People Seem to Favor Action on Climate Change Until….

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Pietro Nivola at Brookings has a new discussion paper that provides, among other things, a useful discussion of where the American public is on climate change.

Superficial polling suggests relatively strong support, but when you probe deeper, the cracks show:

Majorities, in sum, dutifully nod at abstractions-for example, “doing more” to combat climate change. They may even appear to embrace the general labels of particular policy proposals (like “cap-and-trade”). And they say the Democrats can “handle” things better. But they jump ship as soon as they learn that “handling” (or “doing more” about) climate change is not a free ride. For environmental progressives, that reality cannot be ducked indefinitely. Their partisan rivals will make a potent case that adopting, say, a cap-and-trade program will effectively impose a tax increase.

This resonated for me after spending the day Friday talking to folks in Washington about what happened this past week in the U.S. Senate, with a series of votes that suggested enthusiasm for free climate lunches and not so much for action that might incur any costs.

Squid?

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Really, Really Giant Squid

Really, Really Giant Squid

I have a standing policy here at the Inkstain News Center against quoting anonymous sources, but this is too sweet to pass up:

My alligators tell me that Joe Monahan’s college nickname was “Squid”.

“Alligators” is NM politics blogger Monahan’s word for his anonymous sources, who tell him all kinds of important stuff, some of which is true. The alligators have propelled Monahan to worldwide fame. Just ask Monahan, who noted in a recent post that the importance of the alligators has been

noted by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Roll Call, Congressional Quarterly, the BBC, PBS NewsHour, the Santa Fe New Mexican, Santa Fe Reporter, Real Clear Politics, National Public Radio, NM Independent, the Alibi, KOB-TV, KRQE-TV, KASA-TV, KOB Radio, KSFR-FM Radio, C-SPAN, Voice of America and the Las Cruces Sun-News, among many others.

Wow! Good job, Joe, thanks for keeping track. And it clearly shows how prescient your college colleagues were in calling you squid, what with 300 species and all those arms and stuff. Squid rocks. (Squids rock?)

(I’d link to Monahan’s post with the list of media kudoing, but I can’t figure out how to get his permalinks to work, sorry. There’s obviously a reason my work has never been mentioned on Voice of America. I’m no squid.)

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Nuke Cleanup Edition

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Money for nuclear weapons cleanup in the stimulus bill (adwalled):

The federal government will pump $384 million into New Mexico’s nuclear institutions to clean up and dispose of old Cold War waste in one of the largest economic stimulus investments in the state.

Los Alamos National Laboratory will get $212 million between now and 2011 to clean up radioactive waste on an old lab site next to the community of Los Alamos.

Elephant Diaries: Leveraging Audience

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Regular readers will have noticed that I’m a fan of David Zetland, the water economist. He has a great blog that is widely read in the water wonk community. Reading it has helped me a great deal in understanding some key economic principles that underly water issues I follow.

But there’s a problem. A guy like Zetland in the new media ecosystem appeals to a self-selected audience of people interested in the issues he’s raising, either because they agree, or disagree and want to argue, or are just trying to understand. But for his work to have the necessary reach to influence policy outcomes, Zetland’s ideas need to reach beyond the self-selected water wonk world. How to do this?

By infecting people like me with his ideas, or perhaps, my colleague Sean Olson, who wrote about water pricing in this morning’s newspaper:

The logic goes that people notice slight increases in their water bills, but it isn’t enough of a bother to change their watering habits. But when a bill three times the size of their last one shows up, they burn the hose and post a guard at the bathroom door. “If the price is high enough, people will pay attention,” water economist David Zetland said in a recent interview.

Sean pushes Zetland’s message beyond the people who would not self-select.

Elephant Diaries: Why solving “the Web problem” does not solve the problem

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From today’s NYTimes article about the San Francisco Chronicle:

The Chronicle’s Web site, SFGate.com, draws an unusually large audience for a paper its size, three million to four million people monthly, according to Nielsen Online, but generates a fraction of the paper’s revenue.

If serving readers on the Internet is your measure, the Chronicle has been fabulously successful, and it’s going down the tubes. This is another example of the problem with the railroad metaphor. Far from making the mistake of thinking it was in the paper business rather than the news business, the Chron thought it was in the news business and used the Internet to do a bangup job of reaching readers that way.

My Random and Totally Unscientific Cap-and-Trade Headline Survey

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Sat down with my favorite search engine’s news goober this evening to see what’s up with cap-and-trade, and I can report that the sweep of coverage had a certain consistent flavor. Some representative headlines:

  • US Might Not Benefit from Cap-and-Trade
  • Cap-trade on carbon may push up costs
  • Cap and Trade: A Huge, Regressive Tax
  • Cap-and-trade tax hike will slam New Hampshire
  • Carbon tax effective cap and trade alternative

When Roadrunners Attack

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Roadrunner

Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck.

We had a ringside seat this afternoon when Speedy, our neighborhood roadrunner (seen here atop our car last December) stalked across our front yard, eyeing a mourning dove. Speedy has the moves of a cat on the hunt – furtive, able to hold still. He hid behind plants, darting from one bit of cover to the next. When he finally got with range he charged, leaping into the air as the dove took flight.

He must have missed by an inch or two, but the dove got away. Others may have not been so lucky. In the same part of the yard earlier this year, I found a pile of feathers.

On High-Probability, High-Consequence Events

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My friends in the nuclear weapons community have, over the years, helped me understand the tools for thinking about low-probability, high-consequence events, like a warhead accidentally going off. You really don’t want that to happen, so even though averaged across all possible futures the average badness might be relatively low, it’s worth spending some time and energy thinking through ways of reducing the probability of the high-consequence event.

But if the chance of the truly horrific event is somewhere betwen 57 and 95 percent over the next four decades? Holy crap. If you’ve seen that coming and haven’t already started doing an awful lot to try to drive that number down, your system for solving societal problems is seriously fucked up.

57 to 95 percent is the estimated probability of the levees in California’s San Joaquin-Sacramento Delta failing between now and 2050, according to a new report that Rober Service talks about in yesterday’s Science magazine (subscription). Put another way, there’s at least a 57 percent chance that the system that delivers water to half of all Californians will stop delivering water to half of all Californians:

By 2050, the chance of widespread levee failures is as high as 95%, due to runoff from the northern Sierras, which is predicted to be more concentrated in the late winter and early spring, and the increasing risk of earthquake, according to a report last summer by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC). If that occurs, salt water from the San Francisco Bay would rush in to fill the voids, dramatically increasing the salinity of water in the delta, possibly making it undrinkable. Adding sea-level rise to the equation–as climate models predict–brings the date of levee failures closer. “It will happen,” says Ellen Hanek, a PPIC economist in San Francisco.

update: Of possible interest to those who follow discussions of journalism and science, when I first wrote this post, I took Service’s word for the 95 percent figure he used in his article without taking careful note of the “as high as” qualifier he used. When I reread the post and noticed the qualifier, I went and found the original PPIC report and found that they actually say this:

[T]he best possible failure probability under rapid rates of sea level rise, high seismic risk and increasing inflows is approximated by the island with least current combined risk of failure from flooding and earthquakes at 2 percent per year, for a cumulative probability of failure of 57 percent by 2050. For the high end of risk, we used the current estimated combined flood and earthquake annual failure probability of the western Delta islands of approximately 7 percent per year, or a cumulative probability of failure of 95 percent by 2050.

So 57 and 95 percent reasonably bracket the risk as estimated by PPIC, and don’t materially change the “holy crap” tone of my reaction. (And I haven’t read the whole report, just found the section that explained their risk numbers in brief.)