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.

sharing apps

Here’s an article in Washingtonian about new transportation sharing apps and delivery services, and how they are changing the demand for car-dependent neighborhood design in Washington D.C. It’s a feedback loop that just continues to pick up steam once it starts. And this is before computer-controlled vehicles really come into their own, which is going to change everything.

That process works like this: First, it gets easier not to have a car. In recent years, things such as improved public transit and 69 miles of new bike lanes in the District alone have made Washington an easier place to navigate without driving.

Next, new digital businesses—Uber, Instacart, Car2Go—capitalize on this market. (Google has even made noise with a far-fetched idea to roll out a ride service featuring driverless cars.) One of the things these services collectively do is make up for some of the things you lose—say, access to a wonderfully big, suburban-style grocery store—by not driving.

Then the rate of car ownership tumbles: For the 18-to-34 demographic across the region, the share of people who drove to work fell by 7 percentage points between 2000 and 2013, according to the US Census. The District alone gained 12,612 car-free households between 2010 and 2012.

Finally, as a result, lawmakers and regulators have no choice but to catch up—which means even more bike lanes, liberalized transit rules, and denser neighborhoods whose residents make appealing customer bases for bike sharing, and cars by the hour, and novel delivery options for economy-size packs of toilet paper. It’s a cycle that reinforces itself.

The End Of Plenty: The Race To Feed A Crowded World

Here’s a new entry in the running-out-of-food genre.

I’ve embedded a Fresh Air interview about this book at the bottom of the post. You can find a transcript here. And here’s an excerpt:

And so suddenly, you had an instance where the world began consuming fairly consistently more of these major grains than it was producing, whittling down stockpiles to levels we haven’t seen since the 1970s. So, for example, in the 1970s, we consumed or utilized more grain than we ate only about four years out of the decade. In the drier ’80s, it was about five years. Since 2000, we’ve consumed or utilized more of these feed grains in eight of the first 12 years of the decade. So really, we’re starting to see the demand pressures outstrip our ability to produce food. All this while our yield gains, that have been spectacular since Norman Borlaug introduced the Green Revolution agriculture in the ’50s and ’60s, started to plateau.

So it – just as our demands are starting to rise, we’re starting to plateau in the amount of grain we’re getting per hectare, while things like climate change are really starting to hammer us. So we’re looking at, you know, these major disruptions of our food supply. Now, there was a heat wave in Europe in 2003 that killed, like, 73,000 people in Europe. And yet what – that one made headlines all over the world, but what people didn’t realize was that a third of the wheat and grain and fruit crops were decimated that year.

You know, Russia has had these enormous droughts events where they’ve lost up to a third to half of their crop. Here in the United States, we’ve had 2012-2013, you know, we had the worst drought since the Dust Bowl days – cost us $30 billion. So – and what we’re dealing with is sort of the new normal. You know, the researchers say that now we’re going to have to, because of the increased demand from population growth, increased meat consumption in developing parts of the world, that we’re going to have to double our grain production, our food production, by 2050 to make sure everyone’s reasonably fed. And yet, climate change is just starting to really hammer it down, so we’re in a bit of a pinch.

Mckinsey

McKinsey lists “four powerful forces [that] are disrupting the global economy”.

  • “shift of economic activity to emerging-market cities
  • “acceleration of technological change. While technology has always been transformative, its impact is now ubiquitous, with digital and mobile technologies being adopted at an unprecedented rate. It took more than 50 years after the telephone was invented for half of American homes to have one, but only 20 years for cellphones to spread from less than 3% of the world’s population to more than two-thirds. Facebook had six million users in 2006; today, it has 1.4 billion… The mobile Internet offers the promise of economic progress for billions of emerging-economy citizens at a speed that would otherwise be unimaginable. And it gives entrepreneurial upstarts a greater chance of competing with established firms. But technological change also carries risks, especially for workers who lose their jobs to automation or lack the skills to work in higher-tech fields.
  • demographics – the possibility that world population could plateau or actually start to fall
  • globalization

There are a few more things out there that could disrupt the economy for better or worse – renewable energy? biotechnology? climate change? risks to food and water supplies? ocean collapse? nuclear or biological war?