A solar engineer cleans a solar array in a rural village of Puttur in Karnataka state in India. The solar array powers a school that now has extra classes for students at night thanks to the additional power.Credit Harish Hande, SELCO
He’s tended to write on American policies and politics, but this week has refreshingly focused a two-part post package on developing countries, where energy needs, and growth, are greatest.
In the first post — “How can we get power to the poor without frying the planet?” — he explores the challenges faced in trying to boost energy access without greenhouse-gas overload. He lays out the arguments of a range of analysts including the Breakthrough Institute, Roger Pielke, Jr., and Morgan Bazilian and Dan Kammen and the Sierra Club. He appropriately frames the piece around the mythological challenge of navigating between Scylla and Charybdis — finding ways to boost energy access while limiting greenhouse gas emissions. Read more…
Doctors Without Borders health workers wearing protective clothing to shield against Ebola at a clinic in Kailahun, Sierra Leone.Credit Carl De Souza/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The New England Journal of Medicine has published “Ebola and Quarantine,” an invaluable commentary by seven physicians* who warn how overreactions by American elected officials aiming to calm fears of Ebola here could make it more likely that the virus will spread in Africa and possibly other developing regions of the world. I found the piece through a link in a wise editorial in The Times on “the dangers of quarantines.”
The governors of a number of states, including New York and New Jersey, recently imposed 21-day quarantines on health care workers returning to the United States from regions of the world where they may have cared for patients with Ebola virus disease. We understand their motivation for this policy — to protect the citizens of their states from contracting this often-fatal illness. This approach, however, is not scientifically based, is unfair and unwise, and will impede essential efforts to stop these awful outbreaks of Ebola disease at their source, which is the only satisfactory goal. The governors’ action is like driving a carpet tack with a sledgehammer: it gets the job done but overall is more destructive than beneficial. Read more…
As part of a proposed series of coastline defenses, called the Big U, lower Manhattan would be protected by 10-foot-tall berms, partly blended into a string of waterfront parks.Credit Rebuild By Design
Just ahead of the two-year anniversary of the calamitous flooding of New York City by the surge from Hurricane Sandy, Alan Feuer has written a fine piece summarizing how this maritime metropolis, facing decades, if not centuries, of inevitable sea-level rise, is slowly evolving a softer relationship with the sea.
Nina Pham, the Dallas nurse who contracted Ebola while treating a dying patient, embraced President Obama at the White House on Friday after being released from the hospital.Credit Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
There is no question that America’s physical, economic, and social health is far more at risk from the fear of Ebola than from the virus itself. Yet health care leaders from the US president down are pouring resources and attention into managing Ebola far beyond what is required to keep the disease from spreading beyond sporadic cases. Controlling Ebola in the United States requires thorough isolation of symptomatic victims and rigorous attention to personal protective equipment and protocols for health care workers. But it does not require the appointment of an “Ebola Czar,” a promise to call up the National Guard if necessary, or the cancellation of a presidential fund-raising trip in order to convene a two-hour emergency meeting with every top federal official involved in public health and safety.
U.S. health leaders are communicating reasonably well. Constant, honest, humble risk communication is a vital part of establishing trust, which is especially crucial for managing public concern during crises. When mistakes are made, they admit them. When new developments happen—like a Texas Presbyterian health care worker who had to be isolated but was already on a cruise ship—they report them. While perhaps sounding too confident as they claim they can keep Ebola from becoming a public epidemic, they are avoiding un-keepable promises of absolute safety, acknowledging that there may well be more sporadic cases.
But officials are up against the inherently emotional and instinctive nature of risk-perception psychology. Pioneering research on this subject by Paul Slovic, Baruch Fischhoff, and others, vast research on human cognition by Daniel Kahneman and colleagues, and research on the brain’s fear response by neuroscientists Joseph LeDoux, Elizabeth Phelps, and others, all make abundantly clear that the perception of risk is not simply a matter of the facts, but more a matter of how those facts feel. [Please read the rest.]
The most legitimately scary thing about this virus is its tendency to target caregivers like Spencer and other medical personnel and so many family members — particularly women — in affected regions in West Africa. For more on this chilling aspect of the outbreak, please read Ben Hale’s recent piece in Slate: “The Most Terrifying Thing About Ebola: The disease threatens humanity by preying on humanity.”
Updated, Oct. 28, 1:51 p.m., with reply from Azevedo et al. | Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute sent the following response to the critiques I ran of their recent Op-Ed article on the tendency for energy-efficiency improvements to be eroded by “rebound.” Further discussion can play out in the comments below this post:
Why Rebound Matters
By Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger
In response to our New York Times Op-Ed about the limits of energy efficiency and the furious reaction to it from some quarters, Andy Revkin asks whether we can find room for agreement on the rebound effect.
To some degree we already have.
Just over three years ago, when Breakthrough Institute published an extensive review of the economic literature on rebound effects, there was little discussion about how serious rebound effects are, or what the implication might be for climate and energy policy. The conventional wisdom at the time, as Andy can attest, having been party to some of the private exchanges among efficiency experts and advocates, was that rebound effects were so small as to be inconsequential.
While some in energy policy circles still cling to this view, today there is broad recognition that rebound effects are likely substantially greater than has previously been acknowledged. This consensus extends from large academic reviews of the literature such as Steve Sorrell’s groundbreaking 2007 review for the UK government to more recent reviews conducted by the European Commission, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and the International Energy Agency (IEA). All cite studies finding rebounds in various contexts approaching and in some cases exceeding 50%. This stands in contrast, for instance, with the IEA’s estimate from as recently as 2012, which, despite recognizing the existence of rebound, estimated rebound effects globally at a rather precise 9%.
Even Azevedo and her colleagues, who offer a series of criticisms of our argument [link], acknowledge the likelihood of significant rebounds. So it would appear that we can all agree that estimations of the energy savings from energy efficient technologies based upon engineering-level estimates likely overstate significantly the energy savings that will actually be realized. This recognition constitutes progress, given that most climate mitigation scenarios still fail to account for significant levels of — or in many cases, any — rebound.
One precondition for finding agreement, however, is accurate representation of the positions taken by those with whom you are trying to find agreement. Over the last two weeks, a number of commentators and efficiency advocates have taken issue with positions we have never taken. Azevedo and her colleagues, for instance, altered a quote from our Op-Ed to suggest that we had argued that energy efficiency measures would universally and in the aggregate result in higher global energy demand. We have not made this claim.
Bill Gates spends a lot of his time probing the minds and work of researchers and analysts trying to solve the world’s biggest problems. The results often end up on his GatesNotes blog. His new post focuses on the plant genetics research of Edward S. Buckler, a U.S. Department of Agriculture researcher at Cornell.
Buckler was elected to the National Academy of Sciences this year for work that Cornell summarized this way:
Buckler uses genomics and statistical genetics to understand and dissect complex traits in maize, biofuel grasses, cassava and grapes. In the lab, he and colleagues exploit the natural diversity of plant genomes to identify sets of genes and single genes responsible for genetic variation. He is working to develop seeds for breeders and researchers to use to dissect complex traits, characterize genetic diversity and to understand such traits as drought tolerance, nitrogen use, basic development, carbon metabolism and vitamin A and E content.
In "Extreme Whether," a play on climate change by Karen Malpede, a family feud erupts as a brother in law invested in fossil fuels is confronted by nature-loving relatives.Credit Beatriz Schiller
If you’re in the New York metropolitan region, I encourage you to see “Extreme Whether,” an pioneering and brave effort by playwright and director Karen Malpede to use theater to explore the clashing passions around human-driven global warming and our fossil fuel fixation. There are a few more performances in the play’s initial run at Theater for the New City, many with an invited guest discussing the climate challenge after the show (see the list at the end of this post).
I recently saw the play and spoke afterward. You can see excerpts from my conversation with the audience (and mini concert) below.
“Extreme Whether” is a refreshing experiment in bringing the emerging fictional genre called “cli-fi” to a theatrical stage. (Another example is “2071,” coming next month at the Royal Court Theatre in London.)
Malpede’s play is laced with darkness and humor, even in the double meaning of the word “whether” in the title — which I found nicely reflects the deep uncertainty that still surrounds the worst-case outcomes from the continuing buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
The play centers on a fractured family that is a stand-in for the human family writ large. John Bjornson, a crusading climate scientist modeled closely on the retired NASA scientist Jim Hansen, is muzzled by political appointees and betrayed by his twin sister and brother in law — both of whom are blinded to looming environmental danger by their investments in fossil fuels. His foes conspire to drill for gas on a shared family estate. Bjornson, a widower, is buoyed by a student who’s become an important Arctic expert (and his lover), and his nature-loving daughter and an elderly uncle who is the estate caretaker take up arms against the gas-drilling plan.
Survivors grapple with overwhelming heat in an epilogue, but with hints of an alternative future in projected images of wind turbines.
As with any experiment, there are flaws. Read more…
A schoolboy in Zambia's Chadiza district does his homework with the help of a solar lantern that can provide up to eight hours of light on a single day's charge. Crowdfunding helped finance a project to distribute lights to people living off the grid there.Credit SunnyMoney
Below I’m posting some more criticism, from four researchers focused on energy innovation and climate policy: Inês Azevedo, an associate professor and public policy analyst at Carnegie Mellon University, Kenneth Gillingham, an economist at Yale, David Rapson, an economist at the University of California, Davis, and Gernot Wagner, lead senior economist at the Environmental Defense Fund.
My goal is to find “room for agreement” on ways to make sure the world gets the most value out of this kind of bright idea with the fewest regrets.
One issue, for me, is that an environment-focused debate centered on kilowatt-hours and greenhouse gas emissions misses the priceless societal value of wider access to cleaner, brighter lighting. My favorite part of the “sustainable energy for all” speech given periodically by United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is his recollection of his youth studying by lamp or candle light:
I studied at night by a dim and smoky oil lamp. Only when I prepared for examinations was I allowed to use a candle. Candles were considered too expensive to use for ordinary homework.
In the mid 2000s, Rick Piltz helped expose political interference with the communication of federal climate research.Credit Whistleblower.org
Rick Piltz, a gutsy whistleblower who revealed a pattern of politically torqued rewriting of climate science reports during the first term of President George W. Bush, died early Saturday morning after a fight with cancer.
He worked largely under the radar in his many years in the government climate science bureaucracy, but became a passionate defender of climate science and campaigner for cuts in greenhouse gas emissions as a blogger and speaker after leaving government in 2005.
As far as I can remember, I first met Piltz in December 2002, at a three-day Washington workshop organized by the Bush administration to chart new directions for research on human-driven climate change. He was a bearish, soft-spoken and bespectacled man with an intensity and focus that took one by surprise.
The Washington meeting was seen by many climate scientists and campaigners as a delaying tactic. Piltz, who had held senior coordinating positions in the U.S. Global Change Research Program since 1995, took me aside and we talked for a long while about what he said was an growing pattern of political interference in the shaping of government climate documents.
Piltz encouraged me to stay in touch, saying that eventually he’d be able to provide concrete evidence. Read more…
An illustration created by Kate Raworth, a writer focused on the intersection of economics and the environment.Credit
Update, Oct. 19, 12:20 p.m. | There’s been much discussion of the gender question among members of the Anthropocene Working Group, which began in an informal way and is steadily evolving. In an email note, Jan A. Zalasiewicz, the University of Leiscester geologist who is the chairman noted the following:
[W]e do have five women on the AWG (Agnieszka Galuszka, Irka Hajdas, Cath Neal, Mary Scholes, Victoria Smith) — all invited to the meeting — and did have six (Jane Francis, before she asked to step down). So it’s not quite as bad as advertised. We have been alive to this and are working to get closer towards parity, admittedly in our inefficient way (none of us work on the Anthropocene as our day job, if that’s any excuse).
