Category Archives: Web Article Review

water and social unrest

This interview with “British-born novelist and author Rana Dasgupta” talks briefly about economic growth, inequality, and water in India:

There is the potential for immense wealth creation in India in the next 40 or 50 years, so there will be money and resources to redistribute and resources and as long as the tides of poverty and violence are not too catastrophic, then I think probably the system can readjust itself. Right now, within India, without anything else happening outside, there’s enough prospects for growth. In 40 to 50 years, economies of the West are going to be in dramatic decline, and in the longer term, I think the global system as a whole will face some sort of crisis and that will affect India, too. But in the medium term, India has pretty good growth prospects and hopefully there’s the quality of leadership and ideas that can redistribute some of that wealth and find livable solutions to some of these problems.

But inequality and the environment are going to be massive in Indian politics. Really, no one is talking about water, but giving 1.3 billion people clean water to drink is becoming very difficult. And you can’t survive for very long without it, so if a city of 25 million people — and there are at least two Indian cities that have that kind of number — has no water, the effects are immediate. When there’s no housing the effects could be years away, but when there’s no water, there are water riots immediately. People who don’t have it will steal it because they have to.

So water could be one of the triggering events in Indian cities for how a sort of mini-political revolution might happen and realization on the part of the middle classes that there is actually a wider world that is up against its limits.

what’s new with drugs

Drugs are not immune from the current wave of seemingly accelerating innovation (from Pacific Standard Magazine):

New psychoactive substances are coming out so quickly that it’s not possible to ban them fast enough to keep up, let alone police or scientifically understand them. When one substance is outlawed, another is born, just chemically distinct enough from the last one to evade its ban…

Not since the 19th century—when an earlier wave of globalization rapidly accelerated the spread of opium, cocaine, marijuana, and hazily defined “patent medicines”—has there been such a burgeoning and unregulated pharmacopeia. And by all indications, the future promises only more acceleration. Last year, a research lab at Stanford demonstrated that it’s possible to produce opioid drugs like morphine using a genetically modified form of baker’s yeast. Soon, even the production of traditional illegal drugs or illicit versions of pharmaceuticals could become a highly decentralized cottage industry, posing the same kind of regulatory challenge that the specter of 3-D printed firearms poses to the project of gun control.

In 2013, the U.N.’s World Drug Report summed up the global situation this way: “The international drug control system is floundering, for the first time, under the speed and creativity of the phenomenon known as new psychoactive substances.” Testifying before Congress that same year, the DEA’s Joseph Rannazzisi said that his agency could not keep up with “the clandestine chemists and traffickers who quickly and easily replace newly controlled substances with new, non-controlled substances.”

New Zealand is starting to regulate recreational drugs more like food: with labeling, consumer notices, and so on. Sometimes I wonder how long this will stay a mom and pop business – once it’s legal, won’t big drug and chemical companies try to get in on the game? It’s a brave new world.

El Nino

El Nino has officially arrived, according to Slate, and might be a particularly long and strong one.

El Niño transfers huge amounts of heat from the oceans to the atmosphere, and there are hints that this El Niño, combined with the already very warm global oceans, could bring about a new phase in global warming. An associated slow-moving indicator of Pacific Ocean temperatures, called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, reached record levels in December and January. A persistently strong PDO is associated with cold winters in the East and drought in California—we’ve had both in abundance this year. Should the PDO stay strong, it’ll essentially join forces with El Niño and increase the odds that 2015 will rank as the warmest year on record globally. Last fall I wrote that a PDO signal like we’re currently seeing could kick off a surge of global warming over the next five to 10 years.

I don’t have the expertise to say whether this article is sensationalized or not, but it is interesting reading.

By the way, Slate, “The Slatest” is okay, but some of us are still waiting for you to bring back “Today’s Papers”, which was the greatest news summary ever because it would compare and contrast how different media outlets were covering the same story, way back before the Internet was even a thing. I haven’t seen anything like it since. It was “fair and balanced” indeed, and the world got a bit dumber the day it went away. So bring it back, please!

democracy and development

I don’t like to get too much into politics in this blog, and especially not the politics of countries other than my own, but this article about Thailand and Myanmar annoyed me a little bit. I suspect it was written by someone who doesn’t travel much, but is just trying to piece together a story based on things they read in the newspaper. The premise of the story is that there is a clear connection between a western parliamentary system and foreign investment in developing countries. I don’t think this is true – companies in the developed world love investing in developing countries they view as stable and predictable, whether they have representative government or not.

Thailand has made several attempts at a Western-style majority-rule parliamentary model but it simply hasn’t worked – it hasn’t resulted in consensus policies that are acceptable to enough of the various factions of society that they would let the country move forward. So what you see on TV is a somewhat unique way of having that long-term political struggle and trying to come up with something workable. There has been some sporadic violence and loss of life regrettably, but it is nothing remotely close to a “civil war” as some columnists would have us believe. Arguably, this is a democratic process although it is playing out over a long time frame and in a very odd, uniquely Thai way. By the way, there are very real human rights abuses, military violence against civilian protestors, and political repression that have occurred under Thai governments past and present, and I am not condoning any of that in this post.

You can understand why foreign multinational corporations, which have no loyalty or ideology other than profit seeking, might prefer a nearby country like Malaysia or Vietnam, which also offer infrastructure and cheap labor with less chance of the messy political process that is creating some uncertainty in Thailand. Indonesia is another example of a country that has been developing quickly under decades of conservative governments, but is now scaring international companies a little bit with its local brand of democracy. The Phillippines has an American-style constitution, but has never quite gotten its economy in gear.

Burma/Myanmar is interesting because it is somewhat of a blank slate. It could be a laboratory where truly sustainable economic, social, and ecological development policies could be tested and refined if the political leadership really understood and wanted to do that. I think it will more likely just be the next Thailand, with its people richer, healthier, and better educated a decade from now, but missing a portion of the rich culture and natural wonder it used to have. I wish the people of both countries all the best.

climate disinformation?

The New York Times has an article about fossil fuel industry funding of a prominent critic of mainstream climate change science:

For years, politicians wanting to block legislation on climate change have bolstered their arguments by pointing to the work of a handful of scientists who claim that greenhouse gases pose little risk to humanity.

One of the names they invoke most often is Wei-Hock Soon, known as Willie, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who claims that variations in the sun’s energy can largely explain recent global warming. He has often appeared on conservative news programs, testified before Congress and in state capitals, and starred at conferences of people who deny the risks of global warming.

But newly released documents show the extent to which Dr. Soon’s work has been tied to funding he received from corporate interests…

Historians and sociologists of science say that since the tobacco wars of the 1960s, corporations trying to block legislation that hurts their interests have employed a strategy of creating the appearance of scientific doubt, usually with the help of ostensibly independent researchers who accept industry funding.

How much of what we believe is really our own conclusions, and how much of it is manufactured and manipulated without us even suspecting?

1,000 year drought in southwestern U.S.

From the Earth Institute, this drought in the Southwest U.S. is likely to be worse than the one that destroyed an entire advanced civilization in the same spot.

During the second half of the 21st century, the U.S. Southwest and Great Plains will face persistent drought worse than anything seen in times ancient or modern, with the drying conditions “driven primarily” by human-induced global warming, a new study predicts.

The research says the drying would surpass in severity any of the decades-long “megadroughts” that occurred much earlier during the past 1,000 years—one of which has been tied by some researchers to the decline of the Anasazi or Ancient Pueblo Peoples in the Colorado Plateau in the late 13th century. Many studies have already predicted that the Southwest could dry due to global warming, but this is the first to say that such drying could exceed the worst conditions of the distant past. The impacts today would be devastating, given the region’s much larger population and use of resources…

“The results … are extremely unfavorable for the continuation of agricultural and water resource management as they are currently practiced in the Great Plains and southwestern United States,” said David Stahle, professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Arkansas and director of the Tree-Ring Laboratory there.

Discarding the theories about alien abduction, the Anasazi most likely just walked away from their urban lifestyles, which the surrounding ecosystem could no longer support, spread out, and resumed earlier, lower-impact ways of life. Although there was probably significant suffering and loss of life, that entire group of people did not “vanish” – their descendants can still be found in the same general region. Drawing parallels to the modern world, the southwest U.S. is obviously part of an interconnected national and global system, and people, water, materials, and food can be moved around a lot easier than in the 13th century. On the other hand, the world is crowded and there isn’t much space left to spread out in. We can’t have billions of people just walking out of their cities, into the surrounding woods, and resuming a hunting and gathering lifestyle.

fiddling while Sao Paulo burns

Sao Paulo officials knew the city was running out of water, and did nothing, says Jeffry Sachs.

One year ago, I was in Brazil to launch the Brazilian chapter of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), an initiative of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. The main message I heard that day was that São Paulo was suffering from a mega-drought, but that state and local politicians were keeping it quiet. This is a reality around the world: too many political leaders are ignoring a growing environmental crisis, imperiling their own countries and others.

In the case of Brazil, state and local officials had other things on their mind in 2014: hosting the World Cup soccer tournament in June and July and winning elections later in the year. So they relied on a time-tested political tactic: hide the bad news behind a “feel-good” message.

Death Star Discovered

These two views of Ceres were acquired by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft on Feb. 12, 2015, from a distance of about 52,000 miles (83,000 kilometers) as the dwarf planet rotated. The images have been magnified from their original size. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

Apparently the Death Star was not destroyed after all.

Cruising through the asteroid belt, NASA Dawn spacecraft is approaching dwarf planet Ceres, and some puzzling features are coming into focus.

“We expected to be surprised by Ceres,” says Chris Russell, principal investigator of the Dawn mission, based at UCLA. “We did not expect to be this puzzled.”

The camera on Dawn can now see Ceres more clearly than any previous image taken of the dwarf planet, revealing craters and mysterious bright spots.

Mysterious bright spots…I find it odd that this article doesn’t even speculate as to what they might be. Just an optical illusion of some sort? A mineral, radioactive or otherwise? Life, intelligent or otherwise? Aliens preparing to invade? Okay, probably not the latter, because if we got to them before they got to us, we are probably the more advanced species of space monkeys.

Incidentally, on the Death Star issue, the article says this thing has a diameter of 605 miles (974 km). According to the definitive source Wookiepedia, the second Death Star had a diameter of 900 km. So it’s about the right size, given that you don’t know how people come up with these things to begin with. For reference, the Moon has a diameter of about 2,100 miles (3,500 km).

new grocery delivery services

This article is about some new subscription-based grocery delivery services. This could make it even easier to live in car-free walkable communities for those who want to do that. You can shop for fresh food at a market when you want to do that, but have a steady stream of basic staples delivered on a reliable basis. Combine this with smart appliances – meaning your refrigerator and cabinets know what is in them – and you should never have to run out for an item in the middle of the night again. The only possible concern I have is whether this will push us even more towards processed, packaged food.

Sao Paulo Water Crisis

The New York Times has an article about an impending absolute water shortage in Sao Paulo, a metropolitan area of 20 million people.

As southeast Brazil grapples with its worst drought in nearly a century, a problem worsened by polluted rivers, deforestation and population growth, the largest reservoir system serving São Paulo is near depletion. Many residents are already enduring sporadic water cutoffs, some going days without it. Officials say that drastic rationing may be needed, with water service provided only two days a week.

We know mega-cities in the poorest countries struggle to provide water and other basic services, particularly to the poorest people, and climate change is going to make that worse. But this might be the first example of drought and climate change moving up the income scale, affecting relatively affluent people in a relatively affluent (though certainly unequally distributed) city and country. You can say it is due to poor planning or an absence of planning, but that suggests long-term climate change planning is not something any city or country can afford to ignore, no matter how secure its water situation might seem now.