Rhinocrisy

Rolling Stone (of which I am a big fan) has an article on the subject of plastic bags, including some daunting statistics: the world consumes 1 million plastic bags every minute, and Americans use 102 billion every year. While 500 billion plastic bags every year is an outrageous figure, and the plastic bag is a particularly egregious and permanent form of trash, it’s only one of hundreds of kinds of permanent trash that we produce every year.

There is an active, well-funded and continuous movement to maintain our trash productivity. Last year in California, there was an effort in the legislature by a number of environmental organizations, legislatures, and the governor (Schwarzenegger) to ban plastic bags state-wide. Ostensibly this ban exists in San Francisco, although you wouldn’t know it by the profligate use of plastic in this city. The legislative measure went down in flames at the last minute, thanks to extreme lobbying efforts on the part of plastics industry groups, notably the American Chemistry Council. Hopefully environmental groups will regird themselves and push this through in the future.

However: I like to keep my eye a bit ahead of the ball (which is why I suck at baseball). So, I’d like to suggest two laws that I think would do a lot to make our trash situation manageable (that is, virtually nonexistent).

1. Uniform Packaging law - This means that package design should be done with an eye towards recyclability. Packaging should be made of single materials that can be recycled as a unit - that is, nothing like the dreaded Tetra Paks, which, being made of paper laminated with polyethylene and lined with aluminum, are exceedingly difficult to recycle. Packaging should also be minimized - no triple-wrapping things in layers of plastic for no reason at all. I’ve always had a beef with the Japanese about this. Also, my books don’t need to be shrink-wrapped to a piece of cardboard when they arrive from Amazon.

2. Guaranteed Recycling law - This is the more draconian one, which specifies that any manufacturer has to provide means for recycling their product down to harmless components, either themselves or via a third-party service. This means everything - batteries, cellphones, egg cartons, bicycle frames, etc. The consumer will probably be made to bear the additional cost, but it would also mean that manufacturers will be forced to consider the decomposability of their products, and hopefully bring their design around to match.

This might seem like a heavy-handed way to deal with trash, but ultimately it’s the only reasonable way (other than, maybe, vaporizing it with a plasma torch) - we have to stop manufacturing things that are difficult to get rid of. In general, we need to think about who - and what - will bear the costs of our production, of our activity, not just until we get paid for our effort, but until the ends of existence.

Just reposting a link to this excellent comic from BoingBoing, so that it can get a wider readership.

Obama, this morning:

And so the question then is, are we going to be able to put together a package that includes safe, secure nuclear power; that includes new technologies so that we can use coal — which we have in abundance and is very cheap, but often is adding to our greenhouse gases — can we find sequestration technologies that clean that up; can we identify opportunities to increase our oil and natural gas production in a way that is environmentally sustainable? And that should be part of a package with our development of clean energy.

Answer: no. We’ve talked about clean coal here before, and how it’s at best on a twenty-year time horizon before it becomes viable technology. “Twenty years” basically means “never going to happen”, or “this is science fiction”, so whenever you hear someone talking about “clean coal”, understand that they’re talking through their hat. Oil and gas are tapped out domestically; that is simple geological fact against which there is no argument. The only sources left are offshore, which are expensive and environmentally problematic.

Nuclear power has been a mess for many years; some people are now discussing thorium as a safer, cleaner, cheaper, and all-around better alternative to uranium. India is really into it. Maybe that’s a reasonable plan; I don’t know enough to comment.

But I’d like to take issue with Obama saying this:

I am very firm in my conviction that the country that leads the way in clean energy — solar, wind, biodiesel, geothermal — that country is going to win the race in the 21st century global economy. … [W]e can’t overnight convert to an all-solar or an all-wind economy. That just can’t happen.

Here’s an idea: stop funding that unwinnable war in Iraq. Just end it. Then, use that money to spark research on clean energy. If you’re really very firm in your convictions, put some money where your mouth is.

Some of you may already be familiar with Earth Hour, an effort pioneered by the Australians to increase awareness about global warming by symbolically turning off all lights in participating major cities around the world for one hour. It occurs on April 1 (already a great day, now even better) of each year, going since 2007.

When I heard about this my first thought was - “Holy shit! Dark sky!” After all, who gives a toss about stopping catastrophic climate change when there’s the possibility of seeing a really spectacular starry sky? As I’ve hinted here before, I’m more or less committed to sidereal worship, and it’s long been a fantasy of mine to become Lord Commander of Earth so that I can impose just such a venture (viz., forced blackouts) on major cities. I mean, check out the pathetic Bortle Scale map of North America. A guy like me hasn’t a chance in this country.

Or so I thought! But, cloaked in the guise of “environmentalism”, I can advance my umbratory agenda. It seems that Chicago is already on board, and certain other cities seem like ripe targets to follow. If things continue in this vein, I may even abandon my plans to sabotage certain transformers on Walpurgis Night.

This story documents some interesting research — turns out that rather than dedicate vast tracts of land to fueling cars, it would make more sense from a carbon point of view to let the farms revert to forest and continue using fossil fuels for cars.

Strange. I was reading about the Venezuelan terrorist just freed on bail when I saw this Google Ad at the bottom of the screen that said something like “Coffins for everyone!” I had to click. It was for these mass-casualty coffins, easily folded and stacked and then assembled and stacked again. Clever! Too bad they are 100% tropical hardwood. Boo hiss. What’s wrong with a pine box?

But on the topic of the terrorist, it’s sad to see liberals agitating against Posada’s bail. I agree he should face murder and terror charges at least, if not extradition to Cuba or Venezuela. But bail is ok. I don’t support the hypocrisy of letting a CIA asset right-wing nutjob off the hook for terrorism. But I do support bail for all, even those facing terror charges. Prisons suck.

I know how low my expectations of U.S. government have fallen when, upon reading this report, I am not only furious but also relieved, like the time I hurled up a burger that had been out too long.

The U.S. Chemical Safety Board decided to slam oil company BP for screwing the pooch on safety at its Texas City, Texas refinery and contributing to an explosion that killed 15 people and injured 180 in 2005. Their press release is terrifying. It says a tanker-truck worth of flammable hydrocarbons spewed out of a vat in less than two minutes. It vaporized and spread over the property before being ignited and bang. “High overpressures from the resulting vapor cloud explosion totally destroyed 13 trailers and damaged 27 others. People inside trailers were injured as far as 479 feet away from the blowdown drum, and trailers nearly 1000 feet away sustained damage.”

It wasn’t surprising that fuels can burn and even explode. Or that refineries might suffer from design flaws. The two surprises were how open the investigators were about negligence by the oil company and in recommending federal regulation as a cure.

For BP’s part, here was a particularly damning section:

the refinery only investigated three of the eight known previous ISOM blowdown release incidents, where flammable and potentially explosive vapor was released from the same blowdown drum involved in the March 23 accident. In 2004, an internal BP audit graded the refinery’s analysis of incident information as “poor.”

And there was that subhead, “Dysfunctional Safety Culture Existed at All Levels of BP,” followed by lines like “BP executives made spending cuts without assessing the safety impact of those decisions.”

I know I’m not including BP’s side of the story here, because my point isn’t to provide a news story. I’m just pleased that any U.S. federal agency would speak such clear truth to power. And even more surprised that they would call on the government, rather than voluntary industry action, as the remedy. They did so in a section called “OSHA Should Increase Petrochemical Inspections, Enforcement.”

Proposed OSHA fines during the twenty years preceding the March 2005 disaster - a period when ten fatalities occurred at the refinery - totaled $270,255; net fines collected after negotiations totaled $77,860….

Federal OSHA conducted only nine [in depth, multi-week] inspections [between 1995 and 2005], and none in the refining sector. State agencies in the 26 states that operate their own workplace safety programs conducted a total of 48 [such] inspections, including six at refineries. However, a number of states - including Texas, Louisiana, and New Jersey, where much of the U.S. oil and chemical industry is concentrated - rely upon federal OSHA to enforce workplace safety rules….

California’s Contra Costa County, which has its own industrial safety ordinance, inspects each covered facility every three years. A county staff of five engineers performs an average of 16 inspections per year.

I can think of a few other places where the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board’s straightforward analysis could come in handy.

Previously we lamented the ease with which scientific theories on the subject of evolution can be smudged in the public eye, and how simple it is for a disingenuous party to skew the proportions of a “debate”, especially given an ideologically-predisposed audience. Fortunately, other domains of science are vulnerable to the same tactics, so we biologists are not alone.

A case in point: the recently-released documentary “The Great Global Warming Swindle”, aired on the UK’s Channel 4, is earning wild praise all over the [expletive deleted] for finally debunking that pesky global warming myth once and for all. Thanks to the miracle of science, you can actually view this documentary in full. Which I did!^*

The piece is full of errors (and also full of infuriatingly snide and self-satisfied men). I was forced to flip my LCD monitor the bird a couple of times. The most egregious, in my estimation, was a little segment talking about how carbon dioxide makes up only a tiny fraction of the atmosphere (including the good old bit about how water vapor is the primary greenhouse gas, so why should we pay CO₂ so much attention?), and anyway anthropogenic carbon dioxide is only a tiny fraction of the total CO₂ released into the atmosphere every year, swamped by the amount released by volcanoes and decaying plant matter. This is hopelessly insulting if you even know how to spell “science”. Real Climate has a decent thrashing, plus more in comments.

Then it gets weird: the documentary concludes by positing that this is all an effort on the part of the first world to keep the Third World down. Say what? The environmental movement is fighting against big business and First World governments to keep the Third World down?

The producer of the piece is a guy named Martin Durkin, whose inglorious production history is apparently firmly wedded to controversy. Curiously enough, it turns out that he’s closely associated with a band currently called “Spiked” (their hagiographic piece on the documentary is here), previously known as “LM”. A.k.a. “Living Marxism”. George Monbiot reveals that this is apparently the product of the Revolutionary Communist Party, a Maoist unit you might be familiar with. Apparently the RCP feels that the environmental movement is the spearhead of the Western effort to crush Third World development, and is doing what it can to stymie this evil green tide (though evidently the news has not reached all quarters).

Loopy Maoists aside, it’s astonishing how easy it is to make and distribute a documentary like this these days. (You may have noted the similarly-styled documentary “Loose Change“.) The Internet is much better at transmitting than at producing novel ideas (cf. this post), meaning that the veneer of intelligence is often enough to allow something to go skating for miles and miles further than it otherwise might have. Note that the obverse is not necessarily better; the majority of global warming believers likely take it on faith, having received the gospel from Al Gore or some other cherished apostle.

This doesn’t speak well for contemporary discourse. But we shouldn’t be surprised by this state of affairs. Modern questions are often highly technical, and it’s really unremarkable that most people are unequipped with the means to parse them correctly. All of us defer to others in their areas of expertise, and in areas of contention it’s appealing to attend to the words of those experts that scratch our confirmation bias. Maybe it’s unreasonable to expect people to be able to reach the right conclusions under those circumstances.

Daylight savings time starts tonight in the United States, 5 weeks earlier than it has in prior years. The theory behind the change was that it would save energy. The theory, from what I can tell, was based on studies that dated to the Nixon Administration. Like so much in the Bush Administration, it was a “no-brainer” fix, a painless step that seemed like a win-win. I bet you $1 that it turns out to be lose-lose.

The win-win idea was that it would cost little to implement the change, consumers would save money, and the U.S. would become more energy-independent. All of these are likely to turn out false.
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Or rather, food for cars.

I found it strange a few days ago, in this transcript of a conversation between Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, that the two of them agreed that ethanol was a horrible waste. Their reasoning was one I haven’t heard articulated outside of the disgruntled mumblings of luddites:

Hugo Chávez.- Do you know how many hectares of corn it takes to produce one million barrels of ethanol?Fidel Castro.- Of ethanol, I think you talked about 20 million hectares the other day, something like that (Laughter), but remind me.

Hugo Chávez.- Twenty million. No, you are the one with the exceptional mind.

Fidel Castro.- Ah, 20 million. Well, of course, the idea of using food for producing fuel is tragic, it is dramatic. Nobody is certain about what is going to happen with food prices, when soy is becoming a fuel, with the need there is in the world to produce eggs, to produce milk, to produce meat, and it is one more tragedy of the many that exist at this time.

But then there’s this:

An increase in the cost of tortillas, a staple of the Mexican diet since the Maya ruled 1,000 years ago, has triggered a slump in the peso.

Tortilla prices jumped 5.9 percent in January, the most in eight years, after costs climbed for corn, the main ingredient. That increase fanned inflation and a bond market rout that curbed demand for the currency. The peso has fallen 2.3 percent in the past month, making it the world’s second-worst performer against the dollar among the 70 currencies tracked by Bloomberg…

The peso may fall further in the next several months as corn prices continue to rise. Corn has soared 16 percent in the past eight weeks and 121 percent since late 2005 as demand for the grain grows from ethanol producers.

That’s not to say there’s no debate on the subject. But it’s pretty remarkable. Of all the reasons for corn prices in Mexico to finally rebound from their Nafta-depressed state, this is the most depressing. A need to feed cars.

Note: this blog beat me to the discussion.

Update: Saurabh, in comments, spots the impresarios’ math error. What’s two orders of magnitude when you’re in charge of a whole damn country? The basic point remains — consumption of corn for fuel, or speculation on corn because it’s now trendy to see it as an energy commodity rather than a boring old grocery store item, is screwing up Mexico.