recycling

The Washington Post has an interesting article on recycling in the U.S. The prices of most recyclables are down, and although people are putting more recycling on the curb than ever before, there is more non-recyclable material in it than ever before. The technology has improved, but packaging design has also changed a lot towards extremely lightweight, plastic packaging that is cheap to make and ship.

This reminds me of the classic book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way we Make Things, which talks about truly sustainable product design. Clearly, the companies that design this packaging have no incentive to consider how it is disposed of. They don’t pay any of that cost and it is not their problem. Their incentive is to produce cheap, lightweight materials. If on the other hand, they considered the recycling process alongside the manufacturing and transportation process, and designed products with all three in mind, they could produce truly reusable and recyclable materials.

my pope post

Everybody seems to have a post about the pope, so here is mine.

The Pope and Climate Change, Biodiversity, Inequality, Technocracy, Anthropocentrism: He has a lot to say on all of these topics. Here is just a short quote:

We have the freedom needed to limit and direct technology; we can put it at the service of another type of progress, one which is healthier, more human, more social, more integral. Liberation from the dominant technocratic paradigm does in fact happen sometimes, for example, when cooperatives of small producers adopt less polluting means of production, and opt for a non-consumerist model of life, recreation and community. Or when technology is directed primarily to resolving people’s concrete problems, truly helping them live with more dignity and less suffering. Or indeed when the desire to create and contemplate beauty manages to overcome reductionism through a kind of salvation which occurs in beauty and in those who behold it. An authentic humanity, calling for a new synthesis, seems to dwell in the midst of our technological culture, almost unnoticed, like a mist seeping gently beneath a closed door.

The Pope, Philadelphia, and The Sharing Economy. He’s coming here in September. Philadelphia is a city of 1.5 million people, and nobody knows exactly how many additional people we need to plan for. Here are some facts and figures:

  • In 1979 , John Paul II attracted 1.2 to 2 million people. However, he made stops in half a dozen U.S. cities, whereas Philadelphia is the only stop this time.
  • John Paul II drew 1 million in Rio and 4-5 million in Manila. Francis has drawn 3 million in Rio and 6 million in Manila.
  • The 2008 Phillies World Series victory parade drew 420,000 to 750,000.
  • Obama’s inauguration drew 1.8 million to D.C., which they pulled off without major incident.
  • The U.S. Secret Service will protect the Pope while he is here.
  • The Philadelphia government, after refusing to either legalize or enforce against Airbnb for several years, has realized they can legalize it and tax it for this event, and make a fortune.
  • Rick Santorum, prominent science-denying Catholic presidential candidate from Pennsylvania, says the pope should “leave science to the scientists” and focus on things like morals. The pope has not responded to Rick, but he appears to see a connection between morals and not destroying our home planet.

gators and tigers and extinction, oh my!

The extinction rate is now 1000 times normal, says Duke University.

Not to worry, say Stanford, Berkeley, Princeton, and the University of Florida (and what would they know, those ‘gators with their beady dinosaur eyes), it’s only 114 times normal using “conservative assumptions”.

And according to a surprisingly edgy book review in my favorite special interest publication Civil Engineering (because what could be more special than my own interest), there is a new book out:

You probably don’t subscribe to Civil Engineering, so here is the Amazon description:

A growing number of scientists agree we are headed toward a mass extinction, perhaps in as little as 300 years. Already there have been five mass extinctions in the last 600 million years, including the Cretaceous Extinction, during which an asteroid knocked out the dinosaurs. Though these events were initially destructive, they were also prime movers of evolutionary change in nature. And we can see some of the warning signs of another extinction event coming, as our oceans lose both fish and oxygen. In The Next Species, Michael Tennesen questions what life might be like after it happens.

Tennesen discusses the future of nature and whether humans will make it through the bottleneck of extinction. Without man, could the seas regenerate to what they were before fishing vessels? Could life suddenly get very big as it did before the arrival of humans? And what if man survives the coming catastrophes, but in reduced populations? Would those groups be isolated enough to become distinct species? Could the conquest of Mars lead to another form of human? Could we upload our minds into a computer and live in a virtual reality? Or could genetic engineering create a more intelligent and long-lived creature that might shun the rest of us? And how would we recognize the next humans? Are they with us now?

NYT and Cutting Edge Transportation

There was a time when I thought that if the New York Times told me something, it must be true. Like there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, for example. I am a bit more skeptical these days, and I thank the New York Times for opening my eyes to seeking out more diverse sources of news. Still, they have suddenly noticed that autonomous cars and ride sharing are happening, and I think they may be on to something! I just hope these things are not like beards, which are now officially uncool because the New York Times has called them a trend.

U.S. vs. China War?

Here’s an article called How to Avoid a Sino-American War. I think this is a great idea because I have a sense that the world just can’t afford a major war. Global economic progress has never really recovered from the 2008 financial crisis. Maybe it just takes time, or maybe progress is fighting headwinds of food, energy, and water constraints brought on by climate change and natural capital depletion. If the latter is true, perhaps a major war would be the last straw that we just can’t recover from.

Some people thing such a war is a distinct possibility:

In 2001, when an American EP-3 spy aircraft operating over the South China Sea collided with a Chinese air force interceptor jet near Hainan Island, Chinese and US leaders managed to defuse the situation and avoid a military confrontation. Today, such an incident in the South China Sea, where China and several southeast Asian countries have competing territorial claims, would almost certainly lead to an armed clash – one that could quickly escalate into open war.

Last month, at the annual Shangri-La Dialogue security conference, Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong conveyed the deep apprehension of the countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations about the potential for an armed conflict between China and the United States.

So does this article tell us how to avoid a war. You be the judge, but these words don’t mean much to me:

By activating top-level diplomacy, building strong crisis-management mechanisms, and enriching the rules of engagement in the South China Sea, a war between the US and China can be avoided. Given the vast damage that such a conflict could cause, this approach is less an option than a necessity.

climate change and the economy

Here’s another modeling study in Ecological Economics that looks at the effects of climate change on the global economy.

A demand-driven growth model involving capital accumulation and the dynamics of greenhouse gas (GHG) concentration is set up to examine macroeconomic issues raised by global warming, e.g. effects on output and employment of rising levels of GHG; offsets by mitigation; relationships among energy use and labor productivity, income distribution, and growth; the economic significance of the Jevons and other paradoxes; sustainable consumption and possible reductions in employment; and sources of instability and cyclicality implicit in the two-dimensional dynamical system. The emphasis is on the combination of biophysical limits and Post-Keynesian growth theory and the qualitative patterns of system adjustment and the dynamics that emerge.

seafood

National Geographic has put together an online seafood app. It uses information available elsewhere (Monterey Aquarium, etc.), but what is innovative is that you can easily filter the most sustainable, nutritious and low-mercury species using a tool bar. The only problem being that, if you pick all those options at once, there are only a couple choices left.

Collapse

A 2012 article in Scientific American quotes Dennis Meadows and Jorgen Randers (it’s a little unclear which is speaking when) on how they think a collapse will play out:

For the coming few decades, Randers predicts, life on Earth will carry on more or less as before. Wealthy economies will continue to grow, albeit more slowly as investment will need to be diverted to deal with resource constraints and environmental problems, which thereby will leave less capital for creating goods for consumption. Food production will improve: increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will cause plants to grow faster, and warming will open up new areas such as Siberia to cultivation. Population will increase, albeit slowly, to a maximum of about eight billion near 2040. Eventually, however, floods and desertification will start reducing farmland and therefore the availability of grain. Despite humanity’s efforts to ameliorate climate change, Randers predicts that its effects will become devastating sometime after mid-century, when global warming will reinforce itself by, for instance, igniting fires that turn forests into net emitters rather than absorbers of carbon. “Very likely, we will have war long before we get there,” Randers adds grimly. He expects that mass migration from lands rendered unlivable will lead to localized armed conflicts…

Meadows holds that collapse is now all but inevitable, but that its actual form will be too complex for any model to predict. “Collapse will not be driven by a single, identifiable cause simultaneously acting in all countries,” he observes. “It will come through a self-reinforcing complex of issues”—including climate change, resource constraints and socioeconomic inequality. When economies slow down, Meadows explains, fewer products are created relative to demand, and “when the rich can’t get more by producing real wealth they start to use their power to take from lower segments.” As scarcities mount and inequality increases, revolutions and socioeconomic movements like the Arab Spring or Occupy Wall Street will become more widespread—as will their repression.

DICE

This article in Ecological Economics reminded me of the DICE model from William Nordhaus at Yale.

In integrated assessment models (IAMs) economic activity leads to global warming, which causes future economic costs. However, typical IAMs do not explicitly represent the role of natural capital. In this paper, the DICE model by Nordhaus (2008) is expanded with a natural capital variable that is affected both by climate change and by depletive effects of economic activity. Due to a synergy between the two effects, the optimal policy of the expanded model features more and earlier abatement of CO2 emissions than DICE. Interestingly, the policy implications are different from what follows if one tries to capture the depletive effects on natural capital by simply reducing factor productivity growth in DICE. Acknowledging considerable uncertainty, simulations show that climate- and savings rate policies from the expanded model are more robust in the long term than policies that do not consider non-climatic depletion effects on natural capital.

The DICE model and a variety of papers related to it are freely available here.