Climate Climate & Energy

A new study gathers 20 years of public opinion about global warming

Matthew Nisbet of Framing Science and his colleague, T. Myers, trawled through two decades of data on public opinion about global warming (sounds fun, huh?). The results will be published in the fall issue of the journal Public Opinion Quarterly.

An abstract:

Over the past 20 years, there have been dozens of news organization, academic, and nonpartisan public opinion surveys on global warming, yet there exists no authoritative summary of their collective findings. In this article, we provide a systematic review of trends in public opinion about global warming. We sifted through hundreds of polling questions culled from more than 70 surveys administered over the past 20 years. In compiling the available trends, we summarize public opinion across several key dimensions including (a) public awareness of the issue of global warming; (b) public understanding of the causes of global warming and the specifics of the policy debate; (c) public perceptions of the certainty of the science and the level of agreement among experts; (d) public concern about the impacts of global warming; (e) public support for policy action in light of potential economic costs; and (f) public support for the Kyoto climate treaty.

Unfortunately, the full text isn't available online, but Nisbet says that if you drop him an email, he'll send you a PDF. I look forward to reading it myself tonight.

Positive offset reinforcement

The Wall Street Journal has a big package … of stories on energy in their Energy Report. I think you need a subscription to see them; there’s a roundup here. I haven’t looked through everything yet, but I did like this smart, if brief, video on offsets: One of the things Gelobter’s outfit is trying […]

Liquid coal coalition gears up to suck from the public teat

Mike Millikin brings word of the horrific goings-on at a recent conference on liquid coal. Witness: [Sen. Jay] Rockefeller [D-W.Va.], after saying that "coal is the single greatest chance our country has for achieving energy independence," outlined what he described as four key elements for building the coal-to-liquids industry. Build up military uses of coal-based […]

Move Your Bloomin’ Ash

Curbing air pollution from coal plants can lead to more ash in landfills The growing pressure to clean up emissions from coal-fired power plants is good for air quality, but it’s got a sooty lining: pollution capture could end up filling landfills with millions more tons of toxic ash. More than one-third of the ash […]

Radioactive Flyer

International safeguards for nuclear materials are flawed, says report As nuclear energy enjoys a renaissance as a touted climate-change fix, a new report identifies significant flaws in the international safeguards meant to keep nuclear materials in reactors (as opposed to, say, the hands of illegal bomb makers). A two-year study by the Nonproliferation Policy Education […]

Prius easily beats Hummer in lifecycle energy use; ‘Dust to Dust’ report has no basis in fact

A study came out recently claiming to prove a Hummer has lower lifecycle energy use than a Prius. Because the result was so obviously bogus -- and in sharp contradiction with every other major lifecycle analysis ever done -- I didn't spend time debunking it.

But it made it into the comments of my blog and continues to echo around the internet, and the authors keep updating and defending it. A couple of good debunking studies -- by the Pacific Institute (PDF) and by Rocky Mountain Institute (PDF) -- haven't gotten much attention, according to Technorati, so let me throw in my two cents.

The study's title is revealing: Dust to Dust: The Energy Cost of New Vehicles From Concept to Disposal, The non-technical report, from CNW Marketing Research, Inc. Yes, although lifecycle energy use is probably the most complicated kind of energy analysis you can do, this 458-page report is "non-technical" and by a market research company to boot.

Their website says the report "does not include issues of gigajuelles [sic!], kW hours or other unfriendly (to consumers) terms. Perhaps, in time, we will release our data in such technical terms. First, however, we will only look at the energy consumption cost."

Wouldn't want to confuse consumers with unfriendly technical stuff like kilowatt-hours, like those annoying electric utilities do every month. No, let's put everything in dollar terms so no one can reproduce our results. When you misspell gigajoules on your website -- and have for a long time (try googling "gigajuelles") ... you aren't the most technical bunch.

I am mocking this report because it is the most contrived and mistake-filled study I have ever seen -- by far (and that's saying a lot, since I worked for the federal government for five years). I am not certain there is an accurate calculation in the entire report. I say this without fear of contradiction, because this is also the most opaque study I have ever seen -- by far. I defy anyone to figure out their methodology.

More ammo against skeptics

If our How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic series doesn’t fully scratch your skepticism itch, check out Skeptical Science, a well-organized site devoted to tracking climate skeptic arguments and rebutting them.

U.N.-initiated climate-change meeting kicks off

Some one thousand representatives of government, industry, and research institutions from more than 150 countries came together in Vienna today to kick off a United Nations-initiated week-long hobnob on WTF Should We Do About Climate Change. We’re betting relatively little of substance will come out of it, but check in for updates as the week […]

United Mine Workers of America provides fodder for time-capsule editorial on liquid coal

This editorial in the Niagara Gazette is from 2007, not 1977. Honest.

‘Biodiesel’ is looking worse and worse

An example of a long-lived and wildly successful marketing scheme is the station wagon with oversize tires and a four-wheel drive transmission, repackaged as the Sport Utility Vehicle. The only significant difference between these and the cars our parents drove is the mental image planted in our heads by marketing. And the real beauty is that you get to pick from two images:

1. People envy you for having enough disposable income and leisure time to use your car for sport, skiing in the mountains or driving down the middle of your favorite trout stream to do a little fly-fishing.
2. People envy you for owning such a utilitarian vehicle, one befitting a rugged individualist who hauls tools and supplies to job sites (the Marlboro Man).

The glue that binds all this together, of course, is status-seeking behavior -- a genetic propensity for most social primates.

Another wildly successful recent marketing scheme is the word biodiesel. Bio is the Greek root for life: biosphere, biodiversity, and biology. Let's see how well this image of preserving life holds up against the reality of biodiesel.

You take a habitat filled with biodiversity, a forest (temperate/tropical) or grassland (Cerrado/Conservation Reserve), bulldoze and burn all vegetation, plow up the soil, sterilize it with herbicides and insecticides, and finally plant a single genetically modified crop on it. You now have a large flat expanse of land devoid of all life save a single species -- as I have said before, a mall parking lot plus one. The process used to produce the crop is by any definition industrial.

Doing this to produce food is one thing; doing it to feed our cars borders on immoral.

A new subculture has recently sprung up based around biodiesel use. It is a badge of honor (a status symbol) to own a car that runs on biodiesel in this circle, just as a Prius is in other circles. Devotees believe they are sticking it to the man (oil companies). Never mind that oil companies (or companies that look very much like them) will eventually own all biofuel production. As with the SUV, it is based on false marketing from industry televangelists, propagated by believers devoid of critical thought.

Time to cut through the marketing crap and give this fuel a more accurate label: Industrial agrodiesel. We need a new bumper sticker: "Biodiesel: feeding the planet to our cars." And no, I'm not a shill for the bumper sticker oligarchy.