Category: environment

Interesting but flawed . . .

The Yale Project on Climate Change Communication recently put out a report on Americans’ Knowledge of Climate Change.  The findings are pretty interesting, but at times really problematic.  This project has a history of putting out cool products that address the complexity of communication and opinion surrounding climate change, such as their Six Americas project.

This graphic, from that report, shows that dividing the country (or indeed any group of people) into global warming alarmists and global warming sceptics is a gross oversimplification of public feeling and perception.  The poles of alarmed and dismissive are less than 25% of the population.  Disengaged, doubtful and dismissive are only 34% of the population.  Alarmed and concerned are 41%.  Note that neither category is a majority (though alarmed and concerned is a plurality).  Anthropogenic global climate change is NOT dead in public opinion at all.

Well, how did we get to this spectrum of opinions?  The new report suggests that while we spend a lot of time talking politics, the larger issue might be education and outreach.  There are some really interesting findings in here – for example:

Majorities of American adults correctly understand that weather often changes from year to year (83%) and that “climate” means the average weather conditions in a region (74%). Majorities, however, incorrectly believe that the climate often changes from year to year or that “weather” means the average climate conditions in a region, suggesting that many people continue to confuse weather and climate.

Yep.  And I blame the media, who seem to constantly conflate these two on all ends of the political spectrum.  A heavy snowfall does not discredit climate change (or even warming), but a heat wave is not a signal of warming unto itself, either.

A majority of Americans (73%) correctly understands that current conditions are not colder than ever before in Earth’s history, but a majority (55%) incorrectly believes the opposite – that the Earth’s climate is now warmer than it has ever been before (this is false – global temperatures have been warmer than current conditions many times in the past).

Wait, who ever said it was the coldest it has ever been?  I get what they are trying to do, but that is just an odd thing to throw in.  And the fact a majority thinks we are at our warmest point ever speaks to a deeply distressing lack of understanding of our history – things have been warmer in the past, and we know from the geologic records associated with those times what sorts of sea level rise, etc. we can expect.  We are not in terra incognita entirely right now – we have records of sudden changes in the state of the global climate as it warmed beyond where we are today.  The past is prelude . . .
There is a lot of this sort of thing in the report.  All of it is interesting.  But it needs to be read with a careful, critical eye.  I am worried about some of the questions in this study – or at least their phrasing and the interpretation of the results.  For example:

Thirty-nine percent (39%) say that most scientists think global warming is happening, while 38 percent say there is a lot of disagreement among scientists whether or not global warming is happening

At first, this simply seems to be an illustration of the wide divide in the public on the understanding of the nature of the scientific consensus around climate change.  But this question is too broad to really capture what is going on here.  Answers probably varied greatly depending on the respondent’s level of knowledge (highly variable, as the report noted) – for example, a well-informed person inclined to think that the human causes of global climate change are overstated could take the real and significant (but very narrow) debates about the exact workings of various greenhouse gases, or how to best model the climate, and argue that this represents significant disagreements about whether or not anthropogenic global warming is happening (which is a serious mischaracterization), while someone who is more environmentally inclined but has less understanding of the field might simply assume there is no debate in the science at all, which is not true.  To get to 38% thinking that scientists are debating whether climate change is happening or not suggests that something like this happened on this question.  There is more or less no scientific debate, and very minimal public debate, over whether or not the climate is changing – the instrument record is pretty clear.  The question is how fast, and by what exact mechanisms.  Nearly all skeptics agree that some change is taking place – they just tend to doubt that humans are the cause.  If only 7% of the study’s respondents thought that climate change was not happening at all, why would they think that scientists had a greater level of debate?
I really dislike the following questions/data:

Respondents were given the current temperature of the Earth’s surface (approximately 58ºFahrenheit) as a reference point. They were then asked what they thought the average temperature was during the last ice age. The correct answer is between 46º and 51º. The median public response, however, was 32º – the freezing point of water – while many other people responded 0º.

Americans, however, did much better estimating the Earth’s surface temperature 150 years ago (before the Industrial Revolution). The correct answer is approximately 56º to 57º Fahrenheit. The median public response was 54º.

When asked what temperature they thought it would be by the year 2020 if no additional actions are taken to reduce global warming, the median response was 60º, slightly higher than the scientific estimate of 58.4º Fahrenheit.

Realistically, this is a bunch of wild guesses.  We Americans are not so good at simply saying “I don’t know”.  Hell, I would not have nailed these, and I work in this area.  The question requires too much precision to have any reasonable expectation of meaningful data.
Finally, a few moments of oversimplification in the data analysis that bother me – even though I like the idea of the report, and I generally agree with the premise that climate change is anthropogenic:

Majorities of Americans, however, incorrectly believe that the hole in the ozone layer, toxic wastes, aerosol spray cans, volcanic eruptions, the sun, and acid rain contribute to global warming.

Again, the analysis assumes a uniform, low level of understanding of climate change across the sample.  However, a well-informed person would know that the sun is, in fact, technically a contributor to climate change – it is a small forcing on our climate, dwarfed by that of greenhouse gases, to be sure, but still a forcing.  Had I been asked this question, I would have gotten it “wrong” by their analysis . . . but their analysis is predicated on an incorrect assumption about the drivers of climate change.  I could make the same argument for toxic wastes, as depending on what they are and how they are stored, they may well change land cover or decompose and release greenhouse gases, thus impacting climate change.  The analysis here is too simplistic.
I’m a bit surprised that this sort of a report would be full of problematically phrased questions and even more problematic interpretations of the data (i.e. predicated on misunderstandings of the science).  This is amateur hour stuff that any of my grad students could pick up on and address in their work long before they got to publication . . . too bad, as the effort and some of the information is really interesting.  It would have been nice to have a consistently interesting, rigorous report.

Posted on by Ed 0

And people think I'm angry . . .

Er, read the NY Times editorial page today.  Holy Crap.

In Climate Denial, Again

Former Vice President Dick Cheney has to be smiling. With one exception, none of the Republicans running for the Senate — including the 20 or so with a serious chance of winning — accept the scientific consensus that humans are largely responsible for global warming.

The candidates are not simply rejecting solutions, like putting a price on carbon, though these, too, are demonized. They are re-running the strategy of denial perfected by Mr. Cheney a decade ago, repudiating years of peer-reviewed findings about global warming and creating an alternative reality in which climate change is a hoax or conspiracy.

Some candidates are emphatic in their denial, like the Nevada Republican Sharron Angle, who flatly rejects “the man-caused climate change mantra of the left.” Others are merely wiggly, like California’s Carly Fiorina, who says, “I’m not sure.” Yet, over all (the exception being Mark Kirk in Illinois), the Republicans are huddled around an amazingly dismissive view of climate change.

A few may genuinely believe global warming is a left-wing plot. Others may be singing the tune of corporate benefactors. And many Republicans have seized on the cap-and-trade climate bill as another way to paint Democrats as out-of-control taxers.

In one way or another, though, all are custodians of a strategy whose guiding principle has been to avoid debate about solutions to climate change by denying its existence — or at least by diminishing its importance. The strategy worked, destroying hopes for Congressional action while further confusing ordinary citizens for whom global warming was already a remote and complex matter. It was also remarkably heavy-handed.

According to Congressional inquiries, White House officials, encouraged by Mr. Cheney’s office, forced the Environmental Protection Agency to remove sections on climate change from separate reports in 2002 and 2003. (Christine Todd Whitman, then the E.P.A. administrator, has since described the process as “brutal.”)

The administration also sought to control or censor Congressional testimony by federal employees and tampered with other reports in order to inject uncertainty into the climate debate and minimize threats to the environment.

Nothing, it seemed, could crack the administration’s denial — not Tony Blair of Britain and other leaders who took climate change seriously; not Mrs. Whitman (who eventually quit after being undercut by Mr. Cheney, who worked for the energy company Halliburton before he became vice president and received annual checks while in office); and certainly not the scientists.

In 2007, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its most definitive statement on the human contribution to climate change, Mr. Cheney insisted that there was not enough evidence to just “sort of run out and try to slap together some policy that’s going to try to solve the problem.” To which Mrs. Whitman, by then in private life, said: “I don’t see how he can say that with a straight face anymore.”

Nowadays, it is almost impossible to recall that in 2000, George W. Bush promised to cap carbon dioxide, encouraging some to believe that he would break through the partisan divide on global warming. Until the end of the 1990s, Republicans could be counted on to join bipartisan solutions to environmental problems. Now they’ve disappeared in a fog of disinformation, an entire political party parroting the Cheney line.

I agree with basically everything in this editorial.  And I wish more people knew about the censorship of science in the executive branch agencies under the Bush administration – it was horrible and wrong.  And it really happened.  But mostly I am surprised to see the mainstream media actually go after this issue with a vengeance.  It’s about damn time.  I feel less lonely now.

Posted on by Ed 1

An end and a beginning for sustainable development

The WWF has just released its 2010 Living Planet Report (download a copy here).  The big headline, being run by all the news organizations, is that we “need to find another Earth”.  The headline is attention-grabbing, but misses the real issue here.  In several posts on this blog I’ve referenced the fact that we need about three Earths worth of resources to allow everyone to live at the standard of consumption of the average person in the US.  Implicit in this measurement has been the fact that we here in the US (and in Europe, Australia, Japan, parts of China, parts of India, etc.) can go on consuming as we do just so long as the other 4-odd billion people don’t consume much at all.  This is the part of sustainable development nobody likes to talk about – there are two ways to achieve it: either cutbacks on the consumption of those who consume the most until consumption at a fairly high level is available for all (how most people tend to think of it) or just keep a hell of a lot of people really, really poor so that a small minority can just go on consuming (de facto, this is the choice that we’ve made up to this point – that’s right, if you are reading this blog, you live the way you do because 4 billion people cannot).

Well, this report now throws a bit of a wrench into the ugly, unacknowledged path we have chosen – turns out that our current levels of consumption will not be sustainable past the next 20 years no matter how many people we impoverish.  Our global population and consumption figures are simply too high.  That’s right, by 2020 we’d better have figured out how to get twice as much resource out of this planet as we do now.  I don’t see that happening.
I don’t think this means the revolution is coming anytime soon – I think the steadily rising inequality we see here in the US will eventually be mirrored by similar patterns across the advanced economies, as a smaller and smaller group of people cling to their privileges.  Further, the whole two Earths in 20 years argument is a bit overstated, as they work in carbon sinks and other regulating services from ecosystems that are not completely understood and therefore sometimes more resilient than expected, and are often fungible with other resources and biophysical processes.  But if the WWF is right (it is too early to say for sure), we are shifting into an era where our choices for how to achieve sustainable development narrow to one: reducing consumption.  Then we will have new choices – who reduces, and how?

Posted on by Ed 1

Hoping we are either stupid or uninformed . . .

A while back, I put up a post about how the US failure to pass climate legislation is screwing up the entire process at the global level.  While the Chinese are enormously problematic, and the Indians are not much better, our domestic political scene’s inability to come to any sort of agreement on anything that might look like a climate bill makes us the single biggest obstacle to addressing emissions productively.  What most people do not understand is that legislation is not the only way to control emissions here in the US.  In 2007 the Supreme Court held that the Environmental Protection Agency not only could, but indeed had to treat greenhouse gas emissions as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act.  Thus, we can control emissions via the regulations put forth by an agency of the executive branch, effectively cutting Congress out of the loop (unless they want to revoke or amend the Clean Air Act, and nobody seems to have the votes for that).  Hey, that is what the Court said, and what the Court says is the law until Congress rewrites things or the Court reverses itself.
So when people start arguing that the EPA’s impending move to actually come into compliance with the law is something “dangerous”, “activist” or “unwarranted”, they are hoping that the reader/listener/viewer doesn’t know the history or legal background of the issue – and they would often be right.  Certainly, that is the tactic of Mackubin Thomas Owens at the Washington Times, who in a recent Op-ed ignored this case, calling the possibility of controlling emissions through regulations a “ploy” and a “naked power grab by the EPA.” So, let’s review, shall we?
I have no doubt that this is a tactical effort on the part of the Obama administration to force some of those blocking real climate legislation to come to the table and negotiate something they can live with.  However, I don’t think the term “ploy” applies here – this is not an effort by the executive to do some backroom deal, such as consolidating power executive power at the expense of the other branches (for studies in that, see the Nixon and Bush 43 presidencies).  The president and his people surely know that regulation is a much weaker form of emissions control than is legislation.  One need only read the Washington Times Op-ed to see why, as they argue “a constitutional perspective suggests that Congress, not unelected bureaucrats, should be setting U.S. policy.”  Even with the backing of the court, it is much easier to argue against regulations (however legally empowered) created by the bureaucracy than it is to argue against a law passed by a majority (or, in the case of the Senate, a supermajority) of both houses and signed by the president.  Let’s also remember that the rest of the world is watching us to see what we do – and likely will build off of our domestic legislation for any global agreement (to ensure we participate).  Domestic regulation, especially if it is contested, will never work as a similar foundation, and it is entirely likely that the Senate would not ratify any agreement predicated on that regulation (2/3 of the Senate must vote to ratify).  If we want a global deal that even beings to address our problems, then the EPA must be an intermediate step toward binding legislation.
Now, do agencies grab for power when they can?  Of course they do.  But in this case, the EPA laid back until the Supreme Court told them, in effect, they had the right to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.  In fact, one could argue that once the Court placed greenhouse gases under the purview of the Clean Air Act, the EPA had no choice but to move toward regulating emissions lest it fall out of compliance with federal law.  After all, the court found:

“EPA has offered no reasoned explanation for its refusal to decide whether greenhouse gases cause or contribute to climate change,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority. The agency “identifies nothing suggesting that Congress meant to curtail EPA’s power to treat greenhouse gases as air pollutants”. . . The court majority said that the EPA clearly had the authority to regulate the emissions and that its “laundry list” of reasons for not doing so were not based in the law. (via Washington Post)

This is how politics, policy and the global environment intersect, folks – turns out those civics courses were a lot more important than we realized at the time, huh?

Posted on by Ed 12

Shuffling the deck chairs?

I recently had an e-mail exchange with Rick Piltz over at Climate Science Watch (I link to them regularly, and if you are not familiar with the site, you should check it out – it is an activist site that does very good work) about the whole Cucinelli circus.  At the end of that exchange, Rick mentioned that with the upcoming IPCC plenary the question of Patchauri’s leadership was once again on the table.  This got me thinking . . . and I shorthanded an answer to him that I think I can expand on here.
For those not neck-deep in the world of climate change, Rajendra Pachauri is the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  The IPCC is the authoritative scientific body working on the issue of climate change – it is empowered to review the existing literature and evidence (it does not do its own research) and present what amounts to a summary of our best understanding of what is happening to the global climate and why it is happening.  (full disclosure: I have been appointed to the IPCC for this round as a review editor – basically, I will manage the peer-review process for one of the chapters).
The IPCC has come under fire quite a bit – in my opinion, mostly because the scientific story of climate change is getting clearer and clearer, and it is not a happy story.  However, there have also been screwups – for example, some of you may have heard how a completely unrealistic assessment of glacier melt in the Himalayas somehow got through review into the last IPCC report (this melt is important, as it tells us how much flooding to expect downstream (i.e. northern India and Bangladesh, among other areas) in the near term, and how much the river flows of the region will decrease once the glaciers have largely melted (potentially creating significant food crises in the same areas).  I wasn’t completely freaked out by this error – it is large document that is hard to manage, but the review process is very comprehensive.  It’s just not realistic to expect a review, compiled by hundreds of scientists and reviewed by hundreds more as well as representatives from the participating governments (including the US), to come together flawlessly in a reasonable timeframe.  However, when this popped up, the handling of it was botched – it was more or less the classic error: instead of identifying, acknowledging and fixing the error, at first the IPCC was seen to be stonewalling and trying to defend an undefendable statement. At one point, Pachauri issued a remarkably tone-deaf statement in which he effectively called India’s Environment Minister “arrogant” and dismissed the Indian Government’s report which seemed to contract the IPCC findings.  Even if the IPCC report had been correct in its claims, this could have been handled better.  However, the IPCC claims were wrong, and the Indian report was closer to the truth . . . which makes this a disaster.  The whole event badly damaged the legitimacy of the IPCC in some people’s eyes, and was fodder for those who would deny the role of human beings in climate change.  It was a PR disaster, really – the overall science of the report is, in my opinion (and it is an informed opinion) quite solid.  If nothing else, note that as the models of climate get more sophisticated, their results are mapping ever closer to observed reality . . . and the models are predicated on widely accepted understandings of the causes of climate change brought forth through exercises like the IPCC assessments.  Still, it was bad.
Add this to the fiasco from this summer (in which I’m afraid I was a visible participant), where the IPCC secretariat, in Pachauri’s name, issued guidance to members of the IPCC on how to interact with the press. The letter was astonishingly poorly worded to sound like those of us on the IPCC were not to speak to the press at all, when what was meant was that we were not to represent the entire IPCC report by ourselves to the press (in other words, we can speak to the press and say “in my opinion . . .” and be fine, but we cannot say “The IPCC says/believes/thinks . . .” because we do not speak for everyone on the IPCC).  The meaning of the message was completely innocuous, but the initial wording was very unclear, and set off something of a firestorm.
So, does tone-deafness qualify as a reason to throw the chairman under the bus?  Well, if you think that the chairman’s job is to be a media spokesperson, maybe it is.  But if the chair is to run the larger IPCC process, I don’t think replacing Pachauri changes anything – it’s just finding a scapegoat to make it look like the panel has been reformed or something – which I strongly object to, as I don’t think the IPCC needs reform.  The process is sound, the author selection is sound, the data is sound (yes, I know some people have issues with the data, but the vast majority of the scientific community does not – so I am going with them until such time as I see new evidence – though I remain open to new evidence, as our understanding of the climate as a complex system is incomplete, at best).  So replacing Pachauri might actually be read as an admission of guilt or problems with previous IPCC reports that I do not think exist – there is no systematic rot here.
Besides, this round of the IPCC has already started – the authors are selected, and the first plenary will meet soon.  So changing the chair now will do nothing but create administrative confusion.  And the importance of replacing Pachauri rests on the assumption that the chair has a lot of power – and the post does not, in the grand scheme of things.  In the end, the IPCC is an intergovernmental process, which means that the diplomatic process in large, key countries like the US greatly constrain and shape what the IPCC can do – probably more than the chair can.  You’ll notice an absence of calls for replacement from the diplomatic community, which tells you what they think.  More to the point, Pachauri still has his job – if any major country had an issue, he would be out.  For an illustration, take a look at what the Bush administration did to Bob Watson, the previous chair of the IPCC.  The Administration withdrew support for him (and there is documentary evidence to suggest that they did so because ExxonMobil really wanted him gone) and that was that.
So, in the end I vote to keep Pachauri in place.  I think he is sincere in his efforts to get outreach right, both in terms of his own statements and in terms of the dissemination of the IPCC reports.  He knows the process.  And the governments are, for now, backing him, so all of the demands for removal are going nowhere right now.  That said, I fear he may be one more public gaffe away from someone in the diplomatic world getting fed up and demanding a replacement . . . and that would not be good for the IPCC process during this assessment report.

Posted on by Ed 3

Naiveté gets us nowhere . . .

So the Tianjin climate talks have come to an end with little outward sign of progress, despite protestations to the contrary by UN Climate Chief Christina Figueres (via AFP):

“I would dare say that this week has got us closer to a structured set of decisions that can be agreed in Cancun,” said Figueres, the executive secretary of the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change. “This week, governments had to address together what was doable in Cancun. … They have actually done that.”

In her defense, it is Figueres’ job to be a cheerleader for the process, so she sort of had to say that, evidence be damned.  Hey, if nothing else, we got to see China and the US go from passive agressive to openly pissy across the negotiating table, which is always fun.  When the Chinese start referring to “a pig looking in a mirror” to describe the US’s inability to discuss its own failure to pass climate legislation, at least it is amusing . . .
But despite the (not-so) diplomatic fireworks and cheerleading the face of evidence, the oddest statement of the week comes from Greenpeace:

Greenpeace international climate policy director Wendel Trio criticized the hard-line stance of the major players in the talks. “Governments should look at what they can do for the climate, not what the process can do for them,” Trio said.

Look, I know that someone has to stand up for the ideal world we all wish we lived in, if only to remind us of what that ideal looks like when we get too far away, this statement is so staggeringly naive as to be unproductive.  Of course governments will leverage the process for themselves – it’s what they do in international negotiations.  This is reality – begging them to behave like something they are not isn’t going to change anything, and fails to engage with the process as it is in the world – in other words, how things really get done.  A real effort to engage would have to address the staggering complexity of the diplomatic process, as well as the real self-interest of countries.  I am friends with someone close to the biofuels negotiations that just took place in Rome, and the US Government side of that negotiation alone involved several executive branch agencies or offices, and there were major differences between them that took a lot of smoothing before anyone could go sit at a table in Rome . . . so that means that not only are we dealing with national interests, but within countries we are dealing with bureaucratic interests – which speak to the interests of the constituencies of the various bureaucracies.
I share the general stance of Greenpeace with regard to the need for climate action.  However, their energy would be much better spent mobilizing all of the key actors along this legislative/diplomatic supply chain to understand why they care about the climate, and why it is in their interest/the agency’s or offices’ interest/the national interest to take action.

Posted on by Ed 0

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

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

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