Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

Steven Koonin – climate science not settled

Steven Koonin has written an article in the Wall Street Journal called Climate Science Is Not Settled. According to his bio at the end,

Dr. Koonin was undersecretary for science in the Energy Department during President Barack Obama’s first term and is currently director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University. His previous positions include professor of theoretical physics and provost at Caltech, as well as chief scientist of BP, where his work focused on renewable and low-carbon energy technologies.

If I can paraphrase and oversimplify, he thinks that climate science is still too uncertain to make any decisions other than investments in “low-emissions technologies and in cost-effective energy-efficiency measures.” And lots more research, of course. Here is a short passage:

Even though human influences could have serious consequences for the climate, they are physically small in relation to the climate system as a whole. For example, human additions to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by the middle of the 21st century are expected to directly shift the atmosphere’s natural greenhouse effect by only 1% to 2%. Since the climate system is highly variable on its own, that smallness sets a very high bar for confidently projecting the consequences of human influences.

A second challenge to “knowing” future climate is today’s poor understanding of the oceans. The oceans, which change over decades and centuries, hold most of the climate’s heat and strongly influence the atmosphere. Unfortunately, precise, comprehensive observations of the oceans are available only for the past few decades; the reliable record is still far too short to adequately understand how the oceans will change and how that will affect climate.

A third fundamental challenge arises from feedbacks that can dramatically amplify or mute the climate’s response to human and natural influences. One important feedback, which is thought to approximately double the direct heating effect of carbon dioxide, involves water vapor, clouds and temperature.

But feedbacks are uncertain. They depend on the details of processes such as evaporation and the flow of radiation through clouds. They cannot be determined confidently from the basic laws of physics and chemistry, so they must be verified by precise, detailed observations that are, in many cases, not yet available.

You don’t want legitimate scientists with alternative viewpoints to be censored or silenced, so it’s good to read through something like this and draw your own conclusions, while keeping in mind an overwhelming majority of scientists have come to the conclusion that the science is certain enough, and the potential consequences serious enough, to justify action now. His last argument makes no sense to the engineer in me at all, that we shouldn’t try to make projections now using our best understanding of the physical relationships in the system, that we just have to wait until there are changes large enough that we can measure them. If we always did that the entire fields of science, engineering and technology would pretty much grind to a halt, and the rest of our civilization with them.

“help consumers become more irrational”

This Tedx Talk says the idea of “leading with green” in marketing is dying. If we want to scale up green consumer behavior, it says, we have to appeal to people’s irrational interests, like desire for wealth, status, novelty, and sense of altruism.

I instinctively recoil from the marketing-driven view of human beings as brainless consumer robots. And yet, there is no denying that marketing must exist because it works. It bothers me for few reasons. First is the idea that it is necessarily “irrational” to consider emotions in decision making. What is so irrational about trying to experience more pleasure and less pain? Does the fact that it is mental pleasure or pain make it irrational? I don’t think so – trying to improve status because you think it will lead to pleasurable social ties or avoid shame seems perfectly rational to me, as does helping someone so you can avoid feelings of guilt later on.

Another thing that bothers me is the idea that marketers are appealing to people to make choices based on their sense of right and wrong, while not making choices based on their own sense of right and wrong. Sure, it’s true that corporations are amoral piles of paper, but the people inside them do not have to be. We shouldn’t let a pile of paper trying to make a profit remake us flesh and blood humans in its own image.

Clearly a certain segment of the population will make decisions based on their sense of right and wrong. But in order to make the correct choices about right and wrong, they need to correctly predict the consequences of their actions. And to do that, they need to understand the social, economic, and environmental systems we find ourselves embedded in, and we need to look at these systems not just under a microscope and in the short term, but at a larger scale and over long time frames.

So what we need is an education system that teaches ethics and system thinking effectively. Our education system does not do either right now, so we have a situation where even formally educated people have not been given the mental tools to understand the consequences of their choices. A certain segment of the population is willing the make ethical choices, but their sense of right and wrong is easily manipulated by other segments of the population, who themselves have no sense of right and wrong.

If more children were challenged more often to think about right and wrong, as they were also being educated in system thinking, perhaps we could begin to inoculate the population against this madness that is otherwise going to destroy us. I don’t know what fraction of the population has to be ethical system thinkers before our civilization is successful. I think it is much less than 10% now, and it is not working. I don’t think it has to be 100% though. Maybe we should aim for a majority and go from there.

walkability matters – duh

For people still looking for an answer to the question “does walkability matter?”, here is some more solid evidence from Cities to add to the mountain.

In this study, researchers examined 170 neighborhoods in a medium-sized city to see whether walkability influences neighborhood sustainability. Until 2008, there had not been a reliable measure of the social, health, and economic impact of walkable neighborhoods. This dramatically changed when scholars were able to quantify walkability with tools such as Walkscore™; which measures how accessible daily living activities are by foot. The researchers investigated how walkability impacts the quality and sustainability of a neighborhood. They developed models that evaluated the correlation between an area’s Walkscore™ and four broad measures of urban sustainability: neighborhood housing valuation; foreclosures; and crime. Our analysis shows a positive impact not only on neighborhood housing valuation but also on neighborhood crime and foreclosure. These results provide policy opportunities for planners and citizen groups to pursue strategies to encourage the development of more walkable and sustainable neighborhoods.

I know I’m a broken record, but getting around under our own muscle power for most trips most of the time is the key to (in no particular order):

  • reducing carbon emissions
  • reducing air pollution from vehicle emissions, especially particulates which cause asthma and heart disease – this will add quality years to all our lives
  • solving drunk driving
  • saving lots and lots of money that we used to spend on cars
  • saving enormous amounts of space in cities that used to be used for car maneuvering and parking – space that can now be used for relaxing, recreating, habitat, housing, economic or commercial activity
  • creating space for people – yes, you can increase density and reduce crowding at the same time
  • increasing physical health through more physical activity, decreasing obesity, diabetes and heart disease, adding years to peoples’ lives
  • improving psychological health through physical activity
  • increasing social interaction
  • increasing business activity and profits
  • creating an ecosystem of innovative, creative people, businesses, nonprofit and government agencies

growth, sustainability, and employment

This article in Ecological Economics looks at economic growth, sustainability, and employment together:

Two empirical correlations are studied: one between economic growth and environmental impacts, and the other between the lack of economic growth and unemployment. It is demonstrated that, at a global level, economic growth is strongly correlated with environmental impacts, and barriers to fast decoupling are large and numerous. On the other hand, low or negative growth is highly correlated with increasing unemployment in most market economies, and strategies to change this lead to difficult questions and tradeoffs. The coexistence of these two correlations – which have rarely been studied together in the literature on “green growth”, “degrowth” and “a-growth” – justifies ambivalence about growth. To make key environmental goals compatible with full employment, the decoupling of environmental impacts from economic output has to be accompanied by a reduction of dependence on growth. In particular, strategies to tackle unemployment without the need for growth, several of which are studied in this article, need much more attention in research and policy.

I get it – growth and employment are often looked at together in the mainstream economic literature, obviously. Employment is pretty important to living standards and social/political stability. Sustainability and growth are often looked at together in the sustainability literature (which is “mainstream” to some, but not really to most economists). There is an obvious tradeoff between the two as long as our economy devours large amounts of natural resources and produces enormous amounts of waste and pollution. The idea of “decoupling” is that each unit of growth gets slightly greener and cleaner over time. But unfortunately, that process does not seem to be nearly fast enough to prevent eventual collapse. Damage to natural ecosystems is increasing and will eventually threaten the ecosystem services that our human civilization depends on. That is the trend we are on. The only two ways out are to slow growth or to accelerate the decoupling process. This article seems to focus on the former. My opinion is that this path is politically impossible unless it is precipitated by some serious crisis, which we can’t just sit around and wait for because it could cause enormous pain and suffering. So the latter option is the only hope. It is hard but entirely possible if enough people understand the situation and dedicate their efforts to make it happen.

statistical proof that the United States is not a democracy

Here it is at last – from Princeton and Northwestern Universities, statistical proof that the United States is not a democracy:

Each of four theoretical traditions in the study of American politics – which can be characterized as theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic Elite Domination, and two types of interest group pluralism, Majoritarian Pluralism and Biased Pluralism – offers different predictions about which sets of actors have how much influence over public policy: average citizens; economic elites; and organized interest groups, mass-based or business-oriented. A great deal of empirical research speaks to the policy influence of one or another set of actors, but until recently it has not been possible to test these contrasting theoretical predictions against each other within a single statistical model. This paper reports on an effort to do so, using a unique data set that includes measures of the key variables for 1,779 policy issues. Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.

I admit, I didn’t dig in and try to thoroughly understand all the statistics. They took a large data set where people have stated their preferences on various issues over long periods of time. The data set also has information on the incomes of the people responding, so they can do regressions of what various segments of society prefer. Then they look at actual laws that have been passed and compare the two. The results unfortunately but not too surprisingly, show that the preferences of the elite drive actual policy.

Their definition of “elite” was an income of “only” $146,000 a year. Sure, a lot of us would love to have an income of “only” that much. But the point is that is a household of two white collar professionals, not exactly the corporate jet set. So you could say policy seems to represent the preferences of the moderately affluent, upper middle class, or whatever you want to call it. But certainly not the preferences of the median household, the majority, or any sense of broad consensus. I think there is an important distinction to be made between the latter two – the truest democracy, I think, would not be one where 51% of people get their first choice of policy even if the policy is unacceptable to the other 49%. It would be one where the policies chosen are ones almost everyone can accept, even if they are the preferred by almost no one. So it would be a vision of the ideal democracy as diverse people living together in only mildly pissed off tolerance and harmony.

child mortality down 49% since 1990

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.

 

oil prices

It’s interesting that oil prices have slipped back below $100 a barrel ($92.92 for West Texas Intermediate, $96.65 for Brent Crude as I write this on September 15). An NPR article blames this mostly on weak demand, but also maybe on unexpectedly higher supply from North America. Some people are predicting this trend will actually continue:

The International Energy Agency made that point last week, when it said a weaker economic outlook in China and Europe is causing a remarkable slowdown in global demand growth. And demand is declining, West says, as global supplies surge due to the energy boom in North America — including shale oil production from North Dakota and Texas.

“There’s another 3 billion barrels a day that’s coming into the market and staying in the market,” he says. “This has really changed the global supply-demand balance very substantially” — and helped bring more stability to the market…

Fadel Gheit, managing partner and head of oil and gas research at Oppenheimer & Co., says oil prices will still spike higher when severe disruptions occur. But he thinks global supply will continue to grow and keep prices in check.

He predicts that will happen as fracking technology improves, reducing the costs of production.

“The break-even point continues to decline. Yes, we needed $80 [per barrel] oil for the North Dakota Bakken oil development to continue,” he says. “Now, it’s about $65. Five years from now, it could be $50, or even $40.”

In the quote above, I skipped over plenty of dissenting voices in this fair and balanced coverage. Nobody really knows why markets do what they do in the short term, and anything can be rationalized. Then when you go back and look at the data later, often the longer-term trend is staring you in the face. Over the past 10 years or so, the longer-term trend is oil hanging out around $100 or so, whereas it used to be $20-40 for decades and decades before that (this is all adjusted for inflation.) So we’ll see, but I’m not ready to pronounce $100+ oil dead yet just because we’ve been at $96 for a few weeks.

The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth

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.