Sweating the Small Stuff

As with many others, I’ve watch the value of my 401K account drop as markets tumble through greed, fraud and incompetent financial practices. I’m glad I’m eating my vegetables and taking my antioxidants and fish oil to give me a long working lifetime to rebuild my assets after the “meltdown” has subsided.

So the financial markets tank because the Masters of the Universe have been strip mining them, and Congress and the administration drop everything to wrestle with the resulting crisis (does anyone know if they’ve passed the 2009 federal budget yet?). The current financial upheaval is being used by climate-change-denier-fugitive-from-reality Rep. James Imhofe as an excuse to put global climate change mitigation on the blocks, an unbelievably stupid idea, since climate change mitigation represents the largest public works opportunity since the Bureau of Reclamation started building dams, potentially putting millions to work.

I’m sure that people across the country worrying about their retirement accounts aren’t interested in hearing about this, but in perspective, the financial crisis is the small stuff. The BBC has recently reported on a study recently published by the EU which estimates that the global economy is losing more money from the disappearance of forests than through the current banking crisis.

That study, titled The Cost of Policy Inaction: the case of not meeting the 2010 biodiversity target (COPI for short), part of the first phase of the EU’s The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) program, is well-written and densely informative. Sound bites do not jump out of it, so it completely unsuited for American short attention spans, and I wonder if anyone on this side of the pond is going to bother to read even the 16 page executive summary. The 2010 biodiversity target refers to the EU’s Potsdam Initiative proposed by the German government during a meeting in March 2007 of the environmental ministers of the G8 countries and five major newly industrializing countries. The Potsdam Initiative recognizes the economic importance of biodiversity and “ecosystem services”. Ecosystem services include water purification, sequestration of greenhouse gases, natural products (pharmaceuticals), fisheries, timber, erosion control and nutrient cycling. These are public goods with no markets and no prices, so unlike toxic mortgages, there are no economic warnings that go up when ecosystem services are imploded.

A taste of what the COPI report provides is with the trends in fisheries. The executive summary of the COPI report contains this cheery plot of the unsustainability of global marine fisheries, projecting that they are all fully exploited, over-exploited or have crashed. In terms of the societal consequences of collapsing fisheries, the report states:

It is estimated that 1 billion people worldwide are dependent on fish as their sole or main source of animal protein, while fish provided more than 2.6 billion people with at least 20 percent of their average per capita animal protein intake. The expected decline of ocean fisheries will therefore have severe social consequences.

And speaking of where my next bottle of fish oil will be coming from from, the report didn’t even get into the cognitive decline from inadequate consumption of omega-3-fatty acids, which are essential for brain development in children. So, we’re not only starving succeeding generations but leaving them less equipped to deal with global ecological crises.

Since a lot of people can’t come to grips with this issue in terms of starvation and human suffering, the COPI report thoughtfully breaks this down monetarily. The study concluded that the world is expected to have lost land-based ecosystems services (such as forests) worth around 1% of the world Gross Domestic Product in 2010 or 545 billion Euros (733 billion dollars), due to biodiversity losses between 2000 and 2010. This is acknowledged to be an underestimate, and one objective of the second phase of TEEB is to account for what’s missing (oceans, coral reefs, watersheds, ecotourism, pollination services, invasive species (biodiversity as pest control), biochemicals and pharmaceuticals. There are also cumulative impacts not accounted for; one example is that much of the land-based losses are in carbon storage, which increases climate change impacts, and there may be costs associated with adapting to impacts from climate change (think about the disaster response and recovery from Hurricane Katrina). And, according to a new report from the WWF (formerly the World Wildlife Federation), climate change is accelerating faster than predicted in the most recently published IPCC report.

So, we have to mount the most revolutionary economic and social transformation of the human species ever seen in recorded history to respond to the twin challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss, with the time available to intervene running short. And, based on all of the indicators, we can’t even get it started.

I’m full of good news today.

Setting the Bar Low on Houston Air Quality

The Pump Handle passes along a news report that Bill White, the mayor of Houston is crossing swords with Lyondell’s refinery over benzene emissions. He wants the refinery to achieve further emissions reductions, and wants the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to monitor more stringently emissions and fenceline concentrations in air. Benzene emissions from the refinery are below TCEQ permit limits, but the story in the Houston Chronicle says it’s not clear how those limits were developed.

I’m for reducing emissions to as low as reasonably achievable, because it’s a sign that you’re committed to the best industrial practices. However, there's another perspective here. When the Mayor's own task force on Houston air quality concluded:

Air pollution levels in the City of Houston are considered to be unacceptable by knowledgeable experts and the general public and are likely to cause air-pollution related health effects for Houston residents. Pollutant levels are driven by many sources including: tailpipe emissions from cars, trucks and buses; toxic pollutants emitted into the air by more than 400 chemical manufacturing facilities, including 2 of the 4 largest refineries in the U.S.; the petrochemical complex along the Houston Ship Channel and the Port of Houston; and many small operations spread geographically across Greater Houston, such as surface coating processes, dry cleaners, gas stations, printing processes, restaurants, charcoal barbecues, and gasoline-fueled lawn maintenance equipment,

what does he hope to accomplish by singling out Lyondell?

The leaders and citizens of Houston and the state of Texas made their choices long ago to become "business-friendly" which correspondingly meant a lack of commitment to environmental quality; they also chose to become highly reliant on motor vehicles (which by the way are probably the more widespread and significant sources of exposure to air toxics such as benzene). If Mr. White is really interested in improving air quality and public health in Houston, he really should be aiming his sights a little higher than one oil refinery. Lyondell could reduce its benzene emissions to zero and I would defy anyone to show any meaningful reduction in community exposure to benzene, without any action to control the mobile and area sources. I suppose focusing on Lyondell is a start, but at the same time, couldn’t he try to persuade Houstonians not to drive their cars so damn often?