Category Archives: Environment

Feelin’ Hot, Hot, Hot

Environment, Law

The data are in. 2019 was the second-hottest year in modern history. (2016 was the hottest.) The last five years have been the five hottest years on record. According to Petteri Taalas, the Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization, “On the current path of carbon dioxide emissions, we are heading towards a temperature increase of 3 to 5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.” That’s of course presuming that human beings are still around in 2100.

Here is a chart from NASA showing the average global temperature from 1880 to the present. The baseline, represented by zero on the chart, is the average temperature between 1950 and 1980. (“GISTEMP” stands for the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) Global Surface Temperature Analysis.)

The second figure shows that the temperature increase is not evenly distributed around the Earth, but it concentrated at the poles, particularly the Arctic.

The next chart shows the steep decline of Arctic sea ice from 1880 to the present, this time compared to a baseline of the 1981-2010 average.

Finally, this illustration shows the distribution of the 2019 temperature increase (or decrease) within the continental United States, this time compared to the 20th century average. Obviously, the problem is concentrated in the Southeastern states. (I don’t know why NASA keeps changing the baseline. Maybe they just want to keep us on our toes.)

As if to put an exclamation point on these data, last Friday the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-1 decision, dismissed the five year long lawsuit (Juliana v. United States) by 21 American young people intended to force the government to do something about climate change on the grounds that climate inaction was putting their constitutional rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness at risk. The Court ruled that it lacked jurisdiction over the climate, and that “the plaintiff’s case must be made to the political branches or to the electorate at large.” Good luck, kids.

The dissenter, District Judge Josephine Stanton, stated: “It is as if an asteroid were barreling toward the Earth and the government decided to shut down our only defenses. Seeking to quash this suit, the government bluntly insists that it has the absolute and unreviewable power to destroy the Nation.”

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Climate Spirals

The Cost of Climate Inaction

Documenting the Flint Effect

Environment, Health, , ,

In April 2014, Flint, MI’s state-appointed Emergency Manager Darnell Earley made a decision to save $5 million by switching Flint, MI’s water source from Lake Huron to the heavily polluted Flint River. High acidity in the river eroded the protective coating on the city’s lead water pipes, introducing lead into the water supply. Lead is associated with a variety of health and behavioral problems, including impaired growth, kidney damage, high blood pressure, lower intelligence and criminal behavior. Emails show that Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, a former venture capitalist with an estimated net worth of $200 million, attempted to cover up the crisis for several months. It is difficult to determine what role the racial and socioeconomic composition of Flint—as opposed to Republican business values—played in the origin of the crisis or the delay in addressing it. Flint is 53% Black and 45% of its residents live below the poverty line.

New research demonstrates some of the results of lead exposure for Flint’s citizens. A paper by Drs. Daniel Grossman of the University of West Virginia and David Slusky of the University of Kansas looked at its consequences for fertility and fetal death rates. Dr. Marc Edwards of Virginia Tech—who played an important role in documenting the lead levels in Flint—had previously found decreases in fertility and increases in fetal deaths as a result of lead exposure through drinking water.

The Flint water crisis can be seen as a natural experiment with tragic consequences. Their analysis is an interrupted time series design with multiple comparison groups. The interruption occurred in April 2014, when Flint’s water supply was contaminated. The researchers examined changes in several variables of interest in Flint from before to after that date, using Michigan’s 15 other largest cities as comparison groups. Racial, socioeconomic and other demographic characteristics of the parents and children were statistically controlled. Here are the highlights:

  • The fertility rate after April 2014 was 8.5 births per 1000 women lower in Flint than in the comparison cities. This is a 12% decline in fertility and amounts to between 198 and 276 fewer children born in Flint during the time of the study due to the water crisis. Here are the trend lines.
  • There was a “horrifyingly large” 58% increase in the fetal death rate—defined as pregnancies of more than 20 weeks that do not result in a live birth—compared to other Michigan cities. This explains some, but not all, of the decline in fertility.
  • After April 2014, the overall health of Flint’s babies was not as good as those born in the other cities. They were born half a week sooner, were 150 grams lighter at birth, and gained 5 grams per week less than babies in the comparison groups. They also contained a .74% higher percentage of females. This is explained by the fact that male fetuses are more susceptible to prenatal damage.

Alternative explanations for an interrupted time series design focus on the possibility that something else happened in Flint in April 2014 that did not happen in Detroit’s other cities that affected its fertility rate. Maybe the change in the smell or taste of the water was sufficiently alarming to Flint residents to cause them to have less sex, or at least less unprotected sex.

Even if Flint residents avoided pregnancy during the water crisis, this does not explain the increase in fetal deaths or the differences in the health of newborns.

Dr. Slusky discusses the results of their study in this video.

It is likely that the residents of Flint will be dealing with social problems due to the lead crisis for decades, possibly even for generations. The Michigan Attorney General has filed indictments against 15 individuals for their roles in the crisis, but experience suggests that they are unlikely to be held accountable in any meaningful way. Meanwhile, experts are suggesting that residents of many other U. S. cities are being poisoned by lead. Of course, if we continue to defund the Environmental Protection Agency, we are less likely to be aware of the seriousness of the problem.

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Get the Lead Out, Part 1

Get the Lead Out, Part 2

Heavy Traffic

Making a Difference

Environment, , ,

Over the course of the 25 years or so that I taught Environmental Psychology, the section of the course about actions students could personally take to help preserve the environment gradually grew shorter and eventually faded away. It was just too embarrassing. There was plenty of research on how to encourage behaviors such as recycling and energy conservation, but the payoff from these actions was so small that emphasizing them seemed to trivialize the problem of climate change. The authors of the current study have broken free of the trap of emphasizing only trivial behavior changes and have included in their research some actions that will really make a difference.

Seth Wynes, a geographer from the University of British Columbia in Canada, and Kimberley Nicholas of the Centre for Sustainability at Lund University in Sweden, analyzed 148 scenarios from 39 sources—peer-reviewed papers, government reports, and carbon footprint calculators—which estimated the effectiveness of a dozen actions that individuals could take to reduce their carbon footprint. A carbon footprint is a measure of the total greenhouse gas emissions caused directly or indirectly by a person over the course of his or her lifetime.

They confined their analysis to studies done in developed countries, since their carbon consumption is a greater danger to the climate. They assumed that the individual showed total compliance with the behavior change, even though partial compliance was possible for some actions, i.e., switching to a plant based diet. For purposes of analysis, all estimates were converted to a common metric, tons of CO2 equivalent (tCO2e) per year per individual. They then calculated the mean estimate of all available studies of each behavior.

The authors identified four recommended actions that would have high impact, defined as saving more than .8 tCO2e per individual per year. In order of importance, they are:

  • having one fewer child
  • living car free
  • avoiding air travel (one transatlantic flight)
  • eating a plant-based diet

(For a better look at the chart, click here.)

A fifth behavior, switching to green energy, was not recommended due to the authors’ lack of confidence in estimates of its effect. However, the mean savings met their criterion for high impact and they included it on their chart. The remaining behaviors they analyzed were found to have either moderate or low impact.

In a second analysis, the authors tabulated the individual actions recommended in ten high school textbooks widely used in Canada, and in the official government publications of Australia, Canada, the European Union and the United States. Having fewer children and eating a plant-based diet were not mentioned in any textbook; avoiding air travel was mentioned twice and living car free five times. Textbooks emphasized behavior with moderate impact, i.e., conserve energy, or low impact, i.e., plant a tree, or behaviors whose impact could not be estimated, i.e., “raise awareness,” a textbook favorite.

The analysis of government publications produced similar results. Having fewer children and eating a plant-based diet were also not mentioned in any government publications; avoiding air travel was mentioned twice and living car free once. Most of the recommended actions were of moderate impact, such as using public transportation and buying energy-efficient products. Both the textbook publishers and the four governments avoided recommending politically unpopular actions that might cut into corporate profits.

This study is obviously not the last word on reducing carbon usage. The authors admittedly did not attempt to measure rebound effects, in which reduced consumption in one area leads to increased consumption in the same or another area, i.e., knowing you have a more fuel-efficient car, you decide to drive more. Estimates of the impact of some of these actions varied quite a bit, indicating that they may not be completely reliable. The result of the most important behavior, having one fewer child, was based on a single analysis, albeit a solid, peer-reviewed study which assigned one half of a child’s emissions to each parent, one-quarter of each grandchild, and so forth.

Nevertheless, there are good reasons to take this analysis seriously. The differences between the impacts of these behavior changes are considerable. For example, the impact of a couple’s decision to have one fewer child was the equivalent of a lifetime of conscientious recycling by 684 individuals. This suggests that the authors have probably listed them in about the correct order, and that the distinction between low, moderate and high impact choices is real and important.

Researchers have estimated that, if we are to keep warming of the planet below 2° C, per capita emissions must be reduced to an average of 2.1 tCO2e per year by 2050. Wynes and Nicholas report that a person who eats meat and takes one transatlantic flight has used up 2.4 tCO2e, overshooting his or her personal carbon budget by these two actions alone. The current generation of teenagers are not being adequately prepared for the drastic behavioral changes that will be required of them.

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The Cost of Climate Inaction

Cheaper Solar Changes Everything

Norway: On the Right Track

Norway: On the Right Track

Environment,

Norway is the world’s leader in use of zero-emission, fully electric vehicles (EVs). They have 100,000 EVs on the road, over 5% of Norway’s cars. Thirty-seven percent of the new cars purchased in Norway last year were EVs. Norway’s transportation minister anticipates that the number of EVs on the road will rise to 400,000 in 2020, and that the sale of fuel burning cars will end by 2025.

Chevrolet Bolt

There’s a good reason for these trends—incentives. EVs are exempt from Norway’s value-added tax, which adds 50% to the cost of a new vehicle. They are also exempt from road tolls and tunnel and ferry charges. And they get free parking, free charging and the freedom to use bus lanes. These incentives have been so successful that Norwegian politicians are rolling them back. The value-added tax will soon be replaced by a subsidy, which may eventually be phased out. EV owners will have to start paying 50% of the state road charges in 2018, and local authorities are now free to curtail free parking, local tolls, and the use of bus lanes.

Norway isn’t the only place where EV sales are booming. There were over two million electric cars on the road by the end of last year. Here’s the world-wide trend.How good are all-electric vehicles for the environment? Very. This video reports the results of a recent analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists.

What about the price? The average price of a new car is $31,000. To be competitive, the cost of an EV must drop to between $25,000 and $35,000. A new Tesla costs $35,000 and a Chevy Bolt sells for $37,5000. The prices are dropping due to a combination of mass production and the decreasing cost of batteries. This analysis by Bloomberg New Energy Finance projects the future trends in the cost of battery electric vehicles (BEVs) in thousands of dollars (on the left) and the percentage of Americans willing to buy at those prices (on the right).

Currently, Americans can get a federal income tax credit of up to $7500 for purchasing an EV, but there are conditions. This chart summarizes the current status of federal and state incentives, some of which expired at the end of last year.

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Sun Work

Offshore Breezes

The Public Wants Renewables

The World’s Largest Solar Farm

Environment,

Here’s an addendum to last month’s post about China’s heavy investment in renewable energy. The Longyangxia Dam Solar Park in Eastern China presently contains four million solar panels spread over ten square miles of desert. It has a capacity of 850 megawatts, which is enough to power 140,000 U. S. homes. Here’s what is looks like from space.

As previously noted, China plans to spend $361 billion on renewables between 2016 and 2020. They are likely to meet their 2020 renewable goals under the Paris Agreement sometime in 2018. This is possible in part because the cost of solar panels in China has dropped by 40% since 2010.

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China Gets Smart While We Get Stupid

Sun Work

Environment,

The Solar Foundation has published its 2016 National Solar Jobs Census, which they claim is “the most credible, annual review of the solar energy workforce in the United States.” (The report may be downloaded from this web page. For some reason, they require you to identify yourself before reading the report.) The data are based on a combined telephone and email survey of 3,888 businesses engaged in solar activity. A solar job is defined as one in which workers spend 50% of more of their time doing solar-related work; however, 89% of the jobs reported are full-time solar workers.

The headline is that the solar workforce increased by 24.5% in 2016, to an estimated total of slightly over 260,000 jobs. Solar employment has grown 178% since 2010. This is the fourth year in a row in which it has grown by over 20%. In spite of all the fuss here in Pennsylvania over jobs in the natural gas industry, solar employs more people than natural gas; in fact, more than any other energy source except the petroleum.

The Solar Foundations has supplied this handy graphic with the highlights of their survey.

And this relentlessly cheerful video.

The solar job surge is driven primary by demand for residential installations. Installers accounted for 34% of the new jobs. Forty-one percent of solar jobs are in the residential market, compared to 28% in the commercial sector and 31% in utility-scale project development.

One discouraging finding in the report is that the survey respondents predicted a slowdown to only a 10% increase in solar jobs in 2017. The Solar Foundation attributes this in part to the conservatism of employers, who have underestimated solar job growth in previous years. They also make the mathematical point that, as the size of the solar work force grows, any number of new jobs that are added will be a smaller percentage of the total.

The report claims that the overall prospects for solar power remain strong. The cite the rapidly falling cost of solar components, and the extersion of federal Investment Tax Credits until 2021. However, there are some concerns. The declining cost of fossil fuels, especially natural gas, could be a problem. They also mention recent organized attempts (by the fossil fuel industry) to change state net metering laws in order to discourage distributed generation.

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Solar Bipartisanship

The Public Wants Renewables

Cheaper Solar Changes Everything

Solar Bipartisanship

Environment, Politics

Today’s New York Times has an article about how educators and government agents located in rural states are trying to encourage climate-friendly activities without alienating climate deniers. They are learning to discuss climate change without using the words “climate change.” For example, they might instruct farmers on practical ways to cope with drought without ever mentioning the most important cause of recent increases in drought.

One way to encourage renewable energy is to emphasize cost savings. Pocketbook voting may explain why 45% of Republicans favor giving priority to renewable energy over fossil fuels, even though only 12% of them say climate change is a major threat to the well-being of the country.

PowerScout, a San Francisco-based solar company did a study comparing the solar installation rates of donors to the Democratic and Republican parties. Using a database of the names and addresses of campaign contributors from the top 20 solar states, they first narrowed the sample down to 1.5 million contributors living in single family homes. Then they checked these addresses using satellite images and artificial intelligence software. By feeding images of homes with and without solar panels into the computer, the model, called a convolutional neural network, learned to distinguish between them with 90% accuracy.

Here are the results by state.

Overall, 3.06% of Democratic donors had solar installations, compared to 2.24% of Republican donors. However, in California, where solar power is well-established, it was a virtual tie, and in the state with the highest penetration of solar, Hawaii, Republicans had a slight edge.

PowerScout intends to use the same computer technology for marketing purposes, to identify people who are most likely to purchase rooftop solar for their homes.

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The Public Wants Renewables

Cheaper Solar Changes Everything

Offshore Breezes

Environment,
Credit: Aaron Crowe/flickr

The Long Island Power Authority (LIPA) last week approved the construction of the largest offshore wind farm in the U. S. It will be located 30 miles southeast of Montauk at the eastern tip of Long Island. Construction is supposed to begin in 2020 and the plant is scheduled to go online by the end of 2022.

The farm will initially contain 15 turbines, and is located on a 256 square mile plot with room for as many as 200 turbines. Each turbine will be approximately 600 feet tall and the farm will be connected to East Hampton by a 50 mile undersea cable. It should generate enough energy to power 50,000 homes.

The wind farm will not be visible from Montauk, but will be barely visible from Martha’s Vineyard. Previous wind farms have been opposed by property owners who said they would spoil the ocean view. The only opposition to the current project came from commercial fishermen and consumers concerned about rising electricity costs.

At present, the nation’s only functioning offshore wind farm is the Block Island Wind Farm off the coast of Rhode Island, which went online six weeks ago. The Long Island installation will be triple its size.

The wind farm is consistent with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s stated goal of drawing 50% of the state’s power from renewable sources by 2030. Investment tax credits are expected to offset 24% of the wind farm’s cost. The cost of the farm was originally put at $1 billion, but has been revised to $740 million due to reductions in the cost of wind power. LIPA estimates its eventual cost to consumers at 16 cents per kilowatt hour. This compares unfavorably to the current cost of electricity from fossil fuels (7.5 cents per kilowatt hour), but these costs are likely to change.

Due to higher construction costs, offshore wind farms cost about twice as much as onshore farms of the same size. However, offshore wind farms are more productive, since the wind blows more reliably the further offshore you go, and they face less opposition from competing users of the space.

Europe is the world leader in offshore wind power, with the U. K., Denmark, Belgium and Germany having the largest capacity (in that order). The cost of offshore wind power in Europe has fallen by 32% since 2012, and is considerably less than in the U. S. This is attributable primarily to the fact that more of the costs of development are borne by European governments. In Europe, the state covers more of the cost of preparatory work and builds the grid connection.

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The Public Wants Renewables

China Gets Smart While We Get Stupid

Cheap Solar Changes Everything

The Public Wants Renewables

Environment, Politics,

As President Trump (gulp!) signed executive orders reviving the Keystone XL oil pipeline and expediting the Dakota Access pipeline, the Pew Research Center this week released the results of a survey of attitudes toward energy development priorities. The survey was conducted on January 4-9 with a representative sample of 1502 U. S. adults.

Respondents were asked: “Which one of the following do you think should be the more important priority for addressing America’s energy supply?” Here are the results:

The percentage choosing renewables was up from 60% the last time the question was asked, in December 2014.

There continues to be a large divide between Democrats and Republicans on this issue, as shown below. However, it should be noted that there was a virtual tie among Republican and Republican-leaning respondents, with 45% choosing renewable energy and 44% choosing fossil fuels.

The other demographic that produced large differences was age, as shown here:

While Trump plans to weaken the power of the Environmental Protection Agency, a Pew survey conducted between November 30 and December 5 found that 59% of U. S. adults say stricter environmental laws and regulations are worth the cost, while 34% say they cost too many jobs and hurt the economy.

It should be noted that attitudes toward renewable energy are much less polarized than attitudes toward climate change, where 88% of Democrats and Democrat leaners see climate change as a major threat to our well-being, compared to only 12% of Republicans and Republican leaners. This could mean that Americans have decided that investing in renewable energy would be a good idea even if the climate were not changing.

Imagine how many Americans would favor expansion of wind and solar energy if the corporate media were to present accurate information about the costs of alternative forms of energy.

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China Gets Smart While We Get Stupid

Cheap Solar Changes Everything

The Cost of Climate Inaction

China Gets Smart While We Get Stupid

Environment,

China announced last week that it is planning to invest $361 billion in renewable energy development during the 5-year period between 2016 and 2020. The breakdown is as follows: 40% will go to solar power, 28% to wind, 20% to hydro, and the remainder to tidal, geothermal and biomass. The plan is expected to create 13 million new clean energy jobs. It puts China on schedule to meet its greenhouse gas reduction goals from the 2014 U. S.-China treaty five years ahead of time.

Even so, China’s situation illustrates the heavy role that inertia plays in energy consumption. By 2020, renewables are expected to account for only 15% of its total energy, with coal still acounting for more than half.

Offshore wind farm near Shanghai, China.

China’s heavy reliance on coal has exacted serious economic and social costs due to hazardous smog. Last year, as part of their “war on pollution,” the government closed 335 factories and retired 400,000 high-polluting vehicles from the roads. This is starting to pay off, since last year Beijing reported having 198 “blue sky days,” up from just 12 in 2015.

China’s new investments will make it the world’s dominant producer of renewable energy. They now have five of the six largest manufacturers of solar panels, the largest manufacturer of wind turbines, and the largest producer of lithium ion batteries. The Chinese have also proposed a plan for an international green energy grid, with companies from Japan, Russia and South Korea scheduled to participate. The grid is based on the principle that, although sunshine and wind are intermittent at any one place, with a large enough grid, energy can be transfered one location to another to meet everyone’s needs.

Meanwhile, the U. S. is planning to continue to ignore both climate science and economic reality by increasing our reliance on fossil fuels, even as the President-elect makes blatantly false statements about renewable energy.

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Cheaper Solar Changes Everything

Community Solar

The Way of Ta’u