Category: sustainable development

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

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

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

More on food prices, shortages, and riots

Sorry for the lack of posts, folks. I’m in orientation for the new position, which just swallows whole days – useful, but a bit exhausting.
So, a quick post following up on my previous comments about food prices. The Guardian has a good piece on this issue at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/sep/05/mozambique-food-riots-patel
This piece is much better than reporting from US sources, but it does have a significant flaw driven by the political goal of the author – highlighting the failures of economic/development policy and practice, and how this led to our current situation. While I agree that these are major issues, I am concerned with the way the author downplays the fact that there has been simmering discontent with the government in Mozambique for some time. The riots are locally-specific: tied to food markets, development policy and other geopolitical processes, but crystallized into action through a local lens. This is why we have riots in some places, but not others. It’s just too hard to generalize . . . and we don’t learn much when we do, I fear.

Posted on by Ed 0

Er, this is not better . . .

So, Gabon’s president has decided to diversify the economy . . . from oil to palm oil.  You . . . have . . . got . . . to . . . be . . . joking.  First, you are trading one primary commodity for another – in other words, the economic problems of price instability and complete dependence on the consumption of others are not in any way addressed by this shift.  This is not diversification, this is retrenchment to a commodity that the British colonial government more or less stopped promoting in relatively nearby Ghana by 1920!  And don’t tell me about biofuels – palm oil suffers from the same problems as nearly every other form of biofuel, in that it is at best carbon-neutral in and of itself, but requires energy to be converted to usable fuel . . . thus making it carbon positive (i.e. a net carbon emitter).  The market for biofuels of this type is not really there yet, so this is not going to fly all that well.
Second, Gabon is home to a significant amount of high quality, old growth rainforest – home to all kinds of species not seen elsewhere, and part of the equatorial belt of rainforests that suck up 18% of annual global carbon emissions.  The last thing we need is to see Gabon trading this forested area for palm plantations.  One need only look to the situation in Indonesia, where this exact conversion is taking place, to see the kinds of fraud and environmental damage that this shift to a “benign” crop is creating.
Gabon desperately needs a new path to the future, but palm oil is not that path.  Oh, and BBC: some level of analysis that points out any of these issues would have been nice . . .

Posted on by Ed 2

Why food security analyses fail . . .

Case 1: when you fail to define your basic terms correctly.
Laurie A. Garrett, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, tried to write an interesting piece about climate change and food security recently.  Her case is compelling, though she draws far too heavily on a few high profile examples of possible climate impacts on food supply without providing appropriate caveats about the difference between climate change (a trend over time) and climate variability (which can be one-off events, or the byproduct of a larger trend).  This is somewhat standard fare in the popular media, as such caveats really don’t make for good reading.
What got my attention was Garrett’s complete failure to properly define food security.  She argues “The overwrought phrase “food security” connotes literally obtaining sufficient calories and nutrients to stay alive.”  Well, maybe in 1980.  Since then, a tremendous amount of work (to which I have made a very small contribution) has expanded this definition dramatically – food security is about access and entitlement to food and other livelihoods resources – in other words, food security is more than enough calories on hand – you also have to have rights of access to those calories, or you are out of luck.
Why is this a problem in her article?  Well, Garrett is trying to draw a link between climate change a food prices . . . which are presumed to hit the global poor the hardest.  However, rising prices are only a part of the food security story.  If we don’t know people’s rights of entitlement to the calories they need, then it becomes hard to say if we have enough or not enough food available.
For example, let’s assume that a Ghanaian husband and wife have three children – one girl and two boys.  The household needs, at a basal level around 6000 calories a day to meet basic needs.  We can go to their farm, and measure the food they eat, and get a caloric figure.  Perhaps that figure comes back at 6500 calories per day.  This is not enough to say that this household, and all its members are food secure.  Does the wife and her girl child, have the same rights to food as the husband and boys, or must the females wait for the men to eat their fill, before eating whatever remains?  If the females do not have the same rights of access, it may be that the husband and boys are more than food secure, while the wife and her girls are not.
Certainly, it is useful to know where there simply isn’t any food around – but even this is tricky.  Most people forget that Ethiopia was actually increasing its agricultural exports across its famous mid-1980s famines.  It’s just that the food was sold overseas for foreign currency, which was then used to pay off their national debt . . . as the Ethiopian population starved.
This article addresses but one part of the global food security equation – not enough to make sweeping claims of what is to come.

Posted on by Ed 2

Carbon-neutral consumption? Nah . . .

Well, the markets seem to have faith in biofuels – two companies working on this idea have filed for IPOs in the past week.  Both are interesting, though for different reasons.  Gevo is interesting not for its choice of source material (still using corn, wheat and sugarcane), but for the fact that it is turning these sources into isobutanol, which as Martin LaMonica notes

“can be used as a solvent, blended to make jet fuel or other liquid fuels, or used as a raw material for plastics or rubber.”

Diversifying the products that might come from cellulosic sources is very interesting, and hints at directions we might take toward a post-petroleum world.  The big drawback: they are still stuck using food crops as their source material for fuel.  Elsewhere on this blog I have noted that this sort of sourcing of our fuel has significant ramifications for the global food supply, taking out perhaps too much slack in a time of environmental uncertainty (let alone new economic tools in the commodities markets).
All this makes the other IPO filing, PetroAlgae, much more interesting.  They are working with algae as a source material for their fuel.  Algae doesn’t take up arable land, isn’t one of our current food crops, and can be grown in a wide range of environments.  If they can make this work, we might have something interesting there.
Let’s all remember, though, that biofuels don’t really fix the greenhouse problems our current development pathways are generating.  At best, biofuels are carbon neutral – carbon goes into the plant, is released when plant is converted to energy, rinse, repeat).  However, to get the plant to a state that works as a fuel requires energy – that energy has to come from somewhere, and therefore has a carbon footprint.  So biofuels may not be as bad as coal, but completely clean they are not.  The days of the guilt-free consumption of carbon-neutral goods derived from algae are not yet here . . .
Advanced biofuels maker Gevo files to go public via CNET
Algae fuel maker PetroAlgae files to go public via CNET

Posted on by Ed 0