Markets and China’s Energy Consumption

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Qiang Wang of the Chinese of Academy of Sciences had a letter in the 29 August Science magazine (behind paywall) about the critical issue of energy subsidies in China.

Rising global energy prices have caused a drop in consumption in the United States, but in China, not so much:

Source: EIA

Source: EIA

You can see that higher global energy prices have only barely dented consumption in China. Wang argues that China’s energy subsidies are a big part of the problem:

China’s energy prices are mainly decided and controlled by the government. Because the government emphasizes social stability (1) over scarcity of resources or environmental cost (2), it sets the energy prices very low. For example, Chinese gasoline and diesel prices rose by less than 10% (3) in 2007, when global oil price nearly doubled. Moreover, in January 2008, the Chinese government decided to freeze energy prices in the near term, even as international crude oil futures have continued to surge (1).

Energy conservation and efficiency are hard to achieve because government-set prices encourage excessive energy consumption and waste (4). The low energy prices send a distorted market signal to consumers that there is no shortage of natural resources, indicating that enhancing energy efficiency is unnecessary and waste is justified. In 2007, sales of cars with large engines (3 to 4 liters) increased by a factor of 4.5 compared to sales in 2006, and SUV sales increased by 50.09%. Meanwhile, sales of more energy-efficient cars with smaller engines (1 liter) dropped by 30.90%, also compared to 2006 sales (5).

One of the key global problems in aligning energy consumption and production is the allocation problem caused by government subsidies in places like China.

Hunting Flickers

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I awoke before dawn this morning to the sound of the neighborhood birds waking up. It’s still warm enough to leave the windows open at night, but cool enough that we’ve started adding blankets to ward off the 5 a.m. chill. This morning there was a bird sound unusual enough to get my attention.

They say that skilled birders identify more by sound than by sight, but I’m only beginning to acquire the listening skills, so they feel clumsy and confusing. I tried to lie quietly and listen.

After a bowl of oatmeal and some stark newsreading, I took my coffee, binoculars and bird book out in the backyard to see if I could see what was making that intriguing sound. It was in the 60s F (maybe 17C), cool enough that I was glad I had my sweatshirt but not unhappy to be able to still go out barefoot in the morning.

There were the usual house finches and a couple of house sparrows – fewer than I have on summer mornings, but enough to entertain. The finches hop around in the high branches of the neighbors’ giant elm, and particularly love the very topmost branch of a tree a couple of houses away, front-lit against the blue morning sky to the west. In the distance to the west, I could see an occasional flight of pigeons. They never come to my house, but I often see them flying a few blocks away, some sort of commuting corridor between trash bins perhaps.

Sadie came out with me, as she does when I go out in the morning to watch the birds. While I sit and sip coffee, she has a patrol routine. This morning there was something particularly interesting in the pile of concrete blocks on the north side of the yard that required a great deal of sniffing attention. I imagined some small cowering rodent hiding in the fortress of spaces created by the voids in the pile, a giant dog nose poking perilously close to its pocket of safety. No rodent ever spotted, Sadie eventually lost interest and extended the range of her patrol.

Eventually, I heard what the Cornell people describe as a “peah” followed by the loud “”wik-wik-wik” – the sounds I had heard as I lay in bed. I had flickers on my mind, because Lissa and I had caught a glimpse of one down by the river yesterday, zooming from one cottonwood to the next. We have them here year round, but the number of sightings goes way up this time of year.

They were in the big elm somewhere, but the tree is mostly hiding place, not visible perch, and I didn’t get a glimpse until something relatively large (larger certainly than my little finches) took flight, with a dark tail and the barest glimpse of rust color as it streaked over my head and out of sight. I keep straining my ears to hear it again, hoping for a better look.

Eventually, I realized the last quarter of my coffee had gone cold.

Nuclear Weapon in Plastic Cow

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It was art:

A police report indicates Smith said he was a “special agent with the United States Illuminati, badge number 0931.”

His mission?

One from “Director Womack,” to “defuse and confiscate a Soviet-made MERV6SS-22AN warhead, with 14.5 kg of enriched uranium and a plutonium trigger, capable of delivering a 40-kiloton yield.”

Police say Smith believed the device was concealed in a blue, plastic cow sculpture in the basement of the museum.

It’s silly, of course.

Everyone knows that the Soviet Plastic Cow Warhead (SPCW) only had 7 kg. of uranium.

Props to Revkin

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Props to Andy Revkin, whose NYTimes work is the gold standard in climate coverage:

A staff writer for The New Yorker and a science reporter from The New York Times have won the 2008 John Chancellor Awards for Excellence in Journalism, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism announced today. Jane Mayer won the award for the depth and detail of her reporting on the Bush Administration’s war on terror, and Andrew C. Revkin won for his decades-long coverage of the science and politics of climate change.

Mashey on GM Food

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John Mashey had some great comments on my post last week on GM foods. Since it seems unlikely that very many readers dig through old blog comments here, I thought it worth pulling them out and posting here in full. The setup is an argument between David King and Robert Watson over whether starvation in Africa is a product of political opposition to GM food, or whether there really is ample food, and it’s merely a distribution problem. Mashey:

But they’re both right…

Most starvation is from distribution problems.

However, especially given the likely problems we’re going to have with agriculture over the next few centuries, we’re almost certainly going to have to do more (carefully done) GM, especially as cheap nitrogen fertilizer disappears, and as we need to get more drought-resistant crops, etc.

People need to be careful of GM in various ways, but uncategorical rejection of it shows people don’t understand where their food comes from.

One might want to look at the opinions of the father of the green revolution, Norman Borlaug:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_E._Borlaug

More GM = less fertilizer or less pesticide, and sometimes more forest, all good things.

I especially recommend: “Mendel in the Kitchen: A Scientist’s View of Genetically Modified Food”, by Nina Federoff & Nancy Marie Brown. Nina is a professor of Biology at Penn State, and a NAS member.

A couple Q’s for people: (p16-21 above)

a) What do you eat that is natural? (I.e., never modified by humans).
Read about wheat, which comes from a bunch of weird mutations. And of course, modern corn is incredibly far removed from teosinte. Triticale (what/rye hybrid) is totally unnatural, being crated with colchicine (chemical).

[Some wild fish and game are more or less still natural. There might be a few plants around, but most human food comes from highly-bred plants and animals.]

b) How about seedless watermelons? How does that happen?
(Colchichine again).

c) Do you eat pasta from Creso durum wheat (esp. popular in Italy)? or beer from Golden Promise Barley? or California Calrose 76 rice?
OR BREAD?

Of the hundreds of varieties of bread wheat, ~200 were created using X-rays, gamma rays, neutrons, or various chemicals, and so were the others in that list. (p17).

For some reason, smashing genes with radiation and selecting mutations ifs fine, but actually *engineering* the same variation cannot be considered. Of course one needs to be careful.

When is “free” not really “free”?

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David Foster argues that free water for the poor in India comes with a significant cost:

Although water supply in virtually all Indian cities is heavily subsidized, very few BPL (Below Poverty Line) families have household connections. While upper income families benefit from those subsidies, the BPL families are often forced to buy water from private vendors or carry water from public stand posts, water tankers, or public fountains and wells. Unfortunately, even where this water is provided free of charge, we often underestimate the true cost incurred by the poor in obtaining it.

(via David Zetland’s blog)

Palm Oil Crashing Too

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It’s not only the price of black gooey fossil oil that’s crashing. Palm oil is tanking as well:

Palm oil prices have nearly halved after hitting a peak in March, when surging crude oil prices boosted interest in the biofuels derived from palm oil.

Analysts blame the rapid plunge on a supply glut and a prolonged period of unusually good weather, in addition to the strengthening dollar, crude’s drop to $100 a barrel and speculators fleeing from commodity markets.