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Another reason to procrastinate about my Christmas shopping

From the producers of "The Meatrix" and "Grocery Store Wars" comes "The Story of Stuff," a short video about production and consumption, just in time for the holiday shopping binge. Click here for the full movie (sample clip embedded below).

Offshore wind

This exciting story about offshore wind in Britain reminds me that I meant to link a while back to a fascinating post on offshore wind by Jerome Giullet, who works in the industry. At the bottom are links to a bunch of other posts he’s done on wind. As he says, "Wind is free, clean, […]

HRC taps a CAFO champion as co-chair of Rural Americans for Hillary

"A lot of pig shit is one thing; a lot of highly toxic pig shit is another. The excrement of Smithfield hogs is hardly even pig shit: On a continuum of pollutants, it is probably closer to radioactive waste than to organic manure. The reason it is so toxic is Smithfield’s efficiency. The company produces […]

U.S. EPA considers regulating hydrogen sulfide, industry not into the idea

It may be shocking to learn that a gas with the odor of rotten eggs is actually not good for you, but sure enough: the U.S. EPA is considering regulating hydrogen sulfide, a nasty-smelling gas that emanates from oil refineries, paper mills, landfills, CAFOs, and any other place where organic material containing sulfur decomposes. Hydrogen […]

Presidential candidates answer dumb question about global warming

I have complained a number of times — even on CNN! — that the mainstream political press is ignoring the issue of global warming, particularly in the context of the presidential race. Well, it seems CBS News finally decided it was time to address the issue, as part of its "Primary Questions" series, which asks […]

Michael Gelobter argues that the hair-shirtists need to give it a rest

Ask "how can we break our addiction to fossil fuels and stop global warming?" and climate, renewable energy, and peak oil advocates reply in unison: it's going to be hard.

They do couch their warnings in beautifully written and, for the most part, evocative essays on the difficulty and loss involved in weaning ourselves from dinosaur fuel. They express significant melancholy for the (wayward?) ways of wanton energy use and thoughtless environmental destruction we leave behind. But underneath it is always the the hair-shirt: in the creed of those not motivated by greed (lefties), nothing worthwhile could ever be easy.

There are two problems with the "anti-easy" argument:

1. It's wrong, and
2. it's bad political strategy.

San Francisco sues over oil spill, South Korea spill cleanup ongoing

The city of San Francisco has sued the owners of the container ship that hit the iconic Bay Bridge last month and blackened the bay with 58,000 gallons of oil. The “wholly avoidable” accident caused “more injury to the San Francisco Bay Area than we can yet begin to fathom,” says the suit, which seeks […]

The backlash against coal has not made it to the halls of power in WV

There are some heartening recent stories from the land of Coal Backlash. Portland-based PacifiCorp is giving up on new coal plants entirely — not for environmental reasons but for economic ones. (Lesson: coal isn’t cheap.) Missouri is probably the most hostile state for climate activists. It ranks among the top five states for emitting CO2, […]

There is no comparison between Chinese and American GHG emissions

Al Gore's Nobel Prize speech, as reported by the NY Times:

... he singled out the United States and China -- the world's largest emitters of carbon dioxide -- for failing to meet their obligations in mitigating emissions. They should "stop using each other's behavior as an excuse for stalemate," he said.

Much as I love him, Gore's sentiment here is far too generous to the good ol' U.S. of A. There is simply no fair comparison with China. We're not equally responsible for the problem. Not even close.

Jim Manzi replies to Ryan Avent

The following is a guest essay from Jim Manzi, CEO of Applied Predictive Technologies (APT), an applied artificial intelligence software company. He writes occasionally for National Review and blogs at The American Scene.

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Last week on this site Ryan Avent presented a thoughtful response to my recent article at The American Scene arguing against a carbon tax. Grist has graciously invited me to reply.

As I understand it, Ryan had three basic criticisms of my logic:

1. the impacts of global warming will be more messy, unpredictable, and heartbreaking than I let on,
2. I don't understand the economic trade-offs that make a carbon tax an elegant solution to the problem, and
3. the technology-focused approach to the problem I propose is insufficiently conservative.

I'll try to address each of these in turn, all with a spirit of open-minded inquiry.

The first objection highlights the fact that productive global warming debates almost always hinge crucially upon predictions of the future. Consider three generic types of predictions: deterministic ("If I let go of this pencil, it will fall"), probabilistic ("If I flip this coin, it has a 50% chance of coming up heads and a 50% chance of coming up tails"), and uncertain predictions, for which we can not specify a reliable distribution of probabilities ("There will be a military coup in Pakistan in 2008"). Economists will immediately recognize the distinction between probabilistic and uncertain forecasts as, in essence, Knight's classic distinction between risk and uncertainty.

Strictly speaking, all predictions are uncertain, but as a practical matter we treat different predictions differently based on the observed reliability of the relevant predictive rules used to generate them.

No serious person believes that even the physical science projections for climate sensitivity (i.e., how many degrees hotter the world will get if we increase atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration according to some emissions scenario), never mind our predictions for how fast the world economy will grow or the economic impact of various degrees of climate change, are deterministic. This is why climate modelers and integrated climate-economics modelers spend so much time developing probability distributions for various outcomes and combining possible outcomes via odds-weighting to develop expected outcomes. When we hear a modeling group say "the expected outcome is X," it doesn't mean they've assumed only the most likely scenario will occur; it does mean, however, they assume their distribution of probabilities is correct (not being idiots, of course they constantly work hard to try to test and improve this distribution of probabilities).

For the moment, let's assume that predictions of global warming outcomes are probabilistic. I go into all this in my posts and articles in much greater detail, but if we take Nordhaus's DICE modeling group at Yale as a benchmark, we can make the following observations about global warming: