Food miles and greenhouse gas

Ronald Baily writes at Reason:

Transporting food is just one relatively small cost of providing modern consumers with their daily bread, meat, cheese, and veggies. Desrochers and Shimizu argue that concentrating agricultural production in the most favorable regions is the best way to minimize human impacts on the environment.

The authors claim the cost of food transport works out to only 1% of US greenhouse emissions. It's also important to consider that those growing food in warm climates are often poor. Surely it is better not to make developing nations pay the whole cost of reducing carbon emissions.

Will it soon be feasible to mine old landfills?

A Reuters article by Kate Kelland asks whether the planet's growing population and high oil prices will "encourage the possibility of landfill mining."

In Britain alone, experts say landfill sites could offer up an estimated 200 million tonnes of old plastic -- worth up to 60 billion pounds at current prices -- to be recovered and recycled, or converted to liquid fuel.

As many oil analysts predict oil prices will stay above $100 a barrel, waste experts in America, Europe and across Asia have been conducting pilot projects to recoup old plastic and other waste materials.

Prices for high quality plastics such as high-density polyethelenes (HDP) have more than doubled to between 200 and 300 pounds ($370-560) per tonne, from just above 100 pounds a year ago, according to experts in the waste industry.

With this in mind, leaders of the world's waste management industry are planning to come together in London in October for what is being billed as the first "global landfill mining" conference.

Here is the website for the conference which was held several weeks ago.

UNESCO world groundwater survey map

The New Scientist reports:

What the UNESCO map reveals is just how many aquifers cross international borders. So far, the organisation has identified 273 trans-boundary aquifers: 68 in the Americas, 38 in Africa, 155 in Eastern and Western Europe and 12 in Asia. Each trans-boundary aquifer holds the potential for international conflict - if two countries share an aquifer, pumping in one country will affect its neighbour's water supply.

Especially, as the map here shows, growth of populations in the Middle East could make groundwater a source of future conflict in that volatile region.
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Hat-tip: Sullivan

US Supreme Court rules navy doesn't have to obey laws

ABC News reports that Bush wanted the restrictions lifted. These had been placed by courts on the navy's use of sonar off the California coast. The Supreme Court has obliged:

In reinstating the use of sonar, the top US court rejected a lower federal judge's injunction that had required the US Navy to take various precautions during submarine-hunting exercises.

It is believed by scientists that sonar blasts might be killing whales and other marine life.

I guess this ruling that means the Japanese, Russians, British, French, Chinese, Indian navies will now feel free to do likewise? The article continues:

Environmentalists fear that the Court's decision could set a dangerous precedent.

Before Wednesday's decision, NRDC's senior attorney Joel Reynolds said, "If they accept the Navy's premise that the president and the Navy are entitled to a blank check in how they use sonar, then that would be a dangerous precedent and it would be a significant departure from what the law has been in this country for hundreds of years."

"Our Constitution is grounded on the fact that all of us have to comply with the law. Nobody is above the law, and that includes the U.S. Navy," he said.

So much for the Constitution.

Al Gore: the clean coal illusion

Al Gore writes in a NYT Op-Ed:

THE inspiring and transformative choice by the American people to elect Barack Obama as our 44th president lays the foundation for another fateful choice that he — and we — must make this January to begin an emergency rescue of human civilization from the imminent and rapidly growing threat posed by the climate crisis. . . .

Some still see this as a problem of domestic production. . . .

But in every case, the resources in question are much too expensive or polluting, or, in the case of “clean coal,” too imaginary to make a difference in protecting either our national security or the global climate. Indeed, those who spend hundreds of millions promoting “clean coal” technology consistently omit the fact that there is little investment and not a single large-scale demonstration project in the United States for capturing and safely burying all of this pollution. If the coal industry can make good on this promise, then I’m all for it. But until that day comes, we simply cannot any longer base the strategy for human survival on a cynical and self-interested illusion.

I'm hoping Obama will jettison one grand clean energy delusion he has supported in the past: corn-based ethanol.

Gore offers up his 5-point plan:

What follows is a five-part plan to repower America with a commitment to producing 100 percent of our electricity from carbon-free sources within 10 years. It is a plan that would simultaneously move us toward solutions to the climate crisis and the economic crisis — and create millions of new jobs that cannot be outsourced.

First, the new president and the new Congress should offer large-scale investment in incentives for the construction of concentrated solar thermal plants in the Southwestern deserts, wind farms in the corridor stretching from Texas to the Dakotas and advanced plants in geothermal hot spots that could produce large amounts of electricity.

Second, we should begin the planning and construction of a unified national smart grid for the transport of renewable electricity from the rural places where it is mostly generated to the cities where it is mostly used. New high-voltage, low-loss underground lines can be designed with “smart” features that provide consumers with sophisticated information and easy-to-use tools for conserving electricity, eliminating inefficiency and reducing their energy bills. The cost of this modern grid — $400 billion over 10 years — pales in comparison with the annual loss to American business of $120 billion due to the cascading failures that are endemic to our current balkanized and antiquated electricity lines.

Third, we should help America’s automobile industry (not only the Big Three but the innovative new startup companies as well) to convert quickly to plug-in hybrids that can run on the renewable electricity that will be available as the rest of this plan matures. In combination with the unified grid, a nationwide fleet of plug-in hybrids would also help to solve the problem of electricity storage. Think about it: with this sort of grid, cars could be charged during off-peak energy-use hours; during peak hours, when fewer cars are on the road, they could contribute their electricity back into the national grid.
Fourth, we should embark on a nationwide effort to retrofit buildings with better insulation and energy-efficient windows and lighting. Approximately 40 percent of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States come from buildings — and stopping that pollution saves money for homeowners and businesses. This initiative should be coupled with the proposal in Congress to help Americans who are burdened by mortgages that exceed the value of their homes.

Fifth, the United States should lead the way by putting a price on carbon here at home, and by leading the world’s efforts to replace the Kyoto treaty next year in Copenhagen with a more effective treaty that caps global carbon dioxide emissions and encourages nations to invest together in efficient ways to reduce global warming pollution quickly, including by sharply reducing deforestation.

Interesting in the last point that Gore didn't simply call for a carbon-tax, which we know he supports.

Salon: EPA under Bush resemble Stalin-era Russia

Salon's Rebecca Clarren reports on the damage done to America's Environmental Protection Agency under the Bush Administration:

Anti-regulatory crusaders inside the Bush White House have peopled the EPA with top officials apparently more concerned with limiting government spending than public health. According to critics within and outside the EPA, the agency has stifled independent research and compromised scientific assessments of all manner of toxins and carcinogens that Americans breathe, drink and touch.

"It feels like Stalin-era Russia, like the administration set themselves up to decide what's allowable science and what isn't," says a high-ranking staff scientist at the EPA, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "Until the recent economic crash, this has been such an anti-regulatory administration. One of the ways to undermine regulations is to undermine the science behind them. It's absolutely shocking what's going on."

Public health officials say this attempt to derail the scientific evaluation of toxins is one of the most damning legacies of the Bush administration. In late September, the Government Accountability Office issued a scathing critique of the EPA's new toxic-assessment procedures. It concluded that the secretive procedures compromise scientific credibility and sacrifice the public's trust in government. Despite such hefty criticism, public officials fear that because the new procedures have been instituted at the EPA so far below the public radar, their harmful impact will survive long after Bush leaves office. It will take a bold and expedient move by Barack Obama or the next Congress to curtail the influence of the Pentagon and other government agencies on the EPA.

There are going to be all kinds of hazards out there that will take years to identify and fix.