further harm, consult affected communities, prepare to respond to emergencies.”

It’s hard to argue with those.

———-

“Virtual” water exports a problem for Australia and the world

Everyone knows instinctively what water is and what you use it for. You turn on your tap, flush your toilet, drink a bottle of “spring” water, water your lawn, take a whitewater ride down rapids, go fishing in a reservoir – all of that is a use of water. So are the flowers you buy that were imported from Africa, or the shirt you wear that is made from Australian cotton or wool, or the lettuce on the salad you eat during December that was grown in the Imperial Valley of California. The difference is that this water is hidden, or in the parlance of an article from The Age, it’s “virtual” water. And environmental scientist Tim Jarvis is of the opinion that arid and drought-stricken Australia should export less of it’s virtual water.

“Australia is a massive net exporter of virtual water, in other words, water we take to grow crops that we grow for export, such as wheat, rice, cotton,” Mr Jarvis said.

“We have to address this fundamental discrepancy that exists between the fact we’re the driest country yet we’re one of the largest net virtual water exporters,” he said.

Jarvis’ comments about the export of virtual water applies far beyond Australia’s borders. California’s Imperial Valley is desert made ideal, year-round farmland through massive canals importing water from the Colorado River. That water is then exported to the rest of the United States, even those parts that have far, far more water than the desert southwest and the Mojave (which the Imperial Valley would very nearly be without irrigation). Ethiopia exports to Europe so that Europeans have fresh flowers year round, but those flowers contain huge amounts of water that could become quite scarce if Africa dries out as anticipated in the coming decades. Every agricultural product has a cost in virtual water that is used to produce the product, and that virtual water is exported and imported around the world. And this doesn’t even begin to take the huge water costs of resource extraction (settling ponds), energy production (fly ash ponds, steam turbines, and cooling), and even bottled water from overseas (Fiji, Switzerland, et al).

Water will eventually become a valuable commodity world wide, instead of the nearly-dirt-cheap resource it is today. When this happens, cities in deserts (Las Vegas, Phoenix, Los Angeles) may find themselves without enough water to survive, at least at today’s population, without spending great amounts of money to import water. And regions that have sufficient water will have to fight off dryer regions that have designs on their water – some regions (like the Great Lakes) have already had to take action to prevent water from leaving the drainage.

What happens then is anyone’s guess, but resource conflicts over access to potable water aren’t outside the realm of possibility. Neither are mass migrations and environmental refugees from hot, dry areas to cooler, wetter areas – and all the cultural and social ramifications that such migrations bring with them. Which is why international diplomatic meetings like the World Water Forum, meeting in Istanbul this week, are so important.

———-

An update on high voltage direct current transmission lines

Alternating current (AC) has historically ruled electricity transmission. Because AC transmission enables the use of transformers to change the voltage from tens or hundreds of thousands of volts to 240 or 120 volts, it’s used all over the world and has been since the early 1900s. But AC is not the only game in town – direct current (DC) lines exist and are used in certain specific applications. For example, because DC lines have lower losses, they’re used to transmit electricity over extremely long distances. In addition, because different regional electricity grids are out of phase with each other, DC lines (which have little or no phase at all) are used to connect different regional AC grids to each other.

The New Scientist had an article last week on recent developments in high voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission lines. The article reports that there are a number of new HVDC lines being installed internationally, such as a 6.4 gigawatt, 2000 km long line from the Xianjiaba dam to Shanghai in China.

Perhaps more interesting, however, is the idea of the “supergrid,” where HVDC lines are used to interconnect entire continents with electricity so that electricity created in one place (such as solar power in the U.S. desert southwest or the Sahara Desert or wind power from offshore wind farms in the windy North Sea) is available wherever it’s needed, no matter how far away that electricity is used. Not only that, but because HVDC lines are much less wasteful, huge gains in effective electricity production could be realized through improved transmission efficiency.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the article, however, is an analysis that was performed by Gregor Czisch, an independent energy consultant who calculated that a $1.8 trillion investment in building a HVDC network in Europe would be enough to power the entire continent with renewable energy exclusively. This sounds like a lot until you consider that it’s only about 10% of what European utilities are already expected to spend on power plant construction by 2030. And the article claims that Czisch calculated that the completed grid could deliver 100% renewable electricity for less than 5 cents per kWh.

There remain some technological challenges – there’s no such thing as a high power DC circuit breaker at the moment, for example – and NIMBY politics will always play their part in anything as major as tens or hundreds of thousands of miles of new transmission line, but there are no technological or political problems that appear insurmountable at this time.

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MIT develops new Li-ion battery that charges really, really fast

According to the Boston Globe, scientists at MIT have developed a new electrode that enables a lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery to be fully charged 100 times faster than existing batteries. These new batteries, if commercially viable, could charge a cell phone in mere seconds, a laptop battery in less than a minute, or a plug-in hybrid/fully electric vehicle in mere minutes, instead of the hours that existing batteries require. This does assume that you have a sufficiently robust connection to the power grid that you don’t blow the main circuit breaker on the house every time you try to fast recharge your plug-in Prius.

At least two companies, A123Systems and Umicore, have already or are considering licensing the technology for commercialization.

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New biodiesel stays liquid at colder temperatures

One of the major problems with biodiesel is that it gels in the cold, turning into Jello® in the gas tank instead of flowing through fuel lines like petroleum-based diesel does. This problem has limited its usability in the winter and in cold environments in general. But according to the NYTimes blog GreenInc, Integrity Biofuels of Indiana may have solved this problem, and to prove it, they drove biofueled trucks in Alaska in the winter and ran a diesel electric generator down to -24 degrees Fahrenheit overnight without any problems.

The reason that biofuels gel at low temperature is that there are too many saturated oils, but Integrity has used urea to separate the saturated oils from the unsaturated ones, enabling them to create blends that should run down to -60 degrees F before turning into a gel. According to the GreenInc article, the cost of the reusable urea additive is about five cents per gallon.

While biodiesel has the same problems that any biofuel does, namely the conversion of food-producing farmland to produce fuel crops and questions about energy efficiency, biodiesel has one significant advantage – biodiesel can be made from used cooking oils harvested from the grease traps and fryers of tens of thousands of restaurants around the country and the world. Whether there’s enough used cooking oils to make a dent in diesel consumption is a question I haven’t investigated, but turning a waste product that was once landfill bound into a viable and environmentally-friendly product is always a good idea.

Image credits:
Pacific Institute
New Scientist