Author: Ed

Please tell interested people about the blog!

Hello, my small but dedicated fanbase . . . I’ve recently had a few readers request permission to pass along either the blog or a particular post to other folks.  My answer:

PLEASE pass the blog along!

I admit to writing this mostly for myself, but a nice side effect seems to be that some people find it interesting.  In any case, I think a few folks are worried that I will get in trouble for the blog back at my current place of employment – don’t worry, I won’t.  You’ll note that I never blog about work – blogging about work would cross into writing about my job, which immediately causes legal problems with regard to publication – basically, I’d probably have to get each blog post cleared by the legal team at work, and they have much better things to be doing with their time.  So, I am only writing about things that I am not addressing directly at work (I suppose that means you could try to figure out what I was not blogging about, and by subtraction work out what sorts of things I am dealing with at work, but I don’t post often enough to make that viable), and mostly things that are addressed in my soon-to-be-released book.  It’s all fair game, folks, so share away!
Thanks to everyone who is already reading and commenting, here and on Facebook – it makes me miss lecturing just a little bit less . . .

Posted on by Ed 5

An opportunity in the challenges . . .

Via Grist:

TIANJIN, China — China will on Monday host its first U.N. climate conference as it seeks to showcase its green credentials, but hopes are dim that the event will yield major breakthroughs that environmentalists crave.

Three thousand delegates will converge on the northern port city of Tianjin for the latest round of tortured United Nations negotiations aimed at securing a post-2012 treaty on tackling global warming.

But even the most optimistic forecasts for the six days of talks foresee only incremental progress amid the continuing fallout from last year’s failure in Copenhagen by world leaders to forge a comprehensive deal.

“Our expectations are not very high, in the sense that we have not witnessed a willingness from governments to really move the negotiations forward,” Greenpeace International Climate Policy Director Wendel Trio told AFP.

Check the Oh Crap box in the right sidebar.  These guys are foot-dragging, and we’re already out of what most people think is the safe range for CO2 concentrations.  What do I mean by safe?  Well, it comes down to the odds of catastrophic change.  The concern is that, as CO2 levels inch upward, we are approaching a situation where nonlinear changes start to happen – that is, where slow, steady changes in the climate “jump” to a new state very, very rapidly (in decades or less).  We can cope with slow, steady changes in rainfall in most parts of the world.  That is much of what adaptation planning is about these days – adjusting livelihoods and infrastructure for expected changes in the future to minimize the negative impacts.
What worries me, however, is what I don’t know.  Global climate and ecology are extraordinarily complex, linked systems that are not completely understood.  Changes in some parts of these systems may have no effect at all on the larger picture.  Other changes might radiate through these systems, having massive, unintended and largely unpredictable consequences.  As we inch the CO2 concentrations ever upward, and we inch global temperatures upward, we create conditions in which the likelihood of this sort of non-linear change increases.  The big example of this you might have heard of is the potential shutdown of the Gulf Stream, a shift in ocean circulation triggered by larger changes in oceanic circulation linked to salinity and temperature.  If this happens (and it could, though I think it remains unlikely), Europe (for example) would become much, much cooler, radically altering agricultural production and the accessibility of ports from France north much faster than we could keep up with the changes.
This is an extreme example, but there are many other such shifts we worry about . . . and many, many more that we’ve not yet thought of because of the complexity of the systems with which we are engaged.  It is possible to plan for adaptation to such events, though – in fact, I would argue that the idea of the discontinuous change is an opportunity for more productive adaptation and development thought than that which is practiced today.  All you can do in the face of discontinuous change is make communities and countries as resilient as possible – build as much capacity for change as you can, and then let people address these changes in locally-appropriate manners as they start to happen.  In other words, discontinuous change gives us the opportunity to take our hands off the wheel – to stop lying to ourselves that we can plan for everything, or that we even have all of the knowledge we need to make such plans.  Instead, it encourages us to think about a more flexible, resilient world in which people are empowered to address the challenges in their lives.
In every challenge, there is an opportunity . . .

Posted on by Ed 0

New Spamfilter

Hello all:
Just FYI, I have installed a new spamfilter for the comments on this site.  I have to authorize all comments from new users, and I probably have to wipe out about 12-15 spam comments each day.  To keep this work to a minimum, I have installed a new filter that may ask you to verify a code to submit your comment – basically, this heads off the spambots.  I apologize for making comment submission a little bit harder (hopefully only a few extra seconds), but this will make life on the blog a bit easier for me.

Posted on by Ed 0

But nobody I know gets malaria . . .

The BBC reports on a recent article in the Lancet suggesting that funding levels for malaria control and eradication are much too low to be effective in 77% of malaria-endemic countries.  Awful.  I’ve said it before, and I will say it again: if we had anopheles gambiae mosquitos (the most effective malaria transmitters, mostly found in Africa) and plasmodium falciparum malaria (the nastiest version, again mostly found in Africa) in America or Europe, this disease would be long gone.  But when Africans are the principal population of concern, the disease persists . . .
Just a side note: climate change and global travel patterns may yet make us sorry for our avoidance of this issue.  It is easy for someone to contract malaria in Africa and bring it back to the US – lord knows I have done that myself.  This is not a public health issue right now, but if a few anopheles gambiae manage to get aboard a commercial flight and get into an environment that is conducive to their reproduction (i.e. the Southeastern US during the late spring or summer), we could yet have really nasty malaria show up in America.  I wonder how fast funding would increase for malaria control and eradication then?

Posted on by Ed 2

Well, it all depends on what you mean by "have" a government

So, according to NPR Iraq has now set the record for the longest time after a parliamentary election without a government.  For those unfamiliar, Iraq operates under a democratic system that awards seats in parliament by percentage of the vote, and they’ve got several political parties.  The end result?  Nobody has a majority, and at this point nobody seems to be able to cobble together a coalition of enough parties to get a majority and form a government.  Man, you really have to dislike the other guy when you more or less give up power rather than partner with them.
But this is not the sweeping case that the title of the article, “Iraq Breaks World Record for Length of Time Without a Government,” suggests.  By any reasonable standard, the contemporary record has to go to Somalia, which has been operating without anything resembling a real national government since . . . 1991. Yep, I graduated from high school right about the same time Somalia lost its government.  Current college freshmen and sophomores have never lived in a world where Somalia had a national government.  So why no mention of Somalia?  I mean, even if you count the transitional government (put in place in 2004), they went 13 years without a government.  Well, they are disqualified because they are not a parliamentary democracy (turns out Iraq’s record is pretty narrow, after all).  It’s too bad Somalia is out of this competition, though , because it is an amazing case of state failure in the modern world.  The transitional government appears to control, at best, a few city blocks in Mogadishu.  Seriously – that’s not a hyperbolic statement.  They literally control a few blocks.  Sometimes.  Er, that does not count as a national government, people.
Somalia is lines on a map and a bustling informal economy that seems to float a stable national currency – despite lacking a central bank or, as I mentioned above, A GOVERNMENT.  (Economists hate that.  A lot.)  That’s about it.  Somalia is the hole in the map, the one place in the world where there is really no effective control of the territory of the country by anything resembling a state.  Sure, most countries in sub-Saharan Africa, and many in Asia, contain territory over which they have very little, if any, control – but those tend to be little spaces within countries.  Somalia is basically a giant sovereignty hole, with a tiny pocket of control.
I spend a lot of time thinking about this these days, as I think the connection between the state and local communities is probably the central governance question for development agencies in places like sub-Saharan Africa.  Simply put, in much of SSA, the only legitimate governance (that is, governance that people feel bought into, and believe in) is pretty local, and vested in land tenure (those with control over access to land tend to be in charge, since so many people need land to farm and make a living).  Development agencies, on the other hand, tend to work with national governments and generally avoid dealing with “traditional” or “informal” modes of governance, such as those seen at the local level.  The result is a disconnect between a lot of development planning and programming and the reality of life on the ground in many countries – we do our planning and programming through a state that is simply unable to represent the needs of its people effectively, and even if it could it has no means of actually carrying out development planning in a meaningful way.  Yet some folks persist in worrying about how to write legislation that would lead to effective adaptation planning . . . which completely misses the point.  You can write all the laws you want, but if nobody can enforce them and the citizenry don’t see any reason to pay attention to them or any other governmental activity, all you are doing is killing time and trees.
In these situations, we’re looking for governance in the wrong places.  Hell, the people in Somalia are quite vulnerable – to drought, violence, disease, etc.  But they are not all dead, which means they have organized into structures that provide food, shelter, clothing and other goods in an informal way – there is governance here, but not from the state.  I’m not going to valorize much of that governance, as it is rooted almost completely in violence and physical force without respect for the needs of the wider population, but the point is that this governance has found its own form of legitimacy that works, for better or for worse, much better than the pointless national government that the rest of the world seems to want to prop up so they can go on with the charade of working with another national government.

Posted on by Ed 3

C'mon, Wired . . . really?

Dammit, Wired, I do like you . . . but why must you guys always assume that new stuff (ok, sometimes pretty cool stuff) will fix all our problems?  There are situations where a new device or good might be important and useful . . . but to argue that a viable development path might be constructed on improving access to cheap consumer goods worldwide fails to acknowledge the reality of the world today.  Even worse, they are not the first to fall into this fallacy – see the Product (RED) trainwreck (or as I like to call it, the buy-your-way-out-of-your-guilt plan), which came at this from the side of providing aid from rich countries.
Why am I so pissy about these sorts of feel-good ideas?  Because perhaps the central challenge that faces us in addressing the intersection of development and environment is the problem that there is simply not enough stuff in the world to allow everyone to consume at the same level as Americans – not even close.  We’d need between 2 and 3 more Earths.  Or, if some Cal Santa Cruz astronomers are correct and they’ve actually found another potentially habitable planet, maybe only 1-2 more Earths.  Hey, it’s progress . . . oh wait, its 20 light years away and we have no way of getting there.  Right, 2-3 more Earths, then.
Under these circumstances, arguing for more consumption makes absolutely no sense at all – instead, it pushes us ever closer toward a zero-sum world, where the only way to improve one’s own material situation is to take away from someone else’s.  I’d argue that this describes the current situation anyway, as we here can only live at our standard because so many do not – but that is a rant for another day.
This is not to say that the global poor should stay that way.  Interestingly, Wired‘s examples of products they like are largely development interventions (irrigation, water filters, rural lighting, etc.) by a different name.  I have no objection to these interventions – they are rather small in terms of consumption footprint, but have tremendous positive effects.  However, the larger message of the piece seems to be that making cheap stuff for these markets is, in the end, good for them.  No.  This rests on the idea that the only products people want are as practical as irrigation – a very bad assumption.  Most of the folks I work with in rural Ghana would love a TV, though I can personally attest that Ghanaian television will not improve their quality of life.  Or anyone else’s for that matter.  Making cheap TVs that people can afford is not going to help us out of the global hole in which we are located – it will just take up more resources faster.
Making development interventions cheap is good.  Further, introducing them through markets, instead of through proscribed programming that is not sensitive to local context, is often good (sometimes markets fail, though).  But assuming that we can generalize from these examples to a wider statement about markets and human well-being doesn’t fly.  We’re not going to buy and sell our way to a more just, sustainable world.
Now, if someone was to get on revolutionizing the generation of electricity such that it is so cheap as to be effectively free, and we could talk about how to really revolutionize development, as this might address the resource shortage problem.  When, for example, recycling becomes super-cheap (a huge percentage of the cost is energy), and we can reuse what we already have instead of constantly digging up more, this equation might change . . .

Posted on by Ed 2

We come to our senses. Canada goes nuts.

via Climate Science Watch

“Documents obtained through freedom of information law show how Canada’s Harper government is controlling federal scientists’ ability to communicate with journalists on scientific issues. The requirement for ministerial-level pre-approval for media contacts applies broadly, not only to politically contentious issues like climate change and oil sands. “It’s Orwellian,” says Andrew Weaver, a climatologist at University of Victoria, quoted in the Montreal Gazette. The public has a right to know what federal scientists are discovering and learning. On this issue, the Ottawa Citizen suggests the Harper government is engaged in “a creeping and worrisome authoritarianism.”

Oh lord, we unmuzzle our federal scientists here in the US, and the Canadians (the Canadians!?!) go the other way.  Well, if nothing else this demonstrates that science is always political – though not always this obviously.  People forget/don’t realize that governments determine how pots of research money are to be spent, which tends to shape what research gets done.  This decision is political.  So the administration in charge of those research dollars can have a huge impact on science and knowledge . . . without resorting to such crude measures as muzzling their scientists.
I think Rick’s response is on point: this is research being paid for with taxpayer dollars – therefore the taxpayer has a right to hear what the scientists found out with those dollars, even if the government in charge thinks those findings are inconvenient politically.  Any time a government starts to muzzle science that is paid for with taxpayer dollars, the citizenry needs to push back . . .

Posted on by Ed 0

If you are reading this, you are not in the top 1%

Slate has an amazing series on economic inequality in America – The United States of Inequality.  Beyond the interesting and clear examination of economic stratification in the United States over time, the reporting has a few visuals that are absolutely stunning demonstrations of the importance of economic policy on income equality/inequality.  Some may call it social engineering or wealth redistribution.  It most certainly is the latter, and could be the former – if one assumes that poor people in fact like seeing rich people’s incomes grow faster than their own, and would not want to change that circumstance.  And please, please don’t throw trickle down arguments at me – they have been empirically refuted repeatedly since the 70s.  How long does a failed theory get in the face of empirics, anyway?
An example of what I am talking about is this graphic (found here):

I first saw a version of this in a talk by Dick Peet – though I believe he was operating with the top 1% (see below).  My household actually fits into the decile in this figure, according to how they have defined it.  We arrived relatively recently.  As happy as I am to be here, I am not sure that I need any more tax cuts.  Even with three kids, massive daycare bills, etc.  At some point, we just have to pay for stuff like roads, schools and fire departments, and giving me a tax cut is not going to really stimulate the economy – I’m going to save the money for my kid’s college funds.
This figure is stunning (found here)

The top 1% of earners in America earned roughly 8% of all income in the US around when I was born.  Today, they earn 18%.  Where, exactly, is the justification for further tax cuts for this section of the population – their share of total income grew dramatically under Clinton, which is where the tax rate will return to if the Bush cuts expire . . . so how exactly can anyone argue that a return to slightly higher taxes (still very low by historical standards) for the top 1% will hurt even the top 1%, let alone the whole economy?
Why am I writing about this on a blog about development and the environment?  One of the big indicators of development is the GINI coefficient, which measures the distribution of incomes in an economy.  We tend to worry about countries with high or rising GINI coefficients, as it suggests that economic opportunity and development are not reaching a wide portion of the population.  This is even more acute in my current job, where we are tasked with worrying about the situations of the most poor and vulnerable.  Yet here we are in the US, with a clearly rising GINI coefficient. Sustainablemiddleclass.com has an interesting graphic on this:

We are headed in the wrong direction here, even as we chide countries on the same path.  Robs us of our standing to make this argument elsewhere, no?

Posted on by Ed 6

Well, this isn't good . . .

Coral bleaching is back, and the New York Times has noticed.  Nice of them, given the persistence of this problem over the last few decades.  In summary, you care about this because coral is generally seen as one of the canaries in the global coal mine – they are very sensitive to changes in the temperature of the oceans in which they live, and when they get too warm (often only a few degrees above normal temperatures) they lose their color as they go into survival mode – hence the term “bleaching”.  Many bleached corals die, and when they do the very rich biodiversity they support dies with them or disperses.  Yep, coral bleaching is bad.
That said, Justin Gillis and the people he interviewed for this story are perhaps pushing the coral bleaching = global warming thing in the wrong way.  Basically, the argument in the article is that climate change (warming) has pushed average sea temperatures up, and so when we get a warm year, it doesn’t take long for the already warm seas to get too warm for coral:

“It is a lot easier for oceans to heat up above the corals’ thresholds for bleaching when climate change is warming the baseline temperatures,” said C. Mark Eakin, who runs a program called Coral Reef Watch for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “If you get an event like El Niño or you just get a hot summer, it’s going to be on top of the warmest temperatures we’ve ever seen.”

Well, yes . . . but you don’t have to have evidence of a warming trend in the seas to get this outcome.  Instead, all you need is greater climate variability where there are several years with hot enough temperatures to push things over the edge, even if average temperatures have not really risen all that much.  Climate variability is an outcome of climate change – so you can still make the bleaching-to-climate change connection – but you don’t have to assert permanently warmer seas when the evidence for this is pretty uneven globally.  This, of course, is not surprising – the distribution of atmospheric warming is pretty uneven globally, thanks to the circulation of the winds and oceans, and differences in the vegetation that cover the land in different parts of the world.
So, to summarize – yes, coral bleaching is a good preliminary indicator of the impacts of ongoing climate change . . . but it does not necessarily mean that we have an established warming trend as much as evidence of disruptions in the normal variability of air and water temperatures created by the redistribution of excess heat energy in our atmosphere.  Overselling the warming trend (which is there – see here at Climate Charts and Graphs, but not in a manner that can be downscaled to reliable causality for coral bleaching) doesn’t do us any favors as we try to influence policy on climate change, and how to address it.

Posted on by Ed 0