Politics – Page 181 – a sibilant intake of breath

Tomorrow’s electrical generation: distributed or concentrated?

There is an interesting debate ongoing on the Gristmill blog about whether the future of electrical generation lies primarily with big centralized power plants, like today, or with distributed systems.

Naturally, there are many factors that influence which is more attractive, many of which are regulatory rather than inherent to the physics or economics. I suspect the key dynamics will be the relative efficiency of differently sized facilities, the rate at which low-loss high voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission emerges, and the rate at which financing options for small facilities proliferate. Other important considerations will be the rate of improvement in the economics of solar photovoltaic systems, as well as the development and deployment of demand management and energy storage options for the grid.

In any event, it is doubtful whether one approach or the other will ever truly dominate. In all probability, a low-carbon society will incorporate both approaches in keeping with the strengths of different technologies and the needs of different areas.

Overfishing and the EU

Long-time readers will remember the saga of the ‘fish paper’ – my research piece on the sustainability and legality of European Union fisheries policy in West Africa, eventually published in the MIT International Review.

Fisheries being an area of acute concern for me, I was gratified to see an unusually hard-hitting column in this week’s Economist about fish and the EU. It argues that EU goverments have shown “abject cowardice” in relation to their fishers for years. Meanwhile, overcapacity and unsustainable quotas have put the industry into a “suicidal spiral.” The article reports straightforwardly that: “More subsidies would reduce the already slim chance that Europe will ever have a sustainable fishing industry.”

I have argued previously that fishing should never be subsidized. There are far too many dangers of people selfishly exploiting a common good even without them. Indeed, I don’t have much hope when it comes to the long-term viability of world fisheries. That being said, if more people develop the understanding and candour displayed in this article, perhaps the madness can eventually be brought to heel.

Genetically modified potatoes

As is virtually always the case when reading Michael Pollan’s work, The Botany of Desire makes me want to share virtually every page and idea with friends. While a full review will have to wait, one thing that struck me while reading tonight is the situation with genetically engineered Bt crops, as discussed in the last section of the book.

Monsanto’s spuds

Bt is short for Bacillus thuringiensis: a soil bacteria that produces a poison that slays many crop-eating insects. Because it is naturally occurring, the bacterially derived poison is even permitted in many systems of organic agriculture. Genetically modified crops like Monsanto’s NewLeaf tomatoes have had the gene for the manufacture of the poison introduced into their own genetic material.

This is done in one of two relatively crude-seeming ways. Either the gene is inserted into a pathogen that is then allowed to infect the cells of the plant to be modified or DNA is literally shot into the target plant using a .22 caliber ‘gene gun.’ In most cases, the genes don’t end up in the right part of the target plant’s genome. In no cases do we comprehensively appreciate what kind of changes we are creating.

What we do know is this: when we create an environment where pests are exposed to a monoculture of Bt-generating plants, the pests will eventually evolve resistance. According to Pollan, Monsanto expect this to happen to Bt in about thirty years.

This is shocking when you think about it. Firstly, it reveals a kind of extreme short-termism in planning – the expectation that we can keep running on the treadmill and finding new solutions. Secondly, it reveals considerable unethical selfishness. Bt is used by many people other than Monsanto and Monsanto’s customers. The Bt-modified plants threaten to ruin the substance for everybody. Thirdly, it should be remembered that it is not only the resilience of the GM crops that may be undermined. Naturally occurring organisms defending themselves with Bt toxin and similar compounds may suddenly face invulnerable pests, with unknown consequences for nature.

Perhaps the most depressing thing about this section in Pollan’s book is the convincing argument that the above is actually an improvement over conventional potato production. To take the most egregious example, potatoes are regularly sprayed with an organophosphate pesticide called Monitor in order to kill aphids. This is because aphids carry a virus that gives potatoes brown spots inside. People don’t want to eat such potatoes, so farmers respond by spraying the plants with a substance akin to the deadliest of military nerve gasses.

The bigger picture

The more I read about energy usage, climatic science, agriculture, and fisheries, the more deeply green I become. It is pretty challenging to read something as compelling as Michael Pollan’s accounts of industrial agriculture and not begin to profoundly question the kind of soft-green liberal environmentalism that claims that there are just a few environmental externalities that we need to sort out before capitalism as practiced becomes sustainable.

P.S. Names like NewLeaf remind me instantly of Margaret Atwood’s excellent novel Oryx and Crake: essential reading for those trying to make sense of biotechnology’s brave new world.

Stupid comment forms

The following is a short rant intended for all those who design comment forms on websites:

When you have a box that says ‘homepage’ or ‘website’ it is absurd to make people type http://www.mysite.com. The HTTP means Hypertext Transfer Protocol. Every website in the universe uses this transfer protocol, so making someone type it is always redundant.

The same goes for ‘www.’ Homepages and websites are on the world wide web. They aren’t mail servers or any other sort of networked beast.

In conclusion, I should be able to type sindark.com and your comment form should understand it.

P.S. Even more unforgivable than sites that produce errors when ‘http’ and ‘www’ are lacking are the small minority that produce absurd URLs when you enter a site name in X.com format. I have seen sites where putting that yields a link to: “http://www.siteIamcommentingon.com/X.com.” Nightmare!

P.P.S. See www is deprecated for the argument that having to say ‘www’ is unnecessary in all circumstances, not just when filling out comment forms.

Dion on gas prices and carbon taxes

Asking a politician to defend climate change policy in courageous moral terms may be asking too much. Just today, Stephane Dion had to go to great lengths to argue that the carbon tax being contemplated by his party will not increase the cost of gasoline. Designing the tax in such a way may be politically necessary now, but what it fails to communicate is the basic rationale behind taxing carbon at all. It isn’t something the government does to raise revenue. Rather, it is an intelligent intervention to correct a market failure. Even with gasoline at current prices, consumers are not paying the full costs associated with their choices. They are paying for oil exploration and the expansion of expensive alternative fuel options. They are paying to outbid increasingly affluent and fuel-thirsty people in rapidly developing countries. They are not paying the costs associated with the huge risks greenhouse gas emissions pose for future generations.

If we are to deal with climate change, there must be a profound societal acknowledgement of two things: that present-day lifestyles are profoundly harmful to others and that people do not have the right to impose such harm, even when they have been mindlessly doing so for a long time. That moral case is at the very heart of carbon pricing and climate change mitigation in general. Pretending otherwise cheapens the debate, as well as making it shallower. Carbon taxes now may indeed be a useful vehicle for encouraging people to make smart investments in the face of rising fuel prices, but that is not and should never be the core of the justification for them.

Oil producers and game theory

We usually think about oil prices from the perspective of consumers, but it can also be useful to think about the incentives faced by producing countries. A country like Kuwait has a fixed amount of total oil, and a level of recoverable oil that varies depending on price and technology. Oil is the most lucrative product the state can provide on a global level. There are thus serious concerns about what would happen if production began to decline terminally.

Expectations are also critical. If I expect oil prices to keep rising, it may make sense for me to pump less. After all, I can earn more per barrel for it later. All the oil that got pumped at $10 a barrel a few years ago could have contributed a lot more to consumption and investment at today’s prices. Conversely, if I expect this to be a short-term shock, my interest is to pump as much as I can and sell it for sky-high prices.

Producer incentives thus create both a positive and a negative feedback. In situations where oil is running short (and producers know it), the incentive is to cut supply even further to take advantage of higher future prices. In situations where producers consider present prices to be an aberration, the incentive is to glut the market and thus depress prices even more when they do start to fall.

Of course, the oil supplying states are probably just as concerned with keeping their real reserves and production potential secret from one another as they are concerned about hiding it from consumer states. As such, states like Russia and Saudi Arabia that might be lying publicly about their reserves cannot be entirely certain whether other parties are lying as well, and to what extent.

Czech legacy of uranium mining

If I ever visit Prague again, I will be a bit more nervous about the drinking water. The water is drawn from the North Bohemian Cretaceous Basin and only active pumping is keeping that basin from being contaminated by radioactive acids. These originated in a Soviet uranium mining operation that ran from 1974 to 1996. The mine used a technique called ‘in situ leaching,’ which uses injected sulphuric acid deep underground to seperate the uranium from surrounding rock. Unfortunately, this process was undertaken imperfectly and with little respect for the environment. Too much acid was injected and the 15,000 injection wells were installed such that they penetrate an important freshwater aquifer.

The ‘dynamic containment’ now being used involves both the constant injection of fresh water on one side of the contaminated area and the extraction and treatment of contaminated water from the other side. If either process was interrupted, the contamination could spread into water supplies used for drinking or agriculture. At the present pace, the contamination should be stabilized by 2035 (not cleaned up, more than one million tonnes of contaminants will remain underground). Cleanup costs up to that point are expected to be about 1.85 billion Euros.

As with many other cases of nuclear contamination – from the Hanford Site to Novaya Zemlya – the legacy of past activities is long-lived. That should give pause to those rushing to endorse nuclear power as the solution to climate change, particularly when the level of oversight provided by the governments supervising mining, the nuclear power sector, and waste share the Soviet Union’s lack of prudence and environmental concern. Even in better regulated places, it is very difficult to make the nuclear industry internalize such costs. Whenever the damages created become excessive, it is a fair bet that the taxpayers of the future will end up paying.

Rethinking development

When discussing global solutions to climate change, a constant distinction is drawn between three groups of states (two of which we sometimes pretend are the same). There are the ‘developed’ states and a ‘developing’ set which consists of those that are growing rapidly (India, China, Brazil, Russia) and those that are stagnant or even getting poorer (Zimbabwe, Sudan).

An alternative way of thinking about the situation is this. Imagine the states as human beings. The ‘developed’ ones grew up in the very unusual situation of huge amounts of cheap, easy energy everywhere. (Sci-fi nerds might appreciate how they could be equated to Guild Navigators.) As a consequence, they developed in a deformed way. Their economies can only keep going in their present form while that unusual situation continues. The rapidly developing states are following the same line of development, despite the certainty of climate change and the probability of energy prices rising in the long term.

The ‘developed’ states may be all grown up, but they have developed into monsters. ‘Developing’ states may want to muster the determination to mature more gracefully.

Apocalyptic psychology

Emily has written an interesting post about our half-longing for apocalypse and the psychology of climate change. Evoking the possibility of disaster sometimes serves rational purposes, such as providing a way to deal with uncertainties about costs. There are still people who argue that the benefits of climate change are likely to exceed the costs, and others who argue that the cost of addressing climate change is unacceptably high. Pointing out the possibility of catastrophic runaway change is one way to respond to such positions.

That being said, there are deeper and more emotive reasons for which the destruction of our civilization as the result of climate change has psychological poignancy. At some level, there is the feeling that we deserve it – that our abuse of the rest of nature has disqualified us from continued participation in it. Thankfully, quasi-religious notions of sin and damnation generally leave a space for redemption. Particularly if we can do it in a way that doesn’t leave the world littered with nuclear waste and toxic pollutants, moving to a low-carbon society could help humanity to redeem itself in its own eyes.

A bad new copyright bill

Canada’s proposed new copyright act is unacceptably poor, most importantly because of its treatment of Digital Rights Management (DRM). Under the new law, circumventing any such system – no matter why – is against the law. This means that if the company that sold you a song decides to stop letting you access it, you are out of luck. Under the new law, it would be a crime to copy music from a DRM-protected CD that you bought to an iPod that you own, with an associated fine of $20,000.

The law would also mean that organizations like libraries cannot have any confidence in their future ability to use digital materials today and people with disabilities will not be able to use technology to make protected works more accessible. It would make it a crime for me to use VideoLAN player to watch DVDs I bought in Europe, just because people selling DVDs have decided to use monopolistic regional codes to boost profits. Indeed, it would criminalize the distribution of VideoLAN itself.

It must be remembered that the purpose of copyright law is to serve the public good, not copyright holders. We allow copyrights because they create a legal environment in which it is possible to profit from a good idea. As a result, copyright protections help to ensure that people are furnished with new and high quality music, books, etc. By failing to protect the legitimate needs of consumers, this bill fails to enhance the public interest. As such, it deserves to be opposed and defeated.