Economics – Page 123 – a sibilant intake of breath

In Defense of Food

Having recently read and enjoyed Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, his newer book caught my eye this morning. I had seen a review contrasting it negatively with his prior work, but decided to take the plunge anyhow. I am glad I did. While there is less value added in terms of general knowledge, it is a much more practical guide to how the realities of contemporary food production affect the choices of conscientious modern omnivores.

The book does an excellent job of combining a good breadth of consideration with the production of manageable advice. Opening with “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants,” it elaborates those simple sentiments into a pretty good set of suggestions. Critically, ‘food’ refers only to things that would be recognized as such by people from a few hundred years ago. After going through the decidedly unnatural list of ingredients for a loaf of bread, Pollan declares that:

Sorry, Sara Lee, but your Soft & Smooth Whole Grain White Bread is not food and if not for the indulgence of the FDA [in not longer requiring the use of the word ‘imitation’] could not even be labelled “bread.”

Pollan does an excellent job of critiquing food science and the ‘nutritionism’ that reduces the complex chemistry of food and eating to simple affirmation or condemnation of individual chemicals and chemical classes, such as saturated fats. He provides a compelling description of the nature and evolution of the Western Diet, as well as the societal and economic reasons for its emergence and the health consequences that emerge from it.

In addition to discussing what to eat, Pollan provides some good tips on how. Basically, he suggests that people return to forms of eating more rooted in culture. Constant snacking, eating alone, and consuming massive portions are problematic even if the foodstuffs in question are relatively good. He also endorses gardening and cooking from scratch as ways of weeding out non-foods while also gaining more appreciation for the relationships involved in growth and eating.

Pollan provides a list of 24 bits of concise (and sometimes counterintuitive) advice. He provides some good tips on where and how to shop (avoid the centre of supermarkets – stick to the unprocessed foods at the edges). I was particularly delighted to learn about the strong case for how a glass of wine with dinner can do a fair bit to promote cardiovascular health. Since reading his previous book, I had already made some pretty significant dietary changes. Barring the occasional pot of Knorr soup, I have eaten virtually nothing that wasn’t “food” as he defines it. I have also been thinking a lot more about what I eat, where it comes from, how I prepare it, and so forth. Overall, the process has been meaningful and enjoyable.

It is pretty rare for me to buy a book and read it though in a day. The fact that I did with this one demonstrates both how engaging and accessible it is. For those wanting some sound dietary advice, rather than a more extensive discussion of the nature of various food systems, this book is well worth examining. I am planning to foist my copy onto as many people as possible.

The hopelessness of the voluntary

Energy Saving Day in the United Kingdom has produced no measurable results. While this is a blow to the “everyone recycle your used Coke cans and we will be fine” form of environmentalism, it is less surprising to people who have a sense of the scale of the climate issue and an awareness of the (in)effectiveness of past voluntary efforts.

Even if the day had been successful, it would have been more about displacement than reduction. Consider the much touted ‘Buy Nothing Day‘ espoused by certain rejectors of the dominant consumerist culture. Even among those who observe the occasion scrupulously, it is plausible that overall consumption doesn’t fall at all: it just gets displaced to the days before and after. Overall, the idea that serious societal issues can be tackled through 24 hours of voluntary abstinence by a handful of devotees is profoundly flawed.

What is the alternative? Price carbon and de-carbonize infrastructure.

Contraction and convergence

The interim version of the Garnaut Review (mentioned earlier) includes a numberless graph illustrating what the principle of contraction and convergence in per capita greenhouse gas emissions would resemble:

A few features are especially notable. The first is the relative trajectories in the opening years. States with very high per capita emissions, like Australia and Canada, would have to reduce emissions sharply right from the outset. Rapidly growing poor states like China would be allowed to grow until per capita emissions are comparable to those in relatively low emission developed states, such as the EU. Gradually, everybody’s per capita emissions become lower and more similar.

This approach becomes a lot more politically feasible when you take these lines to represent emission allocations rather than actual emissions. Developing states would have a choice about how to use the extra space allocated for their development. They could opt to use the allocation for their own emissions, allowing the growth of GHG emitting industry; alternatively, they could sell the allocations to more developed states at a globally established market price. That way, poverty reduction and development goals could be served at the same time as total GHG emissions trend towards a sustainable level. The big advantage of allowing global trading is that it should equalize the international marginal cost of abatement. In simple terms, that means that it will ensure that the emissions that can be avoided at the lowest cost will be addressed first, minimizing the overall cost of mitigation.

The Garnaut Review rightly highlights that it would be incredibly politically difficult to establish such an international regime. At the same time, it is probably also right to say that a general approach that embraces contraction and convergence has the best chance of stabilizing global greenhouse gas emissions at a level that avoids dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system, and does so in a way that minimizes total costs and manages the distribution of costs and benefits in an acceptably fair manner.

New UNEP report: ‘In Dead Water’

This blog has documented a number of the most important threats facing fisheries and marine ecosystems, including over-exploitation, ocean acidification, harmful fish farming practices, invasive species, and climate change. A new report (PDF) put out by the United Nations Environment Program does a good job of summarizing all of these, as well as providing a good overall picture.

Major conclusions of the report make for sober reading:

Half the World catch is caught in less than 10% of the ocean
With climate change, more than 80% of the World’s coral reefs may die within decades
Ocean acidification will also severely damage cold-water coral reefs and affect negatively other shell-forming organisms
Coastal development is increasing rapidly and is projected to impact 91% of all inhabited coasts by 2050 and will contribute to more than 80% of all marine pollution
Climate change may slow down ocean thermohaline circulation and continental shelf “flushing and cleaning” mechanisms crucial to coastal water quality and nutrient cycling and deep-water production in more than 75% of the World’s fishing grounds
Increased development, coastal pollution and climate change impacts on ocean currents will accelerate the spreading of marine dead zones, many around or in primary fishing grounds
Over-harvesting and bottom trawling are degrading fish habitats and threatening the entire productivity of ocean biodiversity hotspots, making them more vulnerable to climate change
Primary fishing grounds are likely to become increasingly infested by invasive species, many introduced from ship ballast water
The worst concentration of cumulative impacts of climate change with existing pressures of over-harvest, bottom trawling, invasive species, coastal development and pollution appear to be concentrated in 10–15% of the oceans concurrent with today’s most important fishing grounds
A lack of good marine data, poor funding for ocean observations and an ‘out of sight – out of mind’ mentality may have led to greater environmental degradation in the sea than would have been allowed on land
Substantial resources need to be allocated to reducing climate and non-climate pressures. Priority needs to be given to protecting substantial areas of the continental shelves. These initiatives are required to build resilience against climate change and to ensure that further collapses in fish stocks are avoided in coming decades

There is still some debate about which generation will experience the first reeling blows from climate change. It is increasingly clear that the young people of today will be alive to see the collapse of the world’s fisheries and coastal ocean ecosystems.

Business model patents

Intellectual property remains one of the most hotly contested areas in law and politics right now: with everything from the cost of patented drugs in third world countries to the illicit downloading of television shows under contention. What is important to recall throughout all of this is the reason for which the patent system exists: to encourage (a) innovation and (b) the disclosure of how new inventions work by offering a time-limited monopoly to the inventor. On the basis of this fundamental purpose, it seems fair to say that ‘business model’ patents should be eliminated.

A famous example is Amazon.com’s dubious patent on ‘one click shopping.’ To begin with, the idea probably fails the obviousness test. Something immediately obvious to almost anyone well-studied in the field is not supposed to be patentable. More crucially, the Amazon patent doesn’t represent genuine innovation, and it serves no public purpose to have the details explained in a patent. As such, society as a whole only suffers when such legal rights are granted.

A more recent case also illustrates the point. A couple in Utah is suing Starbucks and Apple for patent infringement. Starbucks is giving away gift cards that can be used to download particular music tracks from the iTunes music store. The couple claims that they have a patent on this idea. Can anybody legitimately claim that society would be better off if everybody who gave away such gifts cards had to pay licensing fees to the couple? You can argue that the premiums people pay for patented drugs are essential to ensuring that pharmaceutical firms have sufficient funds for further research; no comparable argument can be made for business model patents. Such patents are useless and parasitic and, as such, should be done away with.

Nicholas Stern video

Emily kindly sent me a link to the video of Sir Nicholas Stern’s presentation in the Examination Schools at Oxford in February of 2007. I was lucky enough to attend in person; I even got to speak with him at the exclusive reception afterwards. My notes are on the wiki. This is your chance to compare a verbatim record of the talk with my notes and thus determine my particular strengths and failings as a note taker.

The talk is well worth watching, not least because Stern is obviously very well informed and quite a capable speaker. His report is fully deserving of its status as the seminal discussion of the economics of climate change.

Garnaut Review interim report

The Stern Review – released in October 2006 by the British Government – is generally considered the most authoritative source on the economics of climate change. Among other things, it concludes that the cost of reducing global emissions is significantly less than the probable costs associated with letting climate change continue on its present course. Now, Australia has released a similar assessment, in the form of the Garnaut Climate Change Review.

Only the interim report is available so far, but it’s likely to make interesting reading for Canadians concerned about climate change. In many ways, the Canadian economy is more similar to that of Australia than it is to that of England. As such, this report may offer some especially useful insights.

P.S. I have some notes from a lecture Stern gave in Oxford.

British Columbia carbon tax

In a relatively big announcement today, British Columbia has announced a new carbon tax on gasoline, diesel, natural gas, coal, propane and home-heating fuel. Canada-wide, the combustion of fossil fuels represents about 70% of total emissions, with the remainder consisting of things like industrial process emissions and those associated with landfills. The B.C. tax takes effect on July 1st, starting at $10 a tonne and rising to $30 a tonne by 2012.

Like many proposed carbon taxes, the British Columbian scheme aims to be revenue neutral, with the funds collected being primarily redistributed back to consumers through reductions in other taxes and increased grants to low-income individuals. This somewhat reduces the environmental effectiveness of the tax, since some of the refunded money will be used to continue doing emissions intensive things, but it makes it easier to defuse claims that this is an excessive new burden on low income people. The projected emissions reduction for the next three years is 1 Mt per year – just 1.5% of the B.C. total, but a start. At present, British Columbia is in the middle of the pack when it comes to emissions among Canadian provinces: approximately on par with Quebec and Saskatchewan, but significantly behind Alberta and Ontario.

B.C. is also part of a regional climatic organization called the Western Climate Initiative, which aims to launch a cap-and-trade scheme for greenhouse gasses. With luck, such provincial and regional systems will yield both absolute reductions in emissions and useful lessons in policy design.

Costly delays at Yucca Mountain

Persistent delays at Yucca Mountain – the Congressionally appointed future home for American nuclear waste – could prove very expensive to taxpayers. Under an agreement between nuclear power utilities and the Department of Energy, firms are charged 1/10th of a cent per kilowatt hour for waste disposal. Yucca Mountain was meant to be open and accepting fuel in 1998.

So far, the delay has cost the American Treasury $342 million in rebates so far, and is projected to cost $11 billion if the facility doesn’t open before 2020. Given the tooth-and-nail resistance from the Nevada government, and the history of lengthy lawsuits in the United States, it’s not impossible that such a delay will occur. Meanwhile, wastes continue to be stored in relatively expensive and high-maintenance cooling ponds and dry storage casks. In the whole mess, consumers lose out twice. The costs for eventual disposal imposed on utilities were passed on to them; as taxpayers, they will also end up paying most of the cost for Yucca Mountain or whatever alternative long-term disposal facility is eventually used.

The situation could be even worse than it seems. Both Clinton and Obama have announced their opposition to the project. Presumably, having one of them win the presidency would return the whole process to the preliminary site selection phase, back where it was thirty years ago. Regardless of one’s position on nuclear power, the need to store the wastes that exist in a safe, economically viable, and long-term way is inescapable. Keeping the waste in a large number of small sites increases both costs and risks.

Canada also lacks a facility for the long-term storage of radioactive wastes.

Crystals for improved CO2 separation

One should always be cautious about noisy announcements regarding climate related technologies. The mainstream media is all-too-willing to repeat them without much investigation or consideration. That said, there is every likelihood that concern about climate change (and increasingly stringent regulations) will produce dramatic breakthroughs in climate relevant technologies. One area in which that could occur is in relation to carbon capture and storage. At present, this is quite an energy intensive process, largely because of the difficulty of separating CO2 from the other flue gasses being produced by a power plant or factory. Some new research suggests that zeolitic imidazolate frameworks could do this much more efficiently than the amine scrubbers currently being tested.

The authors suggest that these crystals could be and inexpensive and durable way to isolate CO2 for sequestration. Their central conclusions about the materials sound promising:

Members of a selection of these ZIFs (termed ZIF-68, ZIF-69, and ZIF-70) have high thermal stability (up to 390°C) and chemical stability in refluxing organic and aqueous media. Their frameworks have high porosity (with surface areas up to 1970 square meters per gram), and they exhibit unusual selectivity for CO2 capture from CO2/CO mixtures and extraordinary capacity for storing CO2: 1 liter of ZIF-69 can hold ~83 liters of CO2 at 273 kelvin under ambient pressure.

If so, they could help reduce the costs associated with installing and operating CCS equipment – a particular boon given the likelihood that coal use will remain a feature of many economies and some processes – like concrete manufacture – are extremely hard to decarbonize.