Category: Politics

All posts on what Bismarck called “the art of the possible”

International emissions trading

In many quarters, there is considerable resistance to the idea of international carbon trading. Some people characterize it as shipping money abroad for no reason, or the buying of ‘Hot Air.’ While there have certainly been problems with the implementation of carbon trading so far, the principle is intellectually sound. It could serve as a strong mechanism for reducing the total costs of climate change mitigation.

To understand why, consider that the major purpose of international carbon trading is to make tonnes of greenhouse gas emission reductions into a commodity. As such, their economic characteristics would be akin to those of other internationally traded commodities. Consider, for instance, an island state that requires copper for various purposes. It is technically possible to acquire copper on their territory, but the costs of doing so are enormous. Their copper reserves are dispersed and of poor quality, making the cost per tonne of finished copper excessive. Provided that the cost of buying copper internationally is lower than that of producing it domestically, the sensible thing to do is to buy the stuff on the world market. If the situation changes somehow (international prices rise, or foreign prices fall), the economically optimal choice may change as well. In the case of copper, this is immediately clear to virtually everyone. States that can produce copper more cheaply relative to other things sell copper internationally while those in the converse situation buy it. Both states with low-cost and those with high-cost copper benefit from this arrangement.

When it comes to carbon emissions, there are still comparative advantages that differ between states. This creates the possibility of positive sum trade: an exchange where both sides end up happier than they would be without trading. A relatively wealthy state that has already eliminated all the greenhouse gas emissions that can be easily forgone can pay a developing state to cut their own emissions. The buying state spends less than they would for producing the reduction domestically, and the receiving state gets the economic incentive to mitigate.

To reach this point, a few critical things are needed. First, for emission reductions to be tradable as a commodity, they must be measurable and verifiable. They differ from other commodities in that it is much more challenging to measure the tonne of CO2 a factory does not produce than the tonne of carbon that it does. That said, the difficulty is surmountable. We know how much greenhouse gas is produced by using different fuels in different ways. We also know how much is produced through different kinds of industrial production, such as cement manufacture. All that is required is the infrastructure and personnel to quantify and ensure reductions.

A trickier problem is that of additionality. If Country X pays Country Y $Z to build a natural gas power plant that will produce ten million fewer tonnes of CO2 than a coal power plant, it can only legitimately bank those tonnes if it was only the payment that motivated the choice. If Country Y actually chose the gas plant because coal plants pollute terribly and coal prices have been rising, Country X did not produce as many ‘additional’ reductions as intended. As with simple measurement, additionality is a practical problem that can be addressed through scientific and economic tools.

Developing and deploying those kinds of tools, so as to further the emergence of a robust and effective international carbon market, should be an excellent way to cut total human greenhouse gas emissions in a relatively rapid and low-cost way.

The media and climate change ‘dissent’

This Ron Rosenbaum article in Slate argues that it is inappropriate for journalists to portray “the anthropogenic theory of global warming” as an undisputed fact. It cites the importance of considering dissenting views, and asserts that the history of science shows that a consensus held by most of the scientific community can be wrong. While there is some value to both arguments, I think they are weaker than the counter-arguments, in this case.

Starting with dissent, we need to appreciate the character of the consensus on climate change and the character of opposition to it. As discussed here before, there are areas of greater and lesser certainty, when it comes to climate change. What is absolutely certain is that we are increasing the concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere and that, in turn, causes more energy from the sun to be absorbed. The precise consequences of that overall warming are not known with certainty, but we do know enough to have very good reason to be worried. Arguably, those dissenting from this view are a combination of the self-interested (industrial groups reliant upon heavy emissions, conservative ideologues opposed to government regulation) and conspiracy theorists. The doubts of legitimate scientists establish the areas of uncertainty within climatic science, including questions about the strength of feedback mechanisms, the effects of planetary warming on regional weather, and so forth.

On the matter of scientific consensus, the article argues that a “lone dissenting voice of that crazy guy in the Swiss patent office” overthrew the Newtonian conception of gravity. This is a relatively absurd claim. Firstly, relativistic physics essentially includes Newtonian physics as a special case, in situations where velocities are not close to the speed of light and massive objects are not close at hand. Secondly, the process through which Relativity became an established scientific theory was largely focused on the collection of empirical evidence (demonstrations of gravitational lensing, for instance) and the refinement of the theory within the scientific community. Newtonian physics, for its part, is still completely adequate for planning space voyages within our solar system – the basic relationships posited within it are close to correct in most cases. If we have done so well with our climate models, we have engineered them effectively indeed.

Relations between science and the media will always be challenging. The media generally doesn’t have the time, expertise, or interest to deal with nuance. It also lacks an audience interested in cautious and non-confrontational assessments of fact. In short, the kind of story that is demanded of the media is one in which the scientific process and the character of scientific conclusions cannot always be presented effectively. Moderating some of the incentives to distort that are inherent to the contemporary practice of journalism is thus an undertaking with some merit. It is not as though we should forbid any mention of opposition to our general understanding of climate change; rather, journalists should strive to make clear that the evidence on one side is overwhelmingly stronger than that on the other. A defendant who was seen to stab someone in the middle of the field at the Super Bowl, viewed by millions of people, surely has the right to make a defence at his trial. He does not have the right to media coverage that gives equal weight to claims that he had nothing to do with the death.

Temperature and extreme weather

A new article in Science provides observational evidence of the link between rising temperatures and extreme weather events:

These observations reveal a distinct link between rainfall extremes and temperature, with heavy rain events increasing during warm periods and decreasing during cold periods. Furthermore, the observed amplification of rainfall extremes is found to be larger than predicted by models, implying that projections of future changes in rainfall extremes due to anthropogenic global warming may be underestimated.

Of all the impacts of climate change, extreme weather seems especially likely to help spur mitigation action, especially when that weather occurs in rich states. Reasons for that include the visibility and newsworthiness of floods, droughts, hurricanes, and so forth. Another major factor is the importance of the insurance industry, especially insofar as their professional estimations of risk affect the cost and feasibility of different projects. That is, so long as policy-makers do not establish incentives for risky behaviour.

On patriotism

Having been exposed once again to the summer light show outside parliament, I find myself thinking about patriotism once again. It seems to me that you can approach it from two different directions. In the first case, you develop a list of virtues that a country might possess. These could include a good human rights record, international generosity, the rule of law, and so forth. You then evaluate any particular state on the basis of your pre-existing preferences. The alternative is to simply assert the unique value of a particular state, as derived from its history and so forth.

The first approach strikes me as far more valid. It is absurd for someone to assert the superiority of their country in a non-comparative fashion, or without relation to particular characteristics which establish a state as worthy or unworthy of admiration. Admiring states as means to desirable ends has a fundamentally liberal quality, while the alternative is mythical, with a distinct whiff of fascism.

In general, love of country seems more dangerous than beneficial. We can certainly admire states that do a good job of advancing human welfare, but we should value the states only as vehicles to those ends, not as inherently valuable entities. The doctrine of “my country, right or wrong” seems unacceptable in a world with so much experience of nationalist war and state sponsored moral outrages.

Nanomaterial safety

When it comes to geological periods of time, our intuitions about how things work cannot be trusted. This is a reflection of the parochial character of many of the heuristic shortcuts in our minds. The same thing applies to the behaviour of objects at a minute scale. For instance, sufficiently tiny machinery is hampered enormously more by friction and surface tension than a larger equivalent would be. Because they have more surface area relative to their volume, they also tend to be much more reactive.

Indeed, asymmetries of behaviour at different scale raise serious concerns about the safety of newly developed nanotechnologies. Just as our brains are calibrated to deal with the kind of experiences that have been normal to human lives for thousands of years, our regulatory procedures are calibrated to respond to known risks like toxicity or corrosiveness.

There have certainly been serious problems that arose from regulation lagging innovation in the past. Think of ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons, or mesotheliomas caused by chrysotile asbestos. Balancing safety concerns with the desire not to stifle innovation is extremely challenging, especially when the entities with the most sophistication in relation to a new technology are its commercial backers.

In some cases, nanomaterials have almost completely escaped regulation because it has been assumed they behave like their non-nanoscale equivalents. That said, nanoscale titanium dioxide is not the same as a macroscopic bar of the stuff. The same is true for carbon nanotubes, silver nanoparticles, and so forth. Indeed, if the substances were equivalent, there would be no promise in nanotechnology itself. Especially when it comes to the exposure of nanoparticles to human beings (though food, cosmetics, etc), it makes sense for the nano-versions to be regulated as new substances, with the onus on the manufacturers to demonstrate safety.

McKinsey ranks mitigation technologies

In the past, I have mentioned both marginal abatement cost curves for greenhouse gasses (curves that describe the cost of eliminating each successive tonne of greenhouse gas) and the economic analyses done by McKinsey. Recently, a friend reminded me of an informative graphic from one of their reports:

The whole report is available online. All the options listed on the left hand side, below the horizontal line, are actually projected to save money as well as reduce greenhouse emissions. Those to the right are progressively more expensive, up to about 50 Euros a tonne.

The graphic is quite interesting because it shows a ranking of the cost at which different technologies can achieve emission reductions. It’s also interesting that they projected how many technologies need to be implemented – and to what degree – to achieve stabilization of greenhouse gas levels at 550, 450, and 400 parts per million of CO2 equivalent.

Put on a graphic like this, it all looks very achievable.

Shifting baselines, oil and ice

One of the more interesting environmental blogs I read is Shifting Baselines: a fisheries focused site that concentrates on how our changing expectations about life in the sea conceal from us the gradual emergence of long-term changes. A couple of other shifting baselines have caught my attention recently. They have to do with the long term trends of Arctic sea ice depletion and increasing oil scarcity. In both cases, exceptional shifts in the recent past have given way to what look like temporary reprieves.

Last summer’s Arctic sea ice minimum was a major record-breaker. It sparked serious thinking about whether the Arctic summer could be ice-free within a decade. This summer’s melt now seems likely to be less severe. Does this mean our level of worry should diminish, or is this simply oscillation around a worrying downward trend? It certainly gives ammunition to those who would like to deny that there is a trend at all. In the long run, it probably doesn’t matter enormously whether the Arctic melts in ten years or thirty. Where it may matter considerably is insofar as awareness of Arctic melting either prompts the emergence of strong climatic policies or provides fodder for those who want to continue to delay.

The same might be said about the recent slip in the price of gasoline. That being said, the nature of the causal factors at work there seems more straightforward. Prices do not seem to be falling because supply constraints have been lifted. Rather, they are falling because people are cutting back on usage: both as a result of general economic weakness and as a result of high energy prices themselves. High gasoline prices are something of a double-edged sword for environmentalists. On the one hand, they do help to encourage investments in efficiency. On the other, they encourage the development of truly filthy alternative sources of fuel (like the oil sands), encourage the development of false solutions (like corn ethanol), as well as making it more challenging politically to support sound environmental policies.

Whether it is ice or energy under consideration, the general lesson of shifting baselines is pertinent. We need to see past short term trends and our focus on how the recent past and the present compare, looking onwards to fundamental forces and long-term developments. Of course, when it comes to systems as massive and complex as the global climatic and economic systems, doing so is enormously difficult.

Honey and veganism

This Slate article on honey and veganism makes some good points: most notably about the inconsistency between refusing honey on ethical grounds and accepting fruit that is pollinated by domesticated bees. Not eating anything that requires bee labour for production rules out “almonds, avocados, broccoli, canola, cherries, cucumbers, lettuce, peaches, pears, plums, sunflowers, and tomatoes.” In theory, one might be able to find some of these things grown only with the assistance of naturally occurring pollinators, but I doubt it is something most honey-shunning vegans have even considered.

My personal position, as described before, is that there is no fundamental problem with using animals for food. The problems arise when it is done in an environmentally unsustainable, unhygienic, or morally unacceptable way. The latter condition means that, when animals above a certain threshold of sentience are involved, they cannot be treated in a way fundamentally contrary to their nature. In the case of bees, I would argue that they fall below the sentience threshold. While it is impossible to determine, at this time, whether they are capable of experiencing suffering, forming complex thoughts, and so forth, it seems plausible to conclude that they generally cannot, and are thus more on par with protozoans, plants, and fungi than with complex animals. I don’t claim that this moral code is entirely comprehensive or internally consistent, but it presently strikes an acceptable balance between my level of concern and the amount of time I am willing to spend pondering such questions and taking actions required in order to not contravene them.

In addition to honey, I generally disagree with the vegan objection to wool. There doesn’t seem to be any fundamental cruelty or desecration involved in the shearing of sheep, though I should probably investigate the conditions in which sheep used for wool production are raised and live.

More on food, ethics, and the environment:

There are many more, but that list should get the curious reader started.

Human Health in a Changing Climate

Health Canada has followed up the climate change impact assessment carried out by Natural Resources Canada with a report of their own: Human Health in a Changing Climate: A Canadian Assessment of Vulnerabilities and Adaptive Capacity. For some bizarre reason, they have decided not to post it on their website. Rather, it is available through email upon request. To simplify matters, here it is:

When I have the chance, I will merge them all into one file and post it.

[Update: 19 August 2008] Here is the whole thing as one 9 megabyte PDF: Human Health in a Changing Climate: A Canadian Assessment of Vulnerabilities and Adaptive Capacity.

[Update: 1 January 2012] Here is just the overview page as an image file.