Margaret Wente is confused

Margaret Wente, everyone's favourite contrarian from the globe and mail, has written an article on the Copenhagen summit.

She asks a few good questions about a proposed fund to help poor countries cope with climate change. But her final paragraph displays utter incomprehension:

"It was the West that invented airplanes, too. Bad us. The trouble with energy consumption is that it is inextricably linked with prosperity, productivity and progress – even in righteous Denmark, which oozes green but remains highly tied to fossil fuels. Canada emits far more greenhouse gases than Kenya because we are far more prosperous and successful. And so – no matter how carbon virtuous we are – we're doomed to be cast as global greenhouse villains."

Carbon virtuous? Us!? We emit 50 times more carbon per capita than Kenya does. We are the global greenhouse villains, if you want to use that terminology.

As far as success goes, we can do lots of neat things now, using fossil fuels, but at the cost of destroying our system by upsetting the global climate. It does look pretty successful if you suffer from myopia.

Of course, I'm pretty sure Ms. Wente doesn't believe we are causing climate change, so that could explain her indignation.

Obama collects his peace prize

I'd sort of forget the President hadn't received his prize until now. But the timing is good, because it comes shortly after he's escalated the war in Afghanistan. As he promised to do in his campaign. I'm not sure why people were surprised, given that he's doing more or less what he said he would do. But it does heighten the irony surrounding this "peace" prize.

From the article:

"He also spoke bluntly of the cost of war, saying of the Afghanistan buildup he just ordered that “some will kill, some will be killed.”

You can't accuse the man of lying. Regarding those that will be killed, I would add that Afghans tend to die in multiples of thirty.

Public Relations - Hacked Climate change emails

As some of you may know, hackers gained access to years worth of emails from an important climate change research center in Britain. They released them onto the internet a little while ago. I'd say they timed it more or less perfectly to coincide with the Copenhagen summit.

I have to give it to them. They are brilliant, and well organized. They knew that from years worth of emails, you can always find some that look damning out of context. These have been spread around the right wing blogosphere, and they've built up momentum to the point that the mainstream media is taking an interest.

Apparently the Saudis are now arguing that human caused climate change is now false, and that the warming was due to natural variation. Which is funny, given that the people bandying about these emails are saying they prove that there's been no warming at all. Which is also funny, given that the northwest passage is becoming navigable. But hey, throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks.

I'm impressed though, these guys have an excellent understanding of how the modern English language media works. Things don't get investigated. Instead, you find two sides, and report what both sides are saying. It's cheaper, and makes for more sensational stories.

From what I've read, there doesn't seem to be anything all that troubling there, when you take the time to examine them in context. Efforts to thwart the Freedom of Information act seem the most problematic. We'll see what the investigation turns up. No one will care by then though, as it will be after the Copenhagen talks. This is purely a short term move to thwart what remains of the momentum to do something at the conference.

Afterwards, it will be shown that it's nothing serious, and live on in right-winger lore, but that's about it. For anyone who's read some of the emails, and would like to know the context, this page has some of that.

I'm very impressed by the saavy and organizational prowess of the anti-climate change forces. They've managed to turn it into a left versus right culture war issue, an issue of freedom and the good guy underdog, against liberal elites. I imagine that's why less Americans believe in climate change than they did previously.

Someone should have told Margaret Thatcher that she was supposed to have believed it all to be a fraud. But her speech warning of the dangers of climate change was in 1990, before this became a hot issue, before the propagandists got to work on it.

Update: Here's a good overview of the situation from Fred Pearce. He also considers the long-term impact this may have on public support for the idea that climate change is occurring, something I should have considered.

Plus ca change....

Thomas Friedman, the man who believes the world is flat, writes about Afghanistan. He's found Walter Cronkite interviewing John F Kennedy.

Kennedy: “I don’t think that unless a greater effort is made by the [Vietnamese] government to win popular support that the war can be won out there......

Cronkite: “Do you think this government still has time to regain the support of the people?”

Kennedy: “I do. With changes in policy and perhaps with personnel I think it can. If it doesn’t make those changes, the chances of winning it would not be very good.”

Frieman then writes that what Kennedy understood is that it's all about America's Afghan [Vietnamese] partners. The interview took place on September 2nd, 1963. He suggests Obama follow Kennedy's example and pay more attention to the Afghan Government.

....

Kennedy's example. A couple of months later, on November 1st, 1963 Kennedy murdered his Vietnamese partners. Or let them be murdered, and encouraged the people who murdered them. In Imperial politics, there's no functional difference.

Incidentally, one of the things the Americans disliked about Diem was his corrupt brother. Karzai's corrupt brother has been in the news recently.

If I thought more of Friedman and American subtlety, I would say this column is an oblique warning that the Americans are going to depose and/or kill Karzai if he doesn't shape up.

However, Occam's razor would suggest that Friedman is merely an idiot. Or Alden Pyle. It is fairly common for Americans not to know their own history, or to know only the nicer sounding parts of it. And the way the American media works, if Thomas Friedman were smarter or more insightful in certain ways, he wouldn't be the rich man he is today.

Regardless, if I were Hamid Karzai, I'd be watching my back.

Texas Bans Marriage?

Maybe? They passed a constitutional amendment back in aught-five, as a pre-emptive ban to gay marriage. It includes this provision:

""This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage."

I'm only a few months into my legal studies, so I haven't got the expertise to tell you if banning something identical to marriage is identical to banning marriage. I'll let you know once I get this figured out.

In the meantime, imagine the possibilities:

Man: Won't you have dinner with me?

Woman: I'm sorry, I'm married.

Man: Nope.

Woman: ....Pardon me?

Man: You're not married.

Woman: ....um....yes, I am.

Man: Not according to the constitution! Dinner?

Woman: *Swoon*

We Don't Know the Future

I just heard on the news that Obama is finishing up his visit to China. The announcer described them as "the superpowers of the 21st century".

You hear this sort of thing a lot. I think it's silly. Maybe they will be. But maybe they won't. We don't know. You couldn't have predicted who would be the superpowers at the end of the 20th century by looking at the great powers of 1909 (Britain?). The term superpower didn't even come into use until after WWII.

Part of our nature as humans is having a sort of silly tendency to assume that the future will be much like the present. We can look backwards at the past and understand that lots of things changed, but our predictions for the future are surprisingly static. I'm sure people in the past would have thought it impossible that the British Empire would go away. But....it did.

In short, I wish newscasters would stop saying that about the US and China.

Leaders Reach Consensus on Doing Nothing

Oh good. Political leaders have agreed to produce no meaningful agreement at the Copenhagen climate change summit in December. They've agreed to agree on principles, but not to set any binding goals. I wonder what sort of useful principles they will agree upon. Maybe:

"Carbon emissions should be reduced, somehow, sometime, by someone. If it doesn't cost too much."

"People should be nice to each other."

I have great hopes for the coming agreement.

Meanwhile, one of the reasons that our leaders have agreed to do nothing may well be that few people seem to believe climate change is a serious threat, or that it's caused by us at all. Here's a survey showing that only 41% of britons think that climate change is largely man made. And in America, support for that idea has dropped by 11% in a year, so that now only 36% of people though global warming was happening and was man made.

Harrumph. George Monbiot speculates that this denial is related to our fear of death, and as the scientific evidence has become stronger and more frightening, people are turning away from it.

Maybe? Or maybe now that Obama is in the White House, and the Republicans have lost all restraint, more people are starting to hear and accept their messages of climate change denial.

Reality will press forward regardless, heedless of the fondest wishes of those who would stick their heads in the sand. Here's a good post from the resident blogger on climate change at Shell, making clear that we must get rid of carbon emissions entirely, and that it is the total amount of carbon in the atmosphere rather than our annual emissions which is the real measure of the problem.

I actually used to be confused on this point. A good analogy would be that we're drowning in a tank, slowly filling with water. When it fills, we drown. The water is already at a dangerously high level, and more is being pumped in. The big question debated in the media is how much to cut the levels of water pumped into the tank. This is important, but it misses the real issue, which is how high the water level in the tank is.

Our discussion on climate change is similar. The most important thing is how much total CO2 and other warming agents are in the atmosphere.

He points us to this website, which shows how much we would have to cut carbon emissions per year to avoid putting a total of one trillion tons of carbon into the atmosphere. It's currently 2.14% per year, until we hit zero emissions. That's the goal politicians are currently shooting for, and hoping that it would keep us under 2 degrees Celsius of warming.

The website also shows how much we would have to cut emissions to reach a safer goal of 750 billion tons, and we would have to start reducing emissions now by 4.5% per year. It says that if we keep under this limit, there is less than a one in four chance of the planet warming more than 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels.

Meanwhile, emissions are actually rising. Every bit of delay makes the eventually change harder, as we'll have already increased the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, and gotten closer to emitting one trillion tons.

Of course, the really scary fact is that both of those measures might be too lenient, and that we may already have put too much carbon into the atmosphere. The correct goal in that case for CO2 concentrations would be somewhere in the past.

We're seeing evidence for this. We're told, for example, that arctic sea ice is now effectively gone in the summers. The thick ice that used to build up over many years has now been replaced by thin ice that forms over one winter and melts in the summer. This is decades ahead of predictions made just a few years ago.

What would even more CO2 and warming do?

I recommend not thinking about that question, and instead pretending that nothing is happening, and that if something is happening, then it certainly isn't caused by us. Certainly we shouldn't try and do anything about all of this if it costs any money. After all, we wouldn't want to hurt the economy.

Netherlands road tax

The Netherlands has announced that they are going to eliminate the tax on new vehicles, and replace it with a tax based on how many kilometres you drive. The tax will be higher with high emissions vehicles, and vice versa.

To do this, they will put a GPS tracker in every vehicle, and send the information about where you drive to the government.

I'm usually for carbon taxes, but this one seems iffy. If would be infinitely simpler, and much, much less intrusive to simply tax the gasoline more at the pump. Why they opted for a much more complicated, privacy eroding system isn't clear, though cynicism and/or paranoia could probably help provide you with some explanations.

I don't really like the idea of the government knowing where we drive. Then again, we already accept that google can see everywhere we visit, and that we can be tracked using our cellphones, so I guess this isn't that huge a leap.

But simply taxing gas would be a much better idea, from most points of view. Also, removing the tax on new cars seems odd, as it encourages buying cars. Cutting car prices by 25% would probably convince some people to buy a car if they'd previously been avoiding it for cost reasons. People are more likely to notice big upfront costs than small, steady costs like gas.

Why isn't Obama doing better?

Another recent dysfunctional element in American politics is the filibuster in the Senate.

The Senate has 100 members. You'll often hear or read things like "It is doubtful that the bill will gather the 60 votes needed to pass", with little other comment. You might find this confusing, as normally in legislatures bills pass or fail based on a majority vote, not a 60% vote.

It's actually a fairly recent development. Since 2006, when the democrats won control of Congress, it's gone through the roof, with the Republicans threatening to filibuster every bill. You need 60 votes for a motion of cloture to shut down debate and move for a vote on a bill, so this has meant that 60 votes is now the effective requirement to pass anything.

The weirdest part might be that they don't actually filibuster anything. They just threaten to do so, and so the Democrats don't bring a bill to a vote.

To the extent that this process is understood, some people use it to make excuses for Obama. "Well, he's trying his darndest, but he needs 60 senate votes, so how can he pass a good climate change bill or a health care bill under those condition?". The democrats currently have 60 senators, so they would have to convince every single one of them to vote for cloture.

I don't think this argument holds water however. The democrats could pass better bills if they really wanted to. I think that they're either wussies, or they simply don't want to. Or a bit of both.

If you think that's far fetched, consider that during George Bush's first four years, he only had 50 Republican Senators in the first two years, and 51 in the last two. Not even and then barely a majority. Yet those four years were a time of sweeping change. They passed massive corporate and upper class tax cuts, they authorized the war in Iraq, they passed the patriot act and they made lots of other controversial changes.

You could blame it on 9/11, and the climate of fear that followed, but that climate fear and the message of "you're with us or you're against us" was something created by the Bush administration to bully their enemies into doing what they wanted. The Republicans are excellent parliamentary tacticians and they used circumstances to get what they wanted

Obama just came into power during a massive economic crisis caused by Republicans. It would have been very easy to use this to bully the Republicans, or at least some more Senate Democrats into giving the administration what it wanted. They have sixty senators, 10 more than Bush had. The fact that they're not doing this suggests that either:

a. They're wussies.

b. They don't actually want things like a health care bill that actually helps people if it means hurting insurance companies or an effective climate change bill, or banking sector reform.*

I lean toward b, but I could easily believe a, or both at the same time. But I'm not convinced the evidence suggests any other possibility.

In America, it's an election year 50% of the time

I was listening to the radio, and heard them say that the health care reform bill might run into trouble if it runs past new years, because next year is an election year, and politicians wouldn't like to support a controversial bill before an election.

You hear this sort of thing a lot, and it helps illustrate how utterly dysfunctional American governance has become. You have a presidential election every fourth year, and then a congressional mid-term election every two years in between that.

To illustrate, these are the election years starting from the millenium: 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010.

Literally half of the time it is an election year. This wasn't such of a problem in the past, before the mediatization of American politics, but modern election campaigns generally last the whole year.

So effectively you have a political culture where half the time is viewed as a bad time to do anything that might be controversial. And controversial, as it happens, is also a synonym for "actually helps people" or "makes things better". You'll never get in trouble voting for corporate interests in an election year.

So there is a vanishingly small window of time in which it is viewed as acceptable or possible to make changes.

Update: To clarify how this works, I should note that members of congress have 2 year terms, they all have to run in every one of those elections I mentioned above. Senators have 6 year terms, but their elections are staggered, 1/3 of them are up for re-election each election cycle.

stopping global warming means leaving oil in the ground

To pick up a point from the last post, I think it's worth making clear that reducing and eliminting emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases means reducing and eventually eliminating usage of oil and natural gas.

Which means leaving oil in the ground. Which means not selling the oil. This is pretty straightforward, but the globe's editorial on the issue betrayed a lack of understanding and confusion on these points, so maybe others aren't clear on this either.

They worried that reducing carbon dioxide would harm "a vital canadian industry" and annoy Alberta. That is true, but it's something we'll have to figure out how to deal with, not a reason to throw our hands up in the air and say it's not a good idea to prevent climate change.

Business as usual means that there will be most likely hundreds of millions or billions of deaths over the next century as crop yields decline and drought makes growing food more difficult, as weather patterns change and ocean ecosystems collapse due to acidification.

Not business as usual means that Alberta will be a bit poorer in conventional terms, and annoyed because it is sitting on oil that it could sell for more than it costs to extract it, and not destroying the world means preventing them from making those profits.

The choice is rarely put that way though, so I think it's worth doing. One more time:

Stopping global warming means not extracting, selling and making money from oil which we possess.

Stopping global warming means shutting down oil the oil industry.

Eventually, anyway. Saying "but this will hurt the oil industry!" is not, on it's own, a valid objection to CO2 reduction plans.

That's the point.

Conservative government opposes their own plan

The conservatives have pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20% by 2020, though they didn't specify how. TD bank produced a report to figure that out, and how much it would cost.

The conservatives responded by calling the report irresponsible. "We oppose our plan, it is a very bad plan," said Mr. Prentice. "Anyone who proposes a plan such as ours is a fool, and it surely won't work. It's too expensive! And we certainly oppose any mechanisms which would make our plan work".*

The Globe and Mail's editorial board doesn't like the plan to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, they fear it might force us to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Eventually, we will have to move to no use of oil and gas, effectively killing the industry. This will prevent the world from being plunged into chaos, probably a worthy goal.

That the fossil fuel industry must eventually die if we stop using fossil fuels shouldn't be controversial, but the Globe fears that the plan to mitigate climate change could "euthanize a vital Canadian industry".*

They propose, if it's too difficult to stop emitting greenhouse gases, then we simply aim for a smaller target than the one in the government plan which the government opposes.

I'm sure they can get the laws of physics to agree with them and get the earth to slow down it's warming to match the reduced Canadian target.

There is a valid concern buried underneath all of this, which is that people like money, and will protest if you stop then from earning money. Alberta and Saskatchewan currently earn lots of money by supplying people with fuel, which those people use to destabilize the climate. This needs to be stopped. Stopping people from destroying the planet means less money for Alberta, so of course they're going to be pissy about it.

So we need to balance this national unity concern with our other goal of not destroying the world, or, alternatively, destroying it less. The globe and mail shows little awareness of this in its discussion of the issue however. They seem to suggest it might be good to lower greenhouse emissions, but not if it upsets anyone, and they don't really seem to grasp why it might be important.

* This is technically a paraphrase.

* An actual quote

Quebec buys NB Power

Huh. Quebec has bought all of the electricity generating stations in my province. They bought all of NB power. I'm confused, they bought them for 4.8 billions dollars, which was NB power's debt. Was the debt greater than the value of NB power? Otherwise this seems like a low price, even considering that residential users get a five year price freeze.

Now NB energy decisions will be made in Quebec. Is there any precedent for this sort of thing in Canada? The article says they're also looking into buying PEI's power plants.

I have no idea how this works in practice, and to what extent NB can still make laws to regulate electricity production in the province. I also don't know if NB power still has a monopoly, or if others can enter the business.

US diplomat in Afghanistan Resigns

A US diplomat in Afghanistan has resigned. He wrote a letter, which was published in the Washington Post. It's worth a read, for anyone thinking about what Canada's role there should be or if there should be a role.

He was a fairly junior diplomat, so I don't think there will be much fallout, but his analysis of the situation seems accurate to me.

Biofuels and rainforests

As politicians began to realise that carbon emissions from oil were problematic, or alternatively, that oil was a finite research, they began to search for non-polluting, sustainable alternatives.

Unfortunately, one of their bright ideas involved using plant fuels to run vehicles, and implementing mandatory minimum standards for biofuel content in gasoline. The idea was that the carbon came from plants, so it was carbon that they had taken out of the air, and also that plants were a renewable source. Sadly, the disadvantages of most biofuels outweigh the advantages.

In America, the most common biofuel used is corn ethanol, which may not even produce as much energy as is required to make it. And it drives up the price of food by diverting corn from food for humans to food for cars. Everyone except corn farmers and politicians agrees that this is a bad idea.

One proposed alternative is sugarcane ethanol. This is a better option than corn, in that it actually contains more energy than is needed to make it. And, say some, it wasn't going to be eaten anyway (not directly), so isn't it a good thing?

Well, no. We don't eat sugar directly, but the land we grow it on could have been used to grow other food. Or we may cut down forests to grow more sugar to power cars. Which produces carbon emissions. Which defeats the point. And you'd have to cut down a lot of forests to replace gasoline entirely.

Unfortunately, cutting down a lot of forests is exactly what people are doing in countries where palm oil is grown, and replacing them with palm oil plantations. The oil goes to make biodiesel for Europe, which has mandated that it be used in fuels. Today it was revealed that a provision to in an important treaty about the rainforests which would have slowed down this process of converting nature to gasoline substitute was removed.

Instead it allows plantations to be classified as natural forest, and countries can be rewarded for keeping forests intact. So they could be paid for deforestation. Quite possibly this was done to ensure Europe can meet it's biodiesel quotas. I fear measures to "combat global warming" which are done in bad faith, or without thinking them through. Biofuel policies are currently making things worse, not better.

Flashes of Memory

All through today I've had random bits of memory from scenes long distant flashing through my mind. None have been particularly significant. I just remembered the house where I was billeted for a grade 8 band trip. The rest have been equally random, with no apparent, conscious triggers. Usually they've been places I was only ever temporarily, such as campgrounds, hotels or the like.

I had this sort of thing happen a lot during my first couple of months in Cuba, when I was still getting used to Spanish and spent a lot of time mute, with only my thoughts. But that seemed more guided, or at least I was reliving whole scenes, or periods of my life.

These are just flashes of nothing. Does anyone else ever have that happen?

lacklustre

This country sucks at protesting. Yesterday was the International Day of Climate Action to put pressure on governments leading up to the Copenhagen meeting. In the biggest city of the country (Toronto), about 200 people showed up. It was very, very underwhelming.

In my small town of 8000 in France, about 1000 people marched on the streets to protest cuts in service at the local hospital. They know how to get things done over there (hint: It's not voting, or at least not merely voting).

Hindsight makes everyone look silly

When discussing the past, people often express wonder and amazement at behaviour which goes against current values.

"How could they think slavery was right?"

"Why were colonizers so brutal"?

"Why didn't they see that gays should be treated just like other people?"

"Did they really think codpieces looked good?"

And so on. It's relatively easy to spot these things in the past, because they conflict with current values. The contrast is glaring and evident.

What people are less apt to realize is that future generations will say similar things about our own society as well. It's hard to say exactly what they'll find wrong with us, because we don't know in what way values will change.

I've got one pretty good guess though. If we keep emitting carbon and permanently (on a human timescale) change earth's climate for the worse, future generations will curse us for it. Their lives will stuck, and they will have stories of the paradise that earth once was and how we ruined it.

At some point, future generations will no longer emit carbon (perhaps because we'll have used all of the oil), much like we no longer use slaves. No longer doing what the past did makes it easier to criticize. They'll shake their heads in wonder.

"They knew it was bad. Why did they do it? I can't believe how stupid they were. We had one planet and they ruined it. For what? To move giant rolling hulks of metal (cars) back and forth?

Maybe a new religion will form, dedicated to cursing us. People will read books written in our time just to laugh at them, much like we laugh at old discussions of the justice of slavery.

Really, from the perspective of the future, what we're doing now will look like the stupidest thing ever done in a long history of human stupidity.

Of course, it's not really our fault, just like past stupidity wasn't really the fault of those who did it. We're only human, and so were they. We think we've changed, but we haven't really. Read an old book, and you'll see things seem pretty similar to the present. I was struck by this while reading Thucydides. All of the same faults and virtues, in an older time, on a smaller scale.

So any humans could be as stupid as we are. It just so happens we've acquired a much bigger capacity to do damage. But we're no worse (or better) than those who chose to keep slaves or do other things we call terrible today. Take that for what it's worth.

In the future though, it's likely that few people will recognize this, and they'll think we were the dumbest humans in human history.

I can't really blame them for that. We do the same thing today, looking at the past.

Day of Climate Action

Today is the International Day of Climate action, from a group endorsing a target of 350 PPM of C02. You should go out and find a protest, and send a message to the government that at least some people don't want the earth to become radically different within their lifetime.

The Canadian government has been pretty lousy on this front. They have been supporting oil sands production, and lobbying against efforts to limit the use of oil shale energy in certain american states. They've also been at the forefront of undermining the international treaty, they've been even more strident than the Obama administration in demanding that it be watered down.

This website has lists of protests across the world. Find one near you and go to it. http://www.350.org/

I should explain a bit about the 350 target. It's been endorsed by James Hansen, among others. Throughout the history of human civilization (ie. not that long on a planetary scale), global temperature has stayed pretty constant, and so has CO2, at around 280PPM. During longer history, CO2 has varied between 200 in ice ages, and 280 in interglacials. Note that just that 80 PPM difference was enough to go from an ice age to where we are now.

Well, we're now at 387, which is more than 100 PPM higher than the norm. We're already seeing effects, particularly in the arctic. Note that the full extent of warming from the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere won't be felt for a couple of decades more, as it takes time for the full effect to occur.

Meaning that even if we stopped all CO2 emissions tomorrow, we'd still have more warming. Quite possibly enough to take us past natural tipping points which would cause more warming, such as:

1. Ice melting, and the darker ground/ocean exposed beneath reflects less light, causing more warming.

2. Permafrost melting, releasing methane, an extremely powerful (though somewhat short lived )greenhouse gas.

3. Methane frozen at the bottom of the ocean melts, releasing itself into the atmosphere.

4. Forests such as the Amazon die, releasing CO2.

We already have number one occuring at a large scale, number two has been occuring at a small scale, there are scattered reports of number three. I'm less sure about number four, though deserts are spreading.

These effects are already beginning at our current level of CO2 PPM, and before the full amount of warming from that CO2 concentration has occured.

The current target that developed nations are discussing is keeping CO2 below 450 PPM. They don't look set to achieve even that, but ignore that for a moment. If we emit 63 more PPM (almost the difference between an ice age and a normal human climate), we may well face enough warming to push us past these tipping points. This will release even more CO2, causing more warming, causing more CO2 release, and there's not much we'll be able to do about any of that.

So, simply put, the best efforts of the international community don't look to be nearly good enough. That's why many are calling for 350 as a target. We've already past it, but that's sort of the point. We've already got too much CO2 in the atmosphere. Current proposals of 450 PPM call for allowing even more.

People and governments need to realize that this won't do, and that the correct target is backwards. There are a few things we can do to lower CO2 concentrations, such as allowing more forests to grow, or sowing biochar in farmers fields (google it). But we must also make massive efforts to slow and then stop our emissions.

It you want to know more about any of this, or if part of it wasn't clear, feel free to ask questions.

And, go find a rally today, and show your support. Your future quite literally depends on cutting CO2 emissions today.

Nation Building

Most of you have probably heard about the fraud in the Afghan election. They are now planning a second round of voting. One major hurdle appears to be that it would have to be held in winter, which would make it logistically impossible in much of the north.

I think this drives home the absurdity of the whole enterprise. Here we have a disunited, tribal society which has never been a nation as such, with borders based on arbitrary lines drawn in colonial times. Illiteracy is widespread. It is commonly accepted that the authority of the "central" government doesn't extend much beyond Kabul, if it exists at all. Local power rests in the hands of warlords, tribal leaders or the taliban, which are not necessarily distinct categories. There is a war ongoing in much of the country, and it is occupied by the militaries of foreign powers.

It seems risible to imagine that these are conditions which will allow for a representative democracy.

To top it all off, it turns out that the mighty mechanisms of representative government in the country, which people for some reason seem to agree would have been legitimate if not for fraud, can be defeated by snow.

Math is hard

We are told in the New York Times that part of the proposed climate deal, an arrangement to help poor countries shift away from carbon could cost "a staggering 100 billion dollars" per year. However would we raise such a colossal sum, the article asks? Why, it might be the most difficult part of any climate accord!

The GDP of the United States is more than 14 trillion dollars, the EU has a GDP of 12 trillion Euros. Japan has over four trillion. Australia and Canada combined add a bit over 2 trillion. And there are a few more rich countries outside of those areas that I could add.*

All together, this makes about 37 trillion dollars per year in rich country GDP. 100 billion is 0.27% of that total. The New York Times would have us believe that this is the biggest challenge facing a world climate change deal.

I would say instead that the biggest challenge is getting everyone to reduce carbon emissions, and reduce them enough to make a difference.

But what do I know?

* These figures are based on the most exhaustive research I could drag myself to do. I looked at wikipedia, and rounded the numbers for total GDP.

Climate refugees

Bangladesh is one countries most vulnerable to climate change. The ganges river delta covers most of the country. River deltas, being low-lying, are more vulnerable to rising sea levels, stronger storms and other effects of climate change. Here is Bangladeshi climatologist Dr. Atiq Rahman, from an article by Johann Hari:

He handed me shafts of scientific studies as he explained: "This is the ground zero of global warming." He listed the effects. The seas are rising, so land is being claimed from the outside. (The largest island in the country, Bhola, has lost half its land in the past decade.) The rivers are super-charged, becoming wider and wider, so land is being claimed from within. (Erosion is up by 40 per cent). Cyclones are becoming more intense and more violent (2007 was the worst year on record for intense hurricanes here). And salt water is rendering the land barren. (The rate of saline inundation has trebled in the past 20 years.) "There is no question," Dr Rahman said, "that this is being caused primarily by human action. This is way outside natural variation. If you really want people in the West to understand the effect they are having here, it's simple. From now on, we need to have a system where for every 10,000 tons of carbon you emit, you have to take a Bangladeshi family to live with you. It is your responsibility." In the past, he has called it "climatic genocide".

It's from last year, but the rest of the article is worth reading if you're interested.

I saw an interesting article on the same topic today, talking about climate refugees in Dhaka, the country's capital. One bit caught my attention:

Dhaka's population was 177,000 in 1974. Now, with more than 12 million inhabitants, it is one of the most densely populated cities on earth and its infrastructure is buckling under the strain.

The city's population grew 67 fold in that time. The mind boggles. It is the most densely populated city in the world. A city simply can't grow that fast and grow well, least of all in a poor country without the resources for the required infrastructure building program. People just have to make do. In practice, this means many live in slums which they build themselves from whatever they can find.

This is a story repeated the world over in developing countries, where there has been a marked trend towards this sort of urbanization. But Bangladesh may be the most extreme case, and if climate change continues, the pressure will only increase as land is lost to the rivers, to the sea and to salt.

And, if current climate trends continue, the problem will just get worse.

goobedy-boogle! bwa fuh smern!

A homeless man just shouted directly in my ear a few minutes ago on my walk home. It hurts. Worst of all, it was just meaningless gibberish:

"ALL THE WAY TO GOOP!!!!!"

And, after I walked on, wishing him a good night:

"F**KING GLABLUH NINE ONE ONE SMAR GLA"

Or something like that.

Hopefully this isn't the pain of (mild) permanent hearing loss. I think there's a tort in here somewhere.

Investment advice: gamble

An article in the globe and mail today recommends (or at least it gives prominent voice to those who do) investing in US stocks to take advantage of the lower US dollar. They say it's cheaper to buy US assets now since the US dollar is down. This is correct.

But, it's only a good investment if the US dollar rises against the loonie again. That's what the people advocating buying US stocks are betting will happen. But it's just that, a bet. If the US dollar keeps falling instead, then your cheap assets will only get cheaper.

One investor says “As we've seen, when the dollar has got to parity or traded above parity it hasn't stayed there long.”. So they expect the US dollar to rise, and the value of US stocks to rise with it. Which would be good for you if you bought stocks before the rise.

This could well happen. But it could well not happen. If China decides to alter its strategy keeping low the value of its currency to help its exports then it will stop buying US treasury bonds.* This will lower demand for US dollars, and lower the value of the dollar.

This could well be a good thing as far as America is concerned, as it would help reduce their unsustainable trade imbalance. But it would most certainly not be a good thing for any Canadians who were convinced they should buy US denominated assets based on a newspaper article.

Feel free to invest in US stocks, but be aware that if you're unsure which way the dollar will go, then you're essentially gambling.

* For those following this, you may have noticed that this is exactly what the US government has been asking China to do for the last several years (stop keeping the renminbi undervalued). Yet at the same time there is widespread worry that China might "stop buying US treasury bonds", which, of course, is exactly what they've been asking them to do. So the policy has been a little muddle-headed here.

If China did stop buying them, then the budget deficit could still be financed, the central bank could buy the bonds instead. This would lower the exchange rate.

Voluntary standards don't work

I saw an article today about how a voluntary carbon emissions reduction market has produced little effect.

Lots of times politicians will propose voluntary standards by an industry to solve a problem. They will say this is preferable than government intervention in order to not interfere with the market.

This is silly. Most likely, the politicians know this, and are just trying to avoid doing anything about the problem or want to help their friends in industry. But, we can't rule out that they're merely idiots.

In either case, (one of) the reason(s) that it's silly is because the very nature of market competition means than voluntary action by corporations to do something that cuts profits puts them at a competitive disadvantage. You can't afford to be nice if it puts you out of business.

Some amount of this sort of thing will always get done because some firms have market power which lets them take small hits in profitability in order to gain a better reputation (this is especially true of large corporations). Or smaller businesses will often do things not directly profitable in order to build there reputation in the community and hopefully increase sales (with the side benefit of feeling nice about it).

But these effects will almost always be very small. The bottom line is, after all, the bottom line. Hence the failure of the voluntary carbon market.

If you want corporations to do something, then make them do it, so that they all play by the same rules. You can't expect them to do the right thing if doing so will put them out of business.

Wind Energy Drying Devices

I exaggerated slightly in an earlier post when I said that I could find problematic assumptions in any New York Times article. This one is good.

It says that most people living in private homeowners associations in the states are banned from drying laundry outside. And, apparently 60 million people live in private homeowners associations.

In response, some states have been passing laws guaranteeing people's ability to dry their clothes outside, to the ire of these private associations. That's where the title of this post came from, a lawmaker passed a law to protect "wind energy drying devices" (clotheslines).

All of this is news to me, and all of this is odd to me. Seems clothes drying outside is banned and disdained because it is seen as something poor people do. Which lowers property values.

I probably find this odd because we've always had a clothesline in our backyard. Rather than poverty, it makes me think of sunny days. We can certainly afford to run the dryer, but that's not really the issue. Dryers damage clothes; some clothes shouldn't even go in them at all. And it's not very hard to put them out on the line or take them in. I'd never even really thought of it as an environmental issue.

But I guess millions beg to differ. Do we have similar attitudes/laws in Canada?

It all depends how you look at it

Most people believe that humans have been extremely successful in exploiting potatoes, wheat, corn et cetera for their own benefit.

An equally plausible theory would be that corn, wheat, potatoes and many other things have been extremely successful in exploiting humans for their own benefit, increasing their numbers and spread o'er the earth beyond what their ancestors might have though possible.

These little guys have been pretty effective at using us for their purposes as well.

Behind the scenes influence in American healthcare

For anyone interest in how the american health industry has manipulated public opinion over the years, this speech from a former insider is a good start. Here is the final paragraph:

"

">During my 20 years in corporate communications and public affairs, I participated in the steady growth and influence of largely invisible persuasion -- and at a time when newsrooms are shrinking and investigative journalism seems to be vanishing. The number of PR people long ago surpassed the number of working journalists in this country. And that ratio of PR people to reporters will continue to grow. The clear winners as this shift occurs are big, rich corporations and other special interests. The losers are average Americans, most of whom are completely unaware how their thoughts and actions are being manipulated to achieve corporate goals on Capitol Hill."

/

More about money

I'd like to expand on what I wrote in the last post. I used desalination as an example, but my point had to do with how we use money to value things. I believe this has led to a common mental error. Money is so commonly used to measure wealth that we take it to actually be wealth.*

It is not. It is what we use to value wealth, and to buy wealth.

The difference is important, though it may not be obvious. I'll give an example. Take a cow. You can buy it with money, or sell it for money. In other words, we give the cow a value in money. With that money, you could also buy lots of things more useful to you than a cow.

That's all however. If you were on a desert island, the cow would be valuable, but the money would not be. The other things you could have bought with money might be valuable, but the itself would be of no use. We use our money to value wealth, and buy wealth. It is a store of value in the sense that we can hold on to it in order to buy valuable things in the future.

But it itself is not actual value. It is the resources and inputs at the base of our economy which provide us with value.

The prevalence of money makes this easy to forget. What is the practical impact of this?

It means that we mistake money for actual wealth. Currently, the actual source of most of our wealth consists of fossil fuels, and the machines we have built that are powered by fossil fuels. If these get more expensive, either because production of them peaks or because we put the proper environmental price on them, then the dollar cost of things that require their use increases.

So we say things like "Nuclear power costs X$ per kilowatt of energy" or "if we switch from oil, wind power can produce energy for X$"

But, we don't build a wind turbine or a nuclear plant from money. We build them using machinery powered by fossil fuels. We extract uranium using machines powered by fossil fuels.

And so on. This analysis applies to more or less everything. But when we discuss these and other issues in the newspaper, we hear of the dollar amounts, with little discussion of the underlying sources of use and production.

It is possible to figure out the dollar prices of the things in the human created economy you see about you. Much less possible is figuring out what was required to create them. They are the products of an incredibly complex system.

If there is one thing that the financial crisis ought to have clearly demonstrated, it is that those in charge of this system do not understand it. It is certainly beyond the grasp of even the brightest human to understand it both in breadth and in depth.

Money masks this complexity for us, by giving a perceived order and intelligibility to things. It gives rise to the commonplace illusion that we can actually produce things with money.

As I mentioned in the comments to the previous post, it does also serve many valuable functions. But one of its harmful functions is masking our awareness of the nature of the world we live in.

I will say it again, and clearly. Money is a way to measure wealth, and is a means to acquire wealth, but it is not itself wealth. Thinking of it as actually being wealth is a mental error.

It controls and facilitates many things in our economy, but it is not the basis of the economy, which is and will always be the resources needed for what we make and consume.

* wealth: 2. abundance of valuable material possessions or resources

4.all property that has a money value or an exchangeable value b : all material objects that have economic utility; especially : the stock of useful goods having economic value in existence at any one time

note: If you think I mean that a man with 100 million dollars in his bank account is not wealthy (a synonym for rich)....well, that's not what I mean to say.

A man with 100 million dollars can buy lots of valuable things. Hence he is wealthy (rich).

Unless he happens to be on a desert island.

Money warps perceptions

I was reading about saltwater desalination, and an article mentioned that it could now be done for a few dollars per thousand gallons. This is still more expensive than just taking it from rivers in most places, so it doesn't get done very much. But I thought it sounded pretty good as a price to pay for water if we had no choice.

Then I thought about it a bit more. You don't run a desalination plant with money. You run it with electricity, and manpower, and inputs of raw materials.

You need money to buy those things, but dollar costs are not a reliable indicator of long run feasibility if you expect the prices of any of the inputs to fluctuate. A more useful indicator would be how much energy is required to produce a given amount of water.

So if, as I expect, the price of electricity rises, then the costs of desalinated water also increase. It's not very useful to think of these costs in terms of their short-term dollar values.

Unfortunately, this error in perception (that money is actual value, as opposed to a medium of exchange for things of value) distorts much of our thinking. I'm quite aware of it, but I still fell for it here, and I imagine it still distorts other assumptions that I have about the world.

* I still think desalination could be a good idea in many places, but I wanted to make the larger point about our assumptions regarding money.

In the long run, we're all warm

Global warming is (or was) often portrayed as a moral issue concerning the well-being of our descendants and of future generations. Among those who accepted that greenhouse gases produce a greenhouse effect, there was still a widespread perception that most of the unpleasantness would be in the distant future.

Recently though, it's been getting much clearer that while future generations will still face big problems from warming, it is also very much a short term issue for those of us alive today. Particularly those of us young enough to be reading this on facebook.

In other words, not only is it a moral issue of us versus our descendants, it's also a matter of self interest to prevent global warming.

I'm bringing this up because Britain's met office just released a report which serves as a good summary of current expectations.

They predict a 4 degree rise over baseline temperatures by....2055, unless we get our act together. This danger exists because of what are called "feedback effects", which refer to natural systems which either release more greenhouse gases or cause more warming as the earth warms. Some possible feedback effects include:

1. The melting of ice replaces a white surface (ice), with a darker surface (seawater, ground, trees, etc.), which reflects less light, and hence less heat, back into space.

2. There is a lot of carbon trapped in permafrost in the north of Canada, Russia and in Alaska. As permafrost melts, this releases the gas in the form of methane, which is much more harmful than CO2.

3. Rising temperatures throw off the rain cycle, which may well destroy vulnerable ecosystems such as the amazon. As the trees go away, they release CO2 they had formerly been trapping.

4. There is methane frozen at the ocean floor in something called "methyl hydrates". As the ocean warms, these could melt, increasing warming.

There are others as well. Anyway, the met office predicts that average temperatures will rise 4 degrees. If that doesn't sound too bad, I suggest you take a closer look at that picture I included at the top. The oceans warm by less than 4 degrees, and land warms by considerably more. It averages at four, but the disruptions on land are considerably greater than it would seem at first glance.

What effects would this have?

1. Extreme disruption of ecosystems. The amazon and other forests dependent on abundant rainfall in warm regions could turn to desert. Crops dependent on certain weather conditions could stop growing.

2. The destruction of coral reefs from acidification. Some of the CO2 released dissolves in the oceans, making them more acidic. This kills coral.

3. The monsoon, vital for asian agriculture, could stop or change greatly. It's dependent on weather cycles caused by ocean temperature.

4. Sea level rise as glaciers on land melt. Not only would this impact people living on the coast, it could also spread salt onto agricultural lands, ruining them for production.

5. The disruption of water supply to regions dependent on melt water from glaciers. Notably, the Indian subcontinent and China are dependent on melt water from the Himilayas. If the glaciers appear only in winter, this could ruin regional agricultural systems.

This is pretty terrible. And, it should be noted that real world conditions have been consistently exceeding worst-case scenarios from climate models, so it could well get worse. It may in fact already be too late to stop many of these things from happening, as there is a long time lag between the time carbon is emitted to the atmosphere and when it has it's effects.

But to do nothing ( our current policy, more or less), would inevitably make the problems even worse, so we must try. This should be priority number one right now. Everything else is just a sideshow.

Myths about Iran

For those interested in the Iranian issues I mentioned earlier, this is a good article.

Reading between the lines

The New York Times has an article about the Swiss health system, and how it is in some ways similar to the bills currently before the US congress, minus the public option (a government run insurance plan that people could choose to buy).

What struck me was actually a small thing in the first paragraph, it serves as an excellent example of a larger trend:

Like every other country in Europe, Switzerland guarantees health care for all its citizens. But the system here does not remotely resemble the model of bureaucratic, socialized medicine often cited by opponents of universal coverage in the United States.

This creates a contrast, implying that some places do resemble the model of "bureaucratic, socialized mediciine" cited by opponents of universal coverage. But, as those of us living in Soviet Canuckistan are aware, our system certainly isn't like that, and none of the European ones are.

Ironically, the health care system that most exemplifies the fears of right wing opponents of universal health care is....the United States of America. The business of american health insurance companies is to collect premiums and then use the money to pay private sector bureaucracies whose purpose is to find ways to deny coverage.

This sort of thing would be trivial, except that it's widespread. Show me an article in the NYT, and I'll find you a similar flaw*. Collectively, this warps political discourse. It is normal in American politics to assume that there are actual, existing bureaucratic nightmare systems. There are many other unexamined assumptions on all subject matters which shape our narratives.

I long thought this was normal, and natural, and that's how newspapers are. But when I went to France, I noticed that it rarely happened. I read Le Monde and, I noticed a conspicuous absence of that sort of thing. Every week with Le Monde there came a NYT supplement, and I frequently found myself annoyed while reading it, as it made such silly errors when compared to the French press.

* Seriously, find me any political or economic article, a normal one, not an in-depth one, and I can show you how it has errors which warp our perception of the world.

Infrastructure Change is Hard

There's an interesting article in the New York Times about efforts to build solar electricity plants in the american desert. Basically, they need water (for cooling, and for cleaning mirrors), and it turns out that there isn't much water in the desert. And, what water there is, is generally already in use for agriculture.

Also, did I mention that the water generally comes from non-renewable aquifers?

These seem like big hurdles. In theory, it could be sustainable by building lots of desalination plants in California, and using large amounts of electricity to make freshwater and somehow safely getting rid of the salty brine that's left over so as to not kill the ocean, and pumping the water through a massive set of pipelines over the mountains and into the desert.

One wonders if that would actually produce enough energy to power all of the infrastructure needed to supply the water. In any case, it seems difficult.

A lot of people, including otherwise intelligent economists, simply assume that if oil supply falls short and prices rise, that price signal will simply lead to new forms of energy being invented and put into place. I used to believe this, but in light of practical problems like this, the idea seems increasingly suspect. Technology isn't created or powered by a magical process that will solve all of our problems, much as the history of the past couple of centuries might make it seem that way.

The theoretical basis people use to justify their belief that new technology will automatically come into place given price rises in old energy is the supply and demand curve, and something called the substitution effect.

If the price of one thing rises (eg. apples), then we have an incentive to replace it with something else that will serve a similar purpose (oranges). This much is true, if simple, but the fault lies in assuming that it works for all things*, and for all things fairly quickly. The details of energy infrastructure substitution are more difficult than apples and oranges. Some problems:

1. Consumer goods are easy to substitute. Infrastructure, however takes a long time, particularly when the infrastructure either hasn't been invented or perfected yet. You will always have unforeseen problems such as the water shortage mentioned above.

So even if people want to switch to something new, it might take a while for that to materialize.

2. You may simply have no good substitutes. So far, nothing has been shown to combine the portability and power of fossil fuels. We can and should still try to develop alternate forms of energy, but we have no magic guarantee that they will provide us with the same abilities as our current sources. Inasmuch as we depend on lots of energy to keep our society going, this means we need to prepare for this second possibility.

Which is why I think we ought to put in place a carbon tax NOW. Price signals will have some effect in moving us to the right direction, but we have no idea how fast, smooth or even possible the transition will be. So best to push the process along faster now, and not assume that "the market will take care of it when the time comes".

And since the energy we will use to build these new sources of energy will come from fossil fuels, trying to build new sources will only get harder if oil gets scarcer and prices rise. Better to start now while prices are still reasonable.

* Insulin is a good example where the substitution effect does not work. Economics deals with these situation through a concept called elasticity of demand, and elasticity of supply. In other words, how easy is it to go without or supply more of a certain product. Insulin is not easy to go without, to say the least, so it has a "inelastic" demand. Large increases in price do not reduce demand.

So, technically what I'm saying here is that oil has a fairly inelastic demand and supply. But people forget about elasticity (if they knew about it) when they imagine new energy sources will spring forth out of the ether once the incentives are right.

Because effective substitution is a common outcome in our society does not mean that it is inevitable. Large spikes in price or substitution to inadequate substitutes are also possibilities allowed by the model.

Whence all this writing?

For those reading these all facebook and wondering why I'm writing so many notes, I should clarify that they're from a blog.

Faster than a speeding automobile

Yesterday, on my walk home from school I was followed by a horrid screeching noise. It turned out to be a car, in exceedingly bad condition. It was stuck in traffic, and so ended up matching my pace for eight minute walk back, squealing in agony every time that it stopped.

The screeching made me notice the fact that I was actually walking faster than the cars. Traffic isn't usually that slow in Toronto, but I have noticed the same thing happening a few other times. Being in a car here is infinitely slower than in Fredericton.

Fortunately, I live 8 minutes from school, about the same distance from a grocery store, right beside a streetcar and subway stop, and lots of other cool things are nearby. So I can easily ignore the traffic creeping along around me as I walk about, but it's incredible what people put up with for the sake of "mobility".

Conform to the Norm

A comment to the last post wondered why vegetarianism is viewed as odd and considered an abnormal choice.

Well, vegetarianism is considered an abnormal choice to make because it IS an abnormal thing to do, meaning that it deviates from behavioural norms. Most people eat meat.

And THAT (deviating from the norm) is considered worthy of a dismissive reaction because, despite our rhetoric of individualism, we are a conformist culture. This is true of every culture, they each have their own norms and accepted modes of behaviour.

Having moved in and out of Cuban, French and Canadian culture, it's something I've been able to confirm through my own experience. It can be quite funny to watch people do things which they are certain are THE one right and natural way to do things, but are in fact just a local standard.

Perhaps one irony is that in our culture, the idea of individualism is something to be conformed to.*

We interpret phenomena through the lens of our cultural norms. Behaviour that deviates from norms is automatically suspect, or at least difficult to understand. So vegetarianism is looked down upon precisely because it is not normal, and people haven't figured out why one ought to be one. Again, this comes down to the fact that our moral codes are generally based on actions we perform directly. Few would take food from the poor, but many buy foods such as meat which make food more expensive and scarce for the poor.

Sooner or later, events and reality will intrude, making it easier for people to reason their way around the various reasons why it could make sense to be vegetarian. Real world events can be a strong catalyst for the re-evaluation of moral codes.

For now, those that choose that path will just have to take comfort in the fact that there are at least enough of them to make a viable community for support. That, provided with health, cost and moral benefits hopefully can be enough for those inclined to do so.

p.s. Just in case anyone got the wrong impression, I'm not actually a vegetarian, though I do eat a fairly meat reduced diet, largely for cost reasons (I'm a poor student). I don't think it necessarily has to be an all or nothing proposition though. Any amount of meat reduction is environmentally beneficial.

* Now that I think about it, how would you go about NOT conforming to individualism?

Turning off the tap hardly matters

I came across some interesting figures on water use for food production today. I'd already known that most water use goes to agriculture. The numbers for water use are roughly 70% agriculture, 20% industry, and 10% for domestic use.

Some agricultural uses take much more water than others. A pound of beef, for example, takes about 4000 litres of water (I couldn't find any universally accepted figures. Click on the image below for a rough idea of water required for different foods).

This is because not only do you have to give the cow water to drink for years, but you also have to water the feed that the cow eats. I'm sure there are other water needs as well.

As humans, we tend to focus on the things we do personally with effects directly visible in our lives. So, if people decide they ought to do something to reduce water usage, they may decide to focus on something immediately present, like turning off the tap.

Eating beans instead of beef would be infinitely more effective; a vegetarian could leave a tap running for hours, and still use less water than your typical meat eater. But since we don't directly see it, people often focus on the much smaller amounts of water usage that they directly control in their houses.

Another under-appreciated fact is that the 70% of water used by agriculture and the 20% used by industry are ultimately used to make things used by us. So, in an indirect sense, it's really our water usage. This applies to pollution and resource usage more generally.

Which is why it's nonsensical when some people assume that the solution to our environmental problems lies with greedy industries*, and if they cleaned up their act, everything would be fine. Ultimately, the problem lies with all of us who consume the products of industrial society.

This is a chart of estimated household usage, for comparison. Note how slight the amounts are compared to those used to produce our foods:

* This is not to say that greedy industries aren't part of the problem. Industry lobbying to mislead the public and preserve the status quo has been quite harmful. The industry financed propaganda campaign against climate change in the US is a prime example.