Category: The environment

Atmosphere, biosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, etc – everything about life and the state of this planet

Open thread: the future of Russia

After the collapse of communism, many in the West assumed that democracy and free market capitalism would triumph in the former Soviet Union. Instead, it seems the chaos in the post-communist period permitted the emergence of economically powerful oligarchs, as well as massive growth in the wealth and power of organized crime groups. Now, former members of the security services, led by Vladamir Putin, are continuing to cement their own control.

There is much about Russia that is worrisome: the suppression of the free press and murder of journalists; continued appalling conduct in Chechnya; ongoing attempts to dominate neighbouring states, including through war; the exploitation of Europe’s dependence on Russian fossil fuels; and more.

What do readers think might happen to Russia in the next 25 or 50 years? What are the most desirable and undesirable plausible outcomes, from the perspective of the Russian people, the world as a whole, central European states, the European Union, and the United States? What effect would different potential outcomes in Russia have on Canada?

Better two-stroke engines

Apparently, it might be possible to make efficient two-stroke engines that are less polluting than their predecessors.

Improving the efficiency of gasoline and diesel engines is an important undertaking, both because it will be a while before electric vehicles are ready for near-universal urban deployment and because there will be rural vehicles running on fossil fuels for quite a while yet.

How to shift the US Congress?

Writing for Grist, Randy Rieland has come up with a summary of arguments about why cap-and-trade is dead in the United States for now. He is right to say that the blame lies primarily with Congress, rather than with the Obama administration. Congress is the most powerful branch of government, and has been highly effective at blocking environmental legislation in the past. While the Democratic leadership in Congress is theoretically allied with the administration in the White House, even the two together clearly haven’t been able to overcome the wall of opposition to meaningful climate policies that has been constructed by Republicans, or the cowardice of moderate Democrats who are unwilling to fight to address this key problem.

The stragic question now becomes how to change Congressional behaviour, and do so before climate-related disasters become so frequent as to finally discredit climate change deniers completely. We cannot afford to wait that long, both because of the physical lags in the Earth’s climate system and the lags in our own infrastructure deployment. By the time the full danger of climate change is unambiguously on display, it will be too late to avoid some terrible effects. It will also be too late for the relatively unintrusive policies being proposed today to work. Sterner stuff will be required.

Baseload solar in Italy

I mentioned before how, by using molten salt as a heat collecting medium, concentrating solar power plants can achieve higher temperatures and continue to produce electricity after dark. Now, the first facility with that capability is being built.

The Archimede Solar Thermal Power Plant is being built in Italy, at a cost of 60 million Euros. It will put out only five megawatts of power (as much as three and a half large wind turbines), but hopefully it will serve as a proof of concept for more ambitious facilities.

US Senate fails again on climate

So, it seems the possibility of a cap-and-trade system in the United States to help deal with climate change has been killed by Congress, at least for the moment. As I have argued before, if the current generation fails to take action to prevent dangerous or catastrophic climate change, that failure is what history will remember us by. We will be remembered as the people who had all the necessary information, but who were so selfish and dysfunctional that they couldn’t step up and take even the first small step.

I remain unimpressed with humanity.

Carbon pricing and competitiveness

Writing in The Globe and Mail, Roger Martin and Alexander Wood argue that carbon pricing could make Canada more economically competitive:

The logic underlying such an argument is fairly straightforward. Carbon pricing can help drive innovation in technologies and business models that promote resource efficiency, particularly in relation to energy. For a country such as Canada, which annually ranks among the most energy-inefficient economies in the world, this presents a huge opportunity. That is because there is an increasingly strong case for how improving resource efficiency translates into improvements in productivity, which is the Holy Grail of competitiveness for economies such as Canada’s.

Every new argument in favour of carbon pricing is potentially useful, given the key role such policies seem likely to play in encouraging the transition to zero carbon forms of energy. Quite possibly, it is especially useful to develop strong economic arguments, so as to be able to respond to the frequent assertion from those who don’t want to take action on climate change that carbon pricing would cause serious economic harm.

Emotional responses to oil production

When I was a child, I remember seeing working on terrestrial or offshore oil rigs as an heroic profession: using knowledge and technology to do something difficult and important, at considerable risk to your personal safety. No doubt, that view was partly formed through exposure to advertising. Like the military and space programs, oil companies realized a long time ago that the combination of high technology with human dedication is an image that people find compelling. Throw together footage of people in hardhats riding helicopters between giant machines, with intense music in the background, and you can pretty easily create a sense of your company and personnel as impressive. Nonetheless, it still has a certain emotional validity, as long as the interactions you think about are all the voluntary ones: companies accessing oil reserves and then upgrading their crude contents into useful products that serve important functions.

Of course, when you start to think about the involuntary interactions, the waters get substantially muddied. Oil producers and users are both guilty of putting their own needs and desires ahead of those who are inevitably harmed as a consequence of their activities, through routes like air and water pollution and climate change.

Now, when I see ads for oil companies, I respond to them like personal insults. They look like taunts from powerful and politically influential companies that are fully aware of how much damage they are causing, but are happy to continue to do so, while continuing to try to foster the image I used to hold of them as brave technical experts.

Of course, there are still people out there who factually reject the idea that oil production and use causes significant suffering for third parties. From that mindset, it is almost inevitable that you would end up with a profoundly different view of oil producers and consumers. It is not all that surprising, then, that deep aesthetic and political disagreements about how the industry should be treated are ongoing.

Now, it seems like a real shame that so much energy, effort, and money have gone into building up an industry that has proven to be so harmful. If all the intellectual effort that has gone into extracting and processing fossil fuels during the last few decades had been applied instead to the development and deployment of renewable forms of energy, we would be a lot farther along the path to carbon neutrality today.

Climate change and capitalism

A number of times, discussions on this site have questioned how the reality of climate change should affect our political philosophy, when it comes to supporting or opposing capitalism. For both practical and theoretical reasons, I have been of the view that replacing capitalism is not a sensible goal, for those deeply concerned about climate change. Capitalism has virtues that may not be present in alternative systems – and what serious alternatives really exist at this point? – and there is no reason to be confident that an alternative system will be able to address climate change, even after we have put in all the time and effort that such a major societal reorganization would require.

Capitalism also includes powerful tools that could be applied to problems like tackling climate change. By establishing a carbon price, emissions reductions can be made to occur in the places where doing so is cheapest. That has benefits in terms of how quickly and cheaply emissions can be cut. It also has benefits for liberty, since it changes the incentives that people face, without forcing them to make one choice or another.

The urgency of climate change is another major reason to focus on the changes that are absolutely necessary, while leaving grand experiments for a more relaxed period in history. Preventing temperature increase of over 2°C above pre-industrial levels requires very aggressive cuts in global emissions. They need to peak as soon as possible (the sooner, the lower total costs will be) and fall to a dramatically lower level by 2050. Given that this is the lifetime of assets being constructed right now, from highways to buildings to power plants, the need to start changing incentives is urgent. It is much more plausible that this could be achieved by incorporating carbon pricing into our existing economic and political framework than it is to think we could launch a whole alternative structure quickly and effectively enough to achieve that result.

Must capitalism be discarded in order to address climate change, or is reform sufficient? Thinking strategically, what should those who are intensely concerned about climate change work to achieve, in terms of political and economic reforms? What real alternatives to capitalism as now practiced are there, and what would the likely benefits and problems associated with them be?