Climate Change and the French Protests

A lot of people in France have been unhappy with the government of Emmanuel Macron, but the issue that caused protests to finally erupt was a modest increase in the fuel tax intended to fight climate change.

In the US, anger over Obama's plan to effectively phase out coal use helped launched the Trump-ization of the Republican Party; denying climate change might be at the moment the core unifying value of the Republicans. The environmentalists and the economists agree that the most sensible way to fight CO2 emissions would be a carbon tax, but just try to pass one.

Meanwhile in Maryland the issue that did the most for the Republicans in the last governor's race was a modest tax on impermeable surfaces like asphalt parking lots, designed to protect the Chesapeake Bay and reduce the sort of storm runoff that keeps trashing Ellicott City. People hated it and called it the "rain tax."

The people, whatever they say, are not on board with environmentalism. It's easy to get a majority to blame big corporations for our environmental problems, but hard to find one for the problems that are the result of the million things we all do every day. It isn't just the Koch brothers or the oil industry or whatever villain you can dream up; it's that people hate being told how to live their lives, and they especially hate being hectored by environmental moralists.

Another Triumph for the Clean Water Act: the Chicago River

Nice photo essay at the Times on the Chicago River, which has gone in fifty years from a giant, stinking sewer to a place that makes people say,

“I was like, ‘This is so beautiful,’” Ms. Blake recalled. “This is my moment. This city is where I want to be.”

I took the architecture boat tour there a few years ago and loved it, one of the most fun cultural things I have ever done.

And all of this happened because of Congress, Big Government, Federal "overreach," decades of lawsuits filed against cities and states by the perfidious EPA that all the mayors and governors denounced as unwonted interference in their affairs. None of the nation's now lovely urban waterways cleaned up themselves; they were all cleaned up because of government mandates, at the cost of billions. One mayor and governor after another said the cost would bankrupt them; instead it has enriched and revitalized them.

It can't be said often enough that the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act were two of the most important pieces of American legislation ever, and that they were indispensible to the revival of our great cities.

A Wonky Comment on Lead in the Ice Core

All the media that pay attention to such things (NY Times, Science News) are covering some results from measuring the amount of lead in an ice core from Greenland, which the study's authors say traces out the history of lead production in the ancient world. They think they can see in this data several major historical events, such as the civil wars of the late Roman Republic and the crisis of AD 250-270. This is pretty cool science; I love the basic idea of studying ancient industrial production by measuring the residue of pollution. But there is something wrong with this study.

First, look how spiky their graph is. A certain amount of random variation is inevitable in any series like this, but why would samples from some years have ten times as much lead as the years before or after? Industrial production in the Mediterranean cannot explain this. So there is another variable at work.

Also, a simplified version of the graph shows that it traces the rise and fall of the Roman economy fairly nicely. But what is happening at the far right end? Granted the European economy might have improved under Charlemagne, but it did not get back to the level of AD 100. Not even close. This seriously raised my hackles and made me wonder what the heck is going on.

Fortunately the authors of the study provided us with an important clue in their Supplementary Material. On these three graphs the simplified ice core data is shown in red. The black line is data from three studies of lead in bog sediments. Notice that all three show the Classical expansion, but only the one at the top shows dramatic growth after 650 AD. That sample is from Flanders Moss in northern Scotland.

Aha! So the missing factor here is wind patterns. The graph we see from the ice core is a combination of at least two variables: how much lead the Romans were pumping into the air, and whether the wind was blowing toward Greenland. Lead concentrations rise in the Carolingian period not because of increased production but because the wind shifted and blew more often toward the North Atlantic. Of course there might be yet more variables, such as changes in refining techniques, or the seasonality of smelting work, or the location of active mines. But anyway there are at least two.

Notice that the bottom bog sample has much higher lead levels than the other two; as you might guess, that bog is in Spain, the epicenter of Rome's metal industries. And it traces out a graph that more closely matches my idea of lead production in the Mediterranean than the ice core graph does. Probably cost about 1% as much, too.

I don't want to seem too negative; the ice cores are a great resource and we should push them as hard as we can. But they don't reveal everything, and sometimes they can be misleading. I understand that a couple of well attested volcanic eruptions do not appear in the ice core data, presumably because weird wind patterns kept any detectable amount of their ash from reaching Greenland. In the case of lead from Classical and Medieval times ice core data clearly should not be used alone, but only in combination with other information. And people who publish about it should be a lot more circumspect and do less grandiose self-promotion; their data is nice but not as good as data from bogs produced by people nobody has ever heard of, whose results completely failed to make it into the news.

Numbers about Dams

To appreciate how essential dams were in the nineteenth century, simply look at the 1840 U.S. Census: It found that almost every river had a dam, and many rivers had dozens. In total, the twenty-six states that made up the United States at the time had around 65,000 dams. With a population of only 17 million at that time, the United States had one dam for every 261 people.

– Martin Doyle, The Source: How Rivers Made America and America Remade its Rivers. Via Marginal Revolution.

Real Cost of Solar and Wind Power Still Falling

Last year XCel Energy put out a request for bids on new electric power generation in Colorado, and their summary of the bids was recently released. This is actual bids from power generation firms, not some analyst's projections, all to be online by 2023. In total XCel received 350 bids, so there is a lot of interest in building these plants.

The cost of electricity from existing coal plants in the US is around $40 per MWH. The average bids received by XCel for renewable power were as follows:

  Wind:                                          $18.10/MWH
  Wind plus Battery Storage:    $21.00/MWH
  Solar:                                          $29.50/MWH
  Solar plus Battery Storage:     $36.00/MWH
  Wind/Solar/Battery Storage:  $30.60/MWH

These numbers are significantly lower than bids from just two years ago. It's the added battery storage numbers that are key, because to use a lot of renewable power you need either fossil fuel back-up or lots of storage. The bid sheet doesn't say how much storage these bids include, but at any rate you can now build some substantial amount of battery back-up into a new solar/wind system and still end up with a lower price than you get from an already up-and-running coal plant. This makes it seem that the price of battery storage is falling fast, and that power generation companies are betting that this will continue.

One reason that power generation firms are interested in the solar/wind + battery storage formula is that they can charge a higher price for the more reliable power than they could for straight solar or wind, so there's a case of market incentives aligning with what the people clearly need.

Incidentally the amount of coal burned in the US fell by 2% last year, despite Trump and rising demand for electricity; these analysts calculated that if Kentucky replaced all their coal-fired plants with a combination of natural gas and wind, the average electricity bill would fall by 10%, even including the cost of building all the new plants.

Sue Yourself

The latest from New York:

Seeking to position himself as a national leader against climate change, Mayor Bill de Blasio on Wednesday announced a two-pronged attack against the fossil-fuel industry, including a vow that city pension funds would divest about $5 billion from companies involved in the fossil fuel business.

The mayor also announced a lawsuit against five major oil companies, seeking to collect billions of dollars in damages to pay for city efforts to cope with the effects of climate change.

“This city is standing up and saying, ‘We’re going to take our own actions to protect our own people,’” the mayor said, wearing a green necktie and sitting in front of large green sign that said “NYC: Leading the Fight Against Climate Change.” He added, “We’re not waiting.”

I hate, have always hated, continue to hate this habit of blaming oil companies for our environmental problems. If you don't like what oil companies do, stop using their product. Get an electric car and an electric lawnmower and a solar panel array. Do something. But sitting back and fulminating against companies who just sell what people want to buy is nothing at all.

The reason we have massive CO2 emissions is not that the oil companies are evil. It is because all of us love driving cars and flying in planes and turning on the air conditioning. What, exactly, could the leaders of the oils companies do about our emissions even if they decided they wanted to? Invest in solar power? They're already doing that. Stop us from driving our cars? If they tried that, we would put them in jail.

If there were a massive verdict against the oil companies, what would the effect be? They would pass the cost onto their consumers, so the net effect (if any) would be to increase fuel costs. If that is your aim, why not just raise the tax? It's a much simpler, more elegant, and more efficient. But I suppose it doesn't serve the purpose of finding Bad People to blame, and punishing them.

Much of the wrath directed against the oil companies these days is about the climate change debate. Some of the oil companies have indeed funded studies by climate change skeptics. I don't care. First, it is an interesting fact that there are scientific climate change skeptics, despite the efforts of the alarmist faction to get them banned from publishing and so on. Second, I think question of belief is not very important here. By and large, European governments are on board with the threat of CO2 emissions and committed to reductions. But their emissions are not falling meaningfully faster than they are in the U.S. This is just a very hard problem, and the solutions have to be technological. Those solutions – other than nuclear power and hydroelectric dams, which most environmentalists oppose – are only now becoming available. As they do, our emissions will fall.

Suing the oil companies is a dumb sideshow.

Fantasies about Socialism

Meanwhile in the awful assemblage of obnoxious opinions called The Stone, Benjamin Yong argues for this:

The real culprit of the climate crisis is not any particular form of consumption, production or regulation but rather the very way in which we globally produce, which is for profit rather than for sustainability. So long as this order is in place, the crisis will continue and, given its progressive nature, worsen. This is a hard fact to confront. But averting our eyes from a seemingly intractable problem does not make it any less a problem. It should be stated plainly: It’s capitalism that is at fault.

As an increasing number of environmental groups are emphasizing, it’s systemic change or bust. From a political standpoint, something interesting has occurred here: Climate change has made anticapitalist struggle, for the first time in history, a non-class-based issue.

I would find this silly if so many people didn't take it seriously. So let me give it a serious response.

First, certain parts of the world have already tried a communist economy, and the environmental results were awful. There is simply no reason to assume that a socialist system would do any better at protecting the environment than the regulatory regimes we have now. It's just the old fantasy of Revolution: after we overthrow the oppressors, everything will be better. Trust us!

Second: is the government producing electric cars? No. Elon Musk is. And General Motors and Nissan. Capitalist firms produce what people want to buy. Ok, you have to factor in advertising and occasionally the refusal of big firms to produce certain things, but by and large capitalism is better at making the things people want than any other system. Nowadays many people want solar panels and electric cars, so capitalist firms produce them. The reason they don't make more is that most people still prefer gasoline and getting their power from the grid. In this case as in many others, what activists like Yong call "capitalism" is really just economic democracy. Firms make lots of stuff because people want it. Try to take it away from them and they are going to howl.

Third: many, many people hate it when bossy leftists tell them they have to change their whole lives and conform to the dictates of the greens: Change now! Give up your favorite things! Or the planet is doomed! Really! You must obey us or else!

People like Yong are somehow (like so many other progressive activists) incapable of hearing how they sound to other people. This whole "we must have systematic change" approach only guarantees that nothing will be done, because let me tell you we are not going to have socialist environmentalism in America. If you didn't like the backlash that gave us Trump, wait until you see the backlash to green socialism.

The only way to meaningfully reduce carbon emissions before a shattering crisis is better technology, some mixture of things that reduce emissions and things that cool the planet. The good news is that these things are possible. Some of them seem far-fetched, but if you ask me, even the craziest planet-cooling schemes are more likely than environmentally-friendly socialism.

Solar Power in India

India's biggest coal company just announced that it is closing 37 of its least productive mines, partly because of competition from solar power. In recent auctions solar companies have been bidding to supply power for record low amounts, as little as 2.44 Rs/kilowatt hour, which works out to about 4 cents. That's with no subsidies. Coal-generated electricity in India costs at least 3.2 Rs/kwh, or 5 cents. The government recently predicted India would generate 57 percent of its electricity from renewables by 2027, far beyond the target set in the Paris Accords.

Cows, Sheep, and Sea Floor Ecosystems

Wherever people go, even hunter-gatherers with paleolithic technology, we transform the ecosystem. When we introduce agriculture and animal husbandry, we transform it again. Here's a great example:

Paleontologists investigating the sea bed off the coast of southern California have discovered a lost ecosystem that for thousands of years had nurtured communities of scallops and shelled marine organisms called brachiopods.

These brachiopods and scallops had thrived along a section of coast stretching approximately 250 miles from San Diego to Santa Barbara for at least 4,000 years. But they had died off by the early 20th century, replaced by the mud-dwellling burrowing clams that inhabit this seabed today. . . .

Evidence indicates that the brachiopod and scallop die-off occurred in less than a century. Because this community disappeared before biologists started sampling the seafloor, its existence was unknown and unsuspected. Only dead shells remain, permitting analysis by paleontologists.

"This loss unfolded during the 19th century, thus well before urbanization and climate warming," said paleontologist Dr. Susan Kidwell of the University of Chicago. "The disappearance of these abundant filter-feeding animals coincided with the rise of lifestock and cultivation in coastal lands, which increased silt deposition on the continental shelf, far beyond the lake and nearshore settings where we would expect this stress to have an impact."

The same thing happened in the eastern US because of intensive agriculture. In the Chesapeake Bay region there was an uptick in erosion and sediment transport when Indians adopted more intensive horticulture around 900 CE, and then another uptick when European colonists arrived. But the real flood of soil into the Bay came between about 1760 and 1860, because of intensive plowing. Soil washing from carelessly plowed fields clogged harbors, transformed streams, and left huge mudflats around fall line cities like Washington, DC. Marshes became swampy forests, and open water became marsh. In some places it requires a major effort of coring and the like to figure out what the estuary was like even 250 years ago.

Symbolic Politics with the Paris Accords

Forgive me for not seeming very upset that the US has pulled out of the Paris climate accord, but then I never took it seriously. It was a voluntary agreement with no teeth, doubly so in the US where Obama never even submitted it to the Senate for a ratification vote. (It would have gotten hammered.) It was simply a symbol of a worldwide elite consensus that human-caused climate change is a real danger.

So it was perfectly predictable that Donald Trump, a master of symbolism, would reject the treaty, metaphorically aligning himself with coal miners, oil drillers, factory workers, and guys who drive big trucks. If there is a consensus among the Davos set, the UN bureaucracy and the European Union Council, of course Trump wants to spit on it.

The difference to the climate future of the earth will be minimal, and so will the effect on the US economy and US "leadership."

Trump's fans will cheer him for it and his enemies will condemn him for it.

While I'm on that subject, yesterday I happened to see a two-week-old news story on job growth in April, which the headline called "STELLAR." The first two comments were, "Thank you President Trump" and "Thank you Obama for leaving." But the preliminary estimate for job growth in April was 211,000,  a little above the average for the past two years of Obama's term but far below his best months. And, just now the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised that number down to 174,000, just below the recent average, and the preliminary May number is a mediocre 138,000. The lesson is 1) that the president's impact on the economy is small, and 2) many Americans will insist that it is huge. They will also believe that things are better when their guy is in the White House and worse when the president is from the other party, regardless of whether the president has even had time to take any actions of economic significance.

Trump's followers will credit him for any piece of economic good news and insist that it is better than Obama ever did even if that isn't so. Trump's opponents will blame him for any piece of bad news and say things were never that bad under Obama, even if that isn't so.

To get back to climate, you can expect that Trump's fans will attribute any good economic news over the next few years to his actions, including his rejection of the Paris treaty. Trump's enemies will attribute any bad economic news to the same causes, along with any bad environmental news.

Meanwhile the things that will actually determine the planet's climate future will continue to be the progress of solar cell and battery technology, fracking, offshore wind power, and a commitment by hundreds of millions of people around the world to reduce their carbon footprints.

Not that politics doesn't matter; governments can do a lot. But with a Republican Congress, there isn't much that Hillary or Bernie could have done to help, and even when he had a Democratic Congress Obama didn't manage to do very much. The biggest political issue right now is the rules governing how private solar panels will connect to the power grid, which is being fought out entirely at the state level.

Forget Trump. Forget Paris. Focus on putting in place technology that works.

Offshore Wind Power in Maryland

Today's energy news:

Maryland regulators on Thursday approved plans for the nation's first large-scale offshore wind projects, saying the decision will position the state to be a leader in the developing industry.

The Maryland Public Service Commission awarded renewable energy credits for two projects off Maryland's Eastern Shore near Ocean City. The PSC says the decision allows US Wind of Baltimore and Skipjack Offshore Energy, a subsidiary of Deepwater Wind, to build a total of 368 megawatts of capacity. . . .

US Wind's proposal is to build 62 turbines between 12 and 15 nautical miles offshore to generate 248 megawatts. It will cost an estimated $1.4 billion to build. Skipjack's plan is for 15 turbines between 17 and 21 miles offshore to produce 120 megawatts. It will cost about $720 million to build.

There are still other regulatory hurdles to overcome, but the PSC's ruling allowing the developers to claim renewal energy credits was widely seen as the key decision. Incidentally this was set in motion five years ago by our then governor Martin O'Malley, who was a dismal presidential candidate but did some interesting stuff as governor.

These projects will generate nearly 5,000 jobs in construction and steel fabrication, and they will lead to a significant investment in the Port of Baltimore. This, not coal, is the future.

The Top Solution for Climate Change

Paul Hawken and a large team of experts tried to crunch the numbers for different proposed remedies to climate change, from vegan diets to offshore wind farms. The result:

The number one solution, in terms of potential impact? A combination of educating girls and family planning.

All of our impacts on the planet are driven by rising population, and the best way to limit the impact is to limit population growth. And the best ways we know of to do that are to educate girls and provide birth control and family planning advice to those who want it.

The New Range Wars

Interesting piece by Kirk Johnson by in the Times about the ongoing struggles over Federal ownership of western land:

Now that President Trump is in office, people here and in other parts of the 11 states where 47 percent of the landmass is publicly owned are watching to see what he will do on everything related to public lands, from coal mining and cattle grazing to national monuments and parks. In Burns, some ranchers and others are feeling emboldened, hopeful that regulatory rollbacks by the federal government will return lands to private use and shore up a long-struggling economy.

But the change in administration has also spawned a countermovement of conservatives and corporate executives who are speaking up alongside environmentalists in defense of public lands and now worry about losing access to hunting grounds and customers who prize national parks and wildlife.

In Idaho, for example, a deal to put thousands of acres into private ownership — exactly the sort of transaction that the militia leader brothers, Ammon and Ryan Bundy, had espoused in seizing the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge — was met with fierce opposition, by no less than a group of conservative outdoorsmen.

The deal had been in the works for years and was backed by Republican elected officials, who said that adding new taxable private land would generate business activity and property tax revenue.

But the proposal, to the surprise of many people on both sides, hit a wall with people like Ray Anderson, a machine shop owner in the tiny community of Grangeville, Idaho, who raised money and helped a group of fellow outdoor enthusiasts kill the plan and boot out of office a county commissioner and state senator who had supported it. Mr. Anderson said he feared that Idaho County, rural and in need of cash, would encourage private owners to develop the lands, or put up fences to keep out hunters and fishermen like him.
“I’m a businessman and I’m a conservative, but nothing about the plan seemed to make sense,” Mr. Anderson said. “Where I grew up I was told that public lands will be public lands forever.”

In Montana, access to public lands for recreation shaped last fall’s governor’s race, with the incumbent, Gov. Steve Bullock, a Democrat, staking out a position in defense of public lands and portraying his Republican opponent as captive to private interests that would put up gates and fences. Mr. Bullock won.

The reason that these issues have been generating conflict for a century is that they are complex, with many people and interest groups on each side. Across the west many people feel in a vague way that the government owns too much land and sets too many limits on how it is used. But every particular proposal to actually put some block of federal land into state or private hands has been hugely controversial. Ranchers have long been in the forefront of these fights, but even many ranchers recognize that they benefit from federal ownership. If the land were put up for sale, two-bit ranchers like them would not be the likely buyers; instead it would be snapped up by oil company executives, or else tech or entertainment moguls from the west coast. Even if they could buy the land the tax bill might turn out to be more than they pay in grazing fees. More broadly, a desire to see the land taken out of federal hands cuts against another great western tradition, being able to go just about anywhere. Small town guys like Ray Anderson love being able to hop in their four-wheelers and just drive wherever there is a track or a chance of making one, and private ownership would bring that to a quick end.

Like so many of the other issues we face, I cannot see how this will ever be solved, and I fully expect that these same fights about western land will still be raging long after I am gone.

Republicans for a Carbon Tax

One thing about which I agree with the Republican platform is that using complex regulations to achieve public goals can be a miserable drag, and we should always be looking for simpler alternatives. And there is actually a better, simpler alternative to Obama's Clean Power Plan and other regulatory attempts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions: a carbon tax. Various right-of-center columnists have been making this argument for years, but very few Republican politicians have signed on, because of the party's aversion to any sort of new tax.

So I was thrilled to read that a bunch of retired Republican office-holders have come out in favor of a carbon tax:

The group, led by former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, with former Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Henry M. Paulson Jr., a former secretary of the Treasury, says that taxing carbon pollution produced by burning fossil fuels is “a conservative climate solution” based on free-market principles. . . .

A carbon tax, which depends on rising prices of fossil fuels to reduce consumption, is supported in general by many Democrats, including Al Gore. Major oil companies, including Exxon Mobil, have come out in favor of the concept as well.

The Baker proposal would substitute the carbon tax for the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, a complex set of rules to regulate emissions which President Trump has pledged to repeal and which is tied up in court challenges, as well as other climate regulations. At an initial price of $40 per ton of carbon dioxide produced, the tax would raise an estimated $200 billion to $300 billion a year, with the rate scheduled to rise over time.

The tax would be collected where the fossil fuels enter the economy, such as the mine, well or port; the money raised would be returned to consumers in what the group calls a “carbon dividend” amounting to an estimated $2,000 a year for the average family of four.

Under the plan, a majority of families would actually come out ahead. But that probably won't make any difference to most elected Republicans, who have been putting themselves on record against carbon taxes for years.

Organic Farming and British Conservatism

A few days ago I stumbled onto an interview with British philosopher Roger Scruton, all done at his farm. He walks around talking about restoring the land, raising organic cows, monitoring the health of his fish pond, riding horses, joining his local church, and generally getting back to the roots of rural England. And then today I was reading the November 11 TLS, which features a long review of three recent books by other Englishmen obsessed with traditional farming and the lore and literature of the English countryside. These men scorn "rewilding" – "teen fantasies . . . of importing lynxes, bears and wolves" sniffs Nick Groom – in favor of the Wind in the Willows landscape of Victorian times. They love hedgerows, hares, corncrakes, wildflowers, little woods, and the sort of butterflies that lady naturalists used to chase around the chalk downs with their long, elegant nets. They enjoy words like "utching" and writers like Wordsworth and John Clare. "Parochial," writes John Lewis-Stempel, "has become pejorative, when it should have become exalted."

Nick Groom is launched into a tragic reverie by the brand names of herbicides:

Such herbicides have now been acculturated, and the chilling compounds of scientific names and numbers have been replaced by branded lines such as "Artist", "Regatta" and Lewis Stempel's favourite, "Othello". I prefer the more melancholy guise of the "Hamlet" herbicide, available from the Bayer Crop Science UK website. "Hamlet is the latest post-emergence herbicide from Bayer to control black-grass in winter wheat crops" – black-grass being slender meadow foxtail, a rush that was used as a staple of floor covering and on theatre stages in Shakespeare's time; it was one of the everyday smells of Merry England. Today, the exploitation of the land in increasing crop yields means that, as Lewis-Stempel puts it, "every time one buys the lie of cheap food a flower or a bird dies".

In America, we tend to think that anti-agribusiness activists will come from the left. But these men are Tories. Like Prince Charles, who was once the biggest organic farmer in Europe, they see modern farming as a threat to what they hold most dear: a world that is old, familiar, small, and thoroughly English. Surely they all voted to leave the EU.

Working in historic preservation, I have been made aware of how badly these questions fit into our left-right divides. The crowd that shows up to protest a planned development is likely to include eco-fanatics, Occupy veterans, old-money traditionalists whose ancestors led the local regiment in the Civil War, and just plain folks worried about traffic and pollution. There is no necessary connection between a love of old ways and the defense of capitalism or militarism. And this should remind us that all grand divisions like left and right do violence to our humanity, and to judge each other by such labels is a gross mistake.

New Power Plants in the US

Preliminary numbers for new power-generating capacity built in the US in 2016

Solar:                 9.5 gigawatts
Natural Gas:    8.0 gigawatts
Wind:                  6.8 gigawatts
Coal:                    0 gigawatts

The figure for new solar power is three times the amount built in 2015, which was twice the amount built in 2014. Of course even at that rate of growth, solar power only accounts for just over one percent of total power production in the US. But that is changing fast.

Prices for Solar Power Still Plunging

In September, Abu Dhabi Water and Electricity signed a contract to purchase solar power from a new plant at 2.42 cents/kwh. That's less than half the going price for natural gas power, and is in fact the the cheapest contract for electricity ever signed, anywhere on planet earth, using any technology. The previous record, also for solar power, lasted only five weeks.

How about We Keep the EPA?

Nature News:

Delhi choked by worst smog in years Delhi has endured several days of heavy smog — reportedly the city’s worst in 17 years. Measurements at the US embassy in the Indian capital showed an air-quality-index value of 999; around 300 is considered hazardous. Levels of harmful particles known as PM2.5 (those with a diameter of 2.5 micrometres or less) reached as high as 762 micrograms per cubic metre in a part of the city. The World Health Organization gives 25 micrograms per cubic metre as a guideline average limit. Among the causes blamed have been construction dust, rising traffic, the burning of agricultural residues in neighbouring states, and the Hindu festival of Diwali, during which firework celebrations are customary. Delhi’s government announced several temporary emergency measures, including the closure of schools for three days, a halt on construction and restrictions on the numbers of vehicles on roads. Delhi is one of the world’s most polluted cities, according to the WHO. Estimates suggest that particulate air pollution causes one-tenth of the city’s deaths.

Picture above shows a cricket game in a Delhi park. Below is another recent image, taken on a rainless afternoon. Cities like Pittsburgh and Cleveland used to look like this. Is that really a part of the great American past we want to bring back?

Britain's "Wild" Landscapes

Richard Smyth:

In his recent book Wild Kingdom, Stephen Moss emphasizes the agricultural underpinnings of much of Britain's "wild" landscapes; "Everything I can see, all around me, has been shaped – and indeed is still being shaped – by human hand." Moss is reiterating a point made nearly forty years ago by Richard Mabey in his breakthrough work The Common Ground (1980). "What we had regarded as a natural landscape was a much more complex product of growth and husbandry", Mabey wrote. "The turf of the southern chalk downs . . . turned out to be the product of extensive sheep-grazing . . . . The wild sweeps of moorland in the Scottish Highlands had been created by a massive program of forest clearance. The Norfolk Broads were the flooded remains of medieval peat mines."

The zoologist and activist George Monbiot has spoken frequently of the problem of "shifting baseline syndrome" in ecology; that is, the conviction that the circumstances to which one has become accustomed – the landscape in which one grew up, for example – are the "correct" circumstances, the default setting. The term can be usefully applied to our attitudes towards the "wild sweeps of moorland" of which Mabey wrote. The objective position is that these are denuded monocultures, industrial badlands stripped of biodiversity by sheep-farming and grouse-rearing. In the generations since their deforestation and clearance, however, we have developed – learned? – a sincere appreciation for the starkness of the bare moor and treeless fell. 

From an article in the August 19 TLS. I would add that human modification of the landscape did not begin with farming, but with our first appearance in the lands outside Africa. We transformed North America by slaughtering mastodons and the like thousands of years before agriculture.

New Chemistry that Might Turn out to be Very Important

Scientists at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, searching for catalysts that might help extract carbon dioxide from the air and turn it into something useful, may have hit the jackpot:

Now scientists from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) claim to have produced one of the most usable of all chemicals – ethanol – in a process that is not only cheap, efficient, and scalable, but also conducted at room temperature.

Employing a catalyst made of copper nanoparticles embedded in spikes of carbon, the team found that electricity applied at just 1.2 volts was sufficient to convert CO2 suspended in water into ethanol. In effect, the team were able to produce a complicated chemical reaction, essentially reversing the combustion process, with relative ease and an initial conversion rate of some 63 percent. This was a surprise to the researchers, as this type of electrochemical reaction often produces many different chemicals, including methane, ethylene, and carbon monoxide.

That's an electron micrograph of the catalyst above, showing copper particles and carbon threads.

If this is really scalable at 63% efficiency, it opens up a world of possibilities; for example, you could use this method to store energy from solar power for use at night. I am skeptical that this would be a cost-effective way to remove carbon from the air, but you could certainly use it to create ethanol that would serve as the base material for organic chemistry that today relies mainly on oil.