I promised you some interesting new material on economics, and here’s a new blog post at the Sun-Sentinel to that effect. I’ll explain more about the difference between risk and uncertainty in the coming weeks and months. Meanwhile, you can find more prescient papers by Pavlov and Wachter here, here, and here, and you can find the Princeton paper here.

The commenter “Max-42″ counters that El Niño is responsible for the record-breaking ocean temperatures, and he’s partly right. El Niño is playing an important role, but so is climate change. Joseph Romm has an excellent post explaining how the two have worked in tandem. I encourage you to check it out.

And, as always, read the original post.

Though I can’t say I’m a huge fan of George W. Bush, I have to admit that one of his infamous coined words seems to be appropriate for my topic for today: misunderestimate.

One trend that seems to be applied to more and more problems today is underestimation. We as Americans seem to want to deny most of our large issues. Climate change, oil spills, deforestation of rain forests, many environmental conflicts and issues fall into this category, along with the most recent British Petroleum oil leak in the Gulf.   Read more…

When humans started creating what we call “architecture”—standing buildings made for a purpose—their motivation was simple. They were not stuck with problems of aesthetics or design. They created structures for their own protection from the elements.

Over time, these spaces came to hold meaning for us, and we desired to make them more permanent. As we began to form societies and changed from nomadic hunter-gatherers to farmers and eventually expanded to citizens of cities, our architecture became more constructed, invasive. Architecture began to allow mortals to leave an indelible mark upon the earth: the Egyptians and their pyramids, the Greeks and their temples, and the Gothic artists and their cathedrals. There are structures that have lasted thousands of years—and will stand for thousands more.

I don’t want this post to simply be a history lesson. But to understand where architecture is going and what it needs to do, we have to see what it has done.   Read more…

In the past, I’ve talked about green trends in architecture and design. I’m usually very cautious about new hip and popular “green” programs or products. There are flaws in a number of programs and materials out there, who are simply riding the “green wave” to more profits while not necessarily upping the ante when it comes to lessening our carbon footprint.

A new program called Earth Aid, however, seems to be a well-planned, well-designed, and well-thought-out program that is simple and easy-to-use, and encourages people to make an impact.   Read more…

Yesterday, we celebrated health care reform, and we talked about the bigger picture, in which I said we must take up the next challenge.

Today, you can check out my column explaining what that next challenge should be. (Yes, I’m back at the Hazleton Standard-Speaker, but only once a month.)

The challenge is energy reform. We need to be clearer about the words we use for this debate. When we talk about cap-and-trade or climate change, it tends to scare people away. It sounds big and complicated, and it gives the false impression that global warming is the only motivation for such legislation. But as my column explains, climate change is only half the problem. We also need to raise the price of carbon because of the economic and national security drawbacks of our dependence on foreign oil. And just like health care, the energy market has negative externalities that the government can reduce. Hence, energy reform.

If you follow the links in our “What to Read” series, none of the column should surprise you. If, on the other hand, you get most of your news from the mainstream media, it probably comes as a bit of cognitive dissonance. (That’s what I aim for. If I didn’t teach you something new, there wouldn’t be much point to writing my op-ed, would there?)   Read more…

Ecotect Example Output

This is my last semester at Penn, and in the architecture department, that usually means it will be the most difficult and time-intensive semester of your undergraduate career. So while my Econ-major friends are taking 3 credits and having fun on the weekends, I’m spending free time working in teams and learning how to use a new piece of software: Autodesk’s somewhat unknown Ecotect Analysis.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not bitter about the dichotomy of work vs. play; most of us architecture students would much prefer learning a new piece of software or discussing the latest smart building material over a night of drinking, so this is pretty exciting stuff. I had never heard of Ecotect prior to about a month and a half ago, and what I knew was very limited.   Read more…

Yesterday, we talked about John Coleman and his sorry excuse for a climate change lesson. As a reader pointed out to me, one piece of evidence in particular has generated another climate news scandal recently. As a refresher:

…according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, global glacier thickness has declined every year for the past 4+ decades. The most recent academic research I’ve seen was published 2 months ago, and it concluded that Antarctic ice loss has been vaster and faster than the IPCC predicted. Another paper published around the same time found that, based on historical evidence, Antarctica is more sensitive to greenhouse gases than previously thought.

When many people hear “glaciers,” they think of the Himalayas. One of the most startling predictions of the 2007 IPCC report was that this gorgeous region in South and East Asia will lose all its glaciers by 2035. If you trace that claim back to its original source, you find quotes in New Scientist and Indian magazine Down to Earth by Syed Hasnain, who studied the Himalayan glaciers for the International Commission on Snow and Ice. Hasnain, it turns out, made the prediction based on “speculation,” not evidence.

Let’s be clear about what this means: Nothing.   Read more…

John Coleman is a TV weathercaster, best known for being one of the founders of The Weather Channel. Nowadays he hangs out at KUSI-TV in San Diego, where he has recently taped a segment on the great hoax of global warming. Coleman’s credentials make him a hero of global warming skeptics, but don’t confuse him with The Weather Channel itself. The Weather Channel’s official position is that greenhouse gas emissions are causing a “significant warming trend”:

The potential exists for the climate to reach a “tipping point,” if it hasn’t already done so, beyond which radical and irreversible changes occur.

They are very careful about not predicting too much, but their statement is 180 degrees different from Coleman’s video clip.

Coleman’s disagreement with the scientific consensus on climate change has been known for some time. As a result, he has said many things that are flat wrong. (Click here for examples.)   Read more…

I was reading an article a few months ago on cleantech and came across a quotation that I thought was most noteworthy, “storage is the Holy Grail of cleantech.” I don’t think there is a truer statement about renewable energy than that. So why is that?   Read more…

In a previous post, I promised to revisit the topic of natural gas. If you’ve been following the American natural gas market you know that prices have fallen substantially over the past year. Now a lot of this has to do with a lack of demand because of the recession as well as other market factors, but there have been some very interesting technological developments that have also had a profound effect on the price of natural gas.

Source: Bloomberg

To preface this post, I’d like to say that I am not attempting to fully answer the question of why natural gas prices are lower as of recently, nor am I predicting where they are going, but I’d like to provide some perspective to some of the technical factors that have driven prices down lately.

First, some fundamental information about natural gas. Not surprisingly, natural gas (at typical terrestrial temperatures) is in gas form. Now this is quite trivial given the commodity’s name but has very important implications for natural gas, especially when comparing it to its good friend crude oil (which is a liquid). Since natural gas is in a gaseous state, the way in which it can be transported is much different than oil. With most kinds of sweet light oil (the stuff that’s traded at WTI prices), you can effectively flow in a pipeline directly from a well into a tanker and then to anywhere in the world.

Natural gas, however, is a very different story. Natural gas is in gaseous state; therefore it cannot be transported as easily as crude oil. This is because it takes up a lot more room and more importantly is dangerously volatile. To transport natural gas it must be done through a pipeline or on a liquefied natural gas (“LNG”) tanker (compressed natural gas exists as well, but plays a minor role currently). To utilize LNG, infrastructure has to be in place that will liquefy the natural gas, which means that there needs to be a facility that will cool the gaseous commodity to -162°C. And, as is obvious, to pipeline something the location must be “pipeline-able” (as I like to call it). Essentially that means that you can’t build a pipeline across the Atlantic ocean (well you can, but it’d be pretty silly), but you can from Alberta, Canada to the Chicago or from the Gulf of Mexico to Galveston. The pictures below show you oil and gas movement in the world.

Oil Trade

Source: BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2009

Natural Gas Trade

Source: BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2009

Since natural gas has historically been a regional commodity, the supply and demand characteristics are also regional. This is one of the main reasons why we see the wide variances in natural gas prices around the world, whereas oil prices are pretty closely tied together (generally, differences in price are due to differences in quality of the oil). Up until just recently, things were looking pretty dismal for the United States on the natural gas front. There were diminishing US supplies but increasing demand—and no real in-country way of adding supply to offset the rising demand.

As of recently, though this problem has been solved by new technologies that can tap into in-country natural gas resources which previously were unrecoverable—which is another way of saying that with current technology and  prices the natural gas was either uneconomic or technologically impossible to recover —are now recoverable. These resources are known as shale natural gas. Previously, shale did not have the permeability to let natural gas flow in a manner that was economic and technologically possible to produce. New technologies, most notably the hydraulic fracturing of a well, can make the previously uneconomic shale economic by increasing the permeability. Essentially what fracturing a well does is create cracks in the rock formation in which the natural gas is present so that the natural gas can flow through the rock and above to the surface. These cracks are created by pumping a fluid with grains of sand or rock (to hold the fracture open) into the well at high pressure forcibly breaking the rock formations and increasing permeability making the natural gas recoverable. This technology has been and continues to be industry-changing.

In June of this year, the Potential Gas Committee reported that estimated natural gas reserves increased by 35% over the past year to 2,074 trillion cubic feet in 2008 (up from 1,532 trillion cubic feet in 2006). This is the biggest increase in 44 years. The massive increase in prospective supply has had a profound impact on the market for natural gas in the United States and has contributed, from a technical perspective, significantly to the drop in the price of natural gas.

This technological advancement once again reminds us that we’re not running out of fossil fuels by any means; we just need to find more clever ways of producing what are now unrecoverable resources.