Author Archives: rdmyers75@hotmail.com

August 2014 in Review

At the end of July, my Hope for the Future Index stood at -2. Let’s see if things got any better in August. 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 Ebola outbreak is very sad and scary. Some people are calling this a “dress rehearsal” for the “big one” that could actually threaten humanity more widely. (-1)
  • New research on patents suggests that they have mixed effects, at best, in spurring innovation – they are effective in some industries (like drugs, chemicals, mechanical technology) but actually an impediment to innovation in others (like computers, electronics, medical technology). The former are examples of technologies with very clear “recipes” which can easily be copied, it seems to me, while the latter are complex and knowing how others have made them doesn’t necessarily mean you can make them easily. Another hypothesis would be that the computer industry just moves a lot faster, so knowing how somebody made something yesterday doesn’t help you compete with them, because they have already moved on to the next thing today. But if that is the case, should we be trying to speed up the slow industries rather than giving some players protections that slow or deter their potential competitors? (-0)
  • The drought in the western United States is looking worse and worse. Is it the “new normal”, or is it just a really bad drought, as happens from time to time? Unfortunately we can only answer this question in retrospect, but it seems prudent to take action as though it were the new normal. Even if it turns out just to be a bad drought, it is clear that snow packs we used to rely on are melting and that we have mined groundwater unsustainably in many places. These are things that urgently need new management strategies – lack of rain is just adding insult to injury. On a slightly positive note, agricultural has adapted to change in the past and may be able to adapt again. (-1)
  • In 1986 Ronald Reagan laid out a bold vision for complete elimination of nuclear weapons…which was interpreted by everyone else as a sign of him losing his mind. (-3)
  • A few people are questioning the gospel of shareholder value as the only thing a company, its management and employees have any business caring about. Milton Friedman, if not exactly spinning in his grave, might have rolled over just an inch or two. But most people and companies still take it as…well…gospel. Noam Chomsky can explain pretty well why this is likely to lead our civilization to ruin – because the long-term “externalities” not being considered, which are costs to everyone for the next several generations, are much larger than the short-term financial profits being made by a few shareholders today. (-2)
  • Cars – the more I think about it, the more I am coming to believe they are the root of all evil in our society, and they have to go. But a positive way of saying that is that we could really solve an enormous number of thorny, intertwined problems if we come up with better, cleaner, faster, cheaper, safer ways to get around, which really shouldn’t be hard! (-1)

Positive trends and predictions (+11):

  • I discovered NetLogo, which is a programming language supposedly even children can learn and use to do dynamic simulations. Educational tools like this are critical if we want to build a new generation of system thinkers with any chance to solve our problems. (+3)
  • There is new research on corridors and connectivity for wildlife habitat. This is important because we are not going to have many huge, interrupted reserves in the future and we need the connected patches and smaller reserves that remain, interspersed with the human-dominated landscape, to be as ecologically functional as possible. And it turns out that the human-dominated landscape itself does not have to be an ecological dead zone, but can actually be preferred by some wildlife such as some kinds of birds and bees (+1)
  • David Cameron has announced a bold plan to make chemotherapy “a thing of the past” through accelerated genetic research. (+1)
  • Elon Musk is trying to put sustainable colonies on Mars longer term as a hedge against human extinction, build cheap batteries for cheap electric cars and houses, build cheap solar panels to charge the batteries, and protect us against killer artificial intelligence. (+1)
  • Vermont is adopting the Genuine Progress Indicator, a GDP alternative that adjusts for natural capital depletion. The World Economic Forum also has a nifty GDP alternative index. (+1)
  • Grid parity for solar energy appears to be here, seriously for real this time. Economic mayhem for the business-as-usual fossil fueled utilities is likely to follow. (+3)
  • Speaking of economic mayhem, cap and trade is going on in California! And looks like it is going to add to the cost of gas…ten cents or so. Just a reminder that consumers can either pay that, or choose to adjust their lifestyle ever so slightly to include ten cents less driving. (+1)
  • A couple more fabulous science fiction technologies, which can be used for good or evil or none of the above, are here: virtual reality and remote control moths. (+0)

Hope for the Future Index (July 2014): -2

August 2014 change: -8 + 11 = +3

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

Wow, we’re in positive territory people!

“blue carbon”

This article in Ecological Economics is about carbon sequestration in “mangrove forests, seagrass meadows, and tidal salt marshes”, and policy and market mechanisms that can help make this happen. To me carbon sequestration is not the only or the primary reason to try to conserve these ecosystems, but I will certainly support it if it gets the job done. Plus if we can come up with hard-nosed market-based approaches that actually work, we can apply them to conservation and restoration of a whole range of ecosystems.

Blue carbon – the carbon stored and sequestered in mangrove forests, seagrass meadows, and tidal salt marshes – is considered a cost-effective means to achieve positive climate change mitigation and adaptation outcomes. Blue carbon is therefore of considerable interest to the scientific and policy communities, and is frequently discussed in relation to carbon markets and climate finance opportunities. This paper identifies peer-reviewed and ‘gray literature’ documents that discuss blue carbon in the context of finance and market mechanisms. The document set is analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively, and the principal scientific, economic, regulatory, social, and management issues that emerge are discussed. The study reveals that (1) the blue carbon literature is dominated by technical and policy commentary, with a dearth of research into practical social considerations and a stark absence of private sector perspectives; (2) there is confusion over the nature and role of important concepts including private and public sector finance and instruments; and (3) understanding of the important issues of investment priorities and risk considerations is also limited. This paper therefore identifies gaps in the blue carbon literature, clarifies critical concepts and issues, and proposes novel pathways for blue carbon research and project development.

Integrating the planetary boundaries and global catastrophic risk paradigms

I think this article in Ecological Economics gets at a very important idea. There are planetary boundaries we are at risk of exceeding, most obviously the ability of the atmosphere and oceans to absorb and hold greenhouse gas emissions before reaching some catastrophic tipping point. Then there are catastrophic risks that come out of left field every once in a while, like war, plague, accidents, and asteroid strikes. Since our attention span and ability to respond seems to be severely limited, we really need to understand which of these risks are the most likely and the most consequential, so we know where to focus our efforts.

Planetary boundaries (PBs) and global catastrophic risk (GCR) have emerged in recent years as important paradigms for understanding and addressing global threats to humanity and the environment. This article compares the PBs and GCR paradigms and integrates them into a unified PBs-GCR conceptual framework, which we call Boundary Risk for Humanity and Nature (BRIHN). PBs emphasizes global environmental threats, whereas GCR emphasizes threats to human civilization. Both paradigms rate their global threats as top priorities for humanity but lack precision on key aspects of the impacts of the threats. Our integrated BRIHN framework combines elements from both paradigms’ treatments of uncertainty and impacts. The BRIHN framework offers PBs a means of handling human impacts and offers GCR a theoretically precise definition of global catastrophe. The BRIHN framework also offers a concise stage for telling a stylized version of the story of humanity and nature co-evolving from the distant past to the present to multiple possible futures. The BRIHN framework is illustrated using the case of disruptions to the global phosphorus biogeochemical cycle.

cars are evil

One of the most important things we can do to build a sustainable, resilient society is to design communities where most people can make most of their daily trips under their own power – on foot or by bicycle. It eliminates a huge amount of carbon emissions. It opens up enormous quantities of land to new possibilities other than roads and parking, which right now take up half or more of the land in urban areas. It reduces air pollution and increases physical activity, two things that are taking years off our lives. It eliminates crashes between vehicles, and crashes between vehicles and human bodies, which are serial killers of one million people worldwide every year, especially serial killers of children. It eliminates enormous amounts of dead, wasted time, because commuting is now a physically and mentally beneficial use of time. There is also a subtle effect, I believe, of creating more social interaction and trust and empathy between people just because they come into more contact, and creating a more vibrant, creative and innovative economy that might have a shot at solving our civilization’s more pressing problems.

No, Joel Kotkin, this is not the same thing as saying everybody has to live in tiny apartments, or in a “luxury city” where young childless “hipsters” do nothing but eat and drink and shop and party. Only someone who has never really experienced a walkable community would have this misconception. These are communities where people live, work, innovate, raise families, shop for groceries, garden, and care about each other. There are a lot of ways the actual buildings and infrastructure can be laid out to achieve the basic objective. It might be “dense” in terms of people, but it won’t feel crowded if the space is used well rather than wasted. There can be lots of breathing room for people, and even for plants and wildlife, as long as space is not wasted on oceans of parking lots and rivers of angry people trapped inside glass and steel bubbles separated by one car length for every 10 miles per hour of speed.

urban bee habitat

The BBC has an article on urban habitat for bees:

There is widespread concern that wild bee populations in rural areas are being adversely affected by a number of factors, including pesticides.

“For a bee species to be present in [an urban] habitat, it must be able to find food and nesting substrate,” said co-author Laura Fortel, a researcher from the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA).

“Urban and periurban (the transition between rural and urban) sites can provide high quantities of flowers all year long; they show a high diversity of land cover types and are often warmer than surrounding landscapes.”

She added: “Also, such habitats are seldom treated with pesticides, which are involved in the decline of bees elsewhere.”

It seems like a reversal of conventional wisdom that cities could be important reservoirs of biodiversity when rural agricultural areas have become degraded. In a way it is a negative story, but in another way it is reminder that we should not cynically assume that urban landscapes are always biological dead zones. There is a lot we can do to make them much more ecologically functional for important species of pollinators and birds. If it is happening to some extent by accident, then it could work even better if we did it by design. We can think about how the individual small patches are designed, then think about how they can connect better to each other, to larger urban parks, and to the rural landscape.

the cyborg moths are finally here!

Well, they’re finally here – the cyborg moth slaves. First it was cockroaches and I didn’t say much because, well, they’re cockroaches. But moths – they’re just one step from butterflies, and it just doesn’t seem like you should do this to butterflies. From butterflies the obvious next step is Paul Mcauley’s cyborg baboon-human hybrids. If you read his book of short stories The Invisible Country, it is not until about the second page that you start to think this sort of technology could raise some ethical issues.

 

cap and trade

This Greentech article has a long analysis of how cap-and-trade is likely to affect gas prices in California. The author comes up with ten cents a gallon, then explains why he thinks the higher estimates offered by the oil industry are just scare tactics. To put the ten cents in perspective, he offers the following options to offset the cost:

This is all good, common sense advice. But I would offer one more: live where you can (safely) walk or bicycle to work, shopping, recreation, and medical care. But, you say, I don’t live in a place like that. Well, you control where you live. Decide that in 5 years you want to live in a place like that, then make it happen. If enough people do that, there will be more places like that. Or if you are a truly tough-minded person, decide that in 10 or 20 years you want the place you live now to be like that, find other people who agree with you, and get out there and make it happen. You will not only reduce greenhouse gas emissions and put money back in your pocket. You and your loved ones will be at much less risk of serious injury caused by a car. You won’t drive drunk, or get run over by someone else driving drunk. Increased physical activity and decreased air pollution will add years to your life. And most important, at least to me, commuting will no longer be an enormous waste of so many precious hours of your life, but quite possibly the best part of your day.

monopoly and free markets

This article from Alternet has a nice explanation of why “free markets” in the absence of regulation do not lead to open and fair competition:

Some monopolistic industries mess around with your daily life in an obvious way, like Big Telecom bringing you the low-grade misery of shoddy service and defective products. Others fly a bit lower under the radar, like the credit reporting monopolist Fair Isaac Corp, which can blast your financial existence in a nanosecond…

What I want to see, when I look at a marketplace is: Is that market open to a newcomer?

If I want to go into the business of farming in this community, can I become an independent farmer? If I want to go into the grocery business, can I do that, is it open? If I want to bring a new variety of paint to the market, do I have a place to sell my new variety of paint? If markets are open, that’s a good thing.

What we see is that the people who have actually preached the doctrine of free markets, this last generation, when you go back and look at it historically, is that the idea of free markets really comes out of the Chicago School, the libertarian wing of academia. They were preaching free markets, but when they would preach free markets, they also preached the elimination of all regulation. But when you eliminate all regulation you end up with no markets at all, because you end up with monopolists, and monopolists are the antithesis of an open market.

This idea of markets truly open to new competitors makes a lot of sense, and it makes sense for the government to support it. However, going back to Joseph Schumpeter and his idea of “creative destruction”, there is another kind of competition that may be more important. Competition is not just about new competitors entering the market to provide the exact same good or service in the exact same way. It is also about innovators finding completely new ways to satisfy people. For example, instead of competing with existing car companies by offering a different brand of car, I can compete by inventing Uber, or a car pooling website, or bike share, or protected bicycle lanes. These are alternative ways of meeting peoples’ need and desire to get from point A to point B. Even if the car company has a monopoly on the market for cars and it is hard to enter that market, we can compete with them. In fact, if they are slow to innovate and respond to outside threats, we may be able to crush them.

This model sounds great, but there is something insidious that often happens. The monopolist, instead of responding with innovations of its own, buys political power and uses it to try to prevent others from innovating. You can see this in the fight against Uber, and Airbnb, and selling solar power back to the grid. This is what I find really shameful and undemocratic, and we good citizens should not let it stand.

grid parity

If a good indicator of grid parity is articles about grid parity, then grid parity seems to be here. This article from Renewable Energy World has a good roundup of recent articles on grid parity and the possibly dire consequences for traditional utilities.

And yet the thesis of the Renewable Energy World article seems to be that all this is overblown. Their main argument is just that people won’t switch because they are stubborn. I don’t buy that. I agree that people are not just economic robots who will do cost-benefit analysis and switch instantly, but if the economics is pushing them off the grid then resistance will gradually fade, until one day it will be a landslide. The one thing I think could slow it down would be reliability. It might be annoying and even dangerous if your entire house is giving you a “low battery” signal. Sure, you could keep a diesel generator around. But that involves storing diesel fuel. It would make more sense to just keep a backup battery. But every once in a while, that backup battery might not be enough, so you might need a second backup battery, and so on. Neighbors or whole towns could share a backup system, but then you would be starting to build a grid again. You could have a natural gas generator, but then you need to be on a natural gas grid, and if I had to choose between the electric grid and the latter I would rather go electric.

We can take it as a good sign or a bad sign that traditional utilities are starting to fight back through lobbying and through the courts. They are trying to get states (examples: Florida, Virginia, South Carolina, even Pennsylvania, ) to outlaw or limit selling energy back to the grid, on the grounds that the customers who don’t do it will then have to pay more. This is true as far as it goes – if all but a few people go off the grid, the ones who are left will be stuck paying for the entire traditional system, which doesn’t work. So as a society we can probably afford to support some early adopters, but once it really starts to catch on it’s all or nothing. Lobbying and buying off politicians might slow the tide for awhile but not forever if the forces pushing us in this direction are strong enough. The traditional utilities can either find a way to get in on the game or die.