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Chinese power production plunges

On DotEarth, Andy Revkin brings us this amazing graph:

(Credit: Richard K. Morse, Stanford University. Data from China's National Bureau of Statistics)

Says Revkin:

Researchers at Stanford University who closely track China's power sector, coal use, and carbon dioxide emissions have done an initial rough projection and foresee China possibly emitting somewhere between 1.9 and 2.6 billion tons less carbon dioxide from 2008 to 2010 than it would have under "business as usual" if current bearish trends for the global economy hold up.

Will the McMansion ever die?

"The McMansion has almost become embarrassing to some people. They're listening not just to their wallet but their conscience."

-- Illinois builder Scott Van Duzor on the slowing of the McMansion trend (forgive us if we're skeptical -- we've heard this one before)

'Anti-science syndrome' plagues the right-wing as well as blogosphere

Note: Watts Up With That, one of the web's most anti-scientific blogs, is a finalist for the Weblog award "Best Science Blog." Even more farcically, early voting suggests Watts has a chance of winning (see here). Since the fine science blog Pharyngula is doing well in the voting, I'd now suggest voting for it.

 

In this post I'm going to present the general diagnosis for "anti-science syndrome" (ASS). Like most syndromes, ASS is a collection of symptoms that individually may not be serious, but taken together can be quite dangerous -- at least it can be dangerous to the health and well-being of humanity if enough people actually believe the victims.

One tell-tale symptom of ASS is that a website or a writer focuses their climate attacks on non-scientists. If that non-scientist is Al Gore, this symptom alone may be definitive.

The other key symptoms involve the repetition of long-debunked denier talking points, commonly without links to supporting material. Such repetition, which can border on the pathological, is a clear warning sign.

Scientists who kept restating and republishing things that had been widely debunked in the scientific literature for many, many years would quickly be diagnosed with ASS. Such people on the web are apparently heroes -- at least to the right wing and/or easily duped.

If you suspect someone of ASS, look for the repeated use of the following phrases:

What's the point of the industrial food system if it no longer provides affordable food?

Vermont's expansion of the food stamp program is an important story, one that demonstrates an increasing shift in our society's relationship to its food. Vermont's policy change on food stamps is likely to be mirrored by other states, and this represents both a fundamental shift in the reality of American need and also, I think, the final stake in the heart of the industrial food system.

From the Times Argus:

Schwarzenegger set to steamroll environmental regs with budget plan

California is in a heap of trouble. A $42 billion heap, to be exact. I've never had to figure out how to fix a $42 billion deficit, and I don't envy Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger or his legislative sparring partners. But it's worth noting some environmental skullduggery that seems to be creeping into the negotiations. (OK, it's more straightforward than skullduggerous, but that's just too fun to say.)

First, there's a push in Schwarzenegger's proposed budget to exempt several transportation projects from environmental review. Or, to put it more plainly, "Just let us build our highways, you girly men." Supporters of the California Environmental Quality Act (traditionally known as "Democrats") are not happy.

How urban life hurts your brain … and what you can do about it

A fascinating little article in Sunday's Boston Globe Ideas section highlights some recent scientific studies on the psychological effects of city life:

Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control ...

"The mind is a limited machine," says Marc Berman, a psychologist at the University of Michigan and lead author of a new study that measured the cognitive deficits caused by a short urban walk. "And we're beginning to understand the different ways that a city can exceed those limitations."

So is it the sensory overload of being in an urban environment or the lack of nature that does the damage? It seems to be a bit of both: Numerous studies have shown, for instance, that hospital patients recover more quickly when they can see trees from their windows and that apartment-dwellers function better when their units overlook a grassy courtyard. Green spaces provide a mental break, according to the article, from the "urban roil."

But what if the urban space isn't roiling? I mean, it stands to reason that walking through Times Square during a power outage at 5 a.m. on a Sunday morning would tax the brain less than doing so on New Year's Eve, but would it be less taxing than hiking through a riotous rainforest?

Interestingly enough, the answer is probably "no." The article goes on to explain that when it comes to nature, the more sensory stimulation, the better.

Although [Frederick] Olmsted took pains to design parks with a variety of habitats and botanical settings, most urban greenspaces are much less diverse. This is due in part to the "savannah hypothesis," which argues that people prefer wide-open landscapes that resemble the African landscape in which we evolved. Over time, this hypothesis has led to a proliferation of expansive civic lawns, punctuated by a few trees and playing fields.

However, these savannah-like parks are actually the least beneficial for the brain. In a recent paper, Richard Fuller, an ecologist at the University of Queensland, demonstrated that the psychological benefits of green space are closely linked to the diversity of its plant life. When a city park has a larger variety of trees, subjects that spend time in the park score higher on various measures of psychological well-being, at least when compared with less biodiverse parks.

OK, you say, so now surprise me. I don't need a psych study to tell me that a walk in the park is good for the mood. Or that traffic jams are less fun than lakes and butterflies. Point taken. But to the extent that scientific studies can help make the case for innovative urban design, including greener, airier homes and apartments, wilder public parks, and less concrete in between, then I'm all for them. And hey, it's a good argument for a corner office.

Diesel technology has peaked

I just encountered a typical lay media puff piece about the 2009 diesel Jetta, which won the Green Car award this year.

Did you know that the next generation of diesel-powered cars and SUVs is 98 percent cleaner than diesels sold just two years ago?

No, but I also didn't know that the older models were that dirty!

Did you know these new clean diesels offer 23 to 43 percent better fuel economy than the same vehicle with a gasoline engine?

Sounds impressive! Until you go to the EPA green vehicle website and discover that the gasoline version with a standard transmission gets an air pollution score of 9 compared to this car's 6.

Democratic aides leak list of Reid's top priorities for 2009

TAPPED's Tim Fernholz posts a list of the first 10 bills that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is planning to move on in the 111th Congress, according to Democratic aides. Energy and environmental issues will be addressed by some of the legislation, including the stimulus bill, which may have notable green elements. Here's the summary of the stimulus plan:

S.1 -- American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. "To create jobs, restore economic growth, and strengthen America's middle class through measures that modernize the nation's infrastructure, enhance America's energy independence, expand educational opportunities, preserve and improve affordable health care, provide tax relief, and protect those in greatest need, and for other purposes."

Also on tap:

S.5 -- Cleaner, Greener, and Smarter Act of 2009. This is a bill that focuses mainly on green investment and updating infrastructure to be more efficient and less polluting. But since a lot of those priorities are expected to be rolled into the stimulus package, one wonders if this is a vehicle for cap-and-trade and the Kyoto Protocols, given this provision: "requiring reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases in the United States and achieving reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases abroad."

Fernholz also lists the "Returning Government to the American People Act," a bill intended to "return the Government to the people by reviewing controversial 'midnight regulations' issued in the waning days of the Bush Administration." This too could have green implications.

Wherein I ramble on about markets and regulations

If I could persuade everyone in America to read a single paragraph, it would be the second 'graph in Dean Baker's new piece in the Boston Review: "Free Market Myth."

Here it is:

In general, political debates over regulation have been wrongly cast as disputes over the extent of regulation, with conservatives assumed to prefer less regulation, while liberals prefer more. In fact conservatives do not necessarily desire less regulation, nor do liberals necessarily desire more. Conservatives support regulatory structures that cause income to flow upward, while liberals support regulatory structures that promote equality. "Less" regulation does not imply greater inequality, nor is the reverse true.

God yes!

As Baker points out, this kind of framing puts conservatives at a huge advantage. Americans are suspicious of the vicissitudes of capitalism, but they're even more skeptical about the competence of government. If you can claim you're arguing for "less government intrusion," you've got a big head start.

Even more irksome to me is the extent to which progressives and environmentalists cede this framing to conservatives -- indeed, help reinforce it! I can't count how many times I've heard people on this site and elsewhere railing against the "free market" and how it's brought the world to the brink of ruin. Argh. The problem not some inherent moral valence of markets -- no such thing -- but the actual practices of actual people who structure markets to benefit those with power at the expense of those without (and those yet unborn). There are no unstructured ("free") markets.

The very term "free market" embeds the myth of a Platonic market free of government involvement. (It's a species of the "noble savage" myth -- the noble market.) But there is not and could be no such thing. Markets are human institutions created by human decisions and maintained by collectively agreed-upon frameworks.

Amtrak arrests its own contest participant

Getting a grip on climate chaos is going to require a functioning rail system -- one that people will willingly use.

Would such a system arrest photographers participating in its own annual photo contest?

Every time Amtrak falls apart -- which typically occurs on days ending in "y" -- it hurts us all. If Obama wants to make concrete change fast, he could do no better than to make rail revitalization a high priority. He should aim to create a system that he would be happy to have Malia, Sasha, and Michelle use.

Meanwhile, we've got Amtrak ... because the federal government doesn't think the DMV inflicts quite enough suffering.