For some eco-pioneers, solving the sludge problem means getting their hands dirty

Part 3 of Grist’s special series on poop. Laura Allen, a 33-year-old teacher from Oakland, California, has a famous toilet....

MIT and NBER (and Tol and Nordhaus) — right wing deniers love your work. Ask yourselves 'why?'

"Study Shows Global Warming Will Not Hurt U.S. Economy" -- That's the Heritage Foundation touting a new study by economists from MIT and the National Bureau of Economic Review.

This study, "Climate Shocks and Economic Growth: Evidence from the Last Half Century" [PDF] -- wildly mistitled and deeply flawed, as we will see -- is yet another value-subtracting contribution by the economics profession to climate policy.

What makes the paper especially noteworthy, however, is not merely the credentials of the authors, but that they thank such climate economist luminaries as William Nordhaus and Richard Tol for "helpful comments and suggestions." The only helpful comment and suggestion I can think of for this paper is, "Burn the damn thing and start over from scratch."

Heritage quotes the study:

Our main results show large, negative effects of higher temperatures on growth, but only in poor countries. In poorer countries, we estimate that a 1?C rise [sic -- the Heritage folks haven't mastered the ° symbol] in temperature in a given year reduced economic growth in that year by about 1.1 percentage points. In rich countries, changes in temperature had no discernable effect on growth. Changes in precipitation had no substantial effects on growth in either poor or rich countries. We find broadly consistent results across a wide range of alternative specifications.

Heritage then quotes a commentary on the study by right-wing blogger for U.S. News & World Report James Pethokoukis, "Sorry, Climate Change Wouldn't Hurt America's Economy." Pethokoukis also quotes from the study:

Despite these large, negative effects for poor countries, we find very little impact of long-run climate change on world GDP. This result follows from (a) the absence of estimated temperature effects in rich countries and (b) the fact that rich countries make up the bulk of world GDP. Moreover, if rich countries continue to grow at historical rates, their share of world GDP becomes more pronounced by 2099, so even a total collapse of output in poor countries has a relatively small impact on total world output.

(If these excerpts suggest to you that the study authors and the economist commenters are victims of some sort of collective mass hysteria, then you are a getting (a little) ahead of me ... but the fact that thoroughly-debunked denier Ross McKitrick is a commenter on this paper certainly suggests this entire effort is indefensible.)

Pethokoukis himself then offers a conclusion that, though amazing, is not utterly ridiculous given a narrow misreading of this absurdly narrow, easily-misread study:

Institutions, motivations, and assumptions in economic analysis

A belated Merry Christmas, everyone! Yes, it’s possible that most of Grist’s readers are not Christian (I’m not, for one)....

They all crush ‘clean coal’: Stanford study, part 1

When we last met Stanford professor Mark Jacobson, he was explaining why you shouldn’t buy a diesel car if you...

ITC to build $12B in wind farm power lines, JCSP study finds $50B savings from wind

Wind power is coming of age as the U.S. becomes the global wind leader and probably the biggest source of new jobs in the energy industry.

ITC Holdings announced Monday plans to build a $10 to $12 billion power transmission network to move 12,000 megawatts of electricity from the Dakotas, Minnesota, and Iowa to the Chicago area.

ITC called the plan, depicted above, the Green Power Express, saying it could:

result in a reduction of up to 34 million metric tons of carbon emissions, which is equivalent to the annual emissions of about seven to nine 600 MW coal plants.

ITC made its announcement the same day a major study, the Joint Coordinated System Plan, was released by the Midwest grid operator and other U.S. regional grid managers was released. It concluded that to increase wind power to 20 percent of electricity production by 2024 (requiring some 230 GW of wind) would require some 15,000 miles of new transmission costing $80 billion. The total cost of the wind would be some $1 trillion.

The WSJ reports this as "New Grid for Renewable Energy Could Be Costly." But in fact the study found that "increasing wind's share to 20 percent of U.S. power production would yield annual net savings of $12 billion annually by 2024 based on wind's low production cost compared to the fossil plants the turbines would replace," as Energy Daily (sub. req'd) explained.

Moreover, JCSP projects that the 20 percent scenario would save 3 billion tons of carbon over the next 16 years, which would generate in 2024 an annual value of some $40 billion a year at carbon prices comparable to that which the European Union has seen over the past year -- and several times that if the price of carbon to reaches levels needed to stabilize at 450 ppm.

One reason I say wind power has come of age is because the announcement and the study don't come from your traditional pro-wind trade groups or think tanks. Far from it.

TVA says leak has stopped but 'some materials flowed into Widows Creek'

You can't out-irony real life. The Tennessean has the story:

TVA is investigating a leak from a gypsum pond at its Widows Creek coal-burning power plant in northeastern Alabama ...

Seriously, Widows Creek coal plant? What PR guy thought that up? The same genius behind Frosty the Coalman, Clean Coal Night, and Deck the Halls with Clean Coal?

TVA says the leak has stopped, but not before "some materials flowed into Widows Creek." At least they won't have to change the creek's name. The story continues:

Gypsum is a byproduct of coal-burning power plants when "scrubbers" are added that use limestone spray to clean air emissions. This pulls sulfur dioxide from the emissions ...

Tighter air emissions controls result in additional waste byproducts. Gypsum can be used in building materials.

As always, the enviros are really to blame. If it weren't for their pesky laws, the pollutants would be in the air where they belong:

Memo to James Hansen: Your opposition to Waxman-Markey is ill-conceived and unhelpful

Climate Wire (subs. req’d) reports today: NASA’s leading climate scientist says he hopes that climate legislation proposed by Democratic Reps....

Study finds that tolls and parking charges are key to ease traffic

Earlier this year, the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit think tank, put out a report on how to get traffic moving...

Did the coal industry create its own PR nightmare?

The press coverage of the Tennessee sludge spill has been nothing short of astonishing. Barely a week has passed since the accident and already a Google search for the phrase Tennessee spill produces 2,280,000 results!

Compare that to 1,740,000 for Three Mile Island and 708,000 for Exxon Valdez. In little more than a week, this has become one of the biggest environmental stories in recent decades.

Obviously, the naked fact of being the biggest coal spill in history (100 times larger than the Valdez spill) is reason itself for the intensity of the coverage. But is it also possible that the level of press interest would not be quite so massive were it not for the tens of millions of dollars spent by the coal industry on its "clean coal" advertising campaign?

In international affairs, this is what they call "blowback." The can of "water" that you thought you were throwing on a small fire turns out to be gasoline, and you suddenly find yourselves engulfed in flames.

I wonder what the folks at the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity are thinking about all this. Can they keep running the ads as if nothing had happened? If they do run the ads, will people just be reminded of all those icebergs of fly ash floating west of Knoxville?

Just checked on the ACCCE website: silence. Not a word on the Tennessee spill.

Must be in meetings. Or maybe working on the lyrics for next year's clean coal carols.