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.

Elephant Diaries: My Semi-Charmed Life

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The standard critique at the interface between the dying dinosaurs of print and the whip-smart web is that newspapers simply did not understand and embrace the web, and are doomed as a result. If newspapers would only do “X” – and among Internet cognescenti, “X” has many definitions – newspapers would be able to thrive, or at least survive, in the new world.

But if audience is a measure, newspapers have gotten the web fine. If our measure of “getting the web” is giving people something they want to read, newspapers have been fabulously successful. Web metrics are notoriously hard, but as Michael Hirschorn notes in an an Altantic piece speculating on the death of the New York Times, lots of people are reading newspapers on the web:

The Web site, nytimes.com, boasted an impressive 20 million unique users for the month of October, making it the fifth-ranked news site on the Internet in terms of total visitors. (The October numbers were boosted by interest in the election, but still …) The print product, meanwhile, is sold to a mere million readers a day and dropping, and the Sunday print edition to 1.4 million (and also dropping). Print and Web metrics are not apples-to-apples, but it’s intuitively the case that the Web has extended The Times’ reach many times over.

In other words, the Times is, clearly giving web readers what they want. This is not about doing a good job of delivering news on the web. It’s about the fact that in so doing, there is not enough money to be made to support the people doing it.

As I sit here looking out my back window on the beautiful yellow morning light sweeping down across Albuquerque, watching for the first birds to hit the feeder, drinking my first cup of coffee, my library of economics and archaeology and climate science stacked helter-skelter on the bookshelves behind me, I also could not help but smile at Hirschorn’s description of one of the things that will be lost when newspapers die:

It will also mean the end of a certain kind of quasi-bohemian urban existence for the thousands of smart middle-class writers, journalists, and public intellectuals who have, until now, lived semi-charmed kinds of lives of the mind.

(h/t Sophie)

Coal-to-Liquids Watch

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Via Andy Revkin, we learn about the opening of China’s first coal-to-liquids plant. This is an important development, because of the very real possibility that relatively abundant coal could become a substitute for dwindling petroleum supplies – a happy prospect for cheap global energy, not so much for the climate. Choose the economic and environmental path you prefer.

According to BP, China has the third-largest coal reserves in the world, behind the U.S. and Russia.

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Kids are Great Edition

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Add up the savings (ad gated):

And refrigerator coils. All that dust that collects on them drives up your electric bill by making the fridge less efficient.
“How many of you have cleaned your refrigerator coils?” asks Angela Sylvestre, a volunteer helping with the energy-saving project.
Every hand in the room goes up, accompanied by a chorus of “I have!” and one crisp additional detail: “It’s disgusting.”

Why I Am Skeptical About Successful Greenhouse Gas Reduction Measures

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From the Economist:

Coal’s share in global energy will continue to climb because of its relative cheapness and abundance, especially in the two largest coal-producing/consuming countries, the US and China. In the US, more coal-fired than gas-fired power plants will come on stream in the next two years. Globally, demand for coal will rise by 4.6% in 2009 to 6.8bn tonnes; this trend will gather speed as countries with large reserves aim to reduce their dependence on oil imports.

(ht Rich Sweeney)

US coal production was up 1.9 percent in 2008.

CO2 Basics

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Andy Dessler does a terrific job in this piece of explaining CO2 basics:

So we know that adding carbon dioxide is going to warm the planet. This leads us to the real question: How much warming are we going to get?

Carbon dioxide by itself will only provide somewhere around 1 degree C warming over the next century. In order to get really large warnings over the 21st century, there needs to be strong positive feedbacks to amplify the initial warming from carbon dioxide.