Ever wonder why rice is not endangered?

There's a demand for it, and secure property rights for producers.

Worried about recycling paper in order to save trees? Don't be. Producers have an incentive to plant more trees in order to serve the demand for wood pulp that goes into making paper.

Let's apply that idea to endangered plants and animals. Someone has. Read it in the New York Times "An Unlikely Way to Save a Species: Serve It for Dinner":

[Gary Paul Nabhan] has spent most of the past four years compiling a list of endangered plants and animals that were once fairly commonplace in American kitchens but are now threatened, endangered or essentially extinct in the marketplace. He has set out to save them, which often involves urging people to eat them.

Cities are good

The Undercover Economist explains. A snippet,

Many people wrongly think that our desire to gather in big cities comes with a big social cost. William Cobbett compared London, the “Great Wen”, to a seeping sore. Some of my rural friends think he was on target.

The irony is that cities are good for the planet. Recent headlines excoriating London for its poor record on recycling omitted the detail that Londoners produce less household waste than people elsewhere in the UK. Londoners have fewer cars. New York is much the same in this regard. Public transport may or may not work well in cities, but will never work in the countryside. And brute economic necessity keeps city dwellers in smaller, greener homes.

A bad equilibrium

Quote:

"People in the UAE are used to having people clean up after them. It doesn't even cross their minds to walk a few steps and drop their bottles in the bins," said a lifeguard, who asked not to be named.

The photos tell the story. Why would you want to be around this filth? Vacationing is what the UAE is known for?

Surely UN jest: Zimbabwe to chair environment body

Further confirmation that the United Nations cannot be taken seriously:

Zimbabwe has been elected head of the UN's main inter-governmental body on the environment, despite criticism over the way it has managed its own economy.

European Union nations led objections to Zimbabwe's candidacy late on Friday, when the Commission on Sustainable Development voted for a new chair.

The 53-nation commission choose Zimbabwe's environment and tourism minister, Francis Nheme, as chairman to replace oil-producer Qatar.
...
Human rights organisations also voiced outrage over the decision.

Both the United States and the European Union have imposed targeted sanctions against Zimbabwe for human rights abuses.

The chair rotates every year between the world's regions and was chosen by African countries this year.

It's all here.

UAE strives to rationalise water consumption patterns

Gulf News has the story:

The UAE, which has one of the highest per capita rates of water consumption in the world, is seeking to rationalise its consumption patterns according to Mohammad Saeed Al Kindy, minister of environment and water.

The country's increase in water consumption is largely the result of massive urban development and the unprecedented population growth rates.

In addition, scarce rainfall which does not exceed 115 million litres per annum, and the absence of permanent surface water add to the problem.

In addition, groundwater is being overexploited.

The UAE is a rich country and high per capita rates of water consumption go along with larger incomes. But they also go along with prices for water which are below cost. The economist recommends raising the price -- substantially. And installing water meters where necessary in order to measure usage and bill for it.

Much of the water usage goes to greening the desert environment. And much of that is done by the state. Will this use also be rationalized?

An inconvenient electric bill

At the home of Al and Tipper Gore. So reports USA Today.

Buying "green power" is just rearranging the deck chairs, buying power that would have been in the energy mix anyway. It's like buying the green M&M's when no one else cares what the color of their M&M's are.

And what about buying carbon offsets? Marginal Revolution shows it can easily be the case that you make pollution worse -- here and here.

Move to curb illegal drilling and conserve a precious resource :: Gulf News

The precious resource is water. Here's part of the Gulf News report:

Abu Dhabi: The Environment Agency-Abu Dhabi (EAD) yesterday launched a pilot project to examine and evaluate water levels of an estimated 100,000 wells in the emirate. The project was launched with commissioning from the German-based Dornier Consortium to register and survey from 10,000 to 15,000 wells in Al Ain and Liwa under a Dh2.2million agreement signed yesterday.
...
According to Al Mansouri [Majid Al Mansouri, EAD Secretary General], the underground water management project aims at bringing all the activities of well digging, drilling or pumping under regulation, and also curbing illegal digging and drilling of wells in the emirate. "The project was launched on the instruction and approval of the Executive Council to preserve underground aquifers and protect them from depletion. The strategy was necessary as all these wells are unregistered, have no data and had been dug or drilled in the absence of regulatory control," said Al Mansouri.

The work on the initial project began last month. The rest of the emirate's wells are expected to be registered and surveyed by the end of 2010.

Markets are generally a good way to organize economic activity. Indeed, for most products it is best for there to be an absence of regulatory control.

Sometimes markets fail, as in this case. The reason is that no one owns an aquifer. This results in a race to exploit this scarce resource. Regulatory control is warranted. It is good that Abu Dhabi is tightening regulations and even better that it is working towards a capability of enforcing the regulations it has.

Their intentions are good.

Environmentalists give a whole new meaning to bottled dressing. And burn more fossil fuel in the bargain.

Biofuels and unintended consequences :: NYT

Quote:

The demand for palm oil in Europe has soared in the last two decades, first for use in food and cosmetics, and more recently for fuel. This versatile and cheap oil is used in about 10 percent of supermarket products, from chocolate to toothpaste, accounting for 21 percent of the global market for edible oils.

Palm oil produces the most energy of all vegetable oils for each unit of volume when burned. In much of Europe it is used as a substitute for diesel fuel, though in the Netherlands, the government has encouraged its use for electricity.

Supported by hundreds of millions of euros in national subsidies, the Netherlands rapidly became the leading importer of palm oil in Europe, taking in 1.7 million tons last year, nearly double the previous year.

The increasing demand has created damage far away. Friends of the Earth estimates that 87 percent of the deforestation in Malaysia from 1985 to 2000 was caused by new palm oil plantations. In Indonesia, the amount of land devoted to palm oil has increased 118 percent in the last eight years.

In December, scientists from Wetlands International released their calculations about the global emissions caused by palm farming on peatland.

Peat is an organic sponge that stores huge amounts of carbon, helping balance global emissions. Peatland is 90 percent water. But when it is drained, the Wetlands International scientists say, the stored carbon gases are released into the atmosphere.

To makes matters worse, once dried, peatland is often burned to clear ground for plantations. The Dutch study estimated that the draining of peatland in Indonesia releases 660 million ton of carbon a year into the atmosphere and that fires contributed 1.5 billion tons annually.

The total is equivalent to 8 percent of all global emissions caused annually by burning fossil fuels, the researchers said. “These emissions generated by peat drainage in Indonesia were not counted before,” said Mr. Kaat. “It was a totally ignored problem.” For the moment Wetlands is backing the certification system for palm oil imports.

But some environmental groups say palm oil cannot be produced sustainably at reasonable prices. They say palm oil is now cheap because of poor environmental practices and labor abuses.

“Yes, there have been bad examples in the palm oil industry,” said Arjen Brinkman, a company official at Biox, a young company that plans to build three palm oil electrical plants in Holland, using oil from palms grown on its own plantations in a manner that it says is responsible.

“But it is now clear,” he said, “that to serve Europe’s markets for biofuel and bioenergy, you will have to prove that you produce it sustainably — that you are producing less, not more CO2.”