OSD’s Annual Report to Congress on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China has some illuminating - and somewhat staggering - insight on the current state of affairs with respect to China’s environment and how it influences their national strategic policies. It’s a fascinating look at how the emerging communist nation is dealing with the realities of becoming a global superpower.

Continue reading "Red China Struggles to Go Green"

Presidential front-runners and Senators John McCain and Barack Obama are lacking environmental leadership by failing to pay for offsets to cover their campaign carbon emissions. An article in the Washington Times titled, Green Crusades Lot of Talk, by Stephen Dinan, notes John McCain and Barack Obama aren’t leading by example. “Though both campaigns say they practice energy conservation, Mr. Obama offsets only some of his airplane flight emissions, while Mr. McCain doesn’t cover even that,” says Dinan.

It looks as if carbon offsets for the campaigns are more of a public relations ploy, rather than a serious commitment to running green campaigns. In his article Dinan declares:

Even some campaigns that started with the best of intentions fell short in execution, stopping payments when their cash flow tightened.

John Edwards, one of the earliest candidates to commit to offsets, paid $21,997 last year to Native Energy, a Vermont-based company, according to Federal Election Commission reports. His most recent payment was made July 11, six months before his campaign ended.

Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, another candidate who made an offsets pledge, recorded his last payment to Carbon Fund in September, more than two months before he dropped out of the race.

“I’m sure that a number of the candidates saw offsets as a good way to show leadership by example, but when confronted with the cold reality of a cash crunch, offsets are one of the first things to go,” said Frank O’Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch.

He said offsets are probably well-intentioned, but are not an overall solution to climate change nor the best way to gauge a campaign’s commitment to addressing global warming.

According to Dinan, Senator Hillary Clinton spent $20,327 last year alone in carbon credits, making payments to Native Energy. Also, read the article to hear the explanations from the McCain and Obama campaigns.

What a perfectly optimistic way to begin the new year, via Hampton Univeristy Professor Cuker in Dailypress.com:

Jesus shared the earth with no more than 400 million other souls, Thomas Jefferson with about 1 billion contemporaries, and at projected population growth rates, our children will live with 9 billion others by mid-century. Such rapid population growth can not go on endlessly. Humans, like all other species, can only populate up to the carrying capacity of the environment. Carrying capacity is set by availability of resources (food, water, places to live) and sometimes by the build-up of toxic metabolic wastes. However, as populations approach their carrying capacity, growth often slows as a consequence of increased mortality and lower birth rates due to disease, competition and malnutrition. And for humans we can add the scourge of wars fought for controlling limited resources.

Our children will live in a much better world if human population growth is checked by the rational decision to reduce family size, rather than by famine, epidemics and war. [snip]

When contemplating ways to reduce your carbon footprint, be sure to include contraception on the list along with fluorescent light bulbs and a hybrid car.

Support candidates for public office who embrace family planning and the environment. Regulate the number of your own children. To leave a better world for those you create, vote wisely, conserve and love thoughtfully.

Lots of interesting comments below the article. My two cents:

$0.01 = Those advocating population control are never the first to volunteer to leave the planet.

$0.01 = Since 2004, US per-capita growth is neutral (2.0 kids). All our growth, as in much of the industrialized world, is by immigration. US population is a small fraction of world population growth.

Oh, and “Love thoughtfully” in the same commentary as a plea for population control? That’s just fascinating. At least he admits there was a Jesus.

[Don’s other habitat is evangelicalecologist.com]

Via ABC News:

In the United States, they found that divorced households spent 46 percent more per capita on electricity and 56 percent more on water than married households did. According to the study, if divorced households could have the same resource efficiency as their married counterparts, they would need 38 million fewer rooms, use 73 billion fewer kilowatt hours of electricity and 627 billion gallons of water in 2005 alone.

More:

But Raoul Felder, a prominent New York divorce attorney, is skeptical.

“I think people who want a divorce are so driven to improve their quality of life environmental factors are the least of what they’re thinking about,” he said. “If they’re not thinking about the effect of divorce on children, they’re not going to be thinking what their environmental footprint is going to be or how many kilowatts they’re using.”

Well, yeh.

The article doesn’t even mention the pollutants pumped into the air by ex-spouses driving (and flying) their kids back and forth between two households. I doubt that’s insignificant.

As if conservatives needed another reason to support the family...

Many of us have yet to finalize plans for our Christmas decorating this year. If you haven’t yet decided what kind of tree to put up, consider the truly environmentally-friendly choice: cutting down a live tree.

While that might sound counter-intuitive at first blush, the fact is that the alignment of consumer demand for live trees combines with the environmental interest in growing them to create a powerful alliance.

“Buying a real Christmas tree is the next ‘green decision’ the public can make,” said Mike Bondi, University of Oregon Environmental Science professor. “In fact, a real tree is the safest choice since the tree is helpful to the environment from the time it is planted right up to the recycling process.”

Industry trade groups are also touting live trees as the next “green” thing, including special labeling for trees grown in a particular way. Gayla Hansen, Pacific Northwest Christmas Tree Association president, says that when you buy a live tree, typically “you’re helping independently owned, family farms.” One way to ensure that there will be lots of evergreen trees grown around this country for years to come is to have a booming and consistent consumer demand for such trees.

This is a clear case of fiscal incentive combining with an environmental interest to create a synergy of economic and ecologic good. We have good reason to think, therefore, that economic and environmental concerns shouldn’t be viewed as polar opposites, but rather complementary aspects of the same basic issue.

While a live tree is maturing, it takes in CO2 and produces oxygen, in addition to providing natural wildlife habitat. And when the Christmas season ends, trees can be easily mulched or composted (HT: The Evangelical Ecologist).

You might even choose to buy a tree that you can re-plant after its indoor use is finished. When I lived in Virginia where the climate was more temperate than here in Michigan, my mother and I often would reuse a Norfolk Island Pine (which admittedly sometimes looked like a Charlie Brown tree).

When there is reliable consumer demand for a product, there is additional incentive to motivate producers to have a sustainable source to meet that demand. That’s as true for Christmas trees as it is for African Blackwood (a preferred source for many woodwind instruments, including the bagpipe).

The following items appear in the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation Newsletter, October 24, 2007:

Cornwall’s Beisner and Care of Creation’s Brown Speak at Proclamation PCA

The Cornwall Alliance’s Dr. E. Calvin Beisner and Care of Creation’s Rev. Ed Brown spoke as a panel on creation stewardship at Proclamation Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, Sunday evening, October 14. Rev. Brown focused on theological foundations for creation stewardship. Dr. Beisner expressed wide agreement with those and then focused on the scientific and economic evidence that recent and foreseeable global warming are largely natural, cyclical, and not catastrophic, and that it is better stewardship to prepare to adapt to future warming or cooling than to try to prevent future warming. Audio recordings of the talks may be heard at http://www.proclamation.org/audio/ by clicking on the links to the three creation panel presentations.

Kishore Jayabalan, the Director of Acton’s Rome office, took to the airwaves this morning on Relevant Radio’s Morning Air program to discuss recent media speculation about Pope Benedict XVI’s statements on the moral responsibility of Catholics to care for creation. Does this make Benedict “green”? Or is this simply a continuation of long-standing Vatican policy dating to the pontificate of John Paul II and prior?

Kishore answers those questions and sheds light on how the Holy See approaches environmental issues and treaties in general during his conversation with host Sean Herriott. You can listen to the interview by clicking here (3.5 mb mp3 file).

The following items appear in the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation Newsletter, October 6, 2007:

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1. NASA’s Hansen Reaches Escape Velocity
by James Lewis, American Thinker, August 27, 2007

James Hansen, NASA’s True Believer in the global warming credo, has just been quoted by the Globe & Mail of Canada as follows:

“Prof. Hansen and his colleagues argue that rapidly melting ice caps in Antarctica and Greenland could cause oceans to swell several metres by 2100 - or maybe even as much as 25 metres, which is how much higher the oceans sat about three million years ago.”

In an email to the Globe and Mail, Hansen writes

“If we follow ‘business-as-usual’ growth of greenhouse gas emissions... I think that we will lock in a guaranteed sea-level rise of several meters, which, frankly, means that all hell is going to break loose.”

For all you non-metric folks, 25 meters equals 82 feet, or about as high as an eight-story building. “Several meters” is only about 9-15 feet. That’s the wall of water that is going to drown all the coastal plains of the world if Hansen’s predictions come to pass.

So you have a choice. You can either (a) hop in your car and head for the hills, or (b) consider the very real possibility that Dr. James Hansen has jumped the shark, and is rocketing upward fast enough to achieve orbital velocity. I personally think he has slipped the surly bonds of earth, as the poet says. NASA’s Prophet of Doom is up, up and away, with a beautiful vrroom.

Dr. Hansen is a math modeler in the climate change game. How does he get Planetary Doom from a math model? It’s very simple. You build in “positive feedback loops.” That is, you look in the vast toolbox of climate variables to find just two factors that might reinforce each other in a catastrophic loop. For instance, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere might create a greenhouse effect, which causes more heating, which causes more water evaporation, which causes more greenhouse effect, which causes more heating, etc., etc. Keep looping that, and you raise world temps by just one degree Centigrade, so the polar ice caps melt and the oceans rise, up to 25 meters. See? It’s easy.

The big problem with this scenario is that the climate system almost certainly has negative feedback loops, i.e., causal connections that work to bring temperatures back to a rough baseline. The climate is likely to have self-regulation mechanisms in much the way that our bodies have self-regulating loops to stabilize our temperature, blood sugar, and a hundred other variables. Why does that seem likely? Because the world hasn’t burned up or drowned in quite a long time, even though temperature variations and greenhouse gases have existed for many millions of years. Such factors as clouds and air particulates are believed to lower temperatures. With a little imagination we could easily build math models for self-regulating loops that would tend to stabilize temperatures. (But it might be hard to swing the federal grant support for those models.)

[Editor’s note: As Cornwall Newsletter readers will recall, the climate system certainly does have negative feedback loops, as demonstrated by the work of Cornwall colleague Dr. Roy Spencer, et al., published in Geophysical Research Letters, showing that tropical cirrus clouds, which have a warming effect, diminish with rising surface temperature. See a University of Alabama press release about Spencer et al.’s work here and here. And that’s just one of many negative feedbacks, just what we’d expect in the work of a wise Creator.--ECB]

However, Dr. Hansen is a true True Believer. So he is not bothered by doubt. He is tremendously irritated by the very existence of doubters, however, like Steve MacIntyre of ClimateAudit.org, who has twice punctured Dr. Hansen’s beautiful balloon -- once by knocking down the infamous “hockey stick” curve, and more recently, by showing that Dr. Hansen blew it by claiming that 1998 was the hottest year on record in the continental United States. Turns out that the Dust Bowl was hotter than today, as any farmer might have guessed. Drat it, another beautiful hypothesis, crunched by ugly facts.

Not discouraged, however, Dr. Hansen has gone further out on a limb, and has now issued a challenge to our presidential candidates. He wants all the 2008 candidates to sign a Declaration of Stewardship for the Earth and all Creation. (Bold in the original). Dr. Hansen is out to Save the Planet from the fires and floods that he is sure will come, unless we all repent, as per specs.

Personally I’d be happy to volunteer for Stewardship over the Earth and All Creation, like my cats and family. But the humans keep telling me to butt out, and come to think of it, so do the cats. Dr. Hansen probably carries a lot more clout on his little piece of the Earth. But whether his Stewardship, or anybody else’s, extends to All Creation seems unlikely.

Instead, it sounds like Dr. Hansen has joined the Space Patrol.

Houston to Hansen: Do we have a problem?

Hansen: (static-hiss-crackle-click-pop-radio-silence)

Here’s the Hansen Declaration for our presidential candidates to sign.

"Whereas the climate system is nearing tipping points with likely devastating consequences for much of creation;

Whereas the responsibility of the United States for excess CO2 in the air exceeds that of any other nation by more than a factor of three;

Whereas the rest of the world cannot be expected to take needed actions until the United States exercises responsibility and leadership;

Whereas, some lawmakers and executives in the United States appear to be unduly swayed by special interests;

It therefore becomes important for citizens to be keenly aware of the position regarding global warming of all candidates for election."[italics added for clarity]

Notice that James Hansen isn’t talking like a scientist any more. Among scientists there is lively skepticism about the possibility of human-caused global warming. But no one I know believes that climate change will “likely (have) devastating consequences for much of Creation.” Creation is a big place, as space explorers should realize.

A recent survey of climate researchers shows that less than 10 percent believe that mild warming, if it happens, will have negative effects, while about 40 percent think it will have positive effects -- such as maybe lowering the rate of seasonal depression among Dr. Hansen’s presumed relatives in wintry Scandinavia.

So Hansen’s Whereas Number 1 lacks evidence. As for Whereas Number 2, China has now passed the US in C02 emissions. Whereas Number 3 places the onus on the US either to perform the Miracle of Total Carbon Sequestration, or to freeze its economy. Thus the first three Whereases are not as obvious as Dr. H seems to think.

In Whereas Number 4 Dr. Hansen makes an ad hominem charge against skeptics who “appear to be unduly swayed by special interests.” It looks like there’s not an honest skeptic in the bunch. But that isn’t the language of normal science, where it’s considered bad manners to accuse skeptics of bad faith. This sounds like the language of Al Gore.

Hansen’s ideas carry weight only if they are supported by solid evidence. Otherwise he is just speaking ex cathedra, like the Pope in Rome. Science isn’t about religious authority. It’s about facts.

So here’s Dr. Hansen’s pledge for 2008 presidential candidates. Please chant in unison. (“Amens” are optional.)

1. Moratorium on Dirty Coal - I will support a moratorium on coal-fired power plants that do not capture and sequester CO2.

2. Price on Carbon Emissions - I will support a fair, gradually rising, price on carbon emissions, reflecting costs to the environment. Mechanisms to adjust price should be apolitical and economically sound.

3. Energy Efficiency & Conservation Incentives - I will support measures to improve energy efficiency, e.g., rewarding utilities and others based on energy and carbon efficiencies, rather than on the amount of energy sold.[Bold in the original]

These points are profoundly confused.

Number 1 insists that we stop new coal-fired plants that produce C02, until we can bury and “sequester” all that carbon dioxide. But the technology for burying all those C02 emissions doesn’t exist. Optimistic estimates are that by 2030 we may have “some valuable methods” for carbon sequestration. So this is either asking for a miracle, which is not very scientific, or a demand that we stop coal (and oil) power plants, which is neither good economics, nor good politics, nor compassionate social policy. Without oil and coal, people will freeze next winter, Dr. Hansen. (You don’t want that, do you?)

When you turn on your lights today remember that your power likely comes from C02-puffing industrial plants. If your electricity isn’t nuclear or hydro, it’s almost certainly generated by coal or oil or natural gas. Our population is constantly expanding, but Dr. Hansen would put a cap plus a rising tax on energy production. For all our new citizens, born here and immigrants, you can forget about joining our standard of living. Instead, we will have fewer lights, less heating, less air conditioning, less food, less medicine, less industry, and a smaller economy per capita. And yet, Dr. Hansen wants it all to be “economically sound.” This is a novel twist on economic soundness.

The key to it all, according to Hansen, is to institute “a fair, gradually rising, price on carbon emissions reflecting costs to the environment.” But “the environment” is not a person, Dr.H. It’s a metaphor: The Environment doesn’t work to reach its goals, it doesn’t put food on the table, doesn’t argue about what’s fair, and doesn’t pay the costs Dr. Hansen imagines. Hansen’s argument is nothing but the rhetorical device of “personification” in the guise of public policy. It’s the Gaiafication of the Earth.

Coming from a scientist this is very weird, just as if Isaac Newton were to personify the force of gravity. It was Aristotle who said that things fell to earth because of the “increased jubilation” they experienced as they rushed closer to Mother Earth. But even Aristotle probably knew that was only a metaphor.

Personification is what young children do when they play with toys: Ken and Barbie dolls are treated like real people in those moments of suspended disbelief. But scientists don’t personify hypercomplex systems like the earth climate.

Yet the personification of Mother Earth is at the core of Dr. Hansen’s Declaration. Hansen demands that “the barriers to efficiency (e.g., utilities making more money if they sell more energy) must be removed.” There, too, he uses words like “efficiency” in his own way, having nothing in common with standard definitions. In Hansen’s economy your energy company won’t get rewarded if they just keep millions of people alive and working. And they certainly won’t get more money by producing more energy. Rather, our new power plants will only earn money if they achieve, let’s call it Hansen Efficiency, defined as “putting out less carbon for the same energy output at rising cost.” Hansen Efficiency is to be achieved with a formula that is “apolitical and economically sound.”

Evidently Dr. Hansen believes that we can escape the basic political question of Cui Bono? or “Who will get the goodies?” In real life, his “apolitical” formula is called a “tax” to punish carbon emissions. It’s a tax we will all pay, as long as we use energy. That includes poor people who want to eat and also get to work. Words mean things, even in economics and politics.

So our NASA eminento has gotten very badly confused. This is the kind of fantasy that Lenin and Stalin used to play with in all those Soviet Five Year Plans . . . .

[Read the full article here.]

Continue reading "Environmental Stewardship News Round-Up"

These two brief essays provide a good juxtaposition of two perspectives that view immediate and mandated action to reduce carbon emissions as either morally obligatory or imprudent. For the former, see Vaclav Havel’s, “Our Moral Footprint,” which states rhetorically, “It is also obvious from published research that human activity is a cause of change; we just don’t know how big its contribution is. Is it necessary to know that to the last percentage point, though? By waiting for incontrovertible precision, aren’t we simply wasting time when we could be taking measures that are relatively painless compared to those we would have to adopt after further delays?”

Contrast that with Bjorn Lomborg’s “Our Generational Mission,” which uses the economic concept of opportunity cost to argue that immediate action is not necessary, and perhaps will never be. He wonders, “Why are we so singularly focused on climate change when there are many other areas where the need is also great and we could do so much more with our effort?”

You may have heard this line before, “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs.” The quote was attributed to Johann Tetzel, a German Dominican Friar, in charge of collecting indulgences in 16th Century Germany.

However, it’s not Roman Catholics who have embraced a re-run of indulgences, but the new gurus of carbon-offsetting at the Evangelical Climate Initiative. Iain Murray of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, takes issue with ECI’s latest venture into indulgence - carbon offsets in his piece for the American Spectator titled, A Pardoner’s Tale. Murray sarcastically notes, “You can atone for your carbon sins by buying carbon offsets from the Evangelical Climate Initiative.” Murray also says:

Not to worry. ECI tells us that “The average American is responsible for about 23 tons of CO2 pollution.” And it just so happens that $99 (Not $78 or $103.54? How did it just happen to come to a price right under the $100 threshold past which consumers are much less likely to purchase?) is just enough to offset 23 tons of CO2 per year.

Murray also highlights the new found free market spirit of ECI, but also calls the faithful to their reformation roots, declaring:

One last concern: Where’s the Good Housekeeping seal of approval on ECI’s moneymaking site? Or the Better Business Bureau logo? Or the link to information about how the Securities and Exchange Commission regulates the carbon offsets and carbon trading businesses to make sure there’s no monkey business going on? They’re not there, because -- well, because there is no regulation of this business. Apparently the ECI has finally found a tiny bit of the free market that it doesn’t want to strangle with regulation. One wonders, though, what happened to the ECI’s strong suspicion of sin in every branch of the corporate world. Or is the carbon offset industry impeccable?

It appears to me that this particular branch of evangelical theology is in dire need of a reformation. When it comes to the sin of carbon emission, perhaps carbon-using Christians should remember the words of Martin Luther’s Letter to Melanchthon: ‘Be a sinner and sin strongly, but more strongly have faith and rejoice in Christ.’

(Powerblogger Kevin Schmiesing pointed out the indulgent nature of carbon offsets in a post last February.)

On the campaign trail just recently, John Edwards called for Americans to give up their SUVs, and then was seen leaving the rally in none other than a sports utility vehicle. But not to worry an Edwards spokesmen said, “We buy carbon-offsets for the vehicle.”

It seems as if individuals and families were serious about altering their carbon footprint, they would curb their energy use instead of purchasing an indulgence for their guilt. It seems to resemble a fad or a trendy phase by guilt-ridden polluters. I wonder if I have to purchase a carbon offset for those parachute pants I once owned in kindergarten?

However, with the rising free and unregulated market of carbon-offsets, it will be interesting to see what other offsets emerge in the marketplace, and whether this will trickle down to the health, food, and tobacco industries. Entrepreneurs who miss out on this exploding market, may be feeling a bit of guilt and remorse as well.