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‘We are just recovering from the LIA’–Why should we expect this to happen?

(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide)

Objection: Today's warming is just a recovery from the Little Ice Age.

Answer: This argument relies on an implicit assumption that there is a particular climatic baseline to which the earth inexorably returns -- and thus that a period of globally lower temperatures will inevitably be followed by a rise in temperatures. What is the scientific basis for that assumption?

But yes!

I was reading this month's Scientific American last night and came upon an article on ethanol. You can't read it without a subscription, so, sorry about that. Matthew Wald, a reporter for the New York Times, wrote it. Interestingly enough, not everyone at the NYT appears to have the same opinion on corn ethanol.

I was expecting the usual: inaccurate, incomplete, and pseudo-neutral. However, it turned out to be quite good. The article was long (which is a necessity with complicated topics), and the author made no pretense of neutrality.

Coal and cars, two great tastes that … gack!

...you might want to hurt yourself:

"A clean car that runs on coal!"

A more appropriate headline:

"A car on coal. Run!"

Washington guv defangs oversight panel

Washington State Governor Christine Gregoire may have announced a major program to clean up the Puget Sound just last week, but this week the tides have, er, turned.

This week, she's planning to limit the power of an independent citizen oversight panel intending to keep an eye on the oil industry -- probably the biggest threat to Sound health.

‘The CO2 rise is natural’–No skeptical argument has been more definitively disproven

(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide)

Objection: It's clear from ice cores and other geological history that CO2 fluctuates naturally. It is bogus to assume today's rise is caused by humans.

Answer: We emit billions of tons of CO2 into the air and, lo and behold, there is more CO2 in the air. Surely it is not so difficult to believe that the CO2 rise is our fault. But if simple common sense is not enough, there is more to the case. (It is worth noting that investigation of this issue by the climate science community is a good indication that they are not taking things for granted or making any assumptions -- not even the reasonable ones!)

Navajo protest third coal-fired plant on reservation land

Members of the Navajo Nation and their supporters have been blockading the site of a proposed coal-fired power plant in northwestern New Mexico for more than a week now, hoping to halt construction of what they believe will be a social and ecological disaster.

If completed, the Desert Rock Power Plant will cover 600 acres in the largest American Indian reservation in the nation, and it will be the third coal-fired plant on Navajo land.

Let’s not fetishize size

Many environmentalists are reverse size queens -- "small is beautiful."

When Schumacher wrote the book of that title, he was responding to a real tendency to ignore diseconomies of scale -- a tendency that still exists. Up to a certain point, both organizations and physical plants produce more output for each unit of input as they grown in size. Past that point, costs of gigantism kick in, and efficiency begins to fall instead of rising.

But Schumacher assumed that this point always occurs at small or medium sizes. In fact, there are many cases in which you get economies of scale up to very large sizes indeed.

For example, computer CPUs are still made in giant factories, not neighborhood plants; your computer would cost a whole lot more if that were not the case.

From Stern to Al

My editors have always told me: if you want to reach the biggest audience, publish late on the Friday before Christmas weekend.

Mission accomplished!

My list of the top 10 environmental stories of 2006 is available here. I hope all three of you enjoy it.

E-waste recycling in U.S. prisons

Only 10 percent of the nearly 500 million obsolete computers in the U.S. are recycled, but where does even that 10 percent go? Many of them are shipped overseas to the developing world, but a large number are dismantled here in the U.S. by prisoners working in largely unregulated facilities.

In mid-October, the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, along with prisoner-rights activists and environmental groups, released a report [PDF] detailing health and safety violations taking place at these facilities, "Toxic Sweatshops." The report includes statements culled from prisoners at 106 facilities run by Federal Prison Industries, which does business as UNICOR, and details their health problems associated with exposure to the thousands of chemicals in electronics.

The use of cheap, under-regulated, captive labor and the environmental implications have made the report a topic of concern for health and environment activists, labor groups, prisoner-rights advocates, and businesses whose prices are being undercut by UNICOR. I had some time to catch up with Aditi Vaidya, program director at SVTC, on the results of the report, how citizens can be more active on this issue, and some of the other SVTC projects to look out for.

Sorry, GM

And how did they do it? Producing high-quality cars with good gas mileage. Often the market rewards the right actors.