Politics – Page 57 – a sibilant intake of breath

Skopcol on Clinton and Trump

Theda Skopcol came to U of T today to talk about America’s ongoing election, and it was a bit encouraging and quite frightening.

On the shreds of sanity side, she said that Clinton will probably win, and the Democrats may even gain control of the senate, which would be vital for supreme court appointments and international treaties.

In terms of never-ending madness and the ongoing tragic decline of the U.S., she said it was likely that Trump supporters will threaten or shoot minority voters on election day, and that the Trumpist ideology of pseudo-fascism will be taken up by many American conservatives who don’t have Trump’s overwhelming personality flaws.

Inequality, entitlement, and the breakdown of social cohesion

For the upper echelons in society inequality often morphs into a feeling of entitlement, which can then translate into actions that further undermine social trust and common purpose. Over the past decade, groundbreaking research by behavioural psychologists illustrates how inequality shifts states of mind. In other words, there is a certain psychology to wealth and privilege.

While we all struggle in our lives with competing motivations — for example, whether to take time to help others or to focus on pursuing our own goals — professor of psychology Paul Piff and his team at the University of California have shown that the wealthier people are, the more likely they are to pursue self-interest to the detriment of others. Through dozens of experimental studies with thousands of human participants, researchers consistently found that as levels of wealth increase, feelings of entitlement also rise and levels of empathy and obligation toward others decline. Although there are always notable exceptions to this trend — we can all point to billionaire philanthropists — Piff argues that, statistically speaking, the tendency to “look out for number one” increases as a person rises to the top of the income and status hierarchy. In his experiments, this phenomenon translates into a greater propensity to engage in self-regarding and unethical behaviour — including cheating to increase one’s chances of winning a prize, endorsing unethical behaviours at work, or breaking the law while driving.

Consider two experiments. In the first, drivers of different types of cars are observed at a pedestrian crosswalk. In 90 percent of cases, drivers stop when they see a pedestrian nearing the intersection — except for those driving luxury cars. Piff’s study found that the latter are almost as likely to run the intersection as they are to wait for the person to cross the street (46 percent did not stop). In a second experiment, researchers created a rigged game of Monopoly — in which one player is given more money (resources) and more dice (opportunity) — and watch how his behaviour changes relative to the other player. In game after game, Piff and his team observe that the better-off player develops a strong sense of self — he becomes louder, ruder, and less sensitive toward the other player. He also feels more entitled than his opponent to take from a plate of pretzels that is placed next to the board.

Although greed affects all people, these studies indicate that it is not present equally across all social strata. The greater resources and independence available to those at the top of the economic hierarchy have a distinct effect on their behaviour. Those with greater wealth can deal more effectively with the “downstream costs” of acting unethically, while reduced dependency makes them less concerned with others’ evaluation. This combination can give rise to the positive values of greed and self-focused behaviour. Indeed, this sense of autonomy can manifest itself even in ordinary human interactions: experiments have shown that those in the high economic echelons are more disengaged in social settings — frequently doodling or checking their cellphones — and are worse at identifying and responding to the emotions of others.

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Those at the top feel more deserving than those at the bottom; having more means you can rely less on others, leading to a reduced feeling that you owe anyone anything. This might help to explain why the wealthy tend to be more economically conservative and object to increased taxation or public spending.

Welsh, Jennifer. The Return of History: Conflict, Migration, and Geopolitics in the Twenty-First Century. 2016. p. 289-90, 91. Italics in original.

While the Occupy Wall Street movement stole headlines for the latter months of 2011, it ultimately fizzled given a lack of agreement among its members on a concrete agenda and its unwillingness to engage — even minimally — with existing political institutions. Twenty-first-century Americans — and the same might be said for citizens of other liberal democracies — have by and large submitted to a system whose permanence is assumed; they focus their energies on the private pleasures of consumerism rather than on cultivating the public good or the political or economic interests they share with others. Fukuyama’s fear that the end of history would foster a consumerist culture, and expose an “emptiness at the core of liberalism,” seems to have been fulfilled.

Welsh, Jennifer. The Return of History: Conflict, Migration, and Geopolitics in the Twenty-First Century. 2016. p. 276

Writing my first book

Nothing about my PhD so far has been easy. As long-time readers may recall, my first comprehensive exam was only passed after two attempts and a lot of effort. The strike was painful, and has made me particularly question the quality of undergraduate education that U of T provides, in terms of class and tutorial sizes, the selection of professors, and support for and integration of teaching assistants into the learning process. I am now edging toward a formal research proposal for departmental approval and ethics review.

I originally wrote a longer document which talked more about methodology and many other things, but my supervisor encouraged me to write something more concise with the essential features of the proposed research project.

The plan now is to make sure the short document is a plausible nucleus for a successful PhD, including through a presentation to a brown bag lunch at the U of T Environmental Governance Lab on October 27th; to incorporate what has been left out in the older longer proposal; and to seek departmental and ethical approval before beginning first round remote interviews.

My supervisor has intelligently cautioned me about seeking too many critiques of these documents – a factor which has complicated and delayed my efforts so far, and which may be drawn from my experience as a civil servant. I have also been warned by Peter Russell that I am starting to write my thesis in the form of the proposal. So no comments please, unless they are strictly limited and focused on the process for making this proposal viable.

Open thread: nuclear refurbishment in Canada

About 16% of Canada’s electricity generation comes from the 19 nuclear reactors at Pickering, Darlington, Bruce, and Point Lepreau.

For years, politicians, regulators, environmentalists, and the public have been contemplating whether it makes sense to refurbish some reactors to extend their lives, particularly as climate change has become a greater concern.

Today, World Nuclear News reports that Bruce Power signed an agreement with SNC-Lavalin for up to C$400 million of work “for Bruce Power’s engineering needs including field services and an incremental program to refurbish six Candu units. The company will be responsible for the tooling to remove pressure and calandria tubes, the installation of new components and the deployment and maintenance of a number of reactor inspection tools.”

WNN also reports that Intrinsik Environmental Sciences have estimated that refurbishing the reactors at Darlington could avoid almost 300 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions between 2024 and 2055.

All the familiar issues with nuclear are at work here: what sort of power would be used in the alternative? Could energy storage and demand management do the same job? Is it technically and financially feasible to extend the operation of existing nuclear facilities?

Concluding 2016 Massey Lecture

Dr. Jennifer Welsh’s lecture tonight about the challenges faced by liberal democracies — including the psychological, political, and social stresses arising from extreme wealth and income inequality — was highly interesting and I took detailed notes, both for a forthcoming response here on my blog and for incorporation into my PhD research project.

I was happy to get some photos at the lecture, which was expertly MCed by CBC Radio’s Anna Maria Tremonti.

Treaty Alliance Against Tar Sands Expansion

This is a thoroughly intriguing development:

First Nations communities from Canada and the northern United States signed a treaty on Thursday to jointly fight proposals to build more pipelines to carry crude from Alberta’s oil sands, saying further development would damage the environment.

The treaty, signed in Montreal and Vancouver, came as the politics around pipelines have become increasingly sensitive in North America, with the U.S. Justice Department intervening last week to delay construction of a contentious pipeline in North Dakota.

The document itself calls “[t]he expansion of the Tar Sands… a truly monumental threat bearing down on all Indigenous Nations in Canada and beyond”.

The document identifies risks from pipeline spills, train derailments, and tanker accidents. On climate change, it identifies “effects that have already started to endanger our ways of life and which now threaten our very survival”. The document calls for signatories to “officially prohibit and to agree to collectively challenge and resist the use of our respective territories and coasts for the expansion of the production of Tar Sands, including for the transport of such expanded production, whether by pipeline, rail or tanker”

According to CBC News it has been signed by 50 aboriginal groups in North America, including the Standing Rock Sioux tribe which is resisting the Dakota Access Pipeline, as well as opponents of the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Pipeline and Energy East.

At the intersection of entitlement and slaughter

My current home in Toronto’s annex neighbourhood is a weird place and time in which to live. Many of the people up and down my street are simultaneously funding cosmetic renovations to their houses, like installing smooth new bricks and stairs. At the same time, there are people who I see daily and who seem to earn their living by picking liquor bottles out of the city’s big blue wheeled recycling bins.

It all makes me feel like people here don’t understand what is going on. The rich landowners are shelling out in hopes of boosted social status or because of psychological insecurity. At the same time, glass and metal containers which could be recycled just as well by the standard municipal recycling service are worth collecting and bringing to specific stores, at the same time as society largely ignores the harm associated with alcohol, and even encourages its use. In Canada, the four kinds of drugs that cause the most damage to individuals and society are alcohol, tobacco, opiates, and benzodiazepines. People who spend their labour collecting liquor vessels provide no benefit to society, since it doesn’t matter whether municipal recycling or Ontario’s liquor sales system collects the glass and aluminium. Within three blocks of here, restaurants burn methane to encourage customers to sit outside.

This is all magnified by my concern about climate change. All the credible science shows that continuing with business as usual will destroy nations, yet people continue to feel entitled to burn as much fossil fuel as they can afford. People find the flimsiest excuse to justify wasting energy on heating or cooling large spaces, flying thousands of kilometres in jets, and constantly adding to their stocks of material possessions. If there are people in the future, they will probably be right to judge us harshly: as the ones who knew the ruin they were imposing for their own fun and convenience and who chose like psychopaths to do it all anyway.

Trudeau’s carbon pricing plan

Today Prime Minister Trudeau announced that the federal government will require all provinces to have a carbon price of at least $10 per tonne by 2018, rising in $10 increments to $50 per tonne in 2022. There’s a lot of politics at work here. The Alberta government says they will only accept the plan in exchange for an export pipeline, while climate activists emphasize that the whole point of a carbon price is to prevent such projects. Trudeau seems to think he has split the opposition in Parliament, and set up an approach that most Canadians will support:

Polls suggest there is overwhelming support for the idea of carbon pricing, and that many Canadians back the imposition of a national climate change target. Trudeau alluded to that generosity of spirit when he said Canadians are prepared to work together and follow through on the commitments to fighting climate change made in the Paris Agreement on climate change. But such good will has its limits.

Environmental groups rushed Monday to condemn the planned price as being too low to take a bite out of Canada’s emissions. Dale Marshall of Environmental Defence said the carbon price needs to rise at the same rate beyond 2022 — a point on which Trudeau was mute.

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It’s a perfectly sound strategy, provided he forsakes his environmentalist allies. It is becoming clearer by the day, they are not going in the same direction as he is.

Trudeau needs to have the courage to tell Canadians that fossil fuels are on the way out as a source of jobs, tax revenue, and economic prosperity. Building new extraction and export projects is wholly at odds with the direction Canada and the world need to go. A price on carbon is a mechanism for discouraging fossil fuel projects, not an excuse for letting them proceed.

An even tighter carbon budget

When we wrote the fossil fuel divestment brief for the University of Toronto, we thought that humans could “pour roughly 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by midcentury and still have some reasonable hope of staying below two degrees”.

If we’re aiming instead to stay below the 1.5 ˚C limit aspired to in the Paris Agreement, that falls to 353 gigatons more CO₂, a figure that means “we’ll need to close all of the coal mines and some of the oil and gas fields we’re currently operating long before they’re exhausted”.

In a way, this makes the politics of climate change simple. Any new project that aims to develop new fossil fuel extraction capacity is either going to need to be abandoned prematurely as part of a massive global effort to curb climate change, or it will be another nail in our coffin as we soar far beyond the 1.5 ˚C and 2 ˚C limit.

Of course, this also makes the politics very difficult. People have a huge sense of entitlement when it comes to both exploiting resources in their jurisdiction and in terms of using fossil fuels with no consideration of the impact on others. The less adjustment time which can be offered to fossil fuel industries, and the more operating facilities that will need to be closed down to avoid catastrophic climate change, the harder it becomes for decision makers to act with sufficient boldness.

Category: Politics