The environment – Page 65 – a sibilant intake of breath

Test for a sentient species: can you run a planet?

In the very long term, the survival of the human species depends upon developing the capability to colonize other planets. Earth is always vulnerable to major asteroid and meteor impacts, and there will come points billions of years in the future when the carbon cycle ends and when the sun becomes a red giant.

As of today, however, humanity has more pressing problems. Indeed, it is not at all clear that humanity will be able to survive the next few centuries. We continue to abuse the planet – exhausting non-renewable resources and accumulating dangerous wastes. At the same time, the world is still wired up for a Dr. Strangelove-style nuclear war, with thousands of cities incinerated with thermonuclear bombs, followed by nuclear winter.

In a way, perhaps overcoming those challenges and any others that arise in the next few centuries will be an important test for humanity. If we were to spread through the galaxy now, we would arguably be spreading as a malignancy: a species that cannot manage itself, and which brings the risk of ruin to any place it visits. If we can spend the next few centuries producing a global society that is safe and sustainable, perhaps we will have gained the maturity to carry something valuable outwards – something that better represents the potential of humanity, when compared with the messes we have produced for ourselves at this stage in history.

10 billion humans in 2100

The population division of the United Nations now estimates that the global human population in 2100 will be 10.1 billion.

While it is challenging to comment accurately and appropriately on the consequences of global population growth, it does seem fair to say that the difficulty associated with providing any particular global standard of living increases as the total global population does. In particular, providing energy for ten billion people to live decent lives – without wrecking the climate – seems like it will be a major undertaking.

Bum me out, and I’ll ignore you

My friend Lauren sent me a link to an article by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger entitled: The Long Death of Environmentalism.

It contains much that is of interest, but one passage stood out for me:

John Jost, a leading political psychologist at New York University, recently demonstrated that much of the partisan divide on global warming can be explained through the psychological concept of system justification. It turns out that many Americans have a strong psychological need to maintain a positive view of the existing social order. When Gore said “we are going to have to change the way we live our lives” he could not have uttered a statement better tailored to trigger system justification among a substantial number of Americans.

‘A strong psychological need to maintain a positive view of the existing social order’ probably contributes to the Lindzen Fallacy.

Possible doctoral topic: can renewables power the world?

It may seem like an unusual topic for a PhD thesis in International Relations / Politics, but it seems to me like it could actually be a useful and interesting one.

The questions would be:

What kind of standard of living could be supported for the world population using only renewable forms of energy?
How quickly could that be deployed, given all the technical and political hurdles?

Ultimately, it is a very political question. The geopolitics of energy have already been front-and-centre for decades, since at least the 1973 oil price shocks. There is also the large and growing dependence of the European Union on Russia for gas, as well as increasing American dependence on exceptionally dirty oil from Canada.

The research could include investigation of places that have already deployed various renewables widely (hydro in Quebec, geothermal in Iceland, wind in Denmark, etc), as well as consideration of what is happening in rapidly developing states like China.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

Dinosaur demise historiography

At the Ottawa Museum of Nature the other day, I saw their video presentation on the demise of dinosaurs. It was interesting to compare it with videos I saw as a child on the same topic. The ones I remember were claymation productions, put out by the National Film Board of Canada. This one was computer animated, and used multimedia effects like fans to simulate the shockwave from the Yucatan asteroid collision.

More than in videos I can recall, this one stressed that both birds and mammals already existed when the extinction of dinosaurs took place. It also included a couple of references to the paleoclimate, describing some of the ways in which the Cretaceous Earth differed from the modern form. The film was also forthright in describing some enduring scientific uncertainties, such as how long it took after the impact for the dinosaurs to actually die.

The Museum of Nature is a pretty great place, even though they removed the live frog exhibit which was my favourite part. They have a rather excellent gift shop that sells – among other things – hand puppets shaped like crabs and very affordable large actual fossils.

Understanding complex dynamic systems

Complex dynamic systems are the most difficult things in the universe to understand because they are bundles of relationships that interact in complex ways. It’s easiest to explain what they are through an example. Think of the Earth’s climate. It has discrete elements like incoming sunlight and the physical properties of water. The elements interact in complex ways that vary with time. Water forms clouds and icesheets which affect the reflection of light. The amount of ice on Earth has an effect on the totality of life on Earth, which then interacts in complex ways with other elements of the climate system: the erosion of rock, the composition of the atmosphere, etc, etc, etc.

Understanding a complex dynamic system at all is challenging. For instance, there is the task of understanding all the interactions that are ongoing when something is in a steady state. The level of complexity jumps when you consider the totality of steady and unsteady states, and all the ways by which they can turn into one another.

It seems arguable that the main task of thinking entities in the universe is to better understand complex dynamic systems. That understanding is always partial – akin to the French concept of connaitre rather than the concept of savoir. You can write down the totality of a person’s phone number on a piece of paper, but you can only express a partial view of what ‘Paris’ or ‘German’ or ‘physics’ is. In addition, it seems that complex dynamic systems are nested and that if we want to be able to behave intelligently in the world, we need to have some kind of understanding of all of them:

The rules of the universe: gravitation, electromagnetism, the nature of matter, etc
The physical Earth: the composition of the planet, and the way physical elements interact
The totality of life on Earth: genetics, behaviour, the history of life, etc
The human body: cells, organs, genes, the endocrine system, the physical brain, etc
The human mind: cognition, politics, economics, creativity, etc

At some point in history, it may be necessary and useful to consider the physical and/or mental characteristics of life from places other than the Earth.

The better a particular being understands each of these complex dynamic systems, the more capable they are of acting effectively in the world (a concept that presumes the existence of intentions, which ties back to each of the dynamic systems under consideration). Understanding them all better is thus a strategy capable of advancing the achievement of any conceivable goal, with the possible exception of intentional laziness or the avoidance of mentally taxing work.

Should the Green Party have a full platform?

Apparently, the Green Party has a position on income splitting. If this seems a bit random and disconnected from the environment, it is also reflective of a controversial question about what the party ought to be.

Given our first-past-the-post electoral system, the Green Party is never likely to elect many MPs. At the same time, the party has a reasonably large number of supporters – quite possibly more supporters across Canada than the Bloc Quebecois. I would argue that the main message these voters are sending is that Canada needs to take better care of the environment, and prioritize the development of a sustainable society more than we do now. I don’t think they are really endorsing their personal Green candidates, for the most part, or even that they are endorsing the overall Green platform.

Since they will never form a government (barring major constitutional reform, or a huge realignment of voter preferences), it seems there is a strong case to be made for the Greens sticking to their core message and not campaigning on unrelated issues (except as individual candidates, if they wish). It seems like taking a stance on environmentally unrelated things could lead to voters who disagree on those peripheral issues rejecting the party. If the Green Party took a strong stance on an issue like whether Canada should (or should not) have intervened in Libya, the risk is that they would be broadening their message somewhat pointlessly and alienating potential supporters. The Green Party isn’t about income splitting, or intellectual property rights, or criminal justice policy. There may be areas in which policies in this area have environmental effects – and it makes sense for the Greens to comment on them in those senses – but I don’t see the sense in them unnecessarily adopting political positions outside their area of core competency.

What do others think? Would the Greens be a more effective force for driving improved environmental policies if they focus on that area exclusively, or does seeking to be a party with a comprehensive platform actually make more sense for them given the nature of our electoral system and what they want to achieve?

Freedoms and loyalties

Modern political life is complicated, in terms of the obligations and allegiances people possess. For instance, it is entirely sensible to say that a person has simultaneous and differing obligations toward family, friends, co-workers, fellow citizens, humanity as a whole, and even all of nature. These obligations can be contradictory. For instance, one’s family might be best served by choices that would harm fellow citizens or humanity as a whole.

There is an important distinction between freedoms in the abstract and freedoms in practice. For instance, one might have the right to legal counsel but be financially unable to secure adequate representation (especially in civil matters). Similarly, the most fundamental of abstract freedoms – sovereignty over one’s own mind and body – are frequently interfered with by states. Despite that interference, however, I think the logic underlying them is sound. What happens to a person’s body and mind should be up to that person. If another person or a government forces something upon you without your informed consent, they have violated important rights, even if they were trying to do good. That’s not an assertion of the fundamental validity of rights, but rather part of a utilitarian calculus. It’s simply the case that a world where the fundamental rights of individuals are respected is better than a world in which they are violated and ignored. It’s the collectivity of outcomes that really matters, but the collectivity is often served best by treating all individuals decently.

It seems to me that our highest loyalty should be to humanity as a whole, or perhaps to the collection of all species with a reasonably rich mental life. It is impossible to behave unethically toward an inanimate object. Crushing a rock to powder can only be a problem if, in so doing, you negatively affect the mental lives of thinking beings. At the same time, there are many smaller groups of humans that demand and frequency receive loyalty, often manifested in behaviours that harm humanity as a whole.

There are clear-cut examples of this: if you are in the army and ordered to use biological weapons against a civilian population, you have been placed in a situation where someone is asserting that your loyalty to them should trump the concern you have for other living beings. In such circumstances, it seems admirable to refuse by asserting the greater importance of loyalty to humanity compared with loyalty to your army or loyalty to your country.

Ultimately, we are all in a complicated ethical position. We have sovereignty over our bodies and minds, but we never have individual security. We are all vulnerable to the will of others and, in cases where it contradicts our own will, we do not have the power to resist the whole world. We will also frequently be punished for obeying higher loyalties rather than lower ones, partly because an important way through which lower loyalties are maintained in the general population is by punishing those that violate them (though consent accompanies coercion in most systems of control).

On the basis of our particular combination of capabilities and options, all we can do is try to behave in the way that best respects our ethical obligations, such as they can be determined on the basis of determined and selfless examination.

‘Bling Boxes’

You may recall the much-hyped ‘Bloom Box’ which promised to be a climate change solution, but which mostly just shifted natural gas burning from big central facilities to a handful of small distributed ones.

More promising is the air capture and sequestration system developed by Bling Box Systems. Their system takes advantage of the 1797 discovery that diamonds are composed of pure carbon, along with the High-Pressure High-Temperature (HPHT) synthesis process developed by General Electric and others in the 1970s. The internet-equipped Bling Box calculates the annual carbon footprint of the individual or family who it belongs to, and then uses an amine process to separate an equivalent quantity of carbon dioxide (CO2) from ambient air. It then uses a patented process to subject the gas to over ten gigapascals of pressure (compared with about 100 kilopascals for ordinary atmospheric pressure), inducing the transformation of the CO2 gas into diamonds made of pure carbon, along with oxygen gas.

Naturally, the amine separation and HPHT processing take up energy themselves. Bling Boxes are configured to calculate the associated emissions based on the electricity generation mix in the area where they are installed. They then produce additional gems to compensate. This ‘bonus bling’ can actually be more massive than the ordinary offset variety, for people living in areas where electricity comes from carbon-intensive sources like coal-fired power plants. People living in areas with lots of wind farms or nuclear power stations will find themselves with smaller heaps of bonus bling at the end of the year.

The oxygen produced by the Bling Boxes can also be put to use: for instance, in equipping an oxygen bar or tent for the use of the owners of the device.

The deployment of Bling Boxes is set to substantially alter the global market for diamonds. Even before taking into account bonus bling, the average Canadian’s Bling Box would produce about 23,000 kg worth of diamonds per year. For the sake of comparison, an African Elephant weighs about 5,000 to 6,000 kg. If they become universal, Canada as a whole would be putting out about 700 billion kilograms worth of stones, bonus bling excluded. That compares with a global total of about 26,000 kg of diamonds mined around the world each year. Each Canadian emitter will be a De Beers unto themselves.

As the technology is deployed globally, bling production will increase still further. Total human CO2 production is sitting at around thirty billion tonnes per year. Converted into bling, that would represent about a million years worth of diamond mining, produced each and every year until humanity changes its sources of energy. Diamond output at that scale would swamp any conceivable set of uses for the stones, so I expect they will mostly end up being dumped into depleted oil and gas reservoirs, and perhaps injected into underground aquifers. Diamond-based carbon capture and storage (DBCCS) would have many advantages over plans to inject the carbon underground in gas or liquid form. For instance, there would be no risk of suffocating leaks.

By changing the economics of the global diamond market substantially, Bling Boxes do risk undermining the traditional role of the clear stones as a girl’s best friend. The ability of these rocks to not lose their shape (whether square cut or pear-shaped) will be less impressive when the world is liberally scattered with billions of fist-sized stones. As such, material girls are advised to shift their preferred form of wealth storage before Bling Boxes become commonplace. There is no reason to believe that the deployment of this technology will undermine the traditional relationship between boys having cold hard cash and them being Mr. Right.

Radiation threats to health

I must admit to being perplexed when I see sentences in news stories like: “TEPCO vice-president Sakae Muto said, however, the plutonium 238, 239 and 240 collected were not in concentrations harmful to human health.”

While I am far from being an expert, it seems to me like at least some of the discussion of the risks from radiation is misleading. In particular, I think it is a bit misleading to pretend that radiation is a homogenous mass like a magnetic field. In reality, the radionucleotides that have been released from Fukushima are solids and gases getting blown around in the wind. They are less like the fading signal from a cell phone tower as you walk away, and more like a person’s ashes that have been scattered into the wind. You can take an average measure for the amount of radiation in an area, but that doesn’t give you a good sense of how much exposure a person will get if they inhale or ingest a random batch of windswept particles.

This seems especially true when it comes to plutonium. Imagine a little speck of plutonium that was part of a burning MOX fuel rod in the Number 3 reactor at Fukushima. Burning zircaloy cladding on the fuel rods could have shifted it into a puff of radioactive smoke that either escaped through a crack in the reactor’s containment or was intentionally vented as part of ongoing efforts to cool the reactors. If that little speck ends up in your lung, it certainly seems as though it would be a danger to your health.

Am I totally off base here?