The environment – Page 123 – a sibilant intake of breath

Planning for accidents

Over at Gristmill, there is a good article about planning in the face of possible accidents. Specifically, it discusses the massive coal ash spill in Tennessee. The article stresses how responsible planning must make a genuine attempt to estimate the probability of a catastrophic accident taking place, as well as the likely consequences of such an accident. Excluding worst-case scenarios from planning makes it likely that plans will go forward which are unacceptably dangerous. It also makes it more likely that possible defences against a serious accident will not be established.

Many of these points are similar to ones made about financial risk by Nicholas Taleb. In both cases, there are very serious risks associated with making plans on the basis of ‘ordinary’ outcomes, while ignoring the possibility that things will become far worse than you anticipated.

The oil sands and Canada’s national interest

This Globe and Mail article on the oil sands and the new Obama administration makes a very dubious assertion: namely, that it is unambiguously in Canada’s interests for the oil sands to keep expanding and feeding US energy demands. It argues that, while most of Obama’s cabinet seems serious about restricting greenhouse gas emissions, General James Jones “may turn out to be Canada’s best ally,” because he supports the continued use of fuel from the oil sands.

In the long run, I think Canada will be better off if most of that carbon stays sequestered as bitumen an boreal forest. It certainly isn’t in Canada’s interests to see a delayed transition to a low-carbon economy in the US, given the extent to which it would increase the probability of abrupt, dangerous, or runaway climate change.

This is a case where short-term economic incentives have been trumping those based on a long-term view and a risk weighted analysis. In that sense, the oil sands boom is quite a lot like the housing boom that is in the process of unraveling worldwide. Canada would do well to accept how newly prominent environmental concerns (coupled with less access to capital) should combine to curtail the oil sands initiative before it becomes even more harmful.

[Update: 8 March 2010]. BuryCoal.com is a site dedicated to making the case for leaving coal, along with unconventional oil and gas, underground.

Fishing for krill

On several occasions, I have discussed the concept of ‘fishing down’ through marine food webs: starting with the top predator species, like tuna, and moving to smaller and smaller creatures as the big ones are depleted. In the waters around Antarctica, this process has come very close to reaching its logical extreme. Fishing for krill has become a big business.

Krill are shrimp-like marine invertebrates that make up a significant portion of the world’s zooplankton: the tiny creatures that eat phytoplankton algae. They, in turn, are eaten by all manner of other creatures, ranging up to large whales. Fishing them extensively risks knocking a whole tier out of the food web, with unknown but potentially severe consequences for all other forms of life in the ecosystem.

The krill that are caught are processed for fatty acids, used to make medicine, and fed to farmed fish. In particular, they are useful for giving farmed salmon more of a red colour, in contrast to the sickly looking pale pink much of farm salmon takes on. The current annual catch is estimated to be between 150 – 200,000 tonnes: much of that taken from the waters around Antarctica. Through the use of new technology, a planned new ship (the FV Saga Sea) will apparently be capable of collecting 120,000 tonnes annually. That is nearly one 1000th of the low estimate for the total global biomass of krill, and more such ships are planned.

While it may be that fishing for krill at this scale doesn’t pose a danger to marine ecosystems, it is worth noting that we have no scientific basis for being confident of that. An experiment is simply being performed in unregulated waters, which will have unknown future consequences. As with so many other instances of humanity’s engagement with the natural world, one cannot shake the sense that we are being awfully reckless.

Environmentalism: a faith or a fad?

If you want to seriously annoy environmentalists like me, there are two assertions that will rarely fail:

Environmentalism is a new religion.
Environmentalism is just a fad.

The first view generally arises from fundamental confusion on the part of the person making the assertion. Since they are used to seeing arguments about the morality of individual action presented in religious terms, they assume that anything that involves such arguments must be religious. The faulty syllogism is roughly: religion tries to tell me how to live, environmentalism tries to tell me how to live, therefore environmentalism is religion. This isn’t the case – both because the syllogism is fundamentally invalid, and because there are key differences in the basis for religion and environmentalism, respectively. The second argument does have some evidence to support it, but there is an overwhelming case for hoping it proves untrue in the long term.

Starting with the religion argument, the first step is to establish the nature of religion. The key element of ‘faith’ is a willingness to accept something without empirical evidence: whether it is the existence of a god, the existing of karma, or whatever. Religious beliefs of this kind cannot be empirically disproved. By contrast, virtually all claims made by environmentalists are dependent on their empirical correctness for strength. If mercury didn’t actually poison people, we would be wrong for avoiding it on that basis. The only non-empirical claims behind environmentalism are about what has value. If we didn’t value human life or the natural world, we would have no reason to be concerned about pollution or climate change, and we would have no reason to take action to prevent them.

Every environmental position and argument is open to as much empirical and logical scrutiny anyone cares to apply to it. Everyone is free to perform whatever experiments they like and, if those experiments produce interesting or unexpected results that can be reproduced by others, they can expect them to eventually become part of the body of scientific knowledge. Likewise, people are free to argue about the moral and logical premises of the ‘what should we value’ debate.

Moving on to the ‘fad’ argument, it is certainly the case that public interest in the environment waxes and wanes. Sometimes, catastrophic events draw special attention to the issue. At other times, people find their attention drawn to other happenings. That being said, I think Denis Hayes is right to argue that: “If environment is a fad, it’s going to be our last fad.” Right now, humanity is living with the following assumptions at least implicitly made: (a) the planet can support six billion of us, with more being added daily (b) at least for most of those people, material consumption can continue to rise at several percent per year. Even if we came up with some miracle machine to solve climate change tomorrow, some new issue would arise as the ratio between the total available mass and energy on the planet and the fraction used by human beings continued to fall.

We live in a finite world and, in at least some cases, we are starting to brush against the physical limitations that exist. For that simple reason, environmentalism is important and likely to be enduring. Thankfully, unlike religions which tend to get tangled up in their own history (witness all those trying to prove that the Bible is somehow historically accurate), environmentalism is generally scientifically grounded. As such, its content and prescriptions have the potential to improve as our understanding of the world deepens. For that, we should all be thankful.

The environmental and ‘anti-war’ movements

Historically, there seem to be a fair number of areas of overlap between various aspects of the environmental movement and various aspects of the ‘anti-war’ movement. It seems important, from the outset, to stress that neither is really a unified force. There are a few people who still aspire to the complete abolition of war, while most others have the ambition of either stopping specific wars or curtailing some of the worst aspects of war in general (war crimes, nuclear weapons, etc). On the environmental side, there is arguably even more diversity. People differ on areas of concern (does animal welfare matter?), on the scale of action (local? national? global?), and on appropriate solutions. Overlapping with both camps are some groups (such as Marxists) who feel that changing some underlying aspect of society will address most or all of the problems of war and environmental destruction more or less automatically.

There are a few reasons for which the anti-war movement is a natural fit for the environmental movement. For one thing, they tend to galvanize the same type of people: predominantly students and older people of an anti-establishment bent. More concretely, there is also strong evidence that war causes environmental destruction and that some types of environmental degradation can encourage wars.

That being said, there are also reasons for which the environmental movement might be wise to distance itself from anti-war campaigners. For one thing, there is the danger of getting drawn into debates that are largely irrelevant from an environmental perspective: dealing with climate change is hard enough without needing to factor in the rights and wrongs of the Gaza Strip or Kashmir. For another, a lot of the anti-war movement functions in an extremely confrontational way. Of course, the same is legitimately said about elements of the environmental movement. While such agitation might be necessary to get things started and keep people honest, it tends to become counterproductive once you reach the point of implementing any specific policy.

Finally, there is a bit of a dated quality to the anti-war movement. It feels bound up with Woodrow Wilson, on one side, and the LSD of the 1960s on the other. Certainly, the idea that war can be eliminated as a phenomenon (or even as a tool of policy for rich democratic states) is no longer considered plausible by many people. Similarly, the idea that all wars are fundamentally unjust is hard to maintain given evidence of recent occurrences that (a) could have been stopped through the just application of force and (b) were themselves significantly worse than an armed confrontation would have been. What seems sensible in a post-Holocaust, post-Rwandan genocide world is the advancement of a ‘just war’ agenda, focused on using law and evolving norms of behaviour to avoid unjust wars as well as unjust behaviour in a wartime environment. In practical terms, this involves mechanisms like the arrest and trial of war criminals, interventions to stop genocide, and agreements to eliminate certain weapons and tactics.

A ‘just war’ movement would certainly find areas for profitable collaboration with environmental groups. Many kinds of weapons are of both ecological and humanitarian concern, for instance. What is necessary is a higher degree of nuance and consideration than exist on the activist side of both movements. Hopefully, more mature and sophisticated arguments and tactics will be able to generate progress in reducing the harm from both armed conflict and environmental degradation.

Book on communicating climate science

Over at RealClimate, they are encouraging people to read a free book on communicating climate science: Communicating on Climate Change: An Essential Resource for Journalists, Scientists, and Educators. It was written by Bud Ward for the Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting. It is available online as a PDF, and printed copies are available by mail for US$8.00.

Given how much public communication on climate change is of low quality, we should hope that good books on this topic get the attention of authors and editors.

The Economist on the dire state of the world’s oceans

A recent issue of The Economist features a leader and a special report on the state of the world’s oceans. As with a lot of their environmental coverage, it sits awkwardly beside the rest of their analysis. It is astonishing that the newspaper can argue that “the mass extinction, however remote, that should be concentrating minds is that of mankind” while not doing a lot more to advocate effective action. Like most of the policy-making community, they haven’t really internalized the fact that climate change is an issue of over-riding importance, and that nothing else can be durably achieved until it has been addressed. In addition to highlighting the dangers of climate change, their coverage includes discussion of how overfising risks rendering sharks and tuna extinct; how the oceans would require tens of thousands of years to recover from the pollution already released into them; how the Greenland is “on track” to melt completely, raising sea levels by seven metres; and how acidification, pollution, and climate change threaten to eliminate coral reefs.

Clearly, it is one thing to have accepted the collective judgment of the scientific community. It is quite another to have fully incorporated the consequences of that judgment into your structure of beliefs and behaviour.

The carbon footprint of this blog

According to Slate, the energy usage associated with running a blog is between 9 and 16 kWh per gigabyte of data transferred. That is based on data about “electricity needed to run the servers hosting the data, the Internet backbone over which those data travel, and the network connections through which the data flow.”

Since sindark.com became active in 2007, the total data transferred has been about 67.7 gigabytes. Based on the high estimate, that suggests about 1,080 kWh of total electricity usage – worth about $54.16 at Ontario energy prices. That equates to greenhouse gas emissions of between 430 and 1,126kg, depending on the source of the electricity. In all probability, the emissions associated with all the computers people used to access the site are considerably larger.

A human spider, climate change, and economic systems

Alain Robert – a man famous for climbing absurdly tall buildings with his bare hands – is also something of a climate change campaigner. A website he runs endorses a three-stage plan for dealing with the problem:

Stop Cutting Down Trees. Plant More Trees.
Make Everything Energy Efficient.
Only Make Clean Energy.

What this speaks to is a central question of the climate change debate: how much do the economic and philosophical bases of society need to change in order to deal with it? Can climate change be successfully addressed through targetted policies that do not fundamentally alter liberal capitalist democracy, or is it only possible to address it through something more ambitious, such as switching from an economic system based on growth to one based on a steady state of wealth?

In some ways, this debate is reminiscent of other debates about capitalism. It certainly seems as though some of the harmful aspects of capitalism can be curbed through good laws, without eliminating the capitalist system itself. Such problems include things like local air pollution and child labour – if we really care about eliminating them, it is entirely possible within our current general economic approach.

For the oil sands, PR is not the problem

In a bizarre story, The Globe and Mail is reporting on how representatives of the oil sands industry are claiming to have “‘dropped the ball’ in engaging with the public about the environmental effects of its energy developments.” This is a bit like saying that the industry has thus far been unsuccessful in deceiving people about the environmental impacts of oil sands operations, which definitely deserve the filthy image they have earned.

The problem with the oil sands certainly isn’t their public relations: it is their greenhouse gas emissions, their destruction of the boreal forest, their contamination of water, and so forth. Altering those aspects of the industry cannot be achieved through media messaging. It is dispiriting – though unsurprising – that the companies involved are keener on giving people the sense that their operations are clean (or at least improving), rather than actually raising standards. While oil sands production cannot be made into an environmentally benign activity, having all facilities adopt the best standards in other existing facilities could make a significant contribution towards reducing the level of harm they produce.