Bringing 21st Century coal to Newcastle. I mean, to China.

To the Point had a discussion of the effort to take American coal, which is currently having trouble competing with natural gas, and export it to China.  Stanford's Frank Wolack says that it may not be so bad from a climate perspective.  His argument is that China is so hungry for power that bringing new coal to there will not really change its carbon emission patterns but will have a beneficial effect of raising the cost of coal in the US market and therefore assist the transition away from coal.  Opponents cite University of Montana's Thomas Power to argue that China's coal usage is very price-responsive and their energy usage is very inefficient.

So, dueling profs, and what to do.  I've attempted Eli's sneaky trick to RTFA with only partial success.  Power's work is here:

....One recent study found that a 10 percent reduction in coal cost would result in a 12 percent increase in coal consumption. Another found that over half of the gain in China’s “energy intensity” improvement during the 1990s was a response to prices. In other words, coal exports will mean cheaper coal in Asia, and cheaper coal means more coal will be burned than would otherwise be the case.... Lower coal costs will encourage investments in new coal-burning facilities in Asia—which in turn create a 30- to 50-year demand for coal.... 

Energy usage per unit of GDP across the Chinese economy is almost four times that in the United States and almost eight times that in Japan. The Chinese government and the large state-owned enterprises that produce, distribute, and use larger amounts of energy are well aware of the burden that high and rising energy cost can impose on the economy. The energy policies embodied in the last several five-year plans have focused heavily on improving overall energy efficiency in order to effectively control energy costs. Lowering coal costs to China would undermine these valuable energy efficiency efforts....

Hmm.

Wolack's technical work eluded me, although there's plenty of mainstream press about it.  I didn't find it on his academic website or elsewhere, but maybe it's out there.  The gist seems to be that China is so power-hungry that its coal demand is relatively inelastic to price, while the US demand is elastic.  Prof. Power obviously disagrees, and I doubt I have the econ chops to sort through it rigorously.

That won't stop me though from first pontificating, and then maybe adding two possibly useful points.  Pontificatingly, I accept the premise that a fast-growing economy is going to have a desperate and therefore more inelastic demand for energy, but not all other things are equal.  In a far poorer society, energy input is a much greater relative cost than in a richer, expensive-labor economy, so its price will drive decisions more in the poorer economy.  Furthermore, the choice of what energy source you use to construct brand new power sources under conditions of growing demand (China) is much more elastic than the choice of whether you will walk away from a recently-constructed coal plant and use a different energy source (America).  Both of these factors weigh in favor greater price elasticity in China.

Possibly-useful point #1:  in the radio podcast, Wolack says opening up US coal to the international market isn't a large enough new supply to reduce overall coal prices and increase consumption.  The problem with this is the choice of scope compared to impact.  Lawyers do this - if they want an environmental impact to look small, they increase the overall area of comparison.  My choice of buying an SUV or an electric vehicle, for example, isn't by itself going to significantly affect the overall vehicle market, but it does matter in the context of many other decisions.  The same is true with a much bigger economic impact of putting more coal on the international market.

My other point is political.  Wolack says "China's increased [coal] imports have almost no impact on how much coal China uses (and thus its emissions from coal) – only on where it comes from."  I dispute that - in the long run.  Humanity's future depends in large part on how much coal is still in the ground 50 and 100 years from now.  As a political matter I think it will be easier to keep a lump of American coal in the ground than it will to be keep of lump of Chinese coal down under.  So, if I have a choice, I'd prefer to take the action right now that keeps more American coal in the ground. This could also be relevant to price elasticity - China's demand growth will eventually slow down, and anything that reduces locked-in preferences to coal could be helpful in the future.

So count me as someone who needs more persuasion on this idea.

Putting bad air down under (in the Up-Goer Five Way)

(I made this in the Up-Goer Five way, using Up-Goer Six.  Also, Up-Goer Five does let me say "Mr. William" and "Goer", so there.)


Mr. William says putting bad air way down under takes too much money, and then says why keep trying it?  One answer would be that it's not working out right now but may in the future, and given we use so many things that make bad air, it's too important to stop.

An even better reason to me is do it because it could make good party-office sense even if it doesn't make the best money sense.  It will be a lot less hard in party-office work to put the bad air business through change that will hurt it than to kill it (not to mention the fire air business down the road that we will need to do something with too).  It's the same reason for saying yes to getting power when we break apart really really small things - the only little-bad-air choice that the party-office right does like - I'll say yes to some of it as part of a big deal to act on bad-air change.

As I've done before, I see this as a lot like the office-party stuff at my water office-work.  We have the most-big city in the US that hasn't put stuff in its water to help keep the hard part of our mouth we use to eat from getting hurt because of the sweet things we eat or drink.  A poor part of the city has many problems in children with this.  While a personal story is not very good way to help reason out this party-office fight, I can say I've felt really bad mouth pain and would never want a small child to feel the same.  So we're going to put that stuff to the water.

But, many people are very angry about this and come when we meet to try to either change our mind or tell us what bad people we are.  One reason they give is that of the three things we can use in the water to help the hard part of our mouth, the one used most is just no-good stuff that comes out from the end of making other no-good stuff, and they say we're being made to drink bad water just as an easy way to throw away the no-good stuff.

I don't really buy that reason, but right now I might say that if we have to pay only a little more for the other two things than that one thing they don't like, then we should use those instead.  As a matter of party-office things, it gets us to a good choice when the "perfect" money-sense choice might cause a lot more of a party-office fight.

For a decision on how to fix bad air over a long time, same thing - we can't keep the party-office side out of it.

You read it here first (or before these other guys, anyway)

(A little update:  a cooking fire from our Vietnam trip.  Time for biochar instead.)

One.  Eli says in 2009 that the developing world's role in climate mitigation should focus on reducing their emissions of black carbon by 90% or more in a decade, and now we learn that black carbon could be the #2 bad guy in the climate biz, displacing poor methane.  For my part, this is one of the few climate issues where I'm pretty optimistic.  Assuming the peak energy arguments are wrong, then economic development means wood burning cookfires and the like are gradually going to be less prevalent.

Another.  I argued last November that Obama should go big on immigration reform, getting immigrants who've been here for a long time on a reasonable path not just to legalization but to citizenship, and that seems to be what he intends.  Personally I doubt even the less-xenophobic faction of the Republican leadership will really go along with a real path to citizenship, despite the extremely vague statements of some.  To the extent they're obstructive, they'll pay the political price, but to the extent we get new voting citizens, it'll take a while before the Republicans live down their past practices.  Gun control is a good example that extends beyond immigration - the new groups are very supportive, especially Latinos.

A third.  At the same post above in November I did my own little calculation to determine there was only a 52% chance that all five conservative Supreme Court justices would defer escape to the Choir Invisible in the next four years, and last week Slate's slightly fancier look found a 54% chance that none would be no more in four.

Good enough for now.  I could add that Libya is looking good while Syria isn't, but maybe another time.

Key the extremes to their context

(via Climate Central.)

I'm not sure yet what I think of Mark Kleiman's post about how people always accept their side's arguments on a position and assume a contrary argument means the arguer is on the other team.  I'm no fan of centrism-worship, or of contrarianism-for-its-own-sake.  OTOH, a critical eye on the arguments used for our own side has some moral value.

In that sense, the 2012 record warmth in the lower 48 states, a record for 1.58% of the planet's surface for a single year, is getting overplayed.  At least, the key front and center should be context, that year after year, record highs generally exceed record lows, and that generally consistent result is significant additional support to the mountain of evidence for climate change.  What's important about 2012 in the lower 48, outside of bringing the American public mainstream a little a closer to the scientific mainstream, is how it reminds us of that context.*

Lose the context and you get big pronouncements like this from Watts Up:  "Low temperature records overwhelm highs in the USA this past week" (emphasis added).  Context may not cure foolishness, but it might help a little bit.


*One exception is if the 2012 record highs are so unprecedentedly big that natural variability couldn't ever explain them, equivalent to rolling two dice and having them come up 13.  That would be important, but I've missed any in-depth discussion of that possibility.

Crowded crowd-funding for solar projects

On Monday, Mosaic announced it would do the first-ever crowd-funding of solar projects, with a $25 minimum investment.  Yesterday I tried to buy in myself but their four new projects are fully funded.  They look like they might be having the same problem that Kiva used to have - more money than projects (it also seems like a different model than Kiva, the money goes directly to the projects rather than paying for a general fund).

Crowd-funding seems like a good way to get micro-investors involved in startups that would otherwise be impossible, to open up a new source of money for investment, to fund smaller projects that are too small for traditional investors, and to fund entirely new and different ventures that venture capital funders find uninteresting.  My impression is that Mosaic serves all but that last interest.  Obviously no one knows if it's going to succeed but it's just as obviously worth a try.  Maybe eco-grandparents will start buying Junior shares in solar projects instead of a stock as a college investment.

The other advantage is for people who want to do something renewable but can't do it on their own property.  Our townhouse has a small roof facing east/west with shading on the east - not an ideal place for solar.  Mosaic might be a better use of money to offset our emissions, and as an offset that others can use.

Precautionary principle possibilities

The options:

1. Prove a negative, or no dice.  No technology can be used unless it's proven in advance to never have risks.  That can't be done, so we can't use any technology, new or existing.

2. Risky, smishky.  Defined risks are no reason to stop or alter use of a technology unless the risk has moved from possibly harmful to scientifically-certain harm.  With no certainties in science, this also can't be done.

3. Squishy real life choice.  evidence rising to a level of x for harms whose severity rises to a level of y compared to the technology's benefit of less than z is the point at which you stop or alter the technology's use unless and until additional research changes the value of those variables.  The only minuscule problem with this is it doesn't provide much of a guideline.  But it's right.

Discussion below in this blog and at Stoat are relevant.  Anti- and pro-GMO forces argue for positions 1 and 2 although they're usually vague about it, as a clear description of their perspective doesn't help them win.  Switching over to variables x, y, and z, pro-GMOers like Keith Kloor obfuscate the non-zero value of x, while anti-GMOers exaggerate the other way.

So what to do?  Caution, I guess.

To try to move from saying something squishy to something interesting, how about this:  prior to the 1970s, the correct policy conclusion was that CFCs have no broad-based environmental harms and should be used liberally.  That's not right, it turns out, but that's the information we had at the time.  The key is moving quickly as new evidence for variables x and y came out.  From a political science/international coordination perspective, the world moved amazingly quickly on ozone-depleting chemicals.  From an environmental perspective, my sense is that we barely dodged a bullet (and we still have another 40 years or so of slowly declining CFC concentrations where something new could go wrong).  We'll see how well we'll do on climate change with already, well-established x and a range of bad to horrible values for y.


Moderately relevant:  I've had a sci-fi story in my head for a while, an alternative history where CFCs were invented and widely-used a century earlier than in real life and long before the science could anticipate their problems.  Society would be finding nature melting and cracking around them, along with peoples' skin, and have no idea of the reason.  Not a particularly happy story.  So, caution.

Four out of five dentists say it's the scientific consensus, stupid

I'm late to the game of the Cox/Ince editorial on science and policy, but two points:

1. It's not "science" that matters most at the intersection of science and policy but scientific consensus that does.  If there's a well-established consensus with very few expert dissenters, then you've got factual conclusions as far as policymakers are concerned.  The consensus could be wrong of course, but that's not really relevant to policymakers - they don't have a choice of waiting for a perfect consensus because that won't happen.  What's missing from the commentary I've seen is that policymakers also don't have the choice of second-guessing the consensus by becoming their own Galileos.

Let's forget climate change for a while and take my constrained policymaking field instead.  Should I direct my water district to add fluoride to our water supply?  The vast majority of dentists say it helps teeth, but some disagree.  Does adding fluoride create non-dental health risks for the general population?  The vast majority of oncologists, endocrinologists, and neurologists reflected in the scientific consensus say somewhere between "no" and "not proven," but some disagree.  It's ridiculous to think I could get sufficient expertise in those three fields as well as dentistry to let me judge between experts.

And fluoride is just one issue.  What about water supply decontamination - should we use chlorine or chloramine?  What is the maximum horizontal acceleration that a worst-case earthquake will exert on each of our eleven dams?  Is the stream gauge appropriately sited to be provide accurate data on stream flow during storm events?  How much chromium 6 is tolerable in our stored groundwater?  Can migrating steelhead trout make it up the proposed fish ladder? I'm not second-guessing these things if they have an expert consensus behind it, regardless of a few dissenters.

Incidentally, I don't distinguish between scientific consensus and other expert consensus.  Seismologists tell us the maximum acceleration during an earthquake, and engineers tell us what dams can handle.  I don't see a difference.

The intersection with policy gets complicated if the consensus has an important dissenting faction or if there's no consensus at all, but that's not what we're facing on some issues, like global climate change.

2.  Contrary to what scientists often say, the science can all-but-decide policy because some policy questions are easy.  Scientific predictions of climate change in the next century under business as usual emission scenarios run from "bad" to "potentially disastrous".  That's pretty much all we need to know from a policy perspective to conclude that we have to deal with it.  The question of how we deal with it isn't easy or exclusively a science question, but whether to deal with it was answered by science.

Vietnam

Anecdata from the last few weeks in northern Vietnam.

1.  The government subsidizes fossil fuels via price caps and money-losing, government-owned energy sector companies, and Hanoi's air pollution is eye-stinging bad (I went jogging and wondered how much life expectancy that cost me).  Presumably Saigon and some other industrial areas are equivalent or worse.

No use ignoring the political support that subsidies of staple products create, especially from politically-important urban residents, but it seems like an alternative arrangement of withdrawing the subsidy and using the money in other ways that help urban air quality could create equivalent support.  Mexico is a decent model.

2.  Just as I've decided that other people's personal problems are far easier to solve than my own personal problems, other nation's political problems are far easier to solve than my nation's.  Why can't the US pass a revenue-neutral carbon tax?  Well, that's complicated....

3.  The government does a decent job of hiding political repression from the casual observer, while massive corruption is openly discussed.  Internet access was everywhere and I didn't find any English language websites blocked, although maybe that will change as English fluency and machine translation improve.  Soviet-style propaganda posters and public loudspeakers spouting messages were also everywhere though and more than a little creepy.  Uncle Ho's picture dominated many living rooms, probably a sincere gesture.

Of the two people who opened up to us in our travels, one was fairly supportive of the government and the other strongly dismissive.

4.  On the good side, we lost count after seeing three dozen or so electric bikes.  Hanoi has as many motorcycle scooters as people so the count isn't even a tenth of a percent, but they're there.  Just as electrifying cars and switching to renewable power is a major/the major part of the American climate solution, electrifying two-wheeled transport could be Vietnam's.  The government also seems to do a decent job of supporting infrastructure for two-wheeled transport, with cement paths and narrow bridges.  A huge tax on cars supports the two-wheel system, often doubling the car's costs.  Why can't we do that in the US, at least for luxury cars?  Well, that's complicated....

5.  I didn't spot a single solar PV system but did see plenty of solar water heaters, every one of them brand new.  Lots of hydro capacity and some construction, both of the all-good, small hydro and mixed result large hydro.  A side-note here:  funny how some enviros are reconsidering opposition to nuclear power but no one talks about large-scale hydro, which by contrast to nukes is economically cheap.  Maybe that's because the major dam projects are all finished in the industrialized world.

6.  Climate isn't quite warm enough for year-round rice production in north Vietnam, so many paddies are left fallow.  It seems like there is sometimes (not always) a choice available to farmers whether to flood or keep dry those fallow paddies, and that might affect methane production in the off season.  There might be a policy opportunity here, incentivizing farmers to keep the paddies dry in the off-season, and verification by satellite would be easy.

7.  I have a flood control idea for my water district, of using a smart grid composed of residential rainwater retention systems to shave the peak off of a flood.  I think it has a shot of being feasible in small, urbanized watersheds.  I wonder if the same couldn't be true for watersheds dominated by rice paddies, emptying them in anticipation of a major storm and then letting them take up some of the excess.

8.  Little-founded speculation, but where the hell are the birds?  I know it's winter and the Vietnamese trap and eat even the little birds, but still the forests and skies seem empty.  Maybe Rachel Carson's future has happened here.

Spectacular scenery but don't come for the wildlife, at least in the north.

9.  Touristing note:  Lonely Planet never led us wrong, other than a two bad addresses for hotels.  In particular, Handspan, Blue Swimmer, Asia Outdoors, and Sapa O'Chau all did a great job for us tourists, adjusting for the necessary flexibility and English fluency level of a developing country.

The long tail of climate change mitigation

Our Water District recently reviewed a draft energy audit on controlling our energy use.  The Board Chair and I had a lot of questions and comments on how we will relate the energy audit to our new goal of achieving carbon-neutrality by 2020.  Some of my general comments are below:


(Nov. 27, 2012 Board Meeting, Item 4.1)

Later on I suggested that we have a "Climate Impact" discussion included in every agenda item just like we currently have a "Financial Impact" discussion with every agenda item.

My point in mentioning this is that these types of actions fall somewhere in the long tail of actions to fight climate change - a program that can affect a lot of people while falling far short of the headline-generating action on a state or national level.  Just as individuals changing their behaviors can make a difference, though, so can these types of institutional changes.  I don't know of a good way to isolate and measure the effects of voluntary actions by local and regional institutions to address climate change, but they shouldn't be ignored.

Time to show fingerprints on Syria issues

From NYTimes:

The Obama administration secretly gave its blessing to arms shipments to Libyan rebels from Qatar last year, but American officials later grew alarmed as evidence grew that Qatar was turning some of the weapons over to Islamic militants, according to United States officials and foreign diplomats.... 

The experience in Libya has taken on new urgency as the administration considers whether to play a direct role in arming rebels in Syria, where weapons are flowing in from Qatar and other countries.

The Obama administration did not initially raise objections when Qatar began shipping arms to opposition groups in Syria, even if it did not offer encouragement, according to current and former administration officials. But they said the United States has growing concerns that, just as in Libya, the Qataris are equipping some of the wrong militants....  

Relying on surrogates allows the United States to keep its fingerprints off operations, but also means they may play out in ways that conflict with American interests....

“....When you have an intermediary, you are going to lose control.”

The obvious reaction is either stop getting involved or stop worrying about showing your fingerprints. I'll go for Door #2.  I supported making the threat of limited military involvement in February and more actual support for the opposition in July, and I think either case would have shortened the time frame of the civil war and improved a future transition.  I remain concerned about ethnic massacres and religious instability in the post-Assad future.  Supporting groups that are less likely to do this, and especially getting Alawite opposition groups into a prominent position in the opposition military forces, could be crucial for the country's future.  Unfortunately, I think the war might still grind for months more, giving time for this option to work out.

For my less interventionist friends, I'll just mention that until recently I hadn't been too opposed to the drone war in Pakistan overall as a legitimate function of self-defense against Al Qaeda, but I'm reconsidering.  Al Qaeda in Pakistan isn't that big of a threat, while Pakistan itself desperately needs stability.  Pakistan is simply more important, and the drone strikes aren't helping.  Not sure if I'd completely eliminate them, but the go/no go decisionmaking needs to change.

A modest carbon tax has modest carbon reduction results

Been meaning to highlight Brad Plumer's post on a paper about the effect of a carbon tax on emissions (full paper here).  A tax of $20/ton, with an inflation-adjusted 4% annual increase, knocks emissions down 14% by 2020, and a larger number in 2050 if you believe economic projections that far in the future.

I include my caveat about 2050 because economics modeling is far harder than climate modeling.  In particular I can't tell what assumptions they make about the cost of renewables in the future, which seems like a game-changer to me.

Still this seems a reasonable argument that a carbon tax has only modest benefits.  By all means we should do it, but also use the funding for renewables, and pursue stricter regulation.  One aspect that surprised me is how much money this tax would raise, over a trillion dollars in the next decade.  That can really help with deficit reduction and maintaining social welfare programs as well as renewable energy funding.


UPDATE:  I really should've mentioned that an annual 4% real increase is not enough in their model to drive large decreases in emissions.  The implication is that if you choose a small initial tax then you need a higher annual increase.  The California cap's minimum price is even smaller than this study ($10/ton), and has a 5% annual increase.  Still it's just part of the pricing system, with emission allowances hopefully functioning as the real control on the amount, together with regulation.

Good Yglesias, Bad Yglesias

In the Good Yglesias category, we have "the spice must flow" problem in that stopping the Keystone XL pipeline and other pipeline-fighting as led to a boom in shipping oil by rail.  This correctly points the problem with a regulatory approach to carbon reduction - someone looks for a way around the regulation.   OTOH, oil is not the same as Herbert's spice - it's a lot more price elastic in the long run, and anything running up the price will reduce the quantity purchased.

Regulation is an imperfect substitute for a carbon cap or carbon tax, but it's better than nothing.

For Bad Yglesisas, we have a cursory rejection of the idea that people making over $400,000 could have their entire income taxed at the highest rate instead of just the amount falling in the highest bracket.  The flaw is a simplistic approach Yglesias takes - identify a problem and then pronounce the whole thing dead.  Yes, as he describes, a ten-dollar increase in income could result in tens of thousands of dollars in additional taxes.  He fails to take the next step to see if the problem has a solution.  In this case, just alter the proposal so that the more a person's income exceeds $350,000, the larger the share of that person's income under $200,000 that gets taxed at the top rate.  It satisfies the Republicans' inane criteria of not raising the top rate while getting more tax money out of the top earners.  The solution isn't too difficult.

That's not to say it's a good idea when compared to simply raising the rate as Obama proposes, along with restoring estate tax rates to the 2009 level.  John Sides notes this proposal protects the ultra-rich by going after the rich.  That seems to be a common theme in Republican Party policy.


UPDATE:  Pat Robertson finds a nut.



Climate change would also fall under a "revealed science" category to the extent that category equals "about as proven as you're going to get in science."

Ironic that a man named Mead doesn't understand the US Civil War

Maybe his misunderstanding comes from losing the "e" at the end of the name.  The current Mead sayeth:

An endless war of limited intensity is worse, many Americans instinctively feel, than a time-limited war of unlimited ferocity. A crushing blow that brings an end to the war—like General Sherman’s march of destruction through the Confederacy in 1864-65—is ultimately kinder even to the vanquished than an endless state of desultory war.

This Mead wants massive Israeli retaliation against Gaza regardless of civilian casualties and thinks Americans would agree with him.  He appears to be under the impression that not much happened in the US Civil war prior to Sherman's march, and that single crushing blow was all that counted.

The reality was that it took years of unlimited ferocity to win the Civil War.  The side that had better logistics won the war, and Sherman's march was a logistical success, living off the land while destroying its ability to support the enemy.  Not a lot that parallels Gaza here.

More broadly, I think there's little evidence that shock and awe achieves its psychological goals.  The British, German, and Japanese people didn't break over the bombing raids.  Psychology does have its place - the Doolittle Raid heightened American morale and convinced the Japanese to make the stupid mistake of withdrawing carriers to defend the home islands and to undertake the high-risk attack on Midway.  Brutality by itself, though, won't win wars.

Tangentially related:  Brad DeLong has been live-blogging a history of World War II.  Definitely worth checking out.

The California Cap passes its first test, barely

News coverage of the California cap-and-trade auction results diverged fairly sharply into whether it went well or had problems. Put me in the half-full category that it went well enough, but just barely.

The Air Board announced a sale price of $10.09 a ton, just barely above the reserve price of $10 and lower than the expected $11-15. Digging around a little doesn’t make the auction mechanics very clear – many bids were far higher than this. The reports imply that everyone paid $10.09, which would mean some type of Dutch auction setup.  (UPDATE:  confirmed it's a Dutch auction arrangement where everyone pays the same price.  Good explainer of the whole auction by Reed Smith is here.  The reserve price is a minimum that keeps the market from collapsing - if there's not enough demand for all the allowances to keep the price above that minimum, the effect of the reserve price is to reduce the supply of allowances being sold.)

I doubt it’s coincidental that the price is just above the reserve – that suggests the ‘market’ expectation is that it won’t be too hard to for California emitters to meet the cap, something that’s uncomfortably close to the problem of the European market that has too high a cap and a collapsed market. OTOH, emitters didn’t have to buy any allowances if they thought they could meet the cap on their own, so their expectation is that the Air Board will keep the California market from collapsing. I put the word ‘market’ in scare quotes because a sealed-bid auction barely qualifies – we’ll get a better idea of market price when trades start happening on a regular basis.

So it worked. A somewhat higher price would suggest a better-functioning market and more incentive for carbon reductions, although a much higher price would provide ammunition to critics’ ridiculous claim that the cap harms California’s economy.

Critics of the system include the state-level California Chamber of Commerce, treading a perilous line against California green energy businesses. The state Chamber filed a lawsuit against the auction on the day before it started. I expect they’ll take some flak for waiting so long to file, but I’ll have to save a look at their legal interests for another day.

The economic interest here is that free carbon allowances actually benefit emitters – the allowances have economic value that can be resold, and California is issuing 90% of the first emissions for free (that percent will decline over time). A 90% benefit isn’t good enough for the Chamber though – they want it all for free, forever. At least they claim they’re not trying to destroy the cap market – they just want free allowances – and that distinguishes them from the evil that is the US Chamber.  This isn't a trivial distinction from the US Chamber, by the way, and shows some-if-inadequate level of responsiveness to in-state business politics.

Even a 100% auction in my opinion would benefit California green businesses and help cement the leadership this state has on the green economy. The state Chamber is being short-sighted on a number of levels, especially if their effort to change the cap market ends up destroying it. This might be a good place for the state legislature to step in and backstop the Air Board’s decision, something that could be possible now that the Democrats have two-thirds majority in both houses, a requirement under the tax-revenue stupidity of California's Proposition 13.

An aside - there is a dividend component to the cap.  In a somewhat complicated procedure, utilities get all their allowances for free but are required to sell some and split the proceeds so 15% goes to reducing greenhouse emissions and the remainder as a credit applied to utility bills.  Seeing that credit will help counter the inevitable claim that the money is just going to solar power fat cats.

Lessons or lack thereof from bipartisan movements

As Obama heads off to Burma, I think back to when I knew something about that country.  I spent two winters there doing volunteer work in the early 90s and then several years in the mid-90s in Oregon focusing on Burma human rights work, comparing the situation to South Africa.  I'm cautiously optimistic at this point, although the ethnic conflict is far from over and even democracy will be no guarantee of good treatment for ethnic minorities.

Relative to most other western nations, the US did pretty well in Burma, backing up Suu Kyi and others in the elected/overthrown leadership.  When we activists went Congress to ratchet up sanctions, the senators we counted on were Patrick Leahy, Mitch McConnell, and Jesse Helms (Ted Kennedy was also good, I think).  Our little Oregon group got every member of the Oregon congressional delegation to support sanctions, with liberal Republican Mark Hatfield being the hardest one to convince.  Burma never became polarized in American politics, as far as I can tell.

In another field that has long been polarized, things are changing.  Washington Monthly has a good piece titled The Conservative War on Prison, with conservatives starting to hop onto the alternatives-to-prison bandwagon.  The article is good on the what and when aspects of conservative change, but less so on the why and why at this particular time aspects.  There was this, though:

At the start of the 2007 legislative session, legislative analysts predicted that Texas was on track to be short 17,700 prison beds by 2012 because of its growing inmate population. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s response was to ask legislators to build three new prisons, but Madden and Whitmire had other ideas. Not only did they bring back a revamped version of their probation proposal—they also took aim at the revolving-door problem by cranking up funding for programs such as in-prison addiction treatment and halfway houses. This time, Perry relented (persuaded at least in part, the duo contends, by a high-stakes meeting they held with him shortly before the opening of the legislative session). Since then, the prison population has not increased, and last year, the TDCJ closed a prison for the first time in decades.

Budget shortfalls do not explain this shift. In 2007 Texas was basking in a huge projected surplus, and the Great Recession was still a year away. Instead, Madden and Whitmire had different winds at their backs. For one thing, the policy context favored reform. One legacy of the state’s prison litigation trauma is that Texas has strict restrictions on overcrowding (unlike, say, California). Under Texas law, when the system approaches capacity, corrections staff must seek certification from the attorney general and the governor to incarcerate more prisoners. The approval process forces state leaders to confront the choice between more prisons and more diversion programming. The political environment had also changed since the GOP completed its takeover of state politics in 2003. As a longtime observer of the state’s criminal justice notes, “Now … all the tough guys are Republicans. They don’t want to be outdoing each other on this stuff.”

I'm not entirely happy with this explanation.  I have my own, which is that ideological movements get bored.  After saying the same thing for a long time, there's a desire to say something else.  I think conservative ideology takes longer to get restless than others, but it still happens.  It's also not always successful:

Of course, there are limits to how far ideological reinvention can go. As political scientist David Karol has argued, it is unlikely to work when it requires crossing a major, organized member of a party coalition. That’s something environmentalists learned when they tried to encourage evangelicals to break ranks on global warming through the idea of “creation care.” They got their heads handed to them by the main conservative evangelical leaders, who saw the split this would create with energy-producing businesses upon whom Republican depend for support.

That's a rather simplified description of what happened among evangelicals, including who started it, how far it got, and whether the movement's truly ended.  It also downplays the difficulty in crossing the ideological and economic barriers of the tough-on-crime mindset and the prison-industrial complex.

I'm not sure what lessons to draw from all this for climate policy purposes.  Sometimes all you can do is wait for people to change - or push change through without their help.  I've also thought for a while that Al Gore has been careful to avoid some of the limelight.  Conservatives are showing some real ferment over immigration, modest change on gay marriage, and tiny little cracks in climate denial.  Maybe we'll get lucky.

Happy California Cap-And-Trade Eve

Nice radio program on California's cap-and-trade allocation auction that starts taking bids tomorrow, and on Monday we'll find out the price per ton, with a minimum price set by regulation at $10/ton.  Second biggest cap-and-trade market in the world after Europe.  Hopefully we've learned from other's mistakes (and I think we have).

One critique deserving a response is whether including a minimum and maximum price on allocations somehow proves a failure of the cap system.  The idea is if a cap's appeal over a carbon tax is that it determines the total amount of emissions, then the floor and ceiling prove the lack of commitment to determine the right amount of emissions.

Three responses:

1. Doesn't matter anyway unless the price hits the floor or ceiling.

2. It's a little simplistic to say a tax focuses on specific price for carbon while a cap focuses on specific quantity of carbon emissions.  The floor and ceiling for a cap just lets society choose a tradeoff between price and quantity.  You could do something similar with a tax by letting the tax price change if total emissions fall through a floor or above a ceiling.

3. If greenhouse gases were as easy to eliminate as ozone-destroying chemicals then we'd have a similar schedule for phaseout.  It's not that easy, so we're doing things less quickly under either a carbon tax in Australia, or cap in Europe and in parts of the US.  Putting a floor is an indication that we overestimated the difficulty in achieving a reduction and therefore will require a larger reduction.  It's actually good news, that we can achieve reductions more quickly than anticipated.

The path to citizenship will be crooked for Republicans

A few more thoughts on the election and then I'll let it go:

Immigration.  The Republicans are in trouble on immigration and citizenship no matter what they do.  No change and they imitate the California Republican Party in relevance.  Much of their elite seems to realize this and want to compromise, but the Democrats should put them through a wringer and demand everything the Ds think should happen:  a reasonable pathway to citizenship for immigrants who have been here for a reasonable amount of time.  The 1987 amnesty applied to people who had been in the country for over five years, setting them on a path to citizenship seven years after being legalized.  Personally I'd lengthen the first period and shorten the second one, but it's a reasonable model for the future.

If the Rs refuse to pass something like this through Congress, then beat them up over it in 2014 while also getting the best compromise possible.  If the Rs do pass something substantial, then they still lose, because those legalized citizens will be Democratic voters for a generation and a fraction.  The Rs painted themselves into this corner, it'll be a long time to get out.  The white vote share of the presidential electorate is declining 2 points every four years, probably translating into a one-percent gain each cycle for the Democratic candidate.

Denialists lost seats.  In under-reported news, four out of five Congressional Representatives dubbed the "Flat Earth Five" by the League of Conservation Voters for denying climate reality lost their seats, and eleven of twelve generally anti-environment candidates also got beat.  These people were specially targeted and I've been looking for more specifics; the League needs to update their website (a little update here).  This is a nice bit of karmic payback for 2010, when most of the eight Republicans who voted to do something about climate lost their seats to primary challengers.

Citizens United redistributed income.  Some billionaires redistributed a few percent of this year's income to the somewhat-less wealthy without causing too much harm at the federal level in this election.  I'm not quite as sure they were harmless at the state and local level this cycle, and even the dumbest of rich people may learn to spend their unlimited campaign money more effectively in the future, again most likely by targeting it at the state and local level.  Watch out for next time.

Overturning Citizens United.  Obama will probably nominate 2-3 justices over the next four years.  Ginsburg, age 79 and with previous cancer bouts, should have retired a year or two ago but took a huge risk hanging on.   Hopefully she'll do the right thing, and Breyer, age 74, might do the same.  The conservatives' ages are 76 (Scalia), 76 (Kennedy), 64 (Thomas), 62 (Alito) and 57 (Roberts).  They'll do their best to last out four years, but might not have a choice.

Bahrain Silence = Climate Silence.  Juan Cole had an interesting post about continuing repression in Bahrain against the Shiite majority.  Too bad that Romney wasn't asked to compare his relative activism over Syria, which I liked, to the situation in Bahrain.  Maybe the Republican talking heads on the Sunday shows could still get asked - this is the worst situation of the US looking the other way, for somewhat obvious military reasons.

Hanging up my local politics crystal ball.  My water district had three elections, and I called all three wrong.  It doesn't make the results bad - I'm actually thrilled that our funding measure that needed two-thirds' support under California law received 72.65% support, and it includes $24 million that helps prepare for sea level rise along San Francisco Bay.  Staff's first draft had $5 million for this; I can (and will) take credit for much of the increased funding.

UPDATE:  forgot to add my plea to reduce the Senate filibuster bottleneck, along with the actually-still-alive hope that Harry Reid might do it.

UPDATE 2:  with actuarial tables and my trusty calculator, I get a 79% chance of four-year survival for each of Scalia and Kennedy, 93% for Thomas, 94% for Alito, and 96% for Roberts, leaving a 52% chance that all five will survive four years.  Their health probably makes this an underestimate, but severe disability might also get one or two of them to leave if they really couldn't serve.

Sixty seconds of Sergio

Not sharing Eli's hesitation about blogging on subjects beyond my expertise, I thought I'd fix the dearth of spaghetti western blogging here at Rabett Run:



I've been watching the above clip for more times than I can count as part of a little project I'm working on.  It's the climax from Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, the second best of Leone's westerns, and the best climax.  The rest of this post is all spoilers, of course.

The part that really interests me is the final 60 seconds of the face-off, starting about 6:30 in the video.  Watch it once and it seems to end in a swirl of faces and a gunshot.  Watch it a couple dozen times and you get a story.

A timeline:

6:30 Angel Eyes starts inching his hand over to his gun.

6:33  Blondie looks at him, and he brings his hand back

6:49  Blondie looks at Tuco and gives him the slightest nod.  Now we who know the outcome also know there's no direct reason for Blondie to give a signal to Tuco - Blondie had tricked him and unloaded his gun.  It's what happens next that shows the reason - Angel Eyes saw the nod and flickers his view back and forth, unsure if there's a plan against him.

7:01  Unnerved, Angel Eyes starts slowly reaching for his gun, looking for Blondie to spot him moving.  Blondie never looks at him again, staring straight ahead at Tuco.

7:16  Angel Eyes takes an almost-last look at Tuco, hand inching closer.  Tuco's starting straight at Blondie.

7:17 - 7:27  Confusing closeups accelerate.

7:28 - 7:31  Tuco finally glances at Angel Eyes.
                  Angel Eyes nervously shifts his view between both opponents and makes his move.
                  Tuco sees the move and begins drawing himself (not that it matters).
                  A shot rings out, and Angel Eyes falls.  Blondie shot him without ever looking away from Tuco.

We learn later that Blondie had tricked Tuco by emptying Tuco's gun, so Blondie never had to really worry about Tuco.  Only by watching it closely do you see that Blondie also tricked Angel Eyes with the meaningless head nod to Tuco, and then by seeming to not pay attention to Angel Eyes, while watching him with peripheral vision and waiting for him to draw.

Nice.  Really nice.

Couple other points:  I had trouble with Angel Eyes walking across the line of fire between Tuco and Blondie earlier in the clip, but I finally realized it helped conceal his draw from Blondie even if it made the hand more visible to Tuco.  Maybe he wasn't quite as worried about Tuco.

At 7:32 you can see Tuco shooting his empty gun at Angel Eyes, i.e. not at Blondie.  Maybe it was just a response to Angel Eyes, but it might have been a choice.  Maybe that had something to do with Blondie's decision to spare Tuco at the end of the movie (not in the clip).

Speaking of the movie's end, Blondie tortures a guy with a fake execution/near strangling and he's "The Good"?  Maybe it was less jarring in the days before enhanced interrogation.  That's just one more good thing about re-electing Obama.

In the preceding movie, Angel Eyes was a good guy.  Nice climax as well, clip here.  Interesting how much swarthier Leone made the kind-of same character and same actor when he was The Bad.

I started watching this clip over a month ago, and immediately started getting lots of Romney ads on YouTube.  I thought that was amusing.

The time window for a revenue-neutral carbon tax is 2017-2018, so get cracking

My theory that our time for serious climate legislation is the two years after the 2016 election relies on the following reasons why up to 2016 won’t work:

• Before 2014 is no good because the current House majority would never pass it (and the Senate minority would filibuster).
• 2014-2016 is no good because the president’s party almost always loses seats in the House in the off year.

Then there’s 2016, the counterpart of the lucky fate of 2012 Senate elections. The Senate gets elected in three separate waves, with a few more Ds than Rs. Fate decreed an uneven distribution with a large minority of Ds up for election in 2012, 23 Ds versus 10 Rs, a big reason why this election was supposed to be bad in the Senate, until the Rs pulled out their unregistered pistols and shot up their own feet. Fate said 2014 would be somewhat closer in distribution between parties, so Math said that 2016 is the vulnerable year for Rs, with 24 Rs up for election compared to 10 Ds.

While far from certain, it’s possible that for two years after the 2016 election, and only for those two years, Ds will have somewhere in the vicinity of 60 votes in the Senate. That’s the chance. The 2018 election puts the Ds back on the defensive, 25 D seats versus 8 R seats.

I suggest two alternatives for explaining climate politics. One is Roger Pielke Jr.’s so-called Iron Law:

When policies focused on economic growth confront policies focused on emissions reduction, it is economic growth that will win out every time.

The other is the acronym BOSO, or Brian’s Obvious Statement of the Obvious:

Getting 60 votes in the Senate is hard.

Only one of these is likely to display true insight into climate politics. The Iron Law appears to be unfalsifiable because it’s not applied where it doesn’t work, so you can probably guess which way I lean. If you go with the Iron Law though, then you make a few bets on technology and just hope for the best (and please don’t annoy Godwin by pointing out that was Hitler’s end-game strategy too). If by contrast you’re just a BOSO, then look for the best strategy to get to 60.

I’m assuming the president will be a Democrat, or a Republican who favors action, and that the House will pass a bill like they were able to in 2010. Getting Republican and possibly squishy Democratic support is the reason, really the only reason, to do a revenue-neutral carbon tax. A revenue-generating tax could do positive things for climate mitigation and adaptation, or a cap-and-trade law could provide similar incentives. It’s the possibility of getting a few Republican votes and the difficulty of BOSO that makes me think we should explore a revenue neutral tax.

And I’m saying “possibility,” not probability for all the above. On the hopeful side, science will continue to beat over the heads of the ignorant, and not-hopeful tragedies like Sandy may do the same.   Renewables will continue to expand while costs decrease, and shale gas can cut into the stranglehold that coal has over electricity politics in swing states like Ohio.  Demographics also favor reality. On the other hand, two election cycles between now and 2017 aren’t that many to get reality into Republican politics, which is actually getting more ideologically rigid at the state and local level.

Still, it’s an opportunity that we should plan for as much as possible, and revenue-neutral carbon tax might be the best way to do it. Meantime, stick with Eli’s strategy of regulating our way through this via the Clean Air Act (and I expect eventually through the Clean Water Act for ocean acidification).

 If the Republicans don’t bend in 2017 and there aren’t enough votes to get around them, then their rigidity will eventually make them a national version of the California Republican Party, a group so unpopular and powerless that it will have less than one third of the seats in both houses of the state legislature. That, however, will take even more time before it happens.

Taking on our toughest challenges

The Christie cameo is probably no accident - enviros would love to split him off from the denialists.


P.S.  For my wonderful Santa Clara County voters, please vote Yes on Measure B!

If campaigns are zero-sum games, why will neither side talk about climate?

I've seen the justified lamentations about the lack of climate discussion in the campaign, and occasional discussion of why Obama hasn't talked that much about it.  (I provided my own explanation - Ohio.)  There's less discussion of why Romney doesn't talk about it, and little about why the interaction between candidates doesn't produce discussion.

In zero-sum politics, a disadvantage for one candidate should be an advantage for the other candidate, so why doesn't at least one of them push his opinion?

Unlike Karl Rove, I don't have THE answer, but I do have possibilities:

1.  This NYTimes article says their positions aren't that different.  Both acknowledge people are changing climate, so there's no reason to talk about that as opposed to their actual differences over energy policy.

I'm not buying it, first because it far overstates Romney's acceptance of climate change: "there remains a lack of scientific consensus on the issue."  That leaves plenty of room for a fight between reality and denial.  Also the strong difference in energy policy - support a growing sector versus abandoning it to China in favor of a declining and polluting sector - should easily reference back to climate.

The article does provide a service in saying Obama hasn't been completely silent.  And Romney's oblique references have been mocking Obama's intention to do something about it.  Let's refine the question to why both sides say so little instead of being silent.

On to more promising ideas.

2.  One or both sides overestimate the risk to their position.  If each side thinks the issue can backfire and hurt their side relative to the other, then neither will bring it up.  Both campaigns might think the issue has a 55% chance of helping the other side - that's not possible in zero sums, but would mean someone has bad political judgment.

I think this plays a role.

3.  It's not climate as an issue but their own ability to hurt themselves.  Maybe the candidates figure anything they say is more likely to motivate the other side than it is to motivate their own side, so again they keep quiet.  The analogy would be to Romney's relative silence over his abortion position, and the Democrats' relative silence about their somewhat-tepid opposition to torture and civil rights violations.

Problem with this one is that surrogates and Superpacs would likely go on the attack over climate, but everyone has little to say.

4.  It's like space policy - not enough people cared to force it on the agenda.  If Hurricane Sandy had happened in September then things might have been different.  If last summer's heat wave had more time to get into the public mindset, it also might have changed things.  The idea here though is that while the policy elites may be thinking of these things, most of the public isn't.

Sadly, I'm giving this last option the most credit, with an assist from overestimating risk.  It doesn't excuse a lack of leadership, but again helps explain it.  And it means those of us who care about climate have to do more.


For a little respite from climate silence, here's a debate between campaign surrogates with the last part discussing climate.  Romney's surrogate flat-out lies in the debate about current coal technology not producing pollutants, but admits that Romney would eliminate greenhouse gas controls that the EPA is currently phasing in under the Clean Air Act.  He also says the government should provide some money for energy research, but nothing to reduce carbon emissions.  So much for the NY Times article.

How dare Nate Silver suggest that someone put his money where his mouth is

The public editor at the NY Times is aghast that Nate Silver proposed a $1000 bet for charity against Joe Scarborough over the election outcome.  Silver thinks the math and data shows a high likelihood of Obama victory, while Scarborough doesn't like math and think people that use it should be told to shut up.  Perhaps sensing that her pearl-clutching isn't too convincing, the editor suggests people think he's a journalist when he's clearly a columnist discussing his own view of things, and gets a news editor to suggest discomfort with a journalistic slippery slope.

I honestly don't get why people have problems with other people proposing bets.  My guess is they don't like betting themselves and therefore think nobody else should be allowed to bet, so they make statements like it's "classless" to bet with money going to charity.  I kind of like incentives, myself, but maybe I'm classless.

As for that scary slippery slope, I would gladly give a push and would love to see other columnists put their money where their mouths are, because it might rein them in a little bit, or their critics.  Kind of harder to do that on the straight news side where it's an institution that's reporting out, not just the names on the byline, but if the institution can figure out a way to do that, then more power to them.  What a wonderful world it would be.

A better critique, also noted by people in Silver's Twitter feed, is that if Scarborough believes the odds are 50-50, and all Silver is offering is an even odds bet, then there's no advantage to Scarborough in taking the bet.  No disadvantage either, but there's no incentive from Scarborough's perspective.  Silver should put up $1250 against $1000 to fix that.  Also the money shouldn't go to the same charity but ideally to different ones that the two sides rank differently in preference.  Part of betting is to make people think carefully about their claims, and if the same charity gets the money then you lose some of that incentive.

And while I'm on the subject - there are many many reasons why Mitt Romney would be terrible for the country, especially on climate change, but I don't think his $10,000 bet offer was one of them.  As a gotcha line in the debate it might have been kind of lame, the outcome might have been deceptive, and the cavalier attitude towards that kind of money is unfortunate, but the simple concept of betting someone over a false statement isn't wrong.  Bloomberg has much better reasons for voting for Obama instead of Romney.

Blackouts a reminder of the potential advantage of Vehicle-to-Grid power supply

NYU Langone Medical Center:

At times with only flashlights to illuminate the way, NYU Langone Medical Center began evacuating about 260 patients, carrying some of them down 15 flights of stairs to awaiting ambulances ready to take them to the safety of other hospitals.... 

But between 7 and 7:45 p.m. Monday, the hospital's basement, lower floors and elevator shafts filled with 10 to 12 feet of water, and the hospital lost its power, according to Dr. Andrew Brotman, senior vice president and vice dean for clinical affairs and strategy.
"Things went downhill very, very rapidly and very unexpectedly," Brotman said. "The flooding was just unprecedented." 

Emergency generators did kick in, but two hours later, about 90% of that power went out, and the hospital decided to evacuate patients.

I wrote a while back about an idea I'm researching of using electric vehicles to supplement backup power during blackouts, a bridge to the truly big idea of Vehicle-to-Grid battery power storing energy from intermittent renewable sources, for release when needed.  This article suggests another reason for EVs as additional power backup - in case your emergency generators fail.

Hospitals strike me as pretty power-hungry, so I'm not sure how long EVs could support them, but you could probably triage crucial uses and cut off the rest.  Any extra time would likely be appreciated.

Somewhat related - I attended a lecture by a Japanese consular official last summer on recovery from the tsunami.  He said that electric networks took only days to get back online, while gasoline supplies took weeks.  The implication is that a system relying more on EVs than gas engines will be more resilient.  Unfortunately we have another chance to see how that plays out here, albeit on a much smaller scale of tragedy.


UPDATE:  as of Saturday Nov. 3, it appears that power is coming back faster than fuel supplies.

Emergency kits: no time like the past, but the present is better than nothing

For those in Hurricane Sandy's evacuation areas, please read Eli's post above.  Or better yet, don't read it.  Just leave, now.

For everyone else, regardless of where you live on the planet, get emergency kits.  People who will have to ride out Sandy in place won't benefit from this 2010 repost, but it's a reminder to the rest of us:

Easy-but-not-cheap 72-hour emergency kits for home, with purchase links

It's hardly responsive to the Haiti quake, but I've been meaning to write about the earthquake/emergency kits I put together for Christmas presents. At least it's a way to lessen the burden on emergency services should something similar happen here.

There are nine members of my wife's family in the Bay Area, and when I found out no one had the 72-hour emergency kits we're supposed to have, I put them together as presents (in-laws loved the kits, too). My emphases were making them easy for me to put together, easy for people with no camping experience to use, and ones that would last as many years as possible without needing replacement or maintenance. In return I was willing to pay more, be more bulky than the minimum possible, and have limited control over food selection.

72-Hour Home kits:

• Water in plastic jugs, 3 gallons/person
• Iodine water-purification pills in case water goes bad (after 6 months, assume it's bad), in case it's leaked away, or in case you need more water (UPDATE: chlorine tabs have been suggested as lasting longer in storage than iodine)
• Mountain House 72-Hour Emergency Meal Kit, 1 per person
• Mountain Oven Flameless Heating Kit: each kit can be used 5 times and can prepare 2 meals at a time. So 2 kits per two people in a household, but also 2 kits in a single-person household.
• Plastic silverware
• Emergency phone numbers/contact list

The above is the absolute minimum. Meals can be eaten in their pouches, so no dishes are needed. Flameless heating kits eliminate the need for cooking stoves (water has to be purified, though). Emergency meals also can be eaten with cold (purified) water although they taste bad. The food and flameless kits should be good for at least 3 or 4 years, and probably more than twice that long.

Your kit should be stored outside your home in case you can't get inside. So in your yard, your car, or somewhere else. The only maintenance this requires is to simply look every six months to see if the water's leaked through the seams of the plastic jugs - it happens fairly often.

Additional useful items:

• Cheap flashlight/headlamp
• Spare batteries in clear plastic bag so you can see if they've become corroded over time
• Plastic tarp and cord as a rain shelter
• Swiss Army knife
• Emergency shelter, 1 per 2 people
• Cheap or expensive first aid kit (I went with cheap kits from the local drugstore)
• Cheap rain gear, spare shoes and clothes

Don't let the extras delay you from putting together the minimum.

I also made better-than-nothing emergency kits for everyone's car, in case you're stuck on the road:

Car kits:

• Half-liter water bottle (enough to keep you hydrated for a few hours until you can find a water source. Keep more than one if you have kids.)
• Iodine (can disinfect murky water from ditches, and you might need to) (or chlorine tabs)
• Emergency shelter
• Small amount of long-lasting food (I found tins of honey-roasted peanuts that were good for four years)
• Cheap rain poncho (I didn't include this, but should have)
• Emergency contact list
• Shoes you can walk many miles in, if that's not what you normally wear
• Cheap, tiny flashlight

You can do much better than this car kit, but it's something in case destroyed roads/bridges keep you from getting home for 12-24 hours.

Additional tricks for both kits: put the contact lists in their own ziplock plastic bags to reduce the chance that they'll mold/get wet over the years. I've also found that the metal caps on the iodine bottles tend to rust over a few years, so I bagged them in their own ziplock bags, and poured a little table salt in the bags to absorb humidity.

Hopefully this is all unnecessary.

UPDATE:  lots of great comments below, and a resource link at Making Light.

N.B.  I've altered the posting time so Eli's post is seen above this one.

Romney in Ohio

Romney's team is replaying the tricks that Karl Rove wore out several times, a false sense of guaranteed victory.  From saying in 2006 that Republicans would control the Senate and the House right before they lost both, to the current claim of momentum, it's smoke and burnt toast.

In Ohio, polls show Obama ahead, and way ahead in the locked in, early vote:

On one hand, the two candidates are locked in a dead heat among Ohioans who have not yet voted but who say they intend to, with 45% of respondents supporting the President and 45% preferring his Republican challenger. 

But Obama has clearly received a boost from Ohio’s early voting period, which began on Oct. 2 and runs through November 5. Among respondents who say they have already voted, Obama holds a two-to-one lead over Romney, 60% to 30%. 

When those two groups are combined, the TIME poll reveals, Obama leads by five points overall in Ohio. 

“At least for the early vote, the Obama ground game seems to be working,” says Mark Schulman, president of Abt SRBI, which conducted the poll. 

Nearly one third of all Ohioans voted early in 2008.

(Emphasis added.)  Romney's losing ground with every day.  If he doesn't pick up three or four points or even more starting now, not just on Election Day, then he loses Ohio (assuming the poll's right, of course).  Nate Silver says the candidate who wins Ohio wins the election in 95% of his simulations.  If Romney loses Ohio, he then needs to win Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, Colorado, and Virginia.

Keep talking up that momentum Mitt, but you're losing the race as long as the Democrats do a good ground game on turnout, or someone springs an October surprise.


UPDATE:  I forgot to add the obvious that Ohio is car-manufacturing oriented, and the less-obvious that it's 82% dependent on coal.  This might help explain, although not excuse, Obama's climate silence.

Republicans care more about diplomats than soldiers

It's not something I would have predicted, but it's hard to make logical sense over the Republican scrutiny of every detail of the four tragic American deaths in Benghazi while having little interest in the events immediately preceding the deaths of thousands of US soldiers under hundreds of scenarios in wars under both Bush and Obama.  I guess diplomats matter more to Republicans?

It's a dangerous world and people make mistakes.  There's no evidence tying security mistakes to Obama and Biden, at less so than the Paul Ryan and the Republican's vote to decrease security funding for diplomats, not to mention Ryan's deception in the last debate by saying no Marines were in Benghazi even though the Republicans had incompetently leaked that the CIA security was present.

Hope some of that comes out tonight, if we are forced to put a microscope on a that small part of the Libyan revolution that otherwise has had enormous positive consequences for Libya and the rest of the world (other than Mali).

Rogue geoengineering and scrivener's error

A shadowy businessman from my state named Russ George has apparently dumped boatloads of iron into the Pacific off the Canadian coastline in an alleged carbon sequestration project.  I first thought he had hooked up with the Haida, a Canadian First Nations indigenous group, in order to get some political backing, but the link shows it may have been more involved:

The dump took place from a fishing boat in an eddy 200 nautical miles west of the islands of Haida Gwaii, one of the world's most celebrated, diverse ecosystems, where George convinced the local council of an indigenous village to establish the Haida Salmon Restoration Corporation to channel more than $1m of its own funds into the project. 

The president of the Haida nation, Guujaaw, said the village was told the dump would environmentally benefit the ocean, which is crucial to their livelihood and culture.  

"The village people voted to support what they were told was a 'salmon enhancement project' and would not have agreed if they had been told of any potential negative effects or that it was in breach of an international convention," Guujaaw said.

One imagines they could have done better things with a million dollars than financing Mr. Ross.  He is of a certain infamy from his Planktos company's effort to do the same thing five years ago and sell carbon offsets certified AFAICT on the basis of their own say-so.

So now they seem to have legal trouble with international agreements that tried to regulate efforts such as those by George.  However, wherever you can find a dubious legal interpretation that could harm the environment, it seems one can find a connection to the recent Rabett favorite, David "Heartstrings" Schnare:

• The London Convention / London Protocol: You may fertilize if the intent is to grow fish but not if the intent is to dispose of carbon in the ocean. Hence, focus on “restoration”.

At the same link, Ken Caldeira writes:

It would be useful if any legal minds in the group would assess exactly the relevant language that Russ George has supposedly violated. 

I recall that in negotiations under the London Convention / London Protocol, there was concern not to impact fish farms which of course supply copious nutrients to surrounding waters. 

If my recollection was correct, somebody proposed an exception for mariculture. I piped up and said that all ocean fertilization could be considered mariculture and that the CO2 storage could be regarded as a co-benefit, achieved knowingly but not intentionally (just as when we drive a car we knowingly heat the planet although that is not our intent). 

My recollection was that in response to this comment, the word 'conventional' was added to the language, so that it now reads: 

"Ocean fertilization does not include conventional aquaculture, or mariculture, .. ". Resolution LC-LP.1(2008) - IMO 

Incidentally, it seems that they have a misplaced comma, as I believe the word 'conventional' was meant to apply to both 'aquaculture'' and 'mariculture', but with the placement of the comma, I read this as 'conventional aquaculture' or 'mariculture'. I am not enough of a lawyer to know whether the intended meaning or the literal meaning is the one likely to prevail under some sort of adjudication process.

The misplaced comma is what lawyers call scrivener's error, a great way to mess up legal documents and run up legal bills.  To broadly over-generalize, under US domestic law courts will correct scrivener's error when it leads to absurd results.  It strikes me as absurd to limit the regulatory exception to conventional aquaculture while expanding it to all mariculture.  The legal issue here isn't domestic law though, but international law as interpreted by domestic authorities, probably Canada in this case.  Hardly my field, but Article 79 of the UN Treaty on the Law of Treaties says if signatories agree there was a clerical error, you just go and fix it.  I think that's where we would stand now on the clerical error, but there are other reasons for thinking George is in legal trouble (comments of Jim Thomas) regardless of the misplaced comma.

One climate adaptation in process for local water demand

So I'm going to get at least one of the climate change goals I've had for my Water District - recalibrate anticipated future water demand based on anticipated future temperatures.

I know that anticipating our future local water supply (about 35% is local, 55% from the Sierras, and 10% is from conservation) is really difficult.  Most likely it will be worse - longer droughts and larger percent of precip coming in large storms where the water mostly flushes to the ocean instead of percolating to groundwater or caught in reservoirs.  Also less snow - and we do get snow in the Bay Area hills, even if it doesn't last.  But none of this translates into numbers that we can plug into our 25-year projections.

Demand, or at least aspects of it, can be modeled in a climate-changed world.  Thanks to weather, we've got past unseasonably-warm years that will be just typically-warm years of the future, and the increased demands from crops and landscapes due to warmth should be easy to see.

While this analysis didn't go into a water supply master plan that we approved last week, it will go into the next iteration.  I brought up the issue below, and got support from our board chair and (after discussion of other issues by staff) from the conservative Republican director on our board:



If the video above goes away, click here, click on the October 9 2012 video, and go to Minute 43.

Wish it was this easy all the time.  Adaptation to climate change still seems like the easiest way to bring about acceptance of climate reality, despite North Carolina's legislature.


(Updated to replace "next week" with "last week".)

Schnare on screen, Captain.

I'm annoyed that Eli beat me to the punch, but I did get the above spy-cam video showing David Schnare's latest work.  More GIFs of Schnare here.

You think that is a Scharescapade, Brian?  This is the real Schnarey thing - Eli

  

Brian's call to Santa Clara County environmentalists to vote for the Safe Clean Water Measure

After the jump below is a shortened version of a letter I'm sending far and wide to the local environmental community in support of a funding measure for the Santa Clara Valley Water District that I represent.  The funding goes to watershed restoration, water supply, and flood control, with this appeal directed to environmentalists.  Mail-in ballots will go out next week.

Letter to Santa Clara County Environmentalists about the Safe Clean Water Measure

Brian Schmidt

October 4, 2012

As a long time environmentalist with what I hope is some “street cred” on valuing the environment and knowing the Water District, I urge you, I beg you, to support the Safe Clean Water measure - Measure B - on the November ballot and to tell your friends to do the same. This fall might be our only chance for a decade or longer to get expanded environmental funding, and it definitely is our best chance based on what we currently know about future circumstances.

(More after the jump....)