climate change activist and science communicator; photographer; mapmaker — advocate for a stable global climate, reduced nuclear weapon risks, and safe human-AI interaction
Matters of money
Getting interviewed by the New York Times, climate scientist Gavin A. Schmidt came up with a very nice quotation:
If you ask a scientist how much more CO2 do you think we should add to the atmosphere, the answer is going to be none. All the rest is economics.
It’s a nice pithy summary – well suited to use as an email footer.
One thing I didn’t know about continental Europe is that in many countries there inheritance isn’t something that you can allocate in your will. If you want to give it all to charity, tough luck: it is impossible and illegal. Instead, you are obligated to leave a set portion of your total estate to your children, divided equally among them. This is referred to as “forced heirship.” There are even provisions in place to “claw back” money given away in the last few years of life, so as to prevent people from circumventing the heirship law by donating while alive. As such, if you give a big dollop of money to a charity and die a few years later (less than two in Austria, or ten in Germany), the state might take it back and give some of it to your children.
This all strikes me as rather batty and weird. After all, the privilege of being able to assign where your wealth goes after death is a natural extension of private property rights in general (though is reasonably subjected to things like inheritance taxes). Particularly in the case of very wealthy individuals, you could also argue that giving a large set share of the estate to each child will do more harm than good. This is what Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and others have argued, when setting up their wills to give only a small fraction of their wealth to their children. Indeed, one of the major consolations associated with the way wealth tends to concentrate is that people who assemble truly colossal heaps of it often give a lot to charity as they age and die. Gates is certainly an example, as were Carnegie and others. The European system seems more inclined towards the establishment of dynasties. That said, it is certainly possible for people who have been given the ability to choose who will inherit their estate to make the choices poorly. There are definitely worse options than even distribution among children. Cases of people leaving their estates to their pets spring to mind.
In practical terms, there are lots of ways people could work their way around such requirements. They could hold much of their wealth in jurisdictions where the law is different. They could also convert most of their wealth into a life annuity upon retirement. It would be interesting to know what proportion of people use such mechanisms in European countries, and how they are distributed between different levels of wealth.
A recent report from the International Food Policy Research Institute highlighted the degree to which climate change threatens global agricultural output:
In parts of the developing world some crop yields in 2050 could be only half of their 2000 levels. Irrigation may not help: climate change will hit irrigated systems harder than rain-fed ones. And the hope that gainers from climate change will outweigh losers looks vain: the damage from higher temperatures and erratic rainfall will be too big.
Couple that with ever-increasing population, and you have a recipe for a lot of suffering and strife.
A new book estimates that the climate change impact of pets is considerable:
In a study published in New Scientist, they calculated a medium dog eats 164 kilograms of meat and 95kg of cereals every year. It takes 43.3 square metres of land to produce 1kg of chicken a year. This means it takes 0.84 hectares to feed Fido.
They compared this with the footprint of a Toyota Land Cruiser, driven 10,000km a year, which uses 55.1 gigajoules (the energy used to build and fuel it). One hectare of land can produce 135 gigajoules a year, which means the vehicle’s eco-footprint is 0.41ha – less than half of the dog’s.
They found cats have an eco-footprint of 0.15ha – slightly less than a Volkswagen Golf. Hamsters have a footprint of 0.014ha – keeping two of them is equivalent to owning a plasma TV.
Just another thing that needs to be tallied up when considering one’s individual climate impact. It is also another reason to support carbon pricing, such as through an economy-wide carbon tax. Such a tax would make people consider the climatic impact of their pets more appropriately, and possibly consider smaller and/or vegetarian options.
All that being said, having a pet is a lot less carbon intensive than having a child. For those out there who are using dachshunds or tabbies as alternatives to procreation, carry right along.
Perhaps the only thing that will ever silence the various overblown objections to compact fluorescent lights is when they are replaced by solid state lighting systems, based on light emitting diodes (LEDs).
Unfortunately, as a post on BoingBoing points out, there is still a way to go before such lighting systems will be viable options for most people. For one thing, they are still expensive. For another, the light they produce may start out not being white, or drift away from being white over time. Worse, it is very difficult for people to distinguish between high and low quality products currently on offer.
Another problem is that LEDs aren’t unambiguously more efficient than fluorescent lighting systems: “The more lumens per watt, the better the energy efficiency. The kind of fluorescent lamps used in offices–the long, narrow ones that are called T-5 or T-8s in Technicalland–regularly get more than 100 lumens per watt. An LED T-8 lamp tested by CALiPER last year got 42.” It seems those of us pushing for more energy efficient lighting may have to continue rebutting claims about mercury and flickering for some time yet.
The Economist argues that the popularity of so-called ‘smart’ electrical grids is cause for suspicion. The fact that builders of renewable energy plants and operators of dirty coal plants are both on side suggests that the grids will not, in and of themselves, produce a push towards reduced greenhouse gas emissions. Indeed, if they reduce the amount of extra capacity required and cut energy prices through greater efficiency they might encourage increased usage and thus increased emissions.
The point is well taken, as is the argument that legislation is required to ensure that new technologies actually lead to climate change mitigation. Without government-created incentives like carbon pricing, we cannot assume that technological advancement and voluntary action will lead to reduced emissions.
Philip Greenspun – founder of Photo.net – has written an interesting post on one way in which big American banks are bilking the taxpayer: specifically, by borrowing money at 0% interest and then plowing it into short-term bonds yielding 2-3%. By using leverage, they can effectively earn even more. Since the bonds being purchased are mostly US Treasuries, this is an especially egregious way of generating private profits at public expense. Having been told that the banks are earning their billion-dollar profits ‘trading,’ Greenspun asks:
“For someone to make money trading, there has to be someone on the other side of every trade who is losing money. Where does each bank find someone who can lose $1 billion every month?”
No prizes for guessing that the losing party is taxpayers and citizens at large.
Greenspun has written previously on investment (including why managed mutual funds are often effectively scams).
In any case, this seems like yet more evidence that banks ought to be seriously busted down to size. It would be refreshing if they could stand or fail on their own merits, rather than propped up in vampiric form because of the systemic risk they create in the financial system.
The British ISP TalkTalk has been working to show why banning people from the internet, based on unproven allegations of piracy, is a bad idea. Specifically, they have highlighted how many people still use WEP to protect their wireless networks from use by strangers, despite the fact that WEP encryption is easily compromised. That means it is easy for someone to use software tools to access a nearby network and then use it for illegal purposes. My own experience with wireless networks has demonstrated that people really will use them for criminal purposes if they can gain access.
Beyond that, the idea of cutting people off on the basis of three accusations alone runs fundamentally contrary to the presumption of innocence in our system of justice. It would inevitably be abused by copyright holders, and it would inevitably lead to innocent people being cut off from the internet, an increasingly vital part of life for almost everyone. Indeed, Finland recently declared broadband access a right.
To me, the fact that laws like this may well emerge in France, the UK, and elsewhere seems like another example of just how badly broken our intellectual property (IP) systems are, and how badly skewed they are towards protecting the rights of IP owners rather than the public at large. We would be a lot better off if patents were granted more selectively, if licensing of them was mandatory, if copyright was less well defended and expired sooner, and if fair use rights were more effectively legally enshrined. Here’s hoping ‘pirate parties’ continue to proliferate, pushing back the IP laws that have become so unfairly weighted towards those who own the content.
After all, it needs to be remembered that there is nothing libertarian or natural about IP protection. Rather, content owners are having their property claims enforced by the mechanisms of the state. The justification for this is supposed to be that doing so serves the public interest; if that is no longer the case, the laws ought to be watered down or scrapped.
Many oil producing states rely upon revenues associated with that resource to finance themselves, particularly when it comes to social spending. This sits awkwardly beside the fact that the era of cheap and easy oil is ending. As such, states seeking to maintain output will face some very tricky choices. To prevent a collapse in exports, they will need to invest much more (making the oil industry less of a support to state coffers). They may also need to reduce or eliminate the degree to which they subsidize petroleum products like gasoline for the local population.
None of this is the kind of thing that keeps governments secure. Indeed, a government that pursues the economically prudent course of investing in long-term capacity might find itself threatened by others who would rather skip the investment to keep things rolling nicely in the present. All that adds another worrisome dimension to the nexus of energy security and global politics. It is especially hard to see how states like Saudi Arabia – where the entire social, political, and economic system depends on money from oil exports – will adapt to a world where maintaining their output becomes more and more costly and challenging.
The Economist recently published an interesting survey on mobile phones and telecommunications in emerging markets. One fact that is a bit startling is that, of the world’s estimated 6.8 billion people, 3.6 billion (53%) are estimated to own cellular phones. As one of the articles argues, a luxury item has become a tool of global development.
It will certainly be interesting to see what happens as smartphones begin to make the same transition. As the internet turns ubiquitous, it seems likely to change in ways more profound and unexpected than simply being available anywhere. As my own experience with smartphones demonstrates, the formfactor of these devices makes them less-than-ideal tools for browsing the conventional web.