ecological civilization, and the bees from The X Files

We’re entering that time of year for look-backs and trend forecasts. Trends in Ecology and Evolution journal has A Horizon Scan of Global Conservation Issues for 2016:

This paper presents the results of our seventh annual horizon scan, in which we aimed to identify issues that could have substantial effects on global biological diversity in the future, but are not currently widely well known or understood within the conservation community. Fifteen issues were identified by a team that included researchers, practitioners, professional horizon scanners, and journalists. The topics include use of managed bees as transporters of biological control agents, artificial superintelligence, electric pulse trawling, testosterone in the aquatic environment, building artificial oceanic islands, and the incorporation of ecological civilization principles into government policies in China.

I vaguely remember that The X Files was obsessed with bees as delivery devices for smallpox, or aliens, or alien smallpox…

I hadn’t heard the phrase “ecological civilization” before. When I Google it I am finding references to statements by the Chinese government and quotes from Marx and Engels (who had a lot to say about depletion of natural resources by short-sighted profit seeking entities, although they might have objected to the term “natural capital”). Here is an article from The Diplomat, a respected international news magazine based in Tokyo:

The “ecological civilization” concept first appeared in 2007, in a report to the 17th National People’s Congress. At the Third Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee in 2013, Xi stressed that China would implement “ecological civilization reforms” – reforms to reconcile contradictions between economic development and the environment. In April this year, the plan was restated, with the release of a document outlining the acceleration of moves to establish an ecological civilization.

Proposals include performing natural resources audits when local officials leave their posts, so as to force officials pay attention to environmental protection while in office, or be held to account when they leave. A pilot scheme will be carried out in five different locations, including Hulunbuir in Inner Mongolia. It is the first time such a trial has been proposed by the central government. It will take place in three stages: a launch this year, expansion next year, then in 2017 full audits in the trial locations, with regular audits starting from 2018. The aim is to get local officials to give greater priority to the environment, compared to the economy…

Sun Xinghua, deputy chair of the China Environmental Sciences Association’s auditing committee, told chinadialogue that “confirmation of property rights for natural resources has never been raised before.” Currently, ownership of natural resources in China is unclear. Clarification of rights and responsibilities will reduce disputes and allow for valuation of natural resources. And valuation will allow the compilation of tables of ‘natural resource debts’, removing a major obstacle to auditing of natural resources when local officials leave their posts.

That’s a pretty interesting idea – calculating a politician’s “debt to nature” based on policies they have chosen. You could even do that for, say, an entire legislature and display that number next to economic output statistics for their time in office.

the Paris agreement

There is plenty of media coverage on the Paris agreement by people more knowledgeable than me. Even though I’m not an expert, I like to skim the actual document and try to pull out a few key points myself, just like I do with the IPCC reports. I had to get all the way to page 21 to find what looks to me like the two most important provisions:

  • Holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels, recognizing that this would significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change

  • In order to achieve the long-term temperature goal set out in Article 2, Parties aim to reach global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible, recognizing that peaking will take longer for developing country Parties, and to undertake rapid reductions thereafter in accordance with best available science, so as to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks of greenhouse gases in the second half of this century, on the basis of equity, and in the context of sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty.

The first paragraph (sentence? nobody does a run-on sentence like the United Nations) is notable because it appears to be a commitment among most of the nations of the world to a more aggressive target than the 2 degrees C that seemed all but abandoned just recently. The second paragraph is nice because it conveys clearly that the goal is not just for emissions to stop growing. They have to be rolled back to a level where they are not actually adding to the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It seems like that would almost certainly have to mean an end to fossil fuel burning, unless carbon is being captured on a large scale.

A more pessimistic way of looking at it though is that the “second half of this century” ends in 2099, and this wording seems like it would let things keep getting worse until then, and then let them stay at whatever bad level they are at.

I suspect that technology is likely to make fossil fuels obsolete well before 2099, and if so these targets will require no action to achieve. If we are still around in 2099, we will probably have new opportunities and problems that are well beyond our wildest imaginations now.

not time to worry about Trump

I’ve been asking whether Trump is using a fascist playbook and we should be worried, but here are a couple articles that say no, it is not time to worry. Both point out that the share of media coverage a candidate gets does not have much to do with the proportion of voters that actually support them. Alternet says that more likely voters support Bernie Sanders than Donald Trump, although the latter gets 23 times more media attention:

The Tyndall Report, which tracks coverage on nightly network newscasts, found that Trump has hogged more than a quarter of all presidential race coverage — and more than the entire Democratic field combined.

Hillary Clinton — who enjoys the most voter support, by far, of any candidate in either party — had received the second-most network news coverage.

Sanders, who is supported by more voters than Trump, has received just 10 minutes of network airtime throughout the entire campaign — which translates to 1/23 of Trump’s campaign coverage.

Nate Silver tries to break it down some more. One interesting data analysis he has done shows that at this point in the last two elections, only 8-16% of all Google searches that would eventually be made related to the primaries had been made. So let’s hope that means that only the crazies on the fringe are paying attention at this point.

more on Robert Paxton

Recently I was musing about the U.S., Donald Trump, and fascism. I suggested that the U.S. has a fairly rigid social order favoring and enforced by traditional political, bureaucratic, business and professional elites. We also have a grassroots movement based on rhetoric of national, religious, and to some extent racial unity, and fearful of outsiders. Here is Robert Paxton’s definition of fascism in his 1998 paper The Five Stages of Fascism:

Fascism is a system of political authority and social order intended to reinforce the unity, energy, and purity of communities in which liberal democracy stands accused of producing division and decline.

So fascism is not just a social order cynically maintained by and for the interests of traditional elites. It is somewhat the opposite – a grassroots movement based on a myth of national, religious or racial purity and unity. The grassroots believe the rhetoric while the elites probably do not, but both are interested in maintaining the social order. The danger arises when the traditional elites cynically choose to join forces with the grassroots fascists, because they do not feel strong enough to maintain the existing social order on their own. Together, the two groups are strong enough to come to power where neither could on its own, but once in power the traditional elites may lose control, particularly under war or crisis conditions.

So ironically, it is at a moment when liberal elements in society are making some progress against the entrenched elites that we may be most vulnerable to a right-wing grassroots movement arising. The Tea Party’s anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric, and Donald Trump’s attempts to use that rhetoric to rise to power, would seem to fit the bill. It is ironic that a modern American fascism would use rhetoric of freedom and democracy to undermine freedom and democracy, but that is our national unifying myth so it makes some sense.

abandoning Lake Powell


Lake Powell is on the Colorado upstream of the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas, controlled by Glen Canyon Dam. Lake Mead is downstream of the Grand Canyon, controlled by Hoover Dam. With the decade-plus drought affecting the basin, there is actually talk of bypassing Glen Canyon Dam and just letting Lake Powell drain into Lake Mead.

One option involves filling Lake Mead first. This would allow Upper Basin water to flow past Glen Canyon Dam for storage in Lake Mead. A legal analysis published in The Water Report, issue 112, concluded that the plan doesn’t violate the Compact, because the counting point for Upper Basin water deliveries could be moved downstream, from Lees Ferry to Hoover Dam. Another option is to release water through Glen Canyon Dam’s river outlet works at 3,374-foot elevation. There’s also the option of drilling bypass tunnels — as former Reclamation Commissioner Floyd Dominy once suggested.

Upper Basin officials say that losing generation at Glen Canyon would cause a “spike” in electric power prices, raising rates by as much as 500 percent. This is highly unlikely. Glen Canyon Dam’s power may be marketed to 174 Southwestern utilities and providers, yet it contributes less than 1 percent of the total capacity of the Western power grid. There are also alternative power sources available.

If Glen Canyon Dam went offline, gas-fired power plants could instantly meet the demand at a similar cost. In fact, given Lake Powell’s recent decline, the dam has already been producing only 60 percent of its generating capacity. Yet no electricity rate “spikes” have occurred.

 

self-parking cars

This article in Governing makes the case that a big impact of self-driving cars will be on the amount of land used for parking:

First, self-driving cars need less room to self-park, making it possible to squeeze more cars into a garage — up to 60 percent more, according to Audi. Second, parking garages would no longer have to be located downtown — drivers and their passengers could exit the vehicles in the city and the cars would self-drive to the garages on the downtown’s periphery. Third, with garages capable of storing more cars, cities wouldn’t need to devote so much space for curbside parking, freeing up valuable land for public transit, pedestrians and bicyclists, and reducing the congestion that comes from drivers searching for a place to park…

Self-driving technology can park a car so precisely that lanes with a width of three meters are adequate, leaving just 10 centimeters of space between the mirrors of parked cars, according to Audi. By packing more cars into less space, the company says that the amount of parking can be reduced by as much as 60 to 80 percent in some cases.

U.S. Fascism?

Is it even remotely possible that the U.S. could go down a Fascist path? I don’t know. Let’s first ask if the U.S. unequivocally qualifies as a democracy. If you set the lowest possible bar, democracy could just mean that government leaders are nominally chosen by majority vote, and there is therefore a process for non-violent change of government. We pass that test. A better definition though, in my view, would be that there is a process for choosing government policies that represent a consensus among most of the people, and that represent a compromise reflecting the interests of most of the people. We clearly do not have this. We clearly have policies that represent the interests of a relatively small class of political and business elites, and we have an entrenched political party system that presents almost insurmountable obstacles to anyone who might seriously challenge that social order. It would take widespread violence or civil disobedience to do that, which is the opposite of a functioning democratic political system. So we have a fairly rigid social order enforced by traditional elites.

If our definition of fascism involves jack boots and arm bands and cattle cars, clearly we are not even close, thank goodness. But could we be headed there? What is a registry database for a small minority religious group, if not a modern version of the armband? Robert Paxton’s stages of fascism start with a sense of victim-hood, nationalism based on religion or ethnicity, anger, and some external or internal enemy to blame. We seem to have these ingredients, at least among the angry white men supporting Donald Trump. Next comes a charismatic leader. I don’t find Donald charismatic, but some people clearly do. Next comes acceptance of the extremists by the conservative establishment because they are not strong enough to govern on their own. I don’t think we are there yet, but we did have the recent capitulation of the more moderate conservative elements in Congress to the Tea Party extremists. After these stages come the assumption of power and exercise of power. That is hard to imagine, but we will find out by this time next year.

I still think Donald Trump is a clown. An amoral attention-seeking clown at best, a Fascist clown at worst. It is reassuring that demographics continue to shift so that angry white men can’t just always get their way, no matter how loud and menacing they are. But I am getting just a bit worried. More geopolitical turbulence or random acts of violence in the next year could shift more people into a scared, angry state of mind where they are more open to the extremist rhetoric.

bacteria vs. cancer

Here’s a bizarre article in New Yorker about curing a terminal brain tumor by purposely causing a serious but treatable brain infection.

The tumor had spread to his brain stem and was shortly expected to kill him. Muizelaar cut out as much of the tumor as possible. But before he replaced the “bone flap”—the section of skull that is removed to allow access to the brain—he soaked it for an hour in a solution teeming with Enterobacter aerogenes, a common fecal bacterium. Then he reattached it to Egan’s skull, using tiny metal plates and screws. Muizelaar hoped that inside Egan’s brain an infection was brewing…

For four weeks, Egan lay in intensive care, most of the time in a coma. Then, on the afternoon of November 10th, Muizelaar learned that a scan of Egan’s brain had failed to pick up the distinctive signature of glioblastoma. The pattern on the scan suggested that the tumor had been replaced by an abscess—an infection—precisely as the surgeons had intended. “A brain abscess can be treated, a glioblastoma cannot,” Muizelaar told me.

I almost called this post “shit for brains”, then I grew up just a little bit.

Ericsson predictions for 2016

It’s about that time of year for predictions and trends. Ericsson has some for the next 5 years:

  • They say early adopters no longer matter for communication technologies, because new ones achieve mass market status so fast.
  • “Artificial Intelligence (AI) will enable interaction with objects without the need for a smartphone screen…Smartphone users believe AI will take over many common activities, such as searching the net, getting travel guidance and as personal assistants. These are areas already being addressed by current generation AI interfaces in smartphones. But the desire to use AI for more advanced purposes is apparent. 44 percent think an AI system would be good as a teacher and one third would like an AI interface to keep them company. Furthermore, a third would even rather trust the fidelity of an AI interface than a human for sensitive matters. 29 percent agree they would feel more comfortable discussing their medical condition with an AI system.”
  • Virtual reality will start to come into its own for tech support, sports, dating, and shopping.
  • ” sensors could be integrated into bricks and mortar in your house, literally connecting your home from the ground up. “
  • “Judging by consumer interest, the next generation of body-monitoring technology may not be worn, but may instead be found within the human body. These ‘internables’ will initially have a similar focus to the current external body monitoring devices. Half of all smartphone users believe internal sensors will give updates on their health and wellbeing in three years.”

guns in the U.S.

Does the United States have a gun problem? There are facts and figures, and there are emotions. You are not a normal human being if you don’t react emotionally to certain kinds of events, and being in touch with these emotions can be a good guide to what you think is right and wrong. Then again, I believe any human being within the normal range can be trained to dig into the facts and evidence, draw appropriate conclusions and build their own personal mental model of the world. Once you have a sense of what you think is right and wrong, this is how you figure out what you think can and should be done about it. So, I’m going to quote from an article that caused a strong emotional reaction from me (warning, it’s probably upsetting to almost anyone but especially parents), and then I’ll go to some facts and figures that I find disturbing on an intellectual level, but also point toward some ideas about what can and should be done.

If you are not emotionally dead, you will be horrified by this stomach-churning New York  Times article about children who are killed accidentally by guns.

It had been a good day for Tristan. He had used the potty for the first time. He and his mother had danced a little jig. Down the hall, Tristan entered the bedroom where his father had been staying because of quarrels with his wife. She had chided her husband in the past for forgetting to safely store his .45-caliber handgun. But he had recently put a lock on his door to keep out his wife and children. He thought he had locked the door before going out to cut the grass.

The lock, though, had failed to catch. Tristan found the loaded gun under the pillow on his father’s bed. He pointed it at his own forehead and pulled the trigger. Hearing the gunshot, Sergeant Underhill sprinted inside to find Tristan face down on the bed, the gun beneath him. When he called 911, the sergeant was screaming so hysterically that the dispatcher initially mistook him for a woman.

“My 2-year-old just shot himself in the head,” he said breathlessly. “He’s dead.”

There’s a picture of the kid alive and happy, which makes it infinitely worse. That’s one horrifying anecdote in this story. It goes on and on and on.

That’s the horror. Let’s turn to some cold facts and figures. Here’s a blog posting called “Deaths from assault over time in 40 relatively rich countries“. Other rich countries do not have the level of violence that we have in the United States. If you are the evidence-inclined type, have a look at the graphics and note that they are on a log scale. The United States has a rate of violent death 5-10 times higher than our close cultural cousins like Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK. And all these places have a little bit higher rates than most of Western Europe and Asia. The places with rates equal or higher than the United States are developing countries and/or countries with organized crime on a large scale.

So is the easy accessibility of firearms the cause of violence? I tend to think tough guy culture (one thing that is unmistakable in both articles is that men and boys are the ones shooting and being shot), a history of inequality and racial discrimination, and the so-called war on drugs are the real drivers. These are the policy levers we need to be working in the medium to longer term. But being awash in guns certainly makes the violence that does occur more deadly. Common sense gun control policies would certainly be great in the short term to treat the symptoms, as long as they are backed up by policies to treat the disease. But hard-core, violent law enforcement approaches to treat the symptoms may actually make the disease worse in the long term, which is probably what happened in the 80s and 90s that we are continuing to pay for today.