A no CARB diet

California has created a market out of thin air. On December 16, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) endorsed (by a vote of 9-1) the cap-and-trade regulation with the goal of reducing California’s greenhouse gas emissions under Assembly Bill 32, the Global Warming Solutions of 2006 law. The regulation limits emissions from sources responsible for 80 percent of California’s greenhouse gas emissions. The plan hopes to establish a price signal to drive long-term investment toward “cleaner” fuels and more efficient use of energy.

“This program is the capstone of our climate policy, and will accelerate California’s progress toward a clean energy economy,” said CARB Chairman Mary D. Nichols in a CARB press release. “It rewards efficiency and provides companies with the greatest flexibility to find innovative solutions that drive green jobs, clean our environment, increase our energy security and ensure that California stands ready to compete in the booming global market for clean and renewable energy. The cap-and-trade program provides California with the opportunity to fill the growing global demand for the projects, patents and products needed to move away from fossil fuels and to cleaner energy sources.”

Right after monkeys fly out of her butt.

According to CARB’s press release, “The cap-and-trade program and the other measures to reduce greenhouse gases provide a model for action that can be used at the federal, state and regional levels. As climate policies are being addressed worldwide, California’s early actions are positioning its economy to reap the benefits on the world stage and are catalyzing action throughout the country and the world.”

Really, “a model”?

Perhaps, but CARB and Chairman Nichols seem out of touch or unaware of the example of the Danish carbon emissions registry which has so far cost treasuries in Denmark and other European countries some 5 billion euros (about US$7 billion). (Source: PBS. Carbon Carousel: European Market a Haven for Tax Fraud) At its zenith the Danish carbon registry had 1256 registered traders, most of them fake. As the Telegraph reported, “the attraction of carbon permits is their intangible nature, so there is no need physically to ship goods across borders. All is done at the click of a mouse.” And, so far, legitimate carbon exchanges such as the Chicago Climate Exchange and Montréal Climate Exchange “have proven to be lackluster at best and dismal failures in general. Carbon prices are nearly $0 per ton.

As for “green jobs”? A Spanish study of Europe’s effort at creating green jobs did two analyses. The study show that the economy loses over two jobs for every green job created. “[T]hrough the use of both methods we have reached a similar conclusion: for every green job, we can be highly confident that 2.2 jobs are destroyed elsewhere in the economy, to which we have to add those jobs that the non-subsidized investment would have created.” Subsidies and taxes cost money, and that money comes from salaries saved.

The regulation will cover 360 businesses representing 600 facilities and is divided into two broad phases: an initial phase beginning in 2012 that will include all major industrial sources along with utilities; and, a second phase that starts in 2015 and brings in distributors of transportation fuels, natural gas and other fuels. Electric utilities will be given allowances and they will be required to sell those allowances and dedicate the revenue generated for the benefit of their ratepayers and to help achieve AB 32 goals. By the end of the program in 2020 there will be a 15 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions compared to today, reaching the same level of emissions as the state experienced in 1990, as required under AB 32.

There are also provisions to develop international offset programs that could include the preservation of international forests. A Memorandum of Understanding has already been signed with Chiapas, Mexico, and Acre, Brazil, at the Governor’s Global Climate Summit 3 to establish these offset programs. Such provisions drew praise from some, “The Pacific Forest Trust commend the California Air Resources Board for all the extraordinary and pioneering work they have done to craft this blueprint for California’s market-based system addressing climate change,” said PFT President Laurie Wayburn. “This truly is a historic moment. It’s exciting to see California leading the way yet again with a robust cap and trade program that creates incentives for U.S. landowners to conserve and steward our forests as a vital climate defense.”

Carbon trading looks like a bad idea whose time has come. As Roger Helmer, a member of the European Parliament puts it, “Carbon trading is wrong on so many levels…many studies have shown that plans to slash fossil fuel use, even if fully implemented, would have a trivial impact on the trajectory of climate – perhaps a tenth of a degree by 2100. And that assumes carbon dioxide really is the driving force in climate change. If it’s not, we get zero benefits, at a huge, economically devastating, wealth-redistributing price tag…[and] most of the authoritative economic studies on carbon trading demonstrate clearly that its costs always greatly exceed any conceivable benefits.”

CARB’s cap-and-trade regulation will either drive the development of green jobs or drive business out of California.

The Sunday funny: Oh Christmas Tree (21st century version)

Another video from author, director, playwright, interviewer, Mark Leiren-Young. Don’t miss the gratuitous use of a chainsaw. As I mentioned before, Mark is the director of the movie, Green Chain and author of a book of the same name and also Never Shoot a Stampede Queen. They make great stocking stuffers.

Santa’s been naughty, just look at those carbon footprints!

Author, director, playwright, interviewer, from the Great White North, Mark Leiren-Young has created a great little video for us. Mark is the director of the movie, Green Chain and author of a book of the same name and also Never Shoot a Stampede Queen. You may agree or disagree with Mark’s environmental stance, but he’s witty and willing to listen to other viewpoints–a startlingly rare combination in today’s hyper-heated rhetoric.

Letter to Lake County Record-Bee

Here’s a letter to the editor of the Lake County Record-Bee:

I noted in the article, “GE crops hot topic at Board of Supervisors,” Lake County’s BOS were in “consensus in support of drafting letters to state legislators and federal regulators indicating Lake County’s support of requiring the identification of GE [Genetically Engineered] ingredients on food labels.”

Such a call implies that GE food should be avoided because the food is “unnatural.” Then let’s toss in traditional selection breeding methods using chemical or radiation mutagenesis whereby hundreds of the foods we consume were developed. Is irradiating species to produce mutations safer than the selection and insertion of a specific trait? If one points out that we know that they are because we have been eating them, the same can be said then for GE crops.

“After 14 years of cultivation and a cumulative total of 2 billion acres planted, GE crops have not caused a single instance of harm to human health or the environment.” – Pamela Ronald, Professor of plant pathology at University of California, Davis.

We humans have been modifying our food supply for 10,000 years. “Except for wild game, wild mushrooms, wild berries and fish and shellfish, virtually all the food in European and American diets is already derived from genetically modified organisms,” notes biologist Henry Miller, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. “Yogurt, beer, tofu, and bread, for example, are made with microorganisms that have been painstakingly modified and optimized over many years or even centuries.”

To be scientifically correct, the BOS should amend their letter to support requiring the identification of all food as genetically modified with the exception of wild game, wild mushrooms, and wild berries.

Making money out of thin air

What do the South Sea Company and carbon exchanges have in common? Everything.

In 1711, Britain’s treasurer, Robert Harley, had an extraordinary idea. He could finance Britain’s war debt by selling shares in a non-existent trading company: the South Sea Company. South America was just opening up and was imagined to be a place where silver and gold flowed as easily as water. But for the scheme to be pulled off, according to a recent Economist article, investors needed to “be persuaded to drive the stock above its par value” in order “to create wealth out of thin air.” It worked for a while. Speculation drove up the price but when negotiations with Spain faltered, the South Sea Company needed government backing to keep the party going. They went old school and bribed people close to the king. Eventually, despite the royal imprimatur, the investors discovered that the scheme contained no substance and was just hot air, and their shares’ par value equaled pond scum.

004 Carnival wind-peddler and wholesaler (stoc...

Today, a number of scientists, companies, and policy-makers are concerned with anthropogenic (man-made) global warming. And, carbon dioxide (CO2), a by-product of burning, has been fingered as the prime suspect. CO2 also happens to be the gas that you and I exhale with each breath. Simply put, CO2 reflects infrared radiation back to earth that would otherwise be lost to the cold cold depths of space–the so-called greenhouse effect.

Climate scientists have built complex computer programs to model the earth’s future climate. Using sophisticated equations with feedback loops and forcings they have “proven” the warming, which vary from 1 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit change, of the worldwide average by the end of this century. For our purposes we can simply say that more CO2 equals a hotter earth. People living at the start of the 20th century who could remember the “little ice age” thought this greenhouse effect beneficial. Today, the warming involved with the higher levels of climate change stands accused of everything from colder winters to cancer, and even illegal immigration (I am not making this up).

Some have suggested that a cap-and-trade system could reduce CO2 emissions; this would be similar to how regulators curbed other smokestack pollutants (such as sulfur dioxide) in the late 20th century. Essentially, regulators “cap” the total output of a pollutant with a limited allowance of CO2, and then polluters can trade their credits. Those who produce less of the pollutant can sell their remaining allowance to those who produce more. The state of New York has collected $282 million under a regional agreement from the auctioning of carbon dioxide credits.

In addition to selling allowances in a cap-and-trade system, indulgences can also be sold in the form of “carbon offsets.” Offsets provide a counter-balance to the CO2-emissions’ damage (presumably) done by flying in an airplane, driving a car, having a child, or all three and more. The offsets vary: one might buy a bit of rainforest (to grow and soak up CO2 through photosynthesis) or fund family planning in Ethiopia (to prevent another carbon emitter from entering the world) as atonement. By buying such carbon-coated indulgences, one can expiate the sins of extravagant western living and transform oneself into a holy carbon-neutral being.

It’s not about saving the world (except for the true believers), it’s about money. Follow the incentives. Baptists and bootleggers, true believers and the buck-seekers, have banded together to make markets out of thin air with offsets or allowances. At the United Nations’ climate change delegate meeting in Cancun that just ended, investment funds, insurance companies and banks have lobbied for a treaty, and not because they are altruistic. Ronald Bailey at Reason writes that the delegates there have decided “to kick the Cancun down the road” because the “rich countries continued their vague promises to hand over $100 billion in climate aid annually to poor countries beginning in 2020.”

Cutting 100 percent of our CO2 emissions lowers CO2 emissions by a whopping 1.5 percent of the carbon cycle, because the rest (210 billion metric tons per year) comes from natural processes. But, “if you’re looking to make money from the trading of carbon allowances (carbon credits) than (sic) it makes a great deal of sense….If you are in the renewable energy business it makes perfect sense to support the reduction of carbon dioxide ‘pollution’,” writes one energy analyst.

I could be wrong, but I see no “there” there. The investment has no portfolio. I think, just as what happened to the British South Sea Company, investors will eventually learn that these hyperventilated bubbles are simply full of hot air. What do the South Sea Company and carbon exchanges have in common? Nothing.

Sources

Buttonwood. “An early attempt to buy government bonds by creating money.” The Economist, November 11, 2010.

Christy, John R. “The Global Warming Fiasco.” In Global Warming and Other Eco-Myths, by Competitive Enterprise Institute, edited by Ronald Bailey, 423. Forum, 2002.

Derbyshire, David. “‘Climate change could give you cancer’: UN report warns of deadly pollutants from glaciers .” Mail Online. December 9, 2010. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1336810/Climate-change-cancer-UN-report-warns-deadly-pollutants-glaciers.html#ixzz17qXOVfeT (accessed December 11, 2010).

Horn, Art. “The Utter Futility of Reducing Carbon Emissions.” Energy Tribune. December 1, 2010. http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm/5961/The-Utter-Futility-of-Reducing-Carbon-Emissions (accessed December 1, 2010).

Lindzen, Richard S. “Global Warming: How to approach the science.” Testimony: House Subcommittee on Science and Technology hearing on A Rational Discussion of Climate Change: the Science, the Evidence, the Response. Richard S. Lindzen, 2010.

Lomborg, Bjorn. “Human Welfare: Food and Hunger.” In The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World, by Bjorn Lomborg, 515. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

NAVARRO, MIREYA. “Carbon Auction Yields $16.9 Million for New York.” Dot Green. New York Times. December 3, 2010. http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/03/carbon-auction-yields-16-9-million-for-new-york/ (accessed December 12, 2010).

Optimum Population Trust. “Your questions answered.” PopOffets. Optimum Population Trust 12 Meadowgate, Urmston Manchester M41 9LB. http://www.popoffsets.com/faq.php (accessed December 11, 2010).
Revkin, Andrew C. “Cold Weather in a Warming Climate.” Dot Earth – New York Times blog. March 1, 2008. http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/01/reconciling-cold-weather-and-a-warming-climate/ (accessed December 11, 2010).

Ridley, Matt. The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. New York, New York: HarperCollins, 2010.

Shuaizhang Feng, Alan B. Krueger, Michael Oppenheimer. “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.” Linkages among climate change, crop yields and Mexico–US cross-border migration. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. http://www.pnas.org/content/107/32/14257.long.

Vaughan, Adam. guardian.co.uk,. 10 31, 2010. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/oct/31/climate-change-computer-game (accessed 11 20, 2010).

200 countries, 200 years, 4 minutes

Do you wonder what the future will hold? Maybe the keys to the future reside in the past. Hans Rosling is a Swedish medical doctor who spent 20 years helping poor Africans get healthy. You might think after seeing famine firsthand he would be pessimistic. Dr Rosling defines himself as neither an optimist nor a pessimist; he is a “possiblist.”

Hottest year on record the quietest fire year in US since 1998


Image via Wikipedia

This is interesting, don’t you think? The U.S. is on track for its quietest wildfire year since 1998 (3.3 million acres), and firefighter deaths (7 firefighters) are the lowest on record, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. USA Today reports, “The USA is on track for its quietest wildfire year since 1998, and firefighter deaths are the lowest on record, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.”

According to NOAA, “The first eight months of 2010 tied the same period in 1998 for the warmest combined land and ocean surface temperature on record worldwide. Meanwhile, the June–August summer was the second warmest on record globally after 1998, and last month was the third warmest August on record. Separately, last month’s global average land surface temperature was the second warmest on record for August, while the global ocean surface temperature tied with 1997 as the sixth warmest for August.”

It’s interesting that 1998 and 2010 are labeled as the two hottest years on record, yet in the US will be lowest acres burned and lives lost.

This week’s environmental story roundup

Supreme Court to Hear Climate Change Case

As the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued a decision that many new or upgraded factories, power plants or other facilities will have to get a permit under the Clean Air Act to emit carbon dioxide, methane or other greenhouse gases (Source: NY Times), the United States Supreme Court has decided to hear the case of American Electric Power Co., Inc. v. Connecticut. The SCOTUS blog says at issue is “Whether federal law allows states and private parties to sue utilities for contributing to global warming.”

Wired.com says, “The case was filed before the Environmental Protection Agency’s right to regulate greenhouse gases was established, and represents an attempt by citizens to control greenhouse gases in the absence of federal mandates.” You might remember, the Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that the EPA could regulate greenhouse gases, a process scheduled to begin early next year. But, Wired.com notes, “A New York court ruled against the states in 2005, saying the suit raised a “political question” beyond judicial scope. An appeals court  reversed that decision last year, noting that the link between greenhouse gas pollution and climate change is not a political question. As justification, they even cited Georgia v. Tennessee Copper Co., an obscure Supreme Court decision in which the high court supported Georgia’s right to sue two copper companies responsible for crop-destroying pollution.” It’s the appeal that the SCOTUS will hear.

Carbon Auction Yields $16.9 Million more for New York

While the Chicago Carbon Exchange (CCX) has pretty much shut down with a ton of CO2 trading for a nickel, the NY Times reports the state of New York “made $16.9 million in the latest auction of carbon dioxide credits, held this week under the cap-and-trade system known as Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative…New York has so far collected $282 million from RGGI (pronounced “reggie”), the most of any of the 10 participating Northeastern and mid-Atlantic states.” The Times article notes, “Under the program, the 10 states agreed to cap carbon dioxide emissions  from electric power plants and charge the plants for the emissions they produce. As an incentive for the plants to pollute less, the states allow those that cut their emissions below the cap level to sell or trade their excess carbon allowances through online auctions four times a year.”

Cancun shindig ends with a semblance of an agreement

Politico reports, “A year after U.N.-led talks all but collapsed in Copenhagen, delegates from countries large and small signed off on a package of low-hanging fruit that includes establishing a program to keep tropical rainforests standing, sharing low-carbon energy technologies and preparing a $100 billion fund to help the world’s most vulnerable cope with a changing climate…diplomats scarred by the chaos in Copenhagen accepted a deal that fails to ratchet down greenhouse gas emissions anywhere close to scientific recommendations [and] fails to establish a firm date for negotiators to reach a conclusion on a new climate treaty.

The World Resources Institute jubilantly reported the Cancun climate talks concluded on 11 December 2010 with countries “agreeing by consensus to move ahead with an international agreement on climate change that includes “targets and actions, increased transparency, the creation of a climate fund, and other important mechanisms to support developing countries. Delegations also recognized the urgency of keeping global average temperature below 2 degrees Celsius, with the ability to strengthen the response in the coming years.”

Not everyone was quite so thrilled, Ronald Bailey at Reason.com said, “It would be cynical to call it a bribe, but the Cancun agreements were largely reached because the rich countries continued their vague promises to hand over $100 billion in climate aid annually to poor countries beginning in 2020. Basically the deal on emissions is that countries will agree to agree on cuts at the next climate change conference in Durban.” While Christopher Monckton wrote on the CFact blog, “The governing class in what was once proudly known as the Free World is silently, casually letting go of liberty, prosperity, and even democracy itself…The 33-page Note (FCCC/AWGLCA/2010/CRP.2) by the Chairman of the ‘Ad-Hoc Working Group on Long-Term Co-operative Action under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’, entitled Possible elements of the outcome, reveals all. Or, rather, it reveals nothing, unless one understands what the complex, obscure jargon means…Western countries will jointly provide $100 billion a year by 2020 to an unnamed new UN Fund. To keep this sum up with GDP growth, the West may commit itself to pay 1.5% of GDP to the UN each year. That is more than twice the 0.7% of GDP that the UN has recommended the West to pay in foreign aid for the past half century. Several hundred of the provisions in the Chairman’s note will impose huge financial costs on the nations of the West…Hundreds of new interlocking bureaucracies answerable to the world-government Secretariat will vastly extend its power and reach.”

Mountain Gorillas on the Increase

A gorilla census in the 180 sq mi Virunga Massif of Rwanda reveals a 26.3 percent increase of the mountain gorilla over the last seven years. (source: allafrica.com) A story in the New York Times notes that increased economic standards in the area had led to a decrease in poaching. “Many of these communities now keep bees to make honey or make handicrafts for tourists — they don’t need to poach,” Martha Robbins, a primatologist with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, told the BBC.

Californian Green Scene

Scientists: NASA’s arsenic bacterium paper “Should Not Have Been Published”

The Week: Last week’s much-heralded discovery of a new form of life is already being dismissed by independent scientists who call NASA’s research “sloppy”

“With great fanfare, NASA announced last week that it had discovered a new form of microbial life that can live on arsenic in a lake in California. Even if the discovery left some underwhelmed, it was generally greeted as a breakthrough, a paradigm shift in how we should think about life itself.” (Source: The Week)  RRResearch, A research blog run by Rosie Redfield has received lots of play for her criticism of the paper, “Bottom line: Lots of flim-flam, but very little reliable information.  The mass spec measurements may be very well done (I lack expertise here), but their value is severely compromised by the poor quality of the inputs.  If this data was presented by a PhD student at their committee meeting, I’d send them back to the bench to do more cleanup and controls.” Slate.com asks, “But how could the bacteria be using phosphate when they weren’t getting any in the lab? That was the point of the experiment, after all. It turns out the NASA scientists were feeding the bacteria salts which they freely admit were contaminated with a tiny amount of phosphate. It’s possible, the critics argue, that the bacteria eked out a living on that scarce supply. As [one researcher questioned by slate] notes, the Sargasso Sea supports plenty of microbes while containing 300 times less phosphate than was present in the lab cultures.”

DWP quietly scales back LA Mayor’s renewable energy goal

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has great plans for LA to make 40% of its power from renewable resources by 2020. The LA Times reports that Los Angeles’s Department of Water and Power (DWP) has begun groundwork to dial that figure back.

Villaraigosa set the 40% renewable target during his second-term inaugural address, part of his bid to make Los Angeles “the greenest big city in America.” But [First Deputy Mayor Austin Beutner] has dismissed that figure as “arbitrary,” and the DWP, faced with resistance to the higher electricity rates needed to obtain cleaner power, is looking to scale back the target, according to a draft plan being circulated by the utility.

Century-old oaks may make way — for a silt dump

An eleven-acre grove of oaks and sycamores in the city of Arcadia is the planned site to dump silt dredged from Santa Anita reservoir in the San Gabriel mountains. The LA Times reports, if an agreement with conservationists cannot be reached, a contractor in January will begin clearing the grove at the bottom of a wash abutting the handsome foothill subdivisions. “This is not something we take lightly,” said Bob Spencer, spokesman for the county Public Works Department. The county, he said, will sit down with residents and environmental groups to explore alternatives.

2 More Rare Red Foxes Confirmed in Sierra Nevada

Federal wildlife biologists have confirmed sightings of two more Sierra Nevada red foxes that once were thought to be extinct. Scientists say DNA samples show enough diversity in the Sierra Nevada red foxes to suggest a “fairly strong population” of the animals may secretly be doing quite well in the rugged mountains about 90 miles south of Reno. The first confirmed sighting of the subspecies in two decades came in August. (Source: CBS News)