Have We Finally Whacked the Mole?

Posted by on

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.

Learning a Foreign Tongue

Posted by on

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?

On the Sustainability of Brackish Water

Posted by on

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.

Kicking the Foreign Oil Habit?

Posted by on

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.

Peak Oil and Climate Change

Posted by on

Dieter Helm, writing in the Oxford Review of Economic Policy, offers the counter-argument to the point made recently by Andy Dessler that the peak and inevitable decline of fossil fuels may put some sort of upper limit on our ability to to put carbon dioxide into the atmosphere:

Some argue that, however intense the dash-for-resources, China (and others) will fail because they will run out. In other words, what will decarbonize the world economy is that there will not be enough carbon resources left to deplete. A particular version of this argument is called ‘peak oil’. It is argued that the peak of conventional oil production has been already reached, and that production will decline over the coming decades, just as demand rises. Prices will, therefore, increase very sharply, setting off a significant substitution effect. From a climate-change perspective, it is argued that this would be good news, but there
are major weaknesses with the peak-oil hypothesis. There may well be lots more resources to discover, notably in an increasingly ice-free Arctic Ocean, and then in Antarctica (as well as elsewhere). Existing ‘depleted’ oil wells typically retain over half the initial reserves, and new technologies (not least using CO2 to increase pressure through oil-enhanced recovery) may be effective. Then there are many near substitutes which may be available, notably tar sands. Once these are included, Canada, for example, becomes one of the top three oil-reserve countries. These sources may be even more polluting than conventional ones. There is also lots of coal.

(Thanks to David Zetland for bringing this paper to my attention.)

Morning Energy News

Posted by on
  • “SASOL’s plans to build a new coal-to-liquids plant in Limpopo, with a production capacity of 80000 barrels per day, are continuing.” Business Day
  • “Louisiana Energy Services is proposing to double the size of a southeastern New Mexico plant being built to make fuel for commercial nuclear power plants.” AP
  • New Mexico rig count down. Me.
  • “U.S. crude oil production will increase 8 percent from 2008 to 2009.” EIA
  • “Current global trends in energy supply and consumption are patently unsustainable.” IEA

Energy Quote of the Day

Posted by on

There has been much discussion of the prospect of developing industrial power from the nuclear fission of uranium. This problem is enormously more complicated than the utilization of solar energy. . . . [W]hereas the solar radiations have been made harmless by natural forces, the artificially induced radiation retains all of its virgin malignity. Whereas the generation of solar energy presents no problem for us, the generation of nuclear energy from uranium is beset with dozens of very serious problems.Whereas solar energy is essentially perpetual, the supplies of uranium are definitely limited.

Eugene Ayres, “Power from the Sun,” Scientific American, August 1950, quoted in Frank Laird’s  Constructing the Future: Advocating Energy Technologies in the Cold War, Technology and Culture – Volume 44, Number 1, January 2003, pp. 27-49

Those Darn Speculators Again

Posted by on

From Platts:

Air China has seen its jet fuel hedge slump to almost half a billion
dollars in the red, the Chinese airline warned shareholders in a notice
published on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange after markets closed Friday.
The company, one of the big three national airlines in China, admitted
that it bought and sold oil options at what turned out to be the top of the
market. The company had the misfortune of tying up a substantial position in
oil derivatives in July — when, as it turned out, oil prices hit an historic
peak before collapsing by more than 60% in the next four months.

Nostalgia

Posted by on

Found while cleaning off the desk in my office today, a report from back in July prepared by staff for the New Mexico Legislative Finance Committee:

FY09 will be a robust 9.3 percent (growth rate) due to extremely high energy revenues.

Ah, those were the days.