Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

considering local government policy in water risk

This paper is about incorporating local government and utility policies/actions in measures of water risk, which in the past have tended to focus on physical measurements. This makes sense because there are some very water scarce places that have managed their limited resources well, and there are some moderately water scarce places where political and bureaucratic mismanagement of resources have led to crises. This probably makes some sense because when the lack of water is starkly obvious (if your country is a desert for example), it is impossible to ignore whereas when the problem is only going to crop up under extreme conditions, local politicians and less competent bureaucrats can ignore it the vast majority of time and nobody will raise the alarm. Better data might help make these crises more predictable and preventable, rather than seeming to sneak up out of nowhere.

Mapping Public Water Management by Harmonizing and Sharing Corporate Water Risk Information

by Colin Strong, Paul Reig, Julian Köbel and Cindy Noe – March 2018

In response to water crises across the globe, data on biophysical conditions associated with water risk have increasingly been collected and understood. However, a complete assessment of water risk also requires an understanding of public water management. Currently there is a lack of global comparable data on public water management, leading to incomplete assessments of risk and suboptimal risk mitigation activities. To fill in that gap in data, this Technical Note proposes the creation of a global comparable geodatabase of public water management indicators to spur tangible improvements in water management. The geodatabase will be populated by crowdsourcing data through the risk assessments of multinational companies that are incentivized to share anonymized public water management as an innovative risk reduction practice.

Who’s really crossing the U.S. border?

This article is from Lawfare, and the answer is interesting.

First off, while the current administration has tried to tie Central American migrants to MS-13, government data reveals that gang members crossing irregularly are the rare exceptions. Since the Trump administration took office, the Border Patrol has detected fewer gang members crossing irregularly than during the Obama administration. In FY2017, these detections amounted to 0.075 percent of the total number of migrants (228 MS-13 members out of 303,916 total migrants). When combined with MS-13’s rival, the Barrio 18 gang, the number rises only slightly to 0.095 percent. This is far from the “infestation” of violent gang members described by the president…

The face of migration has also changed. Back in 2000, Mexican nationals made up 98 percent of the total migrants and Central Americans (referring to Honduran, Guatemalan, and Salvadoran migrants) only one percent. Today, Central Americans make up closer to 50 percent.

A declining Mexican birth rate, a stable economy, and the U.S. border buildup have all contributed to the decrease in migration from Mexico. But as Mexican irregular migration has plummeted, Central American migration has simultaneously picked up. Until 2011, Central Americans constituted less than ten percent of total U.S.-Mexico border apprehensions, but by 2012 they constituted 25 percent, and by 2014 they numbered half of all illicit border crossers. While migration from each country within the Northern Triangle (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) has fluctuated over time, each country has sent roughly similar numbers of people in the aggregate. From FY1995 to FY2016, the U.S. Border Patrol apprehended around 500,000 citizens from each country. In other words, it’s not a coincidence that most recent news stories about migrant parents separated from their children feature families from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

People from Honduras and El Salvador are often fleeing urban gang violence, while those from Guatemala are often fleeing rural poverty.

 

coastal inundation value at risk

Union of Concerned Scientists has tried to combine inundation mapping, property value estimates from Zillow, and property tax information to give an idea of property value and tax revenue at risk from rising sea levels. They chose a time horizon of around a 30-year mortgage. It seems a bit coarse to me, but it still illustrates that with available information, insurance companies, mortgage lenders, and real estate markets are going to start piecing this together and it is going to start showing up in buying decisions and prices.

new political push for carbon tax in the U.S.

There is a new emerging push for carbon taxes in the U.S., led by Republicans and using pro-business language. According to Bloomberg:

The campaign, dubbed Americans for Carbon Dividends, aims to bolster a carbon tax-and-dividend plan advanced by prominent Republicans a year ago, using more aggressive lobbying and advertising to line up support with hopes of winning congressional passage after the 2020 elections.

Under the Climate Leadership Council’s blueprint, every ton of carbon dioxide would be hit with a $40 tax, with the price rising over time and revenue redistributed to households in the form of quarterly dividend checks. In exchange, regulations aimed at cutting carbon dioxide emissions — and much of the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate them — would be eliminated.

Companies that emit greenhouse gas emissions also could win liability protection insulating them from litigation over the costs of climate change — a potentially enticing sweetener as lawsuits mount…

So, nominally anti-tax, anti-deficit politicians would get a revenue neutral program, anti-regulation politicians would get to trade away regulations in favor of taxes, and even the fossil fuel industry would get some liability protection. The other implication here seems to be that at least some Republicans in Congress are starting to think about a post-Trump world after 2020, and/or are willing to look for issues where a veto-proof super-majority could be possible.

Antarctic ice sheet melt accelerating

The rate of melting in Antarctica is accelerating, according to a new study in Nature.

…it lost 2,720 ± 1,390 billion tonnes of ice between 1992 and 2017, which corresponds to an increase in mean sea level of 7.6 ± 3.9 millimetres (errors are one standard deviation). Over this period, ocean-driven melting has caused rates of ice loss from West Antarctica to increase from 53 ± 29 billion to 159 ± 26 billion tonnes per year; ice-shelf collapse has increased the rate of ice loss from the Antarctic Peninsula from 7 ± 13 billion to 33 ± 16 billion tonnes per year.

NYC banning styrofoam

NYC is banning styrofoam as of January 1, 2019.

The ban now means that food service establishments, stores, and manufacturers may not possess, sell, or offer for use single service Expanded Polystyrene (EPS) foam food service articles or loose fill packaging, such as “packing peanuts” in New York City beginning in 2019…

Manufacturers and stores will not be able to sell or offer single-use foam items such as cups, plates, trays, or clamshell containers in the city.

space catapults

A space catapult is a theoretical alternative to rockets, and apparently Airbus and Google are interested.

Rather than using propellants like kerosene and liquid oxygen to ignite a fire under a rocket, SpinLaunch plans to get a rocket spinning in a circle at up to 5,000 miles per hour and then let it go—more or less throwing the rocket to the edge of space, at which point it can light up and deliver objects like satellites into orbit.

Chicago Hyperloop

The Chicago Tribune has a video of how the Hyperloop will supposedly get people from the (Chicago) Loop to O’hare airport in 12 minutes. The City’s press release says the project will be funded entirely by private investors. The construction timeline? It will be “finalized during the process”. I’m a little skeptical, but winning a competitive bid process for a major city does suggest the Hyperloop is more than a pipedream. It almost makes me want to move to a U.S. city that is willing to plan for the future, which in this case means catching up to modern world class cities that have efficient rail links from their downtowns to their airports.

more on the downward spiral of nuclear power economics

This one is from Five Thirty Eight:

The age of the nuclear fleet is partly to blame. That’s not because America’s nuclear reactors are falling apart — they’re regularly inspected, and almost all of them have now gone through the process of renewing their original 40-year operating licenses for 20 more years…

Instead, it’s the cost of upkeep that’s prohibitive. Things do fall apart — especially things exposed to radiation on a daily basis. Maintenance and repair, upgrades and rejuvenation all take a lot of capital investment. And right now, that means spending lots of money on power plants that aren’t especially profitable. Historically, nuclear power plants were expensive to build but could produce electricity more cheaply than fossil fuels, making them a favored source of low-cost electricity. That changed with the fracking boom, Morgan told me. “Natural gas from fracking has gotten so cheap, [nuclear plants] aren’t as high up in the dispatch stack,” he said, referring to the order of resources utilities choose to buy electricity from. “So many of them are now not very attractive economically…”

Morgan and other researchers are studying the economic feasibility of investment in newer kinds of nuclear power plants — including different ways of designing the mechanical systems of a reactor and building reactors that are smaller and could be put together on an assembly line. Currently, reactors must be custom-built to each site. Their research showed that new designs are unlikely to be commercially viable in time to seriously address climate change. And in a new study that has not yet been published, they found that the domestic U.S. market for nuclear power isn’t robust enough to justify the investments necessary to build a modular reactor industry.