Category: Politics

All posts on what Bismarck called “the art of the possible”

Open thread: climate change and growth

Corktown Footbridge, Ottawa

One of the biggest disagreements that exists among those who believe that action is required to mitigate anthropogenic climate change is between those who see it as a problem that can be managed within existing economic systems and those who argue that it requires profoundly different ones.

The first view can be encapsulated as ‘climate change as an engineering problem.’ We just need to give people the right incentives, and enact policies to change over the energy basis of society to one that is carbon-neutral. Readily available tools for doing this include Pigouvian taxes: those meant to incorporate the societal harms associated with various actions into the prices paid by those who do them. Examples include carbon taxes, road taxes, etc.

The second view is more like ‘climate change as a symptom of the problem of capitalism.’ Indian environmentalist Sunita Narain expresses it well:

All technofixes [for climate change] – biofuels, GM crops or nuclear power – will create the next generation of crisis, because they ignore the fundamental problems of capitalism as a system that ignores injustice and promotes inequality.

In this view, changes made within existing economic systems will never be able to go far enough to produce a sustainable society.

Deciding how to act, there are risks on both sides. The engineering approach will face less resistance, meaning it can be rolled out faster, with a higher probability of getting the key elements in place soon. It may not, however, have the power required to solve the problem. The radical approach may ultimately have more capacity to effect societal change, but it would almost certainly take longer, and there is a significant risk that the new society forged wouldn’t even achieve the objective of climate stability. Capitalism’s major ideological competitor – communism – certainly wasn’t environmentally benign, or effective at managing environmental issues.

Can we cut human emissions to zero, thus stabilizing climate, while retaining the basic elements of the present economic system? If so, what mechanisms are the most important to put in place. If not, what sort of system do we need? One that is more democratic, or more authoritarian? One that alters the relations between humans and the planet how?

The Khalid Sheikh Mohammed trial

A number of recent articles have provided interesting commentary on the upcoming trial of alleged 9-11 plotter Khalid Shheikh Mohammed in an American federal court:

Given everything that has already happened, it is very hard to see how this can have a good outcome. The trial cannot be fair – since there have been so many rights and due process violations, and no impartial jury can be found – and the precedent seems highly likely to make bad law.

Slate contributor David Feige is probably right in summing up the likely outcome:

In the end, KSM will be convicted and America will declare the case a great victory for process, openness, and ordinary criminal procedure. Bringing KSM to trial in New York will still be far better than any of the available alternatives. But the toll his torture and imprisonment has already taken, and the price the bad law his defense will create will exact, will become part of the folly of our post-9/11 madness.

Given the situation they inherited, the Obama administration may not be able to do any better. Still, it is worrisome to think what the future consequences of this may be.

[Update: 12 February 2010] Due to the opposition he has encountered, Obama has abandoned plans to give KSM a civilian trial in New York. Disappointing.

The IPCC, climate, and consensus

Leaf and branches

In addition to sketching out the borders of reasonable debate on climate change, Mike Hulme has written some intelligent things on scientific consensus, as embodied in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports:

[T]he use of consensus is merely one (structured) way of distilling evidence – evidence which might be somewhat ambiguous, incomplete or contradictory or where there is latitude for genuine differences of interpretation – into an overall agreed statement on an issue of scientific or public importance.

He also quotes an intelligent comment from a volume by P.N. Edwards and S.H. Schneider:

We have discussed earlier… why it may often be necessary for science to use consensus processes as a way of consolidating knowledge so that it can be useful for policy. Consensus knowledge, by construction, will always allow experts to disagree, with knowledgeable opinion existing at either tail of the distribution of views… Such scientific consensus is not ultimate ‘truth’ and, on occasion, may turn out to be wrong. But the alternatives to the IPCC style of consensus-building are even less likely to command widespread authority within the worlds of science and policy. ‘Vastly better [than random solicitation of views] is the work of groups like the IPCC… which although slow, deliberative, sometimes elitist and occasionally dominated by strong personalities, are nonetheless the best representation of the scientific community’s current general opinion.’

The big problem, from a policy perspective, is the number of politically influential agents who either continue to deny that potentially dangerous anthropogenic climate change is taking place, or who argue for various reasons that nothing ought to be done about it. The fact that these people don’t have views that are reconcilable with the best available evidence doesn’t mean they aren’t able to influence the public policy debate.

The boundaries of reasonable climate change debate

In his well-argued book Why We Disagree About Climate Change, Mike Hulme does a good job of establishing the boundaries of the legitimate debate about climate change and what we ought to do about it:

Many of the disagreements that we observe are not really disputes about the evidence upon which our scientific knowledge of climate change is founded. We don’t disagree about the physical theory of absorption of greenhouse gases demonstrated by John Tyndall, about the thermometer readings first collected from around the world by Guy Callendar, or about the possibility of non-linear instabilities in the oceans articulated by Wally Broecker. We disagree about science because we have different understandings of the relationship of scientific evidence to other things: to what we may regard as ultimate ‘truth,’ to the ways in which we relate uncertainty to risk, and to what people believe to be the legitimate role of knowledge in policy making.

That’s as good a concise summary as I’ve seen. If the people you are debating accept that temperatures are rising, that greenhouse gasses cause warming, and the the climate system may react to human emissions in deeply disagreeable ways, you are within the realm where reasonable discussions can occur. By contrast, if your partners in discussion assert that climate is not changing, greenhouse gasses have nothing to do with it, and that any change will surely be benevolent and gradual… well… here be dragons.

“Coal is the enemy of the human race”

Primary colours on wooden crates

The above wording is blogger David Roberts‘ attempt to summarize the relationship between humanity and coal in the 21st century. While many countries rely on it to produce electrical power and fuel other sorts of industry, there are huge negative externalities associated with it as a power source. These include:

  • Environmental destruction and contamination from coal mining.
  • Human health impacts from coal mining
  • Air pollutant emissions from coal burning, including particulate matter and mercury
  • Greenhouse gas emissions from coal burning
  • Toxic coal ash

A report from the US National Research Council found that American coal plants produce $62 billion per year in negative externalities, before climate impacts are taken into account.

Climate change is the biggest danger associated with coal. Firstly, coal produces a lot of CO2 per unit of useful energy. Secondly, coal reserves are so enormous that burning a significant fraction of what is left would essentially guarantee more than 2°C of mean warming globally, the level scientists and policy-makers have generally accepted as ‘dangerous.’

If it can prove safe, cheap, and effective, there may be a future for carbon capture and storage (CCS). Until that is demonstrated, we cannot assume that there is a future for coal as an energy source. Even before you take the climate impacts into consideration, the total costs are unfavourable compared to greener and renewable alternatives. Once climate change is factored in, the case against non-CCS coal becomes conclusive.

[16 February 2010] Now that I have a fuller understanding of the importance of not burning coal and unconventional fossil fuels, because of their cumulative climatic impact, I have launched a group blog on the topic: BuryCoal.com. Please consider having a look or contributing.

Strategy for denier commenters

Man with power saw

I am happy to say that traffic to this site has been steadily increasing. Visits are up 138% from last year, and October was our best month ever. Increasingly, a sibilant intake of breath is well ranked by search engines.

One problematic element that accompanies popularity is that I attract ever-more climate change deniers and delayers (those who accept that it is real, but think we should take no action). Ordinarily, I am happy to debate with people and try to provide quality information. That being said, it can take up a lot of time to try to refute those who repeat faulty arguments over and over. These people call themselves ‘skeptics,’ but I think they are mis-applying the term. I have yet to encounter one that is willing to back away from even thoroughly discredited positions. Instead, they just move on to another misleading argument.

The question, then, is how to deal with these commentors without losing all scope for socializing and personal projects. Some of the options:

  1. Briefly assert that their position is incorrect and point to a resource that says why. Ignore further attempts at rebuttal.
  2. Point all such commentors towards pre-existing posts and conversations, without offering specific responses.
  3. Adopt the Zero Carbon Canada approach: “ATTN climate change denier trolls: you are cooking our kids and will be deleted.”
  4. Continue to provide detailed, personalized responses as much as possible.

(1) and (2) are appealing because they reduce the extent to which one person seeking to spread disinformation can waste my time. That said, leaving comments unaddressed could lead readers to believe that the points made therein are valid. (3) is appealing because it would prevent bad information from appearing online, though it is obviously a form of censorship. (4) is the ideal world solution, though I do need to wonder whether refuting deniers and delayers in blog comments is really the best use of my time, even if all I am taking into consideration is whether I am acting effectively on climate change.

Which option do readers think is most suitable? Are there other options I ought to consider?

Music economics

Fire escape ladder

According to data featured on Boing Boing, record labels are dying at the same time as musicians are doing better than ever on account of live performances. To a large extent, this must represent the impact of technology on the industry, particularly the internet and file sharing.

Morally and aesthetically, it is difficult to know how to feel about this. In recent decades, recorded studio music has been the major product of the music industry. More and more, that is now being acquired either free or with low margins for producers. Live music has the virtue of being irreplaceable, but the shift in that direction raises questions about where the moral and aesthetic value of music lies.

Personally, I think music studios have alienated the general public to the point that they deserve whatever financial misfortune they encounter. When it comes to musicians, the situation seems more complex. Is it right to keep rewarding someone (and often their heirs) for a song recorded at some point in time, or is it preferable to reward individual performances? Pragmatically, the options available are constrained. That said, there is a case to be made that music that produces a steady stream of enjoyment should produce a stream of revenue for the people who made it.

What do others think?

Debates within society at large, and within the scientific community

Elaborating on work discussed here before, Gavin Schmidt provides some information on what distinguishes the most recently developed sorts of climate models for their predecessors, such as General Circulation Models. The newer Earth System Models:

now include interactive atmospheric chemistry, aerosols (natural and anthropogenic) and sometimes full carbon cycles in the ocean and land surface. This extra machinery allows for new kinds of experiments to be done. Traditionally, in a GCM, one would impose atmospheric composition forcings by changing the concentrations of the species in the atmosphere e.g. the CO2 level could be increased, you could add more sulphate, or adjust the ozone in the stratosphere etc. However, with an ESM you can directly input the emissions (of all of the relevant precursors) and then see what ozone levels or aerosol concentrations you end up with. This allows you to ask more policy-relevant questions regarding the net effects of a particular sector’s emissions or the impact of a specific policy on climate forcing and air pollution.

Atmospheric chemistry is clearly a highly complex field. This makes it all the more strange and troubling that such a vast divide exists between debate between experts in the scientific community and debate within society at large.

That said, I suppose these situations aren’t really all that rare. Serious geologists and biologists continue to work out the minutiae of the history of present status of the Earth, at the same time as laypeople and self-styled ‘experts’ maintain debates about whether the world is 6,000 years old and whether all the creatures on it have existed since the beginning of time. By the same token, no matter how sophisticated scientific modeling of the climate becomes – and how much data accumulates demonstrating human-induced warming – there will still be people willing to baldly assert that climate change isn’t happening / is natural / isn’t a problem / is beneficial / is caused by sunspots, etc.

Wetlands and greenhouse gas emissions

Red maple leaf on grass

A recent report from Wetlands International provides a global overview of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from wetlands. Neither their present state nor their total greenhouse gas holdings are comforting. Indonesia is the world’s most substantial emitter of GHGs from peat, with annual emissions of 500 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2). That is about 2/3 of Canada’s total emissions. When it comes to stock, Canada leads the world with a troubling 155 billion tonnes of CO2 embedded in peat, enough to add 569 billion tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere. In total, the 0.3% of the world’s land surface covered by drained peat already generates about 6% of global emissions.

This reinforces two points about climate change mitigation:

  1. Firstly, we need to pay attention to land use changes as well as fossil fuel use, when it comes to cutting down the amount of GHGs humanity is adding to the atmosphere, eventually stabilizing at zero net emissions.
  2. Secondly, if we create enough warming, there are huge stocks of carbon that could be released, pushing that process even further. Pushing the climate system to the point where positive feedbacks become dominant would commit us inescapably to significant additional warming, over and above that created through direct human actions.

While policies like a carbon tax to discourage emissions are a critical part of the solution, humanity needs to accept that our overall physical and biological impact on the planet is so large that we need to give serious consideration to how our collective policies and individuals choices are affecting the future of the climate. Recognizing the carbon intensity of drying marshland is a small but important part of that.