Politics – Page 170 – a sibilant intake of breath

Climate in 2009: predictions

Two related events are likely to dominate climate news for 2009: the first year of the Obama administration and the UNFCCC negotiations in Copenhagen. Arguably, the biggest open question is just how dedicated Obama will be to domestic and international climate change action. It may be that he lives up to the high expectations of the environmental community, setting the stage for the rapid deployment of a cap-and-trade carbon pricing system in the United States and playing a constructive role in the creation of an international legal instrument to succeed the Kyoto Protocol. It may also be that his focus lies elsewhere, or that Congressional opposition makes his platform harder to implement. The Obama administration failing to make climate a priority issue from the outset is probably the most likely ‘bad news’ climate story of 2009, whereas successful domestic and international engagement is probably the most likely ‘good news’ story.

American re-engagement with the UNFCCC process is a necessary condition for progress, but it will not be sufficient in itself. Much depends on whether India and China can be brought into the agreement, as well as whether deforestation can be successfully incorporated into a new accord. Given the urgency of reducing emissions (starting the long path to stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gasses), it must be hoped that all the key states will rise to the challenge and develop a fair and effective approach.

If there are going to be big climatic surprises in 2009, they are more likely to be physical than political. It is nearly certain that there will be strange and destructive weather somewhere, and that at least some people will attribute it to climate change (whether plausibly or not). A big surprise could take the form of an extreme weather event, or simply the sharp acceleration of a tend such as glacier loss, permafrost melting, or changes in precipitation patterns.

With luck, 2009 will be seen as the year in which the world really began turning the corner towards emissions reductions. Most of the governments most bitterly opposed to action on climate change have been eliminated, and an accord between the big players (the US, China, Japan, Europe, etc) would have the momentum to drag everyone else along. The road ahead will continue to include shifts in policy – as well as very active debates on who should bear which costs – but the general outlines could be affirmed this year and global implementation could begin in earnest. Those broad outlines include the need for both total and per-capita emissions to start falling globally (perhaps with a brief period of residual growth in very poor states), that per-capita emissions should converge between all states, and that many of the costs of global mitigation and adaptation be borne by the societies that have created the problem.

For the sake of all future generations, let’s hope this will be a year of great progress.

Grid technologies to support renewable power

The MIT Technology Review has a good article about renewable energy and the ways electrical grids will need to change in order to accomodate it. Both key points have been discussed here before. Firstly, we need high voltage low-loss power lines from areas with lots of renewable potential (sunny parts of the southern US, windy parts of Europe, etc) to areas with lots of electrical demand. Secondly, we need a more intelligent grid that can manage demand and store some energy in periods of excess, for use in times when renewable output falters.

The article highlights how the advantages of a revamped grid are economic as well as environmental:

Smart-grid technologies could reduce overall electricity consumption by 6 percent and peak demand by as much as 27 percent. The peak-demand reductions alone would save between $175 billion and $332 billion over 20 years, according to the Brattle Group, a consultancy in Cambridge, MA. Not only would lower demand free up transmission capacity, but the capital investment that would otherwise be needed for new conventional power plants could be redirected to renewables. That’s because smart-grid technologies would make small installations of wind turbines and photovoltaic panels much more practical. “They will enable much larger amounts of renewables to be integrated on the grid and lower the effective overall system-wide cost of those renewables,” says the Brattle Group’s Peter Fox-Penner.

In short, a smarter grid holds out the prospect of overcoming the biggest limitation of electricity: that supply must always be exactly matched to demand, and that prospects for efficient storage have hitherto been limited. The storage issue, in particular, could be profoundly affected by the deployment of large numbers of electric vehicles with batteries that could be used in part as an electricity reserve for the grid.

Providing incentives for the development of a next-generation grid (as well as removing some of the legal and economic disincentives that prevent it) is an important role for governments – above and beyond the need to put a price on carbon. While carbon pricing can theoretically address the externalities associated with climatic harm from emissions, it cannot automatically deal with the externalities holding back grid development, which include the monopoly status of many of the firms involved, issues concerning economies of scale, the fact that the absence of transmission capacity restricts the emergence of renewable generation capacity (and vice versa).

The full article is definitely worth reading.

The Pope on homosexuality and the environment

Recently, the Pope announced that fighting homosexuality is just as important as protecting the rainforest. These comments have been rightly attacked from many angles. For me, what it highlights most is the ways in which religion can produce poor prioritization of issues. By according certain things sacred or venerated status, they can become a disproportionate focus for attention, a spark for conflicts, and an obstacle to the completion of more important work. Because religions elevate acts that are purely symbolic (say, baptism) to having a high level of perceived practical importance, they can get in the way of the achievement of practical goals, like enhancing and protecting human health and welfare, as well as that of the natural world. To those who say that religion is necessary to make the majority of people act in moral ways, it can be riposted that many of the supposedly moral issues that get the most attention are basically distractions from the real challenges being confronted by humanity.

This is precisely the property of religion that is satirized by Jonathan Swift in the conflict between the Big Enders and the Little Enders in Gulliver’s Travels. Ultimately, the issue of what gender of people a person is attracted to (or wishes to marry) has as much relevance for other people as which side they choose to crack their boiled eggs on. In spite of that, there are those who successfully employ emotions stirred up over such trivial issues as means to bolster their own support by turning people against one another.

Religion isn’t the only force within society that elevates the symbolic to the practical in a potentially harmful or distorting way. Certainly, there are comparable transformations within politics: in which symbols come to be more important than the things they represent, and their defence comes to be a distraction from more important endeavours. Whatever the cause of such instances of ‘missing the point,’ it is to be lamented. It must be hoped that people in a few hundred years will have learned enough to laugh at an idea so silly that protecting the environment and reinforcing traditional gender norms are (a) both desirable ends or (b) equally worthy of attention.

Torture, psychology, and the law

For the darkest day of the year, a couple of torture-related items seem appropriate. Firstly, there is this New York Times piece, which argues that senior officials from the Bush administration should be charged with war crimes, for authorizing and enabling torture. The editorial argues that there is no chance that prosecutions will be sought under an Obama administration, but that he ought to clarify the obligation of the United States and its agents to uphold the Geneva Conventions, as well as reverse executive orders that “eroded civil liberties and the rule of law.”

The prospect of high-level American decision-makers being put on trial for authorizing torture is so unlikely that it is a bit difficult to even form an opinion about it. At the same time, it is likely that nobody thirty years ago would have anticipated the trials at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), or International Criminal Court (ICC). There is no clear reason for which high political office should be any impediment to being tried for war crimes, but it is very unclear how any such prosecutions would fare in the United States. It would certainly be seen as a ‘political’ act, and any connections with international law would likely be the targets for special criticism and scorn from some quarters.

The other story worth mentioning is an experiment conducted by Dr Jerry Burger, of Santa Clara University. It was a less intense re-creation of Milgram’s famous experiment on obedience to authority. Like Milgram, Burger found that a startling proportion of the population is willing to torture a fellow human being as part of a scientific experiment. This is when the only pressure placed upon the subject of the experiment is the authority of the actor pretending to conduct it. That naturally makes one nervous about what people would be willing to do when they felt an urgent and important issue justified it, as well as when far stronger sanctions could be brought against them if they did not proceed.

Vaclav Klaus on climate change

Recently, Czech President Vaclav Klaus demonstrated the degree to which he deeply misunderstands the issue of climate change:

“Environmental issues are a luxury good,” Klaus added. “Now we have to tighten our belt and to cut the luxury.”

Global climate issues “are a silly luxury good,” he repeated.

Not only is maintaining a stable climate a fundamental requirement for human life and civilization, but it will be future generations who bear the majority of the pain if we fail to reduce emissions quickly. Far from being some unnecessary luxury, cutting greenhouse gas emissions is a vital moral requirement.

In Poznan, Al Gore did a much better job of explaining the ethical situation appropriately:

Very simply put, it is wrong for this generation to destroy the habitability of our planet and ruin the prospects of every future generation. That realization — that realization must carry us forward. Our children have a right to hold us to a higher standard when the future of all human civilization is hanging in the balance. They deserve better, and politicians who sit on their hands and do nothing to confront the greatest challenge humankind has ever faced.

Hopefully, that is a position that will rapidly becomore more widely held among politicians and the population at large.

Carbon pricing and economic freedom

Post-Dion, it will take a bold politician to revive the idea of a carbon tax in Canada. One ironic consequence of that is that it is likely to produce more ‘command and control’ style environmental policies. Whereas an economy-wide carbon tax (or cap-and-trade scheme with auctioning) would encourage every individual decision-maker to examine the cost of reducing their greenhouse gas emissions, trying to achieve those reductions based on targetted government initiatives requires that political and bureaucratic decision-makers try to perform that analysis: trying to identify low-cost potential emissions reductions, as well as instruments through which they can be encouraged.

I have argued previously that just putting a price on greenhouse gas emissions is not sufficient to drive the change we need, because other market failures and economic structures need to be overcome. With that caveat expressed, it is more than a touch ironic that an anti-tax ‘free market’ ideology that rejects carbon pricing may lead to centrally planned solutions emerging, as opposed to market-directed ones.

A related irony concerns the timing of mitigation. As Joseph Romm has repeatedly pointed out, we have the opportunity today to begin the transition towards a low-carbon economy in a relatively voluntary way. Nobody needs to be banned from doing essential; rationing is not required. All we need are sensible economic instruments and accompanying policies, provided we get started right away. By contrast, if we squander the opportunity we have now, achieving the stabilization of the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gasses will require that far more onerous burdens be placed on individuals. In short, today’s unhampered freedom to emit greenhouse gasses is inexorably linked to the necessity of sharply dimininished freedoms in the future.

Fatih Birol on peak oil

In an interview with British journalist George Monbiot, Fatih Birol, the chief economist of the International Energy Agency made the following predictions about when peak oil output for non-OPEC and OPEC states would be reached:

“In terms of non-OPEC [countries outside the big oil producers’ cartel]”, he replied, “we are expecting that in three, four years’ time the production of conventional oil will come to a plateau, and start to decline. … In terms of the global picture, assuming that OPEC will invest in a timely manner, global conventional oil can still continue, but we still expect that it will come around 2020 to a plateau as well, which is of course not good news from a global oil supply point of view.”

Coming from a representative of this particular organization, that is quite a surprising statement. Traditionally, the IEA has downplayed any suggestion that global oil output could peak before 2030. A peak in 2020 suggests that we have a lot less time than most firms and governments have been expecting to transition to a post-oil, post-gasoline, post-jet fuel future.

An early peak in oil output could have an enormous effect on both the development of the global economy and climate change. What effect it will have depends on many factors: three crucial ones being the timing of the peak, the severity of the drop-off in output afterwards, and the investment decisions made by states and firms. If we want to continue to produce enough energy to run a global industrialized society, and we also want to avoid the worst effects of climate change, we need to ensure that renewables (and perhaps nuclear) are the energy sources of the future, and that efficient means of energy storage are developed for vehicles.

Power, oversight, and photography

As this disturbing alleged situation demonstrates, you may be ordered at some point to delete photographic or videographic evidence of an event without appropriate justification.

While there may be situations in which security concerns are justifiably paramount, there are also many situations in which those who have authority simply wish to avoid facing any accountability for their actions. Given the conflict of interest involved for those law enforcement officers on the scene, it seems prudent to retain any photographic or videographic evidence you have produced, even if you are asked by them to delete it.

After all, any impartial evidence that exists can only help in any subsequent official proceedings. The absence of such evidence is likely to strengthen the bias of impartial adjudicators towards those with authority, as opposed to those who simply happened to be witnesses.

Prior relevant posts:

[18 December 2008] Zoom has posted an update about this matter.

Unions and seniority

Given the very high level of interest people have had in this previous discussion of the OC Transpo strike and unions in general (78 comments so far), it seemed worth initiating a second discussion on the matter. Since the union is saying that the major purpose of this strike is to retain the right to have bus routes assigned on the basis of seniority, the general issue of seniority and unions seems to be worth considering.

There do seem to be some valid reasons for supporting higher pay and greater privileges for more senior individuals. Among those are the issue of experience, which those who are senior to an organization can be expected to have in greater amounts, and perhaps the facilitation of standard lifestyle transitions: from youth to adult life, and from that to retirement.

At the same time, there seem to be valid reasons to oppose perks based on seniority. In situations where something worth rewarding is often correlated with seniority, but can be measured easily, it seems to make sense to measure and reward it directly. That way, rather than assuming that ten years on the job makes you more capable, you can reward those who actually demonstrate capability in a day-to-day manner. Another argument is that basing a large share of pay and benefits on seniority rewards the mediocre at the expense of the excellent. Those who are very active and engaged get paid no better than those who perform the minimum obligations of the job. Aside from providing a disincentive for talented people to be part of the organization, that seems basically unfair.

I am not disputing the freedom of unions and employers to negotiate whatever terms seem best to them. I am simply seeking to open a discussion on the advantages and disadvantages of favouring seniority: from the perspective of union members, management, and those who consume the products of services the union members and management provide.

Level and rate targets for greenhouse gas mitigation

When greenhouse gas mitigation commitments are made, the standard form is to ‘reduce by a certain percentage below the level in a base year by a target year.’ For example, 5% below 1990 levels by 2012. This can be easily converted into a target in absolute emissions. Say, cutting from 1,000 megatonnes (MT) in 1990 to 950 MT in 2020.

I have criticized the process of target-setting before, arguing that the ability of organization to set targets that look ambitious can obscure the absence of plans to actually achieve those reductions. In the end, it makes sense to focus our efforts on cutting emissions, rather than haggle over whether to cut by 65% or 70% by 2050.

Given that targets won’t be vanishing any time soon, I do have a proposal for improving one aspect of them. Rather than expressing targets are just an absolute level of emissions at a set date, they should be expressed as both an absolute level and a rate of reduction to be achieved by a target date. A financial equivalent would be to say: by 2010, I will have paid off 50% of my mortgage, and will be paying more off at a rate of $10,000 per year. What this avoids is the theoretical situation in which a state or other entity limps across the finish line, meeting a 2020 target with no new ideas and initiatives for reaching their 2050 target. This would be akin to a pharmaceutical company that has all its blockbuster drugs go off-patent simultaneously, at the same time as it has no promising new ones in the pipeline (not a hypothetical scenario for a significant number of drug companies right now).

Having a double rather than a single target doesn’t affect the disjoint between commitments and achievements, but it may help foster the kind of mindset required to build a low-carbon society.