Category: policy

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

Well, we know how this is going to go . . .

Given the stunning lack of serious coverage of the issue in American papers, readers can be forgiven if they are not up to speed on the situation in Sudan, where we might see the formation of a new country at the beginning of the new year – but probably not.  Southern Sudan is scheduled to hold a referendum on independence from Northern Sudan on January 9, 2011 – and most observers say that the southern Sudanese will vote for independence by a wide margin.  This is not good news for the Sudanese government in Khartoum, not least because most of the oil in Sudan is in the south.  So, we have seen various efforts to stall the referendum, which was promised in 2005 as part of a peace deal to end the Sudanese civil war, because of procedural or logistical issues.  This was worrying, as it showed a lack of commitment on the part of Khartoum . . . and the possibility they would not honor this deal.  Remember, the Sudanese government are the lovely people who brought us the Janjaweed militias in Darfur, so they have a history of, shall we say, problematic behavior.
Say what you will about these subtle hints that I think suggest this referendum will not play out, the signals of a coming disaster are starting to become too clear to ignore.  The BBC (among others) notes that the Sudanese government is blocking further UN presence along the buffer between North and South Sudan.  If you read between the lines, the dialogue here is chilling:

Officials at the UN said the decision had been made following an appeal from South Sudanese President Salva Kiir, who was concerned the North was preparing for war.

But President Omar Hassan al-Bashir’s security adviser, Salah Gosh, rejected the plan, saying troops could not be deployed without the consent of the government.

Ibrahim Ghandour, another leading politician in Mr Bashir’s National Congress Party (NCP), said any tension in the region could be sorted out between the two sides, so a buffer zone between North and South was not necessary.

First, Gosh is correct – the UN doesn’t really have a lot of good mechanisms for ordering countries around.  Unless the security council gets serious and orders a military action a la Kuwait in the early 1990s, UN Peacekeepers do operate at the will of the national government . . . which right now sits in Khartoum.  But for Gosh and for Ghandour to argue against more peacekeepers is worrying . . . peacekeepers are only meant to prevent violence.  Arguing against their presence makes sense only if . . . you are planning violence.  And when you hear the Southern Sudanese leader saying he fears the North is planning war, and he would love more peacekeepers . . . figure it out, people.  Things are about to go very, very badly in Sudan.
There are all sorts of reasons this matters.  First, the human suffering associated with war is never a good thing, and should be prevented whenever possible.  Second, this referendum is meant to be a democratic expression of the will of the people, and if we sit by and let this process fail or devolve into violence, we lose any high ground when discussing governance with other countries.  Further, they would lose confidence in our support for them – basically, we’d be saying that we really want to help, unless, of course, things get ugly.  In which case, we’ll just stand by and watch.  Not a real powerful stance.  Third, if this blows up, the likelihood of regional impacts is very, very high – the conflict in Northern Uganda is intimately linked to the long standing tensions between Northern and Southern Sudan.  A shooting war in Sudan will likely lead to greater violence in Northern Uganda.  Fourth, remember Darfur?  Also in Sudan, folks – and most of that violence started when the North-South civil war was settled, giving the government in Khartoum the time and resources to address what they saw as a threat to their authority in Darfur.  If a new North-South war starts, the impact on Darfur (and the people who fled to neighboring Chad) is difficult to predict.
And let’s not even wade into the large international interest in Sudanese oil.  I don’t even want to think about what might happen to the people in this region if international powers start picking sides.
If there were ever a moment where a forceful statement from the US and Europe could make a difference for a lot of people, this is it.  A real threat to intercede in this referendum before there is a conflict by a power or powers large enough to turn back the Sudanese Army could probably stop this before it starts . . . and earn us a lot of goodwill from the people of the region, even as it infuriates Khartoum.  Then again, who the hell cares what a government headed by an indicted war criminal thinks?  Has there ever been an easier choice for us?

Posted on by Ed 2

Are we really that bad?

So, the Center for Global Development, a non-partisan think tank focused on reducing poverty and making globalization work for the poor (a paraphrase of their mission statement, which can be found here), has issued a report that more or less says that USAID’s quality and effectiveness of aid is very low when compared to other agencies.
Well, I’m not all that freaked out by this assessment, principally because it fails to ask important questions relevant to understanding development needs and development outcomes.  In fact, the entire report is rigged – not intentionally, mind you, but I suspect out of a basic ignorance of the difference between the agencies being evaluated, and an odd (mis)understanding of what development is.
For me, the most telling point in the report came right away, on pages 3 and 4:

Given these difficulties in relating aid to development impact on the ground, the scholarly literature on aid effectiveness has failed to convince or impress those who might otherwise spend more because aid works (as in Sachs 2005) or less because aid doesn’t work often enough (Easterly 2003).

Why did this set me off?  Well, in my book I argue that the “poles” of Sachs and Easterly in the development literature are not poles at all – they operate from the same assumptions about how development and globalization work, and I just spent 90,000 words worth of a book laying out those assumptions and why they are often wrong.  In short, this whole report is operating from within the development echo chamber from which this blog takes its name.  But then they really set me off:

In donor countries especially, faced with daunting fiscal and debt problems, there is new and healthy emphasis on value for money and on maximizing the impact of their aid spending.

Folks, yesterday I posted about how the desire to get “value for our money” in development was putting all the wrong pressures on agencies . . . not because value is bad, but because it puts huge pressures on the development agencies to avoid risk (and associated costs), which in turn chokes off innovation in their programs and policies.  And here we have a report, evaluating the quality of aid (their words) in terms of its cost-effectiveness.  One of their four pillar analyses is the ability of agencies to maximize aid efficiency.  This is nuts.
Again, its not that there should be no oversight of the funds or their uses, or that there should be no accountability for those uses.  But to demand efficiency is to largely rule out high risk efforts which could have huge returns but carry a significant risk of failure.  Put another way, if this metric was applied to the Chilean mine rescue, then it would score low for efficiency because they tried three methods at once and two failed.  Of course, that overlooks the fact that they GOT THE MINERS OUT ALIVE.  Same thing for development – give me an “inefficient” agency that can make transformative leaps forward in our understandings of how development works and how to improve the situation of the global poor over the “efficient” agency that never programs anything of risk, and never makes those big leaps.
Now, let’s look at the indicators – because they tell the same story.  One of the indicators under efficiency is “Share of allocation to well-governed countries.”  Think about the pressure that places on an agency that has to think about where to set up its programming.  What about all of the poor, suffering people in poorly-governed countries?  Is USAID not supposed to send massive relief to Haiti after an earthquake because its government is not all we might hope?  This indicator either misses the whole point of development as a holistic, collaborative process of social transformation, or it is a thinly-veiled excuse to start triaging countries now.
They should know better – Andrew Natsios is one of their fellows, and he has explained how these sorts of evaluation pressures choke an agency to death.  Amusingly, they cite this work in here . . . almost completely at random on page 31, for a point that has no real bearing on that section of the text.  I wonder what he thinks of this report . . .
In the end, USAID comes out 126th of 130 agencies evaluated for “maximizing efficiency.”  Thank heavens.  It probably means that we still have some space to experiment and fail left.  Note that of the top 20% of donors, the highest scores went to the World Bank and UN Agencies, arguably the groups that do the least direct programming on the ground – in other words, the “inefficiencies” of their work are captured elsewhere, when the policies and programs they set up for others to run begin to come apart.  The same could be said of the Millennium Challenge Corporation here in the US, which also scored high.  In other words, they are rewarding the agencies that don’t actually do all that much on the ground for their efficiency, while the agencies that actually have to deal with the uncertainties of real life get dinged for it.
And the Germans ended up ranking high, but hey, nothing goes together like Germans and efficiency.  That one’s for you, Daniel Esser.
What a mess of a report . . . and what a mess this will cause in the press, in Congress, etc.  For no good reason.

Posted on by Ed 0

Jeff Sachs, please shut up (redux)

The Center for Global Development becomes the latest to figure out that the Millennium Villages are not producing meaningful information about their accomplishments . . . because they are not working.  I’m not a huge fan of finding new metrics to test this argument – the simple fact is this: when a project stops releasing its data, you can pretty much be assured the data is not telling the story they want.  But then, this was all completely predictable.
Folks, Jeff Sachs won’t learn anything until you stop paying attention to him and he is forced to consider why nobody is listening anymore.  Do it for him, if not for the global poor.

Posted on by Ed 2

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

Saving Chilean miners, saving development

Well, they pulled all 33 miners out of the hole.  This is an absolutely staggering feat – first, finding the miners nearly a half mile underground in the first place, and then drilling a precision shaft all the way down to them that was straight enough to accommodate a rescue capsule – which then worked flawlessly 33 times.  It never got old watching the miners come out of the ground.  And certainly the Chileans have a lot to be proud of these days.

AP Photo/Jose Manuel de la Maza, Chilean presidential press office

But this whole experience has caused me to think again about development and our persistent inability to get things done in a consistent manner for the world’s poorest people.  This rescue was, in many ways, everything that modern development is not.  The Chileans never asked about the cost – in fact, nobody knows what this cost, besides a hell of a lot.  The government didn’t parse options and try to pick the most cost-effective rescue – they ran three plans at once, to see which would work best.  It was expensive, but saved time and probably saved some lives.  In short, the Chilean government didn’t even try to assess the value of a human life here – by any economic measure, they’ve probably spent a lot more saving these men than the miners will ever earn or spend in the Chilean economy, so the rescue was an economic loser all along – the government decided that saving these men was necessary at any cost, that the value of their lives was not calculable.
When I see that attitude, with this amazing result, I am appalled by the piles of monitoring and evaluation red tape that development organizations must wade through to justify their activities – was that the lowest bid?  The most cost-effective intervention?  All of that accounting misses the point – there is no such thing as a good intervention that leaves people behind in the name of efficiency or cost-effectiveness.  Human lives cannot, and should not, be valued that way.
Second, this rescue was innovative and risk-taking.  They ran three plans at once.  Nobody had ever done any of them at this sort of depth.  There were huge risks of failure.  And they plowed forward anyway – two of them did not work out, but the third (actually, plan B) saved 33 lives.  There are so many of us in development who carry around the desire to try innovative things, to risk failure, learn and try again . . . but the culture of development with its budgeting and monitoring chokes off these sorts of efforts for interventions that produce easily measured results.  When we take risks and fail, the accountants take the money away.  So we go for easy, safe results, even when those results have little meaning for the people at the receiving end of the intervention.  What does it mean to say that this year we trained 25 judges in country X?  Have we really improved the judicial system, or the standard of living for those subject to it?  That number does nothing to help us understand if what we are doing matters at all . . . but we keep working on this sort of project because it is a measurable outcome that is of relatively low risk.
Contrary to what Jeffrey Sachs (see my impolitic rant here) keeps preaching, we DO NOT know what works in development.  If we did, there would be a hell of a lot less suffering in the world today.  We do know, however, what produces measurable results that look good, and we keep pounding away at that sort of work because we can rejustify our budgets each year.  Development is pathetically risk-averse, from the top down, and those that would take risks cannot find the funding or support to do so.
Chile just pulled 33 men out of a hole in the ground a half-mile deep.  They did it with help from mining and drilling experts from more than a dozen countries and with advice from NASA specialists on living in isolated conditions (if there were any doubt of the value of a human spaceflight program, here is yet another spinoff value that we have gained.  NASA’s unique expertise in this area surely contributed to the safe recovery of many of these men).  This was an international partnership to try to do the impossible, making it up as they went along.  And they did it.
Surely we can reimagine development in the same way, and with the same spirit.  But with much more urgency.  There are a lot more than 33 people down this hole.

Posted on by Ed 6

How the sausage did not get made . . .

Ryan Lizza has an amazing piece in this week’s New Yorker that traces how the Senate version of the climate bill – the one backed by John Kerry (D -MA), Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) – really came to an unnatural, totally unnecessary death.  It is a really sad story in that the bill did not have to die.  But it is also the story of stunning incompetence from the Obama White House, which sold the bill down the river just at the moment the three senators might have been able to marshall the votes.  I disagree with Lindsey Graham on all kinds of stuff, but to be honest he comes out looking the best in this piece.  The poor man got hosed.  Kerry comes off looking like a statesman, too.  Even Lieberman seems forgivable for his past behavior.  But the Obama administration looks to have completely blown this one, and both the US and the larger world will suffer greatly for it.
But one thing remains unresolved for me.  How could the White House, run by an experienced legislative dealmaker like Rahm Emanuel, screwed these negotiations up like this?  Incompetence?  An alternative agenda?  I simply don’t get it . . .

Posted on by Ed 4