Category: Energy/Environment

Students Learn Less, and Score Worse, When Hot

(p. 11) A clever new working paper by Jisung Park, a Ph.D. student in economics at Harvard, compared the performances of New York City students on 4.6 million exams with the day’s temperature. He found that students taking a New York State Regents exam on a 90-degree day have a 12 percent greater chance of failing than when the temperature is 72 degrees.
The Regents exams help determine whether a student graduates and goes to college, and Park finds that when a student has the bad luck to have Regents exams fall on very hot days, he or she is slightly less likely to graduate on time.
Likewise, Park finds that when a school year has an unusual number of hot days, students do worse at the end of the year on their Regents exams, presumably because they’ve learned less. A school year with five extra days above 80 degrees leads students to perform significantly worse on Regents exams.
The New York City students in Park’s study do poorly on hot days even though the majority of city schools are air-conditioned (perhaps in part because the air-conditioning often barely works).

For the full commentary, see:
Kristof, Nicholas. “Temperatures Rise, and We’re Cooked.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., SEPT. 11, 2016): 11.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date SEPT. 10, 2016.)

The working paper by Jisung Park on the effects of heat, is:
Park, Jisung. “Heat Stress and Human Capital Production.” Harvard University, 2016.

E.U. Regulations Protect Paris Rats

(p. A4) PARIS — On chilly winter mornings, most Parisians hurry by the now-locked square that is home to the beautiful medieval Tour St. Jacques. Only occasionally do they pause, perhaps hearing a light rustle on the fallen leaves or glimpsing something scampering among the dark green foliage.
A bird? A cat? A puppy?
No. A rat.
No. Three rats.
No. Look closer: Ten or 12 rats with lustrous gray-brown coats are shuffling among the dried autumn leaves.
Paris is facing its worst rat crisis in decades. Nine parks and green spaces have been closed either partly or entirely
. . .
In the 19th century, rats terrified and disgusted Parisians who knew that five centuries earlier, the creatures had brought the bubonic plague across the Mediterranean.
The plague ravaged the city, as it did much of Europe, killing an estimated 100,000 Parisians, between a third and half the population at the time. It recurred periodically for four more centuries. Not surprisingly, the experience left Paris with a millennium-long aversion to rodents.
. . .
. . . why are they proliferating? Could it be everybody’s favorite scapegoat — the European Union and its faceless, unaccountable bureaucrats?
Yes, it could.
New regulations from Brussels, the European Union’s headquarters, have forced countries to change how they use rat poison, said Dr. Jean-Michel Michaux, a veterinarian and head of the Urban Animals Scientific and (p. A14) Technical Institute in Paris.
. . .
While the poison could be a risk to human beings, so are the rats — potentially, although no one is suggesting that the bubonic plague is likely to return.

For the full story, see:

ALISSA J. RUBIN. “PARIS JOURNAL; The Rats Came Back. Blame the E,U.” The New York Times (Fri., DEC. 16, 2016): A4 & A14.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date DEC. 15, 2016, and has the title “PARIS JOURNAL; Rodents Run Wild in Paris. Blame the European Union.”)

Air-Conditioning Is “a Critical Adaptation” that Saves Lives

(p. A3) Air-conditioning is not just a luxury. It’s a critical adaptation tool in a warming world, with the ability to save lives.
. . .
In our continuing research, my colleagues and I have found that hot days in India have a strikingly big impact on mortality. Specifically, the mortality effects of each additional day in which the average temperature exceeds 95 degrees Fahrenheit are 25 times greater in India than in the United States.
. . .
The effect of very hot days on mortality in the United States is so low in part because of the widespread use of air-conditioning. A recent study I did with colleagues showed that deaths as a result of these very hot days in the United States declined by more than 80 percent from 1960 to 2004 — and it was the adoption of air-conditioning that accounted for nearly the entire decline.

For the full story, see:
Michael Greenstone. “‘India’s Air-Conditioning and Climate Change Quandary.” The New York Times (Thurs., OCT. 27, 2016): A3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date OCT. 26, 2016.)

The Greenstone study mentioned above on heat mortality in the U.S., is:
Barreca, Alan, Karen Clay, Olivier Deschenes, Michael Greenstone, and Joseph S. Shapiro. “Adapting to Climate Change: The Remarkable Decline in the Us Temperature-Mortality Relationship over the Twentieth Century.” Journal of Political Economy 124, no. 1 (Feb. 2016): 105-59.

Most Novels Portray Businessmen as Either Foolish or Evil

(p. 8) The last book that made you furious?
Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.” It uses all the tricks of a fire-and-brimstone preacher to sell a message of despair and pessimism based on a really shaky, selective and biased understanding of the science of climate change.

Your favorite antihero or villain?
Harry Potter’s uncle, Vernon Dursley — a much misunderstood man who stands for all the businessmen that novelists have denigrated, while living off the wealth they created. I am being a bit facetious, but I did use to enjoy pointing out to my children that businessmen only ever appear in fiction as foolish or evil or both, when clearly they generally do the world enormous good.

If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?
The prime minister? “The Hockey Stick Illusion,” by Andrew Montford. It’s a great piece of detective work on a key scientific blunder, based around the work of Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, and it forensically dismantles the mistakes that led to people believing they had at last found evidence that current climate change is unprecedented in rate or scale in this millennium. It may yet prove to be so in the future, but it is not so yet.

Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn’t?
Easy. The Bible. Not even the fine translations of William Tyndale, largely adopted by King James’s committee without sufficient acknowledgment, can conceal the grim tedium of this messy compilation of second-rate tribal legends and outrageous bigotry.

For the full interview, see:
SIMON PARKIN. “By the Book: Matt Ridley.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., OCT. 18, 2015): 8.
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date OCT. 15, 2015, and has the title “Matt Ridley: By the Book.” The online version has added questions and answers, that were left out of the published version. The passages quoted above, were in both versions, except for those on recommended presidential reading, which only appeared in the online version.)

Ridley has a courageous and illuminating discussion of environmental issues, in:
Ridley, Matt. The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. New York: Harper, 2010.

Wind Turbines Kill Bats

(p. D2) Wind power can help the world fight climate change, but it’s not so great for bats.
A new study of wind turbines in Britain found that each turbine killed one to two bats each month on average, with some killing more than 60. The researchers said that the efforts that are required in many countries to assess the environmental effect of planned wind farms have proved faulty and inadequate in measuring the risk to bats.

For the full story, see:

JOHN SCHWARTZ. “Kind to the Planet, Not to Bats.” The New York Times (Tues., Nov. 15, 2016): D2.
(Note: the online version of the article has the date NOV. 7 [sic], 2016, and has the title “When Bats Look for Meals Near Wind Power, Bats Die.” The online version is much longer than the print version, and differs somewhat, even where they overlap. The passage quoted above is from the online version.)

The “study” summarized in the passage above, is:
Lintott, Paul R., Suzanne M. Richardson, David J. Hosken, Sophie A. Fensome, and Fiona Mathews. “Ecological Impact Assessments Fail to Reduce Risk of Bat Casualties at Wind Farms.” Current Biology 26, no. 21 (Nov., 7, 2016): R1135-R1136.

Federal Regulations Suppress Organic Innovation In Order to Protect Incumbents

(p. A1) If a fruit or vegetable isn’t grown in dirt, can it be organic?
That is the question roiling the world of organic farming, and the answer could redefine what it means to farm organically.
At issue is whether produce that relies solely on irrigation to deliver nutrients to plants — through what is known as hydroponic and aquaponic systems — can be certified organic. And the National Organic Standards Board, an advisory group that makes recommendations to the federal secretary of agriculture, will get an earful on the topic at its meeting in St. Louis this week.
On one side are the growing number of big and small growers raising fruits and vegetables in these soil-free systems. They say their production methods are no different from those of farmers who grow plants in dirt — and, they add, they make organic farming more sustainable by, for instance, reducing water use.
“Soil to me as a farmer means a nutrient-rich medium that contains biological processes, and that doesn’t have to be dirt,” said Marianne Cufone, an aquaponic farmer and the executive director of the Recirculating Farms Coalition, which lobbies for aquaculture.
. . .
(p. B2 [sic]) The Organic Foods Production Act of 1990 states: “An organic plan shall contain provisions designed to foster soil fertility, primarily through the management of the organic content of the soil through proper tillage, crop rotation and manuring.”
“To me, it seems simple and always has been,” said Sam Welsch, chief executive of OneCert, an organic certification business in Nebraska that has refused to certify hydroponic produce. “There are things the law and regulations require you to do to the soil that you cannot do in a hydroponic system.”
. . .
Colin Archipley’s farm, Archi’s Acres, grows kale, herbs and other produce hydroponically in greenhouses in San Diego. He is frustrated that there is even a debate over whether his produce is organic.
“The reason this has become such a big deal is that systems like ours are becoming more popular because they’re more efficient, which means farmers are more sustainable and profitable,” he said. “That’s put competition on farmers, specifically in Vermont, and so what this really is about is market protection.”

For the full story, see:
STEPHANIE STROM. “Is It Organic? Ground Rules May Be Changing.” The New York Times (Weds., NOV. 16, 2016): A1 & B2 [sic].
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date NOV. 15, 2016, and has the title “What’s Organic? A Debate Over Dirt May Boil Down to Turf.”)

Space Trash Start-Up Aims to Be Quicker than Government

(p. D1) Mr. Okada is an entrepreneur with a vision of creating the first trash collection company dedicated to cleaning up some of humanity’s hardest-to-reach rubbish: the spent rocket stages, inert satellites and other debris that have been collecting above Earth since Sputnik ushered in the space age. He launched Astroscale three years ago in the belief that national space agencies were dragging their feet in facing the problem, which could be tackled more quickly by a small private company motivated by profit.
“Let’s face it, waste management isn’t sexy enough for a space agency to convince taxpayers to allocate money,” said Mr. Okada, 43, who put Astroscale’s headquarters in start-up-friendly Singapore but is building its spacecraft in his native Japan, where he found more engineers. “My breakthrough is figuring out how to make this into a business.”
. . .
(p. D3) “The projects all smelled like government, not crisp or quick,” he said of conferences he attended to learn about other efforts. “I came from the start-up world where we think in days or weeks, not years.”
. . .
He also said that Astroscale would start by contracting with companies that will operate big satellite networks to remove their own malfunctioning satellites. He said that if a company has a thousand satellites, several are bound to fail. Astroscale will remove these, allowing the company to fill the gap in its network by replacing the failed unit with a functioning satellite.
“Our first targets won’t be random debris, but our clients’ own satellites,” he said. “We can build up to removing debris as we perfect our technology.”

For the full story, see:

MARTIN FACKLER. “Building a Garbage Truck for Space.” The New York Times (Tues., Nov. 29, 2016): D1 & D3.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Nov. 28, 2016, and has the title “Space’s Trash Collector? A Japanese Entrepreneur Wants the Job.”)

Gates Foundation Funding “Second Green Revolution”

(p. A12) URBANA, Ill. — A decade ago, agricultural scientists at the University of Illinois suggested a bold approach to improve the food supply: tinker with photosynthesis, the chemical reaction powering nearly all life on Earth.
The idea was greeted skeptically in scientific circles and ignored by funding agencies. But one outfit with deep pockets, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, eventually paid attention, hoping the research might help alleviate global poverty.
Now, after several years of work funded by the foundation, the scientists are reporting a remarkable result.
Using genetic engineering techniques to alter photosynthesis, they increased the productivity of a test plant — tobacco — by as much as 20 percent, they said Thursday[November 17, 2016] in a study published by the journal Science. That is a huge number, given that plant breeders struggle to eke out gains of 1 or 2 percent with more conventional approaches.
The scientists have no interest in increasing the production of tobacco; their plan is to try the same alterations in food crops, and one of the leaders of the work believes production gains of 50 percent or more may ultimately be achievable. If that prediction is borne out in further research — it could take a decade, if not longer, to know for sure — the result might be nothing less than a transformation of global agriculture.
. . .
“We’re here because we want to alleviate poverty,” said Katherine Kahn, the officer at the Gates Foundation overseeing the grant for the Illinois research. “What is it (p. A24) the farmers need, and how can we help them get there?”
One of the leaders of the research, Stephen P. Long, a crop scientist who holds appointments at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and at Lancaster University in England, emphasized in an interview that a long road lay ahead before any results from the work might reach farmers’ fields.
But Dr. Long is also convinced that genetic engineering could ultimately lead to what he called a “second Green Revolution” that would produce huge gains in food production, like the original Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, which transferred advanced agricultural techniques to some developing countries and led to reductions in world hunger.
. . .
The work is, in part, an effort to secure the food supply against the possible effects of future climate change. If rising global temperatures cut the production of food, human society could be destabilized, but more efficient crop plants could potentially make the food system more resilient, Dr. Long said.

For the full story, see:
JUSTIN GILLIS. “Taking Aim at Hunger, By Altering Plant Genes.” The New York Times (Fri., NOV. 18, 2016): A12 & A24.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date NOV. 17, 2016, and has the title “With an Eye on Hunger, Scientists See Promise in Genetic Tinkering of Plants.”)

The Science article co-authored by Long, that is mentioned above, is:
Kromdijk, Johannes, Katarzyna Głowacka, Lauriebeth Leonelli, Stéphane T. Gabilly, Masakazu Iwai, Krishna K. Niyogi, and Stephen P. Long. “Improving Photosynthesis and Crop Productivity by Accelerating Recovery from Photoprotection.” Science 354, no. 6314 (Nov. 18, 2016): 857-61.

“The Stone Age Did Not Come to an End Because We Ran Out of Stone”

(p. A11) Far from recovering a sense of hopefulness during the relative peace of the 21st century, gloominess has become the default position of the intellectual classes in the Western world.
. . .
Ronald Bailey begs to differ. As his book demonstrates, a careful examination of the evidence shows that, at least in material terms (which is not unimportant, particularly for the world’s poor), life is getting better. The overriding reason for this, according to Mr. Bailey, is continuing technological progress, facilitated–and this is crucial–by the global triumph of market capitalism.
Among the scares examined by Mr. Bailey in “The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century” are overpopulation, the exhaustion of natural resources (particularly oil), the perils of biotechnology and genetic modification, and global warming.
. . .
No doubt the age of oil will one day come to an end. But as my old friend Saudi Arabia’s Sheikh Yamani used to point out, the Stone Age did not come to an end because we ran out of stone.
. . .
“The End of Doom” is not quite in the same class as Matt Ridley’s classic, “The Rational Optimist,” but it is a good book and deserves to be widely read.

For the full review, see:
NIGEL LAWSON. “BOOKSHELF; Apocalypse Later; Despite an explosion in population greater than Malthus could have ever imagined, global living standards are higher than ever.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., July 27, 2015): A11.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date July 27, 2015.)
(Note: ellipses added.)

The book under review, is:
Bailey, Ronald. The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2015.

After Global Warming Hits Vietnam: “We Live Better Now”

(p. A9) On a chilly January day recently, Do Van Duy slugged back another shot of rice liquor. It had been a good year for raising fish in the Red River delta of northern Vietnam. He and other villagers in Nam Dien had gathered to toast their success as the Lunar New Year approached–and question whether climate change is such a bad thing after all.
“We live better now,” said Mr. Duy, 31 years old, who now farms grouper, shrimp and crab in the brackish waters of the delta after giving up rice a few years ago. “If you can make the switch there’s a lot more money to be made.”
Nearly three-quarters of households in Nam Dien have abandoned rice farming, said Bui Van Cuong, a fisheries official with the People’s Commune in Nam Dien, as salt water flows farther into the delta’s farmland. “The changes are very apparent over the past 10 years,” Mr. Cuong said.
The shift is focusing attention on a difficult question: Is it better to invest resources in fighting the effects of climate change, or in helping people adapt?
. . .
“Their competitive advantage is changing,” said Le Anh Tuan, a director at the Institute for Climate Change Studies at Can Tho University. “The delta might not always be the best place to grow rice, but people can raise shrimp instead.”

For the full story, see:
JAMES HOOKWAY. “Vietnam’s New Tack in Climate Fight.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., Feb. 25, 2016): A9.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has title “Vietnam Tries New Tack in Climate-Change Battle: Teach a Man to Fish.”)

In Africa Lions “Are Objects of Terror”

(p. A17) Winston-Salem, N.C. — MY mind was absorbed by the biochemistry of gene editing when the text messages and Facebook posts distracted me.
So sorry about Cecil.
Did Cecil live near your place in Zimbabwe?
Cecil who? I wondered. When I turned on the news and discovered that the messages were about a lion killed by an American dentist, the village boy inside me instinctively cheered: One lion fewer to menace families like mine.
My excitement was doused when I realized that the lion killer was being painted as the villain. I faced the starkest cultural contradiction I’d experienced during my five years studying in the United States.
Did all those Americans signing petitions understand that lions actually kill people? That all the talk about Cecil being “beloved” or a “local favorite” was media hype? Did Jimmy Kimmel choke up because Cecil was murdered or because he confused him with Simba from “The Lion King”?
In my village in Zimbabwe, surrounded by wildlife conservation areas, no lion has ever been beloved, or granted an affectionate nickname. They are objects of terror.
. . .
We Zimbabweans are left shaking our heads, wondering why Americans care more about African animals than about African people.
. . .
. . . please, don’t offer me condolences about Cecil unless you’re also willing to offer me condolences for villagers killed or left hungry by his brethren, by political violence, or by hunger.

For the full commentary, see:
GOODWELL NZOU. “In Zimbabwe, We Don’t Cry for Lions.” The New York Times (Weds., AUG. 5, 2015): A17.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date AUG. 4, 2015,)