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The Environment
Hope springs eternal, especially the having your cake and eating it too variety. One example is the idea of increasing environmental protection without sacrificing economic growth. Can it be done? Hardcore environmentalists tend to say no, economic activity is the main way humans hurt the environment.
In “Ten Commandments of How to Fail in an Environmental Campaign”, Avner de-Shalit discusses the various ways environmentalists alienate potential supporters. The Second Commandment is my favorite: Always Use the Terminology of Despair.
While organic farming methods can be as or more productive than conventional methods, for many large scale crops, organic just doesn’t compete. For instance, in the US, organic corn, soybean and wheat crop yields are much lower than conventional yields.
Today the Obama administration officially rejected the Keystone XL Pipeline. As President Obama acknowledged, this decision was mostly symbolic. The existence of the pipeline itself would have made little difference in the battle against climate change, nor would its economic payoffs have been all that great.
As climate becomes less predictable, we’ll have to develop ways to better conserve, store, and transport water during years of favorable weather to soften the impact of the bad years. More reservoirs and canals would help, as would the development of crops that need less water and use water more efficiently. We would also need to continue the development of increasingly resilient crops able to thrive in variable conditions and continue to improve intensive sustainable farming practices.
While admirably trying to save the planet from global warming, many environmental activists seem to undermine their efforts by focusing on a narrow range of possible solutions. Sometimes ideology plays a role: there is an anti-capitalist, anti-technology streak within the environmental movement that resists suggestions that involve harnessing the profit motive or engineering know-how. And then there is a certain amount of zero-sum reasoning...
Note: This and several subsequent posts will be about possible adaptations to climate change. Serious consideration of adaptations does not require any slackening of effort to mitigate climate change.
... limitations and trade-offs are part of every engineering project. You don’t just give up in the face of imperfection – you keep trying to do the best possible job and then continue to adjust the process as new knowledge and technology become available.
... this whole "what side on you on?" way of thinking makes it hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. The science of climate change involves a myriad of research questions, each of which can generate a myriad of hypotheses, generating a range of predictions spanning a continuum of possibilities. Turning climate change into an Us versus Them issue can have a chilling effect on the field if researchers choose not to pursue certain lines of questioning out of fear of being classified as one of Them.
Mandating specific emission reductions for individual companies could also create problems, especially the creation of perverse incentives and disincentives. If the reductions are based on a baseline, businesses will prefer high baselines so that reductions are more doable and less costly. For instance, when in the market to buy new manufacturing facilities, a company might want to buy high-emitting operations to establish a high baseline, thus reducing subsequent compliance costs.
Franzen sees the all-consuming warrior spirit of climate change activists as potentially hurting other environmental causes by redirecting priorities and resources away from conservation projects to the cause of reducing green house gases. Climate change is one threat to biodiversity but there are others, such as habitat loss and fragmentation.
...people generally react in a very basic way to the threat of dire consequences and horrific scenarios. They simply repress and doubt what they hear - a common strategy when faced with alarming prognostications....
Once a country achieves a certain standard of living, inhabitants become less focused on doing whatever it takes to survive and start caring more about the world around them. Poorer countries tend to chop down forests, richer countries to plant them.
Larger businesses promote economies of scale, higher wages (known as the big firm wage premium), and de-materialization of production, logistics and transportation (meaning fewer emission per unit produced). Of course, there needs to be a mix of large, moderate and small businesses, and monopolistic power should be avoided.
The problem with this “small is beautiful” mentality is that small landholders tend to operate on very small margins and are the least likely to afford sustainable practices like letting a portion of their land fallow every year and to allow some bordering forests to remain intact. In poorer countries, when times are hard, the trees are chopped down to sell the wood....
....smaller trucks with less storage space often emit more CO2 per unit transported than those big-ass long-hauls, because the latter transport so much more stuff per haul.
The other side consists of scoundrels and idiots. Problem is, focusing on the personal qualities of those with whom we disagree gets in the way of determining whether their case has any merit. Sometimes we can learn a thing or two from people we dislike.