So says EIA:
The increase in U.S. carbon dioxide emissions in 2007 resulted primarily from two factors: unfavorable weather conditions, which increased demand for heating and cooling in buildings; and a drop in hydropower availability that led to greater reliance on fossil energy sources (coal and natural gas) for electricity generation, increasing the carbon intensity of the power supply.
Jennifer Thacher, writing on the New Mexico Independent, makes the point about job creation in the green energy world:
What about the arguments that investment in green energy will create new jobs? It is important to make clear whether we are talking about net new jobs or just new jobs in a particular industry.
In other words, are jobs in the green sector completely new jobs or are they jobs that are lost in another industry? As the statement points out, engineers and accountants work in green industries, but they also work in traditional energy sectors. From a purely “jobs” perspective, does it matter if green energy replaces traditional energy, and the accountants and engineers move between sectors?
This may have implications for different regions of the United States and there may be reasons other than jobs that cause me to prefer the green energy sector, but it is misleading to talk new jobs as opposed to net job creation.
I’m actually highly sympathetic to many of the ideas discussed in this statement. Energy production has external costs are not reflected in market prices. Because prices are too low, we consume excessive (and thus inefficient) amounts of energy. We should devise and promote methods to correct for these external costs.
We should also be clear about the road ahead. Reducing energy use and investing in clean energy has enormous potential, but lets not act as if there are no opportunity costs to clean energy investments.
One of the messages I got from the whole framing-media-science-policy discussions of the past couple of years was the idea that I (the media part of that equation) don’t solve problems by providing any one explanation of stuff. So, for example, I can do a story, as a colleague and I did earlier this year, collecting all the things you can do to winterize your house and reduce your energy bills and greenhouse footprint. Nothing wrong with that, but a second, and perhaps better, approach, is to bang people over the head with the message, over and over. The political science types call it “agenda setting.”
Last spring, my boss suggested a weekly energy tip feature. We enlisted Al Zelicoff, a local energy conservation guru, and began publishing a tip, with Al’s picture, in every Tuesday morning’s Albuquerque Journal. Energy costs have dropped since then, removing one of the prime motivations for people to follow Al’s tips, but we’ve kept at it.
Measuring success is hard, but Al gets great letters from readers, and I hear people talking about it all the time. Al’s page is here, and a blog-like collection of tips is here.
Dan Yurman calculates the jobs he thinks would be created by expanding the federal loan guarantees for nuclear power:
The Federal loan guarantee program for construction of nuclear power plants, set by Congress at $18.5 billion, could if expanded to cover the entire fleet of 21 proposed new reactors, create nearly 80,000 construction jobs, and more than 17,000 permanent operations jobs over the next 10-15 years.
I rather think John Whitehead’s macroeconomic argument about green jobs applies here. There are jobs to be had creating the infrastructure necessary to supply our nation’s energy needs. If they are not created in providing that energy through nuclear power, they will be created in providing it with coal, or wind, or whatever. To the extent that more jobs are created by doing it with nuclear energy than with other approaches, that merely means nuclear energy is less efficient.
My analysis suggests we could maximize energy-related job creation by hiring a bunch of extreme athletes to pedal those silly bike machines you see in late night infomercials. Hook ’em up to the grid. All the food they have to eat would also add farm sector employment. Win!
(OK, I’m being flip. Just as Whitehead argues with “green jobs,” there may very well be good reasons for pursuing an expansion of nuclear energy. But job creation should not be one of them.)
Since we know the single best way of bringing down high birth rates is to empower women by giving them access to reproductive health choices (including contraception and abortion), education, economic opportunities, and legal protection of their rights, empowering women ought to be one of our highest priorities. (As Kim Stanley Robinson puts it, empowering women is the best climate change technology.)
(via Nora)
I guess all of us eat, right? So the continued slide in the global price of food is a good thing, right? Economists have a model they call the “cobweb model“. It basicaly says that when the price drops, farmers plant less, there’s less food, and the price goes back up. So maybe not such a good thing next year?
In preparing for a talk I’m giving Monday to a couple of classes at the University of New Mexico, I went looking for examples from the BlogoWorld of people citing the old “’70’s global cooling consensus” canard.
It’s a version of my usual talk on the science->media->public brain interface, but I wanted to add the story of our BAMS paper debunking the whole global cooling myth. It’s a great example of what happens when science, all pretty and innocent, wanders out into the scary world where zombies wander the vast plains of politics.
In the past, it was a trivial google exercise, to find someone who believes the myth and quotes it. What I found this morning instead was a whole bunch of people quoting our paper. There were a few half-hearted attempts to debunk it (see here for my favorite definitive explanation of why black really is white), but my temporally selected sample seems to suggest that our meme seems largely to be sticking.
Could this really be true? In invite your counter-examples.
I feel a bit like an enthusiastic tourist of late, visiting the Land of the Economists, learning their customs (Their curries, while an acquired taste, are delicious!) and language.
Their language uses many words that we foreign visitors also use, but in different ways that can be at first puzzling, but eventually instructive. “Rent” was the first clue to me that they were up to something odd but potentially useful. (To the economist, “rent” is the revenue after production costs are subtracted – the reason the Saudi princes are so rich. When lobbyists engage in “rent-seeking behavior,” they’re not trying to get you to sublet their flat.)
The latest example came in yesterday’s lecture on deforestation in Thailand (represented by the variable DF – the economists like to represent things with variables, algebra being one of their sacred cultural traditions – along with that delicious curry). DF is an “environmental bad”. To you and I, bad is generally an adjective, describing, for example, the music our children listen to. But to an economist, nouning the bad serves a useful function. If we can manufacture “a good” – rice, or those annoying CDs kids today buy – why can we not have things that are “bads”? Poop (denoted by the variable “P”) or deforestation in Thailand?
Bruce Thomson, head of the water resources program at the University of New Mexico and a very smart guy, has a guest post on WaterWired about New Mexico’s brackish water gold rush:
[W]e must insist that water dependent development in NM be sustainable. We may allow communities to tap into non-sustainable supplies such as deep brackish water for short periods, but ultimately, every municipal or housing development requiring water must include a credible plan describing how it will provide water forever.
Finally, we must recognize that it’s not “new” water, it’s old water. Very old water.
Does “energy independence” make sense as an energy policy rationale? One of the oft-repeated themes of the presidential campaign was the idea that every U.S. president since Nixon has called for energy independence. Here’s Tufts economist Gilbert Metcalf:
A second broad rationale for government intervention in energy markets is national security concerns. In 2006, the United States imported 66 percent of the 20.6million barrels per day of the petroleum that it consumed Reducing oil imports, it is argued, will reduce our vulnerability
to unstable governments in the Middle East and other oil rich areas. The difficulty with this argument is that oil is a commodity priced on world markets. Even if the United States were to produce all the oil it consumes, it would still be vulnerable to oil price fluctuations. A supply reduction in the Middle East would raise the price of domestic oil just as readily as it raises the price of imported oil.
Even if the United States were able to reduce its consumption of oil to zero, the United States would not be fully insulated from oil price shocks elsewhere in the world. First, an oil price shock that drives up the price of oil for Europe and China would lead those countries to increase consumption of fuels that substitute for oil. Crops used to produce biofuels would be in greater demand in world markets thereby driving up the price of biofuels. Second, a slowdown in the world economy following a price shock would likely have negative spillover effects for the United States.