Politics – Page 192 – a sibilant intake of breath

Hurricanes, insurance, and the Everglades

After being endorsed by Charlie Crist – the governor of Florida – John McCain said something rather unintelligent today:

We’ve got to provide home insurance for every person who lives in the path of a hurricane. We are going to have to work together to save the Everglades and other great environmental treasures of this state.

The first huge problem with this is the transfer of wealth that is being proposed here. People who live on the coast in hurricane territory have every expectation of getting hit by hurricanes again and again. Having the taxes of people sensible enough to live elsewhere used to subsidize insurance for those in the risky area is quite unfair. It is also rather imprudent, as it encourages the continued occupation of hurricane-prone areas, with all the implications for death and property destruction that implies.

I could see some justification for a one-off relocation fee for people living in hurricane areas – especially if weather patterns have changed and made a previously safe area dangerous. I cannot see the logic behind using taxes to encourage people to live in dangerous areas, at a time when extreme weather seems to be getting ever-more-potent.

As for saving the Everglades, it is not at all clear that the people living nearby are helping them. The oil companies are most certainly not doing so. Indeed, the canals cut through the Everglades to allow ships passage to the oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico may well have exacerbated the storm surges that breached the levees in New Orleans.

European expansion and energy policy

The European Union is in the midst of a big internal fight about how to divide climate change mitigation obligations between members. The poorer states that joined recently say they should have easier targets so their economies will be able to grow more rapidly. States that have already made big investments in renewable technology think they should be called upon to improve by a lesser margin. France wants credit for its determined use of nuclear power. In many ways, the arguments are global disagreements writ small – an excellent illustration of which is Poland.

Poland has by far the biggest coal reserves in the EU – about fourteen billion tonnes worth. Germany is in second place with about six billion. The German GDP per capita is also US$39,650 at market exchange rates, compared to US$10,858 for Poland. Thankfully, the European Union has much more robust mechanisms for dealing with these distributional questions than exist in the world at large. There are European courts and European laws; there are also funds for regional development. Perhaps equally important is the recognition that interaction between EU states will be relatively intense for the indefinite future. This creates a stronger incentive to come to an acceptable settlement.

As such, the EU is an interesting test case for broader ideas. Given the lack of global institutions with similar strength, it is far from certain whether EU approaches could be applied worldwide. What does seem fair to say is that if Europe – with its relative wealth and strong institutions – cannot devise a system of burden-sharing for climate change mitigation, it will probably prove impossibly difficult on a global scale.

You must do the heaviest / So many shall do none

When it comes to reducing personal environmental impact in any sphere (pollution, climate change, resource depletion, etc), there comes a point where each individual says: “That is too great a sacrifice.” Some people would refuse to give up incandescent bulbs; some, eating meat; some, driving their cars; some, flying in jets. The question arises of what to do when there is a fundamental conflict between an ethical requirement and a person’s will. In the modern world, this applies perhaps most harshly to air travel.

We know that very substantial emissions are associated with flying. We also know that substantial emissions will definitely cause human suffering and death in the future. One flight emits significantly more than a single person can sustainably emit in a year. Every year emissions are above sustainable levels, the concentration of greenhouse gases rises; each year in which that happens, the mean energy absorbed by the planet increases. At some point in the future, it is inevitable that this process would cause massive harm to human beings and non-human living things. It is also plausible that positive feedbacks could create abrupt or runaway climate change, either of which could cause human extinction or the end of humanity as a species with civilization. In the face of that, it is difficult to say that flying isn’t morally wrong.

At the same time, it is impossible for most people to say it is. Partly, this is because of a failure of imagination. They cannot imagine a world where people don’t fly. Mostly, though, it is reflective of the powerful kind of denial that lets people continue to live as they do, even when convincing evidence of the wrongness of their behaviour is revealed. Rationalizations are myriad: (a) Why should I stop when others will just continue? (b) There has to be a balance between acting ethically and getting what I want. Neither of these has any ethical strength in the face of a known and significant wrong. At the same time, it is implausible that people will abandon their self-deception or that external forces will constrain their behaviour effectively. If that is true, our future really isn’t in our hands. We are slaves to fate, in terms of what technological innovation might bring and in terms of how sensitive the climate really is to greenhouse gasses.

Fishing should never be subsidized

The economic case for government subsidies can be made in one of two ways. The first is the argument based on externalities: the idea being that one person’s behaviour creates benefits for others, but that those others do not compensate the actor. An example might be a landowner who refrains from cutting down trees uphill from rivers. All river users benefit from the flood control and lack of silt. In this case, it might make sense for the government to pay the landowner to save the trees – in providing the subsidy, the government encourages a more socially optimal behaviour. This justification doesn’t work for fisheries. Fisheries are a common property resource and, as such, tend towards over-exploitation. Having fishers catch more does not provide anyone else with benefits; indeed, it harms the ability of everyone else to use marine resources. Subsidizing fishing pushes fishers to continue catching fish even beyond the point where it would normally be unprofitable, leading to further depletion.

The second argument for subsidies is the ‘infant industries’ argument. The idea here is that it can take a while for a new business to reach the level of existing businesses in the field. A brand new textile industry in an African state may not initially be able to produce goods at a cost and level of quality competitive with existing industries in Asia. In such cases, you can justify a temporary program of subsidy, intended to get the industry running. Once again, this doesn’t apply to fisheries. If anything, there is too much fishing capacity in the states that subsidize heavily (North America, Europe, and Japan). Excess fishing capacity is being exported into developing states, depleting the resources there.

The one form of subsidy that can be justified in relation to the fishing industry is subsidized training to get out of it. We can recognize that fishers are having an increasingly difficult time making a living, while also recognizing that subsidizing their fuel or equipment will just batter fish stocks further. The solution is to help people to transition into other industries where they can sustain themselves without depleting pools of resources common to everyone. It is always hard for politicians to say that an industry should be smaller, or should not exist at all, but, in the case of fisheries, that is probably the only position that makes economic and ecological sense.

A partial defence of carbon offsets

Everybody compares carbon offsets with the indulgences of the medieval Catholic Church. Indeed, a good number of people seem to treat the comparison as the decisive point against them. Offsets allow one person to ‘sin’ by flying or driving a big car, then pay for it by having someone else reduce emissions by a similar amount. While there is certainly potential for abuse, the real issue here is about the intuitive sense of fairness people possess.

Obviously, if someone buys an offset that produces no real reduction in emissions, they have been bilked and the climate has suffered. There are plenty of cases of dubious offsets, including all those based around planting trees. Furthermore, it is necessary not only for the sale of the offset to lead to reduced emissions: it must lead to a reduction of emissions equivalent to the face value of the offset and, crucially, these must consist entirely of reductions that would not otherwise occur. The perfect offset is something like this: (a) a farm releases large amounts of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas (b) in the normal run of things, the farm would have no incentive to stop doing so (c) the sale of offsets changes the economics of the situation, making it most economically efficient to capture the methane, perhaps using it to generate electricity (d) this produces a quantity of real and verifiable reductions that can be sold at the marginal cost of capturing the methane.

In this situation, the argument of ineffectiveness does not apply. What we are left with is the offence against fairness – allowing one person to ‘take more than their share.’ While there is intuitive force behind this position, I don’t think it is very convincing. While it would be better to both moderate one’s consumption and help others to do so, it does seem less objectionable to emit and purchase credible offsets than to emit and simply ignore the consequences of your actions. The critical difference between offsets and indulgences is that offsets (when used properly) actually have a mitigating effect on total greenhouse gas emissions; indulgences never did anything at all, except raise money for those selling them and the ire of those opposed.

Carbon tariffs

It is only a matter of time before the first state imposes an import tariff on goods from countries that are not taking action on climate change. On one level, that is fair enough. If domestic manufacturers are paying for their CO2 emissions through a cap-and-trade scheme or carbon tax, they have some legitimate objections against imports from foreign competitors who are not doing so. That said, the actual experience with the first such tariffs is likely to be a huge legal and political mess.

Membership in the World Trade Organization – something common to most big emitters – carries a number of obligations of varying levels of obscurity and enforcement. You can bet that countries that have such tariffs applied to them will protest such treatment aggressively. It would also be fair to bet that the winner of the contest will be determined on the basis of economic power, rather than the rightness or wrongness of arguments. It is even possible that the resulting compromise will be worse from a greenhouse gas mitigation standpoint than if the argument had never begun.

That said, it is at least logically possible for the global trading system to help in the development of an effective global regime of rules, norms, and decision-making procedures around the issue of climate change. It obviously won’t have an effect on countries that don’t do a lot of trading, but they are probably not the most essential ones to get on board anyhow. What will matter most is which of the two biggest economic blocs will triumph: the United States, still in denial about what solving climate change will require, or Europe, where at least some leading states are starting to get serious.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma

Michael Pollan‘s superb book tells the stories of four meals and the processes through which they came to exist. At one extreme is a meal of McDonald’s cheeseburgers, eaten in a moving car; at the other, a cooked wild boar he hunted, accompanied by things grown or gathered. Pollan also considers two types of pastoral food systems: one on a mass scale intended to serve the consumer market for organic foods and a truly pastoral farm centred around grass feeding, healthy animal interactions, and sustainability. His descriptions of the four, and comparisons between them, provide lots of interesting new information, and fodder for political and ethical consideration.

Among these, the industrial food chain and the grass-fed pastoral are the most interesting. Each is a demonstration of human ingenuity, with the former representing the sheer efficiency that can be achieved through aggressive specialization and disregard for animal welfare and environmental effects and the latter demonstrating how people, animals, and plants can interact in a much more ethical and sustainable way, albeit only on a relatively small scale. The account of Polyface Farm – the small-scale pastoral operation run by Joel Salatin – is genuinely touching at times, as well as startling in contrast to the industrial cattle feeding and killing operations Pollan describes. While the book heaps praise on the operation, it also recognizes the limitations inherent: we cannot live in cities like New York and get our food from such establishments, nor can the big stores most people shop at manage to deal with thousands of such small suppliers. Unless you are willing to go back to a pre-urban phase for humanity, the industrial organic chain may be the best that is possible.

Pollan’s book is packed with fascinating information on everything from the chemistry of producing processed foods from corn to some unusual theories he learned from mushroom gatherers. Regardless of your present position on food, reading it will make you better informed and leave you with a lot to contemplate.

Arguably, the book is at its weakest when it comes to ethics. Pollan rightly heaps criticism on factory farms, but seems to pre-judge the overall rightness of eating meat. Some of his arguments against vegetarianism and veganism – such as that more animals are killed in fields growing vegetables than in slaughterhouses – are simply silly. No sensible system of ethics considers it equivalent to kill a grasshopper and to kill a pig. I also think that he places too much emphasis on the relevance of whether an animal anticipates death or not. I don’t see how the inability of animals to “see is coming” makes their deaths qualitatively different from those of human beings.

That said, his arguments are generally coherent and certainly bear consideration. He never explicitly spells out the wrongness of eating industrial meat, though it is clear that his implicit argument is based around the conditions under which the animals live, rather than the fact of killing them. This is a sensible position and he is right to contrast Polyface farm with industrial farms on the basis of how they allow or do not allow animals to express their “characteristic forms of life.” Rather than press his argument to a conclusion, he abandons his consideration in a bout of fantasy: talking about how much better the treatment and slaughter of animals would be if farms and slaughterhouses had glass walls.

I highly recommend this book to almost everyone. Modern life is very effective at concealing the nature and origin of what we are eating. This book helps to pull back the veil to some extent. It is also a reflection of the ever-increasing politicization of food. What you choose to eat is an important signal of your ethical and political views, to be judged accordingly by others. Whatever position you end up taking, it will be better informed and illustrated if you take the time to consider Pollan’s thoughts and experiences.

For my part, the book has convinced me that I should strictly limit or abandon the consumption of eggs. His description of egg operations is especially chilling and supports his assertion that: “What you see when you look is the cruelty – and the blindness to cruelty – required to produce eggs that can be sold for seventy-nine cents a dozen.” Other resolutions stemming from reading this book include to try eating more types of mushrooms, improve my cooking generally, and remember that under no circumstances should one accept an invitation to collect abalone in California.

Meat eating and ignorance

Here is an ethical argument I have been pondering recently:

Most people, if forced to witness the entire process through which a piece of meat is produced, would choose not to eat the meat.
Some people are never put off by this because it never occurs to them to think about, or they have a notion of where meat comes from that is quite at odds with reality.
Some people are aware of where most of our meat really comes from, but choose to ignore this because they want to eat meat anyhow.
Therefore, meat eating in our society is usually the product of true ignorance or wilful ignorance.

I can only see two responses to this argument: questioning the first point or saying that the conclusion is true but unimportant. You could argue that we find the way in which animals are raised and slaughtered unappealing simply because we aren’t used to it. We don’t generally visit factory farms or abattoirs. We rarely even go to butchers with recognizable animals on display. Arguably, we are simply queasy at an unfamiliar sight, rather than genuinely morally repulsed.

That counter-argument has strength, to a degree. I think it can be applied pretty effectively in the case of a meat production chain that doesn’t require large amount of animal suffering and isn’t worrisomely unhygenic. As I have argued before, however, the industrial meat system is both. I maintain that most people forced to sit in a jury on the question – presented with evidence and arguments on both sides – would conclude that considerable animal suffering occurs in the production of the meat people eat, and that factory farming is profoundly unhygienic from the perspective of the animals, those who eat their meat, and the environment as a whole.

So what about the argument that meat eating is ignorant, but that this doesn’t matter? Perhaps it isn’t wrong to act on the basis of ignorance. While true ignorance seems more defensible than the wilful sort, we cannot automatically assume that it is wrong to act on the basis of misinformation, or even intentionally suppress information we feel will inhibit our actions. Alternatively, a utilitarian might say that the net utility of meat eating is greater than that of vegetarianism or veganism – though that becomes a lot harder to argue if the utility of the animals is considered as well. People dead-set upon arguing the appropriateness of eating meat will be able to find a detour around this argument that suits them well enough for them to dismiss it. For those a bit more open-minded from the outset, I think it creates relatively profound problems.

Canadian emissions by province

The chart above breaks down Canada’s 1990 and 2005 emissions by province. It shows emissions of all greenhouse gasses, measured in megatonnes of CO2 equivalent. It is interesting both in terms of totals and in terms of rates of change. The only jurisdiction where emissions declined was the Yukon, where they fell from 0.6 to 0.4 Mt CO2e. One obvious fact demonstrated by this chart is that it is possible to address Canadian emissions to a significant extent by focusing on just two provinces, with another three making more modest but still substantial contributions.

This chart shows the population distribution between the provinces in 2005:

Of course, it is unfair to directly compare emissions with population. When a driver in Ontario drives using gasoline extracted from the oil sands, Ontario bears some responsibility for those emissions. This is akin to the relationship between emissions and world trade, as discussed before. Even so, there is an obvious disjoint between the level of emissions in Alberta and their share of the Canadian population.

To reach a sustainable level of emissions, it will be necessary for everybody to cut their emissions significantly. That being said, the disaggregation of data can help us to make better choices about where to prioritize. From that perspective, the provincial policies of Ontario and Alberta start to look very important indeed.

Patchwork rules and industry strategy

In many states, a disjoint can be seen between action being taken on climate change at the state or provincial level and inaction at the federal level. Some people argue that such approaches are fundamentally inefficient because they increase uncertainty and the cost of compliance. While this is true in a static sense, it ignores an important element of game theory. Generally, the moment at which it becomes possible to effectively regulate an environmental problem is the moment when industry decides that some form of regulation is inevitable. It then switches its attention from lobbying for total inaction to lobbying for the kind of regulatory regime that suits business best: something as large-scale as possible, with long enough time horizons to guide investment decisions.

This is certainly the pattern that was observed with ozone depletion. Industry went from saying: “There’s no problem” to saying: “There’ a bit of a problem, but it would bankrupt us to fix” to realizing that regulation was inevitable, lobbying for a kind that suited them, and developing superior alternatives to CFCs within a year.

As such, it is entirely possible that grumbling about a “patchwork of regional approaches” signals the approach of an inflection point, beyond which effective regulation and large-scale industry and consumer adaptation occurs.