Politics – Page 167 – a sibilant intake of breath

The Pope on homosexuality and the environment

Recently, the Pope announced that fighting homosexuality is just as important as protecting the rainforest. These comments have been rightly attacked from many angles. For me, what it highlights most is the ways in which religion can produce poor prioritization of issues. By according certain things sacred or venerated status, they can become a disproportionate focus for attention, a spark for conflicts, and an obstacle to the completion of more important work. Because religions elevate acts that are purely symbolic (say, baptism) to having a high level of perceived practical importance, they can get in the way of the achievement of practical goals, like enhancing and protecting human health and welfare, as well as that of the natural world. To those who say that religion is necessary to make the majority of people act in moral ways, it can be riposted that many of the supposedly moral issues that get the most attention are basically distractions from the real challenges being confronted by humanity.

This is precisely the property of religion that is satirized by Jonathan Swift in the conflict between the Big Enders and the Little Enders in Gulliver’s Travels. Ultimately, the issue of what gender of people a person is attracted to (or wishes to marry) has as much relevance for other people as which side they choose to crack their boiled eggs on. In spite of that, there are those who successfully employ emotions stirred up over such trivial issues as means to bolster their own support by turning people against one another.

Religion isn’t the only force within society that elevates the symbolic to the practical in a potentially harmful or distorting way. Certainly, there are comparable transformations within politics: in which symbols come to be more important than the things they represent, and their defence comes to be a distraction from more important endeavours. Whatever the cause of such instances of ‘missing the point,’ it is to be lamented. It must be hoped that people in a few hundred years will have learned enough to laugh at an idea so silly that protecting the environment and reinforcing traditional gender norms are (a) both desirable ends or (b) equally worthy of attention.

Torture, psychology, and the law

For the darkest day of the year, a couple of torture-related items seem appropriate. Firstly, there is this New York Times piece, which argues that senior officials from the Bush administration should be charged with war crimes, for authorizing and enabling torture. The editorial argues that there is no chance that prosecutions will be sought under an Obama administration, but that he ought to clarify the obligation of the United States and its agents to uphold the Geneva Conventions, as well as reverse executive orders that “eroded civil liberties and the rule of law.”

The prospect of high-level American decision-makers being put on trial for authorizing torture is so unlikely that it is a bit difficult to even form an opinion about it. At the same time, it is likely that nobody thirty years ago would have anticipated the trials at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), or International Criminal Court (ICC). There is no clear reason for which high political office should be any impediment to being tried for war crimes, but it is very unclear how any such prosecutions would fare in the United States. It would certainly be seen as a ‘political’ act, and any connections with international law would likely be the targets for special criticism and scorn from some quarters.

The other story worth mentioning is an experiment conducted by Dr Jerry Burger, of Santa Clara University. It was a less intense re-creation of Milgram’s famous experiment on obedience to authority. Like Milgram, Burger found that a startling proportion of the population is willing to torture a fellow human being as part of a scientific experiment. This is when the only pressure placed upon the subject of the experiment is the authority of the actor pretending to conduct it. That naturally makes one nervous about what people would be willing to do when they felt an urgent and important issue justified it, as well as when far stronger sanctions could be brought against them if they did not proceed.

Vaclav Klaus on climate change

Recently, Czech President Vaclav Klaus demonstrated the degree to which he deeply misunderstands the issue of climate change:

“Environmental issues are a luxury good,” Klaus added. “Now we have to tighten our belt and to cut the luxury.”

Global climate issues “are a silly luxury good,” he repeated.

Not only is maintaining a stable climate a fundamental requirement for human life and civilization, but it will be future generations who bear the majority of the pain if we fail to reduce emissions quickly. Far from being some unnecessary luxury, cutting greenhouse gas emissions is a vital moral requirement.

In Poznan, Al Gore did a much better job of explaining the ethical situation appropriately:

Very simply put, it is wrong for this generation to destroy the habitability of our planet and ruin the prospects of every future generation. That realization — that realization must carry us forward. Our children have a right to hold us to a higher standard when the future of all human civilization is hanging in the balance. They deserve better, and politicians who sit on their hands and do nothing to confront the greatest challenge humankind has ever faced.

Hopefully, that is a position that will rapidly becomore more widely held among politicians and the population at large.

Carbon pricing and economic freedom

Post-Dion, it will take a bold politician to revive the idea of a carbon tax in Canada. One ironic consequence of that is that it is likely to produce more ‘command and control’ style environmental policies. Whereas an economy-wide carbon tax (or cap-and-trade scheme with auctioning) would encourage every individual decision-maker to examine the cost of reducing their greenhouse gas emissions, trying to achieve those reductions based on targetted government initiatives requires that political and bureaucratic decision-makers try to perform that analysis: trying to identify low-cost potential emissions reductions, as well as instruments through which they can be encouraged.

I have argued previously that just putting a price on greenhouse gas emissions is not sufficient to drive the change we need, because other market failures and economic structures need to be overcome. With that caveat expressed, it is more than a touch ironic that an anti-tax ‘free market’ ideology that rejects carbon pricing may lead to centrally planned solutions emerging, as opposed to market-directed ones.

A related irony concerns the timing of mitigation. As Joseph Romm has repeatedly pointed out, we have the opportunity today to begin the transition towards a low-carbon economy in a relatively voluntary way. Nobody needs to be banned from doing essential; rationing is not required. All we need are sensible economic instruments and accompanying policies, provided we get started right away. By contrast, if we squander the opportunity we have now, achieving the stabilization of the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gasses will require that far more onerous burdens be placed on individuals. In short, today’s unhampered freedom to emit greenhouse gasses is inexorably linked to the necessity of sharply dimininished freedoms in the future.

Fatih Birol on peak oil

In an interview with British journalist George Monbiot, Fatih Birol, the chief economist of the International Energy Agency made the following predictions about when peak oil output for non-OPEC and OPEC states would be reached:

“In terms of non-OPEC [countries outside the big oil producers’ cartel]”, he replied, “we are expecting that in three, four years’ time the production of conventional oil will come to a plateau, and start to decline. … In terms of the global picture, assuming that OPEC will invest in a timely manner, global conventional oil can still continue, but we still expect that it will come around 2020 to a plateau as well, which is of course not good news from a global oil supply point of view.”

Coming from a representative of this particular organization, that is quite a surprising statement. Traditionally, the IEA has downplayed any suggestion that global oil output could peak before 2030. A peak in 2020 suggests that we have a lot less time than most firms and governments have been expecting to transition to a post-oil, post-gasoline, post-jet fuel future.

An early peak in oil output could have an enormous effect on both the development of the global economy and climate change. What effect it will have depends on many factors: three crucial ones being the timing of the peak, the severity of the drop-off in output afterwards, and the investment decisions made by states and firms. If we want to continue to produce enough energy to run a global industrialized society, and we also want to avoid the worst effects of climate change, we need to ensure that renewables (and perhaps nuclear) are the energy sources of the future, and that efficient means of energy storage are developed for vehicles.

Power, oversight, and photography

As this disturbing alleged situation demonstrates, you may be ordered at some point to delete photographic or videographic evidence of an event without appropriate justification.

While there may be situations in which security concerns are justifiably paramount, there are also many situations in which those who have authority simply wish to avoid facing any accountability for their actions. Given the conflict of interest involved for those law enforcement officers on the scene, it seems prudent to retain any photographic or videographic evidence you have produced, even if you are asked by them to delete it.

After all, any impartial evidence that exists can only help in any subsequent official proceedings. The absence of such evidence is likely to strengthen the bias of impartial adjudicators towards those with authority, as opposed to those who simply happened to be witnesses.

Prior relevant posts:

[18 December 2008] Zoom has posted an update about this matter.

Unions and seniority

Given the very high level of interest people have had in this previous discussion of the OC Transpo strike and unions in general (78 comments so far), it seemed worth initiating a second discussion on the matter. Since the union is saying that the major purpose of this strike is to retain the right to have bus routes assigned on the basis of seniority, the general issue of seniority and unions seems to be worth considering.

There do seem to be some valid reasons for supporting higher pay and greater privileges for more senior individuals. Among those are the issue of experience, which those who are senior to an organization can be expected to have in greater amounts, and perhaps the facilitation of standard lifestyle transitions: from youth to adult life, and from that to retirement.

At the same time, there seem to be valid reasons to oppose perks based on seniority. In situations where something worth rewarding is often correlated with seniority, but can be measured easily, it seems to make sense to measure and reward it directly. That way, rather than assuming that ten years on the job makes you more capable, you can reward those who actually demonstrate capability in a day-to-day manner. Another argument is that basing a large share of pay and benefits on seniority rewards the mediocre at the expense of the excellent. Those who are very active and engaged get paid no better than those who perform the minimum obligations of the job. Aside from providing a disincentive for talented people to be part of the organization, that seems basically unfair.

I am not disputing the freedom of unions and employers to negotiate whatever terms seem best to them. I am simply seeking to open a discussion on the advantages and disadvantages of favouring seniority: from the perspective of union members, management, and those who consume the products of services the union members and management provide.

Level and rate targets for greenhouse gas mitigation

When greenhouse gas mitigation commitments are made, the standard form is to ‘reduce by a certain percentage below the level in a base year by a target year.’ For example, 5% below 1990 levels by 2012. This can be easily converted into a target in absolute emissions. Say, cutting from 1,000 megatonnes (MT) in 1990 to 950 MT in 2020.

I have criticized the process of target-setting before, arguing that the ability of organization to set targets that look ambitious can obscure the absence of plans to actually achieve those reductions. In the end, it makes sense to focus our efforts on cutting emissions, rather than haggle over whether to cut by 65% or 70% by 2050.

Given that targets won’t be vanishing any time soon, I do have a proposal for improving one aspect of them. Rather than expressing targets are just an absolute level of emissions at a set date, they should be expressed as both an absolute level and a rate of reduction to be achieved by a target date. A financial equivalent would be to say: by 2010, I will have paid off 50% of my mortgage, and will be paying more off at a rate of $10,000 per year. What this avoids is the theoretical situation in which a state or other entity limps across the finish line, meeting a 2020 target with no new ideas and initiatives for reaching their 2050 target. This would be akin to a pharmaceutical company that has all its blockbuster drugs go off-patent simultaneously, at the same time as it has no promising new ones in the pipeline (not a hypothetical scenario for a significant number of drug companies right now).

Having a double rather than a single target doesn’t affect the disjoint between commitments and achievements, but it may help foster the kind of mindset required to build a low-carbon society.

Obama and manned spaceflight

Apparently, Barack Obama is thinking of curtailing NASA’s future manned spaceflight activities. Specifically, there has been talk of canceling the Ares 1 rocket and scaling back the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle. If true, the news is welcome. There is very little evidence that ongoing manned programs – including the Space Shuttle and International Space Station – are generating useful science or providing other benefits. There is even greater doubt about the usefulness of returning to the moon.

Space exploration is an activity best undertaken by robots. They are cheaper to send up than humans and more capable. Given the very limited value provided by sending live people into space, it is something the United States should discontinue. At the very least, it is something that should be sharply scaled back while the government works to address America’s severe debts and other problems.

Ranking energy technologies, from wind turbines to corn ethanol

Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford, headed up a study to quantitatively evaluate different electricity generation options, taking into consideration their impacts on climate, health, energy security, water supply, land use, wildlife, and more:

The raw energy sources that Jacobson found to be the most promising are, in order, wind, concentrated solar (the use of mirrors to heat a fluid), geothermal, tidal, solar photovoltaics (rooftop solar panels), wave and hydroelectric. He recommends against nuclear, coal with carbon capture and sequestration, corn ethanol and cellulosic ethanol, which is made of prairie grass. In fact, he found cellulosic ethanol was worse than corn ethanol because it results in more air pollution, requires more land to produce and causes more damage to wildlife.

It is naturally very difficult to assess the validity of any particular research methodology, given uncertainties about matters like the future development of technologies, the evolution of the global economy, the availability of fossil fuels, and so on. Nonetheless, it is good to see serious work being done on comparing the overall appropriateness of different energy technologies. Given the unwillingness of many states to impose serious carbon pricing solutions, and the tendency of governments to ‘pick winners’ when it comes to technologies being subsidized, the more high quality data available, the better.

While I haven’t looked over the study in detail, it does seem like the strongest objections raised against nuclear (which is ranked very badly) aren’t really about the environment or economics. The risk Jacobson highlights most is that of nuclear proliferation, and the dangers associated with making fissile material more widely available. Proponents of a nuclear renaissance probably won’t be keen to see discussion of “the emissions from the burning of cities resulting from nuclear weapons explosions potentially resulting from nuclear energy expansion.”

The entire study was published in Energy & Environmental Science, and can be accessed online.