Ecology and Economics

Earth Day Vision of Sustainable Forestry

Hat Tip to Mark Thoma, (as posted 4/20 at Environmental Economics):

An Earth Day vision from Don Melnick, professor of conservation biology at Columbia University and Mary Pearl, president of Wildlife Trust:

Not Out of the Woods Just Yet, by Don Melnick and Mary Pearl, Commentary, NY Times: Our forests are the heart of our environmental support system. And yet, in the 36 years that have passed since the first Earth Day, on April 22, 1970, we have lost more than one billion acres of forest, with no end in sight. The people most vulnerable to the disappearance of forests are the poor: nearly three-quarters of the 1.2 billion people defined as extremely poor live in rural areas, where they rely most directly on forests for food, fuel, fiber and building materials.

Nuclear Waste Recycling Now: Fact or Fiction?

Today many are celebrating Earth Day. I don't celebrate much these days, but decided to share a commercial story that I heard on TV again this morning. A Utah-based group called EnergySolutions is now advertising that we no longer need to store nuclear waste. Nuclear waste storage has been a hot topic here in the USA, as per a Goshute Indian Tribe proposal/controversy and a Nevada proposal/controversy. Here is a bit of EnergySolution's salespitch:

Recycling is the right thing to do for America and will make the PFS proposal for Utah obsolete," said Steve Creamer, CEO of Salt Lake City based EnergySolutions. The utility consortium known as Private Fuel Storage (PFS) has proposed using the Goshute Indian Reservation at Skull Valley, Utah as an interim storage site for spent nuclear fuel.

Living on Earth (as aired on NPR) did a radio spot on Nuclear Recycling on March 10. The transcript is here. A few snips:

...Living on Earth's Jeff Young reports from Washington.…
LYMAN: Well of course it sounds good, the slogan that we should be recycling our nuclear waste instead of throwing it away is appealing on the surface. But the problem is once you start looking at the details, the program completely falls apart.
YOUNG: That's Ed Lyman of the advocacy group Union of Concerned Scientists. Lyman says materials produced by the technology DOE is pushing could still be used to make weapons. And he's skeptical of claims that reprocessing would solve the waste problem.
LYMAN: Unfortunately reprocessing doesn't actually reduce radioactive waste. All it does is shuffle it around. The fact is all these materials have to be disposed of somewhere.
YOUNG: Some scientists who support the administration's general ideas are still uneasy with the proposal. Ernie Moniz teaches physics at MIT and served the Clinton administration as a science advisor and undersecretary of energy. Moniz says reprocessing technology is not ready.
MONIZ: It may lead us down the wrong technology pathway. So again, rushing into large-scale reprocessing would seem to be a bit premature until one has technologies for the whole integrated system in hand.
YOUNG: And then there's the price tag. The administration wants $250 million for the Nuclear Energy Partnership next year. But that's just a down payment on a program that Energy Secretary Sam Bodman says could cost tens of billions of dollars.
BODMAN: This is going to be a very expensive undertaking if we decide to go forward with it. My own estimate, personal estimate, is that it's gonna be between $20 and $40 billion to accomplish all this. …

So what do you think? I heard some months ago, in comments on a blog post that we were on the threshold of proof (as good as such is) via scientifically refereed Journal postings, that nuclear recycling was both feasible and cost-effective. I decided to take a wait and see approach back then. Today I'll ask questions here: Have we crossed such a threshold? Are we near such a crossing?

Everything is connected: wetlands and bird flu

(Cross-posted at the Oikos Blog)

Here's another reminder that things are connected in ways we don't always understand and the environment isn't just something "out there" that we can ignore: environmental problems far away can have surprising impacts on us.

A United Nations (UN) report just released says restoring the world's wetlands may be critical to preventing outbreaks of avian flu, as their revival will keep migratory birds from mixing with domesticated fowl. It says the degradation of wetlands has forced wild birds, some carrying the deadly H5N1 strain, into alternative habitats. That increases the risk of the spread of the disease to poultry and, in turn, humans:

"The loss of wetlands around the globe is forcing many wild birds onto alternative sites like farm ponds and paddy fields, bringing them into direct contact with chickens, ducks, geese and other domesticated fowl," the report said.

The report, which has been presented at a two-day conference at the Nairobi-based UN Environment Program (UNEP), notes that contact between migratory birds and their domesticated cousins is a major cause of the spread of avian flu.

That includes the H5N1 strain, which is potentially deadly to humans. "We know there is a very tight link between the conditions of ecosystems and the likelihood of threats to human health," David Rapport, a Canadian professor of ecosystem health and the lead author of the study, said.

Ethanol: Whose subsidy? At what cost?

Foreign Policy, March 7, 2006 features The Green Bullet by Lester B. Lave, W. Michael Griffin. The authors begin: "There's a straightforward way for Washington to end America’s addiction to foreign oil, while reducing greenhouse gas emissions and resolving the impasse on international trade: Turn farm subsides into fuel subsides." Then they offer up minor "economic" and "environmental" roadblocks, that they easily dismiss:

...So what’s the catch? Corn farming is rough on the environment. Soil erosion due to wind and water is rampant. Fertilizer and pesticide runoffs produce algae blooms that result in “dead zones,” including one in the Gulf of Mexico that is so polluted it cannot support aquatic life. Furthermore, building the ethanol processing plants will take 3–4 years, and gas stations would have to commit to providing ethanol. And, because ethanol uses only the starch in corn, not the oil, protein, or other components, converting corn into ethanol is attractive only if there is a market for the byproducts. Opinions differ, but some estimate that byproduct markets could saturate well short of 11 billion gallons of production.

Fortunately, the surplus corn that isn’t economic to convert to ethanol doesn’t have to be grown, because it could easily be replaced with switchgrass. The prairie grass that President Bush mentioned in the 2006 State of the Union Address is naturally resistant to many pests and diseases, requiring far smaller amounts of chemicals and fertilizers. It’s also drought-tolerant and can grow in poor soil. Most important, it can be used to produce ethanol. If the current federal subsidy given to corn were extended to switchgrass, farmers would realize approximately the same income per acre as they do growing corn today. The new crop would use less fertilizer and pesticides, resulting in less erosion. Fertilizer and pesticide runoff would be dramatically reduced, and much of our motor fuel would be renewable.

To be sure, producing ethanol from switchgrass uses new technology that isn’t fully developed. There are pioneer plants in Canada and Brazil, but the costs of commercial production are unclear.

… And the best part: It can be done without Washington spending a dime more than it already does.

Others are not so sanguine. Robert Bryce's Corn Dog, Slate, July 19, 2005, is subtitled "The ethanol subsidy is worse than you can imagine." Bryce cuts quickly to the chase:

...The stickiest question about ethanol is this: Does making alcohol from grain or plant waste really create any new energy?

The answer, of course, depends upon whom you ask. The ethanol lobby claims there's a 30 percent net gain in BTUs from ethanol made from corn. Other boosters, including Woolsey, claim there are huge energy gains (as much as 700 percent) to be had by making ethanol from grass.

But the ethanol critics have shown that the industry calculations are bogus. David Pimentel, a professor of ecology at Cornell University who has been studying grain alcohol for 20 years, and Tad Patzek, an engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley, co-wrote a recent report that estimates that making ethanol from corn requires 29 percent more fossil energy than the ethanol fuel itself actually contains.

See also Science Daily, April 1, 2005 , Study: Ethanol Production Consumes Six Units Of Energy To Produce Just One,
And, especially, Ted Patzek's collection of Biofuel Literature.

Obviously my bias lies with the skeptics. Are we wrong?

Immigration in terms of Population, Migration, Globalization

Blogs and more traditional news are full of immigration-related stuff these days. But I've seen little discussion interrelating globalization, population dynamics, and the environment. In Population, migration, globalization, Ecological Economics (2006: forthcoming) , Herman Daly attempts it, arguing that we rightfully ought to be as concerned over unfettered capital flight, and outsourcing, as we right now seem to be over immigration here in the US. Daly contrasts globalization ("global economic integration of many formerly national economies into one global economy, mainly by free trade and free capital mobility, but also by somewhat easier or uncontrolled migration) to internationalization (which retains a substantive nation-state presence while highlighting "increasing importance of international trade, international relations, treaties, alliances, etc.").

Was NAFTA supposed to help with the US/Mexico problem? Did it fail? If so, will CAFTA fail too? And if we are to get serious here in the US about limiting immigration, how are we to do so with the 1000 mile long US/Mexico border separating the two countries? Machine-gun turrets (or 9000 new border guards) don't seem prudent political choices. Or maybe they are. Are there really any "rising tides to lift all boats" out there? Or are we just whistling past the graveyard, hoping to ride out the impending storm and somehow then being able to bootstrap the global economy and polis toward a better world. Or maybe there is no storm, just massively enhanced productivity and trickle-down profits that allow the poor to get rich, while the rich get richer.

Here is a sampler of Daly's thoughts, highlighting links to immigration:

The importance of energy efficiency

Amory Lovins (CEO of the Rocky Mountain Institute and co-author of Natural Capitalism) has an interesting and important reminder of the power and importance of energy efficiency:

The mother lode of all energy resources is efficient use.

People want hot showers, cold beer, illumination, comfort and mobility. The trick is to satisfy those demands in the most efficient way — which, barring market distortions, will also tend to be the cheapest way.

Since the Arab oil embargo in 1973, the United States has gotten more new energy from efficiency than from all net expansions of domestic energy supplies put together.

The millions of little things people did to weatherize houses, get more efficient cars, upgrade office lighting, plug up steam leaks, etc., plus some shifts in economic structure, yielded four times as many additional Btus as did the net increase in supply from all new American oil and gas wells, coal mines and power plants built in the same period.

Such savings don’t mean doing less, worse or without. Energy efficiency is not “conservation” by curtailment. It means doing more with less, enjoying more comfort, providing the same or better services, but doing it smarter with advanced technology — a resource that is expanding, even as fossil fuels are being depleted.

Efficiency is step one. Displacing fossil fuels with renewable sources is step two.

It's not exactly rocket science but it's something our leaders seem yet to grasp.

(Thanks to odograph for pointing this one out).