Perpetual Innovation

Category: climate change

  • Finally, a great GOP plan to address climate change. Who’s Who

    The unbelievable list of Who’s-Who from the GOP world have joined together (Climate Leadership Council) to come up with a very workable, market-based, approach to address climate change. Schultz and Baker have been around since the Reagan era. One of their crowning achievements was related to getting the world to reduce all of fluorocarbons (like Freon) which was wiping out the protective ozone layer of our atmosphere. You rarely hear the discuss on the ozone layer, right? Schultz and Baker are a big part of the reason why. The world-wide agreement on fluorocarbons is know as the Montreal Protocol.

    Here is a great article by Schultz and Baker, both from Ronald Reagan era Republicans. A Conservative Answer to Climate Change.

    First, to address climate change, has some scary implications. It really is unnerving if there is no energy policy in the US. In this report, we may have the only energy policy forming since the attempt by President Carter to have an energy policy. Obama tried to use the EPA to regulate fossil fuels and more, which is no substitute for an actual energy policy that is congress/legislative based.

    For decades, economists have linked a market based approach to address the non-sustainable use of energy in the US and globally. One approach is to build a more complicated approach for putting a price on carbon, cap and trade (Emissions trading). A simple tax is so much more straight forward. In this case, they want to take the carbon tax and rebate it back to the population in the form of dividend rebates. The estimate is that the bottom 70% of the population, income-wise, will have a net benefit from this plan. Revenue neutral.

    From an international security issue, it reduces the money we send to other countries in order to use more fossil fuels ($1T over every couple years). The large producers of the world are not necessarily friendly to us: Russia, Venezuela, Saudi, Iran. Much of the terrorism of the world is also paid from from oil moneys (ISIS and the renegades in Nigeria).

    The beauty of this approach — above and beyond environmental benefits — is that people can take that dividend money and pay even more for gas and gas-guzzling vehicles. Or, even better, use if for something they value more.

    I’ve been very disappointed in the GOP; they have let the deniers drown out the engagement of addressing such the critical issue of the non-sustainability of fossil fuels. A smart market approach will work nicely and solve lots of problems simultaneously. This approach will apparently reduce carbon emissions by 2x from  Obama’s EPA approach to “clean energy”, and 3x what dumping the plan an reverting to business as usual (BAU).  As one of the authors and economist Greg Mankiw says, “this is pretty close to a panacea in the way that it solves lots of problems as once”. No need to subsidize renewable; let the best solutions rise and the worst dwindle.

    Consider this dividend-tax as insurance. You buy insurance to reduce future risks and costs. This plan starts to steadily reduce carbon emissions.

    Everyone wins with this plan. Well, except maybe coal, oil and gas companies and countries.

    Now these guys need to go convince Pres Trump and his merry band of fossil burners. Surprisingly, it might just work.

    Also see Amy Harder Feb 8 blog on the topic in WSJ. She discusses the meeting of the Climate Leadership Council with Pres Trump where they voiced that they were “cautiously optimistic”.

  • Study Confirms World’s Coastal Cities Unsavable If We Don’t Slash Carbon Pollution | ThinkProgress

    Study Confirms World’s Coastal Cities Unsavable If We Don’t Slash Carbon Pollution | ThinkProgress:

    This article discusses the melt-off of Antarctica as discussed in a new Nature article. They did a better and more detailed analysis of the volume of water that would move into oceans as the Antarctic melts. They resolved a few of the issues that were not fully addressed by other studies. In addition to the models of ice volume/dynamics, they compared current warming with other times in history, thus offering benchmarks for validating their analysis.

    Even as many areas of Antarctica have been collapsing at an alarming rate, there has also been evidence of the snow building in the center of the (island? of Antarctica). This Nature study seems to resolve these apparent inconsistencies. They build a strong argument that we need to do a LOT now, not later. Many coastal cities will partially or totally under water if we continue for several more decades under the old business-as-usual model of carbon emissions.

    DeConto and Pollard (2016) in their article Contribution of Antarctica to Past and Future Sea-Level Rise look at ice dynamics to better analyze the volume of ice that should be displaced into the ocean waters as temperatures rise. They ran models under business-as-usual and more aggressive action scenarios. Then, they paired their results with key times in history where temperatures where high and sea-levels rose.

    They concluded that a likely scenario if we delay action is 1 meter (3.28 ft.)  of sea-level rise by end of century and 15 meters (~50 ft) by 2500 that would be attributable to antarctic ice melt. Add thermal expansion and other factors and this represents an ugly, ugly prospect.

    Reference

    DeConto, R. M., & Pollard, D. (2016). Contribution of Antarctica to past and future sea-level rise. Nature, 531(7596), 591–597. doi:10.1038/nature17145

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  • Why are so many Americans skeptical about climate change? A study offers a surprising answer. – The Washington Post

    Why are so many Americans skeptical about climate change? A study offers a surprising answer. – The Washington Post:

    So lots of money used to confuse and misinform can go a long way if you want to make sure that no one knows the truth and no meaningful action is taken.

    That brings us to Super PACs. They mostly lie, and always obfuscate the issues. Since there’s no one responsible, they are free to throw mud and tar at will and at random.

    Don’t see how anything could go wrong with the political engines. Do you?

    Misinform and misdirection works.
    We all need to realize that and start propagating truths, not lies. The tools are at our fingertips (and keyboards).

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  • More than three in four Americans believe in global warming – UPI.com

    More than three in four Americans believe in global warming – UPI.com:

    Finally. Even republicans have shifted to a majority accepting climate change. This is not a party thing; this is a human thing.

    Once people start to realize that the earth is warming. And that people are generally responsible.

    There tends to be a some obvious actions that we all must do, soon or later.

    Sustainability is a law of nature that it is hard to break. Ignore it at your own risk, and everyone else’s risk at well.

    We promote doing smarter things now to bend the curve on the human impact on the earth. It is a compounding (geometric or exponential) kind of thing. Small(er) changes now make a BIG difference over time. Business as usual (BAS) simply compounds the issues and the problems.

    Currently, this is a year of El Nino, so the record temperatures for 2015 are on path to exceed last year’s record “by a mile”.

    Related to global warming and El Nino, check out Hurricane Patricia, the strongest hurricane ever recorded. Ouch!..

    So lest start a call to action doing those actions that will save consumers, businesses, governments money while simultaneously making us all more sustainable.

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  • Ain’t no Global Warming Here. {insert your facts here}

    In comes another commentary saying 10 reasons why there is definitely no such thing as global warming. This one includes evidence that the mooses (moose population) are doing much better. Huh!…
    I simply direct people to look at the multiple databases of actual real-live data related to each and every conceivable measure of global warming. Look at the data yourself. Draw it out, and then start discarding junk that misrepresents the facts. There are between 2 and 6 sets of data available for each of the things you might consider related to global warming. Let’s say: earth temperature, air temperature (lower, middle, upper atmosphere), ocean temps (surface & deep), ice packs of glaciers melt offs (ice extents and ice thicknesses)… Not only are these not pretty pictures (graphs really), but some show acceleration. 🙁 

    Here’s what the facts show: Climate Change (unarguable fact, happening everywhere), Global warming (fact), Acceleration of global warming (less easy to prove, but visible), Human cause of climate change (lots and lots of correlations, but not an exact cause-and-effect). Check out Global Warming at Wikipedia (the best summary of information available).
    Catastrophic Human Caused…. {whatever} … This is a matter of probabilities here, but the chances get uglier and uglier once the facts on the ground get uglier.
    Humans causing massive disruptions to each and every one of our earth systems. We’re not just disrupting them, we are breaking them.
    Give a look at the WikiBook by Hall (2013 and updated in 2015). It has a foreword of his own text and thoughts followed by active links into current Wikipedia pages (articles). This way each and every page is totally up-to-date. Wikipedia is the best single source/compilation of information in the world about each of the topics listed. If you question the facts in the articles, then complain. Even better, if you question the facts, research them and post a substantiated correction to the article.
    Each page has hundreds, if not thousands of followers. And the editorial review for these mature pages is very tight. It is not really possible for a Green-Greenie or a King-Coal Denier to jump in and put crappy miss-information.
    In fact, if you find that the facts are wrong or misleading on any of the pages, let us know, and we will gladly assist with the correction(s).
    Check it out, here’s The Sustainability WikiBook: www.tinyurl.com/SustainyBook  Scroll to the bottom for an organized table-of-content set of links to Sustainability information in Wikipedia.    Expect each of the links to have been updated repeatedly within the last week or so as new facts/figures and research become available and contributors update the Wikipedia store of knowledge.

    There’s a very good source that shows graphs, charts and facts related to climate change and those who would deny it exists:  http://www.skepticalscience.com/  It has lots of real information combined with debunking bogus arguments. This is a great source of facts. Visit with an open mind. 

    Make no doubt about it, being wrong about the warming of the planet would make lots of people including the SustainZine folks very happy. Unfortunately the facts don’t lead that way. What seems like a bit of a slowdown in the rate of temperature increases, does not hold up under careful scrutiny. Contributions to what seems like a minor slowdown of the up-rise in temperature are illusive one you factor in mild solar activity, volcano activity and increased pollution (from China and India’s coal).