We MUST Do SOMETHING!

Sometimes, all that matters is that you say you will do something.  Found this out in 2008, running for office.  And wrote about it here, for Learn Liberty Blog.

Of course, things can get a little meta.  As here. 

I understand that "environmentalists" will donate money and contribute outrage even if the non-profits swindling them make empty promises.  But c'mon:  You have to pretend to try.

Through the Looking Glass

I just received this email.  Really, I did.

Dear Duke Employee, 

We are graduate students in the Nicholas School of the Environment working on our masters' project. The project is focused on analyzing the bicycle manufacturing process and using the results of our analysis to drive change in the bicycling industry. As part of the project, we are also conducting a survey of the Duke community to gauge consumer demand for sustainably produced bicycles. You are receiving this email because your department was randomly selected. We would greatly appreciate your help with our project! Every individual who takes the survey will increase the success of our project and the impact on the cycling community. Please note that you may skip any question you do not wish to answer and we guarantee that your answers will be kept strictly confidential. Thank you very much for your time and assistance! 

So....smart, highly educated young people are spending time and money trying to save the environment by making BICYCLES more environmentally friendly.  Think of all the margins on which we might work to reduce our environmental impact (suppose you care about that.  You may not, but suppose for the sake of argument you do...)

How far down the list of "biggest problems" would you have to go to find "improve bicycle manufacturing process"?  You skip over coal-fired power plants, efficiency of aircraft engines, incentives for burning / clear-cutting forests in developing nations. 

 And get all upset about those nasty, polluting bicycles.  Amazingly, this is actually a thing.

Adamant

I reproduce here, verbatim and without comment, an email I received through the Duke System of Public Adamance and Diversionary Environmental Symbolism.

Dear Faculty and Staff in Trinity College of Arts & Sciences, I recently engaged in a friendly debate with my fellow deans at Nicholas School of the Environment and Pratt School of Engineering about which of our schools is the most engaged on the issue of sustainability. 

As you might suspect, I was adamant that we have the most committed and motivated faculty and staff when it comes to sustainability. My colleagues thought otherwise, so we agreed to settle it the old fashioned way -- through a competitive match up called Certified Sustainable: Battle of the Schools. I'm writing to ask for your help. The school that completes the most new sustainable certifications this semester will emerge the winner. From October 9 to December 4, we'll earn points for several sustainability certifications. Please select and complete the certification that applies to you from this list below.

• Staff - Green Workplace Certification ­ Collaborate with coworkers to certify your workplace The first step is to register now for a staff sustainability workshop on either Oct. 14 or Nov. 11 
• Staff & Faculty - Green Lab Certification ­ Collaborate with coworkers to certify your lab 
• Faculty - Green Classroom Certification ­ Certify your Spring 2014 courses 

The school with that has completed the highest percentage of new certifications for which they are eligible will win $500 towards a celebratory event. Other prizes include Men's Basketball tickets, produce from the Duke Campus Farm, and more. These certifications are within reach for all of us, but they do take a bit of time and effort to complete. Let's get a head start now so we can earn our bragging rights once and for all. 

 Let's go Trinity College of Arts & Sciences! Many thanks! 
Laurie Patton 

*********************************** 
Laurie L. Patton Dean of Arts & Sciences 
Robert F. Durden Professor of Religion 
Professor of Cultural Anthropology 

UPDATE:   A sharp-eyed reader noted that what Dean Patton may have intended was to assert that she was "Adam Ant."  To the extent that the contest is desperate, but not serious, I think this is likely true.

Marginal

Perceptions of Toxic Exposure: Considering “White Male” and “Black Female” Effects 

Nnenia Campbell, Christine Bevc & Steven Picou 
Sociological Spectrum, July/August 2013, Pages 313-328 

Abstract: Research on risk perception suggests that social position produces identifiable patterns in the way that people evaluate potential risks, particularly in locally polluted environments. The present study builds upon this literature by examining perceived risk of exposure to environmental toxins among residents located on the Gulf Coasts of Louisiana and Mississippi following Hurricane Katrina. Demographic information from a sample of residents was used to explore the concepts of the “white male effect” and the “black female effect,” discussed in recent research. In support of existing literature, we find that white males tend to be exceptionally risk accepting when asked about potential toxic exposure, whereas black females tend to be exceptionally risk averse compared to other groups. Our analysis suggests that awareness of differential vulnerability and long-standing conflicts over environmental contamination across the Gulf Coast region have left some residents with heightened sensitivity to the possibility of a locally polluted environment. 

Nod to Kevin Lewis

I always wonder about the confounding effects of average and marginal perceptions.  To the extent that white men are wealthier than black women, on average, they are likely to live in different neighborhoods and have different environments.  White men are much less likely to suffer daily exposure to toxic chemicals.  Thus, AT THE MARGIN, they are more tolerant.  But they would have to suffer a lot of exposure just to get to the point where black women start.

Now, that may not be true in this case, and the study may be fine.  But in general if you find  a difference in averages you should think about whether it comes from a difference in margins.

How to build a passive house

This video is from our amazing architect, Vahid Mojarrab, and it shows the foundation and wall assembly of our passive house project in Santa Fe.

Enjoy:




While this seems complicated, at the end of the day, we won't have a furnace or an air conditioner. All the heating and cooling needed can be provided by a single mini-split heat pump.

Will China's development destroy the world?

Um, maybe?

I'm not an expert on global warming, but I do think that of all the fossil fuels, burning coal is the worst for our environment, and China is burning a buttload of coal!

While coal consumption in the rest of the world grew somewhat slowly over the last 12 years, consumption in China more than doubled. China now burns almost as much coal as the rest of the world combined:

(clic the pic for an even more smoky image)

China is both the biggest coal producer AND the biggest coal importer.

Can it be that the biggest single problem facing the world is the need to find a much cleaner energy source for the developing world?

One thing is for sure: a rich world carbon tax is not going to do much, if anything at all, for the environment. Unlike acid rain, carbon dioxide emission is a global externality, not a local one.

Selling Carbon Offsets by Growing Plankton?

"A California businessman chartered a fishing boat in July, loaded it with 100 tons of iron dust and cruised through Pacific waters off western Canada, spewing his cargo into the sea in an ecological experiment that has outraged scientists and government officials...The entrepreneur, Russ George, calling it a 'state-of-the-art study,' said his team scattered iron dust several hundred miles west of the islands of Haida Gwaii, in northern British Columbia, in exchange for $2.5 million from a native Canadian group. The iron spawned the growth of enormous amounts of plankton, which Mr. George, a former fisheries and forestry worker, said might allow the project to meet one of its goals: aiding the recovery of the local salmon fishery for the native Haida. Plankton absorbs carbon dioxide, the predominant greenhouse gas, and settles deep in the ocean when it dies, sequestering carbon. The Haida had hoped that by burying carbon, they could also sell so-called carbon offset credits to companies and make money." [NYT]

Nod to Kevin Lewis

Are Some People Just Too Ignorant?

I do often hear my climate catastrophe worshipping colleagues say that some people are just too darned stupid to understand how smart my colleagues are.  Meaning that this whole "democracy" thing is a problem. Voters should shut up and do what experts tell them to do.

An interesting study, along these lines:

The polarizing impact of science literacy and numeracy on perceived climate change risks

Dan Kahan et al.
Nature Climate Change, October 2012, Pages 732–735

Abstract: Seeming public apathy over climate change is often attributed to a deficit in comprehension. The public knows too little science, it is claimed, to understand the evidence or avoid being misled. Widespread limits on technical reasoning aggravate the problem by forcing citizens to use unreliable cognitive heuristics to assess risk. We conducted a study to test this account and found no support for it. Members of the public with the highest degrees of science literacy and technical reasoning capacity were not the most concerned about climate change. Rather, they were the ones among whom cultural polarization was greatest. This result suggests that public divisions over climate change stem not from the public’s incomprehension of science but from a distinctive conflict of interest: between the personal interest individuals have in forming beliefs in line with those held by others with whom they share close ties and the collective one they all share in making use of the best available science to promote common welfare.

A nod to Kevin Lewis.

More after the jump....

I only speak da troof! I only speak da troof!

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net Read more at http://www.explosm.net/comics/2932/#XqiIOjGDsd14YalZ.99

title of the post comes from Moulin Rouge, as you may remember...

With thanks to Michael McC, who had BETTER get back to reading Mankiw.

I had assumed that this was a hoax.  But it turns out that they mean it.

The moral circle as a common motivational cause of cross-situational pro-environmentalism

Boyka Bratanova, Steve Loughnan & Birgitta Gatersleben
European Journal of Social Psychology, August 2012, Pages 539–545

Abstract:  Public engagement in pro-environmental behavior and support for pro-environmental policy are essential for achieving sustainable living. We propose that the “moral circle” is a common motivational source for engagement in environmentally beneficial activities across situations and may be thus drawn upon to efficiently promote these activities. Study 1 established an association between chronic moral circle size and nine pro-environmental activities from different domains. Via experimental manipulation of the moral circle size, Studies 2a–d demonstrated its causal effect on intentions to engage in pro-environmental activities. Together, these studies offer an important initial demonstration of the beneficial consequences of more expansive moral circle in the domain of pro-environmentalism. Routes for expanding the moral circle and thus promoting pro-environmental activities are discussed.

(Nod to Kevin Lewis)

Some partial year end good news!

People, it looks like both the 45 cents / gallon subsidy for domestic ethanol AND the 54 cents / gallon tariff on imported ethanol are both dead as of January 1!

Amazing. I guess when the economics actually lines up with the political correctness, good things can actually happen.

Sadly though, the ethanol mandate (how many gallons of ethanol must be blended into gasoline each year) is still alive and well. At least it can be filled by cheaper and less environmentally wasteful Brazilian sugar-cane ethanol.

Maybe someday, we can just have a Pigouvian tax on carbon and drop the command and control BS. Not holding my breath though.

Bruno's Idiocy Comes Home to Roost

Bruno Latour (who should have been a porn star, with that name. Far better than the intellectual pornography he sold as scholarship!) is surprised anyone took him seriously.

Okay, he's got a point. No one should have taken him seriously. He claimed that planes don't fly, that color tvs don't really work, and that nothing really is real. It's all socially constructed.

And somehow he got this from misreading Kuhn. (Don't just read on, that link is cool!). Latour wrote drivel like this. (Feel FREE to skip that link).

I have long been amused at how many people whose bizarre minds give them no hope of understanding science use Kuhn as a shield, saying there is no SUCH THING as science. Yeah, I hope that works out for you, pumpkin. Read some more French philosophers, by all means. And get hilariously hoodwinked by Dr. Sokol, of course.

Anyway, having sown the wind, now they can reap the climate change denier whirlwind. Far and away most Americans believe that climate science is fabricated, at least in part. Socially constructed, indeed.

And the response by Bruno Latour? Two parts, both delightful.

1. I never really meant that. Never meant what I said I meant, it was all just an intellectual exercise. Lighten up!
2. Besides, in spite of everything I said about science being socially constructed and unreliable, and measurement being impossible, we ALL KNOW that global warming is real, a fact, an undeniable truth.

Golly, Bruno, and you know that...how?

The answer, as always with the left, is that their feelings, their group-think intuitions, generally anything they happen to believe? THOSE are facts.

Actual facts? Things like prices, scarcity, logic, evidence? THOSE are socially constructed. Nice.

Environmental Preferences: An Innie or an Outie?

So, it turns out that your views on the environment depend on whether you have an innie or an outie.

Sex and Environmental Policy in the U.S. House of Representatives; Per Fredriksson & Le Wang, Economics Letters, forthcoming

Abstract: Using LCV score data, we find that female legislators favor stricter environmental policies than do their male counterparts. Moreover, gender- corrected estimates suggest that voters do not push environmental policy towards the middle, but rather select the ideologically closest candidate.

"Gender corrected?" Is that one of those operations they do in Sweden?
----------------------
Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States; Aaron McCright & Riley Dunlap, Global Environmental Change, forthcoming

Abstract: We examine whether conservative white males are more likely than are other
adults in the U.S. general public to endorse climate change denial. We draw theoretical and analytical guidance from the identity-protective cognition thesis explaining the white male effect and from recent political psychology scholarship documenting the heightened system-justification tendencies of political conservatives. We utilize public opinion data from ten Gallup surveys from 2001 to 2010, focusing specifically on five indicators of climate change denial. We find that conservative white males are significantly more likely than are other Americans to endorse denialist views on all five items, and that these differences are even greater for those conservative white males who self-report understanding global warming very well. Furthermore, the results of our multivariate logistic regression models reveal that the conservative white male effect remains significant when controlling for the direct effects of political ideology, race, and gender as well as the effects of nine control variables. We thus conclude that the unique views of conservative white males contribute significantly to the high level of climate change denial in the United States.

In other words, conservatives are more likely to be conservative? Since the only conservatives who are NOT male are presumably female (unless they have been "gender corrected?"), not clear how you separate out the effects of political ideology from gender. These bozos just ran regressions with some fuzzy, general proxies for overall ideology, and then found that a dummy variable for gender (I bet they used 1 for male and 0 for female, to symbolize the outie and the innie, respectively) was still significant. This article is a truly remarkable "magic bullet" study: conservative white males are evil. I know all you lefties THOUGHT that, but is it really worth running fake regressions to "prove" it?

(Nod to Kevin Lewis)

PS: I thought I was going to be able to resist this, but I'm much too juvenile. The second author of the first paper... "Le Wang" ... is that French for the reason half our population is stupid on environmental policy? Parce qu'ils possèdent "le wang"?

Grand Game: Solar Power Edition

So many choice passages here. I'll just let you folks have at it. What's your favorite fatuous statement, or silly fact?

The article

(Nod to Anonyman, who liked the "fact" one solar panel could produce enough electricity, in a year, to light four 60 watt bulbs for six weeks. WTF?)

Whoops!

Well, we never really meant you HAD to switch to CFLs. All we did was make standard bulbs illegal. "Table for Mr. Freude! Table for Mr. Schad N. Freude!"

Article.

Nod to Angry Alex.

(Lagniappe: A commenter from the article... Me, I eschew all CFLs and use my trusty 40,000 year old, never failing fire torch dipped in endangered species fat. Keeps burning forever or until I bag the last one and have to move on to another! Provides heat, light, natural aroma and is a great dinner time conversation piece next to the stuffed head on the wall. Ta heck with those oil / gas derived spaghetti twirls. Give mah a good heated light source any day 'n' save mu dang fuel oil bill. So if we have nukes, wind turbines, etc. whats the point in saving electricity anyway??? Anyone who has used CFLs knows how poor they are at doing the job. And darn if they don't pollute way way more than normal bulbs do. The moronic non-logic of spinach for brains environmentalists and pink of centre liberals! Some one otta shoot the lot of them and save the planet for the rest of us. Yehaww! )

You don't have to live like a refugee

Or, the UN, the missing environmental refugees, the missing map and the moving goalposts.

There is good overall coverage here.

The UN environmental program (UNEP) had a webpage claiming that there would be 50 million environmental refugees by 2010, along with a nice map of where they might likely come from.

When they started to take fire from this clearly incorrect prediction (It was made in 2005), they just said, "no we didn't say that and took the page down!"

And now? Apparently the 50 million refugees will show up in 2020. They just missed the first bus, I guess:

Grand Game: UN Earth Mother Edition

Pelsmin sends this gem (better than the Onion!): Evo goes devo! Bugs have rights...


As finder, Pelsmin exercises right of first point-out-the-idiocy:

I know the US won't go along with it; ...it refers to natural resources as "blessings." We would never support such right-wing evangelical language.

All this put Pelsmin in mind of George Carlin's riff on endangered species, and "save the f*****g planet." I had not seen this. Fantastic.

Recycling Fail

Ann pretty much nails this, I'd say. Nice. On Wisconsin.

Some stuff I have done on recycling, verbally and written.

and I say it's alright

People, this is so freakin' bad, even for the low standards of economic analysis of the NY Times.

In a recent article bemoaning the move of a solar panel plant from Massachusetts to China resides the following paragraph:

"Beyond the issues of trade and jobs, solar power experts see broader implications. They say that after many years of relying on unstable governments in the Middle East for oil, the United States now looks likely to rely on China to tap energy from the sun."

Alex has already mocked this brilliantly ("China monopolizes the sun!!"), but I gotta say a bit more.

First, the analogy is whack. The sun is (at least not yet) in Chinese possession. The analogy would work if we'd been buying oil rigs from the middle east and are replacing that now with buying solar panels from China.

Second, autarky is BAD, people, not good. A world where we are self sufficient for everything is a world quite a bit worse than the one we currently inhabit. There is nothing inherently "wrong" with importing oil; the problem is the effect using oil has on the environment, which is unchanged by where the oil comes from.

Third, China obviously has a comparative advantage on the US in low level manufacturing. Assembling solar panels is not a natural fit for the US in the global economy.

As Mungowitz has been saying, there isn't going to be a "green jobs machine" in the US, unless we are going to *massively* subsidize each job.

Green Jobs: They Don't Exist

Delicious. Rich. I told you so. (etc)

We gave Evergreen Solar millions and millions of dollars, nearly $50 million, to subsidize production of solar energy panels.

But they closed shop and moved to China.

Now the U.S. is mad at China...FOR SUBSIDIZING PRODUCTION OF SOLAR ENERGY PANELS! ("The cops finally busted Madame Marie, for telling fortunes better than they do...")

Look, if the only way you can make money is to pay more than 100% of the purchase price in subsidies, you don't want to be in that business.

(Nod to Anonyman)