Comments Andy Brett has made

Can we unpack #3 a bit more?

How are we defining the "cost" of a carbon policy? The difference between GDP with the policy and GDP without (which I'm guessing is a bit tricky to nail down)? The reduction in carbon emissions may be easier to see, but I don't

I also agree with Penfold that it makes more sense to look at all sectors as a whole instead of isolating one particular sector.
On You can't achieve the three goals of climate policy at once posted 1 year, 7 months ago 17 Responses

Yep

Hi Steffen,
It's ususally a one-day thing, so it has probably expired already. If you'd like I can email you the article.On Oiloholics posted 4 years, 3 months ago 5 Responses

Great stuff

Great post Dave.

I would throw this analogy out there. In the hypothetical, completely ideal world of globalization where people and nations do only what they do best (hold a comparative advantage for), everything gets divided up and specialized.

But in the real world, people and nations like to do some things themselves. On the national level, defense is one example. Producing a pretty fair amount of food and energy domestically is another. On the personal level, there are tasks and jobs that people just prefer to do, or at least be able to do, themselves, even if they aren't that great at them. For example, most people like to have a certain degree of culinary expertise, usually extending beyond ramen, if only slightly.

I extend this analogy to the "thinkin'" world. There is absolutely no way for everyone to do all their thinking for themselves. They must learn which sources to trust, as you say. But there's a certain level to which you have to be able to do your own thinking, a level which is different for everybody.

For a timely example: I am no legal expert, and probably would have never even seen the NARAL ad opposing SCOTUS nominee John Roberts had it not been for the online firestorm that resulted. Annenberg Political FactCheck is an organization that I have come to trust because of its work on other issues, so when they say something like "the ad is false," that tends to convince me. It also means that on this issue, I did not dig through the legal briefs myself in order to be convinced that the NARAL ad was misleading.

This is also (warning: cliche ahead) the power of blogs: when there's a new blog created every second, there's going to be someone who is willing and able to blog in-depth about almost any particular topic there is, to become the expert on it. Does it really make sense for me to immerse myself and investigate fully a topic like land trusts if someone I trust, like Pat Burns, has already been doing a superb job for some time and will thus be much more efficient than me at analyzing news when it breaks?

The irrationality of some heuristics certainly throws a monkey wrench into this whole thing. The "price implies quality" bias can be a devastating argument against free markets with the exception of commodities markets, since it scuttles the assumption that people act rationally/have good information, since the information they are inferring is incorrect if it's based solely on the "price implies quality" idea.

The idea of "perceived consensus" is also an interesting one, and one which contains elements of framing in it. If something starts to be referred to with words implying consensus, it won't be too long before there is a perceived consensus. Of course, if the basic facts of the matter are incorrect, it won't get anywhere, mostly because of blogs and organizations like FactCheck, but simply having the facts right isn't enough.

One potential problem then is the fact that those who are adept at getting the facts out and investigating might not the ones who are best at framing the issue and getting the message out.

Anyway, lot to chew on. Great stuff.On Being 'right' about peak oil is only the first step posted 4 years, 3 months ago 9 Responses

I'm a man...

Right on, bhurley. The 2004 election was seen by a lot of people as someone who would look at and think about all the facts, and maybe change his mind once in a while, vs. someone who was decisive. Just look how that turned out.

The "support group" comment reminded me of The Red Green Show. For those of you who haven't had the opportunity, here's a little snippet:

Man's Prayer:
I'm a man...
But I can change...
If I have to...
I guess.On Men posted 4 years, 3 months ago 10 Responses

I also know that the two are not the same, but...

...today had quite the bumper crop, so to speak, of publications on the other stuff:

AlterNet

John Tierney

LA Times

Congressional Budget OfficeOn Legalize it, don't criticize it posted 4 years, 3 months ago 3 Responses

Ha

Well crafted, Dave. The housemates want to know what's so darn funny.On ... oh, and R.I.P. posted 4 years, 3 months ago 13 Responses

Insert foot into mouth

1. D'oh

2. Great points, both that you can't determine density from across the river as I tried to and that making all residences as dense as Manhattan is not a great idea. I've got no reply :)

Commerce

While I explicitly mentioned residents in my original post, there would also be a large number of people attracted to a "digital city" even if they didn't plan to live there, increasing the commerce and the overall activity of the downtown area. That could have as much a revitalizing effect on an urban core as an influx of residents.On Coaxing residents to urban cores posted 4 years, 4 months ago 13 Responses

Absolutely

I absolutely agree, biopolitical. That's why I included "like it or not" :)On Could it work? posted 4 years, 4 months ago 10 Responses

Clarification

Wow, I go to work for eight hours, and come back to find myself attacked (and defended!). Cool.

Some clarification:

All I meant with the first point was that the way you drive a car has a big effect on the gas mileage you get. If you're Consumer Reports and just having fun, as Mike put it, you will get worse gas mileage. I wasn't saying anyone was necessarily comparing apples to oranges, just that there's a way to drive like an apple and a way to drive like an orange, and that a mpg meter helps the driver tell the difference. I also don't see how that is falling for it hook line and sinker ;)

On point two: Let's say there's a guy, Hybrid Harry. Before hybrids came around, Harry had two options when it came to cars. Option one was a fast car, 0 to 60 in 8 seconds, but it only got 13 mpg. Option two was a more sensible option, 0 to 60 in 14 seconds, but 25 mpg. Harry really wants the fast car, but because gas prices are so high, Harry can't afford to drive anything that gets less than 25 mpg, so Harry goes for the sensible car.

Now add in hybrids. Now Harry can have the best of both worlds, a car that goes 0 to 60 in 8 seconds and still gets 25 mpg. Harry is now going to go for the hybrid that gets 25 mpg but goes 0 to 60 in 8 seconds rather than the hybrid that gets 60 mpg but goes 0 to 60 in 14 seconds.

That's why I'm saying that these hybrids might have a neutral effect.

I agree with Steve that there are numerous other intangible benefits here. However, while I don't want to rain on Steve's parade, a blanket, one-size-fits-all hybrid subsidy may not be the way to go IF (and it's a large if) the above scenario occurs a lot (Harry switches from the sensible choice to the fast car choice).On Get your (hybrid) motor runnin' posted 4 years, 4 months ago 19 Responses

Point by point

Chris (and Mike -- hi Mike!), thanks for your replies. I'm not 110% convinced of my own position anyway so it's great to have discussions like this. If I may, a little point by point:

1. I agree, that within say an order of magnitude we can understand and predict what will happen to the ecosystem and the global climate. There's more work to be done, too, like these projects I mentioned. I would throw in lightheartedly that I am not impressed by the ability of the NWS to predict rainfall when they go with .10-.25 inches and we get 3.97 inches (June 28th). As you point out, there's a sliding scale here, and it depends on what "practical purposes" we have. I'll concede that this point is not any sort of trump, faux or otherwise :) ...

2. ...but shift that dubious distinction to point number two. It was poorly developed in my comment, but I'll give it another shot here. I don't think it's reasonable to expect someone to care about the global climate in 50 years or biodiversity in the ecosystem as a whole when he is uncertain about if he will be able to eat for the rest of the week. If you told me that a company was going to build a factory that would have one and only one direct effect on the ecosystem, say, the removal of a particular species from the area, but it would mean jobs for 10,000 people who could have a steady source of food because of those jobs, I would go with the jobs. I realize that this is a very oversimplified and unrealistic example, since "when one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world." I had some related comments recently here and here about this same topic, sort of.

3. I agree wholeheartedly that mitigation should continue full speed ahead. I hope it didn't look like I was implying that mitigation is useless, because I don't think that at all. But there is low-hanging fruit to be grabbed on the other side of the coin, in that some, not all, money can be put to better use if we funnel it toward adaptation.

4. Fair enough. I have no idea what the chances are of us "eradicating poverty" by 2100, but I agree that they aren't great. However, I don't think it's necessary to comletely eradicate poverty to avoid many of the disasters that global warming would bring on the poorest people in the world -- obviously we're not going to have six or eight or ten billion people in air conditioned houses that are a safe distance from the ocean by 2100, or ever for that matter. But I think that there's a lot to be gained (and avoided) if we can bring the bottom third of the world's population up to a level where they will not bear the full brunt of some of the effects of climate change, which I (perhaps naively) see as an attainable goal. The way to do that, however, is a discussion for another day and probably another blog.

Additional thoughts

Joel Makower weighs in on Toyota's strategery today over at his blog. Interesting stuff.On Toyota to American public: we make bad cars too! posted 4 years, 5 months ago 4 Responses

Value vs. cost

I think Roy brings up an important distinction between value and cost. I obviously place a very high value on food -- if I didn't have it for an extended period of time, I would die. Same thing with water.

It's because so many people place such a high value on these things that the cost is so low and continues to decline. People have figured out that if you come up with a better way to produce or transport clean water or healthy food, you will have plenty of people willing to pay for it. There's a large incentive, in other words.

Water is practically free in the US. (I've got a post on water markets percolating in my head, but it's not quite brewed yet.) Food similarly has a very low cost. Look at something like rice or oatmeal. You can get upwards of 1000 calories per dollar (in the US) with those foods. If you eat 2000 calories a day, that's $2. This means that even if you earn $5.15 an hour, you can theoretically earn your day's bread in about 25 minutes. This is a great side effect of that huge incentive to come up with effective ways of producing clean water and healthy food -- cheap water and cheap food, meaning people have the other 23 hours 35 minutes of the day to do other things. (I know, it's not a balanced diet).

I think that's what the economist meant when he cited the "3 % of global GDP" statistic :)On Beyond Econ 101. posted 4 years, 5 months ago 11 Responses

Coal vs. Oil

Jim brings up a great point about how important it is not to lump (haHA!) coal and oil together into one. I asked someone, just as a thought experiment, to imagine that any oil burned had no effect on global warming whatsoever; where would we go from there? We've got a fairly limited supply of oil, but a whole lot of carbon in the form of coal, which, as Jim points out, will be the "enabling" (as opposed to limiting) reagent, and is probably best left in the ground.

Friedman wants to get the US off foreign oil and has included greens in this "geo-green" alliance to do so, since hey, they don't like global warming, and using oil causes that, right?

If the goal is simply to get the US off of foreign oil by any means necessary, and if those means include essentially switching the source of energy from oil to coal, Friedman is going to be left with just a "geo" alliance, sans the green.

That's what I was trying to get at with the post; as always, though, the discussion has helped to refine, so thanks to all :)On Friedman drives home the geo-green point. posted 4 years, 5 months ago 18 Responses

The Greens

I'll always have a soft spot for the Green Mountain State after I lived there last summer. A soothe sayer (and by soothe sayer I mean a friend who was guessing) predicted that I will eventually live there permanently; I like the odds, and the outcome :)On Move over, Big Apple. posted 4 years, 5 months ago 2 Responses

Puzzlement

Sorry all, I've been out surveying all day and haven't been in on this veritable flurry of responses. amazingdrx, I am a little confused by this statement:

Your comments seem to be in the realm of obsfucation if not outright sophistry in the cause of continued fossil fueled transportation.

Regarding the renewables, obviously it would be less carbon intensive to use the electricity to power your car if the electricity was from renewables. I was concerned that the average American might wind up emitting more carbon (but still feeling good about themselves) if they moved to electic cars because, as bhurley kindly pointed out, we do get over 50 percent of our electricity from coal. You'll notice that I did not use the 2 pounds per kwhour, the figure for coal, but rather 1.4 or so, to reflect the national average. That's also why I used 10 cents per kilowatt hour; the national average is actually about 7.5 cents, but I used 10 for a round number and to account for the fact that if everyone plugged in their cars, we would almost certainly see a jump in electricity prices across the board.

jimbeyer, when you say 1000 cycles for the life of the battery, do you mean that you can charge/recharge the battery 1000 times? Or something else?On Friedman drives home the geo-green point. posted 4 years, 5 months ago 18 Responses

Sign me up

That is great to hear, Mike, especially numbers 2 and 3. I was secretly hoping that this post would not be breaking any new ground and that I would be preaching to the choir if any urban planners were reading when I suggested that we connect all three disciplines. It sounds like it would have been great to have your point of view present at these presentations.

Your description of urban planning as a "meta profession" has only made me all the more interested in it (you know, for when I grow up). Just think: responsibility for not just three but several complex chaotic systems. Transportation is another great example I completely left out.On Central planning didn't work in economics; will it work in urban planning? posted 4 years, 5 months ago 2 Responses

Wolfowitz

Followers of this thread might be interested in this story from the BBC. Going against the traditional US stance, Paul Wolfowitz has called for cuts in agricultural subsidies to prevent unfair dumping in developing markets.

Not bad, for an opening act.On Environmentalism should look in the mirror to find the source of its troubles. posted 4 years, 5 months ago 23 Responses

But I do agree :-)

The funny thing is, I agree with a lot of what you said. If I may, I'd like to refine some of my points by contrasting with yours.

"Global warming affects us all." Absolutely. I'm not saying that I or anybody else who lives in the developed world should ignore global warming. We must multitask, as you nicely put it. I also agree that some of the people who are most impacted by global warming are those who are living subsistence lifestyles. But I think that the fact that there are people who are living subsistence lifestyles in the first place is problematic, with or without the added impetus of the perils they face because of global warming.

This leads into the next issue I want to clarify. While I think it's problematic that some people are still living subsistence lifestyles, just because I want nobody on earth to have to live week to week doesn't necessarily mean that I want us all to consume like Americans. Maybe I'm being naive, but I don't equate those two situations. I agree that it is simple math; when we say that the world cannot all consume as much as Americans, it's a literal cannot. The reason I don't equate the two situations is that I think there's a growing difference between consumption in the GDP sense of the word and consumption in the natural resources sense (which I tried to elaborate on here, but looking back I don't think I did as well as I would have liked).

Living a sustenance lifestyle is fine until you get a bad crop cycle. Maybe it would be a better, more nuanced way to put it if I said that I think we need to get everyone in the world up to a certain level of certainty that they are most likely to die of "natural causes" and not disease or malnutrition before we can ask them to care about issues like global warming.

"We need to look farther ahead than just our generation." Again, absolutely. My response here is similar to what I said in the first paragraph. I think that the best way to do this is to ensure that everyone has an adequate standard of living that they be assured that they will live out their own lives and then they can be asked to care about future generations.

"Environmentalism has both local and global components." Very true. I don't think anyone disagrees that there is plenty of work to be done. I think it's a personal choice as to what area you choose to focus on. After all, you've got to do what you love.On Environmentalism should look in the mirror to find the source of its troubles. posted 4 years, 5 months ago 23 Responses

Priorities

First, to loshloshlahoi: fair enough.

I think that the big reason that I agree with Jeremy boils down to the fact that human health concerns are a priority (as jdhlax points out) for me as well. I would disagree that "humans are thriving" when so many still live in poverty.

We are getting close to being out of the woods as far as that goes, and I'm hopeful that we will be there in my lifetime. But for the time being, I think that some concerns have to take a back seat. It's not reasonable to expect someone who is still living the nasty, brutish, and short life and who is breaking his back to eke out a subsistence lifestyle to really care about, say, global warming or the impacts he is having on the environment. If wildlife are going to die and the land be marred in order to keep people alive, I don't think there's really a choice there. I am a vegetarian myself, and someone once asked me the hypothetical question of whether I would eat meat temporarily if my life depended on it. I think the answer here is clear as well.

I also love wildlife and wilderness areas. But protecting them can't come at a cost of human life. In addition, when it comes to protecting and preserving those things, there's more than one way to go about it.On Environmentalism should look in the mirror to find the source of its troubles. posted 4 years, 5 months ago 23 Responses

Welcome

Welcome, Jeremy, and excellent first post. I agree with many of your points and I am eagerly awaiting part 2.

While I agree with odograph that the nice thing, maybe even the best thing, about the web is that you don't need to roll many issues into one unified party line, I think that the difference between jdhlax and Jeremy here is a fundamental one. While I have a clear picture of what both groups stand for, I myself don't really have any suggestions for terms to label each with.

While we are on the subject of definitions, though, (and I'm sorry to bring in a comment from a different thread) a few minutes ago jdhlax said:

"In fact, I advocate a return to a hunter-gatherer lifesytle, as agriculture is not natural and is extremely ecologically destructive."

I mean this with all due respect, and it is out of sheer curiosity that I ask, but what do you mean by "natural?" It's a word that gets thrown around a lot but to me it seems like it can mean very different things to different people. Is anything that human civilization makes or produces "unnatural?"On Environmentalism should look in the mirror to find the source of its troubles. posted 4 years, 5 months ago 23 Responses

Right on, Stentor.

I find that I'm able to do the same. The lubra-strips on disposable razors tend to wear out long before the blade actually goes dull, which probably gets a lot of people to throw out perfectly good razors.On Umbra on shaving posted 4 years, 5 months ago 28 Responses

Open Source, Opponents, Tom Friedman

The dichotomy between romanticism and science that Brand brings up in his opening paragraphs brings to mind Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a great read.  

Fortunately for the environmental "movement," there seems to be a critical mass of people who identify with the science side of this dichotomy and who are not afraid to look beyond the initial anathema of something like GM foods and weigh all the different factors that must be considered.  In particular with respect to GM foods, the open source idea that you link to, Dave, is a great example of how people can take an idea that was initially rejected and turn it into something of their own, and Brand's comment about how the Amish have embraced GM foods certainly gives pause to those who would make snap judgements otherwise.  Everything is starting to "go open-source"; the aforementioned Zen and the Art is available for free online, a very open-source idea, Howard Dean's primary campaign was dubbed the open-source campaign and has reshaped politics, open-source software is now available for web browsing, email, instant messaging, and office work.  

But back to the environment.  I was glad to see Brand assert that the enviros will be making this shift over the next ten years.  While I would like to see this change come as quickly as possible, for a while I thought I had missed the boat, since I would say my own "reversal" came just over the past year or so, at least judging by some  papers I wrote last spring and now read again, amazed at how my views have changed.  As Norris asserts, the sheer power of nature (as well as the powerful prose of Thoreau and others, in my opinion) can turn environmentalism into a religion, especially for young environmentalists.  Eventually, though, maybe out of this awe of the environment, you become open to all ideas on how best to interact with it because you want this awe to be around for others.  And ideas that originally seemed ridiculous start to have merit, or at least make sense.  

I think that maybe the most important thing for enviros to realize is that our traditional "opponents" are not a bunch of pitchfork-toting troglodytes who won't listen to reason, and therefore realize not to immediately treat them as such.  There are definitely arguments to be made on both sides of nearly all environmental issues, and enviros who refuse to hear arguments from the other side are simply going to be left out eventually.  Tom Friedman is a great example of someone who is embracing the change that is bound to take place.  To respond to those who would "excommunicate" him, Friedman endorses drilling in ANWR only if it's part of a geo-green strategy; by itself he calls it brain-dead.  This is from the Grist interview itself.  And while the nuclear approach may not be the solution right now and is certainly up for debate, it nevertheless has its merits and is worth thinking about, particularly as we crest Hubbert's peak.  On An essay by Stewart Brand challenges four eco-dogmas posted 4 years, 7 months ago 7 Responses

Send it in

Clark, you really undermine Boot's slam on alternative transportation methods.  There isn't any disputing the points you bring up.  I can only hope that this was a rhetorical device that he was using to try and focus attention on the other methods he was proposing in the article.  

I would parse that down to about 150 words (it's a very succinct point in its essence anyway) and send it in to the Times.  It's only 8 PM on the west coast, you might catch them before they go to press...On Clark Williams-Derry posted 4 years, 8 months ago 2 Responses