Better than a Newspaper

Forecasts Are Worthless

2010-03-20T09:25:00.000-07:00

I'm reading a book called The End of Oil, by Paul Roberts. It's about our struggles with energy. It had rave reviews, but is less good than I expected. He's American, and the perspective shows. Even as he is skeptical of the neo-conservatives, he shares some of their key assumptions.

One assumption is that it matters who owns oil. If the Iraq war had gone exactly as they wanted, and Exxon-Mobil had rights to Iraq's fields, instead of the Russians and the Chinese, Americans would still pay the same price as everyone else.

Things like that aside, the book does do a decent job of covering a vast topic, how we get our energy. It was published in 2004. Reading it turns out to be an excellent demonstration of how bad we are at predicting the future.

For instance, he talks about the incredible growth of the Chinese car industry. It started from nothing not that long ago, and they were producing 2 millions cars in 2000. Roberts wrote that while growth would surely slow, they could get to 3.5 million per year according to Beijing's ambitious plan.

Well, it's 2010 now. Here's a handy chart of China's car production, from wikipedia:

Automobile production by year
Year	Production (in million units)
1992	1.0
1999	1.2
2000	2.07
2001	2.33
2002	3.25
2003	4.44
2004	5.07
2005	5.71
2006	7.28
2007	8.88
2008	9.35
2009	13.83

His prediction for six years into the future was off by a factor of four.

He predicted that by 2020, China might surpass the United States in C02 emissions. How's that going?

Rank	Country	Annual CO₂ emissions^[8]^[9] (in thousands of metric tons)	Percentage of global total	Per Capita^[10] (metric ton)	Reduction needed to reach world per capita average	Emissions intensity^[11] (kg of CO₂ per $1 GDP (PPP))
-	World	28,431,741	100.0 %	4.4^[12]		0.48^[12]
1	China	6,103,493	21.5 %	4.62	4.8 %	1.03
2	United States^[13]	5,752,289	20.2 %	18.99	76.8 %	0.45
-	European Union^[14]	3,914,359	13.8 %	8.07^[7]	45.5 %	0.42^[7]
3	Russia	1,564,669	5.5 %	10.92	59.7 %	0.86
4	India	1,510,351	5.3 %	1.31	-236 %	0.56
5	Japan	1,293,409	4.6 %	10.11	56.5 %	0.33

I'm not sure why everyone talks about China and India when they speak of developing country Carbon emissions.

Again, that prediction was made six years ago. This is one of the points that Nassim Nicolas Taleb hammers on in his book, the Black Swan (which everyone should read). We're really bad at this. In fact, it's so complicated that we can't be good at this.

1. We're trying to predict an incredibly complicated system. There are too many variables, including some which can't possibly be known, yet are consequential enough to throw everything off.

2. Predicting the future requires knowing the technology of the future. And if we knew the technology of the future, we would know it today. Ergo, we would have it today. Yet we don't have it today. Hence, we can't know the technology of the future.

Yet we keep predicting anyway. And there are virtually no penalties for getting it wrong, in most fields. No one bothers to check past predictions.

Before I start reading a new author who's in the business of analysing our situation today, and making guesses about our future, I like to read some of the things they wrote in the past. If you want to know if you should trust Thomas Friedman Today, read Thomas Friedman, Yesterday (conclusion: don't read Thomas Friedman).

Some people actually are better than others. Mostly this is because they avoid making the sort of definite predictions that no one can make. Sometimes there are things we can guess accurately: eg. We are going to keep emitting some large amount of C02 in the near term, at least.

We can draw consequences from these predictions: This will block some outgoing radiative energy from exiting the atmosphere, increasing the net energy content of the earth system.

We can then attempt to describe the possible consequences that will have, while staying humble about what it's actually possible for us to know. You shouldn't trust any extremely definite predictions.

Alberta Foolishly Cuts Oil and Gas Royalties

2010-03-11T20:17:00.000-08:00

This is a very dumb move. They'll earn more money and make people happy in the short run, but lowering royalties is a very silly way to deal with your non-renewable resources.

There is a finite amount of oil to be found in Alberta. With a royalty, Alberta gains a certain portion of the profits. Now they will have a smaller portion of the profits on that finite amount of oil. That is the downside. The upside is that there will be more investment in the short term.

More investment means that their oil resources will run out faster. They'll make more money in the short term as investment goes up, but less money overall, and they'll run out of it sooner.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. Why is it so difficult for people to understand that oil is non-renewable? They talk about oil "production". The word really should be "extraction". No one produces it. They just find it, and remove it from the ground. Then it is gone. The Alberta government will get royalties from the oil, once. They have just settled for a smaller royalty.

It shouldn't make a difference to Alberta how fast oil extraction occurs, because they'll get their royalty whenever it does get pumped. The oil that is economical to be pumped will get extracted sooner or later. Now they will get a smaller royalty.

*caveat: There is one way this could possibly make sense. If the world ever gets around to banning fossil fuels, then obviously Alberta will have been at an advantage if they manage to pump more of their oil out of the ground before that happens. But I don't expect that to happen anytime soon, if ever.

I doubt the Alberta government does either. This is just about short term politics. Bizarrely, a policy design to give less money to Albertan citizens over the long run, and more to the oil companies, seems to be popular.

How Right Wingers Make Democrats Do Their Bidding

2010-03-10T14:15:00.000-08:00

Joe Biden visits Israel. He declares America's everlasting commitment to Israeli security, and that "there is no space" between the two countries. His goal for the visit is to restart the "peace process". This doesn't really mean anything, but the Obama administration wants something to point to, so that it can claim it has a policy.

More or less, he's doing what Netanyahu wanted him to be doing. What did Netanyahu decide was the correct response?

It turned out to be a swift kick to the groin. While he was visiting, the Israeli government announced it was building 1600 new settlement units in East Jerusalem. This means that the Americans can't even pretend there is a fake peace process ongoing. Biden only wanted Netanyahu to give him empty gestures, and he didn't even do that. Instead he spat in his face.

As punishment, Biden showed up 90 minutes late to a state dinner. I don't expect any more lasting change in America's Israel policy.

This is part of a larger pattern. Netanyahu is an Israeli right winger. He seems to have learned well from American right wingers how to deal with Democrats. No matter what they do, kick them in the crotch. If they do something you don't like, called them "communist Nazis" (Republican version), or accuse them of being against Israel. If they do something you like, slap them in the face. If they ask you to do something, refuse, and make a demand of them.

It's a test, to see how far you can go. If they don't resist, then you can push them further next time.

This works, because the Democrats have no self confidence, and no ideas of their own. On American issues, they are convinced that the Republicans are right, and that Republican ideas are popular. No matter how many seats they might win in an election, this attitude persists.

Thus the Democratic health care plan is very similar to the plan passed by Republican Mitt Romney in Massachusetts, or that proposed by the Republicans in 1994. They've tried to win Republican support by making concessions. When the Republicans snarled back at them, they watered it down further.

They filled their stimulus with tax cuts, and cut its size, to try and when Republican support. For this, the Republicans called them communists. They kept trying harder to please the Republicans after that.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is a Republican. Chairman of the Fed Ben Bernanke is a conversative Republican. The Democrats didn't feel confident putting people of their own in place. They have more confidence in Republican ideas.

Barack Obama has continued most of Bush's policies, except with a more pleasant, erudite tone.

Regarding Israel, "there is no space"* between the two countries. They agreed with everything the most right wing Israelis say, and try their darnedest to make them happy.

Originally, Obama asked Netanyahu to make concessions. Netanyahu snarled. Obama backed down. This was a sign to the Israeli leader that he could push harder. If the Americans let this latest snub go, then it will be a sign that they can push for more in the future.

Meanwhile, American liberals haven't learned how to play the game. They focus on what can be done, and criticize those who call for better proposals as being "unrealistic". This means Obama faces no pressure from his left. So he tries to win the support of the frothing mad Republicans who accuse him of being a foreign born communo-Nazi-muslim-terrorist who is not being tough enough on security, and should be torturing more people.

Obama then makes concessions to the Republicans, to show that he's not like that at all. Really.

"Gee whiz, I'm really the sort of guy you should like, I swear. Please, please won't you tell me you like me? I'm doing all of these things you said you wanted."

The liberals need to learn the lesson that the Republicans and the Likud seem to have learned long ago. If you want a man with no self respect to do what you want, treat him like dirt. Make him try harder and harder to please you, and never, ever act satisfied. Maybe dangle a few hints that you'll do what he wants if he does something you want, first. Then once he expects you to return the favour, do it all over again.

It seems to work with Obama. The Democrats are the party of nerds. Republicans the party of the jocks and school yard bullies.

* If you want an example of how deep is Biden's true belief, here's a telling anecdote from Pat Lang, a former high official with the DIA:

" I was there with my Arab employer to visit the senator. the Arab didn't want anything except to meet Biden. He was foolish enough to think that an acquaintance with such people is a kind of talisman. It is not. The Arab made some pro forma positive reference to the "peace process." Biden flew into a rage, grew red in the face and shouted that this was an insincere lie and that his guest knew that it was only Arab stubbornness that prevented "little Israel' from living in peace. His "guest" sat through this with what dignity he could manage. I would have walked out on him if I had been alone."

He'll probably go back to his attitude that "there is no space between the two countries" soon enough, once he forgets about how angry he felt on this trip.

http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2010/03/joe-biden-is-a-flunky-for-natanyahu-co.html#comments

Will we understand what happens to us?

2010-03-05T08:48:00.001-08:00

I had a conversation about climate change denial with an older, wiser friend a little while ago. He didn't know much about it, so I told him how the public increasing believes that either the earth is not warming, or that it is warming, but we aren't to blame. I said this was the result of a well-organized and well funded propaganda campaign to sow confusion as to what scientists are actually saying.

I thought that eventually people would figure out that the climate was changing, and that we were causing it, decades in the future. By that point, runaway feedback effects would mean it would be too late to do much about it. It may already be too late now.

He had a different take. He told me about visiting the Galapagos. It was then, he said, that he realised just what effects we humans have on our environment. The whole world used to be full of large animals, but now they only remain in large numbers in those areas which we don't use for our civilizational purposes.

But by and large, people don't realise this. They look at things around them, and take that for normal. The same could well happen with a changing climate. It's changing rapidly by the geologic standards, but its still a fairly gradual shift as measured by a human lifetime. And we humans can forget how things were just a few short years ago. Does anyone remember what life was like before Google? I think it's quite possible that the climate will be changing, measurably, yet people will be quite uncertain about it.

If people don't understand what scientists are saying now, who's to say they will in the future? We can already measure the melting of the ice in the Arctic. If this doesn't convince people now, why should we be so sure future events will convince them? Toronto had a very warm winter this year. There was very little snow. The children of today and tomorrow may well simply accept this as the new normal.

Most people don't have the tools to understand scientific data, and to figure out what is credible information and what is not. People are increasingly inclined to disbelieve authorities of all kinds, including scientists. Let's not be idealistic about this. People absorbed the past findings of science largely on the weight of authority, not the way they're "supposed" to (ie. learning about the scientific method, and judging for themselves). Some smart looking nerd in a lab coat said it, so it's true. It often was true, because the things the guy in the lab coat said were informed by the results of the scientific process.

But this was a fragile foundation. People are not so trusting of scientific authority anymore. This is not because they have developed a better method, or are judging the facts for themselves. They simply don't believe authorities as they used to. In some ways this is good, in others bad. But one of the bad effects is that when scientists do figure things out using the scientific method, people are less inclined to accept their results, particularly if they're inconvenient for their pre-conceived beliefs, or hold unsettling implications for their way of life.

We who accept the evidence for anthropogenic climate change tend to believe that in the long run, everyone will come to understand the evidence as well. It's not so clear to me that this will inevitably happen.

Edit: This process is not limited to climate change. On most topics, you'll find that the conventional wisdom is often either inadequate or flat out wrong. I think this will only increase in the future. Contrary to initial expectations, the internet has proven to be excellent at spreading disinformation. While it is incredibly useful for informing yourself if used correctly, misinformation actually seems to be rising on a number of topics in the "information" age.

Long term unemployment is terrible

2010-02-21T09:24:00.000-08:00

The New York Times has a pretty good article on long term unemployment. There are millions of people in America who simply can't find jobs, because they don't exist right now. As a result, they're going into debt, and facing extreme hardship.

Attempting to fix this should really be a no brainer for the Democrats. If people keep suffering, they won't get votes. Right now, a lot of the long term unemployed in America are receiving unemployment insurance benefits, but the article says that will stop for many of them in the coming months unless Congress approves an extension which Obama is asking for.

They really, really should do that. It will of course make them more popular. But also, if people stop receiving unemployment benefits, they will buy less. The economy is already suffering from depressed demand, as people cut back on spending since they lost so much of their housing wealth. Giving money to the unemployed is one of the easiest ways to boost demand, as they need it to live.

So if the Democrats are dumb enough not to approve the extension, then not only will the beneficiaries be annoyed with them, but the economy as a whole will be worse off, which also bodes ill for them.

The article follows one woman who has been unemployed for two years, Jean Eisen. She and her husband depleted their savings, and now have 15,000 in credit card debt. This is a good example of the insanity of the modern american credit system. It doesn't sound like they'll ever be able to pay that off. I'm sure there are a lot of people in the same situation.

Banks are currently listing that sort of debt as "assets". On their balance sheets, they presume that this sort of debt will be paid back. It looks to me like a lousy assumption, about as lousy as assuming that the subprime mortgages were going to be paid back.

Obviously, that credit system should be reformed (it probably won't be). But in the short term, it would make sense for the government to keep providing unemployment benefits to these people, so they don't have to go into debt.

You can look at the lifestyle, choices or lack of skills like Jean Eisen, and think that it's her "fault" that she's in the situation she's in. Maybe she could learn how to cook pinto beans, of which she has ten bags. They're nutritious! And she might lose some of that weight she complains is keeping her from getting a job. And maybe they could move to a place with cheaper rent.

But this sort of speculation is the wrong way to go about it. Whatever you might think individuals should do differently, the problem is structural. People like her used to be able to get jobs. And, they did a good enough job to earn the money they received. Now, no matter how hard they look, they can't because the jobs aren't there. In a weak economy like this, if one person does better and does find a job, that means another doesn't. Better individual choices won't do much to solve a collective problem. Its a miserable situation. Welfare is not much help, because thanks to Clinton's reforms it's much harder to get, and you're often required to be working to qualify.

I had very low expectations for Obama and the Democrats. But one of the things that surprised me was their reluctance to do things very clearly in their self-interest, such as improving the social safety net for the long-term unemployed.

It would help them in the polls, and it would help the economy, which would also help them in the polls. They've done a bit to help, but really they should have done a lot, lot more, purely from self interest.

They haven't. They cut a lot of good things to help the poor from the stimulus, and replaced them with tax cuts. Tax cuts don't help Jean Eisen very much. And they wonder why a Republican took Kennedy's seat.

People are suffering, and the guys in power don't seem to be fixing things, so they vote for the other ones. It might not make sense, but the American two party system doesn't make sense. A competent political party (ie. not the Democrats) would have recognized that if they don't make simple fixes like more unemployment insurance to aid to those suffering in the downturn, people will vote for the other guys, even if they're frothing, raving lunatics. It should be a simple choice, not something they debate and waver about.

Democrats: mendacious, and stupid.

Glenn Beck calls for extermination of "progressives"

2010-02-21T08:19:00.001-08:00

Or to be fair, he at least seems to be advocating their re-education. At the recent CPAC conference, he called Progressivism the disease of America, and that it "must be cut out of the nation's political system."

I don't think he specified how it should be cut out of the nation's political life. For the record, I don't think Beck actually wants to round up and exterminate "progressives", or re-educate them. He's just an actor. I have no idea how much of what he says he believes. I used to see his show now and again when he was on CNN, he was much less wacky. But now he's on Fox.

He's a talented performer, and he saw what would sell. One of the things that sells is that "progressives" are destroying America, and in turn they must be....well, you know. To be fair to conservatives, I'm guessing a good many liberals would agree in private with the statement that "Conservatism is a cancer on the American body politic, and it must be ___________. The world would be a better place if conservatives were ____________"

They're pretty polarized down there. What I find amusing about it is that it's not even clear what a "progressive" is. It's someone who wants progress, but towards what? What firm principles does a progressive hold? They used to be called liberals. Then the Republicans made that a dirty word. So, to show they weren't dirty commie liberals, they started referring to themselves as "progressive".

But they still have principles! You can keep your principles, even if you're so spineless that you change your name for yourself if someone starts making fun of it. Right?

If you want to know what principles a progressive has, just look the president whom they support. Barack Obama has plenty of principles!

The principles of progress include:

Creating a really bad health care reform bill, then failing to pass it
Keeping Guantanamo open, and maintaining all the other old secret prison sites worldwide
Continuing the use of rendition.
Being against (one of the) war(s). Thanks to them, America pulled out of Iraq!
(right?). We don't hear about Iraq any more....
Being for the other war. You know, the good one, in Afghanistan
Bombing Pakistan
Bombing Yemen
Bombing Somalia
Threatening to bomb Iran
Staffing a progressive administration with bankers, and giving Goldman Sachs and other banks huge profits shortly after they brought the world economy to the brink of collapse.
Not reforming the banking system. The last crisis was so fun, let's do it again sometime!
Re-appointing Ben Bernanke, because he's such a cool republican and did such a cool job in not allowing a massive housing bubble or a financial collapse.
Not doing anything about climate change
Adopting a new rhetorical attitude towards the Arab world, totally different from that of Bush. The link provides evidence of just how different it is.
Taking nude pictures of everyone who takes an airplane, to "keep us safe"
Maintaining Kennedy's embargo against Cuba
Criticizing Israel a bit, but only if it doesn't make them mad. If it does, time to back off.
Being wussies, and claiming they need 60 votes to pass things, when Bush passed bills with 50. Progressives recognize that the rules are different for them.
Feeling like they're much better and smarter than conservatives, because they've accomplished all of the good things listed above.

I'm pretty sure progressivism has some other cool principles, but that's all I could think of. As you can see, they are nothing at all like the policies that George W. Bush pursued.

So with all of those communist accomplishments I just listed, no wonder conservatives think progressivism is a cancer, and must be destroyed.

I look forward to more progress in the months and years to come. Glenn Beck'll be awful mad about it.

Warmer Winters Mean More Snow (On Average)

2010-02-15T20:43:00.001-08:00

Waaaay back in December, world governments met in Copenhagen, in an attempt to form a deal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It failed miserably. Some were optimistic though, saying that American would pass a bill this year to control greenhouse gas emissions, and then the world could agree on a legally binding treaty later this year in Mexico.

I thought that was silly then, and I'm pretty sure everyone thinks its silly now. For a variety of reasons, Obama and the Democrats in Congress aren't going to pass a bill. But in case they didn't have enough reasons, the snowstorm in DC last week provided another one. Apparently, lots of people are saying that snow is a denial of global warming. They're using this as a further excuse to kill the bill.

It turns out that snow is much more likely to occur in a warming winter. As long as rain is still cold enough to freeze you'll have snow, but if it's not all that cold out, you're likely to have more of it (on average). It turns out warmer winters are wetter, and more wetness leads to more precipitation. See here, and here.

Obviously, any individual storm, or heat wave is not evidence for or against global warming. You have to look at the trends (they indicate warming). So it's an error to point to any single event, as those squawking about the snow storms are doing.

But their mistake is even worse than that, because in a warming world, we should expect bigger snow storms.

America the broken

2010-01-25T18:29:00.000-08:00

This article on the bail bond industry in America is incredible. An entire system has been created in which no one benefits but the bondsmen and the county officials they help elect. Read it. Incredible.

No, scratch that. Incredible is the wrong word. Incredible means not credible, which means unbelievable.

This situation is sadly, quite believable. But in a country that prides itself on being a paragon of democracy and efficiency, and a shining beacon to the rest of the world, it's ridiculous how absolutely nothing works as it "should". Not even something simple like posting bail.

I think it's safe to say that most Americans have an idealized conception of how things in their country are supposed to work. This isn't a liberal vs. conservative thing in most cases. There is a general national consensus on how certain institutions are "supposed" to work. You know what I mean. The description of things you would learn in civics class, if you had taken an American civics class. It is reinforced in and by movies, television and cartoons.

I think it's also safe to say that practically nothing in The Greatest Country On Earth™ works as it should.

I'll repeat that, for emphasis: In America, practically nothing works as it should.

A straightforward, plain English explanation of almost any aspect of american public life or society is enough to shock.

I'm only basing this on anecdotes of particular industries and institutions, but I do believe that the plural of "anecdote" can in fact be "data", or at least I think its true in this case. I'm prepared to defend my pet thesis.

To anyone reading this, have you got an idea in mind of an American institution or industry which you believe goes against this and actually does work as it should, more or less? If so, please post it in the comments. Feel free to include what you believe to be a description of how it "should" work. I will investigate, and write something about it.

Examples of topics: Food production, credit cards, Congress, public schools, the military, health insurance, prisons.

All of the examples I've picked differ greatly in practice from how they "ought" to work. Your job is to find a topic that doesn't.

*Note that in principle that it's possible for something to differ from how it "should" be because it has become more modern and effective. This is possible, but as often as not modern innovations not only shift something from its traditional methods, but they make it more inefficient at the same time. Private military contractors would be one example.

** If the widely held perception of something is that it already is crappy, don't bother listing that as an example. eg. Mcdonald's clerk. The public's perception of that job is probably largely correct, but I don't think that's much to brag about.

edit: It just occurs to me that by posting this, I'm running the risk of getting submissions to the effect of:

"Yoga class. You pay money, go to a class and do yoga. Works like it should."

I guess that's a risk I'll have to take.

59 Senate Seats

2010-01-19T18:43:00.000-08:00

That's how many the Democrats have, now that the Republicans seem to have won Ed Kennedy's seat.

The fact that they did lose, makes you wonder: Are the Democrats the suckiest party that ever did suck?

If that isn't true, then it shouldn't be too difficult for them to realize that even with only 59 seats in the Senate, that's far more than Bush ever had when he was doing lots of bad things.

But oh no, woe is the Democrats, those meenie weenie Republicans will threaten to talk at them a lot (filibuster) if they try and do anything that might be popular. So, it seems like a smarter idea not to do anything, or at least to propose really tiny changes that won't offend anybody.

The thinking goes, this might make them less likely to lost their seats in the general election this year. People will vote for the Democrats, as long as they don't propose changing anything, because people like how things are right now, right?

We'll see how that works. Or maybe they'll figure out that to actually stay in power, they have to do a bit more than give money to corporations and then whine about Republicans when people complain about how they aren't doing anything to help them.

I suspect they like power, most people do. They'll have to produce something at least marginally useful if they want The Historic Nobel Laureate Mr. Obama to last more than one lousy term.

I'm not optimistic they're smart enough to act in their own self interest. But, maybe they'll prove me wrong. The approach they take over the next little while, as this loss sinks in, will be a good indicator.

Oops. re:Iran

2010-01-19T11:31:00.001-08:00

So, a couple of posts down I said that the West would go nuts if Iran threatened to attack its soldiers in Iraq, or elsewhere. Well, I was totally wrong. Iran has apparently announced that they will attack western warships in the Persian Gulf if attacked. No one is making anything of this.

So, um....don't listen to anything I say. I guess the lesson here is that no one's really paying attention to Iran right now, so neither sides announcements really get seized upon.

Yemen? How did we get here?

2010-01-18T21:15:00.000-08:00

I think something is broken. Ever since a Nigerian set his underpants alight aboard an international aeroplane, there have been mutterings of war with Yemen, or war in Yemen, or bombing Yemen with the support of their government. Stuff along those lines.

I heard on the news today that an envoy from Yemen was in Ottawa, asking for military aid against Al-Qaeda. More likely, they will use it for domestic purposes, including fighting their non-al Qaeda rebellions.

I could write you a whole post on why this is likely to be a bad, counterproductive policy, on how the Yemeni government will likely manipulate the west for its own purposes, produce kills of alleged high value targets, and cite Al-Qaeda as a bugbear to extract money, weapons and training. And that would be the less scary story.

The scarier one involves our involvement creating an anti-western backlash, and the propaganda related to that pushing the US into yet another quagmire of a war.

But that's not what I want to write about. Why are we even having this discussion in the first place? This is happening without much of a fuss, with a fairly minor event serving as the trigger.

It's just sort of assumed that it's natural and normal to send drones to bomb Yemen, send them some military advisors, and, if it comes to it, I'm sure the main impediment to sending ground troops would be that the US army is already stretched thin. There likely wouldn't be many moral objections voiced in the mainstream press, or worry that the American people might not support the deployment of troops abroad.

How did we get here? It used to be much harder to start a war.

I think the campaign to invade Iraq changed America. And us, as we're so exposed to their media, and the words of their presidents and government officials. I remember prior to the invasion, people talked about the Somalia syndrome. The minimal US casualties in that country had caused a public outcry, and scared politicians away from any troop deployment which could lead to the loss of American lives.

That has now been entirely overcome. No one talks about that anymore. The US losses in Mogadishu now seem trivial.

Something happened. I'm not sure if it was 9/11, the propaganda campaign, the steady normalization to losses suffered in the Iraq and Afghan wars*, the slow drumbeat of militarization throughout the Bush presidency. Abu Ghraib played a large part as well. They led to desensitization, and eventually resensitization, to the idea that torture was a good idea. The fact that no one of any importance was punished played a great role in allowing this.

I don't think there is any single cause. But we're in a new normal. Obama is continuing most of Bush's policies, in a less bellicose manner. People seem to think this constitutes change. These policies don't seem strange to people any more.

Predator drone attacks absent declarations of war, blase violation of sovereignty, secret prisons, torture, full body scanners in airports, the increased and continued use of paramilitary contractors, escalation of a war, highly secretive legal tactics, claims of executive and national security privilege. There's more, but I can't even remember it all.

This is now largely taken for granted, if its mentioned at all. I have a rough idea of how we got here over the past nine years (has it really been that long?), but it's hard to remember what things were like before, what people thought, how the norms have changed.

A decade ago, those things I listed would have been much more scandalous. Unamerican, even. Some of them might have been done, but they weren't taken for granted as they are now. If you're reading this, and you consider any of the things I listed as not all that shocking, why? Did you always think that way? If not, what changed?

I don't consider them shocking anymore, they're standard operating procedure now. But at one time, I would have considered them extreme, and so would most people.

Why aren't we shocked anymore? And can we go back to being shocked? I think it may be too late. By continuing Bush's policies but in a more respectable tone, Obama is locking these things in as the new "normal".

Right now, I don't know very much about Yemen. I'm hoping I won't have to learn more, by reading dispatches from the Yemeni front in the near distant future.

* This has affected Canada as well. We've lost 139 soldiers in that country. America lost but 18 in Somalia. People care, but they now consider it acceptable. This would not have been true a decade ago. That this is so I believe is due in large part to events and words spoken south of the border.

All options are on the table

2010-01-10T20:46:00.000-08:00

David Petraeus, head of US military operations in the Middle East, has announced that America has drawn up plans for attacking Iran, if they decide it's necessary.

The fact that they have such plans is no great revelation. I would have been surprised if they didn't. I am a little shocked they decided to talk about it in such a blasé manner, though only a little. It was treated as minor news here.

Imagine the furor if the situation was reversed. ie. "Iran announces plan to attack US bases in Iraq and Afghanistan and mobilize proxy forces if US bombs nuclear sites".

I am pretty sure Iran must have plans to this effect. If they announced that however, you'd hear no end of how belligerent and murderous they were, for planning to kill American soldiers.

However, if an American says the same thing, nothing is made of it. I heard this on French news. The only print references I can find on Google are in newspapers from India and Pakistan (and CNN, where this was originally announced). That a high ranking american general announced plans exist to bomb Iranian nuclear sites, breaching international law and killing civilians is of no interest, apparently on this continent.

Margaret Wente is confused

2009-12-10T06:59:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-10T06:50:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-06T14:20:00.000-08:00

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....

2009-12-06T06:37:00.000-08:00

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?

2009-11-18T21:42:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-18T08:48:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-15T07:48:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-14T19:34:00.001-08:00

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?

2009-11-09T08:06:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-09T07:58:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-03T13:57:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-01T15:48:00.000-08:00

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

2009-10-29T10:27:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-27T16:04:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-27T15:44:00.001-07:00

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

2009-10-26T21:05:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-25T07:29:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-24T10:01:00.001-07:00

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

2009-10-24T08:08:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-21T09:29:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-18T09:50:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-18T09:02:00.000-07:00

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!

2009-10-15T16:31:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-15T07:51:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-14T18:35:00.001-07:00

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

2009-10-12T20:03:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-11T20:18:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-11T09:57:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-08T19:06:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-05T08:07:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-03T13:14:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-02T12:55:00.000-07:00

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

Reading between the lines

2009-10-02T08:01:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-01T08:28:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-09-30T18:49:00.001-07:00

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

2009-09-30T18:32:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-29T15:46:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-29T09:51:00.000-07:00

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.

More about efficiency

2009-09-28T07:26:00.000-07:00

On facebook, I've been getting some comments that make clear that it hasn't been exactly clear what the devil I meant by efficiency in the last post.

I'm talking about the economist's version. I studied economics, so its natural to me to think of that type of efficiency....but, I should probably have stated my unstated assumptions. They make arguments clearer.

So....what do economists mean by efficiency? I'll illustrate using something they show in first year called the "Production possibilities frontier". (PPF)

In the simplest version, you might have to two types of goods, and you could split your production between them. The wikipedia example that I linked to has two goods, food and computers. Any point on the line represents maximum efficiency.

If you're at point A, you can produce more computers, but at the cost of less food, and vice versa. This is true of any point on the line. Since you're using your resources to their maximum potential, you can only get more of one thing by getting less of another.

If you're producing at a point inside the curve, then you can get more of both, just because there is still room to be more efficient.

A couple of notes about the PPF. First, the curve is curved because of declining marginal productivity. In other words, we start producing food on the best agricultural land, with the best farmers. If we keep trying to produce more food, then eventually we have to use land not as suited for farming, and take labourers who are better at making computers and worse at making food. So we have to give up more and more computers to produce less and less food.

Second, economists generally shy away from saying how we should allocate resources between the two resources; they leave that one up to the politicians. But if you say you want 75% food and 25% computers (or vice versa), then they do say that you ought to produce those in the most efficient way possible (ie. on the frontier, the line).

In the real world, economist's say that we should strive to be somewhere on the line. They don't have an actual PPF curve for the whole economy, but the theoretical concept applies. Inefficiencies in production anywhere or anyhow mean that we're producing "inside the cuve" or "getting less production than we might have gotten for the same inputs".

This is the rationale behind most contemporary economic commentary, which is why I've chosen the PPF as an example.

Any lack of free trade means that we're producing somewhere inside the curve. We can have more food, and more computers and more stuffed teddy bears for that matter by using open global markets. We reduce inefficiencies and move closer to the frontier of maximal production.

But notice there's no temporal aspect to that curve. It's talking about maximizing efficiency in the present. This is generally what economists mean as well. If, in the future circumstances change that change our production possibilities, well, then our production possibilities will change.

Ta-da! Economists generally talk about these changing circumstances as if there is no problem, because we will find a way to adapt, somehow, and in any case under the new production constraints we can and should still produce in some maximally efficient way at the production possibilities frontier. This is the core of my disagreement of the concept.

I'll use an example to show why this is problematic. Imagine some people on an island. It's a closed system, isolated from the outside world. There is no foreign trade, which is true of our world as a whole as well (we don't import or export to Mars).

Let's say we have two production possibilities: Giant statues, and food. The inputs for both of these things are labour and wood. Labourers carve giant statues in a quarry, then wood is needed to transport them to where they will be displayed. Farmers farm food on land, but they also get lots of fish and other food from the deep ocean. To do this, they need wood from large trees with which to build ocean-going canoes.

Things are going well for the Islanders. They have become pretty efficient. The island now works as a unified whole, producing more food than ever before. This unity has not only facilitated canoe building and fishing, but also allowed improved land agricultural productivity and irrigation systems. The islanders are also able to build lots of giant statues to thank the Gods for their plenty.

The islanders have enlarged the carrying capacity of their island. Previously, it could not have supported such a high population, but now, thanks to their efficient allocation of resources, it can, which also means more skilled labourers to make better statues, and more people to take canoes out to fish the deep. The population has expanded to the extent that can be supported by the increased resources, and living standards have risen as well.

Yay!

There is just one problem: the island is running out of trees large enough to build canoes or move statues. Trees take a while to get that large. Maybe someone notices the problem, and suggests that the islanders cut down less of them. But the island is already near maximum efficiency. So to do that would mean either less statues (which offends the gods), or less food (which means people starve and get angry).

Either possibility is unacceptable. So the islanders keep cutting down the trees, until they run out. They are then unable to get food from the deep ocean, or move their statues. So, they have a new production possibilities frontier. No statues can be made, and much less food can be produced. "Since circumstances changed that changed their production possibilities, well, then then production possibilities will change".

So now, a good economist could say, all these islanders have to do is keep on producing at the edge of this new new PPF, and they will have the most efficient allocation of resources possible. They can adapt to their new circumstances.

Unfortunately for the islanders, in this case adaptation to the new PPF means starvation. They run about smashing statues, cursing the gods, fighting wars, and so on until the population has been greatly diminished to match the new PPF.

The island was Easter Island. This silly story actually happened.

They were an isolated, interconnected system, as our planet it today (we don't import much from the Moon). Population and living standards had risen to match the maximal production of the system, which was attained by producing at the production possibility frontier. In our case we've matched our expectations and needs to the expansive production enabled by our enlarged PPF.

You might contend that we wouldn't be so stupid as a bunch of isolated, primitive pacific islanders who cut down all of the trees upon which their sustenance depended. If so, you ought to pay attention to the news about climate change and the political response. Or you could note the fact that most of our transport and agricultural system are based on oil inputs (including fertilizers and pesticides). Oil is technically a renewable resource, like the trees.

But, like the Islanders, we're using it at a rate far above it's replenishment rate, and ignoring the fact that we don't seem to have any replacement that can keep our productivity similarly high. If and when production peaks and it becomes more expensive, this will reduce our PPF.

This is a problem because we have been producing things as efficiently as we can, and increased our population and living standards to match our expanded PPF. So, we have few redundancies or slack in the system to help us if we are no longer able to produce at such a high rate, much like the Islanders.

Efficiency is overrated

2009-09-27T10:38:00.000-07:00

One of the unquestioned assumptions of our culture is that efficient is better. It seems like a fairly self-evident proposition (perhaps because it's been drilled into us so many times); after all, who is for inefficiency? But it's not always a good thing.

On a personal level, it's pretty easy to understand that efficiency should not be the highest goal. Being perfectly efficient means not stopping to smell the flowers or not having time for five minutes of chit-chat, because you've got something more productive already planned.

So no one really lives their lives perfectly efficiently, nor should they. But on a societal level, people are more willing to take for granted that we should strive after efficiency as much as possible. It's the reigning orthodoxy of our time, underlying support for free trade and globalization.

As far as efficiency goes, I don't think there's much doubt that if you want to maximize the number of computers produced, or dishwashers, or crappy toys or what have you, then the more free trade and globalization the better. Our society has become ever more efficient in this sense of late, using resources to their maximum potential and it is increasingly inter-linked.

There is a tradeoff however. By using resources near their maximum potential, it means there aren't many left over that can be used if something unforeseen happens. And increased efficiency due to interlinked globalized networks has left us vulnerable if any parts of those networks fail. Our set-up maximizes current production by leaving us no reserve capacity.

Efficiency eliminates redundancies. But redundancies serve a useful purpose as backup mechanisms. As an example, we have two of many of our useful organs. If part of us fails, we can still function.

As a society however, we've gotten rid of most of these useful but burdensome safeguards. We have created a productive but fragile society.

The system works alright as long as everything stays connected, and nothing unforeseen surprises us. But we're now much less able to do without these connections than in the past, and we're worse at not being surprised.

N.B.: One problem with arguing against efficiency is that it's hard to do so in a systematic way. If the goal is maximum efficiency, then everything is clear. You find inefficiencies, and proceed to eliminate them. That's what we've been trying to do for the past few decades. But if your goal is "a fair bit of efficiency, but not so much as to leave us vulnerable to disaster if there is a disruption"....then it's not so clear precisely what you should aim for. So I can describe the problem, but I can't say precisely what to do about it.

Assume a can opener

2009-09-26T22:31:00.000-07:00

At law school pub night I was talking with a second year and an economics grad student. The economist was very happy when I told him that I had studied economics in undergrad:

Him: Awesome, reinforcements! I've been arguing with this guy all night (the second year), he's trying to tell me that economics is not a science.

Me: Economics is not a science, nor should it be considered one.

Him: ....buh...bwa?....What? Whose side are you on? Of course it's a science!

Me: Long Term Capital Management (LTCM), managed according to "scientific" economic principles, blew up.

Him: ....Shut up!

Me: The efficient markets hypothesis is bunk.

Him: You, you....JUDAS!!!!

It's possible that it could have been dorkier, but I'm not sure how.

The title of this post is a reference to an old joke making fun of economists for creating theories that heroically ignore the real world. Google it.

The truth can be misleading

2009-09-26T13:48:00.001-07:00

You may have heard recently that Barack Obama was angry about a nuclear site that the Iranians reported to the IAEA. If you read about it, you probably read an article that did not contain untruths. This one is as good an example as any:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/g20_summit_obama_iran

It contains factual statements of what Western leaders said. It's important and useful to know that Western leaders are acting belligerant, and denouncing Iran in strident tones. It likely signifies a renewed commitment to the policy of being ever so angry with Tehran and laying the PR groundwork for a bombing campaign if needed.

But anyone reading that article, or hearing about this on CNN is likely to walk away with the impression that Iran had been illegally concealing a uranium enrichment facility, and been caught red-handed. This shows their perfidiousness, and ill intent. That's the impression I got from scattered news reports anyway.

In the real world however, all that's happened is that Iran decided to create a new uranium enrichment facility, which is within their rights, and announced it to the IAEA, as per the rules, more or less*. Then, the Western leaders decided to pounce upon the announcement for propaganda purposes. This story makes that clear:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/26/AR2009092601359.html?hpid=topnews

It really doesn't seem to me that there was any dramatic revelation here, except that Obama is clearly continuing the Bush administration policy towards Iran. But through repetition of true but misleading statements, a lot of people have gotten the false impression that Iran is up to new tricks.

* There is a technical dispute as to whether or not they should have announced it when they first began to build it (http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=23884&prog=zgp&proj=znpp), but there is no uranium enrichment ongoing there at the moment.

Cubans in a dollarama

2009-09-22T09:01:00.000-07:00

A couple of months ago, I took some Cubans to a dollar store in Fredericton. They were friends of a co-worker, and I had promised to help them around town a bit while they were visiting for an agricultural exchange.

I was remembering this because their was a story on the news that Ex-Honduran president Zelaya has made a surprise appearance in the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa. The coup that ousted him happened when these Cubans were in town, and they wanted all of the latest news, as the coup brought back bad memories of the decades of fascism in Latin America.

But the dollar store was the real highlight of the day, counter intuitively. They had never seen such a thing. The prices were cheaper than in the hard currency stores in Cuba, AND the quality was better.

This was a fair bit different than the reaction Canadians have in stores like that. They walked up and down the aisles in joyous wonder, looking like kids on Christmas morning. They could find a use for everything, either for themselves, or friends and neighbours.

I think there are some interesting lessons here, but they’re hard to articulate. It certainly shows how much we take for granted.

Also, I would note that while Cuba does not deserve most of the negative propaganda used against it, this illustrates it’s not the paradise that some people imagine either. Since coming back I’ve found opinion on that country very polarized between thinking that it’s all bad or all good, but the reality is very nuanced.

Carbon tax

2009-09-20T13:53:00.000-07:00

We face two major foreseeable problems in the near future. One is that the carbon emissions upon which our society is based seem to be heating the atmosphere, and will continue to do so in the future. At a certain point, and we may already be past it, these emissions will trigger what are known as "feedback effects", where the process becomes self-reinforcing and impossible to stop. An example would be the melting of the icecaps causing the surface of the earth to be darker on average, hence reflecting less light and absorbing more heat.

The other problem is that we are running out of the sources of carbon emissions upon which our society is based, particularly oil. Discovery of new fields has been declining, and new sources such as the oil sands are much more costly and take much more energy to extract. While this is good as far as the global warming problem is concerned, it is bad in that:

1. Almost every economic activity we do now uses oil as an input in some way.
2. We have done very little to prepare for when this is not true.

In other words, when oil demand exceeds oil supply, it will hit every area of our economy, and we have done little to prepare for it.

Both of these problems could be mitigated in the same way: learn to use less oil now. If we wait until a crisis is forced on us by oil demand exceeding oil supply, the transition will be more painful than it could have been otherwise. And if we somehow do find a way to keep using as much oil as we do now, and don't stop, then we'll only aggravate the climate crisis.

So, it makes sense to cut back on oil use. The problem is that this means transforming our society, which people are usually hesitant to do until forced. But it we wait until we're forced, the transition will be much more painful. It means, for example, eating more locally produced food, relying less on goods shipped in from overseas or on large transport trucks, shifting away from a suburban model of development, and many other things.

But, we're going to have to do these things sooner or later, so it would make sense to prepare for the transition now, by imposing a tax on carbon emissions and oil use. The problem is, if a politician says: "I want to impose a carbon tax, to shift us away from driving, towards locally produced food, and to make it more difficult to live in the suburbs and commute every day", then people say something like:

"My god, a carbon tax. But I use gasoline! That would make it more difficult to commute in to work from the suburbs each day, and to drive, and to buy things from overseas. That idiot, his plan would never work, it would have all of these negative effects."

The negative effects are the point of course. And while it would cost everyone money, we could give it back by cutting other taxes. That, and the fact that it would help prepare us for a low carbon, low oil future, constitute the positive effects.

Also, you could start it at a low level and gradually increase it, smoothing the adjustment. It would be simple, effective and fairly efficient.

Which is probably why almost no one is interested (though French president Sarkozy put a small one in place recently), because no one really wants to prepare for the future if it means inconveniences today. Instead, you get oddities like the 3000 page cap and trade bill the Democrats are trying to push through congress. It's hard to say what that bill will do if passed, but it seems doubtful that reducing carbon dioxide or oil dependence will be among its major effects.

The alternative to putting in plans for an effective transition yesterday is having the adjustment roughly thrust upon us if and when oil prices spike, or never adjusting and continuing to heat the atmosphere, with severe impacts upon civilization as we know it. We eventually have to do the things that a carbon tax would promote, the question is how hard the adjustment is going to be.

And, based on the short-termism of most political discourse today, the answer is probably that the adjustment will be much harder than we like.

law school

2009-09-20T11:35:00.000-07:00

I'm in Toronto now, I started studying at U of T law school a couple of weeks ago.

I like it so far. I have but 9 hours of class a week, and Fridays off. Yet somehow I'm already busier than I ever was in undergrad. I'm not exactly sure why either, but it something to do with the amount of reading, and the sort of reading. Most of what we've done so far is reading cases, and discussing those in class, to figure out the legal rules contained therein.

The people are are all great. I've been very impressed by everyone in my class, they're very smart, and also very cool, well adjusted people. And everyone has done lots of travel, or other interesting things. Normally I'm not sure how to talk about how I've spent the past two years in Cuba and France; people sometimes find it hard to relate to, but it's fairly normal here.

They say law school is like high school, and I can see why. There are about 190 of use, and we all have the same classes, in the same buildings, so we always see everyone, and I expect I'll know everyone pretty soon. We even have lockers.

Development work

2009-09-20T11:11:00.000-07:00

As some reading this know, I spent some time in Cuba as what's known as a "development worker". I had a great time, and learned a lot, but it's never been clear to me that I accomplished much of anything, nor could I have. I had my doubts about the usefulness of much development work before going, and the experience reinforced them.

My official role was to help Cuban state run agricultural enterprises form business plans to sell higher quality products to the internal hard currency markets. I didn't know anything about business plans, though the Cubans knew even less. I spent much time understanding how their system worked, and more I did, the less I became convinced that whatever business planning framework I had was relevant. I tried as best I could to adapt what I had learned about our business planning methods to the Cuban systems I came to understand. People were generally very happy with the work that I did, but I suspect that where it was useful was in places where the capabilities for doing such planning were already in place.

I came to think about this because I was reading something by Ivan Illich, a former Austrian priest and philosopher who lived much of his life in Mexico and seems to have lived it better than his namesake from Tolstoy's story.

http://www.swaraj.org/illich_hell.htm

Much of that rings true to me. I like to think that I managed to avoid harming anything, and that the main outcome of my time in Cuban was a broadening of my own education, and travel. Which is how Illich implored his listeners to use their privileged status instead.

I think my most lasting and useful effects were produced by showing people how to use our technological systems. I traveled the land, installing anti-spyware programs, explaining the intricacies of windows XP, and resetting antiquated CRT monitors to refresh rates that were easier on the eyes.

Once, entering a building of touristic interest in Cienfuegos, I came across an old man listening to a TV. He was the guard. The TV was loud.

To hear me, he walked over to it, and turned down the volume, one slow push of the button at a time. I showed him that if you held down the button, you could reduce the volume much faster. He was baffled, and grateful. "I've been doing that the wrong way for fifteen years!" he exclaimed.

It is always satisfying to use your knowledge to help another.