The Costly Compromises of Oil From Sand

Byoliveridley

The New York Times prints a summary of the issues facing Canada’s Oil Sands. Of course, most people are well aware of the huge environmental impacts, water pollution, strip mining, destruction of avian habitats, greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution, you name it, they got it. The NY Times waits till the penultimate paragraph to get to the most important point:

Even if Canadian producers dislike American climate change policies, they will be hard-pressed to sell their oil elsewhere. Canada’s pipeline network takes oil sands production south and offers no routes to ports for export to other countries.

The Costly Compromises of Oil From Sand – NYTimes.com

In essence, any meaningful climate change regulation in the United States directly affects the viability of these projects. Canada is already trying to lobby against existing US regulation that explicitly forbids the use of fuels with higher lifecycle carbon emissions that conventional fuels by the military.

Nothing new in the article, just a reminder that any noises you hear emanating from Canada about US climate change regulation are driven by this issue.

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    Friedman, India and Development

    Byoliveridley

    Where Thomas Friedman of the New York Times echoes a blog post of mine from a few months back about cheap cars, development models and India.

    We have no right to tell Indians what cars to make or drive. But we can urge them to think hard about following our model, without a real mass transit alternative in place. Cheap conventional four-wheel cars, which would encourage millions of Indians to give up their two-wheel motor scooters and three-wheel motorized rickshaws, could overwhelm India’s already strained road system, increase its dependence on imported oil and gridlock the country’s megacities.

    No, No, No, Don’t Follow Us – New York Times

    Here’s what I had to say…

    Is it necessary that India and China tread the same path as the U.S and Europe? Does India have to make and use cars that are built using technology developed prior to our knowledge of global warming? The same company that gets cautious praise from the Union of Concerned Scientists for its “leadership” role in global warming will turn around and build factories in India that carry the status quo forward for another 30 years. When you’re starting from the foundation, and you know that the plans provided to you will lead to your house crumbling in 20 years, would you use the plans anyway because your contractor provides you with no alternative? The logical answer seems to be no, but is this process logic driven, or enforced by the existing power structure?

    The answer should be “NO!!”. But Friedman goes ahead and offers some sensible suggestions via the very excellent Sunita Narain.

    Charge high prices for parking, charge a proper road tax for driving, deploy free air-conditioned buses that reach every corner of the city, expand the existing beautiful Delhi subway system, “and then let the market work,” she added.

    Good idea. Now, will Friedman turn around and offer the same prescription for the US? Apparently not. If the US cannot kick the car habit, or show other people how to, this kind of lecturing is pointless.

    Blogged with Flock

  • Volcanos and Climate Geoengineering

    Byoliveridley

    The first thing that occurred to me when I heard about the Sarychev eruption was whether it was going to be large enough to inject significant quantities of sulphate aerosol into the stratosphere. Apparently, it is.

    Sarychev Eruption Generates Large Cloud of Sulfur Dioxide

    When sulfur dioxide reacts with water vapor, it creates sulfate ions (the precursors to sulfuric acid), which are very reflective. Powerful volcanic eruptions can inject sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere, beyond the reach of cleansing rainfall. At these altitudes, the sulfates can linger for months or years, cooling the climate by reflecting incoming sunlight. (The effect is stronger when the eruptions occur at tropical latitudes.) Carn says the persistence of such high concentrations of sulfur dioxide in the OMI data throughout the week indicates that the plume from Sarychev Peak reached high altitudes. Data from other satellites (such as CALIPSO) suggest that the volcanic plume reached altitudes of 10–15 kilometers, and perhaps as high as 21 kilometers.

    In 1991, the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines injected enough sulphate into the atmosphere to cause a 0.5° C drop in global temperature. This was caused by about 20 million tonnes of SO2. We are nowhere close to these kind of emission levels. After all, Pinatubo was one of the two biggest volcanic events of the century.

    Injecting sulphate particles into the stratosphere has been proposed for a while now, I first wrote about it in 2006 when a prominent atmospheric chemist, Paul Crutzen wrote an article proposing this. The science behind this proposal is basic, sulphate aerosols of the size that would be formed from the oxidation of SO2 are the right size to scatter and reflect solar radiation back into space (my Masters thesis did a first order estimate of this effect from Indian emissions!). If injected directly into the stratosphere, they can stay there for a long time and will not deposit to the the Earth’s surface as acid rain. The issue is managing all the crazy regional variations in climate that would result, and the attendant complications in assigning blame, etc. It would also not help the oceans, which would acidify to hell with all the CO2.

    Anyway, so much for that, the volcano is causing all kinds of havoc with Pacific travel and making for all kinds of cool pictures, which are about the most interesting thing happening at this point in time. We shall see how the sulphate situation plays out in the days to come when the dust settles.

  • Cleaner Air Brings Drop in Death Rate – New York Times

    Byoliveridley

    Cleaner Air Brings Drop in Death Rate – New York Times

    When air pollution in a city declines, the city benefits with a directly proportional drop in death rates, a new study has found.

    In other news, Dog bites man (I have never typed “dog bites man” into google news before – shocking…)

    Well, the Dockery and company published a seminal set of articles on the 6 city study back in the 90s that are the gold standard of air pollution epidemiology. It takes large long-term studies like these to establish even tenuous correlations, and their graphs connecting particle concentrations and mortality were beautiful straight lines.

    This follow up is pretty cool because the cities had made most of the reductions in the 70s and 80s after the passage of the Clean Air Act and this study clearly demonstrates that the bar for lowering mortality/cancer rates by lowering fine particle levels has not been reached yet. The abstract of the paper is below the fold.

    Read More “Cleaner Air Brings Drop in Death Rate – New York Times”

  • GE Plumbs the Depths

    Byoliveridley

    The very excellent htww blog by Andrew Leonard on Salon brought this “clean coal” video to my attention. It is a year old, but new to us!

    Do watch. In a one minute commercial, GE manages to greenwash on clean coal, be incredibly sexist, and, in an act that screams a giant F@#$ You to all involved, use as a soundtrack, a song about the misery of coal mining and the hardship faced by miners. I thought it was a parody, it had to be, apparently, NOT!

    Sixteen Tons

    Some people say a man is made outta mud
    A poor man’s made outta muscle and blood
    Muscle and blood and skin and bones
    A mind that’s a-weak and a back that’s strong

    You load sixteen tons, what do you get
    Another day older and deeper in debt
    Saint Peter don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go
    I owe my soul to the company store

    I was born one mornin’ when the sun didn’t shine
    I picked up my shovel and I walked to the mine
    I loaded sixteen tons of number nine coal
    And the straw boss said “Well, a-bless my soul”

    You load sixteen tons, what do you get
    Another day older and deeper in debt
    Saint Peter don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go
    I owe my soul to the company store

    I was born one mornin’, it was drizzlin’ rain
    Fightin’ and trouble are my middle name
    I was raised in the canebrake by an ol’ mama lion
    Cain’t no-a high-toned woman make me walk the line

    You load sixteen tons, what do you get
    Another day older and deeper in debt
    Saint Peter don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go
    I owe my soul to the company store

    If you see me comin’, better step aside
    A lotta men didn’t, a lotta men died
    One fist of iron, the other of steel
    If the right one don’t a-get you
    Then the left one will

    You load sixteen tons, what do you get
    Another day older and deeper in debt
    Saint Peter don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go
    I owe my soul to the company store

    Shame on them.

  • Greenscanner: Or how cool is this!

    Byoliveridley

    Courtesy the grist, my favorite environment related website…

    GreenScanner

    This site is a public database of opinions about the environmental friendliness of various products. It has been designed for use with network-enabled mobile devices so you can use it at the food store. Type in a UPC code and hit “Go” to see what people think about the product (1 is bad, 5 is good). Then you can then add a comment and score of your own!

    This is a start. What we need (I was thinking about this making dinner yesterday) is an easy link between a product’s UPC and its Life Cycle Analysis, if it even exists…

  • Apparently, the Earth is warming up…

    Byoliveridley

    story.global.warming.2.jpgAnd Dog bites man, yet again, it’s amazing how they keep doing that. Think of all the money being wasted on re-proving the obvious, this is money not spent in mitigating the effects, money not spent on research, money not spent on encouraging people to use more efficient lighting… It’s a shame.

    CNN.com – Study: Earth ‘likely’ hottest in 2,000 years – Jun 22, 2006

    Climate scientists Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes had concluded the Northern Hemisphere was the warmest it has been in 2,000 years. Their research was known as the “hockey-stick” graphic because it compared the sharp curve of the hockey blade to the recent uptick in temperatures and the stick’s long shaft to centuries of previous climate stability.

    The National Academy scientists concluded that the Mann-Bradley-Hughes research from the late 1990s was “likely” to be true, said John “Mike” Wallace, an atmospheric sciences professor at the University of Washington and a panel member. The conclusions from the ’90s research “are very close to being right” and are supported by even more recent data, Wallace said.

    The panel looked at how other scientists reconstructed the Earth’s temperatures going back thousands of years, before there was data from modern scientific instruments.

    For all but the most recent 150 years, the academy scientists relied on “proxy” evidence from tree rings, corals, glaciers and ice cores, cave deposits, ocean and lake sediments, boreholes and other sources. They also examined indirect records such as paintings of glaciers in the Alps.

    Combining that information gave the panel “a high level of confidence that the last few decades of the 20th century were warmer than any comparable period in the last 400 years,” the academy said.