Gas Prices, Taxes, Etc.

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I was talking to a friend yesterday, an expert in the science of climate change, about our differing takes on carbon taxes and policy paths forward. My friend, a glass half full guy, believes bold action is needed, and that we can and must do hard things such as, for example, raising the price of gasoline. Hard to argue with that, and maybe I’m just in a gloomy mood about the elephant problem and I’m projecting my malaise on everything else, but I see the political reality as almost certainly guaranteeing that nothing will be done that poses significant consumer/voter expense.

Which is why Tyler Cohen’s quip about Steve Chu’s energy secretary confirmation hearing drew my eye last night. He was riffing off of Matt Wald’s NYTimes post on Chu’s conversion to the view that gas prices are just fine when they’re low:

Mr. Chu, who was expected to get a friendly and brief review by the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, said in prepared testimony that “last year’s rapid spike in oil and gasoline prices not only contributed to the recession we are now experiencing, it also put a huge strain on the budgets of families all across America.’’ He called for a “greater, more committed push towards energy independence, and with it a more secure energy system.’’

He had told the Wall Street Journal last September , “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,” a statement likely to give some commuters a case of road rage.

Cohen:

[I]f he can’t get appointed for favoring higher gas prices, and in a honeymoon period at that…well…you see where this is headed.

Coal Production Up

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Despite the weirdness, 2008 was a good year to be in the coal production game in the United States. But don’t expect the fun and games to continue. From EIA today:

A significant increase in coal exports in 2008 contributed to a 2.8-percent increase in coal production.  Production is expected to fall in 2009 by 4.0 percent as lower total domestic coal consumption is combined with declines in exports and a small increase in imports.  Production is projected to increase by 2.4 percent in 2010 as domestic consumption and exports increase with an improving economy.

In New Mexico, coal production in 2008 was up 13 percent over 2007, mostly the result of the new El Segundo mine out near Grants.

Green Jobs in the Obama Plan

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I see John Whitehead hunched over his keyboard preparing his riposte to this, from the Romer-Bernstein analysis of the job creation prospects in the Obama stimulus package:

Recent research by Robert Pollin and Jeannette Wicks-Lim (available at http://www.peri.umass.edu/green_jobs) suggests that investments in green energy will create jobs that generally pay well above the typical wage. For example, compared to the national median wage of $15 in 2007, some of the jobs created by these investments include: electricians (median wage, $21.50/hour), carpenters ($18/hour), operations managers ($43/hour), and production supervisors ($23/hour). The occupation-weighted average wage in green energy jobs is about 20% above the national average.

The Strange Case of Joe Romm

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I know Joe Romm is a smart guy. I’ve read lots of his work, and interviewed him for newspaper stories. I am sure he must have useful things to add to the climate change-energy policy discussion. He’s aparently an important guy in this arena, because he gets quoted on Andy Revkin’s blog and stuff.

But he has chosen to adopt a style of argumentation that absolutely loses me. I can no longer be bothered to make my way through the tribal argumentation (wherein one tars those one disagrees with with broad brushes and labels) to get to the meat of what he is saying.

Today’s case in point is his latest screed defending his position that “economists don’t understand climate science.” The fallacy of his argument should be immediately apparent. He offers a single economist, and argues from that single particular to an overheated general. That there are economists who do understand climate science, and who have done a useful job of incorporating economic knowledge into the tool kit to be used for dealing with it, should be obvious to anyone who’s followed the climate policy debate. The important thing here is to talk about what economists are and are not saying, not to just dismiss the whole lot of them based on the subset you disagree with.

I could just as easily make an identical argument, citing Romm’s most recent screed, that advocates for action on climate change do not understand what economists have to offer. But that would be obviously fallacious too. It’s just Romm that doesn’t understand it.

Those Wacky Russians

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Well, this is a relief:

The earth is now on the brink of entering another Ice Age, according to a large and compelling body of evidence from within the field of climate science. Many sources of data which provide our knowledge base of long-term climate change indicate that the warm, twelve thousand year-long Holocene period will rather soon be coming to an end, and then the earth will return to Ice Age conditions for the next 100,000 years. (emphasis added)

Elephant Diaries: The Thing That Finally Made Me Cry

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It’s been a hard week. Colleagues who did good journalism around me losing their jobs, and the business I love coming unglued.

We call it “the daily miracle,” somewhat sarcastically, because you see the chaos that sometimes sets in, around 6 in the evening, the false starts and confused discussions, the arguments over what are the good decisions and what are the bad ones, the frenzy of a hundred people trying to make sense of the day. And then, at dawn the next day, I pad out to the driveway, and there it is, wrapped in a plastic bag or girdled with that rubber band, all those people ready to engage in a conversation with me about what they learned.

Belshaw

Belshaw

For more mornings that can be counted over the last nearly two decades that I’ve lived in Albuquerque, the conversation began with Belshaw. It’s been an odd sort of three-part conversation, because Jim and I are good friends, so the conversation sometimes happens over lunch, or the phone, or the endless emails that Jim shoots out beginning at 5 am as he’s cruising the Internet.

Today, the paper published Jim’s last conversation with Journal readers. Because my other conversations with him will continue (there was a 5 am email from Jim today, an interesting New York Times story about Ubuntu – Jim has voraciously eclectic tastes, and knows his audience well), my sadness is mitigated. I get my own personalized Belshaw.

But Jim embodied the conversation.

When I first came to the Albuquerque Journal, as a young journalistic pup imagining my future, I fantasized that I would one day have Jim’s job. It took me a long time spent trying to master my craft to realize that I could not do that job – that while I have the journalist’s conceit that I have something to offer, the personal conversation of Jim’s thrown on my driveway flows from a special gift (or, more accurately, a well-honed skill – nothing like that comes easy) that I do not have.

But I do hope that I can find a way to write usefully about swamp coolers. That is still my dream.

Geology is Poetry if You Listen Carefully

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From a new paper by David Montgomery et al. on the formation of the outflow channels Mars, a rich metaphor from our own desert Southwest. Stare through the classically turgid scientific prose. This is poetry:

The Needles area of Canyonlands National Park, Utah, provides a terrestrial analog for the finer-scale extension parallel to the margins of some Valles Marineris chasmata. At The Needles, the Paradox Formation, a cyclic sequence of evaporites, black shale, and carbonates (Hite, 1968), consists of about two-thirds halite and just over 5% anhydrite (Schultz-Ela and Walsh, 2002). These evaporites form a detachment layer along which lateral spreading formed a stepped series of grabens in response to incision of the Colorado River. Erosion through the overlying sedimentary rock into the underlying salts during the past several million years (McGill and Stromquist, 1979) removed the downdip confinement for the salt deposits and lateral support of their overburden, which spread down a 1°–2° décollement toward the canyon, as simulated by finit-element modeling (Schultz-Ela and Walsh, 2002). Equivalent deformation on Mars could involve volcanic ash (cemented to some degree by salts) and lava flows above salts (or ice and salt-cemented deposits). Welded or cemented tuffs and lava flows would act mechanically much like lithified sedimentary rock when subject to viscous flow of an underlying layer.

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Brackish Water and “Sustainability”

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Worked some Yergin and Hartwick into a piece for this morning’s paper on the regulatory framework (or lack thereof) surrounding deep brackish groundwater in New Mexico:

Water is not oil, but there are similarities in the politics and policies that accompany our consumption of the two precious liquids. Using groundwater, which is almost never replaced by nature on time scales that are of any use to people, boils down to mining a resource that will never be replaced.

Brackish water is not like Spindletop oil. For one thing, the expense of cleaning it up for municipal use — in money, energy and waste disposal — is likely to slow its development, experts say.

But the lack of regulation creates a built-in incentive for a Spindletop-like rush to be first to drill.

Heat, Not Drought, May Pose Biggest Food Threat Under Climate Change

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Interesting bit of work in today’s Science arguing that heat, rather than drought, may be the most significant determinant of declining food production as a result of climate change:

It will be extremely difficult to balance food deficits in one part of the world with food surpluses in another, unless major adaptation investments are made soon to develop crop varieties that are tolerant to heat and heat-induced water stress and irrigation systems suitable for diverse agroecosystems. The genetics, genomics, breeding, management, and engineering capacity for such adaptation can be developed globally but will be costly and will require political prioritization (5, 8, 9, 20). National and international agricultural investments have been waning in recent decades and remain insufficient to meet near-term food needs in the world’s poorest countries, to say nothing of longer-term needs in the face of climate change (1). History provides some guide to the magnitude and effects of high seasonal averaged temperature projected for the future. Ignoring climate projections at this stage will only result in the worst form of triage.

Notice an important bit of emphasis here. The authors are not using this as an argument for greenhouse gas reductions. Their argument takes climate change as a given, and suggests that steps need to be taken to help poorer regions of the world adap.

Doha in Science

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Writing in this week’s Science (who knew economics was a science?), economists Jomo Kwame Sundaram and Rudiger von Arnim argue that the trade liberalization deck is stacked against the developing world, especially sub-Saharan Africa (sub. req.):

Whatever the right assumptions are, all the different models come to essentially the same conclusion: Global gains of a Doha trade agreement are miniscule relative to world GDP and mostly accrue in large and more developed countries. The poorest countries might very well lose.