Saturday, November 14, 2009

Climate Progress

Climate Progress


Should electric cars be intentionally made noisier?

Posted: 12 Nov 2009 09:17 AM PST

This is a guest post by Chelsea Sexton, my friend and costar of the 2006 documentary film "Who Killed the Electric Car?"  At a young age, Chelsea began working for GM marketing their ill-fated electric car, the EV1.  She even married an EV1 service technician!  Now she serves as the Executive Director of Plug In America (full bio here).  Her first guest post was, "So what is it like to actually drive the Chevy Volt plug in hybrid electric car?").  This post was first published on her blog.  The picture is of Fisker Karma's artificial sound-emitting bumper speakers.

Fisker Karma's artificial sound-emitting bumper speakers

For the most part, the electric vehicle world is palpably buzzing with excitement of cars to come — and after some seriously dark years, there is much to look forward to. The collective conversation has finally shifted from "if" to "how", but even on easier "how" points, we can't seem to get out of our own way — which really doesn't bode well for the hard stuff.

Case in point is a newly-emerging issue over the silence of hybrids and electric cars. In the EV generation of the 1990's, their comparative lack of noise was a selling point. Now, according to some, it's a threat to life itself.

Advocacy organizations and hyper news reports are forming a chorus with a fairly shrill tune: "Electric cars are going to kill blind people!" Policymakers are now considering a minimum noise requirement for vehicles; worse, automakers are doing it voluntarily. In due time, plug-ins stand to be a favorite domain of the SEMA crowd, so I'm not referring to the folks who want to trick out their EV as Kitt to their David Hasselhoff. It's in the proposed custom to add constant noise to all hybrids and plug-in vehicles that we've collectively lost the plot.

Pedestrian safety is obviously not an unfair consideration, though the amount of spontaneous momentum it's received lately raises eyebrows.  Realistically, the blind community would likely be the least affected group, compared to the number of sighted pedestrians who run around with iPods connected to noise-blocking earphones or on cell phones (often all but screaming into them to be heard over traffic noise, adding to the communal din), or who simply aren't paying as much attention as we should. And, there is experience to draw upon … in addition to the EVs deployed to date, we have a decade of experience with hybrids, also electrically driven at low speeds. Are Prii littering crosswalks and parking lots with fallen bi-peds and I'm just out of touch?

Either way, we've taken a question that was asked and answered years ago and are turning it into an industry imperative. Except when at a dead stop — when pedestrians of all sorts are reasonably safe, plug-in vehicles are not silent. Many are quiet (though, with today's insulation and sound-deadening measures, so are many gas cars) but they still have some amount of motor whine, electronic humming, fans, coolant pumps, tire noise, etc. Plug-in hybrids may also have gasoline engines running. Yet even with these "features", GM engineers thought of and addressed the issue years ago:  Every EV1 came equipped with a wonkily-named "pedestrian alert alarm". At low speeds, drivers could engage an electronic chirp/headlight flash to warn pedestrians, as needed, that the car was approaching- loud enough to get attention, but not nearly as startling as the regular horn. Drivers loved it- the car made extra noise only in the moments it mattered. Those on foot were protected- the proverbial "win-win". So why are we trying to make what was so simply solved a dozen years ago so complicated today?

Electric vehicles were once pervertedly argued to be a social justice issue based on the idea that only wealthier folks were able to afford the early ones, so their communities would have the air-quality benefits. In response, S. David Freeman has incredulously noted that "air doesn't know a boundary between Brentwood and South LA". However, plug-ins could in fact be a tool in the social justice box for their lower noise profile in addition to lack of tailpipe. The goal shouldn't be to make them louder but to aim at sucking decibels from all vehicles. Yes, I know that performance vehicle enthusiasts would have me strung up (I do grok that many think thrust is as much an aural experience as a visceral one), but who would argue that mom's minivan is deficient without a throaty internal combustion growl? Cleaner, quieter transport means higher property values in often economically depressed neighborhoods adjacent to freeways and high-traffic roadways, to say nothing of the health of the families living there and public dollars saved from not building sound walls and other noise abatement measures. Electric drive technology has attendant benefits beyond the obvious environmental and energy concerns that we haven't begun to analyze- but should, before we go adulterating it.

But (and it's a big one), none of this takes away from the most important- and most overlooked point:

THE PROPULSION SYSTEM IN A VEHICLE DOES NOT ABSOLVE THE DRIVER OF THE RESPONSIBILITY NOT TO HIT SOMEONE.

More simply said, if you can't avoid hitting people you shouldn't be driving a vehicle of any kind. In all of the angst over this issue, it bears repeating. Now can we please — pretty please — get back to the actual (and not insignificant) work of putting cars on the road?

Related Posts:

Boreal Forests: The Carbon the World Forgot

Posted: 12 Nov 2009 05:09 AM PST

This is a guest post from David Childs with The International Boreal Conservation Campaign. For terrific graphics and images, click here.

When we think about forests and climate change, we tend to think about tropical forests. This is not without undue reason – some of the highest rates of deforestation are happening in Central and South America, Africa, and Asia Pacific. But one source of carbon, which happens to be the world's largest terrestrial storehouse of carbon, has been mostly overlooked in international climate discussions to date. I'm talking, of course, about the boreal forest.

The global boreal forest circles the northern portion of our globe, carefully edging along the southern arctic through Russia, Scandinavia, Canada, and Alaska. A report out today by the Canadian Boreal Initiative and Boreal Songbird Initiative states that the boreal forest stores as much as 703 billion tons of carbon in its trees, peatlands, and soils – this amounts to nearly twice the storage capacity per unit area as tropical forests.

So what makes these numbers so high? The main difference with boreal forests is that a significant portion of its carbon is stored below vegetation level whereas tropical forests tend to store the majority of their carbon in the trees and plants themselves. Because boreal forests reside in much colder climates, much of the carbon stored in its vegetation never fully decomposes and is gradually pushed into thick layers of peat and permafrost to be stored for thousands of years.

Oscarlake

The report also argues that the intactness of the boreal forest will be vital in coming years for species adapting to the effects of global warming.  A report earlier this year by the Audubon Society found that many North American birds have shifted their wintering ranges further north over the past century as a result of climate change. Species like the Woodland Caribou have seen drastic declines in numbers in recent years due to a combination of climate change and habitat destruction. Maintaining healthy, intact ecosystems for these species battling with changing environments will be crucial for their long-term viability.

While rates of deforestation in boreal forests tend to be lower than tropical forests, this is no cause for indifference. Around 30% of Canada's Boreal Forest has been designated for logging, and this number becomes much higher when including mining and oil and gas leases.  A recent report by Global Forest Watch Canada (link 3) found that the oil extraction technique of strip-mining large underground deposits of bitumen (often called 'tar sands' due to its thick texture prior to being separated from clays and soils) has devastated a landscape in Alberta of 686 km2, holding up to 21 million tons of carbon. Approved and proposed mining projects account for another 29.6 million tons of biotic carbon, and under a full development scenario of surface and insitu bitumen in the region, it has been estimated that 238 million tons of carbon would be released from tar sands industrial development.

The co-benefits of climate change mitigation and adaptation for species make the boreal forest an ideal place for large-scale conservation. Some success has been achieved at domestic levels, but the international push for boreal conservation has been slow to wake up. Global leaders should not halt their focus on tropical forests in favor of boreal forests, but rather adopt the boreal forest as the next frontier for climate-focused forest conservation.

Related Posts:

Under pressure from Tea Party activists, Charleston GOP censures Lindsey Graham for bipartisanship effort to preserve our national security

Posted: 12 Nov 2009 04:51 AM PST

First Lindsey Graham (R-SC) announced his breakthrough Senate climate partnership with John Kerry (D-MA).  Then Teabaggers tried to "flush" Graham out of GOP, calling him "traitor" and "RINO" and "wussypants, girly-man, half-a-sissy." Graham responded, "We're not going to be the party of angry white guys."  But the Tea Party activists weren't done, as this Think Progress repost makes clear.

On Monday, the Charleston County Republican Party's executive committee "took the unusual step" of officially censuring Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). The local GOP committee admonished Graham for stepping across party lines to work with Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) on a bipartisan clean energy bill and other pieces of legislation. The censure stated that Graham's "bipartisanship continues to weaken the Republican brand and tarnish the ideals of freedom."

Part of the fury from the right against Graham is being spurred by the oil and coal industry. The oil company front group "American Energy Alliance" has blanketed South Carolina with ads smearing Graham for seeking to address climate change.

The pressure against Graham has also stemmed from his criticism of hate radio and Fox News host Glenn Beck. "Only in America can you make that much money crying," said Graham, mocking Beck in early October. Beck has responded with a slime campaign against Graham that he typically reserves for liberals. The leader of the Charleston Republican Party, Lin Bennett, is also a member of Glenn Beck's 9/12 organization in South Carolina. According to its website, the Charleston GOP claims to work closely with tea party groups and Beck's 9/12 activists in selecting its favored candidates.

Will Graham be able to stand up to the angry backlash being cultivated by far right voices and entrenched corporations interests? At a Graham town hall in Greenville last month, activist Harry Kimball of "RINO HUNT" protested by constructing a display that portrayed Graham, as well as other GOP moderates, being flushed down a toilet:

KIMBALL: This is for every RINO who has failed to represent us. [...] [the toilet represents] flushing them, flushing them.

Watch it:

Graham's spokesman defended his boss to reporters yesterday, claiming the senator has a "90 percent conservative voting record." Unfortunately for Graham, that may not prevent him from being "Scozzafavaed."

In Beaufort, South Carolina, a crowd of tea party activists displayed signs which "bore messages such as 'downsize D.C.' and 'Rush and Glenn for president' — an apparent allusion to political talk show hosts Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck."

Related Posts:

Why solar energy trumps coal power: Exclusive new Caldeira analysis explains "the burning of organic carbon warms the Earth about 100,000 times more from climate effects than it does through the release of chemical energy in combustion."

Posted: 11 Nov 2009 03:06 PM PST

100k small

The color of solar cells — and their short energy payback — are trivial factors when considering the huge climate benefit they provide in avoiding the release of CO2 from the combustion of fossil fuels.

That was a central point I made when I broke the story on the error-riddled book Superfreakonomics.  By failing to retract the many glaring errors I pointed out in my original post weeks ago — and instead blowing an aerosol smokescreen with false claims that Caldeira did not say the book misrepresented his views (see here) — Levitt brought upon himself the detailed and devastating takedown by Geophysicist Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, which focused on the same exact paragraph in the book that I debunked:

"A lot of the things that people say would be good things probably aren't," Myrhvold says.  As an example he points to solar power.  "The problem with solar cells is that they're black, because they are designed to absorb light from the sun. But only about 12% gets turned into electricity, and the rest is reradiated as heat — which contributed to global warming."

In my post, I noted that there were three and a half major howlers in this one tiny paragraph, that California Energy Commissioner Art Rosenfeld called this "patent nonsense" when I read it to him, and that a former lead engineer at Princeton Plasma Physics Lab had emailed me to point out that climatologist Ken Caldeira, of all people, had an analysis showing it was trivial:

As Ken Caldeira so grippingly points out (and I tried to make graphically clear in my Stanford talk last year), each molecule of CO2 released thermal energy when it was formed — that's why we formed it.  In the case of electricity generation, about 1/3 of its thermal energy went out a wire as electric power, the rest was released promptly as waste heat.  But each molecule of CO2, during its subsequent lifetime in the atmosphere, traps 100,000 times more heat than was released during its formation.

A hundred thousand is a big number.  It means that running a handheld electric hairdryer on US grid electricity delivers a planet-warming punch comparable to [the heat given off by] two Boeing 747s operating at full takeoff power for the same time period.  The warming is delivered over time, not promptly, but that don't matter; the planetary heating is accrued, the accountants would say, the moment you hit the switch.

And so we have the graphic above.

Several people asked me for the analysis that derived the factor of 100,000.  Climatologist Ken Caldeira was kind enough to share it with me and give me authority to post it.  It is a previously-unpublished joint analysis by Caldeira and NYU's Martin Hoffert titled, "Warming from fossil fuels," which is now posted here.  The abstract reads:

Caldeira abstract

Put another way, as Caldeira and Hoffert write in their final paragraph:

In other words, when we burn carbon and release CO2 to the atmosphere, only 0.001% of the total warming comes directly from the release of chemical energy during burning. The remaining 99.999% of the warming is associated with the trapping of outgoing longwave radiation by that CO2 in the atmosphere.

Thus the color of the solar cells or the heat they reradiate is utterly trivial.  What matters is that they replace the burning of fossil fuels and prevent the fossil carbon from ever being released.  As an aside, Pierrehumbert notes that coal plants also give off massive amounts of waste heat because they are so inefficient, so "That makes the waste heat of solar cells vs. coal basically a wash," even ignoring this factor of 100,000.

Levitt and Dubner need to retract that entire paragraph, much as they have agreed to correct their claim that Caldeira believes "carbon dioxide is not the right villain" in future editions.

Because they failed to quickly own up to the egregious mistakes in that one paragraph, they left themselves open to Pierrehumbert writing his "An open letter to Steve Levitt," accusing Levitt of "academic malpractice":

So, the bottom line here is that the heat-trapping effect of CO2 is the 800-pound gorilla in climate change. In comparison, waste heat is a trivial contribution to global warming whether the waste heat comes from solar cells or from fossil fuels. Moreover, the incremental waste heat from switching from coal to solar is an even more trivial number, even if you allow for some improvement in the efficiency of coal-fired power plants and ignore any possible improvements in the efficiency of solar cells. So: trivial,trivial trivial. Simple, isn't it?

…  A more substantive (though in the end almost equally trivial) issue is the carbon emitted in the course of manufacturing solar cells, but that is not the matter at hand here. The point here is that really simple arithmetic, which you could not be bothered to do, would have been enough to tell you that the claim that the blackness of solar cells makes solar energy pointless is complete and utter nonsense. I don't think you would have accepted such laziness and sloppiness in a term paper from one of your students, so why do you accept it from yourself? What does the failure to do such basic thinking with numbers say about the extent to which anything you write can be trusted? How do you think it reflects on the profession of economics when a member of that profession — somebody who that profession seems to esteem highly — publicly and noisily shows that he cannot be bothered to do simple arithmetic and elementary background reading? Not even for a subject of such paramount importance as global warming.

And it's not as if the "black solar cell" gaffe was the only bit of academic malpractice in your book….

Levitt first tried to respond to my debunking of that paragraph by letting Myhrvold reply.  But that backfired when Myhrvold repudiated the core argument of the chapter!  Myhrvold's "defense" was so lame that Berkeley economist Brad Delong posted on his blog an extensive debunking of it, written by Nicholas Weaver, which ends with perhaps the best one-sentence judgment on the book and its key source that I've seen so far:

… what is happening is I have to conclude that anything Myhrvold says has to be assumed to be false until proven otherwise, and by unquestioningly accepting his assumptions, anything Drubner and Levitt say may need to be taken the same way.

On October 30, Levitt replied directly to Pierrehumbert on RealClimate with another attempted aerosol smokescreen:

Raymond,

I enjoyed your intentional misreading of my chapter on global warming! I think it has really contributed to moving towards a solution to these important problems.

Myrhvold's *main* point was about the energy required to produce the solar cells, not the radiated heat.  He has expanded on it here:

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/ 2009/ 10/ 20/ are-solar-panels-really-black-and-what-does-that-have-to-do-with-the-climate-debate/

His view is simply that solar panels are not a *short-run* solution to cooling the planet. I doubt you could disagree with that, given the arguments you make in your own blog post.

So he, and we, thought it made sense to explore some solutions that DO cool the earth in the short-run.

That doesn't mean you don't work on long run solutions as well.

I'm not sure why that is blasphemy.

Steve Levitt

As anyone can see, it is not an "intentional misreading."  Quite the reverse.  Just go to the now-searchable Superfreakonomics on Amazon and put "reradiated" into the search engine.  Pierrehumbert replied directly:

Steve, glad to see you're reading this.

Something I have found rather bizarre about your responses to the criticisms of your climate chapter is the way you continually try to change history about what you actually wrote, which is plainly there for anybody to see. I found it so unbelievable that you included the "black solar cell" meme when I first heard it that I actually went over to Borders and stood there and intentionally read (not misread) the chapter to see if it was true. Anybody reading what you wrote would never, ever guess that the waste heat effect was so trivial unless they already knew the subject from some other source. And as for the "short term vs. long term" issue, here's something to chew on: if you instantaneously built a solar array big enough to meet the entire world electricity demand, you would only have to wait something under a year before the avoided CO2 radiative forcing paid back the waste heat effect.

The payback time for recouping the carbon cost of manufacturing solar cells is somewhat longer, but still substantially less than the lifetime of the solar cells — and coming down as technology improves. So, there is really no sensible construction I can put on your statement.

Yes, lots of people couldn't believe the book was as bad as I had asserted — especially since the publisher made me take down PDF of the chapter I had posted and also asked Amazon to end the searchability, so no one could see the contents until the book was actually out.  But now everyone can see it was as error-riddled as I said, and that every single statement I made in the original post was accurate.

I'll address the energy payback argument further in a later post.

That makes the waste heat of solar cells vs. coal basically a wash,

Berlin '89: When the Impossible Became Real

Posted: 11 Nov 2009 01:10 PM PST

http://library.msstate.edu/libguidefiles/phillips/Berlin%20Wall%20Freedom.jpg

Sometimes change can happen much faster than people expect.  If we pass a domestic climate bill, as Sen. Baucus (D-MT) and other key swing Senators now believe is likely, and that enables an international climate deal, then I do think that will usher in a much more rapid decarbonization than most people expect.  Continuing the Veterans Day theme, I'm going to repost this Huffpost piece from my friend Joe Cirincione, President of Ploughshares Fund, about a signature event in the end of the Cold War.

I was in Berlin 20 years ago this week. I saw the impossible first-hand: the people of Germany taking down the Wall.

I was then working on the professional staff of the House Armed Services Committee. We were on a staff tour of NATO military bases and arrived in Berlin during this critical week by pure coincidence. When our delegation took off from Andrews Air Force base outside of Washington the Warsaw Pact was alive and apparently formidable. By the time we landed in Europe, it was falling apart.

It is amazing how quickly structures, paradigms, and ideologies that experts believe unchangeable can change. Forces can build undetected for decades, then explode in rapid, transformational movement.

I arrived in Berlin a couple of days after November 9. I was one of the last people to walk through the famous Checkpoint Charlie border crossing. When I passed through in the morning, East German guards were still checking passports. When I strolled back down Unter den Linden, after having a scotch with some Cubans in an East Berlin bar, marveling at the Ishtar Gate from Babylon in the Pergamon Museum, examining World War II bullet holes still peppering some buildings, and joining a student protest over required courses in Marxism-Leninism, the guards were gone. The checkpoint was open for free passage in both directions. As far as I know it never re-opened. Today, it is a tourist attraction.

At a German NATO base we got the standard briefing on NATO military strategy. But when the map went up showing how NATO forces would react to an offensive lead by East German tank divisions, we just looked at each other. We asked the general briefing us what the strategy was now, that the Eastern European forces would not be part of a Soviet offensive. He couldn't answer. We didn't know.

It took years for the West to understand that the events of 1989 were not a fraud or a feint. David Hoffman describes in this new book, The Dead Hand, how President George H.W. Bush "lost" the year 1989.

The fall of the wall was a European earthquake, but in Washington and Moscow, miscommunication and suspicion meant the leaders were badly out of sync. While Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was eager to move on cutting nuclear arsenals, President George H.W. Bush was cautious and uncertain, and a promising moment slipped away.

We cannot let another policy moment slip away. Twenty years after, we are at another historic point, ripe with transformational possibility. Domestically, we see it in issues like health care. Internationally, we see it in potentially profound changes in nuclear forces and policies, and in the very structure of global relations.

The transformation will be resisted. The forces of reaction are strong, as they were in 1989, arguing against change, clinging to the tired policies and weapons of the past. They tell us now, as they did before November 9, that change is impossible, that we are naïve to question the Cold War weapons and strategies, that diplomacy is appeasement, that they are the realists and we, the idealists.

But I have seen the impossible happen. I have a chunk of the wall in my bookcase to prove it. I have seen what the determined action of millions of people can do. I have seen decades of history change in days. These moments are not flukes; they are more the norm than we acknowledge.

We are in such a moment now. We must, like the Berliners of 1989, make the most of it.