So NOW is Climate Change a Clear and Present Danger?

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 10:27:26 -0500

For years – for decades – climate scientists have been telling us that global warming was going to have some seriously bad, seriously expensive effects on the environment. Slowly, the population at large has gone from considering this a "unproved theory" to a "concern", but it's never been a real "problem", at least not in the sense that a ten cent increase in the cost of gas is a problem bordering on a crisis.

We know this is human nature. As a species, we evolved to deal with immediate threats, with clear and present dangers. So while climate scientists and environmentalists move from worry, through to desperation, and finally hopelessness, the political will to take action doesn't materialize.

"Theory" is making a rapid transition to "evidence", as the severity of weather disruption increases around the world. We donate funds for disaster relief amid a growing concern that maybe all that science is right, that maybe we should take action before things get really bad. But then the headlines fade and we go back to bitching about gas prices, demanding rollbacks in electricity rates, and not electing politicians who dare to advance environmental policies because they'll be "too expensive".

Back in reality, well over 300 people have been killed by "unprecedented" tornadoes in Alabama. Damages from this one event are estimated to be between two and five billion dollars¹. Half the North American continent is experiencing "unusual" weather, and the season for this sort of storm has just begun.

So I wonder if this is the year that we have our collective watershed moment. Is this the year that we wake up and realize that we should have been taking dramatic action a decade or more ago? Because this is the new reality. It's going to be expensive, it's going to cost lives, it's going to make food more expensive – if not scarce. Even if we fixed the problem overnight (an absolute impossibility), we're stuck with a least a decade of "what you see is what you get and it's going to get worse before it gets better" weather.

Unfortunately no epiphany seems forthcoming. A quick survey of commentary surrounding the current Canadian election campaign has more people concerned with paying five cents more for a litre of gas today than they are about food shortages or dying in a "freak storm" in a few years. As the New Democratic Party surges in the polls, the most resonant criticism of their policies seems to be that a carbon tax could increase gas prices by four cents a litre, with a corresponding increase in a vast array of goods.

We have transitioned from "people will die" to "people are dying", and we're not scared yet. At least not scared enough to take meaningful action. I really hope we wake the f--- up, and soon.

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[1] Estimate from Eqecat, a catastrophe risk-modeling firm that advises insurance, reinsurance and financial companies, as quoted by upi.com.

The Environment, the Economics of Raw Materials, and the Collapse of Civilization

nospam@example.com (Alan Langford) — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 15:48:00 -0600

The theft of perfectly functional manufactured goods for scrap value has become a serious issue over the past decade. The number of stories of small to medium scale theft, primarily of copper, has gone from rarity to ubiquitous. The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation has declared copper theft a critical threat to infrastructure. The size of the problem has grown because the recovered value of many easily recycled raw materials is exceeds the risk of getting caught.

This can be generalized. If raw materials aren't cheap relative to wages, civilization collapses by dismantling itself. This is a grave matter, and I find the implications profound.

I consider myself an environmentalist. I've always believed that one way to build a more environmentally responsible economy was to factor in the "true" cost of extracting resources from the natural environment — despite never having come up with any practical ideas as to how such a cost could be established. Under such a scheme, all raw materials would be significantly more expensive. But the baseline for measuring "expensive" has to be wages. So there's a deeply fundamental flaw in my belief, namely that it leads to the self destruction of civilization. My simplistic prescription is now completely trashed and a new model is required, because the status quo doesn't work either.

On the other hand I have always been at odds with much of the environmental movement, in that I grudgingly advocate nuclear power. Not because I think it's clean and wonderful and cheap, but because it looks like the only way we can bridge from fossil fuels to something sustainable without the catastrophic collapse of civilization.¹

I mention energy here because it is a big factor in the cost of production and distribution of raw materials. As time passes, we need to go farther, dig deeper, and expend more energy to extract them, so energy is not only a significant cost factor but rising faster relative to other costs. Mining is one of those places where nuclear seems problematic. Having some mining company build a reactor in a remote part of a third world country just to operate a mine seems foolish at best, and a formula for either future environmental disasters or the proliferation of nuclear weapons at worst.

Even in politically stable populated areas, building a couple of hundred nuclear reactors is a much less adequate "bridge solution" than I had hoped. To put it bluntly, there's no point in having a few terawatt hours of nuclear energy available if someone keeps tearing down the transmission lines for scrap. For that matter it won't matter if that power is generated by the cleanest imaginable source. If infrastructure is constantly under attack, reliable energy could easily mean small scale generation in well defended fiefdoms.

I wish I had a solution for this one, even one that's overly simplistic. 2010 should go down in history as the year dire predictions of the cost of climate change started to swing rapidly from radical wing-nut environmentalist overstatements to brutally underestimated realities. It would be nice if 2011 was marked as the year policy makers started to get a grasp of the magnitude of the threats posed by more costly energy and moved urgently to address the problem. We should now be on the equivalent of a war footing, dedicating the bulk of our fiscal, intellectual, and physical resources to solve these problems. Inexpensive energy is axiomatic to the current structure of our society. If we fail to find a way to generate it, our social structures will undergo major upheaval. Major upheaval is never good.

Instead, we remain complacent. The probability of defeat rises with each day; the cost of victory increases exponentially. It is a time for activism. Call your local politician and remind him or her that there are no elections in feudal societies.

1. For the record I don't particularly enjoy doom-saying by sticking "collapse" and "civilization" together. I just happen to think that the problem is that serious.

It's Fixed in the Next Release - Economics

So NOW is Climate Change a Clear and Present Danger?

The Environment, the Economics of Raw Materials, and the Collapse of Civilization