Tag Archives: developing countries

Bill Gates’s potty project

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Bill Gates has a lot to say about toilets, so much in fact that his foundation has a “reinvent the toilet” initiative.

If we can develop safe, affordable ways to get rid of human waste, we can prevent many of those deaths and help more children grow up healthy.

Western toilets aren’t the answer, because they require a massive infrastructure of sewer lines and treatment plants that just isn’t feasible in many poor countries. So a few years ago our foundation put out a call for new solution.

One idea is to reinvent the toilet, which I’ve written about before.

In developed countries, what we do is build energy- and chemical-intensive factories to purify surface or groundwater into clean drinkable water, use more energy to transport it a short distance in pipes, defecate in it, transport it a short distance again (usually by gravity but sometimes with more energy-intensive pumping), then build another energy- and chemical-intensive factory to remove most of the fecal matter from it, before we dump it back into a river and the process begins again with the next town downstream. This system was not designed all at once, but evolved piece by piece over the course of a hundred years or so. If we were starting from scratch, it is highly likely we could come up with a better system. We don’t try because of all the money and effort we have sunk into the existing system. If somebody develops a truly better way of dealing with waste, turning it into useful energy, water, and fertilizer, without violating powerful social taboos about how to deal with waste, that will be a game changer. The concept is that developing countries using such a technology could “leapfrog” developed countries and never have to build the centralized infrastructure, much as they have with cell phones.

Jeffrey Sachs

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Jeffrey Sachs highlights three international conferences in 2015 that may be important:

In July 2015, world leaders will meet in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to chart reforms of the global financial system. In September 2015, they will meet again to approve Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to guide national and global policies to 2030. And in December 2015, leaders will assemble in Paris to adopt a global agreement to head off the growing dangers of human-induced climate change.

The fundamental goal of these summits is to put the world on a course toward sustainable development, or inclusive and sustainable growth. This means growth that raises average living standards; benefits society across the income distribution, rather than just the rich; and protects, rather than wrecks, the natural environment.

Growth that protects the natural environment – I think it’s theoretically possible, but we’re a long way from that and it’s easy to be pessimistic. But at least some leaders recognize that there is a problem worth discussing. His vision is essentially one of technological progress allowing decarbonization of the energy supply:

Back in 2009 and 2010, the world’s governments agreed to keep the rise in global temperature to below 2° Celsius relative to the pre-industrial era. Yet warming is currently on course to reach 4-6 degrees by the end of the century – high enough to devastate global food production and dramatically increase the frequency of extreme weather events.

To stay below the two-degree limit, the world’s governments must embrace a core concept: “deep decarbonization” of the world’s energy system. That means a decisive shift from carbon-emitting energy sources like coal, oil, and gas, toward wind, solar, nuclear, and hydroelectric power, as well as the adoption of carbon capture and storage technologies when fossil fuels continue to be used. Dirty high-carbon energy must give way to clean low- and zero-carbon energy, and all energy must be used much more efficiently.

Clean energy would be an enormous breakthrough. But would it end all our problems, allowing us to grow indefinitely from that point without consequences? In their book Limits to Growth: The Thirty Year Update, Donella Meadows et al. explain why that might not necessarily be the case:

in a complex, finite world, if you remove or raise one limit and go on growing, you encounter another limit. Especially if the growth is exponential, the next limit will show up surprisingly soon. There are layers of limits.

What might the next limit be? maybe depletion of the phosphorus supply, loss of fertile soil, collapse of the oceans, a catastrophic plague affecting crops or people, etc. The point is just not to think that solving the carbon emissions problem would end all the problems caused by our enormous footprint on the natural world.

China is now the world’s biggest economy

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From Jeffrey Sachs:

According to the IMF, China’s GDP will be $17.6 trillion in 2014, outstripping US output of $17.4 trillion. Of course, because China’s population is more than four times larger, its per capita GDP, at $12,900, is still less than a quarter of the $54,700 recorded in the US, which highlights America’s much higher living standards.
In other U.S. – China news, the NSA is worried that China has the ability to crash the U.S. electrical grid with a cyber attack:
China and “one or two others” can shut down the U.S. electric grids and other critical infrastructure and is performing electronic reconnaissance on a regular basis, said NSA director Admiral Michael Rogers, testifying Thursday (Nov. 20) at a House Select Intelligence Committee hearing on U.S. efforts to combat cybersecurity.

urbanization and economic growth

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From PLOS, Urbanization is correlated with economic growth, but it is not necessarily the cause of it.

The authors of the study argue that GDP growth may create conditions that organically drive migration from rural to urban areas, but the assumption that urbanization will necessarily drive strong economic growth may be false. Pointing to the numerous examples of accelerated urbanization without strong economic growth (again, the green graph above), they caution that “urbanization is not an automatic panacea” for economic difficulties. Citing other work, the authors suggest that instead of trying to move people into cities, governments and development agencies should focus on creating a mobile workforce, ensuring broad access to goods and markets, implementing government policies that support commerce, and investing in infrastructure. These efforts could make a bigger difference for short- and medium-term economic growth than arbitrary urbanization targets.

While economic growth is an incredibly complex process and much work remains, this study serves as a good reminder not to confuse causation and correlation: just because two variables are closely related doesn’t necessarily mean that one directly causes the other.

GDP and child mortality

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In this 2007 TED talk, Hans Rosling compares GDP and child mortality rates between countries over long periods of time. He makes some interesting comparisons – today’s “developing” or “emerging” countries have GDP similar to the U.S. about a hundred years ago (all adjusted for inflation and purchasing power, I assume), but they are much more advanced in terms of health and living standards than the U.S. was then. By animating over time, you can see how the catching up process occurred particularly after World War II. These plots are interesting because they show child mortality and GDP in two dimensions, but then use colors and bubbles to add various third variables like education level or carbon emissions.

I have to critique a little bit, I can’t help it. He mentions that GDP growth statistically explains 80% of the gains in child mortality. I accept the statistics, but I don’t think GDP growth is logically the cause of these gains. I suspect there are a couple key technologies, vaccination and water disinfection, that can probably explain a lot of the trend, and the discovery of these technologies happened to occur at a certain time in history. 100 years ago, when the U.S. was passing a threshold to join the club of truly wealth countries, we were in the early stages of discovering and implementing these trends. Today, when countries in Asia and South America are joining the club, these technologies are well established. So it’s not just about wealth, it’s about where we are at a particular moment of history. Logically, there can be periods where the world makes large gains in quality of life without equally large increases in financial wealth, and also the opposite.

super mosquitoes

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According to the BBC, now mosquitoes can purposely be infected with a natural virus that out-competes Dengue fever:

The bacteria Wolbachia is found in 60% of insects. It acts like a vaccine for the mosquito which carries Dengue, Aedes Aegypti, stopping the Dengue virus multiplying in its body.

Wolbachia also has an effect on reproduction. If a contaminated male fertilises the eggs of a female without the bacteria, these eggs do not turn into larvae.

If the male and female are contaminated or if only a female has the bacteria, all future generations of mosquito will carry Wolbachia.

As a result, Aedes mosquitoes with Wolbachia become predominant without researchers having to constantly release more contaminated insects.

In Australia this happened within 10 weeks on average.

A statistic that caught my eye:

Brazil leads the world in the number of Dengue cases, with 3.2 million cases and 800 deaths reported in the 2009-2014 period.

Doing the math, that adds up to a death rate of 0.025%.

child mortality down 49% since 1990

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Amid the depressing news of thousands of Ebola deaths, NPR has an uplifting story about how worldwide child mortality has dropped dramatically, and not just over the last century but over the last couple decades:

In 2013, 6.3 million children under the age of 5 died. That’s a tragic statistic — yet it represents a 49 percent drop from 1990, according to data released Tuesday by the United Nations…

In many ways, under-5 mortality is a lens of how far we have progressed as a civilization. Newborns, premature babies and children under 5 are the most vulnerable members of our society. They are completely reliant on the values, the care and the love that we as a society are providing to each other.

The reduction in mortality rates is a measure of children’s lives, which are very important. Each life saved is someone else who will contribute to our well-being as a whole. But it’s also a measure of how we are progressing as human beings. If there are still children dying of causes which can be easily prevented, cheaply, and we still aren’t doing that? Then we aren’t really progressing as much as we think we are.

They have an animated map of where the biggest gains have been – Asia and South America. There have been gains in Africa, but Africa still has the highest rates and some of the highest rates in Africa are in the same area where the Ebola epidemic is taking place.

 

The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth

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The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth

There’s a free excerpt of this 2006 book posted here. Basically, Benjamin Friedman argues that there is a moral argument to strive for as much economic growth as possible. Not only does it increase material wellbeing, it improves health, adds years to people’s lives, and allows people to have more leisure time. He also believes that it tends to support development of peace, tolerance, and stable, democratic institutions over time.

The value of a rising standard of living lies not just in the concrete improvements it brings to how individuals live but in how it shapes the social, political and, ultimately, the moral character of a people.

Economic growth—meaning a rising standard of living for the clear majority of citizens—more often than not fosters greater opportunity, tolerance of diversity,
social mobility, commitment to fairness, and dedication to democracy. Ever since the Enlightenment, Western thinking has regarded each of these tendencies positively, and in explicitly moral terms.

This is a different definition than just increasing GDP, which makes no implicit moral judgment about equity or fairness. If we define economic growth as growing a more equal (or at least, truly equal opportunity), just, sustainable society, then no rational person will have any objection to it. But I don’t think that is the most common definition in daily use today.

12 “sustainable” countries

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This post from Alternet says we should admire the following 12 countries for their sustainable policies:

  1. Iceland
  2. Switzerland
  3. Costa Rica
  4. Sweden
  5. Luxembourg
  6. Germany
  7. Cuba
  8. Colombia
  9. Singapore
  10. France
  11. Norway
  12. Finland

Now all these countries definitely have progressive policies that other countries can learn from. But with the possible exceptions of Costa Rica, Cuba, and Colombia, all these countries have a lot of heavy industry and finance. They have large carbon emissions. They have replaced a lot of their original natural habitat with ecologically sterile urban development and factory farming. They house corporate headquarters and investors that exploit natural resources and export urbanization and heavy industry abroad. It simply won’t work to take these best-of-business-as-usual, relatively-low-footprint models and copy them in developing countries on a much larger scale. The resulting footprint will still be much too large, and lead to collapse. So what we need to do is take bits and pieces of what they do well, but come up with a completely new, truly sustainable model.