The Upside and Downside of Biology

It seems that biofuels are falling out of favor as a "green" fuel. Land that was once used to grow food is now being used to grow biofuel crops. With the price of food rising and food riots being reported, that seems like a bad idea.

Also, if that was not enough:

A recent study found that growing crops to make biofuels may actually accelerate global warming, because clearing forests or grasslands gives off substantial amounts of carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas that fuels climate change.

However, there may be some biofuel crops that don't require arable land. Jatropha is one that will grow "on marginal or degraded land where not much else will really grow." The plant is pictured above.

While jatropha is a "natural" plant, we may seem some "unnatural," or genetically modified plants, finally being accepted to solve the growing food problem: GM corn is being bought in Asia.

Genetically modified crops that are disease resistant or drought tolerant could provide an alternative to alleviate the global stress.

"I think it's pretty clear that price and supply concerns have people thinking a little bit differently today," Steve Mercer with the U.S. Wheat Associates told the Times.

The re-evaluation comes as riots were reported in bread lines in Egypt and other regions, European livestock face critical feed shortages and biofuels strain the market.

U.S. Carbon Tax Swap

And here I thought I had such a neat idea, when someone else already thought of it, and did a pretty in depth analysis of it: enact a carbon tax, along with a cut in the payroll tax. The tax cut is used to counter the regressive nature of the carbon tax (the tax cut is progressive), as well as to avoid hurting economic growth. Read the paper by Tufts economist Gilbert Metcalf here.

Fuel Tax Offset by Tax Cuts

It looks like all the remaining presidential contenders favor a cap-and-trade system for limiting CO2 emissions. This is about good politics, not good policy, as most economists seem to agree that a carbon tax is the way to go. I don't like tax increases, but was thinking that a carbon tax could be good if it a) was set at the "right" amount, and b) was imposed along with a cut in income taxes, so it would be a "wash" for the typical tax payer. The carbon tax would encourage the conservation of finite resources and development of other, non-carbon energy sources, and a lower income tax would be good for economic growth. The "right" amount, which would equal the economic damage done by a ton of CO2, is likely around $14 per ton, according to Bjorn Lomborg and the IPCC report. This would be equivalent to an increase of 14 cents per gallon of gasoline.

Well it looks like Canada is going this route come July. The 2.4 cents per liter of gas actually seems a bit low, and the 7.2 cents in 2012 seems high, but they seem to be in the right ballpark. I do wonder how they came up with the amount of the tax cut. Have they considered how higher energy costs may drive up the costs of some products, and be passed on to the consumer?

The Most Bang for the Buck?

Developing nations will need $86 billion annually to adapt to climate change, according to the UN. If they don't get it, they aren't going along with any new treaty to cut CO2 emissions.

A few years ago, a study found that six million children could be saved every year for around $5 billion. We still see almost ten million children die every year from preventable and treatable causes. Why not spend a small amount of money now to save millions, instead of a much larger amount to deal with what might happen years from now?

If China and India don't change their ways soon, it really won't matter if these other developing nations participate or not. And maybe freer trade would advance the developing world more in the long run, rather than protectionism and hand outs.

Deadly Snow in China

China, the Middle East, and parts of North America saw some very heavy snow fall this winter. At least 24 people died in China because of it. Global temperature dropped about one degree over the past year. So does this mean global cooling has begun?

Anytime we see an unusual weather event or high temperatures, someone always attributes it to global warming. Those events could just be a fluke of course, but that explanation won't sell as many newspapers or get your attention while channel surfing. From National Geographic:

Well-known global warming doubter Robert Balling, a climatologist at Arizona State University, is guarded in his response to the unusual weather.

"While the trend is surprising, given no volcanic eruption [occurred to block sunlight and cause a global cool-down], I doubt the trend is statistically significant at this time," he commented.

"We both know that if we had seen a jump upward [in temperature], the global warming advocates would have had a field day," he added. "I find the skeptics to be far more cautious."

China CO2 Emissions Growing Faster Than Anticipated

A few months ago I read in POWER Magazine, a trade publication, how China has passed the US in carbon emissions, and that if the Congress decided to go with a cap-and-trade program as the way to combat climate change, it would be putting the country at an economic disadvantage:

It’s time we realized that coal combustion will be increasing in China and India for decades to come. If we spend trillions over those same decades to reduce our CO2 emissions in ways that drive up power costs, the only guaranteed outcome is that China and India are going to eat more of our economic lunch.

Now National Geographic is confirming this:

China's greenhouse gas emissions are rising much faster than expected and will overshadow the cuts in global emissions expected due to the Kyoto Protocol, according to a new study.

China and India have a combined 700 coal fired plants in the works, a figure that dwarfs what the US will be adding. Cutting emissions in the States won't help much in reducing global levels if this continues. Perhaps adapting to climate change is better than trying to stabilize CO2.

Adapt to Climate Change

Lomborg isn't the only one saying that "it would be easier and cheaper to adapt than fight climate change." Critics fear Greenland will melt though, as it did in a movie.

The disastrous hurricanes of recent years have become the poster children of global warming.

But Roger A. Pielke Jr., an environmental policy expert at the University of Colorado at Boulder, wondered whether the billions of dollars of damage was caused by more intense storms or more coastal development.

After analyzing decades of hurricane data, Pielke concluded that rising levels of carbon dioxide had little to do with hurricane damage. Rather, it boiled down to a simple equation: Build more, lose more.

"Everything has been put on the back of carbon dioxide, and carbon dioxide cannot carry that weight," he said.

Pielke's analysis, published last month in the journal Natural Hazards Review, is part of a controversial movement that argues global warming over the rest of this century will play a much smaller role in unleashing planetary havoc than most scientists think.

His research has led him to believe that it is cheaper and more effective to adapt to global warming than to fight it.

Instead of spending trillions of dollars to stabilize carbon dioxide levels across the planet -- an enormously complex and expensive proposition -- the world could work on reducing hunger, storm damage and disease now, thereby neutralizing some of the most feared future problems of global warming.

Read the whole piece here.

Book Review: Cool It

Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming by Bjorn Lomborg is a short (164 pages, if you don’t count Notes and Index) book, but a thought provoking one. Amid some of the dire predictions of catastrophe we hear and read on this topic, he takes a reasoned look at the problem and makes some worthwhile points. These include:

We have other major issues to deal with, namely HIV, malnutrition and malaria, in the Third World – the very part of the world that could suffer the most from global warming. Yet we have relatively affordable means of addressing these problems right now, rather than what problems they might face decades from now due to climate change.

The catastrophe shown in An Inconvenient Truth – cities disappearing because of a rise in sea level of 20 feet – is not supported by the models used in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which shows a worst case rise closer to around 2 feet over this century.

Damages due to extreme weather events are increasing, but not because of a proven link between these events and global warming. We have more people living along the coastal regions today, and they have more valuable assets to lose.

Malaria, widespread in tropical areas, was a major health problem in the US at one time, but isn’t any longer. It was eradicated not because of a change in climate, but because of increases in wealth and technology, which made spraying, draining and medical treatment all possible.

While deaths from heat waves will likely increase, a significant number of cold deaths still occur in winter, and these deaths will decrease in a warmer world.

Considering that the Kyoto Protocol was going to bring about at best a very small reduction in green house gas emissions at a rather high cost, we could do more good in the world by spending our money on micronutrients and mosquito nets to save Third World children from dying today, rather than drastic, expensive cuts in CO2 emissions in hope of saving them decades from now. In a world of finite resources and with real problems of this magnitude, we need to get the most bang for our buck. And this book is a good place to start the discussion on how to do that.