inequality and carbon emissions

A paper in Ecological Economics explores the links between inequality and carbon emissions.

The Trade-off Between Income Inequality and Carbon Dioxide Emissions

We investigate the theoretically ambiguous link between income inequality and per capita carbon dioxide emissions using a panel data set that is substantially larger (in both regional and temporal coverage) than those used in the existing literature. Using an arguably superior group fixed effects estimator, we find that the relationship between income inequality and per capita emissions depends on the level of income. We show that for low and middle-income economies, higher income inequality is associated with lower carbon emissions while in upper middle-income and high-income economies, higher income inequality increases per capita emissions. The result is robust to the inclusion of plausible transmission variables.

It could be that as developing countries develop, greener technologies become available to the working and middle classes faster than their household incomes actually increase. I am thinking of a switch from biomass and coal to electricity and natural gas, for example. These will lower people’s ecological footprint without necessarily costing them a lot more money. Once they start to get more money, they may start to transition to higher-impact behaviors, like driving instead of bicycling, and eating more meat and less grain.

You certainly wouldn’t want to promote income inequality as a policy measure to help the environment. There are social and tax policies that could be pursued instead, for example keeping communities walkable and mixed use even as incomes rise, and pricing meat at its true cost to the environment. These aren’t easy things to do politically in developing countries or anywhere else, of course, because they would require a political system willing to take on corporate power such as the oil, automobile, highway, and agriculture industries which tend to be immensely powerful and intertwined with political, bureaucratic and military elites.

Swale

Swale is a public food forest on a barge in New York City. Here’s what they’re growing:

Swale’s plant community is made up of perennial native fruit trees and shrubs, leafy self-seeding annuals and salt loving grasses. Our model for landscape design is inspired by edible forestry,  permaculture, and salt-tolerant estuary ecosystems. Our plants have come from many generous donations from Greenbelt Native Plant Center, the New York City Parks Department and Visitors onboard! Our plant list is always expanding. Want to bring a plant onboard Swale? Let us know!

Here’s what’s currently onboard:

Canopy
Beach Plum, Black Chokeberry, Black Tupelo, Black willow, ‘Enterprise’ Apple, ‘Goldrush’ Apple, Fuyu Persimmon, Goji Berry, Hawthorn, Italian Alder, Newtown Pippin Apple (native to Queens NY!), Liberty Apple, ‘Northern Spy’ Apple, Northline Serviceberry, Pitch pine, Red Chokeberry, Sweetbay Magnolia

Shrub
American Red Raspberry, Arkansas Blackberry, Blue Ridge Blueberry, Dogbane, Eastern Juniper, False Indigo, Flame Willow, Golden Curls Willow, Gooseberry, Missouri River Willow, Northern Highbush Blueberry, Pennsylvania Blackberry, Red Stem Dogwood, Rosemary, Sassafras, Triple Crown Blackberry, Winterberry

Herbaceous
Asparagus, American, Blackgrass, Black eyed Susan, Buck’s Horn Plantain, Bugleweed, Anise Hyssop, Aster (New England), Bee Balm, Black Eyed Susan, Borage, Comfrey, Dandelion, Daylily, Echinacea, Evening primrose, French Sorrel, Garlic Chives, Goldenrod, Ground Cherry, Hopi Red Dye Amaranth, Lavender, Lemon Balm, Lettuce, Lovage, Meadowsweet, Milkweed, Miners Lettuce, Oregano, Peppermint, Perpetual Swiss Chard, Red Mustard, Red Russian Kale, Roman Chamomile, Rosemallow, Scallion, Saltgrass, Saltmeadow rush, Sea pea, Shore little bluestem, Spotted Joe Pye Weed, Stinging Nettle, Swamp Goldenrod, Sylvetta Arugula, Tansy, Virginia mountain mint, White Avens, Wild leek, Whorled mountain mint, Yarrow

Ground Cover
Creeping Thyme, Creeping raspberry, Golden oregano, Purslane, Strawberries, White Clover, Wild Low bush blueberry

Rhizosphere
Adam’s yucca, Groundnut, Jerusalem Artichoke, Walking Onion, Wild Yam

Vertical Layer
Clematis, Grapes, Hardy Kiwi, Hops, Scarlet runner beans

iris scans

Border counties in Texas are using mandatory iris scans to build a database of illegal immigrants. I imagine it will spread to big city police departments, and then to everywhere else. I imagine at some point it will become a form of identification people can use as an alternative to carrying a wallet and passport. I don’t know that the technology is concerning in and of itself – it’s essentially just a modern and accurate form of identification. What’s concerning is what some immoral governments, amoral corporations, and criminal elements might be able to do with large databases of this type of information.

Cloud Atlas

I just finished Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, and found it to be the best book I have read in awhile. It fits the themes of this blog, but I really don’t want to say too much more about it up front, because it employs some really interesting story telling techniques that I think are much more interesting to discover as you go along than to know about up front. So I don’t recommend reading a review or even description of the book, just read the book itself.

the urban cool island

Here’s an article on quantifying the urban cool island. Which, as you might expect, is the opposite of the urban heat island.

Quantifying the cool island effects of urban green spaces using remote sensing Data

Urban Heat Island (UHI) leads to increased energy consumption, aggravated pollution and threatened health of citizens. Urban green spaces mitigate UHI effects, however, it is still unclear how the green space characteristics and its surrounding environment affects the green space cool island (GCI). In this study, land surface temperature (LST) and land cover types within the outmost ring road of Shanghai, China were obtained from Landsat 8 data and high-resolution Google Earth data. The GCI effects were defined in three aspects: GCI range (GR), amplitude of temperature drop (TA) and temperature gradient (TG). Pearson correlation analysis was processed to get the relationship between the aspects and impact factors. The results indicated that the GCI principle could be explained by the thermal conduct theory. The efficient methods to decrease LST of green spaces include increasing green space area while staying below the threshold, adding complexity of green space shape, decreasing impervious surfaces and enlarging the area of water bodies. For the surrounding environment of the green spaces, increasing vegetation and water body fractions or decreasing impervious surfaces will help to strengthen GCI effects. The findings can help urban planners to understand GCI formation and design cool green spaces to mitigate UHI effects.

This is a subject where I’m out of my depth in terms of formal training, but certainly interested. There are at least two ways you can try to combat the urban heat island effect, which occurs when pavement and other man-made surfaces absorb heat during the day and release it slowly at night (and during the day). The first is to use light-colored materials to reflect sunlight back into space. Using white roof materials whenever practical seems like a no-brainer. Maybe we don’t want snow white paving materials everywhere at the ground level, because that could be displeasing and even painful to the eye, but certainly we could dispense with the asphalt. Even if asphalt didn’t absorb heat, it would still be a hideous, toxic, short-lived material. It’s better to use concrete or brick or stone or almost anything else – it may cost more up front but it will last longer and just generally make our urban areas better. Materials that are permeable to rain water are also available so let’s consider those where they make sense.

The other way is to maximize the use of soil and vegetated surfaces. Soil and vegetated surfaces also absorb heat, I think, but then dissipate much of it again through evaporation and transpiration. Then there is the simple process of tree canopy create shade at ground level (which I imagine satellite studies like the one above may have trouble picking up on). In very dry climates, this may not be practical because to state the obvious, you need water to have evaporation. In very, very wet climates, it might make sense to store rainwater and intentionally spray it on your paved surfaces to cool them down. This is assuming you want to get rid of the heat and water – if you are in a place where water is scarce and precious, you might not want to do that, and you might even want to think twice about having a lot of vegetated surface. Or maybe that is not the right place for large numbers of people to live. Unless you can create more or less a closed-loop water system, in which case it might be a good place, thinking in terms of ecological footprint and preparing for humanity’s possible future in space.

synergy, uniqueness, and redundancy in interacting environmental variables

This is a bit over my head, but one thing I am interested in is analyzing and making sense of a large number of simultaneous time series, whether measured in the environment, the economy, or output of a computer model. This can easily be overwhelming, so one place people often start is trying to figure out which time series are telling essentially the same story, or directly opposite stories. Understanding this allows you to reduce the number of variables you need to analyze to a more manageable number. Time series make this more complicated though, because two variables could be telling the same or opposite stories, but if the signals are offset in time, simple ways of looking at correlation may not lead to the right conclusions. With simulations you have yet another set of complicating factors, which is the implicit links between your variables, intended or not, and whether they exist in the real world or not.

Temporal information partitioning: Characterizing synergy, uniqueness, and redundancy in interacting environmental variables

Information theoretic measures can be used to identify non-linear interactions between source and target variables through reductions in uncertainty. In information partitioning, multivariate mutual information is decomposed into synergistic, unique, and redundant components. Synergy is information shared only when sources influence a target together, uniqueness is information only provided by one source, and redundancy is overlapping shared information from multiple sources. While this partitioning has been applied to provide insights into complex dependencies, several proposed partitioning methods overestimate redundant information and omit a component of unique information because they do not account for source dependencies. Additionally, information partitioning has only been applied to time-series data in a limited context, using basic pdf estimation techniques or a Gaussian assumption. We develop a Rescaled Redundancy measure (Rs) to solve the source dependency issue, and present Gaussian, autoregressive, and chaotic test cases to demonstrate its advantages over existing techniques in the presence of noise, various source correlations, and different types of interactions. This study constitutes the first rigorous application of information partitioning to environmental time-series data, and addresses how noise, pdf estimation technique, or source dependencies can influence detected measures. We illustrate how our techniques can unravel the complex nature of forcing and feedback within an ecohydrologic system with an application to 1-minute environmental signals of air temperature, relative humidity, and windspeed. The methods presented here are applicable to the study of a broad range of complex systems composed of interacting variables.

wildlife resilience and urban parks

This article suggests that urban parks are not as good as rural reserves for supporting biodiversity, but they can still play a role in improving the resilience of species. Of particular interest to me are some the measures ecologists are coming up with to try to define and measure resilience.

Urban parks can maintain minimal resilience for Neotropical bird communities

Birds may use urban parks as shelter and refuge, contributing with numerous ecosystem services upon which humans and other organisms depend on. To safeguard these services, it is important that bird communities of urban environments hold some degree of resilience, which refers to the capacity of a system to absorb disturbances and changes, while maintaining its functions and structures. Here we assessed the resilience of the bird community inhabiting an urban park in the Southeast region of Brazil. We classified birds in feeding guilds and identified discontinuities and aggregations of body masses (i.e., scales) using hierarchical cluster analysis. We then calculated five resilience indices for our urban park and for a preserved continuous forest (reference area): the average richness of functions, diversity of functions, evenness of functions, and redundancy of functions within- and cross-scale. The urban park had less species, lower feeding guild richness, and lower within-scale redundancy than the reference area. However, they had similar proportion of species in each function, diversity of functions, evenness of functions, and cross-scale redundancy. The lower species richness and, consequently, the lack of some species performing some ecological functions may be responsible for the overall lower resilience in the urban park. Our results suggest that the bird community of the urban park is in part resilient, as it maintained many biological functions, indicating some environmental quality despite the high anthropogenic impacts of this area. We believe that urban forest remnants with more complex and diverse vegetation are possibly more likely to maintain higher resilience in the landscape than open field parks or parks with suppressed or altered vegetation. We propose that raising resilience in the urban park would possibly involve increasing vegetation complexity and heterogeneity, which could increase biodiversity in a large scale.

fan buying guide

Let’s face it, cheap fans are annoying. Normally you get a new fan when you a desperate for one – either an old one broke, your air conditioning is on the fritz, or you have company coming and need to cover an additional room. You stop by your local drug store, hardware store, or big box monstrosity and pick up whatever they happen to have. No matter how cheap, it almost always does the job of making air move. But your cheap new fan is loud, rattly, and just all-around annoying. There are some better models out there, and if you have just a few days to plan ahead you can order one of them.

June 2017 in Review

Most frightening stories:

  • The Onion shared this uncharacteristically unfunny observation: “MYTH: There is nothing mankind can do to prevent climate change. FACT: There is nothing mankind will do to prevent climate change”. It’s not funny because it’s probably true.
  • Water-related hazards including flood, drought, and disease have significant effects on economic growth.
  • There were 910 deaths from drug overdose in Philadelphia last year. Interestingly, I started writing a post thinking I might compare that to car accidents, and ended up concluding that the lack of a functioning health care system might be our #1 problem in the U.S.

Most hopeful stories:

Most interesting stories, that were not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps were a mixture of both:

  • Tile is a sort of wireless keychain that can help you find your keys, wallet, and those other pesky things you are always misplacing (or your significant other is moving, but won’t admit it).
  • “Fleur de lawn” is a mix of perennial rye, hard fescue, micro clover, yarrow, Achillea millefolium, sweet alyssum, Lobularia maritima, baby blue eyes, Nemophila menziesi, English daisy, Bellis perennis, and O’Connor’s strawberry clover, Trifolium fragiferum.
  • Traditional car companies are actually leading the pack in self-driving car development, by some measures.

St. Augustine on lying

It turns out St. Augustine wrote a long essay on the subject of lying in 395. So George Costanza’s “it’s not lie if you believe it!” actually goes back a little further.

For not every one who says a false thing lies, if he believes or opines that to be true which he says. Now between believing and opining there is this difference, that sometimes he who believes feels that he does not know that which he believes, (although he may know himself to be ignorant of a thing, and yet have no doubt at all concerning it, if he most firmly believes it:) whereas he who opines, thinks he knows that which he does not know. Now whoever utters that which he holds in his mind either as belief or as opinion, even though it be false, he lies not. For this he owes to the faith of his utterance, that he thereby produce that which he holds in his mind, and has in that way in which he produces it. Not that he is without fault, although he lie not, if either he believes what he ought not to believe, or thinks he knowswhat he knows not, even though it should be true: for he accounts an unknown thing for a known.

So if you believe the thing you say even though there may be incontrovertible evidence out there in the world that it is false, and you just aren’t aware of that evidence or consciously ignoring it, you are not a liar. You may still be an arrogant idiot of course.