Let's Have More Gaslighting

Erika Minkowsky, co-owner of personal chef service The
Heirloom Chef, cooks at her Richmond, Calif. home
on a gas range. (Mercury News photo)

Earlier this month we noted how Berkeley's 2019 ban on natural gas in new buildings was successfully challenged in court by the California Restaurant Association. Other Bay Area cities who had followed Berkeley's lead are now suspending their bans: [bold added]

The Sunnyvale City Council recently temporarily suspended its ban on natural gas in new buildings, which was first adopted in 2022 to help cut Sunnyvale’s greenhouse emissions in half by the end of the decade.

Recently, Cupertino announced the city will suspend its gas ban until this fall. In the East Bay, the Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors earlier this month agreed to pause their all-electric building requirement and gas ban in unincorporated areas of the county. San Mateo County and San Luis Obispo also recently suspended their bans.

Except for his grandparents' house before 1961, your humble blogger has never lived in an apartment or home with a gas range and likely will never do so. Although I agree with the nanny staters that cooking with gas is riskier to health and safety than electric, I don't agree that the decision should be made for people.

Besides restaurants, there are many home chefs who prefer gas--in Chinese cooking, for example, electric cooktops cannot heat woks to the temperature required--and they should be allowed their choice.

Sure, bombard everyone with warnings about the potential dangers to themselves and "the planet," but one of the country's basic principles is that informed citizens should make their own decisions instead of having decisions purportedly made for their own good by a government bureaucrat.

Can you feel it? The tide hasn't turned, but it has been stalled.

People Will Do What's Best for Themselves

From January: EVs pile up in China (Globe and Mail)

5½ years ago we bought the Toyota RAV4 hybrid. We're very happy with its reliability and fuel economy, as well as its 400-mile range on a full tank. The car's emissions are not zero as they are with EV's (this is not the time to get into the debate about lifetime pollution, which includes manufacturing and disposal); let's just say that the hybrid trade-offs were optimal for this consumer.

Apparently many other consumers feel the same way. The production of electric vehicles has far outstripped demand. EVs are piling up on dealers' lots.

As recently as a year ago, automakers were struggling to meet the hot demand for electric vehicles. In a span of months, though, the dynamic flipped, leaving them hitting the brakes on what for many had been an all-out push toward an electric transformation.

A confluence of factors had led many auto executives to see the potential for a dramatic societal shift to electric cars: government regulations, corporate climate goals, the rise of Chinese EV makers, and Tesla’s stock valuation, which, at roughly $600 billion, still towers over the legacy car companies.

But the push overlooked an important constituency: the consumer.

The last laugh goes to Toyota chairman Akio Toyoda, who has repeatedly said that hybrids are superior to EVs.

“People are finally seeing reality,” said Toyota Motor Chairman Akio Toyoda. For years, Toyota and other EV-cautious carmakers had been touting hybrids as a consumer-friendly way to reduce carbon emissions.

Fortunately, America is not yet a command economy like the late lamentable Soviet Union, which produced a glut of low-quality shoes and cars. Eventually consumer preferences win out.

Lab-Grown Meat: Its Time Will Come

Cultured chicken from Good Meat in Alameda (Chron)

Plant-based "meat" has been acknowledged, even by people who won't touch it, to produce substantial environmental benefits in the form of much less greenhouse-gas emissions and water and land use.

Lab-grown meat, on the other hand, currently has little environmental advantage over animal meat. [bold added]

The cultured meat industry...is probably 25 times more energy intensive than traditional beef in its current form, a new UC Davis study has found. And even when production becomes more widespread, the authors have doubts about its potential climate benefits...

Cultured meat, also called cultivated or lab-grown meat, is produced in bioreactors with real animal cells but does not require animal slaughter. The main reason it’s energy intensive is that the nutrients and other ingredients required to feed the cells need to be highly purified, a process that is closer to pharmaceutical-grade rather than food-grade production, though companies are working on changing that, said [UC-Davis Professor Edward] Spang.

Lowering the quality from pharmaceutical- to food-grade will lessen the energy cost, but to be perfectly frank, your humble blogger expects the lab-grown product to be safer than real meat if he's going to go through the trouble of eating it.

This research may have stymied lab-grown meat for now.

But the technology will likely have second life as humans live off-Earth and crave something closer to meat than plant product soaked in meat-simulating chemicals. Fission, or even fusion, energy should be plentiful, and it will be prohibitively expensive to transport and breed animals off world for consumption.

They're having a sale at Spaceway. Let's hop over and pick up a half-dozen tubes of chicken.

Decarbonising the Gut

(Image from katygastro.com)

"Good" gut bacteria can multiply faster by starving them of carbon.

The Yale team...found that the beneficial gut bacterium Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron responded to starvation for carbon — a main building block for all cells — by sequestering a portion of the molecules for an essential transcription factor within a membrane-less compartment...

An awareness of these membrane-less compartments actually goes back a hundred years, [Yale geneticist Eduardo] Groisman said. [Postdoctoral fellow Aimilia] Krypotou’s key insight, he said, was to deduce novel properties for the bacterial transcription factor — termed Rho — based on the extra region. Sequestration of the transcription factor takes place by a process known as liquid-liquid phase separation, a ubiquitous phenomenon present in a wide variety of cells including those of humans.

My college roommates who were going to medical school said that molecular biology was their toughest course, and the preceding paragraph is an example of the concepts they had to deal with. Far be it from this non-STEM major to understand bacterial transcription and membrane-less compartments, but I am able to figure out from the article that if one is starving in general, then one is starving for carbon.

The bottom line is that this research provides yet another reason--gut health--to go on a fasting diet.

Sounding Off

Swedish offshore wind farm (tos)

Two weeks ago we noted that environmentalists claim that lobster fishing is killing North Atlantic right whales (it's speculative because no whale carcasses have been found entangled in lobster-fishing lines.)

But environmentalists have ignored the danger that cacophonous offshore wind farms pose to the whale population.

The harmful effect of noise on whales is well documented:

Anthropogenic noise can change a whale's behaviour, such as causing the marine mammals to feed less or to produce fewer calls. Shipping noise also cause whales to become stressed, with the build-up of stress related chemicals linked to growth suppression, lower fertility and poor immune system function.

To environmentalists wind farms are more important than whales, which are more important than the lobster industry.

Your humble blogger likes both whales and lobsters and hopes technology will provide a solution to whale entanglement, if indeed it's proven to be a problem.

As for offshore wind power, not only does it kill whales, it's not keeping anyone warm on freezing, breezeless nights. I'll take always-on natural-gas or nuclear power plants. And so will our friends, the whales.

Walden by the Bay

The car-free Great Highway during summertime
when the livin' is easy (Chron photo)

San Francisco's movement to ban automobiles from certain streets was burgeoning.

When the sun's shining and the weather's warm, walking or biking along the car-free Great Highway next to Ocean Beach is a pleasurable experience. Ditto for John F. Kennedy Drive, the main East-West artery through Golden Gate Park. Families with children don't have to worry about speeding vehicles or breathing in their pollution.

Now that a cold, wet winter is upon us, some San Franciscans are having second thoughts. [bold added]

A group of merchants on San Francisco’s Valencia Street abruptly canceled this weekend’s “Shared Spaces” road closure and outdoor festivities due to rainy forecasts — and a growing contention that banning cars is bad for business.

Among them is Valencia Cyclery bike shop owner Paul Olszewski, who sent a mass email to his neighbors late Thursday. Cutting off motorists from using the street lessens the chance of making a sale in inclement weather, Olszewski said...

Such comments marked the latest point of friction for Slow Streets and Safe Spaces, programs that embraced the idea of blocking automobile traffic to lure more people outside during pandemic lockdowns. Now these efforts face an uncertain future, as San Francisco and other cities struggle to revive their economies...

Jonah Buffa, president of the Valencia Corridor Merchants Association and owner of the barbershop Fellow Barber, said he’s hearing concerns from a number of store owners who feel the Shared Spaces events have outlived their use, particularly in cold and inclement weather.

He harbors his own doubts about the viability of Shared Spaces. A couple of weeks ago Buffa said he stepped out of his shop on a Friday evening, after crews had shut off the three blocks to traffic.

“I saw one person wandering in the middle of the street, and a few cyclists using it,” Buffa said. “I think there would have been more business if the streets were open to traffic.”

Ambling from store to store on a sunny day in a road-cum-park is living a dream. But the dream will disappear if San Francisco Thoreauvians force the stores to go out of business.

Klamath Tear-Down: Trust the Cost-Benefit Analysis

(Chronicle map)

California has dire need for both water and electricity. Hydroelectric dams provide both, and do so without producing carbon emissions. One would be hard pressed to find a more beneficial example of human engineering.

At first blush it doesn't make sense that four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River will be torn down.

the largest dam-removal project in U.S. history is expected to begin in California’s far north next year.

The first of four aging dams on the Klamath River, the 250-mile waterway that originates in southern Oregon’s towering Cascades and empties along the rugged Northern California coast, is on track to come down in fall 2023. Two others nearby and one across the state line will follow.

Environmentalists and fishermen are eagerly anticipating the restoration of the Klamath chinook salmon run, which once totalled in the hundreds of thousands but is now 10% of that number. But the principal reason for the tear-down is that the cost of maintaining aging dams exceeds the benefit of electricity generation, and "the dams are not used for irrigation, municipal water or flood control."

The plan to raze the dams is the product of at least 20 years of debate over what to do with the river’s old and increasingly problematic infrastructure.

Owned by power company PacifiCorp, a subsidiary of billionaire Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, the dams have long needed major upgrades, including fish ladders, which are believed to cost more than the dams’ worth as hydroelectric assets...

Despite the cost-benefit analysis, some residents are reluctant "to surrender any power source and [have] less water available for fighting wildfires." We just have to trust that Warren Buffett's company knows what it's doing, a good bet based on Mr. Buffett's past record of determining value.

Related: in 2018 Stanford University brought together environmental groups and hydropower interests, who are known for their vehement disagreements, to discuss how to generate more electricity while improving the health of rivers. They already can point to some successes.

Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May

Foster City Lagoon on Tuesday, January 11th

It's a goal, not a resolution

A modest exercise goal since the beginning of the year has been to take at least 10,000 steps each day. That's a little over four miles, which means a minimum outdoors walk of three miles plus a pedestrian (!) activity like shopping.

Hitting the target this week has been a strain because breathing has been difficult. In decades past I enjoyed the sweet smell of operating fireplaces, but late-onset asthma has quelled that pleasure. Before setting out I pack the emergency inhaler and check the air quality: [bold added]

Air quality across the Bay Area was “moderate” to “unhealthy” Thursday morning due to a high-pressure system trapping pollutants in the air over the region, meteorologists said.

The high-pressure system that brought sunny skies and seasonable weather to the Bay Area this week has also made the air stagnant, meteorologists said. A temperature inversion is to blame.

That’s when the air closest to the ground is cooler than higher elevations, allowing fine particles from car exhaust and fireplaces to stay trapped at the ground level.

Aaron Richardson, a spokesperson with the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, said poorer air quality levels at this time of year weren’t unusual.

He said people using their fireplaces is the biggest source of fine particle pollution.

The Bay Area received a lot of rain in the past two months that helped clear the air, he said.

“But now with this high-pressure system, pollution is building up a little bit,” Richardson said.

San Mateo County banned the addition of wood-burning fireplaces in 2015. The silver lining is that our two grandfathered fireplaces, which we haven't used this century due to allergies, could be a desirable feature to a prospective buyer.

Well, enough musing about future real estate values. Time to put on the walking shoes to try to extend that future a little longer.

Apple Woods

Conservation Intl: "Mangrove forests cover just 0.1
percent of the planet’s surface but store up to 10
times more carbon per hectare than terrestrial forests."

Apple is planting forests to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere:

The tech giant, Conservation International and Goldman Sachs have launched a $200 million Restore Fund meant to remove "at least" 1 million metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year by investing in forest restoration projects...

The firm wasn't shy about its dependence on this project. It estimated that it would only cut 75 percent of its emissions by 2030 through improvements to products and the supply chain, and carbon capture would be necessary for the rest.

Comments:

1) Normally your humble blogger looks askance at projects that stray far afield from a company's line of business. However, a successful company like Apple is allowed some leeway. Besides a $200 million investment represents only .01% of Apple's market capitalization.

2) Apple can forecast that nine years from now it will significantly fall short of its carbon-neutral goal. That's confident planning.

3) I worked in a vertically integrated (planting trees, harvesting, saw mill operations) forest-products company for five years and learned how a well-managed operation can be both profitable and sustainable. And that was before the benefits of carbon-capture became important.

4) Many environmentalists have realized from years of wildfires that the philosophy of keeping human beings away is not the best way to preserve nature. Apple wants to invest in "working" forests, in keeping with its history of practical environmentalism.

OK, Don't Listen to the Car Guy Who 's in the Top Two

Green enough: our 2018 RAV4 hybrid has a range of 400 mi.

In a largely overlooked speech from last December Toyota President Akio Toyoda derided the"excessive hype" over electric vehicles: [bold added]

advocates failed to consider the carbon emitted by generating electricity and the costs of an EV transition.

Toyota President Akio Toyoda said Japan would run out of electricity in the summer if all cars were running on electric power. The infrastructure needed to support a fleet consisting entirely of EVs would cost Japan between ¥14 trillion and ¥37 trillion, the equivalent of $135 billion to $358 billion, he said...

In a country such as Japan that gets most of its electricity from burning coal and natural gas, EVs don’t help the environment, Mr. Toyoda said. “The more EVs we build, the worse carbon dioxide gets,” he said.

He said he feared government regulations would make cars a “flower on a high summit”—out of reach for the average person.

With models like the Prius, Toyota is a leader in hybrid cars, which combine a gasoline engine with an electric motor and can be refueled at traditional gas stations. It doesn’t sell pure battery EVs for the mass market in the U.S. or Japan, although it does have a model that runs on a hydrogen-powered fuel cell.

California has banned the sale of gasoline-powered cars after 2035. Also, California EV's will charge overnight using electricity from renewable sources, which are planned to power 100% of the grid by 2045. Therefore, the thinking goes, that unlike Japan recharging car batteries overnight will not cause CO2 emissions to spike.

Your humble blogger believes that 100% dependence on solar and wind power is nuts. Single sourcing of electricity and transportation systems should not be on notoriously unsteady renewable energy, especially during extreme weather events that knocked out power during the California wildfires and the Texas freeze.

Battery technology is improving rapidly, but it's not at the point where we can pull the plug on the oil and gas that run the vast majority of our cars and power plants. (For an example of how well government predicts construction of technologically advanced infrastructure, see California's high-speed rail fiasco.)

Well, there's no need for me to get worked up. When the conversion happens, I'll either be dead, too old to drive, or too addled to care.

Comforted by Limitation

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek reflects upon the "deeply strange" nature of carbon- or radioactive-dating. [bold added]

What makes radioactive nuclei such ideal clocks is that they are reliably unreliable. An isotope’s half-life can be determined accurately by observing lots of decays. For instance, radioactive carbon, which is used to date organic material, has a half-life of about 5,700 years. But it’s impossible to predict when any individual nucleus will decay. In fact, an individual nucleus is a kind of anti-clock: It does not register the passage of time at all. There is no observable difference between old and young nuclei.They remain ideally young, we might say, until they suddenly and explosively die. By monitoring decays within this homogeneous population we measure time statistically, with confidence.

(Graphic from toppr)

In other words scientists can very accurately predict the behavior of a large group of atoms but cannot tell how a single atom will behave.

Of course, it's very easy to analogize this principle of quantum physics to the science of human behavior.

The study of the behavior of groups and whole societies has made significant advancements, but the Holy Grail seems to be predicting how an individual will behave; an immense amount of data has already been stored about each human being who owns a cellphone.

From his eye movements, demographic characteristics, and social networks it would be logical that an algorithm could predict what a person was going to buy, who he would vote for, and whom he will marry.

But hooray for free will, which the ancients said limits the omniscience of a Deity or which moderns might say will constrain the emerging singularity.

If scientists are having difficulty predicting the decay of a single carbon atom, then they are sure to have trouble with a human being. Despite my admiration for science and progress, I am comforted by that idea.

The Sand Pebbles (Science)

Front-page article in the Tuesday fishwrap - "Conquer climate change by sprinkling pebbles on tropical beaches."

Papakolea Beach, Big Island (Chron photo)
Let's pound some green sand.

Eric Matzner, who co-founded the nonprofit Project Vesta this year, intends to mine tons of a soft, crumbly green volcanic stone called olivine, grind it into pebbles and spread it on shorelines, coves and beaches, where the wave action will weather it down like a river sculpts gravel.

Scientists say the process of erosion chemically alters the acidic molecules in seawater and converts carbon dioxide into bicarbonate, thereby taking the heat-trapping gases out of circulation and reversing acidification, one of the primary concerns of global warming. The more the rock breaks down, the more carbon dioxide is taken out of the sea.

It is a natural process that is believed to occur faster in the tropics, where warmer temperatures help the dissolution process. That explains Matzner’s desire to do a trial run there.

The potential sounds almost too good to be true:

“There is enough olivine to remove all human emissions, ever,” Matzner said. “We think this is a viable method to remove CO2 on a large scale.”

Some conservatives believe that the whole climate-change/global-warming brouhaha is a progressive plot to have government seize control of the economy.

Well, I don't believe it; given the stakes--the fate of the world--environmentalists should be on board with a solution like olivine pebbles or a "global sunshade" despite some side effects, e.g., a decline in agricultural production ("For agriculture, it might not work that well, but there are other sectors of the economy that could potentially benefit substantially.")

Eliminating fossil fuels by fiat, not by choice, will shrink the economy by $trillions. The magic-bullet solutions will "only" cost in the low $billions and maybe even anti-warmists would be willing to give them a try. The goal is saving the world, not to destroy capitalism, right?