Compact Fluorescent Bulbs - the Mercury Red Herring

From Wikipedia: "A red herring is a clue or piece of information which is intended to be misleading, or distracting from the actual issue."

http://durhamnc.gov/ich/op/swmd/Documents/mercury_spills.pdf

You have no doubt heard the scare that fluorescent bulbs contain mercury and are a terrible health hazard if they break. The link above shows that this is not the case, and in fact, the reason that environmentalists pushed for them is that even if they are broken at the end of their life (which I have never had happen in 10 years of using them), they prevent the net emissions of very much mercury by decreasing the burning of coal, which is thoroughly contaminated with mercury.  Thus, the school of fish we need to worry about is coal and how to stop using it altogether.

Such recurring scares about large-scale environmental programs serve to decrease public understanding of the climate and energy problems that we face. It's unclear whether these red herrings are deliberately planted or happen naturally as paranoid anti-government and anti-authority sentiments force a large segment of the population to gravitate towards any meme that supports their delusions about the malicious intent of authorities.

Compact fluorescent bulbs do have their drawbacks, many of which have been corrected. They do not reach full brightness as fast as incandescent bulbs when you turn them on. They can last 7 years, but sometimes they fail much earlier. The light from them is concentrated in limited bands of light rather than full spectrum, and some people find it less pleasant to work in. However, they are a huge benefit to the environment and, unless you deliberately break them and huff the vapors, they are as safe as rechargeable batteries which contain cadmium and would kill you if you ate them.

These distractions against progressive environmental regulations are a persistent annoyance. The paranoid thinking underlying them may well be our undoing.

Presidential Update on the Climate

The Republican primaries have begun. News-flash to liberals who have followed their heart and completely tuned-out the nightly debates and news coverage, and I'm not being facetious: RUN FOR YOUR LIVES! Former congressmen from my home district in Georgia and Ousted House Speaker, Newt Gingrich, the chief architect of the Contract on America, is now in the lead in the Republican race. The last time anyone cared about him, he was leading the charge to get President Clinton impeached for "lying to a Grand Jury (impropriety)" while cheating on his sick wife with an employee. When his movement failed, disgraced, he was replaced as speaker by ??Dennis Hastert?? and went out to consult for Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. There actually is a picture of Newt next to the word "Hypocrite" in my dictionary. I pasted it there.

I offered my wife $5 if she could watch Newt Gingrich speak for more than 5 minutes without yelling at the the television. She declined. I think a "Newt versus Obama" race would be a fantastic one for Obama. I've heard people say that Newt is a shrewd and brilliant debater that could whoop Obama. I think Obama will welcome the challenge against a fat, ugly, angry person. I also think that Newt's racism and megalomania is so obnoxious it would really fire up the democratic base. The advantage is that Newt doesn't understand why his opinions are racist and offensive, so he loudly proclaims them whereas a more cynical politician like G.W. Bush pretends to be a compassionate conservative while appointing right-wing nut-jobs (e.g. Bolton, Wolfowitz, etc.) for all executive positions in the government and as supreme court justices.

So, I welcome the entry of Newt to the contest. I think he will fire up the Democratic base and bring enough crazy to the table to scare away the few remaining independents. Since turnout and then independents will determine the outcome of the election, I think Newt will be good for the Climate by boldly stating the backward and anti-science ideas of the Republican party and prevent the voter apathy that allowed Bush to steal the election in 2000.

Now, we can just wait for the next turn in the amazing saga of the Silly Party. Isn't it amazing how Monty Python had this whole thing nailed decades ago?

Common Sense versus reality

The great financial crisis and minor depression from 2008 - present has played out exactly like macroeconomic models predict when a ginormous asset bubble is allowed to expand and then pop. The problem with macroeconomics is that it is a well-developed academic field with non-intuitive phenomena that the general public does not understand. But yet, the public thinks it understands. Much of the rage surrounding the crisis and the political response to it arises from this conflict between "common sense" and nuanced economic models.

One example of the conflict was the bank bailout. Economists and business leaders of all stripes knew that the worst thing you can do in an asset bubble is allow the banks to fail. This is what happened in the great panics of the 19th and early 20th centuries including the Great Depression. Thus, a counterintuitive plan: bail out the very banks that created the collateralized debt obligations on sub-prime loans and the credit default swaps that caused the bubble. The bailout was particularly hard to swallow for all average Joes, myself included, who were up to date on their mortgage payments and had piled on large amounts of debt in the 2000s with the hopes of getting good jobs and paying it all off.

A second example is our current scenario: the liquidity trap. Now the government has created as much liquidity as it can by setting the Fed funds rate at 0%. The Fed cannot stimulate the economy to grow in the traditional way and unemployment has tripled from levels of before 2008, with millions of workers unemployed or underemployed and not searching anymore. Basic macroeconomics calls for stimulus spending by the government to get the economy growing again and to exit the liquidity trap. Demand has fallen off a cliff and needs to rise before the economy can grow again. Ben Bernanke knows what the solution is, but his life has literally been threatened by a political opponent if he attempts to do what he should.

The problem is that "Common Sense" says the government should have a balanced budget, so the Average Joe is out there calling for spending decreases to match the decreased government revenue caused by the Bush Tax cuts and the activation of the government safety net during the economic crisis. If the government decreases spending, it pulls money out of the economy and perpetuates the liquidity trap and the economy continues to spin its wheels (See Great Britain since the conservatives took over).

Now, another problem is that the two sides of the political spectrum no longer play by the same rules.One side deals with problems by weighing all the possible solutions and listening to the best ideas while the other has its own branch of economics funded by think tanks that billionaires independently fund, that tells the same story all the time: low taxes, small domestic government, and no regulation are the answer to every problem in economics.

A third example of the mismatch between common sense and reality, related to the second, is the great fear of inflation amongst the business class, even though inflation is exactly what we need right now to get out of this liquidity trap. For 3 years, armchair economists have been predicting inflation because "the government is just printing money" and "devaluing the currency." This is actually not true, since printing money and lending it to banks are quite different, but yet, for 3 years, the predicted inflation has not happened despite trillions of bank loans and guarantees - just as predicted by settled academic economics from the 1930s.

I have learned a lot about economics since the great recession started but am still no expert. It just all sounds so familiar to what happens in science when the public doesn't understand a complex phenomenon and doesn't like the reality (geology, evolution, climate change, population growth) so a second, parallel field of "academics" is created that will tell the people what they want to hear. Unfortunately, we now have a political field where one side plays to people's fears and misunderstandings of complex phenomena of all stripes: economics, biology, and even physics, while the other party has politicians that understand enough to know what they should do but can't overcome the barriers to explain to the populace why we should do something unpleasant or counterintuitive.

This stuff is all related to my obsession with climate change, habitat loss, population growth, and other examples of the Tragedy of the Commons. Because it is counterintuitive and goes against "common sense," people want to do exactly the wrong thing.

My dad is a lawyer. He once explained his job to me this way: A client comes to me wanting to do something, I tell him not to do it for this, that, and the other reason, then the client does exactly what I told him not to do, and then I try to help him get out of the mess he created. This is the tragedy of fancy thinking. Society knows we need experts and has spent dearly to create the academic institutions that produces those experts, but we often turn around and ignore those fancy experts because we don't really need them. We have common sense.

Who Should a Climate Hugger Support in the Republican Primary Race?

We are farther from a price on carbon than we have been in a decade. The Democratic president has chosen to govern like a conservative Republican of the 1990's. We voted for the next FDR, and we got President Obamney. The Republicans are falling all over themselves to get us back to 1900. What is the political path to climate action that will prevent cataclysmic changes?

One thing to do is to protest and make the climate the only issue you care about. That is underway. Get to DC for the September 3 rally and if you can, go up and block the White House from August 20 - September 3 to stop the Tar Sands Greenhouse Gas Acceleration Project. There are plenty of other people to worry about short-term things like jobs and health care, which most of us care about very much. We stand for Gaia - for a planet that can support human life and the lives of other animals that we have come to like in our short existances. If we don't stop climate change, who gives a damn about your job or career?

Another thing we could consider would be to support a candidate other than President Obama. That technique failed miserably in 1980 when Ted Kennedy ran against Carter. It also failed in 2000, when people in Florida voted for Ralph Nader because they thought Clinton was too conservative and that Gore was "the same" as Bush. There are far too many willfully ignorant people in this country (think about how many people voted for a Republican in the 2008 election despite 8 years of Bush/Cheney) to govern from the progressive side. As frustrated as you might be with how conservative he has been, if you don't throw everything you have to re-elect Barack Obama, you will put extra nails in Gaia's coffin. 

Another technique you could take would be to jump into the Republican debate and force the American Right to have a debate about the climate this year. Here's my take on the effects of the various Republican candidates (if I left them out, it's because I don't take them seriously).

Ron Paul
Dr. Paul could be helping women in Haiti or the Democratic Republic of Congo or Houston. Instead, he entered Congress, where he thinks pushing libertarian ideas will have more impact on people's lives than by directly helping people with the skills given to him by our fantastic system of education. A charismatic and engaging Medical Doctor with the worst God-complex you've ever seen. He saw an enigmatic Austrian Economist (von Mises) talk one time about the Gold Standard and how modern economies based on fiat currencies are bound to fail because early experiments with Fiat Currency failed. (Yes- I did read his book "End the Fed"). Then, he decided he knew more than thousands of economists who spent their graduate careers reading economic philosophy and publishing peer reviewed papers instead of becoming an OB/Gyn. He named his kid Rand after the Utopian Libertarian writer of the same name. He is an honest idealogue (e.g. he refuses the pension that congresspeople are supposed to get) who is the most interesting person in the Republican field.

Then you think about what his administration would look like. Devastating cuts to all the things that the government does to help people - bad. Immediate withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan, efforts to end all subsidies for environmental destruction/exploitation - good. Privatization efforts for all National Parks and other Public Spaces (Turning Rocky Mountain National Park to Pike's Peak) - disgusting.

If you have a blind faith in free markets to solve all problems, you don't understand the tragedy of the commons, which is the problem that Climate Huggers must solve. While we can work with libertarians on some issues (endless wars, decriminalizing marijuana), libertarians just don't get it re: externalities. The free market is basically the human manifestation of natural selection.

I don't want a society based on subhuman evolutionary competition. I know what kind of life wild animals have. I see the carcasses and starving babies. Our goal is to protect civilization, which, despite all its faults, is a lot more pleasant than animal societies that live the way libertarians want us to live. I love to watch birds, but I don't want to behave like them.

Rick Parry (That's Parry with an A for America and Iowa)

Dumber than Dubya. Rick Parry has already threatened the life of the Federal Reserve chairman for causing runaway inflation, despite the fact that we don't have anything like runaway inflation. He's running on Job Creation, but if you don't want to have a career earning minimum wage, then you don't want Rick Parry as president. See Paul Krugman for a devastating take-down of Parry's supposed economic miracle in Texas. As others have pointed out, Parry tries to parrot Ron Paul's arguments about the currency, but he doesn't understand the currency/gold bug ideas well enough to get them right. I thought this guy might win for about 10 minutes, but he's really not smart enough to win against a good politician like Barack Obama in a national election.

Michelle Bachmann

A 5" Deck Screw in every corner of Gaia's Coffin. Michelle Bachmann openly mocks the president for using a teleprompter and then constantly makes errors in speaking because she doesn't have the self-discipline or organizational skill to prepare remarks in advance. This behavior is emblematic for her. She is a very proud ignoramus who has made up her mind without any evidence about almost every issue. She lies about how many kids she has, family reunions,and apparently a lot of other things. She is a cynical politician who hides behind her "strong" Christian faith to disguise a callous political philosophy based on fighting gay marriage and criminalizing abortion and cutting anything that helps poor people get out of poverty or reach their full potential (i.e. education, food stamps, medicaid, health care). Bachmann is the most dangerous person in the field who now pledges to bring back $2 gas by opening up every cranny to oil drilling. But all she does is go out an win elections, so watch out.

Mitt Romney

At least he has shown a willingness to change his mind about things. Unfortunately, he is often doing that in the wrong direction these days. I don't think he can win the nomination because he is too much like Obama. They passed the same health care plan. They are both moderate Republicans in governing philosophy. He probably would have the best shot of actually beating Obama because the other candidates are so crazy that they could not win the independents. Hopefully, a lot of the crazy right would stay out of it during a Romney run.This election would be Bush v Gore again. Obamneycare would be the central election issue and the climate would be ignored.

Pawlenty- I am glad Pawlenty is out. He had no shot. A total Climate Weasel. As Krugman said, he is Sarah Palin in a suit.

Herman Cain 

Who is Herman Cain? I know nothing about this person and I'll take him seriously if he is still in the race in 2012. He's apparently a ballistics expert, and that seems to accurately reflect the rhetoric I've heard from him. Until 2012, I'll just say that an African American will have difficulty reaching the Republican base.


John Huntsman

Huntsman is the only climate-friendly Republican candidate. If you were hedging your bets on climate change issues, you would start campaigning for this guy to stay in the field as long as possible. We'll see whether he sticks to his guns in this election or decides that the science has become questionable (like Romney did).

He was raised Mormon, but his 7 kids went to Catholic Schools, his wife is Episcopalian, and he has an adopted daughter of Indian descent. I don't think he thinks the earth is 5000 years old or thinks that prayer is the way to solve our nation's problems.

The problem with Huntsman is that he's too reasonable to win the nomination. Republicans want someone who will bring back the glory days of 1900. They want someone with "Common Sense," not someone who is way smarter than the average person and thoughtful and will make the best decision for the country. An actual problem is that he is one of these "the tax burden is too high" guys despite the fact that the US has low taxes and that the super rich pay really low taxes, and our economy still stinks. So how do they make these arguments? At least he refused to sign the "no tax" pledge. I don't think a reasonable person can win the Republican nomination. It would be nice to see Obama run against Huntsman for the presidency, since we could debate whether the solution is Cap and Trade or a Carbon Tax and Rebate program.

So - should we care about which Republican wins - very much so and the one we support should be John Huntsman. But, we should not support him openly, since that would crush his candidacy among the Republicans.

After these considerations, I endorse Rick Parry for the Republican nomination for the president of the United States. He is stupid and his technique of dealing with climate change will be to pray about while opening up Yellowstone National Park for unlimited oil drilling, but he would make a tremendous nominee for president from the Republican field.

The Climate Cost of Recharging your Car's AC

I have an Oldsmobile that my father gave me when my Volkswagen TDI died at 220,000 miles. The Oldsmobile is a 2000 Intrigue with 144,000 or so miles. It doesn't have any major problems, but we needed a newer car that we could trust for trips. So, we bought a Camry Hybrid.

I was debating what to do with the Olds because it has a leak in the AC system so it needs to be recharged with 134 a refrigerant every year or so. To recharge is under $100 while to change the compressor is $720. The global warming potential of HFC-134a is 1300 times that of CO2. Thus, if you recharge with 1 pound of HFC-134a every year, you emit the equivalent of 1300 pounds or 0.65 tons of CO2. For those keeping score this would be 0.59 tonnes (metric) of CO2. In comparison, a Camry Hybrid saves 1.3 tonnes of CO2 every year versus a conventional Camry and emits a total of 5.4 tonnes of CO2 per year if you drive 15000 miles per year.

So, should I replace the compressor for $720 before I sell it? Let's say the car is driven for 5 more years and they put in 5 pounds of refrigerant over that time. From an economic standpoint, I should offset the CO2 only if a tonne of CO2 is worth $244 per tonne. I think I could buy 3 tonnes of CO2 on the voluntary market for ten dollars each.

I bought a $10 ton of carbon offsets from Carbon Eliminator as my first installment. That will compensate for the HFC-134a that I used last year. I like Carbon Eliminator because it is one of the only sites that will directly sell anyone offsets without any BS calculations that we don't need them to do for us. It's not from a big organization, but they will use my $10 to install solar panels in Nigeria or the Amazon. Is it "real?" Who knows. They emailed me back and seemed legit to me.

The Souring

I biked over to the closest convenience store to my house last night. They have relatively decent bottles of wine at this gas station, and I wanted to pick one up for our dinner, which was in the oven.

This place doesn't really have a bike rack anywhere, and since I was going to buy something quickly and bike back to my house, I brought my bike into the store with me.

As I walked into the store, I looked around for the best way to get to the wine rack in the back with my bike. The store was empty. The guy behind the counter said "Sir - You can't bring your bike in here!"

I was lost in thought. I processed what he said for a second, looked over at him, and said, hiding a smile, "I didn't see it posted anywhere?"

 "It shouldn't have to be posted!"

Well, do I just take an insult from the guy who sells pornography, beer, cheap wine, blunts, cigarettes, herbal impotence medicine, lottery tickets, and gasoline?

At least he has a job, I guess, but what does he have against bikes? Is he involved in the vast right-wing conspiracy to stop people from biking so they burn more oil?

I was amazed at how quickly I went from jovial to saying this:

"Fine, I will never shop at your store again."

And I never will.

I backed my bike out the door, and I rode a mile farther down the road to the Food Lion. The last thing we need is to discourage people from riding bikes. I can use the extra exercise and the cost savings of going over to the Food Lion.

Now's probably a good time to mention the great satisfaction I have in tearing up credit offers from Chase Bank. Chase Bank gouged my wife and I with a trick refinancing offer about 5 years ago. The offer said we could refinance up to $5000 on our credit line we had open with them at 0% for one year. So, we wrote one of their special checks for $5000 to pay of higher interest debt. We then received a statement from Chase saying we had overdrawn our line of credit and we would get a ~$40 penalty on top of the $300+fee to refinance at 0%. And the interest rate, instead of being 0%, was over 20% because of our huge violation. What had we done wrong? The fine print said we had to take the fees out of our offer. It was hidden in there so you could easily miss it. It was predatory lending at its finest.

I called Chase. Here's how the conversation plays in my mind 5 years later:

"Can I ask what percentage of the people who take you up on this offer receive this penalty?"

"Sir," he replied, "It's your responsibilty to read the document and comply with the rules."

"Listen. My wife handled this transaction. She almost never makes this kind of mistake. We both went to Harvard, we both looked at it and did not expect see this error. I'm willing to pay the penalty but I will not pay 24.99% interest. Move it down to a reasonable rate and we will pay that."

I said the same thing to the person's manager, at which point I was told how irresponsible I was again.

"Okay. Here's the deal. Make this right or I will never use your bank again. I will immediately pay off this loan from another account. If you are bought by another bank, we won't use that bank."

"I'm sorry, sir, but this was your responsibility."

Every day, literally, we get a credit offer from Chase, which has been purchased by JP Morgan. We have good credit and we have often had to carry a balance, so we have paid lots of interest to credit card companies over the last 5 years. Chase was never one of them. Every day, I tear up their offer without reading it. [Note - Ironically, I'm sure Google ads will put a JP Morgan Chase ad on this page. Don't use Chase. They are gougers, but the joke's on them since no one actually read this blog]

There must a name for such break points, where your fuse reaches its endpoint and you just snap. This happens to me kind of frequently, perhaps because I tend to give people the benefit of the doubt a lot and assume that I'm the problem when little things go wrong.

John Lennon must have had this situation in mind in "I'm looking through you." The best line is: "Love has a nasty habit of disappearing overnight."

If the effect of a magic trick is "the prestige", what is the name for this point in a relationship where you turn from amicable to irreparable? I suggest "the souring," but anyone else's thoughts are welcome.

Why Quixotic Climate has Soured on Diesels for Saving the World

As a former grease-car guy, how can I flip-flop and not favor diesels over gasoline? In short, the answer is that while diesels are more efficient in mpg compared to cheap, poorly built gasoline vehicles, the diesel advantage mostly goes away when you compensate for the fact that diesel fuel has 10.1 Kg of CO2 emissions per galllon of fuel burned while gasoline only has 8.8 Kg of CO2 (Numbers taken from EPA site).

Don't get me wrong, there are still great advantages to diesels. Diesels have lots of torque and drive great. I drove a 2011 Audi Q7 diesel and it is quite car ($65,000). However, it's carbon emissions are not anything to write home about compared to a gas powered, 7-passenger, car-based SUV like a Ford Explorer or Flex or a Honda Pilot.

What about biodiesel? Well, I do love biodiesel and the movement is awesome. It's Nopec. It's clearner burning. But it has it's drawbacks. Biodiesel is hard to find in many places. It takes a lot of energy and time inputs to create biodiesel.

If you enjoy working in your shed and diving in grease dumpsters to salvage waste vegetable oil, you can create biodiesel through transesterification with methanol and NaOH. Sure, you get lots of toxic co- and byproducts to deal with and your fuel won't work in the winter because it gels. Oh wait, that's part of the reason.

Until we have electric vehicles that can trade out batteries at stations along the highway, we'll need some liquid fuel to run our cars. How much better are diesels? How do the calculations work out? Should we all switch to diesels?

Diesels emit 12.8% more CO2 for every gallon of fuel they burn. Diesel Fuel also costs 7.7% more than gasoline. When you include those two factors and compare them to equally sophisticated gasoline engines, all of the advantages go away and the two fuels are equally bad. My caveat is that if you're burning biodiesel and supporting an organization like Piedmont Biofuels, then I'm all for it. Until there's a price on net carbon emissions, you'll have to come up with extra cash for that.

If you look at 2 Volkswagen models you get a feel for the payoff of using diesel. The Toureg and Toureg diesel have price differentials of $3600 more for the diesel and fuel usage differentials of $306 more dollars per year for the gasser. Thus, the payoff for a Toureg diesel (not accounting for resale value, which will be better in the diesel) occurs after 10.8 years. For a Jetta Sportwagen versus a Jetta Sportwagen Diesel, the price differential at the outset is $4600 and the differential per year in fuel is $168.70 more for the gasser. It would take 28 years to pay for the diesel not including the added resale value of the diesel or depreciation on the cost benefits because they come in the future. In short, it doesn't pay from a fuel perspective to get a diesel sportwagen, even though those EPA numbers in MPG again look better than they are.

It's surprising to read these figures, and the carbon emission figures are similar. The Toureg diesel only saves 61 Kg of CO2 per year. The Sportwagen diesel saves 297 Kg of fuel per year. Thus, while both are better, they don't approach the massive savings that hybrids provide by using regenerative braking and stop-start technology to save fuel.

The numbers are below:

Car	MPG	Miles driven	Gallons	Fuel Cost	Savings	CarPrice	Payoff   Time(yr)	CO2 (KG/G)	YearlyOutput	CO2 Saved
Toureg	19	15000	789.5	2644.7		42882		8.8	6947.4
Toureg Diesel	22	15000	681.8	2338.6	306.1	46199	10.8	10.1	6886.4	61.0
Jetta Sportwagen	27	15000	555.6	1727.8		21150		8.8	4888.9
Jetta Sportwagen TDI	33	15000	454.5	1559.1	168.7	25973	28.6	10.1	4590.9	298.0