Here’s an idea for a skyscraper hanging from an asteroid. It’s a twist on the old space elevator idea because it doesn’t actually touch the ground. First, you have to go out, catch the asteroid, and put it in the right position in orbit. Then, you build the thing. Then, once you’re in the thing it takes you on a wild ride all over the world every 24 hours.
Category Archives: Web Article Review
globe buying guide
I’m thinking of getting my son a globe for his fourth birthday. I’ve done a little research, which I’m going to share here.
Replogle appears to be the largest manufacturer of globes. But dig into some reviews, and they appear to be not all that well made, yet not priced any lower than other brands.
There are all kinds of globes with electronic bells and whistles out there, like this one from Oregon Scientific. In the end I decided to keep it simple and not go for one of these.
Some globes have “raised relief” for mountains, like this Advantus globe, which is cool.
Ultimately I picked this Waypoint model. Even though it doesn’t have topographic relief, I like the colors and topographic detail.
the Black-Scholes equation
This 2012 article from the Guardian goes into some detail on the Black-Scholes equation for pricing options, which bears some responsibility for the 2007-2008 financial crisis. It was cooked up by geniuses to spread risk, but misapplied by idiots to actually create risk. What are the geniuses cooking up now for the idiots to misapply next?
San Francisco Green Connections
The new San Francisco Green Connections Plan lays out a vision of public streets as movement corridors for both people and wildlife.
bird flu
A strain of bird flu is hitting poultry farms in Tennessee and Georgia right now, but the CDC says the risk to humans of this particular strain is low.
S&P green rating
Standard and Poor’s is coming out with a new rating system for the green-ness of bonds.
Our proposed Green Bond Evaluation methodology looks beyond the governance and management of a bond by providing an analysis and estimate of the environmental impact of the projects or initiatives financed by the bond’s proceeds over its lifetime relative to a local baseline. This would be in addition to assessing the governance and transparency surrounding the bond. When evaluating environmental impact, the methodology would consider both climate change mitigation and adaptation projects.
Mitigation projects focus on efforts to reduce or prevent the emission of greenhouse gases, ranging from upgrades to conventional generation projects to new renewable energy and energy efficiency initiatives. Adaptation projects aim to take practical steps toward reducing the exposure to and managing the impact of natural catastrophes, such as building the resilience of communities and critical infrastructure against an increased risk of extreme weather events due to climate change.
The output of the Green Bond Evaluation would include at least three scores (a Transparency score, a Governance score and a Mitigation score and/or Adaptation score, as relevant…
An interesting question is whether the idea is that investors would expect to make more on a green investment, or whether some investors would be willing to settle for less in exchange for the satisfaction of having a positive impact. Borrowers would have a financial incentive to be good if doing so meant a lower interest rate, which kind of supports the latter possibility. Exactly why the rating agency itself is motivated to do this was unclear to me. But after digging into the paper a little, it looks like governments and companies will have an incentive to show that they are complying with the Paris agreement, so that may be part of what is driving this.
climate change starting to bite in Alaska
Bloomberg has an article about the effects of climate change in Alaska, and failure to deal with them. Surprisingly, it sounds like the state was making some limited strides under Sarah Palin but has completely dropped the ball since.
Across Alaska, in towns built on permafrost, rising temperatures are causing the ground to sink, damaging buildings and roads. In towns built on the coast, less sea ice means greater exposure to storms and floods. Drier conditions have led to more forest fires. Extreme weather killed or injured as many Alaskans in 2015 as in the previous 10 years combined. “Environmental change is not a theoretical in Alaska,” says Rick Thoman, the state’s climate sciences and services manager for the National Weather Service. “It’s happening, and it’s accelerating.”
Alaska was once at the vanguard of states trying to deal with global warming. In 2007, then-Governor Sarah Palin established a climate change subcabinet to study the effects of warmer weather and find policies to cope with them. Over three years, the legislature provided about $26 million in funding. But Palin’s successor, Republican Sean Parnell, disbanded the group in 2011. That year, Alaska withdrew from a federal program that provides funds for coastal management because of concern the program might restrict offshore oil extraction. Since then, lower oil prices, combined with dwindling production, have left the state with a budget crisis that’s among the worst in the U.S. Just when climate change is having real impact, Alaska has less and less capacity to deal with it…
Alaska is an extreme example of a national failure to prepare for climate change. Across the U.S., state funding for environmental projects, such as beach erosion control or upgraded sewage systems, peaked in 2007, even as capital expenditures have since risen 25 percent. States along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts have resisted adopting the latest model building codes designed to protect residents against storms and other extreme weather.
Along with its failure to deal with climate change, it sounds like Alaska has squandered its oil wealth. It could have converted its natural capital in financial capital that future generations could use to deal with the consequences of extracting those natural resources – pretty much a textbook definition of sustainability. It’s not the only failure at the state level – my home state of Pennsylvania could have used royalties from the shale boom to reduce its enormous state and municipal pension mess, but it didn’t and it’s mostly too late now.
small modular reactors
Even though there haven’t been a lot of commercial nuclear reactors built in the U.S., nuclear energy research and development has progressed since the plants we are most familiar with from the 1970s. Here is Forbes talking about a new type of small modular reactor.
This nuclear reactor is something that we’ve never seen before – a small modular reactor that is economic, factory built and shippable, flexible enough to desalinate seawater, refine oil, load-follow wind, produce hydrogen, modular to make the power plant any size, and that provides something we’ve all been waiting for – a reactor that cannot meltdown.
This last point is the really big deal with SMRs. The small size of each module changes the surface-area-to-volume ratio such that heat can be siphoned off easily so that the reactor can’t melt down…
Refueling of SMRs do not require the nuclear plant to shut down. The small size and large surface area-to-volume ratio of NuScale’s reactor core, that sits below ground in a super seismic-resistant heat sink, allows natural processes to cool it indefinitely in the case of complete power blackout, with no humans needed to intervene, no AC or DC power, no pumps, and no additional water for cooling.
I support nuclear energy provided the risks of past designs can be mitigated, and it sounds like there is progress in that direction. Uranium still has to be mined, enriched, transported, and disposed of safely, of course, and safer reactors do not address that issue. There is also the proliferation issue, coupled with the fairness issue of who gets to decide which countries are allowed to have nuclear technology and which are not. But there are no zero-risk options. With the health and climate risks of continuing to burn fossil fuels on a massive scale becoming more obvious every day, we should be giving nuclear a cautious look.
palm oil and peat
Mongabay explains why draining peatlands to grow oil palms is not a great idea.
Peat is a type of soil composed of partially decayed organic material such as vegetation that accumulates over time in a water-saturated environment lacking in oxygen. Peatlands are characterized by a thick layer of peat, often several meters deep that can take thousands of years to form.
Peat swamp forests act as massive carbon sinks, and when they are drained, carbon that has been slowly captured over the centuries it takes the peat to form is suddenly released into the atmosphere. A group of scientists recently uncovered the world’s largest tropical peatland in the Congo basin, thought to store the equivalent of three years’ worth of the world’s total fossil fuel emissions. The draining of peatlands can also lead to widespread subsidence, or sinking, as the organic matter rapidly decompresses and decomposes, ultimately rendering land unsuitable for agricultural or community development, according to NGO Wetlands International.
Across Southeast Asia, peat swamp forests have been cleared, drained, and burned away, often replaced by monocrop plantations or construction projects. Malaysia and Indonesia’s vast peatlands have been significantly reduced by large-scale draining and drying, leading to huge forest and peat fires across the region – such as the 2015 haze crisis that scientists say may have led to the premature deaths of 100,000 people. The event subsequently led Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo to ban the clearance and conversion of peat swamps.
fluoride and neurotoxicity
A coalition of groups including the American Academy of Environmental Medicine and the International Academy of Oral Medicine and Toxicology is petitioning the EPA to ban the practice of water fluoridation.
EPA should exercise its authority under TSCA to prohibit fluoridation additives because application of the Agency’s own Guidelines for Neurotoxicity Risk Assessment to the existing database on fluoride shows that (1) neurotoxicity is a hazard of fluoride exposure, and (2) the reference dose that would reasonably protect against this hazard is incompatible with the doses now ingested by millions of Americans in fluoridated areas. In fact, the amount of fluoride now regularly consumed by many people in fluoridated areas exceeds the doses repeatedly linked to IQ loss and other neurotoxic effects; with certain subpopulations standing at elevated risk of harm, including infants, young children, elderly populations, and those with dietary deficiencies, renal impairment, and/or genetic predispositions.
The risk to the brain posed by fluoridation additives is an unreasonable risk because, inter alia, it is now understood that fluoride’s predominant effect on tooth decay comes from topical contact with teeth, not ingestion. Since there is little benefit in swallowing fluoride, there is little justification in exposing the public to any risk of fluoride neurotoxicity, particularly via a source as essential to human sustenance as the public drinking water and the many processed foods and beverages made therefrom. The addition of fluoridation chemicals to water thus represents the very type of unreasonable risk that EPA is duly authorized to prohibit pursuant to its powers and responsibilities under Section 6 of TSCA, and Petitioners urge the Agency to exercise its authority to do so.
I admit I hadn’t heard of these particular groups, but at first glance they appear to be reputable. I might have previously lumped the anti-fluoride movement in with the anti-vaccine movement or the anti-global warming movement, as pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo at best and a serious danger to the public at worse. But unlike vaccines, the health benefits of fluoridation might not be all that great. If something is not useful and we are not sure if it is toxic or not, there is a strong argument for erring on the side of caution. Maybe one day we’ll look back at water fluoridation similarly to how we look at leaded gasoline or mercury thermometers today – “what were we thinking?”