Integrating the planetary boundaries and global catastrophic risk paradigms

I think this article in Ecological Economics gets at a very important idea. There are planetary boundaries we are at risk of exceeding, most obviously the ability of the atmosphere and oceans to absorb and hold greenhouse gas emissions before reaching some catastrophic tipping point. Then there are catastrophic risks that come out of left field every once in a while, like war, plague, accidents, and asteroid strikes. Since our attention span and ability to respond seems to be severely limited, we really need to understand which of these risks are the most likely and the most consequential, so we know where to focus our efforts.

Planetary boundaries (PBs) and global catastrophic risk (GCR) have emerged in recent years as important paradigms for understanding and addressing global threats to humanity and the environment. This article compares the PBs and GCR paradigms and integrates them into a unified PBs-GCR conceptual framework, which we call Boundary Risk for Humanity and Nature (BRIHN). PBs emphasizes global environmental threats, whereas GCR emphasizes threats to human civilization. Both paradigms rate their global threats as top priorities for humanity but lack precision on key aspects of the impacts of the threats. Our integrated BRIHN framework combines elements from both paradigms’ treatments of uncertainty and impacts. The BRIHN framework offers PBs a means of handling human impacts and offers GCR a theoretically precise definition of global catastrophe. The BRIHN framework also offers a concise stage for telling a stylized version of the story of humanity and nature co-evolving from the distant past to the present to multiple possible futures. The BRIHN framework is illustrated using the case of disruptions to the global phosphorus biogeochemical cycle.

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.

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:

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.

grid parity

If a good indicator of grid parity is articles about grid parity, then grid parity seems to be here. This article from Renewable Energy World has a good roundup of recent articles on grid parity and the possibly dire consequences for traditional utilities.

And yet the thesis of the Renewable Energy World article seems to be that all this is overblown. Their main argument is just that people won’t switch because they are stubborn. I don’t buy that. I agree that people are not just economic robots who will do cost-benefit analysis and switch instantly, but if the economics is pushing them off the grid then resistance will gradually fade, until one day it will be a landslide. The one thing I think could slow it down would be reliability. It might be annoying and even dangerous if your entire house is giving you a “low battery” signal. Sure, you could keep a diesel generator around. But that involves storing diesel fuel. It would make more sense to just keep a backup battery. But every once in a while, that backup battery might not be enough, so you might need a second backup battery, and so on. Neighbors or whole towns could share a backup system, but then you would be starting to build a grid again. You could have a natural gas generator, but then you need to be on a natural gas grid, and if I had to choose between the electric grid and the latter I would rather go electric.

We can take it as a good sign or a bad sign that traditional utilities are starting to fight back through lobbying and through the courts. They are trying to get states (examples: Florida, Virginia, South Carolina, even Pennsylvania, ) to outlaw or limit selling energy back to the grid, on the grounds that the customers who don’t do it will then have to pay more. This is true as far as it goes – if all but a few people go off the grid, the ones who are left will be stuck paying for the entire traditional system, which doesn’t work. So as a society we can probably afford to support some early adopters, but once it really starts to catch on it’s all or nothing. Lobbying and buying off politicians might slow the tide for awhile but not forever if the forces pushing us in this direction are strong enough. The traditional utilities can either find a way to get in on the game or die.

 

more on climate change and U.S. farming

This NPR article says that climate change is allowing North Dakota farmers to switch from wheat to corn.

“Especially the increase in moisture has allowed for better yields and more profit in corn than, say, if we had some of the lesser moisture we had in the ’70s and the ’80s,” Ritchison says.

Corn and soybeans, which also like the moisture, now cover about 15 percent of North Dakota’s cropland, says Ritchison, and the number of acres keeps expanding. The Slabaugh farm is a prime example of corn’s advance. They will plant at least 1,500 acres this year — compared to none 10 years ago.

Changes in weather patterns aren’t the only reason for the move to corn. The crop is also more lucrative: Corn produces much bigger yields per acre than wheat.

All well and good for those farmers, but this doesn’t strike me as an upbeat story in the larger context. If we are in danger of losing productive farmland in many states due to a combination of heat, drought, and groundwater depletion, is it really so helpful that productive farmland in other states is now able to switch from one crop to another? Even if biotechnology helps and yields get higher, it seems like it would be a net loss. This is the United States. What is the story in the tropics, where there is generally less farmland and more people?

genuine progress indicator

Vermont is going to have a go at the Genuine Progress Indicator, a GDP alternative:

Estimating the GPI begins with household consumption, the major component of Gross Domestic (or State) Product (GDP), followed by twenty-four separate adjustments including:

  • Additions for benefits not included in GDP, for example the values of volunteer and household work, and non-market benefits from the services of forests (e.g. water purification) and wetlands (e.g. buffer storm events);
  • Deductions for depletion of our environmental assets, harm to human health, costs of underemployment, and loss of leisure time; and
  • Adjustment for the distribution of income received by citizens, more accurately measuring the ability of the economy to provide for all.

The website explains in detail how the calculations are done.