climate change activist and science communicator; event photographer; amateur mapmaker — advocate for a stable global climate, reduced nuclear weapon risks, and safe human-AI interaction
Matters of money
I have mentioned the value of low-fee index tracking funds before. This article, from this week’s Economist, is sure to rile up some mutual and hedge fund managers. It basically accuses them of being con-men, getting people to pay them high fees with misleading promises of high returns.
The existence and magnitude of alpha remains disputed.
A group of Canadian environmental NGOs has put out a 28 page list of suggested areas of action and recommendations for Canadian policy. Tomorrow Today (PDF) is divided into sections on energy, wild species and places, oceans, water, food and agriculture, human health, and economic signals. The report reflects the work and positions of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, David Suzuki Foundation, Ecojustice, Environmental Defence, Equiterre, Greenpeace Canada, Nature Canada, the Pembina Institute, Pollution Probe, Sierra Club Canada, and WWF Canada.
Some of the more interesting recommendations include:
Clearly, some of the suggestions are more feasible and realistic than others. It is interesting to see what priorities and approaches NGOs agree on when they collaborate.
Given how slick the report overall is, the PDF is of rather poor quality. It has a bunch of layout calibration marks all over it, and selecting text doesn’t work properly because of large, irregularly shaped invisible elements.
A while ago, I posted on how the Mifare RFID system had been reverse-engineered. Now, it seems that the Oyster Cards used in the London Underground have been cracked. Painstaking microscope work and a weakness in the encryption algorithm employed were enough to compromise the system – allowing cards to be cloned and arbitrarily modified. Given how fares for one-way trips run from £4.80 (C$9.58) for Zone 1 and 2, off peak, to £11.30 (C$22.55) for Zones 2 – 8 + Watford Junction at peak time, you can be sure that there will soon be a lucrative underground market in cloned cards and passes.
It goes to show how when you are deploying such an expensive and extensive system, you cannot trust the vendor to simply provide secure products. Robust external evaluation is necessary. Furthermore, you had better be sure to design the system such that a problem that does emerge can be contained and acceptable cost. Hopefully, that will prove true of the London system.
Gas flaring is probably the most wasteful use of hydrocarbon fuels on earth. Natural gas is often found in the same deposits as oil and, in many oil exporting states, the gas released during oil extraction is simply burned, rather than shipped off for use. In Iraq, enough gas is flared each year to double electrical output if used in turbines instead. Worldwide, oil and gas refining and processing produces about 6% of global emissions. In Canada, flaring produces 5.5 megatonnes of emissions annually. Flaring is also common in some West African states, where poor access to electricity is already hampering development.
This is the sort of area where international cooperation could make a big difference. It might not be worthwhile for firms in oil exporting states to install equipment for transporting and using natural gas, but doing so may be cheaper than reducing emissions from other kinds of firms elsewhere. Rather than shutting down production, a cement plant in Canada might pay the up-front costs of a natural gas capture and transport project in Russia. Rather than being burned uselessly, the gas could be used in place of dirtier forms of power: whether replacing dirty coal plants with efficient gas turbines or being used to fuel vehicles. The result would be less waste, and the more efficient use of an increasingly scarce non-renewable resource.
According to the American Public Transit Association (APTA), ridership in 2007 was the highest for 50 years. Use rose 2.1% above 2006 levels and 32% above 1995 levels – a rate of increase twice that of the population as a whole. It also reflects a higher rate of increase than there was for vehicle miles travelled on highways.
The biggest gains were in rail ridership, with significantly lower increases in bus use, except in relatively small communities. This might reflect the transit choices made by planners, or the preference many people have for trains rather than buses.
Lots of statistics can be accessed through the APTA webpage. Some Canadian data is also available. Calgary and Edmonton both saw use of all kinds of transit increase by more than 10% between 2006 and 2007.
Yes! Magazine has an interesting series of short articles describing climate change efforts that can be undertaken in four major areas:
Breaking down the problem by sector is a useful way of assessing the most important areas for action, as well as those where the most improvement can be made for the least expenditure of resources. In an ideal world, simply internalizing the externalities associated with climate change would create the proper incentives for the market to sort out the problem. In practice, law-making is too slow, inconsistent, and unconcerned with future generations for that approach to work alone.
While the report covers a lot of bases, the final conclusions about what ought to be done seem somewhat vague. Perhaps that is reflective of the degree to which adaptation efforts need to be tuned locally and cannot easily be effectively developed at a national level.
A number of news sources are reporting that Ontario is starting a competitive bidding process for a new nuclear reactor. The seriousness of climate change does compel us to at least consider nuclear as an option, though it is entirely possible that the non-climatic risks involved may rule it out as a good idea.
In any case, one line in one article jumped out at me:
Construction would begin within the next decade.
Recently constructed nuclear plants have tended to face significant delays before and during construction, on account of both construction problems and legal challenges. The overall timeline shows just how challenging it will be to achieve significant emission cuts before 2020 by rejigging large emitters. Hitting 2020 levels of 25-40% below 1990 levels is vital if developed states are to get on the path to deep cuts by 2050 and stabilization in the 450 to 550 ppm range.
Corn-based ethanol fuels have received a lot of well–deserved criticism lately. This includes criticisms that they take more fossil fuels to produce than they replace, that they have a marginal effect on total greenhouse gas emissions, and that they raise food prices and starve the poor. Ethanol defenders use two approaches to counter-attack. They claim that these problems are not as severe as reported, and they argue that corn ethanol is a necessary step on the road to cellulosic ethanol, which will be made from non-food crops grown in ways that don’t use fossil fuels intensively.
A recent post at R-Squared questions whether that transition will ever occur. Rapier argues:
Cellulosic ethanol, and by that I mean cellulosic ethanol in the traditional mold of what Iogen has been working on for years – will never be commercially viable.
If so, this is bad news for biofuels in general. Rapier points out problems including the large amount of lignin in biomass, the difficulties in transporting such quantities of biomass to refineries, and the energy use involved in drying the stuff out.
Additional criticisms of cellulosic ethanol can be found in a recent study from Iowa State University. According to their economic analysis, cellulosic ethanol will never be produced at the levels envisioned by the American Renewable Fuel Standard, and will only be produced in substantial quantities if it gets three times the subsidy already granted to corn ethanol:
Competition for land ensures that providing an incentive to just one crop will increase equilibrium prices of all. Also, at pre-EISA subsidy levels, neither biodiesel nor switchgrass ethanol is commercially viable in the long run. In order for switchgrass ethanol to be commercially viable, it must receive a differential subsidy over that awarded to corn-based ethanol.
Largely, this is on account of how growing any crop in massively increased quantities will affect factor prices for other crops: from land to labour to farm equipment.
There is no doubt about it, if technology is going to help us transition to a low-carbon society without giving up liquid-fuel driven transport, we are going to need to come up with some awfully clever new ideas.
Increasingly, there seems to be a strong correlation between a young person’s level of education and their level of pessimism. Arguably, this is on account of the related correlation between education level and level of interest and engagement with current events. Somebody who never watches the news or picks up a newspaper just has less to worry about.
A recent British survey has produced some numbers that support the pessimism hypothesis. The Future Leaders Survey polled 25,000 applicants to British universities. The findings demonstrate a widespread anticipation of a worsening world:
Asked about likely outcomes for humanity by 2032, the responses are gloomy to say the least. Nine out of 10 surveyed think Africa will still be starving and oil will be prohibitively expensive, and eight in 10 expect more terrorism and the effects of climate change to be hitting hard. Inequality within the U.K. and between rich and poor nations will have worsened, according to around 70 percent of those surveyed. Half expect nuclear weapons will have been used again and that the U.S. will still be in Iraq.
16% of respondents said that they expected humanity to go extinct within a century; 78% of respondents said that could only be avoided through radical lifestyle changes. Admittedly, these are people who are just starting out at university, so it doesn’t demonstrate much about the linkage between education and pessimism. It would be quite interesting to have the same group re-polled in four years time. It would not surprise me if they were significantly more dispirited the second time.
One has to wonder whether this makes today’s society an aberration. Surely, history has been full of people who never really expected the world to change, one way or the other. Periods of history have also included large numbers of people believing that big improvements were possible or even inevitable. I am not sure if the kind of apocalyptic feeling spreading through the most influential segments of the most powerful states has much precedent. One can only speculate about what the long-term consequences might be.