Category: Politics

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

COVID vaccination and medical triage

The CBC has some interesting reporting on the medical ethics of triage in relation to the voluntarily unvaccinated:

Udo Schuklenk, Ontario Research Chair in bioethics at Queens University and co-editor of the journal Bioethics, questions the argument that vaccine refusers are victims of misinformation.

“There’s many people in my field who go on about equity considerations, and [how] these people don’t know better and they have been misled,” he said. “And my view is, they have made their autonomous choice.”

“And if you’re telling me that they are unable to make a sensible choice, then we should take this choice away from them. But we should not, on the one hand, give them this choice, and then not hold them accountable for it.

“The vast majority of people in my field of bioethics would disagree with me on what I just said. They’d say there’s many people who don’t know better and have been misled. And my point is, that may well be true, but then this should have a consequence on the kind of choices that these people are permitted to make.”

I understand and can broadly applaud the ethics of doctors treating everyone equally based on the severity of the risks they face, without consideration of whether they brought on those risks voluntarily. At the same time, public health measures in the face of an epidemic are an ancient and appropriate authority of the state and it seems totally reasonable to restrict the activities of people who refuse to comply.

Surely one of the big injustices of the pandemic has been all the people who need non-COVID treatment suffering worse outcomes because the voluntarily unvaccinated are absorbing too many of the resources of the medical system.

Canada if the US collapses

The most disturbing thing about the January 6th riot and Trump coup attempt has been the reaction of American politicians. Despite being witnesses and targets of the attack, politics as usual has persisted, including Trump’s dominance of the Republican party.

This suggests a substantial danger that Americans in power will choose the victory of their tribe over the other above the endurance and peace of the union.

In today’s Globe and Mail, Thomas Homer-Dixon writes:

By 2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence. By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a right-wing dictatorship.

During my international relations undergrad, profs often told us about how for most of Canadian history the biggest threat to Canada’s sovereignty has been invasion from the south. If mass political violence does erupt in the US — likely accompanied by a mass sense that the federal institutions of the supreme court, congress, and the presidency do not hold legitimate power over the whole US populace — it’s hard to believe that the US-Canada border would be respected in the uproar.

Of course it’s undiplomatic to talk in public about what will happen if your neighbour and strongest ally falls into civil war or ceases to be a democracy. Nonetheless, given the pathologies in American politics and society, it’s something Canadians must consider with growing seriousness and urgency.

Solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en against the Royal Bank of Canada

Yesterday I photographed a rally outside RBC headquarters, protesting their financing of the Coastal Gaslink pipeline.

The measure of whether businesses and governments care about climate change is their actions, not the sympathetic statements invented for their advertising and media relations. We can never build our way out of the climate crisis with huge new long-term investments in fossil fuels.

Toronto considering a net zero target for 2040

Next week, the Toronto city council is considering a proposal to adopt a net zero target by 2040. I have written to my city councillor and the mayor supporting the idea as better than nothing, but also explaining why net zero promises risk prolonging rather than curtailing fossil fuel use:

Councillor Mike Colle and Mayor John Tory,

I am writing to you in support of the effort to establish a net zero CO2 target for Toronto by 2040, but also to warn you about the risks of the net zero concept and to advocate fossil fuel abolition as a preferable policy. Please do not be mistaken about my intent: a net zero target is better than inaction, and ought to be passed. Addressing climate change, however, will require much more.

There is a major risk that “net zero” is a delay and distraction tactic which aligns with the interests of fossil fuel producing states and corporations. It’s a way of distracting from the cause of climate change — fossil fuels — and to conjure a misleading sense that the problem can be solved without getting rid of them. By endorsing net zero targets, advocates of climate action risk playing the role of doctors advocating low-tar or filtered cigarettes: extending the life and profits of a noxious industry through the false suggestion that we can get the benefits while avoiding the consequences.

One of the clearest signals that net zero is being used to extend rather than constrain the history of the fossil fuel industry has been the enthusiasm with which such targets have been adopted by fossil fuel producers. For example, Saudi Arabia has made a net zero promise for 2060 while Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman has said: “We are still going to be the last man standing, and every molecule of hydrocarbon will come out.” This ought to be a warning sign that net zero is a Trojan horse designed to delay policies and regulations to abolish fossil fuels before we catastrophically destabilize the climate.

An examination of scale also calls into question the plausibility of achieving net zero by any means other than ending fossil fuel use. Global oil production was about 88.4 million barrels per day in 2020. That’s about 32.3 billion barrels, each with about 136 kg of oil. That adds up to about 4.3 billion metric tonnes (gigatonnes) of oil taken from the ground every year. Even with COVID-related reductions, global CO2 output in 2020 was about 34.81 gigatonnes. That means to bury all the CO2 from our fossil fuel use, we would need to replicate the global oil industry more than eight times over, except with equipment to extract, compress, and bury CO2. All of this would cost energy and money to run and would produce no profit. It has also taken a century to build that level of oil infrastructure. The idea that we can solve our CO2 problem by burying it simply doesn’t make sense physically, even before you start comparing the cost of avoiding the emissions in the first place to the cost of separating and burying them.

In addition, there are enormous non-climate co-benefits from fossil fuel abolition. A 2021 journal article estimated that just the fine particulate pollution from global fossil fuel combustion causes 10.2 million premature deaths annually. This is another demonstration of how the apparent profitability of the fossil fuel industry arises only because we do not deduct the amount of harm arising from their products. Fossil fuel abolition has the promise of saving ten million lives per year, and more when pollution beyond just particulate matter is factored in.

The other risk of a net zero as opposed to a fossil fuel abolition approach is that it will fail to incentivize the right investments. If families and businesses in Toronto knew that fossil fuel use was going to be coming to an end before mid-century, it would no longer make sense to construct new buildings heated with gas, or countless other pieces of infrastructure that reinforce and prolong our fossil fuel dependence. If we let that investment continue and only get serious about fossil fuel abolition later, it will raise the total cost because we will have wasted money on inappropriate infrastructure which we will need to scrap and because we have delayed the deployment of appropriate infrastructure compatible with a stable climate.

To repeat my main point: adopting a net zero target by 2040 would likely have some benefits and is better than inaction. At the same time, the city council must be mindful of the risk that net zero targets are a concealed fossil fuel promotion strategy, not a strategy to stabilize the climate. It is always tempting to be told that you can get the benefits of a damaging activity while avoiding the harms, but with net zero there are strong reasons to fear that it is a marketing strategy designed to keep letting fossil fuel producers profit while others absorb the costs.

Thank you for your attention,

Milan

We’re not going to bury our way out of the fossil fuel catastrophe. What needs burying is the fossil fuel industry itself.

David Brooks on Burkean conservatism

Writing in The Atlantic, David Brooks has produced a good short summary of Edmund Burke’s classical conservatism and how it relates to contemporary US politics:

This is one of the core conservative principles: epistemological modesty, or humility in the face of what we don’t know about a complex world, and a conviction that social change should be steady but cautious and incremental. Down the centuries, conservatives have always stood against the arrogance of those who believe they have the ability to plan history: the French revolutionaries who thought they could destroy a society and rebuild it from scratch, but who ended up with the guillotine; the Russian and Chinese Communists who tried to create a centrally controlled society, but who ended up with the gulag and the Cultural Revolution; the Western government planners who thought they could fine-tune an economy from the top, but who ended up with stagflation and sclerosis; the European elites who thought they could unify their continent by administrative fiat and arrogate power to unelected technocrats in Brussels, but who ended up with a monetary crisis and populist backlash.

…

Another camp, which we associate with the Scottish or British Enlightenment of David Hume and Adam Smith, did not believe that human reason is powerful enough to control human selfishness; most of the time our reason merely rationalizes our selfishness. They did not believe that individual reason is powerful enough even to comprehend the world around us, let alone enable leaders to engineer society from the top down. “We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small,” Burke wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France.

My view is that what we need more than anything is a movement of the right demanding climate change mitigation. Otherwise we end up with an endless sea-saw between strengthening and repealing fossil fuel abolition policies, at the same time as voters are only offered climate change action as part of an intersectional agenda which they may not otherwise agree with. We need to split the right between fantasists who decide what they see based on what they believe politically and empiricists who accept evidence as the adjudicator of truth.

The progressive climate movement has been a crucial development and remains the main force pushing for action. At the same time, this perspective is conspicuously lacking in humility about re-making long-standing societal institutions, with the assumption that most of what is pernicious politically in the world will disappear once everyone is wise enough to accept their ideology. It’s a perspective that concentrates support inward with ever-greater demands for moral purity and ideological conformity, whereas what we need to produce a consensus behind fossil fuel abolition in the US, UK, and Canada is the understanding that nobody’s political project is served by radically destabilizing the climate. If we want to preserve institutions that have endured and shown value over time, we need to eliminate the fuel sources that are destabilizing the physical environment in which they have evolved. There’s nothing more conservative than that.

Related:

The Economist on fossil fuel abolition

I have written before about The Economist‘s inconsistent positions on climate change and fossil fuels. When writing about science or climate change specifically — and in most of their leading editorials — they stress the potential severity of the crisis and the need to take action. In their broader coverage, however, they tend to prioritize economic growth and to celebrate fossil fuel discoveries as potential boons.

In a recent issue, they included some strong and convincing language on how fossil fuel abolition is ultimately a means to protect human prosperity:

The UNFCCC and its COPs, for all their flaws, play a crucial part in a process that is historic and vital: the removal of the fundamental limit on human flourishing imposed by dependence on fossil fuels.

…

The main reason the UNFCCC and COP process matters is that the science, diplomacy, activism and public opinion that support it make up the best mechanism the world currently has to help it come to terms with a fundamental truth. The dream of a planet of almost 8bn people all living in material comfort will be unachievable if it is based on an economy powered by coal, oil and natural gas. The harms from the cumulative emissions of carbon dioxide would eventually pile up so rapidly that fossil-fuel-fired development would stall.

…

In the long run, therefore, the only way to keep growing is by leaving fossil fuels behind. That requires Asian countries, in most of which emissions are still surging, to forgo much more by way of future emissions than the countries of the developed world, where emissions are already declining.

…

Anyone who dreams of a reprieve for fossil fuels must be disabused. It suits Narendra Modi, prime minister of India, Scott Morrison, prime minister of Australia, and Joe Manchin, a senator from West Virginia, never to speak of an end to the fossil-fuels age. But for them to duck the responsibility of planning a transition is rank cowardice. True, oil and gas cannot vanish overnight, but their day is closing. And coal’s day must be done.

This strikes at at least three crucial points: it is acting on climate change and not ignoring it which provides the best guarantee of long-term prosperity; states will need to find a contraction and convergence solution where pollution falls rapidly in rich states which poor states find a development path where their per capita pollution never gets nearly so high; and that for the sake of equity we will need much more energy at the global level, highlighting the need to actually build climate-safe options at an unprecedented rate.

Cohen historical theory

Avner Cohen provides a great summary of writing history (here under the particular limitations of studying Israel’s nuclear arsenal):

The narrative I offer, then, is by nature incomplete and interpretative. Like all narratives, it is not written from God’s-eye view; rather, it is a story told through incomplete human and archival sources.

Cohen, Avner. “Before the Beginning: The Early History of Israel’s Nuclear Project (1948–1954).” Israel Studies 3.1 (1998): 112-139.

Cohen on the purpose of Dimona

The scope of the Israeli request for French technological assistance, the details of which Shimon Peres spelled out in Paris in 1956/1957, was tantamount to a national proliferation commitment. Enough is now known about the extent of the Dimona deal to appreciate how determined Ben-Gurion was to pursue it. The Dimona nuclear complex was designed to include all the technological components required for a plutonium-based nuclear-weapons infrastructure. The project’s scope and purpose were evident in the facility’s sanctum sanctorum, the deeply dug underground reprocessing facility designed to extract plutonium from spent uranium rods. Nothing is more indicative of Israel’s initial commitment to build a nuclear-weapons capability than this supersecret and costly facility. From the beginning, Israel hoped that [sic] within a decade or so to have enough fissile material to build its own nuclear device.

Cohen, Avner. The Worst-Kept Secret: Israel’s Bargain with the Bomb. Columbia University Press, 2010. p. 57–8

Related:

Trudeau’s 2021 SFT

The Trudeau government has released the Speech From the Throne to open the 44th Parliament.

There’s a section on climate action, but it goes on an on about “growing the economy” and doesn’t even mention fossil fuels, much less the need to abolish them.

It’s not super encouraging that the speech is called “Building a Resilient Economy: A Cleaner & Healthier Future for our Kids,” while an infamous 2002 memo on how to cultivate climate change denial was called “The Environment: A Cleaner, Safer, Healthier America.”

This kind of constant prioritization of economic growth over planetary security demonstrates the government’s unwillingness to talk about the implications of what climate change mitigation requires. Arguably, it also feeds a sense in the public that the problem ought to be solvable without major societal or lifestyle changes. It doesn’t apply anything like the standard which I suggested to recent environment minister Wilkinson: “Is every project the government is supporting something which we will be glad to have in a post-fossil fuel world?”