I’ll be traveling on and off the next two weeks, trying not to think about Barack Obama’s worldwide celebrity, so posting will be light.
Uncategorized
Archived Posts from this Category
July 17, 2008
Aquaculture (and green consumerism)
Posted by johnmcquaid under Uncategorized | Tags: aquaculture, fish farming, green consumerism, Greenpeace, Thailand, Wal-Mart, Whole Foods, World Wildlife Fund |1 Comment
U.S. supermarkets are trying to do the right thing by imposing some standards on farmed fish:
Whole Foods plans to announce today the first comprehensive set of aquaculture guidelines by a major retailer. Wal-Mart has established standards for farmed shrimp and certified its factories with the Aquaculture Certification Council. And Wegmans worked with Environmental Defense Fund on its farmed-shrimp policy to ban antibiotics, avoid damaging sensitive habitats, treat waste water and reduce the use of wild fish to feed shrimp.
This is a good start. But it’s only a start. Aquaculture is one of those third- or fourth-tier environmental issues that are more revealing than giant problems such as climate change, because they show why various world systems – natural and manmade – are stressed to the point of breakdown right now. It’s a classic case of seemingly benign, yet perverse incentives backfiring. In this case, consumers have good motives for seeking out farmed fish. They want a better diet. They know there’s too much fishing going on. They know that some wild-caught fish contain unhealthy levels of mercury and other chemicals. In addition, the global supply of wild-caught fish leveled off some years back, driving demand for alternatives further upward. So, aquaculture production has doubled in the past 10 years.
But fish farming is itself an engine of radical environmental/ecological/social change. What happens when you quickly create an industry that has no pre-existing infrastructure, and do it mostly in remote coastal landscapes of the developing world? You get many, many problems. I’ll never forget a trip I took in the 1990s to a shrimp farming region in southern Thailand. A few years earlier, the area had been rice paddies. Then the seafood corporations and venture capitalists arrived, and boom – all the rice paddies were shrimp farms, and subsistence rice cultivators were Thailand’s newest entrepreneurs. But there was no environmental oversight. Landscape was ugly and degraded. Shrimp waste was in piles everywhere. Social problems were on the rise as the farmers spent previously-unimaginable sums of cash. Etc.
Scenes like this have been spreading to different areas of the world, as this Greenpeace report documents (warning: pdf file). There are pernicious innovations, too, including tuna ranching, in which bluefin tuna are captured, caged and fattened – something that is driving their low numbers down further. So as the consumers at Whole Foods and Wal-Mart chowed down on their tilapia and thought they were doing themselves and the world a favor, they were subsidizing the futher fraying of the coastal ecologies around the world.
Efforts like the WWF’s certification program attempt to use those same incentives in a positive manner, by upping demand for sustainable seafood and marginalizing the bad actors. But it’s not clear this type of program will ever do the trick – what’s needed, ultimately, is a combination of actual enforcement and responsible business practices in those remote spots. Until that happens, Western consumers will still be complicit in a lot of unneccessary ecological degradation.
July 2, 2008
Don’t get arrested in PGC
Posted by johnmcquaid under Uncategorized | Tags: Prince Georges County |Leave a Comment
Prince Georges County, adjacent to Washington, DC, has a lot of troubled institutions. But law enforcement is the most dysfunctional, and despite some reforms, some of its law enforcement employees still think their authority gives them license to kill people. The latest incident came this week, when a suspect arrested for running down and killing a police officer was strangled in the county jail. The only people to have access to him were guards and jail staff, who are refusing to talk:
It wasn’t clear why the correctional officers reportedly declined to answer questions. Sgt. Curtis Knowles, president of the county’s correctional officers union, said the union’s position is that its members can be interviewed only during work hours and with a union representative or attorney present, unless a criminal investigation is underway.
However, a state police spokesman said the agency considers its efforts a “criminal investigation.”
County police expressed frustration yesterday that the controversy over White’s death seemed to be overshadowing the death of Findley, whose funeral is scheduled for tomorrow.
“We all understand that the death of this kid is tragic. However, his actions that led to him being in that predicament don’t even begin to rise to the level of the sacrifice that Findley made,” said Vince Canales, president of Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 89.
Well…
1. Premeditated murder is a crime, and when police try to figure out who did it you have a “criminal investigation.” This may be conducted at any hour of the day or night.
2. The best way to avoid overshadowing a police officer’s funeral with a messy criminal investigation into the death of the suspect is to not murder suspects.
I realize it’s a little unfair to single out these two guys, who represent police and correctional officers’ organizations and are in an impossible situation. But the fact that already you have this apparent breakdown in an investigation indicates there’s effectively nobody in charge – the officials who ought to be taking the lead on this are running for cover, eyeing the political/institutional ramifications before the public interest.
June 19, 2008
Can we have an impact on global warming at all? I think so.
Posted by johnmcquaid under Uncategorized | Tags: Breakthrough Institute, cap-and-trade, carbon, climate change, global warming, Jim Manzi, Michael Schellenberger, National Review, Ted Nordhaus |1 Comment
There’s an important debate underway about whether governments ought to – or even can – try to control carbon emissions to mitigate climate change. There are two variations on this theme. One is the “uncertainty” argument advanced by some conservatives, including the National Review’s Jim Manzi:
As far as I can see, proponents of emissions reductions will respond with four arguments: (1) inflate the analyzed costs of global warming by claiming the science actually now says things will be even worse than we previously thought, (2) inflate the analyzed costs of global warming by embedding indefensible discount rate assumptions in the black box of econometric calculations used by economists to conduct the cost-benefit analysis, (3) deflate the analyzed costs of emissions mitigation by claiming a free lunch – that there is a cost-free or low-cost way to radically reduce emissions, and/or (4) turn this into a moral crusade asserting that we have a moral duty to the poor of the world because of our past sins of emission. I have laid out responses to each of these objections: 1, 2, 3 and 4. When considered carefully, emissions mitigation proponents have no persuasive arguments.
In other words, given the unknowns here – both the scale of the problem and the costs of fixing it – we should do nothing. There are several problems with this. The first is that this is not a new argument at all. It is the MO employed by business interests and anti-big government conservatives every time action is proposed on some environmental problem: “we don’t know enough, it will bankrupt us.” This is a recipe for political paralysis – and that’s exactly the point, as Manzi’s post acknowledges. And it has been disastrous – just look at the state of fisheries, to cite a prominent example. Fishing interests managed to tie regulatory agencies in knots for years, saying we didn’t know enough to restrict fishing. Many fish populations collapsed and the fishermen went out of business.
Our experience of the past generation – the past decade especially – argues for being more proactive, not less, especially on gigantic problems. What about the notion that cap-and-trade will sink the economy? It will clearly have at least a modest impact on growth – and it should, because growth is the problem. But businesses always argue that new costs will kill them, while history shows that they usually manage to innovate and adapt.
Finally, Manzi’s argument itself has the whiff of disingenuousness, as if he started not with the goal of actually addressing a problem, but to devise a political strategy and talking points that would allow conservatives to acknowledge the reality of global warming – and thus not seem crazy – while continuing to do as little as possible. It’s situationalism, not a genuine grappling with the issues.
The other argument, advanced by Schellenberger and Nordhaus, the proprietors of the Breakthrough Institute, is that the horse is already so far out of the barn that any global agreement to cap CO2 emissions will be both bureaucratically nightmarish and outrageously expensive – and will ultimately fail:
The entire global framework for reducing carbon emissions, and indeed the entire conceptual and policy framework for addressing global warming, is a failure, based on an older paradigm of pollution control that won’t slow global warming.
At bottom, global warming is not so much a pollution regulation challenge as it is an energy development one. To understand how different this challenge is from past pollution quandaries, consider that by 2050 global energy consumption will more than double, even as we face the challenge of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent. This transformation will not be accomplished by affixing scrubbers on smokestacks or catalytic converters on tailpipes–technical fixes that required little change to the underlying processes and technologies that they mitigated. Rather, it will require fundamental changes to the underlying technologies and fuel sources that power the global economy.
The problem with Kyoto, cap and trade, and most other policies aimed at enacting this transformation is that they focus primarily on the pollution problem, not the energy supply problem. As such, they attempt to enact the necessary transformation of the global energy economy through the indirect mechanism of pollution regulations and carbon markets, rather than through the direct deployment of new clean-energy technologies.
I’m sympathetic to these ideas – after all, they may be right. Carbon emissions are escalating, the world is changing, and there’s nothing resembling a global consensus on how to address this. Even starting now, we may never catch up; and even if we can, cap-and-trade may turn out to be unworkable. But I think the argument fails on two counts. First, global politics can change; cap-and-trade may work. It seems silly to just give up based on the experience of Kyoto, which for all intents and purposes was conceived and executed in a different era. Second, their solution is to direct massive government and private investment to technology. Surely, we need this. But if you’re skeptical about government regulation, you ought to be even more skeptical about government subsdies to private interests, which are, well, pork. In other words, our political system is not set up to dole out billions in a rational, strategic manner.
I don’t see why we can’t do both: try to control carbon emissions while also greatly boosting public and private investments in alternative fuel technologies. (And, of course, the proceeds from cap-and-trade auctions can be directed to do exactly that.) We should be using all the tools at our disposal. Now.
June 10, 2008
Next: edible table lamps
Posted by johnmcquaid under Uncategorized | Tags: carbon, cradle to cradle, green consumerism |Leave a Comment
In the realm of carbon-neutral consumer items, there’s the biodegradable furniture made by Artishok, a team of Dutch design students. It’s based on the Cradle to Cradle philosophy, whose central idea that industrial processes and products can be engineered so that waste is all but eliminated; everything is either recycled or rots:
The Artishok design studio embodies this perfectly, creating furniture from corn based plastics. Artishok’s products look no different than other designer stuff and the advantage of the Artishok items is that they virtually do not contribute to your carbon footprint. After use, you can safely throw the furniture on your garden’s compost heap without polluting the soil even 1%. That means that the eight students are about as close as any designers to replicating the natural cycle directly. There’s likely strong demand for such items because other than recycled materials, 100% natural materials effectively eliminate the garbage problem. C2C based items can be ´fed back´ to mother nature no questions asked! Artishok buys its materials from Biopearls www.biopearls.nl, another Dutch enterprise which makes biodegradable polymers.
C2C has turned the design world on its head in some ways. Everybody agrees that the throw away society must be stopped, but C2C appears to clash with durable design. Because unlike durable designs which seem to deny a product’s end point, C2C is sold primarily because of its ‘rotting away’ value. Critics say that it’s the trash heap nightmare, and not nature, which inspires this and that C2C is merely a marketing ploy. Some people also believe that nature doesn’t need extra compost. That might very well be true, but [C2C gurus] McDonough and Braungart aren’t too extreme. They say that so long as you create stuff that can be re-used by industry, you might consider it on equal terms with biodegradable materials. Every item that´s not ending up in a rubbish dump helps solve the landslide problem.
This is psychologically a bit disconcerting; as noted above, people like to buy things that last, not necessarily things that are compost-ready. This conjures up images of mushrooms growing under the cushions, nature surreptitiously crossing the threshold of the home – a bulwark against the wild – and waiting to erupt. (This may be the reason that though my wife bought me the C2C book a couple of years ago, I have yet to read it.) But those kinds of associations are part of the problem – the idea that we can erect walls that separate us from nature is a fallacy. If economically viable, the compostable couch is a great idea. The only problem is, I don’t know any suburban compost heaps big enough.
June 10, 2008
Green consumerism pros and cons
Posted by johnmcquaid under Uncategorized | Tags: carbon, green consumerism, Planet Green, Prius |1 Comment
Reihan Salam watches Discovery’s new Planet Green channel and observes a fundamental problem with green consumerism. For all the current appeal of green consumer technology – it offers the opportunity to save the planet by buying more trendy stuff – this approach is less carbon friendly than actually giving stuff up and living more modestly. If you must drive, don’t buy a new Prius – better to get a small, old used car (though his Prius-bashing is an exaggeration). Don’t outfit your detached, single family home with solar panels – live, as densely and communally as possible, near an urban center. In other words, it’s not merely the way people live now, but the whole social trajectory of American life during the postwar period, the idea of ever-bigger and better cars and homes as status symbols, that’s the problem. The carbon footprint is a status footprint. And it will be hard to shrink using technology that appeals to the same impulses that gave us sprawl and SUVs in the first place.
On the other hand, this argument is also constructed a bit deceptively. Even though using green consumer items may in the short term amount to tooling around the margins of the problem, there’s little evidence that they, in themselves, do more harm than good. Or, for that matter, that starting out this way can’t lead to bigger, more fundamental choices down the line. Salam’s conclusion similarly presents a false choice between our current profligacy and unappealing forms of carbon-friendliness:
No single policy lever can reverse this trend. Steeper progressive taxes might help, curtailing the mortgage interest deduction would definitely help, but there’s no silver bullet. The only lasting solution is for individual families to take it upon themselves to drop out of the positional arms race, to make do with better and with less.
Yes, but any effective approach to limiting carbon emissions will employ not a single policy lever, but many. In addition to government working to change incentives on how and where people live, changes in objective circumstances – e.g., rising fuel prices – will also push both technology and personal choices in more carbon-friendly directions. So the notion that we will all have to live huddled in shabby, multi-family flats while driving 15-year-old Ford Fiestas around isn’t any clearer a picture of the future than you’ll get watching Planet Green.
June 2, 2008
Samuelson on cap-and-trade
Posted by johnmcquaid under Uncategorized | Tags: cap-and-trade, carbon, climate change, global warming, Robert Samuelson |Leave a Comment
Robert Samuelson is a symptom of the dead-tree industry’s woes: one of those columnists who keeps going and going, saying the same thing over and over in slightly different ways – the Richard Cohen of economics. His attitude is grumpy, his thinking linear. Today, Samuelson makes a hash of carbon cap-and-trade programs, warning that won’t work because, essentially, the government cannot compel private industry to limit carbon emissions without causing massive economic, and political, blowback:
This is mostly make-believe. If we suppress emissions, we also suppress today’s energy sources, and because the economy needs energy, we suppress the economy. The models magically assume smooth transitions. If coal is reduced, then conservation or non-fossil-fuel sources will take its place. But in the real world, if coal-fired power plants are canceled (as many were last year), wind or nuclear won’t automatically substitute. If the supply of electricity doesn’t keep pace with demand, brownouts or blackouts will result. The models don’t predict real-world consequences. Of course, they didn’t forecast $135-a-barrel oil.
As emission cuts deepened, the danger of disruptions would mount. Population increases alone raise energy demand. From 2006 to 2030, the U.S. population will grow 22 percent (to 366 million) and the number of housing units 25 percent (to 141 million), the Energy Information Administration projects. The idea that higher fuel prices will be offset mostly by lower consumption is, at best, optimistic. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that a 15 percent cut of emissions would raise average household energy costs by almost $1,300 a year.
Samuelson quotes some optimistic cap-and-trade rhetoric in order to knock it down, but no credible advocate has ever said this was going to be easy or smooth. And Samuelson, whose default position is skepticism toward regulation of any kind, offers no real alternative to address a brewing global environmental disaster. He suggests a carbon tax instead, which has the virtue of simplicity. But in economic terms, a carbon tax and cap-and-trade are different means to identical ends: putting a price on something that companies now do for free. So he ends up back where he started, without acknowledging it, which is that government attempts to regulate carbon will precipitate a massive economic disaster. Which is just idle, knee-jerk speculation; private industry does respond to incentives and adapt to new realities, whether created by governments or changes in material circumstances.
But I do have some sympathy for him on this point:
Meanwhile, government would expand enormously. It could sell the allowances and spend the proceeds; or it could give them away, providing a windfall to recipients. The Senate proposal does both to the tune of about $1 trillion from 2012 to 2018. Beneficiaries would include farmers, Indian tribes, new technology companies, utilities and states. Call this “environmental pork,” and it would just be a start. The program’s potential to confer subsidies and preferential treatment would stimulate a lobbying frenzy. Think of today’s farm programs — and multiply by 10.
Carbon cap-and-trade programs are, in essence, an enormous global experiment that has yet to succeed anywhere. They are complex, and our government is already terribly compromised by special interests that have a direct hand in writing legislation. It’s not clear that Congress and the executive branch can make this work w/o screwing it up. That’s the best argument for a carbon tax. But, contra Samuelson, government is the biggest and best tool we have to address climate change relatively quickly. To argue, 1980s-style, that government is always the problem simply ignores this broader reality.
May 29, 2008
Is human adaptability speedy enough?
Posted by johnmcquaid under Uncategorized | Tags: carbon, climate change, global warming |Leave a Comment
I agree with this:
The magnitude of the crises we face, the speed with which they are unfolding (as we’re just beginning to understand) and their interconnectedness and interpenetration into every aspect of human society mean that the solutions we need to embrace are not going to be the same sort of solutions we’re used to thinking of now.
The discussions we see today — whether we’re talking energy sources, farming practices or fashion choices — are not even the right kind of debate. Unable to mentally grapple with the idea that we need to be aiming for total sustainability right now, we talk to death the same series of inadequate baby steps. Faced with the need to reinvent the material basis of our civilization, we argue paper or plastic.
If you want truly dangerous bright green ideas, go way out beyond what the conventional wisdom thinks is possible. The conventional wisdom’s sense of the possible is irrelevant to reality; it’s being melted by climate change and planetary crisis faster than an Alpine glacier. Think, instead, of the implications of ideas like zero energy, zero emissions, zero waste, closed loops, true-cost accounting for the value of ecological services, product-service systems, visible flows, totally transparent backstories, open innovation, green infrastructure, etc. These concepts are really weird, full of new insights and critical uncertainties — and they, or ideas like them, are very quickly going to become the operating principles of our entire society. If we want to avoid a catastrophic collision with ecological reality, we need to change our thinking.
Our ideas of what’s normal, or even what’s possible, will not outlast the next decade.
Most of the solutions being proposed today for climate change and energy shortages are small-bore fixes, but because they involve some modest economic pain, our political systems (in the developed world, especially the U.S.) can barely handle them, and those of the growth-crazy developing world not at all. Even the programs that are both ambitious and politically viable, such as cap-and-trade/carbon offset markets, aren’t really working yet, and address only a slice of the multiple ripple effects we’re already seeing in the environment, water, food, and general living conditions around the planet. Here’s the question – how do you reinvent government and redefine our collective relationship with the environment on the fly, as material conditions are changing and our expectations – economic, ecological, social – can no longer be trusted?
NASA photo
May 13, 2008
Next to go: caffeine
Posted by johnmcquaid under Uncategorized | Tags: George W. Bush |Leave a Comment
Every time you think the president’s strange, jocular disengagement from all the unnecessary suffering he has brought about can’t get any more … jocular, something like this comes along:
For the first time, Bush revealed a personal way in which he has tried to acknowledge the sacrifice of soldiers and their families: He has given up golf.
“I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf,” he said. “I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.”
Bush said he made that decision after the August 2003 bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, which killed Sergio Vieira de Mello, the top U.N. official in Iraq and the organization’s high commissioner for human rights.
“I remember when de Mello, who was at the U.N., got killed in Baghdad as a result of these murderers taking this good man’s life,” he said. “I was playing golf — I think I was in central Texas — and they pulled me off the golf course and I said, ‘It’s just not worth it anymore to do.’”
If you had lost a loved one in Iraq, which would bother you more – seeing the president playing golf, or hearing that he had given up golf to ease your pain?
This is the kind of thing you usually hear from aging dictators, living in splendor, protected by layers of sycophants, who still fancy themselves beloved men of the people.
May 12, 2008
The undulating plateau
Posted by johnmcquaid under Uncategorized | Tags: ethanol, oil, peak oil |Leave a Comment
We are, it now goes without saying, living in an era of huge environmental and economic transitions. Until recently these still seemed comfortably abstract, just over the horizon. But starting with Hurricane Katrina and the crazy 2005 hurricane season, it’s become clear that we have already crossed that horizon and the big changes are underway right now.
The latest of these transition points is high oil prices. Until this year, there was plenty of speculation about peak oil – the notion that worldwide energy demand would outpace the ability to extract petroleum from the ground. But many reputable experts, most notably Cambridge Energy Research Associates, thought we had not reached that point, and might not reach it for a number of decades. (You can quibble about what, exactly, is meant by a “peak” – CERA doesn’t like that imagery, preferring to call it an “undulating plateau.” But the bottom line is essentially the same.)
But now it appears oil prices are high and will keep climbing. CERA is saying we are approaching the break point where high prices force major changes in consumption, innovation, and the development of alternatives:
We are in the sixth year of an extraordinary run-up in oil prices. During the 1970s—a decade that saw two oil shocks—prices rose for eight consecutive years before falling. Break Point envisages prices rising for more than a decade amid increasing industry costs and extreme competition for oil supplies and upstream assets. Only then does the world reach a “break point”—the point at which policy, technology, and alternative fuels everse the oil price rise and oil loses its near monopoly in transportation.
The massive scale of the oil industry and the infrastructure to deliver oil products means that any paradigm shift in liquid fuels supply and consumption will take many years to unfold, not months. Few transitions are smooth—and certainly not one that involves a commodity that is the cornerstone of personal mobility and the enabler of global trade. But the seeds of change are being sown. And, as the swift arrival of Break Point prices has proved, some of the results may come sooner than anticipated.
High gas prices are already reducing driving and swelling mass transit ridership. And these shifts will soon reverberate through the political system. I’m betting, for instance, that the proposed transit line that may pass within a block of my house will soon become a certainty.
This is going to be bumpy and painful, with many unpredictable side-effects. The problem is, our political system is heavily invested both in the oil industry and corn-based ethanol – i.e., dead ends. As long as these subsidies and the ossified political entanglements that maintain them remain in place – and in the U.S. government, they are only two among many – they will be huge obstacles to a successful transition, sucking resources from both sensible conservation measures and promising alternatives.
