Category: Science

New discoveries, the scientific method, and all matters relating to the scientific study of the physical world

Cultivating a conservative climate movement

Let’s begin with two simple premises:

  1. The amount of climate change the world experiences depends on the total quantity of fossil fuels that get burned. As such, there is little value in avoiding burning particular coal, oil, and gas reserves in one time period if we then burn them in another
  2. In Canada, the US, and the UK the electoral pattern for a century or more has been alternating between relatively left-wing and relatively right-wing governments

I think it follows from this that for climate change mitigation policy to succeed, it cannot only be supported by progressives or supporters of left-of-centre parties.

It’s true that the most prehistoric form of climate change denial (saying there is no problem, or it’s a problem too small to require action) is concentrated among political conservatives. It’s also true that the fossil fuel industry has outsize influence over conservative politics, parties, and politicians. To me — however — these observations are akin to the argument that since 85% of the world’s energy currently comes from fossil fuels it is imposible or unrealistic to try to replace them. In both cases, the depth of the current dependency demonstrates the need for change, rather than its impossibility.

Recently, UK Conservative MP Alicia Kearns and U.S. Republican congressperson John Curtis co-authored an article in the Times of London: The left should not dominate the conversation on climate change.

They also appeared in a recent panel hosted by the Hudson Institute:

Progressives tend to be very opposed to the argument or idea that conservatives need to be won over to climate change mitigation through fossil fuel abolition. The intersectional climate justice analysis holds that climate change is a symptom of systemic injustice and cannot be corrected through narrow solutions which do not eliminate colonialism or capitalism or patriarchy. It is a joined-together worldview that clearly motivates a lot of people, but I don’t think it’s a sound strategy for avoiding catastrophic climate change. Furthermore, I challenge the claim that only systematic change in our political or economic system can solve the problem. Progressives also tend to assert that renewable energy is cheaper and better in every way than fossil fuel, implicitly acknowledging that it could be possible to replace where our energy comes from without fundamentally changing much more about society.

I can see at least a couple of routes for moving forward with cultivating a conservative commitment to climate change mitigation.

Thinking about the span of the next couple of decades, I think conservatism in the English-speaking democracies may be posed for a huge splitting apart between comparative pragmatists who are willing to accept what science has unambiguously shown and pure ideologues whose policy preferences do not relate to what is really happening in the world. If that split can be enlarged to the point of crisis — when those on the empiricist side will no longer tolerate supporting the same candidates and parties as those on the fantasist side — those willing to consider evidence will likely have a long-term electoral advantage as those most implacably opposed to climate action die off, young people with a better understanding of climate change become politically dominant, and as the undeniable effects of climate change become even plainer.

Another plausible route to cultivating conservative support for climate change mitigation is through faith communities. The Catholic Church, United Church, Anglican Church, and others have been outspoken from the centre of their institutions about the need to control climate change. It’s true that there are some whose theology sees the Earth exclusively as a set of resources to be exploited, or who believe that a religious apocalypse will soon bring an end to the material world making long-term problems irrelevant, but I suspect there are many more in all faiths and denominations who can be won over to the view that we have a duty to care for creation and not to pass on a degraded world to our successors.

I think part of the progressive wariness about outreach to conservatives arises from how the intersectional view ties climate change into the social justice and economic redistribution agendas which animated the left long before climate change became a mainstream concern. Cooperating with conservatives on the narrow issue of replacing fossil fuels would not advance the general project of abolishing capitalism or re-ordering the global system. Some see climate change as a crisis which would be ‘wasted’ if our response only sustains planetary stability. Others convincingly point out that even without climate change as a problem the idea that resource use and waste production can increase indefinitely is fundamentally at odds with a finite planet. All that said, climate change seems to be the most pressing and serious societal problem facing humanity, and resolving it would give us more time and a more stable global environment in which to pursue other aims of justice.

I don’t believe either progressives or conservatives can or should win one another over to their entire worldview. The progressive climate change movement is an enormous success and source of hope, and I am not calling for it to be dismantled or fundamentally altered, though they ought to give more consideration to cross-ideological alliances on certain vital issues. As long as effective climate change policies are something which one side assembles and the other dismantles we cannot succeed, and so winning over conservatives to climate action is an indispensable condition of success.

Related:

Canada and a just transition off fossil fuels

At a town hall tonight on a just transition away from fossil fuels — organized by 350.org and attended by Green Party parliamentary leader Elizabeth May and NDP climate change critic Laurel Collins, but which environment minister Jonathan Wilkinson declined to attend — May repeatedly brought up the Task Force on Just Transition for Canadian Coal Power Workers and Communities as a model. In particular, she emphasized the importance of countering the narrative that escaping our fossil fuel dependence will be bad for jobs, and of respectfully consulting with the most affected communities when making policy.

The central nonsense of Justin Trudeau’s climate change policy is his unwillingness to accept that only fossil fuel abolition will let us avoid catastrophic climate change. Canada has already more than used up our fair share of the global carbon budget, and building new long-lived fossil fuel infrastructure will only increase the costs of our transition when we need to scrap them early and scramble even faster to build climate-safe replacements. Canada’s assertion that we can keep expanding bitumen sands and LNG production and exports is also entirely at odds with what fairness and pragmatism demand globally. The richest and dirtiest states need to lead the way, not keep making excuses, or the global logjam against sufficient action will be impossible to overcome.

Plastic without fossil fuels

Alongside the staggering challenge of replacing the 85% of global energy that currently comes from fossil fuels, humanity must also reckon with how the critical systems which we depend on rely on fossil fuels as inputs. We need to learn to make steel without coal and fertilizer without natural gas.

We also need something aside from fossil fuels as a feedstock for plastics, which are now indispensable in every area of human endeavour from spaceflight to surgery. Research of the sort is taking place. For example, Professor Shu-Hong Yu’s team at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) has produced non-petroleum based plastics which are twice as strong and tough as engineering plastics.

Designing stoppable AIs

Some time ago I saw this instructive video on computer science and artificial intelligence:

This recent Vanity Fair article touches on some of the same questions, namely how you design a safety shutdown switch that the AI won’t trigger itself and won’t stop you from triggering. It quites Eliezer Yudkowsky:

“How do you encode the goal functions of an A.I. such that it has an Off switch and it wants there to be an Off switch and it won’t try to eliminate the Off switch and it will let you press the Off switch, but it won’t jump ahead and press the Off switch itself? … And if it self-modifies, will it self-modify in such a way as to keep the Off switch? We’re trying to work on that. It’s not easy.”

I certainly don’t have any answers, and in fact find it a bit surprising and counterintuitive that the problem is so hard.

The logic does fairly quickly become straightforward though. Imagine an AI designed to boil a tea kettle unless the emergency stop is pushed. If it is programmed to care more about starting the kettle than paying attention to the shutdown switch, then it will choose to boil water regardless of attempts at shutdown, or even to try to stop a person from using the switch. If it is programmed to value obeying the shutdown switch more then it becomes presented with the temptation to push the switch itself and thus achieve a higher value goal.

The solar system’s other water worlds

I have mentioned Europa and Enceladus, moons of Jupiter and Saturn, as being among the most intriguing bodies in the solar system, since their liquid oceans create the potential that life could exist or survive there. Now we know that the dwarf planet Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, also has an extensive reservoir of brine beneath the surface.

Any would be a fascinating target for scientific exporation, though with the crucial caveat that it would require better planetary protection techniques to prevent them from being colonized by organisms from Earth which might take over in any habitable niche and which could even exterminate extraterrestrial life. We now believe that despite efforts to sterilize them spacecraft on the moon and Mars likely harbour viable life forms from Earth. That may not pose much of a risk in a hostile environs with a thin or absent atmosphere and merciless radiation, but it must be among the central concerns for any mission which will visit a body with liquid water.

Advances in medication for HIV prevention and AIDS treatment

Truvada, a brand name for a cocktail of emtricitabine and tenofovir, is a daily oral prophylactic medication which has been found to be highly effective at preventing the uninfected from catching HIV. Now, a new drug is being tested which could provide the same protection in a way that’s more convenient and would be easier for people to use:

Cabotegravir is an integrase inhibitor—meaning that it works by stopping hiv copying its genome into the chromosomes of its host cells, an important stage in its life cycle. Unlike Truvada, which must be taken daily, by mouth, prophylactic cabotegravir is delivered as an injection once every two months.

In combination with the antiretroviral (ARV) drug rilpivirine, cabotegravir may also allow those who are already infected with HIV to be treated with periodic infections rather than multiple daily pills.

Open thread: steel without coal

The most pressing challenge for bringing climate change under control is replacing the world’s energy sources for electricity production, building heating and cooling, and transport. At the same time, humanity needs to learn how to do everything necessary to maintain a technological civilization without fossil fuels. That includes agriculture, as well as the production of crucial raw materials including steel.

This may be one area where hydrogen is a real solution:

[O]ne of the biggest industrial sources of carbon dioxide is not directly energy-related at all.

This is the reduction of iron ore (usually an oxide of iron) to the metal itself by reacting the ore with carbon monoxide made from coke. That produces iron and carbon dioxide. React the ore with hydrogen instead, and the waste product is water. Several firms—including ArcelorMittal, a multinational steelmaker, and a conglomerate of SSAB, a Finnish-Swedish steelmaker, LKAB, a Swedish iron-ore producer, and Vattenfall, an energy company, also Swedish—are examining this possibility.

Climate-safe sources of raw materials are necessary both practically and politically, since people point to the use of fossil fuels in their production as reasons why they cannot be abandoned.

Discrimination by artificial intelligence

I have seen numerous accounts of how — when an artificial intelligence or machine learning system is given a human resource task in the hope it won’t perpetuate human biases — biases in the material used to train the AI lead to it replicating the discrimination. As The Economist recently noted, this can happen even when information on things like the sex and race of applicants isn’t directly provided, since it can be inferred from other features in the data:

Such deficiencies are, at least in theory, straightforward to fix (IBM offered a more representative dataset for anyone to use). Other sources of bias can be trickier to remove. In 2017 Amazon abandoned a recruitment project designed to hunt through CVs to identify suitable candidates when the system was found to be favouring male applicants. The post mortem revealed a circular, self-reinforcing problem. The system had been trained on the CVs of previous successful applicants to the firm. But since the tech workforce is already mostly male, a system trained on historical data will latch onto maleness as a strong predictor of suitability.

Humans can try to forbid such inferences, says Fabrice Ciais, who runs PWC’s machine-learning team in Britain (and Amazon tried to do exactly that). In many cases they are required to: in most rich countries employers cannot hire on the basis of factors such as sex, age or race. But algorithms can outsmart their human masters by using proxy variables to reconstruct the forbidden information, says Mr Ciais. Everything from hobbies to previous jobs to area codes in telephone numbers could contain hints that an applicant is likely to be female, or young, or from an ethnic minority.

In part this is a subset of the black box problem in AI. For example, an AI intended to distinguish dogs from wolves learned to work out which photos had snow in them instead. Since the output from AIs is a set of tuned probabilities, it’s not possible to say what chain of reasoning or source of evidence led them to a conclusion; at the same time, this creates a risk that they will behave in unpredictable and unwanted ways.