Category: Rants

Posts where I spout off on one topic or another

On political ‘science’

As a consequence of returning to school, I am asked several times a day about what my field of study is. This is a touch awkward, as I have never really believed in the ‘science’ part of ‘political science’. I don’t think political phenomena can generally be effectively studied using quantitative methods. Indeed, I would be a lot more comfortable in a discipline with a name like ‘politics, philosophy, and economics’.

Thankfully, I can often dodge the ‘science’ part by saying that I study ‘environmental politics’. Those with a strong interest in academic taxonomy will sometimes persist in questioning until I name a discipline that is formally recognized at this institution, but most people seem content to accept ‘environmental politics’ as a field of study.

There is science involved in this area of research, certainly, but it pertains mostly to how the physical world responds to human choices, not to attempts to understand human interaction and institutions numerically. The interaction between carbon dioxide and electromagnetic radiation can be well-explained mathematically – the relationship between what scientists know and how governments behave, much less so.

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.

Working on climate change

I was out all day today with volunteers devoting their time to sharing the message about climate change and encouraging others to take action.

If the science is right, this is a critical time. These are the years in which humanity will either choose to abandon fossil fuels or choose to commit itself to catastrophic climate change. As such, there may be no more important topic to be working on.

That’s even more likely given how few people are actually doing it. Compare the amount of effort devoted to addressing humanity’s most important problem with the amount of effort devoted to putting up advertising, fancy hairdos, driving dirt bikes, or watching television. The fight for the future of the planet is being waged between a handful of activists and a set of massively profitable fossil fuel companies, while a largely apathetic mass of people mostly ignores it.

Web servers are vulnerable machines

Imagine you have rigged up an unusual machine, like a home-made steam engine or a centrifuge. Even if it seemed to be working smoothly, it’s not the sort of thing you would want to leave unattended. It’s quite likely that doing so would break the machine, and quite probably cause damage to nearby property or people.

It’s important to remember that a web server is a pretty sophisticated machine. An entry served up by a WordPress blog is quite a different thing from a printed newspaper article or even a static HTML page. When you view a WordPress page, there is a dynamic interplay between your web browser and the web server. You request particular content and WordPress uses PHP scripts to pull together the necessary data from MySQL databases. The same is true for other dynamic content management systems (CMS), like Joomla or MediaWiki. Underneath all this, there is Apache HTTP Server and whatever operating system the server is running.

All this PHP and MySQL work creates openings for attackers. These can never be completely eliminated, though maintaining an updated version of your CMS and being careful about things like passwords and file permissions is important.

What may be most important, I think, is changing the perception of what kind of machine a web server is. You cannot assume that it will continue to obediently do what you want if you leave it alone. It is quite possible that some malicious human or robot will find a crack, take control of it in whole or in part, and then use it for nefarious tasks like sending spam or joining a botnet. If you aren’t paying any attention to things like your server logs, you might never even know that your site has been compromised.

In short:

  1. If you run a webserver, be aware that it is a constant target for attack.
  2. It is wise to take precautions, like promptly updating software and choosing strong passwords.
  3. Keep an eye open for unauthorized activity.
  4. Have backups in place for recovery after an attack.

Practice safer blogging!

Free speech online

The internet is one of the places where people in free societies get to exercise their right to free speech. It’s also a place where a lot of private communication takes place, and where the protection of the right to privacy is a constant struggle.

For those reasons, I suggest people consider joining groups that work to protect our rights as citizens online, like the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Also, remember that the only way to preserve rights is to use them. Make use of your right to engage in political speech online (maybe a little anonymity too).

Third rule of the internet

Following up on rules one and two, it seems appropriate to add a third: “You should probably worry more about being attacked online by your own government than by any other organization”.

This is really an extension of the point about how governments are more dangerous than terrorists and how institutions of armed power need oversight.

Based on the open source intelligence available, we have to assume that governments all over the world are constantly monitoring the activity of their citizens online, for reasons both reasonably benign and exceedingly nefarious. It is worth remembering that even if the official purpose of a surveillance program is acceptable, it can be abused by anyone who gains access to it for purposes that may be very dubious. Hackers and rogue government agents are well positioned to use internet surveillance to rob or blackmail people, for instance. It is also worth remembering that data is not only being monitored in real time; it is also being archived for unknown future purposes.

Tools for privacy

Thankfully, we do have some tools to make this ubiquitous surveillance more difficult to carry out. You probably cannot encrypt your hard drive well enough to protect the contents if government agents grab it, but you can encrypt your online communications sufficiently well to make it at least challenging to decrypt them. The more people streaming gigabytes of data via encrypted HTTPS connections, the less feasible it is to archive and crack internet traffic taken all in all.

You can also use tools like Tor. People should be willing to assert their right to anonymous communication.

Politics by spin in Canada

Olivier De Schutter, the right to food envoy of the United Nations, recently released a report highlighting how many Canadians suffer from food insecurity. In response, Canada’s health minister Leona Aglukkaq described him as “ill-informed” and “patronizing”.

To me, this response seems like part of a worrisome trend in Canada. Instead of thinking about real problems, our government obsesses over negative media coverage related to those problems. It’s not malnutrition or worsening climate change or tortured detainees that are the problem, but rather critical media coverage on these sorts of issues. Rather than trying to fix problems, effort seems to be disproportionately dedicated to silencing critics and producing counter-spin.

It doesn’t help that opposition parties generally use every bit of negative media coverage as a means of hammering ineffectually at the government. What they need to realize is that our current government is largely an accident arising from the nature of our electoral system. With one party on the right and four on the left (counting the solitary Green), elections tend to favour the more unified ideology.

Just as the government should re-dedicate itself to governing for the benefit of Canadians, the opposition should dedicate itself forming an electable party through one or more mergers.

Canada’s climate targets in 2012

Today’s report from Canada’s Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development (CESD) has attracted a fair bit of media attention. On climate change, the report argues that Canada lacks a credible plan for meeting our 2020 target of cutting greenhouse gas pollution to 17% below 2005 levels by 2020. This target replaced Canada’s much more ambitious but now abandoned Kyoto Protocol target of cutting to 6% below 1990 pollution levels by 2012.

A few points in response:

1) None of Canada’s climate targets have ever been tough enough to be compatible with a fair global pathway that avoids more than 2°C of warming. In order to stay below the level at which climate change is generally considered ‘dangerous’, Canada and other countries must do much more than has been proposed so far.

2) As the CESD points out, Canada’s existing targets are more notional than realistic. In order to meet them, much more on-the-ground action needs to occur.

3) All of these pollution figures ignore Canada’s huge hydrocarbon exports. The question of how to assign responsibility for a litre of oil or a tonne of coal mined in Canada and sold overseas isn’t straightforward. At the same time, the planet doesn’t care whether the fuel is burned in Canada or in China. Either way, it contributes the same amount of warming to the climate system. If we are to address climate change, exports also need to be phased out.

Once we take into consideration the amount of fossil fuel we are exporting, Canada’s climate change record looks even worse then we only look at our failure to reach our past targets. It can be argued that fuel burnt in China or the United States isn’t our responsibility. This argument isn’t entirely convincing. For one thing, Canada regularly uses the inaction of China and the United States as an excuse to do less about climate change. That position doesn’t seem very credible if we are simultaneously supplying them with large quantities of fossil fuel.

Dealing with climate change requires transitioning the world away from fossil fuel dependence. Continued fossil fuel production is very costly, and delays those efforts. People are going to continue to make excessive use of coal, oil, and gas for as long as they are cheap and their use is unrestricted. At this stage in human history, it makes an enormous amount of sense to simply leave these fuels in the ground. In so doing, we sacrifice the short-term economic value that selling the fuels could provide. At the same time, we gain the opportunity to re-orient our economy and energy system in a way that is compatible with the coming post-carbon world.

Critically, leaving the fuels underground also lessens the harm we are imposing on other people around the world and on future generations. Because of the serious impacts of climate change, fossil fuel production is a fair bit like stealing copper wiring from the houses of other people. It seems profitable to the people doing the stealing, since they didn’t pay to have the wires installed in the first place and they won’t pay to have them replaced. From the perspective of society as a whole, however, copper wire thieves are causing harm while producing no net benefit. Rather than exploiting the economic opportunities that exist because the world hasn’t yet become serious about climate change mitigation, Canada should be investing its efforts and resources into making an effective and efficient transition to a zero-carbon economy with no fossil fuel exports. Firms like Suncor and Syncrude are much like those copper wire thieves. They are profiting handsomely today, but only doing so by imposing frightening costs on all members of future generations. Unfortunately, today’s oil companies are rich and politically influential, whereas future generations are defenceless and silent.

The targets that really matter are global: how much the planet will warm; how much sea ice will melt; how affected global agriculture will be; and how many more people will suffer from extreme weather or shortages of food and water. Canada’s current approach is short-sighted and selfish, to a degree that isn’t entirely obvious if you only look at our domestic pollution reduction targets and our (inadequate) efforts to reach them.

Canada is choosing a future for the world that is characterized by extreme climate instability, with all the human suffering that goes along with that. If we want to choose a different future, we need to accept that the era of fossil fuels is coming to an end, and it is time for us to make a devoted effort to rapidly phasing them out of our energy system.

Thinking of leaving GMail

I am thinking seriously about leaving GMail, despite how the email service itself has been extremely valuable to me. This is because of the following:

1) Irritating interface changes

GMail now has two interfaces. There is a maddening ‘modern’ interface that is full of elements that change shapes and sizes annoyingly. Anywhere you might enter text is likely to annoy you with pop-up ‘autocomplete’ suggestions and the chat system built into GMail has been rendered too annoying to use by integrating it into a left sidebar where elements change shape and size for no good reason.

The ‘Invite a friend’ element in the left toolbar breaks all the rules of good design. It’s a button that serves the purposes of Google, not the user. It is prominently placed even though it is never used. Worst of all, it moves and changes shape when you put the cursor near it. I wish I had some kind of supernatural geekish power to blast it out of existence, and yet it is always there annoying me, taking up space, and being a source of distraction.

I want an interface where things stay still! And where I am not being constantly distracted from the thinking I am trying to do.

There is still a ‘basic HTML’ interface, but some of its behaviours are even more annoying. It will still autocomplete email addresses, for instance, but it doesn’t use my whole contact list. It seems to be a random subset of the much-lesser-used contacts within that list. It is also very awkward to file emails into labels using the basic interface, and to deal with archiving messages.

2) Pimping Google+

I hate Google+ and I will never join. Despite that, Google is constantly trying to force me to join or trick me into joining. In the top left corner of both the GMail web interface and the mobile interface there is always a link to join Google+. I frequently click it accidentally, and that simple accidental act has sometimes caused Google to actually create a Google+ account for me, which I then had to delete.

I wish there was a ‘Never tell me about Google+ again’ button somewhere within Google’s settings. I could click it once and stop being annoyed several times a day by solicitations from the unwanted service.

3) I trust Google less and less with my data

I have written before about how sensitive some of the data held by Google is. “Don’t be evil” is a basic standard they need to meet – not a lofty goal for which they should be praised.

It’s not especially clear to me that Google is living up to its own standards. Even if they are, telecommunications law in Canada and the United States seems to have developed rather perversely in recent years, with governments submitting illegal requests to perform unwarranted searches on personal information and large telecommunication companies complying in secret.

Google probably isn’t unusual in terms of the degree to which it complies with such requests, but it is unusual in terms of the vastness of the dataset they have on users. Potentially, this includes everything from their physical location history (Google Latitude) to their web search history to every email they have sent or received since joining GMail.

Using Google’s services involves putting a lot of sensitive eggs into a basket that may not be especially well protected.

Earth Day 2012

If you want to do something meaningful for Earth Day, I recommend contacting one of your elected representatives tomorrow morning (Member of Parliament, etc) to share your concerns about climate change or another environmental issue. If there are going to be solutions to the dire environmental problems we face, they are going to be at the level of all of society, not at the level of individual consumption. Signing the petition against the Northern Gateway pipeline wouldn’t hurt either. Every way you look at them, the oil sands are an environmental disaster and a violation of our obligation to pass on a healthy planet to our descendants.

Michael Maniates explains why we must go beyond individual action well in his article: “Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World?” (Global Environmental Politics 1:3, August 2001):

The other road, a rocky one, winds towards a future where environmentally concerned citizens come to understand, by virtue of spirited debate and animated conversation, the “consumption problem.” They would see that their individual consumption choices are environmentally important, but that their control over these choices is constrained, shaped, and framed by institutions and political forces that can be remade only through collective citizen action, as opposed to individual consumer behavior. This future world will not be easy to reach. Getting there means challenging the dominant view—the production, technological, efficiency-oriented perspective that infuses contemporary definitions of progress—and requires linking explorations of consumption to politically charged issues that challenge the political imagination. Walking this path means becoming attentive to the underlying forces that narrow our understanding of the possible.

To many, alas, an environmentalism of “plant a tree, save the world” appears to be apolitical and non-confrontational, and thus ripe for success. Such an approach is anything but, insofar as it works to constrain our imagination about what is possible and what is worth working towards. It is time for those who hope for renewed and rich discussion about “the consumption problem” to come to grips with this narrowing of the collective imagination and the growing individualization of responsibility that drives it, and to grapple intently with ways of reversing the tide.

If you really want to take individual action, I would suggest that you make a start on doing something substantial:

  • Resolving to eat less meat
  • Resolving to travel less
  • Resolving to have fewer children

At the very least, replace a few incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescent or LED alternatives. Then at least you will be making a contribution with a value that extends beyond 24 hours.