Catholics in the lead

So I just found out that the Catholic Church has, for maybe the first time, taken the initiative on an environmental issue.  With the planting of a forest in Hungary and the installation of solar panels on the roof of Paul VI auditorium, next to St. Peter's Basilica, Vatican City is the first nation in the world to become 100% carbon neutral.  I'm sure that their contribution to carbon emissions beforehand was effectively zero but the symbolism is important.

On top of going carbon neutral, the Vatican has updated and modernized the seven deadly sins for a more ecologically conscious world.  Led by Monsignor Girotti - the head of the Vatican body in charge of matters of conscience - they have added seven more deadly sins: 

- Environmental Pollution

- Genetic Manipulation

- Accumulating excessive wealth

- Inflicting poverty

- Drug trafficking and consumption

- Morally debatable experiments

- Violation of fundamental rights of human nature 

None of these are quite as appealing as lust and envy and while some of these might be a bit short sited - genetic manipulation for example - and I'm not sure I'd agree with their definition of what a morally debatable experiment is, I think that this list is very refreshing.  It's an acknowledgment, at a high level, that the Catholic Church isn't totally out of touch with the rest of the world.  It'd be nice to see this conveyed throughout every level of the church but it's certainly a start. 

I also think that this merits a re-post of an article I wrote last year on a similar topic.  See below: 

God and Global Warming

Today is the eighth day of the Copenhagen climate negotiations. Representatives from 190 countries have come together to try and craft a political solution to the problem of climate change. It is, in many respects, the high-water mark of the environmental movement. Copenhagen is not the first time that countries have come together to attempt to solve environmental issues—this has happened with varying degrees of success many times—but it has received the most attention. With this attention come the highest expectations of an environmental summit to date.

Yet this summit is primarily political. In fact, to date, the environmental movement as a whole has been primarily political. It has embraced command and control protections, opting to direct actions rather than to change outlooks. Many of the solutions being discussed at Copenhagen fit this model. However, some representatives at Copenhagen do not represent countries. Instead, they are there to represent the world’s major religions.

This is the second time in as many months that many of these figures have come together. The first was at a conference specifically for religious leaders in the beginning of November in preparation for Copenhagen. However, this conference had a twist. Participants were only invited if they had already begun to take concrete steps to improve the environment. These include the Jewish representative’s commitment to cut meat consumption among the Jewish community by 50 percent by 2015 and the Baptist plan to increase environmental education among youth in Baltimore. Each of these commitments is in some way related to the fundamental tenants of the respective religions. But what is important about these commitment—and what separates them from the commitments that may come out of Copenhagen—is that these are primarily commitments to change lifestyles. Not just to cap emissions from churches or to print Bibles on recycled paper (although they did commit to that), these commitments are more fundamental and involve every member of these respective religious communities—they are changes that people can participate in and that will make a real difference.

Command and control solutions to environmental problems may be necessary, but they will not be sufficient. As a result, the lifestyle changes that the religious leaders of the world are beginning to promote are just as important as anything that comes out of Copenhagen. Many of these religious leaders have recognized that their respective creeds place a religious obligation on their followers to take action to protect the environment. It is time that environmental leaders put aside their own religions—or, as may be the case, lack thereof—and embrace the potential of the religious world to protect the environment.

To some degree, as the conference in November demonstrates, this has already happened. But it will take more than just a single conference or participation at Copenhagen. For a very long time, the environmental movement has marginalized the religious world. But as environmental problems become increasingly complex and call for more and more solutions based in lifestyle changes, the need for help from world religions will continue to grow. Religion offers an avenue into people’s lives that the government simply cannot hope to match. For many, it may often be the case that, while the government controls what you can do, religion personally inspires and motivates you to act on behalf of certain causes. To solve the environmental problem facing the world, people must want to solve it, not be forced to solve it. Thus, the engagement of religious leaders is vital for the success of environmental protection.

The problems the environmental movement faces are not new. Martin Palmer, secretary general of the Alliance for Religion and Conservation, notes that, at its heart, climate change is an issue of “sin, greed, selfishness and foolishness.” In other words, an issue involving the same elements of humanity that religion has been dealing with for centuries. It is time for the environmental movement to put aside its lack of religion and embrace the support of religious leaders worldwide. It would be foolish not to. Yes, the hopes of the world’s environmental leaders are staked on Copenhagen, but, in the end, it will likely be the religious leaders there who make the greatest difference.

NPR: non-public radio

So this might not seem like an environmental topic but the arguments in the U.S. Congress over funding federal funding of NPR can provide some interesting insights into a capitalist system; which is very interesting for environmentalists (or should be).  This stems from the nature of NPR as, arguably, a public and non-rival good (acknowledgements to NPR’s Planet Money  show on Friday for getting me thinking about this and for most of the information in the first two paragraphs). 

In order to justify federal funding for NPR from an economic perspective (and, importantly, to justify federal involvement in the provision of any good in a capitalist system) it must be considered a public and non-rival good.  In other words, it is a good which I cannot be excluded from using if I don’t pay (once you broadcast NPR, anyone with a radio can listen, whether they donate or not) and which my use doesn’t infringe your ability to use it (listening to NPR on my radio doesn’t use it all up and prevent you from listening on your radio).  If these two requirements are met then it is unreasonable, generally, to expect that private players in a market will provide the service because there is no way for them to get a return on their investment.  There is quite a bit of work showing that in some situations this is not true, but for simplicity’s sake let’s take it as a given.  Therefore, if it is desirable that the good be provided, the government must step in and provide it.  Thus, the justification for government funding of NPR. 

Now, the obvious question is, if radio is a public good that the government must provide, why are there so many other radio stations that seem to be doing just fine?  The answer, as I learned the other day, is that they have turned the model around.  Instead of viewing the good provided as the content on the radio and the listener the customer, they view the listener as the good provided and the customer is the advertiser.  They’re effectively selling the listener’s ears to the advertisers.  This seems obvious but until it was explained that way I’d never considered it in this framework. 

The implication, from an economic standpoint, is interesting.  People complain about the quality of television (which follows the same model) and radio today but it seems to me that this decline in quality is an inevitable result of the current advertising financed business model.  Producers want to sell the most ‘ears’ to advertisers so they want to attract the most ‘ears’ to their shows.  This incentivizes a dumbing down of television and radio.  Complex programs inevitably appeal to a smaller market share than simple entertainment.  So if the goal is maximizing viewer ship this decline seems inevitable. 

The really interesting implication comes when you consider the impact that the Internet is having on the provision of goods.  It is effectively turning what used to be non-public, rival goods into public, non-rival goods.  The most obvious example is newspapers.  It used to be that you could easily prevent me from reading the paper if I didn’t buy it and my buying the paper meant that there were x-1 papers left for everyone else.  Now, with the acceptance of the internet by major news corporations it is much more difficult to exclude people (you can demand an online subscription but people have come to expect the internet to be free and, as the NYT recently showed, they don’t like being charged for what should be free) but my reading of an online article doesn’t take away from anyone else’s ability to read it.  

So how do newspapers cope?  They’re still working this out but are we going to see the same race to the lowest common denominator that happened in television and radio?  The larger implication, and the one I’m most interested in, is that the rise of the Internet and the decline of rivalry in goods may justify a larger government presence in the economy.  If people expect the same quality of service from areas like newspapers, radio and television it may be that there will have to be a larger government subsidy to these organizations.  That certainly won’t be popular in the current political climate. 

Another thought that came out of the NPR debate that is tangentially related to the above.  One of the problems with non-rival goods is that you can’t, by definition, exclude free riders.  I can listen to NPR whether I contribute money to their fund drives or not.  So my question is, how many of the people up in arms about NPR losing funding are free riders that don’t want to have to pay for NPR?  By all accounts the loss of federal funding could be easily made up from other donors and contributions.  NPR isn’t going anywhere.  But how much of the resistance is coming from people who don’t want to be put in the position of having to pay for what they listen to? 

Why Nuclear Doesn't Make Sense

Anyone watching what is happening in Japan right now should have a pretty good idea why I'm writing this post.  But you're wrong.  As is pointed out here and here, the problem with nuclear is not that it could (will) blow up.  It's not even that the waste sticks around for 100,000 years and needs to be stored somewhere for that long (think about how well we understand the language from 10,000 years ago and you begin to see why that's a problem).  It is simply the cost. 

As is pointed out in the FP article above, the industry can overcome the danger of explosions.  New reactors are far safer than even the ones in Japan.  With some revision to current standards and a bit of beefed up protection, nuclear is relatively safe.  But therein lies the problem and the author of the FP piece never really addresses it.  Nuclear is not viable under current permitting regimes unless it is given huge subsidies.  It is an outrageously expensive source of power.  The new requirements that will come out the disaster in Japan will do nothing to make it less expensive.  

This is the real problem with nuclear.  It isn't fall out, it isn't explosions, it isn't radioactive waste.  It's basic economics.  Nuclear is more expensive than any other available power source when compared on a non-subsidized basis.  So why, when it has a litany of other problems, should we continue to subsidize it?  That money is better spent on research, efficiency programs and subsidies for non-nuclear renewables. 

Erlich's Equation

Paul Erlich may be the most famous population economist.  Of the malthusian school he famously wrote "The Population Bomb" in the 1970s and, then just as famously, had to eat his words in the 1990s.  That his projections were incorrect at the time do not reduce the relevance of some of his work however.  Specifically, in light of the preceding post, I'd like to focus on his equation for environmental impact.  

Elegant and simple, he claims that environmental impact is directly related to affluence, population and some technology factor that moderates the impact of population and affluence.  It looks like this: 

I = A x P x T

 Where I is environmental impact, A is affluence, P is population and T is the technology factor.  While the relationship can be displayed in greater complexity, this equation captures the heart of the issue. 

I bring it up here, because drawing on numbers from the "Prosperity without Growth" Report, it gives a very good mathematical illustration of why technological change is not going to be sufficient.  In 2007 the global per captia income was $5,900, population was 6.6 billion and carbon intensity (used as a proxy for technology in the case of carbon emissions) was 760gCO2/$.  That results in the following: 

5900 x 6.6 billion x .77 = 30 billion tonnes of CO2

Now, taking the following estimates for global population and affluence in 2050 of 10 billion for population (generally accepted ranges are between 9 and 12 billion) and slightly less than a doubling of per capita income to $11,000 (well below the U.S. today at about $40,000) and using the assumption that a stabilization of CO2 at 450 ppm would require a reduction to 4 billion tonnes of CO2 per year, yields the following: 

4 billion / (11000 x 10 billion) = 0.000035

That says carbon intensity would have to fall to 0.035gCO2/$ in the next 45 years.  In the last 30 it has fallen roughly 250 gCO2/$.  The rate of technological change would have to triple in order to meet that demand.  And it would have to triple globally - not just in the developed world.  That just does not seem like a reasonable projection.  A doubling coupled with significant behavior change seems far more likely. 

Technological Misdirection

There has been a lot written about how global warming will be solved not by behavior change but by technological improvements. In some circles this is believed so fervently that they argue for no behavioral change, instead, suggesting that policy should be focused entirely on technological innovation and breakthrough change. The support for this comes from both sides of the debate – from those who think that we do not have an obligation to address the culture, which created enormous CO2 emissions, and from those who think we do but have given up on behavior change as ever being sufficient. Consumers like it because it means that they will not have to stop consuming. Environmentalists like it because it means they won’t have to convince consumers to stop consuming.

Technological change clearly has a place in addressing climate change. To say otherwise is both foolish and hopelessly optimistic (naïve) about the extent to which people are willing and able to change their behavior and the speed at which that could occur. People simply do not change their consumption patterns that quickly. The great environmental successes in pollution control of the past have all come when regulation or market pricing was implemented at the same time new technology was entering the market. The regulations forced adoption of the new technology but did not dramatically change behavior or radically shift consumption. Indeed, as one onlooker has pointed out, one of the main requirements of any successful cap-and-trade system is off the shelf technology that will be easily implemented to cut emissions at the time the cap takes effect.

However, to argue that the only response to climate change should be technological is equally foolish. Our technology simply has not, and does not, progress fast enough to allow the current rates of consumption to continue ad infinitum. Some day in the future we may be able to support, through technology, 9 billion people consuming at the rate that Americans do today. But with current the current rate of technological change we will not survive the medium term.

Recognizing that energy efficiency is not an exact proxy for technological change, the following graph projects reductions in global energy usage if the world implemented every recommendation in the IEA’s 2008 report to utilize best available technology to reduce energy intensity over the next twenty years.

So even if every recommendation is acted upon we will be able to maintain our energy consumption at the same level it is today. With adjustments to the mixture, this might be sustainable but it seems highly unlikely, based on this article that we could change that mixture quickly enough to avoid significant problems. Furthermore, I am skeptical of the accuracy of this report. Note that the baseline energy usage (red line) declines slightly after 2015. So the rate at which we are increasing our energy use is going to decline, under the business as usual scenario, relative to 2005-2010 even as global population increases exponentially and the two largest countries of the world grow at near double-digit rates. I find that to be an extremely optimistic and fairly unreasonable assumption. I think that the line should get steeper, not less steep, and because the best-case scenario is calculated in terms of reductions relative to this baseline, even in a best case scenario the global energy usage should probably increase relative to today usage.

The story is the same if advances in vehicle efficiency are examined. The traditional internal combustion engine has a net efficiency of roughly .16 (1 unit of energy input produces .16 units of output). The hydrogen fuel cell technology – which if commercialized, would be a fairly ‘breakthrough’ technology – has a net efficiency of .32. Roughly double. That seems great until you consider the rate of population growth and how great demand for cars will be in twenty-five years. A conservative estimate would be a doubling of the number of cars on the roads globally in the next twenty-five years. So a doubling of efficiency puts us roughly where we are today.

This same story is repeated over and over again. The Rocky Mountain Institute released a report in 2005 called “Winning the Oil Endgame” that documents in exhaustive detail how U.S. oil consumption by vehicles could be reduced by roughly half by 2025 by implementing new technology in vehicle construction. They projected fuel economy of up to 110 mpg. Five years on there is little evidence that this technological change has materialized to any great extent. There has yet to be a breakthrough vehicle released in the U.S. market. Even in the face of gas prices that approach four dollars a gallon.

All this is not to say that technological change is not the answer. It is not the only answer but it is very much part of the answer. To date technological change has been able to deliver non-geometric improvements in energy consumption. That will not be enough. Doubling engine efficiency while vehicle numbers double leave us no better off than we are now. Unless technology materializes that can deliver exponential improvements in the rate energy is consumed behavior changes must be a large part of the solution. And therefore policy has a role to play beyond promoting innovation. Policy must also promote behavior change.

Because we cannot shift to renewable energy sources overnight, energy use must decline in the medium term. Based on efficiency improvements technology is improving quickly enough to account for roughly half of the reduction in energy use that must occur by 2050 but behavior change must account for the rest. There is no magic bullet for solving climate change. Technology will make it possible to combat climate change but to sell it as the only answer dangerously misdirects public discourse.

Reading List

Digging through some old files on my computer I came across the following reading list. It's from a semi-aborted group at Harvard that was started a few years ago to talk about some of the less technical aspects of the environmental movement. Where are the philisophical underpinnings of the movement? How does literature deal with the issues that environmentalists are concerned with? Etc.

The list here was the initial set of books put together as an introduction to the concept.

The Agricultural Debate

The debate over whether or not GMO and industrial agriculture is necessary in order to feed the world (at the expense of reducing organic or small scale farming) has been getting a large amount of attention recently. In part because of rising food prices and in part because of a nascent movement in the U.S. to simplify our networks of food delivery.

Beyond acknowledging that there are enormous problems with the way we distribute food today (there are just as many morbidly obese people in the world as there are starving people) and that U.S. farm subsidies help nobody, I'm not sure where I come down on this issue. My personal preference is for local, organic and small scale farming but I'm not convinced that it's possible to feed the world - especially if we reach 9 billion people - in this way and not destroy the environment.

However, below are four articles or papers that make succint arguments for the idea that not only can we feed a global population of 9 billion people without industrializing global economy, but that it would be better for individuals in developing countries and might help to combat some of the rural to urban population flight that the developing world is going through. Enjoy!

Shorter:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/08/sustainable-farming/?hp (if you think the debate is settled, take a look at the comments on this piece)

http://www.grist.org/article/2011-03-10-debunking-myth-that-only-industrial-agriculture-can-feed-world

Longer:
Agri Assessment

UNEP Report

Fun with Graphs

In the introductory lecture to my class on sustainable energy this semester our professor went through a bunch of graphs from the BP report on energy that show the distribution of energy use, CO2 emissions, and energy intensity across the globe. One thing about several of the graphs stuck me and I've put them below with a brief explanation.

Graph 1: Primary Energy per Capita

Note where India is on the graph. This is primarily due to their relatively small industrial base and extremely large population (the same reason that China, even with massive amounts of energy use, is small as well. Between the two of them they have somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five percent of the global population). The next graph follows from this one and shows roughly what you'd expect.

Graph 2: Per Capita CO2 Emissions

As I said, this shows roughly what you'd expect. India has the smallest per capita energy use of the countries shown and thus has the smallest per capita CO2 emissions. As a side note, Norway drops off the graph because, while they use an enormous amount of energy, something like 90% of their electricity comes from hydro power, which for all its other environmental problems, is an extremely clean source of energy from a CO2 emissions standpoint.

The final graph is the kicker and what really caught my attention in class. It shows the per kilowatt hour emission of CO2. Basically how efficiently, from an emissions standpoint, you produce your electricity. As I've already said, Norway does this extremely efficiently.

Graph 3: CO2 Emissions per kW of Electricity

It should be obvious now that India does not produce electricity efficiently in terms of emissions. Nor does China (this most people knew already and is due to the massive number of coal power plants they are building). It's worth noting that Brazil, who also gets huge amounts of its electricity from hydro, is so low on the list and Norway isn't even on the list.

So what does it all mean? A lot of economists think that in the next 30 years India will overtake China as the fastest growing economy due to demographic reasons (China's population, due to the one child policy, has peaked and will start to decline. India, on the other hand, is still growing). Right now India's per capita emissions are so low because it's per capita energy use is so low, which is due to the fact that most of the population still lives an agrarian lifestyle. As Dani Rodrik points out here, as countries develop labor moves from agriculture to industry. Industry requires significant increases of energy inputs over pre-modern agriculture. A lot of this energy comes in the form of electricity (factory lights, urban street lights, factory machines, etc). Thus, as India's population urbanizes and industrializes their per capita use of energy, and therefore per capita emissions, will increase. What the third graph says is that for every unit increase in energy usage, their emissions will increase more than anywhere else in the world. So the least efficient country in the world in terms of emissions from electricity will also be the fastest growing country in the world. A wonderful combination.

Big picture? It means that global CO2 emissions will increase even faster as India industrializes than they did while China was industrializing. A terrifying thought for anyone who is concerned about atmospheric concentrations of CO2. It also underlines the absolute necessity of getting developing countries on board with any climate agreement. I'm not sure about the scale impacts of India's emissions relative to the developed world but it isn't inconceivable that their development could negate any unilateral efforts to reduce emissions undertaken by the developed world.