Cleaning Up The Environment: The Gradual Way

There are plenty of alternative technologies to burning carbon fuels to generate power, all of them with drawbacks, and generally lower efficiencies and higher costs. I do not want to debate here the relative merits of solar, wind , nuclear etc. but simply to look at what sort of system is needed to make sure that the world economy is incentivised to improve them and reduce carbon emissions. Burning fossil fuels and capturing the carbon dioxide may be quickest step forward anyway: not ideal, but better than nothing (probably by reinjecting into spent oil and gas reservoirs, where it may have the added benefit of improving oil recovery rates) .

Firstly an effective system should as far as possible use market mechanisms , essentially carbon taxes and credits. On a global scale regulation without market incentives simply leads to cheating, bad implementation, and corruption. There will be some of the latter with market mechanisms, but less so as decisions are decentralised and self-interest comes into play. Nevertheless certain conditions have to be met .

Examine the world free trade set-up (today, the WTO, and its predecessor GATT). Why does it work?
- it is in the self interest of any one country to introduce free trade even if all others do not: as long as other countries are willing to trade. In other words, it does not need everyone to take part for the system to work
- it is in the interest of countries to join up even if others are more efficient at everything they produce (Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage: a neat way of showing that economics is not all bullshit, as it is both true and non-obvious). This means all parties gain, there are no absolute losers
- advantages are progressive. A bit of cheating through susidies, non-tarriff barriers etc. will not wreck the system, as long as it is not too bad
- an important consideration is that there is at least one power who is strong enough to police the system. In the case of free trade, it is actually two, the USA and the EU. Both of them are generally for free trade, despite some glaring omissions in areas like agriculture and steel, and thus usually if reluctantly obey WTO rulings. In the case of the USA, WTO rulings are thus the only international law which is accepted to have precedence over the will of Congress (although it is doubtful if Congress realises or will admit the fact)

These two players are powerful enough to use sticks as well as carrots to get others who sign up to obey the rules, and incentivise non-members to join or even shadow the behaviour of members.

What about a global emissions system (whether Kyoto or something different). Not everybody has to join, but the major emitters do; too much freeloading wrecks the system. The biggest problem is that it does pay to freeload: you would be an absolute winner if you had no emission controls and everybody else (or even the majority) do. Thus policing of the system has to be more coercive, more akin to punishing lawbreakers than to maintaining the WTO.

Essentially it depends on America- without it nothing can be driven through, including getting rising economic powers like China to take part as well. Not only does the US emit 25% of global carbon dioxide for only 4% of the popluation, at twice the rate per head of Europe or Japan, but the right which is now in power is virulently anti-environmental. The key is any change of attitude among Republican voters, and it is not hopeless . Even some green evangelical groups (the What would Jesus drive? constituency ) are emerging. The problem is to convince them that global warming has nothing to do with other issues on liberal agendas. Too early to despair.

How To Cure The Environment (Oh, Yeah?)

I have been too busy to post for nearly two weeks, in contravention of all the rules about getting your blog noticed (not that anybody will, anyway)

It is perhaps just as well. Brand new evidence seems to settle the issues discussed last time of whether humans are having a major effect on the climate. Apparently ocean temperatures are going up in a way which is not compatible with natural solar cycles . Moreover 20,000 sq.km of Arctic ocean ice have gone in the past twenty years, and the same amount again will probably switch off the Gulf Stream (as a system "flip") and thus, ironically plunge Europe and North America into frozen conditions while the rest of the world boils.

OK the scientists may have got it wrong again but you have to trust the weight of evidence by now (even you New Agers and creationists use some modern technology, right? Then deep down, you too believe). On the principle that a small risk with catastrophic consequences should be attended too, this is the biggest issue facing mankind.

Th trouble is it gets tangled in with religious attitudes. The American right seems to think that it is unAmerican not to consume as much as you want, and some of the nuttier fundamentalists do not think it matters because we are close to the End of Days anyway (how dare they presume to know what God wants?). Europeans are just as bad: since they stopped believing in God, Marx or the superior race, most believe in nothing, (with slow but catastrophic consequences). Some, however, and particularly in nature-worshipping Germany and Scandinavia believe in the green paradise and the sinfulness of the modern world.

The net result is that America does nothing, while Europe foists a do-gooding and ineffective piece of socialism called the Kyoto Protocol on the world. Because America will not join, developing countries are exempt (including China, eventually to overtake the US as the biggest energy consumer) and the rest of the world is not incentivised to comply, it will have little effect.

What is to be done? At the risk of being boring, we need to keep the emotion, morality and quasi-religiousness out of it. I will try in subsequent posts to look at the following:
- gradualism (carbon taxes, mix of technologies etc.)
- radical new energy sources
they are the easy ones:
- we leave the earth to be a nature reserve and go and live in space colonies (interestingly mad)
- and hardest and most dangerous of all, a switch back to non-material goals

Global Warming : Real or Not?

This is not the place to discuss this massive issue in detail. There is plenty of information out there . For what its worth my take on the evidence is as follows:
-Despite some uncertainties about the accuracy if the temperature record, yes. There is far too much evidence now, such as the melting of Arctic icecaps . There was a cooling trend between the 1940s and 1970s, but that was just a blip over a longer term warming trend which now seems to be accelerating.
- Is it man-made? That is less certain. There is fair amount of evidence that the sun has moved into a cycle of activity which warms the earth more than at any time for at least five hundred years, and possibly 8,000 years. There is a strong correlation between man made greenhouse gas emissions and temperature, but that may be coincidence: correlation does not mean proof. On balance however it does seem that human activity is making the effects worse, possibly markedly so. It is like taking a man with a fever, and putting him in a hot bath.
- Have there been similar variations in climate before? Over the very long term, much larger: we are in a 10,000 year old interglacial between ice ages. A thousand years ago, when the Vikings sailed from Greenland to North America the temperature was similar to today or a bit warmer. Three hundred years ago was the depths of the Little Ice Age: In the 1690s it was several degrees cooler on average (this was when the pack ice reached the Shetlands, and a third of the population of Scotland and Scandinavia may have died of famine as the crops froze) . So far the climate changes have been within the 10,000 yr historic margins of variation, but there are early signs that we may be moving into uncharted terrritory (such as the rapid rate of ice cap melting). Does it matter, or is this just another apocalyptic scare story? Yes it almost certainly does matter, for several reasons:
- if climate models are correct ( a big if) then the rate of change of temperature will be faster than ecosystems can adjust to
- more importantly, climate systems seem to be non-linear: they can “flip” from one state to another very rapidly .The latter might mean for example that the Gulf Stream switches off, as ocean currents reverse, with dire consequences for North America and Europe (extreme cold instead of heat); or even scarier a runaway greenhouse effect as positive feedback loops make the climate hotter and hotter. This may have happened 250m years in the Great Permian extinction, which wiped out 90% of the world’s species and was even bigger than the one at the end of the Cretaceous which wiped out the dinosaurs. A possible cause is that global warming due to volcanic eruptions melted the methane hydrates below the sea bed, and methane is a powerful greenhouse gas. It is all a question of how one rates a small risk with potentially huge consequences. Thus your chances of dying in a giant meteorite strike, though very small, are still larger than you might imagine for such rare events. It is just that each event might kill millions or even billions. If there is even a very small risk that a runaway greenhouse effect could kill billions or even wipe out human beings, then we cannot continue to carry out such a massive uncontrolled experiment on the earth.

Pangloss Up To Date

In the last post I claimed that the world was not bad at solving its problems, and simply managed to create new and possibly even bigger ones in the process.

Where are we now compared to fifty years ago?

All out nuclear war is still possible. However we have grown to live with the bomb, and with only one superpower, it is as magnificently pointless as Bush's "starwars" missile shield. One can imagine in the future a retreating defensive America and rising Chinese and Indian superpowers in a second cold war nuclear standoff, but it seems implausible. We seem to be through the worst period of danger.

The bomb has in fact imposed an unprecedented global peace. The exception is Africa, which has fallen into post-colonial anarchy, but this is not reported on the world news and nobody cares. Perhaps a third of the population of the Congo died in the past ten years - nobody even noticed. Even Iraq and the current level of terrorism is pretty mild by any historical measure of violence.

Totalitarianism is dead. Autocracy is not, and in China we have a rising first-rate economy with a backward autocratic regime; the last time this combination occurred with in Imperial Germany and Japan, and that was pretty scary. This was brought home to me two years ago in the Holiday Inn in Wuhan. I was watching CNN news on cable when the announcer said the dreaded three words " the Dalai Lama". The screen went blank for three minutes until the item was finished. The censors were watching on line. China is not monolithic however, the Chinese are perfectly well aware of what is going on in the rest of the world, and how Mao ever thought he could convert this nation of individualistic wheeler-dealers into Communists is a mystery.

China brings me on to the subject of the first world/third world gap. China is clearly moving back to its normal position as the world's largest economy (for every century except the last two : so it was just a short term blip) and the Indian economy is finally taking off. That is 40% of the world's population. Within fifty years on present trends a majority of the world's population will be in developed countries, as opposed to about 20% at present.

With this growth comes a reduction in birth rates. The way to reduce population growth is to make people rich and expect them to educate children for a long time, which is expensive, and to liberate women, who are then no longer willing to be child production factories. Thus birth rates have fallen sharply in China, the wealthier parts of India, Latin America. Only parts of the Muslim world and Africa still have catastrophically high birth rates (even in the Middle East birthrates are falling fast, but with a lag to other areas) Indeed in Europe and Japan falling populations are the new problem

Have new and even bigger problems been created? You bet. Environmental destruction and climate change may be either a non-problem, or the shortest route to the Apocalypse yet devised. Less noticed (and if it is, by different people to those who emphasise environmental problems) is the decadence and decline of the West. On these, more in succeeding posts

A Letter From Dr. Pangloss

Dr. Pangloss in Voltaire's "Candide" was a true optimist: he thought that this was the best of all possible worlds. Is a true pessimist is someone who agrees with him? (OK, it's been said before)

It is unfashionable to be optimistic about the world ( even Americans are a bit flaky on happy endings these days). But you know how the thing you worry about most does not happen? Instead something else totally unexpected comes and hits you on the head.

Mankind, society, whatever, is not a person. Nevertheless it is easier to use personal language, and say that over time mankind has tended to solve its worst problems at the expense of creating others, at least in the political and economic areas. Go back 100 years and the worst problems were arguably the huge gap between rich and poor , even in wealthy nations; rampant militarism and the fear (or promise ) of revolution; and colonial oppression of what is now known as the third world.

Move forward fifty years and certain of these problems have gone, but at horrendous cost in two world wars. The worst militaristic regimes of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan had been
swept out of existence in those wars; living standards for the working classes had risen sharply in developed countries, and were to rise even more dramatically in the next two decades; and colonial rule had either gone or was rapidly on the way out. In its place was the shadow of the atomic bomb, and at least until the late 1960s it seemed unlikely, given the human propensity to war, that we could survive without a nuclear holocaust. Moreover fascism might have gone, to be replaced by the equally dire threat of communism (how many, even today, know that Stalin killed even more than Hitler, and as for Mao's victims, we do not yet know the truth).
Third world liberation soon proved to be hollow as the gap in living standards between the first and third worlds became ever wider.

First Post

Why yet another blog? It so self indulgent...

I have some ideas, and as the name of the blog suggests, they are about "big picture" issues. They are not fully formed, and as hopefully a bit of cyberdialogue will help to make them clearer, and inform other bloggies and netsearchers as well.

No personal profile, and that is deliberate: stick to the issues is the justification, cowardice is probably the real reason.

Please keep reading...