Category Archives: Web Article Review

the yeast vats are here

Asimov’s 1953 novel Caves of Steel featured food grown in vats by genetically modified yeast. It took awhile, but that’s here.

Cargill’s new product is an example of synthetic biology, a form of genetic engineering that uses modified organisms to manufacture compounds that would never be produced naturally. What makes EverSweet taste sweet is not stevia; it is a compound produced by a bioengineered yeast…

Ingredients that are being replaced or are likely to be exchanged for products made through synthetic biology include vanilla, saffron, coconut oil, patchouli, olive squalene, and rose oil. Indeed, the world’s largest cosmetics, flavor, and fragrance companies are hoping that synthetic biology will help them replace more than 200 natural botanical extracts.

This particular article is most worried about large food and chemical corporations replacing products formerly produced by small farmers. That’s a shame. It also talks about the growing backlash from the anti-GMO crowd. But the fact is, the backlash is probably growing because the technology has reached commercial viability. There may be a silver lining – if we are worried about ultimately hitting photosynthetic limits on food production, this may be a way around it. I think yeast will eat pretty much anything organic – mine like barley and honey, but I suspect you could feed them garbage, sewage, etc. in a severely resource constrained world. The dark cloud to the silver lining is always that if you remove one constraint, your ecological footprint will tend to keep growing until you encounter another one. The people in the caves of steel weren’t doing all that well as I recall.

Central Oslo Car Free by 2019

According to Reuters:

Cars will be banned from central Oslo by 2019 to help reduce pollution, local politicians said on Monday, in what they said would be the first comprehensive and permanent ban for a European capital…

Under the plans, the council will build at least 60 kilometers of bicycle lanes by 2019, the date of the next municipal elections, and provide a “massive boost” of investment in public transport.

Several European capitals have previously introduced temporary car bans in their city centers, including Paris last month. Some such as London or Madrid have congestion charges to limit car traffic.

CIA torture

Here are some really sickening descriptions of post-2001 CIA torture. It starts with a pretty awful case, but then it goes on and on.

It was the CIA’s goal, through a program designed and executed by two psychologists the agency contracted to run its torture operations, to break his mind. Integral to the program was the idea that once a detainee had been psychologically destroyed through torture, he would become compliant and cooperate with interrogators’ demands. The theory behind the goal had never been scientifically tested because such trials would violate human experimentation bans established after Nazi experiments and atrocities during World War II. Yet that theory would drive an experiment in some of the worst systematic brutality ever inflicted on detainees in modern American history.

 

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.

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.