You can read my earlier Leaf posts here, here, here, and here.

The Leaf I ordered is not due to arrive for another two months. Another engineer that I work with called me up (while he was on vacation) to tell me that he had just test driven an orphaned (the ordering party decided not to purchase) Leaf. It was fresh off the truck and had a 12 percent charge. He warned me that the dealership wanted to sell it for $3,000 over MSRP. I called them the next morning and made an offer to pay cash for MSRP, which they accepted without any hesitation (possibly because my colleague had softened them up when he accused them of price gouging). I drove it home that afternoon.

I decided to buy this car instead of wait for the one I ordered for three reasons:

1) My Nissan account (which I can’t log into) tells me that my email address is not in its database, although I have an email with a confirmation number from the dealership for the car I ordered. This made me nervous.

2) I had ordered a black car because a blue one (my preference) would take six weeks longer to arrive.

3) A Leaf in hand is worth two on order.

I called ECOality (the company installing 240V chargers for Nissan) and asked if they could move me up the schedule. They normally wait until two weeks before your delivery date. Some people have gotten the chargers installed for free thanks to a DOE credit but chickened-out when it was time to pay for the $35,000 car when it arrived.

I’ve never heard back from them. Not a problem in the short term. The 120 volt charger that comes with the car has been adequate for my needs to date (about 40 miles per day).

I wasn’t overly impressed when they inspected my house to see if it would qualify for the DOE credit. The guy showed up in a beater car with no hub caps and pulled a form out of his pocket. His new-hire assistant arrived late in a cab and they didn’t leave a card or any other way to contact the company. At least these cars are creating jobs.

I will be elaborating more on this technological marvel in a later post so stay tuned.

Just got an email from Nissan:

Hi Russ, congratulations! Your vehicle is scheduled to arrive at your Nissan Dealer in the month of September 2011.

 

As your Nissan LEAF^TM is being built and shipped, we will continue to update your vehicle’s status. So make sure to sign in to “my account” to stay current with your estimated delivery date.

Please be aware that it is normal for delivery dates to fluctuate by a few days as production is finalized. Should your delivery date change by more than two weeks, we will send you an email to notify you of the change.

In an earlier post I was pondering which electric car to buy. I have not heard back from Mitsubishi after plunking down (a refundable) $299 dollars to reserve a place in line.

My neighbor just bought a brand new diesel Jetta wagon. These cars get far better mileage than the American average. Three months from now there may be a Prius, Jetta, and Leaf parked in front of my house representing the most efficient car technology available. The Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid will be missing but not for long I suspect.

<blockquote>Beginning May 1, Nissan will reopen reservations to selected US customers who were registered before April 20, 2011 in states currently selling the Nissan LEAF™ (Arizona, California, Hawaii, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas and Washington).

Following this early-reservation period, reservations then will open to the general public in those launch states. More details to follow soon regarding other markets.</blockquote>

<img src=”http://grist.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/leavvsmievchart.jpg” border=”0″ alt=”"id=”BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5599218099200615394″>

<img src=”http://grist.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/leafvsmiev.jpg” border=”0″ alt=”"id=”BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5599197166549539986″>

It will cost me $99 (which is refundable if I don’t buy a Leaf) to get in line to purchase one. Before actually purchasing one at a dealership, I’m expected to spend another $99 to have a Nissan approved electrical contractor send an electrician to my home to tell me what it will cost to install one of their 240 volt, $700 chargers in my garage, which will require a dedicated circuit similar to that used for a clothes dryer.

Mitsubishi is also <a href=”http://i.mitsubishicars.com/reserve”>now taking reservations</a> for its MiEV electric car. However, they want a $299 refundable reservation fee, which they claim will apply to the purchase price of the car (but I suspect the MSRP has already been jacked up by that amount so don’t think you’re getting a deal). They are waiving the $99 electrical inspection fee for the first batch of customers to sign up. I also doubt if they will be using the same electrical contractor as Nissan.

So, anyway, I ponied up for the MiEV and will also pay to reserve a Leaf on May first. I need help deciding which one to get.

I would rarely need to drive beyond the range of either car and because we are already a three car family (wife and two driving children) I can always use one of the other cars for longer trips.

My youngest daughter thinks it would be dumb to pay an extra $5,000 to be able to haul a fifth person about twice a year.

I <a href=”http://biodiversivist.blogspot.com/2010/11/nisson-leaf-test-drive.html”>test drove a Leaf</a> and was very impressed. My biggest concern about the MiEV is range at highway speeds. The official ranges given are for a mixture of city and highway. Note that the Leaf has a much lower drag coefficient. This means it will get better mileage at high speeds than the MiEV.

But in all seriousness, that would only mean driving a regular car about half a dozen more times per year if I chose the MiEV. For two car families, the range difference is largely irrelevant, and for one car families as well come to think of it because you never want to stretch your electric car to its limits.

Before Mitsubishi dropped their price below that of the Leaf I could see no reason to buy it instead of a Leaf. Why pay more and get less of everything? Although, that logic hasn’t stopped Smart car owners. Maybe they should change the name ; )

I also wonder if people will spring for the Leaf just because it has better performance in the same way people spring for a Prius over the Insight?

Which should I buy?

Crossposted from the Biodiversivist Blog

From a paper published in the spring 2011 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons–the official journal of the AAPS (Association of American Physicians and Surgeons):

Research by the World Bank indicates that the increase in biofuels production over 2004 levels would push more than 35 million additional people into absolute poverty in 2010 in developing countries. Using statistics from the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr. Indur Goklany estimates that this would lead to at least 192,000 excess deaths per year, plus disease resulting in the loss of 6.7 million disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs) per year.

Source: http://grist.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/goklany.pdf

<img src=”http://grist.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/nagasakibomb.jpg”>

While tens-of-thousands of grossly inaccurate and wildly sensationalist headlines about a single nuclear power plant that caused not a single radiation related fatality after being hit with a 36 foot high wall of water and magnitude 9 quake circled the globe …200,000 poor people quietly die from malnutrition–annually.

How do you prevent a profit driven media from competing for readership with an ever-escalating arms race of sensationalist headlines? The damage done by the lay press probably matches that of the quake.

Journalists like George Monbiot with the courage to stare down reality, along with the Internet and comment fields, may save us yet:

Why Fukushima made me stop worrying and love nuclear power

And this from IstockAnalyst:

“We have to be aware that as long as the government is mandating using these food sources for fuel, despite the fact that there is still grain that comes out as a by-product, that is going to be a large demand that’s not going away,” Noonan says.

 

Meanwhile, global grain supply fell about 2.5% short of demand this year, says George Lee, the manager of the CF Eclectica Agriculture fund. As a result, with demand growing at about 2.5% a year, the harvest needs to grow by 5% next year, which he says is a big number compared with historical data. “

Cross posted from <a href=”http://www.biodiversivist.com”>Biodiversivist</a>

I took the above photo with my cell phone while filling up our Prius. Your elected politicians are forcing you to fuel your car with food. Why aren’t you morally outraged?

Refiners and gas stations are sitting on full tanks of unsold Super E10. On the other hand, there already are shortages of the more expensive, but also more energy-laden Super Plus.

The article that follows is taken from one I wrote in 2009 when food prices were spiking. Here we are two years later and they are spiking again.

The above cartoon was created last summer (2008) by Michael Ramirez. And he wasn’t the only cartoonist covering the topic. There were food riots in over thirty countries that summer. Big Biofuel tells us their product had nothing to do with it, but think about it. Although the corn ethanol lobby would happily do so if they could get away with it, no sane politician would back a plan to turn all of America’s corn and soybean crops into biofuels. Doing so would starve millions of impoverished children around the world and wreak havoc on our food system. If turning all of it into biofuels would wreak havoc, turning a quarter of it into biofuels (which we just did last year) wreaks one quarter of that havoc.

Attempts to get consumers to use corn ethanol as a fuel have a long history in our country. It has been marketed under the names Alcoline, Agrol, Gasohol, and finally, E-85. Gasohol, which is a 10 percent blend of ethanol, was sold in the eighties. You got to decide if you wanted it or not and most people decided they didn’t as the above picture attests. The ag and biofuel lobbyists got together with our politicians and found a way to fix that. They simply blend it into our gas without our permission and charge us an extra dollar a tank to subsidize the biofuel industry that is forcing this crappy fuel down our throats. I say crappy because, in so many words, that is what Consumer Reports concluded it was when they tested it.

These fuels cannot make a dent in our fuel imports. Only high mileage cars and mass transit can do that. It took an area equal to all of the cropland in Indiana (almost a quarter of our corn crop) to replace a mere 4% of our fuel supply last year.

Cross-posted from Biodiversivist

Photo courtesy of therozblog via Flickr

Imagine what it would feel like to accidentally maim, cripple for life, or kill a bicyclist (daughter, wife, mom, son, husband, dad, teenager or kid) with your car, regardless of who got the traffic ticket.

On top of that guilt, imagine the potential for an emotionally and financially devastating lawsuit.

Oh, and don’t forget the deductible on your car insurance.

I’ve had to brake hard to avoid hitting a cyclist, day, night, rain, or shine, many times in my life. As a cyclist, I’ve been on the receiving end more times than I can count as well.

A bicyclist can be difficult to parse out against a cluttered background and can be moving five times faster than a pedestrian. It’s just physics.

Any motorist hoping that bicycling will be made illegal has a screw loose. This is a case where it would be much better to join them rather than fight them. Motorists should be the most enthusiastic supporters of any infrastructure that gets bicyclists out of their hair.

And did I mention all of the parking that bicyclists free up?

Cross-posted from Biodiversivist

Photo courtesy of Darwin Bell via Flickr

See this article called Ten Fascinating Cases of Mind Control for a fascinating compilation of videos documenting how parasites send their genes into the future (procreate) by controlling the minds of other creatures.

Richard Dawkins describes this behavior as an extended phenotype–the parasite can manipulate its host’s behavior to help the parasite reproduce.

One video in that link describes how a parasite alters the behavior of rats to actually seek out the company of cats, which tends to get them eaten, thus sending the parasite into the gut of the cat to complete its life-cycle.

An estimated 60 million Americans are infected by this same parasite, which may explain a few things.

My neighbor’s cat–with summer hair cut

For more thoughts on this subject read:

Domesticated Dogs–Mutualists or Parasites?

A Lapdog To Go With Your Laptop

This garden has been a lesson in human nature for my kid. I warned her that people would let their dogs crap on her vegetables. She didn’t believe me. All summer we watched from our living room window as one neighbor after the other stood there to let their dogs crap in her vegetable garden. Just today I watched another neighbor let both of her dogs take a dump right in the middle of the freshly tilled soil.

A sign asking them to stop would make some of them feel guilty, which would make some of them angry. Most would probably let their dog crap on the garden anyway, possibly after looking around to make sure nobody is watching.

We decided that the best option is to build a picket fence around the garden and to plant far enough from it to avoid over spray.

Cross-posted from Biodiversivist

There were two interesting cars parked on my street this week. One was a Nissan Leaf (see my test drive video here). The other was a Ford Pinto.

The Pinto was one of the forerunners of today’s small hatchbacks. It had bucket seats with a hand brake between them, a back seat that folded down, a small four-cylinder engine, and of course a hatch back. I owned four of them through high school and college because used versions were inexpensive and easy to repair, although thanks to shody manufacturing, they never lasted long.

Long ago and far away, I once won a gold medal with a painting of a Pinto that was spewing flowers out of the exhaust. It was titled “My rotary-engined, hydrogen-burning, Pinto car.” Turns out that rotary engines don’t work so good and neither does hydrogen.

My next car will be electric. I’ve been waiting my whole life for one. No more oil changes, no more gasoline.

Cross posted from <a href=”http://www.biodiversivist.com”>Biodiversivist</a>

Photo courtesy s.red via Flickr

Crossposted from the Biodiversivist blog

Just how rational are we? Had the optimists not prevailed would the Titanic have sailed? I’ve read most of Ridley’s books and have recently read my favorite, The Red Queen-Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature for the second time.

I was looking forward to this book, which started out good.

I stopped counting after he used the word pessimist for the twelfth time (seriously). He spends an inordinate amount of time complaining about the press’s propensity for pessimistic headlines. Call me a pessimist, but had there been more pessimistic headlines warning of the imminent extinction of the Chinese river dolphin or the ivory-billed woodpecker, would they still be with us? How about the California condor or whooping crane? Oh, wait, they are still with us.

I was taken aback when on page two, just after the photo of a stone tool and a plastic computer mouse, I read the following:

The [stone] axe was made by a single individual. The mouse was made by thousands—perhaps millions—of people, each of whom played a small role in realizing the whole. Farmers grew the coffee that shippers transported and was consumed by oil riggers whose petroleum was used by refinery workers to make the plastic that was molded by factory workers for the mouse, which was assembled by other laborers for salespeople to sell to the retailer who sold it to me. Not one of them alone knows how to make a computer peripheral from scratch.

Look at how similar it is to a paragraph in an obscure book called Poison Darts–Protecting the biodiversity of the world written six years prior …by me:

Look at one of the buttons on your shirt. I challenge any human being on the face of this planet to duplicate from scratch that simple little button without any help from another person. Before rushing to take up that challenge, consider the following. The button is probably made out of plastic; a polymer created from petroleum pumped from the bowels of the Earth. The button was formed in a mold that was, in turn, machined from a metal alloy. The machine tools used to make the mold were made of several different metal alloys. How are you as an individual going to mine, smelt, mix and purify metal alloys and then use them to build drilling jigs with carbide or diamond tipped drills to extract the petroleum? How will you make the machine tools used to fabricate the mold used to make that button? How would you manage to turn the raw petroleum into plastic? Truth be told, duplicating from scratch a simple plastic button is a task that is orders of magnitude beyond anything any human being is even remotely capable of doing alone. It takes the combined knowledge of several generations of humans, and tens of thousands of individuals working in concert to make a plastic shirt button.

Certainly, Ridley managed to make the same point with a lot fewer words and with a lot of the same words might I add: individual, thousands, petroleum, plastic, mold, alone, from scratch. This looks like either a book version of parallel evolution or an example of book-to-book gene sharing. The internet is a wealth of free ideas. How many more books or blogs are out there with a similar paragraph in it?

I agree with many of the concepts presented in this book, a few of which were new to me. On the other hand, I’ve heard almost all of these ideas and criticisms many times and long ago (myth of the noble savage, and on, and on). But that’s me. I read a lot of non-fiction. I’ve noticed that the public has a propensity to mistakenly attribute the ideas collected by journalists to the journalists themselves. It is a journalist’s job to collect ideas for presentation, which Ridley has always been good at, specifically, scientist’s ideas, which made him a good science writer. I also detected a number of factual errors which tainted the rest of the book because it left me wondering how many more errors existed that I was unaware of.

This is not his best work although it may end up being his most popular book and if so, it will be due to the relative ignorance of his reading audience who will not be aware that most of it is a rehash of ideas many of which are many decades old–a formula that also served Michael Crichton as well, except he was writing fiction. What excited the readers of Jurassic Park were the novel (at least to them) technological ideas presented. But according to Ridley:

“People don’t like change,” Michael Crichton once told me, “and the notion that technology is exciting is true for only a handful of people. They are depressed or annoyed by the changes.”

Right. I wonder if he tweeted that epiphany to Ridley over the internet using his cellphone, laptop, or iPad? The lesson to be learned here is not to accept the arguments presented in this book just because they are well articulated by a celebrity or authority figure. If it does not make sense, it does not matter who said it.

I recall when the book Jurassic Park first arrived. My wife enjoyed it in large part because of the novel (to her) ideas it contained. I read it and was bored out of my mind. The concept of finding DNA in mosquitoes trapped in amber was an old one to anybody who reads much science. Without these borrowed ideas, the book was essentially another version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World . The movie, like Star Wars, was worth watching only because of the spectacular advance in special effects. The technology used to portray the tyrannosaurus rex in that movie was a quantum leap over the clay models and iguanas with rubber prosthetics used in the dinosaur movies that preceded it.

Ridley takes jabs at a host of highly respected individuals including but not limited to Al Gore, Lester Brown, Rachel Carson, E.O. Wilson, and George Monbiot. He does not hesitate to go back many decades to find a damning quote–a form of cherry picking that is easy to do with any celebrity. Let me put the shoe on the other foot in an example using Ridley’s wealthy celebrity acquaintance, the strident anti-environmentalist Michael Crichton, who once said, “We cause our diseases. We are directly responsible for any illness that happens to us.” He apparently also once believed “…in auras, spoon bending, and clairvoyance.”

The publisher shrewdly placed a blurb by Ian McEwan at the top of the dust jacket. McEwan is author of the apocalyptic best seller “The Road,” which I really enjoyed, pessimist that I am. Ironically, in the comment field below a short review I once wrote on that book, someone described McEwan as a “deep pessimist.” In the blurb, McEwan praises the book for teeming with original ideas, of which it actually has very few, if any–not that Ridley claims the ideas in this book are original. McEwan thinks they are original (and he is not alone) only because he has not read them before in other books like The Ultimate Resource, Nonzero, The Skeptical Environmentalist, and on, and on. Original ideas are few and far between in this world.

The book, The Ultimate Resource, mentioned above, was written by the late Julian Simon. His obituary in the New York Times described him as an “optimistic economist.” Sound familiar? Here’s a quote from him:

We do not neglect the die off of the passenger pigeon and other species that may be valuable to us. But we note that extinction of species, billions of them …has been a biological fact of life throughout the ages, just as has been the development of new species, some of which may be more valuable to humans than extinguished species whose niches they fill.

Development of new species? Doesn’t that take a lot of time? Simon suffered from severe depression for many years of his adult life. Here are some thoughts on that taken from an admittedly hostile book review of Simon’s posthumously published autobiography:

“Tellingly, after The Ultimate Resource appeared and was immediately seized upon by the cornucopian camp, Simon wrote in a note to himself, ‘I have hit the jackpot. The world has now made it easy for me to remain undepressed. I no longer must deflect my mind from my professional difficulties in order to stay happy, but instead I can now dwell on my worldly success’ and take pleasure in it.’”

“But if your model of reality flows from your agenda, it merely reflects your own state of mind. So by Simon’s own logic, his optimistic model of the universe depended on his ‘needs and interests’ in remaining undepressed. Which means that his optimism does not reflect the reality ‘out there.’”

Reagan and the Vatican both used Simon’s work to justify their efforts to end abortion, of which an estimated 40 million are performed annually. Had the anti-abortion forces gotten their wish since 1965, this book would never have been written because our population would have long ago passed through 12 billion and even Ridley admits that humanity is “just” going to remain fed by 2050 at 9 billion without plowing up what remains of our biosphere.

For me, there are three overarching, although not novel, lessons in this book.

1) Our capacity to swap, share, or simply walk off with ideas is what distinguishes humans from other social creatures like chimps, mole rats, wasps, and ants. Although that seems like a rather obvious observation, it has had huge ramifications. We are not smarter than our immediate ancestors, we just reached a kind of critical mass of population size and density that allowed the trade and exchange of ideas to take off. Life is easier for much more of humanity as a result and like it or not, the only way out of the mess we have created (as far as biodiversity loss and climate change is concerned) is to keep moving forward hoping that market mechanisms can be found to incentivize the preservation of what remains. We can’t go backwards with a population heading for nine billion.

We already had automobiles, airliners, antibiotics, vaccines, nuclear bombs, skyscrapers, television, and toaster ovens in 1945 when our population was about two billion. Technology growth was already fully exponential. What Ridley failed to mention (possibly because it is now water under the bridge) is that our continued rapid population growth has not been a necessary condition for further rapid technological and economic growth. A much lower population would have been sufficient, although now, both rapid technological and economic growth are necessary just to feed humanity and to try to preserve what remains of a rapidly unraveling biosphere. Our huge population is not causing our technology growth. It is the other way around.

2) We are much less likely to make war on trading partners who are providing us with golden eggs; free trade is a very good thing overall. Although this is not a guarantee, as Saddam Hussein recently demonstrated, we may still go to war to steal the goose that is laying them (resources).

3) Government bureaucracies, be they military-industrial supported by conservatives or social services supported by progressives, like weeds in a garden, cannot be allowed to grow ad infinitum. Bloated bureaucracies in the market are eventually weeded out by competitors but government is a monopoly. Government bureaucracies have no natural check on their populations. History is replete with examples of governments becoming so large and ineffective, with massive standing armies of both soldiers and bureaucrats, that they bring about the collapse of their own society.

Let me digress for just a moment to praise one of my favorite movies, Brazil. Why it is called that, I have not a clue. It is a dark comedy set in the future, written by some of the old Monty Python gang. The entire world is one giant city dominated by one giant bureaucracy. Entrepreneurs and unlicensed repairmen are hunted down by heavily-armed government swat teams. Robert De Niro plays the role of an air conditioning repairman who risks his life rappelling down the sides of skyscrapers into apartments …to fix appliances. My favorite scene is one in which a warehouse full of bureaucrats, creating a deafening sound as they pound away on futuristic looking keyboards, falls silent the second the boss goes back into his office and closes his door.

If Ridley has a nemesis, it would be another British writer (and environmentalist) named George Monbiot. Ridley took a poke at him in the book (along with many other noted and much respected environmentalists). Monbiot retaliated in an article in the Guardian titled: “The Man Who Wants to Northern Rock the Planet.”

The two of them have been duking it out in newspapers and in their blogs every since. See “Monbiot’s Errors,” and “Ridleyed With Errors.” Just today I visited Ridley’s blog to find an article titled “Monbiotic logic: call for peaceful debate and for people to die.” Human nature, she’s hard to suppress.

Admittedly, Monbiot can be “pessimistic.” Clear back in 2005, before it was fashionable (or even safe) to critique biofuels, he tried to warn the world of their negative ramifications in an article titled “Worse than fossil fuels.”

Skim through the following quotes:

This is what makes the ethanol and biofuel boondoggle so enraging. But not even Jonathan Swift would dare to write a satire in which politicians argue that – in a world where species are vanishing and more than a billion people are barely able to afford to eat – it would somehow be good for the planet to clear rainforests to grow palm oil, or give up food – crop land to grow biofuels, solely so that people could burn fuel derived from carbohydrate rather than hydrocarbons in their cars, thus driving up the price of food for the poor. Ludicrous is too weak a word for this heinous crime.

…And every increment in the price of grain that the biofuel industry causes means more pressure on rainforests, the destruction of which is the single most cost-effective way of adding carbon monoxide to the atmosphere.

…If you want to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, replant a forest on former farmland.

…Be in no doubt: the Biofuel industry is not just bad for the economy. It is bad for the planet, too.

…But do not forget the single most important problem with biofuels, the one that makes him so capable of making environmental problems worse – they need land. The sustainable future for nine billion people on one planet is going to come from using as little land as possible for each of people’s needs. And if food yields from land continue to increase at the current rate, the current acreage of farmland will – just – feed the world in 2050, so the extra land for growing fuel will have to come from rainforests another wild habitats.

Although I happen to share his “pessimism” in this case, note that these “pessimistic” quotes are not from Monbiot. They are from this book and belong to Ridley. And where does one draw the line between skeptic and pessimist? To see the quotes in context read the section called: “The mad world of biofuels,” pages 240 though 243.

After reading the above quotes, and not knowing beforehand who authored them (not to mention they have, for the sake of brevity, been taken out of context), many would assume that the author (Ridley) is an environmentalist–one who is fully capable of expressing his pessimism. Ridley tends to treat the words pessimist and environmentalist as if they are synonyms. By associating them, he is trying to give the word “environmentalist” a negative connotation. The word “atheist” already has a very negative connotation, right up there with “child molester.” In an attempt to lose the word that has managed to garner such a bad taste, Dawkins once proposed replacing it with the name “brights.” Apparently, Ridley does not see himself as an environmentalist (or pessimist) but he must have a caricature in his head of what an environmentalist/pessimist is because he always finds a way to pin that label on his victims as part of his criticism of them. Some examples:

Another way of putting the same point is to borrow the familiar environmentalist lament that the human race is already, to quote the ecologist E.O.Wilson, ‘appropriating between 20 and 40 percent of the solar energy captured in organic material’.

Even if you take E.O. Wilson’s wildly pessimistic guess that 27,000 species are dying out every year, that equates to just 2.7 per cent a century (there are thought to be at least ten million species), a long way short of the 50 per cent in sixty years.

Ridley’s contradictory self-image reminds me of comedian Dave Chappelle in a skit about the blind black man who is an active and enthusiastic member of a white supremacist organization. Because he can’t see, he does not know he is black, and because he always wears the customary head covering at meetings, none of the white members of this organization know he is black. But then one day, the hood gets removed. The skit ends with the black, ah, white supremacist character divorcing his wife …for having dared to marry a black man. Environmentalism, like skin color (read Outliers) is a matter of degree.

And what exactly is the definition of a pessimist? The opposite of optimist is pessimist but on your way to pessimist you have to pass the realist–ironically, a word that was not used anywhere in this book by my count. After reading this book one might conclude that Ridley’s definition of a pessimist is anyone who disagrees with Ridley. Many of the individuals he critiques by name and labels as pessimists have spent much of their adult lives fighting against hunger and/or biodiversity loss. They get a pessimist sticker simply because have a different game plan, and some get the label even if they have a very similar one.

Ridley actually muses at one point about evolution selecting for pessimists (never mind for the moment that human beings cannot be lumped into such a vaguely defined grouping). From page 294:

And it seems that might quite literally be commoner than optimism genes: only about 20 percent of people  are homozygous for the long version of the serotonin transporter gene, which possibly endows them with a genetic tendency to look on the bright side.

Picture for a moment two bipedal hominids standing on a savanna. A lion is walking towards them. One is a pessimist. He shrugs his shoulders and awaits the inevitable. The other is an optimist (the one wearing the rose-colored glasses). He’s not worried. Things have always worked out before. But, where is the realist? That’s him up there, in the top of the nearest tree. Natural selection has, and for good reasons, put the brakes on optimism, or we would all be “optimists” by now (which is a relative term for we are all optimists to varying degrees depending on time and place). In all seriousness, misplaced optimism can and often does prove fatal, figuratively and literally.

From what I see in this book, Ridley also looks an awful lot like a moderate, fiscally conservative, American progressive (a liberal). Maybe that’s because he’s pulling his punches in this book.

He very much wants to protect what remains of the natural world, and says so several times in the book. This is a major reason he dislikes the organic gardening movement and biofuels (and I could not agree more about his take on biofuels) because they both cause more land to go under the plow.

He acknowledges that some taxes are good (as silly as that sounds), suggesting that one way to limit damage done to nature by the wealthy is a kind of luxury tax incentivizing reinvestment into the market (in theory this might, for example, help to reduce the number of vacation homes on pristine Costa Rican beaches).

He acknowledges that global warming is real (though overblown) and suggests that a tax on carbon that is rebated back to consumers might be a good way to move toward the next generation of power sources.

He acknowledges in several places that overpopulation can be real and damaging to both economies, people, and the environment; does not care for abstinence only programs or top down command and control programs like China’s one child policy, and supports women’s reproductive rights as the best way to help women pick family size.

He is secular (atheist to be more precise) and bashes the excesses of organized religion repeatedly.

He acknowledges that government plays an essential role in markets; good governance is good, bad governance is bad (as silly as that also sounds).

However, the above (admittedly short and widely dispersed) acknowledgments appear to be lost on many readers. After looking at the reviews on Amazon, I fear this book may be emboldening those who are selectively taking from it ideas that support their own pessimistic “shrink government–except the military arm–until you can drown it in the bathtub” world view.

Let’s look at two of the errors I found in the book (out of several).

More than once Ridley optimistically suggests that hydrogen may one day fuel our future. Understand that hydrogen in a pipe or stored in a tank is analogous to electricity in a wire or stored in a battery. Electricity isn’t a fuel. It is an energy carrier. An energy source had to be consumed to make it. And that is also true of hydrogen. It does not exist in nature in large enough quantities to be used as a fuel. Like electricity, it has to be produced with an energy source. Like electricity, it is an energy carrier, not an original source of energy. Expect to see him explain this to you in his next book.

On pages 94 through 97 Ridley muses over oxytocin’s role in promoting trade between groups of humans.

So oxytocin specifically increases trusting, rather than general risk-taking.  As with lovers and mothers, the hormone enables animals to take the risk of approaching other members of the species (page 95).

It is necessary, but not sufficient to explain the human propensity to exchange. On the other hand, it is highly likely that during the past 100,000 years human beings have developed a peculiarly sensitive oxytocin systems, much more ready to fire with sympathy, as a result of natural selection in the trading species.  That is to say, just as the genes for digesting milk as an adult have changed in response to an invention of dairying, so the genes for flushing your brain with oxytocin have probably changed in response to population growth, urbanization and trading  people have become oxytocin – junkies far more than any other animals (page 97).

From an article in the New York Times  dated January 10, 2011:

The love and trust it [oxytocin] promotes are not toward the world in general, just toward a person’s in-group. Oxytocin turns out to be the hormone of the clan, not of universal brotherhood. Psychologists trying to specify its role have now concluded it is the agent of ethnocentrism.

Ridley spends a lot of effort bashing the results of older studies with the results of newer ones (which may eventually be overturned). The shoe is on the other foot this time, or at least until this study’s findings get overturned. In today’s fast paced world, books tend to be partially obsoleted before they get printed.

Global Warming

Following is Ridley’s argument on global warming in a nutshell:

1) The IPCC’s predictions for economic growth are, get this, too optimistic. We won’t generate nearly as much greenhouse gas as predicted.

2) Because wind and solar use more land than coal, natural gas, and oil, they are not greener than fossil fuels.

3) Because fossil fuels are so bountiful, we can essentially view them as renewable. I might buy this argument if he were talking about the sun, but not fossil fuels.

4) Ignore the potential for tipping points to cause runaway warming because he really does not have a comeback for that.

5) Mix in some references to hydrogen and pebble bed nuclear reactors and there you go.

Next I want to look at his discussion of happiness. See pages 26 through 28 for full context:

Rich people are happier than poor  people; rich countries have happier people than poor countries; and people get happier as they get richer.

That is to say, on average, across the board, on the whole, other things being equal, more money does make you happier.

Here he uses a few newer studies to disprove an earlier one that suggested that people don’t get much happier after a certain income level. What Ridley seems to be suggesting is that the richer you are, the happier you will be, as ridiculous as that sounds to me. Human beings did not evolve to be in a constant state of happy (whatever exactly that is). The seeking of happiness is what moves genes into the future. Finding the rainbow would end the game. Ridley has missed this point, but it may be in his next book–status and happiness are closely correlated.

Who would guess that some measure of wealth and the freedom to pursue the happiness that it buys might lead to more consistent levels of good hormones and fewer stress hormones? Surely there must be some point of diminishing returns. If happiness does not peak at an income of say, $15,000, then at what income level does it peak? And does it matter how hard or long you have to work to maintain that peak? If you grow rich enough will you eventually transition from a mere being of flesh and blood into one of pure energy, light, and happiness? Is Bill Gates really the second happiest person in the world? I jest.

There are some exceptions. Americans currently show no trend towards increasing happiness. Is this because the rich had got richer but ordinary Americans had not prospered much in recent years? or because America continually draws in poor (unhappy) immigrants, which keep the happiness quotient low? Who knows?

Who knows? Suspiciously missing from this book is any reference to another book called the Status Syndrome by Michael Marmot. If you have a subscription to Netflix I highly recommend the National Geographic documentary called Stress. The film follows a researcher who documents the poor health of low ranking baboons and does a very good job of reflecting what is found in Marmot’s book. The author appears in the film. The book itself is very dry reading.

In a nutshell, this study does a statistical analysis of the health of British government bureaucrats, which apparently are housed in a place called White Hall. Each public servant has been given a rigid rank reminiscent of the Indian caste system. A ranking of say, nine, might be equivalent to a rat catcher, or untouchable. What makes this study unique is that it statistically controls for just about everything you can think of, income, exercise, diet, and on and on. The only thing that correlates strongly with poor health is low status. The lower your rank, the worse your health prospects.

This conclusion rankles me as much as it does everyone else who was born low on the totem pole. It doesn’t seem fair that we are forced to compete for stature to be happy and healthy, especially against those who were born just inches from the finish line as Ridley was. But life isn’t fair. That is something you can hang your hat on.

The hypothesis is that low ranking social primates like baboons (and White Hall bureaucrats) have a hormone balance that is destructive over time to health. They are chronically stressed. My hypothesis, and I am sure I am not the first to hypothesize this, is that hormones are used by evolution to dish out positive and negative incentives to goad us into behavior that moves genes into the future. In our recent hunter-gatherer past, social rank was closely correlated to reproductive success. That isn’t true anymore. Rich people have been having fewer babies than poor, but that trend will be hard to hold down. In some circles, rich people are starting to have more babies again, as a status symbol of course, and we all know what trend setters set. Demographers who have predicted a peak world population of 9 billion may once again fail to predict the future.

What to do with these study results? We know from experience in communist countries what happens when a government attempts to suppress social hierarchies. In social animals (wolves, chickens, baboons, people) there is a physical need for a stature hierarchy. We also know that because wealth begets wealth (a person with ten million dollars can wriggle his little finger and make ten thousand dollars) that it tends to start accumulating into fewer and fewer hands. You need a big, healthy middle class to keep a big, healthy economy. Only government can redistribute wealth back into society (as opposed to growing its own bureaucracy) to maintain a, literally, healthier status gradient. Serfdom is not a good thing.

Is happiness just another word for nothing left to lose?

You tell me. The definition of happiness isn’t very precise. Essentially, you have to ask people in surveys if they are happy, but because nobody knows exactly what happiness is, well, you can see how survey results may be generating a lot of worthless data. To get more useful results happiness would best be precisely defined and physically measured using a replicable method. This might be done with blood samples (as the primate researcher above did) drawn consistently over long periods of time that correlate with logs, or diaries, or actual video. A plot over time of serotonin, oxytocin, adrenaline and a whole host of other hormone levels would produce a happiness graph. Levels would oscillate up and down over the course of an hour, day, week, month, year. Cigarettes, cocaine, a strong cup of coffee, or a shot of whiskey would cause spikes on the happometer. Your level of happiness could be accurately measured and ranked.

Don’t worry. Be happy?

Keep in mind that Ridley’s world view, like yours and mine, has been shaped by his environment. From Wikipedia:

He is the son and heir of Viscount Ridley, whose family estate is Blagdon Hall, near Cramlington, Northumberland. Ridley was non-executive chairman of Northern Rock from 2004 to 2007, earning £300,000 ($500,000) a year, having joined the board in 1994. His father had been chairman from 1987 to 1992 and sat on the board for 30 years

In September 2007 Northern Rock became the first British bank since 1878 to suffer a run on its finances at the start of the credit crunch. It was forced to apply to the Bank of England for emergency liquidity funding, following problems caused by the US subprime mortgage crisis.  Matt Ridley resigned as chairman in October 2007, having been blamed in parliamentary committee hearings for not recognizing the risks of the bank’s financial strategy and thereby “harming the reputation of the British banking industry.”

For 99 percent of humanity, getting fired is a disaster. For Ridley it meant he didn’t have to stay awake through any more meetings, freeing him to write another book. Ridley wrote this book for many reasons and you can bet that one of them was to enhance his status. Males competing for status is why we have airliners and skyscrapers.

Social status can be a bizarre thing. You can be born into it (Ridley), earn it (Michael Jordan), stumble upon it (lottery winner), or garner it by association (sports fans of a winning team, any degree from a high status school, socializing with someone with higher status). Status seeking does not satiate. After reaching a higher rung you get a new set point and start reaching for the next one. Most economic growth is driven by status seeking, another point Ridley missed but not for long I will wager.

In addition, status is relative. We gravitate subconsciously towards the next level of competition, like basketball and soccer players do. We end up socializing with like-status players.

The polar opposite of happiness is depression, which is what tormented Julian Simon. What evolutionary purpose could depression have? Was the high status he achieved prior to his untimely death from a heart attack the result of his attempts to escape depression? Was his shortened life span the result of decades of depression and feelings of low stature?

Would we have ever heard of Ridley had he been descended from coal miners instead of coal mine owners? With all due respect, not a statistical snowball’s chance in hell, ditto for George W. Bush (not to compare the intellectual capacities of the two). Ridley may have been born with a silver spoon in his mouth but Bush was born with a silver bucket over his head. I’m certainly not knocking Darwin but it was his inherited wealth that freed him to contemplate his belly button and earth worms. What finally pushed the theory of evolution to publication was the threat that some nobody named Wallace (who was running around in jungles scratching out a living by sending butterflies and beetles back to collectors in England) would publish the idea first and get all the credit. I suspect that it was only thanks to Darwin’s integrity that he got any credit.

Will the internet eventually prove to be the great equalizer? Will it finally give voice to the millions of creative minds out there that we don’t hear from because they are too busy earning a living or are drowned out by books chosen for publication based purely on their free market potential for profit? Is there any doubt that a book written by Paris Hilton would be snapped up for publication and have great potential to be a best seller? Ditto for Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, and on and on.

Paul Ehrlich

For decades now, bashing Paul and Anne Erhlich has been a favorite pastime of many conservatives, and interestingly enough, many Catholic and Fundamentalist leaders as well because of their “go forth and multiply” mindsets. I was truly disappointed to see Ridley become the ten-thousandth person (admittedly, there is safety in numbers) to join the feeding frenzy after all of these years.

We all know Ehrlich lost a bet to Julian Simon about the price of metals. God knows how many times I have heard this. On the other hand, how many know that he would have won the bet had he simply picked a different date when the price of metals would have won the bet, say in 2008? This is why economics isn’t considered a science by many. It has little predictive ability–it can’t pick dates either. Ridley denigrates Ehrlich when he says that he “learned his lesson” after that and refused to pick hard and fast dates. Ridley makes no mention of the bet Julian Simon lost to David South when the price of timber continued to rise past Simon’s chosen date.

Your financial advisor can tell you the market will crash one day but because he can’t tell you when it will crash the usefulness of his advice is greatly diminished.

Below, Ridley–fallen financier and aristocrat celebrity journalist who collects other’s thoughts into books–mocks Ehrlich the “butterfly ecologist.” He stops well-short of mocking (primarily, I suspect, because he would be alone on the band wagon) an “ant ecologist” by the name of E.O. Wilson, who shares Ehrlich’s concerns about population and has written many books on similar topics. You would think that someone like Ridley, who should be eating crow after the failure of his own bank, would know better than to mock a scientist who failed, along with everyone else, to predict an agricultural revolution:

The Population Bomb allowed Paul Ehrlich, and obscure butterfly ecologist, to metamorphose into a guru of the environmental movement complete with MacArthur ‘genius’ award.

Note the quote marks around the word genius, which are meant to ridicule. Ridley failed to mention that his obscure butterfly ecologist has also won, among many other awards:

1) The Eminent Ecologist Award of the Ecological Society of America , 2001
2) The Distinguished Scientist Award of the American Institute of Biological Sciences , 2001
3) Ramon Margalef Prize in Ecology and Environmental Sciences of the Generalitat of Catalonia, 2009.

In another place in the book, he goes back into the past to find a quote from one of Obama’s advisors where he mentions a sterilant. Following is the actual passage that this advisor had partially quoted from the book the Population Bomb (written 43 years ago):

Many of my colleagues think that some form of compulsory birth regulation would be necessary to achieve such control. One plan often mentioned involves the addition of temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food. Doses of the antidote would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the desired family size. Those of you who are appalled by such a suggestion can rest easy. The option isn’t even open to us since no such substance exists.

Ehrlich is not talking about permanent sterilization like vasectomies and tubal ligations. He is talking about a reversible form of contraception, like the birth control pill, which is also a “temporary sterilant.” Half of all pregnancies in America are unplanned. Imagine the failure rate in third world countries. Obviously, because one must consistently take a birth control pill to avoid pregnancies, it is not as effective at helping women avoid unplanned pregnancies as it might be. The world could use a better “temporary sterilant” than the pill.

I talk about another form of temporary sterilant in my book. It’s called a TIFIC (take it and forget it contraceptive). It would immunize men and women against sperm cells (by deactivating a single enzyme in the tails of sperm) similar to the way immunization shots work against a virus or bacteria. It would be reversible anytime anyone wanted to conceive. The difference would be that you would take a pill to remain fertile instead of the other way around. No government involvement wanted or needed, no accidental pregnancies by anyone using it.

To get a much more accurate picture of what was going on 43 years ago, read this short chapter about overpopulation from Poison Darts.

I’ll end here, not because there isn’t more to critique but because I have critiqued the book enough. Read it but remain skeptical and never mind Ridley’s apparent inability to differentiate between a realist or skeptic and a pessimist.

Crossposted from the Biodiversivist blog

In this post I am going to critique an article titled:

Disarming the Food to Fuel Conflict

…which was written by someone who did not seem to be aware that his main source of information, the Renewable Fuels Association, is the nation’s largest and best funded corn ethanol lobbying firm. I used the same title because is it just as applicable to my article.

And he’s not the only unwitting corn ethanol missionary out there helping the corn ethanol propaganda mill to spread the word (the missionary analogy is a very apt one if you think about it).

Read:

Ethanol Exports Increase Dependence on Foreign Oil

The story successfully disseminated by the corn ethanol lobby is of one of David fighting Goliath (big oil). In reality corn ethanol has become Goliath. David is represented by the likes of the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Natural Resource Defense Council, and the Nature Conservancy as well as just about every other wildlife conservation and environmental “non-profit” organization.

Big oil is waiting to see which technology will win in the market before they assimilate it into their liquid fuel business model. This will take a while thanks to politicians picking favorites (corn ethanol) for political gain. Biodiesel enthusiasts will point out that their cars get 30% better mileage than gasoline, while corn ethanol imparts a 30% drop in mileage, giving their choice of fuel a 60% improvement in mileage over ethanol.

Palm oil produces far more energy per acre than even cane ethanol, which produces about eight times more than corn ethanol.

Not that I’m not promoting palm oil or cane ethanol over other biofuels because they also convert wildlife habitat and carbon sinks into farmland. Electrification of transport is by far our best option. My wife spotted a Nissan Leaf in a parking lot yesterday with dealer plates on it.

Lobbyists are akin to lawyers in that they are paid to defend a client, right or wrong, through thick or thin, and by any means possible within the bounds of the law. It’s their job to sway public opinion in order to garner political favor. Nothing personal. Just business.

He cites the Renewable Fuels Association and its abbreviation (RFA) in the body of the article a total of ten times. Picture trying to write an informed, honest, and accurate article on the subject of corn ethanol not realizing that your main source of information is a for-profit corporate corn ethanol lobbying firm! The name of the firm, the Renewable Fuels Association, like a Trojan Horse, was deliberately crafted to mislead people like the author of the article I’m critiquing.

The RFA is all about corn ethanol, which is anything but renewable. About three out of every four units of energy in a gallon of corn ethanol came from non-renewable fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, diesel).

This author has unwittingly collected into one neat article every paid-for study and conspiracy theory disseminated by the corn ethanol lobby he could find.

I critique his article below, starting with his concluding paragraph:

Corn based ethanol will never replace gasoline, we simply use too much gas.

This may be the only thing he got right in the entire essay and it defeats his entire premise. The renewable fuels legislation effectively caps ethanol made from corn at 15 billion gallons. Now, why would our politicians put a cap on how much biofuel can come from our food stocks?

It’s because converting food into fuel increases the price of food. Food and fuel compete for the same feedstock. It was a stated goal by the USDA to increase the price farmers get for corn by diverting the supply to ethanol. And it worked:

It’s because a point of diminishing political returns will be reached when voters decide they no longer want to pay higher food prices in addition to subsidies to support a fuel that is worse than what it replaces that has been feeding from the government trough for over thirty years already.

But don’t kid yourself. The corn ethanol lobby just successfully changed the rules for the 10% limit in cars and just got the subsidy (which was slated to expire) reinstated. They have no intention of stopping at 15 billion and would happily turn all of our food into fuel if we let them get away with it.

Ethanol has replaced MTBE in most of the United States and performs the same function; it is added to gasoline to reduce knocking. It has to be added at a greater ratio than MTBE …

Not according to this study by the EIA, Table 2, page 5. Note that it takes 9 barrels of ethanol to replace 10 barrels of MTBE.

And because MTBE production peaked in 2002 at about 3 billion gallons per year it takes just less than 3 billion gallons of ethanol to replace MTBE in our fuel supply. So, if ethanol is being mixed into our fuel to act as an anti-knock additive, why are we presently blending 10 billion gallons of it annually into our fuel supply when we only need three?

There are a number of ways to increase the octane rating of gasoline (increase its resistance to knocking) without using lead, MTBE, or ethanol. It’s generally a matter of economics or in the case of ethanol, government intervention, that determine how a given company will vary gasoline octane ratings. You can still buy ethanol free gas that has all of the usual octane ratings.

The Clean Air Act requires oxygenated fuel to be sold to reduce air pollutants. Ethanol as an additive performs these functions of oxygenation …

This is outdated information. The federal requirement to add oxygen to fuel was removed in 2006 based on the recommendation from a special panel formed by the EPA to study the benefits of adding oxygen:

…removes the oxygen content requirement for RFG sold nationally (effective on May 6, 2006)… These rules also revise a current probation against commingling ethanol-blended VOC-controlled RFG with VOC-controlled RFG produced using other oxygenates. The revision is to prohibit commingling ethanol-blended VOC-controlled RFG with non-oxygenated VOC-controlled RFG, except under certain limited circumstances (Source).

The author continues:

The EPA mandates a gasoline blend of up to 10% ethanol, with a 15% blend advocated for newer cars and trucks.

The EPA does not mandate a gasoline blend of up to 10% ethanol. That sentence does not even make sense. The EPA is the department charged with carrying out that the provisions of the Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA) of 2007, which states that “…the total amount of biofuels added to gasoline is required to increase to 36 billion gallons by 2022, from 4.7 billion gallons in 2007. The Energy Act further specifies that 21 billion gallons of the 2022 total must be derived from non-cornstarch products…”

And the EPA does not “advocate” a 15% blend. Last year the corn ethanol lobby pressured the EPA to increase the maximum allowable blend in cars from 10% to 15%. After much study, the EPA concluded that it would be safe to increase the blend in some newer models of cars and trucks. The corn ethanol lobby was very unhappy about this because they were wanting to force all cars to use that higher blend.

See EPA approves E15–Bob Dinneen unsatiated

The author continues:

According to the EPA website, testing was done a large fleet of government vehicles to determine effects of RFG on power and fuel mileage. No impact on power was noted, but a 3% drop in fuel mileage was noted due to oxygenation.

This is also outdated information. As mentioned above, federally mandated oxygenation was dropped four years ago. However, you will get a similar mileage loss with a ten percent blend of ethanol. A test done by Consumer reports found a 27 percent drop in mileage using E85 in a flex fuel vehicle.

However, a bevy of misinformation campaigns surround the use of resources for these clean energy initiatives.

And why does the above statement not apply to his own article? Because the means justifies the ends when battling evil–big oil? In reality the battle is between the corn ethanol lobby and the likes of the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Natural Resource Defense Council, and the Nature Conservancy as well as just about every other wildlife conservation and environmental “non-profit” organization.

This isn’t a battle between big oil and big biofuel. In reality, oil companies will buy out biofuel production with their pocket change (BP, Shell, Exxon, Chevron).

Google the term “oil company buys ethanol plant.”

Should biofuels become profitable, they will own all production of it because disseminating and burning liquid fuels in gas hog liquid fuel wasters is their business model. It’s what they do.

They should be more concerned about the electric car, which will eventually be mostly powered by natural gas, wind, solar, and nuclear energy–no liquid fuel involved.

These misinformation campaigns, despite the empirical evidence to the contrary, promote the idea that exports of corn are diminishing due to ethanol requirements as well as the idea that domestic ethanol production affects the availability of food in America’s trade partners.

This isn’t true. More specifically, this is a strawman. I’ve never seen critics claim that corn exports have declined. The USDA data is easy to find and readily available for anyone to see. Keep in mind that none of these arguments were formulated by the author of the article I’m critiquing. He’s simply parroting the stuff he’s found on the internet, put there by corn ethanol lobbying organizations.

This is actually the latest argument being pushed hard by the lobbying arms. The NRDC critiques it here and here, pointing out that “The U.S. is feeding less and less of the world because demand is growing faster than our supply.”

The logic goes something like this; if exports have not declined, how could there be a shortage of food (ignoring for the moment their contradicting argument that the type of corn used for ethanol isn’t food)?

It’s a tad more complicated than that. Every year, 75 million human beings are added to the world population. If exports don’t tend to go up enough, something has to break. People are going to go hungry or more land is going to be put under the plow.

And it’s a matter of supply and demand which sets food prices. The nearly one billion hungry people on this planet (three times the population of the U.S.) simply can’t afford the corn meal that provides them with most of their calories. Click on the chart below:

Beginning in 2005 (the year of the fuel mandate legislation) the price of corn has increased 100% (doubled) compared to the two preceding decades. The corn lobby wants you to believe this is just a gargantuan coincidence.

In fact, evidence points to changes in diet and economic growth in America’s trade partners as the reason for a diverting of corn imports away from traditional food uses (and, largely, into livestock production). However, misinformation campaigns have swayed public opinion against the ethanol industry with the belief that food product is being affected.

Waaaaay back in 2008 when food riots were raging around the world, several studies were done to try to understand what happened. Every last study listed several factors that contributed and in every last study biofuels shared the honor of being one of the factors starving people. These studies were done by the likes of the World Bank and the United Nations, and were not part of any misinformation campaign.

The argument of “food for fuel” is in regard to the diversion of cropland and crops to biofuel production and away from food production [snip]…it is surprising to see the volume of misinformation that is available with regards to biofuels, disseminated by figures of authority, politics and learning. It would seem that in the rush to have an informed opinion for policy-making, traditional sources of information have failed to disseminate the truth in volume sufficient to drown out the voices of profit and conflict . [my emphasis]

The author of the article I’m critiquing repeats himself a lot and for that I apologize. Again, whoosh! Right over his head. For reasons hard to infer, the author of the article I’m critiquing has chosen to align himself with big oil’s Minnie Me (big biofuel) instead of the major environmental and conservation groups (backed by scientific research). The RFA is the voice of profit and conflict for the corn ethanol industry. Like a law firm, they are paid to promote their client’s interests, no matter what, and whatever that takes.

There is an incredibly large amount of profit to be made or forfeited by changing public fuel policies, and those entities that are already deeply entrenched in the status quo of petroleum fuels are reluctant to give up their immense profits without battle.

Ah, no. The environmental and conservation organizations arrayed against corn ethanol are mostly, if not all non-profit organizations. Big oil is waiting in the wings to buy out all of the biofuel refineries with their pocket change should they ever prove profitable without government support.

There are also corporations involved in food production that see opportunity to divert attention away from their own profits by misdirecting public opinion through organized campaigns of misinformation.

Ironically, or comically, that is a perfect description of what the corn ethanol lobby is doing. See Corn Ethanol Propaganda Blitz Backfires

.

And it’s illegal to collude. Livestock producers and grocery manufacturers would risk imprisonment if they ever tried that. The diversion of attention and misinformation is coming entirely from the corn ethanol side.

Tremendous amounts of money change hands, and political favor is purchased and coerced.

An accurate description of our political system, but good God, the corn ethanol industry is famous for doing all of that.

Academics and scientists serve both sides of the fence, and scholarly papers are introduced with great frequency to support either side

Or so the corn ethanol lobby wants you to believe. Let me give you an example. Back in 2009, the Union of Concerned Scientists published a letter signed by about 170 scientists and economists (including nine members of the National Academies of Science and two Nobel laureates) urging the California Air Resources Board to ignore the letter signed by 25 biofuel company executives and CEOs who wanted them to ignore greenhouse gas emissions from indirect land use change issues.

As with global warming, it is a rather lopsided scientific battle.

In April 2005, [snip] a …report indicated that America can produce this amount of biomass through forestry products and agricultural products, with “relatively modest changes to land use and forestry and agricultural practices.” … Bear in mind that the research was done prior to 2005, and does not reflect the current technologies of second-generation ethanol production from ultra-efficient sources like algae and sugar cane bagasse[my emphasis].

Note that the author of the article I’m critiquing has suddenly taken a diversion from defending corn ethanol to tell us about fuels that don’t exist in economically viable formats.

Back in 2005, the year the biofuel mandates were put in place, it was assumed that second generation cellulosic ethanol was just around the corner. However, none of the mandates were met and the EPA had to roll them back. From Consumer Energy Report:

…the reason for the EPA’s 100 million gallon estimate [for second generation ethanol] was that they were counting on 70 million gallons from Cello.

Cello was convicted of fraud in 2009.

And how’s that algae thing working out? Not bad if you can pay hundreds of dollars for a gallon of it. From Green Fuel Bites the Dust:

GreenFuel was the first high profile algal concern to go under, but they won’t be the last. I predict that few of them will be standing in just a few short years. Growing algae is trivial and can be done in water, and there is the allure. Turning into biodiesel is not technically very difficult. Doing it all economically is next to impossible. I have had one very prominent algae expert tell me that it will be at least 15 years before there are serious prospects for commercial viability – and that will require multiple large technical breakthroughs.

And finally, what does sugar cane bagasse have to do with biofuels grown in the United States?

Speculation on commodities and the price of crude oil has driven up the price of food, claims a 2010 Energy article by Amela Ajanovic. (Ajanovic, 2010). She also cites farmer’s increased fertilizer prices and rising fuel costs as the primary factor in increased food costs. She also cites as evidence the relationship between dropping food prices and the post 2008 fall in crude oil prices. According to another study, biofuel production has shifted some arable land away from food production, and could have affected food prices temporarily, but the trend is by no means permanent and most likely short term. (Rathmann R, 2010 ) Most of the lands recently switched from other land uses to feedstock production are marginal lands, and were not used for agricultural production previously on a regular basis. (Ajanovic, 2010)

No study I ever say ever claimed that biofuels were the sole culprit. They are always listed as one of the culprits. Note that they are listed as a culprit above as well.

Food prices should eventually drop once enough land is put under the plow to bring supply and demand into better balance, and that is a major reason environmental and wildlife conservation organizations are opponents of corn ethanol.

The speculation was largely fueled by low grain reserves caused in part by the diversion of grain to biofuel. And note that since the cost of corn is tied to the cost of fossil fuel, it goes up with the cost of oil. Thanks to corn ethanol, food prices are now even more closely tied to the price of oil.

These “marginal lands” are called the Conservation Reserve. They “were” wildlife habitat and carbon sinks.

There is mounting evidence that the corn the U.S. exports is not used to feed the world’s poor, but to feed the source of more affluent nation’s rising meat intake

There is no such “mounting evidence” and the fact that a lot of corn goes to livestock overseas is nothing new. The sudden dramatic rise in food prices correlates in time to the sudden dramatic rise in corn ethanol production which correlates in time with the doubling of the price of corn. Pretty simple really.

While ethanol attackers have shown images of starving children in Mexico to shore up the defense of the food vs fuel argument ….

For a sampling of political cartoons on this topic, be sure to click on this link

.

…the USDA reports that Japan is the world’s leader in US corn imports, followed by Korea and Mexico is following close behind. (US Department of Agriculture, 2010) According to this report, these nations use American corn imports to feed livestock for meat production.

The USDA has an active online database that is open to the public, which clearly documents that hose countries have always imported corn for livestock. And how, exactly does the diversion of thirty thousand square miles of corn acreage to American gas tanks reduce this problem?

“Mexico processes much of its production of white corn into human food products, but has turned to imported yellow corn and sorghum for livestock feed to support increased meat production.” (ibid) This report hardly bolsters the claims that lack of corn meal is directly the fault of ethanol production in the U.S., but rather that foreign importers of corn choose to use the imports for animal feed to support the demand for meat by relatively affluent citizens.

And how, exactly does the diversion of thirty thousand square miles of corn acreage to American gas tanks reduce this problem? As part of his ongoing education, the author of the article I’m critiquing should read the FAO report titled Livestock’s Long Shadow. He would learn how important chickens, pigs, goats, sheep, and cattle are to the world’s poorest. A diet of pure corn meal without adequate protein will lead to severe iron deficiency and death.

As the above chart from the article shows, the per capita income of Koreans increased 265.1 times in fifty years. China’s per capita income grew by 34.5 times in the same period. Changes in urbanization, per capita income and population growth all affect meat consumption and production. (van der Zijpp, 1999) As home to the largest population in the world, China’s increased appetite for meat dramatically affects the use and price of imported corn. As China’s affluence grows, meat consumption has increased at the rate of 10% per year. (Zhan G. Li, 1999) China was recently the second-largest exporter of corn, but changing economics and consumer demand have spurred corn imports, of which 80% goes to animal feed. (Zhan G. Li, 1999) as China continues to industrialize, valuable farmland is being lost to development and residential uses. This trend is likely to continue as China’s economy continues to grow. (ibid)

And how, exactly does the diversion of thirty thousand square miles of corn acreage to American gas tanks reduce this problem?

Perhaps the most damning evidence of manipulation of public sentiment towards American ethanol production is in the form of a memo released to the public by the office of United States Senator Chuck Grassley. The memo was from a prominent Washington lobbyist firm, The Glover Park Group, as a business solicitation to the Grocery Manufacturers Association, a special interest group founded to promote the interests of food marketers. The memo states that the purpose of the PR campaign would be to “a single message that clearly conveys the ideas that: Support for corn-based ethanol is driving up food prices and creating a crisis that threatens the kitchen tables and pocketbooks of millions of Americans and the welfare of vulnerable populations worldwide.” (The Glover Park Group, 2008)

Come again? Support for corn-based ethanol actually is driving up food prices and creating a crisis that threatens the kitchen tables and pocketbooks of millions of Americans and the welfare of vulnerable populations worldwide.

To accomplish this end, The Glover Park Group suggests “First, we must obliterate whatever intellectual justification might still exist for corn-based ethanol among policy elites.” Glover Park also had no trouble spelling out how easy this would be due to their low opinion of American voters. “Average voters understand perfectly well what increased food prices mean and with the right messaging are fully capable of drawing the connection to cornbased ethanol

Ah, average voters do understand perfectly well what increased food prices mean and with the right messaging are fully capable of drawing the connection to corn-based ethanol

.

Use some common sense. This is a business that has been negatively impacted by government support of corn ethanol, which has doubled the price of corn. Feed is one of the major expense for livestock, egg, and dairy producers.

The Grocery Manufacturers Association subsequently hired the firm to implement this strategy, and the fallout was quick and lasting. According to Jerry Kram in Biodiesel magazine, Six U.S. senators held a press conference in Washington D.C. to combat the disinformation campaign: Sens. Grassley; Kit Bond, R-Mo.; Byron Dorgan, D-N.D.; John Thune, R- S.D.; Ben Nelson, D-Neb.; and Ken Salazar, D-Colo. “The Grocery Manufacturers Association has an obvious self-interest in launching this campaign,” Grassley said. “They need to blame someone for high grocery bills, but they’ve aimed their fire at a false target.” Grassley later requested a meeting with 15 chief executive officers of GMA member-companies but subsequently canceled the meeting when only one CEO was willing to defend the group’s actions. (Kram, 2008

The GMA lobby has been quite simply out-gunned by a bigger lobby. Six politicians decided to side with the wealthier donors, the corn ethanol and agricultural lobbies. I’m shocked and aghast. This is unheard of in American politics!

Use some common sense. Why would the GMA go to all of this trouble if they were not stinging from the record high corn prices? Grocery stores have razor thin profit margins. The price of food has been rising rapidly since the corn ethanol mandates.

The Congressional Budget Office calculated that ethanol was costing food aid programs almost a billion annually, which translates to about eight billion in the general populace.

The Price of corn quickly doubled when the ethanol mandates kicked in and have held steady. When you multiply that $2 per bushel increase in price times the number of bushels produced you find that corn consumers are paying about $25 billion extra for corn, annually. One big consumer of that corn is corn ethanol! The higher price they pay for their corn increases the cost of the ethanol we are forced to buy from them.

The poor people of the world are the ones who have really been hit. The price of corn doubled in just a few years. It only take a few weeks for a badly malnourished child to be permanently damaged.

As an environmental manager, it is important to note that no matter how beneficial or positive a change in policy may be, a determined adversary can derail public opinion using whatever means are at their disposal. These attacks may be matters of disagreement with government policy, economic policy or ethical disagreements with a far deeper bias.

I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know what an environmental manager is, but I share the opinion with the world’s major environmental and conservation organizations that corn ethanol is an environmental disaster, not a positive change.

The determined adversary is the corn ethanol lobby. What the “far deeper bias” the Union of Concerned Scientists and the world’s major environmental and wildlife conservation organizations have is beyond me.

In the case of domestic ethanol production, it is important to remember that ethanol is added to gasoline not just as an anti-knock agent but because it is federally mandated as an oxygenator. This is required to reduce air pollution. It has the tertiary effect of stretching our fuel supply, because it must be added in larger amounts than previous toxic anti-knock compounds.

As I said earlier, the federal mandate for an oxygenate was dropped in 2006 on the recommendations of a special panel assembled by the EPA and it would only take 3 billion gallons to replace MTBE as an anti-knock additive. We are presently blending 10 billion gallons. Ethanol is being used as a fuel, not as an additive.

The food vs fuel debate caught fire because of the initial efforts of a professional PR and lobbying firm hired by an economically opposed manufacturing group. Glover Park Group is responsible for the operation of at least three websites opposing corn-based ethanol, and organized “expert” testimony to represent the interests of their client in Washington. (Kram, 2008) With a initial budget of $300,000 the Glover Park Group achieved far reaching impact to the corn ethanol industry. (The Glover Park Group, 2008)

Above is also a description of the activities (and also a perfect example of a pot calling a kettle black) of the corn ethanol lobby, except they spend tens of millions on lobbying and PR efforts.

Read Biofuels Industry Lobby Spent $22 Million Buying Influence

The author continues below:

Real causes of high food prices were ignored in the media, such as high fuel prices and fertilizer costs.

Those causes were in addition to biofuels. They are not the “real” causes and they were not ignored in the media. They were listed right there along with biofuels.

The advocates of food vs fuel charged that American farmers and ethanol producers were starving the world’s poor, when the real culprit is the expanding incomes of certain economic sectors of our trade partners.

Not true at all. The expanding incomes were listed right there along with biofuels, but incomes rise gradually. The price of corn doubled in the span of about two years and has stayed that high ever since.

American exports of corn continue to grow, and show no signs of slowing. (US Department of Agriculture, 2010)

The fact that the price of corn doubled even with record acreage being planted is all the evidence needed that exports are not growing fast enough to meet global demand. It’s simple supply and demand.

America uses all but 4% of its ethanol production domestically. (Tabak, 2009)

Ethanol exports rose dramatically in 2010:

Read:

Taxpayer Subsidized Ethanol Exports May Bite Industry in the Future

and

Ethanol Exports Increase Dependence on Foreign Oil

The author continues below:

The ethanol industry has contributed over 400,000 jobs to Americans is all sectors of the economy

Not true. Read:

Corn ethanol tax credit: most expensive way to create jobs ever?

Big ethanol is using bad jobs numbers to push bad tax credit

How the RFA Wastes Your Tax Dollars – Part I: How Much is a Job Worth?

How the RFA Wastes Your Tax Dollars – Part II: Blatant Dishonesty and a Debate Challenge

… and provided tax revenues in excess of 15 billion dollars. (Renewable Fuels Association, 2010)

…and also not true. A full analysis has to subtract the costs from the benefits to see if there is a net gain or loss. You can’t just add up the gains and publish them, well, I guess you can but that’s deception by omission.

High promise is shown for second-generation ethanol from algae and other sources…

Not true. The author uses the repetition tactic a lot, forcing me to repeat things a lot as well. My apologies but:

Back in 2005, the year the biofuel mandates were put in place, it was assumed that second generation cellulosic ethanol was just around the corner. However, none of the mandates were met and the EPA had to roll them back. From Consumer Energy Report:

…the reason for the EPA’s 100 million gallon estimate [for second generation ethanol] was that they were counting on 70 million gallons from Cello.

Cello was convicted of fraud in 2009.

And how’s that algae thing working out? Not bad if you can pay hundreds of dollars for a gallon of it. From Green Fuel Bites the Dust:

GreenFuel was the first high profile algal concern to go under, but they won’t be the last. I predict that few of them will be standing in just a few short years. Growing algae is trivial and can be done in water, and there is the allure. Turning into biodiesel is not technically very difficult. Doing it all economically is next to impossible. I have had one very prominent algae expert tell me that it will be at least 15 years before there are serious prospects for commercial viability – and that will require multiple large technical breakthroughs.

The author continues below:

and in combination with large increases in mass transit and vehicle fuel mileage, these technologies will help supplant our growing need for vanishing fossil fuels.

Vanishing fossil fuels? Three out of every four units of energy found in a gallon of ethanol came from fossil fuels. Corn ethanol, the fuel this author is defending (because it it the only ethanol we got), is worse in the aggregate than gasoline–as bad as gasoline is. It makes no sense to replace gas with something that is worse in the aggregate.

Read

Transgressing identified and quantified planetary boundaries

and

Biofuels Reduce The Biosphere’s Capacity to Absorb Carbon

In America we used corn to make the mandated ethanol instead of importing it from Brazil,

Used is past tense. We “use” our corn to make fuel. Our government did not need to mandate the use of ethanol at all. Our politicians will never let Brazilian ethanol become a significant player in the market because unlike corn ethanol, there is no political advantage in doing that.

…or rolling back Clean Air Act requirements for fuel blending.

There has never been any need to roll back any clean air requirements, although this author has made an impressive attempt to give that impression. See my critique of this earlier in the post where the author still thinks there is a federal oxygenation requirement (that was dropped four years ago). He has confused the ongoing seasonal changes in fuel chemistry (known as reformulated gas) with the now non-existent requirement to add even more oxygen for some areas of the country.

I will spare readers a repetition of it here but adding extra oxygen (not to be confused with seasonal reformulation of gasoline that continues to this day) was found to have dubious, if marginal benefit and there are many ways to change octane ratings other than using lead, MTBE, or ethanol.

In doing so, we created American jobs, generated billions in tax revenue and

In doing so we created American jobs, but also created job destruction by diverting billions of tax dollars away from other job creating businesses. It’s the net job creation that counts, the gains minus the losses.

…reduced the need for gasoline imports in 2009 by 364 million barrels, the amount of gasoline replaced by ethanol.

Actually not. From Ethanol and Petroleum Imports:

…claims of petroleum import displacement have been at a minimum grossly exaggerated. It may even be that ethanol hasn’t backed any petroleum imports out, or that the impact is so small as to be unnoticeable.