Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

Noam Chomsky’s take on Trump and Russia

Noam Chomsky’s take on Trump and Russia is interesting. He is contrarian, as usual. To summarize, he is worried that climate change and nuclear weapons are existential threats to our civilization, and he thinks our political system is failing to deal with these threats regardless of who is nominally in charge.

So, of all Trump’s policies, the one that is the most dangerous and destructive, in fact poses an existential threat, is his policies on climate change, on global warming. That’s really destructive. And we’re facing an imminent threat, not far removed, of enormous damage. The effects are already visible but nothing like what’s going to come. A sea level rise of a couple of feet will be massively destructive. It will make today’s immigration issues look like trivialities. And it’s not that the administration is unaware of this. So, Donald Trump, for example, is perfectly aware of the dangerous effects, in the short term, of global warming. So, for example, recently he applied to the government of Ireland for permission to build a wall to protect his golf course in Ireland from rising sea levels. And Rex Tillerson, who was supposed to be the adult in the room before he was thrown out, as CEO of ExxonMobil, was devoting enormous resources to climate change denial, although he had, sitting on his desk, the reports of ExxonMobil scientists, who, since the ’70s, in fact, were on the forefront of warning of the dire effects of this accelerating phenomenon. I don’t know what word in the language — I can’t find one — that applies to people of that kind, who are willing to sacrifice the literal — the existence of organized human life, not in the distant future, so they can put a few more dollars in highly overstuffed pockets. The word “evil” doesn’t begin to approach it. These are the kinds of issues that should be under discussion. Instead, what’s being — there is a focus on what I believe are marginalia…

And I think we find this on issue after issue, also on issues on which what Trump says, for whatever reason, is not unreasonable. So, he’s perfectly right when he says we should have better relations with Russia. Being dragged through the mud for that is outlandish, makes — Russia shouldn’t refuse to deal with the United States because the US carried out the worst crime of the century in the invasion of Iraq, much worse than anything Russia has done. But they shouldn’t refuse to deal with us for that reason, and we shouldn’t refuse to deal with them for whatever infractions they may have carried out, which certainly exist. This is just absurd. We have to move towards better — right at the Russian border, there are very extreme tensions, that could blow up anytime and lead to what would in fact be a terminal nuclear war, terminal for the species and life on Earth. We’re very close to that. Now, we could ask why. First of all, we should do things to ameliorate it. Secondly, we should ask why. Well, it’s because NATO expanded after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in violation of verbal promises to Mikhail Gorbachev, mostly under Clinton, partly under first Bush, then Clinton expanded right to the Russian border, expanded further under Obama. The US has offered to bring Ukraine into NATO. That’s the kind of a heartland of Russian geostrategic concerns. So, yes, there’s tensions at the Russian border — and not, notice, at the Mexican border. Well, those are all issues that should be of primary concern. The fate of — the fate of organized human society, even of the survival of the species, depends on this. How much attention is given to these things as compared with, you know, whether Trump lied about something? I think those seem to me the fundamental criticisms of the media.

high tech camp stoves

I’m intrigued by these high-tech camp stoves from Biolite (note there may be other, similar products/companies out there, and I am not selling anything on this site.) They use fans and electronics to burn wood or other types of biomass very efficiently for cooking, supposedly produce minimal smoke, and can charge electronic devices. Some of them can charge their own batteries and/or hook up to solar panels to charge them.

using less straws would be good, but obviously not enough

It should be obvious that you can’t just stop using plastic straws and pat yourself on the back for saving the earth. The much bigger problem is packaging, and this article in Scientific American has some ideas for how it could be tackled, and how it has been in a few countries not called the United States.

Legislators could make laws that incentivize and facilitate recycling, like the national bottle deposit and bag tax bills that were proposed in 2009. These bills would have created a nationwide five-cent deposit on plastic bottles and other containers, and a nonrefundable five-cent charge on plastic bags at checkout. The U.K. launched a similar charge on all single-use grocery bags in 2015 and announced a nationwide bottle deposit requirement in March of this year. Within six months of the plastic bag charge being in place, usage dropped over 80 percent. Similarly, in Germany, where a nationwide bottle bill was put in place in 2003, recycling rates have exceeded 98 percent. In the U.S. these actions would go a long way toward recovering the estimated $8 billion yearly economic opportunity cost of plastic waste.

Other actions could include a ban or “opt-in” policy on single-use items like plastic straws. That is, single-use plastic items would not be available or only upon request. A small tweak like this can lead to huge changes in consumer behavior, by making wastefulness an active choice rather than the status quo. Such measures were recently adopted by several U.S. cities, and are under consideration in California and the U.K.

Another, somewhat obvious, idea would be to tax packaging. This would raise some revenue while also nudging companies toward solutions that reduce, reuse, or recycle the packaging to avoid the tax. Some other tax could be reduced to offset this new one, if that seems critically important.

Eco-cities in Japan and China

Here’s a paper comparing and contrasting two eco-city developments in Japan and China.

Ecological urbanism in East Asia: A comparative assessment of two eco-cities in Japan and China

The growth of projects translating the concept of eco-city into practices has accelerated during the last fifteen years, making the eco-city a global phenomenon. Asia in particular has witnessed notable developments, characterized by strong governmental intervention and national initiatives to create model eco-cities. In Japan, the central government launched an “Eco-Model Cities” program in 2008 and has designated twenty-three model cities. In China, hundreds of municipalities have pursued plans to become an eco- or low-carbon city following the government’s demonstration projects. Across East Asia, the eco-city is promoted as an innovative urban policy capable of advancing the agendas of sustainable urbanization and the realignment of the post-industrial urban economy.

This paper compares the policies and strategies of developing eco-cities in Japan and China using Kitakyushu and Tianjin Eco-city as case studies. It examines these cities’ common and contrasting approaches to ecological urbanism, their respective technological and urban design strategies, the relationship between eco-city building and local economic development, and the roles played by different stakeholders in this effort. The research focuses on their Key Performance Indicator systems and the spatial qualities they anticipate, which reflect fundamentally different ideas about what societal role an eco-city should best play. The comparative method sheds light on debates around important aspects of planning and managing an eco-city––namely, between new town and retrofit development, between top-down directive and bottom-up force, and between the eco-city as technology and as culture. This paper thus offers critical insight into the changing notions of urbanity within Asian society.

passive house

This article describes how an old home was retrofit into an extraordinarily energy efficient “passive house“.

I’m guessing the owners are not poverty-stricken. Then again, there must be some payback period and I wonder if it is measured in years or decades. If it pays back reasonably, there should be some kind of financial arrangement that would allow ordinary people to do this.

adjusting productivity/GDP for ecosystem services

Here’s a new paper on a method of adjusting productivity/GDP (they seem to use the terms interchangeably, which confuses me) for ecosystem services and natural capital depletion.

Environmentally Adjusted Multifactor Productivity: Methodology and Empirical Results for OECD and G20 Countries

This paper extends the analytical framework for measuring multifactor productivity in order\ to account for environmental services. A growth accounting approach is used to decompose a pollution-adjusted measure of output growth into the contributions of labour, produced capital and natural capital. These indicators allow the sources of economic growth, and its long run sustainability, to be better assessed. Results presented here cover OECD and G20 countries for the 1990–2013 period, and account for the extraction of subsoil natural assets and emissions of air pollutants and greenhouse gases. The main findings suggest that growth in OECD countries has been generated almost exclusively through productivity gains, while BRIICS countries have drawn largely on increased utilisation of factor inputs to generate additional growth. Regarding natural capital, in countries such as Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Chile, reliance on subsoil assets extraction has contributed to a significant share of income growth. Results also point to a shift towards more environmentally friendly production processes in many countries. In fact, most OECD countries have decreased their emissions over the last two decades, and these pollution abatement efforts result in an upward adjustment of their GDP growth rates, allowing for a more accurate assessment of their economic performance.

It’s a little hard to tease out (from the abstract, since I haven’t read the paper) whether this means we are turning the corner and becoming more sustainable as a planet, or simply becoming more unsustainable at a slower rate than the past. I suspect it is the latter – so while it might be good news, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we are on a sustainable path.

July 2018 in Review

Most frightening stories:

  • The UN is warning as many as 10 million people in Yemen could face starvation by the end of 2018 due to the military action by Saudi Arabia and the U.S. The U.S. military is involved in combat in at least 8 African countries. And Trump apparently wants to invade Venezuela.
  • The Trump administration is attacking regulations that protect Americans from air pollution and that help ensure our fisheries are sustainable. Earth Overshoot Day is on August 1 this year, two days earlier than last year.
  • The U.S. has not managed a full year of 3% GDP growth since 2005, due to slowing growth and the working age population and slowing productivity growth, and these trends seem likely to continue even if the current dumb policies that make them worse were to be reversed. Some economists think a U.S. withdrawal from the World Trade Organization could trigger a recession (others do not).

Most hopeful stories:

  • Looking at basic economic and health data over about a 50-200 time frame reminds us that enormous progress has been made, even though the last 20 years or so seems like a reversal.
  • Simultaneous Policy is an idea where multiple legislatures around the world agree to a single policy on a fairly narrow issue (like climate change or arms reductions).
  • I was heartened by the compassion Americans showed for children trapped in a cave 10,000 miles away. The news coverage did a lot to humanize these children, and it would be nice to see more of that closer to home.

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

Surveillance in western China

Der Spiegel describes the Chinese government’s surveillance of a minority population in the western part of the country.

Beijing is equipping the far-western province with state-of-the-art surveillance technology, with cameras illuminating every street all over the region, from the capital Urumqi to the most remote mountain village. Iris scanners and WiFi sniffers are in use in stations, airports and at the ubiquitous checkpoints — tools and programs that allow data traffic from wireless networks to be monitored.

The data is then collated by an “integrated joint operations platform” that also stores further data on the populace — from consumer habits to banking activity, health status and indeed the DNA profile of every single inhabitant of Xinjiang.

Anyone with a potentially suspicious data trail can be detained. The government has built up a grid of hundreds of re-education camps. Tens of thousands of people have disappeared into them in recent months. Zenz estimates the number to be closer to hundreds of thousands. More precise figures are difficult to obtain. Censorship in Xinjiang is the strictest in China and its authorities the most inscrutable.

Later the article talks about reeducation camps and a point system that rates how “trustworthy” families are.