Ecological Sociology

Mercury in New Brunswick

2012-01-30T08:00:00.000-04:00

That levels of mercury are high and pervasive in New Brunswick and the northeastern US has long been known. A new report Mercury in Terrestrial Ecosystems of the Northeast from The Biodiversity Research Institute in Gorham Maine underscores the issue. The report provides a good overview of the impact of mercury and related policy issues. The key finding is that mercury accumulation, previously considered a risk for aquatic ecosystems, is also found in many wildlife species living on the land. Unfortunately, the study is limited to 11 northeastern states, so there is little direct information about New Brunswick.

Their website, however, does have links referring back to the results of an earlier 2001-05 project focusing on mercury disposition in the aquatic systems of Northeastern North America. This project, which involved Environment Canada as a partner, provides information about NB.

One of the more interesting aspects of the new report is the information comparing the US sources of the emissions in 1990 with those in 2005. Emissions from medical and municipal waste incinerators have been reduced by over 95%, while emissions from coal fired electrical generating plants remain essentially unchanged.

Stoneleigh: the Trust Horizon

2012-01-26T17:19:00.006-04:00

Stoneleigh's concept of the Trust Horizon is among the most interesting sociological ideas for understanding the dynamics of the Transition Era, the period we are now in, a period of rapid and sometimes chaotic decentralization. The following is an excerpt from Stoneleigh's speech, Beyond the Trust Horizon, which is hosted on her The Automatic Earth blog.

Listen to James H. Kunstler's insightful discussion on the Trust Horizon on "KunstlerCast" with Duncan Crary.

[Note: the Trust Horizon is a very tangible reading of Joseph Tainter's collapse theory in The Collapse of Complex Societies.]

Stoneleigh:

Beyond the Trust Horizon

Relationships of trust are the glue that holds societies together. Trust takes a long time to establish, and much less time to destroy, hence societies where trust is wide-spread, particularly for long periods of time, are relatively rare. In contrast, societies where trust does not extend beyond the family, or clan, level are very common in history.

The spread of trust is a characteristic of expansionary times, along with increasing inclusion, and a weakening of the 'Us vs Them' divide. Essentially, the trust horizon expands, both within and between societies. Over time it can encompass higher levels of organization - from family to community to municipality to region to nation and beyond - so long as the expansionary dynamic continues to support it.

Within societies this leads to relatively stable and (at least temporarily) effective institutions, and bolsters the development of the rule of law. The rule of law means that law constrains the powerful (more than usual), and there is a reasonable degree of legal transparency and predictability, so that people are prepared to trust in the fairness and accessibility of justice. Naturally, the ideal is never reached, human nature being what it is, but it can be approached under the most favourable of circumstances.

Within societies, trust also confers political legitimacy (ie a widespread buy-in as to the right of rulers to rule). Where there is legitimacy, there is relatively little need for surveillance and coercion. A high level of trust (all the way up to the level of national institutions) is thus a prerequisite for an open society.

Between societies, an expansion of the trust horizon tends to lead to political accretion. Larger and more disparate groups feel comfortable with closer ties and greater inter-dependence, and are prepared to leave past conflicts behind. The European Union, where 25 countries with a very long history of conflicts have come together, is a prime example.

However, all expansions have a limited lifespan, as do the benefits they confer. They sow the seeds of their own destruction, especially when they morph into a final manic phase and begin to hollow out the substance of social structures. Institutions, whether public or private, retain the same outward form, but cease to operate as they once did. For a while it is possible to maintain the illusion of business as usual (or effectiveness and accountability as usual), but not indefinitely. Everything is subject to receding horizons eventually, and trust is no exception.

Over time institutions become sclerotic, unresponsive, self-serving and hostage to vested interests, at which point they cannot be reformed, as the reform would have to come from those entrenched individuals who have benefited most from the status quo. Institutions become demonstrably less effective, while consuming more and more of society's resources. Corruption, abuses of power, lack of accountability and the loss of the rule of law become increasingly evident, exactly as we have seen with unauthorized wire-tapping, extra-ordinary rendition and many other actions undermining the open society. Once this happens, trust is living on borrowed time. That is very clearly the case in many developed societies today.

Trust in existing organizational structures does not disappear overnight, but ebbs away as institutions decay or the extent of their corruption is revealed. The loss of trust from higher levels of organization undermines the fabric of a society now operating beyond the trust horizon. When trust contracts, socioeconomic contraction is just around the corner. Bank runs are a particularly good example of this. People are currently waking up to the extent of the recklessness, irresponsibility and self-serving short-termism of the banking system, and realizing that reliance on top-down human promises is far riskier than they had supposed. When they cease to trust in those promises, they will are very likely to vote with their feet.

Societies in this position lose a critical pillar of support - the collective acceptance of their people. Governing institutions lose legitimacy, at which point the cost of governance increases significantly, because where there is no trust, resource-intensive surveillance and coercion develop instead. Our societies in the developed world, where institutional decay is well underway, stand on the brink of such a transition.

Where resources are scarce, as they will be soon enough, the diversion of a larger percentage of what remains towards this purpose will aggravate that scarcity considerably. This will further anger people, which is likely to lead to a downward spiral of mutual provocation and recrimination. Most of us have not seen this vicious circle of human sentiment to any great extent, but this is the natural consequence of the collapse of trust.

On the way down, as on the way up, there are effects both within and between societies, as the 'Us vs Them' dynamic sharpens once again. 'Us' becomes ever more tightly defined, and 'Them' becomes an ever more pejorative term. The result is division between disparate groups of people within a society, for instance the unionized and non-unionized, the haves and the have-nots, or different religious or ethnic groups. When there is a paucity of trust, and not enough resources to go meet highly inflated expectations, the risk of conflict is very high. Previously formed political accretions are at a high risk of coming unglued as they will no be longer supported by trust. The European Union should take note.

Between societies, where the existing range of divisive parameters is likely to be much larger, and where there may be a past history of conflict, the risk of conflict flaring up again rises significantly. This is especially likely if societies attempt to deflect blame for the situation they find themselves in towards other nationalities.

We are already seeing evidence of the growing anger, and the change it will usher in as the trust horizon shrinks. In the US, the Tea Party movement is the most obvious example. All major change comes from the ground-up, where the power of the collective is expressed in ways that either support or undermine the actions and intentions of central authorities. It is the interaction between the power of the collective and central authority that determines where a society will head.

The Tea Party movement is a ground-swell of public anger, very much in the tradition of major transformative grass-roots initiatives. It is exactly what one would expect to see at the brink of a collapse in the trust horizon - a movement grounded in negative emotion that both stems from a loss of trust and in turn acts to aggravate it in a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop. The danger with such a movement manifesting such powerful negative emotions is that it will precipitate a major over-reaction to the downside, commensurate with the irrational exuberance we saw to the upside. The anger is largely unfocused, and where it is specific, it is not fully-informed.

The primary target of the Tea Party is big government, but this ignores a major part of the big picture. The abuses of power we have seen are not purely a manifestation of metastatic public authority, but an expression of corporate fascism - the blending and merging of public and private interests in social control. One look at the revolving door between the banking system (where banking law is written) and the US treasury should be enough to demonstrate this.

The Tea Party movement represents largely (but not solely) the unfocused anger of people who know they have suffered, or are about to suffer, substantial losses, but do not (typically) understand the system well enough to understand why. The movement is casting about for someone to blame, as such movements always do on the verge of a trust collapse. The danger is that someone with facile populist answers will come along, offering a target for the urgent desire to blame someone for what has happened and is happening.

This is already happening, as powerful funding sources and nascent populists circle around and seek to tap into the trend for their own purposes. It is absolutely to be expected that existing top-down power structures, or political opportunists with their own agenda, will seek to hijack bottom-up movements as they develop. My primary concern is that in doing so they will lay the foundation for a society attempting to live far beyond the trust horizon, and where there is no trust, and consequently no political legitimacy, there will be surveillance, coercion and repression instead.

It will be easy for movements grounded in negative emotion to gain a foot-hold in the coming environment, as this is very much where the collective mood will lie in the aftermath of a Ponzi collapse. Blame-games will be very tempting (and populists have their own prejudicial ideas as to who should be blamed). However, this would not be compatible with maintaining the constructive and cooperative mindset we need if we are to have a hope of avoiding an over-reaction to the downside that has the potential to magnify the impact of what is coming enormously.

Personally, I would like to encourage the development of a different kind of grass-roots momentum for change, along the lines of what is being developed (albeit not nearly quickly enough so far) by the Transition Towns movement and other comparable initiatives. The key advantages that this kind of approach has are two-fold - the scope of its component activities, based on relocalization, match where the trust horizon is headed, and its driving force is the desire to build rather than to tear down.

Working within the trust horizon is important, as it means individual small-scale initiatives can benefit from the same kind of social support at a local level that larger-scale ones once did at a societal level, when trust was more broadly inclusive. Local currencies work for exactly this reason. While the task will still be difficult, it has a chance of being achievable, especially where the necessary relationships of trust have been established before hard times set in. It is very much more difficult to build such relationships after the fact, but relationships built beforehand may actually strengthen when put to the test.

Trying to maintain a positive and constructive focus at the local level, where trust has a chance to survive, and perhaps even thrive in hard times, and to avoid being drawn into a blame-game, will be an uphill battle. It is nevertheless something we need to do as a society, if we are to have a chance to preserve as much as possible of who we are through what is coming.

Systems: Economic and Ecological

2012-01-25T08:00:00.000-04:00

Two items worth contemplating:

Simon Johnson in The Libertarian and the Lobbyists explores the role of government regulation (or lack thereof) on the recent financial crash. Of particular interest is the discussion of the findings from two recent IMF reports by Prachi Mishra analyzing lobbying practices in the US.
Legislators, of course, have different preferences about what kinds of laws to support, which can make it hard to study mechanisms of political influence precisely. But Igan and Mishra approach the problem in a clever way – they look for instances when elected officials switched their position on legislative proposals that surfaced more than once. And they devote a lot of effort to figuring out what caused this switch. ...
A big increase in lobbying expenditures helps to persuade legislators to switch their votes. And “whether any of the lobbyists working on a bill also worked for a legislator in the past sways the stance on that bill in favor of deregulation.” It is deregulation, of course, that financial firms want – fewer rules and less oversight of any kind. And it really is all about whom you know, and how you know them. In particular, your value as a lobbyist seems to depend very highly on whom you worked with in the past. Igan and Mishra find “spending an extra dollar is almost twice as effective in switching a legislator’s position if the lobbyist is connected to the legislator compared to the case where the lobbyist is unconnected.” ...
Essentially, financial firms have been buying the right to take on more risk. When things go well, executives in these firms get the upside – mostly in terms of immediate compensation, because few executives are compensated on the basis of risk-adjusted returns. That means that when the risks materialize and the firms suffer losses, the costs fall on taxpayers.
Ron Paul is right to point to imbalances of power and massive distortions within the financial sector. He is also correct that many government policies favor relatively few big firms – and favor them in a way that encourages excessive and dangerous risk-taking.
But Paul and others are wrong to argue that the government is the ultimate cause of all financial evil. Executives in financial firms wantto take big risks. They like arrangements under which they win even when they lose.
Big financial firms can more readily buy the necessary political protection (in the form of deregulation), enabling them to become even bigger and more dangerous. This incentive structure has only become more extreme since the financial crisis of 2008.
Erle Ellis describes the findings of his most recent publication, All is Not Lost: Plant Biodiversity in the Anthropocene, as:
the first spatially explicit global assessment of contemporary patterns of terrestrial plant biodiversity (native loss + exotic species gain) at regional landscape scales.The main result: humans have caused a net increase in plant species richness across two-thirds of the terrestrial biosphere, mostly by facilitating species invasions. In most regional landscapes, native species losses were significantly lower than exotic species gains, with agriculture species causing minor increases, but ornamental species sometimes play a large role that is still hard to assess.

While I'm not convinced Ellis's focus on the shift from biomes to anthromes captures the most fundamental characteristics of the Anthropocene, the work is both provocative and, as a result of his heavy use of maps, visually interesting. A number of relevant links are contained in this post by Andrew Revkin.

Aussie Gov't '09 Report Predicts Peak Oil at 2017

2012-01-23T21:16:00.004-04:00

A study of peak oil conducted by the Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics (BITRE) for the Australian Government was completed in 2009 and then buried. The study was leaked on Jan. 20, 2012 in an Australian newspaper. The study examines both conventional and non-conventional (deep water, shale and tar sands oil), combined with the effects of world GDP, fuel prices and demand.

The Energy Bulletin made their own study of the 430-page report and summarized the major findings.

BITRE Report 117: Transport energy futures: long-term oil supply trends and projections

Foreword

In 2007 the Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics (BITRE) commenced a project to look in a strategic way at possible alternative transport energy futures.

This was driven by a perceived need to address two key challenges to ‘business-as-usual’ for Australian and world transport: oil depletion and global warming.

To examine the oil depletion issue, it was necessary to assemble large amounts of data over long periods of time (centuries in a large number of cases). BITRE has had long experience with assembling lengthy datasets from multiple and sometimes conflicting data sources, and then analysing their dynamics. This is what has been done here, to examine the oil production prospects of over 40 countries/regions around the world, as a preliminary to delineating the scope of the oil depletion challenge.

Recognising that the issue of the timing of oil depletion is a highly controversial area, where information can be contested and where there is a range of views and
positions, comments are expressly invited on this report.

Future reports will examine 1) world oil demand/price relationships and 2) the kinds of responses to the twin challenges of oil depletion and global warming that may be possible in terms of alternative fuels and propulsion technologies.

This report has been compiled by Dr David Gargett.

Phil Potterton
Executive Director
Bureau of Infrastructure Transport, and Regional Economics
March 2009

Acknowledgements

This report would not have been possible without huge amounts of data published in graphical form by Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrere.

In addition, production data from the Energy Information Administration of the US Department of Energy has been utilised extensively.

Many other authors have provided specific items of data and are listed in the Data Sources section at the end of the report.

At a glance

The trends in discovery of oil can be used to project similar trends in the subsequent production of oil. Using a method developed here, forecasts of future oil/liquids production for 40 countries/regions around the world have been produced.

The oil production prospects of different countries and regions vary immensely. However, on balance, when an aggregation is done across the globe, it is predicted that world production of conventional oil is currently just past its highest point (conventional oil is oil pumped from wells on land or in water less than 500 metres deep). A predicted shallow decline in the short run should give way to a steeper decline after 2016.

However, deep water and non-conventional oil production are growing strongly, turning a slight decline into a plateau for total crude oil (non-conventional oil is heavy and viscose or indeed tar-like oil). Given the growth in deep and non-conventional balancing the shallow decline in conventional production, it is predicted that we have entered about 2006 onto a slightly upward slanting plateau in potential oil production that will last only to about 2016—eight years from now (2008). For the next eight years it is likely that world crude oil production will plateau in the face of continuing economic growth. After that, the modelling is forecasting what can be termed ‘the 2017 drop-off’. The outlook under a base case scenario is for a long decline in oil production to begin in 2017, which will stretch to the end of the century and beyond. Projected increases in deep water and non-conventional oil, which are ‘rate-constrained’ in ways that conventional oil is not, will not change this pattern.

Importantly, these forecasts assume that world oil production is not constrained in the near term by reduced demand arising from lower world economic growth. Depending on the length of time before a return to more normal levels of world economic growth and resulting higher demand for oil, the dropoff is likely to be delayed.

The outlook is not really changed much if a scenario of increased Middle East oil production is played out. The result of that scenario is that oil production continues its growth for longer and then falls far more precipitously. Arguably, this could be a worse scenario, as far as the world being able to cope comfortably with the transition. The possible effect of higher prices in bringing forward production would have a similar effect. Higher prices might also stimulate exploration but are no guarantee of significant further discovery.

Thus at some point beyond 2017 we must begin to cope with the longer-term task of replacing oil as a source of energy. Given the inertias inherent in energy systems and vehicle fleets, the transition will be necessarily challenging to most economies around the world.

Coping with the supply reductions will be compounded by the fact that shrinking oil supply will interact with measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in order to address climate change. While there are opportunities for joint solutions, there will also be conflicting demands. For example, two of the more obvious sources of alternative motive energy are coal-to-liquids and gas-to-liquids. Both of these would involve increased emissions.

[The complete Energy Bulletin summary is at the link.]

[The complete report is available online as a 474-page PDF.]

This publication is available in hard copy or PDF format from the Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics website at www.bitre.gov.au — if you require part or all of this publication in a different format, please contact BITRE.

An appropriate citation for this report is:
Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics (BITRE), 2009, Transport energy futures: long-term oil supply trends and projections, Report 117, Canberra ACT.

Climate Change and Extinctions

2012-01-19T08:00:00.000-04:00

Biologists have long argued that the current rate of species loss rivals the five great mass extinctions of the geological past. As long ago as 1993, Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson estimated that Earth is currently losing something on the order of 30,000 species per year, or three species per hour. Some biologists have begun to feel that this biodiversity crisis — this “Sixth Extinction” — is even more severe, and more imminent, than Wilson had supposed. Significantly, where past extinction events were the result of physical processes, the current uptick is largely a product of human actions: transformation of the landscape and resultant habitat destruction, overexploitation of species, pollution, and the introduction of alien species.An article in the current issue of Nature argues that climate change may significantly increase the rate of species extinction through processes that have not previously been considered. Here's how Nature describes the article

More species may become extinct as a result of climate change than previously thought, a modelling study suggests.As the climate warms, many species are predicted to shift their ranges to stay within comfortable temperature zones. However, some species will be better able to do so than others. Mark Urban at the University of Connecticut in Storrs and his colleagues have created a model that takes into account the competition that species face for habitats when they move to new ecosystems. They modelled the effect of 4 °C of warming over 100 years on 40 simulated species, and found a much higher number of extinctions than did models that do not account for species competition and species' differing dispersal abilities.Even species with broad heat tolerances might be outcompeted — either by the arrival of newcomers in their current habitats or by native species in ecosystems that become habitable to them in future.

More technical details are provided in the abstract below:

Most climate change predictions omit species interactions and interspecific variation in dispersal. Here, we develop a model of multiple competing species along a warming climatic gradient that includes temperature-dependent competition, differences in niche breadth and interspecific differences in dispersal ability. Competition and dispersal differences decreased diversity and produced so-called ‘no-analogue’ communities, defined as a novel combination of species that does not currently co-occur. Climate change altered community richness the most when species had narrow niches, when mean community-wide dispersal rates were low and when species differed in dispersal abilities. With high interspecific dispersal variance, the best dispersers tracked climate change, out-competed slower dispersers and caused their extinction. Overall, competition slowed the advance of colonists into newly suitable habitats, creating lags in climate tracking. We predict that climate change will most threaten communities of species that have narrow niches (e.g. tropics), vary in dispersal (most communities) and compete strongly. Current forecasts probably underestimate climate change impacts on biodiversity by neglecting competition and dispersal differences.

Design in Nature

2012-01-17T09:58:00.001-04:00

I recently came across a reference to the forthcoming book by Adrian Bejan and J. Peder Zane Design in Nature: How the Constructal Law Governs Evolution in Biology, Physics, Technology, and Social Organization. Here is the publisher's blurb:

In this groundbreaking book, Adrian Bejan takes the recurring patterns in nature—trees, tributaries, air passages, neural networks, and lightning bolts—and reveals how a single principle of physics, the Constructal Law, accounts for the evolution of these and all other designs in our world.

Everything—from biological life to inanimate systems—generates shape and structure and evolves in a sequence of ever-improving designs in order to facilitate flow. River basins, cardiovascular systems, and bolts of lightning are very efficient flow systems to move a current—of water, blood, or electricity. Likewise, the more complex architecture of animals evolve to cover greater distance per unit of useful energy, or increase their flow across the land. Such designs also appear in human organizations, like the hierarchical "flowcharts" or reporting structures in corporations and political bodies.

All are governed by the same principle, known as the Constructal Law, and configure and reconfigure themselves over time to flow more efficiently. Written in an easy style that achieves clarity without sacrificing complexity, Design in Nature is a paradigm-shifting book that will fundamentally transform our understanding of the world around us.

There are lots of similarities between Bejan's ideas and Geoffrey West's work on scaling laws. At its heart, as argued here, Bejan wants to replace explanations of form based on processes of growth with an explanation that emphasizes flow.His website has an interesting set of resources and his TedX talk is below.

A Study of Migration and Climate Change

2012-01-04T14:19:00.003-04:00

from the Energy Bulletin:

Climate Change, Migration and Conflict: Addressing Complex Crisis Scenarios in the 21st Century

by Michael Wertz and Laura Conley

Migration

Migration adds another layer of complexity to the scenario. In the 21st century the world could see substantial numbers of climate migrants—people displaced by either the slow or sudden onset of the effects of climate change. The United Nations’ recent Human Development Report stated that, worldwide, there are already an estimated 700 million internal migrants—those leaving their homes within their own countries—a number that includes people whose migration is related to climate change and environmental factors. Overall migration across national borders is already at approximately 214 million people worldwide, with estimates of up to 20 million displaced in 2008 alone because of a rising sea level, desertification, and flooding.

One expert, Oli Brown of the International Institute for Sustainable Development, predicts a tenfold increase in the current number of internally displaced persons and international refugees by 2050. It is important to acknowledge that there is no consensus on this estimate. In fact there is major disagreement among experts about how to identify climate as a causal factor in internal and international migration.

But even though the root causes of human mobility are not always easy to decipher, the policy challenges posed by that movement are real. A 2009 report by the International Organization for Migration produced in cooperation with the United Nations University and the Climate Change, Environment and Migration Alliance cites numbers that range from “200 million to 1 billion migrants from climate change alone, by 2050,” arguing that “environmental drivers of migration are often coupled with economic, social ad developmental factors that can accelerate and to a certain extent mask the impact of climate change.”

The report also notes that “migration can result from different environmental factors, among them gradual environmental degradation (including desertification, soil and coastal erosion) and natural disasters (such as earthquakes, floods or tropical storms).” (See box on page 15 of the report for a more detailed definition of climate migrants.) Clearly, then, climate change is expected to aggravate many existing migratory pressures around the world. Indeed associated extreme weather events resulting in drought, floods, and disease are projected to increase the number of sudden humanitarian crises and disasters in areas least able to cope, such as those already mired in poverty or prone to conflict.

UK Leading Planning Group Plans for Peak Oil

2012-01-03T18:20:00.005-04:00

from the Energy Bulletin:Review of RTPI’s Discussion Paper, Peak Oil: The Implications for Planning Policy

by Rick Munroe

[The study focuses primarily on spatial planning, transportation and food security.]

The Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) describes itself as “the UK’s leading planning body….” It recently released a 59-page discussion paper on Peak Oil, partly in preparation for a forum on this issue which is scheduled for January 17th in London.

RTPI describes the purpose of its study as follows:
This discussion paper sets out the findings of a study undertaken into the issue of Peak oil and the implications for spatial planning. It aims to promote discussion, raise awareness among transport and spatial planners of the issues around peak oil and suggest an agenda for action by professionals. It is intended as an introduction and primer to the issue; further work will be necessary… to ensure that the concept is properly taken into account in future planning (p. 1).

This study is a compilation of three discrete activities.

1. Literature review.
The RTPI team examined several first-rate sources: the pioneering work of Hubbert, as well as more recent work by Hirsch, Energy Watch Group, the UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security (ITPOES) and the IEA’s landmark 2008 World Energy Outlook. The writing team relied on these sources for credible, balanced reference material.

2. Critical evaluation of present spatial and transport planning (including “discussion of the shortcomings of present approaches in this respect”).
The authors examined existing UK government documents and were struck by the absence of attention to Peak Oil. With respect to the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), the authors found, “Reviews of the literature undertaken for this study revealed no apparent published information or consideration explicitly by DECC concerning Peak Oil, with the exception of the acknowledgement that a key challenge facing DECC is to ensure energy supplies after North Sea oil and gas production has peaked” (p. 15).

With respect to the UK government’s 2007 Energy White Paper, the authors note, “Indeed, the term Peak Oil does not even appear in the White Paper” (p. 15).

Within the planning community, the RTPI team points out, “Peak Oil is not well recognized in spatial planning although some direct effects of Peak Oil will be experienced in the UK within time horizon of national and local plans” (p. 16).

With respect to UK transport planning, the authors note that the new White Paper “remains resolutely silent on the issue of Peak Oil…” (p. 18).

The RTPI team also notes the ongoing inattention to food security: “The area that is almost completely ignored in development plans is that of food security” (p. 18).

With respect to UK policy development in general, the RTPI team concludes, “there are few examples of the Peak Oil concept being explicitly considered in policy development” (p. 20).

Given the relative absence of proactive work within the UK on Peak Oil, the authors “would welcome contributions from readers indicating other examples which could inform the development of policies in the UK in this respect” (p. 21).

3. Recommendations for planners
The RTPI report offers its own recommendations in addition to directing readers to progressive initiatives which have been undertaken by other agencies (eg. Transition Towns, Zero Carbon Britain, Low Carbon Communities Network, etc).

The focus of their recommendations is primarily the transport sector and is summarized in this pointed observation: “Given that Peak Oil will happen at some point, albeit with uncertain timing, and the possible profound and severe impacts that it could engender, integrating Peak Oil mitigation into transport policy is imperative” (p. 42).

Continues at Energy Bulletin.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

the complete RTPI discussion paper is found here.

The limits of mechanistic understanding

2011-12-20T09:23:00.000-04:00

Trials and Errors: Why Science Is Failing Us uses the story of a failed drug, torcetrapib, to illustrate issues involved with understanding complex systems. It begins with a critique of mechanistic reductionism.

The story of torcetrapib is a tale of mistaken causation. Pfizer was operating on the assumption that raising levels of HDL cholesterol and lowering LDL would lead to a predictable outcome: Improved cardiovascular health. Less arterial plaque. Cleaner pipes. But that didn’t happen.
....
Pfizer invested more than $1 billion in the development of the drug and $90 million to expand the factory that would manufacture the compound. Because scientists understood the individual steps of the cholesterol pathway at such a precise level, they assumed they also understood how it worked as a whole.

This assumption—that understanding a system’s constituent parts means we also understand the causes within the system—is not limited to the pharmaceutical industry or even to biology. It defines modern science. In general, we believe that the so-called problem of causation can be cured by more information, by our ceaseless accumulation of facts. Scientists refer to this process as reductionism. By breaking down a process, we can see how everything fits together; the complex mystery is distilled into a list of ingredients.

After a discussion of the problems involved in establishing causation, the article argues that science of the past few decades has pragmatically sidestepped these problems through the use of statistics and the substitution of establishing correlation for establishing causality.

But here’s the bad news: The reliance on correlations has entered an age of diminishing returns. At least two major factors contribute to this trend. First, all of the easy causes have been found, which means that scientists are now forced to search for ever-subtler correlations, mining that mountain of facts for the tiniest of associations. Is that a new cause? Or just a statistical mistake? The line is getting finer; science is getting harder. Second—and this is the biggy—searching for correlations is a terrible way of dealing with the primary subject of much modern research: those complex networks at the center of life. While correlations help us track the relationship between independent measurements, such as the link between smoking and cancer, they are much less effective at making sense of systems in which the variables cannot be isolated. Such situations require that we understand every interaction before we can reliably understand any of them. Given the byzantine nature of biology, this can often be a daunting hurdle, requiring that researchers map not only the complete cholesterol pathway but also the ways in which it is plugged into other pathways. (The neglect of these secondary and even tertiary interactions begins to explain the failure of torcetrapib, which had unintended effects on blood pressure. It also helps explain the success of Lipitor, which seems to have a secondary effect of reducing inflammation.) Unfortunately, we often shrug off this dizzying intricacy, searching instead for the simplest of correlations. It’s the cognitive equivalent of bringing a knife to a gunfight.

The piece ends with a paragraph that links back to an earlier discussion of the role of perception in establishing causation and hints at the importance of distinguishing between the known and the unknown.

And yet, we must never forget that our causal beliefs are defined by their limitations. For too long, we’ve pretended that the old problem of causality can be cured by our shiny new knowledge. If only we devote more resources to research or dissect the system at a more fundamental level or search for ever more subtle correlations, we can discover how it all works. But a cause is not a fact, and it never will be; the things we can see will always be bracketed by what we cannot. And this is why, even when we know everything about everything, we’ll still be telling stories about why it happened. It’s mystery all the way down.

Demographics and Carbon Emissions

2011-12-16T12:52:00.000-04:00

From the Economist's Daily Chart:

Economics and shifting stability states

2011-12-14T09:01:00.001-04:00

The BBC News has an interesting collection of economic graphs from 2001 put together by top economists. My personal favorite is shown below, along with its caption.

"For a long time the perception was that the creation of the euro meant sovereign risk was effectively the same across all countries. That of course proved to be wrong. The Lehman's crisis and financial meltdown that followed affected the deficits and debt levels of different countries in different ways. Interestingly it is much the same countries now with very high yields as it was pre-euro, suggesting little has changed fundamentally in a decade." VICKY PRYCE, SENIOR MANAGING DIRECTOR FTI

Seems like a classic example of shifting stability states with interesting implications for managing socio-ecological systems if you think of the adoption of the euro as the creation of a meso-level institutional structure (larger than the individual participating states, but not encompassing the entire global economy). Conceived that way, the new institutional structure temporarily managed to equalize risk, but a distant disturbance in the larger system (the Lehman bankruptcy) undid it and shifted system control back to the higher (global) level.

A few items of interest

2011-12-03T14:42:00.001-04:00

Michael Batty recently received the Bill Alonso Memorial Prize for his publication Cities and Complexity. Here's a link to the presentation he gave on receipt of the prize. His blog, A Science of Cities, has a number of interesting items, including links to diagrammatic representations of the flow of European debt by both the BBC and the New York Times.
Resilience Science has a couple of interesting posts about the role of leaders in system transformation: What are leaders really for? and Stabilizing Collectives in the Study of Transformation: Instead of “key-individuals”
A couple of recent interesting MA theses dealing with the process of regime shifts and their relation to system transformation: Using Complexity Theory Methods for Sociological Theory Development - With a Case Study on Socio-Technical Transitions and The domino effect : A network analysis of regime shifts drivers and causal pathways

Stability is Destabalizing

2011-11-20T13:18:00.001-04:00

A post from a couple of months ago charted the course of various post-WWII US recessions and posed the question Was there a structural change in the economy in the late 1970s - early 80s?

Over the period from the late 1950's to 1980, US macro-economic policy became better and better at managing recessions. They continued to come at roughly the same frequency, but they were shorter and shallower than the earlier ones. This could, potentially, indicate an increase in rigidity over time as US macroeconomic policy attempted to 'smooth out' the business cycle.

A recent post at Resilience Science draws attention to a similar matter and provides a nice set of links to analytic resources relative to the issue. Here is a key passage:

In complex adaptive systems, stability does not equate to resilience. In fact, stability tends to breed loss of resilience and fragility or as Minsky put it, “stability is destabilising”. Although Minsky’s work has been somewhat neglected in economics, the principle of the resilience-stability tradeoff is common knowledge in ecology, especially since Buzz Holling’s pioneering work on the subject. If stability leads to fragility, then it follows that stabilisation too leads to increased system fragility. As Holling and Meffe put it in another landmark paper on the subject titled ‘Command and Control and the Pathology of Natural Resource Management’, “when the range of natural variation in a system is reduced, the system loses resilience.” Often, the goal of increased stability is synonymous with a goal of increased efficiency but “the goal of producing a maximum sustained yield may result in a more stable system of reduced resilience”.The entire long arc of post-WW2 macroeconomic policy in the developed world can be described as a flawed exercise in macroeconomic stabilisation.

Climate skepticism: An Anglo-Saxon phenomena?

2011-11-12T12:45:00.001-04:00

To date, the bulk of research on media coverage of climate skeptics has centered has been done by Max Boycoff and looked at the US media. The recently released Poles Apart: The International Reporting of Climate Skepticism provides global take on the issue. The Guardian has an interesting post about the report.

Significantly, the report distinguishes among a variety of different types of skeptics

"trend sceptics" (who deny the warming trend)
"attribution sceptics" (who accept the trend, but attribute it to natural causes)
"impact sceptics" (who accept human causation, but claim the impacts will be beneficial or benign)
"policy sceptics" (who, for a variety of often political or ideological reasons, disagree with the regulatory policies being promoted to tackle climate change)
"science sceptics" (who – again, for a variety of reasons - believe climate science not to be trustworthy)

The report analyzed newspapers in six countries and found that the so-called "Climategate" affair received much more attention in the UK and the US than in Brazil, China, France or India and that "significantly more" sceptics are mentioned in the UK and US media than in the other four countries.

The report mentions a variety of factors relevant to the differential coverage:

Outcomes are usually determined by the interaction between internal processes or factors within newspapers (such as journalistic practices, editorial culture, or the influence of editors and proprietors as well as political ideology) and external societal forces (such as the power or presence of sceptical lobbying groups, sceptical scientists, sceptical political parties, or sceptical readers who are simply fearful of higher taxes or energy bills). An array of other factors, such as a country's energy profile, the presence of web-based scepticism, and a country's direct experience of a changing climate also play a role.

For comparison, Boycoff's recent work, which deals with primarily with the extent of climate change coverage by various media outlets around the world, is available here and in the lecture below.

Human agency and the Euro crisis

2011-11-03T15:01:00.002-03:00

Social systems, unlike natural systems, involve human agents who act with particular intentions. The current Euro drama illustrates this nicely. Paul Mason's 'tankist view of the Euro crisis' uses a brilliant physical analogy to clearly explain the deal that was struck a week ago:

In search of a metaphor in this crisis, I repeatedly come back to tank armour. An ultra-modern tank is almost impossible to kill because it is covered with a mixture of ceramic, textile and metal plating that is designed to disperse the incoming energy of an anti-tank projectile: laterally.
After it's done its job the armour does not look pretty, but it works - as long as you don't get hit again.

For all the criticism of the eurozone - the greyness of the political elite, the indecision, the bunga bunga etc - their strategy is not just "kicking the can down the road". It is about dispersing the energy of the debt explosion. For velocity itself is important in the kind of collision we are talking about: over-accumulated debt impacting on real world growth. If you can slow it down, a debt explosion looks like just a long, dreary recession as people pay down their borrowings.

Now to the design of the armour: the complex system being - I will not say designed, but improvised - is composed of layers.

Layer one is the Greek debt write-off. This disperses the stress away from the Greek treasury - which can no longer control its ballooning deficits - and into the EU banking system. ....

The second layer of armour is the 108bn euro bank recapitalisation programme: money from states, Far Eastern investors and the EFSF bailout fund (see below) will be used to shore up the balance sheets of the affected banks. To visualise this, again, imagine a uranium dart hitting a surface that spreads the impact - in this case across a complex fabric of financial entities stretching from Dubai to Shanghai. ...

The deepest layer of armour Europe is trying to clad itself with is the EFSF. There is 726bn euros of taxpayers money committed, which translates into 440bn euros lendable. What they are trying to do is turn that into 1.4tn euros lendable - and the Brits want even larger - by getting, again, global lenders - including China, Brazil, the IMF and Middle East Money - to lend against the 440bn: once again spreading the impact laterally. ...

At each level then, the EU response consists in taking a concentrated impact and spreading it out - across Europe, across the world, and over time.

Given that the post was written a couple days before Greece's decision to hold a referendum on the European Union aid package intended to resolve the country's debt crisis (a decision that has now been withdrawn), Mason was prescient in his observation on the limits of his physical analogy.

However, in economics as opposed to inert matter, there is the problem of people not wanting to take the hit. Right now nobody wants to admit they are even putting themselves in line to take the hit: the German parliament, the kebab-shop phobic Italian right, the IMF, the Greek people. Everybody wants someone else to take the hit.

Muller Confirms Climate Change

2011-10-25T16:51:00.013-03:00

Berkeley Physicist Richard Muller and his BEST team (Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study) have finished their analysis of global temperature studies and have come to a startling conclusion: the Earth is warming substantially, it is largely man-made warming, and the temperature factors cited by the climate skeptics, including Anthony Watts, have at best only a marginal effect on global warming. And this is coming from a KOCH BROS. FUNDED STUDY on climate change, which was undertaken for the purpose of REFUTING the climate change thesis. Furthermore, Muller and his team found that some of the temperature data reported thus far has UNDER-reported the amount of warming that has already taken place.

from Climate Progress:

"Climate Progress actually broke this story back in March — see Exclusive: Berkeley temperature study results “confirm the reality of global warming and support in all essential respects the historical temperature analyses of the NOAA, NASA, and HadCRU.” That was based on an email Climatologist Ken Caldeira sent me after seeing their preliminary results and a public talk by Muller confirming:

“We are seeing substantial global warming”
“None of the effects raised by the [skeptics] is going to have anything more than a marginal effect on the amount of global warming.”

But now the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study have completed their “independent” analysis of all of the temperature stations and found a rate of warming since the 1950s as high NOAA and NASA and faster than the (much maligned) UK Hadley/CRU data:

I had posted on this story back in March myself on this EcoSoc blog. My money was on Muller, who I believed was a scientist with integrity who wanted to rigorously test the climate change thesis. The kicker was that he took money from the Koch Brothers to finance the project. My hunch was that he would end up proving that the climate change deniers were wrong, that the climate really was warming, and that this would be the ultimate kick in the skeptics' crotch: using Koch Bros. money to refute their own campaign of lies and disinformation. Bravo, Dr. Muller.

See his initial video report here:

Ironically, Muller even discusses the reality of peak oil, as a liquid fuel shortage, but which he believes can be replaced by compressed natural gas.

US Govt decides Shale Gas Needs More Openness, Better Data

2011-10-23T04:42:00.000-03:00

The Natural Gas Subcommittee for the US Energy Secretary has been tasked with "Improving the Safety & Environmental Performance of Hydraulic Fracturing" The Natural Gas Subcommittee's 90-day interim report is now available. Their 180-day final report is expected on November 18, 2011.

The subcommittee web site links to lots of interesting information, including a resources page with links to loads of useful information, transcripts of over 25000 public submissions (and, helpfully, a summary of the public comments!)

The interim report is briefly reviewed by ScienceInsider:

The subcommittee to the secretary's Energy Advisory Board was not asked who should be regulating shale gas, Zoback says. Regulation now lies primarily with the states. But "we're pointing out what can and should be done." To regain public trust, the report says, much information about shale gas should become readily available to the public, starting with the chemical recipes for the fluids pumped at high pressure into shale to free up the gas. Those fluids sometimes spill onto the surface and into waterways. And much more information should be gathered on the environment before, during, and after drilling. The debate over whether and how drilling and fracking contaminate groundwater with gas—the infamous flaming water faucet of the documentary Gasland—would benefit especially. "We feel very strongly that having good data will advance a lot of the issues," Zoback says.

Some sort of national organization focused on shale gas should also be formed, the report says. It could create a national database of all public information as well as disseminate best practices to industry as they evolve. Added support for existing mechanisms that aid communication among state and federal regulators would also help.

"It's a remarkable report," says Philip Sharp, president of the think tank Resources for the Future in Washington, D.C. "It's a balanced, high-caliber group with public input. The report is remarkable in having honest, actionable proposals in it. What they say will get attention."

Network Analysis of A Complex Global System: the 147 Super-Connected Corporations that Run the World

2011-10-22T18:42:00.006-03:00

Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world
By wmw_admin on October 21, 2011

Andy Coghlan and Debbie MacKenzie – New Scientist October 19, 2011

[Caption: The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy. Superconnected companies are red, very connected companies are yellow. The size of the dot represents revenue.]

AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters’ worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study’s assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York’s Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world’s transnational corporations (TNCs).

“Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it’s conspiracy theories or free-market,” says James Glattfelder. “Our analysis is reality-based.”

Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world’s economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownerships, so could not say how this affected the global economy – whether it made it more or less stable, for instance.

The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company’s operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.

The work, to be published in PloS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What’s more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world’s large blue chip and manufacturing firms – the “real” economy – representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a “super-entity” of 147 even more tightly knit companies – all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity – that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. “In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network,” says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.

John Driffill of the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather its insights into economic stability.

Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core’s tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable. “If one [company] suffers distress,” says Glattfelder, “this propagates.”

“It’s disconcerting to see how connected things really are,” agrees George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, a complex systems expert who has advised Deutsche Bank.

Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), warns that the analysis assumes ownership equates to control, which is not always true. Most company shares are held by fund managers who may or may not control what the companies they part-own actually do. The impact of this on the system’s behaviour, he says, requires more analysis.

Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power, the analysis could help make it more stable. By finding the vulnerable aspects of the system, economists can suggest measures to prevent future collapses spreading through the entire economy. Glattfelder says we may need global anti-trust rules, which now exist only at national level, to limit over-connection among TNCs. Bar-Yam says the analysis suggests one possible solution: firms should be taxed for excess interconnectivity to discourage this risk.

One thing won’t chime with some of the protesters’ claims: the super-entity is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world. “Such structures are common in nature,” says Sugihara.

Newcomers to any network connect preferentially to highly connected members. TNCs buy shares in each other for business reasons, not for world domination. If connectedness clusters, so does wealth, says Dan Braha of NECSI: in similar models, money flows towards the most highly connected members. The Zurich study, says Sugihara, “is strong evidence that simple rules governing TNCs give rise spontaneously to highly connected groups”. Or as Braha puts it: “The Occupy Wall Street claim that 1 per cent of people have most of the wealth reflects a logical phase of the self-organising economy.”

So, the super-entity may not result from conspiracy. The real question, says the Zurich team, is whether it can exert concerted political power. Driffill feels 147 is too many to sustain collusion. Braha suspects they will compete in the market but act together on common interests. Resisting changes to the network structure may be one such common interest.

The top 50 of the 147 superconnected companies

1. Barclays plc
2. Capital Group Companies Inc
3. FMR Corporation
4. AXA
5. State Street Corporation
6. JP Morgan Chase & Co
7. Legal & General Group plc
8. Vanguard Group Inc
9. UBS AG
10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc
11. Wellington Management Co LLP
12. Deutsche Bank AG
13. Franklin Resources Inc
14. Credit Suisse Group
15. Walton Enterprises LLC
16. Bank of New York Mellon Corp
17. Natixis
18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc
19. T Rowe Price Group Inc
20. Legg Mason Inc
21. Morgan Stanley
22. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc
23. Northern Trust Corporation
24. Société Générale
25. Bank of America Corporation
26. Lloyds TSB Group plc
27. Invesco plc
28. Allianz SE 29. TIAA
30. Old Mutual Public Limited Company
31. Aviva plc
32. Schroders plc
33. Dodge & Cox
34. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc*
35. Sun Life Financial Inc
36. Standard Life plc
37. CNCE
38. Nomura Holdings Inc
39. The Depository Trust Company
40. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance
41. ING Groep NV
42. Brandes Investment Partners LP
43. Unicredito Italiano SPA
44. Deposit Insurance Corporation of Japan
45. Vereniging Aegon
46. BNP Paribas
47. Affiliated Managers Group Inc
48. Resona Holdings Inc
49. Capital Group International Inc
50. China Petrochemical Group Company

* Lehman still existed in the 2007 dataset used

Source

Cesar Hidalgo on Economic Complexity

2011-10-16T08:00:00.006-03:00

As evident from the voluminous discussion of the concept of biodiversity, the significance of diversity within ecosystems has long been recognized. Generally speaking, this isn't the case in economics where the focus has typically been on identifying a small list of 'factors of production' (labor, capital, technology, etc.) and their transformation into a single comparable product ($ value). Taking a complexity view, Hidalgo and his collaborators argue that Adam Smith and Durkheim (with their emphasis on specialization and the division of labor) provide a more fruitful way of conceptualizing the economic realm.

Conceptually, as shown at the left, Hidalgo divides the countries of the world up into four groups: 1) Countries whose few major products are also produced by a number of other countries (e.g., the sugar producing countries of the Caribbean), 2) Countries with diversified economies, but all their major products are produced in a number of other locations, 3) Non-diversified economies that produce unique and exclusive products (such as Saudi Arabia and other oil based economies) and 4) Countries producing a diverse range of unique and distinct products.

Using a measure of economic complexity described in this paper, Hidalgo locates the economies of the world in a quantified representation of that basic conceptual space. Two points are worth of note. First, the countries locate themselves along a diagonal with almost every world economy being located in either the first or the fourth quadrant. As summarized by Ethan Zuckerman:

The nations that make only a few things all tend to make, more or less, the same things. Basically, we can divide the world into two sets of countries – those that have sufficient personbytes of knowledge to produce a wide range of goods, and those that can produce only a few simple things. The places that make everything make things that few others make. Hausmann explains that products require a specific set of personbytes to produce. When you gain additional personbytes of skill, it’s like getting new letters in Scrabble – you can produce a new set of words, but only within the constraints of the letters (skills, knowledge) you already have.

Second, this approach does a much better job than traditional economic analysis in addressing the classic question: "Why are some countries rich and other countries poor?" It explains 73% of the variance in income across nations.

Hidalgo describes his approach to complexity economics in the following two videos.

The same basic ideas are covered in more detail in this version.

His webpage is a wealth of information, including (among other things) pages with links to all his publications, to supporting materials for classes on complex systems, and access to the data sets used in his research.

Canadian Environmental Network unexpectedly terminated

2011-10-14T12:44:00.001-03:00

Here's the first few lines of today's news release:

Future uncertain for network of over 640 environmental groups

Today, the Canadian Environmental Network (RCEN), one of Canada’s oldest, largest, and most well-respected democratic institutions serving the environmental concerns of all Canadians, was forced to lay off its staff and is on the verge of closing its doors and those of its 11 regional offices.
The Network demands to know why it is being shut out of communications with Environment Canada regarding the promised funding for fiscal year 2011-2012. Neither Environment Minister Peter Kent nor his departmental officials have explained why they are not delivering on their promise of continued core funding for the Network, which comprises its key environmental constituency across Canada.

“The Canadian Environmental Network received a letter from Environment Canada in May this year stating their intent to continue core funding in the amount of $547,000 for the current fiscal year. In keeping with our over three-decades-long partnership, we ask that EC honour this letter,” said Olivier Kolmel, Chair of the RCEN.

“The RCEN consists of over 640 highly diverse large and small, rural and urban organisations from coast to coast to coast. The Network forms an invaluable and irreplaceable grid of communication among environmentally concerned Canadians and the Government of Canada.

Resources for petitioning the government to reconsider are available after the break .
Sample letter to your MP

October 13, 2011

[Mr/Ms John/Jane Doe, MP]

House of Commons

Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6

Call to Preserve the Federal Government’s Partnership with the Canadian Environmental Network

Dear MP,

I am writing to solicit your assistance in ensuring the continuity of a 34-year partnership between Environment Canada and the Canadian Environmental Network (RCEN). With our core funding having just today been cancelled and all staff laid-off as of tomorrow, we are seeking political champions. We request a meeting with you to discuss how to urgently and effectively re-establish this partnership.

The Canadian Environmental Network is composed of over 640 diverse community organizations, urban and rural, and from coast to coast to coast; a membership that accounts for at least 630,000 individuals directly involved through their groups. The Canadian Environmental Network has served as a critical consultative mechanism, and has most successfully coordinated transparent and constructive collaboration between Environment Canada and its stakeholders for the past three and a half decades.

This partnership has produced many noteworthy achievements. These include the development of the Canadian Environmental Protection Act; reforms to the Federal Environmental Assessment Review Office to create the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency in 1987; extensive work on Prime Minister Brian Mulroney's Green Plan in 1990; numerous initiatives, such as those on toxic substances, including the Chemicals Management Plan; and the Comprehensive Air Management System that was endorsed by the CCME in November 2010.

The strategic importance of this partnership also touches on economic considerations and social wellbeing. The RCEN has helped maintain and strengthen the foundation of our country’s economy by fostering collaboration that enhances operating certainty for Canadian businesses. Our partnership also makes a difference to Canadians “on the ground” in all our communities. Through the years, we have seen the creation of many jobs, and can account for many millions of dollars in terms of volunteer hours invested in promoting and seeing-through numerous federal projects and programmes. Over the decades, the RCEN has actively supported initiatives that range from Habitat Stewardship in Alberta, to waste and smog reduction in Toronto, and youth-led plantings of native species in Montréal. These remarkable examples only scratch the surface of what has been an internationally emulated model of collaboration that serves the interests and values of all Canadians.

I urge you to do everything in your power to ensure that this partnership continues. Please discuss our urgent situation with your colleagues in Parliament and with Minister Peter Kent. I would be pleased to meet with you to discuss our past work with Environment Canada and your recommendations to keep this alliance intact in the coming months and years. Please consider becoming a champion of the Canadian Environmental Network.

Sincerely,

Olivier Kolmel, Chair

On behalf of the Board of Directors

Canadian Environmental Network (RCEN)

Sample letter of support

[your name and organisation]

DATE

Dear [whomever],

RE: Increasing the Strength of the Canadian Environmental Network (RCEN)

I am contacting you to express my sincere hope that you will do all that is in your power to help us re-establish government support for the Canadian Environmental Network (RCEN). The RCEN is an internationally unique and highly respected network of national and community-based organisations. Environmental groups from many countries have approached us with a view to modelling the way in which we do our work—in both official languages.

Environmental challenges know no political boundaries. No matter what party forms government, we must not lose sight of the necessity for strong, dependable, and continued core support from Environment Canada to the hundreds of thousands of volunteers working through their environmental groups in Canadian communities large and small.

The more than three-decades-long partnership RCEN has developed with Environment Canada—and which was summarily and unexpectedly cancelled on 13 October—has produced many noteworthy achievements. These include the development of the Canadian Environmental Protection Act; reforms to the Federal Environmental Assessment Review Office to create the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency in 1987; extensive work on former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney's Green Plan in 1990; and numerous initiatives such as those on toxic substances, including the Chemicals Management Plan and the Comprehensive Air Management System that was endorsed by the CCME in November 2010.

Increasingly, Canadians are faced with problems of damaged ecosystems, loss of species, serious air pollution, effects of acid rain and climate change, increased warnings about food and agricultural products, and spikes in disease for humans, wildlife, and ecosystems. RCEN has provided a door for government to conduct transparent consultation with, and feedback from, the public on policies and programs to help solve these problems.

The Canadian Environmental Network is composed of over 640 diverse community organisations among 11 provincial and territorial affiliate networks, urban and rural, and from coast to coast to coast; a membership that accounts for at least 630,000 individuals directly involved through their regional affiliates and groups.

The RCEN’s democratic delegate selection process has ensured that individuals representing groups from across the country are at the decision-making tables. By bringing representatives from rural and urban communities to participate in developing policies, we provide a full range of expertise (including biologists, planners, educators, lawyers, geologists, social scientists, engineers, chemists, doctors and other health care workers) of people working on the ground and outside government. This uniquely Canadian approach builds trust between the public and government through collaboration and consultation. By bringing diverse stakeholders, including representatives of industry groups, to a common table, we also resolve differences of opinion, settle compromises, and create solutions that would not arise without dialogue. With this process, better policies are developed that have greater legitimacy with the Canadian public.

Given the growing challenges we all face, the environmental network needs a dramatic increase in funding, not a decrease or outright cancellation. Currently, the RCEN’s funding has been discontinued, in spite of receiving a letter of intent to continue funding in May, and then a summary notice today (four and a half months later) that there will be no funding, leaving us with no opportunity to develop transitional funding strategies. As of Friday, 14 October, our national office will close. Many—in and out of government—believe that core funding of $10 million is a much more appropriate contribution to support the important expertise that our member groups deliver.

/…..2

The RCEN is entering its 34th year. During this time, we have worked co-operatively with Environment Canada and other departments (including DFO, Health Canada, NRCan, Agriculture Canada, and DFAIT, to name a few) resulting in very significant environmental successes which, in addition to the ones mentioned above, include the following:

· The preservation of 12% of Canada’s wilderness, initiated by RCEN member groups through the forest and wilderness caucus and supported by all parties in the House of Commons.

· The RCEN member groups and affiliate networks do the lion’s share of environmental education in communities across the country.

· Our membership has made contribution to policy in areas such as the chemicals management plan, smog science, acid rain, environmental assessment, management of fisheries, marine ecosystems, species at risk—the list is long.

· We have facilitated input into environmental policy in all key federal portfolios, from natural resources to fisheries, health, education, and agriculture.

We cannot lose sight of the immense co-operative work that we have achieved during the last three-and-a-half decades. The model of the multi-stakeholder decision-making process that has been developed co-operatively between Environment Canada and the RCEN has been so successful that it is now being showcased internationally as a model for other countries to emulate.

Canada, like other countries, faces even more serious environmental challenges than ever, and we need the combined force of the RCEN and federal agencies to meet these challenges. We would like you to raise this issue with your elected officials and your colleagues to take the necessary steps to help us ensure that stable increased funding is included in future federal budgets.

As you are taking this matter forward, please call on environmental representatives in your area for further information and to jointly address local environmental issues. You can find their contact information on our website: www.rcen.ca.

Sincerely,

(Signed by person writing this letter, who we hope would be meeting with their MP or influential colleague, or with the executive director/coordinator of their provincial affiliate.)

Rifkin on Energy, Communications and Complex Societies

2011-10-06T11:30:00.009-03:00

I still don't think that a distributed hydrogen grid could supply the same density of energy that fossil fuels does. I'm not convinced that distributed energy will run the kind of "global" economy that we have now (which, he is right, is in its death throes). If Rifkin followed Rifkin's own thinking, the third industrial revolution is distributed production, in which each locality produces what it needs and trades with other nearby localities. Instead of globalized agribusiness, we have small farms everywhere that produce food for a local market. I can't say with any certainty how a "distributed manufacturing system" would operate.

The biggest hole in Rifkin's thesis is that he's only talking about electricity production: he's not talking about transport energy. Electrified transportation is only good for short distances (compared with gasoline, diesel and jet fuel). Reliance on electricity for transport would be a limiting factor that would tend to localize production, and would discourage trading over long distances. And that's another reason why Rifkin's distributed energy grid won't fuel a globalized economy. But for him to leave the discussion of mobility and transport out of the discussion altogether seriously weakens his thesis. As Robert Hirsch said again recently, the peak oil crisis is a liquid fuel crisis that primarily impacts transportation.

Review: The Inquisition of Climate Science

2011-09-25T15:28:00.004-03:00

A post following up on the previous one, using James Powell's recently released The Inquisition of Climate Science to illustrate why science communication can't be left entirely to scientists.

Powell has legitimate scientific credentials: a PhD in geochemistry from MIT, a long history of significant academic and non-academic science related jobs and a number of previous successful books on science for the informed reader. Here's how the publisher markets the book:

The Inquisition of Climate Science is the first book to comprehensively take on the climate science denial movement and the deniers themselves, exposing their lack of credentials, their extensive industry funding, and their failure to provide any alternative theory to explain the observed evidence of warming. In this book, readers meet the most prominent deniers while dissecting their credentials, arguments, and lack of objectivity. James Lawrence Powell shows that the deniers use a wide variety of deceptive rhetorical techniques, many stretching back to ancient Greece. Carefully researched, fully referenced, and compellingly written, his book clearly reveals that the evidence of global warming is real and that an industry of denial has deceived the American public, putting them and their grandchildren at risk.

In terms of the labels in the previous post, Powell is in full-on deficit model mode. Science is under attack; communication failures are blamed on public ignorance, the media, polarization and anti-science sentiments; and, crucially, the solution is to improve science literacy because a literate public will see the light and recognize the validity of the science.

My problem isn't with the documentation of the denial industry but, rather, with a) his understanding of the relationship between the denial industry (and, in particular, the Republican party) and the general public and b) the prescription for action (science literacy) that results. Simply put, the growth of the climate denial industry is more a consequence of climate denial among the public than its cause. Curiously, this fact is evident in one of Powell's blog posts designed to promote the book:

Global warming denial has not only captured the Republican members of the House, it has become mandatory for any serious Republican candidate for president. Before he entered the race, former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty embraced the need for environmental protection, clean energy initiatives, and a cap-and-trade policy on carbon emissions. By mid-spring 2011, T-Paw had reversed himself and “denounced” his previous stance, regurgitating long-disproven climate myths: “I’m old enough to remember when people were predicting there was going to be the next ice age. Until recently people were worried as much about global cooling. [Some people may have been, but scientists were not.] There is climate change but the reality is the science indicates most of it, if not all of it, is caused by natural causes. [Totally false.] And as to the potential human contribution to that, there’s a great scientific dispute about that very issue.” [Totally false.] Pawlenty summed up: “The science is bad.”

The former governor explained his switcheroo: “Well, anybody who’s going to run…has got some clunkers in their record. As to climate change, or more specifically cap-and-trade, I’ve just come out and admitted it, look, it was a mistake, it was stupid.” He went on, “Everybody in the race, embraced climate change or cap-and-trade at one point or another. Every one of us.”

To paraphrase John Kerry, the Republican leaders could all say "we were in favor of cap-and-trade before we were against it." In contrast to the standard deficit model story line -- which portrays the public as empty vessels which can be filled with information that is either correct or incorrect and have, unfortunately, been led astray by a set of powerful institutions that are propagating misinformation -- Pawlenty's statement clearly indicates that the positions of the Republican party are a consequence/reflection of views held by their base, not the source of those views. In other words, Republican candidates are responding to existing beliefs within the electorate rather than creating them.

Thus, the key question is not 'what information do the deniers need to change their mind and how can we deliver it?' but, rather, 'what factors predispose certain elements of the public to selectively perceive the world in one way rather than another and how do those factors interact with the perceptions about climate change?' Some of the most interesting work in this area makes use of the cultural theory of risk. See, for example, the research done by the Cultural Cognition Project and, in particular, The Cultural Cognition of Scientific Consensus (abstract below).

Why do members of the public disagree—sharply and persistently—about facts on which expert scientists largely agree? We designed a study to test a distinctive explanation: the cultural cognition of scientific consensus. The “cultural cognition of risk” refers to the tendency of individuals to form risk perceptions that are congenial to their values. The study, published in the Journal of Risk Research, presents both correlational and experimental evidence confirming that cultural cognition shapes individuals’ beliefs about the existence of scientific consensus, and the process by which they form such beliefs, relating to climate change, the disposal of nuclear wastes, and the effect of permitting concealed possession of handguns. The implications of this dynamic for science communication and public policy-making are discussed.

Powell's second blog post illustrates another feature typical of the anti-denier crusade: a general lack of self-reflection, particularly as it relates to the use of rhetoric. Contrast the publisher's blurb ("the deniers use a wide variety of deceptive rhetorical techniques") with Powell's own rhetoric.

In The Inquisition of Climate Science, I pointed out that the ways in which today’s global warming deniers resemble the Lysenkoists:
Global warming deniers treat the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change with contempt, as though it were common knowledge that they are corrupt. Scientist-deniers like Freeman Dyson and Richard Lindzen vilify mainstream scientists like [James] Hansen; others demand that NASA fire him. After Hansen condemned a presentation that [Viscount] Monckton was to make to the Kentucky state legislature, Monckton wrote the head of NASA accusing Hansen of having financial ties to Al Gore and demanding an investigation. Monckton calls climate scientists evil and likens them to war criminal Radovan Karadzic.

Lysenko accused his scientific opponents of trying to “wreck” the Soviet economy. Today’s deniers accuse climate scientists of wanting to transfer money and power from the people to the government, thus helping to bring down “industrialization and development and capitalism and the Western way.”
Instead of conducting experiments that would prove his theories, Lysenko used questionnaires from farmers fearful of a one-way ticket to the Gulag. Instead of doing research, the global warming deniers use petitions.

The Soviet media endorsed Lysenko and condemned his opponents, Pravda saying that he had “solved the problem of fertilizing the fields without fertilizer and minerals….” Today, right-wing American media like Fox News and The Wall Street Journal ridicule scientists and provide the deniers with a platform to say whatever they like without fear of contradiction.

In Lysenkoism, the Soviet State denounced biological science and made the denial of genetics state policy; today’s deniers urge our government to reject climate science and make the denial of global warming state policy.
We see in Lysenkoism how science denial, when projected from the level of the state, can cost millions, even scores of millions, of lives.

This passage troubles me on a number of levels. First, anyone familiar with the details of the Lysenko case knows that the parallel is superficial at best. Denunciation by a politicized media is not the same as state sponsored rejection. And, more provocatively, from the perspective of the deniers it is the government that is wrapping itself in the mantel of 'consensus science' in order to suppress their views. More fundamentally, anyone with a smidgen of awareness about US politics knows that you can't suggest that the Tea Party and other bastions of climate change denial are similar to communists and expect them to listen to you. Powell's rhetoric, like that of many other scientists pushing the deficit model, preaches to the choir of believers. It has little to offer in terms of the real task, engaging in active dialogue with the deniers.

Should we leave science communication to scientists?

2011-09-21T08:37:00.001-03:00

The answer is no, according to John Beasley and Matthew Nisbet's current article "How scientists view the public, the media and the political process" published in Public Understanding of Science. Here is the abstract:

We review past studies on how scientists view the public, the goals of communication, the performance and impacts of the media, and the role of the public in policy decision-making. We add to these past findings by analyzing two recent large-scale surveys of scientists in the UK and US. These analyses show that scientists believe the public is uninformed about science and therefore prone to errors in judgment and policy preferences. Scientists are critical of media coverage generally, yet they also tend to rate favorably their own experience dealing with journalists, believing that such interactions are important both for promoting science literacy and for career advancement. Scientists believe strongly that they should have a role in public debates and view policy-makers as the most important group with which to engage. Few scientists view their role as an enabler of direct public participation in decision-making through formats such as deliberative meetings, and do not believe there are personal benefits for investing in these activities. Implications for future research are discussed, in particular the need to examine how ideology and selective information sources shape scientists’ views.

The current post on Nisbet's blog discusses the article further and includes the following informative graphic summarizing the difference between the deficit model (which most scientists accept and practice) and the alternative public engagement model of science sommunication.

Tea Party, Politics and Global Warming

2011-09-11T11:53:00.000-03:00

A special report from the Yale Center for Climate Change Communication, Politics & Global Warming: Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and the Tea Party reports how the members of each political party respond to the issue of global warming. For people who have studied US attitudes toward climate change, most of the results are familiar. However, for the first time, this report separates the views of Tea Party members on global warming from the traditional political categories of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. So, that's where I'll focus.

As shown in the chart below, Tea Party members are both least likely to believe in global warming and most entrenched in their opinions (feeling that they are more informed and don't need additional information to form their opinion).

Consistent with the strength of their views, they are less likely to change their view based on empirical experience (i.e., extreme weather; specifically, either the heat wave of the summer or the snowstorms of the winter).

The public is notoriously bad at 'knowledge' questions. For example, the national average is identically split on the level of scientific consensus: 41% say most scientists think global warming is happening and 41% think there is 'a lot of disagreement among scientists'. This is, of course, an empirical issue. One can count up the views of the scientific community as Naomi Oreskes and others have done. No one did particularly well when asked "what proportion of climate scientists think that global warming
is happening?" Only 18% of Democrats and Independents got the right answer (81-100%) while 1% of Tea Party members gave that response. In contrast to all other groups, Tea Party members were more likely to understate the level of consensus (suggesting only 21-40% of climate scientists believed global warming was occurring).

There is a lot more in the report, but, in general, three additional areas stand out:
1) Compared to the rest of the population, Tea Party members are more individualist and less egalitarian in their personal values.
2) Compared to the rest of the population, Tea Party members distrust social institutions and information sources of all types.
3) Despite these fundamental differences, there are some specific climate relevant policies that Tea Party members support in greater numbers than other groups (building more nuclear plants) or hold views generally similar to the rest of the population (funding research into renewable energy, creating bike paths/lanes, increasing availability of public transportation).

In sum, there is a strong and entrenched opposition to the way the climate debate has been framed in the US. The Tea Party members are, and will remain, able to block any 'big government' policy focused on 'global warming.' It is time to reframe the debate in terms of energy and other areas where progress is possible.

Was there a structural change in the economy in the late 1970s - early 80s?

2011-09-06T13:30:00.004-03:00

(Click on the graph for a larger view.) I really don't know what to make of this graph, other than it is really interesting. My thoughts are below, feel free to share yours.

The lines trace the impact of various recessions on employment. Each color refers to a particular recession. The individual lines trace both the extent of job loss (the deeper the drop, the greater the drop in employment) and the length of time to get back to the pre-recession rate of employment (the further to the right, the longer the recovery takes).

The striking thing about the graph is that something fundamental appears to have occurred around 1980/81. If you look at the lines for the seven recessions that occurred between 1948 and 1980, they all have the same basic V shape. There is also a fairly systematic relationship between the depth of the recession, the length of time until the bottom is reached and the time until employment returns to the pre-recession level. In systemic terms, all recessions up to 1980 behaved in a generally similar fashion.

There is also a noticeable difference between the earlier V shaped recessions and the later ones. The earlier ones (1948, 1953, 1957) have very similar profiles; they were deeper (job losses of 3.4-5.2%) and longer (with 13 months until the bottom) than the later V-shaped recessions. The recessions of 1960, 1969, 1974 and 1980 were shallower (job losses of 1.3-2.7%) and shorter (between 4 and 10 months to the bottom).

The three most recent recessions (1990, 2001, 2007) have a very different profile. Rather than the sharp drop and bounce back of the V shape, the whole process appears to have slowed down. The rate of decline and the rate of recovery are both much slower and the impact of the recession on employment is much longer. The profiles of the three most recent recessions look more like a river basin than the V-shaped valley of the earlier ones. It has taken longer to reach the bottom (24 months, or almost twice as long as the 48-57 recessions) and, once there, the percentage of job losses has flat-lined for close to a year before starting to recover.

The transition appears to have occurred in 1980/81. This is the only case where there is a double-dip recession. Moreover, where the 1980 recession looks like the smallest of the V-shaped recessions, the 1981 curve has a transitional look. Unlike any of the previous recessions, the bottom comes a few months later and flatlines for a few months before the upsurge in employment occurs. The other point of significance. Where recessions had occurred on a crude 5 year cycle up to 1980, the cycle is more like 9 or 10 years since the 81 recession. This, like the shifting shape, suggests the overall process has slowed.

As noted in an earlier post, there are other indicators that the global economy significantly changed at this time, a period linked with the early phases of economic globalization.

So, to take a shot at translating this into panarchy terms, recessions are a product of the adaptive cycle. Over the period from the late 1950's to 1980, US macro-economic policy became better and better at managing recessions. They continued to come at roughly the same frequency, but they were shorter and shallower than the earlier ones. This could, potentially, indicate an increase in rigidity over time as US macroeconomic policy attempted to 'smooth out' the business cycle. This national level process, around 1980, confronted a different dynamic -- resulting from changes to the higher (global) level cycle associated with economic globalization. In other words, the shift from one form of recession (V-shaped) to another (river-shaped) involves a cross-scale interaction where changes in the global economy (outsourcing of manufacturing and the increasing financialization of the US economy, for example) affect the ability of the US to rebound from recessions and, in particular, to create jobs.

Budget Smog

2011-09-03T09:16:00.001-03:00

A recent graph from the Congressional Budget Office (below) puts the US budget situation in an interesting light. Once you take the cost of running multiple wars off the books (the decade long decline in the green line) the spending side of the budget is pretty much in a steady state -- except for the cost of healthcare, which is rising dramatically.

So, you would think that environmental regulations that would limit air pollution and save billions in healthcare costs would be a good idea. Instead, as described in detail in Obama pulls back proposed smog standards in victory for business, the Obama administration has crumpled in the face of political pressure. Afraid of being labeled as responsible for "job killing regulation" during a period of high unemployment, the move effectively leaves in place 1997 era standards which even the Bush administration admitted were lax and out of date. (The 1997 regulations were based on science showing that low-level ozone and other atmospheric pollutants contributed to various lung disease but not to death. Subsequent research has unequivocally tied such pollutants to both disease and death.)

Significantly, the regulations are, from a macro-economic perspective, effectively neutral. They would cost industry somewhere between $19 and 90 billion per year by 2020 (depending on the precise standard implemented) and would result in between $13 and 100 billion in healthcare savings. In other words, the total level of economic activity would remain the same, there would just be a shift from government expenditures on healthcare to private sector expenditures on pollution control.

Ominously,

The ozone standard is one of several air-quality rules the administration is in the process of adopting or has already finalized that are under attack. Others include new limits on mercury and air toxins, greenhouse gases from power plants, and a range of emissions from industrial boilers, oil refineries, cement plants and other sources.

This was the easy one. So the likelihood of action on the others is even less. Inaction on smog turns the big club of unilateral action on carbon emissions that the US courts gave the EPA when they ruled carbon was a pollutant into a plush toy. It is looking more and more like US environmental policy is another casualty of the divisive political culture. Return to slow and costly litigation in the courts may be the necessary path

A brief meditation on science, democracy and complexity

2011-08-30T10:22:00.002-03:00

A recent article in the Ventura County Reporter, Our Ocean: As Healthy as it Looks?, does a nice job of contrasting public perception (the ocean looks great from Highway 101, the fishing is good, altogether it seems pretty healthy) with a series of scientific reports predicting environmental catastrophe due to ocean acidification, rising global carbon emissions, overfishing, pollution and a variety of other factors.

What accounts for the differing views of scientists and the public? And why is the situation likely to get much worse? Read on after the jump ...

During the 1980's researchers in an area known as 'public understanding of science' came up with a way to account for such discrepancies -- the deficit model in which the public is rendered as lacking the relevant knowledge/understanding of science and the solution is increased science education/literacy. Aside from making scientists feel superior and funding lots of not particularly successful research aimed at better science education/literacy/communication, this approach has pretty much self-destructed. Take, for example, the abysmal failure of the climate change crowd to convince the public about the scientific consensus surrounding global warming. While they were reasonably successful in getting a change in the way the media portrayed the science -- moving away from articles involving dueling 'experts' on different sides of the issue to a predominance of articles emphasizing scientific consensus -- public attitude, particularly in the US, has not changed substantially. While there are some interesting suggestions on how to proceed in the light of these experiences, my aim is to point to a more fundamental issue -- the inherent conflict embedded in two institutions fundamentally responsible for the success of western civilization, science and democracy, in the context of an increasingly complex world.

Science is about expert specialization and depth of knowledge. We typically ascribe the authority of science to its ability to accomplish things, but this is really a relatively recent phenomena. Engineering and the idea that technological progress can result from applied science rather than trial and error learning is a product of the industrial revolution. Edison's famous saying -- genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration -- illustrates this. He had the idea for the light bulb (inspiration!) but no idea how to make it work. Rather than attack the problem on the basis of science (i.e., analyzing the physical characteristics of different materials and using a theoretical understanding of what material might work as a filament to inform his design) he opted for trial and error (perspiration!). He hired hundreds of individuals to build different light bulbs and systematically test literally thousands of materials until he found one that worked satisfactorily.

Back in the days of the scientific revolution, science got its authority not from practical utility but, rather, by displaying the world as profoundly different from conventional wisdom. Everyone knew that Ptolemy was right and the sun goes around the earth. It was self evident. All you had to do was look up into the sky and watch the sun trace its arc on a daily basis. Through systematic observation over long periods of time, however, Copernicus and other astronomers were able to show that the conventional wisdom was wrong. In short, the authority of science is rooted in the recognition that experts following specified methods could discover fundamental truths that often went against common sense and were inaccessible to non-scientists. Developing the requisite skills requires substantial training and, hence, that expertise is limited to a few specialists. The rest of us, fundamentally, take that knowledge on trust.

Democracy operates in exactly the opposite manner. Its power comes from openness and inclusivity; the ability to harness the skills, talents, ideas, and creativity of individuals who are excluded from significantly affecting the trajectory of social development in totalitarian, authoritarian and other types of less open societies. Egalitarian democracy, in this one narrow sense, is the opposite of elitist science.

Over the past 50 years science has become politicized. Or, should I say democratized? Scientific knowledge, taken on trust at an earlier time by the public, is no longer. Now, it seems, individual gut feelings and conventional wisdom are trusted more than scientists. This trend upsets many. Here is Paul Krugman from his editorial Republicans Against Science:

Lately, for example, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has gone beyond its long-term preference for the economic ideas of “charlatans and cranks” — as one of former President George W. Bush’s chief economic advisers famously put it — to a general denigration of hard thinking about matters economic. Pay no attention to “fancy theories” that conflict with “common sense,” the Journal tells us. Because why should anyone imagine that you need more than gut feelings to analyze things like financial crises and recessions?

Now, we don’t know who will win next year’s presidential election. But the odds are that one of these years the world’s greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge. And, in a time of severe challenges — environmental, economic, and more — that’s a terrifying prospect.

It's one thing to decry the situation, another to come to grips with the causes. No doubt there are many. Here I'll focus on one that receives relatively little discussion and accounts for this rather disturbing factoid: According to Public Policy Polling, substantially fewer Republican voters in Iowa believe in global warming (21 percent) than believe in evolution (35 percent)! Interestingly, the anti-warming fervor is even stronger among Tea Party members, where 27% believe in evolution but a miniscule 5% believe in global warming. It seems that climate science has surpassed the centuries long rift between science and religion as the locus of politicization.

To understand why requires recognition that the world has changed. We can't go back to the way things were -- where the public trusted science. The genie is out of the bottle and no matter how hard people like Paul Krugman, Joe Romm, Naomi Oreskes or Andrew Weaver try, they aren't going to change the minds of the Republican deniers in Iowa (or anywhere else). And, despite their best efforts, I doubt they will be able to ride a righteous rally-the-troops and defeat the enemy campaign to victory.

The underlying dynamic suggests that, through time, people will become less and less trusting of science, not more trusting. The reason for this has to do with the increasing complexity of our world. There are two aspects to the process. First, in the past social and natural processes were largely separate. This isn't to say that humans had no impact on the environment but, rather, that those impacts were more or less the same as those of other species. That changed significantly around 10,000 years ago with the development of agriculture and even more dramatically a couple centuries ago with industrialization. Crudely put, we've gone from a world of separate social and ecological systems to a world of conjoined socio-ecological systems, the Anthropocene. (Or, for the panarchically inclined, human impacts have moved up the hierarchy of adaptive cycles; going from effects at the small/local level to today's effects on the most macro of cycles).

The second aspect is the flip of the first. If the causes of our problems now involve a mix of natural and social processes, then the solutions must involve a similar mix. It is this element of our complexified modern world that has politicized science. Fifty years ago, solutions to environmental problems involved relatively minor social disruption. If the Cuyahoga river catches on fire or you fear a Silent Spring, the solution is to control certain major point sources of pollution into the river or limit the use of DDT.While these actions may cause some problems for the companies involved, they don't threaten the lives of everyday folks. The proposed solutions to global warming, in contrast, hit people where they live -- both individually (e.g., reduced automobile use) and societally (e.g., calls for the end of capitalism or the need to transition to another form of society). Whatever the merits of such solutions, they run headlong into the social values of a significant chunk of the public. And, as the Iowa polling results show, forced to choose between gut attachment to a personal vision of society and science, a significant chunk of the population goes with their gut and rejects science.

Simply put, in the good old days science and politics were separate because the processes governing the natural world were largely separate from those governing the social world. In Durkheimian terms, natural facts were explainable through reference to other natural facts while social facts were explainable through reference to other social facts. In the modern, complexified world, the natural and the social are intertwined. As a result, the solutions are also intertwined; it is no longer possible to solve global ecological problems without significantly affecting the global social system. It's a trend that will only get worse, not better, as time goes on and social and ecological processes become more complexly linked and more tightly coupled. That's the prospect I find terrifying.

It was 45 years ago today ....

2011-08-26T10:38:00.001-03:00

The world's first view of Earth taken by a spacecraft from the vicinity of the moon. The photo was transmitted to Earth by the United States Lunar Orbiter I and received at the NASA tracking station near Madrid. This crescent of the Earth was photographed August 23, 1966 when the spacecraft was on its 16th orbit and just about to pass behind the moon.

Lots of people are familiar with the later, color version, taken by the Apollo astronauts a few years later. The emotional impact of the more famous image -- a blue/living planet set again the black/lifeless moon -- is undeniably greater ... but this is the original.

Robyn O'Brien on Food

2011-08-25T09:20:00.000-03:00

Robyn O'Brien authored “The Unhealthy Truth: How Our Food Is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do About It.” A former Wall Street food industry analyst, Robyn brings insight, compassion and detailed analysis to her research into the impact that the global food system is having on the health of our children. She founded allergykidsfoundation.org and was named by Forbes as one of “20 Inspiring Women to Follow on Twitter.” The New York Times has passionately described her as “Food’s Erin Brockovich.”

Gail the Actuary Tells it Like it Is

2011-08-17T11:14:00.005-03:00

Here's another brilliant summary of our current global economic and energy situation by Gail the Actuary. It's a synopsis of the peak oil thesis and how it plays out as a 'growth ceiling' and economic decline. It doesn't even take into account catastrophic environmental crises caused by climate change (storms, floods, droughts, fires), causing mass migration, starvation and conflict, but that would be almost too much to contemplate at once. What I love most about Gail's presentation is that she finally concludes that "there is no solution." This is the conclusion I came to almost a year ago. When you put the whole ball of wax together, you have to face that fact that there really is no solution. Solutions that work for one complex set of arrangements tend to wreak havoc somewhere else. And there doesn't seem to be any set of solutions that can forestall even a partial collapse of the world's economy. That's either a 'bad thing' or a 'good thing' depending on what is collapsing and whether you're invested in keeping the whole system going. What is collapsing is globalized Capitalist civilization, and frankly, I'm not sorry to see it go.

Included in the presentation is a series of nifty charts and graphs. The most troubling, though, is the graph which shows a strong correlation between oil prices and the price of food.

Beautiful (and disturbing) images of the American drought

2011-08-16T08:46:00.000-03:00

From Time photographer George Steinmetz, more photos here.

Ecological Mayhem as Economic Opportunity

2011-08-15T10:38:00.000-03:00

Can Jeremy Grantham Profit From Ecological Mayhem? analyzes the neo-Malthusian outlook of financial guru Jeremy Grantham, manager of $150 billion in investments, author of a financial newsletter with a wide following and benefactor to The Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment.

Grantham argues that the late-18th-century doomsayer Thomas Malthus pretty much got it right but just had the bad timing to make his predictions about unsustainable population growth on the eve of the hydrocarbon-fueled Industrial Revolution, which “partially removed the barriers to rapid population growth, wealth and scientific progress.” That put off the inevitable for a couple of centuries, but now, ready or not, the age of cheap hydrocarbons is ending. Grantham’s July letter concludes: “We humans have the brains and the means to reach real planetary sustainability. The problem is with us and our focus on short-term growth and profits, which is likely to cause suffering on a vast scale. With foresight and thoughtful planning, this suffering is completely avoidable.”
...
While it may be too late to “gracefully” deal with depleted resources, climate change and related crises, it’s never too late to mitigate the damage. And, crucially, the consequences will be unevenly distributed, creating angles for you to make money and look out for your interests, however you define them.

Grantham has a fairly standard Malthusian take on the future and an interesting recognition of his status: “The rather burdensome thought is that people won’t listen to environmentalists, but they will sometimes listen to people like me.” Building on this, Grantham thinks economics rather than politics may be the way to address climate change -- particularly for the US. “People are naturally much more responsive to finite resources than they are to climate change. Global warming is bad news. Finite resources is investment advice.” He believes this shift in emphasis plays to Americans’ strength. “Americans are just about the worst at dealing with long-term problems, down there with Uzbekistan, but they respond to a market signal better than almost anyone. They roll the dice bigger and quicker than most.” Grantham says that corporations respond well to this message because they are “persuaded by data,” but American public opinion is harder to move, and contemporary American political culture is practically dataproof.

Here's his assessment of the standard litany of potential problems.

Energy “will give us serious and sustained problems” over the next 50 years as we make the transition from hydrocarbons — oil, coal, gas — to solar, wind, nuclear and other sources, but we’ll muddle through to a solution to Peak Oil and related challenges. Peak Everything Else will prove more intractable for humanity. Metals, for instance, “are entropy at work . . . from wonderful metal ores to scattered waste,” and scarcity and higher prices “will slowly increase forever,” but if we scrimp and recycle, we can make do for another century before tight constraint kicks in.

Agriculture is more worrisome. Local water shortages will cause “persistent irritation” — wars, famines. Of the three essential macro nutrient fertilizers, nitrogen is relatively plentiful and recoverable, but we’re running out of potassium and phosphorus, finite mined resources that are “necessary for all life.” Canada has large reserves of potash (the source of potassium), which is good news for Americans, but 50 to 75 percent of the known reserves of phosphate (the source of phosphorus) are located in Morocco and the western Sahara. Assuming a 2 percent annual increase in phosphorus consumption, Grantham believes the rest of the world’s reserves won’t last more than 50 years, so he expects “gamesmanship” from the phosphate-rich.

And he rates soil erosion as the biggest threat of all. The world’s population could reach 10 billion within half a century — perhaps twice as many human beings as the planet’s overtaxed resources can sustainably support, perhaps six times too many.

And why he thinks the results of the famous Ehrlich-Simon bet didn't really settle the matter; if we extend the original bet past its arbitrary 10-year limit to the present day, Ehrlich wins the five-commodity bet 4-1, and he wins big if the bet is further extended to all important commodities.

“The prices of all important commodities except oil declined for 100 years until 2002, by an average of 70 percent. From 2002 until now, this entire decline was erased by a bigger price surge than occurred during World War II. Statistically, most commodities are now so far away from their former downward trend that it makes it very probable that the old trend has changed — that there is in fact a Paradigm Shift — perhaps the most important economic event since the Industrial Revolution.”
When prices go up and stay up, it’s not a bubble. Prices may always revert to the mean, but the mean can change; that’s a paradigm shift. As Grantham tells it, oil went first. For a century it steadily returned to about $16 a barrel in today’s currency, then in 1974 the mean shifted to about $35, and Grantham believes it has recently doubled again. Metals and nearly everything else — coal, corn, palm oil, soybeans, sugar, cotton — appear to be following suit. “From now on, price pressure and shortages of resources will be a permanent feature of our lives,” he argues. “The world is using up its natural resources at an alarming rate, and this has caused a permanent shift in their value. We all need to adjust our behavior to this new environment. It would help if we did it quickly.”

Stephen Colbert's SuperPak promotes Rick Perry. No I mean Rick Parry

2011-08-13T10:58:00.001-03:00

In the interest of the 24 hour news cycle and all things political, its time to analyze the significance of the first foray into the political realm by Stephen Colbert's superpak, Americans for a Better Tomorrow Tomorrow. The last couple days, these two ads have aired in Iowa.

So, what's up? Why would Colbert have targeted Perry and, in particular, drawn attention to his candidacy and asked people to write in the misspelled name of Rick Parry? And why pick the rather obscure venue of the Iowa straw poll? Answers after the jump ... so read on.

Let's begin with some background about the Iowa straw poll from the Des Moines Register:

The Iowa Republican straw poll has the power to alter the character of the 2012 presidential race even though it’s only a mock election. Candidates who fare poorly — at least in the eyes of the media — can go from Prince Charming to pumpkin faster than you can say Tommy Thompson. And sometimes the fairest of them all is the candidate who comes in second.

There are six declared candidates (Ron Paul, Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Santorum, Tim Pawlenty and Thaddeus McCotter) and two big names not on the ballot: Mitt Romney and Rick Perry.

The no-shows: Candidates who don’t show up for the straw poll generally don’t perform. Campaign organization to drive turnout is vital. But as the national poll leader, Romney could overshadow one or more of the weakest contenders. Huntsman, who hasn’t appeared at all in Iowa, and Gingrich will have a harder time but any of the three could pick up some buzz from a breakout debate performance.

Perry: Another wild card is an organized write-in campaign for Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who’s widely expected to run but isn’t yet in the race. Several PACs have bought ads, phone calls and grassroots efforts encouraging a write-in vote for Perry. Any appreciable show of support will make headlines and steal some attention from the established field.

So, there are two major candidates with differing strategies. Romney, despite winning the poll in 2007, decided to avoid it entirely. His reasoning:

John Stineman, a long-time Iowa GOP strategist, says the problem for Romney is that the expectations game is far tougher than it is for any other candidate. Romney poured tremendous resources into the 2007 straw poll in Iowa. He won, but it was as if he peaked too soon and lost the caucuses to upstart Mike Huckabee five months later.
...
Romney's message is that he's skipping all straw polls, and that he'll use his resources to run a campaign aimed at winning contests where the votes actually count.

In contrast, Perry thinks his decision to skip the poll yet mount a substantial write in campaign provides him with a no-loose strategy for dealing with the expectations issue.

But Perry won’t need to fret about a weak showing. While they’re sweating in Ames, he’ll be stealing national attention by making his first appearance in two other 2012 test states, South Carolina and New Hampshire. And then he’ll swoop into Iowa on Sunday, potentially overshadowing the straw poll winner.

It’s not easy to thread the needle of expectations in Iowa. Perry found a way.

“If he gets good write-in support, that would be a significant boost. If he doesn’t get much, well, he can say, ‘I wasn’t campaigning. I haven’t even declared,’” said Steve Roberts, a former Iowa GOP chairman and longtime activist. “It’s kind of a win-win.”

Perry has no campaign staff in Iowa, but he does have organized supporters.

Americans for Rick Perry — bankrolled by Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons and other longtime Perry backers — has spent weeks talking up the governor at Iowa gun shows, county fairs and local GOP meetings.

The group’s Iowa campaign director, Craig Schoenfeld, who worked on George W. Bush’s successful Iowa caucuses team in 2000, tried to get Perry’s name on the straw poll ballot, but state party rules limit participation to candidates who have formally declared that they’re running.

As a concession, the Iowa GOP agreed to allow write-in votes for the first time since the straw poll began in 1979. That could set up a no-lose situation for Perry.

He didn’t have to spend money preparing for Ames. He won’t risk losing face. Meanwhile, Schoenfeld and a staff of eight, plus a dozen or more volunteers in pro-Perry T-shirts will mingle, hand out literature and try to build some buzz.

Given all this, what exactly is Colbert up to? To date, the Christian Science Monitor is the only media organization to seriously address the issue.

Is Colbert’s main target here the Texas governor, who is widely seen as intending to soon announce that he will shortly announce presidential candidacy plans, at some time in the future?
We’re not entirely sure. The ad seems to be operating on a number of levels of meaning, with a poke at Governor Perry being only one of its points.
There’s the title, first of all. It’s “Episode IV: A New Hope.”
Do we have to say what that refers to? OK, we’ll give you a hint. “Star Wars.” As in, it was the title of the first Star Wars movie, which was called Episode IV, because George Lucas already had the whole thing outlined in his mind, including the part where Harry becomes a Horcrux. Just ask any software engineer you know and they’ll explain it.
Secondly, the ad is really about ads, not about Perry per se. It starts with the quick cuts and sound-of-doom narrator of negative ads, warning of a “money storm” that’s gathering over Iowa. In that, it reminds one of the classic “demon sheep” ad that GOP California Senate hopeful Carly Fiorina ran prior to the 2010 election. (She lost.)
Then the Colbert PAC spot switches to the hopeful-ad style, with small kids saluting the flag, and so forth, and generally giving a feeling that Iowa can be saved by “our Super PAC money,” as opposed to that of the special interests.
And thirdly, there’s the meta-language. “Parry,” of course, means “to fend off,” as in fending off a fencing blow. So perhaps the Colbert folks here are subtly telling us all to fend off the corrupting influence of all partisan political speech, and make up our own minds about what direction the nation should follow, instead.

This is fine, but I think there is even more going on that they've suggested. Most obviously, he's continuing the process of drawing attention to the role of money in current US elections. In this sense the ads are a continuation of Colbert's highly publicized effort to create and get approval for his own superpak. In addition, from a purely self-interested perspective, he's flexing his pak's muscle and thus giving people an additional reason to donate.

But those factors don't touch the political implications of the ad. A number of commentators have suggested that, by drawing attention to Perry's write in campaign, the ads will actually help Perry. That seems unlikely to me. My sense is that the master of irony has found a way to out-fox Perry's no-loose strategy by creating an inevitable confusion between write in votes for Perry and Parry. No matter what the result, the precise number of votes for Perry will now be in doubt. While unlikely, there could even be a Florida like recount -- complete with dueling attorneys -- trying to distinguish "Perry" from "Parry", which should not count at all, etc. There is also the unlikely possibility that Parry could out poll Perry. Now that would be a straw poll to remember!

Global Economy: Are we approaching Peak Standard of Living?

2011-08-11T08:00:00.001-03:00

Back in 1956, M. King Hubbert advanced the basic idea behind peak oil theory: the recognition that for any given geographical area, from an individual oil-producing region to the planet as a whole, the rate of petroleum production tends to follow a bell-shaped curve. For example, the chart contrasts Hubbert's prediction for the continental US against observed data. The implications of the idea -- that once a peak occurs the slide downward is inexorable and unstoppable -- have resulted in lots of attempts to determine the peaks of various regions and the globe as a whole.

Hubbert, while famous for applying the idea to oil, viewed it as a process applicable to a wide variety of natural resources. Indeed, he got the idea from an study of coal resources done in the 1920's. Thus, not surprisingly, the idea has spread to other areas. The most expansive treatment occurs in Richard Heinberg's Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines which argues that the twenty-first century ushered in an era of declines, in a number of crucial parameters.

While peak oil types have spent lots of time and energy examining the relationship between energy and the economy, the bulk of the analyses are similar to this (where they measure economic activity in terms of gross domestic product (GDP) or this (where economic drivers such as productivity are the focus). But, at the experiential level of the individual, a much better approximation of the key economic measure is not total GDP but GDP per capita (per person).

What follows are figures calculated from Angus Maddison's annual data for worldwide GDP. They show that, despite the rapid expansion of the BRIC economies, the global rate of economic growth since 1974 is LESS than it was from 1951-1973.

			per capita GDP growth rate
Years			World Average	World, excluding China
1951	-	1973	2.9%	3.0%
1974	-	2003	1.6%	1.1%

1951	-	1960	2.8%	2.7%
1961	-	1970	3.0%	3.1%
1971	-	1973	3.1%	3.2%
1974	-	1980	1.4%	1.3%
1981	-	1990	1.3%	1.0%
1991	-	2000	1.6%	1.1%
2001	-	2003	2.5%	1.0%

So we see that GDP per head grew at a pretty constant average annual rate of about 3% per year through 1973. Toward the end of 1973, the global crisis erupted. Since that point, GDP per head has again grown at a pretty constant average annual rate. But that rate of growth is only slightly more than half the rate during the postwar boom, or slightly more than 1/3 the rate during the postwar boom if China (with its dubious official economic data) is excluded.

What the data show is a clear slowing in the rate of growth -- the global standard of living is still increasing (the values are still positive), but the rate of increase in per capita GDP is less than it was prior to 1974. Placed in the context of peak oil theory, this suggests that the global economy -- understood as the average global standard of living -- is nearing its peak.If you look at the graph above, you will see an S shape leading up to the peak -- growth begins slow, then there is a period of rapid growth (where the curve rises steeply) and, just before the peak, you get another inflection (change in the rate) as the curve flattens out near the peak. It is this flattening out immediately prior to the peak that Maddison's data captures.

(Technical note: Angus Maddison's annual data for worldwide GDP, which span the 1950-2003 period, are available at www.ggdc.net/maddison/Historical_Statistics/horizontal-file_03-2007.xls. Maddison is the world's foremost expert on economic growth and its measurement. His GDP figures are measured in 1990 international dollars (Geary-Khamis dollars). Above, the average annual growth rate for each period is the mean of the annual growth rates; the results are almost identical if one estimates a continuous growth rate throughout the period based on the start-of-period and end-of-period figures.)

Panarchy, the President, and a Whack-a-mole approach to countering terrorism

2011-08-09T08:00:00.004-03:00

The Foreign Policy article Mission Not Accomplished disputes the claim by US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta that al Qaeda's defeat is "within reach."

Although U.S. counterterrorism efforts have indeed substantially weakened the organization, Panetta's comments miss the bigger point about the terrorist threat facing the United States. Over the past decade, that threat has morphed from one led by a hierarchical al Qaeda organization into something much more diffuse, with a greater presence online, that no longer depends on orders from senior leaders in Pakistan.
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Viewing the terrorism threat as solely embodied by al Qaeda as a discrete and hierarchical organization is both inaccurate and dangerous. The more important metric is the popularity of the Islamist movement generally and the jihadi movement specifically. Although it is difficult to measure, its online presence has undoubtedly grown rapidly over recent years. The jihadists' media capabilities have expanded considerably over the past 10 years, and that content can easily be found across the Internet, even on the most mainstream of websites.
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Al Qaeda as we knew it 10 years ago may be no more. But at the rate it has been adapting, it seems likely the United States will be at war with this enemy for another decade. Whether individuals can be mobilized by AQAP's media or that of other jihadi outfits to carry out effective attacks on the United States without training overseas is the most important question in counterterrorism and will likely remain so for years to come.
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On Aug. 3 the White House took a good first step in creating a framework to counter violent jihad, in releasing "Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism." But it is just that: a framework. Ten years after 9/11, this document marks the U.S. government's first concerted policy effort at countering radicalization. Certainly, it is coming years too late, but it is also short on detail and built largely around the concept of community engagement. Community engagement has been the centerpiece of British and Australian efforts to counter radicalization for at least the last four years. What those programs lacked was an element that confronted the ideology of militant Islam, at the national level and online. Emphasizing local community efforts is a logical endeavor, but the jihadi message is global and focused on Muslim suffering abroad, not on local issues in London, Melbourne, or Chicago. Eventually, Washington will have to confront the underlying ideology of militant Islam, not just its byproducts.

In other words, Al Qaeda hasn't decentralized so much as it has franchised. There remains a global ideology. Or, in panarchy terms, the network has presence at the local level (individual cells), the national level (loose network within a particular region) and the global level (typically more in terms of ideology than direct interpersonal contact). As the article points out, the focus on (local) community engagement fails to confront the ideology of militant Islam either at the national level or online. Or, to render the problem in panarchy terms, the approach omits consideration of cross-scale interactions -- particularly the remember interaction whereby lower-level processes (local organization) are rejuvenated through access to resources from the higher levels. In practical terms, you can't only play whack-a-mole at the local level and be successful.

Bodies, Big Brains and Regulatory Reform

2011-08-08T08:00:00.004-03:00

When I started this post, it was just a listing of two things I found interesting. Then I realized they were connected. So... what are the two articles?

A Body Fit for a Freaky-Big Brain, summarizing research on the anatomical adaptations necessary to accommodate our over sized brains -- which use 20 times as much energy per pound as muscle tissue. Among the factors identified: reduction in the amount of gut tissue (also very energy intensive); shifting of diet to a higher energy cuisine based on seeds, tubers and meats; and a genetic adaptation in glucose transporters that resulted in extra molecular pumps to funnel sugar into the brain, while starving muscles by giving them fewer transporters.
Individuals interested in takes on the financial collapse will want to check out Capital Inadequacies The Dismal Failure of the Basel Regime of Bank Capital Regulation. Put out by the libertarian Cato Institute, the paper provides 40 pages or so of analysis aimed at a) documenting that regulatory solutions to financial matters are misplaced because regulatory apparatus is subject to capture and b) advocating a solution based on financial laissez faire.

The solution is free banking or financial laissez faire. The state would withdraw entirely from the financial system and, in particular, abolish capital adequacy regulation, deposit insurance, financial regulation, and the central bank, as well as repudiate future bailouts (and especially the doctrine of Too Big to Fail). ... Such systems have worked well in the past, and reforms along these lines would take the United States a long way back to its banking system of a century ago, in which banks were tightly governed and moral hazards and risk taking were well controlled because those who took the risks bore their consequences.

Now we can debate the empirical validity of these claims -- the individuals who lost all their savings in the bank runs of the Great Depression probably wouldn't agree that "those who took the risks bore their consequences" -- but that isn't the point.

Compare the view of systems and adaptation in the two scenarios. In the first article the "system" is the human body. The basic argument is that modification of one major subsystem (the brain) necessitated modification to other parts of the system in order for the "big brained" version of humans to survive. Contrast this with the view of the economic system advanced in the Cato Institute analysis. Over the past century the economy has changed dramatically. The growth of financial services as the mainstay of many advanced economies is the equivalent of the emergence of big brains -- one particular part of the system is becoming unusually important. A century ago, advanced economies were based on manufacturing and agriculture. Today, these sectors play a comparatively minor role and financial services (conventionally rendered as Wall Street) rule. But, rather than recognizing that change in one part of the system requires an adjustment in other parts of the system, the Cato paper argues for stability in the other aspects of the system (as expressed in the desire for a banking system similar to what was in place in 1910).

There is also a confusion Cato Institute paper about the role of organization (regulation) as it characterizes complex systems, but getting into that would be another (lengthy and necessarily technical) post.

Oh Canada, and other quick takes

2011-08-06T08:00:00.000-03:00

The Guardian reports on unprecedented lobbying efforts by the Canadian government aimed at maintaining an export market for oil from the tar sands.
The lobbying effort, which includes dozens of meetings between Canadian and British government "representatives" and oil executives, was triggered by the release of a consultation document in July 2009 by the European commission, which attempted to definitively assess the "well-to-wheels" carbon intensity of different oils. The document attributed a "default" carbon value for traditional fuels of 85.8g of carbon dioxide per mega joule of energy for traditional oil and 107g_CO2/MJ for fuel derived from tar sands.
The Canadians have managed to delay the EU's original deadline of January 2011 for confirming baseline default values despite new peer-reviewed studies to support the European position. Darek Urbaniak, extractives campaign coordinator at Friends of the Earth Europe, said: "It is unprecedented that a government of one of the most developed countries can devise and implement a strategy that involves undermining independent science and deliberate misleading of its international partners."
Andrew Revkin has an interesting summary of material related to the Somalia famine in A Climate Scientist's view of a Famine's Roots. Among the problems identified -- a faulty IPCC projection.
Funk says the 2007 projection of wetter conditions led some agencies to plan the expansion of agriculture in the region — plans that could be devastated if drier conditions prevail, as his work implies.
Individuals interested in collapse will want to click their way over to Foreign Policy -- where the current issue has several articles on the collapse of the Soviet Union, including the cover story Everything You Think You Know About the Collapse of the Soviet Union Is Wrong. And why it matters today in a new age of revolution.

Padgett, Part III: Autocatalysis in the Economy and in Persons

2011-08-04T08:00:00.000-03:00

This is the third in a series dealing with one of the most interesting ideas I've come across in a decade: the theory outlined in John Padgett's The Emergence of Markets and Organizations. For an overview of the book and description of the network perspective, see Part I. Part II provides a concrete illustration of the approach, the emergence of the partnership structure in Renaissance Italy. This post summarizes the chemical process (autocatalysis) that Padgett uses as a conceptual model for understanding the production of goods and people. This post begins with a description of autocatalytic networks in chemistry and then applies the concept to economic production and, finally, to the production of persons.

What does the network perspective imply? A shift from thinking about objects and actions to a focus on flows.

Human beings ... appear to us to be solid and sturdy objects. But viewed as chemistry, our bodies are just a complex set of biochemical reactions, which reproduce themselves over time, given appropriate inputs from other organisms. Our self-image of temporal continuity notwithstanding, we are not the coherently bounded objects that we think we are, but a chemical process that renews itself for a while. From the chemical perspective, life itself can be defined as an interacting ensemble of chemicals that reproduces itself, in the face of turnover of its parts.

Organizational actors are no different. The production and distribution of goods by firms are only half of what is accomplished in markets. Firms are also produced and transformed by the goods and people passing through them. Social structures should be viewed more as vortexes in the flow of social life than as architectural buildings. In organisms, social or biological, rules of action and patterns of interaction persist and reproduce in the face of continual turnover in component parts, be these cells, molecules, principals or agents. In the flow of people through organizations, the collectivity is not renegotiated anew. Rather, within constraints, component parts are transformed and molded into ongoing streams of action.

What is an Autocatalytic Network?

The simplest self-replicating molecular system consists of just one kind of molecule that makes copies of itself. Chemists call this kind of molecule autocatalytic—it literally brings about its own transformation. In the right chemical environment, with the right combination of smaller chemical compounds to act as food, a single autocatalytic molecule will increase in a geometrical expansion. They are able to do this because they are self-complementary. Complementary molecules fit snugly together because of their matching shapes and the arrangement of their chemical bonds. The base pairs of DNA are probably the most famous complementary pairs of molecules.

An autocatalytic network refers not to a single self-replicating molecule but, rather, a network of several interlinked chemical processes that, taken together, are self-replicating. The best known example of an autocatalytic network is the citric acid cycle (Krebs Cycle) involved in cellular metabolism. The key elements of this process, diagrammed below, include:

A positive feedback cycle of chemical reactions A->B->C->D->A in which the endproduct in the chain becomes the input into the process. In the citric acid cycle, oxaloacetate (chemical A) is combined with a two-carbon acetyl group from acetyl-CoA to produce chemical B and, following a further series of chemical transformations, until at the end of each cycle, the four-carbon oxaloacetate has been regenerated, and the cycle continues
The network cycle is a network of transformation, not a network of transmission. Chemical's aren't transported from one location to another like a sack of potatos but, rather, modified at each step in the process.

Every cycle requires two kinds of input: energy (typically chemical energy) and feedstocks of building-block molecules, such as carbon dioxide, ammonia, and water. The goal in metabolism is to capture as much energy as possible and use it to make new molecules that can reinforce the cycle. The cycle must consist of a sequence of progressively larger molecules. Each molecule in the cycle combines with carbon dioxide or water or some other small molecule to make the next molecule in the cycle. The largest should be able to split into two smaller molecules, both of which are also in the cycle. By constantly building up to a larger molecule that splits in two, the number of cycles keeps doubling, and the system grows.

Abstracted from its chemical origins, autocatalysis can be defined as a set of nodes and transformations in which all nodes can be re-created through transformations among other nodes in the set. In the original biological context, nodes are chemicals, and transformations are chemical reactions.
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Given autocatalysis, reproduction can be sustained even in the face of turnover in network components: Destroy a segment of the network, and the autocatalytic network often (not always) can reconstruct its deleted segment. Self-repair is a key dynamic feature of autocatalytic sets. Autocatalysis, in other words, is the network equivalent to organic life itself. In this context, the origin-of-life problem is finding prebiotic experimental conditions under which an initial random set of chemicals can self-organize and reproduce itself into an autocatalytic set.

Autocatalytic Networks as Economic Production

Padgett then extends this concept to the realm of economic production. The result is an emphasis on production rules and product exchanges. Economies in this biochemical view are more like ecological food webs, or Leontief input-output supply and consumption chains, or an economy wide cradle-to-grave analysis, than they are like neoclassical markets.

There, products are like chemicals, and production rules are like chemical reactions. Actors are holding bins for production rules, through which products flow and are transformed. Economic “life” is the self-organization, through differential reproduction, of technological webs of production rules and product exchanges. These wend themselves through multiple surviving heterogeneous firms, thereby making those firms.
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This chemical perspective can be applied to the analysis of co-evolution of products and firms through the following analogy: Skills, like chemical reactions, are rules that transform products into other products. Products, like chemicals, are transformed by skills. Firms, like organisms, are containers of skills that transform products. Trade, like food, passes transformed products around through exchange networks, renewing skills and thereby firms in the process. In the macroeconomic aggregate, product inputs flow into, and outputs flow out of, this trading network of firms and skills. Economic ‘life’ exists if an autocatalytic network of interlinked skills and products can emerge and renew itself, in the face of continual turnover and ‘death’ in its component skills and products.
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(M)ultiple, overlapping production networks emerge spontaneously, without requiring any intervention by the experimenter. The emergence of multiple, differentiated yet partially overlapping domains of activity (the planes of figure 1), in other words, is not as hard to explain as one might think. “Domains” are sets of production rules and products that are autocatalytic. “Overlapping domains” means that some rules and products are shared. Multiple overlapping domains emerge in autocatalytic models because shared rules and products create synergistic feedbacks – both positive for stimulation and negative for regulation – between individual autocatalytic production networks. Because of such synergistic feedbacks, multiple networks that self-organize are more reproductively resilient than any one network alone.

Note the implications for understanding change:

Actor innovation or novelty is a new partition of production rules or communication protocols into organizations or people. Organizational selection occurs whenever a new partition is reproducible through product and informational feedback with other interacting organizations of rules and protocols. Organizational novelty that survives without disturbing other partitions we label an organizational innovation. Organizational novelty that tips into disrupting other partitions, which collectively find their own (modified) autocatalysis, we label a systemic invention.

Autocatalytic Networks and the Production of Persons
Padgett's conception of persons is rather unusual. Rather than render them in traditional sociological terms -- as corporeal entities with agency and embedded in structure, Padgett's autocatalytic view emphasizes production rules and communication protocols. Biological organisms are not fixed entities; they are autocatalytic networks of chemical transformations, which continually reconstruct both themselves and their physical containers.

A (social) person is the entire repertoire or set of production rules and communication protocols contained within the human being. A role is the subset of those rules and protocols used in the domain in which that person participates. Careers are sequences of roles that a person moves through in the course of his or her history of experiences within that domain. Biographies are sequences of persons that a human being moves through in the course of his or her life, in multiple domains. Relational exchange is the passage of products between rules (contained within roles). But constitutive ties or partnerships, be they economic, political or kinship, enable the passage of rules, both production and communication, between persons. Hence biographies and careers are the structured iteration of constitutive ties. To fix this idea, refer again back to figure 1. If figure 1 is a snapshot of a multiple-network system in cross-section, then careers and biographies are the temporal links that connect a series of such snapshots together into a movie.

Here is a nice illustration of the differences between the two autocatalytic levels (individual and organizational).

As one illustration of these two levels of analysis, think of science as a production network of ideas created by and flowing between theories and evidentiary procedures as production rules. Autocatalysis at this production level means whether the flow of ideas generated by the theories and evidentiary procedures is sufficient to reproduce the use of those theories and procedures. The community of scientists, at the next level of analysis, is a communication network of people who discuss and do science. Autocatalysis at this actor level entails the recruitment and transformation of sufficient people into the community to reproduce its array of scientists, in the face of turnover in personnel. Science and scientists co-evolve. To be sure, science has to work in both its internal and its external selection environments to survive. But since there are many sciences that can work, communities of scientists built around their science regulate and steer (without dictating) the development of science. Because of co-evolution between science and scientists, the evolutionary trajectory of science is neither infinitely plastic and malleable, nor predetermined and teleological. Scientific trajectories are a fan of possible futures, just like biological evolution itself.

In sum, Padgett deploys a distinctive view of traditional "social objects" -- organizations, individuals, governments, etc.

In this book, we take as our mantra: in the short run, actors create relations; in the long run, relations create actors. In the short run, all objects – physical, biological or social – appear fixed, atomic. But in the long run, on different time scales, all objects evolve, that is, they emerge, transform and disappear. To understand the genesis of objects, we argue, requires a relational and historical turn of mind. Namely, on longer time frames, transformational relations come first, and actors congeal out of iterations of such constitutive relations. If actors – organizations, people or states – are not to be assumed as given, then one must search for some deeper transformational dynamic out of which they emerge. In any application domain, without a theory of the dynamics of object construction, the scientific problem of where novelty comes from remains insolvable.
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The rub is that people die. This means that highly developed persons, upon whom the system depends, disappear. And that near empty persons come in to take their place. This implies that biographies and careers have to be structured to keep production autocatalysis going in spite of these routine disruptions. We find in our cases that uncovering the patterns of how people flow through the organizations they create, reconstructing each other through learning as they meet, is revealing for understanding both the mechanics of network reproduction (“regime stability”) and the mechanics of network tipping (“organizational invention”). The challenge is to discover how patterns of biographical and career intersection produce these observed effects.

World's strongest banks

2011-08-02T08:00:00.000-03:00

There are two basic explanations for the recent global financial collapse. The first, the Marxist account, emphasizes the role of capitalist accumulation and, in particular, the ability of the financial classes to profit from asset bubbles. The second account emphasizes complexity and uncertainty. According to this account, lax regulation was a major contributing factor. In light of these competing accounts it is interesting to look at the information below, identifying banks in Singapore and Canada as the world's strongest. Both locations came through the crisis comparatively unscathed and both are noted for their relatively high level of bank regulation.

Reviews: Society in an Age of Uncertainty

2011-08-01T08:00:00.003-03:00

Society, uncertainty, and three books that link the two as reviewed by Tom Slee at Whimsley

1) Everything is Obvious, by Duncan J. Watts

2) Adapt, by Tim Harford

3) Future Babble, by Dan Gardner

Co-evolution from another angle

2011-07-30T08:00:00.001-03:00

As exemplified by this Economist cover article, the concept of the Anthropocene is getting lots of attention. While exemplifying the idea of co-evolution, that is that natural and social systems are engaged in a dance of mutual influence and shifting adaptive landscapes -- the primary focus is on how humans have altered the biosphere.

A recent NYTimes article takes a different approach, documenting various animal adaptations to the urban environment.

White-footed mice, stranded on isolated urban islands, are evolving to adapt to urban stress. Fish in the Hudson have evolved to cope with poisons in the water. Native ants find refuge in the median strips on Broadway. And more familiar urban organisms, like bedbugs, rats and bacteria, also mutate and change in response to the pressures of the metropolis. In short, the process of evolution is responding to New York and other cities the way it has responded to countless environmental changes over the past few billion years. Life adapts.

Punctuated Politics and the obligatory debt limit post

2011-07-28T11:20:00.000-03:00

In light of the current food fight, see this discussion porting the idea of punctuated equilibria from evolution to politics.

Paleoclimate evidence on rapidity of climate change

2011-07-28T08:00:00.002-03:00

How rapidly will climate change occur? Traditionally, the changes were expected to be linear -- that as the amount of carbon in the atmosphere went up, the temperature would rise proportionately. Over the past few decades, this view has increasingly been replaced with the recognition of tipping points and the possibility of comparatively rapid change. James Hansen and Makiko Sato have recently produced a pair of papers -- one technical and the other focused on a more general audience -- describing their recent findings suggesting that the bulk of change from certain feedback processes will occur in a period of decades rather than centuries. Here is the introduction from the non-technical version: Earth's Climate History: Implications for Tomorrow

The past is the key to the future. Contrary to popular belief, climate models are not the principal basis for assessing human-made climate effects. Our most precise knowledge comes from Earth's paleoclimate, its ancient climate, and how it responded to past changes of climate forcings, including atmospheric composition. Our second essential source of information is provided by global observations today, especially satellite observations, which reveal how the climate system is responding to rapid human-made changes of atmospheric composition, especially atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2). Models help us interpret past and present climate changes, and, in so far as they succeed in simulating past changes, they provide a tool to help evaluate the impacts of alternative policies that affect climate.

Paleoclimate data yield our best assessment of climate sensitivity, which is the eventual global temperature change in response to a specified climate forcing. A climate forcing is an imposed change of Earth's energy balance, as may be caused, for example, by a change of the sun's brightness or a human-made change of atmospheric CO2. For convenience scientists often consider a standard forcing, doubled atmospheric CO2, because that is a level of forcing that humans will impose this century if fossil fuel use continues unabated.

We show from paleoclimate data that the eventual global warming due to doubled CO2 will be about 3°C (5.4°F) when only so-called fast feedbacks have responded to the forcing. Fast feedbacks are changes of quantities such as atmospheric water vapor and clouds, which change as climate changes, thus amplifying or diminishing climate change. Fast feedbacks come into play as global temperature changes, so their full effect is delayed several centuries by the thermal inertia of the ocean, which slows full climate response. However, about half of the fast-feedback climate response is expected to occur within a few decades. Climate response time is one of the important 'details' that climate models help to elucidate.

For those who want the technical details, here is the abstract of the scientific publication.

Paleoclimate data help us assess climate sensitivity and potential human-made climate effects. We conclude that Earth in the warmest interglacial periods of the past million years was less than 1{\deg}C warmer than in the Holocene. Polar warmth in these interglacials and in the Pliocene does not imply that a substantial cushion remains between today's climate and dangerous warming, but rather that Earth is poised to experience strong amplifying polar feedbacks in response to moderate global warming. Thus goals to limit human-made warming to 2{\deg}C are not sufficient - they are prescriptions for disaster. Ice sheet disintegration is nonlinear, spurred by amplifying feedbacks. We suggest that ice sheet mass loss, if warming continues unabated, will be characterized better by a doubling time for mass loss rate than by a linear trend. Satellite gravity data, though too brief to be conclusive, are consistent with a doubling time of 10 years or less, implying the possibility of multi-meter sea level rise this century. Observed accelerating ice sheet mass loss supports our conclusion that Earth's temperature now exceeds the mean Holocene value. Rapid reduction of fossil fuel emissions is required for humanity to succeed in preserving a planet resembling the one on which civilization developed.

Padgett, Part II: Emergence of Partnership

2011-07-26T08:00:00.006-03:00

A previous post described the basic outline of one of the most important ideas I've come across in the past decade: Padgett's use of multi-network perspective to explain organizational invention. This post provides a concrete illustration of that perspective in action through the emergence of a system of economic partnership in Renaissance Florence. Future posts, exploring the theory in more abstract terms, will refer back to this material as a way of making the ideas more understandable. For more details .... read on.

Florentine Italy was the birthplace of a novel, and profoundly important, organizational form: the partnership system. Crudely put, the business model shifted from a) one general company run by a family and delivering a diversity of products (think the classic general store found in the western US during the 1880s) to b) a variety of specialty stores focusing on particular product -- hardware store, dry goods store, vegetable stand -- with individual managers and a common ownership.

The partnership system was an innovation in company ownership in which a single controlling partner (or a small number of partners), if he did not manage the branch himself, made a set of legally separate partnership contracts with branch managers in different locations and/or industries. This new “network-star” ownership structure largely displaced earlier legally unitary companies, often built collectively by patrilineage families, which were common in the early 1300s (Sapori 1926; Renouard 1941). Viewed formally, this splintering of a unitary company into overlapping parts was decentralization because it allowed various branches and business markets to be managed separately, through legally independent account books. Viewed operationally, this devolution was centralization because it dissolved unitary committees of numerous owner directors and substituted dominant ownership by just one or at most a few persons (de Roover 1966, p. 78).

The shift was significant for two reasons: "it protected owners (to some extent) against the unlimited-liability risk of complete financial ruin, and it easily allowed diversification into multiple product markets."

In the early 1300s in Florence there was a stark division between local and international finances. Local banking (money changing, deposit banking) was provided the guild dominated cambio bankers while international trade (primarily in woolen cloth) was dominated by high-status merchants organized into family firms. Following the Ciompi revolt of 1378, the cambio bankers were systematically "pulled up into the “jet stream” of international trading, thereby injecting domestic banking organizational forms and accounting practices into international trading. ... The new partnership systems were constructed by cambio bankers reaching overseas to construct new trading branches abroad." Many of the cambio bankers also became city counselors.

As cambio bankers were transported into new settings, both economic and political, they brought with them their old master-apprentice logics of contracts and careers but then adapted these to the new international trading setting, blending with the patrilineage family logics already there. The result was a modularized hybrid—short-term contracts with both family and nonfamily branch managers—in other words, the partnership system.

Padgett treats the emergence of the partnership system as a corollary of elite transformation associated with the Ciompi revolt in which a "republican oligarchy" replaced the "guild corporatism" of the previous era. This

brought economic partnerships into tighter correlation with elite marriages. And this in turn established sinews for the percolation of partnership-system economic techniques, like current accounts, out into the broader network structure of the ruling social elite at large, making that elite itself more mercantile in character. For markets, this new correlation of partnership with marriage provided social foundations for fiducia (trust) within the merchant community to make the credit system function. The final product, on the one hand, was a vibrant financial system that dominated European international finance for a century and, on the other hand, was an intensely status-conscious but politically permeable merchant elite that created generalists (“Renaissance men”) for whom economics, politics, family, art, and philosophy were all refractions of each other.
....
The “rise of financial capitalism” for us is not a grand teleological process of inevitable modernization. It was rooted instead in particular places and histories, which refashioned their own multiple-network social structures in crucial punctuated-equilibrium moments. Florence was unusually creative in part because of its tumultuous political history, which repeatedly transposed and refunctionalized its underlying social networks. Florentine elites invented not because they wanted to, but because they had to, conservatively to preserve their threatened positions. Naturally there is more to explaining organizational invention than political turmoil, but in the case of Renaissance Florence that was the core mechanism that recomposed its economic, political, and kinship networks into tipping.

Jefferson vs Webster: America's First Global Warming Debate

2011-07-24T08:00:00.001-03:00

Interesting article in the Smithsonian describing an early debate over human impact on the climate. Jefferson, measured the temperature on his farm twice daily for 50 years.

In his 1787 book, Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson launched into a discussion of the climate of both his home state and America as a whole. Near the end of a brief chapter addressing wind currents, rain and temperature, he presented a series of tentative conclusions: “A change in our climate…is taking place very sensibly. Both heats and colds are become much more moderate within the memory of the middle-aged. Snows are less frequent and less deep….The elderly inform me the earth used to be covered with snow about three months in every year. The rivers, which then seldom failed to freeze over in the course of the winter, scarcely ever do so now.” Concerned about the destructive effects of this warming trend, Jefferson noted how “an unfortunate fluctuation between heat and cold” in the spring has been “very fatal to fruits.”

Jefferson was affirming the long-standing conventional wisdom of the day. For more than two millennia, people had lamented that deforestation had resulted in rising temperatures.

Daniel Webster, best known for his dictionary, disputed the argument -- both in its traditional anecdotal/historical form and in the more empirical/scientific version that Jefferson and others made subsequent to the invention of the thermometer.

Webster concluded by rejecting the crude warming theory of Jefferson and Williams in favor of a more subtle rendering of the data. The conversion of forests to fields, he acknowledged, has led to some microclimatic changes—namely, more windiness and more variation in winter conditions. But while snow doesn’t stay on the ground as long, that doesn’t necessarily mean the country as a whole gets less snowfall each winter: “We have, in the cultivated districts, deep snow today, and none tomorrow; but the same quantity of snow falling in the woods, lies there till spring….This will explain all the appearances of the seasons without resorting to the unphilosophical hypothesis of a general increase in heat.”

Webster's arguments basically ended the debate and the idea that human activity significantly affected the climate was forgotten until the middle of the 20th century.

On badgers, coyotes, humans and the evolution of cooperation

2011-07-23T08:00:00.000-03:00

A number of years ago scientists documented a strange cooperative hunting relationship among badgers and coyotes. While they are natural enemies -- coyotes sometimes eat badgers, it turns out they both eat squirrels, marmots and prairie dogs. Thus, rather than face each other down they, on occasion, cooperatively hunt together in order to take advantage of the particular skill set each animal possesses.

Badgers and Coyotes catch ground squirrels differently. Badgers usually dig them up, coyotes pounce on them or chase them. Ground squirrels often escape a digging badger by leaving their underground burrows and running away across the surface of the ground. These same ground squirrels escape coyotes by running into burrows and disappearing underground. A ground squirrel will theoretically have less chance to escape a badger and a coyote hunting together. If it runs away from the coyote by going underground into a burrow, the badger will dig it up. If it leaves a burrow to escape the badger, the coyote will run after it and catch it.

These cooperative relations are not short term -- out of 214 observed associations in one study, over half of them lasted more than an hour and 2 lasted for over five hours. A brief video on the phenomena is here.

This is just one of a wide range of phenomena discussed in The Unselfish Gene, an interesting article by Yochai Benkler author of the soon to be released The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest.

Padgett, Emergence of Organizations and Markets, Part I

2011-07-21T08:00:00.007-03:00

I'm an idea junkie. I have fairly diverse interests and scan lots of things. But, for the most part, the things I come across strike me as either generally similar to this or that idea I've come across before or interesting and novel but focused on a matter that isn't terribly consequential.

It is very rare that I come across something that strikes me as fundamental -- in the sense that it addresses a deep problem in a novel way that makes intuitive sense to me. I count three instances in the past decade:
1) Holling's conceptualization of the operation of systems in terms of panarchy.
2) Abbott's description of the process of knowledge change.
3) The ideas discussed in the rest of this post.

How do new organizational forms originate? As a visit to the Oil Drum, or virtually any other major environmental website shows, you see lots of calls for dramatic social transformation. And you can also find good studies documenting historical change in organizational form, for example Chandler's analysis of capitalist managerial organization. But these works, in a Darwinian sense, focus on the selection process -- why a novel form gets perpetuated -- rather than the innovation process -- how the novel form originated. While there is some discussion of where novel ideas come from, the focus tends to be on technological innovation. In many ways it makes sense to speak of bureaucracy as a technology, but it is profoundly problematic to think that the process of social innovation is just a mirror of the process of technological innovation. So, to summarize, a general recognition of the need for social innovation -- that is the development of new forms of social organization -- coupled with virtually no understanding of how novel forms of social organization are generated.

Into this gaping hole walks John Padgett and his collaborators with their forthcoming Princeton University Press title The Emergence of Organizations and Markets. In a work of stunning scope, they lay out a general theory of organizational innovation and then proceed to provide a diverse set of illustrative examples covering the sweep of modern history -- from early capitalism (the emergence of merchant banks, the partnership system, global markets and the joint stock system), thru studies of communist economic transition (China, USSR, Hungary), to the emergence of new linkages between science and capitalism (e.g., the emergence of Silicon Valley and other high tech research network clusters). While the book focuses on economic organization, there is no obvious reason the theory wouldn't apply to other types of organization.

In essence, Padgett translates the biochemical theory of autocatalysis, which Stuart Kauffman has argued provides a model for abiogenesis (the emergence of biological life out of inorganic matter), into a form useful for understanding the emergence of organizations. There are three key parts. First, there is the emergence of novelty. In the abiogenesis example, this would be the emergence of life out of inorganic chemicals. Second, there is the requirement of persistence through time. If life emerged, but failed to persist over many generations, then its development would be transient and not terribly important. Third, the new development must be consequential. The emergence of a single-celled living organism that persisted for millions of years but remained the only form of living organism, as significant as that example of life may be, is not as consequential as the development of a wide variety of diverse living organisms (cats, dogs, whales, people, birds, insects, etc.). I'm not talking about the value of the different organisms themselves, but rather the importance of a process which spills over into other areas and generates greater and greater variety.

In the process, Padgett comes up with a new way of thinking about individual humans: not as static, bounded objects but, rather, as dynamic flows of chemicals, energy and information embedded in networks. The implications for scholars interested in understanding conjoined socio-ecological systems, which have been plagued by the attempt to integrate ecology's focus on flows (energy flows and biogeochemical cycles) with approaches to human systems that emphasize the primacy of individuals and their actions, are hard to overestimate.

Here is how they organize the theoretical discussion:

First, we describe the problem of organizational novelty in the context of multiple social networks. Next, we explain our core dynamic motor of autocatalysis, at the levels of both chemical and economic production. Then, we extend the biochemical concept of autocatalysis to encompass the social production of persons. Fourth, we describe six network mechanisms of organizational genesis that we have discovered in our case studies. Fifth, we identify seven mechanisms of multiple-network catalysis that turned these organizational innovations into systemic inventions. Finally, we discuss the important outstanding issue of structural vulnerability to network tipping. This question of poisedness, for us, is the next research horizon.

There is way too much here for one post. So, there will be several spread out over time. If you can't wait, the key theoretical chapter is here. Padgett's homepage has links to other material, both published and unpublished, including several other chapters from the forthcoming book. For an extended overview, including description of the multi-network perspective, read on ....

The argument begins by distinguishing between innovation and invention and explaining why that is crucial.

innovations improve on existing ways (i.e, activities, conceptions and purposes) of doing things, while inventions change the ways things are done. Under this definition, the key to classifying something as an invention is the degree to which it reverberates out to alter the interacting system of which it is a part. ... But to make progress in understanding discontinuous change we need to embed our analysis of transformation in the routine dynamics of actively self-reproducing social contexts, where constitutive elements and relations are generated and reinforced.

From there, it turns to a network description of a social system.

In a crosssectional view, all social systems look like this to a social-network analyst. Each plane in the figure represents a different domain of activity. In the illustrated example of Renaissance Florence, these are the economic domain, where goods are produced and exchanged among companies; the kinship domain, where babies are produced through marriage among families; and the political domain, where deals are made among factions within the state. Other domains not shown, like religion and the military, could be added. Solid lines represent the collective units (or "constitutive ties”) of cooperation or partnership in production – namely, firms, families and factions, respectively. Such organizational units are called constitutive because they teach the people participating in them production and communication skills. Circles are placed around these units when they become corporate or formal, through having collective names. Dotted lines represent exchanges (or “resource flows”) between production units – namely, products, wives and deals, respectively. Markets are sets of dotted lines. The people participating in organizations and markets can be categorized in various ways, through either personal attributes or institutional memberships, as shown. ....
Vertical lines in figure 1, connecting superimposed dots, are people. Each dot in a plane is a role. In the economic domain, for example, the person may be a businessman; in the kinship domain, he may be a father; in the political domain, he may be a politician – all depending upon how he is attached to others in that domain.

In short, Padgett renders social systems as a set of networks linked together by individuals who are themselves embedded into multiple networks. The key thing to realize is that the vast majority of social science research looks at one network domain at a time. As a result, it remains blind to interactions between different types of network. It is these cross-network interactions that become the focus of Padgett's analysis.

Our interest is how multiple-network topologies can shape the dynamics of emergence and evolution of organizational actors over time. Innovation in our usage is recombination, through one of a variety of organizational genesis mechanisms of network folding. Invention in our usage is the system tipping that might ensue, as a cascade from the original innovation through multiple networks.

...

In equilibrium, cross-domain interactions, while always present, are not necessarily crucial for the analyst to attend to. Background conditions of other domains can be taken for granted by analysts and participants alike during periods of multinetwork regime stability. We define “regime stability” as a reproducing set of interlocking roles, not as behavioral constancy. It is possible, in other words, to take actors as temporarily given, but only within specific historical regimes. In contrast, multiple-network feedbacks are fundamental to attend to during periods of regime transition or change. No matter how substantively important, regime changes themselves – that is, changes in the constitution of actors – are hard to understand within our segregated academic disciplines, precisely because that is when modularity between domains breaks down. Western economic advisors to Russia, brimming with overconfidence and ignorant of the context, discovered this to their dismay. The central finding and argument in this book is that organizational innovation and systemic invention require attention to causal feedbacks of selection, reproduction and tipping across multiple networks and domains.
...
Organizational innovation becomes systemic invention (if it does) when local network transpositions spill over or cascade through multiple-network feedback into the global networks to which local relations are linked. People are the usual channels through which these feedbacks are carried. If and when this chain-reaction occurs, the selection environment itself for the organizational innovation is altered. This can lead to non-linear rates of tipping, in other words, to the dynamics of punctuated equilibria.

In sum, organizational innovations result when the network structure of one domain is folded into another. Think, for example, of the Mafia. Here we have an 'family' network organized around kinship ties, relations of trust and reciprocity, etc that has been folded into the economic domain resulting in a economic enterprise (organized crime) modeled on a kinship network. It is the folding of networks, rather than the typical focus on the actions of this or that individual, that facilitates organizational innovation.

Making these general observations about innovation and invention more systematic requires greater precision in the motor behind multiple-network feedback. For Padgett, that motor is autocatalysis. Consider Figure 1 as a cross-sectional snapshot from a movie. Autocatalysis, taken up in Part II, brings this otherwise static picture to reproductive life by adding the dimension of time.

Global Heating or What's in a Name?

2011-07-20T08:00:00.003-03:00

As the global warming / climate change debate has become stuck in an intractable rut, people have started looking for different words that more accurately convey what is going on. Tom Friedman, for example, has proposed 'global wierding' in order to focus attention on the proliferation of unusual and extreme climate events. Over at Tumblr, Andrew Revkin has suggested the term global heating and provided a wonderful graphic to back up the choice.

The diagram/term have two big benefits. First, it dramatically emphasizes the importance of the ocean as repositories of heat energy relative to the land and atmosphere. Second, it focuses attention on changes to the system -- accumulation of heat energy -- rather than attempting to describe the consequences of that change.

Review: Dynamics of Disaster

2011-07-19T08:00:00.007-03:00

Dynamics of Disaster: Lessons on Risk, Response and Recovery

Edited by Rachel A. Dowty and Barbara L. Allen
London: Earthscan
2011, 240 pages
ISBN: 9781849711432

Here's a briefly annotated Table of Contents followed by a review of the volume as a whole.

Foreword, Alan Irwin
Introduction, Rachel A. Dowty and Barbara L. Allen

Part I: Environmental, Cultural and Political Concerns

1. Katrina's Contamination: Regulatory Knowledge Gaps in the Making and Unmaking of Environmental Contention, Scott Frickel and M. Bess Vincent
Examines the institutional logic operating at the EPA and the manner in which this logic produced knowledge gaps with specific spatial-temporal dimensions in order to explore the connection between knowledge gaps and contentious politics.

2. Organizational Culture and the Katrina Response in Louisiana, Rachel A. Dowty, Peter J. May, Colin E. Beech, and William A. Wallace
Uses Mary Douglas's grid-group typology to link the organizational cultures of various actors involved in responding to Katrina (FEMA, the Coast Guard, the White House, emergent groups) with the actions they took.

3. Disasters as System Accidents: A Socio-ecological Framework, Gary Bowden
Articulates a framework for analyzing disasters not as events but, rather, as the actualization of system vulnerabilities embedded in a diverse set of analytically distinct systems (natural, technological, social) operating at multiplicity of spatial-temporal scales (micro, meso, macro).

4. Conceptualizing Disasters as Extreme Versions of Everyday Life, Edward Woodhouse
Argues that Hurricane Katrina emerged from the same basic decision-making processes and strategies that govern other facets of techno-social life in the US and, hence, the same analytical lens should be applied to both disasters and other less dramatic social outcomes.

Part II: Relocation, Rebuilding and Recovery Concerns

5. Mind Maps, Memory and Relocation after Hurricane Katrina, Kathryn Henderson
Uses interviews and mapping exercises with Katrina survivors to examine the situatedness of local spatial knowledge in daily interaction, its disruption by the hurricane, and the manner in which situated spatial knowledge affects attempts to rebuild.

6. Post-Katrina Neighbourhood Recovery Planning in New Orleans, Roberto E. Barrios
Explores how superficial labels like 'participatory democracy' perpetuate repressive cultural politics through an ethnographic examination of the ways that experts (architects and urban planners) produce the 'voices of city residents' through so-called participatory planning.

7. Rebuilding the Historic Treme Neighbourhood: Lessons in the Repatriation of New Orleans, Barbara L. Allen and Isabelle Thomas Maret
Uses the reconstruction of an historic Creole neighbourhood as a case study to explore what the neighbourhood defined as 'success' in rebuilding, the complications they faced, and the strategies that worked to effectively build networks and synergies among residents, government agencies and NGOs.

Part III: International Disasters and Katrina Comparisons

8. The 2002 Flood Disaster in the Elbe Region, Germany: A Lack of Context-Sensitive Knowledge, Juergen Weichselgartner and Emilie Brévière
For both the Elbe flood and Katrina the potential for disaster was understood years in advance and the awareness of potentially triggering events existed for days in advance. This leads the authors to focus on various barriers to the transfer and implementation of existing research-based knowledge.

9. Social Dynamics of Unnatural Disasters: Parallels between Hurricane Katrina and the 2003 European Heat Wave, Melanie Gall
Examines social vulnerability at the individual, community and organizational levels, particularly as it relates to the public health experts conceptualization of 'excess mortality.'

10. After Disasters: Emergences of National Insecurity in Sri Lanka, Vivian Choi
Explores the interconnection between the Sri Lankan approach to managing natural disasters following the 2004 tsunami and the country's approach to managing war and terrorism.

11. Response and Recovery in the Remediation of Contaminated Land in Eastern Germany, Alena Bleicher and Matthias Gross
Discusses slow developing 'creeping' disasters resulting from polluted former industrial sites in terms of decision-making processes that involve different shadings of ignorance.

Afterword, Rachel A. Dowty and Barbara L. Allen
Ties together the chapters in light of the concepts in the book's title: lessons on risk, lessons on response, lessons on recovery, and their implications for the dynamics of disaster.

As evident from the above annotated Table of Contents, Dynamics of Disaster brings together a diverse mix of international scholars to deliver an interesting blend of distinctive, and occasionally quite original, contributions to the Disaster Studies literature. While space limitations preclude any detailed discussion of individual chapters, they are of consistently high quality; a remarkable achievement for an edited volume.

Viewed as a whole, rather than in terms of the contributions of the individual chapters, the book has two interesting features. First, while deeply rooted in the specifics of a particular disaster (Hurricane Katrina), the book retains a comparative focus. A number of the chapters in the first two sections (which emphasize the experience of Katrina from the top down and the bottom up respectively), draw connections to other events. The chapters in the third section have an explicitly comparative purpose. The decision to structure the volume in terms of comparisons is particularly interesting in light of the heavy emphasis on contextual specificity present in many of the chapters. The logic of comparison is typically associated with what Andrew Abbott termed the 'variables paradigm' -- the idea that there exist certain theoretical categories (gender, bureaucracy, capitalism) that remain largely invariant across time and space and, hence, they (or the set of causal relations among them) can be compared. In contrast, many of the chapters in the volume treat social facts as located -- that is as embedded in a specific social/geographical time and space -- and, as a result, call into question the invariant nature of those abstract theoretical categories often used to facilitate comparison. Significantly, the volume successfully squares this circle through the emphasis on process implicit in the title: Dynamics of Disaster. It is process, rather than a specific set of causal connections, that operates meaningfully across time and space. The Afterword does an excellent job of pulling together a number of disparate threads from the various chapters and weaving them together into a process-oriented tapestry.

Second, the volume purports to be the first book to bring a science and technology studies perspective to disaster studies. Given that STS and Disaster Studies both involve a diverse set of perspectives drawn from a wide range of disciplines that are held together by their relevance for understanding a particular topic (science/technology and disasters, respectively), it isn't inherently obvious that an STS focus will have anything new to say to specialists in Disaster Studies. Dowty and Allen emphasize two particular approaches from the STS toolkit: the public use/understanding of science and the new political sociology of science. The former asks questions about the politics of technical and scientific knowledge formation and the construction of expertise surrounding issues of risk, scientific knowledge and technological know-how. The latter reconceptualises the politics of science in light of the existence of a richer array of interactions among scientists, citizens, government and the private sector than occurred in past decades. The pay off from this is less obvious than one would hope. Not all of the individual chapters fit neatly into one or the other of those categories. Moreover, the connection of these ideas to the material in the chapters is rarely explicit and, hence, the reader is left to do this on their own. Finally, disaster scholars are broadly aware of the issues involved in the politics of knowledge. Thus, it is the heightened nuance and subtlety found in the treatment of these questions by way of the STS tradition, rather than the discovery of previously uncharted territory, that individuals working in Disaster Studies will appreciate. All things considered, this is a small objection to what is otherwise an excellent collection deserving wide circulation among disaster scholars.

When The Water Ends: Africa’s Climate Conflicts

2011-07-17T08:00:00.001-03:00

Here's a follow up to the previous post about climate change and war as threat multipliers; a link to a 2011 Webby nominated 16-minute video "When the Water Ends" produced by Yale Environment 360.

Here's a description of the video's content.

For thousands of years, nomadic herdsmen have roamed the harsh, semi-arid lowlands that stretch across 80 percent of Kenya and 60 percent of Ethiopia. Descendants of the oldest tribal societies in the world, they survive thanks to the animals they raise and the crops they grow, their travels determined by the search for water and grazing lands.

These herdsmen have long been accustomed to adapting to a changing environment. But in recent years, they have faced challenges unlike any in living memory: As temperatures in the region have risen and water supplies have dwindled, the pastoralists have had to range more widely in search of suitable water and land. That search has brought tribal groups in Ethiopia and Kenya in increasing conflict, as pastoral communities kill each other over water and grass.

“When the Water Ends” tells the story of this conflict and of the increasingly dire drought conditions facing parts of East Africa. — how worsening drought in parts of Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere will pit group against group, nation against nation. As one UN official told Abramson, the clashes between Kenyan and Ethiopian pastoralists represent “some of the world’s first climate-change conflicts.” But the story recounted in “When the Water Ends” is not only about climate change. It’s also about how deforestation and land degradation — due in large part to population pressures — are exacting a toll on impoverished farmers and nomads as the earth grows ever more barren.

Talisman Terry bites the dust

2011-07-15T21:08:00.005-03:00

Two years ago Calgary based Talisman Energy created Talisman Terry's Energy Adventure, a coloring book featuring Terry the “fracosaurus.” Terry, depicted in hard hat and work boots, presents a simplified and propagandistic version of the natural gas extraction process and an optimistic portrayal of what land used for shale fracturing can be turned into. The coloring book has been widely distributed to children for the past couple years as part of Talisman's community outreach in the rural areas of Pennsylvania and New York where the company is actively engaged in drilling the Marcellus shale.

This past Monday (July 11), the Colbert Report poked fun at Terry. By Thursday, as reported in the Calgary Herald, he was history. Talisman Energy, as shown in the screen capture below, has done its best to erase Terry's digital presence.

If you're so inclined, you can check out the colouring book's contents here.

Defining Uncertainty, Difficulty, and Complexity

2011-07-15T08:00:00.000-03:00

A useful taxonomy from Scott E. Page's Uncertainty, Difficulty, and Complexity (Journal of Theoretical Politics 20(2): 115–149 DOI: 10.1177/0951629807085815)

My point is that uncertainty differs from difficulty and complexity and that they too matter. ... (U)ncertainty refers to the absence of information about some relevant variable or what some call the state of the world – tomorrow’s weather, to give one example, is uncertain. Difficulty refers to problems that have many interacting variables. Developing a workable form of fusion is difficult as is designing an office building or writing a piece of legislation. Difficult problems have many possible solutions and no obvious best one a priori. When faced with a difficult problem, most problem solvers prove incapable of finding the optimum. They must rely on perspectives and heuristics (Page, 2007). Complexity in turn differs from difficulty. Complexity refers to dynamic environments that contain multiple actors who interact with one another. The response to a natural disaster like a hurricane creates a complex web of interactions whose outcomes are unpredictable. Complex environments cannot be solved in any sense. At best, the complexity can be harnessed (Axelrod and Cohen, 2000).

The relevance of the definitions is outlined in the abstract below:

In this article I clarify the often muddled distinctions between uncertainty, difficulty, and complexity and show that all three can enhance our understanding of institutional performance and design. To cope with uncertainty, institutions align incentives for information revelation; to handle difficult problems, institutions create incentives for diverse problem-solving approaches; and to harness complexity, institutions adjust selection criteria, rates of variation, and the level of connectedness. The distinction between complex systems and equilibrium systems also necessitates a discussion of the differences between the existence, stability, and attainment of equilibria and why, despite often being neglected, the latter two concepts are important to our understanding of institutions.

Barbara Ehrenreich: Smile or Die

2011-07-14T08:00:00.000-03:00

Continuing with the apocalypse versus optimism theme, here are two versions of Barbara Ehrenreich's summary of her latest book, Smile or Die. The RSA Animation version and the longer lecture that it was taken from.

A Is for Armageddon

2011-07-13T08:00:00.003-03:00

With all the doom and gloom of the past couple years, you can't blame Richard Horne (author of 101 Things To Do Before You Die) for taking the piss out of the doomsday message with A Is for Armageddon: A Catalogue of Disasters That May Culminate in the End of the World as We Know It.

As they put it over at BrainPickings,

From religious warfare to grey goo to deforestation, Horne combines science, superstition and sociology in a beautifully illustrated, delightfully dystopian guide to the apocalypse. Underlying the wickedly entertaining tone, however, is a grounded, non-preachy crusade for awareness that exudes the call of urgency none of us want to hear but all of us must.

Opening with a Table of Contents that riffs on the periodic table of the elements, this is a book that make you laugh while it educates. Lots of photos follow. Click on them to get to the full size versions where you can read the text. If you haven't had enough, be sure to check out Slavoj Žižek’s Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in One Minute (the Elvis of Cultural Theory only comes up with four impending catastrophes!) and, for an antidote, An Optimist's Tour of the Future.

Parenti on Climate Change and War: Threat Multipliers

2011-07-12T13:08:00.005-03:00

Christian Parenti's interview on Democracy Now is a fantastic examination of the nexus of climate and society, in particular, the multifarious causal links between climate change and violent conflict. I recommend reading the entire interview as well as reading his book, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence.

Parenti doesn't say that "climate change causes war." Instead, he looks at how states have already been weakened and destabilized by social conditions, e.g. IMF policies forcing "structural adjustments" that include the abandonment of small farmers, political collapse that leads to tribal conflict and a flood of small weapons, and then how climate change amplifies social breakdown and the proliferation of violent conflict. From the interview:

"The Pentagon, particularly around 2007, was putting out these reports and think tanks around them, realizing they were going to be called upon to respond to this problem. To their credit the armed services take climate change seriously, which is more than you can say for, say the GOP leadership in the House. And what they see again and again is not so much a future of interstate conflict, but of irregular warfare within states, social breakdown, increased banditry, mass migration. They realize they’re going to be called upon to respond to these low intensity conflicts and these civil wars, so front and center in their program of response is counterinsurgency.

This goes by different names — small wars, low-intensity conflict, counter insurgency. This is as part of the War on Terror become very important to U.S. foreign policy and I’m critical of that one, because I don’t think it will work. I don’t think it’s moral. But also, counterinsurgency, if you look at its record, what it does to societies is very damaging. Because the object is the population rather than territory, it leaves societies fragmented and vulnerable."

These themes echo the historical study of collapse that I have been reading in Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Civilizations.

Emergence: Spontaneous Order Theory

2011-07-11T08:00:00.001-03:00

Most of the material I've read about emergence traced its conceptual roots to the natural sciences -- even when dealing with social creations like cities or the world wide web. But there is a significant tradition focusing on 'spontaneous order' traceable to Adam Smith (known for the concept of the Invisible Hand) and the Scottish Enlightenment. So, here is some links to that material

1) The online journal Studies in Emergent Order

2) A couple of papers in the journal that look particularly interesting:

“Conflicts and Contradictions in Invisible Hand Phenomena”

This paper makes three interconnected arguments.

Building off my other writings, in a world where there are many non-teleological complex adaptive systems exist, no automatic harmony exists between their different coordinating processes. This paper will focus on four of these systems: the ecological system at the landscape level, and three cultural systems, the market, science, and democracy.
Organizations originating within one such system but operating within more than one, will ultimately be dependent on one set of feedback signals over the others. When conflict between sets of signals arises, such organizations will disrupt, undermine, or destroy the other ordering processes.
Therefore a system of Hayekian spontaneous orders such as the market, democracy, and science, is not and cannot be sustainable based solely on their own internal characteristics because conflict between them is an intrinsic feature of social life. The same hold for any of these systems and an ecosystem. They need to be viewed within a larger context.

“From Hayek’s Spontaneous Orders to Luhmann’s Autopoietic Systems”

In this paper I contrast Hayek’s and Luhmann’s treatment of law as a complex social system. Through a detailed examination of Hayek’s account of law, I criticize the explanatory power of his central distinction between spontaneous order and organization. Furthermore, I conclude that its application to law leads to different results from the ones derived by Hayek. The central failure of Hayek’s failure, however, lies in his identification of complex systems with systems of liberal content maximizing individual freedom. Indeed, in this way, he can only account for systems-individuals and not systems-systems interactions. I introduce Luhmann’s theory of autopoietic systems, which I submit, can solve all the mentioned problems and seems a much more promising conceptual architecture to grasp social systems in the context of a complex society.

3) An annotated bibliography of works on self organizing systems

4) An article tracing the intellectual history of the tradition: From Smith to Menger to Hayek: Liberalism in the Spontaneous-Order Tradition

Climate Change Culture Wars?

2011-07-08T10:52:00.018-03:00

Keith Kloor has an interesting post, Why the Climate Debate is a Culture War. In it, Keith explores the implications of a Yale university study. Here is the abstract of that study:

The conventional explanation for controversy over climate change emphasizes impediments to public understanding: limited popular knowledge of science, the inability of ordinary citizens to assess technical information, and the resulting widespread use of unreliable cognitive heuristics to assess risk. A large survey of U.S. adults (N = 1540) found little support for this account. On the whole, the most scientifically literate and numerate subjects were slightly less likely, not more, to see climate change as a serious threat than the least scientifically literate and numerate ones. More importantly, greater scientific literacy and numeracy were associated with greater cultural polarization: respondents predisposed by their values to dismiss climate change evidence became more dismissive, and those predisposed by their values to credit such evidence more concerned, as science literacy and numeracy increased. We suggest that this evidence reflects a conflict between two levels of rationality: the individual level, which is characterized by the citizens’ effective use of their knowledge and reasoning capacities to form risk perceptions that express their cultural commitments; and the collective level, which is characterized by citizens’ failure to converge on the best available scientific evidence on how to promote their common welfare. Dispelling this “tragedy of the risk-perception commons,” we argue, should be understood as the central aim of the science of science communication.

Having read through the article, I find myself in a love-hate relationship with it. On the one hand, the study gets the big picture right. The empirical evidence that increased scientific literacy and numeracy leads to increased polarization over the reality of global warming rather than increased consensus, it is a devastating critique of the deficit model. Moreover, I agree with their emphasis on the importance of values.

But the paper goes seriously off track in its understanding of the dynamics of public opinion. At the individual level, the paper treats each individual as a little philosopher, rationally organizing their world into a coherent scheme. This is the same basic presumption that animates the deficit model. Except the proponents of the deficit model presume the existence of a universal rationality (science), leading to the presumption that greater scientific literacy will result in enlightenment. In place of a universal rationality, Kahan and his co-authors have substituted culturally specific (and, thus, not universal) rationalities tied to particular values. Everyone is still 'rational' and living in a world that is intersubjectively coherent and consistent, it is just that the shared consensus is within a particular group (people who share the same values) rather than the public as a whole.

This is true, and a big improvement on the standard story, to a point. The problem is they presume every individual is a little philosopher when the evidence is that only about 15-20% of the population is 'rational' in the sense of holding an ideologically coherent view of the world. Admittedly, this small slice of the public is disproportionately important because they tend to frame the terms of the debate. But in a democracy, where everyone's opinion counts, it is a mistake to treat all public opinion as a projection of the dynamics associated with the ideological minority. And this is precisely what Kahan and his colleagues, with their argument about the 'tragedy of the risk perceptions commons,' do.

Think, for example, of the classic culture war issue: the abortion debate. On the one hand you have a view that is ideologically coherent and privileges life. These people see abortion as murder and are opposed to all abortions. On the other hand, you have an ideologically coherent view that privileges women's control over her body and, hence, the right to choose an abortion if she wishes. On the face of it, this scenario conforms very well with the dynamics Kahan and his colleagues describe. You have two separate cultural value systems, each rational in their own way, and a debate framed in terms of the two conflicting cultural values.

But the vast majority of individuals do not hold ideologically pure and consistent views -- that abortion is always wrong or that it is always a choice to be made by the woman. The bulk of individuals have contingent and contextually specific views: abortion is wrong, but there are exceptions for rape or the health of the mother; abortion is a women's choice but she shouldn't choose an abortion for purely economic reasons, etc.

The little philosopher model of human thought argues that people have a coherent set of consistently prioritized values: a > b > c > d > e. Thus, they will choose a over c but prefer c to d. But, as the abortion example shows, this isn't the best way to conceptualize public opinion. The vast majority of people do not think in these terms. For most people, context and the specifics of the situation matter more than abstract principals.

Simply put, the cultural war model is a big improvement on the deficit model. But the culture war model has a significant problem of its own. It represents the public as divided into two mutually exclusive groups based on competing value schemes. A more accurate representation sees the public as divided into three groups rather than two: the two ideological factions who, despite being a numerical minority, dominate the debate and a third group, the bulk of the public who conceptualize the world in situational and contextual specifics rather than ideological absolutes and are increasingly disenchanted with the polarization of political discourse. Moving away from the deficit model is a good first step. But substituting the culture war model isn't the answer. We need a model of political discourse that doesn't presume everyone is a little philosopher.

The inevitable Casey Anthony post

2011-07-07T15:00:00.002-03:00

What does my previous post ranting about the innovation killing potential of Google+ have to do with the Casey Anthony case? And why, when Google reports 40 million pages of material on Anthony, would anyone bother to write more on the subject? Read on .....

Three Ideas

This is the story of three things, how those things came to be in my mind at the same time, the associations/connections that my brain made as a result, and the implications of that set of events. What were the three things? First, there was the Casey Anthony trial. I didn't really follow the case much over the past 3 years. But the coverage leading up to the verdict was so frenetic I got hooked. Curiosity got the best of me and I spent hours watching the closing arguments of both the prosecution and the defense. As a result, I have a basic awareness of the overall case and the way each side framed it to the jury. I, like many of the talking heads, thought the prosecution presented a more coherent case. But given the number of 'uncertainties' and the general level of family dysfunction, I wasn't totally shocked by the verdict.

The second thing rattling around in my brain was a curiosity about the Knobe effect, an effect having to do with the connection between moral judgements and intentionality. This was not something I had ever thought about before, it was directly traceable to an article (The anatomy of intentional action) I read on the day the verdict came down. Conventional wisdom tells us that we need to know whether an act was intentional or accidental before reaching a moral judgement. If someone accidentally steps on the cat's tail, that is forgivable. But, to purposefully step on the cat's tail and intentionally inflict pain is cruel and wrong. This distinction lies at the heart of the Anthony trial narratives. According to the prosecution, Caylee was intentionally murdered. According to the defense, Caylee accidentally drowned and events spun out of control from there.

But, the article discussed research suggesting we're more likely to view an act as intentional if we disapprove of it. In other words, the research suggests that conventional wisdom gets the causal order wrong. Rather than our assessment of whether or not an act was intentional (cause) informing our moral assessment of the act (effect), the research shows that our moral judgement (cause) often affects our assessment of whether or not someone's actions were intentional (effect). So, putting the ideas present in the article together with the trial, we get a plausible account for the divergence between public opinion and the jury verdict. A large segment of the public is obviously upset with the verdict. And many of these same people are thoroughly outraged by Casey's "Bella Vita" lifestyle. Perhaps the research in the article explains the link: these people passed moral judgement on Casey's lifestyle choices and, as a result, attributed intentionality to her actions toward Caylee.

The third item rattling around in my brain was the arguments presented by noted sociologist Charles Tilly in a wonderful little book titled Why?. In it Tilly analyzes the reasons people use to explain events or behavior. The basic points of the book: 1) there are different "types" of reasons, 2) the different types are contextually deployed -- in other words, rather than always giving the same reason for a particular action, people will explain it one way in one situation and another way in a different situation, and 3) there are conventionalized expectations, based on the situation, as to which type of reason we expect someone to provide and, hence, it is seems socially jarring when they provide a kind of reason that differs from the type we expect. This last point explains much of the humor in The Big Bang Theory; humor that follows directly from physics geeks offering up socially unexpected/inappropriate reasons for their behavior.

Publisher's Weekly summarized the book as follows:

He (Tilly) lists four basic types of reasons: conventions (socially accepted clichés like "My train was late," or "We're otherwise engaged that evening"), stories (simplified cause-effect narratives), codes (legal, religious) and technical accounts (complicated narratives, often impenetrable to nonspecialists). He demonstrates that our social relations dictate the kind of reason we invoke in a given circumstance. For instance, we offer more elaborate rationales for our behavior—stories, rather than conventions—to those close to us. We invoke codes with individuals whom we have power over, but not those who have power over us.

Anyone who followed the Anthony trial knows that all four types of reason -- conventions, narratives, codes, and technical accounts -- were present in the testimony. Perhaps Tilly's ideas provide some insight into the jury's verdict. Take, for example, the treatment of the forensic evidence. Generally speaking, the prosecution engaged that evidence by way of technical accounts -- the testimony of various experts -- while the defense tended to make sense of the forensics with other types of reason. The duct tape on the jaw, for example, was explained by a narrative implicating Roy Kronk. Similarly, the defense used the code 'junk science' to call into question the prosecution's technical account about the amount of chloroform present in the trunk of the car. One of the main points that Tilly makes is that people tend to be persuaded by certain types of reasons more than others and, hence, that social scientists (a group of whose technical accounts are legendary for being uninterpretable to the general public) should develop better ways of communicating. Perhaps that is what the defense did. Perhaps the types of reasons the defense supplied more accurately matched the kinds of reasons the jury expected to hear given the specifics of the various situations.

When Ideas have Sex

But the point of this isn't to describe the mash-up of ideas floating around in my head. Nor is it to detail how the Knobe effect or Tilly's types of reason provide insights about the Anthony trial. The point is that, because these ideas were in my head at the same time, my brain was able to find connections between them. And, more to the point, the connections were innovative.

There are millions (billions?) of words on the web about the Casey Anthony trial. I'd be very surprised, however, if anyone else has written about the relevance of either the Knobe effect or Tilly's types to an understanding of the trial process. Put Google to work and see for yourself. With millions of people riveted on the Anthony trial and writing so many reams of material about it, you would expect -- like the famous typing monkeys that ultimately produce Hamlet -- that someone else would have stumbled on the same connections.

Again, the point isn't that the connections are particularly profound. It is that they are innovative and original. They are the product of the idiosyncratic mix of materials floating around in my head (a necessary condition -- if the ideas weren't in my head, my brain couldn't connect them) and one particular type of neural activity (the creation of a network linking them together). Put them together and you have innovative thought -- the meeting and mating of ideas that Matt Ridley discusses as 'ideas having sex.' Or, as James Burke puts it: 1+1=3. If you take two things (a bell and a push-button, for example) and connect them together you get a third (a door bell).

As anyone who watches Dragon's Den (aka Shark's Tank in the US) knows, not all innovations are good innovations. But having the idea is a necessary precondition to separate the wheat from the chaff. In Darwinian terms, evolution is the product of lots and lots of mutations -- most of them trivial and useless -- that the selection process operates on.

Getting into Gary's Head

So, it is the juxtaposition of two or more seemingly unconnected things that lets the brain make connections. If they aren't there at the same time, no connections will be made. How, exactly, did this odd jumble of ideas come to be in my head? As everyone knows, the Anthony trial is in the air and hard to avoid. And, as I mentioned above, the crush of attention piqued my curiosity and I invested a few hours in catching up on an event that many had been following for years.

The other material came to my attention more elliptically. I frequently visit the Resilience Science blog. A few days ago they had a link to an interview with TC Boyle discussing five books dealing with the relationship between humans and nature. When I checked out the interview, I discovered it was hosted on an aggregator site, The Browser, which had lots of interesting material. Over the next few mornings, I returned to The Browser and that is where, on the day of the trial's verdict, I discovered a link to The Anatomy of Intentional Action.

The path to the Tilly material is even stranger. I was engaged in a work related activity, looking for a picture of Erving Goffman. So I typed his name into Google and sorted for images. As I scanned through the images, I noticed a photo of Malcolm Gladwell. Curious about why a search for Goffman would bring up Gladwell's image, I clicked on it and traced it back to the source page, an article in the New Yorker written by Gladwell reviewing Tilly's book and comparing it to Goffman's works. While I hadn't heard of Why? before, I've read several of Tilly's other books and respect his work. So, I read the review and that's how I came to know about Tilly's types of reasons.

Anyone who has spent time wondering the web can give you similar stories about the non-linear connections that result. You start out looking for a recipe for Bánh mì and, through a series of connections that would make Kevin Bacon proud, you end up looking at Mike Carp's minor league batting average. Two things are important to notice about the process. First, while the individual actions -- clicking on this link or that -- are intentional, the search path as a whole is not. I didn't go looking for information about intentional action or different types of reason. I serendipitously discovered it through a process that involved scanning the environment and following up on items that aroused my curiosity.

Second, the presence of these three items in my mind at the same time was equally serendipitous. They were the product of three independent and unconnected scans of the environment that occurred within a period of 24 hours. Like the water flowing downstream in a river, the bulk of what I experience rapidly disappears from my memory. Within a couple days, I can't tell you anything about 95% of the movies I see. So, if one or the other of the thee scans had occurred a day or two earlier or later, its likely that the ideas wouldn't have been in my head at the same time. And I wouldn't have been able to make the connections that I did.

The Poverty of Push

To summarize, the likelihood that a particular individual will come up with an innovative idea is a product of factors influencing co-presence (getting multiple ideas into their brain at the same time) and juxtaposition (having enough points of similarity so that the ideas get connected, but being different enough that the connection results in an idea that is outside the box). Given that the complexity of the world's problems, what processes can we put in place that would improve the odds of coming up with innovative ideas?

Individuals who study information flows contrast two basic models: the push model and the pull model. In the pull model, the information consumer reaches out into the environment and pulls those pieces of information that are of interest to themselves. The scan and select processes that put the three ideas into my head illustrate the pull model in action. In the push model, information is pushed at the consumer based on a variety of pre-established criteria. Think, for example, of an RSS feed where a particular kind of information -- the recipe of the day or news about the economy -- are delivered to your inbox. While there is an initial pull -- the consumer has to established the criteria defining the types of information they want to receive -- once they have been set up, information of that requested type is pushed at the consumer.

Both models are equally good in relation to co-presence; they both connect the information consumer to a flow of information that puts ideas and information into their head. But they differ dramatically in terms of juxtaposition. Push processes provide information that neatly fits within particular predefined parameters. Information consumers who live in a push world may have access to enormous amounts of information, but that information all falls inside particular boxes. It is hard to think outside the box, when all the information you get is inside the box. Pull processes, as we have seen, encourage exploration outside pre-packaged information worlds and, as a result, increase the likelihood that in individual's brain will be inhabited by multiple ideas that provide the basis for interesting and innovative juxtaposition.

Obviously, any given individual uses both processes. But technological developments influence the relative proportion of information an individual gets by one process or the other. Up until now Google has been the preeminent pull technology. You type in a search term and Google pulls in the results for you. But as the company shifts to the social media emphasis of the Google+ paradigm, as suggested in the earlier post, I suspect users will live increasingly in a push world. And there is no way that a push world can replicate the quirky paths that put those three ideas in my head. And without those ideas in my head, we don't get the innovative juxtapositions.

No problem, you say. The ideas weren't particularly interesting. Nobody's paying attention. The world wouldn't be any worse off without them. But that isn't the point. We need technological products that will foster creativity and innovation, not ones that suppress it. It isn't about the individual results, but overall productivity. And, I fear, Google+ is a move in the wrong direction.

July 11 Update:

Since posting this, I've become aware of a book that makes a similar argument: Eli Pariser's The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You. It provides an eye-opening investigation of how ultra-personalization is controlling and limiting the information we’re exposed to. "We’ve moved to an age where the Internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see." For those who don't want to read, you can get the basic idea from his 2011 TED Talk.

Toward a new economic system

2011-07-07T08:00:00.000-03:00

Interesting interview with Tim Jackson, author of the acclaimed Prosperity Without Growth (which expands on this free earlier publication put out by the recently eliminated UK Sustainable Development Commission) . (Yes, the irony of trying to cut the deficit in order to get a sustainable economy by axing the Sustainable Development Commission is, indeed, palpable.) Here are some of the more interesting bits:

The European: When did that psychology come into existence? For much of human history, economic activity was not intimately tied to the idea of growth.
Jackson: That’s a very interesting question that I cannot fully answer. I have written on that topic in the past, and my sense is that our idea of progress derives somewhat from the ideas of the Enlightenment. In the 18th century, you see the emergence of the science of rational discovery and the project of improving man’s condition. And that was accompanied by shifts in religiosity and spirituality. By the time the Enlightenment met Darwin in the middle of the 19th century, established religion had become secularized at least in the protestant countries. That was a very potent mix in which our sense of spiritual progress disappeared.

The European: We began to think of our lives as finite existences?
Jackson: Right, the idea of the immortal soul lost its influence. That obviously placed a huge importance on our physical existence. So progress came to be framed within the context of those finite existences: Future generations deserved better lives, they deserved more than we had. We secularized the original idea of the progress of the soul. And in the process, it became very much tied to material possessions.
.....

The European: Change is uncomfortable.

Jackson: It requires us to engage in a dialogue about power, about who we are and who we want to be in the world. For example: We are confronted with the question of what is defined as success: A big car? Material wealth? If we reject those norms, we have to accept the potential loss of social standing that comes with it. That is the paradox of transformation: People desire change but they are hesitant to pursue it because of the potential pitfalls and structural constraints. So for me the lesson is that agency is insufficient by itself in the context of mainstream change. I find it critically important that we reshape the framework itself.

.....

The European: Still, we are left with the question of what such a structure might look like…
Jackson: We don’t quite know. It would do more to align rights with responsibilities. It would place less emphasis on private ownership over the returns of public assets. It would encourage investments into public goods. It has company structures that code social and ecological returns into the structure itself. It focuses on bridging the sharing gap between the individual and the community.

The European: There’s a lot of Marx in that statement. First came feudalism, then came capitalism, then we threw off the shackles. How would your idea differ from the very illiberal manifestations that grew out of Marxism?
Jackson: It is explicitly post-Marxist and post-capitalist. The Marxist critique of capitalism was probably right in many of its elements but wrong in its outcomes. The idea that the alternative to the market is simply state control fell foul for several reasons: Totalitarian states are suffocated by a large bureaucracy that surrounds the state. And they encouraged the animal spirits that Adam Smith originally regarded as the basis of capitalism. The idea of rights and responsibilities got lost in the process: People didn’t enjoy many rights and didn’t really care about the things that they were supposed to own collectively. I don’t want to return to that.

The European: So this is another attempt at pursuing a Third Way, but without the focus on growth?
Jackson: At any point in history you are a product of ideas and systems that came before you. I would argue that both capitalism and communism have failed as systems of social organization. There is a vacancy right now that demands new ideas. And if we are successful, we will achieve a genuinely different fusion of ideas.

Google+ goes Social: Why Should You Care?

2011-07-05T08:00:00.001-03:00

Wired's Steven Levy has a long, but very insightful article, Inside Google+ — How the Search Giant Plans to Go Social, describing the company's recent rollout of Google+ and the company's long term plans to transform itself and its products in light of Facebook's success. This may well be great for Google's bottom line, but bad for humanity. Here's why.

Without going too deeply into the details of the new product vision (you'll have to read the article for that), there are two main components to Google+. The stream looks a lot like a Facebook feed: a stream of social information from friends and others -- but with a significant tweak. Google thinks they have solved the privacy issue by allowing you to easily create different 'Circles' of friends and, hence, share different information with different people. The second element, Sparks, is a stream of information on topics of interest to the user. But, unlike the results of the standard Google search, the Sparks search algorithms have been tweaked to deliver content that is fresh, visual and viral. In other words, there is a designed synergy: the Sparks stream brings things to your attention that you will want to share with one or more of your Circles.

Overall, the stream and Sparks are indications of how the need to respond to the social challenge has already changed Google’s philosophy. It’s almost as if the Emerald Sea team is creating an anti-Google. Before starting the company in 1998, Page and Brin had tried to sell their technology to portals like Excite and Yahoo, whose execs refused because the Google search engine was deemed too effective: It would fulfill a users’ requests and then briskly send them on their way, taking their lucrative eyeballs with them. Google insisted that search quality trumped stickiness, and built a business on the premise that users were best served by getting results that sent them off to preferred destinations.

But with these streams, Google is changing direction. Right now, the content from Sparks and the social stream is not intermingled, but it’s reasonable to assume that before long, the company will use its algorithmic powers to produce a single flow that skillfully mixes those apples and oranges. Google has already pulled off a much more complicated version of that trick with Universal Search, which includes web pages, images, videos, books, Tweets, news items and other formats among its results. And that’s only the beginning. With its deep resources of information about its users, Google is capable of delivering a comprehensive collection of information, tailored exactly to one’s needs and interests. “It’s the long-term vision that we have for that newsfeed, that stream,” Gundotra says. “We think long-term, four to five years from now, the system should be putting items in there not just from your friends, but things that Google knows you should be seeing.”
...
This mother of all streams would be the equivalent of an intravenous feed of information, with inclusion of all the vital content from our social graph and the world at large (Google calls this the “interest graph”). It would scroll forever, and everything would be relevant. If Google’s original goal was to expeditiously dispatch us elsewhere, with this near-clairvoyant stream, Google could turn us into search potatoes who never leave.

So, Google is changing its business model. Why should we care? To appreciate the significance of this, we need to take a short trip into the world of evolutionary anthropology. Conventional wisdom over the past 160 years in the cognitive and neurosciences has assumed that brains evolved to process factual information about the world. Over the past decade, that view has largely been displaced by the social brain hypothesis. Crudely put, the traditional view held that human information processing capabilities (our brain and related language skills) evolved in relation to adaptive pressures that favored the sharing of technical information and the ability to socialize came as an added benefit. The social brain hypothesis turns this explanation on its head: the selective adaptation was sociability -- specifically the ability to use language in order to bond in groups larger than than those of other primates which bond by touch through sequential grooming. According to the social brain hypothesis, the ability to share technical information is an extra bonus, not the primary purpose of language. This model corresponds much better with how people actually act: we spend 3-4 times as much of our day using language to socialize (How are you?) as we do using it to exchange technical information (That will be $29.95, please.)

In short, Google is recognizing that the primary focus of human communication is social rather than technical and adapting their product to take that into account. This could well be a good move for Google's bottom line, but it is a potentially bad development for humanity. We are facing a set of complex and interconnected challenges -- climate change, population growth, biodiversity loss, improperly regulated economies, new diseases, increasing inequalities in the distribution of income, the end of cheap energy supplies, the list goes on and on -- that require innovative thought and action to successfully address. And pretty much everyone who studies the process of innovation (see, for example, the clip below), argue that innovations come from places that allow ideas to have sex -- that is to interact with one another in ways that will generate something new.

In sum, innovation typically depends on connecting ideas that weren't previously seen as related to each other. The new Google framework, however, is designed to do the exact opposite -- to take all the information and knowledge that they have about you as an individual and deliver to you only those things they think will be of interest. I don't want to be a Luddite here. People are creative and will find new and interesting ways to use Google's social turn to their advantage.

But, everything considered, this development seems to negatively impact the likelihood that ideas will have sex in any individuals head in several ways. First, it turns an efficient search engine into another time suck. Second, while nominally facilitating connectivity (a good thing) it will actually tend to limit the breadth of information that the person receives and the types of connections their mind makes. Think, for example, of the difference between a) receiving a newspaper, scanning all the headlines and deciding to read something totally unexpected and b) receiving a feed limited to specific topics that, as a result, doesn't bring you the article in an area outside your interest. Third, it will take development dollars away from Google's previous focus -- technical search algorithms -- and, potentially, limit future developments in that area.

In a McLuhanesque sense, a new technology creates a new environment. My fear is that, everything considered, the environment created by Google+ encourages protected sex over unprotected sex and, as a result, is less likely to produce new offspring. In a world that desperately needs innovation, this is not a positive development

NB Shale Gas Update

2011-07-03T15:59:00.005-03:00

For those following the developments in relation to shale gas exploration in New Brunswick, several factors are worth noting.

1) More than $350 million in exploration funding for shale gas has poured into a tiny (population about 800,000) province with a relatively high unemployment rate (6.9 % in April), a concern about out-migration, a humongous hole in the provincial budget, and a provincial debt of approximately $10 billion.

2) The Quebec government just placed a moratorium on shale gas exploration, and the opposition Liberals, have called for a similar moratorium in NB. But there is little indication that the government is interested in a moratorium.

3) The New Brunswick Energy Commission recently recommended expanding unconventional gas development.

4) There has been substantial public opposition, organized in part by the NB Conservation Council (which produced this primer on the topic).

5) Much of the interest is the result of claims stemming from a Geological Survey of Canada estimate made several years ago that touted the amount of gas present in NB shale (67 trillion cubic feet, more than left in western Canada)

6) The New York Times has published a bunch of internal emails and oil industry documents showing that the gas may not be as easy and cheap to extract from shale formations deep underground as the companies are saying. On the whole, the documents suggest that shale gas may be a Ponzi scheme investment bubble -- where estimates of large amounts of gas are used to generate investment opportunities and more money is made flipping leases than by producing gas.

7) As a result of all this, natural gas reserve estimates are under attack in the US.

8) Comments from a local industry executive (SWN General Manager Tom Alexander) on the implications of the NY Times documents are here.

8) Apache, one of the bigger players in the province (and, perhaps significantly, a US company), recently announced it was withdrawing from NB following disappointing drilling results.

Interesting times .... indeed.

2000 years of economic history

2011-07-01T11:32:00.006-03:00

The Economist recently published this as their Daily Chart along with the following explanation.

An alternative timeline for the past two millennia

SOME people recite history from above, recording the grand deeds of great men. Others tell history from below, arguing that one person's life is just as much a part of mankind's story as another's. If people do make history, as this democratic view suggests, then two people make twice as much history as one. Since there are almost 7 billion people alive today, it follows that they are making seven times as much history as the 1 billion alive in 1811. The chart below shows a population-weighted history of the past two millennia. By this reckoning, over 28% of all the history made since the birth of Christ was made in the 20th century. Measured in years lived, the present century, which is only ten years old, is already "longer" than the whole of the 17th century. This century has made an even bigger contribution to economic history. Over 23% of all the goods and services made since 1AD were produced from 2001 to 2010, according to an updated version of Angus Maddison's figures.

I've always appreciated Maddison's attempt to quantify global economic production and this chart is an interesting way to present his data. It can, however, be misinterpreted if you aren't careful. Specifically, a quick look at the graph makes it seem like things have fallen off a cliff. But that isn't the case. The graph is in percentage terms. So, the total of all the columns of either category (economic production -- dark blue columns or population -- the light blue columns) will always add up to 100. So, the 6% for the 21st century means that 6% of the total person years lived since the year 0 occurred between 2000 and 2010. As the 21st century goes on, the percent associated with this century will grow and, correspondingly, the percent associated with other centuries will decline. This will be most notable for the 20th century.

Once you understand that the 'collapse' is an artifact not worth much attention, two significant features stand out. First, after hundreds of years of not much change, things started to increase in 18th and 19th centuries and really took off in the 20th. Here we see the results of changes in social organization -- capitalism, the industrial revolution, and all that. Second, and much less appreciated, take a look at the switch in relative height of the two columns beginning in the 20th century. For most of the two thousand year period the percent of economic output was crudely one-quarter the percent of years lived. In the 19th century it rose to approximately 40%. They relative proportions reverse in the 20th century with economic output being crudely twice as large a percent as years lived -- a proportion that is even larger for the first decade of the 21st century. This switch captures the productivity gains associated with the switch from an economy based on muscle power to one based on chemical energy.

Summer Blog: Fewer words, more video

2011-06-28T17:09:00.003-03:00

First off, we have some substance -- Will Steffen's Ted Talk about the Anthropocene.

We follow up with a wonderful example of human impact on the planet -- 200 years of dams.

Finally, what ya gonna do? Well, the Coalition for Green Capital, American Council on Renewable Resources, Carbon War Room and a number of others have banded together to put out the following. Don't get fooled by the logos and other paraphernalia that show up around the one minute mark. Watch it all the way through ... it is very clever.

Meet your new energy hog

2011-06-26T06:18:00.005-03:00

Interesting article on the dynamics of technological development -- set-top boxes have become a major source of home energy consumption and, despite the success manufacturers have had developing power saving modes for computers, there seems to be no significant attempt to do the same set-top boxes

The Price of Gas

2011-06-25T08:00:00.000-03:00

Bill Freudenburg Tribute Sites

2011-06-24T07:52:00.005-03:00

Some of you are, no doubt, aware that noted environmental sociologist William Freudenburg died of cancer last December at the age of 59.

A video tribute site, with lots of interesting material related to Bill's work, is now available.

Specifically, there are the following items:
1) Bill in His Own Words (interview of Bill done in November 2010)
2) The Legacy of Bill (tributes from colleagues who attended Freudenfest)
3) Bill's Blowout in the Gulf Lecture (lecture on his latest book, November 2010)
4) 12 class lectures by Bill, part of his "ENVS 1 Intro to Environmental Studies" course

While the class lectures are nominally 'introductory' material they are informed by Bill's own research and full of unique and unusual insights. Some of his last work placed a special emphasis on “disproportionality,” or the tendency for a major fraction of all environmental impacts to be associated with a surprisingly small fraction of the overall economy as covered in Structural Factors and the Double Diversion: I=PAT and beyond embedded below. (Note: the recording quality on some of the class lectures isn't great and you have to turn the volume all the way up.)

ENVS 1: Structural Factors and the Double Diversion: I=PAT and beyond (Freudenburg 9-30-10) from Environmental Studies UCSB on Vimeo.

Finally, photos of and memories about Bill, testimonials to the personal impact Bill had on their lives and other such things are here.

Jon Stewart, Bill McKibben, Fox News and Comedy

2011-06-21T14:11:00.006-03:00

Jon Stewart's visit to Fox News has generated lots of discussion about the distinction between political satire and ideologically inclined news. (For people who haven't seen it, here is a link to the whole interview). Stewart portrays himself as a comedian who looks at things through an ideological lens -- but places the comedy first -- rather than an ideologically driven activist. Chris Wallace, for whatever reason, doesn't seem to get the distinction.

But all one needs to do is look at an example where ideology -- rather than comedy -- reigns. Specifically, environmental activist Bill McKibben (author and founder of 350.org) recently wrote a Washington Post op-ed piece (“A link between climate change and Joplin Tornadoes? Never!”) that was subsequently narrated and illustrated by Stephen Thomson of Plomomedia.com.

Compare this with what Stewart does -- when the ideology comes first, the comedy suffers. McKibbon's piece comes across as sarcastic rather than satirical and, no matter what you think of the message, most people won't find it as funny as what Stewart does. Point, set, match to Stewart.

WalMart, the Supreme Court and Marxism without Revolution

2011-06-21T09:04:00.004-03:00

In Marxism without Revolution John Quiggan provides an interesting analysis of the current socio-economic situation: There isn't a proletariat calling for revolution in the Western world. But there clearly is a ruling class, a top 1%, which controls wealth and power. Based on the insights from several books, most notably Jerry Cohen’s if You’re an Egalitarian How Come you’re so Rich, Quittan poses the following question: How can we more effectively oppose the rule of this 1%? (Note: for a wonderful, interactive graph displaying the changing proportion of US income allocated to different groups through time, click here.)

As Cohen puts it, the revolutionary working class postulated by Marx had to satisfy four conditions:
1) They constitute the majority of society;
2) they produce the wealth of society;
3) they are the exploited people in society;
4) they are the needy people in society.
. . . . 1. and 2. give the proletariat the capacity to revolutionise society, and 3. and 4. give them the reason to do so.
It seems clear, as Cohen says, that no sensible definition of the working class is going to satisfy all four conditions.
On the other hand, there clearly is a self-conscious and generally dominant class, centered on control of capital, but including plenty of people whose source of power and wealth is derived from their job rather than from capital income. On a narrow definition, it includes the top 1 per cent of US households which now receive 25 per cent of all income and hold around 35 per cent of all wealth. More broadly, the top 20 per cent of the population has, in broad terms, increased or maintained its share of national income as the top 1 per cent have become richer. This broader group controls more than half of all income and wealth.
. . . .
Coming back to Cohen’s conditions, the case to be made against the top 1 per cent is that:

1) They constitute a tiny minority of society
2) they consume far more of the wealth of society than they actually contribute
3) they exploit their control over capital for their own benefit
4) they are the primary obstacle to meeting a wide range of social needs
. . . .
The existence of those structures mean that a relatively simple set of feasible political demands, primarily involving reversal of the losses of the past few decades, could form a basis for political opposition to the rule of the top 1 per cent. The key elements are fairly obvious, and include

reimposition of control over the financial system
restoration of a progressive tax structure, combined with a more vigorous assault on international tax evasion/avoidance
shifting the burden of ‘austerity’ back to those responsible for the crisis, and rejection of cuts to the welfare state
repeal of anti-union laws and measures to make union organization easier

With those modest goals in mind (particularly the idea of making it easier for workers to organize and pressure for their needs) it is useful to consider the recent WalMart supreme court ruling. The broad evidence clearly shows that women are, on average, paid less, are less likely to be salaried, and hold lower-ranked positions than men. This is true even though there is less turnover among women, meaning that the average female employee has been working at Walmart significantly longer than the average male employee. You can see the data for yourself here.

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the plaintiffs' lawyers had improperly sued under a part of the class action rules that was not primarily concerned with monetary claims. But they were divided 5 to 4, along ideological lines, on whether the suit met a requirement of the class action rules that “there are questions of law or fact common to the class.” Stated another way, the conservative majority among the court used the case as an opportunity to up the threshold for class certification. Room for Debate has an interesting mix of informed reactions to the ruling.

In simple terms, the underlying issue involves the 'homogeneity' of the class. Class action lawsuits are typically done on a contingency basis and are expensive. Thus, in situations where the individual claims are likely to be small, lawyers who undertake this work need to come up with a large class in order to justify their upfront expenses in bringing the case. In the WalMart case the average damage was approximately $1100 per year. So the lawyers devised a scheme that would let them claim 1.5 million potential class members in order compensate for the relatively low per-person claim. And, as a result, the individuals in the class were much more diverse in their personal situations than, for example, individuals exposed to asbestos on the job.

So, how does this all relate back to Quiggan's analysis? One of his suggestions was changes in laws to make union organizing easier. Or, to put the point more generally, to make it easier for the less-powerful to advance their position. This is exactly the opposite of what has happened in the Supreme Court ruling. By upping the bar for what counts as a homogeneous class the Court has made it harder for large, relatively heterogeneous classes with small individual claims to organize in order to redress their grievance.

Complexity, industrial farming and the modern tomato

2011-06-17T12:20:00.004-03:00

For individuals familiar with complexity theory and the arguments against reductionism, Robert Dorit's article The Humpty-Dumpty Problem doesn't cover any new ground. However, it covers that ground clearly and succinctly. So, even if you know the material, it's a useful read as you'll come away better able to communicate the issues involved.

In Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit, Barry Estabrook explores the implications of a food production system that systematically removes complexity in order to maximize profit. Personally, as someone who grew up in Yakima Washington (aka the 'Fruitbowl of the Nation') I'm not convinced that tomatoes were ever our 'most alluring fruit.' I've got a laundry list of various varieties of pears, peaches, cherries and even apples that I'd put ahead of any tomato. That minor quibble aside, there is a nice excerpt from the book with many interesting factoids available here.

Smil on Global Energy

2011-06-16T08:00:00.000-03:00

Vaclav Smil knows as much about energy as anyone on the planet. His article Global Energy: The Latest Infatuations takes direct aim at the notion that production and mitigation alone can be sufficient for dealing with the twin problems of energy need and global warming. He points, in particular, for the need for conservation efforts by the US and Canada in order to curtail a social system predicated on excessive energy use.

The United States and Canada have a long history of shifting from one energy fad to the next—and sometimes back again—while rarely addressing the core issue of how much energy we use. As a result, the two nations have the dubious distinction of using twice as much energy per capita as the richest European nations and orders of magnitude more than most developing nations. The author argues that new energy sources such as renewables and new nuclear have no chance of proving up to the task unless we can curb our wasteful ways. Likewise, he argues that carbon sequestration and climate engineering will fall far short of heading off drastic changes in global climate unless we turn down the tap.

While not articulated in this manner within the article (which focuses on drawing out the policy implications rather than explaining the theory behind the analysis), Smil's analysis hinges on a theoretical accounting of the following chart showing the relationship between per capita energy use and the human development index for a variety of countries. The text accompanying the figure reads as follows: "At very low and low per capita consumption levels, higher use of energy is clearly tied to rising index of human development, but once energy per capita reaches about 150 gigajoules per year, the correlation breaks down. More is not better."

Crudely put, Smil is using the Human Development Index as a proxy for social complexity. Thus, consistent with the second law of thermodynamics, he notes the existence of a relationship between energy input and complexity -- the more complex a system is, the greater the energy input into the system necessary to compensate for entropy. But this does not imply that all social forms make maximal efficient use of that energy. Europe achieves a level of social complexity more or less equivalent with that of North America on half the energy input. For this reason, Smil argues that conservation rather than production or mitigation should be the focus of North American energy policy. But, as his survey of the current discourse surrounding energy policy in North America shows, conservation is not a major topic. Thus, while the article does an excellent job of diagnosing the current situation, it really doesn't come to grips with the path dependent nature of North America's form of social organization and level of social resistance associated with going down a different path.

IPCC shoots itself in the foot ..... again

2011-06-15T11:55:00.008-03:00

A May 9th IPCC press release highlighting findings from an unreleased report stated: "Close to 80 percent of the world‘s energy supply could be met by renewables by mid-century if backed by the right enabling public policies a new report shows."

The report (IPCC Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation) was released yesterday (June 14) and a new controversy has already arisen. Steve McIntyre, over at the 'knowledgable skeptic' blog Climate Audit first identified the problem and defined it in clearly understandable terms here: 1) the 80% figure represents the high end of the most optimistic (ER-2010) scenario and, hence, isn't representative while 2) the ER-2010 scenario was initially published by Greenpeace and the European Renewable Energy Council (here) and its lead author (Sven Teske) also served as one of the lead authors of the IPCC report. In short, there is a clear appearance of impropriety that lead Mark Lynas (author of Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet) to conclude that the "renewables report conclusion was dictated by Greenpeace."

There are two major points that need to be fleshed out here. First, the report as a whole is much more reasonable/plausible than the lead from the press release would suggest. Here, for example, is a summary of the report's core finding:

scenarios strongly indicate that RE (renewable energy) will become increasingly important over time, even without but particularly with GHG (green house gas) emissions constraints. However, the resulting contribution of RE in the various studies available in the literature is much lower than their corresponding technical potentials. Moreover, even if substantial growth rates are combined with future RE deployment paths, they are, in general, lower than what has been achieved by the RE industry during the past 10 years.

This is pretty mainstream stuff. In other words, the overall validity of the report has been (legitimately) called into question because of two stupid decisions which may or may not be related: a) the decision to include Teske as a lead author of the report and b) the decision to draw attention to the report by providing a sexy (but pretty obviously misleading) lead -- that close to 80% of global energy supply could come from renewables by 2050.

As for the ER-2010 scenario itself, it is just bad policy analysis. To start with, it presumes economic conditions (e.g. a significant price on carbon, read a cap and trade regime, in place as of 2010) that are already demonstrably false. But this is just the beginning of the problem. As noted by Lynas

How is this (i.e., the 80% reliance on renewables without any increased reliance on nuclear) achieved whilst also reducing carbon emissions at the same time, which is after all the supposed point of the whole exercise? By assuming a totally unrealistic global consumption of energy, with total primary energy use in 2050 actually *less* than the baseline of 2007. The magic trick of getting rid of nuclear whilst generating 80% of the world’s energy from renewables is performed by making an absurd assumption that primary energy use will fall (from 469 exojoules today to 407 in 2050) even as population rises from 7 to 9 billion and GDP per capita more than doubles. I doubt this is even thermodynamically possible, let alone the basis for good policy.

So, there is more going on here than the stupidity of the two decisions described above. Rather than assessing the plausibility of the assumptions that went into the various scenarios and giving them more or less weight accordingly, they seem to have accepted all of them at face value and given them equal weight. Indeed the ER-2010 scenario was one of four picked out for particular attention. The emphasis given to such an obviously flawed scenario indicates an abandonment of the committee's role as scientific assessor of the work.

More on energy tomorrow.

Update: Andrew Revkin just weighed in on the issue.