Author: Milan

In the spring of 2005, I graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in International Relations and a general focus in the area of environmental politics. In the fall of 2005, I began reading for an M.Phil in IR at Wadham College, Oxford. Outside school, I am very interested in photography, writing, and the outdoors. I am writing this blog to keep in touch with friends and family around the world, provide a more personal view of graduate student life in Oxford, and pass on some lessons I've learned here.

Ten days to chapter two

By the end of this month, I am to submit the second chapter of my thesis. On “problem identification and investigation” it will detail the scientific processes that led to the Stockholm Convention and the Kyoto Protocol. Largely because of the sheer scale of the latter effort, it is a more difficult thing to pin down, especially in a reasonably concise way. If someone knows of an article or chapter that provides a neat scientific history of the climate change debate, UNFCCC, and Kyoto, I would appreciate being pointed in that direction.

On the theoretical side, the chapter will examine the ways in which phenomena in the world are categorized as ‘problems’ or not. I am also going to examine the role of existing bureaucratic structures in determining if and how scientific research in undertaken. There, the contrast between the American and Canadian approaches to dealing with POPs should be illustrative.

About 7,000 words long, this chapter will be one of the three pillars upon which the thesis as a whole will succeed or fail. As such, I am understandably anxious to do as good a job on it as can be managed, given the limitations on how much I can actually read and remember. My biggest source of anxiety remains the thought that I haven’t done enough research to speak authoritatively on the subject. Finishing the Litfin and Bernstein books is thus the first order of business, for the next few days. To that end, I should resume my ‘peripatetic and caffeinated’ reading strategy.

Visual programming tools for non-coders

Using Yahoo Pipes, a neat visual tool for making simple web applications, I made an RSS feed that aggregates new blog posts, blog comments, changes to the wiki, and 43(places/things/people) contributions. While this particular feed is probably only of use to me, people may well find the architecture useful for doing other things.

While it will probably never be the case that you can do serious computer engineering without knowing how to write code, tools like this are a good way to deal with the fact that the vast majority of computer users will never write Java or PERL. Designing interfaces which are both flexible and comprehensible to non-experts is quite a challenge, but certainly one worth taking up. Much of the momentum behind blogs is simply the result of the fact that they can be set up and operated by people who have never needed to deal with a command prompt or the configuration of a web server.

Quarterly Church Walk party

Later tonight, my flatmates and I are having one of our periodic parties, the major purpose of which is to see some of our classmates who have disappeared from site since everyone separated into the various optional seminars. There are probably a couple of people from my year in the M.Phil in International Relations who I haven’t seen since before the summer, and I know very few of the people who joined the program this year. Of course, the scattering that has already occurred is just a prelude to what will happen in July, as people spread out to all corners of the earth and many separated areas of human endeavour, leaving behind a dedicated cadre to complete the D.Phil in an additional two years.

It will be exciting to see where such a dynamic and capable group of people find themselves in twenty five or thirty years. That said, I know very little about the subsequent fortunes of people who completed this program in the best, barring the subset that have gone on to teach it: a surprisingly high fraction of the total body of instructors.

Given the extent to which the ‘come as your supervisor’ theme of the previous party was ignored, this one has officially been declared ‘ambiguously themed.’ Interpret that as you will.

[Update: 18 February 2007] The party went well, and had a good number of people present, though very few were actually from the IR program. Someone left a dark blue backpack in our sink. It says: ‘Hikerpak’ on the side and seems to contain various notes and papers. If you know to whom it belongs, please come and claim it.

American primaries upcoming

The primary season that precedes American elections is always an interesting time for strategizing. As a supporter of either party, you want to achieve two things: the election of the most appealing or electable candidate for your party, and the election of the most appealing or least electable candidate for the other. The tension in the latter pair is probably the most interesting bit. Should committed Democrats try to help a centrist like Guliani get elected (a particularly pressing issue in states with open primaries, where registered Democracts can vote in the Republican primary and vice versa) or should they try to push the Republicans towards a hopeless candidate?

The risk averse option, and the one that seems the most sensible, is to choose the most electable option for the party you support (provided their platform is not seriously objectionable) and the most tolerable option for the other party. For this election cycle, it isn’t quite clear who would fill either role, but my guesses right now would be Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani. That said, I am reasonably willing to tolerate moderate fiscal conservatism, as long as it isn’t accompanied by culture war conservative values fodder. American voters may well feel otherwise. For instance, an atheist candidate is essentially unelectable in the US, but would probably be slightly preferable for me.

From the perspective of someone who is not a dyed-in-the-wool supporter of either party – and both have plenty of ugly features – the strategies that yield relatively centrist candidates are probably the most desirable. Anyone who is able to excite the party faithful to a feverish level, but not reach out to the intelligent independents who must ultimately represent the balance of opinion, is both unlikely to win and unlikely to govern very well.

It will be interesting to see what we learn about the candidates while they are tramping around New Hampshire and Iowa: another curious feature of American electoral politics.

More published photos

First, it was The Oxford Student. Now, the 2007 Wadham College Gazette, produced by the college and distributed to students past and present, features two photos that I took and posted on various websites. The back cover is a photo I took of the flowers behind the cloisters last spring. Happily, they credited me for the images. Unhappily, they called me Milan Llnckyi.

Now, I can understand how a person sees Smyth and writes Smith. I cannot see how someone sees Ilnyckyj, just wings it, and writes ‘Llnckyi.’ Every single website from which these photos might have been taken (blog, Facebook, and Photo.net) includes my name in full. Incredulity aside, I have invented a mnemonic for the aid of future generations:

I
Love
New
York
City.
Kate (Happy Birthday)
Yodels
Joyfully.

Add this to the pronunciation guide, in Ilnyckyj lore. Still, I am flattered that the college found my photos worthy of printing and distributing.

PS. I really can’t be too scathingly critical. I have been double and triple checking this entry to make sure I haven’t committed the spectacular gaff of misspelling my own name.

Climate change, law, and predictability

Happy Birthday Kate Dillon

In a somewhat surprising move, a coalition of opposition members of Parliament in Canada have passed a bill forcing the government to live up to the commitment that was made when we signed and ratified the Kyoto Protocol. Specifically, Canada is to cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to 6% below their 1990 levels by 2012. This is quite a substantial reduction to achieve in the next five years, given that emissions are presently about 30% above their 1990 levels.

In many ways, this situation demonstrates how not to deal with the problem of climate change. What you need to do is create the certainty, within industry, that the costs of GHG emissions will increase predictably and progressively over time. Then, when decisions are being made about what equipment to buy and how to set up industrial processes, the extra constraints can be taken into account. By contrast, the present on-again-off-again approach doesn’t create clear incentives. Even worse, it is not clear to industry what will happen after 2012.

The most straightforward and effective approach would be a tax on every tonne of GHG emissions, weighted according to the contribution the particular gas makes to global warming. Since methane contributes more than CO2, it would be more highly taxed. That tax would then rise progressively over time, until Canada reached the point where GHG emissions stabilized and then began to drop towards pre-industrial levels. Whether such an approach would be politically possible (especially with Alberta eying a tar sands bonanza that could mean massive emissions) is another matter. Three plans for meeting the target are outlined in this article from The Globe and Mail.

It comes in threes

The first substantive chapter of the thesis is about problem identification and investigation. This is not being treated as necessarily temporally prior to the next two substantive chapters (consensus formation and remedy design), but the three do seem analytically separable. Throughout the triptych, at least three themes are likely to be ever-present: the moral relevance of uncertainty, the importance of social roles, and the ways in which normative assumptions are embedded and concealed within processes.

The confluence of three other things defines the reasons for which this thesis is a novel contribution: the exploration of those themes, the combination and comparison of the two case studies, and the focus upon the contribution that international relations as a discipline can make to the subject at hand. Having those three overlapping reasons is comforting, because it means I am quite unlikely to be utterly scooped by someone else who is looking at the same problems in similar ways.

Pragmatically, it does seem like the environment is likely to be a growth area in international relations. That said, there are three major possibilities for the future overall:

Climate change proves to be less threatening than the worst case, runaway change scenarios would suggest; other environmental problems prove manageable
Climate change is as bad as some of the most pessimistic assessments claim, but it is uniquely threatening among environmental problems
For whatever reason (population growth, economic growth, technological progress, etc) additional problems of the climate change magnitude will arise

If I had to put my money on one of those options, it would be the second. I can see human behaviour causing all manner of specific problems, both localized or confined to particular species or elements of the environment. It is hard to see another human activity (aside from the danger of nuclear war) that threatens the possibility of human society continuing along a path of technological and economic evolution, during the next three to five hundred years.

Back among IR scholars

I switched gears in reading today, and the result has been dramatic. There are really three kinds of research going into this thesis:

Background reading about fundamental concepts like the nature of science
Research on the case studies
Examination of analyses of other case studies

Shifting from 1 to 3, I feel like I have gone from picking a few grains of gold dust out of a bucket of mud to striking a vein of solid gold. By that, I do not mean that the previous reading was uninteresting or poor scholarship. Rather, I mean that the ratio between pages of reading and possible thesis content approaches 1:1 in a lot of Litfin’s work, while it was much lower when reading general background materials. Seeing whole paragraphs that I could well imagine in my own thesis is both empowering and frightening. It proves that I am not totally insane in what I have written so far, and it holds out the threat that what I have come up with isn’t exactly original.

In any case, reading Karen Litfin’s Ozone Discourses, on the Montreal Protocol, has been quite engaging – even if she does have an annoying habit of wandering off into abstract discussions of marginally related philosophy, apparently simply so as to prove to everyone that she has thought a lot about Foucault.

That said, perhaps her statement that there is a “general human proclivity to believe that what one does not understand must not be very important” is proven in my response to her lengthy dissemination on Habermas et al.

PS. Days remaining until submission: 66.

Old and new festivals

The month of February is derived from the Latin word februare, meaning ‘to purify,’ and was the last month of the Roman year. The association between February and purification, however, precedes the founding of Rome. On the 15th of that month was a pagan festival called Februatio. Later, it was called Lupercalia, after Lupercus – the cave near Palatine Hill where a female wolf supposedly suckled Romulus and Remus. The festival was meant to purify the settlement where it was held, releasing health and fertility.

William Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar begins during this festival, one way in which the Shakespearean history of Caesar’s life differs from that of Plutarch. Indeed, the crown with which Antony “thrice presented him” was a symbol of that ancient festival, and Caesar’s refusal to accept it cited in Antony’s comments following his death (III, ii). This goes to show that refusal to participate in public festivities can be dangerous for you, if you are a person of influence. In 494 CE Pope Gelasius I replaced Lupercalia with the feast of the Purification of the Virgin.

By contrast, the association between the feast of the obscure Saint Valentine and romantic love was apparently the work of Geoffrey Chaucer in the 14th century:

For this was on seynt Volantynys day
Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese [chose] his make [mate].

It seems that Hallmark is not entirely to blame, after all, nor is the Christian replacement for the festival of Lupercalia. Those wishing to invoke the spirit of either the new, as opposed to the ancient, celebration may do well to emulate the Squire from The Canterbury Tales:

So hootehotly he lovede that by nyghtertaleat nighttime.
He sleep namoore than dooth a nyghtyngale.

For those not so fortunate, or who prefer to keep February as a time of purification, there a mass of fine, free literature out there. Reading some would be a lot more charitable than sacrificing two goats and a dog to Lupercus, as was traditionally encouraged.

[Update: 11:59pm] Mica has a Valentine’s Day video up. It has his standard lighthearted charm, and may be just the thing for people who face this day with bitterness (provided that it is of the sort that can be assuaged, rather than the kind deeply rooted in your very soul).

Dolphin safe tuna

One of the most reliable ways of locating tuna stocks is by following dolphins. Once you find dolphins feeding on the fish, you set your nets around and catch them. Of course, this method will sometimes lead to you catching dolphins as well. In eighteen years of dolphin set tuna fishing in the United States, 18 dolphins were recorded as caught, along with 34 tonnes of sharks and rays and 295 tons of other fish. Such by-catch is virtually always discarded. In an equivalent period of dolphin safe fishing (where electronic Fish Aggregation Devices are used instead), no dolphins were caught, but 237 tonnes of sharks and rays were, along with 15,500 tonnes of other fish. Again, this was discarded.

Dolphin safe fishing is also disproportionately likely to catch immature tuna, which have not yet reached their full size and which have contributed very little to reproducing the species, since tuna generally take a long time to reach sexual maturity.

This only makes sense if you strongly privilege dolphins over other forms of marine life. Either because:

You think dolphins themselves are bearers of rights
People have much stronger preferences regarding dolphin treatment than that of other elements of marine ecosystems, and those preferences determine what is moral.

Admittedly, each of these is a viable moral position consistent with the ways in which we generally view what kinds of things can bear rights. That said, the trend in ecology is towards recognizing the importance of ecosystem integrity. From this perspective, setting nets around dolphin pods is probably the greenest way of catching tuna. This is especially true since it is possible to design nets that dolphins virtually always escape, but tuna do not.

Of course, now consumers know that to be eco-friendly, they are meant to buy the dolphin safe tuna. Confident in the belief that the problem has been dealt with, not enough people realize that we have probably made things worse.