The environment – Page 178 – a sibilant intake of breath

Perspective

The following is simply plagiarized, from Carl Sagan, but it is nonetheless quite important. Back in my insomniac elementary school days (as opposed to my insomniac graduate school days), I remember reading quite a number of his books. The non-fiction ones tended to be particularly interesting and well illustrated. These specific observations of his have always struck me as especially poignant:

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

This is an expression that I expect would be inspiring, humbling, and amazing for any human being.

Paul Martin on economic governance

Former Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin’s talk was candid, informative and engaging. At a Global Economic Governance Program seminar, he covered a very diverse collection of issues: from China’s hunger for natural resources to the regulation of multinational corporations. I have never seen the room so packed, and the questions were excellent. He managed to get some good laughs, as well. In response to my question about climate change, he said, in part:

“Climate change has long since been recognized as caused by human activity principally.

The net effect is going to be devastating.

Prince Edward Island will disappear; Toronto won’t. That’s a disaster on both sides

That would make a great headline back home, wouldn’t it?”

Generally, he was very open, but there were certainly a few notable questions ducked. He declined to endorse a candidate for the Liberal leadership race when asked, for instance. People should feel free to have a look at my transcript, in which I have tried to quote directly wherever I could type fast enough.

PS. As today’s photo demonstrates, there is a downside to having a camera that takes 2-3 seconds to charge and fire its flash.

Thesis flowchart: data to action

One thing the thesis should definitely include is flowcharts. They make it easier to disentangle what is going on in complex relationships, both by clearly showing what phenomena are connected, and by suggesting the direction(s) in which causality runs. Here is one that I came up with, regarding the relationship between personal consensus (the position a person reaches after having thought a question through and reached an answer that satisfies them internally) and group consensus:

Data to action flowchart

The starting point is the data presented to the individual. This consists both of empirically observed phenomena and of representations of truth made by others. There is an internal dynamic here. For instance, a person who has been reading a lot about global warming might be prejudiced towards interpreting an unusually hot summer in their part of the world as evidence for that trend. This is partly captured in the two-way arrow with group consensus, but it is also a matter of internal cognition.

Both empirical data and arguments (both logical and those based on other kinds of rationality) are transformed into personal opinions through the applications of heuristics. Examples of heuristic reasoning devices include:

Conceptions about which individuals and groups provide trustworthy information
Conceptions about what kind of evidence is strong or weak (for instance, opinions on the use of statistics or anecdotes)
Particular facts that are so thoroughly believed that they become a touchstone against which other possibilities are rejected

This is not a comprehensive listing, but it gives an idea of the kind of mechanisms within a single person that are at work when forming opinions.

The link from personal opinions to personal choices is not a simple linear one. A second category of heuristics exist that do not determine what is considered true. Instead, they determine which opinions are important; specifically, they determine which opinions are important enough to deserve action.

Two major types of personal choices are represented in this model. Those in the box ‘personal choices’ could be called direct actions. This would include something like buying a hybrid car or boycotting a company. Within the arrow between personal opinions and group consensus lies the other kind of action: namely advocacy actions, in which an individual tries to convince other individuals or groups to adopt the same position the original individual has already reached. That feeds into the “information and arguments” boxes for other people, as well as contributing to the group phenomenon of consensus.

Group action is thus both the sum of personal choices, and the product of public deliberation leading to institutional or societal choices. Here again, a process of prioritization takes place.

An adapted version of this diagram could be constructed for scientists and for non-scientists. The biggest difference would be that scientists can engage in a broader project of empirical examination, thus contributing in a different way to the information and arguments being presented to others. They may well also employ different kinds of heuristics, when forming personal choices.

Carbon offsets

Cycling home with a £5 quarter-kilo of Fair Trade coffee, I found myself thinking about carbon offsets. These are financial instruments in which an individual or group pays someone else to reduce the carbon emissions they would otherwise have produced, so as to offset the buying individuals own carbon emissions. Al Gore used them to make the production of An Inconvenient Truth carbon neutral. They were also used by The Economist to make their Survey on Climate Change (Subscription required) carbon neutral. At the end of the opening article, they explain:

This survey, which generated about 118 tonnes of carbon dioxide from flights, car journeys, paper production, printing and distribution, has been carbon-neutralised through the Carbon Neutral Company. The cost was £590; the money was spent on capturing methane from an American mine.

According to the calculator at climatecrisis.org (the site set up by Al Gore to accompany his book and film), my annual carbon emissions are about 1.6 tons, including two trans-Atlantic flights a year. Not having a car and living in a shared dwelling makes a big difference, even if all our power is coming from the huge coal plant at Didcot.

At the rate The Economist paid, I could offset that for £8. It might be a worthwhile thing to include in my thesis. My only problem with it all is that it is hard to tell which of the many websites that sell offsets actually provide what they claim. There has been a kerfuffle recently about dodgy wind power cards. Does anyone know of a reputable place where I can offset those 1600 kilos of carbon? This site looks like a possibility.

Obviously, paying for the offsetting of your own carbon isn’t an adequate response to the issue of climate change (any more than buying Fair Trade coffee is an adequate response to global poverty), but it couldn’t hurt. It is also a potentially useful demonstration of how seriously you take the problem

[Update: 5:00pm] According to the company The Economist used, one round-trip flight from London to Vancouver generates 1.7 tonnes of CO2. As such, it would seem appropriate to offset at least four or five tonnes a year, to cover electricity, heating (however St. Antony’s does it), and travel.

Thesis case studies, justification for

The Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants and the Kyoto Protocol are both attempts at a multilateral solution to a previously unknown transboundary environmental problem. The reasons for which these case studies are useful for accessing fundamental questions about the science-policy relationship are several:

Each agreement addresses an environmental problem that only recently became known.
Each deals with a problem that is essentially transboundary, and requires concerted effort to resolve.
Each involves scientific uncertainty, both about the material effects of the problem in the world and about the different characteristics of possible approaches for dealing with it.
Each involves normative and distributional issues, with regards to groups that benefit or are harmed by the application of the agreement.

As such, each represents the outcome of a dialogue between stakeholders and experts. The former group is concerned with securing their interests, or those of their principles, such as they are understood at the time of interaction. The basis upon which this group operates is that of legitimacy: either implicitly held among those representing themselves, or transferred through a process, agreement, or institution to a representative whose legitimacy is premised upon advocacy.

The latter group is concerned with the generation and evaluation of data. Understood broadly here, ‘data’ are claims about the ontological nature of the world. This includes claims that are rigorously verifiable (such as those about the medical effects of certain pollutants) as well as those involving considerable interpretation (such as the meaning of international law).

The groups are not mutually exclusive, and many individuals and organizations played an overlapping role in the development of the agreements. Through the examination of these two case studies, as well as related matters, this thesis will engage with the interconnections between expertise and legitimacy in global environmental policy making, with a focus on agreements in areas with extensive normative ramifications.

Thesis presentation upcoming

This coming Wednesday, I am to present my thesis plan to a dozen of my classmates and two professors. The need to do so is forcing further thinking upon exactly what questions I want to ask, and how to approach them. The officially submitted title for the work is: Expertise and Legitimacy: the Role of Science in Global Environmental Policy-Making. The following questions come immediately to mind:

What do the differences between the Stockholm Convention on POPs and the Kyoto Protocol tell us about the relationship between science and environmental policy?
What issues of political legitimacy are raised when an increasing number of policy decisions are being made either by scientists themselves, or on the basis of scientific conclusions?
How do scientists and politicians each reach conclusions about the nature of the world, and what sort of action should be taken in it. How do those differences in approach manifest themselves in policy?

The easiest part of the project will be writing up the general characteristics of both Stockholm and Kyoto. Indeed, I keep telling myself that I will write at least the beginning of that chapter any time now. The rest of the thesis will depend much more on examination of the many secondary literatures that exist.

The answers that will be developed are going to be primarily analytic, rather than empirical. The basis for their affirmation or refutation will be logic, and the extent to which the viewpoints presented are useful for better understanding the world.

Points that seem likely to be key are the stressing of the normative issues that are entangled in technical decision making. Also likely to be highlighted is the importance of process: it is not just the outcome that is important, when we are talking about environmental policy, but the means by which the outcome was reached. Two dimensions of the question that I mean to highlight are normative concerns relating to the North/South divide and issues in international law. The latter is both a potential mechanism for the development and enforcement of international environmental regimes and a source of thought about issues of distribution, justice, and responsibility that pertains to these questions.

I realize that this is going to need to become a whole lot more concrete and specific by 2:30pm on Wednesday. A re-think of my thesis outline is probably also in order. I should also arrange to speak with Dr. Hurrell about it soon; having not seen him since the beginning of term, there is a certain danger of the thesis project drifting more than it ought to. Whatever thesis presentation I ultimately come up with will be posted on the wiki, just as all of my notes from this term have been, excepting those where people presenting have requested otherwise.

Timeframes and humanity

Ever since word starting really spreading about the fish paper, many people have been sending me all kinds of information about fisheries. I have been receiving newspaper articles, scientific papers, government reports, letters, photographs, and all sorts of personal commentary. I can’t deal with it all, but that isn’t the issue. The problem is not a surfeit of information, but a lack of will. People – the number of people living in the world now – need mechanisms for dealing with one another. In essence, they need mechanisms for dealing with a quantity of people out of all keeping with the history of any sort of monkey, much less human beings.

The kind of logic that is required is profoundly non-obvious, because it relates to a scale of experience that we have only been exposed to recently, when it comes to the span of biological time.

Hopefully, we will prove able to adapt.

Conservatism and the environment

In the northern lower reading room of the Bodeleian, I read a really interesting chapter on ecology and conservatism by Roger Scruton, from the University of Buckingham.¹ He makes a surprisingly solid argument that a greening of conservatism would be more of a return to its roots than a departure into uncertain territory. He evokes the position of Burke that all living people are involved in a trusteeship involving both the living and the dead. The moral onus is to maintain, resist damage, and pass along that which has been inherited.

The problems with this position are twofold, and both problems arise from the parochialism of conservative environmentalism. I have always admired the sensible conservative caution about grand projects and the building of utopias. That said, encouraging enclaves to behave in environmentally responsible ways does nothing to protect those within from their neighbours (or those across the world) who do not behave similarly. When the greatest environmental threat in the world (climate change) arises from collective economic activity, a love of one’s home and country, and the fervent desire to protect both, will come to nothing without international cooperation and the changing of behaviour, using some combination of consent and coercion.

The second problem is that of material equality. Protection of what you have inherited for those who are to follow may be a noble individual pursuit (think of the shame attached to those who squander fortunes and wreck empires), but it is not a path towards greater global justice. Now, greater global justice may be exactly the kind of Utopian project that conservatives are smart to be wary about. That said, there can be moral impulses strong enough to make us embark upon difficult and uncertain projects, simply because it would be profoundly unethical to behave otherwise. When it comes to extreme poverty and the deprivation and danger under which so much of the world’s population lives, I think those impulses are justification enough.

Strategically, it seems essential to foster an emergence of green conservatism in the political mainstream. We cannot oscillate between relatively responsible governments and those that act as wreckers. Moreover, once both sides of the mainstream have accepted how vital the environment is, and the sacrifices that must be made to protect it, there is a better chance that the debate and policy can move forward. If one group is forging ahead with more far-thinking ideas, they risk excessive electoral punishment. If, however, the thinking of both politicians and the population as a whole evolves towards a more serious way of thinking about environmental management, there is a much greater chance that the push will be sustained and effective.

[1] Scruton, Roger. “Conservatism.” in Dobson, Andrew and Robyn Eckersley. “Political Theory and the Ecological Challenge.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2006.

Fish presentation tonight

My fisheries presentation in Wadham is in a few hours. For those who are not going, but who are interested in EU fisheries policy in West Africa, you can have a look at the following:

My PowerPoint slides (1.8mb)
My speaking notes (79kb)
The page on my wiki relating to this (includes PDF versions of the above).

Wish me luck.

[Update: 10:00pm] The talk went well, but was quite poorly attended. The ratio of hours I spent preparing to aggregate hours the audience spent listening (number of listeners * length of talk) was no better than 1:1. Perhaps, if I had called it: “A Second Spanish Armada: Neo-Colonialist Pillage in West Africa,” more people would have attended.

That said, having two people I knew in the audience – my friend Bilyana and my college advisor Robert Shilliam – made it seem more worthwhile. Also, it is always good to have a change to practice public speaking. I am getting better, but I still find that I get entirely lost within the act of speaking and lose a good sense of how I look from the outside.

All academic issues aside, the warden has some nice cheese.

Heat and light as services

Yesterday, I read about a rather clever idea. Right now, individual homeowners (or renters) make the decisions about what kind of heating, lighting, and insulation to use. Utility firms simply sell them electricity, oil, and gas in order to meet their demands. As such, the firms have no incentive to help people conserve and, despite possible financial incentives to be more efficient, few homeowners will do so. The latter problem is clearly more acute with renters.

The alternative presented is for utility firms to sell a package of lighting and heating services instead. Then, they would have an incentive to cut power consumption and upgrade to more efficient infrastructure. They would also benefit from being able to do so at a much larger scale than individual consumers. Apparently, firms are already doing this in Woking and London.

Given how incredibly wasteful homes are when it comes to energy usage, especially in the UK, this seems like a smart way to changing incentives. Households in the UK use 25% of the total electricity generated, and produce an equivalent amount of CO2. 60% of that energy is used for heating, often in houses that are poorly insulated and were never designed to be kept at today’s room temperatures throughout.