Quotulatiousness

May 15, 2013

Canadians’ hypocrisy on climate change

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Stephen Gordon fired off a tweetstorm yesterday:

May 5, 2013

A second life for the American chestnut tree?

Filed under: Environment, Science, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 10:25

The Economist reports on a trial of genetically modified chestnut trees:

Once upon a time, according to folklore, a squirrel could travel through America’s chestnut forests from Maine to Florida without ever touching the ground. The chestnut population of North America was reckoned then to have been about 4 billion trees. No longer. Axes and chainsaws must take a share of the blame. But the principal culprit is Cryphonectria parasitica, the fungus that causes chestnut blight. In the late 19th century, some infected saplings from Asia brought C. parasitica to North America. By 1950 the chestnut was little more than a memory in most parts of the continent.

American chestnuts may, however, be about to rise again — thanks to genetic engineering. This month three experimental patches will be planted, under the watchful eye of the Department of Agriculture, in Georgia, New York and Virginia. Along with their normal complements of genes, these trees have been fitted with a handful of others that researchers hope will protect them from the fungus.

The project has been organised by the Forest Health Initiative (FHI), a quango set up to look into the idea of using genetic engineering to rescue species of tree whose populations have been devastated by fungal diseases or insect pests. It has sponsored research at several universities, and this month’s trial is the first big field test. If it works, the FHI will ask the government for permission to plant transgenic chestnuts in the wild, with the intention of re-establishing the species in America’s woodlands. And if that goes well, it could provide a model for projects to re-establish elm trees (being devastated by Dutch elm disease, a beetle-born fungal infection), ash trees (threatened in North America by a beetle called the emerald ash borer, and in Europe by a fungal disease called ash dieback) and a fir tree known, confusingly, as the eastern hemlock (which is plagued by the woolly adelgid, a sap-sucking bug).

April 19, 2013

Enviro-Apocalypse Now (or real soon, anyway)

Filed under: Environment, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:17

At sp!ked, Tim Black reviews the latest environmental doom-mongering tome from Andrew Simms:

All of this ought to leave Simms & Co looking like the boys who cried climate catastrophe. Yet somehow, as Cancel the Apocalypse shows, they are continuing, unabashed, to preach environmental doom despite its palpable absence. In fact, the hyper-pessimism has even been ramped up a bit. ‘The horsemen are galloping and there are more than four of them’, Simms chirrups. ‘Climate change, financial meltdown, the global peak and decline of oil production, a mass extinction event of plant and animal species, overuse of fresh water supplies, soil loss, economic infrastructure increasingly vulnerable to external shocks — it’s the age of the complex super disaster.’ It seems devastating climate change is no longer enough for Simms; he wants to solicit a whole host of other unrelated, and highly debatable, phenomena for his narrative of woe. Cancelled? No way, Simms chortles: the apocalypse is back on.

So how is Simms able to maintain his unshakeable belief in our imminent destruction? What makes him and his tweedy, right-on puritan mates different to, say, William Miller, founder of the Second Adventists (later to become the Seventh Day Adventists), who, as Simms tells us, believed the day of reckoning would fall in 1843, 1845, 1846, 1849, 1851, 1874 and 1999?

The ostensible answer is that whereas previous doomsayers derived their predictions from ‘gobbledygook floating up from patterns of words and numbers dimly discerned in books about faith and belief’, Simms and his followers rely upon ‘verifiable scientific experiment’. Of course, The Science.

Which is funny, because Cancel the Apocalypse does not contain much in the way of ‘verifiable scientific experiment’. What it does feature, though, is a scientistic use of the authority of science to justify a whole range of dubious assertions. In Simms’ hands, science is no longer science. It is a metaphor, an authority-bolstering gloss, allowing him to talk, for example, of socio-historical phenomena such as the economy in terms of the laws of nature: ‘Just as physical laws constrain the maximum efficiency of a heat engine’, he writes, so ‘economic growth is constrained by the finite nature of our planet’s natural resources, the variable but ultimately bounded biocapacity of its oceans, fields, geology and atmosphere’; and later on, ‘the laws of physics mean it is not possible to create the order of such [economic] exchanges without a little something being lost [Simms is referring to the biosphere]’.

March 28, 2013

British energy prices graphically explained

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:24

At The Register, Lewis Page debunks the propaganda from the government and shows the cost components of British energy prices from the government’s own published source:

The government’s Department of Energy and Climate Change, with the current minister as mouthpiece, has just pushed out a report claiming that its green policies are saving us money now and will save us even more in coming decades. Can it be true? We can save the planet — or anyway reduce carbon emissions — and it not only costs nothing, but puts money in our pockets?

In a word, no: of course not. If that was true there would be no need for government action, we’d be acting to reduce carbon emissions on our own. And indeed, once you skip the foolish tinned quotes and bogo-stats in the executive summary, the report itself makes it very clear that in fact green policies are already to blame for most of the sustained climb in electricity prices we’ve suffered over the past decade — and that it’s going to get a lot worse.

The blue and brown bars are what you would pay without green intervention. The rest is thanks to the greens.

The blue and brown bars are what you would pay without green intervention. The rest is thanks to the greens.

So there you are, plain as day. The various green interventions in the UK and EU energy markets which have come in since the turn of the century are already costing you a hefty sum — the government have already forced up the price you pay for electricity today by nearly 20 per cent over where it would have been if they’d left matters alone. If they carry on as planned, by the year 2030 they will have managed to drive it up by more than a third over where it would normally be.

March 24, 2013

Humans are very good at spotting patterns … even when they aren’t really there

Filed under: Environment, Health, Media, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:01

In Slate, George Johnson explains why the human ability to detect patterns can sometimes work against us:

Lay a chessboard on a table. Then grab a handful of rice and let the grains fall and scatter where they may. They won’t spread out uniformly with the same number occupying each square. Instead there will be clusters. Now suppose that the chessboard is a map of the United States and the grains are cases of cancer.

Each year about 1.6 million cases of cancer are diagnosed in the United States, and epidemiologists regularly hear from people worried that their town has been plagued with an unusually large visitation. Time after time, the clusters have turned out to be statistical illusions — artifacts of chance.

The Erin Brockovich incident, one of the most famous, is among the many that have been debunked. Hexavalent chromium in the water supply of a small California town was blamed for causing cancer, resulting in a $333 million legal settlement and a movie starring Julia Roberts. But an epidemiological study ultimately showed that the cancer rate was no greater than that of the general population. The rate was actually slightly less.

March 23, 2013

Human Achievement Hour 2013

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Oh, right. It’s once again time for the Gaia-worshippers to do an hour’s penance for the crime of being alive in an industrialized society. The Competitive Enterprise Institute proposes a different way of using that hour:

On Saturday, March 23 at 8:30pm (local time), some people, businesses and governments around the world will choose to sit in the dark for one hour as a symbolic gesture to take action against climate change. The organizers of Earth Hour say that they [no] longer expect energy use to actually drop during the hour, but instead see it as a way for people to show their commitment to reducing energy use and taking action beyond the hour.

It’s absolutely every person’s right to decide if they want to conserve energy for whatever reason; they are free to sit in the dark as long as they want. However, it should not be their right to impose their beliefs or opinions on others. And that is what is at the heart of the environmentalist movement. While many participants in Earth Hour sincerely want a cleaner environment — a desire most of us share — the environmentalist movement whether implicitly or explicitly seeks to clamp down on human progress by reducing energy consumption whether through regulation and taxation. They want to make fossil fuels, which they see as dirty, more expensive to encourage the use of renewable “greener” energies.

Despite any good intentions, the ultimate result of environmentalist policies is not a healthier, cleaner environment. Instead we will see a population that is sicker and poorer. The only way we achieve technology that is “greener” is by building on older “dirtier” technology. As we make it harder and more expensive for those in the business of creating new technologies, all we do is slow progress and make it that much longer to reach more environmentally friendly solutions.

March 18, 2013

Mark Lynas and his break with the anti-GMO activists

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Media, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:11

Mark Lynas was one of the most prominent activists working against the adoption of genetically modified crops. Over time, he realized he was fighting the wrong battle and publicly recanted his decades-long struggle. He talks about it in an interview with Charlie Gillis in Maclean’s:

Q: You’ve disavowed a cause you were identified with for decades. How are you feeling about your decision?

A: It’s been traumatic, but it’s also been something of a liberation. I’ve obviously been inconsistent in my life, but so are we all. In my view, it’s better to be inconsistent and half-right, than to be consistently wrong. Even the pope doesn’t claim these days to be infallible, yet that’s what most environmental groups do.

Q: Still, you’ve offended your former allies, a lot of whom are now trying to discredit you. Some say you exaggerated your part in founding the anti-GM movement to start with. What’s that been like on a personal level?

A: My whole social scene has been characterized by my environmentalism. I’m in a situation where I can go to a party and I don’t know who’s currently not speaking to me.

Q: On Twitter, Vandana Shiva, a prominent environmentalist in India, likened your calls for farmers to be able to plant GMOs to saying rapists should have the freedom to rape.

A: That was simply astonishing, and frankly, hurtful to people who have actually suffered the trauma of rape. Look, these attacks on me are obviously done in the interests of damage limitation. It’s sort of an emperor’s-new-clothes thing. I have helped expose the fact most people’s concerns about GM foods are based on mythology. Once you can get past the idea that there’s something inherently dangerous about GM foods, it’s a whole different conversation. We actually can tell whether GM foods are safe. They have been extensively tested hundreds and hundreds of times, using different techniques. Many of the tests were conducted independently. The jury is entirely in on this issue.

[. . .]

Q. You argue that opposing GMOs is actually anti-environmental.

A. That was the realization that changed my mind. That recombinant DNA is actually a potentially very powerful technology for designing crop plants that can help humanity tackle our food-supply shortages, and also reduce our environmental footprint. They can help us use less fertilizer, and dramatically reduce pesticide applications. We can reduce our exposure to climate change through drought and heat-tolerant crops. So the potential is enormous.

March 14, 2013

Reason.tv: Matt Ridley on How Fossil Fuels are Greening the Planet

Filed under: Environment, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Matt Ridley, author of The Red Queen, Genome, The Rational Optimist and other books, dropped by Reason‘s studio in Los Angeles last month to talk about a curious global trend that is just starting to receive attention. Over the past three decades, our planet has gotten greener!

Even stranger, the greening of the planet in recent decades appears to be happening because of, not despite, our reliance on fossil fuels. While environmentalists often talk about how bad stuff like CO2 causes bad things to happen like global warming, it turns out that the plants aren’t complaining.

March 4, 2013

Solar power in a dark German winter

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Europe — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 13:44

The German government is having to pay a lot of money in subsidies to solar power generators, but is also having to scramble to buy power from other European sources as the solar output is falling far below current demands:

The Baedeker travel guide is now available in an environmentally-friendly version. The 200-page book, entitled “Germany – Discover Renewable Energy,” lists the sights of the solar age: the solar café in Kirchzarten, the solar golf course in Bad Saulgau, the light tower in Solingen and the “Alster Sun” in Hamburg, possibly the largest solar boat in the world.

The only thing that’s missing at the moment is sunshine. For weeks now, the 1.1 million solar power systems in Germany have generated almost no electricity. The days are short, the weather is bad and the sky is overcast.

As is so often the case in winter, all solar panels more or less stopped generating electricity at the same time. To avert power shortages, Germany currently has to import large amounts of electricity generated at nuclear power plants in France and the Czech Republic. To offset the temporary loss of solar power, grid operator Tennet resorted to an emergency backup plan, powering up an old oil-fired plant in the Austrian city of Graz.

Solar energy has gone from being the great white hope, to an impediment, to a reliable energy supply. Solar farm operators and homeowners with solar panels on their roofs collected more than €8 billion ($10.2 billion) in subsidies in 2011, but the electricity they generated made up only about 3 percent of the total power supply, and that at unpredictable times.

February 18, 2013

Reason.tv: 3 reasons to build the Keystone XL pipeline

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Environment, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:30

Few energy projects have inspired the level of vitriol surrounding the Keystone XL Pipeline, that would run 1,700 miles from Alberta, Canada through the United States to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico.

The oil sands of Alberta are estimated to hold 170 million 170 billon barrels of petroleum, the largest reservoir of black gold outside of Saudi Arabia.

Because the pipeline crosses an international boundary, President Barack Obama has the final say over whether to give the project a green light.

February 13, 2013

The imaginary trade-off between ecology and economics

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:37

Matt Ridley on the improvements in the environment in the western world:

Extrapolate global average GDP per capita into the future and it shows a rapid rise to the end of this century, when the average person on the planet would have an income at least twice as high as the typical American has today. If this were to happen, an economist would likely say that it’s a good thing, while an ecologist would likely say that it’s a bad thing because growth means using more resources. Therein lies a gap to be bridged between the two disciplines.

The environmental movement has always based its message on pessimism. Population growth was unstoppable; oil was running out; pesticides were causing a cancer epidemic; deserts were expanding; rainforests were shrinking; acid rain was killing trees; sperm counts were falling; and species extinction was rampant. For the green movement, generally, good news is no news. Many environmentalists are embarrassed even to admit that some trends are going in the right direction.

[. . .]

Why are environmental trends mainly positive? In short, the gains are due to “land sparing,” in which technological innovation allows humans to produce more from less land, leaving more land for forests and wildlife. The list of land sparing technologies is long: Tractors, unlike mules and horses, do not need to feed on hay. Advances in fertilizers and irrigation, as well as better storage, transport, and pest control, help boost yields. New genetic varieties of crops and livestock allow people to get more from less. Chickens now grow three times as fast in they did in the 1950s. The yield boosts from genetically modified crops is now saving from the plow an area equivalent to 24 percent of Brazil’s arable land.

What is really making a positive dent in the environmental arena is the unintended effects of technology rather than nature reserves or exhortations to love nature. Policy analyst Indur Goklany calculated that if we tried to support today’s population using the methods of the 1950s, we would need to farm 82 percent of all land, instead of the 38 percent we do now. The economist Julian Simon once pointed out that with cheap light, an urban, multi-story hydroponic warehouse the size of Delaware could feed the world, leaving the rest for wilderness.

It is not just food. In fiber and fuel too, we replace natural sources with synthetic, reducing the ecological footprint. Construction uses less and lighter materials. Even CO2 emissions enrich crop yields.

February 1, 2013

USS Guardian to be dismantled in place after grounding on coral reef

Filed under: Environment, Military, Pacific, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

The US Navy has decided that the best course of action is to break up the minesweeper USS Guardian after it ran solidly aground on a coral reef in the Sulu Sea:

USS Guardian aground in the Sulu Sea January 2013

“We’re working very closely with the Philippine coast guard, with their navy and their government personnel. We’ve been grateful for their support as we all work together to remove Guardian and minimize further damage to the reef,” James said.

It’s expected to take over a month to dismantle the Guardian, which ran aground before dawn on Jan. 17.

Crews have already removed 15,000 gallons of fuel from the ship. They’ve also taken off hundreds of gallons of lubricating oil and paint. They’ll be removing human wastewater and other materials that could harm the environment, James said.

The U.S. Navy is hiring floating cranes to help with the removal. A contractor in Singapore is sending the cranes, which should arrive on site in a few days.

The Navy originally said the Guardian would be lifted by crane onto a barge and taken to a shipyard. But now the Navy says the ship is “beyond economical repair.”

No one was injured when the ship ran aground at the reef in the Tubbataha National Marine Park. The park is a World Heritage Site in the Sulu Sea, about 400 miles southwest of Manila.

Update, 8 February: A bit more information about the salvage operations which are supposed to have started on February 4th.

January 24, 2013

Is the media’s love affair with “extreme weather” just an elaborate insurance scam?

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Environment, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:04

Terence Corcoran in the Financial Post:

All it takes these days is a little normal January Canadian cold spell and all of a sudden the nation is plunged into a frenzy of chatter about “extreme weather.” The CBC led the way, aided and abetted by climate alarmists in the Canadian insurance industry, with help from an apparently leaked data point from an Environment Canada report that supposedly will show that Canadian winters are now 3.2C warmer than they used to be. Get it? It’s really cold, but that’s because of climate change, which is making Canada’s winters warmer.

If you find this confusing, well, get used to it. That may even be part of the objective, which, judging by the sudden extreme flood of media reports, seems to be keep Canada’s population agitated about global warming, a cause that has so far failed to ignite voters.

If the theory of climate change doesn’t grab people, maybe “extreme weather” will. The media certainly love it. All News Radio in Toronto now has an “Extreme Weather Centre” that rouses itself every time weather happens — snow storms, cold spells, heat waves, rain, temperature anomalies. Alarmist weather forecasting and reporting is a media staple, but the concept now appears to have reached a new level of hypedom.

[. . .]

The insurance angle was cleverly juxtaposed with a leaked bit of data from an Environment Canada report that will not be released until May. It supposedly will show that Canadian winter temperatures have risen 3.2C since Canada began keeping systematic records in 1948. As a standalone bit of data, not much can be made of it. Even less can be made of it for popular consumption if current temperatures are approaching record cold. How can we have record warm and record cold at the same time?

That’s where “extreme weather” comes in. It’s also where the Canadian insurance industry, through a front group called the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction, is actively promoting extreme weather as a major vehicle for business and policy development. With offices in Toronto and the University of Western Ontario, the institute’s membership is almost exclusively insurance companies, its eight-member board is stacked with five insurance executives, and the executive director is Paul Kovacs, is former head of the Insurance Bureau of Canada.

January 9, 2013

Australian heatwave attributed to Gaia’s anger at mankind’s sins

Filed under: Environment, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:14

Brendan O’Neill surveys the gleeful coverage of Australia’s current weather as a divine retribution by “Mother Nature” for the evils mankind has wrought:

There is something very ugly about the commentary on Australia’s heatwave. There’s almost a palpable sense of glee among some green-leaning commentators that this coal-exporting, climate-change-denying nation is now being punished with fire. The message seems to be that Aussies deserve this scorching weather; they brought the hotness upon themselves through their temerity, through daring to exploit their country’s myriad natural resources and, even worse, daring to question the gospel of climate change.

The casualness with which observers have made a link between Australian people’s behaviour and beliefs and the current heatwave, as if alleged moral turpitude makes the weather, is striking. Even before any serious scientist has had time to assess the nature and origins of the heatwave, one of the Guardian‘s green reporters described the hotness Down Under as further evidence that “global warming is turning the volume of extreme weather up, Spinal Tap-style, to 11″. Taking his cue from the Middle Ages, when weather was also frequently given sentience, treated as the punisher of wicked men, the reporter says climate change, and its enabler climate change denial, is “loading the weather dice”. It is no coincidence, he says, that “the two nations in which the fringe opinions of so-called climate sceptics have been trumpeted most loudly — the US and Australia — have now been hit by record heatwaves and [superstorms]” — because apparently it is “shouting from sceptics” that prevents “clear political action to curb emissions” and which therefore unleashes yet more floods, storms, and presumably locusts at some point in the future.

January 5, 2013

LA terminates luxury option for electric car owners

Filed under: Environment, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:43

It’s telling that one of the folks quoted in this article clearly identified the free parking at the airport as a primary reason for buying an electric vehicle:

On a recent morning, Jack Luu parked his plug-in Toyota Prius in one of the most expensive lots at Los Angeles International Airport before flying off to a film shoot in Canada. The lot, where Mr. Luu leaves his car as many as 10 times a month for business trips, normally charges $30 a day.

But when Mr. Luu returned home three weeks later, he drove out, as usual, without paying a dime.

“That was a huge reason why I bought the car in the first place,” says the 35-year-old Santa Monica, Calif., postproduction company executive, whose car qualifies for free parking for up to a month at a time in two of LAX’s most convenient—and costly—short-term lots.

Other than that, he says his ride is “expensive, underpowered and not really all that green,” because it can run just 12 miles on electricity before switching to gas.

For years, LAX has offered electric-vehicle owners one of the most generous incentives of its kind in the country: free parking for 30 days in two of its terminal lots, which contain, altogether, 38 charging stations. The rule was meant to encourage people to buy greener cars, but lately it has turned the lots into a mob scene, with some electric-vehicle drivers circling the stations desperately for electricity or running extension cords while others hog the charging spaces for weeks at a time.

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