It's cheap to be green

Friends & colleagues, please read Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman's column in the NY Times today, "It's Easy Being Green."

Last June, I gave a decision tree on global warming. The distinguished economist says my numbers are wrong - that it's much cheaper to avert disaster than I had assumed. Skepticism of global warming is like smoking. It's socially unacceptable. We have to fix this earth.

If you want good news on the subject, read up on biochar. It would be cool to merge a simulation of a region's farms with a transportation problem, to see if biochar would do against petroleum, examining requirements and emissions for water, nitrate, and carbon. I bet the farmers would come out ahead from all that transportation saved. But I'm too busy with the water market work to get to it this year.

How to solve the world water crisis

With my colleagues at the University of Canterbury's Water Markets Research Group, we've worked out a way to solve this horrible problem. I've put it on my academic web site: Why and how to set up a water market that is physically, economically, and environmentally correct.

This work depends on operations research, hydrology, economics, and basic information technology. Thus the title for my blog.

We've named this approach the Forever Fair Water Market System. I created a logo for this work that is meant to look both like an infinity symbol and two waves sharing water.

I commissioned my talented niece Florence Kerns to create this image that represents some of my interests: the impact of business on the hydrological cycle; the interactions of water, energy, and nutrition; the impact of cities on ecology.

Agriculture produces demands of energy, water, and soil, and supplies of energy and food. These demands and supplies interact in complex ways. Agriculture’s supply of food also affects transportation, inventory management, and nutrition. Consumers' choices of foods produces demands on the food supply chain. Consumers' choices of habitat and transportation also produces demands on agriculture and the environment. It's a complex world!

How can we sending price signals to get commerce to back off its environmental impact? My research is to find ways to gently press business away from its environmental impacts. Toward that end, here is our proposal to solve part of the world water crisis.

If you use this image, please reference me and Florence.

Good news & bad

1. Bad. Best to get the bad news out of the way. Burning coal at home is making a comeback. Here is a suggestion for high school science teachers: get kids to analyze coal for its toxicity. Let them find out for themselves. From a business point of view, people are working for short term profits without thinking about the obvious mid and long-term risks.

2. Good. International law comes down on Mugabe. The rule of law is civilization's way forward. Somebody seizes power then starts stealing. Then someone else seizes power and starts stealing, plus revenge. The cycle breaks only by intervention, local or international, which installs democracy.

3. CNN has a video of a human-powered car. I've been thinking of this for ages.



Now if we can just get a cheap Chinese-made clone of it!

Fools rush in.

The Eco.org.nz website gleefully announces the "strengthened" NZ biofuels bill. In fact, they have completely mucked it up! From their site:

“(3) The principles of sustainable biofuels are as follows:
“Principle 1: Less greenhouse gas
“Sustainable biofuels emit significantly less greenhouse gas over their life cycle than obligation engine fuel. In relation to this principle, the Order in Council must—
“(a) specify a methodology for life cycle assessment of greenhouse gas emissions from obligation engine fuels; and
“(b) specify minimum levels of no less than 35% greenhouse gas emission reductions for qualifying biofuels in comparison to obligation engine fuel.
“Principle 2: Food production“ Sustainable biofuels do not compete with food production and are not grown on land of high value for food production. Without limitation, the following biofuels do not contravene this principle:
“(a) byproducts of food production described in the Order in Council:
“(b) ethanol from sugarcane grown in circumstances and in areas described in the Order in Council:
“(c) rotational oilseed crops grown not more than 12 months in any 24 month period on the same land or as otherwise specified in the Order in Council. “ In relation to this principle, the Order in Council must—
“(a) specify a methodology for assessing the effects of the production of a biofuel on food production and for assessing whether those effects amount to competition; and
“(b) specify a mechanism for recognising particular land (including land outside New Zealand) as being land of high value for food production.

What's wrong with this?

The mistake governments are making with biofuels is to subsidize them. Subsidies increase consumption, when we need less consumption! Subsidies do the opposite of promoting conservation. The result is a screwed up agricultural sector. The correct solution is to implement either a properly designed carbon tax or cap & trade system. Then people would be encouraged to conserve, and biofuels would become a natural economically viable alternative to petroleum.

But with the bill described above, we have government trying to meddle in such details as which land has"high value for food production," and minimum standards of carbon emissions for biofuels. The thinking is that we need to avoid taking land out of food production for biofuels, as if land use should be decided by government!

In fact, we need to take land out of food production and put it into biofuels. Currently, we are eating far too much meat and dairy, which require huge tracts of land and cause correspondingly huge environmental impacts. By changing our diets a little bit, we could afford to put some of the land into biofuels. Give peas a chance.

Furthermore, we have to set the market incentives correctly. The government should have the nerve to control carbon emissions directly. Then quit eco-monkeying with details best left to farmers.

Sometimes the environmentalists are the environment's worst enemy!