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."

Via Worldchanging, here is some really interesting data compiled by the Dept. of Energy on gasoline use per capita on a state-by-state basis. Trust me, the numbers are not what you’d expect. Jamais issues a call for additional analysis, which I think would be very interesting.

The state-by-state listing just begs for further analysis: the corresponding per capita rates of hybrid ownership and light truck/SUV ownership; average population density; portion of the populace living in "high density" environments; gasoline prices; telecommuting rates; availability of public transit; even "red" vs. "blue." Anyone up for a bit of number crunching?

I would totally take him up on this if I had time in my life right now to look up some of these numbers. Perhaps late next week, if someone hasn’t taken the initiative already.

I’ve mentioned this nifty carbon mitigation tool called the Terrapass before, but I only recently did these similar/supplementary products come to my attention:

Certified Clean Car is a program pretty similar to the Terrapass program, with the added benefit that a graduate from my academic program works there.

PV USA Solar allows you to calculate the amount of CO₂ produced by your home, your business, your commute, or your travel, and then purchase renewable energy certificates to offset those emissions. PV USA Solar is run by Renewable Ventures LLC, the same folks that are in charge of Certified Clean Car, listed above.

Green-e certifies energy-related products across America, and provides information on local sources of electricity from renewable sources, as well as providers of the renewable energy certificates mentioned above.

There’s a fun set of posts up at the Environmental Economics blog that I highly recommend checking out. In the first post John Whitehead constructs a fantastic little model for relating trigger price (the price of oil at which it becomes economically viable to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) to household willingness to pay (or existence value) for lost profits due to environmental concerns. In the second post he builds in a ten year gap between the decision to drill and the commencement of drilling and explores the effect of different discount rates. At the very end John also offers a link to the spreadsheet that he used to make his calculations, so if you’re inclined to tinker, you can play with the model yourself.

Happy drilling!

...or at least some links to info about them...

I’ve really let things go lately; sorry about that. The big news has obviously been legislation being pushed through Congress, namely the energy bill and the Asia-Pacific Partnership for Clean Development, an “alternative” to the Kyoto Protocol. Both of these bills have been covered to death by more thoughtful authors than myself, so rather than weighing in on them with pounds measured in redundancy, I’ll simply offer links (below the fold) to the one or two readers out there who haven’t already read up.

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.

There are some excellent predictions in the Onion’s recent issue circa 2056. The first of two environmentally-relevant future-article deals with overcrowding at Yellowstone National Parking Lot, and as for the second, well, you’ve already heard about peak oil, but have you wondered about the possibility of peak solar?

Last (but certainly not least) a piece that a friend stumbled across while doing some Internet research on threatened beach birds: F*** Snowy Plovers and Their Hippie Protectors.

I promise to go back to real science blogging soon.

As I’ve said before, I’m something of a fence-sitter with respect to replacing carbon-emitting sources of power with nuclear power. As a disclaimer to those who would decry my willingness to consider this purportedly evil technology, I’m becoming more and more skeptical that it’s really a good idea, which is why this morning’s Times article makes me nervous:

Federal officials say the program would produce a total of 330 pounds [of plutonium 238] over 30 years at the Idaho National Laboratory, a sprawling site outside Idaho Falls some 100 miles to the west and upwind of Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. Officials say the program could cost $1.5 billion and generate more than 50,000 drums of hazardous and radioactive waste.

Project managers say that most if not all of the new plutonium is intended for secret missions and they declined to divulge any details. But in the past, it has powered espionage devices.

"The real reason we're starting production is for national security," Timothy A. Frazier, head of radioisotope power systems at the Energy Department, said in a recent interview.

You’ll note that the article doesn’t say a word about using plutonium 238 as a source of power for more “menial” tasks, such as putting electricity into people’s homes, and indeed I don’t know if it’s even practical for such a task. But I also think that public reaction to a case like this will be indicative of people’s willingness to accept nuclear solutions to energy problems in general versus searching for safer, more economically viable sources of power.

From the “more complicated than you probably thought” file, I found this gem of an article about how marine ecosystems develop around artificial structures, such as oil rigs. When these rigs become obsolete, the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act requires their removal within one year, yet almost everyone seems to agree that leaving them is in beneficial as well as more cost-effective. What people disagree on is exactly what to do with them:

Under the Rigs to Reefs program, the platforms are either towed elsewhere and sunk, tipped on their sides or cut down well below the water's surface so they would no longer be hazards to navigation.

[...]

In the previous Congress, then-Rep. David Vitter (R-La.), now a senator, introduced a bill to authorize the use of obsolete oil platforms for culturing marine species, scientific research and as artificial reefs.

[...]

The fate of the oil rigs has also attracted the attention of fishermen such as Dan Leonard, who raises clams at his Bull Bay Clam Farm, near here. He thinks the platforms could be the foundation for an offshore ocean farming business.

[...]

For differing reasons, aquaculture farmers, biotechnology companies, fishermen, scientists and oil executives agree that a new life could await the rigs once they are no longer needed for drilling.

This particular article is about oil rigs off the Gulf Coast, but we’re facing the same issues in Southern California as well. I didn’t run across any timely local articles, but I did find something far more interesting – underwater photos from local rigs. I would love to have used one of these photos in this post, but the photographer seems to prefer that interested parties view the pictures on her site, so I encourage you to check 'em out.

I suppose I’m not helping my karma situation by referring people to an article that the author claims could cost him his job (in the title even!), but I’m gonna do it anyway. Devilstower, a lifelong employee of the coal industry, has posted a magnificent assessment of the evolution of the modern coal industry at DailyKos.

For practically every minute of my life, I've been involved in coal. I grew up in a part of Western Kentucky that was then the biggest coal producing area in the country. When I was small, my home town held a "Strawberry Festival," because the country produced a good part of the nation's strawberries. By the time I was a teenager, the festival was renamed as the "Coal Festival." Those strawberry fields were long gone.