Should We Sequester Carbon?

When people talk about "clean coal" (for example, President Obama) they're really talking about carbon sequestration, a geoengineering approach for the long-term storage of carbon dioxide. Let's see if this is a good or even practical idea.

Here's a simple model taken from Nikiforoff (1959). The dark lines show combustion of fossil fuels and the sequestration of atmospheric CO2. These are industrial, capital intensive activities that work in parallel with natural processes that deal with atmospheric CO2.

QUESTION: Why do we have to rely on carbon sequestration when there is a perfectly good process already in place called the natural carbon cycle? Natural systems already do a better job of carbon fixation. Living matter converts CO2 in the atmosphere into organic compounds (usually sugars) through photosynthesis. Living matter also returns CO2 to the atmosphere through ecosystem respiration. When living matter dies it turns into humus through the process of humification (the stuff you eat with pita bread at a Middle Eastern restaurant is hummus) and then returns to the earth through carbon fixation.

ANSWER: Neoliberal economists have convinced us that capital can always be substituted for natural resources. Here's an example involving natural ecosystem services where it doesn't work. The natural carbon cycle is in equilibrium. Data from the 1990's suggests that we would need to sequester about 6.4 Gt/yr of carbon to bring the systems back into balance--every year for the rest of eternity even if we cap emissions at today's levels (if we don't cap emissions, the 6.4 Gt/yr number will increase exponentially). Does anyone other than a neoliberal economist think this is a practical idea?

A somewhat better response is the UN REDD program (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation). Unfortunately, reforestation competes with other land uses: food production, livestock grazing and living space for further economic growth (for example, parking lots so that the projected world population of between 5 billion and 14 billion people in 2100 can all have three automobiles and a place to part them).

A better response would be to reduce exponential growth rates and give the environment some time to recover and give us some time to figure out how to live in balance with the biosphere (sometimes called the precautionary principle). The alternative response is to look at sequestration as a marginal part of of a "policy wedge" approach, which would seem to be the way the Obama administration is going. If they play the Stabilization Wedge Game they have until 2056 to get back to 2006 emission levels and then from there get to sustainable emission levels. Do you think they will be successful?

Should We Control Direct-to-Consumer Advertising of Pharmaceuticals?

The brief answer, following up on an earlier post, is NO! We need to be more concerned about the promotional impact of free-samples. Free-samples, handed out by physicians, hook both the patient and the physician on future, insurance-supported payments for expensive patented vs. less expensive generic drugs.

If you're interested in how the promotional process works and how important free samples are to kicking off a promotional campaign, you can read my recently published paper here (WARNING: it's technical and statistical).

The Gold Mine at Goldman Sachs

On the PBS News Hour, Paul Solman just completed a two-part series "Making Sen$e: Inside Golman Sachs, Record Profits." Some interesting points were made: (1) contrary to CEO Lloyd Blankfein's testimony before Congress, GS is making most of it's money out of its own account (about 10% of its business is reported as generated from client funds), (2) which raises the possibility of front running (using advance knowledge of client trades to make advance purchases of it's own securities), (3) which makes me wonder why anyone would put their money with GS and (2) why the Fed thought they might qualify as a "lending institution" for the TARP program?

Oh, wait! Two prior Treasury Secretaries, Robert Rubin and Hank Paulson were Goldman employees before their brief stint as federal government employees. Does it make your stomach a little queasy?

Feedbacks From Ecosystem Pressure

Here's a quote from the IPCC WG2 TAR Chapter 5:

The Earth is being subjected to many human-induced and natural

changes, often referred to as global change. These changes

include pressures from increased demand for resources driven

by economic growth, increased human population, land-use

and land-cover change, the accelerated rate of anthropogenic

nitrogen production and other air pollutants, and urbanization

and industrialization; resulting fossil fuel emissions contribute

to a discernible impact on global climate

The model used by the IPCC to understand global change is the State-Pressure-Response (SPR) model from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD):

In the SPR model, "state" refers to the current state of the ecosystem, "pressure" includes direct and indirect human pressure and "adaption" includes automatic ecosystem adaptions and deliberate human adaptions to changes.

What I would add to this model is a feedback from "state" to "pressure", that is, if ecosystems deteriorate, it will have an impact on human-induced pressures (imagine a Malthusian catastrophe where population growth outruns the ability of ecosystems to support the population--the IPCC has been careful not to introduce catastrophes into their modeling so the feedback loop is missing).

To make the SPR model a little more specific, substitute "economic growth" for "pressure," ecosystem "Biodiversity" for state and limit consideration to "Economic Responses." According to the IPCC, economic growth reduces biodiversity. However, biodiversity is needed for economic growth (consider the effects of soil degradation on agricultural productivity) even though ecosystems are almost never included as an input to economic growth models. The questions is, what will be the economic response? Physical capital cannot be substituted for ecosystem services (tried and failed in Biosphere 2). The impact will probably not be positive!

What is the current status of ecosystems? The Living Planet Index developed by WWF shows that after a peak in the mid-1970's (during the OPEC oil crisis and resulting environmental response), biodiversity has been declining. What's your best guess about when we'll see the economic response, if it hasn't happened already.