Photos: SETAC in Milwuakee

For some reason my pictures of catching Neosho Madtoms are not coming up on this computer, but I wanted to put some pictures up anyway. So here's some pics from my recent trip to SETAC in Milwaukee. (captions below the pic)

Yes. I'm wearing shorts in Milwaukee. In November. Has anyone heard of this whole 'climate change' thing?
This is the Milwaukee River (I think). There's a nice river-walk behind a bunch of buildings in the downtown. The first part of the week was so nice we walked along here a couple of times during lunch. Later in the week it got extremely cold and windy, so I guess we haven't gotten to the point where it is warm all year yet.

Apparently there's a duck theme to the riverwalk.

Unfortunately the closest thing we saw to an actual duck was this chair floating down the river. I also have pictures of traffic cones in the water. Beautiful.

This is recovered treasure from a sunken Spanish ship. The weight of the silver block is supposed to be so great that you can't run away with it, but there were still two guards with tasers there.

This was the beer line just before 5 30 when the open bar opened.

What? That doesn't look like a scientific conference! How'd that get in here?

Kansas WRAPS

On Tuesday I attended a work group meeting of Kansas WRAPS participant agencies. WRAPS stands for Watershed Restoration and Protection Strategies. The goal of WRAPS is to fund novel and innovative projects that will improve watersheds. The idea is to do this by getting local stakeholders to participate. The WRAPS process is 4-stage: Develop, Assess, Plan, and Implement. Each WRAPS group represents a particular watershed, and each year they may request funding to accomplish one of those 4 stages.

The funding requests greatly exceeded the available funds (as expected) so the requests had to be pared down considerably. My understanding is that this work group, consisting of representatives from perhaps a dozen state agencies and other interested parties, was intended to offer guidance and thoughts on how to assign that money.

At the meeting, I was told that the initial criteria for getting WRAPS funds was for projects that were experimental or novel or otherwise a dramatic change from approaches that had been tried previously. Yet many of the project proposals included ideas that have been used extensively elsewhere. For example, one group asked for money to build terraces. Fortunately, the work group, along with the ultimate decision-makers, agreed that this was not what WRAPS is intended to fund.

This meeting was actually a fairly interesting look at how decision-making at this scale gets made. For example, there was considerable talk about the possible need to protect the service providers. A service provider is an agency who actually carries out the projects that the WRAPS group wants to implement. So if WRAPS group A gets the money, then they are going to pay, say, Kansas State University (A service provider) that money in order for one of the professors there to design and organize the project. What the WRAPS work group was discussing was whether or not we ought to consider the fate of those service providers when assigning funds. If a service provider is on the books as accomplishing a particular task for 4 different WRAPS groups, but only 2 of those groups get funded, will that service provider be able to exist on 1/4^th of the projects it had planned for?

Personally, I don’t believe that should factor into the WRAPS funding assignments at all, because if it does, then it becomes a powerful incentive for WRAPS groups to use those service providers that the WRAPS work group thinks are worth preserving. In essence, the funding agency would be funneling money to particular groups (and eliminating competition). By ignoring those considerations, the service providers that can’t adapt to the changing conditions will simply fade away.

These were the kind of meta-issues that dominated the meeting. There was surprisingly little discussion of the ‘innovations’ that were being proposed. I guess I was a little surprised by that. Fairness was the big motivating force behind a lot of these discussions. The first idea that always arose was to make everything the same for everyone. Yet fairness can also be achieved by any method that is transparent and logical. Written decisions explaining the justification for a particular project can be just as fair as a universal system that can be applied in advance.

The other major issue that got a lot of conversation at the work group meeting was in regards to a couple of individual WRAPS groups. Apparently this is an issue related to history. Bill Hargrove, the K-State representative, took issue with the lower Ark River watershed having two WRAPS (the City of Wichita has one, and Sedgwick County has one). Almost everyone in the room made a point of lamenting the inability of City and County to work together, ostensibly because every other WRAPS group in a similar situation had managed to unite into a single committee/group. Yet, the map online of WRAPS watersheds shows a lot of overlap. Further, the online FAQ for the project seems to suggest that overlapping WRAPS are perfectly acceptable. The issues facing the City and the County would appear to be separate. Yet it was fully ten minutes before the uproar about “Wichita and Sedgwick” died down. Suggestions were made that any funding to those groups be given on the condition of them merging.

I find this very silly. Bill Hargrove, in particular, used questionable logic by maintaining that “every other WRAPS group” had to collaborate, yet he himself identified other WRAPS groups that had overlapping watersheds. Further, Bill had made a point earlier in the meeting of not taking a ‘cookie-cutter’ approach to funding WRAPS groups, because each one should be evaluated differently. Yet his (and others) primary objection to the Wichita-Sedgwick split was that it didn’t fit into the cookie cutter mold that had been used on so many other projects. Personally, I think that such an arbitrary distinction (the city lines) is silly, but I can understand from an organizational standpoint why it makes sense: Within the city limits, Wichita has extremely well-defined lines of communication between stake-holders and the WRAPS group. But translating those interests outside the city is…odd.

The WRAPS program is a good one. The plan is sound, although the implementation and evaluation is tricky (isn’t it always?). I’m looking forward to participating in this project more in the future.

Report from Kansas E3: Energy, the Environment, and Economics.

So last week on Thursday I attended the 2007 State of the State, Kansas Economic Policy Conference (with the above title). The conference is put on by the Institute for Policy and Social Research at the University of Kansas. They’ve got a website with some basic information.

The key theme of this meeting was about how to balance our staggering energy demands with the environmental hazards caused by energy generation. I had been under the impression that this was going to be more of a panel-discussion type of conference. The two big sessions were labeled “Panels” and listed moderators, but in the morning session each of the panelists gave a 20+ minute talk, and there was virtually no time for questions.

I found the conference to be very interesting, at least the portions I saw (I did not see every speaker). Several points stood out, and I’ll discuss them briefly:

1. Our energy problems are enormous, and getting much greater. All the speakers agreed upon this point. They also agreed that the dramatic increases in demand over the next 25 years will be driven by increasing energy consumption in China and India. One speaker tossed out the staggering datum that China is building 1 coal power plant a week. The (old-school) industrialized world (OECD countries) is probably not going to see dramatic increases in energy consumption. The estimated increases are amazing. Speaker Tim Carr, of the Kansas Geological Survey and the University of West Virginia, put the energy numbers into a somewhat comprehensible format. Today, we globally use the energy equivalent of 211 million barrels of oil (MMBOE) a day. By 2030 we’re globally expected to be using 311 MMBOE/day. As he points out, there probably are enough coal, petroleum, and natural gas resources available to meet this demand over the next hundred years. As he also pointed out, the problem is the effect using such resources will have on the environment.

2. Nobody in the energy industry has any idea how to develop an environmentally friendly energy source. The morning Keynote speaker, William Downey of Kansas City Power and Light, repeated over and over again that “I have been in the utility industry for 35 years, and we’ve essentially got the same options for power generation now that we had 35 years ago.” Tim Carr pointed out that wind, ethanol, geothermal, solar, and all other biofuels account for less than 1.5% of our global energy usage. Downey also pointed out that the amount of money being spent on R&D has been decreasing from both the public and private sector over the past thirty years, despite the increasing need to find solutions. In my opinion, this is strong evidence that the industry is not hiring a diverse enough workforce in the R&D field. If energy companies continue to hire geologists and engineers who have specialized in understanding how to find petroleum and coal, it should be obvious that they aren’t going to be able to come up with innovative strategies to utilize solar, tidal, or bio-energy options.

3. Individuals with positions of security generally give terrible talks. Not all the talks I saw were awful. William Downey’s talk was actually quite good, especially considering the computer went out and the tech people kept interrupting him. Other speakers were less skilled orators. I assume this is because they didn’t practice. The speakers were generally rambling, monotone, and apparently intimidated by the audience. Some of them mumbled! By contrast, almost all the truly great talks I’ve seen have been by graduate students or other young and ‘inexperienced’ speakers. I assume this is because the younger speakers have more at stake. The mind reels at the implication that the people who are most listened to are the ones who have quit caring about how to express themselves.

4. Mis-information and spurious correlations can dramatically alter how people perceive an issue. Tim Carr put up a correlation between life-expectancy and energy consumption, making vague appeals to “refrigerating medicine” as the causative agent. I don’t actually have the data to disprove this assessment, but he offered no evidence in support of it. Other speakers have suggested that HIV/AIDS, which dramatically lowers life expectancies whether or not it is treated, is single-handily driving down life expectancy in Africa. Eliminate African countries, and the energy-lifespan relationship looks a lot weaker. Yet by putting up a figure with little or no context and supporting data, Tim Carr managed to suggest that we must produce more energy to save lives. In reality, the relationship between energy usage and life-span is more complex, and even spending more time in contemplation of Carr’s figure suggests that any relationship that might exist plateaus at a level 1/10^th of the U.S. per capita energy consumption. That information doesn’t support the central tenet of the speakers: That energy consumption must continue to rise.

Tim Carr also put up a list of “Humanity’s Top Ten Problems Next 50 Years” as enumerated by Richard Smalley, a 1996 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry. #1 on the list is Energy. Carr said “I like to start my talk with a Nobel Laureate.” This is an appeal to authority, and while Richard Smalley was certainly passionate about cheap energy, it is hard to take seriously a list that lists “Energy, Food, and Water” as the top three concerns, while listing “Population” as #10. After all, if population problems are solved, won’t most of the food, water, and energy problems be solved? Further, Smalley himself advocated education as the means to achieve cheap energy, yet education is only #8 on the list. Again, by showing this slide, appealing to authority, and then moving on without any critical analysis of the idea, the real issue is obscured so that a particular viewpoint can be promoted.

5. The conference organizers don’t know how to make a vegetarian food option. No. Potatoes and asparagus (the sides) do not constitute a ‘substitute’ for beef. And here I thought KU would be able to provide some reasonable alternative (cheese ravioli? Anything?).

I really didn’t end up learning much about how environmental concerns could be addressed while developing economically viable energy sources. Mostly the energy people seemed to just throw up their hands and advocate “clean coal” (I’ll try to explain why this is a misnomer in some future post) or nuclear. I’m not sure nuclear isn’t a good solution, but I’m not as informed as I ought to be about the risks. The other major suggestion was to get consumers to be more energy efficient. That strategy has been so effective in some places that energy companies have raised their rates to compensate for lost revenues.