The environment – Page 175 – a sibilant intake of breath

The identification of environmental problems

The identification of an environmental ‘problem’ is not a single crystalline moment of transition, from ignorance to understanding. Rather, it is ambiguous, contingent, and dependent upon the roles and modes of thinking of the actors involved, and values that inform judgments. Rather like Thomas Kuhn’s example about the discovery of oxygen (with different people accessing different aspects of the element’s nature, and understanding it in different contexts), the emergence of what is perceived as a new environmental problem occurs at the confluence of facts, roles, and existing understandings. While one or more causal connections ultimately form the core of how an environmental problem is understood, they are given comprehensibility and salience as the result of factors that are not strictly rational. From the perspective of global environmental politics and international relations, environmental problems are best understood as complexes of facts and judgments: human understandings that are subjective and dynamic, despite how elements of their composition are firmly grounded in the empirical realities of the world.

POPs and climate change

Consider first the case of persistent organic pollutants (POPs). The toxicity of chemicals like dioxins was known well before any of the key events that led to the Stockholm Convention. At the time, the problem of POPs was largely understood as one of local contamination by direct application or short distance dispersal. It took the combination of the observation of these chemicals in an unexpected place, the development of an explanation for how this had transpired, and a set of moral judgments about acceptable and unacceptable human conduct to form the present characterization of the problem. That understanding in turn forms the basis for political action, the generation of international law, and the investigation of techniques and technologies for mitigating the problem as now understood. Even now, the specific chemicals chosen and the particular individuals whose interests are best represented are partly the product of political and bureaucratic factors.

If we accept former American Vice President Al Gore’s history of climate change, the form of problem identification is even more remarkable. He asserts that the discovery of rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations by Roger Revelle in the 1960s, rather than of specific changes to the global climatic system directly, were what prompted the initial concern of some scientists and policy makers. This is akin to how the 1974 paper by Mario Molina and F.S. Rowland established the chemical basis for stratospheric ozone depletion by CFCs which, in turn, actually led to considerable action before their supposition was empirically confirmed. Gore’s characterization of the initial discovery of the climate change problem also offers glimpses into some of the heuristic mechanisms people use to evaluate key information, deciding which arguments, individuals, and organizations are trustworthy and then prioritizing ideas and actions.

Definition and initial implications

For the present moment, environmental ‘problems’ will be defined as being the consequences of unintentional (though not necessarily unanticipated) side effects of human activity in the world. While mining may release heavy metals into the natural environment, this didn’t crystallize in the minds of people as a problem until the harm they caused to human beings and other biological systems proved evident. While the empirical reality of heavy metal buildup may have preceded any human understanding of the issue, it could not really be understood as an environmental problem at that time. It only became so through the confluence of data about the world, a causal understanding between actions and outcomes, and moral judgments about what is right or desirable. Likewise, while lightning storms cause harm both to humans and other biological systems, their apparent status as an integral component of nature, rather than the product of human activities, makes them something other than an environmental problem as here described. Of course, if it were shown, for example, that climate change was increasing the frequency and severity of thunderstorms (a human behaviour causing an unwanted outcome, though a comprehensible causal link) then that additional damage could be understood as an environmental problem in the sense of the term here used.

Worth noting is the possibility of a dilemma between two sets of preferences and understandings: the alleviation of one environmental problem, for instance by regulating the usage of DDT, may reduce the scope to which another problem can be addressed, such as the possibility of increased prevalence of malaria in a warmer world. It is likewise entirely possible that different groups of people could ascribe different value judgments to the same empirical phenomena. For instance, ranchers and conservationists disagree about whether or not it is desirable to have wild wolves in the western United States.

Problem identification, investigation, and the formulation of understandings about the connections between human activity and the natural world do not comprise a linear progression. This is partially the product of how human psychological processes develop and maintain understandings about the world and partly the consequence of the nature of scientific investigation and political and moral deliberation. Existing understandings can be subjected to shocks caused by either new data or new ideas. Changed understandings in one area of inquiry can prompt the identification of possible problems in another. Finally, the processes and characteristics of problem investigation are conditioned by heuristic, political, and bureaucratic factors that will be discussed at greater length below.

Problematizing the origin of environmental problems as human understandings does not simply add complexity to the debate. It generates possibilities for a more rigorous understanding of the relationship between human beings and nature (including perceptions about why the two are so often seen as distinct). It also offers the possibility of dealing with dilemmas like the example above in a more informed and effective manner.

Nicholas Stern on climate change

During the initial coverage of Nicholas Stern’s report on the economics of climate change, I wondered why the media was paying so much attention. After all, the man is an economist reporting on something that scores of scientists have addressed comprehensively through the IPCC process. Now that I have heard him lecture, and spoken briefly with him personally, I have a much better sense. The man is what Karen Litfin calls a ‘knowledge broker,’ translating scientific data into policy options.

His basic position is the realistic liberal optimist one:

Climate change is real and potentially devastating
It is essentially a massive economic externality
Regulating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is the way to stop it
This can be done at moderate cost (1% of GDP) and without a massive change in (a) the basis of economic activity within the developed world or (b) the way in which people choose to live their lives.

He acknowledges that the energy balance needs to shift dramatically. In order to be responsible, he says, we need to shift all electrical production in the rich world to carbon neutral forms (renewables, nuclear, and possibly hydrocarbons with sequestration) by 2050. By that time, land transport should also be based on power sources that do not emit GHGs, whether because they are using stored electricity, or because they use fuels that are GHG neutral. India and China need to be encouraged to sequester the CO2 emitted from their coal stations, probably at the expense of the rich world. All in all, rich states should bear 60-80% of the costs of mitigation.

He focused a great deal on atmospheric CO2 levels. His target is to stabilize between 450ppm and 550ppm. This would lead to a likely scenario where mean global temperature rises by about 2 degrees Celcius (though by much more at the poles, given the nature of the climatic system). On the basis of a ‘business as usual projection’ we will hit 450ppm in eight to ten years. To stabilize at 450ppm, we would need to slow the rate of growth in GHG emissions immediately, having it peak in 2010. Then, we would need to reduce at about 6-10% a year thereafter. If we delayed the peak to 2020, we would likely be at the 550ppm portion of the range: an area that the German head of climate change policy expressed grave concern about, during the question session. Stern himself said that 550ppm is the “absolute upper bound” which it would be “outrageous” to exceed.

As for his very controversial decision about discounting rates, I think he defended himself admirably. He broke it into two bits: the possibility there will be no future generations beyond date X (they ascribed a 0.1% chance a year to an event like a comet or gamma ray burst that would simply snuff humanity out) and the strong likelihood that people in the future will be richer. The latter means that it may be economically efficient to delay some of the costs of dealing with climate change, especially given the probability that new technology will emerge.

I need to move on to other work, though I could discuss his comments for many thousands of words. I will transfer my handwritten notes to the wiki later this evening and link them here: notes from Nicholas Stern’s 21 February 2007 address to Oxford University.

PS. A few weeks ago, my default thesis music was Jason Mraz‘s superb album “Live at Java Joe.” Now, I am listening to Enter The Haggis‘ frantic song “Lannigan’s Ball” from their album Aerials over and over again.

The road to Kyoto plus, lessons from ozone

A lot of people seem to despair about the possibility of effective regulation of greenhouse gas emissions around the world, but the more I read about the cases of persistent organic pollutants and CFCs, the more plausible it seems, given that a few specific and important progressions take place.

The first is the process of scaling upwards in policy levels, as seen very distinctly with CFCs. The Rowland and Molina paper that first suggested that CFCs cause stratospheric ozone degradation was published in 1974. By 1975, two US states had already banned their use as aerosol propellants (Oregon and New York). Hopefully, the progression from there to national and international regulation is one that can be emulated. Already, lots of American cities and states have signaled that they are serious about climate change, and willing to use regulation to combat it.

The second important dynamic has to do with industry expectations. Six years before CFCs became an issue in environmental regulation, DuPont – the largest manufacturer – canceled its program for developing alternatives. When it became clear that regulation was forthcoming, they were able to field some alternatives within six months, and a comprehensive range within a few years. Up to the point where regulation seemed inevitable, they continued to claim that alternatives could not be easily developed. The point here is twofold. First, it shows that the existence of solutions to environmental problems is not independent of regulation and industry expectations about future regulation. Secondly, industries that anticipate national legislation (as they began to in the US in the mid-1980s on the CFC issue) become a powerful lobby pushing government towards completing an international agreement. It is far worse for American industry to be at a loss because local rules are tougher than global ones than it is to simply deal with some new issues.

Thus, an American administration that takes up the baton from the many states that have initiated their own efforts to deal with climate change might be able to create the same kind of expectations in industry. Some are already asking for regulation to “guide the market,” specifically decisions about what technologies and forms of capital in which to invest. From there, it is at least possible that the US could play a key role in negotiating a successor treaty to Kyoto that begins the process of stabilizing and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

A related point has to do with the extent to which environmental images are heavily influenced by images and symbols. According to Karen Litfin, the Antarctic ozone hole was one of the major factors that led to the Montreal Protocol. She calls it an ‘anomaly,’ unpredicted by the atmospheric science that had been done up to that point, and thus capable of making scientists and politicians more aware of the possibility of unancitipated risks.

At his talk yesterday, Henry Shue says he is hoping for some iconic moment in climate change, to play a similar galvanizing role (a bare-topped Kilimanjaro, the Larsen B collapse, drowning polar bears, and Hurricane Katrina don’t seem to have done it yet, though the connection between climate change and the last of those is not entirely established.) Some spectacular and distressing (but hopefully non-lethal) demonstration of the profound effects human greenhouse gas emissions are having may be necessary to generate an urgent and powerful drive towards effective responses.

Coffee, sandwiches, and bibliographies: the blocks from which theses are made

There was a talk in Corpus Christi today that was a kind of grad student slam dunk. Organized by Cinnamon Carlane and given by Henry Shue, the talk was on the ethics of climate change. Firstly, it involved free sandwiches (fully 2/3 of which were vegetarian). Secondly, as with most of Professor Shue’s talks, it involved the distribution of a comprehensive bibliography. With a thesis upcoming, you can never have too many articles of assuredly high quality to include in your discussion and, perhaps more importantly, your bibliography. Thirdly, the room was packed with people interested in environmental politics: an elusive variety of student who seem to be spread across every program and department, and only come together under unusual circumstances.

Shue’s moral argument is, of course, very well thought out and compelling. The biggest flaw, I think, is that he is not focused enough on the policy course that would be required to deal with climate change effectively, and the secondary moral phenomena that arise from that. That said, being able to make a strong foundational case that climate change is a problem upon which we are morally obligated to act may be an important step in the generation of the requisite level of political will.

Those interested in this stuff will probably appreciate knowing that Professor Sir Nicholas Stern is talking about his report on the economics of climate change in the exam schools, this Wednesday at 5:00pm.

Climate change, law, and predictability

Happy Birthday Kate Dillon

In a somewhat surprising move, a coalition of opposition members of Parliament in Canada have passed a bill forcing the government to live up to the commitment that was made when we signed and ratified the Kyoto Protocol. Specifically, Canada is to cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to 6% below their 1990 levels by 2012. This is quite a substantial reduction to achieve in the next five years, given that emissions are presently about 30% above their 1990 levels.

In many ways, this situation demonstrates how not to deal with the problem of climate change. What you need to do is create the certainty, within industry, that the costs of GHG emissions will increase predictably and progressively over time. Then, when decisions are being made about what equipment to buy and how to set up industrial processes, the extra constraints can be taken into account. By contrast, the present on-again-off-again approach doesn’t create clear incentives. Even worse, it is not clear to industry what will happen after 2012.

The most straightforward and effective approach would be a tax on every tonne of GHG emissions, weighted according to the contribution the particular gas makes to global warming. Since methane contributes more than CO2, it would be more highly taxed. That tax would then rise progressively over time, until Canada reached the point where GHG emissions stabilized and then began to drop towards pre-industrial levels. Whether such an approach would be politically possible (especially with Alberta eying a tar sands bonanza that could mean massive emissions) is another matter. Three plans for meeting the target are outlined in this article from The Globe and Mail.

It comes in threes

The first substantive chapter of the thesis is about problem identification and investigation. This is not being treated as necessarily temporally prior to the next two substantive chapters (consensus formation and remedy design), but the three do seem analytically separable. Throughout the triptych, at least three themes are likely to be ever-present: the moral relevance of uncertainty, the importance of social roles, and the ways in which normative assumptions are embedded and concealed within processes.

The confluence of three other things defines the reasons for which this thesis is a novel contribution: the exploration of those themes, the combination and comparison of the two case studies, and the focus upon the contribution that international relations as a discipline can make to the subject at hand. Having those three overlapping reasons is comforting, because it means I am quite unlikely to be utterly scooped by someone else who is looking at the same problems in similar ways.

Pragmatically, it does seem like the environment is likely to be a growth area in international relations. That said, there are three major possibilities for the future overall:

Climate change proves to be less threatening than the worst case, runaway change scenarios would suggest; other environmental problems prove manageable
Climate change is as bad as some of the most pessimistic assessments claim, but it is uniquely threatening among environmental problems
For whatever reason (population growth, economic growth, technological progress, etc) additional problems of the climate change magnitude will arise

If I had to put my money on one of those options, it would be the second. I can see human behaviour causing all manner of specific problems, both localized or confined to particular species or elements of the environment. It is hard to see another human activity (aside from the danger of nuclear war) that threatens the possibility of human society continuing along a path of technological and economic evolution, during the next three to five hundred years.

Dolphin safe tuna

One of the most reliable ways of locating tuna stocks is by following dolphins. Once you find dolphins feeding on the fish, you set your nets around and catch them. Of course, this method will sometimes lead to you catching dolphins as well. In eighteen years of dolphin set tuna fishing in the United States, 18 dolphins were recorded as caught, along with 34 tonnes of sharks and rays and 295 tons of other fish. Such by-catch is virtually always discarded. In an equivalent period of dolphin safe fishing (where electronic Fish Aggregation Devices are used instead), no dolphins were caught, but 237 tonnes of sharks and rays were, along with 15,500 tonnes of other fish. Again, this was discarded.

Dolphin safe fishing is also disproportionately likely to catch immature tuna, which have not yet reached their full size and which have contributed very little to reproducing the species, since tuna generally take a long time to reach sexual maturity.

This only makes sense if you strongly privilege dolphins over other forms of marine life. Either because:

You think dolphins themselves are bearers of rights
People have much stronger preferences regarding dolphin treatment than that of other elements of marine ecosystems, and those preferences determine what is moral.

Admittedly, each of these is a viable moral position consistent with the ways in which we generally view what kinds of things can bear rights. That said, the trend in ecology is towards recognizing the importance of ecosystem integrity. From this perspective, setting nets around dolphin pods is probably the greenest way of catching tuna. This is especially true since it is possible to design nets that dolphins virtually always escape, but tuna do not.

Of course, now consumers know that to be eco-friendly, they are meant to buy the dolphin safe tuna. Confident in the belief that the problem has been dealt with, not enough people realize that we have probably made things worse.

Richard Branson’s $25M atmosphere challenge

With Richard Branson offering US$25 million to someone who can come up with a system to remove greenhouse gases (most importantly, CO2) from the atmosphere, a lot of people are probably wondering whether it is a pipe dream. Aside from the obvious option of growing more plants, I would be inclined to think so. In order to separate CO2 from air, then sequester it somewhere, it seems likely that you would need a lot more capital and energy than would be required to simply switch away from fossil fuels. It’s like turning on your air conditioning because your oven is making the house too hot. I don’t doubt that it is possible, but I doubt that it is a sensible solution.

That said, finding a technical solution to the greenhouse gas problem would please a very great many people. Though less likely to actually mitigate climate change, the ‘separate and sequester’ plan seems a lot more sensible than the sulfate injection plan, discussed previously. While it may be unlikely that someone will actually claim his prize (and it might distract research attention from more promising options like making more efficient solar panels), that is not to say it would be a bad thing if someone did.

The environment as a security matter

Of late, it has become somewhat trendy to consider the environment as a ‘security’ issue. The most frequently cited example is the danger of massive refugee slows caused by environmental factors (such as climate change or desertification). Also common are assertions that people will soon begin fighting wars over natural resources. While massive environmental change can obviously spark conflict, I am skeptical about claims that this constitutes a major change in the character of international security.

To me, the first strain of thinking seems a lot more plausible than the second. There are already island nations that need to think seriously about what the 7-23″ rise in sea levels by 2100 projected in the fourth IPCC report will mean for their habitability. Environmental factors like soil quality and rainfall have helped to determine the patterns of human habitation and production for all of history, and it is unsurprising that changes in such things could have serious disruptive effects. Large scale population movements, both within and between states, are concerning because of the level of suffering they generally involve, as well as the possibility that they will have problematic secondary effects such as inducing conflict or spreading infectious disease.

The idea of resource wars is one that I think has been overstated and, to some extent, misunderstood. There are certainly resources that can and have been fought over, and resource issues frequently play a role in establishing the duration and character of conflicts. Armed groups with no economic base cannot long persist in the costly business of war-fighting. That said, the idea that states will go to war over something like water seems, in most cases, implausible. War is an exceptionally costly enterprise – much more so than new purification or desalination facilities. Also, most water problems arise from irrational patterns of usage, often themselves the product of a distorted cost structure. While equity compels that people should be provided with enough water for personal needs as a standard function of government, it simply makes sense that those using it on a very large scale pay for it at a level that accurately reflects the costs of production. If that happened, we would see a lot more drip-feed irrigation and a lot fewer leaky pipes. Some perspective is also in order: producing all of the world’s municipal water through oceanic desalination would cost only 0.5% of global GDP, and there is no reason to think that such a drastic step will ever be necessary.¹

I am not saying that resources and conflict are unrelated: I am saying there is no reason to believe hyperbolic claims about the nature of international security being fundamentally altered by resource issues. It is also worth noting that conflicts over resources are often used as justifications to engage in actions that can be more sensibly explained by considering other causes.

Thinking about the environment as a security issue has implications both for prevention and mitigation behaviours. Because politicians and the general public place a special emphasis on matters of security, spinning the environment that way can be a form of rent seeking. Those who see the need to do more as pressing may find that this kind of resource transfer justifies selling the security side of the environment more than they otherwise would. On the mitigation side, it suggests that dealing with environmental problems may require forceful action to prevent or contain conflicts. Given the aforementioned costs of such actions, the case to take preventative action against probable but uncertain threats becomes even stronger.

[1] Shiklomanov, Igor A. “Appraisal and assessment of world water resources.” Water International. 25(1): 11-32. 2000

PS. People interested in the hydrosphere may enjoy reading the accessible and informative chapter on it in John McNeill’s Something New Under the Sun. this report from SOAS on water and the Arab-Israeli Conflict also makes some good points.

Perspectives on international environmental law

It cannot be taken as a good sign to have a presentation in twelve hours and still not really be sure about the main thrust of what you are going to say. I feel like I have a lot of structural elements, but only a semi-rough conception of what I am going to build out of them. The feeling is somewhat akin to that which I have towards the thesis and, indeed, life in general once this program ends.

The immediate requirement is to decide how skeptical I ought to be about international environmental law. The fact that Canada, for instance, doesn’t seem to feel particularly obligated to meet its Kyoto targets makes one wonder whether there’s conviction out there to match rhetoric. One temptation is to fall back, and say that environmental law is just one more mechanism through which governments can be lobbied – both internally and externally. Another possibility is to say that law isn’t what’s in the books and filed with the Secretary General, but rather what states actually get up to. The latter view would probably be more favoured by my international law instructors, but it makes the whole corpus of international environmental law even more nebulous than it previously appeared to be.

I suppose I will write a draft, read for a few hours, then decide exactly what to say in the morning (when my cognitive faculties are at their lowest ebb).