Carbon Tax: The Lesser Of Two Evils

In a speech last Thursday, Tillerson said a carbon tax would be a "more direct, a more transparent and a more effective approach" than many of the current plans for curbing greenhouse gases, including the cap-and-trade approach favored by President-elect Barack Obama.

Tillerson: Embracing a C02 tax?

In supporting the carbon tax, Tillerson "has become an unlikely member of a club that includes former Vice President Al Gore, consumer advocate Ralph Nader and President-elect Barack Obama's designated head of the National Economic Council, Larry Summers," the Wall Street Journal noted.

In point of fact, Tillerson hasn't joined any club.

Like many CEOs these days in energy-producing industries, he's just afraid his company will soon be hit with a tidal wave of new regulation to curb greenhouse gas emissions — regulations that will destroy trillions of dollars of U.S. wealth.

"My greatest concern is that policymakers will attempt to mandate or ordain solutions that are doomed to fail," Tillerson said. Like cap-and-trade. Or new Environmental Protection Agency rules that essentially seek to regulate everything in our economy that uses carbon-based fuel. Since 85% of our energy comes from carbon-based fuel, that means the entire economy.

Tillerson understands the political situation. A new president and an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress mean some form of draconian global warming action is likely, and soon — despite the fact that the Earth, rather than heating up, has been cooling for at least seven years, according to the four major global temperature data sets.

Tillerson would be a fool and probably in breach of his fiduciary responsibility to his shareholders and employees if he were to ignore this. So he has supported a carbon tax — which economists agree would be the most fair, least costly and most efficient way of reducing global C02 output.

It's a sad commentary indeed when CEOs have to support things that aren't in their interest, solely to survive. That's certainly the case with global warming.

Unfortunately, many of the proposals now being considered to cut C02 and other greenhouse gas emissions would entail enormous costs with very little benefit.

Take last fall's Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPA) by the EPA, which the new president has vowed to implement. ANPA sounds innocent. But cutting C02 output by 70%, as Congress has mandated, won't be easy. The costs will be enormous and could wreck our economy.

According to Global Insight, ANPA could cost the U.S. nearly $7 trillion in real output by 2030, or about $650 billion a year. Meanwhile, 800,000 U.S. jobs would be lost annually for several years.

This is why Tillerson says he supports a carbon tax — not because he's suddenly seen the light on global warming. A carbon tax is the least damaging, least costly alternative available for cutting carbon-based fuel use.

Other things are at work, as well. Last year, Tillerson faced a challenge to his position as chairman of Exxon Mobil from the Rockefeller family, an Exxon Mobil shareholder that didn't like Tillerson's climate-change skepticism.

No doubt it's not lost on Tillerson that Sen. Jay Rockefeller has just been named to head the Senate's Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, and will be in his face very soon.

For the record, as the world shivers through a second frigid winter in a row, the U.S. is already cutting back on its CO2 output. According to Energy Department data, from 2000 to 2006, per capita output of C02 in the U.S. plunged 4.7%. Meanwhile, it increased by 3% in Europe. Yet Europe's energy taxes are five to 10 times what they are in the U.S.

Hmm. Just a thought, but maybe we don't need higher carbon taxes here at all.

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Venomous mammal caught on camera

By Rebecca Morelle
Science reporter, BBC News

See the footage of the rare, venomous mammal

Rare footage of one of the world's most strange and elusive mammals has been captured by scientists.

Large, and with a long, thin snout, the Hispaniolan solenodon resembles an overgrown shrew; it can inject passing prey with a venom-loaded bite.

Little is known about the creature, which is found in the Caribbean, but it is under threat from deforestation, hunting and introduced species.

Researchers say conservation efforts are now needed.

The mammal was filmed in the summer of 2008 during a month-long expedition to the Dominican Republic - one of only two countries where this nocturnal, insect-eating animal (Solenodon paradoxus) can be found (the other is Haiti).

It is an amazing creature - it is one of the most evolutionary distinct mammals in the world Dr Sam Turvey, ZSL

The researchers from the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust and the Ornithological Society of Hispaniola were able to take measurements and DNA from the creature before it was released.

Dr Richard Young, from Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, said: "My colleagues were excited and thrilled when they found it in the trap.

"But despite a month's worth of trapping effort, they only ever caught a single individual."

Specialised teeth

The Hispaniolan solenodon is one of the creatures highlighted by the Zoological Society of London's (ZSL) Edge of Existence programme, which focuses its efforts on conservation plans for animals that are both endangered and evolutionarily distinctive.

Dr Sam Turvey, a ZSL researcher involved with the programme, told BBC News: "It is an amazing creature - it is one of the most evolutionary distinct mammals in the world.

"Along with the other species of solenodon, which is found in Cuba (Solenodon cubanus), it is the only living mammal that can actually inject venom into their prey through specialised teeth.

"The fossil record shows that some other now-extinct mammal groups also had so-called dental venom delivery systems. So this might have been a more general ancient mammalian characteristic that has been lost in most modern mammals, and is only retained in a couple of very ancient lineages."

A population was discovered living in a remote corner of Haiti

Dr Turvey and other scientists working for the Edge programme recently discovered a population of solenodons living in a remote corner of Haiti.

The researcher said that the team was surprised to find them; previously it had been feared that the creatures had become extinct in this country because of extensive deforestation, recently introduced mongoose and dogs, and hunting by humans for food.

He said: "They are still incredibly vulnerable and fragile. So it is really important to get back out there to work how how these animals are surviving."

Conservation efforts are now needed in both Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the teams believe, but the first step would be to find out more about the animal.

Dr Young said: "We know little about its ecology, its behaviour, its population status, its genetics - and without that knowledge base it is really difficult to design effective conservation."

The research will be undertaken by ZSL's Edge programme, Durrell, the Ornithological Society of Hispaniola, the Audubon Society of Haiti, and the Dominican Republic's National Zoological Park and Agency for Protected Areas and Biodiversity.

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Croplands May Wither as Global Warming Worsens

Climate models predict that the hottest seasons on record will become the norm by the end of the century--an outcome that bodes ill for feeding the world

By David Biello

FOOD CRISIS: By 2040, global warming will heat up the growing season enough to begin to reduce crop production.

Note: Click here to enlarge image.
Courtesy of Science/AAAS

In summer 2003, more than 52,000 Europeans died from heat-related ills, 30,000 in France alone, during an unrelenting heat wave that featured temperatures 6.5 degrees Fahrenheit (3.6 degrees Celsius) higher than normal. Crops also suffered, with corn production down by 30 percent and wheat by 21 percent, among other foodstuffs. And a similar hot spell in Ukraine in 1972 led to a wheat shortage that prompted that staple's prices to more than triple by 1974. But even without record-breaking heat, recent years have seen food riots from Bangladesh to Haiti as world agriculture was pushed to the breaking point by a combination of greater demand for food, biofuels and poor weather.

Such disruptions in the world's food supply may become even more the norm by the end of this century, according to a new analysis published today in Science. Climate modeler David Battisti of the University of Washington in Seattle and food security expert Rosamond Naylor of Stanford University used the results of 23 climate models to determine that there is a more than 90 percent chance—in other words, it is very likely—that the lowest growing season temperatures in the tropics and subtropics by the end of the century will be higher than the highest temperatures at present.

That area includes the southern U.S., Central America, southern Europe, central Asia, northern Australia and all of Africa, according to Battisti. "Although it had not been calculated before," he says, "it was not surprising to find that for most of the tropics and subtropics, the future summer temperatures would be out of bounds compared to what we have ever experienced."

Planning meetings for the Global Seed Vault in Norway spawned the idea of looking at average summer temperatures, which climate models can project relatively reliably and which have a large impact on crop yields—between 2.5 and 16 percent less wheat, corn, soy or other crops are produced for every 1.8–degree F (1–degree C) rise. "The impacts we will see on yield, combined with a growing population that depends greatly on agriculture for food and income, will demand a profound level of adaptation, which might include moving hundreds of millions of people," Battisti says.

According to the projections, the temperate zones, like most of the continental U.S., will also be affected. "By the end of the century, however, the seasonal growing temperature is likely to exceed the hottest season on record in temperate countries (equivalent to what France experienced in 2003), and the future for agriculture in these regions will become equally daunting," the researchers wrote.

To date, concerns about climate change's impact on agriculture have focused on drought—another likely outcome of warming world. As a result, plant scientists have researched ways to develop drought-resistant strains of various crops, such as a variety of corn that agriculture giant Monsanto Company and chemical company BASF have submitted to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for approval.

Funding for such agricultural research in general has been dwindling in recent years, according to the Washington, D.C.–based International Food Policy Research Institute.

"Current levels of agricultural research are not adequate to help developing countries to adapt to climate change," says IFPRI water resources expert Claudia Ringler. But "the dire picture in the paper assumes no adaptation. Adaptation will certainly happen. Farmers in Russia will change the time of wheat planting [for example], and may switch to a different crop if the hot summer of today becomes the norm of the future."

Battisti and Naylor, however, assumed greenhouse gas emissions lower than the present output and the fact that more carbon dioxide (CO₂), the most common greenhouse gas, will boost plant growth may not help. The forecasted CO₂ boost—as much as 10 percent—in crop growth will be more than offset by the 20 to 40 percent drop due to higher temperatures alone—and will be further exacerbated by any drying, Battisti warns.

That means the future of agriculture as the climate changes could be even worse than this prediction—and that's before taking into account other factors such as the effect of pests.

"We want to look at the impact of climate change on the distribution of pests and pathogens that affect crops," Battisti says, "starting with maize in Africa." With three billion people living in the affected regions, at least a billion of whom are already malnourished, figuring out how to adapt agriculture to global warming couldn't be more urgent.

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