Category: Politics

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

Resource types and the resource curse

As discussed before, the ‘resource curse’ hypothesis holds that the presence of valuable resources can sometimes reduce the security of states, since it offers up a prize to anyone capable of seizing them. A bit of recent research has added nuance to the picture. By looking at the long-running civil war in Columbia, the authors were able to look at periods when coffee (a labour intense crop) and oil (a capital intense crop) rose and fell in value:

Using newspaper reports of violent skirmishes in 950 Colombian municipalities between 1988 and 2005, Dube and Vargas find that when coffee prices went up, violence went down in locations where a large fraction of land area was under coffee cultivation. When coffee prices fell, however, as they did by almost 70 percent in the late 1990s, violence in coffee areas rose dramatically. The researchers estimate that an additional 500 deaths may have resulted from the increased conflict that came from lower coffee prices. The opposite was true for oil: It was higher prices that intensified conflict in areas with productive oil wells or pipelines. (Since both coffee and oil prices are traded in global markets, it is unlikely that price increases were caused by panicking commodities traders spooked by increased civil-war violence in Colombia.)

One suggestion that arises is not unfamiliar: establish strong governance regimes in states with capital intensive resources. It is far better to be like Norway, using resource income transparently and putting aside a share of the oil revenues for the benefit of future generations, than like Nigeria, long mired in conflict as different groups compete for resource wealth.

On the labour intensive side, the proposal is a bit more novel: provide international aid to stabilize commodity prices in conflict-prone states. There are those who argue that a 50% drop in coffee prices helped cause the Rwandan genocide. Surely, the economic cost of temporarily bolstering commodity prices in delicate states is less than the probable cost of re-establishing security and resuming development after an internal conflict. The difference between the economic cost and the moral cost of inaction is probably greater still.

California’s Proposition 8

One sad element in the upcoming American election is California’s Proposition 8: an attempt to amend the state constitution to ban gay marriage. Restricting the rights of homosexuals is every bit as repugnant as doing so on the basis of sex or race. Hopefully, people in a few decades will view homophobia with the same near-universal hostility we nor direct towards racism and sexism.

Those unwilling to support gay marriage really ought to be ashamed of themselves. It is especially despicable to try to prevent it through constitutional amendment, given how a key role of constitutions in democratic political systems is to protect the rights of minorities that often face discrimination.

[Update: 22 December 2008] As everybody knows, Proposition 8 passed. Now, some people are seeking to have existing gay marriages voided. Hopefully, the court cases arising from this will eventually overturn the referendum, given that it is never appropriate to decide on minority rights by such means.

Fine words, more dubious actions

Admirably, the British government has chosen to accept a tougher target for emissions reductions by 2050: pledging to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050. They are right to stress how commitment to climate change mitigation cannot falter in difficult economic times.

Unfortunately, two major contradictions continue to exist in British policy: a continued intention to add extra runways to its busy airports, and the proposal to add two new 800 MW supercritical coal-fired power units to the Kingsnorth Power Station. We have reached the point where we must simply refuse to allow coal power plants that do not capture and store their emissions to be built in developed countries.

[Update: 15 January 2009] The British government has announced that it is going forward with a third runway for Heathrow. Hopefully, they will be stopped by popular protest.

Accounting for changes in sinks

It is highly likely that any successor to the Kyoto Protocol negotiated in the next couple of years will include targets based on emissions produced directly by human activities. That means any emissions associated with melting permafrosts, accelerated decay in peatlands, or dried out forests would not be included in the overall total. This is pretty worrisome, given that the climate doesn’t care about the origin of emissions. We could conceivably meet out target for anthropogenic emissions while nonetheless putting far more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere than would be wise.

At the same time, it wouldn’t be fair to penalize only the country where the second-order emissions get produced. If the Amazon dries out due to climate change, it is not entirely or even mostly the fault of Brazil. The fairest course of action seems to be:

  1. Come up with a hard global target for both direct human emissions and those induced by climate change itself.
  2. Assign the direct emissions to the states producing them.
  3. Divide up the secondary emissions and assign them to each country according to their total historical contribution to climate change.

That means if Canada has emitted about 2% of all the anthropogenic greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, we would be responsible for 2% of induced emissions coming out of the permafrost in Canada and Siberia, the drying of the Amazon, etc. That way, the polluter is paying, albeit belatedly, and the focus remains the actual amount of greenhouse gas entering the atmosphere, which is the critical determinant in what will happen to the climate.

Climate change – rhetoric and urgency

Joseph Romm has written an interesting post on science, rhetoric, and why those who deny the reality of climate change are so effective at spreading their message. Basically, he argues that they are more sophisticated in terms of argumentation styles, and that they are able to engage people on terms they can intuitively appreciate.

Right now, it actually seems more as though the biggest gap is between accepting that humans are causing climate change and accepting what the consequences of that really are. Even organizations that claim to accept the conclusions of the IPCC are nonetheless perpetuating a society emitting grossly unacceptable amounts of greenhouse gasses. How, for instance, can you accept the science of climate change, then deny that it has a major impact on the applicability of a political philosophy based on unending economic growth?

With bluntness very unusual for a scientist, Andrew Weaver summarized the situation we are in:

[U]nless we reach a point where we stop emitting greenhouse gases entirely, 80 per cent of the world’s species will become extinct, and human civilization as we know it will be destroyed, by the end of this century.

We don’t actually need to completely eliminate emissions by the end of the century, but we certainly need to begin cutting them deeply and rapidly. That remains a reality that no government anywhere seems to have fully accepted. Right now, we are like a gambling addict losing $1,000 an hour. If we can get it down to a dramatically lower level, we can keep gambling for longer without going completely bust. Achieving that will require a lot of politically difficult work.

ICCAAT derided, tuna stocks denuded

The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) has generally shown itself to be ineffective in its mandate. Indeed, some have suggested with a fait bit of validity that the acronym more accurately expands to “International Conspiracy to Catch All Tuna.” A panel including experts from Canada, Japan, and Australia has now published a report with similar conclusions, saying that the organization is “”widely regarded as an international disgrace” and that there have been widespread failures in reducing illegal fishing, providing accurate catch data, and maintaining proper monitoring arrangements. When it appears that even Japan might be willing to back a moratorium on bluefin tuna fishing, you can be sure the situation is dire.

Unfortunately, the global record on fisheries management overall is dismal. Even the Alaskan pollock fishery – considered by many to be one of the most sustainable in the world – has seen a population drop of 50% since last year. The problem is simple to explain and very challenging to solve. There are too many people fishing with gear that is too good. Not enough parts of the sea are set off as safe havens for marine life. Pollution and climate change are also having an impact. Politicians are too spineless to stand up to the fishing lobby, not even in order to defend the public good, but to stop that very industry from destroying itself in our lifetimes. The industry needs to be much smaller and much more tightly regulated; the most destructive gear needs to be banned; monitoring needs to be improved; and states must prove themselves willing to enforce the law.

The chances of all that happening are fairly slim. All told, global fisheries provide one of the most acute examples of where human beings are weighing so heavily on the planet’s physical and biological systems that collapse is rapidly approaching.

Prior related posts:

The Shifting Baselines blog is also an excellent source of fishery-related news.

US and Canadian electoral predictions

As of today, fivethirtyeight.com is projecting a 93.8% chance that Obama will win the American election, with a projected 351 electoral college votes compared to McCain’s 187. They are giving Obama an 84% chance of winning Florida, which would basically decide the election by itself, giving Obama a lead McCain couldn’t counter with other swing states. They are also projecting 56 Democratic senators.

The UBC election stock market is putting the odds of a Conservative majority in Canada at around 10%. The Tories are projected to gain seven seats (ending up with 131 total), while the Liberals are projected to lose eighteen seats (ending up with 85). The big winner is expected to be the NDP: gaining fourteen seats (for a total of 43) while the Bloc loses four and ends up with a total of 47. Two seats are projected to go to Greens or independents.

Appetite for climate policy in Europe

In many ways, the European Union leads the world on climate change policy. In most states, there is broad political support for carbon regulation. They have also undertaken the largest experiment in carbon pricing. While the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) certainly has a large number of problems, it will hopefully develop towards greater effectiveness and prove a model for others. The EU also has some ambitious targets and, in many cases, reasonable mechanisms for working towards them.

Of course, it becomes more difficult to sell strong climate policies to voters when the economy heads south. Poland is suddenly extremely anxious about the carbon intensity of its coal-fired power plants, while other states are worried about the global competitiveness of their industries.

This is part of the reason for which it is so critical to get a strong new global agreement by the time of the Copenhagen meeting of the UNFCCC. Once emissions-intensive sectors are regulated in most of the states where they are important, states will be less anxious about losing competitiveness.

The death of libertarianism

There is a lot about the political philosophy of libertarianism that is appealing. The idea that one should be free to behave as one wishes – as long as it doesn’t harm others – seems to provide a decent balance between allowing people to pursue their own purposes and stopping that pursuit from harming the general interest. That being said, the degree to which libertarianism can be liberating is diminishing with time. This is basically because of both the growing fact of interconnectedness and because of our growing awareness of it.

One example is economic globalization. At one point in time, it would have been considered reasonable to argue that economic activity on one side of the world has no morally relevant effect on the other. Now that markets are more linked, products and capital flow, and awareness of linkages exist, that becomes very difficult to argue. Before, it is as though the chooser was alone in a room with a light switch. It is of no particular moral consequence whether they choose to have it on or not. Now, it is more as though that light switch also reduces the function of the equipment in a hospital across town when it is pulled. Whereas libertarianism previously permitted free choice, the inter-linked example includes a moral obligation to act in a certain way.

Climate change may be the ultimate force diminishing how liberating libertarianism can be. Not only do nearly all of our life and economic choices impact innocent third parties around the world, they also contribute to a problem that will have a huge long-term impact on future generations and the natural world. Arguably, this makes the doctrine of “do what you like but do no harm” impossible to follow in practice.

It is not clear if or how the appealing aspects of libertarianism can be maintained in a world full of important material interconnections. The most plausible answer seems to be a combination of working hard to create situations where multiple moral choices actually do exist (light switches that don’t shut down breathing machines) and accepting those situations where the tradeoffs are real and making a determined effort to choose the least harmful option.