Category: Energy/Environment

Audits Worth Less When the Audited Directly Pay for Them

(p. B1) Environmental regulators in Gujarat, one of India’s fastest-growing industrial states, found themselves in an implausible situation a few years ago: Every single city breached national air quality standards. And yet environmental audits kept finding that factories met pollution limits.
So the Gujaratis hired some researchers from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to carry out an experiment, changing the way the audits were made. Instead of hiring their own auditors, companies had auditors assigned to them randomly. Instead of being paid by the companies they audited, auditors drew a fixed fee from a pool that all companies paid into.
Measured compliance rates abruptly plummeted. But once the new system was in place, the real emissions from polluting factories finally started to decline. The Gujaratis kept the new approach.
“When fact-checking is not done in an independent way, there is a long history of things turning out the way the entity being fact checked wants them to turn out,” said Michael Greenstone of the University of Chicago, a former chief economist for President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers who was one of the researchers involved in the study. “Until you change the incentives, this will not change.”
The problem may seem remote, but it turns out that the same incentives apply in the United States, even in programs that, at first glance, appear to provide an unmitigated benefit.
Last month, the Energy Department released an extensive report assessing the impact of the federal weatherization program, which was begun in 1976 to shield the homes of low-income Americans from the elements, save them money on heating bills and improve energy efficiency.
It concluded that weatheriza-(p. B10)tion — insulating homes, changing boilers, plugging leaky windows and the like — was a stellar investment. Not only were the energy savings substantially larger than the cost of weatherizing homes, the report found, but the gains soared even more once the broader impacts on health were taken into account.
“The results demonstrate that weatherization provides cost-effective energy savings and health and safety benefits to American families,” the Energy Department announced.
But do they? When Professor Greenstone and two other independent economists looked under the hood — not a trivial challenge, given the report’s 4,500 pages — they found a collection of idiosyncratic choices and unorthodox assumptions that severely undermined the credibility of the enterprise.
In the end, they concluded, the government research effort, which was led by the Energy Department’s own Oak Ridge National Laboratory, cannot tell us whether weatherization is a fabulous program or a waste of taxpayer dollars.

For the full commentary, see:
Eduardo Porter. “ECONOMIC SCENE; For Government That Works, Call In the Auditors.” The New York Times (Weds., OCT. 7, 2015): B1 & B10.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date OCT. 6, 2015, and the title “ECONOMIC SCENE; For Government That Works, Call In the Auditors.”)

Madly-Recycling Germans Pay to Burn British Trash

(p. A1) MAGDEBURG, Germany–Each day, trucks roll into this city filled with the latest hot import from the streets of Manchester, England: garbage.
The destination is a power plant that makes a business of turning trash into electricity, or as it touts in a brochure, “spinning straw into gold.” The straw in this case is large, pillowy blobs of rubbish, neatly wrapped in plastic.
. . .
A waste not, want not attitude mixed with a national zeal for recycling has led to an awkward problem for Germany: It isn’t producing enough of its own trash.
Over the past decade, heaps of garbage-burning power plants and composting facilities were built throughout Germany as the country shut off all its landfills to new household trash. But instead of growing, as many thought it would, household-waste production flattened, in part because sparing Germans edged their already-high recycling rate even higher.

For the full story, see:
ELIOT BROWN. “Germans Have a Burning Need for More Garbage; Lack of garbage forces power plants to import waste; ‘straw into gold’.”The Wall Street Journal (Tues., Oct. 20, 2015): A1 & A10.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Oct. 19, 2015.)

Recycling Is Costly “Religious Ritual”

John Tierney penned another eye-opening commentary, this one as a cover-story for the SundayReview Section of The New York Times. A few of the best passages are quoted below.

(p. 1) In 1996, I wrote a long article for The New York Times Magazine arguing that the recycling process as we carried it out was wasteful.

. . .
So, what’s happened since then? While it’s true that the recycling message has reached more people than ever, when it comes to the bottom line, both economically and environmentally, not much has changed at all.
Despite decades of exhortations and man-(p. 4)dates, it’s still typically more expensive for municipalities to recycle household waste than to send it to a landfill. Prices for recyclable materials have plummeted because of lower oil prices and reduced demand for them overseas. The slump has forced some recycling companies to shut plants and cancel plans for new technologies.
. . .
One of the original goals of the recycling movement was to avert a supposed crisis because there was no room left in the nation’s landfills. But that media-inspired fear was never realistic in a country with so much open space. In reporting the 1996 article I found that all the trash generated by Americans for the next 1,000 years would fit on one-tenth of 1 percent of the land available for grazing. And that tiny amount of land wouldn’t be lost forever, because landfills are typically covered with grass and converted to parkland, like the Freshkills Park being created on Staten Island.
. . .
Last week the National Institutes of Health announced that it had prematurely ended a large national study of how best to treat people with high blood pressure because of its exceptional results.
In this trial of more than 9,000 people age 50 and older with high blood pressure, an aggressive treatment strategy to keep systolic blood pressure below 120 was compared with a conventional one aimed at keeping it below 140. The subjects all had a high risk of heart attacks, stroke and heart failure. The N.I.H. concluded, six years into a planned eight-year study, that for these patients, pushing blood pressure down far below currently recommended levels was very beneficial.
. . .
As a business, recycling is on the wrong side of two long-term global economic trends. For centuries, the real cost of labor has been increasing while the real cost of raw materials has been declining. That’s why we can afford to buy so much more stuff than our ancestors could. As a labor-intensive activity, recycling is an increasingly expensive way to produce materials that are less and less valuable.
Recyclers have tried to improve the economics by automating the sorting process, but they’ve been frustrated by politicians eager to increase recycling rates by adding new materials of little value. The more types of trash that are recycled, the more difficult it becomes to sort the valuable from the worthless.
In New York City, the net cost of recycling a ton of trash is now $300 more than it would cost to bury the trash instead. That adds up to millions of extra dollars per year — about half the budget of the parks department — that New Yorkers are spending for the privilege of recycling. That money could buy far more valuable benefits, including more significant reductions in greenhouse emissions.
So what is a socially conscious, sensible person to do?
It would be much simpler and more effective to impose the equivalent of a carbon tax on garbage, as Thomas C. Kinnaman has proposed after conducting what is probably the most thorough comparison of the social costs of recycling, landfilling and incineration. Dr. Kinnaman, an economist at Bucknell University, considered everything from environmental damage to the pleasure that some people take in recycling (the “warm glow” that makes them willing to pay extra to do it).
He concludes that the social good would be optimized by subsidizing the recycling of some metals, and by imposing a $15 tax on each ton of trash that goes to the landfill. That tax would offset the environmental costs, chiefly the greenhouse impact, and allow each municipality to make a guilt-free choice based on local economics and its citizens’ wishes. The result, Dr. Kinnaman predicts, would be a lot less recycling than there is today.
Then why do so many public officials keep vowing to do more of it? Special-interest politics is one reason — pressure from green groups — but it’s also because recycling intuitively appeals to many voters: It makes people feel virtuous, especially affluent people who feel guilty about their enormous environmental footprint. It is less an ethical activity than a religious ritual, like the ones performed by Catholics to obtain indulgences for their sins.
Religious rituals don’t need any practical justification for the believers who perform them voluntarily. But many recyclers want more than just the freedom to practice their religion. They want to make these rituals mandatory for everyone else, too, with stiff fines for sinners who don’t sort properly. Seattle has become so aggressive that the city is being sued by residents who maintain that the inspectors rooting through their trash are violating their constitutional right to privacy.

For the full commentary, see:
JOHN TIERNEY. “The Reign of Recycling.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., OCT. 4, 2015): 1 & 4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date OCT. 3, 2015.)

The Kinnaman paper mentioned above, is:
Kinnaman, Thomas C., Takayoshi Shinkuma, and Masashi Yamamoto. “The Socially Optimal Recycling Rate: Evidence from Japan.” Journal of Environmental Economics & Management 68, no. 1 (July 2014): 54-70.

Seven Times More Trees in World than Previous Estimate

(p. A9) There are slightly more than three trillion trees in the world, a figure that dwarfs previous estimates, according to the most comprehensive census yet of global forestation.
Using satellite imagery as well as ground-based measurements from around the world, a team led by researchers at Yale University created the first globally comprehensive map of tree density. Their findings were published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.
A previous study that drew on satellite imagery estimated that the total number of trees was about 400 billion. The new estimate of 3.04 trillion is multiple times that number, bringing the ratio of trees per person to 422 to 1.
. . .
The map was generated using 429,775 ground-based measurements in more than 50 countries, collected from a variety of sources, including the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, the National Forest Inventory and several peer-reviewed studies, said Henry Glick, co-director of the Ucross High Plains Stewardship Initiative, a research program within the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.
The effort paired existing tree-count data, in which a person either counted or estimated the number of trees in a given area, with environmental characteristics such as temperature and elevation. This enabled them to get a more accurate count than the rough forest-cover estimates via satellite. To fill in the gaps where there were no field measurements, they made estimates based on tree-density trends in regions with similar environmental characteristics, Mr. Glick said.

For the full story, see:
MARK ARMAO. “World Has Many More Trees Than Previously Thought, New Report Says.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., Sept. 3, 2015): A9.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the title “World Has Many More Trees Than Previously Thought, New Report Says.”)

Obama’s Law Professor Accuses Feds of “Burning the Constitution” on the Environment

(p. A19) LAURENCE H. TRIBE, the liberal icon and legal scholar, has grabbed headlines in recent weeks for publicly attacking President Obama’s signature climate change initiative — the Clean Power Plan — which would regulate carbon emissions from power plants. He was retained as an independent expert by Peabody Energy, the world’s largest private-sector coal company, and is representing it in a lawsuit that seeks to invalidate the plan.
Professor Tribe represented Al Gore in Bush v. Gore and taught the president constitutional law at Harvard (and later served in his administration). Now he is arguing passionately that Mr. Obama’s plan is unconstitutional, using language more at home on Twitter and the Fox News ticker than in a courtroom.
In a House of Representatives hearing last week, he compared the plan, which would most likely lead to the closing of many old coal-fired power plants, to “burning the Constitution.”

For the full commentary, see:
RICHARD L. REVESZ. “An Obama Friend Turns Foe on Coal.” The New York Times (Thurs., MARCH 26, 2015): A19.

Those Who Use “Consensus” Argument on Global Warming, Should Endorse Genetically Modified Food

(p. B3) NAIROBI, Kenya — Mohammed Rahman doesn’t know it yet, but his small farm in central Bangladesh is globally significant. Mr. Rahman, a smallholder farmer in Krishnapur, about 60 miles northwest of the capital, Dhaka, grows eggplant on his meager acre of waterlogged land.
As we squatted in the muddy field, examining the lush green foliage and shiny purple fruits, he explained how, for the first time this season, he had been able to stop using pesticides. This was thanks to a new pest-resistant variety of eggplant supplied by the government-run Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute.
Despite a recent hailstorm, the weather had been kind, and the new crop flourished. Productivity nearly doubled. Mr. Rahman had already harvested the small plot 10 times, he said, and sold the brinjal (eggplant’s name in the region) labeled “insecticide free” at a small premium in the local market. Now, with increased profits, he looked forward to being able to lift his family further out of poverty. I could see why this was so urgent: Half a dozen shirtless kids gathered around, clamoring for attention. They all looked stunted by malnutrition.
. . .
I, . . . , was once in [the] . . . activist camp. A lifelong environmentalist, I opposed genetically modified foods in the past. Fifteen years ago, I even participated in vandalizing field trials in Britain. Then I changed my mind.
After writing two books on the science of climate change, I decided I could no longer continue taking a pro-science position on global warming and an anti-science position on G.M.O.s.
There is an equivalent level of scientific consensus on both issues, I realized, that climate change is real and genetically modified foods are safe. I could not defend the expert consensus on one issue while opposing it on the other.

For the full commentary, see:
MARK LYNAS. “How I Got Converted to G.M.O. Food.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., APRIL 26, 2015): 5.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed word, added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date APRIL 24, 2015.)

“Plunged Back into a Pre-Industrial Hell”

(p. B1) If you drive a car, or use modern medicine, or believe in man’s right to economic progress, then according to Alex Epstein you should be grateful–more than grateful. In “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels” the author, an energy advocate and founder of a for-profit think tank called the Center for Industrial Progress, suggests that if all you had to rely on were the good intentions of environmentalists, you would be soon plunged back into a pre-industrial hell. Life expectancy would plummet, climate-related deaths would soar, and the only way that Timberland and Whole Foods could ship their environmentally friendly clothing and food would be by mule. “Being forced to rely on solar, wind, and biofuels would be a horror beyond anything we can imagine,” writes Mr. Epstein, “as a civilization that runs on cheap, plentiful, reliable energy would see its machines dead, its productivity destroyed, its resources disappearing.”

For the full review, see:
PHILIP DELVES BROUGHTON. “BOOKSHELF; Go Ahead, Fill ‘Er Up; Renouncing oil and its byproducts would plunge civilization into a pre-industrial hell–a fact developing countries keenly realize.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., Dec. 2, 2014): A15.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Dec. 1, 2014, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; Making ‘The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels’; Renouncing oil and its byproducts would plunge civilization into a pre-industrial hell–a fact developing countries keenly realize.”)

The book praised in the review is:
Epstein, Alex. The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels. New York: Portfolio, 2014.

War Improves Air Quality by Reducing Fossil Fuel Consumption

(p. A4) A paper published on Friday [September 25, 2015] in the journal Science Advances analyzed satellite data from observations of major cities in the Middle East and found that measurements of nitrogen oxides in the air around those cities provided insights into the effects of war, civil unrest and other crises.
Nitrogen dioxide, a byproduct of the burning of fossil fuels, is part of the chemical reactions that produce ozone and smog. Nitrogen oxides are often used by scientists as an indicator of economic activity and of the effectiveness of pollution-control measures.
From 2005 to 2010, the Middle East had some of the world’s fastest-growing levels of polluting emissions, in step with economic development. According to the paper, however, in recent years many of the cities in the region showed a rapid decline in levels of nitrogen oxides, while levels continued to rise elsewhere in the world.

For the full story, see:
JOHN SCHWARTZ. “Study Finds Surprising Byproduct of Middle Eastern Conflicts: Cleaner Air.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., AUG. 22, 2015): A4.
(Note: bracketed date added; the print version had the journal simply as Science.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date AUG. 21, 2015.)

Entrepreneurs Creating Healthy, Tasty Meat, Without Killing Animals

(p. B2) “The next couple of years will be exciting ones,” says Joseph D. Puglisi, a Stanford University professor of structural biology who is working on meat alternatives. “We can use a broad range of plant protein sources and create a palette of textures and tastes — for example, jerky, cured meats, sausage, pork.”
“The true challenge will be to recreate more complex pieces of meat that are the pinnacle of the meat industry,” he added. “I believe that plausible, good-tasting steaks and pork loins are only a matter of time.”
Puglisi is advising Beyond Meat, a start-up that is a leader in the field, with investments from Bill Gates and both Biz Stone and Ev Williams of Twitter fame, not to mention Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the venture capital firm that backed Google and Amazon. Beyond Meat says its sales are doubling each year.
“We’re really focused on the mainstream,” said Ethan Brown, the founder of Beyond Meat, over a lunch of fake chili, meatballs and hamburgers.
. . .
“We want to create the next great American meat company,” Brown says. “That’s the dream.”
. . .
The mainstream food industry isn’t saying much publicly. But recently released documents from the American Egg Board, a quasi-governmental body, show it regarded Hampton Creek’s egg-free “Just Mayo” spread as a “major threat.” In one internal email, an Egg Board executive jokingly suggests hiring a hit man to deal with Hampton Creek.
. . .
. . . if I can still enjoy a juicy burger now and then, while boosting my health, helping the environment and avoiding the brutalizing of farm animals, hey, I’m in!

For the full commentary, see:
Nicholas Kristof. “The (Fake) Meat Revolution.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., SEPT. 20, 2015): 11.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date SEPT. 19, 2015.)

New Evidence Says Scientists Must “Start from Scratch” on Computer Weather Models

PlutoArmosphere2015-08-16.jpg“An image of Pluto’s atmosphere, backlit by the sun, captured by the New Horizons spacecraft as it zipped past the planet.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A13) Confounding expectations, Pluto’s atmosphere has actually thickened over the last 26 years, and many planetary scientists changed their minds. Maybe the atmosphere would persist throughout Pluto’s 248-year orbit, they speculated.

Now the story appears to be changing again. New Horizons obtained a snapshot of the structure of the atmosphere by looking at distortions in radio signals sent from Earth passing through Pluto’s atmosphere.
What the new measurement “seems to have detected is a potential for the first stages of that collapse just as New Horizons arrived,” Dr. Stern said. “It would be an amazing coincidence, but there are some on our team who would say, ‘I told you so.’ ”
Even if the atmosphere is collapsing, though, the view from the night side of Pluto is, at present, spectacularly hazy. A photograph showing a silhouette of Pluto surrounded by a ring of sunlight “almost brought tears” to the atmospheric scientists, Dr. Summers said, showing sunlight scattered by small particles of haze up to 100 miles above the surface.
“This is our first peek at weather in Pluto’s atmosphere,” he said.
Computer models had suggested that the haze would float within 20 miles of the surface, where temperatures are about minus 390 degrees Fahrenheit. Instead, the haze particles formed higher, 30 to 50 miles up, where temperatures are balmier, around minus 270.
“We’re having to start from scratch to understand what we thought we knew about the atmosphere,” Dr. Summers said.

For the full story, see:
KENNETH CHANG. “Pluto’s Atmosphere Is Thinner Than Expected, but Still Looks Hazy.” The New York Times (Sat., JULY 25, 2015): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date JULY 24, 2015.)

Increasing Recalls of Organic Food Due to Bacterial Contamination

(p. B3) New data collected by Stericycle, a company that handles recalls for businesses, shows a sharp jump in the number of recalls of organic food products.
Organic food products accounted for 7 percent of all food units recalled so far this year, compared with 2 percent of those recalled last year, according to data from the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Agriculture that Stericycle uses to compile its quarterly report on recalls.
In 2012 and 2013, only 1 percent of total units of food recalled were organic.
Kevin Pollack, a vice president at Stericycle, said the growing consumer and corporate demand for organic ingredients was at least partly responsible for the increase.
“What’s striking is that since 2012, all organic recalls have been driven by bacterial contamination, like salmonella, listeria and hepatitis A, rather than a problem with a label,” Mr. Pollack said. “This is a fairly serious and really important issue because a lot of consumers just aren’t aware of it.”

For the full story, see:
STEPHANIE STROM. “Private Analysis Shows a Sharp Increase in the Number of Organic Food Recalls.” The New York Times (Fri., Aug. 21, 2015): B3.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date AUG. 20, 2015, and has the title “Recalls of Organic Food on the Rise, Report Says.” The last paragraph quoted above differs in the print and online versions; the version quoted is the print version. The online version of the paragraph is: “According to Stericycle, 87 percent of organic recalls since 2012 were for bacterial contamination, like salmonella and listeria, rather than a problem with a label. “This is a fairly serious and really important issue because a lot of consumers just aren’t aware of it,” Mr. Pollack said.”)