Earth Day Sunday Music: John Denver

Even though Earth Day 2008 is still more than a week away (technically it is April 22, 2008), I wanted to get a jump on a post about it. There are many events planned around the world next weekend. The zoo in Houston, Texas will be holding an event this coming Saturday, April 19. Anyway, last year, when I was searching for a song that had an environmental theme to it, Charles Hugh Smith of Of Two Minds blog suggested Big Yellow Taxi originally done by Joan Baez.

Later I realized some of the songs sang by the late John Denver also had environmental themes. John Denver in many ways epitomized the cognitive dissonance we all exude in our ideals. While he championed protection of the environment, he had a hobby of flying airplanes, which leave a pretty large carbon fingerprint for a hobby. I also heard that he pushed for the construction of an airport near his home over the objection of many of his neighbors. Even so, the music he left is loved by millions and expresses the ideals of conservationists.

Rocky Mountain High


And in the following video, Denver talks about the development of the song Calypso, which is based on a trip he took with Jacques Cousteau (it includes the video for the song).

Calypso

The Air Car

Talk about environmentally friendly! It only goes 200 kilometers on a tank (about 125 miles), but it is filled up with air. The first video is a BBC news report.



And here is an Australian report:

The Next Gold

With the advent of global warming, potable water will become an increasingly scarce commodity. As the arctic and antarctic ice caps begin to melt in summer, sea levels will begin to rise. Couple this with poor urban planning (much like what is happening in Atlanta right now) and you have the makings of a potential crisis for millions of people.

There is one thing America is known for: ingenuity. We need to apply our ability to come up with innovative solutions to known water problems. An idea that I think should be given consideration is building desalinization plants along the coasts and pumping converted sea water into potable -- or at least non-potable, but usable -- water.

Certainly the main obstacle to such a project is its capital-intensiveness. And critics could argue against it either because the cost is perceived to be prohibitive and unnecessary based on the premise that global warming doesn't exist (the conservative argument) or because it could become just another case of private profits and socialized losses.

Something that many people don't know is that in the Native American tradition, things that are produced by the earth or nature belong to everyone and should not inure to the benefit of private companies or individuals. The question that begs to be asked in this line of thought is this: Who made the water? Who made the air we breathe? Who made the soil? (Did man make the water, air or soil -- and by extension, the minerals produced by natural processes?) It goes to the heart of property rights that have formed the basis of our legal system.

Ultimately, we must recognize that we owe it to our country -- and our world -- to make the best use of our natural resources. The implementation of a water supply from converted sea water will take many years to implement. The point in its favor, however, is that the need is foreseeable years -- even decades -- in advance.

Obviously, there are other problems related to increasing use and need for other commodities. Energy demand is growing every day, not only due to developing economies in Asia (which, long term, may end up becoming the center of the next empire), but also due merely because of an increasing global population and the energy needs to grow crops to feed them. Overfishing is causing a natural food supply to become more scarce and innovative techniques are needed there as well. That will require a non-polluting and renewable energy source.

As a result of these challenges, we need to create a national energy policy based on sustainable technologies. This problem, too, is foreseeable. There are many technologies based on sustainable energy: wind, solar, hydroelectric, tidal and geothermal. The effectiveness of each of the natural energy supplies vary depending on location. What is needed is a national program to maximize the use of these various natural energy supplies.

I haven't been writing much lately. I told you I've been thinking a lot. See what happens when I do that?

A Response to Alex Taylor III

Today, Alex Taylor III wrote an article posted at CNN Money wherein he criticized Thomas Friedman of the New York Times in his article Debunking auto industry myths. That all fine and good; but in the process he made (I feel) an unfair statement:

It has been argued here before that if the government wants to be serious about improving fuel economy, all it has to do is boost the tax on gasoline. The revenue generated could be rebated to lower-income drivers who are truly disadvantaged or invested in mass transit. The auto companies aren't going to argue for such a tax because it would give them a black eye with consumers. And the government won't do it either, because of its anti-tax bias.

But Friedman, using his column as a bully pulpit, could argue for such a tax with impunity. And it would be a whole lot more effective than perpetuating the old myth about the ignorant luddites in Detroit who are withholding the small, fuel-sipping cars that Americans really want to buy.

But he has argued for a tax on gasoline. Here is a quote from his column back in February:

But at the same time, we have to impose a tax that creates a floor price of $3.50 a gallon for gasoline — forever. This is also about leverage. It says to all the parties: we are going to conserve enough gasoline and spur enough clean alternatives to fossil fuels that no matter what you all do in the Middle East, we will not depend on you for energy.

Another thing I take issue with is his statement that U.S. automakers and Americans don't need to change their habits:

That's wrong...and wrong. Forcing people to buy more efficient cars by ordering car companies to make them is like forcing people to lose weight by banning food companies from selling Big Macs and pizzas. The reason Americans consume so much gasoline is that they like their big pickup trucks, SUVs, and V-8 engines. The reason the automakers make them is because people want to buy them.



He also tries to defend them by saying:

American manufacturers DO build fuel-efficient cars but Americans don't buy them. Ford (Charts, Fortune 500) is currently offering cut-rate financing on the 2008 Escape Hybrid, while GM (Charts, Fortune 500) is subsidizing the smallest car in its lineup, the Chevy Aveo. And GM can brag all it wants about having more models - 30 of them - than any other manufacturer that get more than 30 miles per gallon on the highway, but it gets precious little credit for it in the marketplace.

The reason people (like me) don't buy them is because the quality is not as good as a Honda or Toyota -- even if it is cheaper. Furthermore, the Aveo's fuel economy is not as good as the Honda Civic or Fit or Toyota Echo or Yaris. (I know, I checked.)

Don't believe me? Here is the fuel economy for the Chevy Aveo:

City 26
Highway 35

And the Honda Civic:

City 30
Highway 38

You need only look at Consumer Reports or a similar opinion poll by consumers on what kind of car they want to buy to know that GM's economy cars have a ways to go in terms of quality. And as for the Escape Hybrid? It's hybrid engine is designed not to increase its gas mileage but instead to increase its power. That misses the point of hybrid technology.

Cause of Honeybee Deaths Linked to Virus

Back in April, I posted a video by Bill Maher arguing that we should celebrate Earth Day every day. In his monologue, he recounted the news story at the time that honeybee colonies were disappearing for some unknown cause. Well, it appears that the cause has been discovered:

(Fortune) -- Scientists investigating the recent disappearance of U.S. honeybees have linked a little-known virus to the die-off, suggesting that a novel infection capable of wiping out hives has spread widely among America's bees. The researchers also reported circumstantial evidence that the virus may have been introduced to the U.S. via bees imported from Australia.

As reported last month in Fortune, the disappearing bee syndrome, dubbed colony collapse disorder, or CCD, threatens many commercial beekeepers with ruinous losses. That in turn could cause major problems for U.S. growers, who rely on honeybees to pollinate nearly a hundred fruit and vegetable crops. Without trucked-in hives to blanket flowering plants with bees, farmers' yields of everything from apples to melons to zucchinis would plummet. The U.S. Secretary of Agriculture has estimated that CCD has the potential to cause a $15 billion direct loss of crop production and $75 billion in indirect losses.

The scientists, whose study was published online today by the journal Science, stressed that they haven't proved CCD is caused by the viral suspect, Israeli acute paralysis virus, or IAPV. (Its name reflects IAPV's discovery by Israeli researchers, not its place of origin, which is unknown.) The fact that the virus is usually found in colonies devastated by CCD may merely mean that it is a symptom rather than a root cause; just as rare infections often hit immune-suppressed AIDS patients, bees may get infected by IAPV when an unknown factor hammers their immune systems, precipitating CCD.

The researchers also detected IAPV in apparently healthy honeybees from Australia, where no cases of CCD have been reported. That suggests that even if the virus is a key culprit, it doesn't destroy colonies by itself. Instead, it may act as a kind of last straw that triggers the collapse of hives stressed by other things that have set up bees for killer infections in the U.S.

Although a rare virus has been pinpointed as the culprit, the suspicion (as the story points out) is that it is merely the trigger. The main cause is still suspected to be something environmental. The best evidence still says that our lifestyles are harmful to the environment. The time has come to count the external costs of maintaining our disposable society. The honeybees -- and, by extension, our own existence -- depends on it.

Toil and Trouble

Image taken from Despair.com.

More problems. My electricity went out on my RV. It turned out that it was just a shorted wire that was easily fixed once I took the RV to the shop. The internet connection here is still inconsistent, so posting has been difficult. OK, these are minor problems, considering all I have been through.

I took a sailing trip (I Kidd you not) and then took a speedboat ride in Galveston Bay on Saturday. I went to a couple of museums and a Chinese Garden that had miniature replicas of China's Terracotta Army and Forbidden City, as well as a guided tour explaining Chinese history on Sunday and Monday. I'll try to get some pictures up soon.

I was going to go swim in the Gulf of Mexico until I saw a news report while eating breakfast that showed thousands of fish getting washed up on the beach due to an unknown cause. I heard that the water here is dirty partly due to the pollution dumped into the Mississippi River, which then gets washed up on the beaches here. It's enough to galvanize you to action for environmental causes.

What did you all do this weekend? Anything interesting?

Is Saudi Arabia Running Out of Oil?

In a report over at The Oil Drum, blogger Stuart Staniford argues that the Ghawar oil fields are starting to get depleted and that this accounts for the recent rise in oil prices. The post comes with a lot of maps, charts and technical analysis. I am reproducing some of them here with some of his analysis.


Visualization of oil saturation in Ghawar, with focus region on 'Ain Dar and Shedgum regions at northern end. This is the "Linux Supercluster" picture (finder's credit Bob Shaw), showing a simulation visualization of the state of Ghawar at some year, probably but not certainly 2004. I have color reversed the original picture so that in this version, the red areas are interpreted to represent dry oil in the reservoir. The dark blue areas are water below the oil. The pale blue areas are interpreted to be swept, with most oil that can be removed already gone. Source: Figure 3 of Linux Clusters Driving Step Changes in Interpretation Simulation (pdf).

Mr. Staniford then asks:

Here the question is: is this an accurate picture of the state of recent depletion of Ghawar? (Ghawar is the world's largest oil field, and source of over half of the oil produced by Saudi Arabia).

And if so, then the second question arises: does that depletion have anything to do with this picture?

Saudi Arabian oil production, Jan 2002-Jan 2007, average of four different sources. Annotations show important events causally influencing production, including all documented megaprojects for new supply in the the time period. Graph is not zero-scaled to better show changes. Click to enlarge. Source: US EIA International Petroleum Monthly Table 1.1, IEA Oil Market Report Table 3, Joint Oil Data Initiative, OPEC Monthly Oil Market Report, Table 17 (or similar) on OPEC Supply.

In particular, Saudi oil production has been falling with increasing speeed since summer 2005, and overall, since mid 2004, about 2 million barrels of oil per day in production has gone missing (about 1mbpd in reduction in total production, and about another 1mbpd in that two major new projects, Qatif and Haradh III, failed to increase overall production). That's 2.5% of world production and, if that production hadn't gone missing, gasoline in the US likely would still be somewhere in the vicinity of $2/gallon instead of well over $3.

I will analyze six or seven separate lines of technical evidence, and argue they all point to a consistent picture, which says that the answer to both questions is "Yes". Yes, the northern half of Ghawar is quite depleted. And yes, this probably explains at least part of recent production declines. Furthermore, it is likely that more declines in Saudi production are on the way.

I don't know if this is disinformation just meant to create panic (and therefore drive up the price of oil), or if the shortage due to this one region is just temporary. I can just tell you that the general feeling is that cheap oil is starting to run out. In any case, I think that the link at the top is worth a look.

Before I go on, I think I should give a disclaimer (which I am borrowing, for the most part, from Mike Shedlock's site):

The content on this site is provided as general information only and should not be taken as investment advice. All site content, including advertisements, shall not be construed as a recommendation to buy or sell any security or financial instrument, or to participate in any particular trading or investment strategy (or an endorsement or recommendation of any product on any ad). The ideas expressed on this site are solely the opinions of the author(s) who may or may not have a position in any company or advertiser referenced above. Any action that you take as a result of information, analysis, or advertisement on this site is ultimately your responsibility. Consult your investment adviser before making any investment decisions.

If Saudi Arabia is truly starting to run out of oil, then we here in America need to get cracking developing technology to make our use of oil more efficient and develop alternative forms of energy. Most of our electricity comes from burning coal; and while we have a 250-year supply of it, it burns very dirty. Different areas of the country are more suitable to other, cleaner, forms of energy production: solar, wind and hydro power. Each of these are renewable and relatively clean forms of energy production. While current technology does not allow for these forms of energy production to be used widely, it would be wise for Americans to put our smartest minds to work creating more energy-efficient automobiles and buildings. Rather than looking toward converting food crops into more oil for our cars, we need to focus on making our cities more fuel efficient and develop more mass transit lines so that we can cut unnecessary oil usage.

It is my feeling that we, here in America, need to use our strength of innovation to solve our energy problems rather than looking for ways to produce more energy. Our real problem is that we are wasting too much energy that we have access to now. Reducing the demand on oil by conserving and increasing energy efficiency would be the smartest and most effective method of driving down our energy costs.

Belated Sunday Music Video: Big Yellow Taxi

Counting Crows music video for "Big Yellow Taxi" originally done by Joan Baez:



Hat Tip: Charles Smith of Of Two Minds Blog

Environmental Issues In Popular Music

I have been trying to find a music video on YouTube that follows an environmental theme from popular Top 40 music (pop, rock, Christian or country) but I can't seem to find any that really talk about environmental or ecological issues. The closest I seemed able to find was the Australian band Midnight Oil's Blue Sky Mine. But that was not a Top 40 hit -- at least not here in the U.S. Their one Top 40 hit, Beds Are Burning, was really about the treatment of Native peoples (Aboriginal) in Australia.

I have read several artists, such as Peter Gabriel and Sting, that are involved in Social Justice and Environmental causes, but I have not been able to find actual examples of popular songs that deal with environmental concerns.

Can my regular readers think of any popular Top 40 songs that were about environmental issues for Earth Day?

Earth Year

Today is Earth Day. Bill Maher has a New Rule: make it Earth Year. Something I didn't know before is that bee colonies are disappearing. He said we don't know what is causing it, but without bees, plants don't get pollinated. Without pollination, plants won't produce food. Without food, we humans go hungry.

He mentions corn syrup as a potential cause, but I want to make another point about corn syrup. I read on another blog somewhere that the American obesity epidemic started right at the time that we started using corn syrup in all of our food. While our sedimentary lifestyle certainly and larger portion sizes at food establishments certainly contributes to the problem, we should not discount the possibility that the cheaper, sweeter corn syrup isn't contributing to the problem as well.

But back to the bees and the problem with pollination of plants, we are already suffering with drought conditions over the last several years. And the warming of the Earth's atmosphere is contributing to it. The last thing we need is to combine drought conditions with lack of pollination for the plants.

Supreme Courts Rules EPA Has Right to Regulate Air Quality

In a story in the New York Times entitled Court Rebukes Administration in Global Warming Case, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, found that states have standing to challenge the EPA's failure to protect the environment.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court ordered the federal government on Monday to take a fresh look at regulating carbon dioxide emissions from cars, a rebuke to Bush administration policy on global warming.

In a 5-4 decision, the court said the Clean Air Act gives the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to regulate the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from cars.

Greenhouse gases are air pollutants under the landmark environmental law, Justice John Paul Stevens said in his majority opinion.

...

The court had three questions before it.

--Do states have the right to sue the EPA to challenge its decision?

--Does the Clean Air Act give EPA the authority to regulate tailpipe emissions of greenhouse gases?

--Does EPA have the discretion not to regulate those emissions?

The court said yes to the first two questions. On the third, it ordered EPA to re-evaluate its contention it has the discretion not to regulate tailpipe emissions. The court said the agency has so far provided a "laundry list" of reasons that include foreign policy considerations.

The majority said the agency must tie its rationale more closely to the Clean Air Act.

"EPA has offered no reasoned explanation for its refusal to decide whether greenhouse gases cause or contribute to climate change," Stevens said. He was joined by his liberal colleagues, Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter, and the court's swing voter, Justice Anthony Kennedy.

When the Supreme Court's majority says that your policy has no "rational explanation," that's a pretty strongly worded rebuke. Let me explain:

There are three basic levels of constitutional scrutiny. The highest scrutiny is reserved for "fundamental rights" cases such as those involving freedom of speech and press, religious freedom, etc. This level is called the "Strict Scrutiny Test" or SST for short.

The second level of scrutiny, called "Intermediate Scrutiny," is reserved for rights that are deemed "important" as opposed to "fundamental." This often involves sex discrimination cases.

The lowest level of test, and the one which the government is supposed to be able to pass the easiest is the "Rational Basis Test" or RBT for short. The Rational Basis Test is usually applied to taxing and spending priorities of the government. The government merely has to show that its taxing, spending or regulating policy merely has some rational relation to a legitimate government interest.

What the Supreme Court appears to be saying is that the Bush Administration wasn't even able to show that its failure to regulate the quality of air had some rational basis to it.

That's bad.

Orange Snow in Russia

I may have been complaining about the ice and snow around here, but at least we don't have this problem.