Quick takes and random stuff, March 7, 2024
Oil, bias in climate research, education ROI, total vs. per capita, and more...
Graph of the week
I’m going to pull one graph from the U.N. Global Resources Outlook 2024 (3/1/2024) for this week’s graph of the week. There is a lot of information in the report, and I need to spend some time reading it, but for now the graph here is worth highlighting, partly because of the information and partly because it takes time to read. See if you can figure it out before reading further.
I’m not sure I like the layout here, but I see the point of trying to have totals and per capita in the same graph. The solid bars, colored by year, are million tonnes of greenhouse gases, and the values must be read off the left y-axis. The circles are tonnes per capita, and the value in the circle corresponds to the value on the right y-axis.
For example, Asia + Pacific almost doubled total emissions from 2000 to 2020, and their per capita emissions went up from 3 tonnes per person to 5. On the other hand, North America saw a bit of a decrease in emissions from 2000 to 2020, and, in fact, total emissions in 2020 are lower than 2000 for Asia + Pacific. Despite this and the fact that per capita emissions dropped from 23 tonnes per person to 15, per capita emissions are still 3 times higher in North America than in Asia + Pacific. Similarly, the High income group dropped emissions from 14 tonnes per person to 11 from 2000 to 2020, but they still use more than every other income group—in fact, 11 times more than the Low income group. Overall, though, the world is still emitting more in total and per capita. Good luck reversing that, as there are a lot of people who would like to have access to more energy.
More data centers
From DCD (2/24/2024)
Virginia landowner JK Land Holdings has purchased 108 acres in Ashburn for data center developments for $180m, the Washington Business Journal reports.
The land in question is at 19508 Freedom Trail Road in Ashburn, Loudoun County, and was purchased from homebuilder Toll Brothers Inc., which previously planned to build around 1,300 apartments and townhouses.
Don’t worry, it isn’t as if we generally need more housing.
More oil
Following up on the World Energy Consumption post on Tuesday, here are two graphs from the EIA.
The first shows the U.S. increasing oil production (3/5/2024).
The second shows China’s increased oil processing (3/4/2024)
Crude oil processing, or refinery runs, in China averaged 14.8 million barrels per day (b/d) in 2023, an all-time high. The record processing came as the economy and refinery capacity grew in China following the country’s COVID-19 pandemic responses in 2022.
China has increased refinery capacity more than any other country in recent years, partially to meet the country’s transportation fuel needs but also to produce feedstocks for its petrochemical industry.
EVs are not the best
From the Washington Post (2/29/20240)
But a new report from the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy suggests that the “greenest” car in America may not be fully electric. The nonprofit group, which has rated the pollution from vehicles for decades, says the winning car this year is the Toyota Prius Prime SE, a plug-in hybrid that can go 44 miles on electricity before switching to hybrid.
Why, you ask?
The analysis shows that simply running on electricity is not enough to guarantee that a car is “green” — its weight, battery size and overall efficiency matter, too. While a gigantic electric truck weighing thousands of pounds might be better than a gas truck of the same size, both will be outmatched by a smaller, efficient gas vehicle. And the more huge vehicles there are on the road, the harder it will be for the United States to meet its goal of zeroing out emissions by 2050.
It really doesn’t make sense to push electric vehicles if the goal is to reduce emissions. It turns out that the size and weight of the battery are an issue, and so far, it is hard to make them much smaller and lighter. Ultimately, physics doesn’t care about our beliefs. Now, how many climate activists will follow the science and support hybrids and not just electric vehicles?
Issues with climate science
Before I make a few points, climate change is real and, ultimately, not good. Still, the essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education (2/27/204), Does High-Profile Climate Science Tell the Full Story? Social feedbacks and career incentives cause scientist to leave out a lot. is worth reading, as it makes some concerning points. Here are a few:
In fact, the 2-degree Celsius limit was first proposed in the late 1970s, long before sophisticated studies of climate impacts had emerged. Its appeal was, essentially, that it was a round number thought to represent the warmest the earth had been in 100,000 years. By 1992, it had become conventional wisdom that humanity should aim to avoid anything more than 2 degrees Celsius of warming; it was officially codified as “dangerous interference with the climate system” by the United Nations in the 2009 Copenhagen Accord. Six years later, the U.N. Paris Agreement affirmed the 2-degree Celsius goal while also articulating aspirations for limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, in part due to pressure from environmentalists and some diplomats.
Generally speaking, the more warming that happens, the more negative consequences, but to my knowledge, there isn’t any hard cutoff for warming past which we all die.
While I knew that such a hypothetical cost-only analysis would not be publishable, I thought perhaps Nature would be interested in publishing a more complete cost-benefit analysis. So, later in 2018, I submitted a paper to Nature, titled “Net Economic Impact of U.N. Global-Warming Mitigation Targets,” that placed the calculated benefits described by the aforementioned paper in the context of mainstream estimates of the costs of decarbonization. The study showed that when costs were considered alongside benefits, the conclusion of the benefit-only analysis was overturned: The Paris Agreement targets would impose net harm on the world economy through 2100.
The paper did not make it to the peer-review stage. It was desk-rejected for being, supposedly, of insufficient interest and an insufficient advance (a subsequent version was later published in PLOS ONE).
I find this particularly frustrating. Even if this paper was incorrect in assumptions or calculations, it is worth publishing to initiate a debate. But note, it wasn’t rejected because of possible errors; it was rejected based on “insufficient interests.” There are other examples in the article related to this type of bias, which then pushes researchers to write articles with the correct viewpoint for reasons of stature and promotion.
The left likes to say they follow “the science,” while they at the same time seem to want to avoid any discussion about “the science.” The EV example above is the same thing. It is almost as if devotion to EV is religious and not scientific. Kudos, though, to the Chronicle for publishing this piece.
Education ROI
Another good article by the Chronicle: There Are More Good Jobs in Rural America Than It Might Seem. That’s Bad News for Colleges. (2/29/2024)
Lacking a college degree is not as much of an impediment to a good job in rural areas as it is in urban areas, the report’s authors found. Only one in four workers in rural America holds a bachelor’s degree, but they hold 36 percent of the good jobs, and workers with a high-school diploma or less were more likely to hold a good job in rural America than their urban counterparts. Rural workers with a high-school education have a 40-percent likelihood of having a good job, compared to a 36-percent likelihood for urban peers.
This quote seems awkward to me. It seems that 25% of rural workers have a bachelor’s degree, and they get 36% of the good jobs. In other words, the degree increases the chances of a good job, but only by 11 percentage points. They don’t discuss if the cost of the degree was worth this increase.
The last sentence suggests that there isn’t that much of a difference between urban and rural workers. A rural worker has a 40% chance of getting a good job, compared to 36% for an urban worker. What I like here is putting this in terms of odds. Basically, a student with only a high school diploma has a little better than a 1/3 chance of landing a good job. My next question is: Are there attributes of these students that would indicate they would get a good job and really didn’t need to go to college?
Note that the article points out differences by region, race, and sex.
The spinning CD
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