The environment – Page 179 – a sibilant intake of breath

Climate change and nuclear power

Among environmentalists these days, the mark that you are a hard-headed realist committed to stopping climate change is that you have come to support nuclear power. (See Patrick Moore, one founder of Greenpeace, in the Washington Post.) While appealing in principle, the argument goes, renewable sources of energy just can’t generate the oomph we need as an advanced industrial society – at least, not quickly enough to get us out of the hole we’ve been digging ourselves into through fossil fuel dependence.

I am sympathetic to the argument. A good case can be made for employing considerable caution when dealing with something as essential and imperfectly understood as the Earth’s climatic system. Nuclear power is strategically appealing – it could reduce the levels of geopolitical influence of some really nasty governments like Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Russia. It is appealing insofar as carbon emissions are concerned, though it is not quite as zero-emission as some zealots claim, once you take into account things like fuel mining and refining, transport, and construction. It is appealing insofar as it can generate really huge amounts of power, provided we can find people who are willing to have reactors in their vicinities.

The big problem, obviously, is nuclear waste. Nuclear reactors produce high level radioactive waste, as well as becoming radioactive themselves over the course of time. The scales across which such waste is dangerous dwarf recorded human history. Wastes like Plutonium-239 will remain extremely dangerous for tens of millennia. As The Economist effectively explains it:

In Britain only a few ancient henges and barrows have endured for anything like the amount of time that a nuclear waste dump will be expected to last—Stonehenge, the most famous, is “only” 4,300 years old. How best, for example, to convey the concept of dangerous radiation to people who may be exploring the site ten thousand years from now? By that time English (or any other modern language) could be as dead as Parthian or Linear A, and the British government as dim a memory as the pharaohs are today.

In fairness, we have some reason to believe that future generations will be more capable of dealing with high level radioactive waste than we are. There is likewise some reason to believe that we can bury the stuff such that it will never trouble us again. Much of it has, after all, been dumped in far less secure conditions. Chernobyl remains entombed in a block of degrading concrete, and substantial portions of the Soviet nuclear fleet have sank or been scuttled with nuclear waste aboard. (See: One, two, three) Off the coast of the Kola Peninsula near Norway, 135 nuclear reactors from 71 decommissioned Soviet submarines were scuttled in the Berrents Sea during the Cold War. In addition, the Soviet Union dumped nuclear waste at 10 sites in the Sea of Japan between 1966 and 1991.

In the end, I don’t find the argument for long-term geological storage to be adequate. We cannot make vessels that will endure the period across which these materials will be dangerous. As such, I do not think we can live up to our obligations towards members of future generations if we continue to generate such wastes – though that is unlikely to matter much to politicians facing US$100 a barrel oil. Pressed to do so, I am confident that a combination of reduction in the usage of energy and the development of renewable sources could deal with the twin problems of climate change and the depletion of oil resources. The short term cost might be a lot higher than that associated with nuclear energy, but it seems the more prudent course to take.

All that said, I very much encourage someone to argue the contrary position.

Tuna farming

The bitter joke among fisheries scientists is that the Japanese are engaged in a dual project of turning all available knowledge and energy to the farm-rearing of bluefin tuna while simultaneously expending all available effort to catch every wild example.

This month, they succeeded in one of those aims: Hidemi Kumai and his team at Kinki University managed to raise fry born in captivity to adult size and them have them breed successfully. Because of the complexity of their life cycle, it is a considerable achievement. (Source) These are valuable fish, with the record holder having sold for $180,000 in Tokyo. The three largest fishers of Bluefin tuna are the United States, Canada and Japan.

This is good news for those who enjoy bluefin tuna sashimi, though they should probably be hoping that the rearing process can be scaled up to commercial levels. According to the US National Academy of Sciences¹, present day stocks are only 20% of what existed in 1975. Some sources hold existing bluefin stocks to be just 3% of their 1960 level. Present stocks are only 12% of what the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas has designated as necessary to maintain the maximum sustainable yield for the resource. Within another fifty years, it is quite possible that wild bluefin tuna will no longer exist.

[1] National Academy of Sciences. National Research Council. An Assessment of Atlantic Bluefin Tuna. Washington DC National Academy Press, 1994.

On modes of reasoning

One major tenet of liberalism is the idea that greater awareness of the world gained by people collectively through science and individually through education can improve overall human welfare in the long term. Firstly, the idea is that people will gain a more accurate understanding of the world and how it works. Much more controversially, they might improve the way they reason.

A game much loved by economists illustrates the controversy:

There are two players. The first player is asked to divide $10 into two parts and offer one to the second player. If the second player accepts the offer, each player gets to keep their share. If the second player refuses, nobody gets anything.

Standard economic logic would call upon player one to offer exactly $0.01, which player two should happily accept. Both players are made better off and should thus be willing to make the deal, and each player has maximized their earnings, given the rules of the game.

Of course, the game doesn’t work this way with real people. Hardly anyone will accept an offer of less than $3. This is entirely logical if you view the game not as an isolated occurrence, but one event in a life. Over the course of a life, it pays to develop strategies that keep you from having advantage taken of you. Likewise, over the course of repeated interaction, it pays to have strategies by which other people can be compelled to give you a better deal. This one choice may not offer the scope for such development, but the existence of such heuristic devices (like rules of thumb) can be extremely efficient where people have limited information and thinking power.

Economists, on the other hand, are about the only people who make offers of less than $1. More tellingly, they are also about the only people who accept such meagre offers. Through exposure to economic theory, their mechanisms of logical thinking have been altered. It is probably fruitless to speculate on whether they have been improved. Economists can understand the importance of factors like those listed above, so playing this way isn’t obviously a sign that their thinking has worsened. Of course, if economic trailing makes them less likely to anticipate that people might reject a $0.01 offer, perhaps they are worse off overall.

What is more interesting than the consideration of whether the economically optimal strategy is inferior or superior is the consideration of how frameworks of understanding affect decision-making and, furthermore, what effect that has on the liberal conception of welfare improvement through improved knowledge. The previous blog entry, for instance, portrayed the costs of global warming in terms of how much it would cost people to deal with (a very common economic representation). Drowned polar bears and damaged ecosystems only matter insofar as they affect people. Personally, I find such an approach reprehensible – for the same reason I think the wholesale denial of animal rights is morally unacceptable.

One can defend that position on pragmatic grounds: human beings with a reverence for nature have a better chance of living good lives and/or not wiping ourselves out. Saying we should cultivate the belief on those grounds is similar to Rorty’s conception of ironic liberalism. By contrast, the belief that the integrity of natural systems matters for its own sake has an intuitive appeal of a sort very un-chic and difficult to defend in a world full of poststructuralist rejections of firm ontological foundations to moral truth. Anyone who can devise an argument for the inherent value of nature not subject to such criticism will earn my appreciation.

PS. Inside nested padded envelopes, the dust-infested Canon A510 is en route to a registered service depot. If they decide to cover the problem under the warranty, I expect they will replace the camera outright, rather than trying to open and clean it. Doing so would take a fair amount of some technicians time and, if the camera isn’t properly sealed, it would only be a matter of time before parts of my sensor would start getting opaque again. Hopefully, it will come back in time for my trip to Ireland later this month.

PPS. I just upgraded to WordPress 2.0.4. Please report any bugs you come across on the bug reports page. Note also that, due to a barrage of spam comments, I have tightened the comment filtering settings. My apologies if any of your comments get zapped by the filters.

Global warming damage curves

Perhaps the biggest question about global warming is what environmental economists refer to as ‘the shape of the damage curve.’ I would say that the scientific evidence that global warming is taking place is essentially ironclad (though the relationships of some events, such as more severe hurricanes, to it are rather more tenuous). Equally true is the fact that human beings are contributing to the warming of the planet. What the damage curve represents is the amount of harm caused by each additional unit of global warming, expressed in terms of the cost that would be required to mitigate it. Mitigation costs include everything from relocating people to dealing with larger malarial areas, making agricultural changes, and increased building heating and cooling costs in different areas. The costs are net of any benefits that global warming provides: such as being able to grow certain crops farther north, or having a longer growing season overall.

The most benign possibility would look something like this:

The damage increases steadily with the amount of mean global temperature change. This is helpful because it allows us to predict the degree of future damage quite effectively and make reasonably good choices with regard to how much reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions we should undertake.

A worse option looks like this:

The damage increases at an increasing rate, as temperature does. This seems intuitively more likely than the first option, since bigger increases are likely to unbalance more and more complex biological and climatological systems.

An even worse option looks like this:

It is possible that climate change would involve a big jump that we wouldn’t see coming until it was too late. An example would be the much talked about possibility that the Gulf Stream, which warms Western Europe, could be disrupted. The biggest reason this is problematic is because we might believe we were in a scenario like the one in chart one, only to be proved spectacularly wrong.

The trillion dollar question, of course, is which of these approximations we should adopt as the basis for policymaking, until such a time as compelling evidence for one of the possibilities or another emerges (hopefully not by means of humanity actually following one of those curves too far). The most cautious option is to assume that the progression would be like chart 3, with the break at an unknown location. The prudent policy, then, would be to try and stabilize GHG levels at their present positions. Of course, that could involve massive reductions in possibilities for economic growth in the rich world and poverty reduction in the poor world. A tricky decision to make, in the face of such important considerations on both sides.

Personally, I don’t think any serious action will be taken until some very real evidence of the harm that can be caused by global warming has manifest itself. As for the question of what should be done, in the ideal circumstance, I am profoundly uncertain. What do other people think?

Tutorials very successfully concluded

My tutorials this afternoon went exceptionally well. Discussing an area that you really know a great deal about with someone who is interested but just starting out in their scholarly examination of it is both engaging and rewarding. I am especially enjoying the tutorial on distributive justice. I remember how interesting it was to first read Rawls, Mill, Singer, et al and it is particularly gratifying to be sharing such ideas with someone else. The only danger is assigning a reading list that is far too long. As far as the tutorials on globalization and global justice go, I need not have worried about being short on communicable knowledge.

The other tutorial, on OPEC and the oil price shock, was also quite interesting. I have gone over 20th century Middle Eastern history enough times now that I feel quite comfortable talking about it and have a list of sources in mind basically all the time. In general, the tutorials were a reminder of the excitement that can be associated with the conveyance of knowledge.

I am looking forward to the four tutorials that remain with these two students.

The moral choices in assigning rights

The best piece of writing I have come across in the last week or so is a chapter from the Bromley and Paavola book on environmental economics that I have been reading. By A. Allan Schmid, it is called “All Environmental Policy Instruments Require a Moral Choice as to Whose Interests Count.” The argument is that the idea of solving environmental problems in a purely technical way (internalizing externalities, to borrow from the economics lingo) is impossible. When a policy is represented that way, there is always a moral choice being concealed. In tort law, this becomes explicit through an instrument called nuisance.

If my neighbours are making homemade beer and the process produces a constant cloud of nasty smelling gas that wafts into my yard and through my windows, I could seek remedy in court. It would then be decided whether or not the smell constitutes nuisance. If not, the court effectively grants a right to produce the smell to my neighbours. I would then be free to try to convince them to use that right differently, for instance by paying them not to make beer.

If the court rules in my favour one of two things can take place. They can grant an injunction, forbidding my neighbours to make beer without my permission. This is great for me, since I can effectively sell them the right to make beer if the amount they are willing to pay exceeds the amount the smell bothers me. This is what Coase is alluding to in his argument that it doesn’t matter who you assign rights to, as long as bargaining can occur (See: Coase Theorem). Of course, he ignores the distributional consequences of assigning the rights one way or another. As an alternative to an injunction, the court can fix a set amount of damages to be paid. This relieves the nuisance, but gives me less scope to take advantage of the court’s decision.

What the example illustrates is that in creating policies to deal with externalities, the rights in question must be effectively assigned to one party or another. We either assign companies the right to pollute, which people around them can negotiate for them not to do, or we assign those people the right not to live in a polluted place, in which case the company has to go to them with an offer. The assigning of rights, then, isn’t a mere technical instrument for achieving an environmental end, but a matter of distributive justice.

Consider the case of fisheries access agreements in West Africa. West African governments have the sovereign right to exploit the waters in their Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs). They can also choose to sell that right, as many have done, to the EU. The governments end up getting about 10% of the value of the fish that are caught, while suffering the loss of future revenue that is associated with the depletion of the fisheries (since they are exploited at an unsustainable level). In this case, the distributional consequences of West African governments being rights holders are fairly adverse. The incentives generated inflict harm on the life prospects of those whose protein intake previously came from fish caught by artisinal fisheries now rendered less productive due to EU industrial fishing. Likewise, the life prospects of future generations of citizens are harmed.

One of the best bits of the Schmid piece is the following:

A popular phrase contrasts “command and control” with voluntary choice. Another contrasts “coercive” regulations with “free” markets. This is mischievous, if not devious. At least, it is certainly selective perception. First of all, the market is not a single unique thing. There are as many markets as there are starting place ownership structures. I personally love markets, but of course I always want to be a seller of opportunities and not a buyer. Equally mischievous is the idea that externalities are a special case where markets fail. Indeed, externalities are the ubiquitous stuff of scarcity and interdependence.

He puts to paid the idea that there is a tradeoff between economic efficiency and moral principles. That is simple enough when you realize there is an infinite set of economically efficient outcomes, given different possible preferences and starting distributions.

Those wanting to read the entire piece should see: Schmid, A. Allen. “All Environmental Policy Instruments Require a Moral Choice as to Whose Interests Count.” in Bromley, Daniel and Jouni Paavola (eds). Economics, Ethics, and Environmental Policy: Contested Choices. Oxford : Blackwell Publishing. 2002. pp. 133-147.

Seeking sources

I have decided to take on two of the three potential tutorial students for the St. Hugh’s summer school, primarily because it is a good opportunity to gain teaching experience. As such, I am in the process of finding sources on the following topics that would be appropriate for clever high school students:

Causes and consequences of the 1973 oil price shock
The creation and history of OPEC
Distributive justice issues, regarding food
Corporate involvement in Latin America, same sector

If anything jumps to mind immediately to anyone, I would appreciate if you would leave a comment.

Fish paper finalization

Embedded in Starbucks, working on the revision of the fish paper, I am reminded that this is a particularly good environment in which for me to get things done. Critical factors include the absence of food I could go make, inability to connect to the internet (without paying for wireless access – £5 an hour, shocking!), and an atmosphere that is just distracting enough to keep my mind on target. Somehow, typing on a laptop in a coffee shop just feels very efficient. The entire introduction to the NASCA report was written in TextEdit in the Starbucks on Granville Street, near Georgia Street, while waiting for Sasha Wiley. The ready availability of caffeinated beverages is another natural advantage; on hot Oxford summer afternoons, there is little more capable of inducing work than four shots of espresso served over ice.

With Dr. Hurrell in France between yesterday and August 3rd, the fish paper is my top priority. That seems in keeping with a) the importance of publication if I hope to get anywhere in an academic context and b) the name recognition of a journal run by MIT. Getting it ready for publication involves two kinds of tasks – one relatively easy, and one relatively hard.

The easy task is contextual editing, as described in a previous post. I need to cut down a few sections that are non-critical, and perhaps reflective of the original status of this work as a term paper for an international law class. I need to tweak the language in a few spots and come up with a few neat ‘bullet point’ style recommendations of the sort Fernando and I generated for the NASCA report. I wouldn’t expect the above to take more than a couple of days.

The hard bit relates to a few scientific claims that are attributed to Clover – a journalist – rather than to specific scientific papers. Ideally, I should be able to cite both him and a scientific source for each. In practice, it may be hard to find sources that say exactly what he does. The statements in question are part of a general pattern broadly corroborated by scientific sources, but it is obviously better to have specific support than general support.

By the time I leave for Scotland on the 27th, the final copy of the paper should have been sent off to the editors of the journal. Naturally, I would appreciate if someone were able to give it a fine-tooth-comb going over, so as to ensure that no minor mistakes of language remain in the final version.

PS. Another pigeon hole check has revealed no Etymotic ER6i headphones. Once they arrive, I will finally be free from the lowest-common-denominator background music that is a feature of all corporate coffee shops. (I can hear Ms. Wiley gnashing her teeth at my corporate tolerance, halfway across the world, but I find the very plastic conformity of all Starbucks locations to be among the primary reasons for which they are such good places to get work done.)

Academic and employment matters

My intended ‘hard push towards academic targets’ week lost a bit of forward momentum today. I did finish reading one thesis, and some more chapters out of the increasingly dull book on environmental economics. I picked up liner socks and 50% DEET insect repellent for Scotland ($30 together!) and filled out paperwork so as to get paid for my RA work.

None of the three candidates for tutorial teaching in August with whom I have been put into contact are intent on studying areas in which I have much extant expertise:

A: Where countries get water from at present, where they are likely to do so from in the future, and the conflicts that arise as a consequence
J: Impact of the 1973 OPEC oil price shock on domestic energy policies in developing countries
K: The impact of corporations on the distributional justice of food in Latin America

In order to teach any of these, I would need to research them extensively myself. That would normally be a welcome prospect, but I have much to do before going to Scotland and the first tutorial would take place the day after I got back. Of the three, I think I could handle the second two at a lesser level of specificity: talking about the origin and consequences of the price shocks and about distributional justice and corporations in international relations generally. I’ve turned down the first option outright, and am conversing with the students to determine if common ground can be found for discussion on the latter two.

The pay rate is excellent for these tutorial positions, if you already know the material well enough to suggest sources and then evaluate and discuss papers with only limited preparatory work. When it involves researching whole new sub-fields, it becomes less appealing from that perspective. Given that there seems to be no shortage of research work coming in from Dr. Hurrell, which is much more directly relevant to my thesis, it may be a good idea to stick to that, the thesis, and these other projects that keep cropping up.

Environment and representation

Revising the fish paper, and reading Bromley and Paavola on environmental economics, the question of the nature of ethical resource relations between the rich and poor world keeps arising. In particular, the issue of paternalism is persistent. The question must be asked of whether there are individuals or groups who ‘know better’ when it comes to environmental choices and, if so, how the superiority of their understanding can be verified and legitimated.

Whether it is Angolan diamonds or West African fish, there is often a case to be made that rich world access to commodities in the poor world has harmful effects. It may fuel conflicts (as with diamonds), it may reduce the future possibilities for resource use within the poor countries (as with fish), and it may enrich corrupt or non-representative elites while not benefitting the population at large. People have generally been critical of the Chinese government for striking resource deals with states that the west shuns because of their poor human rights records and lack of democratic credentials.

The big question, it seems, is how to treat the interests of people in non-representative political systems. Do people in democratic systems (or rich countries) have an obligation to effectively act as their agents, anticipate their preferences, and try to guide outcomes towards satisfying them?

Much recent policy seeks to do exactly this. When China decides that the electricity and prestige generated by the Three Gorges Dam is worth more than the flooded territory and other costs of construction, on what basis can or should we say that they are wrong? We can accuse them of short-term thinking (though our right to do so in anything beyond an advisory manner is dubious) or of violating the rights of individuals (which almost always happens when people are forced to do things in systems that lack political and legal accountability). All that said, the idea that rich states or international organizations can take up the cause of representing the general population of China strikes me as a problematic one.

Naturally, there are also accusations of hypocrisy. How many environmental choices within the rich world have been made on the basis of short-term thinking? How many have harmed a great many individuals for dubious value? Do not the states which are undergoing the process of development today have the right to make the same mistakes as states that have already developed did in the past? To the last of those, it can be responded that our level of understanding about the world has improved substantially since the industrial revolution. When developed states first used DDT, they were not aware of important consequences the introduction of that chemical into the environment would have. Arguably, the same can be said of all the coal that was burned to generate steam power and electricity. The trickier question is whether improved knowledge creates an obligation on the part of developing states to make choices that avoid incurring the kind of harms already suffered in the developed world.

There are also international efforts to encourage better environmental policy that might reasonably be seen as empowering, rather than paternalistic. The Publish What You Pay Initiative and Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative are trying to encourage (or require) resource extracting firms to publish the details of their contracts with governments. This allows scrutiny by the domestic regulators of the firms, by different branches of the governments involved in the contracts, by people living under the authority of those governments, and by international bodies. Presumably, having access to such information could allow for the mobilization of political energy, on the part of any or all of those organizations. At first glance, this model is more appealing than the paternalistic one.

In the end, this is reflective of a larger overall tension within environmental debates. There are certain groups that are often willing to promote optimum outcomes (scientists and economists in particular) that are based on analyses that are rigorous according to standards established within their own disciplines. Then, there is a political process that arrives at decisions on the basis of ongoing political realities – many of which have nothing to do directly with the nature and importance of the environmental issues in question. Finally, there are those who assert the fundamental rightness of views or policies on the basis of some combination of these considerations and others. Such a view suggests that there is an ideal policy (or at least a better policy) out there, but that its nature is not fully captured in technocratic assessment and does not arise spontaneously from the political process. I believe this intuitively, but have a great deal of trouble sketching out the details.

On what basis, however, can the desirability of this kind of policy be asserted? One mechanism is democratic endorsement. Many theorists assert the value of open discussion as a mechanism through which policy might be chosen. Of course, translating discussion into action brings it up against all the barriers produced by existing distributions of power. Likewise, people are not equally capable of engaging in discussion – especially when expert knowledge is a required currency in order for arguments to be taken seriously.

These are not questions to which I see straightforward answers. There is no group that can be trusted to evaluate the situation from a neutral perspective. There is likewise no solid way to assert which values are important, and how important each is with respect to others. The easiest solution, from the perspective of those trying to act in the world, is to identify those areas where present practice deviates most substantially from ideal practice as best understood, and where the gap between the two can be closed or reduced through available and acceptable means. I call this the strategy of picking low-hanging fruit. Of course, the assumption behind this strategy is that the big questions above will eventually be resolved to the satisfaction of most, allowing for further progress. There is plenty of reason to be skeptical about that.