Category — The Environment

Somewhat belatedly I’d like to link to this piece about slum urbanism: how environmentalists and other city-lovers can learn from the way slums are pieced together.  “Slum” here is used to mean an informal settlement within a city, usually in the developing world. Spending time in these slums is a revelation to any American, I think, partly for the expected reasons, namely that they’re squalid, dangerous on account of the ubiquitously shoddy construction and exposed electrical wire. Less expected is that the streets of these slums often seem full of life and happy, not only in comparison to American urban ghettos, but also compared to our wealthy suburbs. Often there are a multitude of small shops, neighbors pausing in their daily errands to gossip, and children playing. It’s worth thinking about what a tremendous indictment of our built environment that this fact represents. Unlike the slum-dwellers we are subject to laws ensuring our buildings are built safely, but also unlike them we’re subject to laws that make our neighborhoods isolating, ugly, environmentally disastrous and hostile to all forms of retail except the big box stores we’ve been talking about on the blog. As Austen Bramwell writes:

sprawl — an umbrella term for the pattern of development seen virtually everywhere in the United States — is not caused by the free market. It is, rather, mandated by a vast and seemingly intractable network of government regulations, from zoning laws and building codes to street design regulations.

My own experiences with slums contributed mightily to my conviction that the built environment is a major determinant of our politics, culture, and even our religion. I wrote a post some time ago about urban form and religion by a particular slum, and since almost no one was reading Plumb Lines back then, I’ll take the liberty of quoting it in full:

I recall walking through a slum once in India, girdled by a wide moat doubling as a sewer, where the buildings were built so close to one another that at times I had to turn sideways to fit between them. Occasionally I had to duck while turning to avoid the naked electrical wires strung overhead. No street ran in a straight line for more than twenty feet without careening off at a random, vertiginous angle.

After advancing through this maze for several minutes, I emerged into a courtyard built up to two stories on all sides, not more than 500 feet square, with a great blue god in the middle, twice the size of a human being. This was the only space in the slum where the watery sun could illuminate the pavement without passing through a trellis of clothes lines, power lines, and architectural promontories, and the only space wide enough to walk with comparable ease for more than a few paces. The effect was intoxicating and over-awing, long before the arrival of the inevitable and cliched am-I-the-first-Westerner-to-see-this moment.

This memory returned to me as I was reading Lewis Mumford’s The City in History, when he discusses the invention of the formal axis terminating in a church or some other monument. This is a familiar form in our age, since it was considered the exemplar of civic grandeur for several centuries in Europe (it is also a natural, if rarely employed form in a gridded city built of skyscrapers — the view up Park towards Grand Central in New York and the view down LaSalle towards the Board of Trade in Chicago being notable examples).

According to Mumford, the axis was the quintessential urban form of the Baroque city, first employed in the approach to Santa Croce in Florence and spreading from Florence like a disease to the rest of  Europe. His contempt for the form is obvious, and he laments in particular the “dreary” approaches opened up in front of the old cathedrals, which used to be approachable only by twists and turns, like the idol in the slum. Certainly, even if used in the service of the Church, the linear approach to Santa Croce testifies to the glory of Man, not G-d. Mystery has been conspicuously eradicated; every form is patent and legible. From the formal axis it’s a short step to van der Rohe.

There is much to be said for the beauty of straight lines, and for Baroque urbanism in general, but the slum-dwellers and the medieval Europeans understood religion better than the Florentines. A visitor to a medieval European town looking for its church would stumble suddenly into a small open space in the presence of a tremendous vertical element whose face was a mass of flowers, monsters and saints. Like my sudden stumbling onto Krishna,  this slow, difficult approach to the transcendent could be read as an allegory of Augustine’s approach to G-d: a slow, difficult inward movement until you come to the very center of yourself and find G-d pulling you up and outside.

…the Saints did play like champions.  And it was a pretty damn good game right up until the end. After that interception, though, you could tell the Colts were rattled.  Peyton Manning especially.  That was the nail in the coffin right there, except it was the Colts and they’ve pulled back from worse brinks before.

I enjoyed the game.  I don’t watch much in the way of sports, but I do love a good football game.  On that note – anyone here read any good sports-bloggers?

Oh, and I knew this ad would get some blog-traction today.

For a slightly more dystopian take, read this.  Given the state of affairs we’re in over the growing and consumption of certain illicit plants this is not so far-fetched.  And if it is far-fetched, then so is the war on drugs.  So is the light-bulb ban.

My favorite ad – probably the stuff from Doritos.  I laughed the hardest when that kid slapped the guy for taking his chip.

And I’m pretty excited about the new Ridley Scott Robin Hood movie, which I hadn’t heard anything about until last night.  I was a big fan of Gladiator and I’ve always been big on Robin Hood stories.  I remember seeing Kevin Costner’s version when I was ten, in a movie theater in Florida.  The audience cheered after Morgan Freeman’s speech.  Yes, those were simpler times.  I still have a soft-spot for that movie, warts and all.  I mean, who cares about the accent?  If anything, Costner’s performance led directly to some really good lines in Robin Hood: Men in Tights.

You can have an open-thread here if y’all would like….

P.S. – I’m with Sonny Bunch (in the comments) on this one – to some degree.  I think the ad was a parody of enviro-extremism, but I also think it didn’t take seriously the question of the security state.  In other words, while it parodied the green movement, it laughed off the very real threat of the creeping security state, which can use green policies as easily as it can use marijuana or terrorism to grow and further intrude upon our privacy.

Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, writing in Foreign Policy:

In this, Obama was following two decades of magical thinking among both greens and liberal Democrats about energy technology. In this view, energy efficiency pays for itself, solar and wind power are already nearly cost competitive with fossil fuels, and both can quickly and cheaply reduce emissions. This Pollyanna view of fossil fuel alternatives and efficiency, which makes going green seem cheap and easy — little more than the cost of “a postage stamp a day” — has provided the justification for green-policy advocacy that has overwhelmingly focused on pollution regulations and carbon pricing while ignoring serious investment in energy research and development…

The real technological obstacles to decarbonizing the global economy today represent an insurmountable obstacle to political efforts to limit carbon emissions. Until policymakers get serious about addressing the central technological challenge, all efforts to control carbon emissions are doomed.

The entire article is worth a read.

I think their criticisms of this policy–seen in the Waxman-Markey House Energy Bill–are solid.  They correctly point out that the bill includes substantial giveaways to energy industries, much like insurance industry concessions in the health care bill.

But in what world is legislation going to get through the US Congress that isn’t rife with all kinds of industry goodies?

If we want to fund (as Nordhaus and Shellenberger prefer, and I’m with them on this one) R&D, how is that not going to create government-industry alliances?  They might benefit different industries than in the Waxman-Markey bill, but this sounds to me like the same basic program, just with different recipients on the other end.

Particularly when Nordhaus and Shellenberger call for this:

However, the technologies we need will not materialize in response to carbon prices or emissions caps. Nor will they arrive, as many conservatives would have it, by getting the government out of the way and simply allowing a new generation of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates to tinker away in their garages.

Rather, we need to create a new clean energy economy in the same way we created our information economy: by identifying a set of well-defined technical problems and mobilizing the human resources of our technologically advanced civilization — our scientists, laboratories, universities, and engineers — to solve them.

If the money is going to spent anyway (which I assume it will be), I generally think the Nordhaus-Shellenberger proposal would be a much better allocation of federal resources than a cap and trade bill laden with buy-offs for the energy industry.  But we shouldn’t act as if it would be anything other than a different form of government-industry collaboration.

That said, I’m pretty skeptical of this idea: [Read more →]

At Master Resource, Jim Manzi synthesizes several objections he’s aired to comprehensive greenhouse gas regulations in one easy-to-read Thomas Friedman take-down. I find this stuff pretty persuasive, but it’s worth noting that there’s real tension between objections to cap-and-trade grounded in rigorous cost-benefit analysis and objections to cap-and-trade grounded in, well, Senator Inhofe’s belief that “global warming is the greatest hoax perpetrated on the American people.”

At its core, Manzi’s argument hinges on accepting the scientific consensus with respect to both the existence of global climate change and its probable impact. He uses the UN’s own projections to argue the economic costs of regulation outweigh the likelihood of catastrophic warming. On the other end of the conservative spectrum, we have people like Rick Santorum, whose recent op-ed helpfully compares  anthropogenic global warming to other well-known examples of crank science like The Theory of Evolution.

Aside from lazily gesturing at the uncertainty of scientific knowledge and repeating “ClimateGate” over and over again, Santorum doesn’t really have an argument against the existence of climate change. Unfortunately, this outlook seems to be the dominant strain of thought on the American Right (granted, the leaked CRU emails didn’t help matters). The problem with this approach is that straightfoward denialism is totally inconsistent with any attempt to grapple with the real costs of emissions controls – if there’s no danger from unregulated greenhouse gasses, why bother to see if the actual science of global warming demands immediate action?

Straightforward denialism allows those who favor aggressive emissions controls to shape the public’s perception of climate science. Instead of sober cost-benefit analysis, people who basically accept the existence of global warming (read: most of the voting public) are now more likely to think that climate change is catastrophic rather than incremental. The longer the right’s response to anthropogenic warming is dominated by the likes of Inhofe and Santorum, the longer this perception will linger, which doesn’t bode well for efforts to stop monstrously expensive cap-and-trade legislation.

Time has a piece today on climate change that discusses a small atoll called Ifalik in Micronesia.  I spent one year of my life in Guam teaching Micronesians and was fortunate enough to spend a few vacation weeks on a nearby (relatively speaking) island called Ulithi.  I even tutored a student or two from Ifalik, if I remember correctly.  I can’t tell you how beautiful the water and the islands (and the people) were–there’s a photo in the essay that gives you a clue.  We were so far away from major cities that in the evening the sky literally lit up a million lights.  It was unbelievable.  If the sea level rises significantly from climate change, these people will either have to evacuate or be in serious danger.

The outrigger canoes mentioned in the essay are the traditional form of transportation.  Master Navigators would navigate (through oral transmission, nothing written down) by memorizing the patterns of the stars, waves, and common animals (e.g. birds over waters).  They could navigate from The Philippines to Hawaii. Whether or not climate change would end that traditional way of life, the economics of the world already has.  What I saw in those islands was (in many cases) the last years of such traditions, and it was a great honor in my life to be shown and experience the very small glimpse I was afforded.

I’ll never forget a question one of the local folk asked me one day.  He asked:  “What Island are you from?”  I tried to explain that I wasn’t from an island….I grew up in Ohio.  But then I remembered that the every landmass on earth is surrounded by water. So from then on, I said I was from “Ohio Island.”  Which they seemed to dig.  I was later quasi-officially adopted into one of the local tribes (which, truth be told, involved me giving lots of car rides to “relatives” and doing a traditional dance in a thu (i.e. loincloth – the dance is something like this; click the link for some video).

So it’s a very sad personal reflection on what might happen to those islands and the people who call them home.  This isn’t necessarily a tirade against the West.  I’m not entirely sure anything can be done (feasibly) to limit global warming.  But reading that story took me back to  another time in my life.

Here’s an interesting back and forth from the combox to ED’s post on climate change. (Found in comment thread #1).

Kyle writes:

I think – to some degree – you’re conflating two theories that don’t have the relationship you’re purporting them to have.

Theory 1 – climate change, Theory 2 – markets and fuel.

You’re right that economic principles will, at some point, force an increase in the price of certain fossil fuels as they become scarcer (a combination of supply and demand changes) and higher energy prices will result in behavioral changes for consumers and changes to the type and number of producers in energy markets. If we assume climate change to be exacerbated by man-made activity, it’s still entirely unclear that by the time fuel scarcity prompts a mitigating change in human caused carbon emissions, there will still be time and resources enough to either reverse the shift or dampen its effects on the biosphere.

Shorter, mother nature knows no free market, only her own rules and timetables. e.g. The Dust Bowl

ED responds:

The Dust Bowl is certainly a good cautionary tale of improper agricultural techniques. I’m not sure it lines up exactly with climate change, however. Just as it’s entirely uncertain that fuel scarcity will prompt a mitigating change in human caused carbon emissions, it’s also entirely uncertain that it won’t, and even more uncertain that cap and trade will do anything whatsoever to curb emissions or slow climate change especially so long as China and India remain out of play.   (my italics)

On ED’s  last point—i.e. cap and trade has to be implemented across the globe or we are in prisoner’s dilemma territory and likely China and India (and Brazil) won’t go for it–I agree (and so does Kyle).

But I don’t really understand what ED is saying in that portion I italicized.  I’ll loop back to this point in a second, but first I’ll start by putting my cards on the table and saying that (as a layman in this field) I basically accept the (so-named) consensus scientific opinion that 350 parts per million is an acceptable level of carbon in the atmosphere. Beyond that we are in danger territory.  That level was passed in 1990.

I’m open to debate on the degree of danger and the best way to deal with that danger while still taking into account the current reality of poverty and disease.  But even there I mostly hold that what should be done is what is being called for by say a climate action network group. (pdf)

I also know politically there is no way what they call for is ever going to happen.

e.g. (from page 3 of the pdf):

“Industrialized countries as a group must take a target of 40% reduction of CO2 by 1990 levels by 2020.”

This statement goes under the “ambitious” category of the threefold “fair, ambitious, and binding.”

In contrast, the Waxman-Markey House Bill and the Kerry-Boxer Senate Bill are calling for 17-20% reduction from 2005 levels.

That bill is going to have one helluva time passing the Senate.  But it’s not even close to what is needed, if we are to accept the policy proposal of the Climate Action Network (which again in rough outlines I do). [Read more →]

“If anyone tries to tell you that uncertainty about climate change is a reason for inaction, he’s either a fool or a scoundrel. Probably a bit of both.” ~ Mark Kleiman

Kleiman makes a number of assumptions in his piece before reaching this one.  He assumes some hypothetical climate change statistics and then assumes that because he has made such a speculation that the policy going forward should be precautionary against said speculative fiction.  But simply because Mark Kleiman says that we might see an 8 degree (C) increase in temperature by 2100 does not make it so.

Writes Kleiman:

Ordinarily, it is the proponents of action who bear the burden of persuasion.  But in this case political inaction means, in effect, licensing a massive gamble, though no individual chooses to make it. Rather, the gamble would be the outcome of billions of uncoordinated self-interested decisions: precisely the sort of process that, in the absence of external costs, leads to efficient outcomes.  But none of the arguments for the freedom of economic activity applies to activities with huge, indirect, deferred, and diffuse external costs:  by contrast with Adam Smith’s baker, there is simply no “invisible hand” mechanism that directs private action in such a situation in the direction of the public interest.

Actually, just like with any free market, climate change will respond to market pressures coupled with government incentives.  Rising fuel costs will reduce the amount of fuel used and the less people drive and fewer things are shipped via truck and freighter, the lower our CO2 emissions will be.  The government can invest in mass transit to help ease in a different norm for transportation as traditional fuel, and therefore traditional means of travel, becomes more and more prohibitively expensive.  Private innovators can be allowed to come up with the next revolutionary inventions in renewable energy and green transportation.  The government can issue tax credits to innovators and consumers who participate in the green revolution.  They can also provide more grants to college students pursuing science and engineering degrees.

These are positive steps rather than punitive ones.  The punitive measures should be directed at individual players – polluters and industries which have the largest hand in producing emissions.  Cap and trade is too broad and too subject to capture to be effective.  Targeting specific polluters makes more sense, while nudging normal Americans toward a different energy and transportation model in the future. [Read more →]

Remember that big chart Al Gore used in his documentary?  If not, here it is:

This chart shows the correlation of high global temperatures and high CO2 levels (though some have argued that if you look closely, you’ll see that temperature actually rises before CO2 levels rise, but we’ll leave that for another day.)  More interesting to me is the presentation of the data itself, and particularly the x axis which includes the present year all the way back to 650,000 years ago.

Now, compared to the life of a human being, 650,000 years is a long time.  In fact, modern humans have only been on earth for about 200,000 years, so not even a third of that chart includes human life. [Read more →]

I have been pondering the issue of global warming lately.  I generally take a cautious position when it comes to climate change.  I am first of all uncertain as to what portion of climate change can be attributed to human activity, but also cautious about assuming that simply doing nothing is the proper course.  If we can take measures that ease the effects of global warming – anthropogenic or no – then I think we should, but we should be wary that legislation doesn’t inadvertently harm the poorest among us and across the globe, or end up creating such a drag on the economy that the ill-effects outweigh the benefits.  Jim Manzi has written a great deal along these lines. [Read more →]

This is pretty neat.  I think one of the coolest aspects of the green revolution will be to see all the innovations in technology.  Generating electricity simply by driving seems to have quite a lot of potential.

From NyTimes:

India served notice on Sunday that it remains opposed to legally binding targets to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, digging in its heels against the United States as the Obama administration begins marshaling support for a new global agreement on climate change…

India’s refusal to accept mandatory cuts in emissions is neither new nor unique. China also opposes a deal with compulsory targets. And both countries say their economic growth should not be constrained when the West never faced such restrictions during its period of industrialization.

This last point of the West’s arrogance is dead on the money.  The West (esp. the States) who still today is the biggest polluter, who rose to the standard of living we now enjoy by first doing serious damage to ecosystems (cf. Charles Dickens) and then tells developing nations like China, India, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Brazil, who are basically where the US was in say the 19th and early 20th centuries in many regards that they can’t have their Industrial Revolution, thereby (if actually every implemented) sending everyone back to the farms to massively increase human population (since cities lead to de-population over time), famines, and total ecological meltdown.

So yeah India is not so politely going to tell the US to go f#$@ themselves with their idiotic, time-wasting, carbon-burning, and money draining world climate conferences and Kyoto style wrong-headed (however well-intentioned) environmentalism.  And quite rightly.  Also it would undoubtedly sound more beautiful if said in Hindi.

I happen to think a cap and trade system for post-industrial societies makes a lot of sense–like the EU.  And now the US.  So I actually support a cap and trade (and rebate …which I think is missing from Waxman-Markley).  But not elsewhere.

How then to respond to the argument that if India and China don’t go post-carbon then everyone else will be screwed as they alone over the next half century will burn so much carbon (in the form of coal mainly not gas btw) that it will destroy the carrying capacity of the biosphere to maintain life, thereby ending human existence on the planet?

[Sidenote: Notice that the Earth doesn't need saving, rather we need saving on it.  If we humans are all killed, the earth will be quite fine thank you very much.  Life will flourish without our currently parasitic existence robbing it of our its rightful place.  Only humans are arrogant enough to think they can save the earth.]

William McDonough can answer that question much more eloquently than I can, so over to him:

Notice the emphasis on abundance and learning from nature as the proper wellspring of how to design human ecology/industry (called biomimicry).  Again we don’t need to save the earth, we simply need to learn how she does things in the biosphere (e.g. NO WASTE) and then creatively apply those lessons to our human sphere of existence–what Teilhard Chardin called the noosphere.  The sphere of mind. The future of evolution is human choice.  Evolution has brought us to be the species that has conscious choice and memory and therefore history, law, politics, economics, art, religion, etc.  Either we apply the lessons we have learned about the biosphere to our noosphere, thereby uniting the two in a mutually prosperous relationship or we continue to be parasites and the host will eventually kick us out and go on living without us and our species will have failed.  Evolution will then try something else and maybe find a better vehicle.  Or maybe not.