‘Resistance’ versus ‘abstinence’ in responding to climate change

During the course of our extended discussion on the ethics of travel, given climate change, the idea came up that living in a high-carbon society has similar ethical characteristics to living under an unjust regime. For instance, an aggressive totalitarian state that attacks its neighbours. In both cases, people are born into the society without any say in its character. In both cases, people can become aware of the harm their society is causing to others. In both cases, individuals face the question of how to respond to the injustice.

Right now, our society is engaged in harming future generations for our own personal and economic self-interest. We are doing so by emitting greenhouse gases that profoundly threaten the quality of life of future generations. In a way, it is as though we are mining the health, welfare, and prosperity of those who will come after us, so that we can continue to live in the way to which people have become accustomed.

While living in such a society probably creates moral obligations to assist those who are being harmed, and who will be harmed in the future, it does seem like the primary moral impetus is that of resistance. Given that our society operates in a fundamentally unjust way, those of us who have come to understand this have an obligation to change the nature of that society. Obviously, there are a wide variety of possible approaches – everything from working to reduce your personal impact to working to reform government from within to armed insurrection. Similarly, there are a wide variety of personal costs that may be borne by those who choose to act. They might sacrifice more lucrative careers for ones which offer more scope for promoting societal change. They might give up luxuries that they and others once took for granted. They may bear even more acute costs, if they choose to resist in less socially acceptable ways. For instance, those who climb buildings to deploy banners – or who choose to protest peacefully in places where governments have forbidden it – could find themselves facing legal consequences.

Rather than seeing the problem of responding to climate change as an exercise in personal harm reduction, it may make more sense to think about it as an exercise in driving societal reform, through whatever means seem to be effective and ethically acceptable.

Is the above a sensible framework for thinking about climate change? Is it preferable to an ethic that calls upon us primarily to reduce our own emissions? In what ways are the ethical obligations that arise from a ‘resistance’ view different from those that arise from an ‘abstinence’ perspective?

$3,500 for old cars

Morty the bulldog, with tongue wagging

Automobile makers and dealers apparently want the federal government to pay people $3,500 if they give up an old car and get a new one. What industry wouldn’t want that? I am sure Sony would like the government to give $1,000 grants to anyone buying a new laptop, just like Apple would appreciate $200 grants for those replacing music players. The only justification for such a public subsidy is that the environmental damage done by the new cars will be lessened to an extent worth more than $3,500 to society at large.

Here are two ideas I think would be better:

  1. Offer anybody $500 in exchange for recycling any car, regardless of whether they get a new one or not. This would both lead to a reduction in the total number of vehicles out there (especially those in a very poor state of repair) and set a floor price on used-car sales. After all, nobody would sell a car for less than $500 if the government would give them that much to scrap it.
  2. Offer grants if people recycle and old car and buy a zero-emission vehicle, with the amount increasing along with the efficiency of the vehicle per passenger-kilometre. For instance, trading in a car might get you a $500 credit towards a bicycle, a smaller credit towards an electric scooter, and an even smaller credit towards an electric car.

Of course, the supporters of either of these approaches are a lot less politically influential than car companies and car dealers, making it unlikely that any government would embrace these approaches. Still, I hope this doesn’t emerge as yet another policy designed to extend the lifespan of yesterday’s carbon-intensive transport, production, and consumption. What we need are policies to help drive the economy towards modes of energy production and use that are sustainable and compatible with a stable climate.

Marriages and alliances

In Frank Herbert’s Dune, the character Lady Jessica is under orders from a powerful group to only bear her husband daughters. Eventually, it is revealed that the purpose of this was to ensure that her daughter could be wed to the son of an enemy clan, in order to seal the rift between them.

While such marriages have a medieval feel, it certainly seems to be the case that such unions can unite differing factions and promote the emergence of new political unions. It will be interesting to see how gay marriage changes that dynamic, especially if it spreads beyond liberal democracies. Such unions will not be able to produce biological children – for the foreseeable future – but perhaps they will still serve the role of binding groups together.

How different Dune would have been if Paul Atreides could have wed Feyd-Rautha or Glossu Rabban.

Patent reform idea

Red-winged Blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus) - Gatineau, Quebec

The trouble with patents is that they block people out of using the latest technologies and techniques. Sometimes, that means one manufacturer can offer things their competitors cannot. Sometimes, it means that firms can effectively block technologies that would otherwise compete with them. The question, then, is how to encourage innovation without permitting such barriers.

One idea that comes to mind is state support for innovators: invent something useful, and the state gives you a lifelong pension with a value proportionate to the value of the invention. They then distribute it for everyone to use for free. The size of the pension could be based on the number of dollars that get spent implementing your idea, with larger amounts for innovations that people really pour money into using. The state could fund the system with higher taxes on businesses and consumers. Consumers benefit because best practices spread more rapidly, and the market overall benefits because firms are less able to undertake anti-competitive behaviours.

There is, of course, the issue of pre-existing patents. One way to deal with that would be to take the age of the youngest patent holder, calculate a maximum plausible remaining lifespan, and decree that all existing patents will expire at that point, including those held by corporations. There is also the issue of dealing with international patent agreements. Indeed, that and the entrenched interests of firms that hold lots of valuable patents are probably the major forces that would block any such reform. That being said, implementation difficulties aside, it does seem possible that this would be a better system than the current practice of granting a time-limited monopoly on use to patent owners.

Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller

Razor wire and leaves

Jeff Rubin is a Toronto-based economist for CIBC World Markets, and he has written a book predicting a future of “triple digit” oil, and some of the consequences it will have. While the book is interesting and many aspects of the hypothesis are plausible, the lack of rigour in analysis makes the work less convincing than it might otherwise have been. For one thing, “triple digit” oil covers an awfully broad range. For another, it isn’t clear whether the effects he predicts will unfold in the order he anticipates. For instance, if severe climate change impacts emerge before acute and permanent increases in the price of fossil fuels, the global consequences may look rather different.

When he says that the world is going to get ‘smaller,’ Rubin is reversing the normal sense of globalization having shrunk the world. What he really means is that the world will get larger, relative to our ability to travel and move goods, and that we will have a correspondingly more local focus as a result. That means less imports of all kinds, less travel, and the re-localization of industry. Rubin’s strongest points and arguments relate to the production and use of fossil fuels: such as the effect of domestically subsidized fuels in oil producing states, the limitations associated with energy efficiency, the problems with corn ethanol, and the importance of energy return on investment, when contemplating alternative fuels and sources of energy.

Rubin’s habit of mixing established fact with speculation, and sometimes dismissing important possibilities with a brief splash of rhetoric, makes this book more valuable as a prod to thinking than as a guide to what is likely to happen. The book also contains the occasional overt error, such as referring to prosperous South Korea as the ‘Hermit Kingdom’ – rather than the tyrannical regime to the north. The chapter on climate change was certainly lacking in ways that make me doubt the overall quality of Rubin’s understanding and analysis. He doesn’t really seem to grasp the concept of a stabilization pathway, technological wedges, or the physical realities that must accompany the stabilization of greenhouse gasses at a safe level. His discussion of electrical generation – in both fossil fuel based and alternative forms – is similarly lacking in detailed and rigorous evaluation.

In the end, Rubin’s work is an interesting way to set yourself thinking about the effect that constrained energy ability would have upon the world and your life. When it comes to evaluating the macroeconomic and societal consequences of such a development, the book would probably best be read alongside a more transparent and quantitative analysis, such as that in David MacKay’s book on sustainable energy.

Obama’s speech in Cairo

President Obama’s speech on the United States and the Muslim world, delivered in Cairo, is worth watching:

It covers the history of Islam, the United States, and the Muslim world. It also covers Afghanistan, Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Iran, nuclear proliferation, democracy, religious freedom, the rights of women, and economic development. Many translations are available. Climate change was not directly mentioned, despite its considerable importance for both Muslims and Americans.

At the very least, the speech demonstrates the change in tone between this administration and the last one. Whether it is the start of something more meaningful, time will tell. Slate has some commentary: relatively positive and more negative.

Who Killed the Electric Car?

Yellow Fiat rearview mirror

This film is worth seeing, if only to dispel the notion that all the electric vehicles that existed in the last few decades were awkward, short-range creations. The EV1 looks about as good as the forthcoming Chevy volt, got 260km per charge (with the second generation Ni-MH battery, apparently available from the outset), and was released in 1996. The film also helps to illustrate some of the relationships between lawmaking, regulation, and strategic industrial behaviour. Sadly, it also hints at the general willingness of political bodies and even bureaucracies to fold in the face of industry pressure, even when industries are acting against their own long-term best interest. Indeed, the film makes a reasonably compelling case that the American auto industry conspired to crush the electric vehicle as an alternative to the gasoline-fueled internal combustion engine car.

The film also does a decent job of highlighting that the hydrogen car has always been a deeply unlikely proposition; hydrogen is just an energy carrier, and it is a deeply problematic one. Fuel cells are expensive and don’t last very long. Hydrogen takes energy to produce and compress of liquefy. It is tough to store, and there is no fuel distribution infrastructure for it. Compared to all that, electricity looks very appealing.

The film does seem to contribute to the common argument that our current approach to automobile regulation lacks vision, especially given the degree to which auto companies are now creatures of government largesse. Given climate change, given the possibility of peak oil, given the geopolitical consequences of oil dependence, it really seems as though they should be under much stronger pressure to produce very efficient vehicles, as well as vehicles that do not derive their energy from fossil fuels. Now that the government and unions own GM, perhaps they can insist on digging up any corporate records that haven’t been destroyed, with respect to internal deliberations on electric vehicle strategies, as well as responding to California’s mandate for zero emission vehicles.

Individual vehicles won’t ever really be an efficient option, compared with mass transit. That being said, it is unlikely that we will see their abandonment in the developed world, nor much diminished interest in them in the rising middle classes of developing states. If we are going to keep building cars, we need to do so far more intelligently. Electric vehicles will likely be a big part of that.

[Update: 2:11pm In retrospect, some of the film’s conspiratorial allegations may be less convincing than they appear at first blush. It is certainly plausible that oil companies would have a reason to resist the widespread deployment of vehicles that are not dependent on their key product, but it is another thing entirely to prove that they actually took action in that direction.

Subsidized oil in producing states

It is widely understood that oil-producing states like Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Iran provide huge fuel subsidies to their citizens: selling them oil for a fraction of what it would fetch on the global market. Indeed, Iran is a major importer of gasoline, partly because domestic refineries are only able to produce and sell it at a loss. The most egregious example of all may be electricity in Saudi Arabia, about half of which comes from oil. A 2006 royal decree set the price paid by power plants for oil at 0.46 cents per million BTU: equivalent to $3 per barrel of oil, or $0.07 per gallon. That this is happening while companies are using up huge amounts of natural gas to produce synthetic crude in the Canadian oil sands is a demonstration of how irrational global energy use can be.

Indeed, with oil consumption growing at 5% per year in OPEC countries, between 2004 and 2007, they have actually contributed almost as much to increased global consumption as China has. One estimate holds that continued increases in domestic usage by OPEC states will cut their exports by 2.5 million barrels per day by 2010. That is about a quarter of total American oil use.

Steven Chu on the oil sands

Canada Goose goslings (Branta canadensis) - Beside the Ottawa River

Apparently, Energy Secretary Steven Chu thinks that technology will somehow make oil sands extraction compatible with climatic stability. While the The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers was quick to praise his statement, it is wrong for a series of reasons. When it comes to emissions from the extraction and upgrading of bitumen, many are to dispersed to be compatible with carbon capture and storage (CCS), even if it does emerge as a safe, effective, and affordable technology. More importantly, about 85% of the emissions associated with oil derived from the Athabasca oil sands are generated when the fuels are burned. On one hand, that means that oil from that source isn’t enormously dirtier than oil from other sources (when considering only greenhouse gas emissions). On the other, it isn’t really the relative dirtiness of fuels that will determine how much warming we experience, but rather the cumulative quantity of greenhouse gasses added to the atmosphere. Climatic stability depends on keeping most of the carbon in coal and unconventional oil buried: not putting it into fuels that will be burned in the atmosphere, with waste products emerging to warm the planet.

Chu is a good enough scientist to realize that we cannot square the circle of unrestrained hydrocarbon usage and climatic stability. Unfortunately, it seems that politics still haven’t advanced to the point where not using fossil fuel resources is seriously contemplated. That is short-sighted and a shame, not least because it perpetuates the development and emergence of techological and economic systems that are fundamentally unsustainable. Rather than coveting the hydrocarbon resources of western Canada, North American leaders need to get serious about harnessing the renewable resources of the continent, while cutting total energy consumption towards the point where it can be renewably provided.

Anthony Cary on climate change and the recession

Earlier today, I saw a presentation by Anthony Cary, the British High Commissioner to Canada. He was talking about why this recession has involved less of a diminished interest in environmental protection than previous ones, as well as about the upcoming climate change negotiations in Copenhagen.

Detailed notes from the presentation are on my wiki, along with notes from other presentations on climate change.