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Category: environment

Published on Leave a comment on Seeing RED To Be Green

Two interesting pieces today, both concerning carbon "sinks" and their ability to alleviate global warming due to carbon release.

First up is a story on "Reducing Emissions from Deforestation:"

Tropical deforestation, which releases more than 1.5 billion metric tons of carbon to the atmosphere every year, is a major contributor to global climate change. Recognizing this, a group of forest-rich developing nations have called for a strategy to make forest preservation politically and economically attractive. The result is a two-year initiative, dubbed "Reducing Emissions from Deforestation" (RED), launched by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

So is 1.5 billion metric tons per year a lot or a little? Continuing its summary of the study:

[T]he authors found that reducing deforestation rates by 50% over the next century will save an average of about half a billion metric tons of carbon every year. This by itself could account for as much as 12% of the total reductions needed from all carbon sources to meet the IPCC target of 450 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by the year 2100.

It also finds:

[C]omputer models that link climate effects to changes in the carbon cycle have predicted that tropical forests will survive and continue to act as a "sink" by absorbing carbon, provided that emissions can be kept under control . The efficiency of the tropical forest as a carbon sink might in fact diminish over time, but the authors expect that it will not disappear completely.

A second article considers the role of the oceans in absorbing carbon from the atmosphere and the reverse:

A University of Colorado at Boulder-led research team tracing the origin of a large carbon dioxide increase in Earth's atmosphere at the end of the last ice age has detected two ancient "burps" that originated from the deepest parts of the oceans.

The new study indicated carbon that had built up in the oceans over millennia was released in two big pulses, one about 18,000 years ago and one 13,000 years ago, said Thomas Marchitto and Scott Lehman of CU-Boulder's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, who jointly led the study. While scientists had long known as much as 600 billion metric tons of carbon were released into the atmosphere after the last ice age, the new study is the first to clearly track CO2 from the deep ocean to the upper ocean and atmosphere and should help scientists better understand natural CO2 cycles and possible impacts of human-caused climate change.

As a non-specialist, it does seem like the public debate about global warming seems to focus quite a lot on how much carbon is introduced into the atmosphere, rather than how much is taken out.

Published on Leave a comment on Commerce and Agriculture

On Monday, the President nominated Carlos Gutierrez, CEO of Kellogg, to be the next Secretary of Commerce. From all accounts, Mr. Gutierrez is a wonderful American success story and an exceptional businessman. He breaks a pattern of promoting from within and seems to have had few ostensible ties to Republican politics. My hope for our new Secretary is that he is an advocate of free trade and not particularly beholden to interests groups like the National Association of Manufacturers, who in my view look to the government way too often for trade protection. I'll watch his confirmation hearings with that in mind.

Today, the President nominated Mike Johanns, Governor of Nebraska, to be the Secretary of Agriculture. He is not an insider and also seems like a successful executive. My hope for our new Secretary is that he is up to the task in two key areas. First, I am concerned that we are not moving fast enough to identify and contain mad cow disease and otherwise protect the food supply from disease. A lot of the remedies (like more testing of the herds) would act like a tax on beef production. Not a popular policy for the governor of Nebraska. Second, I want all tariffs and other barriers to the import of sugar from other countries to be eliminated. These barriers are a giveaway to the corn industry, and they are, in my view, the reason why we are lagging in our development of ethanol as a renewable fuel source. We should be making it out of Brazilian sugar, not import-protected domestic corn, at a much more competitive price. Again, dropping these barriers would seem to be a tough sell for the governor of Nebraska. This particular endorsement doesn't make me too optimistic, but I'll reserve judgement until I see the new Secretary in action.