For the oil sands, PR is not the problem

Graveyard

In a bizarre story, The Globe and Mail is reporting on how representatives of the oil sands industry are claiming to have “‘dropped the ball’ in engaging with the public about the environmental effects of its energy developments.” This is a bit like saying that the industry has thus far been unsuccessful in deceiving people about the environmental impacts of oil sands operations, which definitely deserve the filthy image they have earned.

The problem with the oil sands certainly isn’t their public relations: it is their greenhouse gas emissions, their destruction of the boreal forest, their contamination of water, and so forth. Altering those aspects of the industry cannot be achieved through media messaging. It is dispiriting – though unsurprising – that the companies involved are keener on giving people the sense that their operations are clean (or at least improving), rather than actually raising standards. While oil sands production cannot be made into an environmentally benign activity, having all facilities adopt the best standards in other existing facilities could make a significant contribution towards reducing the level of harm they produce.

How can the government spend to fight climate change?

Grass and snow

Partly for reasons of political acceptability, most approaches to pricing greenhouse gas emissions aim to be revenue neutral. This includes cap and trade and carbon tax systems where new revenues are offset by decreases in existing taxes; it also includes tax-and-dividend systems, in which that process is more fully automated. That being said, fiscal neutrality has gone out the window as governments seek (whether wisely or not) to offset the recessionary consequences of the credit crunch. That leaves us with a question: if you want to spend government money fighting climate change, how should you do so?

One option business is happy with is big subsidies for the development and deployment of big new technologies like next-generation nuclear reactors and carbon capture and storage (CCS). While such an approach may yield long-term benefits, it does risk simply funneling money from taxpayers to polluters in the near and medium term. It is also an approach that firms have already been very effective at advocating for themselves.

A more attractive option is to help finance the up-front costs of projects that both save money and mitigate emissions. This includes all kinds of unglamorous things, such as improving insulation and the efficiency of boilers, capturing waste heat in hot flue gasses, and replacing windows. Such an approach might be especially effective if directed towards public buildings such as schools, hospitals, government offices, and military facilities. That way, the government is investing in something that will improve its own medium-term financial position (important if existing debts are to be repaid, and future crises are to be managed), while also making a start towards a serious greening of government operations.

In the end, a lot of the most effective tools governments can employ cost very little. Improving building codes, requiring that vehicles be more efficient, and implementing carbon taxes all require only modest government expenditures – though they may cause other actors to incur major expenses. Approaches that are light on regulation and heavy on government spending are probably more likely to be wasteful than those based on compulsion through prices and regulation but, given the inevitability of additional fiscal stimulus in much of the world, it seems sensible to devote some of that directly to mitigation activities, while ensuring that spending not directly motivated by climate change doesn’t contradict climate change mitigation goals.

How else should a government that is feeling the urge to loosen the purse strings spend money on reducing emissions? With a new Canadian budget being tabled in ten days, it is a pertinent question.

‘Third hand smoke’

In the last couple of days, I have seen a number of news sources talking about ‘third hand smoke.’ This refers to the blindingly obvious fact that smokers stink, as do their clothes, homes, furniture, cars, etc. Before the UK smoking ban, just spending a night in a pub would leave your clothes smelling appreciably of tobacco for several days (and often several washes) afterwards. Anyone who has spent a lot of time riding in buses or airplanes will be able to tell you that a heavy smoker can usually be identified from a couple of seats away, even if they don’t happen to be smoking during the voyage. It is similarly obvious that those breathing the rank odour of stale tobacco are probably inhaling some of the toxins that come along with it, as well.

I maintain that smoking is one of the most vile habits a person can have (as well as being a singularly idiotic affront against your own health). Hopefully, the increasingly society-wide rejection of the practice will spread, become more firmly entrenched, and eventually emerge as the worldwide norm.

Are embassies still necessary?

Dylan Prazak

This Vanity Fair article discusses the evolution of American embassies from open glassy structures intended to be a concrete reflection of American values into fortresses that almost completely isolate those inside from the country hosting them. This is certainly true of the new embassy in Baghdad. It has its own electricity and water supply and it is sharply isolated from even the ‘Green Zone,’ which is itself a fortress for foreign occupiers. The article goes on to ask whether embassies are even really necessary, in this age of mass communications:

Faced with the failure of an obsolete idea—the necessity of traditional embassies and all the elaboration they entail—we have not stood back to remember their purpose, but have plunged ahead with closely focused concentration to build them bigger and stronger. One day soon they may reach a state of perfection: impregnable and pointless.

There is certainly something to the argument. If the people working there are completely out of contact with the local population, they may as well be located in their home state. Due to security concerns, day to day matters like visas and assistance for tourists are increasingly handled at locations aside from embassies. Perhaps all ambassadors need these days is some secure office space, a home in a well defended gated community, and the ability to rent facilities where large social functions could take place. Eliminating embassy compounds would remove a tempting target for terrorists, and allow a lot less diplomatic and local staff to be retained.

In the end, the two key questions seem to be:

  1. Do embassies still do anything that couldn’t be accomplished by fewer people in less specialized secure facilities?
  2. Do any of those enduring purposes justify the risk and expense now associated with embassy construction and operation?

It seems to me that the answers may be ‘not much’ and ‘often, no.’ The most important remaining role for many embassies may be in espionage: snatching up nearby radio transmissions and providing some land that operates under the legal regime of the ambassador’s home state.

Internet footprints and future scrutiny

Frozen blue lake, Vermont

Both The Economist and Slate have recently featured articles about the increasingly long and broad trails people are leaving behind themselves online: everything from comments in forums to Facebook profiles to uploaded photographs. Almost inevitably, some of this content is not the kind of thing that people will later want to see in the hands of their employers, the media, and so forth. I expect that more savvy employers are already taking a discreet peek online, when evaluating potential hires.

The two big questions both seem to concern how attitudes will evolve, both among internet users in general and among scrutinizers like employers. It’s possible that people thirty years from now will view our open and informal use of the internet as roughly equivalent to the famously uninhibited sex had by hippies in the 1960s: a bit of a remarkable cultural phenomenon, but one long dead due to the dangers inherent. It is also possible that people will come to view the existence of such information online as an inevitability, and not judge people too harshly as a result. Less and less human communication is the ephemeral sort, where all record ceases once a person’s voice has attenuated. As a result, more of what people say and do at all times of their lives (and in all states of mind) is being recorded, often in a rather durable way.

Personally, I suspect that the trend will be towards both greater caution and greater tolerance. Internet users will become more intuitively aware of the footprints they are leaving (especially as more high-profile cases of major embarrassment arise) and employers and the media will inevitably recognize that almost nobody has produced a completely clean sheet for themselves. Of course, there will still be a big difference between appearing in photographs of booze-fueled university parties and appearing at KKK rallies. The likely trend is not that a wider range of activities will be excusable, but rather that more evidence about everything a person has done will be available.

We can also expect the emergence of more private firms that seek to manage online presence, especially after the fact. Whether that means bullying (or bribing) the owners of websites where unwanted content has cropped up, creating positive-looking pages that outrank negative ones, or stripping away elements of databases through whatever means necessary, there will be a market for data sanitation services. While some people are likely to push for revamped privacy laws, I don’t see these are likely to be much help in this situation. When people are basically putting this information out in public voluntarily, it’s not clear how legislation could keep it from being scrutinized by anyone who is interested.

A few related posts:

Climate in 2009: predictions

Robert Pini

Two related events are likely to dominate climate news for 2009: the first year of the Obama administration and the UNFCCC negotiations in Copenhagen. Arguably, the biggest open question is just how dedicated Obama will be to domestic and international climate change action. It may be that he lives up to the high expectations of the environmental community, setting the stage for the rapid deployment of a cap-and-trade carbon pricing system in the United States and playing a constructive role in the creation of an international legal instrument to succeed the Kyoto Protocol. It may also be that his focus lies elsewhere, or that Congressional opposition makes his platform harder to implement. The Obama administration failing to make climate a priority issue from the outset is probably the most likely ‘bad news’ climate story of 2009, whereas successful domestic and international engagement is probably the most likely ‘good news’ story.

American re-engagement with the UNFCCC process is a necessary condition for progress, but it will not be sufficient in itself. Much depends on whether India and China can be brought into the agreement, as well as whether deforestation can be successfully incorporated into a new accord. Given the urgency of reducing emissions (starting the long path to stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gasses), it must be hoped that all the key states will rise to the challenge and develop a fair and effective approach.

If there are going to be big climatic surprises in 2009, they are more likely to be physical than political. It is nearly certain that there will be strange and destructive weather somewhere, and that at least some people will attribute it to climate change (whether plausibly or not). A big surprise could take the form of an extreme weather event, or simply the sharp acceleration of a tend such as glacier loss, permafrost melting, or changes in precipitation patterns.

With luck, 2009 will be seen as the year in which the world really began turning the corner towards emissions reductions. Most of the governments most bitterly opposed to action on climate change have been eliminated, and an accord between the big players (the US, China, Japan, Europe, etc) would have the momentum to drag everyone else along. The road ahead will continue to include shifts in policy – as well as very active debates on who should bear which costs – but the general outlines could be affirmed this year and global implementation could begin in earnest. Those broad outlines include the need for both total and per-capita emissions to start falling globally (perhaps with a brief period of residual growth in very poor states), that per-capita emissions should converge between all states, and that many of the costs of global mitigation and adaptation be borne by the societies that have created the problem.

For the sake of all future generations, let’s hope this will be a year of great progress.

Grid technologies to support renewable power

Indistinct Vermont barn

The MIT Technology Review has a good article about renewable energy and the ways electrical grids will need to change in order to accomodate it. Both key points have been discussed here before. Firstly, we need high voltage low-loss power lines from areas with lots of renewable potential (sunny parts of the southern US, windy parts of Europe, etc) to areas with lots of electrical demand. Secondly, we need a more intelligent grid that can manage demand and store some energy in periods of excess, for use in times when renewable output falters.

The article highlights how the advantages of a revamped grid are economic as well as environmental:

Smart-grid technologies could reduce overall electricity consumption by 6 percent and peak demand by as much as 27 percent. The peak-demand reductions alone would save between $175 billion and $332 billion over 20 years, according to the Brattle Group, a consultancy in Cambridge, MA. Not only would lower demand free up transmission capacity, but the capital investment that would otherwise be needed for new conventional power plants could be redirected to renewables. That’s because smart-grid technologies would make small installations of wind turbines and photovoltaic panels much more practical. “They will enable much larger amounts of renewables to be integrated on the grid and lower the effective overall system-wide cost of those renewables,” says the Brattle Group’s Peter Fox-Penner.

In short, a smarter grid holds out the prospect of overcoming the biggest limitation of electricity: that supply must always be exactly matched to demand, and that prospects for efficient storage have hitherto been limited. The storage issue, in particular, could be profoundly affected by the deployment of large numbers of electric vehicles with batteries that could be used in part as an electricity reserve for the grid.

Providing incentives for the development of a next-generation grid (as well as removing some of the legal and economic disincentives that prevent it) is an important role for governments – above and beyond the need to put a price on carbon. While carbon pricing can theoretically address the externalities associated with climatic harm from emissions, it cannot automatically deal with the externalities holding back grid development, which include the monopoly status of many of the firms involved, issues concerning economies of scale, the fact that the absence of transmission capacity restricts the emergence of renewable generation capacity (and vice versa).

The full article is definitely worth reading.

The Pope on homosexuality and the environment

Dylan Prazak making a monstrous face

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

Morty wants a treat

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

Cars parked in Gatineau

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.