Green Cars...

Many people are attracted to either all-electric or hybrid cars because they believe they are helping the environment by doing so – they are “green” cars.  There are other reasons as well, but for many buyers of “green” cars, their green-ness is the major factor.

However, when you take into account the additional carbon footprint and other pollutants produced in the manufacture of both hybrid and all-electric cars, and the indirect carbon footprint and pollution increase from all-electric cars (because they're recharged with electricity produced most often in a non-nuclear power plant), then they don't look quite so green.  Over the average lifetime of a green car, both the carbon footprint and the pollution are worse than the average gasoline-powered car – and there's nothing on the horizon that would change that.  Massive conversion of power plants to nuclear or fusion power would help a lot, but that's not very likely.  Massive conversion to wind or solar doesn't work because there is no known way to store power produced during the daytime for use at night.  Lithium mining is notoriously polluting and energy intensive, but no replacement technology for lithium-ion batteries is even in the laboratory, much less in production.

None of this information is a secret, nor is it hidden or hard to access.  Do a little googling and you can find all you want.  Green cars are a myth (albeit a popular myth!).  They really should be called brown cars.

Bjorn Lomberg (of The Skeptical Environmentalist fame) has a nice summary of this in today's Wall Street Journal)...

An Environmentalist Discovers Science...

Fascinating speech via reader and friend Doug W., who says:

I have never been quite sure what to think about the GM food scare, but in general my BS detectors were vibrating. Fascinating. Of course, his climate change stuff is still off, but it’s still worth a listen.

Transcript (a little different than the actual speech) available here...

More on the Manzanita...

Larry E. writes after reading my post about the $200G manzanita transplantation:

A little follow up to our Manzanita story.

Part of the problem with this event is that it presupposes that somehow this is "The Best Time in History" (tm) (I swear I'm gonna trademark that someday). Somehow the species that are here now, are optimal, that the temperature now, is optimal, the sea levels are optimal, that somehow NOW is a better than all the times in the past or any potential future. That if a species goes extinct NOW, it is somehow more important than all the species that came before might come into existence.

The reality is that this NOW is a tiny, tiny blip in the history of the life on earth, the planet, the universe, or even just human history. Far more species have gone extinct than exist. Extinction is a normal, natural occurrence and if the Manzanita goes "extinct in the wild" whatever that really means, something else more suitable will eventually fill that ecological nitch. This give and take in nature has done quite nicely over the history of the earth.

While I applaud efforts to collect, study and even store plants and seeds etc. for future reference, attempting to preserve every existing species in the wild is at best misguided and at worse driven by financial gain. Pointing at the impact of humans as if somehow human existence is not also natural and instead, unlike all other species on the planet, represents a scourge, seems a bizarre exercise in self-loathing by groups of people that like all of the rest of us fly airplanes, drive cars, live in houses, but apparently feel terribly guilty about their own personal existence or are being used by those that seek financial gain.

In terms of planetary impact, the difference between humans and other species is that we alone are able to recognize and analyze our behavior and make conscious adjustments. Where the field mouse population will reproduce and feed and grow until it consumes all of the available resources, until it the population is checked by starvation, felled disease or predation; humans alone make deliberate adjustments. Creating laws to clean up rivers, protecting vast areas of land, treating their own waste products. Packing out our own waste from wilderness areas is the rule for humans, where the field mouse leaves its feces everywhere. Replanting forests where tree killing beetles won't stop until the last tree is gone. Locusts will destroy anything edible before they move on.

Lets stop with the self-loathing and instead start celebrating ourselves and our accomplishments.

I certainly agree with Larry's main point: that it's crazy to think of this moment in planetary history as somehow representing an ideal that must not change.  This is a logical fallacy (a mistake in thinking process) that many observers have noted, but it persists.  Most people have little sense or knowledge even of human history, much less the much broader palette of planetary history.

I suspect I would depart from Larry a bit when it comes to conservation: when it's clear that mankind's activities are needlessly imperiling a species, and when the mitigation can be done for a reasonable cost, I'm all for species preservation.  For example, many plant and animal species on Hawai'i are endangered for no reason other than mankind's meddling, and they can be preserved at a cost I believe is reasonable (thought others might disagree).  On the other hand, preserving a desert lizard subspecies (that wasn't even a subspecies until environmentalists identified that as a tactic) at a cost of forbiding all development in the Anza Borrego desert – that's a questionable cause with an unreasonable price tag.

In other words, I'd like to see some balance in these decisions.  How useful or beautiful or genetically important is the species in question?  Is it actually a genetically distinct species, with important differences from its nearest relative?  How much would it cost (either in direct cost, or indirect costs of missed development opportunities) to preserve the species?  This calls for an informed judgement call – something that bureaucrats in general and politicians in particular are horribly bad at.  A structure much like a court, with appointed judges, would, I suspect, be the most likely human organization to make those judgements wisely.  A Supreme Conservation Court, if you will...

Move a Bush? That'll be 200 Gs, Please...

Reader Larry E. passes along this story about $205,075 of stimulus money being used to transplant a manzanita bush.  He comments:

Well, here is our fine government at work. Hundreds of thousands to move and "nurture" a single plant. Paying people 10s of thousands to monitor it?? REALLY?? There sure are a lot of environmental groups making tons of money off this kind of thing. No wonder they run around trying to "protect" every species of plant and animal. They have a financial interest in seeing things classified as endangered or protected etc.

I've seen references before to this sort of bonanza for environmentalist groups (a key Obama/Democratic Party constituency).  What I haven't seen, though, is a rigorous accounting of such shenanigans.  I'll call it an unproven likelihood for now.

I dug a bit into the subject of the article Larry sent along, mainly because (as my long time readers will already know) I'm quite partial to manzanitas in general.  My yard is chock full of them, with beautiful specimens of all four of our local species.

The manzanita in question is Arctostaphylos hookeri franciscana, a subspecies of Arctostaphylos hookeri.  It is readily available from commercial nurseries in several horticultural varieties, and is a commonly used landscaping plant in California.  It's also a denizen of a long roster of botanical gardens.  It is not “extinct” as most of us understand that word, as many thousands of individual plants are alive and well.  However, it is “extinct in the wild”, meaning that there are no known naturally occurring specimens.

Or at least there weren't until 2009:

Native San Francisco manzanita bush believed to be extinct in the wild for more than 60 years has been discovered in the Presidio surrounded by concrete and highway traffic.

The wild specimen of Franciscan manzanita was found by a San Francisco biologist who noticed the flowering plant as he was driving in his car.

News of the discovery was like a jolt of fertilizer for local botanists, who see it as an important opportunity to reintroduce to the local ecosystem a long lost part of the city's natural history.

"It's like the unicorn of San Francisco," said Daniel Gluesenkamp, who was returning home from a climate change conference in Sonoma on Oct. 16 when he spotted the plant after crossing the Golden Gate Bridge.

"It's a rare second chance to do it right this time ... to relink the chain of life that we broke," said Gluesenkamp, the director of habitat restoration at Audubon Canyon Ranch.

The ground-hugging shrub, uniquely adapted to San Francisco's natural sand dunes, wind and fog, has not been seen growing in the wild since 1947. That's when the last known patch was bulldozed at the old Laurel Hill Cemetery, which was paved over for homes and businesses.

Just before the bulldozers rumbled through, local botanist James Roof saved two specimens, which have been kept alive at Berkeley's Tilden Botanical Garden.

The plant, Arctostaphylos franciscana, has been reproduced and is sometimes sold as an ornamental plant, but experts consider the nursery variety to be a hybrid genetically unsuitable for reintroduction into the wild, as different from the original species as a German shepherd is to a wolf.

Well, that's a bit different, isn't it?  Maybe.  The assertion is that the commercial varieties are genetic hybrids, and “unsuitable for reintroduction”.  I didn't find any other support for that assertion anywhere, though in general the scientific papers that would support it aren't openly published on the web (dang it!).  So I just don't know if there really is an objective, science-based reason for extreme preservation measures for the individual plant discovered.

But even if there were such reasons, the price tag for transplantation (or “translocation” as the scientists called it) seems rather large.  Were there alternatives?  Well, of course there were.  At the very least, cloning the plant would have been very inexpensive – cloning a woody plant is generally quite easy, and has been a common practice for well over a century, by taking “cuttings” and rooting them.  And taking cuttings is the standard procedure for propagating manzanitas.  For a few hundred dollars, the scientists could have had hundreds of plants that were genetically identical to the individual plant in question (and I'm willing to bet that already they've done this along with moving the mother plant).  So the scientific justification – preserving the genome – could have been satisfied for much less money.  Any remaining reasons are, I think, totally sentimental.  And that's rather a lot of my tax dollars to spend for such sentiment...

The conservative blogosphere seems to have gone a little crazy over this story.  A google search found hundreds of hits, most in that world, and generally reacting much as Larry did.  However, I did find some mentions in the left-leaning blogsphere, and they were all rather negative about it as well.  It seems that the “optics” of this look bad to just about everybody...

Update:

Ah, I just found another reference (PDF) – possibly the original source for this story.  An excerpt:

FREY, M.*¹ and CHASSE, M.^2
1Presidio Trust, 34 Graham Street., San Francisco, CA 94129
²National Park Service, Fort Mason, Building 201, San Francisco, CA 94123

Saving the Franciscan Manzanita – a Plant Extinct in the Wild

In October 2009, the exciting discovery of an individual plant of Arctostaphylos franciscana (Franciscan manzanita) was made in the Doyle Drive corridor of the San Francisco Presidio. This discovery was significant because the Franciscan manzanita has been considered extinct in the wild for over sixty years. This discovery created the opportunity to bring Arctostaphylos franciscana back into the wild as a viable, reproducing, and self-sustaining species. Construction for the highway in the area of discovery was scheduled to begin in January 2010 leaving only twelve weeks to save the plant without delaying construction. Representatives from the Presidio Trust, the National Park Service, CalTrans, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, California Department of Fish and Game, and the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy (five government agencies and one non-profit) all met and drafted a plan to save the plant. The plan had three primary objectives; first, to preserve for posterity the individual (mother plant) discovered in October 2009; second, to allow for the establishment of offspring from the mother plant (clones from rooted cuttings and rooted layers, as well as plants raised from seedlings) both in the wild through reintroduction and ecological restoration and through ex situ preservation of the mother plant offspring in botanical gardens and special nursery environments so that it can serve as an on-going source of genetic material for this purpose; and third, to propagate other known genotypes of the Franciscan manzanita so that at least three wild, self-sustaining populations of the Franciscan manzanita can be established utilizing this diversity of genotypes to promote the long term viability of this species in the wild. Generally, biodiversity conservation strives to protect rare species in situ, that is, in historic wild locations whenever possible. Following this principle, the ideal approach would be to preserve the mother plant in its current location. However, because retention at the discovery location was deemed infeasible because of undue risks associated with that location, the mother plant was translocated to an environmentally appropriate location within the Presidio. Between the discovery and construction in the area seeds, cuttings, and the plant itself were all salvaged. On January 23rd the 10-ton mother plant (with root ball) was moved to a new home in the Presidio.

This confirms a couple of things I guessed at earlier.  Note that the authors are from the Presido Trust and the National Park Service – both organizations are tightly aligned with the environmentalist movement (in fact, they're often accused of being “infected” with environmentalists in need of subsidies).  It's safe to assume that both of them are at least empathetic to the environmentalist mindset, and it's quite likely that they both are active environmentalists (in the modern, politicized sense of that word).  This is basically confirmed by what they state is their first objective in saving this specimen: “to preserve for posterity the individual (mother plant)”.  That is precisely the sentimentalist motive I mentioned earlier.  Their second objective is cloning, and their third is reintroduction.  Their first objective I reject as something that should be funded with my tax dollars (but if private individuals wanted to spend their money on it, I'd be glad to see it); the second and third objectives I would gladly see my tax dollars spent on.

Quote of the Day...

From an interview with Roger Scruton in the Wall Street Journal:

Many of the people who brand themselves as climatologists are not in the first rank of scientific minds, you know? I'm not really entitled to say that. But you do have a sense that these are guys who are not particularly good at mathematical modeling, they're not particularly good at computer science, they're not particularly good at physics, not particularly good at chemistry, but who put all those together . . . [and] become an 'expert.'

The interview is wide-ranging and quite interesting for more reasons than just the quote above.  Read the whole thing...