Politics – Page 195 – a sibilant intake of breath

A few thoughts on climate justice

A couple of articles at Slate.com address the issue of ‘climate justice.’ This is, in essence, the question of how much mitigation different states are obliged to undertake, as well as what sort of other international transfers should take place in response to climate change. The issue is a tricky one for many reasons – most importantly because anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions constitute a unique experiment that can only be conducted once. If we choose the wrong collection of policies, all future generations may face a profoundly different world from the one we inherited.

If we accept Stern’s estimate of a five gigatonne level for sustainable global emissions, that works out to about 760kg of carbon dioxide equivalent per person on Earth. Releasing just 36kg of methane would use up an entire year’s allotment, as would just 2.5kg of nitrous oxide. One cow produces about 150kg of methane per year. Right now, Canada’s per-capita emissions are about 24,300kg, when you take into account land use change. American emissions are about 22,900kg while those of India and China are about 1,800kg and 3,900 respectively. Because of deforestation, Belize emits a startling 93,900kg of CO2e per person.

The questions of fairness raised by the situation are profound:

Should states with shrinking populations be rewarded with higher per capita emissions allowances?
Should states with rising populations likewise be punished?
Should developing states be allowed to temporarily overshoot their fair present allotment, as developed states did in the past?
To what extent should rich states pay for emissions reductions in poor ones?
To what extent should rich states pay for climate change adaptation in the developing world?

It may well be that such questions are presently unanswerable, by virtue of the fact that answers that conform with basic notions of ethics clash fundamentally with the realities of economic and political power. We can only hope that those realities will shift before irreversible harmful change occurs. Remember, cutting from 24,600kg to 760kg per person just halts the increase in the atmospheric concentration of CO2. The level of change that will arise from any particular concentration remains uncertain.

Another vital consideration is how any system of international cooperation requires a relatively stable international system. While it is sometimes difficult to imagine countries like China and the United States voluntarily reducing emissions to the levels climatic stability requires on the basis of a negotiated international agreement, it is virtually impossible to imagine it in a world dominated by conflict or mass disruption. It is tragically plausible that the effects of climate change could destroy any chance of addressing it cooperatively, over the span of the next thirty to seventy years.

Rejecting Canada’s new copyright act

As a student, I was constantly being called upon to support various causes, through means ranging from making donations to attending rallies. Usually, such activities have a very indirect effect; sometimes, they cannot be reasonably expected to have any effect at all. Not so, recent protest activities around Canada’s new copyright act: a draconian piece of legislation that would have criminalized all sorts of things that people have legitimate rights to do, such as copying a CD they own onto an iPod they own.

Defending the fair use of intellectual property has become a rallying point for those who don’t want to see the best fruits of the information revolution destroyed by corporate greed or ham-fisted lawmaking in the vein of the much-derided American Digital Millennium Copyright Act. At their most controversial, such acts criminalize even talking about ways to circumvent copyright-enforcement technology, even when such technology is being mistakenly applied to non-copyrighted sources: such as those covered by the excellent Creative Commons initiative or those where fair use is permissive for consumers. Watching a DVD you own using a non-approved operating system (like Linux) could become a criminal offence.

For now, the protests seem to have been successful. Of course, the temptation for anyone trying to pass a controversial law is to hold off until attention dissipates, then pass it when relatively few people are watching. Hopefully, that will not prove the ultimate consequence of this welcome tactical victory for consumer rights.

Trains and buses

Commenting on the possibility of Seattle installing a streetcar system, Dan Savage has argued: “People like trains. People hate buses.” Though public transportation policy is hardly his area of expertise, he does understand how people think and he is able to express himself forcefully and directly. On some level, it is definitely true. I like trains and subways. In London, I took the subway all the time; not once did I ever take a bus. Taking the train from Oxford to London feels like a luxury; taking the bus feels like a jerky, tedious chore.

In Heat, George Monbiot argues that the solution is to make buses nicer: cleaner, newer, and with attractive add-ons like wireless internet. He also argues that inter-city buses should avoid city centres, with all the nightmares of traffic and fiddly intersections they inevitably involve. While that would improve point-to-point travel in the UK, it doesn’t really reveal the reasons for which buses are treated with everything from moderate dislike to outright disdain. Is it a class issue? Lisa Simpson called the bus “”the chariot of the poor and very poor alike.” Is it a practical matter of comfort and efficiency, as Monbiot describes? If so, can it be overcome through practical measures like those he suggests. Are buses doomed to forever be an inferior good?

It is generally recognized that increasing bus services is the cheapest way of expanding public transport – both in terms of capital considerations and overall lifetime costs. That said, if transit use is significantly hampered by the dislike people feel for buses, perhaps alternatives should be more strongly considered. Arguably, this is especially true when it comes to people who have the financial means to use a car instead. If they get driven off the public transit system as soon as they hit that level of affluence, the system remains dominated by users without a great deal of political influence. In an argument akin to those about two-tier healthcare, it is possible that the self-exclusion of the wealthy from the public system perpetuates mediocrity.

One way or another, we need to hope that the private vehicle is reaching its apex in human history. Even with the eventual development of electric vehicles and other low or zero-emission options, the sheer amounts of space and resources devoted to producing and maintaining private transportation infrastructure are probably not sustainable. Given that it will be politically impossible to drag people from their cars kicking and screaming, we need to think seriously about how to encourage voluntary shifts to public or non-motorized transport. Better bike infrastructure and public transit seems crucial tot that campaign.

No Arctic summer ice in 2012-13?

According to a BBC article, some scientists are predicting the disappearance of all Arctic summer ice within five to six years. This projection is based on computer modeling by Wieslaw Maslowski and uses data that doesn’t even take into account the spectacular loss of Arctic ice last summer. Maslowski’s team has produced an estimated rate of loss much higher than those of other groups who have studied the issue, but he defends the quality of his modeling:

“We use a high-resolution regional model for the Arctic Ocean and sea ice forced with realistic atmospheric data. This way, we get much more realistic forcing, from above by the atmosphere and from the bottom by the ocean.”

Even the work of other teams suggests the loss of summer ice between 2040 and 2100: a very rapid climatic change, given how most forms of natural climatic forcing operate on the timescale of millennia

The progressive deterioration of the northern polar cryosphere is disturbing for a number of reasons. Because water absorbs more energy from sunlight than ice does, the loss of the icecap would accelerate global warming. It would also eliminate or substantially alter the lifestyles of those living in the north, as well as most Arctic species. That said, there is some chance that the sudden disappearance of the Arctic icecap would be dramatic and irrefutable enough to kick off much more serious global action to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and prepare to adapt to the amount of change that is now inevitable. In a world where the Arctic vanished before our eyes, radical ideas like those of Monbiot may start seeming reasonable to a lot more people.

Boomtowns and bitumen

Since 1999, the population of Fort McMurray has nearly doubled. Primarily, this is on account of the oil sands: unconventional petroleum reserves whose exploitation is being driven by high prices and geopolitics. The demand for labour is dramatically increasing its price, both directly and indirectly. Apparently, inexperienced truck drivers can expect to make $100,000 per year. Shell has also just opened a 2,500 unit housing complex for its oil sands employees, part of their $12 billion in local infrastructure spending.

With oil around $90 a barrel and the atmosphere still being treated as a carbon dump, this is not terribly surprising. That said, such projects are certain to develop increasing momentum of their own. Once they bring enough jobs and money, they are hard for a provincial government to not support – especially if many of the environmental costs are being borne by people outside the province or by future generations. Internalizing environmental externalities through taxation or regulation becomes progressively more difficult as the incentive of certain parties to preserve the status quo increases. Such asymmetries are likely to give oil sands development a harmful legacy in terms of general policy development, in addition to its climate change effect and local environmental impacts.

Meat and antibiotics

Quite a while ago, I wrote about connections between human disease and the factory farming of animals. Recently, some new observational data has supported the link between the two. In the Netherlands, a new form of the superbug MRSA has emerged. It is strongly resistant to treatment with tetracycline antibiotics: a variety heavily used on livestock. The animals need the drugs because they are kept in such appalling conditions (unhygienic and constrained) that they would get infections too easily otherwise.

Xander Huijsdens and Albert de Neeling found that 39% of pigs and 81% of pig farms in the Netherlands were hosts to the potentially lethal antibiotic resistant bacteria. People who came into contact with pigs were 12 times more likely to contract this form of MRSA than members of the ordinary population; those who come into contact with cattle are 20 times more susceptible. The strain has since been found in Denmark, France, and Singapore. A study conducted by the University of Guelph found the strain in 25% of local pigs and 20% of pig farmers.

Maintaining the effectiveness of antibiotics for the treatment of people is highly important for human welfare. Antibiotics are one of the major reasons why modern medicine is valuable: they help people die dramatically less often after childbirth and surgery than was the case before their development. They have also helped to make diseases that would formerly have been probable death sentences treatable. The fact that we are allowing farms to deplete their value so that they can produce meat more cheaply (by forcing more animals closer together in less clean conditions) seems profoundly unwise. In Pennsylvania, legislators have even banned farmers who produce hormone and antibiotic milk from saying so on their packaging – on the grounds that it would make consumers unduly worried about the other milk on offer.

Problems with government databases

By now, everyone has probably heard about the data loss debacle in the United Kingdom. The British government lost the child benefit records for 25 million people. These records include addresses, dates of birth, bank account information, and national insurance numbers. In total, 40% of the British population has been exposed to the risk of identity theft.

Obviously, this should never have happened. One government agency requested some anonymized data for statistical purposes. Instead, a different department sent them the whole dataset in an unencrypted format. Encrypting the discs would have made it nearly impossible for thieves to access the data; anonymizing the data would have made such theft unprofitable. The failure to do either is the height of idiocy, but it is probably what we need to expect from the civilian parts of government when it comes to data security. Security is hard; it requires clever people with good training, and it requires oversight to ensure that insiders are competent and not cheating. People who are naive and naturally helpful can always be exploited by attackers.

In response to this situation, two sets of things need to be done. The first is to correct the specific failures that cause this kind of problem: require encryption of sensitive documents in transit, limit who has access to such sensitive databases, and tighten the procedures surrounding their use. The second is to limit the amount of such data that is available to steal in the first place. That could involve using paper records instead of digital ones – making mass theft dramatically harder to accomplish. It may also involve not creating these kinds of huge databases, as useful as they may seem when working properly.

It is fair to say that there will always be people out there able to break into any information that a large number of civil servants have access to. This would be true even if all civil servants were capable and virtuous people, because a lot of the best computer talent is applied to breaking flawed security systems. Given that bureaucrats are human, and thus subject to greed and manipulation, the prospects for keeping a lid on government data are even worse. Acknowledging the realities of the world, as well as the principle of defence in depth, suggests that limiting the volume of data collected and held by all governments is an appropriate response to the general security risks highlighted by this specific incident.

Bali talks beginning

Starting tomorrow morning, there will be twelve days of talks in Bali, Indonesia intended to begin the process of drafting a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol, when the period it covers ends in 2012. This particular meeting is mostly about choosing the structure for the real negotiations. Three possibilities are likely:

The parties agree to extend the Kyoto Protocol, keeping in place many of its institutional structures
The parties decide to create a whole new instrument
The talks collapse in acrimony, with no agreement

Which of these takes place will largely depend on the stances adopted by the great powers and major emitters, especially the United States, Russia, China, Japan, Brazil, and the European Union.

Some questions of succession hang over the proceedings. The new Rudd government in Australia has only been in power for a week, and may not have a well developed negotiating position. More importantly, everyone knows the Bush administration will soon be out of power. Leading Congressional Democrats are attending the summit themselves. It remains to be seen what effect that will have.

McKinsey climate change study

McKinsey – a major consultancy – has released a report (PDF) on the costs of reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. The general conclusion is a familiar one: that existing technologies and emerging technologies with a high probability of success can collectively reduce emissions by a very considerable degree at modest cost. Specifically, the study argues that 3.0 to 4.5 gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent can be averted by 2030, at marginal costs of under US$50 per tonne. Business as usual would see present emissions of 7.2 gigatonnes grow to 9.7 gigatonnes by 2030: almost twice what the whole planet can handle.

The executive summary linked above is well worth reading, as it is rich with detail. It stresses how abatement will not happen through a few big changes: many thousands of emitting activities must be incrementally reformed. That said, 40% of the abatement they describe would actually save money in the long term (for instance, by replacing existing systems with more energy efficient varieties).

Perhaps the most interesting element in the whole report is the abatement curve on the fifth page of the executive summary. It ranks a collection of mitigation activities from those that produce the highest level of economic benefit per tonne to those that are most costly. For instance, increasing the efficiency of commercial electronics could save $90 per tonne of CO2 equivalent. Other win-win options include residential electronics, building lighting, fuel economy standards for cars and trucks, and improvements to residential and commercial buildings. Cellulosic biofuels are net winners, though of a lesser magnitude, as is changes to soil tillage to boost the strength of carbon sinks. The most expensive abatement options include carbon capture and storage, the use of solar electric power, and the use of hybrid cars (the single most expensive option listed).

This is quite an encouraging view. Achieving substantial reductions within a developed economy for under $50 a tonne is promising in itself. It also suggests that international abatement prices could be even lower, given how insane things like tropical deforestation are from an economic perspective, once climate change is taken into account.

Climate change and the Inuit way of life

At several points in the past, Arctic native groups including the Inuit have been effectively involved in the development of international regimes for environmental protection. Perhaps most significant was the role of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference in the development of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs). Studies done on the human health impact of Arctic POPs on the Inuit provided a big part of the scientific basis for the agreement. Arctic native groups were also effective at pressing their moral claim: chemicals being manufactured elsewhere were poisoning their environment and threatening their way of life.

A similar claim can be made about climate change, though the probable outcome is a lot more negative for Arctic native groups. Relatively few states and companies manufactured the bulk of POPs and, in most cases, less harmful chemicals can be used in their place. The economic costs of phasing out POPs were relatively modest. While the costs of dealing with climate change are a lot lower than the costs that will be incurred through inaction, they are nonetheless many orders of magnitude greater than the costs associated with abatement of POP use.

The threat posed to the Inuit by climate change is also quite a bit more far-reaching. It is entirely possible that the whole Arctic icecap will be gone within twenty years, or even sooner. 2007 was by far the worst year ever recorded for Arctic sea ice. Without summer sea ice, the Arctic ecosystem seems certain to change profoundly. Given the reliance of traditional Inuit lifestyles upon hunting terrestrial and marine mammals, it seems like such conditions would make it impossible to live as the Inuit have lived for millenia. This isn’t even a matter of worst-case scenarios. Even without significant new feedback effects, summer Arctic sea ice is likely to vanish by mid century. Increasing recognition of this partly explains the ongoing scramble to claim Arctic sub-sea mineral rights.

As with small island states, there doesn’t seem to be enormously much hope for avoiding fundamental and perhaps irreversible change in the Arctic.