Category: Politics

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

Treating malaria

Vegetable stir fry

Legend has it that the gin and tonic cocktail evolved to provide the administrators of the British Empire with both ethanol and quinine. The former would keep them happy, and the latter would help keep malaria-carrying mosquitos at bay. In the present day, chloroquinine is still a common treatment for malaria. At 20-40 cents a dose, it is dramatically cheaper than the more effective alternative: a drug called artemisinin which is derived from the Artemisia annua shrub. A course of artemisinin treatment costs between $5 and $7 – too much for many people in the developing world.

Also problematic is how using artemisinin-only treatments will rapidly lead to drug resistance in mosquito populations. Mutations that confer advantages against a particular compound are relatively common, and are strongly selected for by evolution once they occur. It is much less likely that a malarial parasite will evolve both resistance to artemisinin and to a drug used in combination before one compound or the other kills it. As such, artemisinin combination therapies (ACTs) are the preferred treatment. These are somewhat more expensive, at $6 to$10 for a course of treatment.

Several organizations are trying to tackle the cost issue. In particular, the World Bank and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are cooperating on a scheme called the Affordable Medicines Facility-malaria (AMFm). Given that malaria continues to kill 1-3 million people per year – and sicken between 400 and 900 million – such efforts are to be applauded and encouraged.

Remembrance Day

Remembrance Day is a fundamentally problematic holiday. On the one hand, it is meant to recognize the awfulness of war. On the other, it is meant to glorify those on our side who participated in wars. A truly pacifist holiday might be more easily palatable, but it would doubtless arise the ire of those who served in past conflicts and those who recognize the righteousness of at least some of them.

Wars can be divided into three categories:

  1. Those fought for reasons of immediate self defence (i.e. the Polish defence efforts when both Russia and Germany attacked at the outset of the Second World War).
  2. Wars fought for purposes that we can generally recognize as morally admirable now (the defence of the innocent).
  3. Wars fought for purposes we know consider immoral (territorial gain, the elimination of ethnic groups, etc).

What arises in response to this categorization is the question of to what degree those today can judge the wars on the past on the basis of contemporary ideas of morality. If Canada’s participation in the First World War was essentially in defence of imperialism, does our subsequent belief that imperialism is an unacceptable aim alter how we should feel about the war? Secondly, there is the matter of the individual evaluations of soldiers. If soldiers have no responsibility for assessing the rightness or wrongness of the war they are in, we are obliged to honour the Nazi machine-gun operator defending Juno Beach as much as the Canadians storming it. If soldiers are responsible for assessing the morality of the wars they participate in, we cannot simply honour them as a block.

When you move beyond crude patriotism to an ethic of equal human worth, it becomes very difficult to continue to accept war memorials at face value.

The biofuels controversy

Civilization Museum stairwell

Ricardo Hausmann, over at the Financial Times, has written an article on why biofuels are wonderful, not to mention the wave of the future. He says that current oil prices guarantee the long-term viability of biofuels, that there is lots of under-utilized land to grow them on, that the market can sort out the fuel/food issue, that higher profits for farmers from biofuel production will reduce government subsidies, and that developing countries will benefit because they have the most under-utilized land. Hausmann concludes that:

Standards will have to be developed to allow the energy and automotive industries to co-ordinate technologies. To make this scenario appealing, the impact of the expansion of the agricultural frontier on the environment and biodiversity, and the distributive effects of the rise in food prices will have to be addressed.

But these problems seem solvable given the expected political benefits in terms of lower net carbon emissions, more energy security, more efficient agricultural policies and greater opportunities for sustainable development.

While there is some reason to share his enthusiasm for biofuels, it is becoming increasingly clear that they have very serious (perhaps fatal) technical and ethical problems. The idea that biofuel profits will reduce government support for agriculture is also laughably naive.

Perhaps the most outspoken critic of biofuels is George Monbiot – British journalist and author of Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning. In his most recent article on the subject, Monbiot pans biofuels as both ecologically ineffective and ethically unsound. He argues that their purported climate change benefits are over-stated:

[Nitrous oxide emissions] alone ensure that ethanol from maize causes between 0.9 and 1.5 times as much warming as petrol, while rapeseed oil (the source of more than 80% of the world’s biodiesel) generates 1-1.7 times the impact of diesel. This is before you account for the changes in land use.

A paper published in the journal Science three months ago suggests that protecting uncultivated land saves, over 30 years, between two and nine times the carbon emissions you might avoid by ploughing it and planting biofuels.

He also argues that the drive towards biofuels will literally starve the poor, as farmers start using their land, water, and labour to fuel SUVs rather than feed people. He cites how Swaziland, in the grip of famine and receiving food aid, is nonetheless pushing to expand biofuel production from their main crop: cassava. His concerns do not seem unfounded, given how the amount of corn it takes to fill the tank of an SUV could feed a hungry person for a year.

Jean Ziegler, the United Nations’ independent expert on the right to food, has called biofuels “a catastrophe for the poor” and a “crime against humanity.” Such concerns deserve to be taken seriously. While it may ultimately be both possible and necessary to use biofuels for air travel (given the absence of any alternatives to liquid-fuelled engines for planes), it seems entirely possible that the drive towards biofuels for ground transport will further increase the harm being caused to the developed world and the biosphere by the unsustainable behaviours of the rich.

Climate and the rainforest

Civilization Museum Ceiling

Picture a square of tropical rainforest 100m to a side. According to a study from 2000, it is heavily laden with carbon: between 155 and 187 tonnes for wet forest and between 27 and 63 tonnes for dry. That means that each square kilometre of rainforest is holding between 2,700 and 18,700 tonnes of carbon: with about 70% of that in trees, 20% in the soil, and the rest in roots, understory, and litter.

Cutting down the trees for timber and to open farmland releases some portion of that stock into the atmosphere: with the amount dependent on how the soil’s carbon absorption changes and what is done with the wood and wood waste. When the forest is burned, either intentionally to clear land or unintentionally, the bulk of that carbon gets released into the atmosphere more of less immediately. As a result of both land use change and forest burning, the World Resource Institute estimates that deforestation represents about 18.3% of all human greenhouse gas emissions. As such, tackling it is a priority.

Arguably, the best thing individuals can do is refuse to eat meat or use first-generation biofuels. A considerable amount of cattle production takes placed in cleared areas of rainforest, with additional land cleared to grow soya to feed to cattle. On the biofuels front, there are both situations where rainforest is cleared directly for biofuel plantations (palm oil) and situations where the use of agricultural land to grow biofuel crops (corn) increases the overall need for agricultural land, pushing things like soy production into previously forested areas.

One other element to be aware of is the connection between population growth, urbanization, and deforestation. Several states actively encourage people to relocate from crowded areas to more sparsely populated zones bordering forested areas. Indonesia has sought to shift people away from Java in the same way Brazil has encouraged development in the Amazon to try to reduce crowding in the south.

Addressing deforestation is thus a two-fold proposition. In the first instance, the developed world needs to be aware of how commercial activities directly encourage deforestation. Restricting the use of tropical hardwoods, encouraging vegetarianism and veganism, and improving public transit would all help. Secondly, developing states must be encouraged to value their forests at a level high enough to prevent their destruction. That will probably require some kind of international financial instrument whereby the states actually protecting forests receive payments from all the states that benefit from ecological services those forests provide. The latter is a more wide-ranging solution, but the former can be more immediately implemented. If we are to keep that carbon in rich tropical soil and majestic tree trunks, action on both fronts needs to be undertaken.

Sources:

Reloaded with non-fiction

I have officially abandoned my earlier initiative to finish all my pending books before purchasing more. Mostly, that is because I finished all the non-fiction on my list and all of the fiction I have read recently has been depressing. While much of the non-fiction can also be dispiriting, it feels less like emotional self-flagellation to read it.

My new crop of non-fiction:

  • Bodanis, David. Passionate Minds. 2006
  • Collier, Paul. The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It. 2007
  • Easterly, William. The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. 2006.
  • Overy, Richard. Why the Allies Won. 1995.

The Easterly book was endorsed by Emily Paddon during one of our pre-seminar conversations in Oxford. It is also one of those books that I have heard mentioned in conversation often enough to feel concerned about not having read. The Collier book is clearly on a related theme. I saw Paul Collier speak many times at Oxford and always found him candid and informative. Richard Overy’s book was one of the best I read in the course of two history seminars at Oxford; I look forward to having the chance to take my time in reading it, rather than having it as one of several urgent items in an essay’s source list. Finally, I got the Bodanis book because I have heard it well recommended and know little about Voltaire and even less about Emilie du Chatelet.

I will certainly finish the fiction eventually, but I will do so interspersed with meatier stuff.

Climate ethics principles

Building in Old Montreal

Last November, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change convened a meeting in Nairobi. One document that resulted from that meeting was the White Paper on the Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change (PDF). On the basis of arguments similar to those I have heard from Henry Shue and Stephen Gardiner, the document lists seven things that states intending to behave ethically on the climate change problem should do:

  1. Immediately acknowledge that they have a duty to reduce their emissions as quickly as possible to their fair share of safe global emissions;
  2. Immediately agree that an international greenhouse gas atmospheric stabilization target should be set as low as possible unless those who are most vulnerable to climate change impacts have consented to be put at risk from higher levels;
  3. No longer use scientific uncertainty or cost to their economies alone as justification for refusing to reduce GHG emissions;
  4. No longer refuse to reduce GHG emissions now on the basis that new less-costly technologies will be available in the future or that not all other nations have agreed to reduce their GHG emissions;
  5. Accept national targets for assuring that atmospheric concentrations of GHG are protective of human health and the environment that are based upon ethically supportable allocation criteria;
  6. Acknowledge that nations commit human rights violations that refuse to reduce their GHG emissions to their fair share of global emissions needed to protect those most vulnerable from climate change to loss of life, health, and well-being;
  7. Accept that those who are responsible for climate change have a duty to pay for costs of adaptation to and unavoidable damages from climate change.

Generally speaking, these are fine principles. If every major emitting state adopted them, it is entirely plausible that emissions could be brought down to sustainable levels within the next couple of decades and that the inevitable consequences of climate change from past emission could be equitably addressed. What the list fails to consider is the inherent Nash Equilibrium problem. States do not act as all states would act in an ideal world; rather, they generally act in a way that is rational given their inability to control the actions of other states. Given the Stern conclusion that mitigation is far less expensive than inducing and enduring climate change, it would be in the interest of all states to mitigate. Given how many states are proving reluctant to take that seriously, states that are serious about tackling the problem find themselves pushed towards a rationality of building up adaptive capacity instead of reducing emissions.

All that said, ethicists are not meant to be pragmatists. Having a well-argued idea of what ethical behaviour in the face of climate change would be provides a cognitive platform from which to evaluate current actions. It may also help to raise the overall profile of the issue in democratic states where moral and ethical argumentation can be an important element of the political process.

Banning photography reduces our security

Yet another story has surfaced about the authorities being overly heavy handed in response to photography. This time, it a Japanese man threatened and detained because he was taking photos from the window of a moving train. There are two important responses to this trend. The first is to stress that it is useless for security purposes. If there is a situation in which taking a photo would help a terrorist to achieve their objectives, no enforceable anti-photo policy will deter them. Anyone willing to plan or undertake a terrorist attack will be able to tolerate any punishment that could conceivably be imposed for taking photos. They are also likely to be able to take photos in a way that will not be noticed: either with sneaky hidden cameras or with a simple camera phone or by developing an awareness of when the authorities are watching. Banning photography in places like vehicles and bridges punishes photography enthusiasts and serves no security purpose.

Secondly, the ability to take photographs is an important check against the abuse of authority. Without the infamous videotape, it is likely that the Rodney King beating would never have received public attention and that the officers involved would have been able to lie their way out of the situation. Similar abuses, such as the inappropriate use of tasers, have been appropriately documented because people present had the capability and initiative to make a recording. Photos, videos, and other recordings can provide a vital record of interactions with authority: both allowing people whose rights are abused to provide evidence and allowing frivolous claims to be dismissed. A security force that is serious about good conduct and oversight has nothing to fear and much to gain from a bit of public surveillance.

More generally, banning photography is symptomatic of the demise of open society. While there are legitimate security risks that exist and reasonable steps that should be taken to protect against them, reducing oversight and individual liberty both undermines the very things we are trying to protect and creates new risks of abuse at the hands of modern society’s burly new enforcers.

[Update: 15 November 2007] This post on Classical Bookworm, about a recent incident at the Vancouver airport, highlights how important it is for private citizens to be able to record the actions of police and other security officials.

Related posts:

Pakistan’s state of emergency

Montreal flats

While I cannot speak on them with any particular knowledge or authority, it does seem that the unfolding events in Pakistan generate some ominous possibilities within the region. A recent Stratfor briefing argues that:

Whether Musharraf himself survives is not a historically significant issue. What is significant is whether Pakistan will fall into internal chaos or civil war, or fragment into smaller states. We must consider what that would mean.

One can only begin to imagine how the Middle East would change if Pakistan disintegrated. It’s a nuclear power bordering a huge but relatively fragile democracy, as well as Iran and Afghanistan. Furthermore, that exists in the context of the Iranian drive for nuclear weapons, the weakness of the Afghan federal government, and. the possibility of the breakup of Iraq (as well as a Turkish attack against the northern Kurdish region). Even for a region that has frequently been in turmoil, this is quite a confluence of events.

Given the context, it is unsurprising that climate change is not the top priority in Pakistan, though the inevitable disruption a changing climate will bring in future decades does seem likely to exacerbate tensions in this part of the world.

Brief post on the Alberta oil sands

“If anything characterizes the 21st century, it’s our inability to restrain ourselves for the benefit of other people.”

This quotation from James Katz comes from an article on the annoying use of cellular phones in public or at inappropriate times. It applies just as well to an issue currently being protested in Alberta as a new legislative session begins: the oil sands.

If oil companies had to bear all the direct and indirect costs associated with production in the oil sands, it seems doubtful that the industry would exist. Those costs include air and water pollution, the large-scale use of fresh water supplies, deforestation, soil contamination, the wholesale destruction and of large tracts of land, and heavy greenhouse gas emissions.. The Pembina Institute – probably Canada’s best environmental NGO – has a website devoted to oil sands issues.

With oil likely to hit $100 a barrel this week, it seems probable that ever more of Alberta’s northern boreal forest will be carved up for petroleum.

Reliable Replacement Warheads

Old Montreal

Since July 16th, 1945 the United States has been a nuclear power. The first American thermonuclear weapon was detonated in 1952. During the span of the Cold War, tens of thousands of hydrogen bombs were assembled and mounted inside artillery shells, torpedoes, submarine launched missiles, cruise missiles, land-based ICBMs, and aircraft-mounted bombs. Now, these weapons are starting to age and a debate has emerged on what should be done with them.

Many of these weapons are highly complex. A standard submarine-based missile has a conical warhead. Inside is a uranium casing that serves to contain the original blast until a maximum amount of fission has occurred. At the bottom of that casing is a ‘pit’ of plutonium which is at a sub-critical density. Around that is a casing of brittle, toxic, neutron-reflecting beryllium. Inside it may be a cavity containing tritium and deuterium gas (in the case of a “boosted” primary). Around the beryllium outer sphere is a shell of high explosives designed to explode with fantastic precision, crush the plutonium pit to supercritical density, and initiate the fission reaction.

This whole assembly exists to initiate fusion in the ‘secondary,’ located higher in the outer uranium casing. The material that undergoes fusion – usually lithium deuteride – is wrapped around another sphere of uranium and is, in turn, wrapped in more uranium. All this is to create the largest possible yield in a relatively small and light package. The small size and conical shape allow eight or more of these devices to be placed on a single missile and then independently targeted once that missile is at the height of its ascent.

The 2008 budget allocated $6.5 billion for the maintenance of the American nuclear stockpile. That consists of 9,900 assembled warheads – 5,700 of them deployed operationally. In addition to these, about 7,000 plutonium pits are stored at the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas. As the weapons age, concerns are developing about their reliability. They all contain high explosives, toxic chemicals, and corrosive agents. While it is possible to upgrade many of the non-nuclear components and replace them with more stable variants, the newly assembled bombs could not legally be tested: potentially leaving military commanders in doubt about their usability.

That is, in essence, the core of the ongoing debate about the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW). The program would begin by refurbishing 100 kiloton W76 warheads, which is already undergoing a less ambitious retrofitting. The hope is that the program can produce weapons with long durability and lower maintenance costs, and be able to do so without requiring full-scale tests of the devices, as were conducted in Nevada and the Marshall Islands during the Cold War. I won’t get into the details of the debate here. More than sufficient information exists online and in recent newspapers and magazines. What is less frequently considered are some of the aspects of international law relevant to nuclear weapons.

The whole program should remind people about an oft-forgotten element of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Everyone remembers the bit about signatories without nuclear weapons pledging not to acquire them. People forget that the treaty also obliges existing nuclear powers to reduce their arsenals as part of an overall progression towards de-nuclearization. Upgrading your nuclear arsenal to endure further decades of operational status is hardly consistent with this requirement. It also signals to other states that the United States continues to consider operationally deployed nuclear weapons an important part of their overall military strategy.

Individuals and organizations contemplating a sizable RRW program might also do well to re-read the Advisory Opinion on the Legality of the Threat or use of Nuclear Weapons set down by the International Court of Justice. While such legal considerations are relatively unlikely to affect whatever decisions are made in relation to the RRW, examining the status of the law can be a good way to reach decisions about the respective rights and obligations of states.