Since I started blogging again, I've tried to revive Organic Matter without the wonkiness that used to characterize the site. So far, if success were salsa, mine would best be described as 'mild.' I even forgot to include a photo in my last post, not that I have one to illustrate any of the ideas I was writing about. If YouTube, philosophy, and climate change have one thing in common, it's that they aren't very photogenic. Anyway, I've created a whole new category to describe the deepest fathoms of my failure. And I intend to plumb these depths with fervor.

This all happened because of a letter which I was compelled to write in response to an op-ed in my parents' hometown newspaper, the Redding Record Searchlight. In his piece, Keith Ritter cites Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger's new book, Breakthrough, to restate and reargue the tired canard that "technology will save us." His argument could very well be a corruption of Nordhaus and Shellenberger's these - I haven't read the book myself, and I'm hesitant to let Ritter put words in their mouths. Like most of his ilk, he ignores economic realities, including entrenched subsidies for carbon-based fuels, and an utter lack of public funding for renewable energy development. The point is, his piece so infuriated me that I couldn't keep myself from writing to the paper. And having been published, I likewise cannot keep myself from tooting my own horn on the Internet. The text of my letter is after the fold, which is after a completely unrelated photograph.

How do you not click on this headline?

WANT TO GO GREEN? STAY MARRIED
Divorced Households Have Negative Impact on Environment, Study Finds

[…]

The reason is simple — it's all about efficiency, says Jianguo Liu, lead author of the study who has the Rachel Carson chair in ecological sustainability at the university's department of fisheries and wildlife.

"In the divorced households, the number of people is smaller than in married households," Liu told ABCNEWS.com. "The resource efficiency used per person is much lower than in married households."

This article by Bill Gates was published over a month ago, which might make me seem lazy, but I prefer to think of it as a testimonial to my commitment to filing away any little bit of information that might make an interesting post. Even if it takes me a month to actually bring these ideas to fruition. On to the article:

This week in Seattle, an extraordinary group of people -- scientists, policymakers, and advocates - came together for three days to discuss what can be done to stop malaria. Melinda and I issued a challenge to those attending the meeting. We asked them to begin charting a course to eradicate malaria - not just to control or reduce it, but to work toward a time when no one on earth is infected with malaria, and no mosquitoes carry the disease.

It’s interesting to see Bill Gates so involved with a philanthropic effort. I’m not saying that it hasn’t happened before, just that I’ve never heard about him doing anything similar to this. I’m sure that there’s a great deal to be said about dealing with malaria, but what really caught my attention was this comment, buried about halfway down the thread:

Erdicate [sic] Malaria? What about bio-diversity? Let's hope that if a new virus comes from outer space, our only hope for a cure does not reside in Malaria...

Months ago I begged readers to track down or write and publish a clear, concise, cradle-to-grave overview of nuclear power, an issue that is incredibly important right now, and yet one that I must admit I find terrifically boring and thus difficult to research. Basically I was looking for a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis to determine whether nuclear ought to be a major part of the toolbox for reducing carbon emissions.

No one took the bait back then, but finally the Economist has come to the rescue:

...most studies reckon that even a moderate carbon tax would not make nuclear power generation competitive in a free energy market. Europe's emissions-trading system (ETS) is, in effect, that sort of a tax. And according to Oxera, a British consultancy, even with that implicit tax on carbon-based power generation, new nuclear plants would not be economic without government help.

But if the implicit tax rose, that might change. The point of a carbon tax is to reflect the cost to society of damage that using carbon does. Setting a price on those social costs is difficult. Europe's ETS implies that the social costs of carbon dioxide are €20 per tonne; but a British government study in 2002 estimated them at £70 (€112). Such estimates are necessarily vague; but if that higher figure is fed into Oxera's model, new nuclear plants begin to look economically viable.

We’re not given any sweeping conclusions about whether or not going nuclear is the right thing to do, but the article does close with the clear sentiment that, in America at least, nuclear expansion will occur.

This conclusion, however, seems to be largely based on the premise that the nuclear option is one that is supported by environmental interests, which I’m not sure is true. Certainly, most of the invested and educated environmentalists I know (by way mostly of the environmental blogosphere) seem to feel that the risks strongly outweigh the benefits. I wonder whether their views are shared by the greater environmental voting bloc, or whether most self-proclaimed environmentalists feel that the need for action on climate change exceeds any concerns over a return to nuclear power.

Apropos to the final link in my post earlier today (technically yesterday, but who’s counting?), there is a wonderful article in this morning’s New York Times that demonstrates precisely the problem with managing fisheries in a sustainable manner:

In just the last 35 years, exploding markets for sushi-grade tuna, combined with intensifying industrial-scale hunts aided by satellites and spotters in airplanes, have devastated not only the fish but also many fisheries. [...]

The threat to the bluefin was underscored last week by researchers who have tracked hundreds of the fish on their ocean-spanning journeys using electronic tags. They found that the tuna that spawn in the west, which are most severely depleted, are further threatened by an ever-broadening gantlet of hooks, seines, harpoons, traps and now farm-style pens, in which netted fish are raised and fattened - all to supply the Japanese sushi trade. [...]

In all, 330 tags provided unparalleled records of fish as they repeatedly dove thousands of feet, traversed the ocean in a few weeks, and routinely crossed imaginary lines drawn nearly 25 years ago by tuna-fishing nations to divvy up what were thought to be separate eastern and western populations.

I wanted to take a quick opportunity to draw attention to links from a couple of comments. First up is Carl Zimmer’s follow-up to my post about the ivory-billed woodpecker. In his original post at The Loom, Zimmer predicted that pretend-scientists would try to turn the rediscovery of the once-“extinct” woodpecker into an argument against the accepted ecological principle that habitat fragmentation is a threat to biodiversity. He promised to post any such antics, and has followed through .

In a comment on a more recent post by new user Japhet, I linked to an article from the Economist that got a lot of press on other ecoblogs, but which I didn’t have time to address. Hungry Hyaena commented on the article, and so I thought I’d add links to a couple other pieces that made it into the Economist. The first is from the same issue (April 21^st), and discusses the potential for reforesting the watershed above the Panama Canal in order to help sustain the water supply that keeps the canal open. The second article, from yesterday’s issue, is about dwindling fish stocks, regulation schemes, and the potential of aquaculture. Please discuss.

This isn’t a recent article by blog standards, but I’ve been meaning to write something about it, and I haven’t seen it posted anywhere else (which doesn’t mean it’s not, just that I haven’t seen it). Anyway, the article in question is about a report by the Energy Information Administration (EIA) which suggests that a national cap and trade system for carbon would not cause significant economic losses to the United States.

EIA estimated carrying out the [National Commission on Energy Policy’s] plan would cost each U.S. household $78 per year, reducing the gross domestic product in 2025 by about one-tenth of 1 percent.

The commission also recommended a 36 percent increase in the average fuel economy for cars and light-duty trucks between 2010 and 2015, and doubling to $3 billion a year the budget for federal energy research and development. In addition, it called for new tax incentives for gasifying coal and building nuclear plants.

The BBC (along with every other major news source in the known universe) wrote yesterday about the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment. The assessment was put together by over 1,000 scientists, and addresses every environmental topic you can imagine, from resource use and climate change to overpopulation and famine.

I’m glad that I ended up reading the BBC article, because the Associated Press would never print a quote like this:

"There will undoubtedly be gainsayers, as there are with the IPCC; but I put them in the same box as the flat-Earthers and the people who believe smoking doesn't cause cancer," said Professor Sir John Lawton, former chief executive of the UK's Natural Environment Research Council.

Snark aside, the prognosis is not good, but neither is it devoid of potential solutions.

I ran into a post on DailyKos by Senator Barbara Boxer, D-Ca (yeah, Kos is so hip now that congresspeople post diaries - some would argue that this is not a good thing), who calls on citizens to contact the CEOs of ChevronTexaco, Royal Dutch/Shell, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and BP, and pledge to boycott them if they opt to drill in the Arctic Refuge.

I've never had a lot of faith in boycotts to impact policy - at least not without a level of widespread participation that is rarely attainable - but neither would I discourage anyone from participating in this campaign. Besides, since someone found Organic Matter by searching for 'ANWR Boycotts' (it brought them here), I thought it would be helpful to at least provide the resource for those in search of it.