Elon Musk says he is trying to put people on Mars in 10-12 years, put sustainable colonies on Mars longer term as a hedge against human extinction, build cheap batteries for cheap electric cars and houses, build cheap solar panels to charge the batteries, and protect us against killer artificial intelligence. He also thinks other people should advance the Hyperloop and figure out how we can live forever. I think this is a pretty good to-do list.
alternative energy
This article (in the descriptively name journal Energy) describes how California could move to an all-renewable energy future, then tries to put an economic value on that. It is always the link between air pollution and health that surprises me. Why don’t people get more upset that power plants and vehicle exhaust are literally taking years off all our lives when there are other alternatives out there?
This study presents a roadmap for converting California’s all-purpose (electricity, transportation, heating/cooling, and industry) energy infrastructure to one derived entirely from wind, water, and sunlight (WWS) generating electricity and electrolytic hydrogen. California’s available WWS resources are first evaluated. A mix of WWS generators is then proposed to match projected 2050 electric power demand after all sectors have been electrified. The plan contemplates all new energy from WWS by 2020, 80–85% of existing energy converted by 2030, and 100% by 2050. Electrification plus modest efficiency measures may reduce California’s end-use power demand ∼44% and stabilize energy prices since WWS fuel costs are zero. Several methods discussed should help generation to match demand. A complete conversion in California by 2050 is estimated to create ∼220,000 more 40-year jobs than lost, eliminate ∼12,500 (3800–23,200) state air-pollution premature mortalities/yr, avoid $103 (31–232) billion/yr in health costs, representing 4.9 (1.5–11.2)% of California’s 2012 gross domestic product, and reduce California’s 2050 global climate cost contribution by $48 billion/yr. The California air-pollution health plus global climate cost benefits from eliminating California emissions could equal the $1.1 trillion installation cost of 603 GW of new power needed for a 100% all-purpose WWS system within ∼7 (4–14) years.
more on corporate social responsibility
Just thinking some more about yesterday’s post on the profit motive and shareholder value as the only responsibilities of business. I remembered a recent interview with Noam Chomsky where I thought he explained very well why profit maximizing entities do not automatically serve the greater good:
In market systems, you don’t take account of what economists call externalities. So say you sell me a car. In a market system, we’re supposed to look after our own interests, so I make the best deal I can for me; you make the best deal you can for you. We do not take into account the effect on him. That’s not part of a market transaction. Well, there is an effect on him: there’s another car on the road; there’s a greater possibility of accidents; there’s more pollution; there’s more traffic jams. For him individually, it might be a slight increase, but this is extended over the whole population. Now, when you get to other kinds of transactions, the externalities get much larger… Destruction of the environment is an externality: in market interactions, you don’t pay attention to it. So take tar sands. If you’re a major energy corporation and you can make profit out of exploiting tar sands, you simply do not take into account the fact that your grandchildren may not have a possibility of survival — that’s an externality. And in the moral calculus of capitalism, greater profits in the next quarter outweigh the fate of your grandchildren — and of course it’s not your grandchildren, but everyone’s.
What makes the gospel of shareholder value so insidious is that it gives the human beings inside corporations a shield to hide behind – an excuse to not ask any questions about right and wrong in their daily actions. I think Milton Friedman has it right that a business corporation on paper is a completely amoral entity. Now it appears that business corporations are evolving and molding a whole new species of human beings in their image! As children we are taught to think about right and wrong every day, but then as adults we don’t have to any more. This is not human at all, and we can reject it – the managers and employees at the car companies and energy companies have a responsibility to think about right and wrong every day and to make choices that are consistent with what they think is right. If the only thing that is right is not working for that company, then so be it. Consumers can do the same. The political system can provide somewhat of an ethical framework for society from the top down, but we individual humans need to take responsibility for our daily actions and meet it halfway.
the gospel of shareholder value
This article from the Boston Globe talks about the idea that maximizing profits and shareholder value (which hypothetically is the present value of all future profits) is the sole function of a corporation.
Experts on the history of business say the Market Basket saga is a window onto something deeper than a power struggle among the Demoulas clan that owns it. They see it as emblematic of a war over the future of the American corporation—what its purpose is, how it should be run, and whom it should be engineered to benefit. They argue that maximizing profit and shareholder value—an approach to running companies that drives investment on Wall Street and serves as the closest thing to modern management gospel—is only one way of defining corporate success, and a fairly new one at that…
Post and others argue that a well-run company can—and should—be managed in a way that benefits not just the investors who own its stock, but a wide range of constituents. As opposed to “shareholders,” they call these people “stakeholders”: a group that includes employees, customers, suppliers, and creditors, as well as the broader community in which the company operates, and even the country that it calls home. According to that view, Market Basket’s employees and customers are essential to the firm’s success and, thus, rightful beneficiaries of its prosperity.
It also links back to a 1970 Milton Friedman article in which he argued that it is unethical for a person employed by a corporation to try to be ethical on the company dime:
In a free-enterprise, private-property system, a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom.
The main problem I have with this is that the ownership of corporations is so diffuse these days that it is almost impossible for shareholders to exercise any sort of ethical control. Many shareholders are large institutions that collectively have no motives beyond the profit motive, even if individuals among them are ethical. No, the only way for society as a whole to behave ethically is for the vast majority of individuals to consciously act ethically every day – be they shareholders, employees, or customers. I don’t see that happening today.
more on Ebola
Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic
NPR has an interview with the author of this book. An excerpt:
How did we go from a virus that’s found largely in animals to a virus that can be deadly for humans — and spread across four countries?
Human behavior is causing this problem. More and more, we’re going into wild, diverse ecosystems around the world, especially tropical forests.
Some scientists believe that each individual species of animal, plant, bacterium and fungus in these places carries at least one unique virus, maybe even 10 of them.
We, humans, go into those wild ecosystems. We cut down trees. We build mines, roads and villages. We kill the animals and eat them. Or we capture them and transport them around the world.
In doing that, we expose ourselves to all these viruses living around the world. That gives the viruses the opportunity to spill over into humans. Then in some cases, once the virus makes that first spillover, it discovers that it might be highly transmissible in humans. Then you might have an epidemic or a pandemic…
The experts I talk to say the next big one will almost certainly be caused by a zoonotic virus, coming out of animals. And it’s likely to be one that is transmissible through the respiratory route — that is, through a sneeze or cough.
Ebola is not an easily transmissible virus. It requires direct contact with bodily fluids. It doesn’t travel on the respiratory route.
Viruses such as the and SARS are much more of a concern to scientists that study these things than Ebola because they are already transmissible through the respiratory route. They are also highly adaptable, and they mutate quickly.
In terms of the next big one, SARS and MERS stand higher on the watch list than Ebola.
July 2014 in Review
I’m going to do a “month in review” post where I sort selected posts that talk about positive trends and ideas vs. negative trends, predictions, and risks. Just for fun, I’ll keep a score card and pretend my posts are some kind of indicator of whether things are getting better or worse. I’ll give posts a score from -3 to +3 based on how negative or positive they are.
Negative trends and predictions (-6):
- The “trophic theory of money”, which to oversimplify just says that economic growth will always add to humanity’s ecological footprint. I don’t buy this 100% but our footprint is certainly continuing to grow with no obvious signs that we are about to turn the corner. (-1)
- New dams on the Mekong, a hotspot of aquatic biodiversity, may block fish passage although some mitigation measures are being tried. (-1)
- A new book by Edan Lepucki describes a future where people “traverse a cross-section of mid-collapse landscape, framed by the gradual decline of civilization”. (-1)
- 100 years ago, exactly now, Europe was dissolving into the mostly unexpected chaos of World War I. Which led later to the extraordinary pain of the Great Depression. (-3)
- Artificial intelligence and robots are finally turning into a commercial reality, with positive and negative implications like crushing labor unrest. Also, they can identify dog breeds with some accuracy. (-0)
Positive trends and predictions (+4):
- Urban trees can mitigate a small, but not insignificant (around 2%), amount of a city’s carbon emissions. And that’s with business-as-usual practices – I speculate that this could be boosted to 5-10% with a concerted effort, which combined with emissions reductions could make an actual difference. (+1)
- “Blue Urbanism” gives some examples of how cities could be more aware of their impacts on the oceans (but clearly, those impacts are still huge so I’m not giving this any points). (+0)
- On the green infrastructure front, Biophilic Cities lays out a hopeful vision of how urban areas can be more integrated into the natural world. A new website, Falling Fruit, is trying to combine information on worldwide urban green infrastructure with a focus on edibles. (+2)
- Some EU cities are considering a complete ban on the internal combustion engine…by 2050. Stockholm however is envisioning a “single, supple mesh of mobility” by 2025. (+1)
- Autonomous vehicles are not quite a commercial reality, but they will be and there are both positive and negative implications of that. (+0)
- Dubai is building a gigantic, climate-controlled city-like mall under a dome. Children who grow up in places like this will be able to adapt readily to gigantic, climate-controlled mall-like cities in outer space. (+0)
So my Hope for the Future Index stands at -2.
do airplanes spread horrible plagues?
Are you more likely to be exposed to germs on an airplane because of the recirculation of air? No, according to Wired, because the air is very well filtered and constantly exchanged with outside air. Now, I too have gotten that cold right after traveling. So I probably got that cold from something I touched at the airport T.G.I. Fridays. So the moral of the story, I think, is always remember to wash your hands at the airport before you pick your nose. Other theories I have come up with, without trying to collect a shred of scientific evidence, is that the dry air on planes dries out your mucous membranes so there is less of a barrier to germs, and/or that the general stress and lack of rest when you travel just wears down your body’s defenses to the ordinary garden-variety germs you encounter every day.
making chemotherapy “a thing of the past”
From the BBC, this caught my eye:
Prime Minister David Cameron has said it “will see the UK lead the world in genetic research within years”.
The first genetic codes of people with cancer or rare diseases, out of a target of 100,000, have been sequenced.
Experts believe it will lead to targeted therapies and could make chemotherapy “a thing of the past”…
The project has now passed the 100 genome mark, with the aim of reaching 1,000 by the end of the year and 10,000 by the end of 2015
Ronald Reagan, peacemaker
I didn’t know this about Ronald Reagan (from the New York Times review):
Reagan had already spooked Republican foreign policy hands with lofty talk of “the total elimination one day of nuclear weapons from the face of the earth.” In Reykjavik, with Gorbachev, “he was pretty much on his own,” Adelman writes, “which suited Ronald Reagan just fine.” But much of what the president said on his own — that he wanted to share missile-defense technology, eliminate offensive nuclear weapons in 10 years and plan a “tremendous party” in 1996, to which he and Gorbachev would tote “the last nuclear missile” from their countries’ arsenals — “scared everyone,” one assistant said. Reagan’s own national security adviser was so dismayed that he restricted distribution of the meeting notes. “After Reykjavik,” a staff member told the journalist James Mann, “Reagan was watched by someone all during the rest of his term in office.”
I see – so it wasn’t nuclear weapons that “scared everyone”, but having a leader with a vision to get rid of them. We have reached a new height of cynicism today, when abolition of nuclear weapons is barely even being talked about. And if we can’t deal with nuclear weapons, which are in only a few hands, how will we deal with potentially even worse weapons, in potentially many more hands, in the future?
U.S. Drought Monitor
According to the United States Drought Monitor, the drought in California is getting pretty alarming.
mounting evidence from reservoir levels, river gauges, ground water observations, and socio-economic impacts warrant a further expansion of exceptional drought (D4) into northern California. For California’s 154 intrastate reservoirs, storage at the end of June stood at 60% of the historical average. Although this is not a record for this time of year—the standard remains 41% of average on June 30, 1977—storage has fallen to 17.3 million acre-feet. As a result, California is short more than one year’s worth of reservoir water, or 11.6 million acre-feet, for this time of year. The historical average warm-season drawdown of California’s 154 reservoirs totals 8.2 million acre-feet, but usage during the first 2 years of the drought, in 2012 and 2013, averaged 11.5 million acre-feet.
Given the 3-year duration of the drought, California’s topsoil moisture (80% very short to short) and subsoil moisture (85%) reserves are nearly depleted. The state’s rangeland and pastures were rated 70% very poor to poor on July 27. USDA reported that “range and non-irrigated pasture conditions continued to deteriorate” and that “supplemental feeding of hay and nutrients continued as range quality declined.” In recent days, new wildfires have collectively charred several thousand acres of vegetation in northern and central California. The destructive Sand fire, north of Plymouth, California—now largely contained—burned more than 4,000 acres and consumed 66 structures, including 19 residences.