I go to the French Riviera and bring a heat wave with me. It's like the last time I was in France. They had record heat then also. Too bad this was a purely business trip with not even a weekend of holiday in France. I didn't even get one day of sightseeing. But I did get some fine relaxing dinners at the cafes in the evening. I wish the US had the equivalent long relaxing cafe dinner and conversation. We would spend three or four hours on eating and conversation. That is the proper way to spend the evening.
Larger commentary ideas have accumulated but so has work, so they will dribble out.
I did notice an interesting development in one of the accumulated Financial Times. The economic structure of forest farming in Costa Rica continues to evolve. They are working out a structure whereby small landowners can get a regular stream of payments for future harvests. There has been a reaction against the large corporate forest farms that were purchasing small land holdings. This lease like setup lets the large forest farmers get the benefits of a well organized large farm without eliminating the small landholders. It reduces the pressure on small landholders to use poor farming techniques that generate a regular annual income. They can afford the multi-year delays and the costs of forest maintenance during the years between efficient harvests.
It is also interesting that this is driven as much by purchaser requirements from buyers like Home Depot as it is by local regulations. Purchasers are demanding certification of appropriate forest management because their customers are demanding attention to forest management.
The Financial Times has a nice section on current trends in Energy Generation. It's on their pay only web site, so no link. I get mine on that pretty pink paper.
Interesting trends:
- Micropower is becoming more financially viable. Some of this
is micro-cogeneration related, some is UPS replacement related,
some is peak shaving. The micro-turbines have come way down in
cost and an increasing number of customers can justify the cost of
installing production equipment on a basis other than simple
energy generation. Those customers can then justify using the
micropower whenever their variable cost of operation is less than
the current cost of grid power. This leads into a maze of cost
comparisons between grid pricing policies and gas pricing
policies, but there is a growing slice of the market where
variable costs are less than grid costs. Impacts are two fold:
- Pollution reduction/shifting. Natural gas is the usual micro power source, and micro turbines tend to be both highly efficient and very clean.
- Grid distribution control and stability. Micropower changes the grid in terms of reactance control, load/capacity on transformers and distribution lines, load/capacity planning on power generators. If handled properly, it should enhance grid stability and efficiency.
- There is a significant customer base that will pay a premium for renewable power. Some may consider this foolish, but then I consider paying for cable TV foolish. The premium for renewable power is less than the cost of cable TV. If they get personal satisfaction from this, it is a good use of their money. Some take pleasure from seeing solar power systems on their home. If you are more than 1km from the power grid the cost of installing poles and power lines may exceed the cost of solar power. But for most of these buyers it does not make financial sense. However, people spend similar sums on fancy landscaping and other toys, so there is no harm in making a market in this.
- Wind power is becoming more financially viable. Predictions in the US are uncertain. They range from a period of very slow growth to continued rapid growth. The European predictions are more stable. There will continue to be steady growth. This is because the competing power generation costs are higher in Europe, there are many suitable wind power generation sites available, and the distance from generation to use is much shorter than the US. o For example, Denmark and Ireland have extensive wind power sites available, significant local demand, and no other native power sources. Every alternative requires imports from other countries. So wind power is increasingly attractive on a purely financial basis.
The growing hostilities between church and press remind me of the ugly downward trend found in Spain before the Civil War, in Japan after World War I, and Palestine today. In all these cases the divergent sides reached a level of vindictiveness that eliminated the middle. At the beginning of each dispute, there was a large spectrum of opinions. But the extremes were so hostile that they cast everyone in the middle as an enemy. At first it was words, but it escalated to threats, violence, murder, and organized assassination campaigns. The people fled middle, leaving only the two extremes. War was the result.
This present neo-manichean tendency to demonize your opponent sets the foundation for this. It is not healthy for society. It is appropriate to demonize the true demons, but recognize the humanity in your opponents as well. There is a very large spectrum of disagreement and error that does not require hatred and demonization. If you recognize this in your actions you open up an alternative to eliminating the middle. You can persuade them to join your side. This may involve accepting some divergent opinions on your part as well.
There is some validity to the complaints by the Church. You do have to wonder why a homosexual affair between two adults, both over 20, is cause for nationwide scandal. Perhaps it is because of the teacher student relationship. The problems of power abuse in sexual affairs is very real and college professors have abused that power on many occasions. You deal with it by appropriate disciplinary actions. It does not become international news. One case where it did become international news was the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, and politics was certainly a factor in that. There is a complex history of local politics in the Globe, Times, and church relationships, and the complaints regarding political motivations are valid.
But the blindness of the Church is amazing. Cardinal Law concealed and perhaps abetted abuse of 10 year old children. These are not adults. This is a powerful adult and a young child. The sense of betrayal by the public is extremely powerful. It is incredible that the Archbishop does not acknowledge that a great betrayal has taken place. Perhaps the press is going beyond what is appropriate, but to claim that this is driven only by politics is absurd. And to liken it to the outrages of totalitarian regimes is an insult to the victims of those regimes.
All this excludes the important question for the middle. What is appropriate punishment? What is atonement? How do you handle forgiveness? The zero tolerance idiocy has shown its moral bankruptcy elsewhere. Zero tolerance is really a proclamation of moral bankruptcy. It proclaims that you are incapable is making a proper moral judgment on a case by case basis.
The church has tried zero tolerance in the past. The quote "Kill them all. God will know his own." comes from that era. We have zero tolerance today where little boys playing cowboys and Indians are arrested and charged. Something better is needed.
But at the moment it appears that the press will not tolerate any discussion of punishments that are commensurate with the crime, repentance, or recovery. The church is equally adamant in its refusal to accept any outside criticism of its actions or decisions. This is not healthy.
Writing update: 67 out of 124 comments dealt with. Unfortunately some large ones remain. Another late night. And I hate computers that hiccup. Consistently slow or consistently fast is OK. But unpredictable pauses drive me crazy, and lead to lots of editing errors. Page count: 57 on Config, 24 on Audit. About 15 new are needed, and about 40 more will be revised or reorganized.
And I fixed the email address.
The Census Bureau released more statistics recently. Analysis of part of them may help people understand their weaknesses.
They surveyed people on how they got to work: car, transit, etc. According to the Census the counties around Washington, DC had a significant decline in the use of mass transit over the last year. Yet, during that same time period, the Metro measured record crowding and ridership. They had a significant increase.
The difference is one of measurement. The Metro counts people going through turnstiles. It has no direct record of why. This is different than the Census question. So some of the difference is travelers who are not going to work. The Metro count is also opinion free. It does not depend on the subject being honest or understanding the questions. The Census question has the problem regarding honesty, since the respondents may have political reasons to answer inaccurately. The Census question is also open to misinterpretations. How do you answer it if you drive to a transit station, park, and use transit the rest of the way?
I've already seen several articles using, abusing, and commenting on the Census reports. The Census figures are nationwide, but this discrepency around DC is getting more press than usual.
In 1000 AD there were thriving farms in Greenland and major vineyards in England. Three hundred years later these were gone. Looking further back, you find that the Roman Empire was also very warm, while the Dark Ages and the Reformation were much colder than it is now. If you examine the paleontological record you find worldwide temperature swings of over 5 degrees with periods of a few centuries to a couple thousand years. And if you look at the last two thousand years it is clear that we are in the middle of a major warming period. So global warming is real.
Is global warming going to be a disaster? History shows that there are local disasters. Just ask the Greenland farmers. The paleo record is in part based on measuring when warm climate plants and animals died and got replaced by cold climate plants and animals, or vice versa. There were some global extinctions, but there is much less evidence for major global problems. The big changes are local shifts. So local disasters will happen.
What should we do about it? We plan for the annual seasons. Civilization would not exist if we did not. Considering the extent of the historical disasters it makes sense to prepare for this global warming.
Step one is to predict it. Humanity spent millenia learning to predict the seasons. We need to predict climate changes. Recent climate models are good enough that when given current inputs, they predict the current climate. That was a lot of work and it is a necessary first step. Next we need to predict the changes. We have history and it shows a lot of variations. The paleo-climatologists are working on the models to predict past climate. So far nobody has a model that when given the inputs for the Roman Empire, successfully predicts several centuries of cooling, then centuries of warming, then cooling, then warming. They just don't understand the climate well enough.
The current anti-humanist movement is a real problem. Paleo-climatologists are careful to avoid modeling much closer than 1000AD. Getting the wrong answer would mean project cancellation, funding cancellation, public hysteria, protesters, or worse. These guys went into their science because they like looking at slices of frozen mud with a microscope, not because they enjoy being the target of a political witch hunt. But that's OK for now. Getting the models right for the period 5,000 BC to 1,000 AD is fine. Once they get that right, people with an appetite for political conflict can find out what the prediction is for the next centuries.
Meanwhile, you have to wonder about idiots who are pushing Kyoto. We are facing serious local disasters as part of a centuries long global warming trend. Why waste resources on CO2 emissions reduction. CO2 production clearly doesn't help, so it makes sense to reduce production as part of general productivity and pollution reduction efforts. But don't ruin economies over such an irrelevancy. Instead, think about how best to prepare for significant climate change. In some areas it will be good, like farming in Greenland. In other areas it will be bad. The Sahel famines were just a warm up.
Half of my dozens of pages were wiped by the ever popular "if you don't save frequently you will lose everything when Windows crashes". Of course it is when you have lots of work to do that you forget. Aargh.
The weekend target is about 40 finished pages. It won't happen. One page of finished, proofed, publication ready work per hour is my long term history. So only about half of it gets done this weekend. The blog might not suffer. It may get used to clear the thinking during breaks from writing.
Other improvement: a documented way to reach me, should anyone be reading. Next, figure out how to avoid breaking the permalinks. Right now they are more like jello links.
Today's best long form: 9m30s. Feh. After some one handed push hands we got introduced to locks and neutralizing direction pushes. We need to be careful with these. It will be a while before we do this without first agreeing on who will do what when. Someone could get hurt. Amazing how much of a sweat you can work up in an hour of swaying around in a crouch.
But I've got a dozen pages more to write for work before today ends.
Australia has joined the US in official rejection of the treaty. The trade war targeting of the US was inflicting too much damage on Australia also. Apparently all the Bonn concessions were not enough to make it acceptable.
This is in response to the article by Steve.
Keep out the politicos and neo-manicheans
The anti-humanists are only part of the problem. Another big part is the politicos and the neo-manicheans. The politicos (politicians, activists, commentators, et al) need a sound byte answer, and they evaluate all decisions in terms of "does this help my side get elected?". For energy policy this becomes:
- Maximize positive PR value
- Minimize loss of jobs
- Minimize business disruption
The neo-manicheans are a facet of much American life. They divide the world into purely good and purely evil. They cannot deal with the complexities of tradeoffs, cost-benefit analysis, or the rest of reality. They want to make simple good vs evil descriptions and decisions. Energy policy does not fit the neo-manichean mind set.
The evidence of recent history is that the greatest improvements have been made when the decisions are made by accountants and engineers. They take some very broad guidelines:
- Maximize profit
- Minimize cost
- Minimize pollution
The recent result has been significant worldwide improvements in all forms of pollution levels. These have also been profitable changes because they are usually associated with a variety of business related improvements.
Energy Efficiency
One big part of this in the US is energy efficiency. The US economy now delivers products using one third the energy that it did in 1975. That sounds big and it is, but there is plenty more available. This is closely related general productivity improvements. During that period labor productivity improved at rates ranging from 1.5% to 2.5% per year. The average energy productivity improvement was 3.8% per year. Energy efficiency is a bit easier than labor efficiency.The biggest savings have been in commercial and industrial sectors. People think of "Efficient fluorescent light-bulbs" as an example of commercial savings. But the first really big saving back in the 70's in New York was not light-bulbs. It was restructuring the financial industry to eliminate 500,000 jobs. This isn't 500,000 better light bulbs. It is 500,000 empty offices, with no lights, no A/C, no elevators, nothing. And it eliminated 500,000 people commuting to work. These really big restructurings included really big energy efficiency improvements.
When you limit your thinking to how to do the same stupid stuff tomorrow that you did today, but with less energy, you do face limits. But these are the only approaches that the politico's can stomach. No politico wants to be the one who says "My energy policy put 200,000 people out of work. But don't worry. They'll find other jobs." That is 200,000 votes just lost. So you must keep the politicos out.
The neo-manicheans cannot deal with the reality of building a better, faster, lower cost business model. You do not resolve the conflicts and contradictions with simplistic good and evil thinking. This is exactly where you need accountants and engineers.
There is every reason to expect that with a few simple steps you can maintain or increase the efficiency improvements.
- Encourage the accountants and engineers to include energy use and cost in all their decision making. (This is easy.)
- Require products to provide usable energy use information. (This enables consumer decision making.)
- Eliminate tax subsidies and penalties. (This is extremely hard.)
Wind Power
The information on Irish wind farms was simply misread. The referenced article quoted 500 MW as the power generation anticipated from one particular farm planned for installation off the coast of one island. The overall estimated available wind resources offshore are about 600 TW for Ireland alone. Limiting that to locations with depths, waves, and construction costs suitable for current technology drops this to 5-10 TW. The investment available for construction limits the rate that systems will be built. Ireland is particularly well located for wind power, with rolling hills and a huge fetch for winds off the North Atlantic. The onshore potential in Ireland is just as large as the offshore.
Wind power makes good financial sense. It will be increasingly important. Present installed capacity is 12,000 MW in Europe and 4,200 MW in the United States. This is growing steadily. Good steady growth of a financially viable industry is not magic. You can predict it and plan for it. The predictions indicate that it will be a couple decades before wind is a major replacement for conventional power sources. It will reduce the need for conventional power installations, especially after 2010. That is roughly the time when the industry growth and construction rate will become mature. It will be another decade or two before wind installations even keep up with the new power demands.
Wind power also requires significant investment in electrical
transmission lines. With wind you gather power where it is windy
and transmit it to where it is needed. This is much like hydro
power. In a manner similar to the several thousand kilometer
transmission lines from Hydro Quebec down to the East coast cities,
there will be transmission lines from the windy regions to the power
consuming regions.
These transmission lines and the "ugliness" of wind turbines will be
targets for the anti-humanists. The "it kills birds" arguments
are fading, mostly because there are enough systems installed that the
facts are getting hard to overlook. If you take some reasonable
precautions with paint schemes and turbine design, you can keep the
bird kill down to that from a large tree. (Large trees kill
birds too. Birds are not too bright. Birds will fly into
trees and kill themselves.) But ugliness is still an argument
that the anti-humanists use. There is a 500 MW wind farm
proposed for some shallows between Cape Cod and Nantucket. The
argument "it will scare off the tourists" is a current favorite. In
fact, the tourists will need binoculars just to see the turbines.
Claiming that wind power won't work is wrong. It is more
neo-manichean thinking. It is not an exclusive substitute
for other power sources and will not make big changes for another
decade. But it is a good idea that deserves its financial success.
Kyoto - A trade war, not an environmental policy
The Kyoto treaty is an amazing piece of propaganda. It is a trade
war treaty. When you dig into the details you find that every detail
was chosen to minimize the cost to Europe and maximize the cost to the
US. The baseline dates were carefully chosen to give Europe the benefits
from the fall of Communism. There is no compensation for population
changes, penalizing the US (which is the only major party with a growing
population.) When it looked like everything was about to fall apart in Bonn,
they very quietly conceded most of the economic points that made it costly
to Japan, Canada, and Australia.
Even with all that, it was approved in Japan only by silent acquiescence
to some rather extraordinary enforcement concessions. Japanese industry
promises to make changes to reduce CO2 production. The penalty for excess
emissions is ... (drum roll) ... promising to try harder in the future.
That is the only penalty. This is more significant than
it would be in the US. In the US, a corporate commitment means that
some spokesman's lips are moving. Without real penalties it means
nothing more. Japanese corporations take the embarrassment of unkept
promises more seriously. They will take steps to reduce CO2 production
as long as these do not harm the industry or economy. But they will
not accept economic harm. They will accept the embarrassment rather
than inflict economic harm.
Canada may yet refuse to join, despite all the European concessions.
It is just too hard to structure the treaty to inflict major harm
on the US without also causing major problems for Canada. So Europe
faces a conflict between abandoning the trade war built into Kyoto,
or having Canada back out.
Forestry
The same economic improvement process that has driven energy efficiency is driving worldwide change in forestry. See this article from Foreign Affairs for an extensive discussion. The very long time between starting a farm forest and regular harvests obscures the effects. It takes decades to establish the farms, plant the trees, care for the forest, and eventually harvest the finished wood products. But there are many farm forests now coming into production. They are having an impact similar to other industrial transitions.The farm forest is much more efficient (in land, energy, labor, etc.) and has the effect of forcing the wild wood gatherers into more and more reckless harvesting and cost cutting to compete. This transition needs careful management. The old wild harvesting industry is doomed in the long term. Farm forests provide a much cheaper and better product. But the wild harvesting industry participants may do serious damage during their struggle to survive. When faced with imminent extinction they do take actions that cause long term damage. In wild harvesting nations, like Indonesia, you find rapid desperate cutting without regard to long term impact because it is the only way that they can keep their costs competitive with the farm forests. The transition to farm forests is hindered by political instability. Starting a farm forest requires making a significant capital investment based on the belief that you will be able to harvest the profits 10-20 years later. Farm forests are common in stable countries like New Zealand and the US. They are found in countries like Costa Rica and Brazil, where there is a reasonable likelihood for long term stability. But countries like Indonesia have serious problems making this transition.