309 South First, Talent 045

Originally uploaded by JoeDuck

Soon selling a 1BR Talent, Oregon house in great location with full lot for $137,500. Owner financing with a reasonable down payment.     I live across from the house in one of the nicest parts of sunny Southern Oregon – the friendly town of Talent.

Although the house is small, it’s in good shape.    A slap patio could probably be converted to double the living space which is currently about 500 square feet.      Zoning in this area would also allow a second house on the lot.

I’d like to hear more from those concerned a lot about how Global Warming will harm humanity regarding their calculations.    Kyoto is now recognized by anybody who understands the issues as failed and misguided.  Ethanol’s bizarre rise to fame was a great example of how “good intentions” often combine with opportunism, profit, and politics to make a dumb idea even dumber  (ethanol in early forms actually increases GW, though newer techniques do not.  However it’s still a questionable use of corn and innovation, fueled by farm belt political and profit agendas that conflict with common sense).

It seems to me there are – broadly – three camps in the debate:

1.  Extreme Skeptics.    “No global warming is going on”.    These folks are basically in denial about the large body of evidence such as …. thermometer and satellite ane ice core records …. that make it clear we are experiencing some warming.    These folks also insist wrongly that the evidence the warming is “human caused” is bogus or lies or  a science conspiracy.    Although there are legitimate concerns about some of the science surrounding global warming there is NO DOUBT we have warming and little doubt that “most” of that warming is human caused.     HOWEVER I do not think the warming carries the hazards often claimed.

3.  Alarmists.   This group  seems to have flunked math class…. many times….  they generally argue on general ground that we need to reduce emissions without bothering to calculate the costs of doing so and measuring those costs against the alternatives (feeding people who are starving NOW, getting water to people who need water NOW, educating people who need it NOW).    There are environmental catastrophes of biblical proportion and slowing development to meet our CO2 agenda appears to conflict with getting standards of living to rise.   It is bordering on nonsense to fear catastrophe from global warming even on long time frames.    Humans adapt daily to temperature changes and we can adapt centurially to a rise of 2-4 degrees if in fact it does materialize as projected.

2.  Common sense.   Moderate mitigation, much more focus on current emergency and infrastructure improvements.

Another wonderfully insightful, common sense, non-alarmist discussion from Bjorn Lomborg in his “Cars, Bombs, and Climate Change”

If we are to have a constructive dialogue about the smartest policy responses to global warming, we need to replace our fixation on far-fetched, Armageddon scenarios with realism about the true costs of dealing with this challenge.

Following are MY views, not Lomborg’s:

It’s clear to me that we have probably never seen in the history of science so much officially sanctioned alarmist nonsense as we have with climate change.   It’s not that there is no threat – there is a threat – it’s just that the climate issues  are very likely of less consequence than far more pressing catastrophic issues such as nuclear proliferation, possible economic collapse, and most importantly poverty and health conditions in many parts of the developing world – conditions that will at least in the short term require fossil fuels to help.

Perhaps even more importantly it’s absurd to think that China will “go along” with the developed world with respect to CO2 reductions.   They won’t and it’s naive to think this will change with any types of political pressure.

THEREFORE, we need to be thinking of ways to do the following:

1. Help solve pressing issues such as our own economic challenges, global instability, and continued massive poverty in undeveloed regions.    Working to modify some crazy trade barriers is a good start as well as strategic redirection of defense spending to actually provide for our defense rather than raise the stakes as so far has been done during the Bush/Clinton/Bush/Obama war spending sprees (in fairness Obama cannot yet be blamed for his massive spending.   His new policies may work or they may not – we don’t have enough data.  I would argue that the policies of the past failed to achieve a positive return on the massive investments).

More about military spending … later …

In the meantime we need to be adapting to climate change.   Luckily that’s not all that difficult.    Today I have already adapted to a temperature change of  about 50 degrees F.      Since the best estimates of global warming say we’ll have about a HUNDREDTH  of that temperature change happening in the next decade , I’m pretty sure I can keep the family alive.    If you want suggestions just send a self addressed stamped envelope to “Joe’s Climate Advice”, Talent, Oregon.

As I brought in my recycling bin today I thought “well, curbside recycling sure seems like a great innovative idea, a well run program and a clear example of where major change made a positive difference”.     Then I realized that I was making the same mistake advocates always make with respect to this type of thing – I was only looking at the benefits and not the costs.

Naturally the internet came to the rescue of my ignorance, though I don’t have time to find the real answers.

This article was a good start at some of the challenges of even making a determination:  http://environment.about.com/od/recycling/a/benefit_vs_cost.htm

I have NOT changed my mind but I have realized how ignorant I am about the costs involved in these programs.   Based on the article and the fact that we tend to exaggerate the tiny spaces we need here in USA to landfill huge amounts of garbage,  I’m now thinking that recycling  probably is *very expensive* and may not be a good use of economic resources when landfill space is cheap and abundant.

This is a great research project for later when I have more time to kill, but some factors that don’t appear enough in analyses of these things are:

1.  Value of the time spend by individuals to participate.

2. Energy resources used to recycle things.  On a small scale some “obsessive” types of folks make a lot of separate “recycling” trips.  I’d like to know at what point the energy costs of a separate recycling trip outweigh the energy savings of the recycling.  My guess is that driving more than a mile with a bag of cans is … very environmentally unsound.    Of course most will combine this trip so it’s not separate, but all behaviors should be considered.

On a larger scale there are HUGE costs to set up these programs.   Separate trucks, runs, gas, etc.    The inefficiency of having TWO runs vs ONE run is a very large issue, and I’m anxious to see if recycling advocates do a good job of looking at the energy costs in this equation.    Historically energy analyses border on the insanely incompetent, failing to take into account things like “present value” when showing that it’s *economically* a good idea to put in energy efficient windows when in fact this cost is usually enormous compared to the modest annual savings.    There are energy benefits that are NOT economic, but those need to be expressed in some way other than pretending there is money saved.

(Quick example.  Let’s say you replace  20 old windows at $400 each with high quality insulated double panes.    That is $8000 spent *today*.     The energy savings from this, unless you live in Alaska and probably not even then, will need to be on the order of $400 per year just to give you a yield on that investment of 5%.   My total heating bill for the year is under  $1000 here in Oregon and clearly new windows won’t knock that back 40%, so….

This is an old pic but I like it!

Glacier Point, Yosemite National Park, California, USA

Originally uploaded by JoeDuck

Ben at Yosemite