Tag Archives: sustainability

election season

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I try not to get too political on this blog, but as we approach the election season, I have to say that I am just sick of the Republican candidates. These are not serious grownups proposing serious grownup solutions to real problems. We have problems like financial instability, food and water security, sea level rise, economic stagnation, weapons of mass destruction, and global issues of war and peace that need serious attention. There is no time to waste on bullshit. Some are suggesting a GOP implosion is a real possibility.

So what caused the current rebellion in the GOP ranks? It finally dawned on loyal foot soldiers in the odd-couple coalition that they were being taken for suckers. Their causes always seemed to get the short end of the stick. The GOP made multiple promises and fervent speeches on the social issues, but, for one reason or another, the party establishment always failed to deliver.

This belated realization stirred the anger that has flared across the ranks of the followers — and not just in the South. The financial crisis, the bailout of the banks, and collapsing prosperity intensified their sense of betrayal. People began mobilizing their own rump-group politics to push back. The tea party protests were aimed at President Obama, of course, but they were also an assault on Republican leaders who had misled and used the party base for so long. Tea party revenge took down long-comfortable legislators and elected red-hot replacements who share the spirit of rebellion…

If my lobbyist friend is right, the Republican establishment brought this crisis on itself by cynically manipulating its own rank and file. The party can’t deal with the real economic distress threatening the nation as long as rebellion is still smoldering in the ranks. Of course, that suits the interests of the country-club and Fortune 500 wing of the party — the last thing they want is significant economic reform. Confusion and stalemate have their political uses. On the other hand, the GOP can’t give the tea party rebels what they want without darkening its electoral prospects for 2016. Chaos to be continued.

I try not to get overly political on this blog, but I will be starting to think and talk about policies that relate to growth, sustainability, and risk and the upcoming election season.

guns, germs, and porcines

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At last, here is a grand unified pork-centric theory of history.

Many people, for many different reasons, rejected pork in the ancient Near East. Largely arid, it was a land of sheep, goats, and cattle. Nomads didn’t keep pigs because they couldn’t herd them through the desert. Villages in very dry areas didn’t keep pigs because the animals needed a reliable source of water. Priests, rulers, and bureaucrats didn’t eat pork because they had access to sheep and goats from the state-focused central distributing system and considered pigs filthy. Pigs remained important in only one place: nonelite areas of cities, where they ate waste and served as a subsistence food supply for people living on the margins.

Later the Greeks and Romans were both huge fans of pork, which I didn’t know.

Lloyds of London is worried about food

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Lloyds of London says we should be worried about the food supply. And yes, they have insurance for that.

Global demand for food is on the rise, driven by unprecedented growth in the world’s population and widespread shifts in consumption patterns as countries develop. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) projects that global agricultural production will need to more than double by 2050 to close the gap between food supply and demand. As this chronic pressure increases, the food system is becoming increasingly vulnerable to acute shocks…

Sudden disruptions to the supply chain could reduce the global food supply and trigger a spike in food prices, leading to substantial knock-on effects for businesses and societies. The food system’s existing vulnerability to systemic shocks is being exacerbated by factors such as climate change, water stress, ongoing globalisation, and heightening political instability…

A shock to the global food supply could trigger significant claims across multiple classes of insurance, including (but not limited to) terrorism and political violence, political risk, business interruption, marine and aviation, agriculture, environmental liability, and product
liability and recall. These losses could be compounded by the potential for a food system shock to last for many years; and the ability of insurers to pay claims quickly is expected to be an important factor in post-shock recovery. More broadly, the insurance industry may also be affected by impacts on investment income and the global regulatory and business environment.

meeting future food demand

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This article in Water Resources Research says we have a shot at meeting future food demand.

Sustainable options for decreasing food demand and for increasing production include reduction of food losses on both the producer and consumer ends, elimination of unsustainable practices such as prolonged groundwater overdraft, closing of yield gaps with controlled expansions of nutrient application and irrigation, increases in crop yield and pest resistance through advances in biotechnology, and moderate expansion of rain fed cropland. Calculations based on reasonable assumptions suggest that such measures could meet the food needs of an increasing global population while protecting the environment.

leisure time and sustainability

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This article in Ecological Economics makes a link between leisure time and sustainable behavior.

The considerable gap between the individuals level of concern about climate change and the degree to which they act on these concerns is a major impediment to achieving more sustainable consumption patterns. We empirically investigate how the amount of discretionary time that individuals have at their disposal influences both what type of sustainable consumption practices they adopt and the size of this value–action gap. We contend that discretionary time has a twofold effect. Given fixed preferences, time-poor individuals tend to satisfy their preferences by adopting sustainable consumption practices that require relatively less time. Moreover, a lack of discretionary time also inhibits agents from developing preferences that actually reflect their underlying environmental concerns. Our findings support both of these hypotheses and suggest that increasing discretionary time is associated with significant reductions in the value–action gap. This suggest that policies which increase discretionary time, such as measures to improve the work–life balance, may thus help in fostering the emergence of pro-environmental preferences among consumers in the long run.

This makes some sense to me. It also makes sense to me that sustainability is partly about social capital – people having time to interact with each other through formal and informal organizations, think things through, have discussions and make ethical judgments about what kinds of actions they want to take together. When we are working 40-60 hour weeks in the single-minded pursuit of corporate profits, many of us just don’t have time and energy to engage in this sort of social capital building even if we want to.

democracy and development

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I don’t like to get too much into politics in this blog, and especially not the politics of countries other than my own, but this article about Thailand and Myanmar annoyed me a little bit. I suspect it was written by someone who doesn’t travel much, but is just trying to piece together a story based on things they read in the newspaper. The premise of the story is that there is a clear connection between a western parliamentary system and foreign investment in developing countries. I don’t think this is true – companies in the developed world love investing in developing countries they view as stable and predictable, whether they have representative government or not.

Thailand has made several attempts at a Western-style majority-rule parliamentary model but it simply hasn’t worked – it hasn’t resulted in consensus policies that are acceptable to enough of the various factions of society that they would let the country move forward. So what you see on TV is a somewhat unique way of having that long-term political struggle and trying to come up with something workable. There has been some sporadic violence and loss of life regrettably, but it is nothing remotely close to a “civil war” as some columnists would have us believe. Arguably, this is a democratic process although it is playing out over a long time frame and in a very odd, uniquely Thai way. By the way, there are very real human rights abuses, military violence against civilian protestors, and political repression that have occurred under Thai governments past and present, and I am not condoning any of that in this post.

You can understand why foreign multinational corporations, which have no loyalty or ideology other than profit seeking, might prefer a nearby country like Malaysia or Vietnam, which also offer infrastructure and cheap labor with less chance of the messy political process that is creating some uncertainty in Thailand. Indonesia is another example of a country that has been developing quickly under decades of conservative governments, but is now scaring international companies a little bit with its local brand of democracy. The Phillippines has an American-style constitution, but has never quite gotten its economy in gear.

Burma/Myanmar is interesting because it is somewhat of a blank slate. It could be a laboratory where truly sustainable economic, social, and ecological development policies could be tested and refined if the political leadership really understood and wanted to do that. I think it will more likely just be the next Thailand, with its people richer, healthier, and better educated a decade from now, but missing a portion of the rich culture and natural wonder it used to have. I wish the people of both countries all the best.

critical natural capital

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This article in Ecological Economics is about the idea of critical natural capital. Critical natural capital is meant to bridge the gap between strong sustainability, which says manufactured capital cannot be substituted for natural capital, and weak sustainability, which says it can. Critical natural capital says that some, but not all, of it can be substituted, because some of it is, well, critical.

The other theme of this paper is the “capability approach”, which is based on the ideas of Amartya Sen. Reading Amartya Sen is on my list of things to do eventually someday, but I haven’t gotten to that yet.

This article is an attempt to conceptually improve the notion of strong sustainability by creating a rapprochement between its core concept, critical natural capital, and the capability approach. We first demonstrate that the capability approach constitutes a relevant framework for analysing the multiple links between human well-being and critical natural capital. Second, we demonstrate that the rapprochement between critical natural capital and the capability approach can form both the normative basis and the informational basis for a deliberative approach to human development which embraces a strong sustainability perspective. This conceptual rapprochement, as illustrated in our case study, opens up avenues of research towards the practical implementation of human development projects from a strong sustainability perspective.

1989

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“We’ve got to do more to ameliorate the violence and suffering that afflict so many regions in the world, and to remove common threats to our future. The deterioration of the environment, the spread of nuclear and chemical weapons, ballistic missile technology…”
-George H.W. Bush, December 3, 1989

Hmm…how are we doing on this stuff now?

spending vs. investment

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Maybe somebody can explain all this to me (from Project Syndicate):

With all of the rules pointing toward recession, how can Europe boost recovery?

A two-year €400 billion ($510 billion) public-investment program, financed with European Investment Bank bonds, would be the best way to overcome Europe’s current impasse. Borrowing by the EIB has no implications in terms of European fiscal rules. It is recorded neither as new debt nor as a deficit for any of the member states, which means that new government spending could be funded without affecting national fiscal performance.

Thus, some of the investment spending currently planned at the national level could be financed via European borrowing to relieve national budgets. Such an indirect way of dealing with strict rules would also be easier than starting long and wearying negotiations on changes to the fiscal framework…

In addition, the ECB could purchase EIB bonds on secondary markets, which would help to keep funding costs low – or even reduce them. More important, purchases of EIB bonds would enable the ECB to undertake quantitative easing without triggering the degree of controversy implied by intervening in 18 separate sovereign-bond markets, where concerns that ECB purchases would affect the relative pricing of sovereigns are very real.

Already, €200 billion of EIB bonds are available. Adding €400 billion would increase the pool substantially. Together with asset-backed securities, covered bonds, and corporate bonds, €1 trillion of assets – the threshold widely thought to make quantitative easing by the ECB credible – would be available for purchase.

What I think it means is that if we don’t have the money to do the things we want to do, we can just make some more up. But of course, we can’t just make up an infinite amount of money, because we can’t just do an infinite amount of things here on our finite planet. So if we make up too much money, people might start to realize that money is just made up.

Here on this finite planet, we have a certain amount of resources at our disposal that allow us to do things – natural resources like energy, water, and fertile soils; machines, structures, and infrastructure we have built; and the physical efforts, knowledge, and skills of people. Also, less tangible things that we have tended to take for granted in the past – the ability of oceans and other ecosystems to grow food, absorb wastes, and cycle carbon, nutrients and gases that we can’t live without, for example. If we are finding that we don’t have the resources to do all the things we want to do, then we are poorer than we would like to be. We can make up some more money, but ultimately the financial system is just something we have come up with to allocate the resources and efforts we do have available, and ultimately to impose limits on ourselves just short of the actual physical limits, which actually do exist.

Where am I going with this? If we want to get richer, we have to protect the resources we can’t do without, like the health of ecosystems and the atmosphere. We have to impose limits on ourselves voluntarily today before the real physical limits are imposed on us. Then if we want to be richer tomorrow, we need to spend the resources we do have on the right kinds of investments in the right kinds of structures and machines; we need to spend our efforts in smart ways and increase our knowledge and skills in the right areas.

The kind of short term economic and financial press coverage I quoted at the beginning of this post doesn’t make the connections between money and the real world, and doesn’t make a distinction between financial spending in general and smart investment in the future. Jeffrey Sachs has written a nice post that makes some of these points, and argues that there has been a recent drop in true investment right when the world needs it most urgently:

Neither neo-Keynesians nor supply-siders focus on the true remedies for this persistent drop in investment spending. Our societies urgently need more investment, particularly to convert heavily polluting, energy-intensive, and high-carbon production into sustainable economies based on the efficient use of natural resources and a shift to low-carbon energy sources. Such investments require complementary steps by the public and private sectors.

The necessary investments include large-scale deployment of solar and wind power; broader adoption of electric transport, both public (buses and trains) and private (cars); energy-efficient buildings; and power grids to carry renewable energy across large distances (say, from the North Sea and North Africa to continental Europe, and from California’s Mojave Desert to US population centers)…

These considerations are reasonably clear to anyone concerned with the urgent need to harmonize economic growth and environmental sustainability. Our generation’s most pressing challenge is to convert the world’s dirty and carbon-based energy systems and infrastructure into clean, smart, and efficient systems for the twenty-first century. Investing in a sustainable economy would dramatically boost our wellbeing and use our “excess” savings for just the right purposes.