I’ve been attending the US-Ocean Carbon and Biology Workshop in Woods Hole this week (see webcast during day). Here’s some highlights and thoughts that are of general interest.

There was a report about how the rate of CO2 emissions was increasing about 4% per year from 1960-1979, decreased to 1.5% per year from the 1980’s to 1999, and in this decade (since 2000) has increased again to 4% per year. This is obviously alarming because it shows that we are not any making progress at all in reducing CO2 emissions: things are getting worse not better. Also, last year was the first year that China has equaled or replaced the US as the nation with the highest CO2 emissions (it’s close enough to be difficult to tell if it is equal to or greater than). Don’t fret though, on a per capita basis, we’re still winning the CO2 emission game by a long shot because we have a third as many people as China.

I thought it was also interesting that today in the NYT there’s also a Freakonomics blog post about “Financial literacy” where you can take a brief quiz and it talks about how a scary number of Americans get many of these questions wrong. For example Question #1 is:

1. Suppose you had $100 in a savings account and the interest rate was 2 percent per year. After 5 years, how much do you think you would have in the account if you left the money to grow?
a. More than $102
b. Exactly $102
c. Less than $102
d. Do not know

I think these two pieces of information make an interesting juxtaposition. Maybe the CO2 rising doesn’t seem as alarming as it should because everything else in our lives is increasing. Population, the economy, traffic, computer speed… We’re used to things increasing. And this kind of acceleration is usually considered a good thing. There's even an urban myth that compounding interest was hailed by Einstein as humanity’s greatest invention (this appear to be a made up quote). With this perspective, maybe its not so bad that CO2 goes up 4% a year, basically increasing with compounding interest like a savings account?

Yikes is all I can say. And I can’t say it sincerely enough, I think I’d have to scream it to feel like I’m doing justice to the sentiment. Elemental cycles are not mutual funds. We started at 280 ppm in the 1800's (ppm=parts per million) and we’re up to 382 this year. Most think there’s no way we can get our emissions under control before we hit 500, and we’re beating the worse case scenarios already to surpass that (see above). We’re talking about more than doubling the CO2 in the atmosphere. Elements aren’t money. They have mass, I hate to say it, but they’re real. Money used to be backed by a real gold standard, but that was done away with - there isn’t enough gold out there anymore. The giant pool of money is (usually) increasing. That’s easy, its just digits on a bunch of hard drives somewhere. Money doesn’t follow conservation of mass (which is a discussion point in and of itself). The greenhouse gas and climate change problem is almost entirely caused by taking oil or coal buried deep in the ground and burning it and putting that carbon in the air. Not only do we have to stop putting the carbon it up there, we will likely have to figure out ways to pull some out of the atmosphere as well, “sequestering it” as it is known.

Last week Al Gore laid out an ambitious plan to stop become independent of fossil fuels by 2018. It’s very ambitious considering how broad the changes will have to be throughout our society. But, it is humbling to realize the kind of action that we need to actually solve the climate change problem. Our society has a choice: Do we decide it's too hard and pick a lesser path, or do we say that’s what we have to do and figure out how to get it done.

I particularly like that Gore is trumpeting this policy approach that we've talked about [before: http://www.bluemassgroup.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=11381]

[Gore] said the single most important policy change would be placing a carbon tax on burning oil and coal, with an accompanying reduction in payroll taxes.

cross post: bluemassgroup

Gas-Tax Holiday Roundly Rejected: "The dumbest thing I've heard in a long time".

A week ago on BMG we had a lively discussion about what is now referred to as the McCain-Clinton "Gas Tax Holiday". We preceded the pundits by a few days, as this became a major story this week. This idea was pretty much universally rejected by Economists, Democrats, and Republicans this week. The criticisms come from all angles: Environmentally this hurts our fledgling efforts at reducing fossil fuel emissions when we are already exceeding worse case scenarios for emissions; Economically the savings, an estimated $28 per family, would like not even reach consumers because prices would stay high due to demand and the oil companies would actually get those funds as a result; Politically, this is pure pandering to the voter since no one thinks the policy is a good one, nor is Congress considering or willing to consider this "Gas Tax Holiday". I list a number of links here from pundits describing this:

Mayor Bloomberg:

"It's about the dumbest thing I've heard in an awful long time, from an economic point of view," Bloomberg told reporters at City Hall. "We're trying to discourage people from driving and we're trying to end our energy dependence ... and we're trying to have more money to build infrastructure."

Gail Collins: A funny and sarcastic angle on this:

All this actually tells us something about the Democratic candidates, which has nothing to do with fuel prices. Obama believes voters want a sensible, less-divisive political dialogue, that the whole process can become more honorable if the right candidate leads the way. Hillary really doesn’t buy that. She has principles, but she doesn’t believe in principled stands. She thinks that if she can get elected, she can do great things. And to get there, she’s prepared to do whatever. That certainly includes endorsing any number of meaningless-to-ridiculous ideas. (See: her bill to make it illegal to desecrate an American flag.)

Paul Krugman: A Princeton Economist and rabid Clinton supporter (one of my favorite columnists for his Iraq war stance, but now I find him rather incoherent lately) who includes the sentence that the Gas Tax Holiday is a bad idea, and has also said so on his blog. I wonder if he's hoping for a Clinton administration cabinet position. He says:

"To be clear, both Democratic candidates have been saying things they shouldn’t; Hillary Clinton shouldn’t have endorsed the bad idea of a gas tax holiday."

Thomas Friedman:

The McCain-Clinton gas holiday proposal is a perfect example of what energy expert Peter Schwartz of Global Business Network describes as the true American energy policy today: “Maximize demand, minimize supply and buy the rest from the people who hate us the most.” Good for Barack Obama for resisting this shameful pandering.

NYT editorial "The Gas-Guzzler Gambit" on May 1st:

Neither Mrs. Clinton nor Mr. McCain have explained the inconsistency in their positions. We know pandering when we see it. We also know that suspending the gas tax for the summer won’t solve this country’s energy problems or even reduce the price of gas.

Salon's Alex Koppelman:

As I've said before, Clinton deserves the hits she's taking on this issue -- I've yet to see a single expert who thinks her proposal would do Americans any good... One of the principal objections to the holiday proposal has been that because the tax is not actually collected at the pump, there's no reason to believe that the oil companies will actually pass on to consumers the full savings from the suspension of the tax.

And the NYT had an article this week about how the high gas prices are creating significantly more demand for smaller fuel efficient vehicles. In other words, the high prices are working - we're starting to get more efficient (there's a long way to go though).

Finally we have a real policy issue difference between the candidates, and one that touches on the critical problems energy policy, national security and climate change. I think the Obama campaign should be more pointed in their response to the McCain-Clinton Gas Tax Holiday. After all if there's consensus that this is a useless policy, what does it mean that McCain and Clinton are basically trying to buy voters' support for a $28 that they will most likely not even get? Isn't that more than a little bit condescending to the voters? I've lived in the Midwest, people there are not dumb, but they may feel alienated from the East and West coast (rightly so oftentimes). As the pundits have pointed out: this just a case of Washington politics trying to pander to those midwest voters, not provide meaningful policies and vision.

Pundits: It's time to step up to the plate. Ask Clinton and McCain why they are calling for a gas-tax holiday that the experts roundly criticize as a bad idea. Ask Clinton and McCain if they really think they can trick voters with this bad policy, and does that mean they are condescending to the voters by not offering real solutions to our energy and environmental problems.

willis music video

I've always joked that music inspires my science. Well I've written two blogs while waiting for this music video to be processed in various ways tonight. Here it is: Penguin Fight Song



willis is our rock band. Apparently, we write deep songs about penguins. Bono eat your heart out.

Open Access in Environmental and Earth Sciences

A simple question: If you wanted to see the scientific papers on the state of Global Warming, or the cutting-edge papers directly addressing how society should respond (note: I can't believe this paper isn't open access, try it, follow the link), couldn't you just google scholar them and read them? Without a University or individual subscription, the answer is shockingly: no.

There is a movement afoot called the "Open Access" movement to allow the scientific literature to be accessible to anyone without subscription fees. The notion is simple: research is most often typically paid for by the tax dollars of nations of the world. That research should be freely available to the citizens who paid for it. Instead, much of that research is written in scholarly manuscripts published by private publishers who own the copyright (Note: the publishers own the copyright, not the authors) and is sold on a subscription basis to scientific libraries and interested individuals.

All that seems fine at first glance, and has largely been the business model for many decades. However, what about the parents of a sick child who want to examine the research papers themselves? Should they have to pay $30 for every article to a private (for profit) publisher? You can see the problem. This has been exacerbated by the increasing availability of the internet: many journals are becoming electronic only, or combination electronic/paper delivery. The electronic component is leased annually as long as subscription dues are paid. Unsubscribe, and the library typically loses electronic access to all the years it was a subscriber.

There's been a real tussle over this, and the Open Access movement has risen similar to the open source movement in computing (e.g. Linux), but with differences too, in particular, real editorial costs associated with publishing a scientific journal that make up the fixed costs that need to be considered. Public Library of Science (PLOS.org) is the flagship of this movement.

Earth sciences has lagged behind considerably. Our most exciting papers most often come out in Nature or Science (both are not open access, the former is For-Profit), and most of our smaller specialized journals are either Elsevier (for profit company that owns much of the scientific literature), or by the American Geophysical Union that has not adopted open access. There is Biogeosciences that has real open access, and Limnology and Oceanography, my favorite journal by far, that has pay-extra open access as an option.

The debate is starting to come to Earth and Ocean sciences. Pete Jumars, former editor of Limnology and Oceanography, wrote a truly excellent Limnology and Oceanography Bulletin piece about this recently. And interestingly, he seemed to be interacting with bloggers about it in the years before likely while formulating ideas. He seems to have come around in the intervening years between writing bloggers and writing his article. But many of my colleagues express reservations about open access, arguing that if the costs are moved to the author (e.g. $2500 author charges to publish in PLOS) then only researchers at major Universities with research grants will be able to publish (and similarly creating a problem for colleagues in third world nations). It is true the economics of open access are fundamentally different and challenging.

Yet, no matter how you view it public access to tax-dollar funded scientific research is clearly the right thing to do. Do we avoid doing something that is right because it is different and challenging? No. It will be interesting to see how this evolves in the coming years.

"Gas Tax Holiday": Clinton is going backwards on Climate Change Policy

Note: this was cross posted at Bluemassgroup and had a lively discussion (60+ comments). Also various news stories and editorials came out in the following days agreeing that the Gas Tax Holiday is a bad idea. Friedman's is great.

Original Post:
Hillary Clinton recently argued for the suspension of the federal gasoline tax. A Clinton ad airing in Indiana says the following:

Hillary Clinton knows it's time to act, take some of the windfall profits of big oil to pay to suspend the gas tax this summer, investigate the oil giants for price gouging and collusion

This is basically agreeing with McCain's similar plan just a few weeks ago, calling for a gas tax holiday from Memorial Day to Labor Day.

Putting aside any kneejerk response to parroting the McCain campaign, this is bad climate change policy to the core. It is true gasoline costs are rising due to a variety of reasons including (continuing) Middle East regional instability, increased demand from China and India, and of course pathetic US efforts to conserve gasoline usage. Yet no candidate who wants to honestly claim to be a future leader in turning back the tides of climate change could offer a "Gas Tax Holiday".

Regardless of which candidate one supports, if we earnestly want to stave off climate change, then Clinton needs to be called out on being on the wrong side of this issue. In contrast, Obama has come out against the "Gas Tax Holiday", and stated:

The only way we're going to lower gas prices over the long term is if we start using less oil.

What is going on? It feels like Clinton is giving in to the notion that in order to win the midwest we have to ease their pocketbooks. That's a perfectly respectable goal. But in economics you want to tax things that you want to discourage. We desperately need to discourage fossil fuel consumption.

A much more effective way to accomplish both goals (easing pocketbooks and reducing carbon emissions) is to decrease federal income taxes by what the average household pays in gasoline taxes: basically redistribute the revenue from gasoline taxes back to the taxpayers as income tax decreases (or rebates, after all they are in vogue these days: call it the Thoreau Rebate or something catchy). And then let the people know: if you drive less than the average person, you'll get more money back. If you want to drive a Hummer, that's fine, you'll just pay more for your gas. Don't own a car? You'd make out quite well. And then this could lead to a five year program of gradual gasoline tax increases (with matching income tax rebates). If people knew gas taxes were going to steadily rise for five years, people would have a significant long-term incentive to choose more efficient vehicles whenever the need for purchasing a car came up. An issue is that current gas tax revenues are often assigned to road improvements etc. Of course the "Gas Tax Holiday" has the exact same problem.

Back to the kneejerk reaction of Clinton parroting McCain: Clinton is giving into the notion that to win as a Democrat, one needs to be more Republican-like. Didn't the Globe run a front page story today about how Republicans in Indiana are defecting from the Republican party?

Actually making a dent in climate change is going to take vision and leadership on a truly unprecedented scale. I've written previously here and here how Gore understands the magnitude of this issue and how the issue transcends politics. Obama recently confirmed that Gore would be part of his administration. To my great sadness, this primary campaign season has successfully vilified "hope". Yet, considering that we are already doing worse than the worst-case scenarios of just a few years ago for carbon dioxide emissions, I am cynical enough to wonder: are Obama and Gore our only hope?

Climate change: Massachusetts sues EPA (again)

Massachusetts lead a group of 18 states in an "unusual legal petition" against the EPA on the one year anniversary of last year's Mass vs EPA Supreme Court hearing.

"Once again the EPA has forced our hand, which has resulted in our taking this extraordinary measure to fight the dangers of climate change," Attorney General Martha Coakley of Massachusetts, which is leading the petition, said in a statement. "The EPA's failure to act in the face of these incontestable dangers is a shameful dereliction of duty."

I'm proud to live in a state where we're fighting the good fight. But, while this is so important, we just haven't begun to turn the tide on climate change. I heard a colleague speak this week and learned that humans are currently exceeding predicted worse case scenarios for carbon emissions from just a few years ago. This is with the Kyoto protocol in effect. That is certainly not progress.

There's also "the other CO2 problem" that scientists are just starting to realize the importance of: Ocean acidification (More here.) Carbon dioxide is acidic, and humans have put so much up in the atmosphere that the surface oceans are becoming more acidic. Scientists beginning to learn are learning that that has profound implications for marine life and fisheries.

Thank you Massachusetts for leading the way. It's only the beginning of a long series of significant and urgent changes though. Is there a plan for how (Massachusetts) will transition its climate change policy in the soon arriving post-Bush era?

cross-post: bluemassgroup

The mainstreaming of mixed race - and parallels to interdisciplinary science

The New York Times has an article on individuals of mixed race heritage in the US. The video is particularly fun to watch, seeing how these Rutgers students identified themselves. I had a real flashback to a similar group I participated in one meeting in college about mixed race. Notably, census data from 2000 showed 6% of married couples are interracial, and 3% of Americans are mixed race. And it is disproportionately higher among younger people (under 40). Obama is making mixed race mainstream (along with Tiger Woods, J-Lo, Karen-O etc...).

Being Japanese-Scottish, this has always been an issue for me, even when I didn't know it was (the Japanese family picnics, where I really didn't fit in...). But like many in the article, I find being mixed race much more of a strength than a weakness. I actually think it also really lends itself to interdisciplinary science, having a firm (racial) identity was just never an option. Having a flexible identity becomes the norm. Choosing what parts of different things you want to be your identity becomes subconscious. And, probably most importantly you get used to being uncomfortable, being in the spaces in between, and that's when you learn the most.

I wrote a lot more about this theme, early on in Obama's presidential campaign, at Bluemass group (link here). I got some really nice feedback for writing that (more articulate and passionate) essay.