This Permaculture Research Institute article has some interesting videos about projects to attract more backyard wildlife. I don’t think I could convince my urban neighbors that these are a good idea (a “hotel” for centipedes and bees?) They need some adaptation and scaling for urban areas. It could be done though. I especially like the idea of girls playing with bugs – it is natural for children to be covered in bugs most of the time and modern society has gotten away from that.
Category Archives: Web Article Review
the “greater depression”
This article from Project Syndicate is very pessimistic about prospects for the global economy. It focuses mostly on low inflation:
Draghi began by acknowledging that, in Europe, inflation has declined from around 2.5% in mid-2012 to 0.4% today. He then argued that we can no longer assume that the drivers of this trend – such as a drop in food and energy prices, high unemployment, and the crisis in Ukraine – are temporary in nature.
In fact, inflation has been declining for so long that it is now threatening price stability – and inflation expectations continue to fall. The five-year swap rate – an indicator of medium-term inflation expectations – has fallen by 15 basis points since mid-2012, to less than 2%. Moreover, as Draghi noted, real short- and medium-term rates have increased; long-term rates have not, owing to a decline in long-term nominal rates that extends far beyond the eurozone…
A year and a half ago, those who expected a return by 2017 to the path of potential output – whatever that would be – estimated that the Great Recession would ultimately cost the North Atlantic economy about 80% of one year’s GDP, or $13 trillion, in lost production. If such a five-year recovery began now – a highly optimistic scenario – it would mean losses of about $20 trillion. If, as seems more likely, the economy performs over the next five years as it has for the last two, then takes another five years to recover, a massive $35 trillion worth of wealth would be lost.
When do we admit that it is time to call what is happening by its true name?
This discussion doesn’t really get at potential root causes (a valid criticism of most economic and financial reporting, I think) – is it just a lack of confidence feeding on itself? Is it lack of innovation causing productivity to fall? Is it automation causing productivity to rise but lining too few pockets? Is it climate change or some other manifestation of environmental degradation?
The reference to falling food and energy prices wouldn’t seem to support that last hypothesis. But I don’t quite get it – Brent crude is at $102 a barrel compared to its historic inflation-adjusted level of $20-40 for most of the last century. Meat and grain prices in the U.S. are definitely up due to one of the worst droughts ever in some key farming states. And that’s the U.S., not the tropics where the bulk of humanity now lives and the bulk of food needs to be grown in the future. So if I am right and there are serious pressures on water, energy, and food, we better hope that we are innovating at the same time to do something about it.
12 “sustainable” countries
This post from Alternet says we should admire the following 12 countries for their sustainable policies:
- Iceland
- Switzerland
- Costa Rica
- Sweden
- Luxembourg
- Germany
- Cuba
- Colombia
- Singapore
- France
- Norway
- Finland
Now all these countries definitely have progressive policies that other countries can learn from. But with the possible exceptions of Costa Rica, Cuba, and Colombia, all these countries have a lot of heavy industry and finance. They have large carbon emissions. They have replaced a lot of their original natural habitat with ecologically sterile urban development and factory farming. They house corporate headquarters and investors that exploit natural resources and export urbanization and heavy industry abroad. It simply won’t work to take these best-of-business-as-usual, relatively-low-footprint models and copy them in developing countries on a much larger scale. The resulting footprint will still be much too large, and lead to collapse. So what we need to do is take bits and pieces of what they do well, but come up with a completely new, truly sustainable model.
more on drought in California
From the BBC:
For many years rainfall, reservoirs and irrigation canals have allowed this sunny expanse in California to produce half of America’s fruit, nuts and vegetables.
But after three extremely dry years, the farmers are turning to groundwater to keep their crops and their precious trees alive.
There’s a water-rush as drilling companies are burrowing ever deeper – and there’s no restriction on how many wells can be sunk underground…
In some parts of the Central Valley, the water level has dropped more than 20m in less than a year…
This year, for the first time, farmers in many parts of the Central Valley have received no rainwater or runoff allocation for their crops from the water district…
“If this drought situation is the new normal we are going to have to completely re-think how much food we can grow – and a lot of people depend on California for growing food,” he said.
It can be hard to separate the long-term signal from the short-term noise, but still this seems like it may be climate change finally coming to bite us. That’s what happened in Australia and it took them a decade to accept their “new normal”.
Water, energy, and food supplies (and prices) all fluctuate constantly and affect one another. Here’s NPR talking about a few of these fluctuations but ultimately coming back to, yes, drought.
Across the country, the virus killed several million piglets, adding up to a lot fewer hogs at market. So tighter supply means Lewis gets paid more per pound, per hog.
“It’s been remarkable what the price has done,” says Lewis. “The last couple of years, hog farmers dug a real deep equity hole. And so it’s really nice to have that hole start to get filled up.”
He’s referring partly to the cost of feed — a major expense here on the farm. After record high corn prices in 2012, feed has now gotten cheaper, and Lewis can raise bigger hogs.
It’s a different story with cattle, which take much longer to bring to market. When feed prices skyrocketed two years ago, many ranchers sold off more cattle than they might have otherwise.
That extra beef is long gone, and ongoing drought in the Plains states means herds aren’t growing fast enough to meet demand.
The headline suggests that higher meat prices “aren’t scaring consumers”, but later they say that “Shoppers who can may spend more to eat the same amount of meat. Others will spend just the same, but get less.” That’s how it works in this economic system of ours – those who can pay more, do, and those who can’t, do without.
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.
Dashboard for inclusive, sustainable, and multi- dimensional growth
The World Economic Forum has proposed a “Dashboard for inclusive, sustainable, and multi-dimensional growth.” It includes the World Bank Group’s “adjusted net savings or genuine savings indicator” which sounds to me like GDP with an adjustment for natural capital depletion.
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:
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Drive 70 mph instead of 72 mph on the freeway. That difference would improve your fuel economy by about 2.5 percent. The savings are much larger if you actually drive the speed limit.
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Buy a car that gets 31 mpg instead of 30 mpg. That will get you more than a 3 percent savings in fuel cost, more than offsetting the price increase.
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Keep your tires properly inflated. The Department of Energy estimates that underinflated tires waste about 0.3 percent of gasoline for every 1 psi drop in pressure.
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.