Climate Climate & Energy

Human-powered irrigation can increase harvests for farmers

Recently, I wrote about treadle pumps that let human power replace diesel power for irrigation. As a one-to-one replacement it sounded pretty oppressive. But it turns out that it is not a one-to-one replacement.

Poor farmers who only earn a dollar or so, per person per day, can afford to do a lot more irrigation with treadles than they can renting diesel pumps from rich farmers and buying diesel fuel to run it. So they multiply the size of their harvests by two or three, their incomes by even more. Even in a formal efficiency analysis, you are probably increasing rather than decreasing the output per unit of labor. In human terms, you are increasing the amount of fresh vegetables the family can eat, and paying for things like school fees in areas where education is not necessarily completely tax-paid. So you are making life better for the farmers, and even slightly increasing their autonomy from richer neighbors.

Climate change will cause agricultural output to decline significantly, says study

Attention, people who eat: Climate change could cause global agriculture output to decline by up to 16 percent by 2080, according to a new study from the Center for Global Development and the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Like life itself, the allocation won’t be fair: productivity is likely to generally decline in developing countries […]

The next generation puts us to shame

These are the winners of the 16th International Children's' Painting Competition on the Environment. This year's theme was climate change.

The works speak for themselves, but the children who created them also wrote eloquent statements. The winner (top) is by 12 year-old Charlie Sullivan of the United Kingdom, who writes:

In related news, the ’07 corn harvest will break records

For decades now, the USDA has been dumping cash into cellulosic ethanol research (most recently through a joint venture with the DOE). So the USDA’s analysts should know something about the prospects for mass production of cellulosic ethanol, hailed by its boosters as a panacea that can wean us not only from oil, but also […]

Earning it

Another day, another Whitman editorial boosting nukes. At least this one has a slightly better disclaimer: Christine Todd Whitman is the former governor of New Jersey and EPA administrator. She is the CASEnergy Coalition co-chair. The CASEnergy Coalition is an advocacy group that believes greater use of nuclear energy is critical to a U.S. energy […]

WSJ on the carbon tax vs. cap-and-trade debate

People keep emailing me this Wall Street Journal piece on the debate between carbon tax and cap-and-trade, but as far as I can tell there’s nothing new in it. This is well-trod ground on sites like Grist. The one interesting thing about it is this graphic: For reasons Sean has well–described, I don’t believe these […]

Demand for oil remains strong despite price increases

I was wrong.

Back in the summer of '05, when oil prices were flirting with $60 per barrel, I predicted that oil would surpass $70 before it fell below $50. That is, I thought that oil prices would continue to rise in the short term.

I got that part right. Oil prices on the futures market briefly touched the $70-mark that fall, and reached the mid-$70s by the following spring.

But I also predicted that oil would fall to $40 per barrel before it reached $80 -- on the theory that, over the course of several years, rising oil prices would put a crimp in demand, while goosing production a bit.

That part I got dead wrong.

Desertification amplifies climate change, and vice versa

Here is yet another carbon-cycle amplifying feedback not in most climate models.

On the one hand, the United Nations' top climate official, Yvo de Boer, announced that:

Climate change has become the prime cause of an accelerating spread of deserts which threatens the world's drylands.

On the other hand, he pointed out that desertification would, in turn, accelerate climate change:

You'll see a sort of feedback mechanism ... quite a lot of carbon is captured in soil, so with more desertification (exposing the soil), you also get more CO2 emissions. They are two halves of the same coin.

Well, two sides of the same coin, anyway. But we get his point. He was interviewed at a U.N. desertification conference in Madrid. What's coming?

Debating Bjorn Lomborg on global warming

I taped a debate with Lomborg today on a Denver radio station. I'll post a link when it will be broadcast on the Internet. I'll be interested to hear your reactions.

I have long thought it is pretty much impossible to win a one-on-one debate on climate change with anybody who knows what they're doing -- who knows the literature and is willing to make statements that are not really true but can't be quickly disproved. After all, the audience is not in a position to adjudicate scientific and technological issues, so it just comes down to who sounds more persuasive. And Lomborg is quite good at sounding reasonable -- he doesn't deny the reality of climate change, only its seriousness.

Lomborg is more of what I term a delayer -- the clever person's denier. Lomborg is especially persuasive because he is so clearly concerned about reducing suffering and death in the Third World.

Religious leaders convene for a floating climate-change symposium

Religious leaders from Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Shiite, Shinto, and Sunni traditions are in the midst of a six-day climate-change symposium coordinated by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I. Traveling on a ship down the coast of rapidly melting Greenland, the leaders are floating ideas on cooperating to close the perceived gap between religious and environmental interests. […]