Learning to "value" the earth- $$$ not :) :) :)

It was said by Oscar Wilde that, "nowadays people know the price of everything but the value of nothing." Sadly, that's probably more true now than when it was written. In our culture, we even know the price of a person's soul. Some have taken note of this and thought, 'hey, to fix the ecological problems, we need to learn to value things that are around us in a non-price-tag way'. I think that may be giving us to much credit. What I think we need to do is put more price tags on things we've taken for granted, like forests. Sure, we can say how much the wood is worth, but that doesn't really capture the whole picture - we need to find out everything that the forest does for us. This includes some things that are pretty easy to put a price tag on like filtering our water, preventing flood damage, harboring plants that may be used in medicines or cosmetics....but also things that are difficult to quantify, like the price of a peaceful walk through the woods on a fall day.

There has been a lot of research and general thought recently about exactly this, the overall $$$ of ecosystems. For a primer, go here, or for a good study about it, try here. It would be difficult to underestimate the importance of this type of research because it will underpin much of our plan of attack on climate change. Here's my logic: if people actually thought about the dollar value of things we may lose as a result of global warming, they would be less reluctant about a potential economic cost of preventative action. The biggest question to me is how much will it take.

Take the analogy of health care. People are willing to pay a decent amount of money every month to an insurance provider on the chance that they will get sick. In this situation, the big decision - whether you decide to pay for insurance or not - depends on:

a.) the your perception of the likelihood of something bad happening, so that you get your money's worth

and

b.) how much you can afford to pay if said 'bad event' happens.

When you consider that some sadly common events, like have a heart attack, or cancer, or a life threatening illness, could get you a hospital bill in excess of $20,000, you typically decide to get insurance (obviously this is not the case for everyone, for a variety of reasons). What I postulate is that if the public perceived the danger of climate change to be a cost which they could NOT afford to pay when the day comes, they would be willing to pay for climate insurance. Here's where it becomes complicated; what is the cost?

If you looked at the link above, you would see that the value of world ecosystem services has been estimated at 33 trillion dollars, or nearly double world GDP. This doesn't get to the value of what we could lose though. Yes, it's true that nearly every ecosystem has the potential to be impacted by climate change, but we're not going to lose the value of all of them. At the same time, we could lose a lot more than the ecosystem value calculation contains, including, for a starter, the homes of 100 million of people from sea level rise (for more impacts, check out this article). My point is, someone needs to spell out clearly for the general public that paying for carbon reduction through clean energy, efficient cars, better lightbulbs, more efficient heating, and so on, is akin to purchasing climate insurance, and that the cost of inaction WILL BE HUGE. Advising otherwise would be like telling people with medical problems not to get health insurance because they'd be better off without it (oh wait, that's exactly what Rush Limbaugh is advocating ...damn)

The Sexiest Hybrid Ever

Finally! Plug in hybrids will be coming to our streets. I've been waiting for them since I heard that a company in California was retrofitting Priuses in 2004. At that point, Toyota execs said they had no plans to release one. Clearly, they've changed their minds. For that matter, so have the other executives. There will be plug-ins offered by Chevy (Volt), Nissan (Leaf, which is all-electric), Mitsubishi, Cadillac, and Ford (escape) (see the list here). The one notably left off of hybrid.com's list is the diesel-electric VW golf, to which I am giving the title of, "sexiest hybrid ever". I mean, here's a car you actually can look green and badass in while driving - definitely a first. Just click on the link and drool over that car for a bit. If I have my way, it will be the next one I own.

A lesson in composting

First. It's been way too long since I've written a post. Life got a little crazy for a bit, so I am way overdue. I have a backlog of potential posts building up in my ideas folder (yes, I have an ideas folder). This one is inspired by something I saw at the National Museum of Natural History, a good attempt at being green, but poorly executed.

This should be a fairly obvious; but to compost a piece of waste, say a paper plate, or leftover vegetables, it actually needs to be composted. This is entirely different from throwing waste in a trash bin. Regular garbage goes from the familiar process of bin, to garbage truck, to distribution facility, and then (usually) to landfill. Think about that final destination for a second - "land" "fill". Garbage is put there with no intent of ever degrading, because then the land would not be "filled", thus dashing the hopes of ever building over it years later. Everything that we throw out this way is never going to recycled, never will be reused, and will certainly never be composted. The best case scenario is that the landfill operator uses the methane emitted to provide a little power.

For the above reasons, it’s a pet peeve of mine when I see perfectly compostable waste thrown away in bins destined for the landfill (mall food courts stress me out immensely). This is even worse in circumstances where businesses that have gone to through the effort to get compostable plastic cups and cutlery, only to dump them in the trash. It happens more often than you would think, and at institutions that should know better like the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.

When I visited there last month, I was elated to see that their enormous food court used all recyclables and compostables, with the exception of a few things like coffee cup lids and saltine cracker wrappers. This was pretty good I thought, until I went to dispose of the waste afterwards. There were separate bins for recycling and waste, but no compost bins anywhere! I looked around, but no luck. At first I thought that maybe they just composed all of their waste, but unfortunately the presence of a few plastic items would make that impossible. All of their effort to 'green-up' their eatery, and yet, it was all heading to the landfill. The scraps, compostable or not, will remain there for centuries. I find this excusable for small businesses that want to be environmental responsible but do not fully understand how it works, but the preeminent natural science museum in this country should know better. And based on their numerous exhibits on dinosaurs and deep time, they should understand better than most how long things last when they're buried.

In fairness to the museum, I should say that there ARE other environmental benefits to using compostable plastics made with PLA. The major one is that the process of making PLA is much kinder to the environment than other plastics. The industrial waste stream is much, much larger than the consumer one, so minimizing upstream pollution sources may actually be more important than working on the eventual disposal location. (a good primer on this can be found at thestoryofstuff.com). Regardless, the museum should be setting a good example, following through with their good intentions, and composting the waste. Better yet, they should use the opportunity to explain to their patrons the importance of waste reduction rather than perpetuating the myth that throwing out compostables in a trash bin is akin to composting them.

Another re-post... but a good one about oil dependence

The post, titled, "Oil Dependence is a Dangerous Habit", is from one of the best climate bloggers out there at Climate Progess. He runs down the list of our oil imports, which may be pretty shocking to those who haven't seen it. Yes, it's long, but it has some amazing graphics, the first of which I resposted here. Enjoy.

Perfect follow-up to my last post

If you haven't seen any videos by Peter Sinclair, you should check them out. In this one, he lays out basically the same argument I used in my last post, except in video format, and with lots of amazing vintage and current clips linking the pro-smoking and pro-global warming crowd. Definitely give it a watch.

What's the motive?

One of the most proliferated rumors in the field of climate science is that the scientists are only presenting research that proves the widespread assumption that climate change is real, and hiding any evidence to the contrary (link, link, link, I could keep this up all day). It has even been suggested that we are being paid off to perpetuate the global warming 'hoax'. This is not only is this insulting to me and my field, it implies as grave misunderstanding of the purpose of scientific research (at least in the area of climate science). Let me explain:

1. We don't get paid more to prove or disprove anything

When a researcher gets a grant, the money is used to fund an investigation with a necessarily uncertain outcome. If the outcome was known, there would be no study (naturally). What this means is the money is given BEFORE the study is published, not as a result of a desired outcome. For example, with my current project, I am hoping to understand the climate of Southern Mexico. It may have been warmer or colder, wetter or drier. I will not know until I get my data. Furthermore, the study will be just as likely to be published if I find that the Mexico was substantially warmer 500 years ago, and has been cooling dramatically since then (maybe even more so!).

2. There is money passed around, but not received by us!

One of the most ironic things about the idea that climate scientists are being paid off to support climate change is that the exact opposite is happening - people are being paid by Exxon Mobile and others to create confusion about climate change to slow legislation. This is a very scary operation termed the "manufactured doubt industry", which I will hopefully address in a longer post. For now, here is a little synopsis.

Essentially, what happens is big corporations that have incentive to keep the public misinformed about climate change (like oil companies, car companies, power companies, etc.) give money to institutes that put out bogus science, or give false testimony at climate hearings. A few examples of such groups are the George C. Marshall institute (financed by Exxon Mobil), The Competitive Enterprise Institute (funded by Exxon, Ford Motor Company fund, and Pfizer) and the infamous Heartland Institute (with countless donors). These groups somehow get called in as the 'credible experts' by media outlets for contrary opinion, because controversy sells over science (heartland, competitive enterprise, george marshall).

3. We geologists could make more money if we switched sides

When I thought about my career path, I knew that I would be taking a substantial pay cut to be a climate scientist. My background in geology would make me well-suited to a very profitable career in the oil and mineral resources industry, which has the highest starting salary of ANY field in the country; it actually blows the rest out of the water. I will probably never be poor when I get my PhD, but with a university or government job, I'm never going to be filthy rich either. My point is that the geologists who realize early on that they could make a lot of money in industry, and then go on to research climate change are pretty respectable people. We aren't after money, and are not being paid off; all we want to do is provide the best possible science to understand this enormous global problem. Please consider this when you see statements by the American Geophysical Union or the Geological Society of America (the two largest academic geological societies), strongly asserting the reality of human induced climate change.

To sum up: What do we have to gain by publishing papers that confirm anthropogenic climate change?

Far less than we have to gain by confusing the public so that our present CO2-emitting activities need not change.

A plan to save the world

I am tired of this waffling and 'dithering' on a real climate plan. Dick Cheney accused Obama of dithering on Afghanistan after he thought about the issue for 3 months. What do you call it when you won't address a problem for 21 years (see the first senate hearing on the subject in 1988)?

Last week I did out a little math on how much it would cost us to actually replace our fossil fuel power plants with renewables. It was quite simple really, just took a bit of looking up on the Energy Information Administration website, which has everything you ever wanted to know about power in this country. The next step was to find out how much power plants cost, and I used a base calculation for a 500MW plant:

• Geothermal plants are relatively cheap: ~$575-1,500 million or so
• Wind Power plants may be a little cheaper, at $1000/kw installed, or $500 million/500MW

I could go further, but I'll stick with just these two, because wind alone has to capability to power the whole country (see this map). For my calculations, and ease of reading I've used a conservative ballpark estimate for the cost of one 500MW plant, $1 billion.

Now for the part about how much power we need to generate:

I got this info from the EIA, and did my calculations in terms of 500MW plants. In total, we currently have the equivalent of 627.682 coal plants, 116.596 petroleum plants, and 815.06 natural gas 500MW plants in this country. Mind you, this is our total capacity, not what we actually use. Bottom line, if we wanted to replace all of our fossil fuel plants we would need 1559.338 new 500MW plants.

Now let's think first about the space it would take up. Wind power would obviously be the more expansive option, so at an average footprint of 2.02 km per plant (based on upper estimate of what is necessary for 1000 turbines), we would need to cover 3155 square km's (1218 square miles) or roughly the size of just 1.7% of North Dakota, one of the most promising states for windpower.

The more important consideration will of course be the price tag. At $1 billion dollars a plant, the whole plan would cost us $1.559 trillion dollars. Granted, this is a lot of money, so I should provide some scale. Let's compare this amount to how much we are about to spend in Afghanistan. At ~$1 million/soldier/year over there, the new surge is going to raise total cost $30 billion to ~$100 billion/year. If we can spend $100 billion on that unpopular war, what is to stop us from spending the same amount building renewable power plants? At that annual cost, we could build enough plants to replace all fossil fuels in 15.59 years.

Now here there are two big bonuses, which are how this could actually be passed.

1. This would create a ton of jobs, especially in the midwestern and southwestern states (wind and geothermal resources respectively) and would be the equivalent of a massive stimulus. Wind plants could also be placed along both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, so most states could get a piece of the action if they wanted to.

2. Unlike war, renewable energy pays itself back, and then some. Wind power plants break even (generating as much total revenue as the cost to build them) in about 7 years, and geothermal plants would be only slightly longer. Thus, if the government subsidized this project next year at with same Afghanistan budget we could be carbon neutral with regard to electricity, and fully paid off by 2030. After 2030, the renewable plants would be providing net revenue to the country, eventually doubling the initial investment. I know this is a bit of a pipe dream to think that we would actually start right now, but hey, don't say that we can't. I am so tired of hearing people say that the cost of a switch to renewables is unimaginable or unrealistic. I have imagined it, and it is completely realistic. We just need to set priorities. One of them might not be spending as much as the rest of the world combined on our military (~$680 billion/year). Seriously, the war in Iraq has already surpassed $1 trillion, and will eventually get to $3 trillion by the time we actually finish up there. It sounds like hyperbole, but with that budget, we could replace all of our fossil fuel power plants twice.