Rhinocrisy

The ongoing discussion in comments about whether the U.S. could have or would have stopped the Janjaweed in Darfur if it weren’t for those darn Chinese reminds me of a tendency I’ve seen again and again in foreign policy. That is the “who wants to play the heavy this time” game. Because few country’s governments really want to, say, sign the Rio Declaration (the proto-Kyoto), or outlaw bribery, or enact any number of other measures that sound good to the public but are deeply opposed by the people who Matter. So what they do is they figure out, subtly, who in the group will pay the fewest consequences by blocking action, and then they all go home and shrug and say, “We tried but XXXX wouldn’t let the measure move forward” and then go sip fine scotch with the people who Matter. Sometimes the public take these statements literally and they pass laws that put their own country into good moral standing, other countries be damned. So Europe tries to live up to Kyoto, with or without the U.S., for a while at least.

In the case of global warming, of course, the U.S. has played spoiler. For nuclear issues, France has been handy. Japan won’t let anyone really save the whales. Chile spoils other marine endangered species protections. Nobody who Matters wants that treaty to restrict small-arms sales, not even Sweden, home of Phil

My sis points me to this post about GM bentgrass designed for golf courses making its way into the wild. In the past I’ve been pretty heavily involved with anti-GM activism, including participation in some Greenpeace and Rainforst Action Network campaigns. Their focus has always annoyed me, especially as a biologist.

The fact of the matter is, the danger posed by GM crops is not really that substantial. It’s possible that GM bentgrass will run wild and overrun the world, but in truth it’s far LESS likely to do so than ordinary bentgrass. GM traits are maintained by selection - artificial selection. If they confer any fitness advantage, it is usually only in a narrow context. In the case of the above bentgrass, it’s that it was engineered for increased glyphosate resistance (which is done by expressing an alternative version of the protein whose action glyphosate normally blocks). In fact it’s likely that this would prove disadvantageous compared to normal bentgrass in the absence of maintenance and the application of RoundUp, since it’s more or less wasting resources expressing a redundant protein, and probably under much more poorly-controlled gene regulation than normal bentgrass.

So if this bentgrass gets out into the wild, chances are it’ll die out quickly, or at least that the offending GM segment of the genome will be bred out. All this talk of GM super-weeds taking over the world is therefore quite overblown and probably not something we need worry about. Sure, volunteer GM corn might occasionally turn up in a field downwind, and there’ll be some degree of contamination in the wild, but no cataclysm will result.

Food safety issues are a bit more problematic, but still I think exaggerated. RoundUp-ready tomatoes probably aren’t some sort of pestilence, and although some genetic modifications may produce unanticipated responses, especially allergenic responses (as has actually been observed), the stuff isn’t poison. Not compared to, say, Twinkies, which is not a major environmental issue.

These are the issues that get pressed because this is what draws (or drew, rather, since these days the movement is somewhat muted) popular attention. The real issues, as I see them, however, are corporate control of agriculture and biodiversity.

Remember that this is cutting-edge technology, and farmers are beholden to the seed companies that produce this stuff; they must buy RoundUp-ready seed from them every year, not to mention RoundUp itself. GM technology is a powerful way for corporations to insinuate themselves deeper into the agricultural process; the infamous “terminator” technology developed to prevent farmers from saving seed at all is a prime example.^*

And by far the greatest danger is the loss of diversity. GM crops are a very close monoculture; being engineered, they are completely lacking in genetic variation. Not only does this make for a remarkably boring and uniform food supply, it means that there is no standing genetic variation to serve as grist for breeding future strains. This is how agriculture is possible, after all: the selection of desired attributes from amongst a vast pool of available variation. The loss of this variation is a loss of accumulated wealth; we as a species worked hard to develop great varieties in our food crops. It decreases the security of our food supply to reduce it.

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^* Also a good example of ignorance of biology being used to foist arguments; many opponents of terminators complained of it wreaking havoc by spreading and creating a plant holocaust. But this is nuts; obviously, it would breed itself out of any population within a generation and cease to be a bother.

Lately I’ve been fantasizing about constructing for myself an electric Mini Cooper. It’s actually quite plausible; a number of hobbyist organisations facilitate the process, and financially it’s not out of reach. A brand-new 2-door Mini convertible retails for a scant $24,000, and the conversion process, depending on the batteries you employ, comes to somewhere around $6,000. The sort of performance you get is highly variable, depending on weight of the car, aerodynamics, etc., and batteries.

These last are the critical component in electric vehicles and for alternative energy in general - fossil fuels can be burned to produce power on demand, but the same is not true of many renewable energy sources. Appropriate vectors are thus a critical technology (so you can store power for when you need it), and right now the focus seems to be on batteries, as the most easily achievable in the near-term.^*

For cars, these range from simple lead-acid batteries, which might give you something like 50 mi of driving range, adequate for most people, to cutting-edge lithium polymer (LiPo) batteries, which have incredibly long lifetimes, almost no “memory” (that is, the battery does not degrade much over time, in contrast to say, NiCad batteries), and a much higher capacity than other types of batteries. Electric vehicles equipped with such batteries get ~300 mi of travel time before they must be recharged.

This is fine and wonderfully geeky, but it’s not necessarily clear that an electric car is a good idea yet for the ideological purist. For one thing, this is not a zero-emission vehicle. It has the potential to be, certainly; if it’s charged entirely by non-polluting, renewable energy sources, then it indeed can be considered as such. But most of the power in the grid comes from fossil fuels, and dirty ones at that (such as coal), especially on the Eastern seaboard, where I live. And the greater efficiency of electric motors relative to internal combustion engines means, if the power is oil-fueled, you’re only reducing your pollution output by about half. This is good, but not great.

What it DOES do is push the problem back to a single point: non-polluting power generation is the only thing we need develop if we have an electric car fleet. This is appealing because it makes the task of regulation much easier, if only a single industry, especially a large-scale, extremely centralized one, is responsible. On the other hand, it pushes the problem out of sight, where it might actually be free to grow worse. There seems to be little action in the area of moving away from coal-burning power plants - except possibly retrograde action.

Thorny. Anyway, new poll on the right.^†

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^* Fuel cells, like the hydrogen-based ones much touted by George Bush, probably won’t be feasible for another ten or twenty years, which some suspect is why Bush latched onto them - pie in the sky.

^† As an unfortunate coda to our last poll, you might read this story about polar bears resorting to cannibalism because of thin food supplies.^‡ Depressing. For further depression, read this review by Jim Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, probably the best-known climate change researcher in the world (link courtesy of my Bong doppleganger).

^‡ I have to wonder if they know they’re not supposed to eat polar bear liver.

The House voted a few days ago to allow offshore drilling in all outer-continental shelves in U.S. territory. That is, everything more than 50 miles offshore is open for oil and gas exploration and drilling development. The region between 50 and 100 miles is subject to ban by individual states before a specified time deadline (2009 for oil, a single year for gas), but since the bill mandates that 50% of royalties must be paid out to states (instead of almost entirely to the federal government, as it is now), many states might choose to forgo such a ban.

It’s unlikely that the Senate would pass anything so grandiose, since offshore drilling favors major opposition from environmental groups, but it’s important to remember that this is all happening in the run-up to election season. This year high gas prices are sure to be an important point of debate^*, which will certainly contribute towards people making incredibly bad decisions in the name of easing the lives of consumers.

It therefore behooves us to review why offshore drilling is an incredibly bad idea.

Oil companies are fond of pointing out that oil spills, and offshore drilling in specific, make up a tiny fraction - less than 5% - of the total amount of petroleum pollution that gets into the ocean, and an even smaller fraction if you include natural seepage. Of course, in most of those situations the pollution is relatively diffuse and not nearly as destructive as in the case of an oil spill, when it coats everything and makes life very difficult for otters and other cute animals.

But never mind that; what concerns us is not improbable outlier events, but the routine activities of drilling. In brief: the basic protocol for oil exploration and drilling is: your rig (of whatever type) sets up where you want to drill. Then you cut into the ground, directing your drill where you want it to go until you’ve reached your source. After that you drop in tubes, seal it in place and start pumping.

The catastrophe you want to prevent here is blowout - when gases or fluids under pressure force their way out of the bore. Blowouts can be catastrophic. The worst oil spill in history occured in the Gulf of Mexico, in the Bay of Campeche when an exploratory well (Ixtoc I) blew out and was uncontrolled for nearly a year, spilling somewhere between 140 and 428 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. The way you prevent blowouts is by maintaining pressure in the shaft using “drilling muds” or “drilling fluids”. These are usually recirculated in the shaft and re-used, but a significant amount is deposited on the ocean floor. The high-density fluids used in drilling muds, as well as the drilling cuttings from the bore itself, may contain heavy metals like cadmium or mercury in order to give it weight. Needless to say, introducing such toxic metals into ocean environments is not healthy for them, especially in shallow-water environments. Drilling fluids also may contain extremely toxic hydrocarbon lubricants, although safer alternatives to many of these exist or are being developed.

A second important source of pollution is produced water released from the bore - this can contain hydrocarbons, metals, and most significantly, slightly radioactive compounds, like radium, which may precipitate out and settle onto the ocean floor.

I’m tired of saying this, but it’s especially disgusting that bills like this one are being passed while there has been no substantial Congressional action to encourage conservation, which could probably offset the bulk of increased production from offshore drilling with relative ease. And, as has been continually pointed out, since oil is traded on a pretty ideal global market and most major oil companies are multinational, there is absolutely no difference in terms of price to the consumer to increasing production at home or abroad.

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^* For some stupid fucking goddamn idiotic reason.

Alt hippo* wants a lefty blogger campaign directed at the issue of ANWR. I’m game, partly because I find the issue compelling (see this), partly because I’ve been so impressed by the Social Security-focused discussion I’ve been watching Jonathan Schwarz of A Tiny Revolution participate in, and partly because I just find oil resource issues fascinating.

Speaking of which, here is the USGS factsheet on ANWR. You should read it, because it’s the report that everyone will be quoting from when they talk about how much oil is sitting in ANWR. Taking the region as a whole (i.e., including “native lands” and offshore sites, what’s called the “1002 Area”), the 5% confidence figure for technically recoverable oil is 15 billion barrels of oil (bbo). The more realistic figure is the mean confidence estimate, which is 10 bbo. This is a substantial quantity of oil, to be sure. To put it in perspective, Sudan has estimated reserves of ca. 1 bbo. U.S. proven reserves (i.e., that which you are capable of getting out of the ground) are somewhere around 29 bbo. In other words, ANWR can potentially add half again as much to American proven reserves. Although estimates of production are at this point premature, they are of course being made. Gale Norton claims ANWR could produce up to 1.4 million barrels per day. On a good day, the U.S. consumes 20 million barrels of oil.

If the drilling is confined to the “undeformed area” (the region above the Marsh Creek anticline, a boggy and unattractive mess), about 7 bbo are recoverable. Compare to the caribou calving concentration map of former USGS scientist Ian Thomas (who was fired for posting them on his USGS site), and you will find the happy truth: caribou calving will be unaffected by drilling in undeformed areas.

Sounds great, right?

Here’s a wrench in the works: the above numbers are from a USGS survey done in 1998. A previous assessment in 1987 found exactly the opposite results: 75% of reserves were believed to lie in the deformed area, where most of caribou calving occurs. While it’s probably the case that the 1998 study is more reliable than the 1987 one, the point is: exploratory drilling, and probably actual wells, will not be confined to the undeformed area. If drilling is approved in ANWR exploration will cover the entire 1002 area. Makes sense - why trust a flimsy study when you have approval to do exploratory drilling wherever you want?

And it seems likely that drilling would inevitably entail driving some natives off their land for the 4 billion barrels of oil they’re sitting on, but obviously that’s not as important as caribou.

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* Random fact of the day: phylogenetically, the hippo is the closest surviving land relative of whales and dolphins, followed by the cow. See this.