Author: Grist – the Latest from Grist

by Grist

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by Ashley Braun

When the Big Apple’s health department tried putting out free condoms, it found the recipients were less than stimulated by the wrapper’s appearance. To sex it up, the city held an online contest to design a new package, 15,000 voters got in on the action, and of course, one hot symbol nailed it.

The condom design that came out on top? The international sign for the power button. Six million of these limited-edition rubbers will hit the roads of New York City, turning on sex lives and (hopefully) powering down overpopulation.

After all, New Yorkers are all about power: power shopping, power
trips, and now … power condoms. But if the city runs out of these rubbers, will the residents pitch tents outside city hall in protest? That’s the kind of news we hope won’t break.

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by John Legge

Editor’s Note: In his book Food Rules, Michael Pollan declares, “Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.” The idea is that by cooking at home, you’ll avoid all the unpronounceable chemicals found in store-bought junk. And even though you might gorge on it, you can only eat as much as you made—and it takes hands-on effort, not just a trip to the supermarket, to procure more. In that spirit, we offer DIY Junk Food, the recipe column for those who want to get their hands dirty in the kitchen before enjoying some sublime junk.

—————-

Photo: John Legge

I love Almond Joys. There’s nothing like hydrolyzed
milk proteins, soy lecithin, caramel coloring, sodium metabisulfite, and sulfur
dioxide to get my mouth watering. (Those last two additives keep Almond Joys extra-fresh
for an extra-, extra-long long time.)

Of course, I don’t want to actually eat those mystery
ingredients that candy bars are so full of, but that doesn’t mean I want to
skip the perfect Almond Joy combination of coconut, chocolate, and almonds.
Lucky for me, I’m a pastry chef. I knew I could figure out how to make my own Almond
Joy using just the basics—sugar, eggs, flour, honey, salt, butter, coconut, vanilla,
chocolate, and almonds (or no almonds because, you know, sometimes you feel
like a nut and sometimes you don’t). And I didn’t need a chemistry set to give
my Almond Joys long shelf-life—the bars don’t stick around that long.

If you’re afraid you’ll eat all 18 of your homemade
Almond Joys in a day, I recommend stowing at least half of the pre-formed bars
in the freezer. Then you can pull out the right number for you and a friend.
Just make sure you defrost those frozen bars before you bake them.

Homemade Almond Joys

7 oz sweetened shredded coconut
¾ cup white sugar
3 Tablespoons all purpose flour
½ teaspoon salt
½ cup egg whites (about 4 eggs)
1 Tablespoon honey
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 ounces whole roasted almonds (unsalted)
4 ounces good quality chocolate, chopped
1½  Tablespoons butter

Photo: John LeggeMix the coconut, sugar, flour and salt together in a sauce
pan.

In a bowl combine the egg whites and honey and whisk until
foamy.

Add the egg mixture
to the sauce pan and mix thoroughly with a rubber spatula.

Cook over medium high heat until the batter slightly
thickens and takes on a little color, about 10 minutes. You will need to stir
frequently so that the batter doesn’t burn on to the bottom of the pot.

Mix in the vanilla.

When the batter is cool enough to handle, form spoonfuls
into oval bars. Lightly press two whole almonds into the top of each bar.

Bake at 350 degrees
for 20 to 25 minutes, or until golden brown. 
Allow the bars to cool to room temperature.

While they’re cooling, combine the chocolate and butter in a
double-boiler (you can set a metal bowl over a pot of boiling water if you
don’t have a double-boiler). Allow the chocolate to melt slowly, mixing it with
the butter.

Dip the top of each bar into the melted chocolate, shaking
off the excess.

Once the chocolate is set, you’re done.

Makes about 18 (highly delicious and preservative free)
bars, which can be eaten immediately or frozen for later use.

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by Tom Laskawy

Well, bluefin tuna, it was nice knowing you:

A proposal to ban the export of Atlantic bluefin tuna prized in sushi has been rejected by a U.N. wildlife meeting.

Thursday’s decision occurred after Japan, Canada and scores of poor nations opposed the measure on the grounds that it would devastate fishing economies.

Monaco introduced the proposal at the 175-nation Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES. It argued that extreme measures are necessary because the stocks have fallen by 75 percent and current managing agencies have done nothing to rebuild the stocks.

Only the United States, Norway and Kenya supported the proposal outright. The European Union asked that implementation be delayed until May 2011 to give authorities to respond to concerns about overfishing.

The Pew Environment Group responded to the news:

Today’s vote puts the fate of Atlantic bluefin tuna back in the hands of the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT), the very body that drove the species to the disastrous state it is now in.

Ah, the ICCAT, or as marine biologist Carl Safina likes to call it, the International Conspiracy to Catch All Tunas. The ICCAT has repeatedly overruled its own scientists to set catch quotas far above sustainable levels. In fact, ICCAT’s scientists recently came out in support of the trade ban just rejected at the CITES meeting. The only thing the ICCAT seems able to manage is the Atlantic bluefin’s destruction.

It’d be nice to think that at there are plenty of fish in the sea, but really, there aren’t. At least the U.S. did the right thing. The rest of the international community may not have mustered the courage to save the tuna, but everyone should realize that, vote or no, Atlantic bluefin tuna is an endangered species and should not be eaten. You have been warned.

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by Samantha Thompson

Since coming out in
support of climate legislation in October, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham
of South Carolina has faced a lot of vitriol from groups on the right, including
Tea Party activists in Charleston. This criticism culminated in a formal censure from
Charleston County that lambasted Graham for subverting “Republican
leadership and party solidarity for his own benefit” and defiling “the ideals
of freedom, rule of law, and fiscal conservatism.”

But one unlikely group is coming to Graham’s defense: the
Christian Coalition. The group released a radio ad last week defending the senator’s
actions.

The ad begins with an audio clip of President George W. Bush
lamenting America’s addiction to oil as a “serious problem.” (You can listen
to it here.) It continues with
narration from Roberta Combs, president of the Christian Coalition:

President Bush was right: our addiction to
foreign oil threatens our national security and economic prosperity. America
spends almost a billion dollars a day on foreign oil and a lot of that goes to
countries that do not like us and harbor terrorists. Washington’s failure to
act puts our national security at risk, and drains our economy. I’ve heard from
so many Christian Coalition supporters that energy is one of the most important
issues we face today. America is a can-do country. We’ve got to take the lead
to explore energy alternatives and protect our national security. We have to
make our country safer by creating jobs with the made-in-America energy plan. I
would like to ask you to call Sen. Lindsey Graham and encourage him to continue
fighting for our families.

Could the Christian Coalition give fledgling climate
legislation the leg up it needs?  The
organization boasts 2.5 million supporters, largely conservative Republicans;
if they embraced the cause, they could give a big boost to efforts to build a
bipartisan coalition for a clean-energy and climate bill. 

Meanwhile, dozens of
South Carolina veterans are also saluting Graham for his climate activism in an ad [PDF] running in
local South Carolina newspapers, funded by the Pew Project on National
Security, Energy and Climate:

As U.S. military veterans, we share Senator
Lindsey Graham’s strong belief that our national security depends on more than troops
and arms. America must also reduce its dangerous dependence on foreign oil and
develop its own alternative energy sources.

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by Alan Durning

Photo: Flickr via Imnop88aAs I argued in part 2, electric bikes could be forerunners for electrifying the whole transportation sector. They’re sweeping into urban areas in China by the tens of millions. New technologies are improving e-bike performance. And powerful institutions are aligning to speed battery innovations.

Many observers now believe e-bikes will grow rapidly in North America, including in the Pacific Northwest. Colorado-based market analysts Pike Research, for example, predict that U.S. sales will quadruple from 250,000 e-bikes in 2010 to more than 1 million in 2016, as shown in the chart below. (Asia is left off the chart, because it’s on a different scale. Some 98 percent of e-bike sales worldwide have been in China.)

To speed this process, one common approach—evident in the bevy of tax credits available for purchasers of hybrid and electric cars—would be to subsidize e-bike sales. That’s what Santa Cruz, California did early in the 2000s decade. Coupons from local authorities helped sell as many as 1,000 e-bikes there, making it briefly the e-bike capital of North America. Similarly, rebates from Swiss localities have boosted e-bike sales in Switzerland. Some 16,000 sold there in the first half of 2009, according to one report.

The implicit assumption behind underwriting new products with public funds is that once they are adequately established in the marketplace, they will spread contagiously without continued public support. The public investment is justified by the subsequent flipping of a market, in which cleaner, greener products push out dirtier products and yield large benefits for society.

This assumption may be reasonable for green products that are new and unfamiliar, such as ground-source heat pumps and green roofs, or that are not produced on a large enough scale to bring down manufacturing costs. But electric bikes are neither new nor unfamiliar: half a million have sold in the United States over the years. And they’re a variation on the ubiquitous bicycle, which is found in a majority of homes. What’s more, we should have already benefited from the economies of scale, insofar as they’re rolling out of Chinese factories at a pace of 20 million a year, far in excess of the scale of U.S. auto manufacturing before the recession. Furthermore, the notion that there is a tipping point for sales of e-bikes is speculative at best. In fact, a look at electric bikes’ progress in North America and abroad leads to the conclusion that they confront a formidable set of barriers to growth—barriers that public sales rebates are unlikely to overcome. I’ll describe these barriers in my next post.

Stay tuned for part four of this five-part series tomorrow.

This post originally appeared at Sightline’s Daily Score blog.

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by Lisa Selin Davis

Photo: Gardens Under GlassThe shopping mall is not dead. In Cleveland, in fact, it’s growing
green: cucumbers, lettuce, herbs and even flowers.  

In the former Galleria at Erieview mall, a project called Gardens Under Glass is taking root, part of a grand plan to transform malls into greenhouses. It’s just one of many Cleveland-based projects, suggesting that this rust belt city might have a few sustainabilty tricks to teach urban centers everywhere.

Vicky Poole, who heads up marketing for the Galleria, conceived this project after looking at a photograph of plants growing in a cafe window. Hmmm, she thought, imagining a
retooled version of the food court. The mall was already scrambling to find innovative uses for itself in a flagging economy, primarily as a wedding hall, but also as a farmers market. A greenhouse, she discovered, could thrive in the building’s climate controlled environment under the tremendous glassed-in atrium that runs like a spine down its emtpy center.

Poole and her partner-in-green Jack Hamilton (who manages Artist
Review Today magazine and gallery, located in the Galleria) won a $30,000 grant to set up the greenhouse project. The money came from Cleveland’s Civic Innovation Lab, which funds ideas for growing the local economy (other projects include a recycled glassware company and a renewable energy group).

In February, spinach, tomatoes, and strawberries were started in a composted
soil system produced by a local company. This week, a hydroponic system was delivered that will exponentially increase output. They also added artificial light to supplement the daylight streaming through the glass ceiling.

Poole’s vision for the mall is both a master marketing tool—this one, like so many of its mid-80s brethren, was in dire straights not long ago, with dozens of vacancies in its 200 stores—and an inventive way to promote sustainability in what has proven to be a largely unsustainable architectural dinosaur. It’s pretty hard to find alternate uses for 100,000-plus square feet of mostly windowless space. “I don’t look at us as a mall anymore,” she says. “We really serve the downtown business community.”

Already, the farmers market is growing in popularity. The grander plan calls for the entire mall to become a retail ecovillage: vegetarian restaurants, health food stores, garden supply outlets, more farmers’ stalls and shops selling recycled goods. There are other ecovillages in Cleveland and a whole slew of green initiatives that we detailed in 2008.

What’s great about this mall project, though, is that it comes from the private sector, from one woman with a big idea and a big enough space to realize it. “I hope it’ll bring this building back,” she says.

In the meantime, malls are struggling to find new uses. Perhaps dead malls will become centers of local live produce?

 

 

 

 

 

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by Jonathan Hiskes

There’s some fascinating new research about “CO2 domes,” invisible clouds of carbon pollution that hover above urban areas. Bradford Plumer at The New Republic does a great job setting the context:

Does it matter where carbon dioxide is emitted? From a climate perspective, at least, the standard answer has always been, “Not really.” Carbon dioxide mixes pretty evenly and uniformly throughout the atmosphere, so that the heat-trapping gases coming out of a factory in China have the same effect on global temperatures, pound for pound, as the greenhouse gases emitted by, say, cars in Delaware. (This is in contrast to a number of other air pollutants, whose effects are often localized—sulfur dioxide only causes acid rain in discrete areas.)

The new finding:

But a new study just published in Environmental Science and Technology by Stanford’s Mark Jacobson adds a slight twist to this standard view. Older research has found that local “domes” of high CO2 levels can often form over cities. What Jacobson found was that these domes can have a serious local impact: Among other things, they worsen the effects of localized air pollutants like ozone and particulates, which cause respiratory diseases and the like. As a result, Jacobson estimates that local CO2 emissions cause anywhere from 300 to 1,000 premature deaths in the United States each year. And presumably the problem’s much worse in developing countries.

Mark JacobsonMark Jacobson, professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of the Atmosphere/Energy Program at Stanford, has been vocal about the need for a complete clean-energy transformation. This week, with the political world consumed by health care, his work offers a reminder that carbon pollution is a serious health problem. It makes traditional air pollution—such as particulates and ozone—more harmful, so it poses particular threats to the places with the worst air pollution—cities.

Here’s a map of CO2 released from fossil fuels (with red and yellow marking the biggest pollution points), compiled from 2002 data by the Vulcan Project at Purdue University. It’s a map of emissions, which isn’t quite the same as airborne concentrations, but it gives a sense of where pollution happens:

Map courtesy of Purdue University Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences

Jacobson’s urban-dome research presents two implications worth teasing out:

Trouble for cap-and-trade?  The new evidence adds a wrinkle to cap-and-trade plans by suggesting that it matters where pollution happens. Cap-and-trade rests on the assumption that a ton of carbon has the same impact regardless of where it’s emitted, so it doesn’t matter if a factory in Nashville and a power plant in Phoenix trade emission permits. It only matters where emissions can be reduced most cheaply.

But, says Jacobson, “This study contradicts that assumption.”  Stanford’s press release on the research plays up the contradiction; “Urban CO2 domes increase deaths, poke hole in cap-and-trade proposal,” blares the headline. 

If the research proves correct, it doesn’t argue against cap-and-trade so much as highlight the need for a multi-pronged approach to CO2 regulation. The Clean Air Act can set plant-by-plant performance standards while a declining cap covers the broader economy. (That’s the approach taken by the Kerry/Boxer Clean Energy Jobs & American Power Act.) So the study shouldn’t be used to entirely discount the idea of cap-and-trade plans—but that doesn’t mean it won’t be.

Urban vs. rural.  Jacobson’s research also pits the interests of rural and urban communities against each other.  Cities could stand to suffer more under climate change, but the senators representing large urban areas already have proportionately less power to push through legislation that would curb CO2 pollution.  California, with its 37 million residents and numerous polluted urban areas, has two senators who want to enact climate legislation; Wyoming, with 540,000 residents and vast expanses of rural land, has two senators who oppose climate legislation. 

Urban and rural areas have already been at odds over climate policy—and that was before we had any evidence that cities might really get the short end of the stick.  The “domes” research provides more fodder for the fight. It underscores the essential unfairness of the effects of carbon pollution, and raises the question of just how much Wyoming should have to say about the health of Californians.

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by Agence France-Presse

Bolivian President Evo MoralesLA PAZ—An alternative “people’s conference” on climate change in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba in April will seek to advance an international global warming referendum, organizers said Tuesday.

“The only thing that can save mankind from a [climate] tragedy is the exercise of global democracy,” said Bolivia’s United Nations Ambassador Pablo Solon, a key organizer of the summit.

A priority of the meeting would be discussing the possibility of a global referendum “with the goal of reaching two billion people,” he told reporters.

Thousands of people, mostly members of social movements and indigenous groups, are expected to attend the People’s World Conference on Climate Change and Mother Earth Rights on April 20-22.

Organizers say it is intended to “give a voice to the people” on climate change after the perceived failure of the U.N.-sponsored Copenhagen summit on the same issue.

Solon said he expected participants from 94 countries and representatives from 70 governments to attend, without giving further details.

Bolivian President Evo Morales, who in January issued an open invitation to the conference to governments, scientists, and social movements, has said a number of South American presidents would also attend.

But the outlines of the conference remain vague, and it is so far shaping up to be something between an environmental forum and a political rally. It is expected to tackle many of the themes Morales raised at the Copenhagen summit last year, including creating a “climate court of justice” and the need to “change the system of capitalist consumerism”—proposals that could be included in the suggested global vote.

Solon said the summit’s conclusions would be delivered to the next U.N.-sponsored meeting on climate change, currently scheduled for December in Mexico.

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by Umbra Fisk

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by Ashley Braun

Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld made a clothes call about his thoughts on global warming during Paris Fashion Week. Unlike those other designers who prefer diamonds, Karl flooded the runway with real ice: a 240 metric ton iceberg sculpture in a room that was chilly in temperature, but not in reception to his global cooling theme.

Karl may make fake fur mod, but he’ll only appease the polar bears until they start sweating out of their skin. Personally, we’re not convinced Karl’s wooly wardrobe and climatic condescension are quite yeti ready-to-wear.

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by Josh Nelson

Kate Sheppard asks if the passage of health care legislation will hurt or hinder progress on climate legislation.  But the underlying question is whether or not Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is looking for an excuse to bail on climate negotiations.  The answer to that question might just be yes.  His rhetoric hints at the possibility, and he’s willing to distort the truth about reconciliation without hesitation while huffing and puffing that it leaves him no choice but to bail on unrelated legislation.  If Sen. Graham does end up using the passage of health care reform as an excuse to give up on climate talks, his lack of integrity will be readily apparent for all to witness.
First, some back story.
Last week this National Journal article ($) made me worry:

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, the lone Republican working with Democrats on both immigration and climate change legislation, might walk away from talks on those issues if Senate Democrats use budget reconciliation to pass changes to their healthcare bill in a deal with the House, according to Graham and a leadership aide. … A Senate GOP aide said it was too early to begin worrying that a deal will be struck on a climate bill that would put a price on industrial carbon emissions. But at the same time, aides said stakeholders should consider the impact reconciliation will have on climate legislation and the possibility that the midterm elections could yield more business-friendly Republicans in Congress.

“They should definitely realize there’s not a lot of good reasons to cut a rash deal at this point,” a Republican aide said. “I think they’re going to have a very hard time convincing any Republicans, particularly with reconciliation hanging over their head. It seems like, to me, from a business perspective, they should consider that.”

But since it was National Journal quoting an anonymous republican aide, I didn’t place much weight in it.  Was that a mistake?  Could Sen. Graham really take such offense to reconciliation that he would scuttle climate talks over it?
Sen. Graham emerged last fall as a leading republican in negotiations on clean energy and climate legislation.  While he wasn’t ready to support the Boxer-Kerry bill on the table, he expressed confidence in “a pathway forward … that makes us more energy independent, creates sound environmental policy, promotes job creation and frees our nation from dependency on foreign oil.”  In the months that followed, as he was attacked by South Carolina republicans over and over again, he continued making the case for clean energy.  In early January, responding to being censured by a local county Republican Party, he shot back: “I do believe in finding common ground to solve hard problems.”  As recently as the end of January he was still “committed to finding a new path forward.”
But in late February, the rhetoric took a turn for the worse:

In a private meeting with several environmental leaders on Wednesday, according to participants, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), declared, “Cap-and-trade is dead.”

Then on the March 7th edition of Face the Nation, Graham said [PDF]:

We’ve had reconciliation votes but all of them had received bipartisan support, the least was twelve when we did reconciliation with tax cuts. So it is taking a partisan product and making it law.

It isn’t clear whether he was being disingenuous or was just mistaken, but his statement was factually incorrect.  Graham was apparently referring to the 2001 tax cuts.  But as the Sunlight Foundation has documented, Bush’s 2003 tax cuts were passed through reconciliation on a hyperpartisan 50-50 vote.  Whether he was being disingenuous or not, those were harsh words, and they are not encouraging for those of us who have worried all along about the Senator’s ability to negotiate in good-faith.
Graham’s most disturbing comments about reconciliation came on Sunday on ABC’s This Week:

If they do this, it’s going to poison the well for anything else they would like to achieve this year or thereafter.

He continued:

“I’ve been working with Lieberman and Kerry, we’ve come a long way on the climate and energy issue,” Graham said. “This is one issue where the president has been great. He’s saying all the right things to give us a chance to become energy independent, clean up the air and create jobs. But when it comes to health care, he’s been tone deaf, he’s been arrogant, and they’re pushing a legislative proposal and a way to do that legislative proposal that’s going to destroy the ability of this country to work together for a very long time. And that’s not necessary.”

Jeromy Symons gets this exactly right:

“Senators shouldn’t squander this opportunity for real energy reform because they are angry on other topics,” he said. “Think where our nation would be if Congress called it quits every time parties fight over one issue. Nothing would ever get done.”

Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) remains confident in Sen. Graham’s interest in proceeding, citing earlier statements the republican senator has made.  But Sen. Graham says a lot of things.

Ezra calls it an empty threat, quipping that “if Graham doesn’t think the well is already poisoned, then I dare him to take a sip from it.”  But it isn’t clear to me that Sen. Graham is above using this as an excuse to back out of climate negotiations.  While talking a relatively good talk most of the time, he’s been working behind the scenes to weaken the legislation as much as possible.  And by the looks of things he’s had significant success on that front.

I can’t help but note that Sen. Graham initially became interested in climate legislation because of his mentor John McCain.  McCain, of course, has long since bailed on climate discussions for plainly political reasons.

Bailing now offers Sen. Graham an easy opportunity to accommodate his increasingly anti-science base by pulling the football on the gullible democrats once again.

On Monday Graham warned reporters that the draft legislation he is developing with Sens. Kerry and Lieberman may not be public until mid-April.  If all goes according to plan, health care reform will be the law of the land by then.

When democrats pass health care legislation in the next few days, Senator Graham will have a potentially career-defining decision to make.  He can take the easy route, the predictable path, by joining republicans in an orchestrated tantrum and an attempt to completely shut down the government.  Or he can do what he knows is right and continue working for clean energy legislation that will create jobs, reduce pollution and improve our national security.  We’re going to find out what Sen. Graham is made of very soon.

Originally published at EnviroKnow.

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by Tom Laskawy

Michelle Obama went before the Grocery Manufacturers Association today seeking its support for her “Let’s Move” anti-obesity initiative. The GMA, which counts food companies like Kraft, General Mills, and Coca-Cola among its membership, isn’t necessarily friendly territory for Michelle Obama. But if the standing ovation she received is any indication, Big Food is trying hard to show it’s on the right side of the obesity issue.

Still, according to the AP, the First Lady made sure to keep things civil.

Obama said she would like to see less confusing food labels and portion sizes and increased marketing for healthy foods. She urged companies not just to find creative ways to market products as healthy but actually increase nutrients and reduce bad ingredients.

“While decreasing fat is good, don’t replace it with sugar,” she urged. “This needs to be a serious industry wide commitment to provide healthier foods.”

Obama’s campaign is largely focused on school lunches and vending machines, along with making healthy food more available and encouraging children to exercise more.

Absent from her speech was any mention of that thing government does. You know, where they add a charge on top of the retail price of a product. To raise money. Whatchmacallit. Oh, yeah. Taxes! Whew. That was hard to say.

Now, I’m not suggesting the First Lady shouldn’t broach the topic of obesity via the low-hanging fruit of corporate partnerships, education and exercise. Indeed, there’s no question that including the biggest food companies—the ones that former FDA chief David Kessler will tell you are largely responsible for the huge increase in our caloric intake over the last 30 years—is a necessary pre-condition to addressing obesity. But that doesn’t mean it’s sufficient.

At some point, the First Lady, or the president, or someone in government is going to have to bring the hammer down and announce that reducing access to and increasing the cost of unhealthy food is going to be a major part of addressing obesity.

A slew of recent studies have come out recently suggesting just that. Dr. Barry Popkin at UNC looked at historical food consumption data among young adults and found that increased junk food prices did result in lower caloric intake and less weight gain. I wrote previously about another “lab experiment” that demonstrated similar results.

Meanwhile, a study out of Kansas that hasn’t gotten nearly enough attention indicates there are risks associated with leaving taxes out of the equation. In this work, a group of researchers at Kansas State examined the relationship between obesity and food access for low-income women (as represented by recipients of government-funded WIC food benefits). Here’s what they found:

[T]he availability and density of food stores was not associated with obesity in metropolitan and rural areas. However, contrary to previous studies, the findings showed that the presence of a supermarket is not protective against obesity for women in these areas. Women who resided in micropolitan areas in Kansas had an 18 percent increase in obesity risk when living within a 1-mile radius of a supermarket. The presence of small grocery and convenience stores also was associated with an increased risk of obesity. [emphasis added]

The point here isn’t that food deserts, reduction of which is a central part of the “Let’s Move” campaign, aren’t real or that they don’t matter at all—though it’s striking that in small Kansas cities, access to supermarkets was actually associated with an increased risk of obesity. It’s that the overall food environment plays a much more important role. Another way to put it is that it’s not so much the stores as what’s in them and what’s near them that is the problem.

Futzing with industrial food recipes won’t make much difference as long as we are surrounded by opportunities to consume empty calories. Complicating matters is the fact that, without taxes or subsidies, healthy food will always be more expensive than unhealthy food. And not just because of our skewed farm subsidy system—but because inferior products are always cheaper.

As a political scientist of my acquaintance observed to me, Americans are by and large motivated by the idea of “negative liberty.” We want freedom from interference by government in our daily lives more than we want anything else. Typically, that’s captured in the phrase, “This is America. I should be able to [fill in the blank] any time I want.” As a result, attempting to restrict consumption of harmful goods (like tobacco, alcohol, SUVs or—yes—sugary drinks) becomes almost impossible since denial of that good to “deserving” Americans will invariably take place.

Unfortunately, restricting access to unhealthy food, however we manage it, is an unavoidable necessity for any serious attempt to reduce obesity. The only question is whether we’ll ever find the courage to admit it.

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by Jonathan Hiskes

Pam Worner runs a business near Seattle helping home builders adopt “green” building practices. She’s fond of the phrases “tangled up in green” and “I don’t care what your countertop is made out of.” There’s a lot packed into those sayings—the first pinpoints a classic problem with green building, while the second suggests a solution. 

“Tangled up in green” gets at the overwhelming array of eco-friendly building options.  A given structure might have high-efficiency appliances, state-of-the-art insulation, a solar water heater, eco-certified hardwood floors, a permeable driveway, indigenous plants in its landscaping, easy access to a light-rail station and grocery store, and on and on. All these elements are well and good, but some are energy-efficiency features, others save water or improve its drainage, and another protects tropical forests halfway around the world.  And some are definitely more significant than others.

“I don’t care what your countertop is made out of” reflects Worner’s conclusion about what building features are most important. If climate change is the biggest environmental threat to human welfare, then reducing energy use is the most important goal of green building—by far. This is the consensus view among green building experts (for a good explanation of the energy-trumps-everything argument, see Auden Schendler’s book Getting Green Done). A countertop made of recycled paper is nice, but a highly efficient furnace is going to pay much higher environmental (not to mention financial) dividends over the years.  If homeowners can cut energy use, Worner figures, they don’t have to sweat every small thing.

So far so good. When I spoke with Worner at a Built Green trade show in Bellevue, Wash., last week, these struck me as helpful but orthodox ideas. But then she continued.

Her company, Green Dog Enterprises, advises construction companies to approach green building by helping their customers answer the question “What does green mean to you?”

What it means to customers turns out to be a lot of different things. The top priorities that they give often include indoor air quality, foreign-oil dependence, global warming, polar-bear habitats, rainforests, supporting local businesses, and reducing auto-dependency.  Those could point to all different sorts of building features. 

“You can’t do everything,” Worner said. “Most of the certification programs give equal weight to lots of different things. That gets really difficult, because you can’t do all of them. And sane homeowners would not want to do everything. You’ve got to help people feel good about what they’re doing, and that means helping them do what gives the biggest bang for the buck on what matters to them.”

But you steer them to the “right” priorities … right? You explain why energy efficiency matters more than anything else?

“That’s the ‘greener than thou’ condescension creeping in,” she said when I asked about this.

This seemed to contradict her energy-trumps-everything position. What if my personal “green” preference is exposed beams in my house from virgin old-growth trees? (Hypothetically, of course.)

“I’d say great. Let’s talk about salvage,” she said. Turns out there are divers who retrieve logs from the bottom of the Columbia River, where they fell off barges decades ago. If you’ve got the money, there are more sustainable options than you might think. Worner’s business helps builders and customers sort through those options (it also provides verification for several building certification programs).

 “Greener than thou” is another of her favorite phrases.  It’s her label for the environmentalist scolds who remind well-meaning homeowners that they’re always falling short in some regard. “Ah, I see you’ve done X, but why didn’t you think about Y?” your eco-jerk friend might say. Who’s motivated by that?

“People will only take a second step if they feel good about the first step,” she said. “So we should be in the business of making people feel good about what they do. That means getting rid of the guilt and the judgment. We have to meet them where they are. That’s what any kind of social change and behavioral change is about.”

Meeting people where they are sounds nice, but what if where they are is fretting about their countertops?  Shouldn’t a responsible green-building professional direct clients toward the features that make the most environmental difference?

Worner advocates pointing customers to rebates for high-efficiency furnaces, tax credits for solar water heaters, and other federal and local incentives. So there’s a balancing act involved—not belittling the green steps the customers want to take, but steering them toward high-impact features as well.

Related Links:

Zero-Carbon Buildings

Daylight saving time doesn’t save energy

The other half of Kerry-Graham-Lieberman is weak too

by Alan Durning

Photo: Sightline DailyIn part 1, I described the appeal of and demand for electric bikes, and mentioned that three trends bode well for them in the Pacific Northwest and the rest of North America. Battery-juiced two-wheelers could finally break out of their current status as transportation novelties, helping us rise to challenges as great as climate change, oil addiction, and recession. In this post, I detail these trends.

Technology, overseas markets, and political trends all bring good portents for e-bikes.

Trend 1. Technical innovation keeps improving electric bikes. The latest Giant, with lithium ion batteries, reportedly has a real-life battery range of 50 miles, doubling what previous models achieved. Sanyo has introduced a European style city bike (pictured on the left) with impressive power-system integration.

Trek, a leading American bike maker has entered the e-bike market with designs that may prove appealing to muscle-powered cyclists because of their high-performance feel (pictured on the right).

Meanwhile, garage inventors keep coming up with intriguing innovations like the StokeMonkey (which I described previously); Electric Mountain Drive from Oregon’s Ecospeed (pictured atop this post); and this VoltWagon electrified trailer (pictured below) that hitches to a regular bike and hauls cargo effortlessly.

Luckily for e-bike makers, advanced battery research is in its heyday, thanks to billions of dollars of investment from public and private institutions around the world. The hunt is on for better batteries not only because they’re essential to electrifying transportation and getting the world off of oil but also because they’re needed to harness intermittent, renewable power sources such as the sun and the wind. As battery improvements emerge, electric bikes stand to gain quickly.

. . .

Trend 2. Electric bikes are spreading like wildfire in China and are catching on in parts of Europe as well. As David Goodman recently wrote in the New York Times:

In China, an estimated 120 million electric bicycles now hum along the roads, up from a few thousand in the 1990s. They are replacing traditional bikes and motorcycles at a rapid clip and, in many cases, allowing people to put off the switch to cars … From virtually nothing a decade ago, electric bikes have become an $11 billion global industry.

In the Netherlands, a third of the money spent on bicycles last year went to electric-powered models. Industry experts predict similar growth elsewhere in Europe, especially in Germany, France and Italy, as rising interest in cycling coincides with an aging population. India had virtually no sales until two years ago, but its nascent market is fast expanding and could eclipse Europe’s in the next year.

China reportedly had 56,000 electric bikes in 1998. Getting to 120 million in 12 years’ time is a phenomenal change, even in a country as populous as China, and e-bikes don’t appear to be slowing: USA Today reports that sales in China are expected to reach a staggering 22 million in 2010 alone, bringing the number of e-bike owners in the country to one tenth of the population. It’s an impressive example of electrifying the transportation sector. It’s also good news for e-bike prices: mass production on that scale has brought production costs down, and just as Chinese-made motor cycles have spread quickly in Asia and Africa, e-bikes are now radiating from China as well.

. . .

Trend 3. Political trends are encouraging for electric bikes as well. Despite disappointment at Copenhagen and slow progress on a climate bill in Washington, D.C., climate change, oil addiction, and the chance to transition to a job-generating clean-energy economy remain potent political issues across much of the industrial world, prominently including the Pacific Northwest.

To seize the opportunity for a clean-energy revolution and move beyond carbon, we need to get completely off coal and oil quickly. Efficiency, compact communities, and transportation alternatives are our best friends in these tasks. But even with great success on all these strategies, we will still need some way to propel our trains, buses, trucks, and cars. The main no-carbon candidates are biofuels and electricity. We’ll need some of each, but electricity has tremendous advantages. It can come from many different carbon-free sources, can travel easily by wire, and can integrate the transportation sector with the rest of the electric grid in ways that make each stronger and more economical.

An impressive array of political and industry leaders have recognized and embraced the pivotal role the electrification of transportation can play in advancing a clean-energy economy. That’s why, for example, the 2009 U.S. federal stimulus included a bevy of investments in research on advanced batteries and electric vehicles.

Electrifying bikes is a perfect first step in pursuit of vehicle electrification, because battery-assisted two wheelers are an easier engineering challenge than are electric cars. Frank Jamerson of Electric Bike World Report told USA Today, “The electric bike is the first wave of the electrification of the personal transportation industry.”

Vehicle electrification is an energy storage problem, not a propulsion problem. Electric motors are much more efficient than fossil-fueled engines, but storing electricity is dramatically harder than is storing liquid fuels. For example, you can fill the tank of a gasoline-powered car in five minutes then drive on that fuel for several hours at highway speeds. Conversely, you need to recharge the Tesla Roadster, a $100,000 all-electric sports car, for roughly an hour for each hour of highway driving. (It takes 3.5 hours to charge fully. Its range is 244 miles, which it could cover in 3.5 hours at 70 mph. A Chevy Volt, which takes longer to recharge, has an electric-only range of 40 miles, after which it runs on a separate gasoline engine.)

Simple physics favor e-bikes over e-cars. Bicycles, even ones loaded with batteries, weigh less than their riders. Electric cars, in contrast, weigh many multiples as much as their drivers. Consequently, most of e-bikes’ battery charge can be spent moving the mass of the rider, but most of electric cars’ charge must be spent moving the bulk of the car itself. What’s more, part of e-bikes’ energy comes from leg muscles, again reducing the required battery power. In auto parlance, e-bikes have human-electric hybrid drives.

For these reasons, electric bikes are in the cat bird seat of electrified transportation at a time when many forces are aligned to speed electrification.

. . .

This alignment of interests (trend 3) coincides with rapid technical progress (trend 1) and huge economies of scale coming from China (trend 2). Together, surely these trends will push electric bikes into the mainstream of personal transportation, at least in good weather, at least in urban parts of the bike- and tech-loving Northwest.

Many observers think so. Many marketers think so. Big-box retailer Best Buy is confident enough that it has introduced e-bikes and other small electric vehicles to a Portland outlet in 2009 and is rolling them into more Northwest stores in 2010.

Maybe electric bikes are on the verge of breaking through in the Pacific Northwest, spreading contagiously as they have in China. But maybe they are not. Maybe the barriers to electric bikes are different in North America than in China or Europe. Whether or not you should buy one doesn’t depend on this question. But our public policies with regard to electric bikes, and perhaps with regard to other electric vehicles, depend on what’s blocking e-bikes in North America. If it’s just a matter of pushing them to a market tipping point, public subsidies can help—the subject of my next post.

Stay tuned for the next installment of this five-part series tomorrow.

This post originally appeared at Sightline’s Daily Score blog.

Related Links:

What can China teach us about electric bikes?

Four obstacles facing electric bike popularity

Should electric bike sales be subsidized?

by Agence France-Presse

Credit: SanyoTOKYO—Japanese electronics giant Sanyo said Tuesday it had opened two “solar parking lots” in Tokyo where 100 electric hybrid bicycles can be recharged from sunlight-powered panels.

The system uses lithium-ion batteries to charge 100 of Sanyo’s “eneloop” bikes, with enough power left over to also illuminate the parking lot with LED lights at night.

The concept is a “completely independent and clean system eliminating the use of fossil fuels,” said Sanyo Electric Co., which has emerged as a leader in solar and other alternative energy technologies.

The two lots, which also feature electric outlets to power external equipment in an emergency, were set up near commuter train lines in Tokyo’s Setagaya ward, where the cycles will be parked for community use.

The charging points rely on rooftop photovoltaic panels, and Sanyo said the system also works on rainy days.

The eneloop “peddle-assist” bike features a “dynamotor” built into the hub of the front wheel, which charges a battery when the bicycle is cruising downhill or a rider is braking. The bicycle’s electric motor kicks in when a rider peddles, providing a virtual wind at one’s back and making inclines feel more like flat terrain. There is a power boost mode for particularly steep climbs.

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Performance issues in Chicago men’s room reek havoc on water conservation

Nations now free to fish bluefin tuna to extinction

If it does matter where CO2 is released, cities are in trouble

by David Roberts

Jeff Goodell.To head off the worst impacts of climate change, should human beings deliberately engineer the earth’s climate? Or rather, should they try, with uncertain odds of success and at least some chance of inadvertent catastrophe? Should they even learn how, or would the knowledge itself wreak havoc?

These are the sorts of questions journalist Jeff Goodell grapples with in How to Cool the Planet: Geoengineering and the Audacious Quest to Fix Earth’s Climate, due out on April 15. As readers of his previous book Big Coal know, Goodell’s talent lies in addressing heavy economic and political issues through the prism of individual human narratives. Once again he’s gathered a cast of eccentric characters and darkly entertaining stories that carry the reader through choppy conceptual waters.

Goodell and I discussed the promise and perils of geoengineering in wide-ranging conversation earlier this month. Here are some highlights, followed by more in-depth excerpts from our conversation.

On geoengineering of the crazier sort:

This is field of wacky ideas. I talked to a guy who thought it would be great to spread Special K out in the ocean to reflect sunlight and cool the earth’s temperature. People who want to launch nuclear bombs at the moon, to shoot moon dust into the outer space to reflect sunlight away.

On the two serious forms of geoengineering:

“Solar radiation management” or “solar shielding.” It’s about blocking sunlight. In order to offset the temperature change from a doubling of CO2 emissions, you only have to reflect a small amount of sunlight away from the earth—one or two percent. The other category is carbon dioxide removal—machines and technologies that can pull CO2 out of the atmosphere. These are far less problematic,  politically and morally.

On environmental groups’ concerns about geoengineering:

It’s not so much the fear that we’re going to screw this up, though that’s part of it, but more the fear that we’re still trying to get a cap on CO2 and this is just seen as a kind of a political nightmare. It becomes an alternative, a quick fix, an easy sell. Why do we have to go through all the pain and hassle of political coalitions to cut emissions if we can just spray some particles in the atmosphere?

On whether knowledge about geoengineering should be restricted:

I went to Pompeii once a few years ago. They had all the porn in a separate room at the museum. It used to be that only men could go in there. It was seen as dangerous for women to go look at giant phalluses, because they’d get corrupted morally. It’s a bad idea for geoengineering to be the equivalent of the Pompeii sex room.

On whether geoengineering can be humane:

[There’s] a kind of parallel between geoengineering and gardening. This is about learning to garden the planet. I was inspired to think about this because of my wife’s garden, seeing this partnership with nature she has in her garden. It leads to a beautiful thing. The hopeful side of me thinks geoengineering can be smaller, smarter. It can be modest,  about regional stuff, experimenting, learning what works, what doesn’t work. Being humble about this, being open about this.

On his worse fears about geoengineering:

The idea that a nation or a group of nations will decide, for nationalistic or militaristic reasons, or a genuine belief that they can fix their problems, to do this. They will do it badly, and cause a lot of climate chaos. …  You can imagine the island nations getting together and saying, “You guys have been fucking around for 30 years, and we don’t want to drown, so we’ve got a couple of billionaires that are helping us with some airplanes. We are going to do this.” … It’s going to get taken up by the guys who want to blow up New York City.

But my nightmare scenario is that we won’t do anything. It will just be decades more of apathy. We’ll block progress on research on geoengineering, we won’t reform our energy system, we will just continue with the status quo for another two or three decades. We’ll just ride straight ahead into climate chaos.

On reactions to his book:

I’m already getting people who are pissed off at me for writing this book. It’s going to be controversial.

Read more from the conversation with Jeff Goodell: 

On the different kinds of geoengineering
On “taking control” of the climate 
On messing with nature and being transparent
On techno-determinism and inevitability
On keeping geoengineering from running amuck

 

 

On the different kinds of geoengineering

Q. Could you offer a rough taxonomy of types of geoengineering?  Which of them should we be taking seriously?

A. One of the first things I found out was, this is field of wacky ideas. I talked to a guy who thought it would be great to spread Special K out in the ocean to reflect sunlight and cool the earth’s temperature. People who want to launch nuclear bombs at the moon, to shoot moon dust into the outer space to reflect sunlight away. I try to focus on the serious ones. There are two distinct kinds.

One is what the British Royal Society, which did a big report on this last year, termed “solar radiation management” or “solar shielding.” It’s about blocking sunlight. In order to offset the temperature change from a doubling of CO2 emissions, you only have to reflect a small amount of sunlight away from the earth—one or two percent.

Of the solar radiation management technologies that can do this,  there are two that people are thinking about seriously. One is spraying particles into the stratosphere—sulphate particles,  similar to what comes out of coal plants except without all the dirty metallic toxins, or in the future, particles specifically engineered out of inert metals. So acid rain, pollution, inhaling them …  you’re not going to have snow drops of this stuff raining down on your house or anything like that. It could potentially change the color of the sky somewhat. It could have aesthetic effects. But we don’t know of any health effects yet.

Another way is brightening clouds, which turns out to be the organic, homegrown version of solar radiation management. You can throw seawater into certain marine clouds that would act as cloud condensation nuclei and make the droplets smaller. Smaller droplets have more surface area, so they make the cloud a brighter color and it reflects away more sunlight. It’s a little difficult to imagine cloud writing used for the whole earth, but you could use it in specific areas, the Arctic or Greenland.

The other category is carbon dioxide removal—machines and technologies that can pull CO2 out of the atmosphere. These are far less problematic, politically and morally. One of the scientists I write about in the book is David Keith at the University of Calgary,  who is starting a company to build enormous machines that can suck CO2 out of the atmosphere the way CO2 is sucked out of the stack of a power plant. There are some advantages to this because you can locate these machines anywhere. They are very expensive now, but there’s a lot of potential.

There are other ways of sucking up CO2. The most well known to many people is dumping iron slurry into the ocean to stimulate plankton blooms. The plankton absorb carbon and then, in theory, sink down to the bottom of the ocean and sequester it. Many problems with that—we don’t know how much is actually sucked up and how much makes it to the bottom. Another technique is biochar, a way of burning charcoal and burying it in the soil to increase the uptake of carbon in the soil.

There are lots of other ideas, but these are the main things that I talk about in the book.

Q. I noticed you left out white roofs and other small-scale efforts.

A. White roofs are a great example of things we are already doing to change the reflectivity, or albedo, of the earth. They have other benefits, like lowering the temperature of the house and reducing air-conditioning costs, but even if you whitened every roof on the planet, it still wouldn’t have much effect.

 

On “taking control” of the climate

Q. Did your feelings about geoengineering change over the course of writing the book? Where did you come out?

A. They did change. My initial thought was that it was just a completely crazy idea, that we were nuts to consider it. It’s the reaction anybody has when you say we’re going to start messing with the climate. It seems like a very hubristic undertaking. That’s the easy way to think about it. But after meeting some of these scientists and thinking hard about this, I came to take the idea seriously. We’re not talking about the climate equivalent of putting a housing development in virgin redwood forests. We’re already messing with the planet in profound ways, and as Stewart Brand and others have said, we might as well get good at it. It’s not crazy that we could learn how to control the levers of this system better.

In a certain way, we’re already doing this. Even by setting climate targets—350 parts per million, or 80 percent reductions by 2050, or whatever—we’re making implicit judgments about what kind of world we want to live in. One of the interesting things about geoengineering is that it makes that conversation explicit. That’s an important idea: we are in charge of the climate whether we like it or not. It’s not a question of do we want to try to take control— we’re already in control. We’re already fucking with this system in a profound way.

Q. There are two things run together there. It’s one thing to say we’re screwing with things in a profound way; it’s something else entirely to say we’re in control of that. Control seems to imply intentionality, knowledge, and the ability to undo what we’ve done. You can’t skip past that.

A. Right. I don’t mean that we’re in control of the outcomes, but after, what, 20, 30 years of understanding that we’re running profound risks of destabilizing the climate by continuing to dump CO2 into the atmosphere, we’re still doing it. We’re not cutting emissions at all. We’re not trying to manipulate the weather right now, but we are, by our disregard, exerting a kind of control. Not setting any limits—that’s a kind of decision.

One of the things I like about the geoengineering discussion, for all its risks and craziness, is that it does make this explicit.  That’s a good conversation to have.

Q. Even before climate change, before the industrial age, the earth’s climate clearly advantaged some people over others; there were massive inequalities. If you accept that we are in control,  don’t you problematize the notion that the pre-industrial climate has any kind of claim on us? Why should we think that’s the preferable climate?

A. Absolutely. That opens the door to all the political complexities. Where do we want to set the thermostat? If, on some crude measure, we have the ability to decide what kind of climate we want, how do we decide? Who makes the decision? In Copenhagen, the developing world and some of the island nations are holding the West accountable for this. You can see the tension escalating as we move into this new world.

What happens if we get into some sort of climate emergency— something really goes wrong, not necessarily in the United States,  but in China or wherever—and people demand some kind of political action? What do we do? We’re not going mandate that everyone sell their SUVs. Not only does that not work for social reasons, but because of the inertia of the climate, reducing CO2 isn’t going to have much effect in the short-term.

There’s a lot of worry that someone, China or India or some combination of the developing world countries, would try some of this [geoengineering] stuff out of desperation. You can imagine the island nations getting together and saying, “You guys have been fucking around for 30 years, and we don’t want to drown, so we’ve got a couple of billionaires that are helping us with some airplanes. We are going to do this.” How would the West respond? How would anyone respond? There are all kinds of big implications, from the environmental part of it to the military and nation-state aspects.  These kinds of things are percolating in the background because,  while we don’t know that we can do it right, or do it without catastrophic consequences, we know that it’s doable.

Q. One of the fascinating things about this, especially in this early stage of things, is how much history is being shaped by this relatively small set of idiosyncratic personalities. Individual people can have a relatively huge effect on how it unfolds. I don’t know if that’s scary or not.

A. One of the reasons I wanted to focus on some of these scientists is that I was fascinated by this sort of hubris they must have to even be thinking about this kind of a thing. Do they have integrity? Are they nuts?

But that’s not where I came down. As you know from reading the book, the people I focus on, especially Ken Caldeira and David Keith,  I came to deeply respect their reasons for doing this. That was encouraging. But there’s this worry that all these ethical scientists are working on it now, but as soon as it gets a little more perfected, it’s going to get taken up by the guys who want to blow up New York City. This will soon get taken out of their hands. I was struck, reading Oppenheimer’s biography, thinking about how he worked on this for what seemed like all the right reason, and then what happened so quickly to his dream. There are a lot of parallels.

 

On messing with nature and being transparent

Q. At times in the book you seem to characterize environmentalists as ideologically or almost religiously opposed to any mucking about with nature. I felt like they were almost being used as straw men at some points. Did you run across people like that, who categorically oppose intervention?

A. It’s hard to characterize. There’s not broad knowledge out there [about geoengineering], in general. But when I would talk about this with environmental groups, it’s not so much the fear that we’re going to screw this up, though that’s part of it, but more the fear that we’re still trying to get a cap on CO2 and this is just seen as a kind of a political nightmare. It becomes an alternative, a quick fix, an easy sell. Why do we have to go through all the pain and hassle of political coalitions to cut emissions if we can just spray some particles in the atmosphere?

Q. This is obviously an incredibly consequential question: What effect will the knowledge itself have? Will knowledge of how to undertake geoengineering sap the will for carbon cuts?

A. Let me say two things about that. One, it’s not like there’s a tremendous amount of momentum and progress to derail. It looks to me like business as usual as far as the eye can see. And second, it may be that geoengineering plays the role of the sort of drunken crash film they show you in drivers ed. Like, oh fuck, this is the sort of thing we don’t want to do! If we don’t get our act together, we’re heading for this freako world of geoengineers and climate control!  Nobody knows how this will play out. That’s one reason we need real research.

I went to Pompeii once a few years ago. They had all the porn in a separate room at the museum. It used to be that only men could go in there. It was seen as dangerous for women to go look at giant phalluses, because they’d get corrupted morally.

It’s a bad idea for geoengineering to be the equivalent of the Pompeii sex room.

Q. There’s my headline. I would like to think it’s going to serve the crash-film role. The geoengineers themselves, [Carnegie Institution atmospheric scientist] Ken Caldeira and those guys, say explicitly this is a back-up plan, that it would be a bad thing if we were forced into a corner and had to use it. They are saying the right things. But to the extent it leaks out into popular media, you get the SuperFreakonomics guys saying, “Oh, I guess Al Gore’s a big dummy.” When it hits pop culture it loses the nuance, the sense of caution. I cringe to imagine the story Politico would write about this, you know? How do you keep the cautionary note attached?

A. I have to say, that was my biggest concern about doing the book. Do I want to be part of that? I’m already getting people who are pissed off at me for writing it. It’s going to be controversial.  It came down to the fact that I don’t believe in secrecy. I don’t think you can control these ideas. We learned from the way science operated during the Cold War that we want openness, we want transparency. We don’t want this as some black ops project. There is a kind of inevitability about this, so we may as well start having a frank talk about it. I think it’s good that I can talk about it in the context of the dangers, help try to frame this in a relatively balanced and intelligent way.

 

On techno-determinism and inevitability

Q. Let’s talk about that. Lots of people in the book expressed some version of that thought: we know this stuff, we have these tools, and therefore it’s inevitable we will use them. How certain are you about this techno-determinist view of things?

A. Well, I’m not sure about anything that’s going to happen in the future. But if you look at this very broadly, altering our environment is what humans do. Have you ever been to Houston?

We’re forced into that direction with climate because of what we’ve done so far and the risks of catastrophic change. It’s interesting, when you talk to people like Ken Caldeira—he’s anything but a technological cheerleader. He helped organize the big anti-nuke rallies in Central Park. But his work has shown that a geoengineered world may be more like our world than a non-geoengineered world.

We all know weather is chaotic. We can’t predict what’s going to happen next week, so how are we going to predict what’s going to happen in the next ten years? But when you talk to these guys about the possibility of climate control broadly, they don’t see it as that complicated of a project. The levers and pulleys in this system are not as complex as you would think. That doesn’t mean that we are going to be able to target rainfall over Iowa or something, but this is not as scientifically complex an idea as it would first seem.

It’s also important to remember, you and I are talking about this from a U.S. point of view. The ghost of John Muir lingers in all our conversations. But look at what happened in China on the 60th anniversary of the Communist Party. They were promising blue skies,  shooting all of this stuff into the sky to get rid of the clouds. No one knows that this cloud seeding stuff works; it’s all a level of hocus pocus. But they were doing it on a massive level, with dozens of military jets, simply for the political symbolism for it. There are no Muir-esque taboos about messing with nature in a culture like that.

 

On keeping geoengineering from running amuck

Q. What do you see as the route to getting some sort of international legal structure in place to govern this stuff? Do you see any precedent?

A. There’s really not one. The policy part of this is difficult and complicated. Obviously there’s some comparison to nuclear proliferation, in that you have to ask, how do you restrain a lone actor? It’s striking to me that a lot of people with expertise in nuclear arms and negotiations are beginning to get interested in geoengineering.

One of the things [Stanford law professor] David Victor talks about in my book is the danger of setting policy too early, before we know what the real issues are and what the science tells us. To start imagining governance structures right now is important on some high level, but what’s really important is finding out what the risks are,  what works and what doesn’t, which engineering challenges are going to be surmountable and which are not. We still haven’t actually sprayed particles into the atmosphere! So in the near term, the big regulatory and governance challenge is how to set up field experiments. Modeling and conferences only take you so far. At a certain point we need to try some of this stuff.

Q. It was a bit of a surprise to me to read that it would take about ten years to set up a high-quality, controlled experiment with solar shielding. Ten years isn’t long in climate terms, but sociopolitically, ten years is ages. It seems we’ll be in the dark about this for quite a while.

A. That’s how long it will take to set up a large-scale field experiment. And that is a long time. It suggests the importance of starting to think about it now. Also, there’s a lot of other work that can be done prior to that—engineering the sprayers and things like that, work that can be done on a smaller scale. There’s lots more modeling work.

This is ten years to do a top-notch scientific experiment on a large scale. It doesn’t mean somebody can’t go up there and just start doing this, and doing this badly. It doesn’t mean that none of this is going to happen for ten years.

Q. The chapter on Edward Teller, the old Cold War atomic physicist, is fascinating. To me he is the quintessence of a certain kind of 20th century thinking: technology is mankind’s way of beating nature down, overcoming nature by sheer force of will. I mean, the guy wanted to use nukes to create a seaport in Alaska! In a sense,  geoengineering strikes me as a descendent of that kind of thinking.  There’s a different way of thinking about technology emerging today,  which traces its roots more to biology than physics. Technology as smaller and more distributed, working with natural flows rather than against them, converging with nature rather than overcoming nature.  I’ve always assumed that the arc of history will leave the 20th century vision of technology behind in favor of this new vision. But geoengineering makes me think that maybe the 20th century vision is going to win out in the end!

A. That speaks to the central theme of my book.

I want to say one thing first. The people I talked to who are the most thoughtful and interesting, a lot of them are physicists, and in the case of Ken Caldeira, actually worked with Teller at the Lawrence Livermore lab. He used to have lunch with Teller. A lot of these guys are really adamant about openness, transparency, the need for research that is not in the Department of Energy—not Edward Teller replaying itself. They are very conscious of the legacy of this kind of large-scale engineering.

This idea of smaller, more active management of our world is right; it is not necessarily true that geoengineering is not a part of that. My final chapter is a kind of parallel between geoengineering and gardening. This is about learning to garden the planet. I was inspired to think about this because of my wife’s garden, seeing this partnership with nature she has in her garden. It leads to a beautiful thing. The hopeful side of me thinks geoengineering doesn’t need to be a totalitarian, Edward Teller vision. It can be smaller, smarter. It can be modest, about regional stuff, experimenting, learning what works, what doesn’t work. Being humble about this, being open about this.

Q. But we’ve learned gardening over centuries. Shooting a bunch of particles up into the stratosphere seems ham-handed, like finding a dry spot in your garden and dumping a gallon jug of water on it. We just don’t know enough to do it elegantly yet.

A. The only reason there’s any urgency about this is there are potential catastrophes that await us if shit gets weird. If any of this stuff about dangerous climate change is anywhere accurate, we’re in for some very rough rides in the coming decades. How do we manage that risk?

But also, it doesn’t have to be shooting particles into the atmosphere in this massive, lets-control-the-universe kind of way. It can be: unless we do something in x number of years, Greenland’s gone and we’ve got 22 feet of sea level rise. Can we try to change the sunlight hitting Greenland and slow the melting somewhat? If it doesn’t work, reversibility is obviously hugely important. But it doesn’t need to be a totalitarian vision.

Q. The obvious looming danger is that rich people do this to save their asses and poor people get hung out to dry—which would be a continuation of what’s happening now, right? How do we go about trying to make sure that doesn’t happen?

A. That’s a really hard question. As you said, we haven’t done a very good job of that in anything we do—not only in climate.  Millions of people starving to death and we don’t really care.  Certainly there has been lots of progress, but generally, rich people take care of themselves. I don’t know how you change that equation.

It was interesting, when I was first starting this book, I went to a venture capital retreat and ended up sitting with this Wall Street guy. I was talking about exactly this, the problem of equity,  worrying out loud about whether I should be writing this book. He had never heard of geoengineering, but I explained it to him briefly. He said, “Look, if we in the West have the ability to cool the climate a little bit, that would help people in the developing world.  Don’t we have a moral obligation to find out if it could work?”  It struck me. This stuff can be used for all kinds of purposes— it’s up to us as human beings to decide how we’re going to use it.

Q. What does your non-optimist side say?

A. There are a few things I worry about most. One is the fantasy of the quick fix. You already have people like Bjorn Lomborg talking openly about this. I’m sure we will see Heritage Foundation stuff coming out about the virtues of geoengineering. My immediate fear is that it will co-opt the political debate. That’s why it’s really important for scientists and journalists who understand that this is not a substitute for cutting emissions to get out in front. That’s my near-term fear.

Farther out is the idea that a nation or a group of nations will decide, for nationalistic or militaristic reasons, or a genuine belief that they can fix their problems, to do this. And it won’t be a nation like the United States or western Europe. It will be China,  India, a collection of developing nations. It could be any group of nations. They will do it badly, and cause a lot of climate chaos, and it’s not clear where we will go from there. It’s a scary scenario.  You can imagine this going forward with what look like good intentions, the same way Iran is supposedly going forward with nuclear just to power their country with clean energy, without any kind of vetting, safety guards, or transparency.

But as I wrote in the book, my nightmare scenario is that we won’t do anything. It will just be decades more of apathy. We’ll block progress on research on geoengineering, we won’t reform our energy system, we will just continue with the status quo for another two or three decades. We’ll just ride straight ahead into climate chaos.

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China and India to report their global warming pollution every two years

Adding iron to sea boosts deadly neurotoxin, study finds

by Jake Schmidt

Both China and India have now reaffirmed that they will report their global warming emissions every two years. The framework of this was agreed in the Copenhagen Accord which outlined that every two years developing countries will report their national emissions inventories and emission reduction actions based upon internationally agreed guidelines (as I discussed here). 

Here is what the Accord actually said in this regard:

“Mitigation actions subsequently taken and envisaged by Non-Annex I Parties, including national inventory reports, shall be communicated through national communications…every two years on the basis of guidelines to be adopted by the Conference of the Parties”. 

And now two key players in those portions of the agreement have just reiterated to domestic audiences that they will implement this provision. That is a very positive move which takes further international steps to address global warming as agreed in the Copenhagen Accord (as I discussed here).

China’s chief climate negotiator, Xie Zhenhua, highlighted before the National People’s Congress (the legislative body in China) that under the requirements of the Copenhagen Accord, China has agreed to submit an inventory report every two years to the U.N. Secretariat (as my colleague reported). And Indian Minister Jairam Ramesh just announced that they will be releasing an emissions inventory for 2007 in May, to be updated every two years (as reported by The Hindu). 

So why is this so important from an environmental standpoint? One of the fundamentals of any environmental policy is a three step process of knowing:

Where you currently are (e.g., how good, bad, or ugly is your current environmental situation);
Where you want to head (e.g., what are you trying to achieve in order to solve the challenge); and
Where you are at various points towards your end goal—point 2 (e.g., in 2 years time are you making good progress towards your goal or not).

Creating a process to improve the assessment of progress. Before the Copenhagen Accord, the world had an incomplete system of accountability and transparency. All countries developed national emissions inventories and submitted “National Communications” containing summary information on national emissions, actions that the country was undertaking to reduce emissions, and reports on the country’s progress. But these National Communications have been extremely limited for developing countries as they have been too infrequent to generate information on current trends. For the most part, official information on developing country emissions dates back to 1994. That is an incomplete snapshot as we know that those emissions have changed dramatically since then.  For example in 1994 China and India accounted for 14 and 4 percent of the world’s emissions from fossil fuels and now they account for 22 and 5 percent, respectively—both country’s emissions essentially doubling over that timeframe.* 

So the announcements by Chinese and Indian officials are important steps to improve the environmental assessment provisions of the international framework. And it will add confidence to efforts to regularly assess the progress that countries are making towards their commitments recorded as a part of the Copenhagen Accord (as I discussed here). 

Going into Copenhagen we effectively had official global warming emissions from developing countries reported every 15 years and now we have emissions reported every 2 years.  A point highlighted by Minister Ramesh: “The last data on emissions dates back to 1994”.

So the fact that the world didn’t have good, regularly updated, and consistent information on where key countries emissions stood and a system to regularly assess progress was a significant limitation.  But this limitation is slowly being eliminated as countries take concrete steps to implement the key provisions of the Copenhagen Accord.  China and India have now reaffirmed to important domestic audiences that they will move forward domestically with the transparency provisions—a critical cornerstone of the agreement reached in Copenhagen.

————-

* Data from the World Resources Institute’s Climate Analysis Indicator tool for 1994 and 2006, respectively.

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Where do things stand on international efforts to address global warming?

by Agence France-Presse

WASHINGTON—Adding iron to the world’s oceans to capture
carbon and fight global warming could do more harm than good, as the mineral appears
to boost the growth of a plankton that produces a deadly neurotoxin, a study
published on Monday shows.

Researchers led
by Charles Trick of the University of Western Ontario in Canada found that
fertilizing the ocean with iron can boost the growth of Pseudo-nitzschia, a
phytoplankton that produces a component of the neurotoxin domoic acid.

Humans who eat
shellfish or crab that have ingested Pseudo-nitzschia could get amnesic
shellfish poisoning, severe cases of which can cause neurological symptoms,
including permanent, short-term memory loss, which gives the intoxication its
name. Amnesic shellfish poisoning can also be fatal.

For the study,
which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the
researchers examined water samples taken from open-ocean tracts in the
sub-Arctic North Pacific Ocean where iron-fertilization experiments were
conducted.

They found that
the population of Pseudo-nitzschia had doubled compared to controls, that
adding iron to the water appeared to increase the amount of domoic acid
produced by individual phytoplankton, and that the natural release of the toxin
boosted further growth of the potentially harmful plankton.

Previous
iron-enrichment experiments have focused on studying how adding iron to the sea
affects carbon cycling, but have overlooked the potential ecological impacts of
geoengineering-designed fertilizations, the study found.

Earlier studies
by other teams have shown that iron fertilization produced no measurable
quantities of domoic acid, and that some coastal Pseudo-nitzschia produced only
low concentrations of the toxin.

Iron
fertilization is still mainly in the experimental phases, with about “12 experiment-sized iron fertilizations”
already undertaken, mainly in the Pacific Ocean, Trick told AFP.

The findings of
the study he led raise “serious concern over the net benefit and
sustainability of large-scale iron fertilizations.”

Scientists in
the 1990s began fortifying small areas of the ocean where the sea water is rich
in nutrients but low in plankton, to see if adding iron to the water would
stimulate the growth of phytoplankton and boost carbon capture.

Adding iron resulted
in rapid growth of the phytoplankton, which, in the process of photosynthesis,
uses energy from sunlight to fix inorganic carbon in surrounding surface waters
to produce organic carbon.

Some of the
organic carbon ends up deep in the ocean, effectively removing carbon from the
surface waters, while surface-water carbon is replenished by taking carbon
dioxide from the atmosphere.

Iron
fertilization, like other forms is geoengineering, is “purposely changing
the system and may have unintended consequences,” said Scott Doney, a
senior scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts,
commenting to AFP on the findings.

“You have to weigh how the changes affect higher animals, how it
affects fish and mammals,” said Doney, who did not take part in the study.
“You have to know what are the trade-offs between how much carbon you
actually store and how big an effect you have on the environment.”

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