NASA Administrator Not Sure Global Warming Is Worth Worrying About

This morning on NPR, Michael Griffin--the head of an agency which has funded some of the best global warming research--said out loud without the slightest hint of shame:

I have no doubt that … a trend of global warming exists. I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with. To assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of Earth's climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn't change. First of all, I don't think it's within the power of human beings to assure that the climate does not change, as millions of years of history have shown. And second of all, I guess I would ask which human beings — where and when — are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that's a rather arrogant position for people to take.

Griffin is setting up some egregious strawmen here. First, nobody is saying that this is the best of all climates. The issue is that this particular climate is the one that our current biosphere and world economy is based on. It's the one that determined where we built our cities. Where we grow our food. The arrogant position is to suggest that the poor of the world might be happier if they had to pick up and move, give up their homes, learn to live with more frequent and dangerous storms, crop failures, and wars touched off by mass migrations. The arrogant position is to suggest that the climate is for human beings alone, and the rest of nature can go hang.

Griffin also pretends that carbon reduction advocates expect to prevent the natural processes of climate change that happen over thousands of years. Human society and the biosphere can adapt to change on this timescale. It's manmade climate change we are worried about, and that is happening much faster and to a society where most people already live on the fringe of poverty.

It is particularly painful for me to see the head of NASA sounding like Ann Coulter. I love space exploration and NASA has always been a great and heroic agency to me, no less because of the work NASA has done on global change. For Griffin to have been in charge of all this science and to refuse to acknowledge the social and political implications of the science is just beyond stupid.

I am anticipating the response of the actual scientists at realclimate.org.

Design for the other 90%

I found this site through Firedoglake. It's a museum exhibition (in New York, unfortunately, not close to any of us) called Design For The Other 90%.

“The majority of the world’s designers focus all their efforts on developing products and services exclusively for the richest 10% of the world’s customers. Nothing less than a revolution in design is needed to reach the other 90%.”
—Dr. Paul Polak, International Development Enterprises

This used to be called appropriate technology, which you might define as "the simplest technology that will get the job done." This site showcases pickup-truck bicycles, rollable water carriers with no moving parts, $100 laptops for children, and so on. The site's very inspiring, so take a look.

What will GM do now? (Pt 2)

With Honda about to introduce a fuel cell car, The Wall Street Journal says that GM is hustling to green itself. But you don't have to read too far between the lines to think that it's just a thin coat of green paint.

"We have to have people think we are part of the solution, not part of the problem," said Lawrence Burns, GM's vice president for research and development and global planning."

[so at first they thought ethanol vehicles would do the trick--this part snipped]

By early last year, Mr. Lutz and others had concluded GM had to do come up with a much more dramatic idea for addressing global warming and oil consumption -- a environmental "halo" vehicle, such as the Prius, that would cast a glow over GM's entire product line. [The article goes on to discuss the Chevy Volt, which could get up to 150 mpg.]

Now, "halo vehicle" could be just an unfortunate turn of phrase, so I don't want to take a cheap shot at GM just on that basis. But look, the Prius and the Honda hybrids are much more than "halo" vehicles. If anything, they point out the efficiencies of the more mundane offerings in the Toyota and Honda product lines, like the Corolla, which can get into the mid-30s or better.

I'll be thrilled if GM follows through and introduces a mid- to high-end fuel efficient vehicle based on advanced technology, aimed at the people who are buying $25-30,000+ cars now. But they will never be thought of as a "green" company unless those "halo" vehicles can draw attention to lower-end efficient cars. A 150 mpg Chevy Volt is great, but it needs to draw attention to a 35 mpg Chevy Cobalt. There was nothing in the WSJ article suggesting that GM is even thinking about the low end of their line.

Over the river (reservoirs & nuclear reactors) and through the woods...

Nuclear power - safe, secure and green, right? Not so fast...

This London Times article points to a number of problems facing nuclear power, often thought of as one of the most green sources of power. Nuclear plants require a very large amount of very cool water. "If temperatures soar above average this summer...many nuclear plants could face a dilemma: Either cut output or break environmental rules, in either case hurting their reputation with customers and the public." Either way, nuclear power finds itself in a bit of a predicament.

France is one country that relies heavily on nuclear power. Durnig Heat Wave 2003, France Edition, "17 nuclear reactors operated at reduced capacity or were turned off." Not a good thing!

The article brings up a number of other good points about nuclear. What are your thoughts about it? Does safety and security weigh in at all in the argument?

What's your carbon footprint?

About a year ago I was thinking of creating a carbon calculator by which people could calculate their emissions and decide--if they really wanted to drive that SUV--what other steps in their life they could take to offset it, i.e. by insulating their home or whatever. This was just before the big offset craze where everyone is "buying offsets" to make themselves "carbon neutral." I gave up on the idea because I couldn't figure out where to draw the line. If you're paying for someone to mow your lawn, is that part of your emissions or his? And if it's part of his, does that mean you're responsible for emissions that you create as part of your work?

Now, a google search on "carbon calculator" shows that lots of people had the same idea, and they published their calculators on the web. I tried out a few of them to see how consistent they were. Here's what I found.


Click on the link to see a larger view of the table.

The table shows that my total emissions change by a factor of 8 (7 to 53 tons/yr) and vary from 88% to 154% of the supposed "national average", depending on which website I use. Three of the values did come in close to each other, at about 20 tons/yr. The outliers were the Inconvenient Truth calculator (7 tons) and the EPA's calculator (53 tons).

Of course, the devil is in the details of how these things are calculated. But, 4 of the 5 websites I selected (more or less at random) were selling offsets. So the "savvy consumer" might be tempted to comparison shop for offsets, and the site offering the lowest price or the lowest number of tons is more likely to make the "sale." This problem seems to render the whole practice suspect.

Now while you are thinking of this, go over and read "Are Offsets the New Oat Bran" at Joel Makower's blog.

New List of Candidates for World Bank President

According to Hullabaloo (with link to the Wall Street Journal article), Former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is on the White House list of candidates. He's considered qualified because he has "traveled widely in Africa." If that's all it takes, we know someone who's probably logged a few more miles in Africa than Frist.

Honda to Introduce Fuel Cell Vehicle in US Next Year

Wow.
What is GM gonna do now?

Coulter, ugh.

Jerry ran across this piece of garbage by Ann Coulter. I'm not even going to link to it, but I'll throw out an excerpt. You can google it if you want to read the whole thing.

The ethic of conservation is the explicit abnegation of man's dominion over the Earth. The lower species are here for our use. God said so: Go forth, be fruitful, multiply, and rape the planet -- it's yours. That's our job: drilling, mining and stripping. Sweaters are the anti-Biblical view. Big gas-guzzling cars with phones and CD players and wet bars -- that's the Biblical view.

This kind of blather is so easy to take down that it's not even worth the effort--Coulter and her ilk (Malkin, Limbaugh, The Washington Post Editorial Page) have ceased to make any sense except to those predisposed to believe them. The national conversation has become so infiltrated by right wing talking points that we can get up in a huff when a sometime Bush critic (Don Imus) makes a racist remark, but the Coulters of the world can spout much more inflammatory nonsense on a daily basis and still have nationally syndicated audiences and $20,000 speaking fees.

The only reason that I post this at OTB (other than to liven things up a bit) is that it's an excuse to link to some of my favorite media critic sites. Probably the best one out there, with a "just the facts" approach, is Media Matters for America. I also read Glen Greenwald frequently. Both of these sites also have many good links. If you want to see just how broken the media has become in the last 20 years, take a look.

Peak Coal?

Richard Stuebi at Cleantechblog says we've never wondered about running out of coal:

It has been widely assumed that there is an abundant supply of coal (especially in the U.S.), enough to last for centuries. Coal has been increasingly viewed as the "backstop" fossil fuel: plentiful, cheap, known. As long as we can deal with coal's environmental issues, particularly CO2 emissions, we can always fall back to coal -- not only for power generation, but for producing transportation fuels as well.

A recent essay by Richard Heinberg brings these important preconceptions into question. In his essay, "Burning the Furniture", Heinberg reviews a recently released study by a German organization named Energy Watch Group, in which it is asserted that worldwide coal production will peak in the next 10-15 years.

Stuebi also includes a link to the Heinberg article. It is interesting reading for anyone who is trying to evaluate an energy policy.

This Old House

At Cleantechblog, Heather Rae is renovating a 19th century farmhouse in Maine using a green building approach. She posts updates (like this) every week or so.

Are Environmental Restrictions Blocking Fuel-Efficient Cars from US?

Via AmericaBlog, I found this article on the MSNBC web site. It describes how Americans had five efficient (>40 mpg) car choices in 2005 but are now down to two. Meanwhile, Europeans can choose from 113 different models. The figures come from a report by the Civil Society Institute (pdf here). The study also cites a survey showing massive consumer demand for clean, fuel efficient vehicles.

Many of the European models are diesel, and according to the article, they are difficult to sell in the US because of restrictions on sulfur in diesel fuel. In addition, US auto worker unions do not want to allow imports of more cars when the US auto industry is downsizing. Yet, a number of these cars are built by US companies - Ford, GM, and DaimlerChrysler - and also by Japanese companies that sell many cars in the US.

So, it seems that the labor question can be answered by building similar cars in the US. Are well-intended sulfur emission regulations keeping these cars out, as the article says? If so, does it make sense to create exemptions for high-mileage vehicles? Or has the US auto industry just missed the boat not only on hybrids, but on clean diesel as well?