Sir David Attenborough “wrong” on human plague.

coolitadmin — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 17:00:35 +0000

Sir David said that the planet is running out of resources.

“We are a plague on the Earth. It’s coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so. It’s not just climate change; it’s sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde. Either we limit our population growth or the natural world will do it for us, and the natural world is doing it for us right now,” he told the Radio Times.

But Bjorn Lomborg, the author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist” and an adjunct professor at Copenhagen Business School, said that this “Malthusian” view is outdated.

He argued that new technologies mean that humans need less land to produce food. Therefore the population can grow without harming wildlife and as people become richer it may even be possible to return degraded land to wildlife.

This has already happened over the last two centuries and will continue with precision farming, genetically modified crops and other technologies.

“I love David Attenborough’s programmes but the idea we cannot support the population is entirely neglecting the advance of technology we have found to utilise land and resources much more effectively.

“We have dramatically more people but also ways to make agriculture more productive on less land.”

Dr Lomborg also said improving standards of living meant people had less impact on the planet.

He said as people become richer they live in cities and do not impinge on nature so much.

“If you have unrestricted poverty then people will slash and burn to feed their kids but if you are rich you go and become a web designer in the city.

“The reality is that modern industrial production is one of the main ways of reducing our footprint.”

Dr Lomborg said it was a “human hating” point of view to think reducing the population is the only way to save species.

“Humans are part of nature and also have a space here – even if you look at it only from biodiversity point of view.

“The smart thing is to stop them being poor and get the technology so they are less of a danger to the biodiversity David Attenborough loves.”

Vanessa Baird, the author of the No Nonsense Guide to Population, also said Sir David was wrong.

She said it was not a question of how many people there are on the planet but how much they are consuming.

“Fixating on human numbers is perhaps easier than dealing with the tough political issues. Like, how are we going to make the fast and concerted shift away from fossil fuels to renewable energy when there is so little political will to do so and there is such a powerful vested interest in the business-as-usual model of assured destruction.”

She said fixating on population could also lead to dangerous extremist views.

“There have been many population panics before the current one – and it’s best not to forget that they led to some pretty twisted and socially divisive thinking and actions. Somehow ‘too many people’ has a way of meaning ‘too many of them’. It’s rarely, genuinely, ‘too many people like us.’”

Bjorn Lomborg: Climate-Change Misdirection

coolitadmin — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 23:25:24 +0000

In his second inaugural address on Monday, President Obama laudably promised to “respond to the threat of climate change.” Unfortunately, when the president described the urgent nature of the threat—the “devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms”—the scary examples suggested that he is contemplating poor policies that don’t point to any real, let alone smart, solutions. Global warming is a problem that needs fixing, but exaggeration doesn’t help, and it often distracts us from simple, cheaper and smarter solutions.

For starters, let’s address the three horsemen of the climate apocalypse that Mr. Obama mentioned.

Historical analysis of wildfires around the world shows that since 1950 their numbers have decreased globally by 15%. Estimates published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences show that even with global warming proceeding uninterrupted, the level of wildfires will continue to decline until around midcentury and won’t resume on the level of 1950—the worst for fire—before the end of the century.

Associated Press. The National Wind Technology Center outside Boulder, Colo.

Claiming that droughts are a consequence of global warming is also wrong. The world has not seen a general increase in drought. A study published in Nature in November shows globally that “there has been little change in drought over the past 60 years.” The U.N. Climate Panel in 2012 concluded: “Some regions of the world have experienced more intense and longer droughts, in particular in southern Europe and West Africa, but in some regions droughts have become less frequent, less intense, or shorter, for example, in central North America and northwestern Australia.”

As for one of the favorites of alarmism, hurricanes in recent years don’t indicate that storms are getting worse. Measured by total energy (Accumulated Cyclone Energy), hurricane activity is at a low not encountered since the 1970s. The U.S. is currently experiencing the longest absence of severe landfall hurricanes in over a century—the last Category 3 or stronger storm was Wilma, more than seven years ago.

While it is likely that we will see somewhat stronger (but fewer) storms as climate change continues, a March 2012 Nature study shows that the global damage cost from hurricanes will go to 0.02% of gross domestic product annually in 2100 from 0.04% today—a drop of 50%, despite global warming.

This does not mean that climate change isn’t an issue. It means that exaggerating the threat concentrates resources in the wrong areas. Consider hurricanes (though similar points hold for wildfire and drought). If the aim is to reduce storm damage, then first focus on resilience—better building codes and better enforcement of those codes. Ending subsidies for hurricane insurance to discourage building in vulnerable zones would also help, as would investing in better infrastructure (from stronger levees to higher-capacity sewers).

These solutions are quick and comparatively cheap. Most important, they would diminish future hurricane damage, whether climate-induced or not. Had New York and New Jersey focused resources on building sea walls and adding storm doors to the subway system and making simple fixes like porous pavements, Hurricane Sandy would have caused much less damage.

In the long run, the world needs to cut carbon dioxide because it causes global warming. But if the main effort to cut emissions is through subsidies for chic renewables like wind and solar power, virtually no good will be achieved—at very high cost. The cost of climate policies just for the European Union—intended to reduce emissions by 2020 to 20% below 1990 levels—are estimated at about $250 billion annually. And the benefits, when estimated using a standard climate model, will reduce temperature only by an immeasurable one-tenth of a degree Fahrenheit by the end of the century.

Even in 2035, with the most optimistic scenario, the International Energy Agency estimates that just 2.4% of the world’s energy will come from wind and only 1% from solar. As is the case today, almost 80% will still come from fossil fuels. As long as green energy is more expensive than fossil fuels, growing consumer markets like those in China and India will continue to use them, despite what well-meaning but broke Westerners try to do.

Instead of pouring money into subsidies and direct production support of existing, inefficient green energy, President Obama should focus on dramatically ramping up investments into the research and development of green energy. Put another way, it is the difference between supporting an inexpensive researcher who will discover more efficient, future solar panels—and supporting a Solyndra at great expense to produce lots of inefficient, present-technology solar panels.

When innovation eventually makes green energy cheaper, everyone will implement it, including the Chinese. Such a policy would likely do 500 times more good per dollar invested than current subsidy schemes. But first let’s drop the fear-mongering exaggeration—and then focus on innovation.

The Deadly Opposition to Genetically Modified Food

coolitadmin — Fri, 22 Feb 2013 23:22:52 +0000

Finally, after a 12-year delay caused by opponents of genetically modified foods, so-called “golden rice” with vitamin A will be grown in the Philippines. Over those 12 years, about 8 million children worldwide died from vitamin A deficiency. Are anti-GM advocates not partly responsible?

Golden rice is the most prominent example in the global controversy over GM foods, which pits a technology with some risks but incredible potential against the resistance of feel-good campaigning. Three billion people depend on rice as their staple food, with 10 percent at risk for vitamin A deficiency, which, according to the World Health Organization, causes 250,000 to 500,000 children to go blind each year. Of these, half die within a year. A study from the British medical journal the Lancet estimates that, in total, vitamin A deficiency kills 668,000 children under the age of 5 each year.

Yet, despite the cost in human lives, anti-GM campaigners—from Greenpeace to Naomi Klein—have derided efforts to use golden rice to avoid vitamin A deficiency. In India, Vandana Shiva, an environmental activist and adviser to the government, called golden rice “a hoax” that is “creating hunger and malnutrition, not solving it.”

The New York Times Magazine reported in 2001 that one would need to “eat 15 pounds of cooked golden rice a day” to get enough vitamin A. What was an exaggeration then is demonstrably wrong now. Two recent studies in theAmerican Journal of Clinical Nutritionshow that just 50 grams (roughly two ounces) of golden rice can provide 60 percent of the recommended daily intake of vitamin A. They show that golden rice is even better than spinach in providing vitamin A to children.

Opponents maintain that there are better ways to deal with vitamin A deficiency. In its latest statement, Greenpeace says that golden rice is “neither needed nor necessary,” and calls instead for supplementation and fortification, which are described as “cost-effective.”

To be sure, handing out vitamin pills or adding vitamin A to staple products can make a difference. But it is not a sustainable solution to vitamin A deficiency. And, while it is cost-effective, recent published estimates indicate that golden rice is much more so.

Supplementation programs costs $4,300 for every life they save in India, whereas fortification programs cost about $2,700 for each life saved. Both are great deals. But golden rice would cost just $100 for every life saved from vitamin A deficiency.

Similarly, it is argued that golden rice will not be adopted, because most Asians eschew brown rice. But brown rice is substantially different in taste and spoils easily in hot climates. Moreover, many Asian dishes are already colored yellow with saffron, annatto, achiote, and turmeric. The people, not Greenpeace, should decide whether they will adopt vitamin A-rich rice for themselves and their children.

Most ironic is the self-fulfilling critique that many activists now use. Greenpeace calls golden rice a “failure,” because it “has been in development for almost 20 years and has still not made any impact on the prevalence of vitamin A deficiency.” But, as Ingo Potrykus, the scientist who developed golden rice, has made clear, that failure is due almost entirely to relentless opposition to GM foods—often by rich, well-meaning Westerners far removed from the risks of actual vitamin A deficiency.

Regulation of goods and services for public health clearly is a good idea; but it must always be balanced against potential costs—in this case, the cost of not providing more vitamin A to 8 million children during the past 12 years.

As an illustration, current regulations for GM foods, if applied to non-GM products, would ban the sale of potatoes and tomatoes, which can contain poisonous glycoalkaloids; celery, which contains carcinogenic psoralens; rhubarb and spinach (oxalic acid); and cassava, which feeds about 500 million people but contains toxic cyanogenic alkaloids. Foodstuffs like soy, wheat, milk, eggs, mollusks, crustaceans, fish, sesame, nuts, peanuts, and kiwi would likewise be banned, because they can cause food allergies.

Here it is worth noting that there have been no documented human health effects from GM foods. But many campaigners have claimed other effects. A common story, still repeated by Shiva, is that GM corn with Bt toxin kills Monarch butterflies. Several peer-reviewed studies, however, have effectively established that “the impact of Bt corn pollen from current commercial hybrids on monarch butterfly populations is negligible.”

Greenpeace and many others claim that GM foods merely enable big companies like Monsanto to wield near-monopoly power. But that puts the cart before the horse: The predominance of big companies partly reflects anti-GM activism, which has made the approval process so long and costly that only rich companies catering to First World farmers can afford to see it through.

Finally, it is often claimed that GM crops simply mean costlier seeds and less money for farmers. But farmers have a choice. More than 5 million cotton farmers in India have flocked to GM cotton, because it yields higher net incomes. Yes, the seeds are more expensive, but the rise in production offsets the additional cost.

Of course, no technology is without flaws, so regulatory oversight is useful. But it is worth maintaining some perspective. In 2010, the European Commission, after considering 25 years of GMO research, concluded that “there is, as of today, no scientific evidence associating GMOs with higher risks for the environment or for food and feed safety than conventional plants and organisms.”

Now, finally, golden rice will come to the Philippines; after that, it is expected in Bangladesh and Indonesia. But, for 8 million kids, the wait was too long.

True to form, Greenpeace is already protesting that “the next ‘golden rice’ guinea pigs might be Filipino children.” The 4.4 million Filipino kids with vitamin A deficiency might not mind so much.

Preventing the Next Sandy

coolitadmin — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 00:18:10 +0000

When Sandy hit the east coast of the United States on October 29, it not only flooded the New York City Subway and became an important election issue. It also resurrected the claim that global warming was to blame, together with the morally irresponsible argument that we should help future hurricane victims by cutting CO₂ emissions.

Now, global warming is real, and cutting CO₂ is a good idea when the reduction cost is lower than that of the damage it prevents. There is also a grain of truth in the connection between hurricanes and global warming: The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change expects stronger but fewer hurricanes toward the end of this century.

But the end of the century is 88 years from now, and blaming global warming now is simply unconvincing In its 2012 report on extreme weather, the IPCC said it puts little trust in any attribution of hurricanes to global warming.

The authors of one of the central Science papers for the U.N.’s hurricane estimates put it clearly: “It is premature to conclude that human activities … have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane activity.” We will be unable to detect an impact “until we near the end of the century.”

In fact, the U.S. has not seen a hurricane of Category 3 or higher since Wilma in 2005. Those seven years without strong hurricanes is the longest such span in more than a century. (Sandy, which was downgraded from a hurricane before it hit New York, was rebranded in the media as a “superstorm.”

While Bloomberg claims that Sandy is the costliest storm in U.S. history, and holds implications for “the survival of the human race,” this is simply wrong, as any recollection of the costs of Hurricane Katrina would show. When adjusted for inflation and growth of coastal communities, Sandy ranks only 17th for U.S. storms, and both the number and power of hurricanes that make landfall in the U.S. have been declining slightly since 1900, not increasing.

But the real damage from the claims about Sandy and climate change stems from what often follows: the argument that if global warming caused this destruction, we should help future victims of hurricanes by cutting CO₂ emissions now. As Rober Redford put it, we need to “reduce the carbon pollution that’s fueling these storms.” Like so many others, he deplores doubters: “By ignoring the scientific facts, they dishonor the human suffering brought on by climate change.”

Unfortunately, focusing on cutting CO₂ would really dishonor human suffering, because any realistic carbon cuts will do virtually nothing for the next 50 to 100 years.

Consider sea-level rise, which caused by far the most damage in New York. Models show that the world’s most ambitious climate policy, the EU’s “20-20-20” plan, will have a net cost of roughly $250 billion a year for the rest of the century, or about $20 trillion in total. Yet it will reduce sea-level rise by one-third of an inch by 2100. If the U.S. embarked on a similar plan, the cost and the benefit would probably be on a similar scale: less than one inch reduction in sea-level rise by the end of the century at a net cost of about $500 billion annually.

Consider this extremely unrealistic scenario: Even if we almost immediately could get the entire world—including China and India—on board for drastic carbon cuts, and even if we would suck CO₂ out of the atmosphere toward the end of the century, we could reduce sea level rise by only 7 to 18 inches by the end of the century. Models show that the cost, by then, would be at least $40 trillion annually.

Contrast this to what New York City is rightly concerned about: the 3.3 percent chance each year (entirely without global warming) that a Category 3 hurricane will hit New York. This would cause sea surges of up to 25 feet (about 10 feet higher than Sandy), putting Kennedy Airport under 19 feet of water. Much of the risk could be managed by erecting seawalls, building storm doors for the subway, and simple fixes like porous pavements—all at a cost of around $100 million a year.

Sandy underscored a fundamental question for all parts of the world that are affected by hurricanes. If we want to reduce hurricane damage, should we focus primarily on a very cheap solution that would enable us to handle storm surges much better within a few years, or on an incredibly expensive solution that would require almost a hundred years to avoid one-third inch of 25-foot surges?

The morally defensible answer is clear, and it has nothing to do with immediate reductions in CO₂ emissions.

Preventing the Next Sandy

A Fracking Good Story

cooliteditor — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 17:56:34 +0000

PRAGUE – Weather conditions around the world this summer have provided ample fodder for the global warming debate. Droughts and heat waves are a harbinger of our future, carbon cuts are needed now more than ever, and yet meaningful policies have not been enacted.

But, beyond this well-trodden battlefield, something amazing has happened: Carbon-dioxide emissions in the United States have dropped to their lowest level in 20 years. Estimating on the basis of data from the US Energy Information Agency (EIA) from the first five months of 2012, this year’s expected CO2 emissions have declined by more than 800 million tons, or 14%, from their peak in 2007.

The cause is an unprecedented switch to natural gas, which emits 45% less carbon per energy unit. The US used to generate about half its electricity from coal, and roughly 20% from gas. Over the past five years, those numbers have changed, first slowly and now dramatically: in April of this year, coal’s share in power generation plummeted to just 32%, on par with gas.

America’s rapid switch to natural gas is the result of three decades of technological innovation, particularly the development of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” which has opened up large new resources of previously inaccessible shale gas. Despite some legitimate concerns about safety, it is hard to overstate the overwhelming benefits.

For starters, fracking has caused gas prices to drop dramatically. Adjusted for inflation, gas has not been this cheap for the past 35 years, with the price this year 3-5 times lower than it was in the mid-2000’s. And, while a flagging economy may explain a small portion of the drop in US carbon emissions, the EIA emphasizes that the major explanation is natural gas.

The reduction is even more impressive when one considers that 57 million additional energy consumers were added to the US population over the past two decades. Indeed, US carbon emissions have dropped some 20% per capita, and are now at their lowest level since Dwight D. Eisenhower left the White House in 1961.

David Victor, an energy expert at the University of California, San Diego, estimates that the shift from coal to natural gas has reduced US emissions by 400-500 megatonnes (Mt) of CO2 per year. To put that number in perspective, it is about twice the total effect of the Kyoto Protocol on carbon emissions in the rest of the world, including the European Union.

It is tempting to believe that renewable energy sources are responsible for emissions reductions, but the numbers clearly say otherwise. Accounting for a reduction of 50 Mt of CO2 per year, America’s 30,000 wind turbines reduce emissions by just one-tenth the amount that natural gas does. Biofuels reduce emissions by only ten Mt, and solar panels by a paltry three Mt.

This flies in the face of conventional thinking, which continues to claim that mandating carbon reductions – through cap-and-trade or a carbon tax – is the only way to combat climate change.

But, based on Europe’s experience, such policies are precisely the wrongway to address global warming. Since 1990, the EU has heavily subsidized solar and wind energy at a cost of more than $20 billion annually. Yet its per capita CO2 emissions have fallen by less than half of the reduction achieved in the US – even in percentage terms, the US is now doing better.

Because of broad European skepticism about fracking, there is no gas miracle in the EU, while the abundance of heavily subsidized renewables has caused over-achievement of the CO2 target. Along with the closure of German nuclear power stations, this has led, ironically, to a resurgence of coal.

Well-meaning US politicians have likewise shown how not to tackle global warming with subsidies and tax breaks. The relatively small reduction in emissions achieved through wind power costs more than $3.3 billion annually, and far smaller reductions from ethanol (biofuels) and solar panels cost at least $8.5 and $3 billion annually.

Estimates suggest that using carbon taxes to achieve a further 330 Mt CO2 reduction in the EU would cost $250 billion per year. Meanwhile, the fracking bonanza in the US not only delivers a much greater reduction for free, but also creates long-term social benefits through lower energy costs.

The amazing truth is that fracking has succeeded where Kyoto and carbon taxes have failed. As shown in a study by the Breakthrough Institute, fracking was built on substantial government investment in technological innovation for three decades.

Climate economists repeatedly have pointed out that such energy innovation is the most effective climate solution, because it is the surest way to drive the price of future green energy sources below that of fossil fuels. By contrast, subsidizing current, ineffective solar power or ethanol mostly wastes money while benefiting special interests.

Fracking is not a panacea, but it really is by far this decade’s best green-energy option.

Food for the Wealthy, Not for the Poor

cooliteditor — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 17:50:54 +0000

The Stanford study showed what most academics already knew: there are few if any health benefits of organic foods. In reaction, many critics of the study emphasized their lower pesticide content, and general environmental benefits.

But these points conceal much larger drawbacks. Avoiding well-regulated pesticides can do some good — based on my calculations using U.S. Food and Drug Administration estimates, it might avoid up to 20 cancer deaths per year in the United States. But organic food also costs 10 percent to 174 percent more for fruits, vegetables and meat. As I point out in my book, “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” a decrease of just 10 percent in fruit and vegetable consumption in the U.S. because of higher prices would cause an increase in cancer of about 4.6 percent of the total number of cancers, or some 26,000 additional cancer deaths annually.

The Stanford study emphasizes the importance of eating fruits and vegetables “however they are grown,” but the scale is missing. Eating more fruits and vegetables is incredibly more important than avoiding already well-regulated pesticides. In fact, it can be argued that if the higher costs mean you reduce your intake of fruits and vegetables by just one-thousandth of an ounce a day (equivalent of half a grain of rice), your total risk of cancer goes up, not down. Based on my calculations using World Cancer Research Fund data: omit buying just one apple every 20 years because you have gone organic, and you’re worse off.

Organic advocates often claim that its methods lead to less nitrogen pollution, but calculated per good produced, that pollution is similar to or higher thanconventional methods. And most important, the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that shifting U.S. agricultural production to organic would require an area greater than the state of California to be converted from pristine land into agriculture.

Finally, organic entails a huge price tag. For the U.S. alone, estimates (measured by lost gross domestic product based on my calculations) suggest a cost of at least $100 billion annually.

Most of the world’s inhabitants need cheaper food, so we should focus on higher yields, and better access to fertilizer and pesticides. Well-regulated use of genetically enhanced crops offers the potential to boost yields, reduce pesticide use, and better ability to handle adverse conditions like saline soil and droughts.

The evidence is clear: organic products are neither healthier nor better for the environment.

Why the Carbon Tax Doesn’t Work

coolitadmin — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 18:36:36 +0000

There is a small problem with all the efforts the world has undertaken to reduce carbon emissions – they are not working to reduce emissions to any where near the amount the carbon community believes is necessary to avoid global warming.

A group of Nobel Laureates and other top experts who combined to form the Copenhagen Consensus believe that the world’s emphasis on emissions reductions via carbon pricing and similar mechanisms, is simply not going to work. They propose a cheaper but more radical global solution.

The Copenhagen Consensus was formed in Denmark to bring together top global knowledge to determine the best way to allocate funds to solve particular problems. They have applied their methods to a number of global problems. For example, they concluded that the most economic way to reduce global poverty was to make sure that pre-school children have sufficient nutrition. Without pre-school nutrition, adult capabilities are greatly reduced and they are much less productive members of the community.

When it comes to carbon, they concluded that because electricity had become essential to the current living standards of a vast number of people on the globe, simply pricing electricity at higher levels would not make an enormous difference to usage.

Australia has one of the world’s largest carbon taxes, which is being combined with big rises in power costs. Accordingly, we are a global leader in trying to reduce emissions via electricity pricing. The Copenhagen Consensus believes our strategy is not economic and while electricity consumption may reduce, the cost of that reduction will be out of proportion to the emissions cuts.

The head of the Copenhagen Consensus, Bjorn Lomborg, came to the ADC Hayman Leadership Retreat and explained that the Copenhagen Consensus believes there is a better way to cut emissions – spend more money researching renewable power generation with the aim of reducing renewable electricity generation costs to levels that are lower than carbon.

Currently both wind and solar do not have economic storage systems, so in the case of wind there has to be expensive back up carbon sourced power generation. Bjorn Lomborg sets out his views in the attached video.

From my point of view, he is one if the first people I have heard who makes sense on carbon. Certainly putting up electricity prices in Australia by 30 or 40 per cent (only about one third is the carbon tax) is not going to vastly lower emissions.

What it does do is lower the standard of living of many Australians and is now causing them to challenge whether the carbon/climate links have validity.

There are a number of renewable research projects here and around the world which are getting closer to substantially lowering the cost of renewable energy.

If the Copenhagen Consensus is right then that’s where the world needs to focus if it is to be serious about carbon and climate.

Why Doom Has Not Materialized

coolitadmin — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 18:27:57 +0000

Sometimes the news is that something was not newsworthy. The United Nations’ Rio+20 conference — 50,000 participants from 188 nations — occurred in June without consequences. A generation has passed since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, which begat other conferences and protocols (e.g., Kyoto). And, by now, apocalypse fatigue — boredom from being repeatedly told the end is nigh.

This began two generations ago, in 1972, when we were warned (by computer models developed at MIT) that we were doomed. We were supposed to be pretty much extinct by now, or at least miserable. We are neither. So, what went wrong?

That year begat “The Limits to Growth,” a book from the Club of Rome, which called itself “a project on the predicament of mankind.” It sold 12 million copies, staggered the New York Times (“one of the most important documents of our age”) and argued that economic growth was doomed by intractable scarcities. Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish academic and “skeptical environmentalist,” writing in Foreign Affairs, says it “helped send the world down a path of worrying obsessively about misguided remedies for minor problems while ignoring much greater concerns,” such as poverty, which only economic growth can ameliorate.

MIT’s models foresaw the collapse of civilization because of “nonrenewable resource depletion” and population growth. “In an age more innocent of and reverential toward computers,” Lomborg writes, “the reams of cool printouts gave the book’s argument an air of scientific authority and inevitability” that “seemed to banish any possibility of disagreement.” Then — as now, regarding climate change — respect for science was said to require reverential suspension of skepticism about scientific hypotheses. Time magazine’s story about “The Limits to Growth” exemplified the media’s frisson of hysteria:

“The furnaces of Pittsburgh are cold; the assembly lines of Detroit are still. In Los Angeles, a few gaunt survivors of a plague desperately till freeway center strips . . . Fantastic? No, only grim inevitability if society continues its present dedication to growth and ‘progress.’”

The modelers examined 19 commodities and said that 12 would be gone long before now — aluminum, copper, gold, lead, mercury, molybdenum, natural gas, oil, silver, tin, tungsten and zinc. Lomborg says:

Technological innovations have replaced mercury in batteries, dental fillings and thermometers; mercury consumption is down 98 percent, and its price was down 90 percent by 2000. Since 1970, when gold reserves were estimated at 10,980 tons, 81,410 tons have been mined, and estimated reserves are 51,000 tons. Since 1970, when known reserves of copper were 280 million tons, about 400 million tons have been produced globally, and reserves are estimated at almost 700 million tons. Aluminum consumption has increased 16-fold since 1950, the world has consumed four times the 1950 known reserves, and known reserves could sustain current consumption for 177 years. Potential U.S. gas resources have doubled in the past six years. And so on.

The modelers missed something — human ingenuity in discovering, extracting and innovating. Which did not just appear after 1972.

Aluminum, Lomborg writes, is one of earth’s most common metals. But until the 1886 invention of the Hall-Heroult process, it was so difficult and expensive to extract that “Napoleon III had bars of aluminum exhibited alongside the French crown jewels, and he gave his honored guests aluminum forks and spoons while lesser visitors had to make do with gold utensils.”

Forty years after “The Limits to Growth” imparted momentum to environmentalism, that impulse now is often reduced to children indoctrinated to “reduce, reuse, and recycle.” Lomborg calls recycling “a feel-good gesture that provides little environmental benefit at a significant cost.” He says that “we pay tribute to the pagan god of token environmentalism by spending countless hours sorting, storing and collecting used paper, which, when combined with government subsidies, yields slightly lower-quality paper in order to secure a resource” — forests — “that was never threatened in the first place.”

In 1980, economist Julian Simon made a wager in the form of a complex futures contract. He bet Paul Ehrlich (whose 1968 book “The Population Bomb” predicted that “hundreds of millions of people” would starve to death in the 1970s as population growth swamped agricultural production) that by 1990 the price of any five commodities Ehrlich and his advisers picked would be lower than in 1980.

Ehrlich’s group picked five metals. All were cheaper in 1990.

The bet cost Ehrlich $576.07. But that year he was awarded a $345,000 MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant and half of the $240,000 Crafoord Prize for ecological virtue. One of Ehrlich’s advisers, John Holdren, is Barack Obama’s science adviser.

Like Water for Climate

coolitadmin — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 18:25:13 +0000

MALMÖ – “Everyone knows” that you should drink eight glasses of water a day. After all, this is the advice of a multitude of health writers, not to mention authorities like Britain’s National Health Service. Healthy living now means carrying water bottles with us, sipping at all times, trying to drink our daily quota to ensure that we stay hydrated and healthy.

Indeed, often we drink without being thirsty, but that is how it should be: as the beverage maker Gatorade reminds us, “your brain may know a lot, but it doesn’t know when your body is thirsty.” Sure, drinking this much does not feel comfortable, but Powerade offers this sage counsel: “you may be able to train your gut to tolerate more fluid if you build your fluid intake gradually.”

Now the British Medical Journal reports that these claims are “not only nonsense, but thoroughly debunked nonsense.” This has been common knowledge in the medical profession at least since 2002, when Heinz Valtin, a professor of physiology and neurobiology at Dartmouth Medical School, published the first critical review of the evidence for drinking lots of water. He concluded that “not only is there no scientific evidence that we need to drink that much, but the recommendation could be harmful, both in precipitating potentially dangerous hyponatremia and exposure to pollutants and also in making many people feel guilty for not drinking enough.”

So why do we keep hearing (and believing) that more water is better? Well, obviously Gatorade and Powerade would like us to drink more of their products, and getting us to gulp more than we would naturally like seems like a brilliant marketing move. Likewise, the latest Hydration for Health science gathering, which promotes drinking more water, has been sponsored by Danone, which sells bottled water under brand names like Volvic and Evian.

The drink-more-water story is curiously similar to how “everyone knows” that global warming only makes climate more extreme. A hot, dry summer (in some places) has triggered another barrage of such claims. And, while many interests are at work, one of the players that benefits the most from this story are the media: the notion of “extreme” climate simply makes for more compelling news.

Consider Paul Krugman, writing breathlessly in The New York Times about the “rising incidence of extreme events” and how “large-scale damage from climate change is … happening now.” He claims that global warming caused the current drought in America’s Midwest, and that supposedly record-high corn prices could cause a global food crisis.

But the United Nations climate panel’s latest assessment tells us precisely the opposite: for “North America, there is medium confidence that there has been an overall slight tendency toward less dryness (wetting trend with more soil moisture and runoff).” Moreover, there is no way that Krugman could have identified this drought as being caused by global warming without a time machine: climate models estimate that such detection will be possible by 2048, at the earliest.

And, fortunately, this year’s drought appears unlikely to cause a food crisis. According to The Economist, “price increases in corn and soybeans are not thought likely to trigger a food crisis, as they did in 2007-08, as global rice and wheat supplies remain plentiful.” Moreover, Krugman overlooks inflation: prices have increased six-fold since 1969, so, while corn futures did set a record of about $8 per bushel in late July, the inflation-adjusted price of corn was higher throughout most of the 1970’s, reaching a whopping $16 in 1974.

Finally, Krugman conveniently forgets that concerns about global warming are the main reason that corn prices have skyrocketed since 2005. Nowadays 40% of corn grown in the United States is used to produce ethanol, which does absolutely nothing for the climate, but certainly distorts the price of corn – at the expense of many of the world’s poorest people.

Bill McKibben similarly frets in The Guardian and The Daily Beast about the Midwest drought and corn prices. Moreover, he confidently tells us that raging wildfires from New Mexico and Colorado to Siberia are “exactly” what the early stages of global warming look like.

In fact, the latest overview of global wildfire incidence suggests that, because humans have suppressed fire and decreased vegetation density, fire intensity has declined over the past 70 years, and is now close to its preindustrial level.

When well-meaning campaigners want us to pay attention to global warming, they often end up pitching beyond the facts. And, while this may seem justified by a noble goal, such “policy by panic” tactics rarely work, and often backfire.

Remember how, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Al Gore (and many others) claimed that we were in store for ever more devastating hurricanes? Since then, hurricane incidence has dropped off the charts; indeed, by one measure, global accumulated cyclone energy has decreased to its lowest levels since the late 1970’s. Exaggerated claims merely fuel public distrust and disengagement.

That is unfortunate, because global warming is a real problem, and we do need to address it. Warming will increase some extremes (it is likely that both droughts and fires will become worse toward the end of the century). But warming will also decrease other extremes, for example, leading to fewer deaths from cold and less water scarcity.

Similarly, there are real health problems – and many of them. But focusing on the wrong ones – like drinking a lot of water – diverts our attention from more important issues. Telling tall tales may benefit those with a stake in the telling, but it leaves us all worse off.

Green Domestic Product?

coolitadmin — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 17:45:28 +0000

SANTIAGO – One of the recurrent themes at the United Nations’ spectacularly unsuccessful Rio+20 summit in June was the need to change how we measure wealth. Many argue that we must abandon our “obsession” with Gross Domestic Product and develop a new “green” accounting standard to replace it. In fact, doing so could be a serious mistake.

Illustration by Paul Lachine

GDP is really just an account of the market value of all goods and services. This sounds like a good indicator of wealth, but, as is frequently pointed out, it includes things that do not make us richer and leaves out things that do.

For example, if people are not compensated for the harm done by pollution, its adverse effects will not be included in GDP. If we pay to clean up pollution, this increases GDP, but no wealth has been created. Likewise, there is economic value produced when wastewater is naturally cleaned by wetlands, but no transaction has occurred, so it is not counted in GDP.

It is worthwhile to consider these limitations of GDP as a measure of wealth. And it could make sense to produce a better GDP, which adds uncounted benefits, subtracts the costs of externalities, and excludes activities that generate no wealth. Unfortunately, many of the proposed “green” substitutions, however well intentioned, may not address these limitations adequately and could, in fact, produce worse outcomes.

One prominent example reported in the run-up to Rio+20 and used to support “greening” GDP centered on the Nakivubo Swamp in Uganda’s capital, Kampala, where wastewater flows from the city toward Lake Victoria. Without the swamp’s purification services, a study showed, Kampala would need a sewage plant costing at least $2 million a year.

According to economist Pavan Sukhdev, the former head of the United Nations’ Green Economy Initiative, the point was simple: “It’s going to cost $2 million per year to do what the swamp was doing for free, and they don’t have that money.” Thus, swayed both by the uncounted benefits from wastewater treatment – estimated at up to $1.75 million a year – and the potential outlay to build a sewage plant, Kampala decided to protect the area. “Economic logic prevailed,” says Sukhdev.

The Nakivubo Swamp is an excellent example of the need for careful valuation of the environment. Such information is crucial for making good decisions. For example, if the wetland were to be destroyed to make way for a new district, we know that its benefits would have to be at least $1.75 million higher than the costs.

But there is also a significant risk of political misuse of such information. Kampala’s decision-makers decided to protect the area. In other words, they rejected ever considering alternative possibilities for the area.

Green campaigners often seek such outcomes, but they are entirely unjustified. The swamp is close to the city center and its industrial center, and there is a land shortage in Kampala. In all likelihood, the net benefits of job creation and economic growth that could result from creating a new district (in place of the swamp) would be dramatically higher than the $1.75 million. There is a reason why few large, rich cities, if any, have undeveloped wetlands in their midst.

If green measures are used to shortcut the political process, we can actually end up worse off, because countries will be deprived of jobs, wealth, and welfare, while relatively small environmental benefits will be achieved. The Nakivubo Swamp is not a case of economic logic prevailing, but exactly the opposite – a failure to consider all options and choose the best.

Imagine if our ancestors had made a similar valuation in the past, deciding to protect swampland at all cost. Much of lower Manhattan would still be a swamp, rather than being turned into the powerhouse of New York City, at a huge cost to society.

In general, green accounting may end up being more biased than conventional GDP measures. Green GDP does include uncounted losses, so it avoids the problem of overestimating our wealth, but it fails to account for the potentially much larger benefits of innovation.

For example, the World Bank claims that in order to be green, we need to take into account that consuming fossil fuels will deprive future generations of those resources. In reality, burning fossil fuels over the past 150 years has enabled us to be free to create and innovate an amazingly richer world of antibiotics, telecommunications, and computers. These will further enrich the future, but are not counted.

Moreover, as we have burned fossil fuels, we have simultaneously found new resources and discovered new methods, such as horizontal fracturing, which has dramatically increased the availability of natural gas while driving down its cost. All of this leaves future societies amazingly richer – but would be missed in green GDP measures.

In practice, green accounting might easily have led our forefathers not to cut down forests, because this would entail losing a valuable resource. But converting forests to agriculture led to cities and civilization. Innovation and substitution followed, which ultimately produced many more calories and much more wealth.

Most policymakers still focus on GDP, because, while not perfect, it is strongly correlated with highly prized real-world outcomes. A country with higher GDP generally has lower child mortality rates, higher life expectancy, better education, more democracy, less corruption, greater life satisfaction, and often a cleaner environment.

So, while green accounting certainly can play a role, we must not allow it to become a roadblock to development.