Environmental News, Articles & Information | Global Warming News | EcoWorld

What is this EcoWorld thing all about, anyway? Earlier this year, EcoWorld’s posts suddenly attracted a commenter who must have pasted a few dozen comments onto various stories within a week or two. Some of these comments were duplicates of previous comments, or had duplicate passages, and while the general thrust of the comments were well worth posting, it was getting to be a lot of work to read and edit the flow. Most websites have automatic blocks for this sort of thing, but we like most of what we get, including most of this. These many comments – all written in all-caps by the admitted hunt and peck typist – were very insightful and they looped into religion and civilization issues – and the writer was trying to tackle it all. That is a tall order. But this commenter’s digressions into the other great issues of humanity was a reminder – there is a person behind every editor. What do we believe – what philosophy underlies the opinions and analysis we’ve provided on literally thousands of many pages for over 12 years? Who is the man behind this editor? And doesn’t any editor who is crass enough to post a million dollar billboard owe his readers a goofy glimpse? So here goes…

There is an ideological struggle for the soul of environmentalism that anti-environmentalists don’t care about, and environmentalists barely grasp. There are two ways to address environmental challenges and they should be complimentary approaches. One approach centers on reducing consumption, improving efficient use of energy and water, conserving open space. This approach dominates environmental thinking today. But the other approach is vital – and that approach centers on increasing the production of clean energy and water, and developing land to accomplish these goals. We call these two complementary approaches demand side vs. supply side environmentalism. Without a balance between these approaches, solving environmental challenges (without incurring devastating economic hardship) is doomed to failure.

Global warming is not the principle cause of drought, for example, nor of extreme weather. Both of those problems on a global scale can be addressed by reforestation, especially in the tropics. Reforestation, reversing desertification, and refilling aquifers all over the world – actions that will mitigate global warming but are also extremely important to accomplish even if there was no global warming alarm – will require more energy production, to desalinate seawater and to operate pumps to relocate fresh water. As we document in “Revisiting Desalinization,” for $5.0 billion dollars (which includes a budget for mitigation and disposal of the brine) a desalinization plant can provide water for 5.0 million residential users, and would only require about 250 megawatt-years of electricity per year. This is an astonishingly low amount to those of us who bought into the conventional wisdom that desalinization requires too much energy – one good 1.0 gigawatt nuclear power plant can desalinate 4 cubic kilometers of water per year, enough to supply 20 million residential water users.

Using desalinated seawater to replenish aquifers and supply water to cities requires a lot of scratches in the ground – something the demand side environmentalists decry. But they are wrong. And speaking of scratches in the ground, why aren’t we building canals to redirect excess fresh water from the Volga to the Aral Basin, or from the Congo to the Lake Chad Basin? Compared to the costs to mitigate industrial CO2, redirecting huge volumes of water to restore the lakes and aquifers in Central Asia and in Africa’s Sahel is easily done – but it requires some big scratches in the ground.

The point here is sometimes we have to protect the environment from the environmentalists. The demand side environmentalists often seem to want no development, anywhere, yet in many critical areas development – more energy, more water – is what we need not only to service the world’s growing population but also to preserve and restore the environment. We should take all that CO2 tax revenue – and brace yourself, it’s coming – and use it to fund massive development projects to repower and rewater the planet, restoring rains, cooling the land, reforesting, moderating the weather and eliminating severe droughts. That would be a better use of funds.

So there is an attempt to summarize EcoWorld’s editorial philosophy – for the cautious reader’s examination – since the mission is more important than the money.

The previous post, Radical Environmentalism, was not something to be lightly posted. Yes we may rant and rave on the internet, and blogs are spontaneous and raw, but EcoWorld is more than a blog. Since 1995, EcoWorld has been a global editorial brand, presenting news, analysis, commentary, features, information resources, on anything and everything green to a worldwide audience. If we’re going to rant, we’d better have given it some thought.

Green is suddenly the big rage.

Back in 1995 environmentalism as a media genre, if you will, was in decline, and it stayed pretty much under the radar until about a year or two ago. All of a sudden it’s the biggest thing going. And as a result it’s a lot like the internet boom, a burgeoning, exploding, brand new sector where there are new entrants filled with passion and little else.

EcoWorld went online in 1995 partly because we wanted to promote, through education, information and advocacy, a doubling of the timber mass of the planet in 50 years, and we still do. But all I see in 2007 is people cutting down rainforests in South America to grow sugar cane, cutting down rainforests in the Congo to grow cassava and jatropha, and cutting down rainforests in Indonesia to grow oil palms. And the jaguars and the gorillas and the tigers are being squeezed tighter, and the biofuel barons crow that they are going to stop global warming.

We might be better off to tear up (at most) 50,000 square miles in Athabasca to extract their heavy oil, which at $40 per barrel contains a 50 year supply of oil for the whole world (this is more than 100 times the amount of oil reserves in the ANWAR refuge). For tropical biofuel crops to replace crude oil you’d have destroy 5.0 million square miles of rainforest. And excuse me, but 5.0 million square miles of tropical rainforests are a hell of a lot more crucial to global climate than 50,000 square miles of frozen wasteland in the extreme north.

In my opinion, deforestation, (especially tropical deforestation) combined with depleted water tables (which increases the thermal conductivity of the earth) has more to do with global warming than greenhouse gas. We should develop super-efficient, clean burning, hybrid powerplants that still emit CO2 and greatly increase the world’s energy production so we can desalinate seawater and pump it into every basin on earth, and refill all the aquifers, everywhere. This will lower the thermal conductivity of the planet and facilitate more vegetation.

In my opinion, we should stop all tropical biofuel production, and on every biofuel operation within a formerly tropical rainforest, we should pump in fresh, desalinated seawater and replant rainforest trees. Restoring all tropical rainforests from 3.0 million to 8.0 million square miles will decrease regional droughts by restoring transpiration, and it will decrease global droughts and extreme weather by restoring a more constant monsoon cycle. And I don’t care if I burn CO2, which is only 2-3% of total CO2 emissions (the rest is natural). I love trees, I don’t mind a good campfire, and leave my incandescent lights alone. This is what I believe. Of course we should minimize air pollution – but if anything, reducing CO2 emissions is a distraction from this important goal.

It offends me that we already have “carbon crisis trainers” who are going to tell us how to lower our carbon footprint. Don’t be surprised when they arrive at your front door, wearing badges, to confiscate your incandescent lightbulbs. But CO2 is not pollution – it is an important greenhouse gas, and it is also necessary for plants to grow. Should we lower CO2 emissions? Maybe, but even so, under no circumstances should we prioritize this over preserving and restoring tropical rainforests. Right now, as the rainforests burn anew, the environmentalists are looking the other way because they want to encourage biofuel production, and to ignore this destruction is as presumptuous and negligent of them as anything they might allege any automaker or oil company ever did.

Our answer to the radical environmentalists is supply side environmentalism. And even if we accept that CO2 emissions are harmful, we must attack the problem in ways that avoid tyrannical rationing, or punitive resource pricing, and embrace energy production as well as greater energy efficiency, and always do rational cost/benefit analysis.

So dialogue is necessary; debate is necessary; dissent is necessary – not only to establish what is, but also what to do about it. That the radical environmentalists cannot accept this, even with global warming, is a mistake. It is a mistake that will not only undermine our freedoms and liberties, but possibly the environment itself, and should be challenged.

In the April 23, 2007 issue of Business Week, a magazine one might reasonably hope to have a balanced perspective on environmental issues, an article has appeared entitled “Climate Wars: Episode Two,” by John Carey.

Beneath the title, the teaser line reads as follows:

“With the skeptics almost silenced, businesses are fighting over how to cut carbon emissions.”

Silenced?

Does anyone in America remember the first amendment? Does anyone in America still remember that skepticism is one of the foundations of science? What if the skeptics are right?

Our concerns with global warming alarm are well documented: Climate models don’t adequately take into account the role of changes in land use nor the role of water vapor; they don’t allow for balancing mechanisms in the earth’s climate; they emphasize industrial CO2 emissions at the expense of countless other factors. One good volcanic eruption and all of a sudden we’ll be wanting to warm the earth – but don’t bother the journalists – their minds are made up and the debate is closed.

What’s perhaps most amazing is these journalists who have relentlessly demonized the energy and transportation industries – the biggest industries on earth – for correctly trying to insert a note of caution into the mad rush to blame anthropogenic CO2 emissions for every thunderstorm or hot day, are abruptly free of their cynicism now that these companies are on board. Carey writes approvingly, like some forgiving parent, that the major oil companies and automakers have “evolved.”

Carey can’t help taking an easy shot at President Bush, who despite whatever else you may think of him is right on this one.

As Carey says,

“There are still holdouts, not the least George W. Bush. His mantra is that China and India must sign on if the U.S. is to impose curbs…”

Mantra?

How about a good point? China and India together produce nearly 5.0 gigatons of CO2 each year, compared to not quite 6.0 gigatons for the U.S. But China and India have 2.4 billion people, compared to .3 billion in the U.S. Even if industrial CO2 matters – and a skeptic would be underwhelmed at that notion – what happens as China and India continue to industrialize?

Maybe Carey and other journalists – along with any conscientious environmentalist – ought to realize that mandating CO2 emission reductions are going to empower the biggest businesses on earth. Maybe they should realize that as we embrace this obsessive fanaticism, outlawing backyard barbecues and incandescent light bulbs, the only companies powerful enough to remain in the industrial production game will be those select members of monopolies and cartels. Maybe the corporate multinationals have simply realized there’s a lot of money, taxpayer’s money, to be made by rolling over. And who can blame them?

Why doesn’t anyone in the media report on how scientists who have continued to question global warming alarm and the role of industrial CO2 have been intimidated and silenced – assuming “silencing” people is still a bad idea in the United States? Why doesn’t anyone in the media follow up on the myriad of reports that continue to raise questions about the wisdom of doing anything in the name of reducing CO2 emissions – such as devastating the remaining tropical rainforests to grow “carbon neutral” biofuel, when it may be the tropical rainforests are more critical to the global climate than regulating CO2?

There are many disturbing fallacies in Carey’s article. How about contrasting his bias against evil businesses who have suddenly been brought to heel, to his almost reverential, totally uncritical treatment of the environmental organizations who have opportunistically stoked this hysteria? Environmental organizations in the United States have been taken over by radicals, who are anti-growth, anti-capitalism, anti-car, anti-industry; they want to force everyone off the sacred “open space” and cram us all into ultra-high-density mega-cities; essentially the radical core of the environmental movement is communist. They have literally billions of dollars each year they use to spread propaganda and lobby politicians, and the global warming scare is the best thing that ever happened to them. Hiding behind their nonprofit status, they are as big as big business can get. But unlike businesses, these environmental radicals have declared economic war on the world.

Hopefully before it’s too late Americans will recognize the truth, that radical environmentalism has corrupted the environmental movement, co-opted journalism, cowed our policymakers, and undermined open scientific discourse. Radical environmentalism is the reason homes cost two or three times what they should cost, and the reason we haven’t got enough roads to drive efficiently to work and back, and instead have to wait in gridlock for hours every day. They are the reason for energy and water shortages, and they will be to blame when rationing and punitive pricing is the norm for those essentials. Have there been important goals that environmentalists have accomplished? Of course. But they have gone too far.

Anyone who watches the news with a critical eye should be concerned about the certainty with which this is being pushed. It is the biggest propaganda campaign in U.S. history. It is being sold, and to think there are no hidden agendas, or room for skepticism, is a mistake of epic proportions. And believe it or not, the environment may be the biggest victim of all, along with our liberty and freedom.

In previous posts we’ve expressed concern – to put it mildly – over the role emerging biofuel markets are having in accelerating tropical deforestation. In our posts “Deforestation and Global Warming,” “Biofueled Ethanol,” “Reforest the Tropics,” “IPCC 2007 & Deforestation,” “Is Biofuel Carbon Neutral?,” “Biofueled Global Warming,” and many others, we make the case that tropical deforestation is the most significant cause of desertification and droughts on earth, it is a major cause of extreme weather, and, along with other changes in land use, may actually have as much or more to do with global warming than industrial CO2 emissions.

Now we have a story in the St. Louis Post, dated April 15, 2007, entitled “Ethanol Plants Come With Hidden Costs: Water,” which surveys the impact ethanol refineries may have on fresh water supplies. Here’s an excerpt:

“The ethanol industry says it takes about 3 gallons of water on average to produce a gallon of ethanol and that recycling and other water-saving innovations will reduce that amount. Sometimes that consumption is understated: In Minnesota, one of the few states that require reporting of water use, a state study in 2005 found that ethanol plants used an average of 4.5 gallons for every gallon of ethanol. The water drawn for ethanol is a cost borne by communities — or whole regions — and a price sometimes ignored in the planning stages for new plants, experts say.”

Not mentioned in this story, of course, is the cost in water to irrigate the corn to produce the feedstock – the 3.0 to 4.5 gallons of water required for ethanol refining doesn’t include the water required to grow the corn, and corn is a relatively water-intensive crop.

Another cause of global warming we believe to be grossly understated to-date by climate scientists is the impact of depleted water tables, which increases the thermal conductivity of any land where the water tables have dropped significantly. Notwithstanding the potential global warming impact of depleted aquifers, the health of aquifers is an important and under-recognized factor influencing general environmental health, imperiling springs that feed aquatic ecosystems, as well as supplies of water for people. And often once these aquifers are depleted too much, it becomes difficult if not impossible to replenish them.

Ethanol proponents have correctly debunked the notion that ethanol is not energy-positive. While not as energy-positive as sugar cane, corn ethanol does embody more energy than is required to make it. But the impact of ethanol production on land use, the impact of ethanol production on water consumption, and the impact of ethanol production on water tables and aquifer health is not sufficiently understood.

Many forms of ethanol and biofuel production in general are very promising – but environmentalists are way behind in developing proper certification for biofuel crops, and as a result, for now it is probably accurate to say that biofuel mania is doing more harm than good to our global environment.

A new study from from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Dept. of Global Ecology at Stanford University, entitled “Combined climate and carbon-cycle effects of large-scale deforestation” has just been released, and it raises far more questions than it answers.

The fundamental conclusion of the report is that deforestation at higher latitudes actually causes global cooling, and deforestation in the tropics causes global warming. This is because replacing forests with grasslands is assumed to increase the reflectivity of the land – forests are darker than grasslands – which the researchers assert succeeds in having a cooling effect in the northern latitudes. In the tropics, however, where forests cause cloud formation, tropical deforestation is said to have a warming effect since clouds are more reflective than grasslands.

The most interesting statement in the entire report, one that anyone concerned with global warming should ponder closely, is the following:

“Although carbon-cycle effects have been taken into account in the promotion of afforestation as a climate change mitigation strategy, the biophysical effects of land-cover change have been largely ignored.”

Unfortunately this quote is not included in the summary press releases, and the full report is not available to the general public.

In the recently released IPCC report, one-third of global warming was asserted to be caused by changes in land status. But were these scientists yet considering all of the biophysical effects of land-cover change? Or are those effects being largely ignored?

It is easy to say common sense is of no use when trying to determine what might be causing global warming. But climate models, like economic models, are trying to make sense out of systems of nearly infinite complexity. When confronting chaos, common sense is a useful rudder. And to state the problem in plain terms, tropical deforestation is increasing, the justification for this is to combat global warming by growing biofuel, and the result is more global warming. It is an absolute disaster. And also don’t forget that droughts and extreme weather are often caused by tropical deforestation, not global warming.

Have the scientists who produced this study (or those who produced the most recent IPCC report) therefore identified all the biophysical effects on global warming? Did they consider the impact of lowered water tables which increase the capacity of the earth to absorb heat? Would that modify their calculations when they state there is no benefit to reforesting the temperate regions? Wouldn’t forest cover facilitate water retention and higher water tables, and wouldn’t forests shield the earth itself from heating, particularly if the water tables are depleted and the earth’s capacity to absorb heat is heightened? We have depleted our water tables by an order of magnitude in every agricultural valley and irrigated plateau on earth – over 10 million square miles.

Those who have made up their minds may say common sense is useless when debating the cause and the extent of global warming. Yet our world’s tropical rainforests have shrunk 60%, from 8.0 million square miles to less than 3.0 million, and our deserts have grown from 3.0 million square miles to 5.0 million, and over 10 million square miles of farmland is now conducting heat as never before due to lowered water tables. Elsewhere, another 7.0 million square miles of temperate and boreal forests have been lost.

Altogether, we have altered nearly 50% of the land surface of our planet in the last 150 years – and all of these changes have made those lands hotter. And yes, there are also .5 million square miles of very, very hot urban heat islands.

Before we lose another million square miles of tropical rainforest to the biofuel barons – burning away in the name of “CO2 neutral” energy production – perhaps we should take a much, much harder look at the “biophysical effects of land-cover change.”

Much of the water in Southern California comes from the north, and to get into the Los Angeles basin must be pumped over the Tehachapi Mountains. This is the biggest water lift in the world, about 2,000 feet (ref. NRDC).

When looking at alternatives to transporting huge quantities of water that might be better left where it is, desalinization is not getting sufficient attention. It turns out that 2,000 feet of lift is about the point where the energy necessary to desalinate seawater is actually slightly less than the energy required to pump water over a 2,000 foot mountain.

In our features “India’s Water Future” as well as “Arctic to Aral,” we have reported on the energy requirements to pump water. Using the same formulas, it turns out that the energy required to lift a cubic kilometer of water 2,000 feet is 248 megawatt-years.

What if that water were desalinated in plants located on the Pacific Coast, perhaps using land within Camp Pendleton between Los Angeles and San Diego? As we reported in “Photovoltaic Desalinization,” desalinization plants able to process 1.0 cubic kilometers per year are being designed today, at an estimated cost of $2.0 billion dollars. At an operating energy requirement of 2.0 kilowatt-hours per cubic meter, it would take 2.0 billion kilowatt-hours to desalinate one cubic kilometer of seawater. That’s only 228 megawatt-years, LESS energy than is used to pump the same amount of water into Los Angeles from the north.

According to the Los Angeles County Dept. of Water and Power, the average residential household in LA County uses 500 gallons of water per day (ref. LADPW). That equates to 690 cubic meters per year, which means that 1.0 cubic kilometers of water would supply nearly 1.5 million households with water – well over five million people.

For every gallon of usable water extracted from seawater, seven gallons of slightly more salinated seawater must be returned to the ocean. The costs for a system to distribute this water in a sufficiently dispersed stream certainly wouldn’t cost more than the desalinization plant itself. Assume a cost of $5.0 billion for a desalinization plant that would supply water to 5.0 million people. Amortized over 50 years, this capital cost would only amount to about $20 per person per year – adjusting for present value of money, certainly no more than $50 per person per year – not much.

What water crisis? What water shortage?

Within the United States, biofuel crops will provide a welcome supplement to petroleum-based fuels, but comprehensive and enforced biofuel certification in the tropics is urgently needed.

According to a report in Tierramérica posted on March 26, 2007, entitled “Brazil Intends to Dominate Ethanol Market,” Brazil intends to “increase its current production of 17,300 million liters a year by a factor of 12, without sacrificing forests, protected areas or food cultivation.”

Would someone please explain how Brazil is going to increase their biofuel production twelve times, without massive additional deforestation?

What if tropical reforestation didn’t just help wildlife, but also reduced droughts and extreme weather?

If you believe, as I do, that global warming (and droughts and extreme weather) is caused by deforestation (especially in equatorial and tropical regions), desertification, and depletion of water tables – something which has affected over 50% of the land surface on earth – then this news is just another chapter in an unfolding catastrophe.

From Indonesia where rainforest gives way to oil palm plantations, to Africa where rainforest gives way to cassava plantations, to Brazil where new sugar cane developments roll over Amazonia, it appears the final 3 million square miles of rainforest are under relentless attack to grow biofuel crops, and environmentalists are looking the other way.

And even if you believe, as apparently nearly everyone does, that global warming is caused by increased CO2 emissions, where is the benefit from biofuel? Taking perennial rainforest out of the global CO2 sink, permanently replacing it with monocultures of biofuel plants is not a CO2 neutral operation. Tropical rainforests used to cover 8 million square miles, and their reduction to today’s mere 3 million square miles tracks perfectly with the increases in atmospheric CO2 observed over the past 100 years.

It certainly doesn’t help that each year the sugar cane fields are burned to facilitate planting the next annual crop. Much of the CO2 emitted in the past few years worldwide has been from deforestation, but unlike in past decades, this time the burning season is for the biofuel barons, not the loggers. And where are the environmentalists, as this CO2 rises, and the last Sumatran Tiger habitat is burned away?

Moreover, as the Tierramérica report helpfully points out “each liter of ethanol requires 30 liters of water.” Since deforestation causes drought, and biofuel crops are planted where forests once were, where on earth are we going to get all this water?

It is particularly ironic that the Europeans, who are falling over themselves to be sanctimonious about global warming, are mostly to blame for the accelerating destruction of rainforests, particularly in Asia and Africa, in order to grow biofuel.

Biofuel has potential to supplement global energy reserves. Someday, if and when cellulosic extraction methods are perfected, biofuel may contribute significantly to global energy supplies. But in the meantime, biofuel feedstock certification methods are way, way behind the curve. And environmentalists are emphasizing CO2 reduction at the expense of our rainforests, and climatologists are unwilling to admit their climate models do not sufficiently understand the role of forests, water tables, and water vapor in regulating the weather.