Isaac Laquedem

Your neodymium footprint; or, how wind power despoils China

Yet another encounter with the ubiquitous phrase "carbon footprint" (hopelessly vieux jeu) and a chance remark by Mrs. Laquedem spurred me to consider the effects of humankind on the other ninety-plus naturally occurring chemical elements.  Two years ago I wrote about China using its near-monopoly over the element neodymium as an instrument of foreign policy, so let's start there.

Neodymium is one of the lanthanide series of metallic elements, commonly called "rare earths" although they are neither rare nor earthy.  Neodymium's main use is as an ingredient in powerful magnets, including those in earphones.  If you're listening to your iPod while you read this, you have some neodymium in your ears right now.

China has been the only supplier of neodymium from 1998 when a rare-earth mine in Mountain Pass, California closed for environmental reasons (here's some talk about that); the California mine reopened a few months ago.

Mining and refining the rare earth metals is a messy business:  Bloomberg reports that China's rare earth mines produce five times more waste gas a year than all of the mines and oil refiners in the United States, and that waste gas is part of our neodymium footprint.

What else is in our neodymium footprint?  Electric cars, for one thing; a Toyota Prius contains about 2 pounds of neodymium.  Wind power, for another; Vestas uses 180 pounds of neodymium in its 3 megawatt wind turbine.  Vestas may be efficient: The USGS, relying on an outside source from 2008, said that a wind turbine uses about 1 tonne of neodymium for each megawatt of generating capacity.

One metric ton ('tonne") of neodymium is enough for 1100 Priuses -- but then Toyota sells 500,000 Priuses a year, so it uses about 450 tonnes of neodymium a year, about 1/40 of the world's annual production.  Neodymium is also in the Chevrolet Volt engine as well as in its Bose speaker system.

So who knew?  When we drive our electric cars through the gorge and look at the wind farms, somewhere in China a hillside is crying because we stepped on it with our neodymium footprint.

Who knew? Many of our neighbors drink fluoridated water already

The controversy over fluoridating our water sparked me to check into my belief in one of our prevailing local myths: that fluoridated water, like salted streets and corrupt elections, is something that we'd have to go east to find.  After a few moments' research, I came across this map, which states that the water is already fluoridated in Forest Grove and large portions of Beaverton and Aloha.

Who knew?  I'll have to taste my ale more closely to see if I can tell the difference between one location and another.

The Feds won't regulate CO2 from biomass plants. Should Oregon?

Here's another interesting measure, also from our good friends on the Oregon House Interim Committee on Rules.  It's House Bill 2440.  Just one page long, it exempts from state greenhouse gas regulation certain air contamination sources.  The sources it would exempt are those that use "straw, forest slash, wood waste or other waste from farm or forest land, nonpetroleum plant-based biomass or animal-based biomass" to produce "thermal energy, electricity, or biofuels." ("Thermal energy" is a fancy word for "heat.")  The state could continue to regulate greenhouse gases from these sources only to the extent that the federal government requires it to do so.  The federal Environmental Protection Agency has put off for three years regulating greenhouse gas emissions from biomass plants, leaving the field open for the states.

The measure itself defines emissions from these facilities to be "carbon neutral emissions," regardless of whether they are actually carbon-neutral, a fine bit of artful phrasing.

The first question to ask when you read legislation is cui bono - who benefits?  I thought of several industries that might support this measure.  For example, a plant that produces and burns natural gas from cow manure would be protected from state greenhouse gas regulation.  So would a plant that burns forest slash, if it uses the energy to boil water or heat a building.  So, also, would woodstoves in private homes.  It's a measure that may have a worthy purpose, but that provides one more reason for presession measures to say who (not just what) proposed them, and at whose request.

Two biologists explain the push for Milwaukie light rail

This week's Economist reports that biologists are turning their attention to management, and in particular looking at how biochemistry and genetics affect how people work with one another.  Dr. Michael Zyphur (then of the National University of Singapore and now at the University of Melbourne) led a study of how testosterone is related to status and what the Economist calls the "collective effectiveness of groups."  (I think that means whether co-workers can actually get anything done.)  His team found that "the greater the mismatch between testosterone and status, the less effectively a group's member's cooperate," which in business means lower productivity, and thus lower income.

The article then discusses a study by Gad Saad and John Vongas of Concordia University (Montreal), which it sums up as follows:  "Men's testosterone levels responded precisely to changes in how they perceived their status.  Testosterone shot up, for example, when they got behind the wheel of a sexy sports car and fell when they were made to drive a clunky family saloon car." 

It occurred to me that the results of Drs. Saad and Vongas explain why our local transit authorities like to spend money on trains and not on buses.  Trains are sexy; buses are clunky.  What's motivating our transit planners may not be nostalgia, or federal money, or construction contracts and union jobs for their friends, but plain old hormones.

Greenhouse gases: the White House turns a public report into a secret, sort of

This week, reports the New York Times, an internal White House document "came to light" that took issue with the conclusion of the Environmental Protection Agency that what the Times calls "climate-altering gases" and the rest of us call "greenhouse gases" are a threat to human health and welfare.  The document was marked "DELIBERATIVE - ATTORNEY CLIENT PRIVILEGE."  The right wing, personified in this instance by Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, says that this document proves that the EPA's proposed finding is based on politics and not on science -- why else would an internal White House document argue with the EPA's conclusion?  The director of EPA says that the document, which is not dated, is a summary of comments of other agencies mostly prepared under a Bush administration appointee.  Right and left both make much of this secret document, even though they argue to opposite conclusions about what it means.  The story has acquired the unavoidable "Memogate" tag.

The great secret about the secret document is that its contents were never much of a secret.  Much of the content comes from a November 28, 2008 letter from Shawne McGibbon of the Small Business Administration to the then-administrator of the EPA, which has been out in public for months.  Some of the comments might be fodder for late-night television, such as the one asserting that EPA's proposed regulations would impose a heavy regulatory burden on the 63,000 small-business dairy farms because of the methane from cows and ammonia from manure.  Others are more provocative, such as SBA's observation that, because carbon dioxide is relatively evenly distributed above the United States, the entire nation would either be in or out of compliance with any standards. 

The main lesson I draw from this is that the way that official Washington brings something to public attention is to say that it's secret.

More old news on global warming

Some time ago I noted that, despite the current administration's apparent belief that global warming through greenhouse gases is a recent and unproven theory, the magisterial 1967 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica had described the phenomenon.

I came across this interesting passage in another textbook:

The water-vapor content of the atmosphere varies and cannot surpass a certain amount.  But carbon dioxide has the same absorbing properties as water vapor, and in spite of the fact that it makes up only a very small part of the earth's atmosphere, Arrhenius believes that it has important climatic effects.  He concluded that if the quantity of it in the air were doubled the climate would be appreciably warmer, and that if half of it were removed the average temperature of the earth would fall.  Chamberlin has shown that there are reasons for believing that the amount of carbon dioxide has varied in long oscillations, and he suggested that this may be the explanation of the ice ages, with intervening warm epochs, which the middle latitudes have experienced.

So far so good, as no serious scientist doubts that the CO2 content of the atmosphere influences the climate.  (Arrhenius was a Swedish scientist who lived from 1959 to 1927, and published his theory about the influence of carbon dioxide on climate in 1896.)  The question is whether our industrial activities appreciably affect that content.  So let's continue with this textbook:

If the effect of carbon dioxide on the climate has been correctly estimated, its production by the recent enormous consumption of coal raises the interesting question whether man at last is not in this way seriously interfering with the cosmic processes.  At the present time about 1,000,000,000 tons of coal are mined and burned annually.  In order to burn 12 pounds of coal 32 pounds of oxygen are required, and the result of this combustion is 12+32=44 pounds of carbon dioxide.  Consequently, by the combustion of coal there is now annually produced by man about 3,670,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide.  On referring to the total amount of carbon dioxide now in the air, it is seen that at the present rate of combustion of coal it will be doubled in 800 years.  Consequently, there are grounds for believing that modern industry may have sensible climatic effects in a few centuries.

Two observations:  first, this is from a source even older than the 1967 Britannica.  It comes from the new and revised edition of An Introduction to Astronomy by Forest Ray Moulton (1872-1952), professor of astronomy at the University of Chicago.  The new and revised edition from which I quote was published in 1925; the first edition came out in 1905.

Second, coal consumption in the United States is now only 1,120,000,000 tons per year, about the same figure quoted in 1925.   Professor Moulton's figure for 1925 is, however, a worldwide figure, and today the world consumes about 6,300,000,000 tons of coal a year, which is about six times the 1925 consumption. 

It was warm out today, and it should be warmer tomorrow.

A Stanford student models the universe with rubber bands, and The Wall Street Journal notices

Stanford University organized a contest with a simple task:  take rubber bands and "add value" to them.  Entrants were to send in a video of what they did with the bands.

As reported today by Lee Gomes in The Wall Street Journal, some of the ideas resembled things already done (e.g., wear rubber bands as bracelets to promote awareness of particular diseases).  Others were inventive.  At lease one struck Mr. Gomes (and me also) as brilliant.  It was the entry of Michael Fischer, a computer science senior at Stanford, who built a series of small pendulums connected by rubber bands and then used it to demonstrate a property of the special theory of relativity.  You can watch the video of Mr. Fischer's demonstration here and you can see the other videos here.  But as Mr. Gomes cautions: "Unfortunately, you need to know what [Mr. Fischer] is talking about before you can understand what he is saying."

Pluto may not be a planet, but it has three moons

I learned something I didn't know from last month's astronomical discussion of Pluto, which is that last year two more Plutonian satellites were discovered.  They are very small compared to Pluto's first-known satellite, Charon, and might be only about 50 miles across.  How hard are they to see?  Their apparent diameter as seen from earth is about the same as that of an aspirin tablet seen from a spy satellite.  Here's an animation of how Charon and the two newbies orbit Pluto.

A side effect of voting Pluto out of the club

Does the astronomers' vote that Pluto is no longer a planet mean that Clyde Tombaugh, the man who discovered it, is no longer famous?

Defining planets and affordable housing

A snippet of science news on nomenclature sparked a chain of ideas that took me from the Kuiper Belt to the problem of providing affordable housing in Portland.

Anyone under age 80 grew up learning that the solar system includes nine planets, ranging from Mercury to Pluto.  When it was discovered, astronomers believed Pluto to be about 3600 miles in diameter, more or less comparable to Mercury in size.  Later observations led astronomers to move their estimated downward, and when the Hubble Telescope finally got a good look at the planet, they concluded that Pluto is only 1413 miles across, and its satellite Charon 728 miles across.

The International Astronomical Union is meeting in Prague this month and one topic on the agenda is to define "planet."  One proposed definition is that a planet is any object massive enough for gravity to shape it as a sphere and that orbits a star instead of something else.  Any object of several hundred miles or more in diameter that's spherical and orbits the sun would qualify.  Pluto would stay in the planetary club, but more than forty other objects in the solar system would be admitted, including Charon, a few asteroids, dozens of objects in the Kuiper Belt such as Sedna and Quaoar, and Rush Limbaugh.  (Just kidding about that last one, but he does meet most of the definition.)

All that fuss reminded me of a riddle that Abraham Lincoln used to pose:  "If you called the tail of a dog a leg, how many legs would a dog have?" he would ask.  "Five," the mark would say.  "No," Lincoln would answer, "calling a tail a leg doesn't make it one."  Similarly, calling Pluto, or Charon, or Sedna, or Mr. Limbaugh as a planet doesn't make any of them one.

And calling a subsidy program an "affordable housing program" doesn't make it one, unless the result of the program is housing that someone making less than $X can afford, and then someone who actually makes less than $X moves into the housing.  (In Santa Barbara, California, "$X" is $160,000 a year.)  The Oregonian reported that since 1998, the City of Portland has spent $107 million on providing affordable housing, and has with those funds provided 2,212 dwelling units.  Professor Bogdanski points out that this equals $48,372.51 per dwelling unit.  Did these subsidies work?  They certainly helped build the various buildings.  I'd like to suggest, however, that the way to decide if these subsidies worked is not to see how many units were built as a result (though that helps) but to see how many of those units are still owned or rented by low-income households, and if there's a more effective way to spend $48,000 per dwelling to get low-income households into houses and apartments, which is (or should be) the real goal of an affordable housing program.  A subsidized unit that's occupied by a high-income tenant or buyer doesn't help achieve the goal of the program.

For contrast, let's suppose we took $20,000 and lent it to a low-income renter to use to buy the renter's house, with $10,000 going toward the down payment and $10,000 going toward paint and repairs.  The condition is that the $20,000 is a loan secured by a second mortgage on the house, not a gift, and has to be repaid without interest 10 years later or whenever the tenant sells the house.  Some of the loans wouldn't be repaid, but a whole bunch of houses would be painted and fixed up and have first-time homeowners as occupants.  I think a program like this would be more effective at getting low-income households into houses and it would have the side effect of improving some Portland neighborhoods.