Science and Energy News: 9/26/08

Following state Rep. Christine Scanlan’s (D-Summit County) discussions with federal officials regarding the need for lodgepole pine beetle action, Gov. Ritter has asked the federal government to fund three 10-year forest-restoration projects in Colorado.  To date, short-term contracts have been the norm.  Ritter and the Forest Health Advisory Council are arguing that vendors are somewhat unwilling to commit to long-term projects without more certainty that the funds will be there.  Just like renewable enery projects.  Forest health and watersheds demand a long-term approach.  Hopefully the request to Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer will be approved.

More pine beetle news: NCAR scientists are working to figure out how the death of millions of acres of trees will affect local weather and climates.  Models are showing the beetle outbreak is already large enough to raise temperature by 2-4F over the short term.  Researchers have put ground measuring stations in regions expected to be affected by beetle kill in the next year or two.  Volatile organic compounds are among the variables they want to measure.  Of long-term concern: the 300 megatons of CO2 that is expected to be released to the atmosphere by trees in British Columbia alone by 2020.

The Department of Local Affairs (DOLA) and the Governor’s Energy Office (GEO) will announce up to $10 million in community new energy grants as part of the second annual “Colorado New Energy Economy” conference on Tuesday, Oct. 14, at the Colorado Convention Center.  The “New Energy Communities Initiative” will reward local governments working collaboratively to position their communities at the forefront of the state’s New Energy Economy. This year’s Colorado New Energy Economy conference will focus on local issues and will give communities a chance to share local sustainable initiatives that are taking place across Colorado.

Monday brought news that the University of Colorado and the Colorado School of Mines were to be recipients of $16.5 million in six-year National Science Foundation research grants through NSF’s Materials Research Science and Engineering Center program. The School of Mines will receive $9.3 million to establish a new Center, which will focus on investigating emerging renewable energy materials and technologies. It will be the first NSF-funded Center dedicated solely to renewable energy. CU-Boulder will receive $7.2 million to continue and expand work at its existing Liquid Crystals Research Center. This will be the third round of NSF funding for the Center. Founded in 1995, the Center has spun off six different companies, and its research is contributing to a number of different fields, including better liquid crystals for solar panels and the origins of DNA.

Gov. Bill Ritter wrote to President Bush yesterday asking that Bush work with states like Colorado and not against them as the Bush administration moves toward oil shale development.  I hope Gov. Ritter isn’t holding his breath.  Bush only works with states when they agree with his policies.  It’s not that much longer until Jan. 20th…

Emissions of CO2 worldwide are larger than the worst-case scenario used by the IPCC last year.  While deniers and delayers continue to assail even business-as-usual scenarios, the real world case is quickly worsening.  Unfortunately, this underestimation has also been seen in most every other cause and effect of climate change, from warmer temperatures at higher latitudes to melt rates around the world to the severity of droughts and other extreme weather events.  One important note: emissions didn’t decrease as a result of an economic downturn.  China, the U.S. and India are currently the three largest emitters.  Not all the news was bad: Denmark’s emissions dropped 8 percent. The United Kingdom and Germany reduced carbon dioxide pollution by 3 percent, while France and Australia cut it by 2 percent.  I haven’t heard about their economies coming to a screeching halt, as CONservatives have erroneously claimed would happen.

Additional Economic Figures: Fuels, Unemployment and Housing

As Congress works to pass an immoral bailout of corporatist gambling, activities continue across America.  Demand for fuels was down again in August by about 4% versus last year.  Of particular interest to me was the stockpiles of gasoline stockpiles: they’re down to the lowest level since 1990!  This has gotten no play in the corporate media while House Dems capitulated on off-shore drilling: refineries were operating at only 67% of capacity.  That’s correct: only fuel corporations have refineries operating at only 2/3s of their possible maximum.  What’s the price of gasoline again?  It’s still $3.50 a gallon?  I don’t wonder why.  Do you?  Or more accurately, why does anyone still think that doing nothing about global warming will cost less than doing something?  150 platforms were destroyed since Aug. 2005.  Here’s the ultimate laugher with respect to off-shore drilling: if platforms are being wrecked by moderately strong hurricanes, what incentive do fuel corporations have to build new ones?  Let me complete things here: lack of refining capacity is what has held product from the market, not lack of drilling space.  Even then, refineries aren’t operating where they should be.  Opening up areas off-shore will not decrease the price of gas.  Ever.

More people filed for jobless benefits last week than any time since Sep 2001.  Unemployed people do not expand economies.  Is anyone delusional enough to think that the $700 billion bailout will propel corporations to hire more people?  They won’t.  People will remain jobless, people will continue to lose their homes, which means the bailout will fail.  That means our economy will be in terrible shape for quite some time to come.  And Republicans will be only too happy to point their fingers at everyone else.  Unfortunately, Democrats have left a golden opportunity to properly cast con-servative economic policies as immoral and insane.

Existing home sales fell again last month.  They were down 10.7% compared to a year earlier.  Banks are holding on to all their capital because every bank knows every other bank issued as much crappy debt as they did.  No money flowing between banks means no money in the system.  That brings the system to a screeching halt.  If Congress were to send any portion of the $700 billion they’re handing over to mega-corporations to the citizenry, the wheels of our economy would receive a much needed boost of grease.  Bush’s corporate cronies know they’re causing the system to collapse and they have the audacity to demand a bailout from Americans.  Simply disgusting.

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[Update]: MSNBC has an article up citing two of the above and adds a third: manufacturing orders plunged again last month.  The same article says existing home sales were expected to fall only by 1%.  That’s pretty damn far from the 10%+ actual drop.  Good thing economists are more trusted than weather forecasters.  I’d hate to see what would happen if economists were ever wrong…

Drilling Ban to Expire in 5 Days

Congressional Democrats have capitulated on the off-shore drilling ban.  The House has voted to allow off-shore drilling, putting the ball to the Senate’s side.  That “capitulation” description was provided by Rep. Boehner of Ohio.  Normally, I stay away from Republican framing.  Working within it only reinforces it.  However, in this case, I’ve decided to do it.  In this case, I do want Americans to have the opinion that Democrats are spineless in the face of a little resistance.  Democrats dramatically misread the conditions surrounding off-shore drilling.  I don’t want a bunch of bought off fools making my energy policy, be they Democrats or Republicans.  One of my Senators had an interesting role to play in this failure and I’ll have more on that below.

In slightly better news, the Senate did vote for a $17 billion energy tax package that extends credits for wind, solar and energy efficiency projects.  Those provisions were sent to the House as part of a larger tax bill that also extends several business and personal tax breaks.  Unfortunately, it only provides a one-year extension for the Alternative Minimum Tax, something that should be taken up with seriousness and made permanent.  I know, that’s tough to do with ideological Republicans and spineless Democrats.  Perhaps next year, we always hear.  In any event, the energy tax package is definitely good news because it provides for multiple-year extensions.

The current House version of the energy tax package removed fossil fuel incentives: expansion of refineries to process oil sands and oil shale, as well as alternative fuel credits that could have been applied to coal-based fuels.  I’m going to write another post describing some updates on the global warming front.  Seen through that lens, the removal of fossil fuel incentives is indeed a good thing.  We’ll see how the final bill comes out of Congress.

Two Big Reasons the Financial Crisis … Isn’t

Well, well, well.  The more the financial “crisis” and the Bush administration-led “solution” play out, the more the whole thing stinks.  How much does it stink?  Enough so that there should be no way any member of Congress, Democrat or Republian, votes to give the Bushies the power they’re so desperately seeking.

First, it’s not so much of a crisis as Bush would have us believe.  Bush’s cronies have been sitting on this legislation for months.  Which would indicate prudence except they’ve been talking about how good the economy is doing and how stable it is this whole time.  This plan could have been sold faster if they said at any time that the economy was starting to look weak because of the housing and financial institution crises.  More to the point though, the Bush administration waited for months while the financial markets got slaughtered.  Why?  Because they didn’t want another one of their failures to go public prior to this year’s election.  Remember, many Republican Representatives and Senators came out over the weekend saying Democrats shouldn’t try to score political points with this crisis.  Their faux concern rings even more hollow now that the leader of their party did just that while allowing major corporations to fail and allowing our economy to sink further than it otherwise would have.  They should work on cleaning up their own house before looking into their neighbors’.

Second, not only does the Bush administration expect taxpayers to foot the bill of foreign banks with bad debts, they want tax dollars to go to banks who aren’t even in trouble!

You have to remember, these are not all weak or troubled firms that own mortgage-backed securities. A lot of them are very successful banks and investment houses that have done very well, have been responsible, are holding performing assets that have value. They were not necessarily irresponsible players, and so you have to be careful about how you deal with them.

Why does the Bush administration want American taxpayers to help banks who don’t even need it?  Because their solution doesn’t address the real crisis.  There isn’t a quick fix to the mess we’re in.  Banks don’t know how many of their assets are bad or what they’re actually worth.  The legislation Bush wants passed can’t fix a problem that remains undefined.  Democrats need to stand firm and wait for more solid information to become available.

What Do You Want?

As the Bush administration continues to expect taxpayers to shoulder the burden of the out of control gamblers on Wall St., maybe a small dose reality of the options being considered should be presented.  So here is my take.

You can believe the Bushies when they say Congress should do something about the crisis that Bush’s allies created without due consideration of the ramifications.  You can believe that this crisis is so big and so bad that nobody should have any oversight of the Treasury Secretary’s decisions on which bad assets taxpayers get to assume.  You can believe that Bush and his cronies have your best interest in mind as he saddles the country with up to $700 billion (for now) of additional debt and leaves irresponsible, untrustworthy executives in control of their firms.  You can believe these things while the Bush administration makes absolutely no attempt to protect the taxpayer or as it makes no attempt to improve the environment for homeowners or small business owners.  You can believe they’re protecting America by assuming foreign banks debt.

By doing so, of course, you then support the following.  You don’t want to shift our energy from fossil fuels to renewables.  You don’t want to address global warming.  You don’t want any investment in our country’s infrastructure.  You want the next generation to live under a system that pays billions of dollars per year on interest on the debts that you incurred.  You want Social Security to fail.  You want Medicare to fail.  You don’t want any meaningful change to our broken health care system.  You don’t want any improvements to our education system.  You don’t want America to move any further into the 21st century because we’ll still be paying off our 20th century debts.  You want to cover foreign bank mistakes as well as domestic bank mistakes.

Here is the thing nobody is talking about: if regular Americans are on the hook for multiple Trillion dollar games (i.e. Iraq, Wall St. rip-off, hurricane recoveries, etc.), there’s no money for anything else.  Republicans want government to fail.  They’ve purposefully created a culture where higher taxes are forbidden.  At the same time, Republicans have created the largest government spending programs in our history and now have overextended America’s financial obligations to such a degree that something has to give.  Do you think Republicans are going to allow the War (“defense”) budget to be cut?  It represents, by far, the largest expenditures of your tax dollars.  If the government doesn’t collect any more money, programs will have to be cut.  If “defense” is off the table, Republicans have been honest about their goal for years: no social programs.  A small group of extremists are working very hard to force those programs to be cut out of the budget.

So we can pay for Wall Street’s immoral gambling problem.  Or we can hold a small group of executives and government officials responsible for their long history of mistakes and get back to work ensuring America can continue towards a prosperous 21st century future.  What do you want?

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[Update]: Barack Obama recognizes what I’ve described above.  Health care, energy, education and everything else will have to take a back seat if Bush’s immoral bailout goes through.

Front Seat: Economic Concerns

The big news continues to be the Bush administration’s response to the collapse of the U.S. financial sector and Americans’ response to that.  Yesterday, I outlined the “rescue plan” and offered some thoughts of my own and others’ as well.  Today, I’m reading disturbing things in the corporate media about the “rescue plan”.  In a nutshell, a number of overpaid economists who were dead wrong about the state of the economy leading up to the stelllar failures are presenting this as an either-or situation.  That approach is incredibly narrow-sighted, especially given some of the alternative solutions I wrote about.

Don’t get me wrong: we are all facing a crisis that could get a whole lot worse.  I duly recognize that fact.  What counts moving forward is how we deal with that crisis.  Adding $700 billion to the national debt and taking one point of economic growth per year away from the next five years is the wrong solution.  CNN’s Paul LeMonica’s view is we can choose between that solution and doing nothing.  Seriously, that’s all Paul (and others!) can offer?  How about enforcing some penalty on the gamblers responsible for this crisis?  Once again, the richest among us are perilously close to getting off scott-free after making the worst possible decisions and sticking the rest of us with their gambling debt.  The fact that folks like Paul offer up only two extreme solutions to this crisis is indicative of how scared they are of the monied interests of Wall St.  They should be afraid of the interests of Main St.

What’s most insulting about this offering of extremes is the warnings accompanying them.  Jobs might be lost, people might lose their homes, incomes could fall, blah, blah, blah.  Hey!  Wake up, pundits!  All that has been happening.  Bush’s Republican government has created the fewest jobs in 8 years’ time since WWII.  Foreclosures are occurring at record rates.  Real incomes haven’t increased in 8 years’ time.  Not doing anything about the Wall St. crisis won’t create some new economic reality for Main St.  It’s Main St. that has had to deal with their own economic crisis and now that Wall St. is feeling the pinch, suddenly it’s time to roll out the rescue plans.  On Main St.’s back, I might add.

Meanwhile, the markets contine to roil.  The dollar fell today, oil spiked by $20 per barrel (the highest one-day gain ever) to $130!!, and the Dow is down 370 points again, just to name a few.

2008 Economic Crisis – Conservative Economics Have Failed

The American taxpayer is being tapped for up to $700 billion (for now) to cover the bad bets of unregulated financial entities for the next two years.  There’s a lot to talk about in that one sentence.  I’m going to start by pointing out that too many companies were gambling.  They lost the bet, but taxpayers are being called upon to pay up.  Read this carefully: that is immoral.  It is even more immoral in the face of Bush’s administration refusal to offer homeowners any kind of possibility to keep their homes over the past two years.  It’s the main pillar of Republican ideology: you’re on your own.

I’ve heard and read that the government could recoup the money.  I have heard zero details on how that could happen.  It’s a vague request for trust by this Republican-led government that needs to demonstrate it’s worthy of that trust.  Remember, Bush’s administration has received everything it has asked for for seven years, from both Republican and Democratic Congresses.  That includes supplementals for the invasion and occupation of Iraq – totaling some $600 billion so far.  That includes tax cuts for billionaires and the largest corporations.  Now Bush and his cronies want Americans to assume the debt from Wall Street’s gambling habit.  What about what Americans want, including keeping their homes, their jobs, their wages, their health care, and their hard-earned money.  We’ve heard for years from conservatives that Americans should be able to keep their money.  Now conservatives want Americans’ money to prop up their irresponsible corporate allies?!  Even though conseravtives’ ideological economic policies have failed on every level, we’ll never hear them admit it, despite their greed for our money to cover for those failures.

What’s In The News: 9/18/08

Bush breaks yet another record.  George Bush’s disapproval rating is the highest of any President.  Ever.

Palin can’t answer questions.

Pine beetles are also eating at Utah’s forests.  Part of a Utah newspaper story: the complex relationship between climate change, pine beetles and wildfires.

File this in a desperate campaign’s attempt to garner attention.  Republican Bob Schaffer is telling audiences that Rep. Mark Udall won’t debate him.  Despite the fact that they’ve debated six times already and have eight more scheduled in the next 47 days, or one per week.  Udall’s spokesman said it best, “I have two concerns here. One is that Bob Schaffer can’t count. The other is that he is dishonest.”  Hey Bob, there’s a reason your campaign is down by double digits.  Telling lies won’t close that gap – it will just make you look like an ass when you lose.

Arctice Ice Melted to 2nd Lowest Extent on Record in 2008

That shouldnt’ be news if you’ve visited this site this summer.  I’ve maintained a running series on this critical issue as I’ve been collecting and watching resources on it (August discussion, July discussion).  The same can’t be said for the corporate media, of course.  The Rocky Mountain News finally took note of the situation, but wrote only five short paragraphs on it.  Thankfully, there is no “other side of the story” in the piece.  I am going to discuss the situation in much more depth than the Rocky did, leaning on those resources I mentioned above.

First, take a look at a graphic of the arctic ice concentration, provided by the University of Illinois.
These data were measured by NASA satellites.  This extent is very low when compared to the climatological standard, a comparison made by the National Snow and Ice Data Center in their most recent write-up.  Another useful figure is a time series graph provided by the NSIDC.  This is their figure as of today, comparing the climatological pattern, the 2007 lowest extent and 2005, the previous 2nd lowest extent.   The easy conclusion climate change deniers and delayers will reach is 2008 wasn’t as bad as 2007, so everything is fine and we need not do anything.  Anticipating that, allow me to present additional data.

The following graph is a one-year time series of northern hemispheric sea ice area.
Compared to the range seen throughout the year, this demonstrates that there is no significant difference between 2007′s record low figure and this year’s figure.  Both plummeted to about 3 million sq. km.  The lower part of the graph shows the deviation from the climatological mean.  By mid-October last year, the deviation increased from -2 to -3.  Dredging up old statistical lessons, last year’s event was incredibly rare.  It remains to be seen if something similar occurs this year.  The fact that we’re once again seeing a -2 deviation is indicative of how uncommon and serious this summer’s melt was.  As I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, the Arctic ice became an island for the first time in recorded history.

In fact, this summer’s melt was actually more impressive than last year’s melt in one respect: the total amount of ice that melted was actually greater as the following graph demonstrates.
Early in 2007, the northern hemispheric ice area covered ~13.25 million sq. km. before melting away to 3 million sq. km.  Earlier this year, the area covered by ice totaled 14 million sq. km. and again melted away to 3 million sq. km.  That’s 11 million sq. km.! Imagine for a moment if the winter-time recovery wasn’t as strong as it was.  The record low area seen last year would likely have been blown away by 750,000 sq. km.  Actually, the more I look at the graph, the more it looks to me like this summer’s melt is a record in terms of total area melted in one season. The melt during the 1980s appears to be on the order of 10 million sq. km. per year. More than that, the general trend of this graph since 1979 is not good: the areal extent is heading further down with time.

That downward trend is more obvious when an anomaly graph is examined, as below. 
1978-2000 serves as the climatological baseline.  Since 2000, the downward trend of sea ice area can be easily seen.  The anomaly for this year is currently teetering between “recovery” between 0 and -1 standard deviations and another temporary collapse toward -3 standard deviations, which happened last year.  The difference betwen 2006-2007 and 2007-2008 is even more apparent on the graph also.  The area anomaly recovered all the way to -0.5 from -3 in the span of six months last winter.  This summer, due largely to the weakened ice from last summer, the ice melted to a similar areal extent as last year.  The specific locations of melt were different, as expected, but the pattern held up, as scientists predicted early this year.  The ice could delay its recovery due to the immense heat content of the oceans (relative to the climatological mean) once again.  Sea surface temperature anomaly maps show very warm waters around Canada and Greenland, for example.

The three previous graphs are automatically updated daily at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Polar Research Group’s website.

I will say that it makes sense for the Rocky to wait to run this story until the melting season was over, as it allows for discussion to take place at a relevant point in time.  I will also say again that it was nice to see an article citing scientific information only, not ideological rhetoric from deniers/delayers. The extent of coverage is, in my opinion, too light. This situation can best be described as unprecedented. That warrants more than five light paragraphs of coverage.

This story is far from over.  Will ice be able to stage a recovery like it did last year, thin though it turned out to be?  When will the next ice shelf calving occur?  Ice extent is faring somewhat better in the southern hemisphere.  When will that situation change?  I’m also keeping an eye out for Greenland ice and glacier science articles.

2008 Energy Bill: House Version & Initial Reaction

The House passed their initial version of the 2008 energy bill.  Two major focal points of this bill are the following: it would allow drilling 50 to 100 miles off-shore and it would repeal tax breaks (corporate welfare) for oil corporations.  Republicans have been pining for the former and screaming about the latter for months.  Americans generally support increased drilling as long as its coupled with renewable energy research funding increases.  A clear majority of Americans support rescinding the fossil fuel industry’s welfare.  Americans can pretty easily make the connection between $4.00 gas and news of record profits that corporations like Exxon enjoy every quarter.  They’re tired of that being the status quo.  So I say let Republicans continue to scream about stopping the corporate welfare.  They’ll continue to look like ideologues for it.

Republicans are also whining about no “litigation reform”.  But here’s the reality: if the off-shore areas end up going up for lease, which would require Senate passage of the same bill (unlikely this year) and no veto by Bush (not a guarantee in the off-chance Congress actually passes something), it’s not like they’ll drill on those new areas.  Why?  Because here’s the dirty secret Republicans want to keep out of the spotlight: fuel corporations currently hold leases on 68 million acres of land and they’re not drilling on them right now.  More than that, those corporations have no plans to begin drilling any time soon.  They’re enjoying the high fuel prices too much.  Increasing the supply would bring that price down.  That situation was true before demand for fuel started falling in the face of $4.00 gas and is even more true now.  With demand decreasing, they have absolutely no incentive to put more fuel into the market.  So no environmental lawsuits will be issued because no corporation will drill.