I was reading this morning about Tom Selleck (for those of you unfamiliar with any reasons why anyone would still care about Tom Selleck some seventeen years after ‘Magnum, P.I.’ went off the air, he’s been in the news for water theft in California) and I found myself thinking that if you were a writer of fiction, you could not have created a more unintentional metaphor for the global warming crisis than California.

It’s the perfect recipe for an allegory. You have a marginal environment that is slowly sliding into catastrophic uninhabitability (and of course, unspoken in your novel is the idea that it’s doing so primarily because of the macrocosmic problem that you’re replicating in microcosm here, which is always nice thematically) and a cast of characters who are so wealthy, so powerful, so utterly solipsistic that they’re simply unable to adapt to the changes because it involves them being told “no” and they don’t understand what it means anymore. And so droughts and wildfires gradually become endemic, turning into the new status quo, but the movie stars and big-name agents and Hollywood producers don’t understand why they have to ration their water just like the little people. Surely all that money counts for something, doesn’t it? Surely they’re just purchasing a commodity, and as long as they can afford the premium that results from high demand and limited supply, they should be allowed to use as much as they want however they see fit?

Of course, we haven’t gotten to the third act yet. As much as it’s entertaining to watch Tom Selleck publicly humiliated and forced to cough up undisclosed sums of money, I don’t think we can really call that a “climax” in a narrative sense. Maybe we’ll get a scene where L.A. goes up in flames, all the Hollywood mansions consumed by wildfire as Ariana Grande asks her PA to “do something about this”. Or maybe we’ll get a proper trial scene, not with Tom Selleck but with a big-name, bankable movie star in the role of water thief like…oh, gosh. We could go with the “poetic justice” angle and put Schwarzenegger in there, as a member of the Republican party whose stance on global warming is to stick their fingers in their ears and shout, “LA-LA-LA, I’M NOT LISTENING!” (As well as the former governor of California, and not a proponent of environmentalism or water rationing at the time.) Or you could go the “dramatic irony” route, and stick in someone like Sean Penn to show that sometimes people talk the talk but aren’t willing to walk the walk. Or hey, you could go all “meta” and cast Kevin Costner. Either way, it’d have to end with jail time.

But ideally, our “California” story should make you think. Watching people casually ignore the slow death of their home state, simply because they can’t imagine anything really bad that money won’t make go away, should maybe make people think about what’s happening in our wider world. Because the only difference between Tom Selleck and the Koch brothers is one of scale.

Neil Reynolds is probably the Globe and Mail’s premier hack columnist: your bog-standard anti-Keynesian upper class white guy with a knack for pretentious phrasing oft combined with folksy imagery. The Globe generally doesn’t have a lot of gratituously pointless writers on its staff, so presumably Reynolds fulfills a quota; either that or he couldn’t get a job with Sun Media.

Consider the following passage:

But people adapt to changes in climate. In the Dirty Thirties, people delivered blocks of ice to the poor, slept in basements, wore wet headbands under their hats, went to air-conditioned movies – and took it easy.

This is really a masterpiece of twaddle. In the Thirties, see, there were hot summers! But people of the time (who, by virtue of being older and more self-reliant than the current spoiled generation, were better people) “adapted” by sleeping in basements and wearing wet headbands beneath their hats. If this were a “of times gone past” sort of column, this hokum would be forgivable if not laudable. But it’s not: this is the basis for Reynolds’ entire column, wherein he explains that global warming isn’t a big deal because the changes are very small and anyways we’ll just adapt to it. We will, as our forefathers before us, sleep in the basement and therefore global warming is really not a bother at all!

This sort of fatalistic non-denial denialism is nothing new for Reynolds: just a month past he was ponderously repeating the words of Robert Laughlin, a physicist with no actual climatology background, who informed us all that despite what we might believe, climate change will not destroy the Earth. Having managed to dispense of that straw man while glossing over the minor problem of mass extinctions and the not-really-comforting thought that just because we can’t blow up the planet with global warming doesn’t mean we can’t render ourselves extinct, Reynolds sat back, content being the Wise Man of Letters. Before that, he was explaining that Europe may experience some truly harsh winters in the coming years with a tiny little “not that this has anything to do with global warming but maybeeeee people will stop believing in it!” so as to appear reasonable. Reynolds doesn’t bother with low-class denials of basic scientific evidence; he’s too well-bred for such things. Instead, he goes for the “it’s really not a problem” form of denialism – denialism because it, like the more traditional form, exists to stand against the idea that, gosh, maybe we should do something about carbon emissions.

(Also, not particularly related to the subject matter at hand, but do consider this gem, wherein Reynolds discusses a 19th-century geologist’s study on coal supplies as if it was in any way relevant to anything whatsoever, as evidence of his ability to suggest that the inconsequential or irrelevant are in fact deeply consequential and relevant.)

Of course, the problem with this entire line of argument is that slight changes in temperature can do things much more bothersome than force you to sleep in the basement. For example, they can result in half of Russia being on fire. Or mass flooding rendering more than two million Pakistanis homeless.1

Now of course these instances aren’t necessarily climate-change related; there’s no way to definitively prove that one way or the other, and to do so would just be engaging in the reverse of “look how hard it just snowed so there’s no global warming” arguments that are definitively stupid. But what is true is that increases in temperatures make dangerous weather of this sort more likely to occur, just as a mass decrease in temperature might make glaciers marching across Europe more likely.2 Dangerous weather of this sort isn’t “adaptable.” It’s just expensive, and generally then requires federal expenditures to make life livable again for the affected populace, which of course is something Reynolds traditionally dislikes so you’d think he’d be on the “spend a little now to save a ton later” bandwagon, but shockingly this is not the case.

1. It is probably a good thing that they didn’t read Reynolds’ column beforehand, or they might have drowned in their basements. [↩]
2. Not that we have to worry about glaciers, what with them melting at record rates. [↩]

Well, it was inevitable: US politicians are using the recent blizzard in Washington DC as proof that global warming doesn’t exist. I’m going to pass over this for now, save to mention in passing the strong resemblance between climate change denialists and creationists in their tendency to seize on any evidence against the other position as being fatal while insisting that their position is valid despite the total lack of evidence for it.

No, what I’m more interested is in how the whole idea came about that unusually cold or stormy weather disproves climate change, and I think fundamentally it’s a matter of branding. The abortion debate is a good example of how choosing the right term to describe your position can be essential in framing the debate: who would want to be anti-life or anti-choice? In light of that it’s significant that in this issue, the denialists haven’t attempted to even come up with a name for their position, never mind reframing the debate. The fact that they’re perfectly happy with the terms the other side uses show just what a problem those terms are.

Let’s start with the most common name for the phenomenon, “global warming.” It’s easy to see why the term was first used: it’s a clear and accurate description of what’s happening, as temperatures gradually rise worldwide. The problem, as we’re now seeing, is that while that may be the overall trend, not everything that’s caused by global warming is going to result in warmer weather. Nor is it necessarily going to have a stronger effect than more local weather effects; in other words, you can still have a snowstorm while the Earth is getting warmer. But by calling it “global warming,” scientists and activists created the impression that the world will get warmer, point blank — which is why cynical politicians can now take advantage of a blizzard to score points on CNN. Another problem is that for many of us who live in cold climates, the notion of global warming sounds like a positive thing rather than a negative one, and the generally positive connotations of the word “warming” don’t help. (You’ve never heard of anyone being “warmed to death.”)

The main competitor to “global warming” has been simply “climate change,” but it’s easy to see why that didn’t catch on: it’s too vague, and at any rate sounds too neutral to be any kind of rallying cry. There was an attempt a few years ago to rebrand it as “global weirding,” to reflect the fact that rising temperatures will lead to more extreme weather, but this depends too much on already knowing the term “global warming,” and has the added disadvantage of sounding like a theory to explain the popularity of Lady Gaga.

What’s my suggestion? If it were up to me I would go with “catastrophic climate change,” which opens the gates wide enough to include all of the severe weather effects that may be caused by a rise in temperature and, more importantly, sounds like an unequivocally bad thing. Most likely, though, it’s too late: at this point we’re almost certainly stuck with “global warming”, and as many people are learning, it doesn’t matter how good your data is if you don’t brand it right.

Once again, Sarah Palin writes a column saying that the secret to American energy independence is drilling for oil.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the fact that Palin claims energy issues as her particular sphere of expertise just amazes me, and similarly it amazes me that nobody important bothers to point out that, on her professed area of expertise, she is a goddamned idiot.

To be fair, for quite possibly the first time ever, Palin actually includes a few numbers in her screed: specifically, domestic American petroleum consumption. Unfortunately, this does not get her a cookie, because if you’re going to talk numbers about consumption and then say “well we gots to drill more of them wells you betcha,” you need to link it to that other number, which is production.

The United States has an estimated 21 billion barrels of remaining uncollected oil reserves.1 Were it all to become suddenly available tomorrow, the USA’s consumption rate of 19.5 million barrels per day wouldn’t allow it to last long. This is because a consumption rate of 19.5 million barrels per day is also a consumption rate of 7.1 billion barrels per year. So basically, the United States has nearly three years’ worth of oil reserves handy at its current consumption rate.

Of course, that figure isn’t really that meaningful either, because there is still no magic straw given to us by a friendly genie2 that gets all the oil out. Oil wells do not show up overnight. Even if the United States government expedited the leasing process, the oil companies still have to drill exploratory wells, develop a production plan from that exploration, and then install production wells. That’s a six-to-nine-year process to reach basic production.

And even when you reach basic production, you don’t reach peak production that quickly any more, because all the easily drilled oil deposits are now empty. Oil is sometimes in the ground in a big single pool; the Ghawar field in Saudi Arabia, for example, was mostly a big-ass single pool. But the big-pool deposits are mostly gone, so you can’t just stick a well into the ground and get all the oil from a single field. What’s left in the ground at this point is the harder-to-reach stuff: far-offshore fields (which take more than six to nine years to successfully explore and drill, one might add) and land-based fields which are kind of like Styrofoam except instead of air pockets there are oil pockets. These do not produce oil at “traditional” production rates. It will be in the neighborhood of fifteen years before anybody sees more than a relative dribble.

And finally, unless Sarah Palin plans to nationalize the oil industry like some sort of socialist or something, that oil is just going to go onto the free market anyway, where all the other countries in the world – like, say, India and China – will compete for its purchase. And frankly, at this point they can more easily afford it than the United States can.

So to sum up: Sarah Palin’s “drill” plan involves ignoring how much oil is actually in the ground, how quickly it can be drilled, how easily it can be accessed, and the basic reality of the global oil market. And this is where she thinks she is an expert.

Dear Rachel Maddow: please, just take all of this, put your Rachel Maddow style on it, and do a five-minute segment. You can’t tell me you don’t want to make fun of Sarah Palin again. You would be lying if you said that.

1. CIA World Factbook, following from World Oil and Oil and Gas Journal. British Petroleum’s most recent publicly available statistical analysis – in 2007 – puts it at 30 billion, but most consider that an outlier. [↩]
2. Genies hate the Middle East for bottling them, so clearly they would be on America’s side. Well, if they existed, anyway. [↩]

I was going to make fun of Michael Lynch’s incredibly witless op-ed in the New York Times which boiled down to “despite the fact that absolutely everybody in the world says that peak oil is either upon us or nearly so, they are all wrong and in fact the entire world is made of oil, basically,” but then I found out that actual energy analysts had made fun of it for me.

– Fisheries may be near collapse, but shifting to sustainable fishing has allowed many fisheries to reverse course shockingly fast.

– The EESTOR will be in production, apparently, by 2010.

– And Nike stops using Amazonian leather in its shoes.

The Quitbull in her brand new Wall Street Journal Washington Post op-ed that she totally wroted herself:

There is no denying that as the world becomes more industrialized, we need to reform our energy policy and become less dependent on foreign energy sources. But the answer doesn’t lie in making energy scarcer and more expensive! Those who understand the issue know we can meet our energy needs and environmental challenges without destroying America’s economy.

Well, here’s the thing. Those who understand the energy issue – hell, those who look at it for more than five minutes – know that the central problem is that energy is getting scarcer and more expensive all by itself.

There just isn’t enough oil to go around. “Drill, baby, drill” aside, there’s no realistic way to keep oil production stable in even the short term, let alone increase it. We’re losing the equivalent of 400 wells every day; that’s how much oil production is dropping. New conventional sources like offshore deposits in Brazil are ridiculously hard – and expensive – to drill, and unconventional deposits like tar sands or shale basically need so much energy to make oil it’s a net deficit.

Natural gas? Canada has some of the largest natural gas reserves left in the world, and we estimate we have about 25 years’ worth left. Barring illness or sudden death, everybody reading this will likely live to see the end of large-scale natural gas production on the planet.

Now, the usual rejoinder is “oh yeah well COAL buddy.” But estimates of remaining coal supplies have shrunk every time they’ve been comprehensively studied because it turns out every chance people have gotten they’ve dramatically overestimated the amount of coal that’s actually left; at current levels of production we have 144 years of coal left. In 2000, we thought we had 277 years’ worth. And of course, that figure is only good for the amount of coal we’re digging up right now; if we dramatically increased production worldwide, say to replace all the oil we can’t drill any more, it would be more like 30 years’ worth.

(Ironically, it turns out that we probably have just exactly enough carbon-based fossil fuels left in the ground to completely fuck over our climate.)

Now, we essentially have two options. One is that we can do nothing and get fucked. Sarah Palin is a fan of this method, because there is plenty of evidence that she loves to A) do nothing and B) get fucked, but also because she is a notoriously stupid woman who doesn’t know shit about anything, least of all the actual scarcity upon which her state’s wealth is premised. The second option is increasing the cost of energy use, both because we need to condition people to use less energy (and more wisely), and because we need a lot of funds generated to create the new energy infrastructure we needed to start building twenty years ago. That’s the purpose of cap-and-trade (or a carbon tax, if you prefer).

The rest of the article is the usual Palin bullshit, but one claim in particular is worth mentioning:

The Americans hit hardest will be those already struggling to make ends meet. As the president eloquently puts it, their electricity bills will “necessarily skyrocket.” So much for not raising taxes on anyone making less than $250,000 a year.

It is worth noting that the Congressional Budget Office estimates that cap and trade will cost the average American household $175 per year – or about 47 cents a day. The CBO released this report less than two months ago; it’s not really something that someone who “understands the issue” should not know about.

I am generally a fan of the concept of “vertical farming,” IE building/converting skyscrapers into huge hydroponic growing towers. I think their necessity is inevitable and beyond that they’re just a good idea.

But lemme get this straight: vertical pig farming? And open-air vertical pig farming at that? Did nobody involved in the design of this potential project perchance smell a pig before going ahead with drawing up plans?

Because live pigs, you know, smell kind of bad. Horrendously bad. And when you have a lot of pigs – like, for example, in a skywards-oriented factory farm – they smell really, really bad. Like “watch surrounding property values plummet” bad. Like “health hazard” bad.

I could almost see it if we were talking sealed-building vertical pig farms (although doubtless that would not be great for the pigs). But open-air? In Canada? What are they gonna do in winter, twenty stories up, when -30 winds are a daily occurrence? Are they going to just deal with the pigsicles?

Top comment: The pig shit problem is an easy fix. All you do is get a giant and a midget, who must dress in matching leather outfits, to work in the recesses of the building and turn the manure into cheap energy. — Zenrage

A commenter over at Ezra Klein’s blog asks:

Again, I’m curious about the reasons for conservatives advocating a tax instead of cap and trade. Why is one more palatable than the other for them?

Because it’s a stealth tax cut.

Make no mistake, of course – when it comes to carbon control policy, conservative viewpoint for the past decade or more has been a variety of do-nothingism/free-market panaceas/”we need to study it more”/etc. However, when carbon control policy becomes inevitable, carbon taxation becomes the more popular alternative among conservatives and moderates as opposed to cap-and-trade.

This is because carbon taxation is inevitably paired with reduction in other taxes, to offset the overall tax burden upon the public. Which in and of itself is fine and good. However, the important thing about carbon taxation is that it is, in essence, a wide-ranging sin tax, and sin taxation exists both to profit off of behaviour society decides it wants less of and to serve as motivation to cease practicing that behaviour.

Consider a hypothetical. I am a citizen of Whereveria, paying twenty-five percent of my income out via income tax. Now, say Whereveria institutes a carbon tax, designed to replace a portion of my income tax, and that my carbon usage, being typically Western and more wasteful than it should be, generates taxation equal to, say, ten percent of my income. Whateveria, not wishing to create an onerous tax burden, institutes its carbon tax at the same time as it cuts income taxes by ten percent. Now, my tax burden personally hasn’t changed; I’m still paying out twenty-five percent of my income in taxes, it’s just that fifteen percent of it is income tax and ten percent is carbon tax.

But. Say also that I decide to be environmentally responsible and reduce my exposure to the carbon tax. I buy a hybrid car, install solar panels, re-insulate my home to make it more efficient, do other vaguely hippie-esque things, and so on and so forth. My carbon taxation payment drops from ten percent of my income to, oh, let’s say three percent. I’ve just dropped my overall tax exposure to eighteen percent of my income from twenty-five percent; in short, I’ve given myself a twenty-five percent tax cut, and the state has no option to recover more income from me short of raising income taxes for everybody, which isn’t going to happen both because it would still create an onerous tax burden for those unable to reduce their carbon emissions easily and because tax hikes have become something only Commie-Nazis do nowadays.

Furthermore, due to the nature of carbon emissions reduction, many of the most efficient methods of reduction are those most easily undertaken by – guess who – the upper classes. Rich people can more easily afford to buy an electric car, to rejigger their home to make it environmentally friendly, to buy carbon-friendly organic food, and all the rest of it. Poor people? Have to keep scraping along on a day-to-day basis because they have trouble generating the capital for a big lifestyle outlay that would positively affect their carbon taxation exposure. So they’ll just keep chugging along.

Does it make more sense that David Frum supports carbon taxation over cap-and-trade now?

I recently got into an argument with a friend who is vegetarian about vegetarianism.

For the record, I am not one of those people who thinks vegetarianism is stupid or proof of lack of moral character or something. I am similarly not one of those people who fetishizes the act of eating meat. (You know, the “ooooh I love MEEEEAT” people. The ones who seem to confuse eating meat with, say, sex. For the record: meat can indeed be quite delicious, but if you think eating it is a better experience than getting head, seek medical attention immediately.) And if someone wants to advance vegetarianism from the moral perspective of causing as little harm as possible to those species most like us, that strikes me as being a perfectly valid tack to argue from, albeit one with which I don’t agree.

But my friend was arguing from the environmental standpoint. You’re probably aware of the general thrust of the argument, so I’ll merely go over the bullet points: breeding animals for the purpose of slaughter generates a massive amount of greenhouse gas emissions, from numerous sources (their farts, their feed, et cetera). Furthermore, factory farming is more directly bad for the environment in that you get mountainous piles of toxic animal shit that can, for instance, poison groundwater. Factory farms also require us to pump animals full of antibiotics so they don’t die of disease and the like, which in turn not only reduces the quality of the meat they produce but also means that the meat they produce is similarly stuffed chock-full of things we probably don’t want in our meat anyway.

All of this is undeniably true, and there exists a perfectly valid and rational environmental argument to reduce meat consumption and eat organically produced meat – free-range, wild-fed animals are better for us to eat (and, as anybody who has eaten them can attest, taste far superior to factory-farmed meat anyway). Meat should be more expensive for us to eat; we don’t need to eat that much of it in order to stay healthy and as a result we tend to overconsume it when it becomes available by simple virtue of math. (Remember: the average amount of meta you need at a given meal? About the size of a deck of playing cards.) This is the point of things like the PB&J Campaign.

But it’s not an environmental argument for vegetarianism; it’s an environmental argument for eating less meat, which is not the same thing. (Honestly, if you want to encourage healthier meat production, doing it by refusing to buy meat is counterintuitive; doing it by buying meat that is raised in an ethical, ecologically friendly and healthy manner makes more sense, because you aren’t just monetarily punishing factory farmers, but also rewarding the free-range meat producer.) My friend was arguing that mass vegetarianism was the only environmentally acceptable solution to issues of agricultural supply. And that, I am afraid, just doesn’t fly.

It doesn’t fly because while the ills of factory farming of meat are more dramatic and obvious than those of the mass farming of fruits and vegetables, this doesn’t mean that the latter don’t exist. Oceanic dead zones are the direct result of mass plant farming, because mass plant farming requires fertilizer to come from somewhere, and if it’s not coming from animals (IE, “organic fertilizer”), it has to come from artificial fertilizer, which not incidentally demands the consumption of a great deal of fossil fuels in its production. And that means nitrates – a lot of nitrates – being dumped into the soil, and consequently into river and stream runoff, and consequently into oceans. (Simply using animal manure isn’t nitrate-free, of course, but it’s a lot less intensive because plants are, you know, designed to eat poop.)

Up until the 20th century, of course, all of this was not nearly so much an issue, because large organized mono-crop farming (“I’m a beet farmer,” “I’m a pig farmer,” “I’m a cabbage farmer,” et cetera) was relatively rare; farms existed as small, self-contained entities, with farmers having a variety of crops of both animal and plant varieties, using their obvious symbiosis to maximize production of both basic types of crop, and using the surplus produced beyond what was necessary to keep the farm healthy and stable to live off of and trade for amenities.

That’s where modern agriculture must return. Not reducing the overall yield, but gaining it from myriad small producers rather than a few macro-farms with no crop diversification. It’s healthier for the farms, healthier for us and healthier for the planet. And until we get to the point where we can really invest in massive self-contained “vertical farms” where all the plants are grown hydroponically, it’s the only realistic option we’ve got.

PETA – and just those four letters together should alert most people to the fact that this is gonna be a doozy – has decided that the best way to convince people to stop eating fish is to rename them “sea kittens.”

There are Sea Kitten Facts. Many male sea kittens woo potential partners by singing to them. While this is not particularly easy to do underwater coherently, female sea kittens don’t generally seem to mind. And so on.

There is even an interactive web toy that lets you “design your own sea kitten” by giving it a Fu Manchu moustache, sunglasses or an elephant disguise, which are of course all things one associates with kittens.

The problem is thus: How do you even begin to start making fun of this? And the answer is that it is impossible to do so. You just have to stand back and respect their total insanity for what it is.

Turns out the annual rate of decline for the world’s 400 largest oilfields is nine percent annually.

The time to shift to full electrical grid for everything, including vehicles, is – well, it was five years ago, frankly. But now it’s now.

The world’s first commercial-scale wave power generators are online in Portugal.

Does anybody have a good site for information about potential oceanic methane sequestration technologies? Google-fu is failing me, and I’m looking at it as a potential topic for a law school research paper (specifically implementation of same on a global level and interactions with the law-of-the-sea treaties).

Via MetaFilter: the odds of us seeing a Permian-type extinction event in our lifetime via the clathrate gun method just got a lot better.