Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

carbon pricing

Here is Christine Laguarde on The Path to Carbon Pricing.

The transition to a cleaner future will require both government action and the right incentives for the private sector. At the center should be a strong public policy that puts a price on carbon pollution. Placing a higher price on carbon-based fuels, electricity, and industrial activities will create incentives for the use of cleaner fuels, save energy, and promote a shift to greener investments. Measures such as carbon taxes and fees, emissions-trading programs and other pricing mechanisms, and removal of inefficient subsidies can give businesses and households the certainty and predictability they need to make long-term investments in climate-smart development.

At the International Monetary Fund, the focus is on reforming its member countries’ fiscal systems in order to raise more revenue from taxes on carbon-intensive fuels and less revenue from other taxes that are detrimental to economic performance, such as taxes on labor and capital. Pricing carbon can be about smarter, more efficient tax systems, rather than higher taxes.

Carbon taxes should be applied comprehensively to emissions from fossil fuels. The price must be high enough to achieve ambitious environmental goals, in alignment with national circumstances, and it must be stable, in order to encourage businesses and households to invest in clean technologies. Administering carbon taxes is straightforward and can build on existing road fuel taxes, which are well established in most countries.

This is one of the few policies that probably almost all economists would agree on – taxing externalities. Instead of allowing businesses individuals to profit while imposing a cost or harm on others, you make them pay that cost as a tax. This has dual benefits – first, it creates an incentive to reduce the negative behavior, second it raises revenue that can replace a tax on work or income. It’s good for the economy, the environment and people.

We do have politicians from one of the two major U.S. parties talking about climate change, and we have a big international summit coming up. So there are opportunities. We should get something done, and then build on it by finding other harmful materials and behaviors we can tax, like fuels that cause air pollution, building materials that cause water pollution, packaging that is not designed to be recycled, and dangerous consumer goods like motor vehicles that kill a million people a year. This is not unprecedented – we did it with cigarettes. By the way, to get this done, we need a constitutional amendment making it crystal clear that a person is a human and a human is a person, and a corporation is not a person for the purposes of political speech.

 

biking as the only form of transport

This article has an interesting slide show on what a city really designed around biking (aka cycling) might look like. Bike lanes go right into and out of buildings. I like the concept, but I wonder what it would be like to walk in this city. I like the idea of a city built for walking as the first and preferred form of transport, then bicycling second, then maybe personal rapid transit third. In my utopia, homes, work places, shopping/resting/gathering places, and natural areas are located so that most people take most daily trips on foot, hop on their bikes a few times a week to go to a meeting or visit friends across town, and hop on some form of motorized transportation maybe once or twice a month to go out of town. Actually that pretty much describes my typical month right here in decidedly non-utopian Philadelphia, USA.

election season

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.

drone stikes

Here’s some more evidence that drone strikes are not as surgical as we have been led to believe.

THE FREQUENCY WITH which “targeted killing” operations hit unnamed bystanders is among the more striking takeaways from the Haymaker slides. The documents show that during a five-month stretch of the campaign, nearly nine out of 10 people who died in airstrikes were not the Americans’ direct targets. By February 2013, Haymaker airstrikes had resulted in no more than 35 “jackpots,” a term used to signal the neutralization of a specific targeted individual, while more than 200 people were declared EKIA — “enemy killed in action.”

In the complex world of remote killing in remote locations, labeling the dead as “enemies” until proven otherwise is commonplace, said an intelligence community source with experience working on high-value targeting missions in Afghanistan, who provided the documents on the Haymaker campaign. The process often depends on assumptions or best guesses in provinces like Kunar or Nuristan, the source said, particularly if the dead include “military-age males,” or MAMs, in military parlance. “If there is no evidence that proves a person killed in a strike was either not a MAM, or was a MAM but not an unlawful enemy combatant, then there is no question,” he said. “They label them EKIA.” In the case of airstrikes in a campaign like Haymaker, the source added, missiles could be fired from a variety of aircraft. “But nine times out of 10 it’s a drone strike.”

guns, germs, and porcines

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.

Freeman Dyson on the origin of life

Recently I remembered that Freeman Dyson has this dissenting view on the origin if life. It’s a little hard to follow, but the basic idea is that life preceded DNA/RNA. It started as simple molecules that were able to metabolize, grow and evolve, but not able to replicate themselves efficiently. In other words, life without DNA. If I understand it correctly, this means DNA/RNA would have had to arise separately, perhaps as a virus that then infected the larger molecules and gave rise to modern cells. The most interesting implication, to me, is that this means life arose more than once. So life arising is not as rare an event as we might think. Maybe it happens relatively frequently under a range of conditions, and maybe Earth is not the only place it happens. Maybe it arises frequently, but it rarely gets off the ground. Dyson admits his theory is rejected or ignored by most biologists, but he insists it fits the facts. I was reading this abstract in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, which was a little over my head but reminded me of Dyson’s theory.

Despite recent progress, the origin of the eukaryotic cell remains enigmatic. It is now known that the last eukaryotic common ancestor was complex and that endosymbiosis played a crucial role in eukaryogenesis at least via the acquisition of the alphaproteobacterial ancestor of mitochondria. However, the nature of the mitochondrial host is controversial, although the recent discovery of an archaeal lineage phylogenetically close to eukaryotes reinforces models proposing archaea-derived hosts. We argue that, in addition to improved phylogenomic analyses with more comprehensive taxon sampling to pinpoint the closest prokaryotic relatives of eukaryotes, determining plausible mechanisms and selective forces at the origin of key eukaryotic features, such as the nucleus or the bacterial-like eukaryotic membrane system, is essential to constrain existing models.

 

 

how big is the solar system?

Here is an interesting reminder how big the solar system really is. These people used a weather balloon to represent the sun. Then the planets were marbles of varying sizes, and they had to be placed miles apart in the Nevada desert to represent the right size. They tried to measure it out accurately, then drove around in the dark and used time lapse photography to capture the orbits. Cool stuff.

 

Russian nuclear materials

I thought we were told the Soviet nuclear materials were “secured” in the 1990s. I think what that meant is that most of them were moved from surrounding countries to Russia and placed under guard. But first of all, there may have been some unaccounted for. And second of all, it doesn’t much matter if they are under guard in Russia if there are corrupt Russian authorities stealing and trying to sell them, which apparently is what is happening:

Criminal organizations, some with ties to the Russian KGB’s successor agency, are driving a thriving black market in nuclear materials in the tiny and impoverished Eastern European country of Moldova, investigators say. The successful busts, however, were undercut by striking shortcomings: Kingpins got away, and those arrested evaded long prison sentences, sometimes quickly returning to nuclear smuggling, AP found.

Moldovan police and judicial authorities shared investigative case files with the AP in an effort to spotlight how dangerous the nuclear black market has become. They say the breakdown in cooperation between Russia and the West means that it has become much harder to know whether smugglers are finding ways to move parts of Russia’s vast store of radioactive materials — an unknown quantity of which has leached into the black market…

The most serious case began in the spring of 2011, with the investigation of a group led by a shadowy Russian named Alexandr Agheenco, “the colonel” to his cohorts, whom Moldovan authorities believe to be an officer with the Russian FSB, previously known as the KGB. A middle man working for the colonel was recorded arranging the sale of bomb-grade uranium, U-235, and blueprints for a dirty bomb to a man from Sudan, according to several officials. The blueprints were discovered in a raid of the middleman’s home, according to police and court documents.

I always find it depressing to think that after all the heroic efforts and relative success fighting nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism over the decades, it would only take one incident to bring it all crashing down.

There is a slightly comical side to this otherwise terrifying story. All the U.S. headlines are predictably about Islamic State. But in this story, the bad guys are the sellers – Russian and Moldovan gangsters. The buyers were not actual Islamic State, but FBI agents posing as Islamic State.

Dyson, Feynman, Hawking… Carson?

Thinking back to my recent post about Freeman Dyson – a brilliant physicist who has suggested solutions to problems in biology, which biologists refuse to take seriously.

Here is what Richard Feynman has to say about scientists trying to solve puzzles outside their fields:

I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy — and when he talks about a nonscientific matter, he will sound as naive as anyone untrained in the matter…

In this age of specialization men who thoroughly know one field are often incompetent to discuss another. The great problems of the relations between one and another aspect of human activity have for this reason been discussed less and less in public. When we look at the past great debates on these subjects we feel jealous of those times, for we should have liked the excitement of such argument. The old problems, such as the relation of science and religion, are still with us, and I believe present as difficult dilemmas as ever, but they are not often publicly discussed because of the limitations of specialization.

Maybe, but is the solution then for everyone to specialize, accept the blinders that specialization causes, and never look beyond them? That can’t be right. The solution has to be for everyone to be trained in a comprehensive, general theory of system science. Then some people remain generalists, while others go on to specialize in a particular type or locality within that larger system theory. Then we would all have a common language and framework for talking to each other.

Take the case of Ben Carson, the “neuroscientist who can’t think“:

When Trump, an alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, says that climate change is a hoax, I can believe it’s a cynical lie pandering to the Republican base, rather than an index of his ignorance.  But when Carson, a retired Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon, denies that climate change is man-made, or calls the Big Bang a fairy tale, or blames gun control for the extent of the Holocaust, I think he truly believes it.

It’s conceivable that the exceptional hand-eye coordination and 3D vision that enabled Carson to separate conjoined twins is a compartmentalized gift, wholly independent of his intellectual acuity. But he could not have risen to the top of his profession without learning the Second Law of Thermodynamics (pre-meds have to take physics), without knowing that life on earth began more than 6,000 years ago (pre-meds have to take biology), without understanding the scientific method (an author of more than 120 articles in peer-reviewed journals can’t make up his own rules of evidence).  Yet what does it mean to learn such things, if they don’t stop you from spouting scientific nonsense? …

What I don’t get is how his rigorous scientific education and professional training gave Carson’s blind spots a pass.

The Feynman quote is in a Forbes article trying to refute Stephen Hawking talking about technological unemployment. From the Forbes article:

…the rise of the robots cannot possibly make us any poorer than we are now. And that’s in the very worst case: the worst that can possibly happen is that some other people become richer and we get to jog along much as we do now. That’s also the result that is vanishingly unlikely to actually happen. What is far more likely to happen is that we all, jointly, become vastly wealthier…

We have some mixture of human labour and machinery, automation, which produces the things that we consume today. Further, the only useful definition of income is what we’re able to consume. We’re not really interested in whether people have jobs or not, we also don’t care very much about income as income. The root point that we do care about is that people are able to consume things. Shelter, clothing, food, health care, the real point is that people get to eat, sleep under a roof, not be naked (except, of course, when that’s more fun), get treated for what ails them (possibly the result of that fun) and so on. Or, as Adam Smith said, the sole purpose of any production is consumption. It is only consumption, the ability to consume, which is the issue of any importance.

Well, I have a big philosophical problem that the idea that the purpose of life is consumption. What about love, art, achievement, leisure? But let’s stick to science and economics. I don’t have to be Stephen Hawking or even Richard Feynman to give some easy counter-examples. First, if we “produce” more, as measured in dollars changing hands, we can easily be degrading things that aren’t easily measured in dollars, like the atmosphere, forests, and oceans, for example. And eventually, the loss of these ecosystems could bring our civilization to its knees, making us very poor indeed in material terms, no how many dollars we thought we had. That’s a little theoretical, but for recent and obvious cases of technological unemployment, look at the displacement of agricultural workers in the southern U.S. in the early to mid-20th century, and the continuing poverty, ill health, and social problems of their descendants today. Or if you think racism was a larger factor than economic factors there (I think the two are overlapping and intertwined in many ways), look at the factory workers in Appalachia, both black and white, who were displaced by lower cost labor overseas. Again, their descendants are beset by widespread poverty, health and social problems which show no sign of getting better any time soon. So clearly, technological unemployment causes real poverty and suffering for some people, some places, and some times. The difference between these past examples and the AI future might be that it affects most people, most places, all the time, unless we find political solutions to spread the wealth.

And here is Stephen Hawking on exactly that subject in his recent “ask me anything” session:

The outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.

Now, I’m not a famous physicist or even a brain surgeon, but that sounds about right to me.