Category: Politics

All posts on what Bismarck called “the art of the possible”

2012 climate change fast

Back in 2007, I participated in a climate change fast. It seems an appropriate sort of moral gesture to make in response to the problem, given that it is highly likely that climate change will disrupt agricultural patterns and lead at least some people to suffer from hunger as a result.

This year, between September 21st and October 2nd, another fast is being held in response to climate change: A Fast and Vigil for Climate Justice. The main twelve-day fast will be happening on Parliament Hill. The organizers are calling on people to contact their elected representatives, asking them to take action on climate change and eliminate fossil fuel subsidies. They also encourage people to write letters to the editors of newspapers, and to participate in one day of the fast themselves.

There is a website where people can pledge their support for the event.

I was also sent this program for the event by one of the organizers.

Drugs Without the Hot Air: Minimising the Harms of Legal and Illegal Drugs

Psychologically active drugs may be the least rationally regulated part of our society, with one dangerous and addictive drug advertised and available everywhere (alcohol) and only nudges to disocurage the use of another that kills five million people a year globally (tobacco). Meanwhile, police forces and court systems around the world tie themselves up with investigating, processing, and incarcerating people who own or sell small quantities of much less dangerous substances.

David Nutt was appointed as chairman of the British Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs in 2008: an expert panel intended to provide non-partisan advice on drugs to the government. He was fired in 2009 after pointing out that the chances of getting hurt from an hour of horseback riding are about 30 times greater than the odds of dying from taking a pill of MDMA (ecstasy). His book Drugs Without the Hot Air: Minimising the Harms of Legal and Illegal Drugs covers some extremely interesting ground in a convincing and well-argued way.

Nutt describes how policy-making in the area of drugs is often driven by a combination of media-enhanced hysteria and an effort on the part of politicians to seem ‘tough’ on the issue. He categorizes many of the harms that result from this, ranging from criminal records acquired by youth (which harm their lives much more than drugs) to harsh restrictions on the availability of painkillers around the world, leaving many with terminal illnesses to die in a great deal of pain.

Nutt also provides a nuanced and interesting description of the nature of addiction, distinguishing between people who rely on steady access to a drug to control and underlying condition (as diabetics use insulin) and those whose use of a drug has been sufficient to give them harsh withdrawal symptoms when they stop using it, which in turn drives them into a cycle of continuous use. Nutt argues that treating addicts as criminals causes a great deal of harm to the addicts themselves and to society at large, through mechanisms including the suppression of scientific research, the discrediting of the law through its obviously unjust application, the enrichment of criminal gangs, increasing the spread of infectious disease, diverting attention from controlling alcohol and tobacco, and the indirect encouragement of more harmful drug-taking practices because safer alternatives are not available.

My copy of the book is sprinkled with a few typographic errors which I am told have already been corrected in the newest printing. It’s also a bit challenging to square a few of the claims about the relative dangerousness of drugs. Early in the book, Nutt describes a complex exercise in which multi-criteria decision analysis was used to evaluate the relative harmfulness of a variety of legal and illegal drugs across sixteen dimensions, encompassing both harm to the individual and harm to society. The ranking found alcohol to be the most destructive drug overall, followed by heroin and crack cocaine. Methamphetamine, powder cocaine, and tobacco follow. Lower in the list are amphetamine, cannabis, GHB, and benzodiazepines. At the bottom of the scale are ecstasy, LSD, and psilocybin mushrooms. Between ecstasy and benzodiazepines – about 1/3 of the way up the harmfulness scale – Nutt lists ‘butane’ – an inhalant. Later in the book, however, he characterizes butane as extremely dangerous and capable of killing people on the first use if misused. Perhaps the scale is based on the proper administration of the drug. Still, it seems like a drug that carries a significant risk of accidental fatal overdose should probably be rated as more harmful than drugs like cannabis which carry no such risk.

Regardless of the exact ranking of harmfulness that is most appropriate, the book contains a great deal of interesting information, as well as an informative chapter on what parents should tell their children about drugs. Nutt argues convincingly that treating drug addicts as people with a serious medical problem makes more sense than treating them as criminals, and lays out a good case for why the supposed ‘War on Drugs’ has failed. He also provides some interesting information on the functioning of the brain and makes some suggestions about how drugs of all sorts could be regulated to reduce harm. He does a good job of pointing out the hypocrisy in our treatment of tobacco and alcohol and makes some sensible suggestions for how states could effectively discourage the use of the latter.

All told, Nutt’s book provides a scientist’s take on the various substances people consume with the desire to change their thinking, as well as the consequences of the production and use of those substances for individuals and society. By repeatedly pointing out the many areas where policies are poorly informed by reality and counterproductive, he makes a strong case for the need for drug law reform. Both for individuals who wish to educate themselves about drugs and for policy-makers who aspire to regulate them more appropriately, this book could be a very useful reference.

Nutt is now associated with the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs which has a great deal of useful information about drugs and harm reduction on their website.

Gardiner on climate ethics and moral corruption

In A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change, Stephen Gardiner addresses the argument that a green energy revolution could be an exciting opportunity that benefits the lives of those who are alive today as well as those in future generations.

He characterizes this perspective as potentially interesting empirically, but largely unimportant ethically. It would be good if we could solve climate change while benefitting ourselves, but we have a moral obligation to address it even if doing so requires sacrificing things that we value in our own lives.

Generally speaking, Gardiner’s strongest point is that we are strongly psychologically disinclined to take responsibility for our contribution or to do anything about it. Because we have an intense desire to persist in climate-altering behaviours, we are willing to accept logically weak arguments for why we ought not to do anything, why we have already done enough, why the problem will solve itself, etc. He refers to this as “moral corruption”. In my experience, this self-justifying and self-deceptive behaviour is especially evident when people try to justify activities that (a) contribute very substantially to their personal carbon footprint, and which are (b) basically entirely voluntary and recreational.

Even without growth, climate change is a problem

Over at Forbes, Tim Worstall has written something rather silly about climate change:

“This might look like very bad news, that economic growth has pretty much come to an end as an important phenomenon. On the other hand we could regard it as pretty good news as well: for it means that we no longer have to worry about climate change.”

When we talk about economic growth, we are talking about gross domestic product: the sum of all the transactions that happen in an economy in a year.

Climate change isn’t caused by GDP directly, but rather through the burning of fossil fuels. What matters is how much fossil fuel gets burned, not what the size of the economy is. Even with a shrinking economy, climate change is a huge problem if we continue to get the bulk of our energy from oil, gas, and coal. Conversely, a strongly-growing economy built on nuclear or renewable sources of energy could see rising GDP with falling greenhouse gas pollution.

In The Bridge At the Edge of the World James Gustave Speth summarizes our predicament:

“How serious is the threat to the environment? Here is one measure of the problem: all we have to do to destroy the planet’s climate and biota and leave a ruined world for our children and grandchildren is to keep doing exactly what we are doing today, with no growth in the human population or the world economy.”

Our challenge is to find a way to leave most of the Earth’s remaining fossil fuels underground. Reducing our emphasis on economic growth may help with that, but it is not sufficient. It may not even be necessary, if we are successful at building prosperous economies based on zero-carbon sources of energy.

Air conditioning, energy, and climate change

Here’s a statement liable to make a person think about ethics, international relations, climate change, and energy:

As Stan Cox points out in his book, “Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World“, America uses more energy for air conditioning than Africa uses for everything.

While it certainly illustrates some of the injustice that now exists between countries, it also touches upon the ways in which our present choices can be an injustice toward future generations, as well as how climate change can beget more climate change. As people get richer and the world gets hotter, more energy is likely to be used for air conditioning. Since much of that energy will come from fossil fuels, that will in turn cause more climate change.

Nuclear proliferation and nuclear abolishment

The Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons was assembled by the Australian prime minister in 1995, with a mandate to consider nuclear proliferation and the elimination of nuclear weapons.

Their final report is well worth a look. It opens with a concise statement that lays out the situation:

The destructiveness of nuclear weapons is immense. Any use would be catastrophic.

Nuclear weapons pose an intolerable threat to all humanity and its habitat, yet tens of thousands remain in arsenals built up at an extraordinary time of deep antagonism. That time has passed, yet assertions of their utility continue.

These facts are obvious but their implications have been blurred. There is no doubt that, if the peoples of the world were more fully aware of the inherent danger of nuclear weapons and the consequences of their use, they would reject them, and not permit their continued possession or acquisition on their behalf by their governments, even for an alleged need for self-defence.

Nuclear weapons are held by a handful of states which insist that these weapons provide unique security benefits, and yet reserve uniquely to themselves the right to own them. This situation is highly discriminatory and thus unstable; it cannot be sustained. The possession of nuclear weapons by any state is a constant stimulus to other states to acquire them.

Personally, I don’t have a great deal of hope that we will avoid the use of nuclear weapons during my lifetime. I suspect that regional rivalries will drive large numbers of states to acquire the weapons and that eventually some miscalculation, lapse in control, or security breach will result in the use of a bomb, possibly followed by nuclear retaliation.

If that is to be prevented, states with access to sophisticated nuclear technology and the means to produce bomb-grade uranium and plutonium need to become a lot more serious about non-proliferation. The recent behaviour of countries including the United States suggests this is unlikely.

Recruiting for 350

Yesterday evening, I was out trying to collect email addresses for Toronto 350’s events email list.

I wasn’t being pushy – mostly just wandering around with a clipboard and a 350 t-shirt saying ‘good evening’ to people and then trying to engage the ones who responded in a discussion about climate change and the group. Over the course of two hours, I got 10 email addresses – one of them totally illegible. Many of the people who I spoke to yesterday declined to give me their email because they were already inundated with similar messages from other environmental groups. A few others explained that they didn’t see climate change as the environmental issue on which we should be concentrating our attention.

It’s a slow business: trying to build up a group run by a handful of volunteers, without any resources or connections to influential people in the city. My hope is that once I start at the University of Toronto it will become a lot easier to recruit members who will be willing to organize and participate in events. Then perhaps we can begin to engage effectively with the question of how to motivate interested members of the general public to take useful action on climate change.

That challenge of motivating people may be the central problem of climate change. There is a small group that has a huge interest in maintaining the fossil fuel status quo, and they are doing an effective job of pushing that agenda. The majority of people probably do support the transition to a post-fossil-fuel economy in a general sense, but they aren’t willing to push for it or to accept the sacrifices that it is likely to involve.

Organizing and analysis

During the last couple of months, I have been involved with establishing a local chapter of the climate change organization 350.org. Since the organization has no money, it relies upon the work of volunteers during their spare time. This is good in many ways, since it means the group consists of people who have a personal conviction that it is necessary to take action on climate change and that they are willing to devote their talents to the project.

All told, the process of organizing differs substantially from the kind of analysis that happens in government and academia. Indeed, I wonder how much the skills required for good organizing and good analysis overlap. The key requirement for organizing seems to be an ability to motivate people to take action. For that action to be effective, it is obviously necessary to have a big-picture understanding about the science and politics of climate change. At the same time, an active awareness of the scale of the problem may hamper effective organizing. It is impossible to honestly claim that any single action or campaign will make a major difference in the trajectory of Canada’s emissions, much less those of the world as a whole. Motivation requires the hope that one person’s actions will make a difference; analysis often suggests that the actions will have no perceptible effect.

Climate change is a problem without precedent. That means we cannot know in advance which strategies could succeed in curbing it. Given how threatening and urgent it is, I think we need to try everything simultaneously: technological development, political lobbying, grassroots organizing, and all the rest. If nothing else, organizing 350.org is a way of getting in touch with people who are serious about the problem. Together, we can do a better job of evaluating our efforts, spotting opportunities, and correcting mistakes.

P.S. If you are in Toronto and interested in helping to prevent dangerous climate change, I would appreciate if you would join the 350 Toronto mailing list. If you really want to make a difference, please get in touch with me about joining our organizing team.

Writing to ministers is rarely a good use of time

In Canada, there is a large apparatus that exists to handle correspondence sent to federal ministers. This is because they receive a large volume of correspondence, much of it consisting of large numbers of form letters sent by supporters of various non-governmental organizations.

When a letter to a minister is received, it is usually sent to a low-level civil servant who works on files vaguely related to the subject matter of the letter. If at all possible, the response drafted will say that the matter is outside the minister’s area of responsibility (since this keeps things simple). Letters may also be forwarded to other ministers deemed better suited to answering it. For instance, letters to the prime minister are often sent to the minister responsible for the files described in the letter. These ministers may in turn pass along the letter to yet other people.

When a response to a ministerial letter is drafted by a civil servant, the standard practice is to ignore whatever the letter writer is urging the minister to do. Say you write a letter objecting to the construction of a new power station. The response you get is unlikely to mention the power station or any of your concerns. It is also extremely unlikely to promise any new action. What it is overwhelmingly likely to do is to list a number of popular actions already taken by the government in your general area of concern, and then to list a few more actions in the area that have been promised.

Once a maximally bland letter has been written by a civil servant, it will get passed to the political staff in the minister’s office who will add a bit of their own content.

At no point is the minister likely to see your letter and, if they actually sign it themselves, they are merely likely to glance over the text prepared by their officials. By writing to a minister, the main action that you produce in response is to re-direct a low-level civil servant away from their usual work to write a suitably inoffensive and low-content response to your query.

If you want to write a letter that will actually get read by someone influential, you can consider writing to the deputy ministers of federal departments. They generally don’t have an elaborate system in which other people write their correspondence for them, and they are probably more likely to actually read your letter. While in theory deputy ministers do not set policy, their roles as administrators and as expert advisors mean they are influential people and that it could be quite meaningful to change their minds on a subject. You can find out who the deputy minister of a department is from the organizations website, which will also include their mailing address.

Alternatively, you can always try writing ‘private’ on the envelope of your letter to a minister. Caution on the part of officials may lead to the minister actually opening the mail personally.

Finally, it is worth knowing that all references made in the media to ministers and to government departments are meticulously observed and recorded by civil servants. Even mentioning a minister in a tweet is likely to get you added to a column in some civil servant’s spreadsheet. As such, it can be a more effective use of time to write a letter to the editor that mentions a minister than to write to the minister directly.