Economics ignored by economics professor?

by robstephaustralia

SuperFreakonomics Ignores the Business Case for Sustainability
[Via HarvardBusiness.org]

Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt’s SuperFreakonomics has certainly gotten a lot of people worked up. The point of contention is a chapter about global warming which makes the case that Al Gore and others are getting us way too worked up about the climate problem because the only way to solve it is to convince people to “put aside their self interest and do the right thing even if it’s personally costly.”

The authors go on to explain their solution — geoengineering — which purportedly isn’t going to require us to cut back on our energy use or rethink the way we do business. But what they have completely failed to address — and what the (ahem) lively discussions on the topic have missed as well — is what the benefits of tackling climate change might be, instead of just the costs.

The authors have missed a major economic issue: the process of shifting our economy to a low-carbon one has enormous upsides completely aside from the benefits to climate balance.

I’m not going to try and take apart their arguments or judge the soundness of their climate science as a whole; there are some others who are already doing a detailed job of that. If you like your climate discussions hot and sarcastic (which can be entertaining), see Joe Romm’s posts on his Climate Progress blog. Or if you like the cool, dispassionate analysis, I’d recommend the Union of Concerned Scientists or the well-respected journalist Eric Pooley’s take on how the authors — who he says are friends of his — “flunk” the science.

There’s also been a fascinating back and forth which includes the authors and Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman. In short, Krugman is not pleased and he lays out some devastating concerns about the mental exercise the authors have undertaken (“We’re not talking about the ethics of sumo wrestling here; we’re talking, quite possibly, about the fate of civilization. It’s not a place to play snarky, contrarian games”).

The brouhaha is truly unfortunate on many levels. It’s not that having a discussion of geo-engineering is a bad thing — we should explore and assess many options. But the real problem is that the authors of SuperFreakonomics — and even the big critics who have gotten sucked into it — seem to have taken too narrow a view of the problem. While the authors clearly believe that there is too much climate-change hype, there is some agreement that there’s a warming problem (or why propose a solution — the main point of the chapter — at all?). But the focus of the discussion is entirely on a way to counteract the effects of greenhouse gases, as if there are no other issues related to our reliance on fossil fuels.

Instead, let’s just think about the business benefits of changing our products and processes to reduce carbon emissions, regardless of the atmospheric benefits. How will changing to a lower-carbon economy help companies? Well, there’s real money involved here — energy and other resources are getting fundamentally more expensive over time as demand around the world rises and supply gets harder to find. Oddly, the SuperFreakonomics authors acknowledge this Econ 101 supply problem in passing with the statement: “In just a few centuries, we will have burned up most of the fossil fuel that took 300 million years…to make.” So why wouldn’t we want to move away from a declining resource?

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Steven Levitt is one of the authors of Superfreakonomics and an economic professor at the University of Chicago. Yet according to this article, he seems to have taken off his economic hat in the chapter on climate change. Or at least he decided to wear his hat somewhat askew.

Moving away from fossil fuels has very strong economic implications, particularly since these fuels are a dwindling resource which will become more expensive over time.

The countries and companies that decouple themselves from fossil fuels will slash their costs and increase profits mightily. In fact, as Robert Kennedy, Jr. pointed out in a speech recently, the countries that have already reduced their reliance on fossil fuels — such as Iceland, with its geothermal energy, and Sweden, with a carbon tax driving down energy use as the country grew — have made their economies richer and more stable. (Yes, Iceland then bet its wealth on bad investments at the heart of the financial crisis in 2008 and bankrupted itself, but that’s another story.)

As many have repeatedly argued, we also place ourselves at great risk globally by continuing to pour money into oil markets. We send hundreds of billions of dollars a year to parts of the world that don’t like us very much. And we place ourselves at personal risk — the National Academy of Sciences just estimated, conservatively, that fossil fuels cost $120 billion per year in health costs and cause 20,000 premature deaths (that’s more than six 9/11s if you’re counting).

In their admiration of geoengineering, which only covers up the effects of burning fossil fuels, the authors appear to ignore the benefits that moving away from fossil fuel use engenders.

So, not only did they mess up in several ways when it came to the solutions to climate change, they also missed the economic implications of continuing to burn fossil fuels. I guess being contrarian was more important than fundamental economics. It helps sell more books, I guess.

It will be interesting to see the response

by simone.brunozzi
The must-read solutions book — “Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis” by Al Gore.:
[Via Climate Progress]

The long-awaited sequel to An Inconvenient Truth comes out Tuesday. If you want a preview, Gore and the book are featured in an excellent Newsweek cover story, The Thinking Man’s Thinking Man.

In September, Nature Reports Climate Change asked me (and several others) to suggest three books to read ahead of the Copenhagen conference. Of those, they then asked me to review Gore’s new book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis:

When your last work led to an Oscar and Nobel Prize, anticipation is high on the sequel. And former US Vice President Al Gore’s new book delivers. Our Choice, due out in November, is a wonderfully readable treatise on climate solutions.Whereas An Inconvenient Truth framed the crisis that climate negotiations are tackling, this followup spells out what needs to be done.

Based on 30 of Gore’s ‘Solutions Summits’ as well as one-on-one discussions with leading experts across multiple disciplines, the book aims, in Gore’s words, “to gather in one place all of the most effective solutions that are available now”. Gore naturally focuses on energy, the source of most anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, and discusses many underappreciated strategies such as concentrated solar thermal power and cogeneration. He also devotes a full chapter to soil, a major carbon sink that is gradually degrading. Farming strategies for restoring soil carbon are described, including biochar, a porous charcoal that can potentially enhance the soil sink while providing a source of low-carbon power. And like its PowerPoint-based predecessor, Our Choice is replete with lush photos and simple but powerful charts. This [is] a must-read book for those who want a primer on all the key solutions countries will be considering at Copenhagen.

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Here is a guy who held summits with people from many walks of life in order to gather information for this book, who has altered his opinions as new data emerges, and I bet many people will just ignore him. While two guys who have no background in this issues and really talked to very few people (apparently mischaracterizing those they did talk with) will make the best seller lists.

We shall see but I am just completely amazed at the vitriol that gets thrown at Gore without any real basis. What has Gore every really DONE that makes him such a target? No sex scandals. No financial scandals. A Vietnam vet.

People can disagree with his politics but I just have no idea where the vitriolic disdain comes from. He is used as a scare word, like ACORN or Kennedy. It apparently does not matter that he is right more often than not and that many of the initiatives he sponsored have had huge positive impacts on us all.

I expect his ideas will be more useful and achievable, with lower overall costs , than those of Superfrteakonmics. They will most likely actually be based in reality.

Technorati Tags: Environment, Government, Politics, Science, Sustainability

I’ve been waiting for this

Wireless power system shown off:
[Via BBC News | Science/Nature | World Edition]

A US firm has demonstrated its technique that sends power through the air, powering and charging devices wirelessly.

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One of the big items from science fiction of my youth that has not appeared yet is broadcast power – charging and running things without the need for a ire or cord.

Now we could charge our cell phones without ever having to plug them in. Same with flashlights or even TVs. Even electric cars could be recharged while standing still.

I’m sure there will be some other great uses that come up. Should be fun.

Technorati Tags: Energy Use, Science

It does not add up

by christian.senger

This is from the Republican energy plan. It is a very long document and , as often happens, the short summary leaves out some very important things.

We can discuss policy differences and whether doubling the number of nuclear power plants will really be effective at all. Those are the sorts of policy discussions that separate out the different sides and helps, at least in theory, in getting to a working solution. At least in theory.

But some of the numbers underlying their rationales do not hold up. This undercuts their desire for more nuclear power plants as a measure to gain energy independence.

The Act’s purpose is “To increase energy independence and job creation by increasing safe American energy production, encouraging the development of alternative and renewable energy, and promoting greater efficiencies and conservation for a cleaner environment.” The numbers I find in the Act do not seem to support the ability of nuclear power plants to achieve these goals, at least as proposed in the Act.

First, the document has some very odd definitions. In fact, they claim that nuclear is a renewable energy source (which it is not), just like wind and solar. Renewable resources are ones based either on energy from outside our planet (solar, wind, tidal) or on energy sources from inside (geothermal). Relying on non-renewable natural resources to provide energy (oil, gas, uranium) is simply not sustainable using the GOP’s approaches. By calling it a renewable resource, they can include it when talking about alternative energy sources like wind and solar, confusing the issues.

The fact is that shifting to nuclear simply means that we get our energy from other places than the Middle East, such as Russia or Kazakhstan. The plan discusses current uranium sources. The 104 plants presently in use required about 53 million pounds of uranium in 2008. Adding 100 more plants in 20 years (something I think may be extremely difficult to accomplish), would then double that to about 100 million pounds.

The plan estimates that Arizona has about 375 million pounds that represents 40% of our nation’s total. This results in about 940 million pounds total in the US. Let’s round that up to 1 billion pounds total.

That means that the entire Nation’s uranium resources would be used up in 10 years if this plan is followed! But it would be faster than that because we would be using some during the 20 years it would take to get to 200 nuclear plants.

The plan states “Development of these resources would prevent the United States from being over reliant on less stable foreign sources of uranium.” How is that possible when we would use up all of our resources in such a short time?

Uranium is not a renewable resource by any definition that would impact our energy needs. We are not going to renew that 1 billion pounds of uranium. Maybe it they had included using NASA to explore for uranium on the moon we might see this as a more plausible means to energy independence.

Of course, there are other things to deal with such as disposal of the waste, nuclear proliferation, the siting of these 100 new plants, the huge amounts of water that are required for running them, the technical know how to build 5 new plants a year every year for 20 years, the production of containment vessels for the reactor, and the huge capital investment needed.

In addition, it requires us to continue to use the 100 plants we still have. These plants were licensed for 40 years. Most will require new licenses to continue running. Issuing new licenses for them is not a foregone conclusion (here, here, here).

But the main thing from crunching the numbers on nuclear power is that we would use up all of our Nation’s resources very rapidly and be left back where we are now – relying on unstable supplies from other countries.

Nuclear power at the rates the plan discusses does not seem like a route to energy independence.

Technorati Tags: Energy Use, Environment, Science

A natural organization, a natural society

The Natural Organization – The Rules – Part 1 The Hypothesis:
[Via Robert Paterson's Weblog]

We take the Copernican Revolution for granted today. Of course the sun is in the centre of the system! Of course we should trust the observations of things as they are rather than the dogma of the authorities!

But most of us are still happy to believe the dogma that our organizations are machines when observation reminds us that they are not.

The machine view – silos – spans of control – reporting lines – job grading – departments – top down – princes and peons – had utility in a simpler world. But now, many of us at work are finding that we have to work around all of this stuff. What project does not involve many departments? In Pub Radio and TV what department does not involve the web or the viewer/audience? Today what effective organization does not work tightly with suppliers and contractors? What really great organization does not work with its customers? Some even work with competitors.

What organization today would not like to cut its costs by 70% and increase its productivity by 100%? But with the current way of organizing – this is impossible.

The traditional org chart works against all of this! None of these results or relationships can be found on the traditional org chart. There are no budget lines that support these relationships. Budgets fight these relationships.

Surely, we are organized to own and to control a simple controllable world that no longer exists. We are organized like a machine in a Networked World.

If we are making the shift to a world that is complex and “Natural” we have to have a organizational model that fits this new reality.

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This is very important, high level material, looking at how entire cultures have changed throught out previous revolutions in social structures. Take a look at the interlocking S-curves and compare them this this:

This is a graph of the adoption of a novel hybrid corn by a group of farmers in the 30s. It shows that spread of an innovation throughout a group. This curve is repeated again and again as novel changes make their way across a population, whether the innovation is an antibiotic or an idea. The only difference in the various curves seen in groups is the time from beginning to end. Some happen faster than others because the community is more connected, more innovative or just ready for change.

I’ve talked about this before. The S-curves Robert uses display societal or even larger global changes in the entire world around us, not just a sub-population. The core of all S-curves is that when a tipping point is reached, the rate of adoption of the idea/innovation goes exponential, resulting in tremendous changes in a short period of time.

These changes present dislocations that can be devastating to groups that are unable to accept the altering landscape. We saw the largest uptick in civil violence, along with some of the largest concentrations of financial power during the last shift in American society, between about 1870 and 1920. But these changes also present opportunities for entire societies to become much more efficient at supporting themselves, while distributing resources, such as food and energy, more evenly.

Robert’s interlocking curves simply demonstrate a larger-scale, longer timeline view of the same S-curves seen in smaller groups. It takes some time for change to propagate through a society but the overall trajectory is the same.

So, just as there are individuals that are innovators. early adopters , early middle, etc., there are social groups that fill the same roles. As the innovative groups adopt the changes, they begin to affect the majority that are in the middle, moving them along the societal S-curve.

With the speed that things are now changing, I would say we are at the beginning of the exponential rate of change seen in these S-curves. Organizations that are earlier in the innovation cycle will be able to take greater advantage of the new changes than slower adopting groups. The power of the laggards will diminish.

Robert and I have been discussing so many of the same things over the years. It is pretty cool to me that he has looked at the same sorts of changes from an overall societal perspective while I have been focussing on groups of individuals. But the overall dynamics would appear to be very similar.

So the goal is to increase the rate of innovation diffusion through a group and thus through a society. The sooner we make the transition, the sooner we get to a leveling off area and can take a breath, figuratively.

Technorati Tags: Energy Use, Environment, Health, Science, Sustainability

Just one thing

by Stuti ~
Eating your veggies doesn’t have to be scary:
[Via Gristmill]
[Crossposted at Path to Sustainable]

Save some moolah (and Ma Earth) by snarfing beans instead of burgers once a week.

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Please be careful, though. While most people produce gaseous carbon dioxide, nitrogen and hydrogen, up to a third produce methane (no one knows exactly why the difference but it probably has to do with different intestinal flora). Methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

So, if you are a methane producer (here is a way to tell) make sure you use Beano or similar before eating beans. I have found that a good soaking in water, several hours to overnight) helps a lot. Just remember to discard the water and use fresh water to prepare the beans.

Here is my recipe for Red Beans and Rice:

1 pound of red kidney beans
2-3 bay leaves
1 yellow onion (diced)
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 pound andouille sausage (cut into quarter inch pieces)
2-3 cloves of garlic (chopped)
1/2 teaspoon each of back, white and red pepper
Prepared white or brown rice

1. In large dutch oven, cover beans with water and let soak for 2 hours (1 hour will work and so does overnight). Remove any beans that float. Drain the beans and rinse with cold water. Add bay leaves, cover with 2-3 inches of water, set on high heat and bring to a boil.

2, While the water is heating up for the beans, put a frying pan on medium heat. Add the olive oil and diced onions. Cook until the onions become tender.

3. Add the sliced andouille sausage, garlic and pepper. Heat through for 3-5 minutes, with occasional stirring. Add mixture to dutch oven when water has begun to boil.

4. Cover, lower heat and simmer for 2-3 hours, adding water to keep mixture from sticking to the bottom. After 2 hours or so, you can remove the lid and let the mixture reduce somewhat. Keep stirring every so often to keep it from sticking and prepare some rice (white or brown).

5. Once the red beans has gotten to a nice thick consistency, it is ready. Put a scoop of rice on a plate followed by a scoop of the red bean mixture.

I like to mix everything up together and dig in. Sometimes a little shredded cheese on top is nice and garlic bread is always a treat.

And never any toots!

Technorati Tags: Environment, Science

Good choices

While there has been some real questions raised about the real usefulness of Obama’s economic team, his energy team is really shaping up to be filled with stars. I discuss one of them over at Path to Sustainable.

Not, it very well may be that the solutions to both of these areas are intertwined but I think we will really only see that after some time has passed. Right now, we are only beginning to alter the paths that brought us close to financial ruin and ecological crisis.

With everyone concentrating on the economy, perhaps these people in Energy can accomplish some important first steps.

Technorati Tags: Environment

Idea Club March 23

by ktylerconk

Remember the next Idea Club is in a short time. We will focus how to convert knowledge into action and on how sustainable communities may be created. You can RSVP by clicking the orange Sign Up! at the top of the page.

Idea club has been getting more popular each month. I expect that this will be a very wide ranging discussion since the tops are somewhat intangible. What type of knowledge are we talking about? What sorts of actions are best? What does sustainable really mean?

It will be fun. To get some idea of what a sustainable community might be like, read up on the Earth Charter and the Earth Charter Initiative.

Technorati Tags: Economy, Environment, Health

Combine this with a beer helmut

by Mykl Roventine
What Every Man Needs:
[Via The Moderate Voice]

A MUST at football games..

Of course, you can spend a little more and get this one, which accommodates waists up to 54 inches. And a beer helmut permits you to carry two extras and drink from them without having to raise you hands.

I would expect that most men outfitted with this combo would most likely watch all their games from the comfort of their couch. Less change of spilling that way. Or falling down the steps with all that beer.

Technorati Tags: Entertainment, Health

New nuclear plants. Old problems.

Exclusive analysis, Part 1: The staggering cost of new nuclear power:
[Via Climate Progress]

A new study puts the generation costs for power from new nuclear plants at from 25 to 30 cents per kilowatt-hour – triple current U.S. electricity rates!

This staggering price is far higher than the cost of a variety of carbon-free renewable power sources available today – and ten times the cost of energy efficiency (see “Is 450 ppm possible? Part 5: Old coal’s out, can’t wait for new nukes, so what do we do NOW?“).

The new study, Business Risks and Costs of New Nuclear Power, is one of the most detailed cost analyses publically available on the current generation of nuclear power plants being considered in this country. It is by a leading expert in power plant costs, Craig A. Severance. A practicing CPA, Severance is co-author of The Economics of Nuclear and Coal Power (Praeger 1976), and former Assistant to the Chairman and to Commerce Counsel, Iowa State Commerce Commission.

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There are several other models for nuclear power plants that appear to be much cheaper, more stable and safer. The ones I think have some real potential are those based on Pebble Bed designs. The reactors are designed to be much less likely to fail in ways seen with current designs (i.e. overheating of the ‘core’ tamps down the nuclear reactors instead of resulting in potentially catastrophic explosions of steam seen in some current designs.)

These plants appear to be capable of producing energy at pennies per kWh but are still in the earlier stages so this could change. They are also modular, so that new capabilities could be brought on line. They are also smaller. allowing them to be used in regions that could not be served by larger plants.

Building new plants using older designs will not really solve our problems. But it seems that newer, creative designs may have a place in our energy repertoire.

Technorati Tags: Environment, Science