Tag Archives: climate change

Climate Change and Global Child Health

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According to the American Academy of Pediatrics:

Climate change threatens to reverse the gains in global child health and the reductions in global child mortality made over the past 25 years. There is broad recognition that greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are causing climate change. The problem of climate change transcends geopolitical boundaries and will have extensive impacts on child health and security. With implications for all of humanity, climate change will disproportionately affect children and the poor, magnifying existing disparities in social determinates of health.

I don’t know if “reverse” means we stop making gains, or if child mortality rates actually revert to where they were 25 years ago. Either way, it kind of suggests the amazing progress of recent decades may have peaked, at least for the time being.

gaming the system in Arizona

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Arizona water managers are being accused of finding a way to gain the system as climate change takes hold and there may not be enough water to fill both Lake Powell and Lake Mead.

Under a formula set by the state and the U.S. Interior Department, Lake Powell will send 9 million acre-feet to Lake Mead this year to prevent shortage, rather than the 8.23 million acre-feet it would send under normal river conditions. Each acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons and is enough to serve about two households for a year.

Conserving enough to prevent a shortage but not so much as to slow the flow from Lake Powell represents a “sweet spot,” CAP argued, in language that has now alarmed upstream water officials…

CAP’s “manipulation of demands in order to take advantage of the supposed ‘sweet spot’ in Lake Powell water releases undermines (regional conservation), and is unacceptable,” Denver Water CEO James Lochhead wrote.

climate-friendly investing as a stag hunt

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No, the idea is not that killing and eating stags has a lower carbon footprint than beef (although it might, but if everyone did it would there be enough stags to go around?). The stag hunt is a game studied by game theorists similar to the prisoner’s dilemma. Players can maximize their outcome by cooperating, but there is a risk in assuming other players will also cooperate, and therefore an incentive to make choices that are low-risk for individuals but sub-optimal for everyone.

Green Investment and Coordination Failure: An Investors’ Perspective

To achieve the goal of keeping global warming well below 2 °C, private investors have to shift capital from brown to green infrastructures and technologies and provide additional green investment. In this paper, we present a game-theoretic perspective on the challenge of triggering such investments. The question of climate change mitigation is often related to the prisoner’s dilemma, a game with one Nash equilibrium. However, the authors perceive investment for mitigation and adaptation as a coordination problem of selecting among multiple equilibria. To illustrate this, we model a non-cooperative coordination game, related to the stag hunt, with a brown equilibrium with lower payoffs that can be achieved single-handedly and a green equilibrium with higher payoffs that requires coordination. As multiple experiments show, in such games actors often fail to coordinate on a payoff dominant equilibrium due to uncertainty. Thus, we discuss how uncertainty could be reduced along two options: one that concerns a change in the payoff structure of the game and another that concerns subjective probabilities.

Boulder vs. Exxon

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Boulder, Colorado is suing Exxon.

The politically liberal town known as the gateway to the Rocky Mountains and two counties in the same neck of the woods said Colorado’s economy depends on snow, water and cool weather when they accused Exxon Mobil Corp. and Suncor Energy Inc. of “causing and exacerbating climate change” in a state-court lawsuit filed Tuesday…

The Colorado communities said they’re facing expenses and costs related to earlier snow melt, which has increased the risk of forest fires, dried-out soil, beetle outbreaks and drought.

The lawsuit joins others against fossil fuel companies filed by California and New York communities, but this is the first brought by an interior state. “Colorado is one of the fastest-warming states in the nation,” Elise Jones, Boulder County Commissioner said in a statement. “Climate change is not just about sea level rise. It affects all of us in the middle of the country as well.”

big banks divesting from dirtiest fossil fuels

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A number of banks have stopped funding new coal and tar sand projects due to climate risk, including HSBC.

Europe’s largest bank HSBC said on Friday it would mostly stop funding new coal power plants, oil sands and arctic drilling, becoming the latest in a long line of investors to shun the fossil fuels.

Other large banks such as ING and BNP Paribas have made similar pledges in recent months as investors have mounted pressure to make sure bank’s actions align with the Paris Agreement, a global pact to limit greenhouse gas emissions and curb rising temperatures.

I might like to believe that the finance industry has become socially responsible, but I don’t. It is completely amoral. Still, that means that when it thinks there is a significant risk to investment returns and takes action as a result, we can assume the risk is real.

 

value of learning curves in climate change planning

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This article gives an example of how to put an economic value on climate change adaptation incorporated in a larger planning framework.

The Economic Value of Climate Information in Adaptation Decisions: Learning in the Sea-level Rise and Coastal Infrastructure Context

Traditional methods of investment appraisal have been criticized in the context of climate change adaptation. Economic assessment of adaptation options needs to explicitly incorporate the uncertainty of future climate conditions and should recognise that uncertainties may diminish over time as a result of improved understanding and learning. Real options analysis (ROA) is an appraisal tool developed to incorporate concepts of flexibility and learning that relies on probabilistic data to characterise uncertainties. It is also a relatively resource-intensive decision support tool. We test whether, and to what extent, learning can result from the use of successive generations of real life climate scenarios, and how non-probabilistic uncertainties can be handled through adapting the principles of ROA in coastal economic adaptation decisions. Using a relatively simple form of ROA on a vulnerable piece of coastal rail infrastructure in the United Kingdom, and two successive UK climate assessments, we estimate the values associated with utilising up-dated information on sea-level rise. The value of learning can be compared to the capital cost of adaptation investment, and may be used to illustrate the potential scale of the value of learning in coastal protection, and other adaptation contexts.

“coal plant chicken”

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No, coal plant chicken is not grilling chicken using waste heat from a coal plant, although that is not a terrible idea. It’s the idea that coal-fired utilities are competing for slices of a shrinking pie, and they are going to blink out of existence one by one.

Zindler, BNEF’s head of Americas, said about half of all U.S. coal plants lose money on any given day as cheap gas, along with wind and solar farms, push electricity prices lower. Meanwhile, demand for power is flat. The result, Zindler said, is coal plants wrestle to outlast one another, fighting for a bigger piece of the pie. “Every day across multiple regional transmission operating systems, we see power plants staring across at each other and saying ‘Who is going to go first?’ ” Zindler said. “It’s only a matter of time as these plants try to outlast each other.”

Elsewhere in the same article, coal-fired utility executives say this is not true because coal and nuclear are currently the only two cost-effective ways to generate a constant base load. I don’t have the expertise to agree or disagree, but I know that nuclear technology is advancing, and battery technology which can be used to smooth out intermittent loads is also advancing.

X-Prize for turning carbon emissions into useful products

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There are a number of ideas for turning carbon dioxide into concrete, carbon nanotubes, or other useful products:

Four teams are working on ways to use carbon dioxide in concrete: CarbonCure Technologies Inc. of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia; Carbon Upcycling UCLA, which is affiliated with the University of California, Los Angeles; Montreal-based Carbicrete; and Carbon Capture Machine Ltd. of Aberdeen, Scotland…

Another four teams are making fuel, plastics or chemical feedstocks: India-based Breathe; C4X of Suzhou, China; CERT, from the University of Toronto; and Huntington Beach, California-based Newlight Technologies.

Two teams are making carbon nanotubes and nanoparticles, which are used in a broad range of products: C2CNT of Ashburn, Virginia, and Carbon Upcycling Technologies of Calgary.

Exxon vs. climate

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Exxon is getting in trouble in Massachusetts:

Exxon Mobil Corp. suffered another legal defeat in its attempt to dodge state investigations into whether the company’s public comments about climate change misled investors for years.

Massachusetts’ top court on Friday affirmed a judge’s decision that Exxon must hand over documents dating back to 1976 to Attorney General Maura Healey. The court also agreed that Exxon’s 300 Mobil-branded franchise service stations in the state give Healey jurisdiction over the Texas-based company.

Weighing in on the overall environmental threat at the heart of the dispute, the court wrote that Healey’s investigation concerns climate change “caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions — a distinctly modern threat that grows more serious with time, and the effects of which are already being felt in Massachusetts.”

more on Richard Muller

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BREAKING NEWS: According to Richard Muller from UC Berkeley, global warming is caused by the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Not changes in the Earth’s orbit, not changes in volcanic activity. Either changes in carbon dioxide or something else that happens to exactly match changes in carbon dioxide. But in all seriousness, this guy is a serious physicist who set out to challenge the findings of the IPCC using hard data, and says he ended up confirming them beyond a shadow of a doubt.