July 01, 2008
June 19, 2008
Ambinder on McCain on offshore drilling: Does not compute.
Marc Ambinder wonders whether John McCain's flip-flop on offshore drilling might be a reaction to new circumstances, rather than mere political cynicism. Ambinder lists our growing knowledge about climate change as one of those new circumstances. Huh?
June 16, 2008
The biofuel circus
Mark sent along this story about a biotech startup, gently nudging me to break a long blabsence (I've been on the road for two weeks raising my carbon footprint, doing biofuel stuff). They are among a bunch of tech entrepreneurs with promising very early stage technology to leapfrog the millenia-old technology of yeast fermentation (and centuries-old technology of distillation), using...
May 16, 2008
Good carbon policy needs good monitoring
Our water expert Froude Reynolds paddled by yesterday and threw this post on the dock: This report discussing the potential revenues from an auctioned cap and trade carbon emissions program points out that offsetting increased costs to the very poor and compensating energy companies for increased costs to them would only take about 30% of revenues raised at auction....
Bush and the Farm Bill
The unspeakably bad farm bill has been thoroughly examined and I have no new insights to offer. It has a couple of small, positive elements, but they are not redeeming features unless you think giving away the odd dime is what 'redeemed' John D. Rockefeller. It's environmentally, sociallly, and morally an outrage, and a big one. A perfect storm of...
May 14, 2008
Do carbon taxes hit oil producers?
If they do, we can make the Saudis and the Russians carry part of our tax burden. Wouldn't that be lovely?
May 13, 2008
Greenhouse-gas footprints and environmental activism
GHG emissions are costs, not sins. They require appropriate pricing, not moralistic ranting. Why is this hard for libertarians to understand?
May 12, 2008
McCain puts one over the outside corner
McCain gave a big climate speech at a wind turbine company in Oregon today. I'm writing this as the Sox drop the third out of four to the Twins, and I'm thinking, dammit, I deserve a simple world in which I can have clear binary opinions. Boston should win all the time, McCain should be wrong about everything and say...
May 03, 2008
McCain's bullsh*t
He doesn't believe he's going to free us of dependence on Middle East oil. But he pretends to mean it, which allows his audience to pretend to believe it.
Ooooops!
Hillary Clinton says her gasoline tax holiday will help farmers, who don't pay tax on fuel used on the farm.
May 02, 2008
"The long and sad annals of truly bad ideas"
Would you like to join Henry Aaron in denouncing the "gasoline tax holiday" scam? You can, if you act quickly.
The Republican war on science, continued?
For going on eight years now, we have had a White House that profoundly believes that politics trumps reality, and that the Presidency carrries with it the right and the obligation to ignore inconvenient facts. People in the Bush White House say things like: We believe the presidency requires leadership. There are times that a president will take a position...
May 01, 2008
Dinde Clinton et dindon Obama à la sauce Krugman
Contra Krugman, there's a good campaign parallel between health care and climate change.
April 30, 2008
... and ye shall receive
Obama's anti-gas-tax-holiday TV spot is up. Effective, but not very accurate.
April 29, 2008
Froude Reynolds with more on the Westlands scam
The RBC welcomes guest poster Froude Reynolds, from whom we anticipate occasional posts like the following. Reynolds carried pipe in tomato fields, walked along canals, and studied water in California universities in preparation for current employment that makes a pseudonym a reasonable precaution. For nearly eight years now, the Bush administration has cost the environment. It cost us eight pivotal...
April 28, 2008
Gas prices
Obama resisted enormous political temptation to score a cheap one on gasoline prices today, while Clinton went in the tank. Yay for him, and too bad for her. This round began when McCain floated the insultingly dumb idea of suspending federal gasoline taxes over the summer. This was just another piece of idiocy coming out of his policy closet of...
April 18, 2008
Why do the Dutch ride lousy bicycles?
As is well known, the Dutch have an extensive, pervasive, and very green bicycle habit. Big cities have four completely separate surface circulation systems with integrated signals (cars, pedestrians, trams, and bikes); tourists wandering on foot into the bike path get hit or yelled at. Bicycle parking is not a matter of a few posts on the sidewalk, or bikes...
April 17, 2008
Goodbyes
This week I returned from a memorial service for my first collaborator in arts policy research, and my second PhD advisee, to find that my most recent coauthor, on biofuels and global warming, had taken his life. It's been a tough week, as both were friends, optimal colleagues, much too young, and respectively central to the two main areas of...
April 13, 2008
A big step backwards
Kevin Drum correctly lands on the $25b homebuilder cookiejar in the Senate's housing bill (passed on Thursday) with both feet. Is it fair to pile on? You betcha; anyway fairness has almost nothing to do with the part of this outrage Kevin doesn't mention, which is the lunacy of subsidizing housing in any way with the earth heading for a...
April 12, 2008
RIP NYC Congestion Charge
This is very sad news. Bloomberg worked hard for a congestion charge, though his political management in Albany was apparently pretty inept; the policy is sound in many ways,;and it's simply absurd that legislators from beyond the city and its suburbs should have anything to say about it anyway. (I have to admit, having recently spent a few days in...
April 10, 2008
Biodegradability: Bug or Feature?
I spent a day this week catching up with the latest and greatest in biomaterials science at Wageningen-UR, a principal Netherlands center for research in this field. I saw algae making ethanol and a plant making electricity just by growing in very wet soil, and a lot of other cool stuff. One line of work the hosts were especially proud...
March 07, 2008
It's not just fossil fuels
Let's play a kids' riddle game. My short-term benefits on first use are positive, and can be obtained at very low up-front cost. In your social circle, I indicate coolness and status. Once you use me, you find that the (again, short-term) benefits of using are increasingly greater than not using, even if you start to wish you had never...
February 17, 2008
Luxury fever and GHG reduction
From a global-warming perspective, you'd rather have people buying $100,000 wristwatches than $100,000 Hummers.
February 11, 2008
A really bad day for biofuels
This is a really big deal. (The original articles are here, behind the AAAS paywall.)There is now more than good reason to expect that no biofuel from seeds, possibly none (even cellulosic) grown on land that could grow food, will reduce global warming if substituted for petroleum products. The insight of the papers discussed in the article, and work by...
February 08, 2008
January 31, 2008
January 28, 2008
Muddling through II - a Frenchie alternative
My scenario for British electrical generation: 25 GW of nuclear and 75 GW of wind
January 27, 2008
Muddling through I
British energy policy: a well-intentioned muddle without a coherent target scenario
December 07, 2007
Stupefying toys: it’s not the lead you need to worry about
Lead is really bad for you if you inhale or eat it, especially if you’re a kid wiring up neurons into the best possible brain, so toys that put it into kids are deplorable. But I think we’re missing something much more alarming about toys. Plato’s Socrates warned his students that they should be even more careful about what they...
November 14, 2007
Woo hoo
Here's a Cat4 cyclone (called hurricanes in the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Gulf of Mexico) drawing a bead on Kolkata and Bangla Desh. Satellite photo here. It reminds me of the days before Katrina, with some interesting differences: (1) The people in the path of Sidr are poor as churchmice. (2) They live in one of the largest, flattest, lowest, river...
November 07, 2007
November 01, 2007
Carbon tax, or economics is not a good choice of religion
Economists really like economics. Which, I guess, is a good thing, but when they really get into it, dancing around the flaming computer as it blows regressions into the air late at night, they can be a little unbalanced. This article, for example, leaves me genuinely uncertain whether it's a piece of incredibly dry self-teasing, or serious. (The author is...
October 30, 2007
Obama's radicalism
A permit-auction system is about as radical a global-warming proposal as you could make. And Obama has made it.
October 27, 2007
October 09, 2007
September 21, 2007
August 29, 2007
August 27, 2007
More environmental mischief, and another batch of rich pickpockets at the public trough
[update: the Chron has a story on this here] At the end of my post on coalmining I asked “What more damage will they do before we finally run them out of town?” and a California reader came back with two stories: Well, the Department of the Interior will make it their mission to give the freshwater of the west...
August 22, 2007
Pinchot and TR would weep to see this
At the end of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the renegade wizard Saruman has been hanging out among the hobbits while the big adventure of undoing Sauron goes on at the center of the action. He spends his time doing mean-spirited damage to the environment, cutting down all the trees and generally wrecking the landscape, until he's driven out....
July 08, 2007
More on Live Earth
I would add two things to Mike's well-taken criticism of artist-bashing below. First is a distinction between agendas and alternatives. Artists can play an altogether wholesome role in shifting the public's attention, getting them to focus on particular issues rather than others, or even more important, shifting their attention from private concerns to public concerns. On the latter issue, they...
Global Warming Concerts
The weekend's Live Earth concerts against global warming are at the intersection of three of my favorite bêtes noires, namely (i) the idea that the arts are validated when they do something "useful" like help kids learn math, or push economic development in failing downtowns; (ii) putting science and real consequences aside in favor of romantic symbolism and gestures in...
June 10, 2007
The giggle test
There are cheap ways to increase the reflectance of roadbeds and rooftops, making cities more comfortable in the summer, reducing energy consumption, and counteracting global warming. But they seem too trivial to matter, precisely because they don't have large costs or side-effects. Thus they don't enter the political discourse. This is a problem.
June 09, 2007
Silly season at the gas pump
Like most things, gasoline is bigger when warmer. Since the gas pump measures volume as you fill your car, you get less gasoline by weight, therefore less energy, when the gas is warm than when it's cold. So far so good, but here the failure of high school science and economics education starts to send the story into never-never land,...
June 07, 2007
"Transactional lobbying" and congestion pricing in New York
Even when Republicans do the right thing, they do it corruptly.
May 28, 2007
Yay, LAT
"Print it once and print it all" used to be the LA Times tradition for news; instead of dribbling out an evolving story in daily disconnected tidbits, they would run long, coherent, interpretable stories about situations. Today's editorial on the carbon tax is in that tradition. Informed, thoughtful, and complete. They also resist the meme of "yeah, but it's politically...
May 24, 2007
More on transit and urban planning
Megan McArdle was so upset by my post dinging Schwarzenegger for the transit cuts in his budget that she dipped a toe in the waters of sarcasm. Her post commits several common errors in the discourse around this issue....
Schwarzenegger maybe doesn't get it after all...
Arnold Schwarzenegger has been parading all spring in very green finery, comprising a bunch of legislation and executive orders directed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions in California. This is quite interesting political behavior because of his Republican base, a bunch that, with exceptions, is generally allergic to the idea of saving the planet at the intolerable cost of actually giving...
May 19, 2007
Are the wheels coming off corn ethanol?
The Wall Street Journal yesterday had a Potomac Watch column by Kimberley Strassel, "Ethanol's Bitter Taste," behind their paywall, detailing the political hostility rising corn prices are stimulating even in corn states (because those are also chicken, beef, hog, etc. states). At an agriculture conference in Indianapolis last fall, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns and EPA Administrator...
May 06, 2007
Targeting conservation policy
The renewed enthusiasm for compact fluorescent lamps (CFL's) highlights a persistent inefficiency in resdiential energy conservation programs. The underlying tension is between an understandable desire to get people to do the right thing and the complexity of the science involved (though the science is no more than high school physics). A regional, climate-aware strategy for public education and subsidies for...
April 17, 2007
Biofuels and global warming
Global warming can only be arrested by putting less...a lot less...so called "greenhouse gases" (mostly CO2 from burning fossil fuels) into the air, taking CO2 already released out, or - a longshot and controversial approach - making the planet more reflective. (This post is one in an ongoing series you can review in the Energy and Environment thread.) Among the...
April 03, 2007
Mass v. EPA
I don't have a lot of time to blog on Mass v. EPA, but it's importance suggests that something be said about it. As Jack Balkin rightly notes, the Court is rarely terribly principled about standing, esp. in the context of regulatory agencies. Jack observes that, "Whether you buy...[his] line of argument [that Mass v. EPA was rightly decided] depends...
March 24, 2007
Global Warming--A Policy Design Problem
Mike is, of course, quite right to note that doing something about global warming comes with real costs. All the bunkum about attacking global warming creating a bunch of new technologies (and implying that it will add to economic growth) is really irresponsible. Of course it will spur new technologies, but not nearly as much as the economic activity that...
March 23, 2007
Global warming and the economy
As public and political opinion gets behind the idea that human activity is warming the planet by putting so-called "greenhouse gases" into the atmosphere, we are, thankfully, starting to talk about what to do about it. This post is an effort to obstruct unrealistic and irresponsible hoping for "something to do that doesn't require any actual heavy lifting". What matters...
February 03, 2007
The ideal issue
This week marked an odd intersection of two stories that seem completely unrelated but actually reflect a lot of light on each other. I'm referring to the New York Times' admirable series on NFL players' post-career physical trainwrecks, and the global warming issue. The players get a lot of money to amuse us with collisions between 300-lb armored projectiles. Half...
Posted by
Michael O'Hare
at 09:42