Raise your hand if you’re not “aware” of greenhouse gas emissions
June 19th, 2009
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Are you aware of greenhouse gas emissions? Are you aware that human civilization is currently producing large amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses? Are you aware that this is considered a potential problem? Are you aware that this can contribute to global climate change? Are you aware that emissions of CO2 from fossil fuels go hand-in-hand with other pollution that can cause health problems, smog and other ecologically undesirable effects? Are you aware that fossil fuels are becoming more and more problematic as a foundational energy source?
You are? Really? Are you sure?
Well a number of groups still seem to think you’re not, because the biggest thing that environmental organizations seem to do is “raising awareness” of the issue. They’ve been at it for some time, but they seem to think that the population is just not aware enough. A considerable amount of effort has gone into raising awareness and a tremendous amount of money has as well.
The latest effort: An enormous electronic sign in the most expensive advertising space in the world.
That’s right, Times Square New York, and not just any location in Times Square, but right smack in the middle of Madison Square Garden a new 70-foot high tech sign has been erected to make sure everyone in the city is aware of the amount of CO2 being produced by mankind. The main corporate sponsor of the sign is Deutsche Bank, but it is part of a larger effort at spending as much money as possible on advertisements to “raise awareness.” Plans are that this big electronic sign will remain for at least three years.
The sign itself displays a running total of emissions of CO2-equivalent greenhouse gasses. The sign shows the numbers in terms of CO2, but what it is really showing is the carbon dioxide equivalent of all greenhouse gases emitted (well except water vapor). These include things like methane and nitrous oxides. Of course, there are a few catches to this, because not all the gasses in question can be compared to carbon dioxide in an apples-to-apples manner. For example, methane is considerably more potent than CO2 in trapping infrared radiation, but it also has a much shorter atmospheric lifetime, decomposing within less than ten years in the atmosphere. Thus, the effects of methane are much more noticeable in the short term and less so in the long term.
There’s also an obvious level of uncertainty to these numbers as nobody is actively measuring the emissions from every source in the world in real time. Additionally is the complex issue of what is considered a man-made emission. A large amount of methane comes from organic decay, and nitrous oxide is produced in large amounts from the oxidation of nitrogen compounds in soil. But just how active a role in a system must humankind play for the emission to be considered artificial?
This is really splitting hairs though, because the bigger question is what do these numbers mean to the average person? the answer is nothing, absolutely nothing. They seem really big, that is for sure, but there’s really no context to this. It’s a classic example of obfuscation through the use of values that most people can’t really understand the magnitude of. A billion tons of carbon dioxide? Well, the earth’s atmosphere has a total mass of over five quadrillion tons, so is that a lot?
Whatever the case, this large number, though meaningless to the average lay person does help in making the scary “countdown to doomsday” idea seem all the more impending.
But what did this thing cost?
Interestingly, I have not been able to find any news reports which give a total cost for the sign, including the construction, maintenance and, most importantly, the cost of leasing the space. The cost of leasing space for a large advertisement on a prominent Times Square building ranges from one hundred thousand to around a quarter of a million dollars per month, depending on the size of the display and other factors. LG pays $165,000 a month to least space for the sign shown to the right. It’s considerably smaller than the new carbon emission sign, but is also in a prominent location.
Of course, there are other costs involved, including the construction of the sign. Many of these electronic signs can cost several million dollars to put in place, although this sign has only an alpha-numeric display and not a full sized video wall, which is especially expensive. (It does apparently use a specialized kind of lighting system that is super-efficient and thus may increase the cost even more) The light emitting diodes on the display alone number over forty thousand. As it is, this sign probably had a capital cost of about two to five million dollars. Add to this the cost of upkeep, electricity and insurance along with the fact that “carbon offsets” are paid for the signs energy use and the annual cost comes out to a few million annually. (Carbon offsets and credits are a whole other topic worth looking at)
So what is the total cost? Hard to say, but at least ten million dollars and possibly much more than this, all things considered.
Seems like a good deal huh? I mean is there really anything substantive that could be done with a few tens of millions of dollars that would have a greater impact than “raising awareness”? Are there any problems in the world that this money could at least put a small dent in?
….Guess not…
By the way, if you live outside the US, don’t be jealous of our big stupid sing. There are plans for signs like this in the most expensive advertising locations around the world! Chances are the Aussies will be the next ones to have this giant waste of money to gawk at, as there is already talk of building the next sing in Sydney!
News photos credit: Newsweek and Reuters. Other photos believed to be public domain or open source.
This entry was posted on Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 10:18 pm and is filed under Bad Science, Culture, Enviornment, Misc, Obfuscation, Politics, media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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June 19th, 2009 at 10:52 pm
Well I guess that one’s awareness can’t be raised too much….
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June 20th, 2009 at 2:27 am
So the question now becomes: where are these idiots getting the money to do this?
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June 20th, 2009 at 7:11 am
Good point, Buzz on the number being pointless. The average person knows its a big number but with no context you could tell them that each year we product two hundred thousand tons of CO2 or five million tons or eight hundred billion tons. Is that a lot? Most people don’t deal with tons of CO2 on a regular basis so it doesn’t mean very much.
People are aware of the problem and this strikes me as a kind of doomsday clock thing because it implies that there is impending disaster by keeping a constantly running count, but the count number does not mean much to most people.
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June 20th, 2009 at 10:27 am
I think we are all aware but maybe not aware enough because the numbers keep climbing and to me that means that not enough people are doing their part to help out. I try like I got all the lightbulbs changed and I buy organic food when I can and local too and I try to not drive so much. I still need to do more like my car is not very good but don’t have the money to buy a hybrid now and there are not any good electric cars out yet. I am going to wait a cpl years and hope that electric is out by then and if not I will look at a hybrid which is better. I don’t have a house just an apartment so can’t puit out solar panels but I am sure I could do more like maybe see if the landlord and other residents could work to chip in for a solar system on the roof or a wind system.
Nobody is perfect and I am guilty of being a little lazy at times so it might help to get this hammered at all of us more and lets face it, sometimes being bugged is the only way to get things done. Everyone IMHO should be considering a solar panel or two and taking other steps.
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June 21st, 2009 at 1:26 am
To Juno77: I fail to see how buying organic food helps to stop climate change.
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June 21st, 2009 at 6:46 am
No doubt the $ needed to place this giant sign came from some of our “bailout” money. Actions such as these do nothing but help to convince me that probably 80% of all the drama about greenhouse gasses and global warming, yadda yadda is to be taken with a grain of salt.
Sorry if that offends you.
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June 22nd, 2009 at 2:27 pm
More aptly, I’d submit that organic food, as less efficient to grow, increases CO2-equivalent emissions per calorie produced – though certainly if the entire world switched to organic food, the result would be a net drop in CO2-equivalent emissions because so many people would starve to death.
Putting off replacing your car is a great way to conserve, however. The energy used to produce a car is immense compared to the mere fuel uses of driving it.
“A solar panel or two” is mere feel-good nonsense in terms of “climate change reduction”. There’s an excellent chance – especially if you don’t live in a southern desert, and don’t have a tracking system – of never even breaking even on production, shipping, and installation energy.
If you really care about the issue, arguably the best thing you can do is buy as many products from India and China as possible, to help enrich them, so that they’ll be rich enough to afford to not just burn immense amounts of filthy coal.
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June 22nd, 2009 at 4:40 pm
Sigivald said:
That’s really very true, and it is why these plans to subsidize purchase of ‘new efficient cars’ to get ‘old clunkers off the road’ are really suspect. By suspect, I mean ‘covertly supported by people who stand to gain’ from them.
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June 22nd, 2009 at 4:56 pm
gman said:
There are frequent references to organic food being good for reducing global warming or greenhouse gas emissions. These claims usually don’t give much reason. They just say “We need to cut down our carbon footprints and go to less greenhouse gas intensive methods of doing things like reducing energy usage, using green energy sources and eating organic food” Or “One way you can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions is by eating organic.” Or just “Help stop global warming – eat organic.”
They never give the actual reason for this, they just state it. Actually one of the advocates of “organic agriculture as part of a greenhouse gas reduction stratigy” is one of the high ranking agriculture commissioners in the EU. (Oh yeah.. also she happens to own a rather large organic farming operation.. she says that that is not a conflict of interest because it’s actually her husband who runs the organic farming side of things…. right)
I’ve never seen any real evidence that organic agriculture is less intensive when it comes to greenhouse gasses. In fact, I’ve seen some evidence that it is more intensive. One thing that contributes a considerable amount with farming is oxidation of nitrogen compounds in the soil. This is accelerated greatly by tilling. If you leave the soil alone it oxidizes slowly but the big thing that speeds it up is agitating it. Conventional farming doesn’t till nearly as much as organic farming because most of the fertilizers are designed to be water soluble and avaliable in their raw form. Organic farming relies on a lot of composting and soil working. This means it needs more energy for the effort but also more nitrogen oxidation – This is directly associated with high tillage farming methods.
The other thing is that organic farming relies heavily on composting (not that conventional farming doesn’t to some degree), but considerably more so in organic farming. Intentional composting of agwaste and biological materials produces quite a bit of methane. Compared to burning such waste or even putting it in a landfill (where it may actually not decompose for a long time, making it a kind of carbon sync).
Compost piles and rapid composting methods tends to decompose the matter faster than it can be resaturated with oxygen which leads to more anaerobic respiration and thus methane.
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June 22nd, 2009 at 5:00 pm
By the way, I’m receptive to my contention that organic farming is more carbon intensive being refuted, but the only explanation I hear in opposition is “all those chemical fertilizers.”
I’d really like to see a good comparison of methods that takes into account these factors, but I have yet to find any studies that actually do an objective comparison of the methods.
I’ve seen data that claims organic farming is less greenhouse gas intensive by showing the energy needed to produce conventional fertalizers and then saying organic doesn’t use this energy, but never does the data consider the energy for organic methods. It basically assumes that there is no emissions.
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June 22nd, 2009 at 7:24 pm
“Putting off replacing your car is a great way to conserve, however. The energy used to produce a car is immense compared to the mere fuel uses of driving it.”
Immense?
http://portal.unesco.org/education/en/file_download.php/a01355752c9e869a63cc5651084cfa30Cars+and+energy.pdf
… says that the energy in a car’s construction is about 20,000MJ. Energy content of gasoline is about 40MJ/L, so that 20,000MJ is about 500L of gasoline. That much gas will push a very efficient car about 10,000km … or about 1/20th to 1/30th of its life.
That estimate may be off though, since there is also this:
http://www.triplepundit.com/pages/this-week-david.php
which has estimates for fuel:manufacture like 75% and 90% for a Prius and Hummer. Still not getting into the “immense” class to my eyes. The author of that web-page comes to a similar conclusion, recommending that old, inefficient, cars be removed from service for “the good of the planet”.
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June 22nd, 2009 at 8:07 pm
mdf said:
I disagree on that. In fact, I’d think the most “green” option for transport would be to get a very old yet small car that is ready to go to the junk pile and be turned (at best) into scrap steel and revive it to drive it as long as possible, thus preventing the need to manufacture a new car.
The “effeciency” issue is not something that I think is as cut and dry as one might think. Newer cars may have some improvements and of course hybrids have advantages (especially in city driving due to regenerative breaking) but when you get down to it, small light weight cars get the best gas mileage.
One of my friends in high school had about the s**tiest cars you can imagine. I mean it was SO bad that if you were making a comedy movie and wanted a ridiculously crappy car for the movie, this would be a good choice. He got it for free, because in high school and without a job… that’s kinda what you’re limited to. This car was epic it was so bad. It was so bad people took pictures of it and it was a kind of legend. he was the kid with the crappiest car around.
The car: A 1984 Toyotta Corolla (this was in the late 1990’s). It was very badly rusted. The exterior sheet metal on the doors was literally gone (like a gaping hole looking into the inside of the door. NO A/C. Heat barely worked. Radio did not work. The headlight switch didn’t work, so his uncle had wired up a jerry-rigged switch to the headlights that dangled under the steering wheel. It a 75 horsepower push-rod cam motor. I believe it had power steering at one time that no longer functioned.
One of the back doors did not stay closed because the latch was broken. It was wired shut. The car must have had 200,000 VERY ROUGH miles on it in the upstate New York salted roads.
I can’t even find a picture to convey how bad it was. This image: http://removeurcar.com/images/home.jpg Is of a car in better condition than it.
No I am not exagerating.
Now, anyone else would have junked that car long ago. He drove it for more than two years. It ran okay. I helped him put new spark plugs in it and flush out the engine oil. (twice… what came out looked like thick goo).
Anyway, the small engine Corolla from 1984 has a millage rating of something like 46 MPG. I swear it had close to that even at the age. I mean it used less gasoline than almost any car I’ve seen.
Now I submit that if you were desperate to keep that car on the road to the bitter end, you could have gotten another five years out of it. You’d need a couple more rolls of duct tape but it drove and the engine worked reasonably well. Who knows how long it would take before the engine or transmission blows out and can’t be repaired?
And the MPG rivals that of a prius.
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June 22nd, 2009 at 11:27 pm
Dr. buzz0,
Would you be able to provide a link to the data you mentioned about organic food and emissions? I would love to read it. I have read some of your archived posts about organic farming, and would like to read more about it.
Cheers mate.
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June 23rd, 2009 at 9:23 am
The Curtains said:
Here are some studies on nitrous oxide emissions from farming and especially organic farming. Bare in mind that organic farming techniques that reject concentrated fertalizer tend to be very tillage-intensive and tend to place a large amount of biological material on the soil surface:
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bsc/sspn/2007/00000053/00000005/art00015
http://soil.scijournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/70/2/570
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6TC6-4TDBM65-1&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=937383902&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=1b09ce0512c9ba28ee31afd3fabd38fd
http://www.ars.usda.gov/research/publications/publications.htm?seq_no_115=196301
No till and reduced till farming:
http://www.lesspub.com/cgi-bin/site.pl?332&ceNews_newsID=1516
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6T5T-4BWCBY3-3&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=937392272&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=1dbe3ef367ae52a1779b21522a3904c8
Other info:
http://calorielab.com/news/2008/05/05/organic-food-may-not-be-as-great-as-some-say/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bloom/actions/organic.shtml
http://www.pesticideinformation.eu/2008/06/the-truth-about-organic-farming-in-europe-johnston-vs-melchett/
http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/16-06/ff_heresies_03organics
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/the-great-organic-myths-why-organic-foods-are-an-indulgence-the-world-cant-afford-818585.html
I will try to find more info on the rates of methane generation from intentional composting versus landfill or burning of biomass (also bare in mind that organic farming produces more biomass waste due to lower yeilds per plant of fruit or other final product) as well as the implications of composting on methane oxidation rates.
It’s amazing how much info is out there claiming that organic farming is better without producing any evidence or looking at a very narrow area. for example, several sites mention nitrous oxide from agriculture and then say organic farming is better without even saying it produces less (it is implied strongly though) or giving a reason why it would.
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June 23rd, 2009 at 2:30 pm
mdf: Those UNESCO numbers look pretty dubious, yes – and they don’t seem to include transportation costs. (Or if they do, they’re so dumbed-down for their “educational” purpose that they’re useless for this, by not being clear).
The AskPablo/Triplepundit numbers seem to suffer the same issue of counting only materials production energy use and using vague estimates of percentages of materials.
But there’s also the energy used by the factory itself, the endless machining and production processes, and countless other costs (hell, the energy used by the workers on their commute!)
(Shipping a RORO full of vehicles from Japan isn’t exactly free, after all. (It’s hard to find good information on RORO fuel economy, but this one is a good starting point.
Tokyo to Portland (a common destination for Toyota unloading) is 4,216NM. At 11.5 knots, that’s 366 hours to cross. That ends up being 80 gallons of fuel per vehicle just in sea transport fuel – 300L. Which is oddly more than half the construction cost of the vehicle.
Proving, again, that we can’t just look at materials cost.)
It still looks to me like you have to get a MUCH more efficient car to replace your existing one for it to be a net energy win – especially if it might not last the full 160kMi that the provided analyses assume. For a Toyota or a Honda, that’s a safe assumption. Not so much for a GM, sadly.
(Snark time: Not surprising, I suppose, for an analysis from a “sustainability engineer” (?) who is an MBA rather than an actual, well, engineer.)
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June 23rd, 2009 at 3:06 pm
Sigivald said:
I wouldn’t say 160kMi is a safe assumption for any car. Sure, the car may last that long mechanically, but it depends on how well the person takes care of it. No matter how well it’s made, it could be dirty, scuffed up, have moldy french fries down in the crevas behind the seat, have sand ground into the carpet badly enough to wear away the fibers and otherwise just be in crappy condition. In that case it might not be worth keeping on the road by the time it gets to 120kMi.
(Believe me, I’ve seen cars ready for the junk heap due to no design issue but due to not getting any care).
Then there’s the issue of accidents. Considering the cost of replacement body panels these days it’s surprising what an insurance company will consider a total.
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June 29th, 2009 at 1:15 am
Does it really matter how much precission there is to the numbers? is one million tons that much less than one million four thousand and fifty seven tons? We should be looking to big cuts and things that will change things by a large enough percentage that it does not matter how we calculate the nickles and dimes of it.
I think if we have to debate the small factors that go into something to come up with it we are doing it wrong. We should look at the bigger picture and just stop the really large sources that are beyond doubt of being a big contributor.
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