Avoiding Collapse in Modern Civilization

THE NATURE OF THE NEW WORLD
October 2, 2007 -- By Lester R. Brown, Earth Policy Institute

Plan B 2.0 Book Byte:

We recently entered a new century, but we are also entering a new world, one where the collisions between our demands and the earth’s capacity to satisfy them are becoming daily events. It may be another crop-withering heat wave, another village abandoned because of invading sand dunes, or another aquifer pumped dry. If we do not act quickly to reverse the trends, these seemingly isolated events will occur more and more frequently, accumulating and combining to determine our future.

Resources that accumulated over eons of geological time are being consumed in a single human lifespan. We are crossing natural thresholds that we cannot see and violating deadlines that we do not recognize. These deadlines, determined by nature, are not politically negotiable.

Nature has many thresholds that we discover only when it is too late. In our fast-forward world, we learn that we have crossed them only after the fact, leaving little time to adjust. For example, when we exceed the sustainable catch of a fishery, the stocks begin to shrink. Once this threshold is crossed, we have a limited time in which to back off and lighten the catch. If we fail to meet this deadline, breeding populations shrink to where the fishery is no longer viable, and it collapses.

We know from earlier civilizations that the lead indicators of economic decline were environmental, not economic. The trees went first, then the soil, and finally the civilization itself. To archeologists, the sequence is all too familiar.

Our situation today is far more challenging because in addition to shrinking forests and eroding soils, we must deal with falling water tables, more frequent crop-withering heat waves, collapsing fisheries, expanding deserts, deteriorating rangelands, dying coral reefs, melting glaciers, rising seas, more-powerful storms, disappearing species, and, soon, shrinking oil supplies. Although these ecologically destructive trends have been evident for some time, and some have been reversed at the national level, not one has been reversed at the global level.

The bottom line is that the world is in what ecologists call an “overshoot-and-collapse” mode. Demand has exceeded the sustainable yield of natural systems at the local level countless times in the past. Now, for the first time, it is doing so at the global level. Forests are shrinking for the world as a whole. Fishery collapses are widespread. Grasslands are deteriorating on every continent. Water tables are falling in many countries. Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions exceed CO2 sequestration.

In 2002, a team of scientists led by Mathis Wackernagel, who now heads the Global Footprint Network, concluded that humanity’s collective demands first surpassed the earth’s regenerative capacity around 1980. Their study, published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, estimated that global demands in 1999 exceeded that capacity by 20 percent. The gap, growing by 1 percent or so a year, is now much wider. We are meeting current demands by consuming the earth’s natural assets, setting the stage for decline and collapse.

In a rather ingenious approach to calculating the human physical presence on the planet, Paul MacCready, the founder and Chairman of AeroVironment and designer of the first solar-powered aircraft, has calculated the weight of all vertebrates on the land and in the air. He notes that when agriculture began, humans, their livestock, and pets together accounted for less than 0.1 percent of the total. Today, he estimates, this group accounts for 98 percent of the earth’s total vertebrate biomass, leaving only 2 percent for the wild portion, the latter including all the deer, wildebeests, elephants, great cats, birds, small mammals, and so forth.

Ecologists are intimately familiar with the overshoot-and-collapse phenomenon. One of their favorite examples began in 1944, when the Coast Guard introduced 29 reindeer on remote St. Matthew Island in the Bering Sea to serve as the backup food source for the 19 men operating a station there. After World War II ended a year later, the base was closed and the men left the island. When U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist David Kline visited St. Matthew in 1957, he discovered a thriving population of 1,350 reindeer feeding on the thick mat of lichen that covered the 332-square-kilometer (128-square-mile) island. In the absence of any predators, the population was exploding. By 1963, it had reached 6,000. He returned to St. Matthew in 1966 and discovered an island strewn with reindeer skeletons and not much lichen. Only 42 of the reindeer survived: 41 females and 1 not entirely healthy male. There were no fawns. By 1980 or so, the remaining reindeer had died off.

Like the deer on St. Matthew Island, we too are overconsuming our natural resources. Overshoot leads sometimes to decline and sometimes to a complete collapse. It is not always clear which it will be. In the former, a remnant of the population or economic activity survives in a resource-depleted environment. For example, as the environmental resource base of Easter Island in the South Pacific deteriorated, its population declined from a peak of 20,000 several centuries ago to today’s population of fewer than 4,000. In contrast, the 500-year-old Norse settlement in Greenland collapsed during the 1400s, disappearing entirely in the face of environmental adversity.

Even as the global population is climbing and the economy’s environmental support systems are deteriorating, the world is pumping oil with reckless abandon. Leading geologists now think oil production may soon peak and turn downward. Although no one knows exactly when oil production will peak, supply is already lagging behind demand, driving prices upward.

Faced with a seemingly insatiable demand for automotive fuel, farmers will want to clear more and more of the remaining tropical forests to produce sugarcane, oil palms, and other high-yielding biofuel crops. Already, billions of dollars of private capital are moving into this effort. In effect, the rising price of oil is generating a massive new threat to the earth’s biological diversity.

As the demand for farm commodities climbs, it is shifting the focus of international trade concerns from the traditional goal of assured access to markets to one of assured access to supplies. Countries heavily dependent on imported grain for food are beginning to worry that buyers for fuel distilleries may outbid them for supplies. As oil security deteriorates, so, too, will food security.

As the role of oil recedes, the process of globalization will be reversed in fundamental ways. As the world turned to oil during the last century, the energy economy became increasingly globalized, with the world depending heavily on a handful of countries in the Middle East for energy supplies. Now as the world turns to wind, solar cells, and geothermal energy in this century, we are witnessing the localization of the world energy economy.

The world is facing the emergence of a geopolitics of scarcity, which is already highly visible in the efforts by China, India, and other developing countries to ensure their access to oil supplies. In the future, the issue will be who gets access to not only Middle Eastern oil but also Brazilian ethanol and North American grain. Pressures on land and water resources, already excessive in most of the world, will intensify further as the demand for biofuels climbs. This geopolitics of scarcity is an early manifestation of civilization in an overshoot-and-collapse mode, much like the one that emerged among the Mayan cities competing for food in that civilization’s waning years.

You do not need to be an ecologist to see that if recent environmental trends continue, the global economy eventually will come crashing down. It is not knowledge that we lack. At issue is whether national governments can stabilize population and restructure the economy before time runs out.

In addition, here is a synopsis of Jared Diamond's book entitled Collapse:

Diamond lists eight factors which have historically contributed to the collapse of past societies:

1. Deforestation and habitat destruction
2. Soil problems (erosion, salinization, and soil fertility losses)
3. Water management problems
4. Overhunting
5. Overfishing
6. Effects of introduced species on native species
7. Human population growth
8. Increased per-capita impact of people

Further he says four new factors may contribute to the weakening and collapse of present and future societies:

1. Human-caused climate change
2. Buildup of toxic chemicals in the environment
3. Energy shortages
4. Full human utilization of the Earth’s photosynthetic capacity

Biomimicry, Maximizing Wealth and Minimizing Materials Flow

Excerpt from:
Natural Capitalism
1999 -- By Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins

Materials efficiency is just as much a lesson of biological design as the making of spider-silk: biomimicry can inform not just the design of specific manufacturing processes but also the structure and function of the entire economy. As [Janine] Benyus notes, an ecologically redesigned economy will work less like an aggressive, early-colonizer sort of ecosystem and more like a mature one. Instead of a high-throughput, relatively wasteful and undiversified ecosystem, it will resemble what ecologists call a Type Three ecosystem, like a stable oak-hickory forest. Its economy sustains a high stock of diverse forms of biological wealth while consuming relatively little input. Instead, its myriad niches are all filled with organisms busily sopping up and remaking every crumb of detritus into new life. Ecosystem succession tends in this direction. So does the evolution of sustainable economies. Benyus reminds us, "We don't need to invent a sustainable world--that's been done already." It's all around us. We need only to learn from its success in sustaining the maximum of wealth with the minimum of materials flow.

2007 Farm Bill

After searching for information on the 2007 Farm Bill, I realized that I was still uncertain of all the proposals and debates. Please let me know if you have any suggestions for good articles on this topic.

In addition to the article below, I would recommend these links:
Purdue University (including overviews of Energy and Conservation proposals within the bill)
Reflections on the 2007 Farm Bill Debate (3rd article down) by Brent Sohngen of Ohio State
Panel Discussion on 2007 Farm Bill at UC Berkeley

The Year of the Farm Bill
Summer 2007 -- By Amy Kiser, Terrain (a free publication of ecology center)

The nation's Farm Bill has likely never before made it to the Top Ten—or Top Two Hundred—of your focus factors. An enormous and complex piece of legislation, the bill grinds through Congress every half-decade or so. Allocating a staggering amount of money, its effects are profound—driving land-use decisions, dietary choices, and even immigration. This year the Farm Bill may vault into your consciousness as more people than ever try to shape it to align with pressing national interests.

The Farm Bill's many elements are organized into ten "Titles." One of the most contentious is Title I, which primarily subsidizes corn, soy, wheat, rice, and cotton. The federal government pays farmers to produce as much of these crops as possible. The effects of this free-market-tweaking policy could fill a book, but the most obvious is that farmers are rewarded for growing subsidized crops as monocrops for export, animal feed, and biofuels, rather than growing non-subsidized diverse market crops that could provide food for their surrounding communities and urban centers. According to the Congressional Research Service, the top 10 percent of farm-subsidy recipients (mostly corporations and absentee landowners) take in more than two-thirds of those payments.

This represents a considerable government giveaway to already-profitable farms. Last time the Farm Bill was passed, a coalition of Senators argued to lower the cap on subsidies from a half million to a quarter of a million dollars, claiming that "millionaire farmers" were reaping all the benefits of the legislation, and that it favored the consolidation of farms by pushing the smallest farms out of business and undermining the economic development of small farming communities...

Conservation and the protection of water, air, wildlife habitat, and farmland is the concern of Title II, a category whose funding is chopped away every year by Bush's budget. One of II's provisions is the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), which rewards livestock and crop producers for making conservation and environmental improvements. Some of these improvements, however, you wouldn't wish on your best friend—and certainly not your next door neighbor's land.

Last year, the Union of Concerned Scientists submitted an excellent brief to the House Committee on Agriculture, analyzing perverse incentives in Title II and recommending remedies. The organization is particularly critical of the EQIP provisions that actually underwrite and promote the expansion of large concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), which are bona-fide disasters from the standpoint of waste treatment, profligate use of antibiotics, and E. coli contamination.

Title III of the Farm Bill contains programs designed to develop and expand commercial outlets for US commodities. Unfortunately, the cheapness of the commodities subsidized by Title I gives our producers an unfair advantage over our so-called "free trade" agreement partners. Mexican corn growers, for example, cannot compete with the subsidized US corn that is dumped into their country, driving Mexican farmers out of business and indirectly creating economic refugees who may immigrate to urban centers in the US and elsewhere.

Title VII funds agricultural research and extension programs, including grants for food biosecurity and developing biotechnology crops for poor countries. In the last Farm Bill, a tiny wedge of funds was earmarked to support research and extension activities for organic agriculture. Needless to say, in Title VII and others, the federal government gives large-scale industrial agriculture and its methods a heavily weighted economic advantage over organic and small-scale family farms.

The behemoth Farm Bill of 2002 was launched with little fanfare. In the immediate wake of 9/11, Congress had little appetite for heated or prolonged debate about domestic issues, and we were about to invade Afghanistan. In the years since, skyrocketing obesity and Type II diabetes rates, E. coli scares, and books and films like Fast Food Nation, SuperSize Me, and the Omnivore's Dilemma have alerted the public that all is not right with our food and farming systems. Finally, scrutiny is turning to the role the federal government plays in this mess.

The Farm Bill can be a powerful vehicle, capable of driving entrepreneurship and research, protecting species and restoring habitat, supporting public health, and strengthening rural communities and regional food systems. With enough public input, this year's bill might just fulfill its promise.

"He not busy being born is busy dying"

Via CEOs for Cities
Excerpts from:
The Living City
August 2007 -- By Jonah Lehrer, Seed Magazine

Cities act just like creatures. They obey the same metabolic laws that govern every organism. Which means that cities, just like elephants, get more economical with size.

It turns out that every city is simply a scaled version of the same city. A city can double its population without doubling its resource consumption.

President of Santa Fe Institute Geoffrey West told (the terrific science and culture magazine) Seed, "One of the basic principles of cities is that it's more efficient to bring people together. You need a little bit less of everything per person. It's the exact same way in biology."

While most of us imagine idyllic rural America as the epitome of sustainable living, conventional wisdom is exactly backward. "Cities are bastions of environmentalism," according to West and his collaborator Luis Bettencourt. "People who live in densely populated places lead environmentally friendly lives. They consume fewer resources per person and take up less space. And because efficiency scales with the size of the population, big cities are always more efficient than small cities."

Bottom line: The secret to creating a more environmentally sustainable society is making our big cities bigger. We need more metropolises.

The researchers also found that as cities got bigger, each individual got more productive. "A doubling of population led to a more than doubling of creative and economic output. A bigger population means more economic activity for each person, which encourages more people to move to the city, which results in more economic activity, and so on."

Every city runs out of resources. But that's where innovation comes into play. West told Seed, "The only way to avoid stagnation from a shortage of resources is to change something.... There's the invention of the steam engine, the car, the digital revolution... A city that isn't innovating is on the verge of collapse."

Turns out that innovation returns smaller dividends per person as the population expands. That's why the bigger the city, the faster it must innovate in order to continue its patterns of growth.

Although cities are the driving force behind accelerating innovation cycles, cities cannot take innovation for granted. West warns cities and corporations not to cut money for research and development, especially in tough times. It only reduces your ability to innovate when you need it most.

Innovation in cities is rooted in human interaction and lots of it. "Cities concentrate our social interactions and that's what leads to this explosion of knowledge creation and innovation." So West's team plans to study urban form to figure out how the social interactions of urban streets translate into new kinds of knowledge. And I can't wait to see the results.

Production and Consumption

The revolution of production and consumption
May 29, 2006 -- By Timo Mäkelä, Sitra

Growing numbers of decision-makers, scientists and economists believe that the world economy is heading towards a crisis because of diminishing natural resources and their consequently high prices. What is more, the race after energy and natural resources will lead to ever wider and more acute environmental problems. The climate will change while storms and draughts will become commoner and the environment impoverished and polluted. The Earth simply cannot long support the accelerating rate of production and consumption.

We do not need to look far for an example. At its current growth rate, the amount of grain and paper that China would need in 25 years’ time equals 70% of all grain production in the world and 200% of paper production. More oil would be consumed than the global oil production of today put together.

The UN and the World Bank issued recently an extensive report on the state of the world. It did not make for an amusing read.

Out of the 25 natural resources sustaining life on Earth, nearly 20 are endangered. If every single person in the world consumed like Europeans do, it would take more than two Earths to sustain it. The Americans consume even more, at a rate that according to the same calculation would require four Earths.

Some companies and investors are beginning to worry. A sustainable development classification will be gradually introduced and required of companies as evidence that their ethics are high and the environmental risks under control. In fact, we are moving towards a new industrial revolution, this time directed by the limits of our planet and environmental risks.

Part of this revolution is the rapid growth of global markets for new environmental technologies and services. According to estimates, the markets have already exceeded €500 billion, which is close to those of pharmaceutical and aviation industries. The annual growth rate is 5–10%. As much as 15% of new risk investments in the world are made in the production of renewable energy sources, environmentally friendly technologies and cleaner production. Here, Japanese and American companies are striving for market leadership.

The largest corporation in the world, the American General Electric, has recently revamped its strategy and launched its “Ecomagination” programme. The company will focus in the future on producing more sustainable and environmentally friendlier technologies.

Japan, on the other hand, is ahead of Europe in the efficient use of both energy and natural resources. Japanese products and technologies are taking markets by storm.

Europe is still the leader in environmental technology markets. The German recycling industry produces technologies and innovations for global markets, and Spain is one of the leading utilisers and producers of wind and solar energy. In Denmark, wind energy has surpassed meat products as an export.

But time is running out. That is why Europe is keen to seize this new opportunity. Ecological innovations and the more efficient use of natural resources and energy are an integral part of the EU’s growth and jobs strategy, the Lisbon strategy.

EU’s new environmental technology programme promises research and risk funding for companies investing in environmental technologies. The programme also aims to improve the pull and functionality of the markets. Public procurement, financial steering mechanisms and new product regulations and standards play a key role. Many of the EU Member States, including Finland, have issued their own national environmental technology programmes.

The new and more efficient technologies and methods that save natural resources and energy are a rational choice now and in the future. More efficient production decreases environmental damage but is also financially justified, as it simply saves money.

The industrial revolution geared towards sustainable development will mean efficient recycling of natural resources, extensive use of renewable energy sources, innovative production, materials and technologies, as well as new concepts of how we should move from one place to another. Nothing less will suffice, and as long there is a will, there are plenty of ways. New companies and innovations are in great demand.

The 11th Hour

Here is a trailer for the new documentary entitled The 11th Hour. It's world premiere was at the 2007 60th Annual Cannes Film Festival and will be released on August 17th 2007.

Sustainable Development: A 21st Century American Vision?

As I watched E.O. Wilson speak on BookTV today I was reminded once again of how finite the world's resources are for ourselves and future generations. If every human consumed at equal rates to Americans, it would require four Earths to sustain it. This somber statistic persuaded me to post this snippet I read during a recent BART ride.

Excerpts from:
Learning from History: U.S. Environmental Politics, Policies, and the Common Good
November 2006 -- By Richard N.L. Andrews, Environment

In 2005, the United Nations commissioned Millennium Ecosystem Assessment reported that over the past 50 years, rapid and extensive change in human ecosystems has resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on Earth. More land has been converted to cropland since 1945 than in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries combined, and water withdrawals from rivers and lakes have doubled since 1960. Since 1750, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, the major contributor to global warming, has increased, with 60 percent of that increase happening between 1959 and the present. Fifty percent of all the synthetic nitrogen fertilizer ever used has been applied since 1985; flows of biologically available nitrogen in terrestrial ecosystems have doubled since 1960 and may increase by two-thirds more by 2050. An estimated 10 to 30 percent of all mammal, bird, and amphibian species are currently threatened with extinction.

These changes have contributed to substantial gains in human well-being and economic development at growing costs to the essential services that ecosystems provide to human societies: providing food, water, fuel, wood, and fiber, supporting and regulating natural processes that are necessary for human life and health (nutrient cycling, soil formation, water purification, the climate system, and the control of disease organisms), and providing spiritual and recreational values. These damaging trends are substantially reducing the availability of these services for future use.

U.S. environmental policies have been prominent causes of these damaging trends and must be part of any solution. Throughout American history, the United States' dominant policies have been to promote the economic exploitation of natural resources, first nationally and now globally...

At times throughout this history, U.S. environmental policies also have included initiatives to manage and protect the natural environment...

The net effect of these policies has been to provide unprecedented levels of material comfort to many people and extraordinary affluence to a few and to reduce and even repair some environmental damage.

It would be a mistake to attribute the vast environmental changes in the United States entirely to public policies. Policies tend to lag behind economic and social trends, because government typically acts only in response to a buildup of pressure for collective action...

The enduring challenge for U.S. environmental policy is to build, maintain, and constantly renew public support for effective environmental governance, at home and worldwide. To meet that need, U.S. environmental policy today must recover an essential missing element: a broadly shared vision of the common environmental good. Such visions have emerged at several points in the past. Examples include the sanitation movement of the nineteenth century; the City Beautiful movement of the 1890s; the Progressive civic reform and conservation movements that followed it; the New Deal vision of combining ecological, social, and economic recovery; and the vision of a modern society in harmony with its natural environment that was articulated in NEPA and widely voiced by the American public on Earth Day in 1970...

The closest current approximation to such a vision is perhaps the idea of sustainable development, as articulated by the United Nations' World Commission for Environment and Development in 1987 and in the Agenda 21 document endorsed by the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. The commission envisioned sustainable development as a pattern of development that would meet the needs of human communities today without jeopardizing those of the future, and its vision specifically included economic development, ecological sustainability, and social equity as essential and interdependent elements...

Barring some new defining crisis or leadership commitment, the future of U.S. environmental policy will be shaped by the reemergence--or failure to emerge--of a new broad-based national coalition for an ecologically sustainable economy and inclusive and democratic society.

Banning Incandescent Light Bulbs: Economic Rationality

BAN THE BULB
May 9, 2007 -- By Lester R. Brown, Earth Policy Institute

ECO-ECONOMY UPDATE:
BAN THE BULB: Worldwide Shift from Incandescents to Compact Fluorescents Could Close 270 Coal-Fired Power Plants

On February 20, 2007, Australia announced it would phase out the sale of inefficient incandescent light bulbs by 2010, replacing them with highly efficient compact fluorescent bulbs that use one fourth as much electricity. If the rest of the world joins Australia in this simple step to sharply cut carbon emissions, the worldwide drop in electricity use would permit the closing of more than 270 coal-fired (500 megawatt) power plants. For the United States, this bulb switch would facilitate shutting down 80 coal-fired plants.

The good news is that the world may be approaching a social tipping point in this shift to efficient light bulbs. On April 25, 2007, just two months after Australia’s announcement, the Canadian government announced it would phase out sales of incandescents by 2012. Mounting concerns about climate change are driving the bulb replacement movement.

In mid-March, a U.S. coalition of environmental groups—including the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Alliance to Save Energy, the American Coalition for an Energy-Efficient Economy, and the Earth Day Network—along with Philips Lighting launched an initiative to shift to the more-efficient bulbs in all of the country’s estimated 4 billion sockets by 2016.

In California, the most populous state, Assemblyman Lloyd Levine is proposing that his state phase out the sale of incandescent light bulbs by 2012, four years ahead of the coalition’s deadline. Levine calls his proposed law the “How Many Legislators Does It Take to Change a Light Bulb Act.” On the East Coast, the New Jersey legislature is on the verge of requiring state government buildings to replace all incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents by 2010 as part of a broader statewide effort to promote the shift to more-efficient lighting. (See additional initiatives.)

The European Union, now numbering 27 countries, announced in March 2007 that it plans to cut carbon emissions by 20 percent by 2020. Part of this cut will be achieved by replacing incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents. In the United Kingdom, a nongovernmental group called Ban the Bulb has been vigorously pushing for a ban on incandescents since early 2006. Further east, Moscow is urging residents to switch to compact fluorescents. In New Zealand, Climate Change Minister, David Parker, has announced that his country may take similar measures to those adopted by Australia.

In April, Greenpeace urged the government of India to ban incandescents in order to cut carbon emissions. Since roughly 640 million of the 650 million bulbs sold each year in this fast-growing economy are incandescents, the potential for cutting carbon emissions, reducing air pollution, and saving consumers money is huge.

At the industry level, Philips, the world’s largest lighting manufacturer, has announced plans to discontinue marketing incandescents in Europe and the United States by 2016. More broadly, the European Lamp Companies Federation (the bulb manufacturers’ trade association) is supporting a rise in EU lighting efficiency standards that would lead to a phase-out of incandescent bulbs.

At the commercial level, Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer, announced a marketing campaign in November 2006 to boost its sales of compact fluorescents to 100 million by the end of 2007, more than doubling its annual sales. In the U.K., Currys, Britain’s largest electrical retail chain, has announced that it will discontinue selling incandescent light bulbs.

Switching light bulbs is an easy way of realizing large immediate gains in energy efficiency. A study for the U.S. government calculated that the gasoline equivalent of the energy saved over the lifetime of one 24 watt compact fluorescent bulb is sufficient to drive a Prius from New York to San Francisco. While a worldwide phase out of the inefficient incandescents would reduce world electricity use by more than 3 percent, shifting to more-efficient street lighting and replacing older fluorescent tubes with newer, more-efficient ones might double this reduction in power use.

Although highly efficient compact fluorescent bulbs have been around for a generation, they have until recently been on the fringe, used only by environmentally-minded consumers and typically sold in hardware stores, but not in supermarkets. One reason consumers lacked interest was that the new bulbs can cost five times as much as incandescents. Only the more knowledgeable consumers knew that a compact fluorescent bulb uses only one fourth as much electricity as an incandescent bulb, lasts 10 times as long, and easily saves $50 during its lifetime.

One disadvantage of compact fluorescents is that each bulb contains a small amount of mercury, roughly one fifth the amount in a watch battery. This mercury is only a small fraction of that released into the atmosphere by the additional coal burned to power an incandescent.

Mercury released by coal-fired power plants is the principal reason why 44 of the 50 states in the United States have issued mercury intake advisories limiting the consumption of fish from freshwater streams and lakes. Nonetheless, worn-out compact fluorescents, watch batteries, and other items that contain mercury still need to be recycled properly. Fortunately, this is possible, whereas the mercury spewing from coal smokestacks blankets the countryside, ending up in the water and food supply.

Shifting to the highly efficient bulbs sharply reduces monthly electricity bills and cuts carbon emissions, since each standard (13 watt) compact fluorescent over its lifetime reduces coal use by more than 210 pounds. Such a shift also substantially reduces air pollution, making it obviously attractive for fast-growing economies plagued with bad air like China and India.

In the United States, an ingenious website called 18seconds.org (the name derives from the time it takes to change a light bulb), provides a running tally of compact fluorescents sold nationwide since January 1, 2007. As of early May, it totaled nearly 37 million bulbs, yielding a reduction in carbon emissions comparable to taking 260,000 cars off the road. Sponsored by Yahoo! and Nielson, the site also provides data on how many dollars are being saved and how much less coal is burned. Data are available on the website for each state, providing a convenient way of monitoring local progress in replacing incandescents.

The challenge for each of us, of course, is to shift to compact fluorescents in our own homes if we have not already. But far more important, we need to contact our elected representatives at the city, provincial, or state level and at the national level to introduce legislation to raise lighting efficiency standards, in effect phasing out inefficient incandescent light bulbs. Few things can cut carbon emissions faster than this simple step.

In a world facing almost daily new evidence of global warming and its consequences, there is a need for a quick decisive victory in the effort to cut carbon emissions and stabilize climate. If we can engineer a rapid phase-out of incandescent light bulbs it would provide just such a victory, generating momentum for even greater advances in climate stabilization.

Related post: Economic Irrationality

Economic Irrationality

Irrational Incandescence
May 31, 2007 -- By The Economist via Energy Bulletin

Some ways of cutting carbon are cheaper than others. So, at different carbon prices, different sorts of methods of abatement become worthwhile. Vattenfall, a Swedish power utility, has tried to quantify which ones would be worth undertaking at what price (see chart 3).

The result is a testament to economic irrationality. The measures below the horizontal line have a negative abatement cost—in other words, by carrying them out, people and companies could both cut emissions and save money. At a macroeconomic level they would boost, rather than reduce, economic growth.Lighting, for instance, accounts for some 19% of the world's electricity use. A standard incandescent light bulb costs around €1, says Theo van Deursen, chief executive of Philips Lighting, and uses €15-worth of electricity a year. A low-energy one costs €5-6 and uses €3-worth. The payback on investing in a compact fluorescent bulb, therefore, is less than a year. Yet low-energy lighting makes up only 30% of Philips's sales. Mr van Deursen admits to being disappointed. Sales are rising faster in the developing world: there, people pay more attention to electricity bills than they do in the rich world.

Economists trying to explain this apparent irrationality suggest that the savings are too small and the effort involved in change too large. People find their electricity bills too boring to think about; within companies, those responsible for keeping bills down may not have the authority to spend the necessary capital. Another explanation is the agency problem: that the developer who would have to pay higher capital costs up front will not be forking out for the electricity bills. Besides, people buy houses not because they have good insulation but because they have pretty views.

Compared with pursuing greater energy efficiency, the abatement measures into which so much money is now being poured look rather expensive. Carbon capture and storage and wind and solar power, for instance, all have positive, and relatively high, abatement costs.

But the cheapest sources of abatement are difficult for policymakers to get at. Billions of different actors are involved. They cannot be targeted in the way that a few hundred factories can. What is more, a moderate carbon price is not likely to be effective, since people clearly do not care enough about cost.

One policy option is to decouple the utilities' revenues from the amount of electricity they sell. That gives them an incentive to increase the efficiency of power usage rather than to produce and sell extra power. California is already doing this, which is presumably why electricity prices there are among the highest in America, while consumption is relatively low.

Energy-efficiency standards, such as building regulations, are another option. Economists generally prefer to avoid rules that specify what companies can produce and how, because they require governments, rather than markets, to allocate resources, and markets tend to do a better job. But if, as in this case, a public as well as a private good is involved, and the market does not seem to be doing its job properly, there is an argument for governments giving it a nudge.

There are lots of energy-efficiency regulations in place already, and they are being tightened. Incandescent light bulbs are the top target at the moment. Both the European Union and Australia said earlier this year that they are planning to ban them. But the man in the vanguard of this green revolution is Fidel Castro, who started phasing them out two years ago.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Editorial Notes (Energy Bulletin) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Nice piece by The Economist (UK). Another good one from the Economist: The truth about recycling. Conservatives and libertarians in search of an intelligent way to approach environmentalism might have a good role model in the (conservative) Economist...

The Vattenfall website has a big section on climate change.

The chief executive of Vattenfall, Lars Josefsson, was recently profiled: Hero or villain? A carbon critic relies on coal (International Herald Tribune).

Europe seems to be further along than the USA in its sense of urgency about conservation. Der Spiegel had a long series about it: Why Conservation Is the World's Best Energy Source.

UPDATE (June 13)
Two posters at The Oil Drum found source documents for the striking graphic in the article. The graphics in those documents are more readable and more complete than the graphic in the above article.

Marco located a bigger and better version of the figure on page 7 or 8 of Vattenfall’s Global Climate Impact Abatement Map (25-page PDF).

Peaknik located another version of the graphic on page 10 or 11 of Global Mapping of Greenhouse Gas Abatement Opportunities (54-page PDF).

David Jeffery's response to Irrational Incandescence:
Cheap ways to reduce greenhouse emissions
June 28, 2007 -- By David Jeffery, Oikos

An interesting article in The Economist last month took a look at the cost of various options for reducing greenhouse emissions (summarised in the graph above).

Two things are particularly notable:

* There are a number of options that have a negative cost. In other words, not only would they reduce emissions, they’d also save us money. The biggest one is insulation and low-energy lighting is also up there.

* The solutions we hear a lot about – such as wind, solar and carbon capture – are among the most expensive options.

So why are we not voluntarily making decisions that would not only reduce emissions but also save us money?

The Economist identifies a couple of possible reasons, the most compelling to my mind is that the people who make the choices are not the people who pay the costs of those decisions. For example, property developers have to pay for insulation but they won’t get the benefits of lower electricity bills, so their incentive is to go cheap on insulation. If the property is to be rented out, it’s not even the buyer who pay those bills – it’s a tenant.

How to solve this? In theory, awareness of the issue should be enough: if tenants and buyers of new houses (or other buildings) are aware that good insulation can save them substantial amounts of money, they should demand it and be prepared to pay more for it – in the same way they’d be prepared to pay more for a good bathroom or kitchen.

So why isn't this happening? And seeing as it doesn’t seem to be happening, is there a role for government in mandating it in building standards or requiring developers and sellers to at least provide understandable information (eg, energy efficiency ratings)?

Is There A Green Business Bubble?

Excerpt from:
Is There A Green Business Bubble?
May 2, 2007 -- By Joel Makower, Two Steps Forward

Here, in no particular order, are ten reasons why I think the greening of business will be an enduring issue for years to come, regardless of the media's attention span:

1. The problems aren't getting any better. This is fairly obvious, especially if you've seen The Movie. The environmental movement, it's been said, is rapidly morphing into the climate movement, and there's a parallel shift taking place on the business side. The motivations may be different -- for activists, climate has become a rallying cry that gives disparate groups a singular focus; for companies, it's about the need to squeeze efficiency out of every operational nook and cranny while reducing risk and enhancing image -- but the upshot is the same: Until the climate problem is under control, it will be Job One, environmentally speaking, inside most companies. And as concern, regulation, and market-based mechanisms to address climate change ramp up, this will be a key business focus for a long, long time.

2. The political will is finally emerging. Again, climate is the reason. In the U.S. and elsewhere, political leaders are realizing that this isn't a topic that will go away; indeed, it is gaining steam and could even be a focus of the 2008 U.S. election. That could increase public scrutiny of how company lobbyists are pressing for favorable treatment, and some of this pressure could come from companies otherwise seen as "leaders" in corporate climate action, leading to activist charges of greenwashing or worse. If there's evidence of a parade of public concern over climate change, politicians will certainly want to get in front of it, and companies may end up finding that there's simply no longer enough lobbying money to buy their way out of the problem -- or, better still, not enough politicians willing to be bought.

3. Consumers are waking up. This remains to be seen, of course, but there are encouraging signs that the American public is finally ready to vote with their pocketbooks, choosing greener products, or products from companies perceived to be green leaders. One thing is certain: the pipeline of greener products from household brands is filling up. We'll see a new wave of green product introductions starting later this year, including some from companies that haven't previously been in the green marketplace. If their products catch on, that pipeline could become a gusher.

4. The supply chain is gaining power. Wal-Mart, which is pushing its 60,000 suppliers to perform all sorts of sustainability somersaults, is one big reason, but they're hardly alone. Corporate and institutional buyers of everything from carpets to car parts are looking upstream for solutions, asking suppliers to, variously, reduce packaging, eliminate hazardous materials, use more organic or biobased ingredients, and take other measures to "green up" their products and operations. That's moving some markets toward cleaner production methods far faster than any mass consumer movement could.

5. The environment has become a fiduciary issue. The past twelve months has seen an almost weekly stream of stories and reports from large financial institutions -- banks, insurance companies, and investment houses -- talking about the risks of climate change, toxics, and other environmental issues to shareholders. And shareholders, especially pension funds and large faith-based institutional investors, are starting to hammer hard on companies to acknowledge, reduce, and report on their risk profiles in these areas.

6. The bar keeps moving. One theme of my presentations lately is the question, "How good is good enough?" Simply put, it bemoans the lack of standards or general agreement on what constitutes a "green business." That lack of standards frustrates many companies' efforts to be seen as "good guys"; instead, they never seem to be good enough. But there may be an upside to the lack of definitions: With no standards, the bar is free to drift continually higher. And that seems to be what is happening. For example, as more companies claim some form of carbon neutrality, the value of carbon neutral as a marketing claim becomes increasingly devalued. And as the bar rises, laggard companies, even if fully compliant on the regulatory front, are finding themselves further and further behind, from a reputational perspective.

7. Companies are moving beyond "sustainability." Given the rising bar, it would follow that companies are continually innovating, and that the cutting edge moves increasingly farther out. Within the next two years, it would not surprise me if being a "sustainable" company was no longer seen as a leadership goal. The real leaders will have focused their sights on being restorative -- for example, not being merely carbon neutral, but being carbon negative, taking more carbon out of the atmosphere than they put in.

8. More companies are telling their stories. It's no longer good enough for companies to be quiet and humble on things green. That doesn't necessarily mean they should be needlessly boastful, especially if it's not in their nature to do so. But doing the right thing and keeping it quiet is less of an option these days. Customers -- both consumers and business customers -- want green heroes, companies they feel are setting the pace. Companies holding on to the belief that walking more than talking can insulate them from criticism will find that the risks of being overly exposed may be outweighed by the risks of being seen as a laggard. Expect green advertising and marketing campaigns to mushroom in the coming months.

9. Clean technology is changing the game. The clean-tech boom (which, indeed, may be a bubble unto itself) is making it easier and cheaper for companies to transform their products, processes, and performance to use more renewable energy, biobased or lightweight materials, and fewer toxic ingredients. Given that some of the most promising, game-changing technologies are only just now reaching their intended markets, we are on the cusp of a new generation of clean-tech products and services. As they roll out, whether from startups or mega-conglomerates, they'll enable a wide range of new green products, services, and business opportunities.

10. There's money to be made. That's the real bottom line: The environment is now being seen increasingly as a potential value-add, not merely a cost to be minimized. Hence, green leaders are emerging throughout companies, not just in the environmental departments, as forward-thinking entrepreneurs (and intrapreneurs) identify and exploit new ways to leverage green thinking into new products and markets. As the number of success stories moves beyond hybrid automobiles and organic foods to include other categories products and services, green will be seen as a more "normal" part of the marketplace.

A response can be found at Clean Tech For A Better World

The Road To Clean Energy Starts Here, by Jeffrey D. Sachs

The Road to Clean Energy Starts Here
May 2007 Issue -- By Jeffrey D. Sachs, Scientific American

Realizing crucial energy technologies will take more than just research and development

The key to solving the climate change crisis is technology. To accommodate the economic aspirations of the more than five billion people in the developing countries, the size of the world economy should increase by a factor of four to six by 2050; at the same time, global emissions of greenhouse gases will have to remain steady or decline to prevent dangerous changes to the climate. After 2050, emissions will have to drop further, nearly to zero, for greenhouse gas concentrations to stabilize.

The overarching challenge is to make that transition at minimum cost and without economic disruption. Energy-saving technologies will play a pivotal role. Buildings can save energy at low capital cost, and often net overall savings, through improved insulation, efficient illumination and the use of heat pumps rather than home furnaces. Automobiles could, over time, reach 100 miles per gallon by a shift to plug-in hybrids, better batteries, lighter frames and other strategies. Of course, technologies such as heat pumps and plug-in hybrids partly reduce direct emissions by shifting from on-site combustion to electricity, so that low-emission power plants become paramount.

Low-emission electricity generation will be achieved in part through niche sources such as wind and biofuels. Larger-scale solutions will come from nuclear and solar power. Yet clean coal will be essential. New combustion techniques, combined with carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), offer the prospect of low- or zero-emission coal-fired thermal plants. The incremental costs of ccs may well be as low as one to three cents per kilowatt-hour.

All these technologies are achievable. Some will impose real added costs; others will pay for themselves as lower energy bills offset higher capital outlays. Some estimates suggest that, as of 2050, the world will have to negate around 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year at a cost of roughly $25 per ton, or $750 billion annually. But with a world economy by then of perhaps $200 trillion, the cost would be well under 1 percent of world income and perhaps under 0.5 percent, a true bargain compared with the costs of inaction.

Achieving these technological solutions on a large scale, however, will require an aggressive global technology policy. First, there will have to be market incentives to avoid emissions, in the form of either tradable permits or levies. A reasonable levy might be $25 per ton of emitted carbon dioxide, introduced gradually over the next 10 to 20 years. Second, there will have to be ample government support for rapid technological change. Patents can help spur private market research and development (R&D), but public funding is required for basic science as well as for the public demonstration and the global diffusion of new technologies. In sum, we need a strategy sometimes described as RDD&D.

In the past two years, the Earth Institute at Columbia University has hosted a Global Roundtable on Climate Change, involving leading corporations from around the world. These companies, including many of the largest power producers, are ready to reduce carbon emissions. They know that CCS must be a high priority. A new Global Roundtable Task Force on CCS seeks to promote the required RDD&D. Fortunately, the European Union has already pledged to build at least a dozen CCS demonstration projects in Europe by 2015. But we will also need such centers in the U.S., China, India, Australia, Indonesia and other highly significant coal-power producers. In the low-income countries, this will require a few billion dollars; that is where the RDD&D investments of the high-income countries will be essential. The CCS Task Force aims to break ground on one or more demonstration plants by 2010 in every major coal region. By 2015 this crucial technology can be proved and added to the bid to avert climate disaster. This model of RDD&D won't stop there. Harnessing technology to achieve sustainable energy will involve much of the global economy for decades.

Costs Shrinking For Solar Thermal

Shrinking the costs for solar power
May 11, 2007 -- By Michael Kanellos, CNET News via Peak Energy

One of the big problems with solar power has been that it costs more than electricity generated by conventional means. But some experts think that, under certain circumstances, the premium for solar power can be erased, without subsidies or dramatic technical breakthroughs. A sufficiently large solar thermal power plant (also called concentrated solar power, or CSP) could potentially generate electricity at about the same cost as electricity from a conventional gas-burning power plant, experts say.

It's not easy. The plant would also have to come with a large energy storage system, be built next to others and be located close to users. To date, no one has completed a facility that comports to all of these parameters, said Fred Morse, an energy analyst who has studied the issue. "Solar thermal is available at much more attractive prices than solar photovoltaic. The land mass isn't huge, but it does take a while to build these," said Stephan Dolezalek, a managing partner and co-head of the clean tech practice at venture firm Vantage Point Venture Partners, an investor in Bright Source Energy, which builds solar thermal plants and components.

Both Dolezalek and Jiang Lin, who heads up the China Energy Group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said that solar thermal is likely the most promising technology in the entire alternative-energy field right now. When asked when solar thermal can hit parity, Lin responded "now." Conventionally generated electricity ranges between 5 and 18 cents per kilowatt hour (the amount of money to get a kilowatt of power for an hour) but in most places it's below 10 cents, according to the Energy Information Agency. Solar thermal costs around 15 to 17 cents a kilowatt hour, according to statistics from Schott, a German company that makes solar thermal equipment.

A solar thermal plant would need a facility to store the heat harvested in the day by its sunlight-concentrating mirrors so that the heat could be used to generate electricity at night. "You need the kind of system that can run in the evening," Morse said. At some sites, such as Nevada Solar One, excess heat is stored in molten salt and released at night to run the turbine. The plant, ideally, should be capable of generating about 300 megawatts of electricity. Those plants can churn out electricity at about 13 cents a kilowatt.

That's still a relatively high price, so utilities would need to group two, three or more 300-megawatt plants together to share operational resources, Morse said. "They could share control rooms or spare parts," he said. That would knock the price closer to 11 cents a kilowatt hour. "Under 10 cents is sort of the magic line," he said.

Dolezalek puts it another way: the plants need to be around 500 megawatts in size. Most solar thermal plants right now aren't that big. The 22-year-old thermal plant in California's Mojave Desert is 354 megawatts. Utility company Southern California Edison is erecting a 500-megawatt plant scheduled to open in 2009. By 2014, solar thermal plants located in the Southwest could crank out nearly 3 gigawatts of power, estimated Travis Bradford of the Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development, a nonprofit based in Cambridge, Mass. That's enough for about 1 million homes.

Costs can then be reduced further by building the plants close to consumers. It costs about $1.5 million per mile for transmission lines, according to statistics from Acciona Solar Power, which owns solar thermal plants. Solar thermal plants work best in arid deserts that get little rainfall. Since some of the fastest-growing cities in the world are located in sun belts, that's less of a problem than it used to be. ...

Even if all of these factors could be completely optimized, solar thermal power plants would likely not produce electricity at a level that would compete with coal plants. Coal plants, however, will likely be hit with carbon taxes in the near future, which will make solar thermal more competitive. Still, at less than 10 cents a kilowatt, solar thermal would be competitive with electricity from gas-powered plants.

Utilities will also likely work hard to lower the costs of solar thermal in the coming decades, Morse added. Utilities are under mandates to increase their renewable energy sources. Citizen groups often complain about wind turbines and the wind doesn't blow at a constant, predictable rate. Several companies are intent on tapping heat from under the surface of the earth to generate power. Geothermal power, however, works best only in certain locations.

"There is an enough flat, unproductive land in the U.S. to power the U.S.," Morse said. "We just don't have the wires to get there. Eisenhower built the national highway system. Some president will build the national grid."

Tackling Climate Change: A bargain

Tackling Climate Change: A bargain
May 4, 2007 -- The Economist (Subscription)

About 0.1% of world GDP would do it

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), set up under the auspices of the United Nations to establish a consensus on global warming and what to do about it, has now completed its fourth assessment report. The first two parts, published earlier this year, about the science and the impacts of climate change, were designed to spread gloom. Change was happening, they said; it was mankind’s fault; and it was going to be damaging. The third part, released on Friday May 4th in Bangkok, is about mitigating climate change, and is designed to spread hope. Just as mankind caused the problem, it says, so mankind can stop it—and at a reasonable cost.

In some areas of economic activity, emissions could be cut with no cost to consumers or taxpayers. The heating and lighting systems of many buildings, for instance, are startlingly inefficient. Improving this would cut both emissions and bills. Economists are troubled by this, for it implies that people and businesses are not maximising their economic self-interest; yet the low take-up of energy-efficient lightbulbs suggests this is indeed the case. Governments are therefore beginning to tighten regulations on the energy efficiency of buildings, and to talk about, for instance, banning incandescent lightbulbs. The IPCC reckons that such measures could cut 30% of projected emissions from this sector at no extra cost.

Transport is trickier, because car ownership is rocketing and the demand for fuel is fairly inelastic. If people want to drive they are going to drive, unless governments jack up petrol prices to levels that are politically unacceptable. So for emissions to fall in the transport sector, new technologies, such as more efficient biofuels or electric cars, are needed. Given a big R&D effort in this sector, there is a good chance that those will be forthcoming.

Similarly, in power generation, there is scope for cutting emissions. The cost of renewable energy, such as wind and solar, has been falling. Nuclear generating technology has improved. Carbon capture and storage, which involves taking the carbon dioxide (or C02) out of power station flue gases and injecting it back into the earth, is also a possibility, though that technology is at an early stage.

Technological solutions to climate change, then, are available. But most of those on offer in the power and transport sectors cost more than fossil-fuel generated energy. Fortunately, economics comes to the rescue. Burning fossil fuels imposes a cost to society that is not reflected in their price. Economics says that it should be; and if it were, the price of using fossil fuels would rise in relation to the price of using renewable energy.

Unfortunately, the social cost of carbon is hard to calculate. Plenty of economists have tried, with unconvincing results. It requires estimating the impact of climate change on economic growth, which involves too many unknowns. So the IPCC report starts from the other end. Rather than trying to work out the social cost of carbon, and letting it feed through to reduce greenhouse-gas concentrations in the atmosphere, it starts from a manageable greenhouse-gas concentration and works backwards to a carbon price. Conveniently, it says the “social cost of carbon is at least comparable to, and possibly higher than carbon prices for even the most stringent scenarios assessed by the IPCC”.

And what is the right price? The report says that to stabilise greenhouse-gas concentrations at 550 parts per million (a level most scientists think safeish) would require a price of $20-50 per tonne of carbon by 2020-30. That is along the lines of the carbon price established the European Emissions-Trading Scheme, which varied between $6 and $40 in 2005-06. It has not bankrupted the European economy so far. The IPCC’s economic models reckon, on average, that if the world adopted such a price the global economy would be 1.3% smaller than it otherwise would have been by 2050; or, put another way, global economic growth would be 0.1% a year lower than it otherwise would have been.

The world would barely notice such figures; so one might think that climate change can be easily sorted. The problem, of course, is that the numbers work only if they are applied globally. If a few countries—even a few big countries—adopt a carbon price, it will make little difference. All the world’s big emitters need to do it. Which brings the world straight back to the problem that sank Kyoto. No country alone can make a difference, and it is in every country’s interest to ensure that everybody else bears the burden. As the IPCC report convincingly argues, the technology and the economics of this problem are easily soluble. It is the politics that is so difficult.

Designing Cities For People

Designing Cities For People
May 1, 2007 -- By Lester R. Brown, Earth Policy Institute

As I was being driven through Tel Aviv from my hotel to a conference center a few years ago, I could not help but note the overwhelming presence of cars and parking lots. Tel Aviv, expanding from a small settlement a half-century ago to a city of some 3 million today, evolved during the automobile era. It occurred to me that the ratio of parks to parking lots may be the best single indicator of the livability of a city--whether a city is designed for people or for cars.

The world's cities are in trouble. In Mexico City, Tehran, Bangkok, Shanghai, and hundreds of other cities, the quality of daily life is deteriorating. Breathing the air in some cities is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes per day. In the United States, the number of hours commuters spend sitting in traffic going nowhere climbs higher each year.

In response to these conditions, we are seeing the emergence of a new urbanism. One of the most remarkable modern urban transformations has occurred in Bogotá, Colombia, where Enrique Peñalosa served as Mayor for three years, beginning in 1998. When he took office he did not ask how life could be improved for the 30 percent who owned cars; he wanted to know what could be done for the 70 percent--the majority--who did not own cars.

Peñalosa realized that a city that is a pleasant environment for children and the elderly would work for everyone. In just a few years, he transformed the quality of urban life with his vision of a city designed for people. Under his leadership, the city banned the parking of cars on sidewalks, created or renovated 1,200 parks, introduced a highly successful bus-based rapid transit system, built hundreds of kilometers of bicycle paths and pedestrian streets, reduced rush hour traffic by 40 percent, planted 100,000 trees, and involved local citizens directly in the improvement of their neighborhoods. In doing this, he created a sense of civic pride among the city's 8 million residents, making the streets of Bogotá in strife-torn Colombia safer than those in Washington, D.C.

Enrique Peñalosa observes that "high quality public pedestrian space in general and parks in particular are evidence of a true democracy at work." He further observes: "Parks and public space are also important to a democratic society because they are the only places where people meet as equals. In a city, parks are as essential to the physical and emotional health of a city as the water supply." He notes this is not obvious from most city budgets, where parks are deemed a luxury. By contrast, roads, the public space for cars, receive infinitely more resources and less budget cuts than parks, the public space for children. Why, he asks, are the public spaces for cars deemed more important than the public spaces for children?

Now government planners everywhere are experimenting, seeking ways to design cities for people not cars. Cars promise mobility, and they provide it in a largely rural setting. But in an urbanizing world there is an inherent conflict between the automobile and the city. After a point, as their numbers multiply, automobiles provide not mobility but immobility. Congestion also takes a direct economic toll in rising costs in time and gasoline. And urban air pollution, often from automobiles, claims millions of lives.

Another cost of cities that are devoted to cars is a psychological one, a deprivation of contact with the natural world--an "asphalt complex." There is a growing body of evidence that there is an innate human need for contact with nature. Both ecologists and psychologists have been aware of this for some time. Ecologists, led by Harvard University biologist E.O. Wilson, have formulated the "biophilia hypothesis," which argues that those who are deprived of contact with nature suffer psychologically and that this deprivation leads to a measurable decline in well-being.

Throughout the modern era, budget allocations for transportation in most countries--and in the United States, in particular--have been heavily biased toward the construction and maintenance of highways and streets. Creating more livable cities and the mobility that people desire depends on reallocating budgets to emphasize the development of rail- or bus-based public transport and bicycle support facilities.

The exciting news is that there are signs of change, daily indications of an interest in redesigning cities for people, not for cars. One encouraging trend comes from the United States. Public transit ridership nationwide rising by 2.1 percent a year since 1996 indicates that people are gradually abandoning their cars for buses, subways, and light rail. Rising gasoline prices are encouraging still more commuters to abandon their cars and take the bus or subway or get on a bicycle.

When Beijing decided to promote an automobile-centered transportation system, a group of eminent scientists in China protested. They pointed out that the country does not have enough land to accommodate the automobile and to feed its people. What is true for China is also true for India and dozens of other densely populated developing countries.
Some cities are far better at planning their growth than others. They plan transport systems that provide mobility, clean air, and exercise--a sharp contrast to cities that offer congestion, unhealthy air, and little opportunity for exercise. When 95 percent of a city's workers depend on the automobile for commuting, as in Atlanta, Georgia, the city is in trouble.

By contrast, in Amsterdam only 40 percent of workers commute by car; 35 percent bike or walk, while 25 percent use public transit. Copenhagen's commuting patterns are almost identical to Amsterdam's. In Paris, just under half of commuters rely on cars. Even though these European cities are older, with narrow streets, they have far less congestion than Atlanta.

Not surprisingly, car-dependent cities have more congestion and less mobility than those that offer a wider range of commuting options. The very vehicle whose great promise was personal mobility is in fact virtually immobilizing entire urban populations, making it difficult for rich and poor alike to move about.

Existing long-term transportation strategies in many developing countries assume that everyone will one day be able to own a car. Unfortunately, given the constraints of land available for cars, not to mention those imposed by oil reserves, this is simply not realistic. These countries will provide more mobility if they support public transportation and the bicycle.

Green shoots of growth

Green shoots of growth (Subscription)
December 7, 2006 -- Editorial, Nature

Energy from biomass is an idea whose time has returned.

Until the twentieth century, biomass was humanity's principal source of energy, heating our stoves and feeding our draught animals. Even today, roughly 10% of all our energy comes from biomass — far more than from any other renewable energy source or, for that matter, from nuclear fission.

But this use of biomass for energy supply is accompanied by many challenges. For one thing, it is often not all that renewable — the biomass sources that provide firewood to the world's poor, for example, are not being replanted. For another, it is very inefficient: gathering firewood takes a long time. The history of the past couple of centuries has been in large part one of people moving away from biomass as soon as they can afford to do so.

Three recent developments have spurred renewed interest in biomass, however. One is the need to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The requirement for other external energy inputs during biomass processing means that it often involves some net carbon emissions — but the amount of carbon dioxide given off by burning biomass is the same as that taken from the atmosphere by photosynthesis in the first place. If biomass projects could sequester carbon, either by enriching the soil beneath plantations or by storing any carbon dioxide produced in combustion, they could even be carbon negative — a unique selling point for this energy source.

The other two developments are the upward movement in the prices of oil and natural gas, and the related revival of concerns about the security of their supply. Most nations are seeking home-based energy sources that do not rely on political stability in the Middle East or Russia.

It seems unlikely that these factors will provide sufficient impetus to propel biomass energy to the very front rank of possible alternatives to fossil fuels. But biomass clearly has a potential role as part of a portfolio of energy sources for the twenty-first century.

If that role is to be fulfilled, two things need to happen. Nations have to build regulatory mechanisms that recognize the carbon benefits of technologies such as biomass — through emissions pricing, a carbon tax or a combination of the two. And intensive research needs to be conducted into both the efficient production of biomass and its conversion into useable energy.

One focal point for such research should be finding ways to grow biomass quickly and in an easily processed form while minimizing external inputs, such as fertilizer and pesticides. Another is the systems engineering of farms and ecosystems, finding ways to fit biomass projects into and around present land use and possible changes in farming practice.

A major attraction of biomass is that it is likely to benefit poorer countries, which tend to be in tropical regions where plants grow quickly. There is plenty of scope for more collaboration between developing countries on biomass research and development, both to meet local needs and for export.

But this requires consideration of the local and global ecological impact of biomass expansion. Vast tropical monocultures eating away at primary forests — as exemplified by the production of palm oil in Indonesia — will benefit no one, except those who profit from selling the fuel. In effect, such approaches take green subsidies from richer countries, and use them to despoil the tropics.

Similar problems afflict existing biomass programmes in the United States, where ethanol refineries often burn fossil fuel and are reliant on subsidized corn monoculture. More innovative approaches would include firing the refineries with agricultural waste, and feeding them with plants of many different species. Biomass energy should be developed energetically, but within the context of appropriate environmental policies, and using approaches that are both sustainable and cost-effective.

Do We Tax Energy Enough?

Here is the link with audio and video of this great discussion as well as related papers by Hassett and Parry. I would recommend signing up for a free subscription to Resources by Resources for the Future as well as reading Greg Mankiw's blog. Below is an introduction to the discussion.

Do We Tax Energy Enough?
March 29, 2007 -- American Enterprise Institute For Public Policy Research

What are the advantages and disadvantages of carbon and gasoline taxes? Ian W. H. Parry of Resources for the Future and AEI’s Kenneth P. Green, Kevin A. Hassett, and N. Gregory Mankiw will examine the pros and cons of carbon and gasoline taxes, discuss possible levels at which they could be set, and compare taxation to regulation as an alternative way to address environmental concerns.

Absent-minded killers

Absent-minded killers
March 22, 2007 -- By Jeffrey Sachs, Project Syndicate

We kill other species not because we must but because we are too negligent to do otherwise.

As a species, human beings have a major self-control problem. We humans are now so aggressively fishing, hunting, logging, and growing crops in all parts of the world that we are literally chasing other species off the planet. Our intense desire to take all that we can from nature leaves precious little for other forms of life.

In 1992, when the world's governments first promised to address man-made global warming, they also vowed to head off the human-induced extinction of other species. The Convention on Biological Diversity, agreed at the Rio Earth Summit, established that "biological diversity is a common concern of humanity." The signatories agreed to conserve biological diversity, by saving species and their habitats, and to use biological resources (e.g. forests) in a sustainable manner. In 2002, the treaty's signatories went further, committing to "a significant reduction in the current rate of biodiversity loss" by 2010.

Unfortunately, like so many other international agreements, the Convention on Biological Diversity remains essentially unknown, un-championed, and unfulfilled. That neglect is a human tragedy. For a very low cash outlay - and perhaps none at all on balance - we could conserve nature and thus protect the basis of our own lives and livelihoods. We kill other species not because we must, but because we are too negligent to do otherwise.

Consider a couple of notorious examples. Some rich countries, such as Spain, Portugal, Australia, and New Zealand, have fishing fleets that engage in so-called "bottom trawling". Bottom trawlers drag heavy nets over the ocean bottom, destroying magnificent, unexplored, and endangered marine species in the process. Complex and unique ecologies, most notably underground volcanoes known as seamounts, are ripped to shreds, because bottom trawling is the "low cost" way to catch a few deep sea fish species. One of these species, orange roughy, has been caught commercially for only around a quarter-century, but already is being fished to the point of collapse.

Likewise, in many parts of the world, tropical rainforest is being cleared for pastureland and food crops. The result is massive loss of habitat and destruction of species, yielding a tiny economic benefit at a huge social cost. After cutting down a swath of rainforest, soils are often quickly leached of their nutrients so that they cannot sustain crops or nutritious grasses for livestock. As a result, the new pastureland or farmland is soon abandoned, with no prospect for regeneration of the original forest and its unique ecosystems.

Because these activities' costs are so high and their benefits so low, stopping them would be easy. Bottom trawling should simply be outlawed; it would be simple and inexpensive to compensate the fishing industry during a transition to other activities. Forest clearing, on the other hand, is probably best stopped by economic incentives, perhaps combined with regulatory limits. Simply restricting the practice of land clearing probably would not work, since farm families and communities would face a strong temptation to evade legal limits. On the other hand, financial incentives would probably succeed, because cutting down forest to create pastureland is not profitable enough to induce farmers to forego payments for protecting the land.

Many rainforest countries have united in recent years to suggest the establishment of a rainforest conservation fund by the rich countries, to pay impoverished small farmers a small amount of money to preserve the forest. A well-designed fund would slow or stop deforestation, preserve biodiversity, and reduce emissions of carbon dioxide the burning of cleared forests. At the same time, small farmers would receive a steady flow of income, which they could use for micro-investments to improve their household's wealth, education, and health.

Aside from banning bottom trawling and establishing a global fund for avoided deforestation, we should designate a global network of protected marine areas, in which fishing, boating, polluting, dredging, drilling, and other damaging activities would be prohibited. Such areas not only permit the regeneration of species, but also provide ecological benefits that spill over to neighbouring unprotected areas.

We also need a regular scientific process to present the world with the evidence on species abundance and extinction, just as we now have such a process for climate change. Politicians don't listen very well to individual scientists, but they are forced to listen when hundreds of scientists speak with a united voice.

Finally, the world should negotiate a new framework no later than 2010 to slow human-induced climate change. There can be little doubt that climate change poses one of the greatest risks to species' viability. As the planet warms, and rain and storm patterns change dramatically, many species will find themselves in climate zones that no longer support their survival. Some can migrate, but others (such as polar bears) are likely to be driven to extinction unless we take decisive action to head off climate change.

These measures are achievable by 2010. They are affordable, and in each case would ultimately deliver large net benefits. Most importantly, they would allow us to follow through on a global promise. It is too painful to believe that humanity would destroy millions of other species - and jeopardise our own future - in a fit of absent-mindedness.

Corn Can't Solve Our Problem

Corn Can't Solve Our Problem
March 25, 2007 -- By David Tilman and Jason Hill, The Washington Post

The world has come full circle. A century ago our first transportation biofuels -- the hay and oats fed to our horses -- were replaced by gasoline. Today, ethanol from corn and biodiesel from soybeans have begun edging out gasoline and diesel.

This has been hailed as an overwhelmingly positive development that will help us reduce the threat of climate change and ease our dependence on foreign oil. In political circles, ethanol is the flavor of the day, and presidential candidates have been cycling through Iowa extolling its benefits. Lost in the ethanol-induced euphoria, however, is the fact that three of our most fundamental needs -- food, energy, and a livable and sustainable environment -- are now in direct conflict. Moreover, our recent analyses of the full costs and benefits of various biofuels, performed at the University of Minnesota, present a markedly different and more nuanced picture than has been heard on the campaign trail.

Some biofuels, if properly produced, do have the potential to provide climate-friendly energy, but where and how can we grow them? Our most fertile lands are already dedicated to food production. As demand for both food and energy increases, competition for fertile lands could raise food prices enough to drive the poorer third of the globe into malnourishment. The destruction of rainforests and other ecosystems to make new farmland would threaten the continued existence of countless animal and plant species and would increase the amount of climate-changing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Finding and implementing solutions to the food, fuel and environment conflict is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity. But solutions will be neither adopted nor sought until we understand the interlinked problems we face.

Fossil fuel use has pushed atmospheric carbon dioxide higher than at any time during the past half-million years. The global population has increased threefold in the past century and will increase by half again, to 9 billion people, by 2050. Global food and fossil energy consumption are on trajectories to double by 2050.

Biofuels, such as ethanol made from corn, have the potential to provide us with cleaner energy. But because of how corn ethanol currently is made, only about 20 percent of each gallon is "new" energy. That is because it takes a lot of "old" fossil energy to make it: diesel to run tractors, natural gas to make fertilizer and, of course, fuel to run the refineries that convert corn to ethanol.

If every one of the 70 million acres on which corn was grown in 2006 was used for ethanol, the amount produced would displace only 12 percent of the U.S. gasoline market. Moreover, the "new" (non-fossil) energy gained would be very small -- just 2.4 percent of the market. Car tune-ups and proper tire air pressure would save more energy.

There is another problem with relying on a food-based biofuel, such as corn ethanol, as the poor of Mexico can attest. In recent months, soaring corn prices, sparked by demand from ethanol plants, have doubled the price of tortillas, a staple food. Tens of thousands of Mexico City's poor recently protested this "ethanol tax" in the streets.

In the United States, the protests have also begun -- in Congress. Representatives of the dairy, poultry and livestock industries, which rely on corn as a principal animal feed, are seeking an end to subsidies for corn ethanol in the hope of stabilizing corn prices. (It takes about three pounds of corn to produce a pound of chicken, and seven or eight pounds to grow a pound of beef.) Profit margins are being squeezed, and meat prices are rising.

U.S. soybeans, which are used to make biodiesel, may be about to follow corn's trajectory, escalating the food vs. fuel conflict. The National Biodiesel Board recently reported that 77 biodiesel production plants are under construction and that eight established plants are expanding capacity.

In terms of environmental impact, all biofuels are not created equal. Ethanol is the same chemical product no matter what its source. But ethanol made from prairie grasses, from corn grown in Illinois and from sugar cane grown on newly cleared land in Brazil have radically different impacts on greenhouse gases.

Corn, like all plants, is a natural part of the global carbon cycle. The growing crop absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, so burning corn ethanol does not directly create any additional carbon. But that is only part of the story. All of the fossil fuels used to grow corn and change it into ethanol release new carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The net effect is that ethanol from corn grown in the Corn Belt does increase atmospheric greenhouse gases, and this increase is only about 15 percent less than the increase caused by an equivalent amount of gasoline. Soybean biodiesel does better, causing a greenhouse gas increase that is about 40 percent less than that from petroleum diesel.

In Brazil, ethanol made from sugar cane produces about twice as much ethanol per acre as corn. Brazilian ethanol refineries get much of their power from burning cane residue, in effect recycling carbon from the atmosphere. The environmental benefit is large. Sugar-cane ethanol grown on established soils releases 80 percent less greenhouse gases than gasoline.

But that isn't the case for sugar-cane ethanol or soybean biodiesel from Brazil's newly cleared lands, including tropical forests and savannas. Clearing land releases immense amounts of greenhouse gases into the air, because much of the material in the plants and soil is broken down into carbon dioxide.

Plants and soil contain three times more carbon than the atmosphere. The trees and soil of an acre of rainforest -- which, once cleared, is suitable for growing soybeans -- contain about 120 tons of organic carbon. An acre of tropical woodland or savanna, suitable for sugar cane, contains about half this amount. About a fourth of the carbon in an ecosystem is released to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide when trees are clear-cut, brush and branches are burned or rot, and roots decay. Even more is lost during the first 20 to 50 years of farming, as soil carbon decomposes into carbon dioxide and as wood products are burned or decay.

This means that when tropical woodland is cleared to produce sugar cane for ethanol, the greenhouse gas released is about 50 percent greater than what occurs from the production and use of the same amount of gasoline. And that statistic holds for at least two decades.

Simply being "renewable" does not automatically make a fuel better for the atmosphere than the fossil fuel it replaces, nor guarantee that society gains any new energy by its production. The European Union was recently shocked to learn that some of its imported biodiesel, derived from palm trees planted on rain-forest lands, was more than twice as bad for climate warming as petroleum diesel. So much for the "benefits" of that form of biodiesel.

Although current Brazilian ethanol is environmentally friendly, the long-term environmental implications of buying more ethanol and biodiesel from Brazil, a possibility raised recently during President Bush's trip to that country, are cloudy. It could be harmful to both the climate and the preservation of tropical plant and animal species if it involved, directly or indirectly, additional clearing of native ecosystems.

Concerns about the environmental effects of ethanol production are starting to be felt in the United States as well. It appears that American farmers may add 10 million acres of corn this year to meet booming demand for ethanol. Some of this land could come from millions of acres now set aside nationwide for conservation under a government-subsidized program. Those uncultivated acres absorb atmospheric carbon, so farming them and converting the corn into ethanol could release more carbon dioxide into the air than would burning gasoline.

There are biofuel crops that can be grown with much less energy and chemicals than the food crops we currently use for biofuels. And they can be grown on our less fertile land, especially land that has been degraded by farming. This would decrease competition between food and biofuel. The United States has about 60 million acres of such land -- in the Conservation Reserve Program, road edge rights-of-way and abandoned farmlands.

In a 10-year experiment reported in Science magazine in December, we explored how much bioenergy could be produced by 18 different native prairie plant species grown on highly degraded and infertile soil. We planted 172 plots in central Minnesota with various combinations of these species, randomly chosen. We found, on this highly degraded land, that the plots planted with mixtures of many native prairie perennial species yielded 238 percent more bioenergy than those planted with single species. High plant diversity led to high productivity, and little fertilizer or chemical weed or pest killers was required.

The prairie "hay" harvested from these plots can be used to create high-value energy sources. For instance, it can be mixed with coal and burned for electricity generation. It can be "gasified," then chemically combined to make ethanol or synthetic gasoline. Or it can be burned in a turbine engine to make electricity. A technique that is undergoing rapid development involves bioengineering enzymes that digest parts of plants (the cellulose) into sugars that are then fermented into ethanol.

Whether converted into electricity, ethanol or synthetic gasoline, the high-diversity hay from infertile land produced as much or more new usable energy per acre as corn for ethanol on fertile land. And it could be harvested year after year.

Even more surprising were the greenhouse gas benefits. When high-diversity mixtures of native plants are grown on degraded soils, they remove carbon dioxide from the air. Much of this carbon ends up stored in the soil. In essence, mixtures of native plants gradually restore the carbon levels that degraded soils had before being cleared and farmed. This benefit lasts for about a century.

Across the full process of growing high-diversity prairie hay, converting it into an energy source and using that energy, we found a net removal and storage of about a ton and a half of atmospheric carbon dioxide per acre. The net effect is that ethanol or synthetic gasoline produced from this grass on degraded land can provide energy that actually reduces atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide.

When one of these carbon-negative biofuels is mixed with gasoline, the resulting blend releases less carbon dioxide than traditional gasoline.

Biofuels, if used properly, can help us balance our need for food, energy and a habitable and sustainable environment. To help this happen, though, we need a national biofuels policy that favors our best options. We must determine the carbon impacts of each method of making these fuels, then mandate fuel blending that achieves a prescribed greenhouse gas reduction. We have the knowledge and technology to start solving these problems.