Rants – Page 42 – a sibilant intake of breath

Fishing and restraint

Research being done off Lundy Island, in the United Kingdom, shows how quickly some marine ecosystems can begin to recover when fishing is discontinued. A five year old marine protected zone has resulted in the lobster population increasing sevenfold, as well as benefits to other species. This is consistent with the kind of larger scale recoveries that took place during the world wars, when the need for merchant ships and the dangers of war prevented most fishing fleets from operating.

It makes a person wonder what would be involved in producing a genuinely sustainable national fishery (trying to do the same in the open ocean is probably impossible for the foreseeable future, given the sheer number of unapologetically rapacious national fleets). One idea that comes to mind is this:

Ban all imports. This will ensure that all fish being sold were caught under the sustainable approach.
Restrict all fishing equipment (except safety equipment) to that which was available at the height of the age of sail. That means no diesel engines, no fish aggregating buoys, no satellite navigation, etc.
Set catch quotas at a level where marine ecosystems as a whole remains vibrant and robust.

This would make fish dramatically more expensive, probably reducing consumption considerably. Arguably, it would actually increase employment in the industry. It would also make the industry rather more interesting to those both within and without it. Fishing from wooden tall ships has a lot more aesthetic appeal and romance than smashing the ocean floor and stripping the sea with freezer trawlers.

Of course, the above is supremely unlikely to ever happen. The question, then, is whether we will ever be able to come up with a mechanism that provides society with fish in an ethical and sustainable way, or whether we will keep plundering the resource, earning poorer and poorer catches, until we must be satisfied with whatever worms and jellyfish remain.

How politicians think

The Oil Drum has an interesting post on the psychology of leaders, arguing that their mindset has important consequences in relation to how they evaluate long-term questions like the future of hydrocarbon resources. The argument there is being made about Peak Oil, but it could just as well be applied to climate change:

Our leaders base decisions on lawyer thinking.

The outcome of a trial is not based on the facts; it is based on what they can convince the jury the facts might be. Likewise the outcome of an election is not based on facts; it is based on what they can convince the electorate the relevant facts, issues and threats might be.

Politicians do not deal in facts. They deal in perception. After years of working this way it becomes a framework in which they think.

The basic point is similar to the old joke about how public figures use statistics rather as drunkards use lamp posts: for support rather than illumination. Furthermore, the awareness that other politicians and politically active groups and individuals will use statistics in this way somewhat debases numerical evidence as a form or empirical awareness about the world.

Another important point is made about the differences between political and objective reality:

Politicians tend to inherently believe that the outcome of an event will depend on people’s perceptions and beliefs about that event. Politicians have very little experience with situations where objective reality is more important to outcome than the subjective perception of the reality.

This tendency is especially damaging when it comes to climate change. Because it progresses at an uncertain rate, it may well be that climate changes slowly while the perceptions of most people remain fairly stable, then changes too quickly for anything low-cost and effective to be done. On a problem characterized by uncertain time frames and potentially strong feedback effects, we need to get out in front of the issue, rather than being led by public or elite political opinion.

Pigs eat more fish than all of Japan

Apparently, 17% of wild-caught fish ends up getting fed to livestock. That’s pretty astonishing, given the increasingly dire state of global fish stocks, and it underscores the way in which most modern agriculture is fundamentally unsustainable.

As long as it is dependent on outside inputs where the supply is growing scarcer, it won’t be a mechanism for feeding humanity indefinitely.

Much better to leave those fish in the sea or, failing that, at least feed them to people.

US solar moratorium

What is to be done when people are plowing ahead with new coal power plants, despite the threat of climate change, and people are simultaneously forgetting about the expense, risk, and contamination associated with nuclear power? Impose a two-year moratorium on new solar projects, clearly. This at a time when we have eight years or so to stabilize total global emissions, before starting a long and deep decline – from over thirty gigatonnes per year to under five, within the lifetime of those now starting to ponder retirement.

Clearly, environmental issues relating to solar power stations need to be considered – just as bird strikes as so forth must be considered in relation to wind. That being said, a moratorium on the technology at the same time as oil sands and shale oil production are ramping up seems like hypocrisy.

Summer streets

For three Saturdays in August, New York City will be making six miles worth of city streets exclusively the domain of bikes and pedestrians. It’s an impressive undertaking, and a good method for making people think twice about their assumption that streets exist for the sake of drivers. For a long time, city dwellers have mostly assumed the roadways to be the exclusive territory of two-ton steel beasts. Taking them back is a step towards more cohesive communities, as well as a lower-carbon future.

If feasible, I would love to take the train down and have a look.

Overfishing and the EU

Long-time readers will remember the saga of the ‘fish paper’ – my research piece on the sustainability and legality of European Union fisheries policy in West Africa, eventually published in the MIT International Review.

Fisheries being an area of acute concern for me, I was gratified to see an unusually hard-hitting column in this week’s Economist about fish and the EU. It argues that EU goverments have shown “abject cowardice” in relation to their fishers for years. Meanwhile, overcapacity and unsustainable quotas have put the industry into a “suicidal spiral.” The article reports straightforwardly that: “More subsidies would reduce the already slim chance that Europe will ever have a sustainable fishing industry.”

I have argued previously that fishing should never be subsidized. There are far too many dangers of people selfishly exploiting a common good even without them. Indeed, I don’t have much hope when it comes to the long-term viability of world fisheries. That being said, if more people develop the understanding and candour displayed in this article, perhaps the madness can eventually be brought to heel.

Fuel cells are a pipe dream

Seven reasons why hydrogen fuel cell cars will never be a commonly deployed technology:

You get hydrogen by cracking hydrocarbons or electrolyzing water. In either case, you are better off cutting out the hydrogen production step. You can burn the hydrocarbons directly (or make liquids from solid ones) and you can use the electricity to drive electric vehicles. Pretty much any time you make hydrogen, you are using up a better fuel.
Cooling and compressing hydrogen for storage takes a lot of energy. Even liquid hydrogen has less energy per litre than gasoline.
We would need to build an infrastructure of hydrogen liquification stations and pipelines.
Storing enough hydrogen to travel a decent distance is difficult.
Arguably, storing that quantity of hydrogen in a car is quite dangerous.
Fuel cells are very expensive, partly because they require platinum catalysts. They are also relatively fragile.
Fuel cells that produce water as a by-product might have trouble in freezing cold conditions.

Granted, a few of these factors might change. We might develop an ideal system for storing hydrogen or develop fuel cells with cheaper catalysts. Even so, the number of objections is large. Forced to bet, my guess for the ground transport of the future is electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids for urban areas and biofuel or coal-to-liquid powered vehicles for long-distance travel.

On evolution

The other day, I was reading about how flowers have evolved to attract the right sort of pollinators and encourage those creatures to carry their gametes to other flowers. They thereby attain the benefits of sexual reproduction (primarily the generation of novelty) without the need for locomotive capabilities. Other plants manipulate animals into disperse their seeds, as well as not eating their vital components, at least before the plants have had the chance to reproduce. Sometimes it is extremely intricate: peppers that want their seeds being eaten by birds (who will not digest them) rather than mammals (who will) have developed sophisticated chemical deterrents, specially shaped to bond to only the right sort of receptors.

Thinking back on it today, I was struck by just how impoverished any understanding of biology prior to understanding evolution must have been. It is rather saddening that some people have missed the boat, and tragic that some are trying to put others in the same position. Evolution isn’t something you ‘believe in’ or not; it is something you understand to a greater or lesser degree.

A bad new copyright bill

Canada’s proposed new copyright act is unacceptably poor, most importantly because of its treatment of Digital Rights Management (DRM). Under the new law, circumventing any such system – no matter why – is against the law. This means that if the company that sold you a song decides to stop letting you access it, you are out of luck. Under the new law, it would be a crime to copy music from a DRM-protected CD that you bought to an iPod that you own, with an associated fine of $20,000.

The law would also mean that organizations like libraries cannot have any confidence in their future ability to use digital materials today and people with disabilities will not be able to use technology to make protected works more accessible. It would make it a crime for me to use VideoLAN player to watch DVDs I bought in Europe, just because people selling DVDs have decided to use monopolistic regional codes to boost profits. Indeed, it would criminalize the distribution of VideoLAN itself.

It must be remembered that the purpose of copyright law is to serve the public good, not copyright holders. We allow copyrights because they create a legal environment in which it is possible to profit from a good idea. As a result, copyright protections help to ensure that people are furnished with new and high quality music, books, etc. By failing to protect the legitimate needs of consumers, this bill fails to enhance the public interest. As such, it deserves to be opposed and defeated.

Selling ‘clean coal’

In the spirit of the laughable ads from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, there is a new offering from the coal industry. The strategy seems to be shifting from “there is no reason to believe in climate change” to “anything that would harm the fossil fuel industry would cause unacceptable harm to consumers.”

‘Clean coal’ will always be a non-sensical statement, given the environmental damage done by coal mining, the toxic emissions, and greenhouse gasses. Even with carbon sequestration, coal will be a dirty way of generating power. Furthermore, it seems unlikely that coal in combination with carbon capture and storage will be a source of cheap energy. As the cancellation of FutureGen due to cost overruns suggests, clean coal isn’t cheap.