Ellee on biofuels

Via Peter Risdon, Ellee Seymour's latest venture into the world of climate science is a shocker.

Ellee links approvingly to Conservative MEP Robert Sturdy's letter extolling the (alleged) virtues of biofuels.

This is, not to put too fine a point on it, quite mad and possibly evil too. The lemming-like dash towards biofuels has driven world grain prices inexorably upwards, leading to price inflation and all the suffering that brings. The reaction of governments in many producer countries has been to slap export taxes on grain exports - for example China, Argentina - or imposing export quotas like Vietnam. This has made things even worse. Unrest is becoming widespread -

Clashes over bread in Egypt killed at least two people last week, and similar food riots broke out in Burkina Faso and Cameroon this month.

Farmers in Argentina have pledged to continue a nationwide protest after the government refused to back down on tax rises on agricultural exports.

See also Mexico, Italy (!), etc.

Everybody with the slightest bit of sense is jumping off the biofuels bandwagon post-haste:

The government's chief environmental scientist has called for a halt to their deployment. 

A UN specialist on food availability says that biofuels are a crime against humanity. 

Even the not-very-bright people in the government are starting to backtrack. 

Everyone who gives a damn is against biofuels, so why on earth is Robert Sturdy for them? Can he really not have heard that  they're a disaster. Or could it possibly be because he is a big arable farmer who will derive huge benefits from high grain prices? Tell me it ain't so.

So when I say everyone who gives a damn, what I should have said was "everyone who gives a damn about people other than themselves".

Coal

Thought for the day:

Greens are calling for a moratorium on new coal fired power stations. Would they have still been making these demands if we still had a mining industry? 

Food security

Food security is a subject that's enjoyed a little splurge of interest in the last couple of days. The government's new science adviser, Professor John Beddington, is reported as saying that the food shortages are likely to affect us long before climate change.

This is interesting, because one of the main factors behind the increase in food prices has been the diversion of farming land to biofuels production, ostensibly as a contribution to the "fight against global warming". So here's a classic case of the cure being worse than the affliction. Thank-you, greens.

Of course, no government scientific adviser is allowed out in public without a genuflection before the global warming goddess, and Beddington is no exception. His comments include the obligatory reference to climate change which is (obviously) going to make things much worse. It always does, doesn't it?

Now, there is a bit of evidence that warming will reduce crop yields, but these claims are not generally accepted, not least because historically warming has lead to times of plenty while colder climate has lead to shortage. There is much more certainty over the fertilising effect of more CO2 in the atmosphere. With CO2 levels continuing to go up, and temperatures steady for the last ten years, we should actually be expecting higher yields. And that's before you factor in the impact of genetic modification which is now pretty widespread, outside backward places like Europe.

It's certainly true to say that crop yields have been rising dramatically in recent years, at least in the US:

If you look at the chart, it's clear that in the last fifty years yields have nearly quadrupled. Given that agriculture in much of the rest of the world is nowhere near this productive, there would appear to be enormous scope to increase production.

All we need to happen is for governments to stop interfering, to stop putting up barriers to trade, so that surpluses find their way to places of shortage, to stop the roll out of GM crops so that the benefits can be enjoyed by farmers and consumers everywhere, and for government chief scientists to stop playing the Cassandra and stick to the facts.  

Alex Singleton gets it spectacularly wrong

Alex Singleton of the Globalisation Institute is a sensible chap and resides very much on the side of the angels. Unfortunately in his article at the Graun today he gets it spectacularly wrong.

His thesis for the day is that green taxes won't work, and so we should introduce compulsory carbon offsetting.

We should scrap green taxes on flying and replace them with compulsory carbon offsetting. Like a tax, offsetting would add to the price of a journey. The difference would be that the money would go to actually improve the environment.

And he's quite definite about the kind of offsetting schemes he want to see.

It is certainly true that some carbon offsetting schemes are dubious. One involves discouraging the use of labour-saving diesel water pumps in developing countries and getting people to use back-breaking pedal-pumps, which were banned in British prisons a century ago. We should not allow some ill-conceived options to put us off more worthwhile schemes, such as planting trees.

Which is where he has got it wrong.

Anthropogenic global warming is alleged to be happening because carbon, which was formerly locked away in the form of oil, coal and gas, has been released into the atmosphere. Growing trees is going to have little or no effect on the situation,  because trees have a finite life cycle and when they die they just release carbon back into the atmosphere.

As Britain's great chronicler of trees and woodland, Oliver Rackham, has said of carbon offsetting:

Telling people to plant more trees is like telling them to drink more water to keep down rising sea levels.

Bluff calling

I'm just off out to the school board meeting, but before I go here's an ingenious solution to global warming, penned by Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph. 

Both warmers and skeptics agree that if there is going to be any warming it will be seen first in the troposphere. Because of this consensus (a real consensus this time) a tax on carbon, linked to the temperature of the troposphere should be supported by both sides of the debate. The tax would initially be quite low. But if the temperature rises, as predicted by the warmers, then the tax goes up. If it falls, or is stable, which is what the skeptics think might happen, then the tax remains relatively trivial.

A rather neat idea, in that it calls the bluff of both sides.  

Still more cackhanded greenery

The greens have got it wrong again!

Kevin Vranes, writing on the Nature Climate Feedback blog recounts the sad tale of some more perverse results of the Kyoto Protocol. It's like this. Rich countries that can't meet their Kyoto obligations pay poor countries to reduce their emissions instead. While this might be doneby means of something obvious like building biomass incinerators or windfarms, one outlet that has proved very lucrative for the third world has been the burning of a chemical called HFC-23.

Now, HFC-23 is the by-product of the manufacture of a refrigerant with the equally romantic moniker of HCFC-22. Both of these substances are chlorofluorocarbons and therefore can damage the ozone layer. Despite this their manufacture is still allowed, under a developing country exemption from the Montreal Protocol.  When Kyoto was put in place however, the developing countries discovered that as well as depleting the ozone layer, both chemicals were also greenhouse gases. In particular HFC-23, the by-product, turned out to have a very long lifetime in the atmosphere. Because of this Kyoto was going to reward them, and reward them big-time, for burning it rather than releasing it into the atmosphere. As Vranes puts it:

[P]roducers of HCFC-22 now make more money burning HFC-23 than they do selling HCFC-22. Imagine what being paid handsomely to burn your waste does to your incentive to reduce your waste. If your waste stream costs you to dispose of it, you might try to improve your production to reduce waste and thus save money. And even if you did get paid to burn your waste, it might make financial sense to reduce waste anyway if your efficiency improvements paid more in reduced operating expenses than burning waste generated in income. But neither is the case for HCFC-22 factories. For them a double financial incentive now exists: keep making HCFC-22 in copious amounts at a profit, which will produce HFC-23 as a now-valuable waste product. And since HCFC-22 producers need not even lift a finger to burn their HFC-23 (those funding the CDM project fund the capture and burn device), any incentive for switching away from the ozone-depleting HCFC-22 as a refrigerant is also destroyed.

 The great law of unintended consequences strikes again. Now just explain to me again why Mr Bush was so wicked for not signing Kyoto?

Carbon dioxide removal

A commenter at Tim Worstall reminds me of a cunning masterplan I developed in a moment of idleness some years ago. If the problem is that a load of carbon stored in an inert form under the ground has been converted to CO2, then the sensible solution is to get it back into an inert form again. Luis Enrique, puts it thusly:

 It would appear to (ignorant) me that a good way of reducing atmospheric C02 would be to replicate the process of how it got underground - i.e. growing lots of trees, cutting them down and burying them as landfill and growing more. repeat. Which is kind of why I no longer care about buying paper from managed forests then chucking it in the bin. Am I making an error here?

I must say this looks flawless to me. Maybe we don't need send our economy back to the dark ages.

So it's OK! We're not doomed after all! 

Light bulbs

There is a marvellous debunking of the EU's proposed ban on incandescent light bulbs over at EU Referendum.

• Something like 50% of light fittings in the UK will have to be thrown on a scrap heap and replaced because they can't be used with the "long-life" CFL lightbulbs that are to replace the incandescents.
• CFLs can't be used with security lights or dimmer switches. These will have to be scrapped too.
• They use much more power to make, in a process which uses toxic materials including mercury vapour.
• If they are switched on and off as required, they don't last as long as claimed.
• If you don't switch them on and off as required but leave them on, the proclaimed energy saving is largely lost.

The similarity between this and the recycling scam is remarkable. A vast and expensive gesture turns out to be a waste. A pattern looks to be establishing itself: environmentalism is bad for the environment.