Ten reasons to be cheerful, part 10: The environment
Despite all the scare stories, I'm optimistic that the next generation will live on a planet that is cleaner and greener, and probably nicer to look at.
10. Environment
Claims are made that our cities, rivers and coasts grow more polluted by the day. In fact some areas have improved considerably. The streets of late Victorian London were awash with horse manure, with children standing at street corners to clear a path in exchange for a small coin. City air was more polluted when nearly all homes burned coal fires. The London smog of 1952 killed an estimated 12,000 people in a fortnight, with theatres closed because audiences could not see the stage. It prompted the Clean Air Act of 1956.
In the late 1970s most London buildings were black, including Westminster Abbey, the Palace of Westminster and Whitehall. They were cleaned up only when the air became sufficiently soot-free to make it last. The Thames, once toxic to fish, now bears stocks of several species. Other rivers and coastlines are much cleaner than they have been.
Even air pollution from industrial activity is diminishing in Britain and most advanced economies. New technology makes this possible, and it is the poorer and up-and-coming countries that find it too expensive. China is building new coal-fired power stations at a rate of more than one a week, and plans to do so for at least a decade. It will make sense to develop the technology for cleaner burning so that it becomes affordable.
In fact one of the biggest aids to reducing pollution is the switch to natural gas-fired power stations, since it burns much cleaner. With maybe 100 or more years of gas reserves now extractable, the switch from coal to gas will have a major impact on pollution. The switch to electric vehicles charged from gas-fired power will dramatically cut the pollution caused by engines burning petrol or diesel.
The second Green Revolution in agriculture will increase yields from acres under cultivation and bring hitherto marginal land into use. This will give the rainforest more protection than all the pledges and treaties that have hitherto been resorted to.
In all of this it is technology, rather than behavioural change, that is making the difference and which will bring results. We do not have to live more simply, just more cleverly so that we can achieve our aims while leaving a smaller footprint. I have confidence in our ability to do this.
Ten reasons to be cheerful, part 4: Resources
The mantra is "The world is running out of scarce resources; we are leaving none for our children." It is not true, and resources are my fourth reason for optimism.
4. Resources
In a famous 1980 scientific wager, Julian Simon invited Paul Erlich, author of "The Population Bomb," to choose 5 resources he thought were being depleted, and bet they would fall in price over the decade. Erlich chose copper, chromium, nickel, tin and tungsten, and duly paid up when their price fell over a decade, indicating relative abundance rather than scarcity.
We are indeed using resources, but our ability to extract new sources is advancing faster than our rate of use, meaning that they are becoming relatively more plentiful, and therefore falling in price over the decades. Two things happen as we use resources. If they become more scarce the price rises, motivating us to find new sources of supply and to use less. We also develop cheaper substitutes.
Famously in the case of copper we developed fibre optic cables to convey our signals as copper rose in price. We use plastic pipes instead of copper ones to convey liquids because they are cheaper. The falling demand for copper means that world reserves are now estimated at between 25 and 60 years (depending on assumptions about growth rates), whereas at the time Erlich wrote, it was much less.
This is not to suggest copper will suddenly run out in 25 or 60 years. If it becomes scarce it will become more expensive, and people will use other things in its place. The reason the world is not running out of scarce resources is that the technology to locate and extract them is advancing year by year, and market prices motivate us to use it.
The Earth is nearly 4,000 miles from surface to centre, and we have barely scratched its surface. There are plenty of resources; all it takes is technology to tap them, and an incentive to do so. It also takes technology to develop substitutes, and carbon fibre, laminates and plastics are less resource-intensive than their predecessors.
It is not only our ability to tap new sources that advances: or skill at reclaiming and recycling previously used resources is also advancing. And crucially, our technical advances now enable us to stretch our resources further, using less of them to achieve the same effect. It all means that resources are not running out.
Ten reasons to be cheerful, part 3: Energy
We've been told the world is running out of sources of energy, and we've been preached to about renewables and made to spend vast sums on them. In fact energy is the third of my sources of optimism.
3. Energy
The oil, we are told, is running out, and they talk of 'peak oil.' There are vast reserves of coal, but it pollutes more than we want, so the talk turns to renewables. Biofuel from food grains lacks all sense or reason. The farmers loved it, of course, and so probably did the politicians who collected their votes. Poorer people who had to compete with Chelsea tractors for cheap food were less pleased.
Wind farms have blighted our areas of natural beauty, are very expensive, and may not even contribute to environmental quality when their whole life pollution, including construction, is factored in. Moreover there has to be back-up power for when winds prove unreliable.
Renewables are jacking up the fuel bills that customers complain of, despite their tiny contribution to total energy supply. The big change to the equation has been the natural gas revolution, with hydraulic fracturing technology giving us access to reserves we knew about but could not previously tap. We now have many decades, maybe hundreds of years, of reserve supplies. And those reserves are not in politically sensitive or unstable areas.
Gas does emit carbon, but half that of the coal-fired power stations it can replace. It is what will fuel our power stations. It can even substitute for oil in transport if we move to electric vehicles using gas-generated electricity. It is a fossil fuel, of course, but not in short supply.
Coming close on its heels is photo-voltaic power, with the price of the cells subject to a kind of Moore's Law that sees the prices tumbling steadily over the years. Technology has thus already shown us the solution to the energy shortage. Environmentalists oppose this solution, of course, because it does not necessitate the behavioural changes that they seek.
Note that a US coal-fired plant converts only about 33% of the potential energy to power. An incandescent light-bulb is only about 3% efficient. This makes coal to incandescent light only 1% efficient. By contrast an LED powered by gas-generated electricity is 20% efficient – twenty times as much. Technology like this is solving the problem.
Ten reasons to be cheerful, part 2: Water
Some people tell us that water scarcity might well be the cause of future wars as the world struggles to cope with shortages. In fact water is my second cause for optimism.
2. Water
The shortage pointed to is of usable water, not of water itself. Although four-fifths of the Earth's surface is covered by water, some 97 percent of the Earth's water is too salty for people to drink or to use for irrigation, and much of the water that is accessible is not safe to drink. The question is whether we can develop the technology required to purify water to render it of drinkable quality at a price that can be afforded.
Great advances are being made in fairly low technology solutions to water purification in less developed countries. A range of ingenious solutions has been developed from simple filtration systems that use coal ash, to solar-powered ones using plastic bottles. Great efforts are under way from a number of foundations to finance the construction of deep wells to bring clean water to villages whose nearest other source is miles away.
A combination of such developments will contribute much to ensuring adequate supplies, but ultimately it could well be desalination technology that provides an inexhaustible supply. The main desalination technique hitherto has depended on boiling seawater and condensing the steam. This works well and is in widespread use, but it is very energy-intensive.
The alternative approach that is rapidly gaining ground uses osmosis (technically reverse osmosis) to separate out the salts using membranes. This also uses quite large amounts of energy, but advances in engineering are making it more efficient as time passes. Such plants could be solar powered as those costs come down, and can be located in areas that both need water and have many hours of sunlight.
Ultimately the question of the future supply of clean water comes down to whether we can develop the technology to purify water efficiently, and the answer seems to be that we can. Of course the water will have to be where it is needed, but its transmission is again a problem susceptible to technological solutions. Both of these depend on access to cheap and abundant sources of energy if they are to be affordable, and it seems likely that the gas revolution has made the breakthrough which makes that outcome likely.
Ten reasons to be cheerful, part 1: Food
We are told there won't be enough food for our increasing numbers, and that millions in poorer countries will starve. In fact this will almost certainly not happen, and the world's future food supply is a source of optimism.
1. Food
It was Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) who popularized this view in "An Essay on the Principle of Population." He stated that agricultural output increases in a linear (arithmetic) way, but that population does so in an exponential (geometric) way. This means that large numbers must starve.
The Malthus view has not been borne out by events. Our ability to use technology to increase food production has enabled food output to keep pace with population, even with the explosive growth of the 20th Century. The use of fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides has boosted production per acre in ways he could not imagine.
The Green Revolution between the late 1940s and the 1970s, led by Norman Borlaug, saw the development of high-yield crop varieties, plus changes in agricultural infrastructure, and is reckoned to have saved more than a billion people from starvation.
A second Green Revolution is coming about based on genetic modification. Desirable traits can be crossed between species, enabling plants to be bred that can overcome many of the limits of traditional agriculture. Plants have already been developed to resist herbicides so that weeds can be killed without affecting food crops. Even more exciting is the research under way to develop crop strains that will resist pests themselves without needing chemical assistance.
Researchers are developing crops that will thrive on marginal land, that can resist drought and temperature extremes, and that are saline tolerant. This will open up to agriculture huge areas of land not presently suitable for crops. Varieties are being produced that can fix atmospheric nitrogen and fertilize themselves in the way that legumes do. Others are under way that incorporate vitamins to supplement unbalanced diets and reduce the health risks caused.
Yet more research is being done to create varieties that yield more food and less waste, enabling greater output per acre. We will not need to cut down rainforests. Our future food production should easily outpace the population increase, overturning the Malthusian pessimism.
Environmentalists whose agenda is behaviour change have raised scare campaigns over GM foods, yet GM crops have been in widespread use now for many years without adverse effects. Far from posing a hazard to our future well-being, they stand to make a huge and positive contribution to it.
Why won't the environmentalists learn any economics?
Today's example comes from Canada but I get hugely and vastly irritated by very much the same thing over here. Quite simply the blind refusal of many in the environmentalist movement to understand what it is that economists are trying to tell them. Mike Moffatt (both an economist and a Green, so something of an unusual mixture) tells of his experience here. Taking David Suzuki to task for his illiteracy here.
“But if you ask the economists, in that equation where do you put the ozone layer? Where do you put the deep underground aquifers of fossil water? Where do you put topsoil or biodiversity? Their answer is ‘oh, those are externalities’. Well then you might as well be on Mars, that economy is not based in anything like the real world,” Dr. Suzuki goes on to say. Dr. Suzuki’s remarks on externalities were clarified in an interview given to the magazine Common Ground: “I won’t go into a long critique, but currently nature and nature’s services – cleansing, filtering water, creating the atmosphere, taking carbon out of the air, putting oxygen back in, preventing erosion, pollinating flowering plants – perform dozens of services to keep the planet happening. But economists call this an ‘externality.’ What that means is “We don’t give a shit.” It’s not economic. Because they’re so impressed with humans, human productivity and human creativity is at the heart of this economic system. Well, you can’t have an economy if you don’t have nature and nature’s services, but economics ignores that. And that’s an unbelievably egregious error.”
As Moffatt goes on to point out the idea that economists ignore externalities is a nonsense given how much attention is paid to them. Moffatt is also a lot politer with Suzuki's view than I would be or am. For Suzuki has got the point entirely bass ackwards. Economists do not say that externalities are not important because they're not included in the price system. Quite the opposite: the statement is that we've a serious problem because externalities are important things which are not included in the price system. And it's a serious problem because we do use the price system to calculate what to do and leaving important things out of such calculations is a serious problem.
Which is why all the discussion about externalities revolves around how do we get externalities included in our decision making process? We could use regulation, yes, and at times that is indeed the appropriate way to do it. See Coase's Nobel winning work for when this is so. With other such problems it might be that tweaking the price system is the appropriate solution: see Coase again, or Pigou (come on, that's from the 1920s, you'd sorta expect people to have picked up on it by now) or even M'Lord Stern and his review on climate change. Assuming it's all happening then the solution is to tweak the pricve system by imposing a carbon tax. And then we're done, dusted and problem solved.
That other people place different values upon the environment than I do worries me not in the slightest. It is precisely such differences of opinions about value that make a market. What does annoy me intensely is that almost all of the environmental problems that are currently being complained about have indeed been studied by economists. And they've found solutions to them as well. Just about any and every environmental problem is either about externalities or common access to a resource. In many ways these are just the flip side of exactly the same problem. But we do indeed know how to solve each of them and both of them. Hardin on ownership or regulation, Pigou on tax or regulation, both mediated through Coase on transactions costs (with a decent assit from Ostrom on communal ownership). There, that's it: far from economics ignoring matters environmental economics has solved the damn problems.
So why won't the environmentalists listen?
Making a mockery of scientific ethics
Last week saw an outrageous abuse of scientific ethics which deserves wider coverage and denunciation in case it becomes widespread. French scientists based at Caen had a paper published in the journal "Food and Chemical Toxicology." The paper concerned the effects on rats who were fed supplements of the herbicide Roundup or a crop genetically modified to tolerate high levels of Roundup.
Unusually, as Arstechnica reports, journalists who wanted advance copies were obliged to sign an agreement not to show the findings to any outside experts before publication.
This unprecedented step meant that the usual process of peer review and assessment which is basic to science was thwarted. Usually scientific journalists contact outside experts in advance of publication to see what validity the new study has, and to comment on any weaknesses they might see.
In this case they were prevented from doing so, and the initial coverage lacked the analysis that customarily puts such papers in context. Following that initial coverage, the experts found much at fault in the survey.
"The authors used a strain of rats that is prone to tumors late in life. Every single experimental condition was compared to a single control group of only 10 rats, and some of the experimental groups were actually healthier than the controls. The authors didn't use a standard statistical analysis to determine whether any of the experimental groups had significantly different health problems."
Some of them were completely dismissive of any value the report might claim to have.
One called the work "a statistical fishing trip" while another said the lack of proper controls meant "these results are of no value." One report quoted a scientist at UC Davis as saying, "There is very little scientific credibility to this paper. The flaws in the test are just incredible to me."
The point is that the scientific authors deliberately prevented these flaws from being revealed at the time of publication. They had a field day of uncritical coverage, and violated all the ethics of scientific research to achieve that. The result is that for years to come anti-GM zealots will cite their findings without any of the criticism that undermined them.
As they say, a lie can be halfway round the world before truth gets its boots on.
Why we really do want a carbon tax
I know, I know, climate change isn't happening, it's all been made up. OK, so, for the next few paragraphs let's just assume that it is, we're causing it and also that we need to do something about it. And here's yet another example of what we want and need to do about it is a simple and straightforward carbon tax:
Scottish Renewables said that although the review had reduced connection costs for generators based on the mainland, estimated projected annual connection charges for the Pentland Firth and Orkney Waters area have almost doubled – from £56 million last year to £107m in 2020. Had the affected projects been built in the UK's other Marine Energy Park, in the south-west of England, they would instead receive an annual subsidy amounting to around £2m.
The point here being that connecting the Orkney Islands to the national grid is bloody expensive. Connecting Cornwall to the grid isn't (even if connecting it to the 21 st century still has some way to go). Thus, assuming that we actually want tide and wave power to be used to run washing machines in London we should be connecting up Cornwall and not the Orkneys. This is what prices do for us, give us the information we need to make decisions.
In addition, the increasing capacity of renewable electricity due to be generated in the Orkney waters from wave and tidal projects will require a new, larger grid cable at additional cost. The Government has the power under the Energy Act, as amended by the Climate Change and Sustainable Energy Act, to adjust transmission charges for renewable electricity generators in a specified area in the UK. Stuart called on the Government to use this power, which can be exercised if renewable development in a particular area is likely to be deterred or hindered to a "material" extent by the level of transmission charges that would otherwise apply, for the benefit of projects in the Orkney Islands. "We would like to see the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change use his powers to adjust the transmission charges and ensure costs do not deter renewable energy generation in the north of Scotland, home of the world's leading wave and tidal sector," he said.
And there's our problem with the current system. Having given the Sec of State the power to intervene then the political pressure is on the Sec to intervene and ignore prices. And make our solution to climate change ever more expensive for political reasons.
Oh, did I mention that the constituency is the longest held Liberal/Lib Dem seat in the country? The same party as the relevant Sec of State?
As at the top, assume that climate change is happening, it's a problem, we're causing it and we must do something. What we must do is therefore change just one thing, the price of carbon. Instead of this appalling mish mash of regulation and political favouritism that we currently have. For we can see that when politicians have the power to pick and choose they're always urged to pick and choose the method that picks our pockets even more. What's worse, they often agree to do so.
Junk statistics on the carrier bag charge
I was intrigued by an interview on Sky News last week with Tamsin Omond, an environmental campaigner from Climate Rush. A keen supporter of levying a 5p charge on plastic carrier bags, she claimed that in Wales—where such a law has been in force since October 2011—“use of these bags has fallen by 95 per cent.”
This is a remarkable and barely believable statistic and the Sky presenter looked suitably sceptical (see video below from 3 minutes in). “It fell by 95 per cent?!? Over how long a period?” Osmond replied that “because it’s only been in place for a quarter of the year, use fell by 22 per cent over the last quarter...” “So you extrapolate that through?” “Exactly.”
Hmm. That’s quite an extrapolation. If we look at the figures, we can see that the average number of plastic bags used in Wales fell from 9.7 per person in 2010 to 7.6 per person in 2011. This, indeed, is a drop of 22 per cent. Such declines are not unprecedented. Plastic bag use fell by 22.5% in England in 2008, for example (presumably because of the credit crunch), but since Wales was the only part of the union to record a significant fall in use in 2011, it is reasonable to assume that the plastic bag charge played a role.
But does this equate to a 95 per cent reduction overall? To reach this figure, the campaigners have assumed that there was no decline in plastic bag use until the 5p charge came in on October 1st. If so, the annual rate could only have fallen by 22 per cent if the last quarter saw plastic bag use plummet by 95 per cent. They further assume that plastic bag use will remain at a five per cent of the pre-levy rate throughout 2012 and forevermore.
This logic does not stand up to scrutiny. Firstly, the basic maths is wrong. If the levy introduced in the final quarter was responsible for the entirety of the 2011 drop, it would mean an 88 per cent decline in that quarter, not 95 per cent. This would be nit-picking if the other assumptions were sound, but they are not. There is no reason to believe that plastic bag use was not already declining in the previous quarters. In the months running up to the 5p levy, the government, shops and the supermarkets informed the public that the charge was about to be introduced and it is fair to assume that people were already being weaned off free carrier bags to some extent before October 1st.
Moreover, the last quarter of the year is not a typical retail period. The pre-Christmas period is the food and retail sector’s busiest time (see graph below from the Office for National Statistics) and, therefore, it is the period in which a disproportionately large number of plastic bags are consumed. Doubtless, the plastic bag levy led to fewer bags being used between October and December, but it is wrong to assume that the decline in the absolute number of bags used will continue during quieter shopping months when fewer bags are used overall. That, however, is exactly what campaigners have done.
Looking at the survey data, it seems clear that the 5p levy did not lead to a 95 per cent reduction in plastic bag use, nor anything close to it. Figures from the British Retail Consortium show that “the number of shoppers [in Wales] who said they had used their own bags on their last supermarket trip rose from 61% in September 2011 to 82% by April 2012.” In other words, the number of people who didn’t use their own bags in supermarkets fell by half. This is all well and good, but it is some distance from 95 per cent. Research from Cardiff University found that “the number of people who always take their own bags when shopping rose in Wales from 27% (42% in supermarkets) before the introduction of the charge to 43% (64% in supermarkets) afterwards”. This is an increase of about 50 per cent and many would applaud it, but it is not congruent with the claimed 95 per cent drop in plastic bag use.
None of this is intended to suggest that the Welsh policy is necessarily misguided. Clearly, there has been a marked decline in plastic bag use which many would welcome. Equally, we know that such laws have unintended consequences, such as the tenfold increase in the sale of black bin bags in Ireland after similar legislation was introduced in 2002. The point is that policy should be based on sound evidence rather than hyperbolic claims from special interest groups. It is easy to bandy impressive figures around, but when one digs a little deeper, they often turn out to be built on weak foundations. Time will tell what effect the Welsh levy has had, but the available evidence suggests that the 95 per cent figure is a junk statistic based on dodgy mathematics and unsound assumptions which should not be taken seriously.
Sure, experts should do their expert things
Apologies for this extensive quote from The Guardian. It might shock the eyes of those who generally avoid that particular paper:
One more thing is required of academia: to play its role right at the heart of democracy. Being adequately informed is a democratic duty, just as the vote is a democratic right. A misinformed electorate, voting without knowledge, is not a true democracy. Society needs the expertise of academics in the most important issues: climate science above all. A democracy then needs the press to disseminate academia's knowledge and to do so with integrity. But the media's ambition to be entertaining and provocative too often overrules its respect for intellectual rigour.
Journalists cannot hold degrees in every subject they report on, but their job is not to claim they know the science better than the experts, or to practise that consummate deception of pretending there is controversy when the consensus is overwhelming. But a controversy is more fun, and the media – skedaddling towards infotainment – is losing sight of the core purpose of its activity: to be a truthful messenger, in this case between the world of academia and the public. I would propose a system of certification for media articles in which there is a clear issue of social responsibility – a kitemark of quality assurance. It would be awarded by teams of academics, and be given to the article, not the journalist, recognising the facts, not the sometimes spurious credibility of being a "personality".
It would be awarded when the article is accurate, using reliable sources and peer reviewed studies. There already exists the Climate Science Rapid Response Team, which answers journalists' questions to help them achieve accuracy. The formality of certification is necessary, though, for the reader to know whether to trust an article. Accuracy must not only be achieved, but be seen to have been achieved.
Now note that this is voluntary. We're in favour of voluntary cooperative action around here so let us applaud this idea.
However, let us also insist that this be carried over into the realm of what we do about climate change assuming it exists. For there are experts there just as there are in whether it exists. And we call those experts "economists". Those who study how human beings respond to the incentives in their lives. These are the correct experts to be using of course, for assuming that climate change does exist, is a problem we want to do something about and is amenable to human action (as you all know, generally my own view), then it is indeed changing what humans do that will be the solution. Which, in turn, means changing the incentives humans face.
So, entirely happy to support the idea of a "kitemark" scheme, an entirely voluntary one, for articles on the science of whether climate change is happening and how. But that same scheme also needs to extend to cover those articles which discuss what we should do about it. Something which, I assure you, will be much more entertaining.
For absolutely nothing from nef, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Action Aid, CAFOD, Oxfam or any of the other NGOs will manage to pass such a test. Certainly nothing put forward by Jonathan Porritt, George Monbiot, Bill McKibben would achieve the badge of sensible and factually based policy. Most of the output of the various scientific institutes, even of our own government's Chief Scientific Officer would go unlaurelled. In fact, it's a reasonable certainty that articles by the Ministers involved, laying out their policies would fail, as would Green and White papers as proposals for legislation.
For the truth is that economists are in general of one mind about what we should do about climate change, assuming that it is happening, is amenable and so on. We should either have a carbon tax or a cap and trade system. And that's all we need. Set the incentives, get the prices right, and let that only calculating engine that we have capable of solving for a solution, the market, get on with its job.
The disagreements are more trivial. Should we tax now and hard now (Stern) or lightly now and more heavily in the future (Nordhaus)? Should the actions attempt to prevent a 2oC rise or not (Tol often enough)? Should it be a tax or would cap and trade allowing the idiot politicians to meddle more be even worse (erm, me, who is not an economist)?
I would certainly su[port a scheme which asked for an verified scientific accuracy in articles about climate change. For I know very well that almost all articles suggesting what we should do about it will fail such a test. Which would be, don't you think, just so hugely, hugely, entertaining? As well as educational.