Monthly Archives: February 2014

Hope For Climate Change As A Key 2014 Issue

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First, a word to my fellow Minnesotans. Go the the damn caucus tonight! For the rest of you, please become aware of the political process where you live and get involved. Science-oriented people, people who understand that climate change is real and important and that we need to develop a green energy economy (with our without nuclear, that’s a separate issue not an alternative) need to become more involved in the political process. Support candidates who understand these things and who will work towards saving us from driving of the cliff we are heading rapidly towards. Also, keep gender in mind; support excellent women candidates. Also, keep diversity in mind. Support diverse candidates. OK, you really can’t be a “diverse” person, but you know what I mean.

Climate change did play a measurable, observable role in some of the elections last year. I don’t think we can say that it was the deciding issue in any campaign, but there is almost never a single deciding issue. Rather, there is a short list of issues that matter in many campaigns, and quite possibly, for the first time ever climate change was on that short list for some contests. It is YOUR job (and mine) to make sure that climate change is on the short list for all campaigns ever from now on. We have to start by getting involved in the electoral process. In the 17 or so US states with a caucus system, this means becoming a delegate. Being a delegate means candidates go out of their way to find you, talk to you, find out what is important to you. Why the heck would you NOT want to do that? Eventually, you will be a member of what is effectively a small Electoral College who will decide who runs from your district. Your vote may end up being one of only dozens that determine candidates for your party at various levels.

For me, I’ll be working to retire the Republican representative from my district, Minnesota CD3. Erik Paulsen is probably more pro-environment than he votes, but he is a cookie-cutter Tea Bag Republican and votes the party line along with Michele Bachmann (I can see her district from my living room) and the rest of the over-the-top conservatives who run the Republican party, and thus, the House, at the moment. He needs to go.

I’ll be working to recruit a woman of color who has a background as a scientists (chemistry degree, worked in green technology early in her career) and for whom climate change and green energy are top issues, along with the usual social justice and economic issues. This is why I’l be supporting Sharon Sund if she runs. (If you want to help me help her to decide to run, even if you don’t live in Minnesota or, for that matter, the US, pleas go SIGN THIS PETITION!)

I’ll also be working with Shawn Otto and others to advance the Science Debate Project. I don’t know what we’d be doing this particular election cycle but we need to have the candidates for president in two years debate science in the public forum. In the mean time, everybody should be debating science in the public forum. And no, I don’t mean science vs. science denialism. I mean demonstrating an understanding of the science on one hand and making claims about policy that is actually based on the science on the other.

Sitting around and complaining about how science does not enter politics and when it does, it does so as a lifeless Tea-Drinking Zombie, is uninteresting and unproductive. It isn’t that hard for individuals to do something, and if enough pro-science individuals get involved, change can happen.

Go make change happen. Please.

Photo Credit: practicalowl via Compfight cc

Obomified with this on line resource.

I'd Like Sharon Sund To Run For Congress

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This is an open letter to potential CD3 congressional candidate Sharon Sund. There is no declared candidate in this district at this time, but there is an increasing interest in recruiting Sharon to run against Erik Paulsen.
 
 

Sandra_SundDear Sharon,
 
Three years ago I decided to get involved in the Minnesota Third Congressional District election. I had been involved in previous races, supporting various DFL candidates through the caucus, primary, and election process. But this time I decided to explicitly seek out a candidate who was science oriented, who would make issues like climate change a campaign priority and not just an add-on, and volunteer my time. I was pleasantly shocked and amazed to quickly discover that you were seeking the DFL nomination and that you were explicitly pro science, and that you had a degree in an area of science and had worked as a scientist yourself.
 
You may remember that I contacted you to find out more, to verify what it said on your web site, and that we chatted. Not only did it become clear that you really were a science oriented candidate, but that you were also a progressive with experience organizing progressive campaigns (such as support of the Affordable Care Act) and an experienced fund raiser. In short order I volunteered for your campaign, and eventually became staff on that campaign, and at the same time, we became friends.
 
Working on that campaign was a great pleasure for me. One of the things I remember most is the internal policy of that campaign to always be honest, always play fair, always respect other members of the DFL. The idea was to win the nomination, but if not, to remember — and these words were often said by staffers, volunteers, and by you — that we are all Democrats. We did not gain the nomination at the convention, but the very first thing (after a bit of crying and hugging and such) after that was to concede gracefully, to shake the hands of the winner and his team, and to wish them well.
 
Now it is time to consider the next Congressional election. I am asking you to run again, to declare candidacy for Congress of the United States for Minnesota’s Third District. Here are some of the reasons I think you should do this.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST AND COMMENT!

Peak Oil vs. Peak Chocolate Chip Cookies

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Peak Oil is a controversial concept. Some people actually think that the production of oil in nature is continuous (which is a tiny bit, but hardly at all, true) so we can keep pumping oil out of the ground and it will just keep being produced by tiny microbes. But aside from that particular, and annoying, made-up controversy, “real” Peak Oil (or should I say Peak Real Oil) is still controversial. Peak Oil is defined as the moment when the maximum rate of petroleum extraction occurs, and thereafter production declines steadily, like on a bell curve. But that is, in my view, the wrong way to look at it. I would like to propose a different way, and to understand this approach we first must understand chocolate chip cookies. Which is not difficult.

If you make a batch of chocolate chip cookies, then everyone in the house starts to eat them, when does “Peak Chocolate Chip Cookies” occur? Obviously, this occurs the moment the chocolate chip cookies are pulled out of the oven. That is when the maximum number of cookies are available. Subsequent “extraction” rates are not a function of cookie availability, but rather, the social politics of the household, the number of hungry people, and other factors. The cookies will be “extracted” at any one of a number of rate functions. Often, the initial number of cookies extracted from the cooling rack, cookie plate, or cookie jar starts out very slow because they are too hot and have not achieved structural stability so they are hard to eat, especially for dunkers. But then the rate may go way up and then, because the cookies are being consumed rapidly, and/or people become sated, it may go down. Or, the baker of the cookies may bake them in secret and hide them in the cookie jar until after dinner, then reveal the existence of the cookies at which time peak extraction commences. Or there may be house rules as to how many cookies everyone can eat which will affect the rate of extraction. And so on. But no matter what, Peak Cookie happened the moment the cookies were pulled, baked, from the oven. (We will leave the consumption of cookie dough prior to baking for discussion at another time.) The point is, it is easy to see that “Peak Cookie” happens at the moment baking ends, and the variation in extraction rate thereafter is a function of many factors that will vary from household to household and from time to time. And all those factors are important events or processes. Peak Cookie, as a concept, is uninformative of the social dynamics, demographics, and collective individual proclivities of the household, which really are the things that matter.

This analogy reveals the fact that the “peak” (measured as production) is only part of a function of how much substance (cookies, oil) there is, and is, until the amount of substance is just about to run out, more a function of other things. For oil, this includes knowledge (of oil deposits), technology (to extract harder to get at oil), geopolitics (some oil is in countries that are currently in a snit, or that we don’t talk to), and of course, economics.

And, really, what I want to know about, and what you want to know about, is our own personal peak oil, or more manageably, our encompassing society’s peak oil. For instance, if a large deposit of oil is unavailable because we say so (for conservation reasons unrelated to petroleum) or political reasons (because it is buried beneath an enemy’s territory) then we can’t count that oil in our calculations of availability, and thus, extraction. Oil that is in our own country and not under a national park, on the other hand, is different.

In this way, perhaps a better way to think about Peak Oil is to look at the historical complexity of the process of bringing this fossil (oil is a fossil) to a place and refine it to a form that we can burn in our homes, cars or factories. Looked at it this way, from the perspective of the United States, we have had several “Peak Oil” moments.

Not counting whale oil, we experienced our first Peak Oil moment when the vast oil fields in Texas and Oklahoma and a few other places started to dry up. When that happened we started to buy more oil from countries that we really had very little respect or love for. Today, we get a fair amount of oil from a region of the world where we occasionally have to go to war to keep that oil supply open. And, we have to look the other way when the governments of those countries continue with highly objectionable policies. Imagine having a two grocery stores near your house. One of them is run by a really nice family, pillars of the community, your kids go to school with their kids, everything is fine. The other is run by a paroled sex offender who is also suspected of being a mass murderer. Plus he is a jerk. At first you always get your groceries at the store run by the nice family. But then they retire and move to Florida and you are now forced to do business with the child molesting, mass murdering jerk, because you really have no other option. That is a moment when the cost of grocery shopping, no matter what the cost of the actual groceries, becomes very high. That is a kind of peak groceries. It has little to do with the economics of the groceries. And yes, “Peak Oil” as traditionally defined is usually embedded in an economic model. This is why my suggestion of what “Peak Oil” means is different: When you (metaphorically) sell your soul to continue to obtain a resource, you’ve reached a moment in time that is very important.

The initiation of serious off shore drilling is another moment in the extraction of oil. Off shore drilling is expensive and dangerous at many levels. In the United States we shifted towards off shore drilling as our on-land deposits were worn out, and because it is somewhat cheaper (sometimes) to take nearby offshore oil than foreign near-the-surface on-land oil, and for geopolitical reasons. Those costs may not always be expressed in the “spot” prices of oil in dollars per barrel. But they are real costs.

Fracking is something that has been done for years. It is a nice trick to extract more from a deposit that has started to become tenacious. The technique is used for water, liquid petroleum, and gas. It is messy and expensive and usually results in a flow of product that soon diminishes, so whatever investment was made in the process initially does not have long term benefit. When you start fracking, that means you’ve reached one of those peaks. You are doing something you really didn’t want to do because availability or cost of the same product through other means is diminished.

The Canadian Oil Sands and other tar sands type oil has been known of for years, but it has been very little exploited. It is dirty, dangerous, expensive, and often inconveniently located. But we have been using more and more of this undesirable resource, and we are talking about using a LOT more of it in the near future. The costs of using this type of resource, aside from the continued pouring of fossil carbon (as carbon dioxide) into the atmosphere, are huge. But we are doing it. Another peak.

The alternative way of thinking about Peak Oil proposed here has the benefit of being more realistic and useful because it identifies not one peak but rather multiple peaks. Also, and this is important, one aspect of this definition of Peak Oil that is new is not to measure price or some overall measure of availability which might exclude significant costs (known as “external costs”), but rather, to identify the things we really do to continue to extract the resource. Over time we are doing more and more difficult and costly things, with many of these costs going well beyond price of the product. Such extra costs include deadly warfare and allowing governments and media to be taken over by the petroleum industry with all sorts of negative side effects that go well beyond the extraction, refining, and shipping of petroleum products.

Every major shift in strategy of access to ancient petroleum can be interrogated as a possible “Peak Oil” moment.

Yes, yes, I fully understand that I’ve strayed very far away from the usual definition of Peak Oil. But in so doing, I think I’ve pointed out a more important reality inherent in the business of extracting a non-renewable resource from the earth. A simple Peak Oil curve is the subject of a great deal of argument and speculation. The problem is, this argument and speculation tends to miss the point. We are like an addict with easy access to some drug that is highly addictive, gets you really high, is not too expensive, and can be easily obtained. Then the drug source runs dry so we seek out shadier sources and start to get in trouble. Then those sources start to dry up so we turn to different drugs with more severe health effects. But that starts to become less available, and paying for it gets more difficult so, eventually, we start rooting around under the sink for anything that looks consumable and might serve to get us high or at least, knock us unconscious. Eventually, we hit the drain cleaner. That kills us. There was not a smooth curve of availability of opium that went smoothly up and down. Rather, there was a series of shifts from a not so bad thing to a worse thing to an even worse thing to the horrid end and they find our body under the back porch where we were rooting through the recycling looking for spent cans of shaving cream.

Peak Oil is a gloss. The real story is a tragedy with several acts.

Peak Oil graph from Wikipedia

Nonferrous Mineral Mining in Minnesota: An Issue of Science Policy

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This is mainly about copper mining in a part of Minnesota that has previously seen extensive iron mining. Most mineral rights across Minnesota are owned by the state, which then may lease rights to miners. Recently, 31 nonferrous mineral leases were approved by the Minnesota Executive Council, which consists of Governor Dayton, Secretary of State Ritchie, State Auditor Otto, Attorney General Swanson, and Lt. Governor Prettner-Solon. It was a four to one vote with Otto voting no.

The reason that Rebecca Otto voted no is that she felt the science based policy justifying these leases was not fully developed, and that there are potential significant long-term effect that had not bee fully accounted for. Matt Ehling wrote a piece for the Star Tribute, reposted on Otto’s state web site, which stated in part:

… During the comment period before to the vote, industry representatives framed the approval of the leases as just one part of a longer process. Lieutenant Governor Prettner-Solon offered similar sentiments, and stated that rigorous environmental oversight – along with public comment – would follow in the event that major exploration or mining project proposals were submitted.

Upon inquiry from Governor Dayton, Department of Natural Resource (DNR) Commissioner Tom Landwehr stated that such project proposals would constitute public information, but would generally not be made available to the public short of a Data Practices Act request. Governor Dayton then directed Commissioner Landwehr to affirmatively make any lease-related proposals available to the public.

The council’s lone “no” vote, State Auditor Rebecca Otto, stated that she had had “a revelation” early the morning of the meeting that informed her vote. “We have not done copper sulfide mining in this state yet,” said Otto. She expressed concerns about potential fiscal burdens associated with copper sulfide mining that might be placed on future generations. Secretary of State Ritchie expressed concerns about the process generally.

And in a Minnesota Public Radio interview with Cathy Wurzer, Otto explained:

My concern really boils down to the financial assurance that we’re going to require. Really what that is is it’s a damage deposit we’re going to require from the mining companies so that if something goes wrong, that they are on the hook for the cleanup costs.

They’re estimating 500 years of water treatment after operation at the PolyMet’s mine. My concern, then, is how do we calculate the cost for that to make sure we get an adequate damage deposit. Five hundred years.

That’s an awfully long time, so do we really know how to calculate these numbers right so that taxpayers aren’t left with the cleanup costs after these mines close? And do we know what form of financial assurances to get? These companies quite often have gone bankrupt, and are taxpayers going to be protected if there’s a bankruptcy? Severe weather events.

We’ve had more of those recently. Are we going to factor in the cost potentially of a severe weather event and what that could do?

So it’s really about being proactive and preventative and making sure these companies have real skin in the game in their financial assurances that they must provide so that they’re incented to get this right and don’t damage our water quality and leave cleanup costs to the taxpayers.

Mining equals jobs and is good for the economy. But mining is one of the most environmentally destructive activities we undertake as a species, especially in terms of local effects. Also, mining is one of those industries that in the past has often been carried out, it seems, without proper attention to “external” costs, meaning the costs not paid by the mining companies and thus not on the hypothetical spreadsheet of inputs and outputs. In that interview, Otto was asked, “Those who support copper-nickel mining say we have more to gain financially than to lose with more jobs, tax revenue. As someone who has argued for protecting taxpayers, does that argument hold water for you?: Her reply:

It could. There could be gains. There could be loss. I’ve looked at U.S. Government Accountability reports kind of looking at the track record of this type of mining around the country, and quite often the taxpayers are left on the hook.

The devil is in the details on this. Minnesota does not have experience with this type of mining, we have not calculated these numbers before. I don’t know that even with the mining we’ve got now we’ve gotten the financial assurances right, nor the right forms.

As a state there are things we don’t know all the time and we’ve made mistakes. In this day in age with some of the pressures we have with the economy and people retiring, we must get this right and spend the time. Otherwise what we could end up doing is privatizing the gain and socializing the pain.

What Otto is looking for is not a way to stop mining, but rather, a way to address the ultimate, true costs of the operation especially as they would be incurred by taxpayers statewide (that is what the State Auditor does!). Meanwhile, industry is naturally looking for ways to externalize costs and thus maximize profits. The problem is that we don’t know enough about the external costs, and it may be the case that the development of this economic activity is proceeding as though we do. This is an excellent example of well researched and developed science-based policy being very much needed, and at least one science-oriented elected official trying to see to it that this happens.

For Minnesotans, expect nonferrous mining to be an issue in several upcoming races. I hope that this does not become a slug-match between an unadulterated “pro-mining” stance and an unadulterated “anti-mining” stance because, surely, the science policy will be lost in such a fray. Let’s try to do this right, which means doing it intelligently.