Tag: climate change

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Fire & Ice: Always Becoming; Never Being

Climate change is not something we face only today. Warmer temperatures helped during the rise of the Roman Empire and cooler ones probably contributed to its downfall.  It was warm around the year 1000, when the Viking colonized Greenland and they were later wiped out by the advance of the Greenland ice. Interestingly, archeology in Greenland is now revealing Viking settlement patterns that were buried by ice for hundreds of years. Yes, it was as warm back then as it is now with our warmer temperatures.

North and west of Milwaukee are the kettle-moraines. This is where the last ice age stopped. The ice sheets dithered over the land here making sort of waves in the landscapes. Where glaciers stopped are moraines, long hill waves. An ancient glacial river, where sediment settled, is called an esker. These snake around like raised rivers across the farmlands. Where there was a depression in the glacier and dirt accumulated is called a drumlin. These are now round hills. Finally there are kettles, depressions carved by ice as the glacier retreated. What happened was that shards of ice got stuck in the ground, like glass in tar. When they melted they left holes. Some became lakes or marshes; others are just holes. 

Most lakes are the gift of the glaciers, which is why you find so many in Wisconsin and Minnesota and not so many farther south. Over time, all lakes fill in and unless glaciers, man or an earthquake makes a new one, there are no more little lakes. I used to really enjoy the study of this stuff. Natural succession occurs when a lake fills in and gradually, through a succession of plant communities, becomes a forest. This can take thousands of years, which is why the lakes are still here.

The ice retreated from Wisconsin only about 10,000 years ago and the last ice age is called the Wisconsin glaciation, since there is so much evidence of it in Wisconsin. Besides the kettle-moraines, the area around Lacrosse, where Chrissy is from, is called the driftless area because the glaciers did not cover it and leave glacial dirt, also called “drift.” It was like a hole in the ice, but it was much affected by the glaciers. As the glaciers melted, water raced down forming long narrow valleys called coolies. Grand Coolie in Washington State is a really big example of the phenomenon. It was formed when a giant ice dam broke and washed away pretty much everything in its path. The area of Western Wisconsin is clearly different from the East.  Rolling hill give way to a more ragged landscape.

I road my bike from Lacrosse to Milwaukee a couple of times and felt the geography. It is hard going, up and down, until you get past Reedsburg. Then you go down a long hill, which I understand is the Baraboo Ridge, and the peddling gets easier. There are hills, but they are not quite as steep or abrupt.

Anyway, talk about climate change! 10,000 years ago is not really that long in the great scheme of geologic time. The glaciers also created the Great Lakes and are formed the basis for that great fertile soil you find in the Upper Midwest. I suppose you could blame them for the poorer soils farther north, since that is where it was pushed from. All changes produce winners and losers.  Climate change is no different. All things considered, we are better off now than during the ice ages. 

Ice Age Trail

The Ice Age trail follows the edge of the glaciers throughout Wisconsin. I went to the Waukesha part, the Latham district. Latham was a naturalist of the 19th Century. He was instrumental in founding the national weather service.

I feel very at home in the Kettle-Moraines. That was my first contact with natural communities. We went out here on field trips from school and when I could ride my bike far enough I made my own visits. The landscape meshed well with my childhood love of natural history. The soil on the terminal moraines tend to be rocky and gravel and not so good. Ironically, that is one of the reasons we have ice age parks. The soil was not good for farming, so the land reverted to state ownership when the owners just walked away or else sold it cheap.

The natural cover in the Waukesha kettle-moraines is oak-savanna, locally called “oak openings.”  The trees are spread apart in a park-like setting.  The trees do not get very big because of the poverty of the soil, so a century old tree might be only thirty feet high, but they get very picturesque.   Until settlement, the oak savanna was maintained by fires, set naturally by lighting or more often set deliberately or accidentally by Native Americans. I wrote about that in a series of posts about fire in the woods.  Indians burned the land to improve hunting and once a fire started it could burn for a long time. Since there were no roads and few clearings to stop it, a fire burned until the next heavy rain. For a long time after the European settlement, we excluded fire from the landscape and a lot of brush has grown up.  According to signs I saw along the trails, the State of Wisconsin is trying to reestablish the “natural” or at least the pre-settlement ecosystems.   This means the judicial use of ecological fire.

I think I should say something about natural succession, since not everybody is as familiar with it.   Basically, there is a succession of natural communities that establish themselves on any piece of land. Each natural community creates conditions that allow the next stage to prosper while, ironically, creating conditions where its own continuation is disadvantaged. For example, pine trees fill in a field, but as they grow together they create shade where young pines cannot grow, but the sheltered forest and the improving soil is a good environment for maples, which come to replace pines. 

If you start with bare dirt, the first things that come in are weeds, then perennial grass and so on.   In a reasonably fertile piece of dirt in Eastern Wisconsin, you will get the weeds, perennial plants, box elders and ash and finally maples-beech-basswood if there is sufficient moisture and soil depth, otherwise oak-hickory.  But in some places you won’t really get forest at all.  Wisconsin has a lot of prairie ecosystems.  Of course, we really don’t know what the “natural” succession would be because no human has ever studied one. The Native Americans burned too, as above.  

You can see above a field that might be in the process of becoming an open forest. When I studied natural succession, we talked about climax forests.  That was the ecosystem that supposedly was the ultimate goal. Once established, the climax forest would remain until disturbed by nature or man.  This implied permanence unjustified by the evidence.  We now have a more subtle understanding of ecology. There really is no “goal”. Everything is just becoming something else.

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We’re Cooked

I went to a discussion of the costs of cap & trade. There were experts from Brookings, CBO, EPA, Energy Information Agency, the National Black Chamber of Commerce & Heritage Foundation, so we got the full spectrum of analysis.  Lots of the assumptions were different and the ideology was contrasting, but they all came up with the same ballpark conclusions: cap & trade as it is now formulated in the House bill will cost a lot and probably will not work very well to control climate change.

As I have written many times before, I favor a broad carbon tax, which is why I could never run for office.   I support cap & trade BECAUSE it is a type of carbon tax, albeit a less efficient and possibly corrupt way to do it, but it looks like there is enough inefficiency in corruption in the House bill to question it.

One flaw in the bill is that it includes almost nothing about nuclear power.  In the long run, we will need to go with renewable power.  In the medium run, there is no way to achieve the needed carbon reductions w/o nuclear power, which emits no greenhouse gas.  Many environmentalists stupidly reject nuclear power.    No form of power is w/o risks and costs, but if you believe that global warming is the existential threat some people say it is, doesn’t that almost certain risk of climate change trump the hypothetical risk of nuclear power?   Not one person has died in the whole history of nuclear power in the U.S.  Nobody was even seriously injured in the worst “disaster” in nuclear power history at Three Mile Island.

But a probably more serious problem is the phenomenal growth of emissions from developing countries such as China or India.  China is the world’s leading emitter of CO2 and their emissions are growing rapidly.   China adds the equivalent of two 500 megawatt coal fired plants EVERY WEEK.  In one year it adds the equivalent of the whole British power network and by 2030 China alone could emit as much CO2 as the whole world does today. In other words, if everybody else cut to zero, it wouldn’t matter.

Talk is cheap, BTW.  China has promised to cut emissions relative to GDP.  That is good.  But the U.S. has been cutting emissions relative to GDP since 1973 and in 2006, the U.S. was the only nation to cut emissions in absolute numbers during a time of economic growth. 

So my conclusion is that we are cooked.  We should think about adaptations to a warmer world.   And we should be working on alternatives AND building nuclear power stations.  Congress should go back to work and enact a true carbon tax that would get the government out of the business of picking winning and losing companies and technologies. Government has an abysmal record in doing this (consider the recent debacle re ethanol) and there is no reason to believe it has gotten any better. The current bill doesn’t inspire confidence. I like the idea of markets for environmental services in general. I was tentatively in favor of the climate bill. It has some good aspects, but it needs smarter leadership and some hard thinking.

BTW – the picture is Union Station from the window of Heritage Foundation, where the panel was held. 

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Walking Trees

Species moving is nothing new and I was glad to read about serious efforts to think ahead and planting trees in new environments to adapt to global warming.   The tree you plant today will be around for a long time and if the climate changes it will still be there.  Of course, humans moving tree species is really nothing new.   Foresters have pushed the loblolly pine north and North American trees dominate the plantation forests in South America, Australia and South Africa.   Sometimes trees grow better someplace other than their native range.    A most famous case is the Monterey pine, which grows poorly in its narrow native range in California, but thrives magnificently (some think invasively) in the Southern Hemisphere.  

As environments shift, global warming will redefine what we mean by “natural” or “native.”   Environments won’t merely shift north or uphill.  They will be different from what we have today.   We will soon be seeing environments that have not been around for millennia or maybe even millions of years.   There have not been temperate forests north of the Arctic Circle for millions of years, for example.   The relationships among species will be new.     It will be an interesting time to be alive and we have to be involved in the dynamic of changing environments. 

Anyway, read the article.

I wrote a post covering some of these issues, BTW.

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Too Far Down This Road

My last (for a while) post thinking about global warming.  I just finished a two-day seminar on the subject, which is what made me review.  There is some overlap in the posts (sorry) but they also can stand by themselves.  

The world cannot & will not reduce CO2 emissions any time soon. CO2 we have already emitted will be around a long time and the world will emit more in 2050 than it does now. Experts disagree about how much the earth will warm or the seas will rise, but they will. It is coming and we can do nothing to stop it. So what do we do?

Solve the right problem

We missed prevention and now are in the mitigation and adaption phase. There never really was a prevention opportunity. Prevention was no longer an option by the time we recognized the problem. As late as the 1980s, scientists still warned about global cooling. The current interglacial period was ending, they said. Aggressive government action to reverse that would have been harmful. Decision makers were naturally skeptical when the new -opposite – threat came along. Besides, they were busy dealing with current life on earth threat, ozone depleting chemicals. Anyway greenhouse gas emitting technologies were (and remain) baked into human systems. Real alternatives never had a real chance. (Kyoto was too late and too lame.) So let’s just move on.

After recognizing the true nature of the problem, we should work to avoid the worst-case scenario and reduce emissions to the extent possible. For example, we need to use more nuclear power and generally encourage higher prices for oil and other fossil fuels to promote alternatives. We also need to concentrate on the places where the greatest amount of NEW emission will originate. Europe and the U.S. can work to limit emissions, but the big growth will come from places like China & India.

Stop moralizing

Then stop the moralizing and the panic. Adapting to climate change is an engineering problem. Global warming is not really a mystery.   Although we don’t understand all the variables, it is a naturally explained process. It is not the retribution for crimes against Gaia or the wrath of angry nature.  Even in its worst-case projections, it is not the biggest change the earth has ever experienced, nor it is the worst human (or hominids) have endured. Our big brains developed in response to earlier episodes of dramatic climate change. We didn’t get to the top of the food chain by being stupid and can adapt to this too.

It was warmer before

For most of the history of terrestrial life on earth there were no glaciers at all. Temperate forests grew near the poles and tropical rain forests extended well into the latitudes of Canada or Siberia. By all indications, life was perfuse on the warm globe and successful. The problem of climate change is one of location. Plants, animals and humans are adapted to today’s climate. They are not easily moved, but change does not mean immediate destruction. Some forest types in the southern Appalachians or on high ground in the Sonora region, for example, are characteristic very different climates and are relics of conditions long gone. Natural systems can persist for a long time after conditions have changed, but if struck by catastrophes, they may not come back under natural conditions. Human intervention can sometimes create or recreate such ecosystems (if that is desirable).

A tree cannot move, but forests can

Beyond that, most species of plants and most animals are hardy over large ranges. Most species of trees can grow from Florida to Wisconsin and beyond. The mix is different, but you can find many of the same species in both places. As the climate changes, the mix will change too, but people unfamiliar with forest ecology may not be able to tell the difference.

To mitigate this problem we can facilitate movement. For example, avoid using plants near the southern edge of their range. (My pine trees near the northern end of their natural range will probably grow better in greenhouse conditions.) It is also important to leave corridors. North America has more tree species than Europe. Why? It has to do with the direction of the mountain chains. In N America, the Appalachians and Rockies extend north/south. Eurasia has a fairly consistent mountain mass east/west from the Pyrenees to the Himalayas. During the last ice age, as forest types retreated south, their seeds ran up against high altitudes in Eurasia and many didn’t survive. In North America, this was not a factor. We need to ensure that natural communities can advance north with the climate.

Nature is resilient. What about us?

Our infrastructure and methods of working are built around current conditions. Some of this is not a real problem. No farmer is growing the same crops using the same methods as his father. These are routine changes. Physical infrastructure is a bigger problem, but it is more political or legal than material. It is costly to change infrastructure, but infrastructure does not last forever and is constantly renewed. The problem is the routing. Roads and railroads run through existing right of ways. Moving them may be very difficult.

Location of cities is an obvious challenge, but in most cases we are not talking wholesale relocation. We could mitigate future problems simply by being smarter today. For example, with satellite mapping, we can tell the elevation of a place within a meter and project how much water it would take to flood it. We would be smart to avoid building permanent structures soggy sites. It doesn’t make sense to build on flood-prone places, whether or not we have climate change.

We also need to look at all the options and we Americans don’t have to invent everything.  Let’s look to good practices worldwide. Brazil has been working on alcohol fuel for four decades. Arid Australia is a leader in allocating scarce water resources. Although not currently the world leader, it might be India that soon lead the world in biotechnology.

But in the end we might have some great options from the science of biotechnology. Biotechnology can produce plants that require less water, fertilizer and energy to produce. But the connection is even more direct. Biotechnology is already contributing to the production of biofuels and may soon make the production of ethanol from cellulous faster and easier. Cellulose alcohol is the holy grail of liquid fuels. That would mean we could make fuel out waste products such as wood chips or stalks, or from easily grown and ecologically benign crops such as switchgrass.

Paradigms change and we can make them change. If we think only about how things are today, we can never solve our problems. In fact, it is likely that today’s problems CANNOT be solved with today’s methods. We can do it. It requires a leap of faith, but it is a leap of faith in human intelligence and our ability to learn & adapt.

We are standing at a crossroads where our provision of energy, water and food are radically changed. These three factors will be more completely integrated than ever before. All change is difficult, but if done right this one will make all (or at least most) of us much better off and make our lifestyles more sustainable.

A cooler earth?

But perhaps the greatest mitigating thing we ought to do is one we currently do not understand. Can global warming lead to cooling? As the world was warming up from its last ice age (w/o the help of humans BTW) about 11000 years ago, it suddenly got another cold blast. This is called the Younger Dryas stadial. The cause is thought to have been a sudden influx of fresh water into the Atlantic, which interfered with the heat transfer from the tropics to the poles. Some scientist think this could happen again. Although the Younger Dryas event involved the aburpt breaking of an ice dam and a lot more fresh water in a short time, conditions could be similar if glaciers rapidly melt. It would be nothing like the movie “The Day After Tomorrow”, since RAPID change in the real world means it took place over the course of about 50 years and it was not global, but cold temperatures in Europe and N. America would be a problem. An urgent priority would be to understand this mechanism and – if possible – prevent it from doing damage. But currently anything in this subject area is just speculation. My own take on it is that activists want to cover all the bases so that they can blame any weather scenario on human activity.

Always look at the bright side of life

I would make no investments in beachfront property and inhabitants of low islands may consider seeking higher-level opportunities, but we humans have faced worse. As a matter of fact, the Younger Dryas unpleasantness probably forced our ancestors into inventing cereal agriculture. Anyway, we are too far gone down this road to go back and start over.  Our options only include things we can do now, not what we should have done before.  Whether big events are blessings or curses depends on how you adapt and what happens next.  

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Government, Markets & the Environment

Markets are a little out of style these day, but my faith is intact. I don’t seek or expect to find perfection.  Imperfect as they may be, markets will be back because nothing else works better; we need them.  Over reasonable time periods, markets produce in great abundance whatever goods or services society wants. They can do this because they are based on the greatest of renewable resources – human ingenuity. The market is a mechanism that focuses the genius of the people on what they consider most important.  When the innovation of the market is focused on improving the environment, we can expect good results.

The Difference Between a Medicine & a Poison is Dosage and Usage

Let me first stipulate some government regulation is indeed required for a clean environment.  There is no such thing as a pure system and market incentives alone are insufficient to address externalities, the things that people don’t own or own collectively.  But the choices and intelligent inherent in the market mechanism is still the way to go most of the time.  We just need to employ the appropriate tools at the appropriate time and against the appropriate problems. Command and control regulation was appropriate and successful in going after large point source pollution in the 1970s. Although many of these problems have been largely eliminated, we still need regulations to prevent their recurrence. However, as the problems we face become finer and more diverse, we will need more and more to rely on incentives for innovation and market mechanisms to finish the job. Command and control is the big chain saw that creates the gross shape. We needed the chain saw, but now it is time to put it aside. We are at the fine carving stage and it is time to use different tools.

Not in Spite of Governments Best Efforts; Because of Them

We need to learn from experience. The big government chain saw is useful but also dangerous. It has solved many environmental problems but many of today’s environmental problems result from earlier government interventions. To err is human, but if you want to screw up on a really monumental scale you need to enlist the help of big government.

Private industry could never by itself have produced the resources needed to destroy the wetlands of Louisiana in order to build sometimes underwater cities, such as parts of New Orleans. Government water projects & subsidies encourage the growing of water hungry crops in the middle of our southwestern deserts. Government mandated the use of asbestos in of our buildings and local building codes often prevent sustainable buildings. Government agricultural policies and trade restrictions turn over many square miles of our land to inappropriate crops while at the same time starving farmers in developing countries by subsidizing competition against them. Government programs to protect jobs allow dirty inefficient industries to stay in business long after the market would shuttered them as unprofitable.

My personal favorite result of government master plans is kudzu. Anybody who has been around the countryside in the Southeast knows this persistent invader that shrouds everything in its way. It can grow a foot a day and choke a forest in a matter of weeks. It costs farmers and foresters a fortune every year to keep it down. In the 1930s, the Civilian Conservation Corps planted kudzu all over the south. Farmers were paid as much as eight dollars an acre (bigger money in those days)  to plant fields of the vines in the 1940s. I guess we can consider that a successful government program.  They are well established now.

Most of these things were done with good intentions & they were often based on what was considered the best the science of the time. The science was right about Kudzu. It was and remains an excellent way to prevent erosion. It just is a little too enthusiastic about covering-up everything else. We need to be very careful with any big plan. Each generation says “back then they THOUGHT, now we KNOW” but they always learn a generation too late. If you think I am wrong, consider the current ethanol subsidies and the rush to biofuels. Biofuels are a great idea, but only when appropriate feedstocks are used. The Europeans have had to rethink their biofuels programs after they learned that whole forest in Indonesia and Malaysia were being cut and burned to establish palm oil plantations. Sure enough, palm oil burns clean, but all those trees that used to be the forest don’t. In the U.S. we will come to regret replacing big oil with big corn if that becomes our main ethanol fuel stock.

A Proper Choice Architecture

A proper environmental policy involves government in the role of setting up incentives and then leaving the decision making to those who are closest to the problem and have the most to gain or lose. It does not pick winners or losers. It will by its nature be iterative, gradual and diverse. You cannot expect immediate effects, but you will get a better long term result and a sustainable solution when you bring a wider spectrum of human intelligence into the game.  The genius of a lot of people solving their own problems with their resources always outweighs that of a small group of experts trying using other people’s money to come up with a global solution that applies to others.

There is an old joke. This guy comes into the doctor’s office. “Doc,” he says raising his arm, “It hurts when I do this.” The doctor replies, “Then stop doing that.”

A good first step for a better environment is for the government to stop doing some of the things it is doing now. For example, the government should not subsidize flood insurance. If you are building your home or business in a place with a reasonable risk, you can get insurance from a private vendor. If firms whose business it is to insure you think it is too risky at an affordable price, why should the government step in and be a bigger fool? This simple move would almost immediately create de-facto conservation zones on most barrier islands and fragile estuaries and cost the taxpayers nothing. In fact we would save money by getting out of the fool support, insurance & protection business. 

Another thing the government could do is to phase itself out of the water business. Where water is scarce, it is usually governed by century old rules that were created to encourage people to farm deserts by giving them government subsidized water. Maybe it was a good idea back then, but not any more.  As a result of these antiquated practices, water today is distributed like bread in the old Soviet Union. The first guy in line gets a lot at a low price. Those with political influence do not have to stand in line at all. Other people get nothing much or nothing at all. The simple market solution is to charge a market rate for the water. People will stop wasting water when it is no longer almost free. Farmers will decide that maybe it is not worth growing that cotton in the middle of deserts and land will revert to uses more in line with its natural state. I said PHASE out. We cannot just make people quit all at once, since many people have their life savings tied up in the current system, but let’s start today.  

The most far reaching thing we can do, however, is a kind of an earth tax. This tax would largely REPLACE income taxes. We could determine the externality cost of most forms of energy and tax accordingly. That is why I favor a carbon tax. It is not only a way to raise revenue, but also a means to encourage wiser use of resources. For example, you would not have to ban SUVs if the price of gas was high enough. People would make choices rationally. A person might load seven passengers into that SUV and have a much smaller impact on the environment than those seven individual Prius drivers and each would be paying accordingly.  That is the beauty of allowing choice.

Bigger government alone is never the solution for environmental problems. The most intrusive governments (communists) were by far the biggest polluters. Their system created so much pollution that it wore down stone and still managed to produce poor economic results. It was amazing how much better it got when the communists lost power.

A smart government that creates incentives toward a goal, but does not mandate precise means will be able to use the market mechanism to produce both a cleaner environment AND a better economy.

The environment is not a left-right issue.  Some have just framed the issue in their terms. “Want a clean world,” they say, “then you must let government boss you around.”  Experience does not bear this out.  We can understand and recognize the problem w/o accepting their big government control as the solutions. Command & control was a stage we needed to pass through to get to where we are today.  It worked back then. It was fitting, proper and necessary back in 1970, but it is not 1970 anymore.  We now need to fine tune and we cannot command that.  The market mechanism is the future.   With good choice architecture, it will harness human imagination, intelligence and innovation as it always does.

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A New World for Global Warming

The global warming debate has taken a responsible turn.  Talk was cheaper than oil for a long time.  Countries around the world talked a lot and did next to nothing confident that they could blame the U.S. for not taking decisive action.   Domestic opponents had similar opportunities.   They could blame the “naysayers”.   To be a global warming opponent in good standing, all you really needed to do was go to the Al Gore movie and complain about the plight of the polar bears. 

For all the sound and fury about Kyoto, from 2000-2008 greenhouse gas emissions rose in both the EU and the U.S.   Guess emissions went up LESS?  Hint: not Europe. In other words, doing “nothing” worked about as well as doing something.  But our Euro friends got to stand on the moral high ground.  Last year, BTW, U.S. CO2 emission DROPPED by 2.8%, the biggest drop since we started to keep CO2 emission data.

But I should not be too snarky. Kyoto was and remains a seriously flawed agreement.   There was never any chance that the Senate would ratify it.   In fact, back in the 1990 ALL the Democrats and ALL the Republicans preemptively voted that they would not accept the agreement since it set up all sorts of silly expectations on the part of developing countries giving them a free ride and putting obligations only on the U.S. and other developed countries.  There is no way that we can achieve any serious climate change goals if we leave out the big polluters of the future.  China is the world’s biggest CO2 producer.  India, Indonesia, Brazil and others are growing fast.  You just cannot exempt the future trouble spots. Kyoto was too much about international wealth redistribution and not enough about environmental progress.

Nevertheless, U.S. must be part of a solution. I have been observing European efforts to create a carbon market. It is easy to find fault.  So far, it really doesn’t work, but we can learn from their experience.  If the U.S. pushes in the same direction, together we can make it work.

BTW – The French get  78% of their electricity from nuclear, which produces no greenhouse gas. Americans should be able to do as well, but we manage only around 20% and have not authorized & built a new plant since 1973.  We have to put nuclear power back into the mix.  It is safe and clean. Despite all the fears, In its sixty year history, NOBODY has ever died in a U.S. nuclear power accident.  It cannot be business as usual. Addressing climate change will require lifestyle changes. It will cost money and change comfortable relationships. Nobody wants to take these steps. I know this will come as a surprise, but not everyone is honest in carrying out their promises. Countries will obfuscate and cheat. Many world leaders were happy that the U.S. was not pushing the climate change solution bandwagon. They could make sanctimonious statements of concern and hide behind the U.S. while avoiding the really hard choices. Now we are stripping away this cover.

Just because we cannot do everything does not mean we have an excuse to do nothing. I am not in panic mode. I do not believe that we will cause irreparable damage if we do not address the problem immediately, but we certainly need to do something effective very soon.

Price will be the primary mechanism for sorting out this environmental problem and I have long advocated higher energy prices. Anyone who demands lower energy prices is not serious about solving environmental problems.

There is good news. Our experience with solving environmental problems has been good. We managed to address serious problems such as sewage, particulates, acid rain and CFCs more rapidly and at lower cost than anyone predicted. The proof is that we no longer worry much about these problems and they are no longer subjects of national debate. Climate change is a bigger challenge because it is international and carbon is ubiquitous, but if the U.S. and the EU are on board, it will work. That is the plus side of economy hegemony. We can set the standards that others must follow if they want to participate in world markets. We need to move while we still have such power.

There is lots of money to be made in greenhouse gas markets. We can do well by doing good. My concern is that erstwhile climate activists will stand in the way. You would not guess this from the rhetoric, but if you listen carefully you find the fault lines. Addressing climate change will mean higher energy prices (which “hurt the poor”) and job disruption and displacement (which hit union workers hardest).   Some businesses will be nimble enough to take advantage of the changing situation and make money; others not so much. I hear the complaints already. The quick and clever will do well.  Our environment will be better as we develop sustainable solutions, but opponents will only see those “left behind.”

BTW – The picture at top is a garden near Smithsonian now and the picture at the bottom is the same place in early February.   Right after the Obama inauguration, some people claimed that the Mall was damaged and may never recover.  It is hard to see on the sign, but it complains that only time will tell if it will come back.   A few months later, it did.  Nature is resilient.

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Climate Change

I am almost ready to sign my first carbon credit sale on my forests.  It is a sweet deal in that I get retro credit for the growth since 2003.  The contract is valid for fifteen years from that time, so it runs until 2018.  My first thinning on the CP property is 2019 and I will thin the Freeman property in 2011 or 2012.  Both are good dates, since the first one will have the contact until the very time of thinning and the second will grow back (i.e. sequester more carbon) in time for the reckoning.  The thinning makes the forest grow faster, but it takes a few years to catch up.

Below is Hoofddorp in Holland.  During the little ice age, these sorts of canals froze.  The don’t any longer.  Hoofddorp is a pleasant little town near Amsterdam.  There is a Courtyard Marriott there.  These pictures are from fall 2006.

I am not sure how the economy will affect the environment.    The falling price of gas has already made people less sensitive to using less.   As I wrote before, I think we should tax gas back up, but the recession makes that very unlikely scenario even less likely.    We made a lot of progress because of higher energy prices and I have to see that lost in the mixture of bad economy and lower energy prices.    Global warming is happening and we are part it.  Solutions are going to include things like higher energy prices, alternatives and nuclear power, but expect no panacea breakthrough in our lifetimes.

There is nothing we can do to prevent some global warming.  Although it might not be so apparent in a cool spell like we have had this year, barring extraordinary volcanic activity or a meteor collision, the earth will be significantly warmer in 2100 than it is today. The best we can do is mitigate it and adapt to the changes. We CAN adapt.   I don’t think there is cause for hysteria. 

We do not know the details of what will happen, but we can make some general assumptions. We will face sea level rises, water shortages, and changes in weather patterns. The most likely situation will mean that it will be significantly warmer near the poles and somewhat warmer and drier nearer the equator. So what can we do now?

Below – swans in the canal

Some things are simple common sense. For example, if you expect a sea level rise of a couple of feet, do not build permanent structures on land less than a few feet above sea level. For example, we would not rebuild below sea level areas of New Orleans or subsidize building near the ocean in general – no more expensive houses on barrier island or seaside hills.   This is fairly easily accomplished.  We just should NOT subsidize insurance rates.  If people have to pay the real risk premiums, most will not build in the first place.  Since trees live a long time, we might also consider planting southern species further north. Genetic engineering will allow plant species to adapt quicker.  
 
My pines, BTW, are indeed a southern species growing near the northern edge of their natural range.  I also planted some bald cypress, which are southern trees and maybe I will do some longleaf.

Humans can adapt to climate changes. We evolved during the transition from ice ages to warmer periods.  That is one reason we got our big brains.   We needed cultural adaptations our intelligence permitted to cope with transformations and new environments that our strictly biological heritage was not quick enough to handle.  If you wait to grow fur, you die.  If you “borrow” fur from the local animals, you stay warm and alive.  Even so, it almost finished off our species.  With our more developed technologies the expected  climate change  will be a cake walk compared to what our troglodyte & and wandering ancestors faced.

We also need some perspective.  The earth has been much warmer than it is today … and much colder. Life thrived in the hot Mesozoic and survived during the frigid ice ages. The problem is change itself.  Natural and human communities are adapted to today’s world. People and animals can move; forests maybe not.  The problem, to repeat, is the change, not the warmer or colder stable state.

Some years from now, our grandchildren might face a far different dilemma than the one we expect. Consider this scenario.  What if greenhouse gases have made the world warmer and human & natural communities have begun to adapt to this new stability?  What if future generations develop a carbon free panacea of an energy source? Do they see reversing climate change as a benefit or a threat? Maybe at that point they prefer the warmer world and they want to keep it warm with the new weather patterns.  After all, we would not want to go back to the colder conditions of the little ice age in 1650 or 1770.  That was normal back then.  We prefer the climate we have now. Climate change is a problem in either direction.

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Realists, Not Hysterical Hypocrites

The evidence for human induced global warming is less conclusive than proponents say, but it is impressive. Some argue that we need not act until the threat is imminent, but if we wait for it to fully and perhaps suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations may come too late. So what do we do?

If you look at the literature and even entries on other parts of this blog, you will see that a common response to the politics of global warming is to indignantly claim that it is the fault of Bush, Republicans, the U.S. or big corporations. The subtext is, “If only THEY weren’t so greedy, WE could address this problem.” The idea seems to be that if we would just sign on to Kyoto, or legislate properly, the problem would go away. It won’t.

Proper regulations and government incentives will be required. But these are means, not ends. Legislations by itself will do nothing. What is it that we want the legislation to do? There are several things that are required.

Raise the price of energy. Why do we depend on oil? We use oil because it is cheaper and easier to use than the alternatives. If there was a cheaper alternative, we would already be using it. One of the pernicious effects of cheap oil is that it preempts development of alternatives. Worse, the price of oil tends to drop as soon as alternative look promising and the would-be alternative producers are driven to bankruptcy. We need to guarantee a high price for oil and gas.A high energy price is the fastest way to encourage conservation. We saw that historically. Energy efficiency increased when prices were high in the 1970s and 1980s and flattened in the late 1980s and 1990s when oil was cheap. The presidents’ policies seemed to have little effect. We saw it recently when the prices went up after Katrina. Suddenly SUVs were out and hybrids were in. Price succeeds. Politics fails.

Go nuclear. It is a paradox that so many environmentalists oppose nuclear power. Nuclear power produces no greenhouse gas and no pollution. It is safe (nobody has ever been killed in an American nuclear power accident). And we don’t need to import anything from the Middle East. We can solve the waste problem or at least not using nuclear power is a greater risk.

Beyond that, a revived nuclear industry can be a growth and export industry for us.

Share technologies. The big polluters of the future are China, India and other developing countries. We need to partner with them to make sure they don’t go the dirty route. President Bush’s proposed deal with India and the Asia Pacific Partnership are good steps. Kyoto addressed the problems of the past and was outdated the day it was negotiated and the sooner everybody figures that out the better.

Encourage and protect biotechnology & nanotech. Biotech may make it easier to process cellulose (wood chips, switchgrass etc) into methanol. It may produce other forms of energy. Biotechnology and nanotechnology are the future. Don’t let a misguided precaution strangle innovation in the cradle. If/when climate change does occur, biotechnology will allow the rapid development of new varieties of crops suited to the new conditions.

I didn’t mention research into alternatives, because I don’t have to. If we do the things above, price and the market will encourage the changes. If you insist on putting some government money into R&D, that’s fine. Just don’t expect much.

So let’s cut the foolishness and get to work. The solution is not easy, but it is simple.

BTW – some of you might recognize the cadence in my initial post. I think the situations are parallel.