Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

solar roads

I clicked on this article from Woodhouse about new paving technologies expecting to hear about porous pavement. But it turned out to be all about paving with solar panels:

The company’s aim is to reduce carbon emissions by paving currently tarmacked surfaces with solar panels, turning a previously unproductive landmass into a renewable energy powerhouse.

The solar energy collected by the smart surface could be used to feed the grid during the day time, or even power things such as heating elements under the surface to clear ice and snow from the roads in the winter. Eventually, it might be possible to power electric cars as they drive along.

Pavement covers enormous areas in our cities, so this could be huge. On the other hand, the lack of any mention of stormwater worries me slightly. There is a lot more time and effort going into developing better materials to capture energy than to manage water, when both are important. In fact, when it gets to the point (now in some places, very soon in others) where people can make serious money installing solar panels on their rooftops and paved surfaces, that could even come into conflict with stormwater management opportunities (green roofs and porous pavement being two examples). On the other hand, my water bill has been creeping up to the point where it is not that much less than my electric and natural gas bills. So where the economic drivers have been overwhelmingly on the side of energy until recently, water may be catching up. Of course, we want to find materials and approaches that do both, so let’s get to work on that.

new vs. old economy in Pennsylvania

Pennsylvania – we’re not always known as the most progressive of states, at the forefront of the major trends – but even here, the old business as usual economy is fighting against the new, more sustainable one. At the moment, traditional electric utilities seem to be winning their battle to limit the amount of solar energy homeowners can sell back to the grid. But at the same time, Uber and Lyft seem to be making progress in their battle against the filthy sleazy old taxi companies. One thing Uber has now that taxis never have even considered – car seats! I would support it for that reason alone.

slavery

What happens when an economic system is designed to support the profit-seeking of a small class of immoral people? Well, that sort of thing might have happened somewhere in the world in the past, but certainly not in the United States. Oh wait…

The domestic slave trade was highly organized and economically efficient, relying on such modern technologies as the steamboat, railroad and telegraph…

The sellers of slaves, Baptist insists, were not generally paternalistic owners who fell on hard times and parted reluctantly with members of their metaphorical plantation “families,” but entrepreneurs who knew an opportunity for gain when they saw one. As for the slave traders — the middlemen — they excelled at maximizing profits…

Planters called their method of labor control the “pushing system.” Each slave was assigned a daily picking quota, which increased steadily over time. Baptist, who feels that historians too often employ circumlocutions that obscure the horrors of slavery, prefers to call it “the ‘whipping-machine’ system.” In fact, the word we should really use, he insists, is “torture.” To make slaves work harder and harder, planters utilized not only incessant beating but forms of discipline familiar in our own time — sexual humiliation, bodily mutilation, even waterboarding. In the cotton kingdom, “white people inflicted torture far more often than in almost any human society that ever existed.”

These are quotes from a New York Times review of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist.

Ryan Avent on Automation

In this Economist podcast, Ryan Avent talks about how automation is leading to a “hollowing out” of the workforce. Basically, the concept is that as computers and machines get better at performing more and more skilled jobs (book-keeping is one example given), there is gradually less demand for the medium-skilled workers who used to do those jobs. High-skilled workers like computer programmers are doing very well, although I presume the automation will gradually creep higher and higher up the chain, so today’s safer jobs will be less safe tomorrow.

At the same time these medium-skilled workers in developed countries are getting squeezed out, developing countries are not benefiting like they used to from their large pools of low-skilled workers as manufacturing becomes more and more automated, and can be done cost-effectively closer to consumers in richer countries.

trees!

Here’s a long document from the “Trees and Design Action Group” in the UK about everything to do with planting trees in the city. Of particular use to me are some good references on dealing with underground utilities, species selection, and just lots and lots of great pictures. Even some nice stats on the odds of being killed by a tree compared to car accidents and cancer (the odds are very low, but not zero).  Trees really can be done a lot better than most American cities do them.

automation

Longreads has an excerpt from Nicholas Carr’s book The Glass Cage: Automation and Us

The historian Thomas Hughes, in reviewing the arrival of the electric grid in his book Networks of Power, described how first the engineering culture, then the business culture, and finally the general culture shaped themselves to the new system. “Men and institutions developed characteristics that suited them to the characteristics of the technology,” he wrote. “And the systematic interaction of men, ideas, and institutions, both technical and nontechnical, led to the development of a supersystem—a sociotechnical one—with mass movement and direction.” It was at this point that what Hughes termed “technological momentum” took hold, both for the power industry and for the modes of production and living it supported. “The universal system gathered a conservative momentum. Its growth generally was steady, and change became a diversification of function.” Progress had found its groove.

We’ve reached a similar juncture in the history of automation. Society is adapting to the universal computing infrastructure—more quickly than it adapted to the electric grid—and a new status quo is taking shape. The assumptions underlying industrial operations have already changed. “Business processes that once took place among human beings are now being executed electronically,” explains W. Brian Arthur, an economist and technology theorist at the Santa Fe Institute. “They are taking place in an unseen domain that is strictly digital.” As an example, he points to freight shipping. Not long ago, coordinating a shipment of cargo across national borders required legions of clipboard-wielding functionaries. Now, it’s handled by computers. Commerce of all sorts is increasingly managed through, as Arthur puts it, “a huge conversation conducted entirely among machines.” To be in business is to have networked computers capable of taking part in that conversation. Any sizable company has little choice but to automate and then automate some more. It has to redesign its work flows and its products to allow for ever-greater computer monitoring and control, and it has to restrict the involvement of people in its supply and production processes. People, after all, can’t keep up with computer chatter; they just slow down the conversation.

“Living Planet Report”

WWF has released a new edition of their “Living Planet Report”. I like this report, for one thing, because it has kept the idea of ecological footprint alive. Ecological footprint was originally developed, or at least widely publicized, in this book in the 90s:

Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth

Ecological footprint may be the most intuitive way of explaining the idea that humanity is overdrawing the Earth’s resources. The new report puts the ecological footprint at 1.5, meaning 1.5 Earth’s would be required to support our current level of natural resource consumption and waste production indefinitely. To understand how this is possible, imagine you are lucky enough that your parents put a massive trust fund in your name the day you are born. Being born on the Earth is like this. If you are smart, you can live your entire life on the interest, and so can your children and children’s children, as long as they are as smart as you. If you are dumb, you can live an extravagant lifestyle for some period of time, maybe a long time, but eventually it will catch up to you. An ecological footprint of 1.5 suggests that humanity is using up about 1.5 times the amount of natural capital each year that the Earth can support in the long term. Natural capital is the obvious things like fossil fuels and fish, but also less tangible things like fertile soils and the ability of the oceans and atmosphere to absorb our waste products.

The accuracy of Wackernagel’s methods can be endlessly debated, and have been, but the WWF report also has a reader-friendly summary of more recent academic work on “planetary boundaries”. These look at carbon emissions, loads of nitrogen pollution, crop land as a percent of ice-free land, and humanity’s appropriation of primary productivity, among other things. And generally, I think they converge on a pretty similar conclusion that we are living beyond our means and eventually we are going to pay. Normally I try not to shamelessly promote my book, but for my book I made what I think is a pretty cool and useful graphic, which I am sharing below.

planetary_boundaries

Summary of Ecological Footprint and Planetary Boundary Literature

And just in case you think I might be making this stuff up, here are my references:

Rockstrom, J. et al., 2009. Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity. Ecology and Society 14, 32.

Running, S.W., 2012. A Measurable Planetary Boundary for the Biosphere. Science 337, 1458–1459. doi:10.1126/science.1227620

Wackernagel, M. and W. Rees, 1996. Our ecological footprint: reducing human impact on the earth, New catalyst bioregional series. New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, BC ; Philadelphia, PA.

 

the shifts and the shocks

The Shifts and the Shocks: What We’’ve Learned —and Have Still to Learn— from the Financial Crisis

Felix Salmon in the New York Times has this to say:

Martin Wolf is as grand and important as an economic journalist can ever become… His is the loudest and foremost voice saying that the global policy response to the crisis was far too timid; that it all but ensures we will have an even worse crisis down the road; and that unless we start implementing extreme measures today, we will be running headlong into catastrophe.

According to Salmon, his (Wolf’s) solution to the problem is the following:

  1. “central banks should target a much higher rate of inflation”
  2. “abolishing ­fractional-reserve banking, which would give governments the job of directly creating all the money in the economy”
  3. “attempts to prevent corporations from accumulating cash”
  4. “an end to the tax-deductibility of interest payments”
  5. “a scaling back of international banks”
  6. “a mass refinancing of European sovereign debt into eurobonds”
  7. “a radical change in debt contracts to make them much more equitylike”

Okay. I don’t know. I don’t really have the expertise to agree or disagree. All this seems aimed at giving the government and/or central bankers more direct control over the money supply. But do the experts really know exactly what the money supply should be? If we give the keys to the printing press over to the politicians, I think we know what will happen. If we give them to a handful of “experts”, I’m not sure we know what will happen, except that the world economy will be at the mercy of whatever theories they happen to believe in. That leaves the ebb and flow of individual banks setting interest rates based on supply, demand, and greed, with the government trying to nudge the system back toward balance if it starts to get out of balance.

It doesn’t seem like a great system, but if we experiment with something different and it causes the masses to lose our faith that money is a real thing (because it is only because we think it is), that would be hard to recover from. So I don’t know, maybe higher capital requirements but short of 100%, complete transparency in trading of derivatives and other weird forms of risk trading, and a constitutional amendment (in the U.S. anyway) to ban campaign contributions or political speech of any kind by financial corporations. The individual human persons who work for those corporations could still engage in political speech, of course, but only as private citizens using their own time and money.

September 2014 in Review

At the end of August, my Hope for the Future Index stood at +1.  As I did last month, I’ll sort selected posts that talk about positive trends and ideas vs. negative trends, predictions, and risks. Just for fun, I’ll keep a score card and pretend my posts are some kind of indicator of whether things are getting better or worse. I’ll give posts a score from -3 to +3 based on how negative or positive they are.

Negative trends and predictions (-8):

  • The drought in California’s Central Valley and on the Great Plains continues to get worse. (-1)
  • There are signs that Europe may be in a long-term economic depression. The term “new normal” is being batted around to describe a possible long term slowdown in growth affecting the entire world. (-2)
  • Governments and corporations are starting to use armed drones in crowd control. (-1)
  • In a new simulation of a society with increasing resource scarcity and technological innovation, increasing resource scarcity wins. (-1)
  • Meat and dairy consumption can’t continue rising at their current rate forever. (-1)
  • Herman Daly reminds us that the most common measure of economic growth does not distinguish between costs and benefits. Benjamin Friedman, in arguing that there is a moral imperative for economic growth, also used a more socially inclusive definition of growth than the most common one in use today. (-1)
  • The Ebola outbreak continues to get worse and worse, although people are arguing that this is not the type of plague that could threaten civilization itself. (-1)

Positive trends and predictions (+8):

  • Some countries have more sustainable policies than others, and the world could become more sustainable if we all copy the best examples. But even then, the world would probably not be sustainable enough. (+0)
  • People have come up with some novel ideas for backyard wildlife habitat. (+1)
  • Big companies are figuring out how to set up units that innovate more like startups. (+1)
  • Walkable cities with green infrastructure may help boost creativity and problem solving. There is plenty of evidence that walkability might be the single most important key to more sustainable cities. (+1)
  • There have actually been small advances in telepathy. Too soon to say if this will be used for good or evil. (+0)
  • There is a new generation of robot vacuum cleaners. Anything that can free humanity from the drudgery of house work has to be a good thing – almost any other use of our time has to be more productive, creative, or at least more fun. (+1)
  • There is some buzz about sustainable consumption. I just don’t know – the whole concept of “consumption” as an end in itself seems unsustainable to me. (+0)
  • There is also continuing buzz about “green growth” and “de-growth”, but in my opinion very little evidence that these ideas are catching on. (+0)
  • We were reminded that green infrastructure is more than just stormwater management. It’s a beautiful vision to link stormwater management, urban trees and parks, corridors and rural reserves together. But we need more people to share the vision and make it happen. (+1)
  • Another way to make cities a lot more sustainable is to have the price of parking actually reflect its total economic, social, and environmental cost, including the opportunity cost of the oceans of land that are just wasted. (+1)
  • Worldwide child mortality has dropped almost by half just since 1990. (+2)

Hope for the Future Index (August 2014): +1

August 2014 change: -8 + 8 = 0

Hope for the Future Index (September 2014): +1

super mosquitoes

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%.