Politics – Page 207 – a sibilant intake of breath

Filling the gaps in chapter two

The conclusion from working on my second chapter is that I have read too much general background material and not enough on my case studies. I am fairly well covered on POPs, since I have done research on them before. Naturally, adding a few more sources would be nice, though there are not really a great many out there. I am also quite well covered on current events relating to climate change, because there has been such a raft of coverage and discussion. While my intention has never been to write a blow-by-blow account of either (how could I possibly do so in 30,000 words?), it is certainly necessary to have a comprehensive understanding of the history, before any important and valid analysis can be done.

As such, I need to fill in my knowledge on recent developments pertaining to POPs, which should not be hugely difficult. Then, I need to shore up my section on the early history of the climate change debate. Aside from the mandatory OUSSG dinner and talk tonight, I suspect this will fill the next 32 hours. Naturally, I am interpreting my promise to Dr. Hurrell of having a second chapter dropped off at Nuffield by Wednesday as having that chapter dropped off, by my own hand, in time for him to read it on Thursday morning.

Framing, selection, and presentation issues

One of the major issues that arises when examining the connections between science and policy are the ways information is framed. You can say that the rate of skin cancer caused by a particular phenomenon has increased from one in ten million cases to one in a million cases. You can say that the rate has increased tenfold, or that it has gone up by 1000%. Finally, you could say that an individual’s chances of getting skin cancer from this source have gone up from one tiny figure to a larger, but still tiny seeming, figure. People seem to perceive the risks involved in each presentation differently, and people pushing for one policy or another can manipulate that. This can be especially true when the situations being described are of not comparably rare: having your chances of being killed through domestic violence reduced 1% is a much greater absolute reduction than having your chances of dying in a terrorist attack reduced by 90%.

Graphing

When talking about presentation of information, graphs are an important case. Normally, they are a great boon to understanding. A row of figures means very little to most people, but a graph provides a wealth of comprehensible information. You can see if there is a trend, what direction it is in, and approximately how strong it is. The right sort of graph, properly presented, can immediately illuminate the meaning of a dataset. Likewise, it can provide a compelling argument: at least, between those who disagree more about what is going on than how it would be appropriate to respond to different situations.

People see patterns intuitively, though sometimes they see order in chaos (the man on the moon, images of the Virgin Mary in cheese sandwiches). Even better, they have an automatic grasp of calculus. People who couldn’t tell you a thing about concavity and the second derivative can immediately see when a slope is upwards and growing ever steeper: likewise, one where something is increasing or decreasing, but at a decreasing rate. They can see what trends will level off, and which ones will explode off the scale. My post on global warming damage curves illustrates this.

Naturally, it is possible to use graphs in a manipulative way. You can tweak the scale, use a broken scale, or use a logarithmic scale without making clear what that means. You can position pie charts so that one part or another is emphasized, as well as abuse colour and three dimensional effects. That said, the advantages of graphs clearly outweigh the risks.

It is interesting to note how central a role one graph seems to have played in the debate about CFCs and ozone: the one of the concentration of chlorine in the stratosphere. Since that is what CFCs break down to produce, and that is what causes the breakdown of ozone, the concentration is clearly important. The graph clearly showing that concentrations would continue to rise, even under the original Montreal Protocol, seems to have had a big impact on the two rounds of further tightening. Perhaps the graph used so prominently in Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth (the trends on display literally dwarfing him) will eventually have a similar effect.

Stats in recent personal experience

My six-month old Etymotic ER6i headphones are being returned to manufacturer tomorrow, because of the problems with the connector I reported earlier. Really not something you expect for such a premium product, but I suppose there are always going to be some defects that arise in a manufacturing process. Of course, being without good noise isolating headphones for the time it will take them to be shipped to the US, repaired or replaced, and returned means that reading in coffee shops is not a possibility. Their advantage over libraries only exists when you are capable of excluding the great majority of outside noise and of drowning the rest in suitable music.

Speaking of trends, I do wonder why so many of my electronics seem to run into problems. I think this is due to a host of selection effects. I (a) have more electronics than most people (b) use them a great deal (c) know how they are meant to work (d) know what sort of warranties they have and for how long (e) treat them so carefully that manufacturers can never claim they were abused (f) maintain a willingness to return defective products, as many times as is necessary and possible under the warranty. Given all that, it is not surprising that my own experience with electronics failing and being replaced under warranty is a lot greater than what you might estimate the background rate of such activity to be.

Two other considerations are also relevant. It is cheaper for manufacturers to rely upon consumers to test whether a particular item is defective, especially since some consumers will lose the item, abuse it, or simply not bother to return it even if defective. Secondly, it is almost always cheaper to simply replace consumer electronics to fix them, because of the economies of scale involved in either activity. From one perspective, it seems wasteful. From another, it seems the more frugal option. A bit of a paradox, really.

[14 March 2007] My replacement Etymotic headphones arrived today. Reading in coffee shops is possible again, and none too soon.

The identification of environmental problems

The identification of an environmental ‘problem’ is not a single crystalline moment of transition, from ignorance to understanding. Rather, it is ambiguous, contingent, and dependent upon the roles and modes of thinking of the actors involved, and values that inform judgments. Rather like Thomas Kuhn’s example about the discovery of oxygen (with different people accessing different aspects of the element’s nature, and understanding it in different contexts), the emergence of what is perceived as a new environmental problem occurs at the confluence of facts, roles, and existing understandings. While one or more causal connections ultimately form the core of how an environmental problem is understood, they are given comprehensibility and salience as the result of factors that are not strictly rational. From the perspective of global environmental politics and international relations, environmental problems are best understood as complexes of facts and judgments: human understandings that are subjective and dynamic, despite how elements of their composition are firmly grounded in the empirical realities of the world.

POPs and climate change

Consider first the case of persistent organic pollutants (POPs). The toxicity of chemicals like dioxins was known well before any of the key events that led to the Stockholm Convention. At the time, the problem of POPs was largely understood as one of local contamination by direct application or short distance dispersal. It took the combination of the observation of these chemicals in an unexpected place, the development of an explanation for how this had transpired, and a set of moral judgments about acceptable and unacceptable human conduct to form the present characterization of the problem. That understanding in turn forms the basis for political action, the generation of international law, and the investigation of techniques and technologies for mitigating the problem as now understood. Even now, the specific chemicals chosen and the particular individuals whose interests are best represented are partly the product of political and bureaucratic factors.

If we accept former American Vice President Al Gore’s history of climate change, the form of problem identification is even more remarkable. He asserts that the discovery of rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations by Roger Revelle in the 1960s, rather than of specific changes to the global climatic system directly, were what prompted the initial concern of some scientists and policy makers. This is akin to how the 1974 paper by Mario Molina and F.S. Rowland established the chemical basis for stratospheric ozone depletion by CFCs which, in turn, actually led to considerable action before their supposition was empirically confirmed. Gore’s characterization of the initial discovery of the climate change problem also offers glimpses into some of the heuristic mechanisms people use to evaluate key information, deciding which arguments, individuals, and organizations are trustworthy and then prioritizing ideas and actions.

Definition and initial implications

For the present moment, environmental ‘problems’ will be defined as being the consequences of unintentional (though not necessarily unanticipated) side effects of human activity in the world. While mining may release heavy metals into the natural environment, this didn’t crystallize in the minds of people as a problem until the harm they caused to human beings and other biological systems proved evident. While the empirical reality of heavy metal buildup may have preceded any human understanding of the issue, it could not really be understood as an environmental problem at that time. It only became so through the confluence of data about the world, a causal understanding between actions and outcomes, and moral judgments about what is right or desirable. Likewise, while lightning storms cause harm both to humans and other biological systems, their apparent status as an integral component of nature, rather than the product of human activities, makes them something other than an environmental problem as here described. Of course, if it were shown, for example, that climate change was increasing the frequency and severity of thunderstorms (a human behaviour causing an unwanted outcome, though a comprehensible causal link) then that additional damage could be understood as an environmental problem in the sense of the term here used.

Worth noting is the possibility of a dilemma between two sets of preferences and understandings: the alleviation of one environmental problem, for instance by regulating the usage of DDT, may reduce the scope to which another problem can be addressed, such as the possibility of increased prevalence of malaria in a warmer world. It is likewise entirely possible that different groups of people could ascribe different value judgments to the same empirical phenomena. For instance, ranchers and conservationists disagree about whether or not it is desirable to have wild wolves in the western United States.

Problem identification, investigation, and the formulation of understandings about the connections between human activity and the natural world do not comprise a linear progression. This is partially the product of how human psychological processes develop and maintain understandings about the world and partly the consequence of the nature of scientific investigation and political and moral deliberation. Existing understandings can be subjected to shocks caused by either new data or new ideas. Changed understandings in one area of inquiry can prompt the identification of possible problems in another. Finally, the processes and characteristics of problem investigation are conditioned by heuristic, political, and bureaucratic factors that will be discussed at greater length below.

Problematizing the origin of environmental problems as human understandings does not simply add complexity to the debate. It generates possibilities for a more rigorous understanding of the relationship between human beings and nature (including perceptions about why the two are so often seen as distinct). It also offers the possibility of dealing with dilemmas like the example above in a more informed and effective manner.

Nicholas Stern on climate change

During the initial coverage of Nicholas Stern’s report on the economics of climate change, I wondered why the media was paying so much attention. After all, the man is an economist reporting on something that scores of scientists have addressed comprehensively through the IPCC process. Now that I have heard him lecture, and spoken briefly with him personally, I have a much better sense. The man is what Karen Litfin calls a ‘knowledge broker,’ translating scientific data into policy options.

His basic position is the realistic liberal optimist one:

Climate change is real and potentially devastating
It is essentially a massive economic externality
Regulating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is the way to stop it
This can be done at moderate cost (1% of GDP) and without a massive change in (a) the basis of economic activity within the developed world or (b) the way in which people choose to live their lives.

He acknowledges that the energy balance needs to shift dramatically. In order to be responsible, he says, we need to shift all electrical production in the rich world to carbon neutral forms (renewables, nuclear, and possibly hydrocarbons with sequestration) by 2050. By that time, land transport should also be based on power sources that do not emit GHGs, whether because they are using stored electricity, or because they use fuels that are GHG neutral. India and China need to be encouraged to sequester the CO2 emitted from their coal stations, probably at the expense of the rich world. All in all, rich states should bear 60-80% of the costs of mitigation.

He focused a great deal on atmospheric CO2 levels. His target is to stabilize between 450ppm and 550ppm. This would lead to a likely scenario where mean global temperature rises by about 2 degrees Celcius (though by much more at the poles, given the nature of the climatic system). On the basis of a ‘business as usual projection’ we will hit 450ppm in eight to ten years. To stabilize at 450ppm, we would need to slow the rate of growth in GHG emissions immediately, having it peak in 2010. Then, we would need to reduce at about 6-10% a year thereafter. If we delayed the peak to 2020, we would likely be at the 550ppm portion of the range: an area that the German head of climate change policy expressed grave concern about, during the question session. Stern himself said that 550ppm is the “absolute upper bound” which it would be “outrageous” to exceed.

As for his very controversial decision about discounting rates, I think he defended himself admirably. He broke it into two bits: the possibility there will be no future generations beyond date X (they ascribed a 0.1% chance a year to an event like a comet or gamma ray burst that would simply snuff humanity out) and the strong likelihood that people in the future will be richer. The latter means that it may be economically efficient to delay some of the costs of dealing with climate change, especially given the probability that new technology will emerge.

I need to move on to other work, though I could discuss his comments for many thousands of words. I will transfer my handwritten notes to the wiki later this evening and link them here: notes from Nicholas Stern’s 21 February 2007 address to Oxford University.

PS. A few weeks ago, my default thesis music was Jason Mraz‘s superb album “Live at Java Joe.” Now, I am listening to Enter The Haggis‘ frantic song “Lannigan’s Ball” from their album Aerials over and over again.

The road to Kyoto plus, lessons from ozone

A lot of people seem to despair about the possibility of effective regulation of greenhouse gas emissions around the world, but the more I read about the cases of persistent organic pollutants and CFCs, the more plausible it seems, given that a few specific and important progressions take place.

The first is the process of scaling upwards in policy levels, as seen very distinctly with CFCs. The Rowland and Molina paper that first suggested that CFCs cause stratospheric ozone degradation was published in 1974. By 1975, two US states had already banned their use as aerosol propellants (Oregon and New York). Hopefully, the progression from there to national and international regulation is one that can be emulated. Already, lots of American cities and states have signaled that they are serious about climate change, and willing to use regulation to combat it.

The second important dynamic has to do with industry expectations. Six years before CFCs became an issue in environmental regulation, DuPont – the largest manufacturer – canceled its program for developing alternatives. When it became clear that regulation was forthcoming, they were able to field some alternatives within six months, and a comprehensive range within a few years. Up to the point where regulation seemed inevitable, they continued to claim that alternatives could not be easily developed. The point here is twofold. First, it shows that the existence of solutions to environmental problems is not independent of regulation and industry expectations about future regulation. Secondly, industries that anticipate national legislation (as they began to in the US in the mid-1980s on the CFC issue) become a powerful lobby pushing government towards completing an international agreement. It is far worse for American industry to be at a loss because local rules are tougher than global ones than it is to simply deal with some new issues.

Thus, an American administration that takes up the baton from the many states that have initiated their own efforts to deal with climate change might be able to create the same kind of expectations in industry. Some are already asking for regulation to “guide the market,” specifically decisions about what technologies and forms of capital in which to invest. From there, it is at least possible that the US could play a key role in negotiating a successor treaty to Kyoto that begins the process of stabilizing and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

A related point has to do with the extent to which environmental images are heavily influenced by images and symbols. According to Karen Litfin, the Antarctic ozone hole was one of the major factors that led to the Montreal Protocol. She calls it an ‘anomaly,’ unpredicted by the atmospheric science that had been done up to that point, and thus capable of making scientists and politicians more aware of the possibility of unancitipated risks.

At his talk yesterday, Henry Shue says he is hoping for some iconic moment in climate change, to play a similar galvanizing role (a bare-topped Kilimanjaro, the Larsen B collapse, drowning polar bears, and Hurricane Katrina don’t seem to have done it yet, though the connection between climate change and the last of those is not entirely established.) Some spectacular and distressing (but hopefully non-lethal) demonstration of the profound effects human greenhouse gas emissions are having may be necessary to generate an urgent and powerful drive towards effective responses.

Coffee, sandwiches, and bibliographies: the blocks from which theses are made

There was a talk in Corpus Christi today that was a kind of grad student slam dunk. Organized by Cinnamon Carlane and given by Henry Shue, the talk was on the ethics of climate change. Firstly, it involved free sandwiches (fully 2/3 of which were vegetarian). Secondly, as with most of Professor Shue’s talks, it involved the distribution of a comprehensive bibliography. With a thesis upcoming, you can never have too many articles of assuredly high quality to include in your discussion and, perhaps more importantly, your bibliography. Thirdly, the room was packed with people interested in environmental politics: an elusive variety of student who seem to be spread across every program and department, and only come together under unusual circumstances.

Shue’s moral argument is, of course, very well thought out and compelling. The biggest flaw, I think, is that he is not focused enough on the policy course that would be required to deal with climate change effectively, and the secondary moral phenomena that arise from that. That said, being able to make a strong foundational case that climate change is a problem upon which we are morally obligated to act may be an important step in the generation of the requisite level of political will.

Those interested in this stuff will probably appreciate knowing that Professor Sir Nicholas Stern is talking about his report on the economics of climate change in the exam schools, this Wednesday at 5:00pm.

American primaries upcoming

The primary season that precedes American elections is always an interesting time for strategizing. As a supporter of either party, you want to achieve two things: the election of the most appealing or electable candidate for your party, and the election of the most appealing or least electable candidate for the other. The tension in the latter pair is probably the most interesting bit. Should committed Democrats try to help a centrist like Guliani get elected (a particularly pressing issue in states with open primaries, where registered Democracts can vote in the Republican primary and vice versa) or should they try to push the Republicans towards a hopeless candidate?

The risk averse option, and the one that seems the most sensible, is to choose the most electable option for the party you support (provided their platform is not seriously objectionable) and the most tolerable option for the other party. For this election cycle, it isn’t quite clear who would fill either role, but my guesses right now would be Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani. That said, I am reasonably willing to tolerate moderate fiscal conservatism, as long as it isn’t accompanied by culture war conservative values fodder. American voters may well feel otherwise. For instance, an atheist candidate is essentially unelectable in the US, but would probably be slightly preferable for me.

From the perspective of someone who is not a dyed-in-the-wool supporter of either party – and both have plenty of ugly features – the strategies that yield relatively centrist candidates are probably the most desirable. Anyone who is able to excite the party faithful to a feverish level, but not reach out to the intelligent independents who must ultimately represent the balance of opinion, is both unlikely to win and unlikely to govern very well.

It will be interesting to see what we learn about the candidates while they are tramping around New Hampshire and Iowa: another curious feature of American electoral politics.

Climate change, law, and predictability

Happy Birthday Kate Dillon

In a somewhat surprising move, a coalition of opposition members of Parliament in Canada have passed a bill forcing the government to live up to the commitment that was made when we signed and ratified the Kyoto Protocol. Specifically, Canada is to cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to 6% below their 1990 levels by 2012. This is quite a substantial reduction to achieve in the next five years, given that emissions are presently about 30% above their 1990 levels.

In many ways, this situation demonstrates how not to deal with the problem of climate change. What you need to do is create the certainty, within industry, that the costs of GHG emissions will increase predictably and progressively over time. Then, when decisions are being made about what equipment to buy and how to set up industrial processes, the extra constraints can be taken into account. By contrast, the present on-again-off-again approach doesn’t create clear incentives. Even worse, it is not clear to industry what will happen after 2012.

The most straightforward and effective approach would be a tax on every tonne of GHG emissions, weighted according to the contribution the particular gas makes to global warming. Since methane contributes more than CO2, it would be more highly taxed. That tax would then rise progressively over time, until Canada reached the point where GHG emissions stabilized and then began to drop towards pre-industrial levels. Whether such an approach would be politically possible (especially with Alberta eying a tar sands bonanza that could mean massive emissions) is another matter. Three plans for meeting the target are outlined in this article from The Globe and Mail.

Dolphin safe tuna

One of the most reliable ways of locating tuna stocks is by following dolphins. Once you find dolphins feeding on the fish, you set your nets around and catch them. Of course, this method will sometimes lead to you catching dolphins as well. In eighteen years of dolphin set tuna fishing in the United States, 18 dolphins were recorded as caught, along with 34 tonnes of sharks and rays and 295 tons of other fish. Such by-catch is virtually always discarded. In an equivalent period of dolphin safe fishing (where electronic Fish Aggregation Devices are used instead), no dolphins were caught, but 237 tonnes of sharks and rays were, along with 15,500 tonnes of other fish. Again, this was discarded.

Dolphin safe fishing is also disproportionately likely to catch immature tuna, which have not yet reached their full size and which have contributed very little to reproducing the species, since tuna generally take a long time to reach sexual maturity.

This only makes sense if you strongly privilege dolphins over other forms of marine life. Either because:

You think dolphins themselves are bearers of rights
People have much stronger preferences regarding dolphin treatment than that of other elements of marine ecosystems, and those preferences determine what is moral.

Admittedly, each of these is a viable moral position consistent with the ways in which we generally view what kinds of things can bear rights. That said, the trend in ecology is towards recognizing the importance of ecosystem integrity. From this perspective, setting nets around dolphin pods is probably the greenest way of catching tuna. This is especially true since it is possible to design nets that dolphins virtually always escape, but tuna do not.

Of course, now consumers know that to be eco-friendly, they are meant to buy the dolphin safe tuna. Confident in the belief that the problem has been dealt with, not enough people realize that we have probably made things worse.

Nye and Roberts on democratization

Last night’s talk on democratization by Joseph Nye and Adam Roberts basically encapsulated the most dominant strand of academic thinking on the subject. It was heavily focused on the American role in the Middle East (though Russia’s apparent slide towards autocracy was not entirely ignored) and essentially concluded that the US can and should continue to spread democracy, but must do so in moderate and locally tailored ways, rather than just stomping on people. There was agreement that the next administration (whether Clinton or McCain) would pursue more or less this path.

Both speakers agreed that attacking Iran would be an appalling error: both strategically, given the capacity of that state to cause havoc in the region, and politically, because of how an attack would unify moderates and conservatives in Iran around the present regime. It would also further diminish American credibility in the Muslim world.

Finally, there was some discussion of narratives: the one that Osama bin Laden propagates, that of the United States, and the kind that Europe might fruitfully deploy. As a continent that has managed to come together into peace and prosperity, after an appalling history of war, perhaps the European experience can be illustrative for other regions.

All of these points are sensible and sound, as you would expect from professors from Harvard and Oxford – the latter even knighted. One question that remains sitting on the table is how to deal with allied states that have less than excellent democratic credentials. It certainly damages US soft power to be so reliant upon the House of Saud, as well as people like Pervez Musharraf and Hosni Mubarak. It creates many opportunities to accuse the US of hypocrisy. That said, the generally cautious approach recommended by both speakers suggests a course of constructive engagement, rather than something more aggressive (though not forceful).

On a side note, the St. Antony’s International Review seems to be doing a very good job of publicizing itself. This is very welcome, given Oxford’s notable lack of a quality international relations journal. I should try to get a book review or something into it, before I leave Oxford.