Law – Page 47 – a sibilant intake of breath

Dangerous anthropogenic interference

The stated objective of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is to achieve “stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” The most problematic aspect of this mandate is the open definition of ‘dangerous anthropogenic interference.’ Given that we have direct ice core evidence that concentrations of carbon dioxide are higher than at any point in the past 650,000 years – along with indirect evidence that this is the peak for the last 20 million years – it is fair to say that we are already interfering dangerously with the climate system.

Of course, one cannot go straight from showing elevated CO2 to ascribing danger. That said, the link between greenhouse gasses and increases in radiative forcing and temperature is incontrovertible. So too, the realities of icecap and glacier melting and ocean acidification. The question is no longer about whether or not we will cause dangerous interference, but how much danger we are willing to tolerate in exchange for less rapid and comprehensive changes to our high-carbon lifestyles.

Your rights as a Canadian photographer

Bullies within private security and police forces are increasingly keen to harass people taking photographs in public places. As such, being aware of the laws relating to photography in your jurisdiction is quite worthwhile. The standard ‘I am not a lawyer / this does not constitute legal advice’ warning applies.

Things you cannot do:

Misrepresent someone in a slanderous way through photography or captions accompanying photographs.
Photograph people in their homes, or in spaces where they have a ‘reasonable expectation of privacy,’ such as public bathrooms.
Trespass, especially at night.
Take photos “that could be considered national secrets, interfere with a large number of Canadian’s lives, impair or threaten the Canadian Forces, national security or intelligence.”

Things you can do:

Take photos for non-commercial use in nearly any public space.
Photograph and publish photos of anyone, aside from young offenders, who are “newsworthy, doing newsworthy things, or are public figures or celebrities.”
“It is not against copyright law to take a photo of any architectural work, for example, a building, or a permanent piece of public art.”

The document linked above has a lot more detail, including statutes specific to provinces. It also has some good tips on what to do if you are confronted about taking photographs. As always, remaining calm and polite – but clear and firm about what it is within your rights to do – is the best approach. Deleting your photos in response to a confrontation is probably not a great idea because (a) it reinforces the idea that those confronting you have the right to make you do this (b) when they almost certainly do not (the exemption is the national security case) and (c) you will be destroying evidence that the photos you were taking were legal.

Small change

The New Yorker has an interesting article on American coinage. It focuses particularly on the question of what should be done with small denomination coins, given the ever-higher prices of metals like zinc, copper, and nickel.

It also includes a lot of interesting asides: such as how the American nickel was designed to have a mass of one gram per cent of value, at a time when the American government was flirting with the metric system. The article also features an amusing example of how industry sets us shell groups of ‘concerned citizens’ who are keen to block changes to the law that would be disadvantageous to them. In this case, a major supplier of zinc to the U.S. Mint founded Americans for Common Cents in order to resist moves to eliminate the diminutive coin.

Personally, I think that scrapping the penny is an act long overdue. For years now, I have been picking them out of the change I get back from purchases in order to reduce the mass of stuff being ferried about in my pockets. Even if every price gets increased to the next five cent mark, the benefits from being rid of the bothersome coin will be more substantial.

Telecom immunity and the rule of law

A recent article in Slate discusses how legal policy in the United States should be fixed in the post-Bush era. There are many things in it with which I wholeheartedly disagree. Perhaps the most egregious case is in relation to providing immunity to telecom firms that carried out illegal wiretaps for the administration. Jack Goldsmith argues:

Private-industry cooperation with government is vital to finding and tracking terrorists. If telecoms are punished for their good-faith reliance on executive-branch representations, they will not help the government except when clearly compelled to do so by law. Only full immunity, including retroactive immunity, will guarantee full cooperation.

I think the bigger danger here is providing a precedent that firms can break the law when asked by the administration, then bailed out afterwards. Only fear of prosecution is likely to make firms obey the law in the first place. Providing immunity would invalidate the concept of the rule of law, and open the door to more illegal actions carried out by the executive branch. “Full cooperation” is precisely what we do not want to encourage.

If government wants to intercept the communication of private individuals, it must be a policy adopted through the due course of law. People need to know what it involves (though not necessarily the details of exactly how it works), who supported it, and how those supporters justified the choice. Greater security from terrorism at the cost of a more opaque and lawless state is not a good tradeoff. Company bosses should fear that they will be the ones in the dock when evidence emerges of their engaging in criminal acts, regardless of who asked them to do so. The alternative is more dangerous than the plots that warrantless wiretapping sought to foil.

Carbon trading, windfalls, and consumers

This background note on carbon trading from the Sightline Institute does a good job of explaining the relevance of different modes of permit allocation to consumers. That sounds terribly dull, I’m sure, but it’s simple and important. The basic idea of carbon trading is that you set some level of allowable emissions for a facility, firm, sector, or economy. Say you want to reduce total national emissions by 2% over the next year. You multiply current national emissions by 0.98 and create permits for that quantity of emissions. What you do next is very important. You can either auction these credits to the highest bidder, requiring firms that produce greenhouse gasses to purchase them, or you give some or all of them away for free to such firms.

The critical point here is that these credits are money. Auctioning them does two things: it requires polluters to pay for their emissions and it raises funds. These can be invested in research, used to subsidize low-carbon technologies, or just used to fund general tax cuts. When these credits are given away for free, they give firms the option of either continuing to pollute for free or selling the right to pollute to someone else.

The point made in this document is that consumers end up bearing the cost from either approach. This is because unless firms are tightly regulated or in competition with other firms that don’t face emissions restrictions, they will both profit from any permits they are allocated for free and pass along the cost of permits to consumers. The analogy used in this document is a good one:

Try buying World Series tickets from a scalper. Would he charge you any less if he found the tickets on the ground? Of course he wouldn’t. Like energy, the street price of World Series tickets is based on supply and demand. The supply and demand for tickets is the same no matter how much the scalper paid for them, and so the price he charges you will also be the same no matter how he got them.

Of course, the scalper would much rather get his tickets for free – and that’s precisely the point. Polluters are financially much better off if permits are given away instead of auctioned, but the cost of cutting emissions and the resulting effect on energy prices will be the same no matter how the permits are delivered.

As such, the superiority of an auction system is further reinforced. Not only does it implement the Polluter Pays principle, but it also provides a mechanism through which governments can compensate consumers for the manipulative behaviour of firms.

Car standards in China and North America

The Toronto Star has reported that: “No gasoline-powered car assembled in North America would meet China’s current fuel-efficiency standard.” Even the proposed tougher Californian standards – the ones about which there is a big fight with the Environmental Protection Agency – will not do so. In the United States, there is a proposal to require 35 mile per gallon (14.9 km/L) performance by 2020. Today, all Chinese cars are 36 mpg (15.3 km/L) or better. Canadian cars average 27 mpg (11.5 km/L), and don’t have to meet any minimum standard of that type.

That’s certainly something to consider the next time you hear that tougher standards will maul the auto industry. Judging by the relative performance of Japanese and American car companies, it might be fairer to say that continuing to pump out dinosaur vehicles is more likely to leads to its demise on this continent.

Two perspectives on air power and insurgency

These two articles provide contrasting views on the use of air power by coalition forces in insurgency situations, such as those in Afghanistan and Iraq:

The first is much more personal, written by a woman who spent months living with soldiers in the Afghan valley where the campaign is ongoing. It does a good job of capturing the chaos and violence being endured by coalition soldiers, as well as the psychological toll of doing so. The second is more removed and – unsurprisingly – more straightforwardly critical.

Both do a good job of setting up questions about how to ethically, legally, and effectively use air power when fighting insurgent wars. At the end, it’s pretty clear that no unproblematically ‘good’ answers to them exist.

Adding Dennis the Menace to the crime bank

Apparently, Scotland Yard wants schools to collect DNA samples from five year old children who “exhibit behaviour indicating they may become criminals in later life.” While there are plenty of reasons for opposing the Orwellian scheme, the more interesting implication is that the police think they can anticipate criminality in adulthood on the basis of the behaviour of five year olds. If so, to what extent can we consider a predisposition towards criminal behaviour to be a manifestation of an individual’s choices? The premise behind our justice system is that people generally commit crimes as an act of will, and it is the wilful disobedience of law that is being punished. If the police believe that crime can largely predicted on the basis of problematic behaviour beginning in childhood, it calls into question the overall validity of our concept of what crime and criminals are.

Sectoral solutions

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.

Kosovo and Quebec

A recent (and very unscientific) poll in The Globe and Mail suggests that many Canadians see the Kosovar declaration of independence as a “precedent that could be used in Quebec.” Personally, I found the question ambiguous. If anything, the situation in Kosovo is a demonstration of why Quebecois succession is a poor option.

Since at least the end of the first world war, there has been a profound tension between civic and ethnic nationalism. At best, ethnically defined nationalism has been a means of peacefully dividing empires into groups of states that get along decently; at worst, it has been a significant cause of genocide and ethnic cleansing. Virtually all states have minorities. Many have minorities in border regions, alongside states where those people have a majority. Given the difficulty and bloodiness of adjusting national borders, it is generally preferable to maintain states capable of accommodating members of ethnic minorities as full and equal members of the society – a possibility only likely to be manifest when the society has some philosophical basis other than ethnicity.

Normally, then, we should hope for pluralistic states that base their legitimacy around popular consent. What Kosovo exemplifies is a case where this has not occurred: where a central government has undermined its legitimacy in an entire region (as Russia has done in Chechnya) and has thus made it impossible for that area to be a legitimate portion of the state. The Kosovar case shows just how far such abuse must generally go before it constitutes good cause to break up a civil federation. Quebecois grievances are not on the same level, and thus do not constitute a license for succession.