Aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon Spill

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This entry has been substantially updated (January 2020)

It was in April 2010 that the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling platform exploded, releasing almost 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico over the next five months.  The oil reached the coast 50 miles away, and coated 11% of Louisiana's coastline with crude severely damaged over 1,300 miles of Gulf shoreline. 

The Saltwater Marshes of Louisiana are unlike other coastal regions: instead of a beach pounded by waves, the marshes represent a a tattered-lace pattern of grass-secured bogs and inland waterways.  Much of the waterways are, of course, the estuaries of rivers such as the Mississippi, the Atchafalaya, the Calcasieu, and so on.  There are a large number of canals, such as the Intracoastal Canal, that crosshatch the marshes and admit saltwater much further inland. Cordgrass is a major feature of the landscape; it covers the ground and its roots prevent erosion, while catching runoff of fertilizers and other chemicals.

The oil sank into the soil, killing most of the grass in the affected areas and launching a renewed period of erosion.  The PNAS study (reference below) mentions that the grasses heroically held back much of the oil, but suffered worsening retreat as a result of the  root destruction.

This area is unlucky in that it's in a part of the world where land use has been taken for industrial applications by several generations of developers: sugar, cotton, petroleum--all part of globalized extractive industries, under urgent pressure to squeeze revenues from this luminously beautiful land.  While the Deepwater Horizon disaster was the biggest release of oil into the ocean, ever, it is part of a long history of industrial devastation by the oil industry in Louisiana.

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SOURCES 🙵 ADDITIONAL READING

B.R. Silliman, J. van de Koppel, M.W. McCoy, J. Diller, G.N. Kasozi, K.E. P.N. Adams, 🙵 A.R. Zimmerman, "Degradation and resilience in Louisiana salt marshes after the BP–Deepwater Horizon oil spill," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) 109 (28) 11234-11239 (10 July 2012)

Ed Yong, "Mixed Report for Oiled Salt Marshes," The Scientist (25 June 2012)

Deborah Dardis 🙵 Pat Pendarvis, "Louisiana's disappearing wetlands," Louisiana's Oil: the Environmental and Economic Impact--Southeastern Louisiana University (12 July 2010)

ADDED:  Victoria Macchi, "Half a World Away, Vietnamese Build Lives on the American Bayou" VOA News (15 Sep 2015); embarrassingly anodyne text, but the photos are interesting.  Unfortunately, this is most of what I could find about the remaining Vietnamese fishing community in the Marshland area.

Andrew Nikiforuk, "Why We Pretend to Clean Up Oil Spills" Hakai Magazine via Smithsonianmag.com (12 July 2016); a little heavy on the sanctimony, but reasonably informative

"Effects of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill on Coastal Salt Marsh Habitat," Office of Response and Restoration (23 November 2016)

Slums & Favelas

According to UN-Habitat statistics, the slum population of the earth is expected to exceed 1.1 billion in 2010; the total urban population for this year will probably be about 3.5 billion.¹ A common problem in all countries is equity formation in the poorest areas, which often conflicts with supplying public services to those who live there. This is because one of the most important public services is assisting job creation and capital formation, closely followed by utilities, medical services, transportation, and public health.

Selected Slums, Worldwide
Name	Metro	Est. Pop.
Soweto	Johannesburg	1,695,047
Orangi Township	Karachi	1,200,000
Nezahualcoyotl	Mexico City	1,140,528
Ezbet El Haggana	Cairo	1,000,000
Dharavi	Mumbai	1,000,000
Mathare	Nairobi	1,000,000
Tondo	Manila	630,604
Kibera	Nairobi	550,000
Bumbu	Kinshassa	525,770
Kimbanseke	Kinshassa	523,180
Korail	Dhaka	500,000
Tondo	Manila	407,330
Manshiyet Nasser	Cairo	350,000
Valle de Chalco	Mexico City	323,461
Ixtapaluca	Mexico City	290,076
Cité Soleil	Port au Prince	250,000
Rocinha	Rio de Janiero	180,000
Govindpuri	Delhi	150,000
Heliópolis	Sao Paulo	120,000
Yerawada	Poona	109,308
Belen	Iquitos [Peru]	65,000
Timbauba	Recife	60,000
San'ya	Tokyo	35,000
Cingapura	Sao Paulo	N/A

In less developed countries (LDC's), cities typically grow at the expense of the countryside, and migration is usually "push-driven." The "push" takes the form of reduced income potential from small farms (in cases where land reform has taken place) and rural unemployment (in areas where it has not).² When rural immigrants arrive in the slums, they are likely to find grossly inadequate provisions for themselves. The authorities will not know what to do with them; the local residents won't want to pay the taxes for them, or have them occupy greenfields; the local workers won't want to compete with them for jobs.

This typically leads to informal settlements, known as favelas (Brazilian Portuguese), barriadas (Peruvian Spanish), "shantytowns", "slums," and so on. These are in the city because that is where jobs are to be found.

In cities of the LDC's, informality does the following:

1. criminalize residency: urban residents may lack a right to live in a particular place³; they almost certainly will live in a settlement that is not authorized (for example, on squatted land or structures; in land set aside for farming or watershed);
2. deny tax revenues: in most countries that are still developing, a chronic headache is a lack of financial resources to urban governments. This is a severe problem in the USA; in countries like India or Brazil, it's catastrophic. Government revenues are allocated on the basis of official population data, which is likely to undercount by a wide margin; and most urban expenditures must come out of locally-collected taxes.
3. criminalize employment: informal occupations include activities that are illegal per se, such as drug trafficking or prostitution, but they are not limited to those things. All human services are supplied by the informal sector of LDC slums, from medical to transport, garbage collection, banking, local security, and prepared food. But there is no licensing system, and entrepreneurs may face violent resistance to entering markets. As a result, gangs usually act as both state (regulator and civil court) and firm.
4. reduce productivity: Informal businesses are almost always tiny and confined to the smallest tools available; this prevents industrial efficiency. Informal banking is expensive, unreliable, and underused; home equity is precarious and often ignored by the authorities in "slum clearing" programs.

Typically slum dwellers learn that accumulating productive capital is a doomed endeavor; the authorities will think nothing of destroying it just to get the slum dweller to go somewhere else.⁴ Yet this violates a fundamental expectation that people have of their leaders, viz., that their leaders will defend them and theirs. In slum settlements, the official authorities are little different from an army of occupation, and in many cases are an army of occupation.⁵ Activists on behalf of the slum are usually seeking formal recognition of their property rights (at least, to the physical structures); often, when this is won, the state is still inclined to ignore what it claimed to have granted. It can do this because the slum dwellers are regarded as nuisances, not citizens.

Job creation, for most slum dwellers, comes from capital formation. Labor is superabundant in the slum; it makes the slum an economic benefit for the rest of the city, but a huge share of the income of slum residents comes directly from other slum residents, not outsiders. When enterprises employ workers in the slum, they are limited by capital. This is why charitable enterprises have glommed onto the microcredit bandwagon en bloc. After decades of paying top dollar to aid recipients to get them to integrate the "backward classes" into economies that are already struggling to industrialize, aid agencies are now acknowledging the existence of a separate third world inside the third world.

The microcredit approach to capital formation (and job creation) is the main method now in place for economic development in the Third World. As mentioned, it replicates on a national level the model of development used by the World Bank/IMF towards the LDC's at a global level. Prior to the 1970's, the preferred method of economic development and monetary stabilization was prophylactic: countries like Pakistan, Indonesia, and Brazil were encouraged to develop domestic industries to reduce the hazard posed by capital flight or sovereign debt default. If essential foodstuffs were produced domestically, the argument went, then famine was unlikely to occur as a result of currency crises. After the mid-1980's, most developing countries changed to export-oriented development policies. In some cases, such as southern Africa, this can generally be said to have been unsuccessful. In areas where it has been successful, some argument exists over whether it was the EOI policy or the centralized control of capital investment and imports that did the trick (e.g., China, Republic of Korea, Taiwan R.o.C., Viet Nam).⁶

One big advantage to donor countries of the microcredit-microdevelopment approach is that it can directly bypass the local government, and deal directly with local NGO's or with the residents of slum areas themselves. A downside is that slum enterprise is itself entirely unsupervised, and can use the aid money to defraud or extort from other slum residents. It's not clear how serious a problem this last item is. One problem is that the idea assumes that slum residents are capable of sound construction work; even in jhuggi jhopri settlements (or temporary shanty towns in India, typically settled by construction workers) it's unlikely that very many workers have the spare time, energy, or range of skill to build a seismic residence (Davis, 2006, p.72).

Another advantage is that development aid is directed for the most part to things that residents are likely to want. In the past, a common approach was to clear informal structures and build housing projects. In the table above, the link for Cingapura goes to an article about a fairly recent Brazilian program of development that began with a project and turned to renovation assistance. In the areas of Cingapura where the old structures remain (but in renovated state), one appears to have Jane Jacob's ideal city: a dense, but small-structure neighborhood navigated mainly by foot, in which residents often use the street as a sort of living room.

An obvious downside to this, however, is that the slum is actually gentrified; while the residents may seem poor by the standards of North American or EU managers, the new occupants are likely to be outsiders who snap up professionally-improved lots. The former residents migrate to a new slum. At the same time, as legal structures recede to accommodate informality, the very function of the laws (such as the preservation of public spaces, safe waterways, adequate drainage and sanitation, etc.) is defeated. The local government is defeated and sidelined; it may have deserved this, but microfinance typically enshrines the defeat as permanent irrelevance for the state.

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Notes

1. UN-HABITAT defines a slum as "housing with one or more of the following conditions: inadequate drinking water; inadequate sanitation; poor structural quality/durability of housing; overcrowding; and insecurity of tenure." See Planning Sustainable Cities — Global Report on Human Settlements 2009, Part VI Statistical Annex , p.6. However, relevant to this post is the definition of slum used by the government of Maharashtra State: "a congested, unhygienic area or buildings that are public hazards."
   
   Population of the world and divisions thereof, see Ibid., p.9; population of slums (by country), see Ibid., p.24. Curiously, despite detailed statistics on slums in Latin America, Africa, and so on, none appear for the developed nations. However, global projections for the developed world as a whole appear in the site for the Global Urban Observatory (GUO)
2. That migration to cities is typically push-driven is my own personal inference based on studies of others. Take, for example, Michael Herrmann & David Svarin, “Environmental pressures and rural-urban migration: The case of Bangladesh” , UNCTAD (January 2009), p.5:

   The rapid expansion of the labor force in the non-agricultural sectors, which leads the way to an accelerated expansion of the population in the urban centers, is attributable to relatively strong push and pull factors. On the one hand, a relatively weak agricultural development, which has been attributable to the recurrence of natural disasters, enforces people to search for employment opportunities outside agriculture; on the other hand, a relatively strong development of the non-agricultural sectors, which has been due to the expansion of the textile industries, has enabled many people to find employment in the non-agricultural sector.

   Notice the "pull" comes from the creation of textile jobs, which are presumably more attractive than rural jobs. But rural jobs are simply unavailable; rather than leaving the countryside to seek an improvement, workers leave under duress: textile jobs are notoriously awful, especially for people accustomed to quiet and fresh air. Bangladesh slums are certainly not more attractive places to live than the adjacent countryside. And indeed, the next section of the paper cited above outlines the push-like character of pull-driven urban migration:

   Although agricultural labor productivity has increased in Bangladesh, it is not so much due to an increase of agricultural value added, as it is due to a decrease of the agricultural labor force, associated with accelerating rural-urban migration in the country. The development of the agricultural sector in Bangladesh is therefore more appropriately measured by yields in agricultural produce. Our data shows that despite considerable investment in agriculture, yields in important agricultural produce have fallen during the past decades. Since the early 1980s yields of groundnuts, rice and wheat fell by 1 mt/ha on average. The main reasons for the weak agricultural development are exogenous factors, notably climate-change induced natural hazards. Natural hazards destroy harvests and threaten food security, especially of poor households.

   In other words, policies taken by the (urban) authorities, or rich countries, have made it impossible for even a declining labor force to make a living off the land. Juxtaposed against the putative "pull" of urban jobs, it is clear that the "pull" takes the form of a Hobson's choice: move to a slum or starve.
3. Many, if not most, pre-industrial or incipient industrial countries have restrictions on labor mobility. For example, in the People's Republic of China, citizens could be compelled to live where the authorities chose, and denied permission to move. After the 1990's, there was still a requirement that citizens secure permission live permanently in any particular shi, or municipality. See Kenneth G. Lieberthal & David M. Lampton, Bureaucracy, Politics, and Decision Making in Post-Mao China, University of California Press (1992), Chapter 12, "Urbanizing Rural China: Bureaucratic Authority and Local Autonomy" p.354ff. In England, between 1662 and 1832, the Settlement Act effectively tied each certifiable pauper to one of the 15,000 parishes in the country.
   
   Restrictions on labor mobility are typically motivated by the need to certify the poor for eligibility for relief. In pre-industrial England, for example, one was allowed to move away from one's parish, but could not receive relief outside of it. Since most laborers seem to have been vulnerable to recurring episodes of unemployment and destitution, this was an important constraint from emigrating from depressed areas. In the collectives of the Communist regimes, rural workers were typically treated as serfs of the regime and confined to kolkholzy or sovkholzy their entire lives. This was a more extreme form of mobility restriction. More recently, China and Vietnam retain the Hukou/Ho khau system of household registration (Congressional-Executive Committee on China, "China's Household Registration System"-2006)(Refugee Review Tribunal: Vietnam [Australia-10 May 2005] ).
4. Probably the most devastating example of this was the 2004 destruction of Yamuna Pushta, an immense slum complex in Delhi. The demolition displaced perhaps 150,000 people. It was precipitated by Delhi hosting the 2010 Commonwealth Games. This tragic event was depicted in the documentary "Yamuna Gently Weeps" (trailer here). See also "Over 300,000 people to be forcefully evicted from Yamuna Pushta," Habitat International Coalition (2004). Another documentary of slum demolition is "Phnom Penh for Sale - Cambodia" (Journeyman Pictures 2009), where a settlement on Boeung Kok Lake, Phnom Penh, was demolished to make way for commercial development ("A further 160 families in Cambodia face forced eviction," Human Rights Blog, 2009). The settlements around Boeung Kok Lake that are under attack house some 4,200 families--a tiny fraction of the number liquidated overnight in Delhi. In 2008 alone, Amnesty International received reports about 27 forced evictions, affecting an estimated 23,000 people.
   
   In Lagos, Nigeria, there is the example of Maroko. Maroko was a former fishing village that became a refuge for urban poor driven from gentrified parts of booming Lagos. By 1990, its population was around 300,000. It was bulldozed in July of that year without any meaningful resettlement scheme. In this particular case, the perpetrator was a military regime internationally renown for kleptocracy. See Chinazor Megbolu, "Maroko Evictees Take Case to African Commission," This Day (14 January 2009). See also Davis, p.101. See also Davis's list of major slum evictions (102).
5. This refers not merely to obvious examples such as the Occupied Territories of Palestine, or to urban centers in Iraq, or formerly Tamil-controlled regions of Sri Lanka. In a great many LDCs, civil wars or coups have led to parts of a country being under military rule. In such cases, there was little, if any, difference in conduct between the nation's army toward its own population, and that of a foreign invader towards the civilians in combat zones.
6. See, for a brief summary of the history of development policy, see Rajneesh Narula, "Switching from import substitution to the ‘New Economic Model’ in Latin America: A case of not learning from Asia" , Latin America/Caribbean and Asia/Pacific Economics and Business Association (December 2002). Note that the merits of the respective policies are not at issue here; the point is merely that a change in policy regime took place, and the Bretton Woods Institutions were instrumental in this change.

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Sources & Additional Reading

Tripti Lahiri, "Ayn Rand move over: In Pune, India, shantytown residents design by consensus" Christian Science Monitor, (25 March 2010)

Filipe Balestra website;"Sambarchitecture"; Sara Göransson has no dedicated website

David Basulto, "Incremental Housing Strategy in India," Archicentral (18 May 2009)

Filipe Balestra and Sara Göransson, "Incremental Housing Strategy in Pune, India," A Weekly Dose of Architecture (25 May 2009)

Bromwyn Curran, "The Cruel Utility of Slums" , Development Asia (January-March 2010), p.16

Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, Verso Press (2006)

Srinanda Sen and Jane Hobson, "The Pune Slum Census: Creating a Socio-Economic and Spatial Information base on a GIS for integrated and inclusive city development" GIS Development Conference Proceedings, Enschede, The Netherlands (May 2002)

The Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centers (SPARC; the NGO that sponsored Filipe Balestra & Sara Göransson visit to Pune); publications page; see especially Sundar Burra, "Co-operative Housing in Pune" (November 1999)

Alex Perry, "Life in Dharavi: Inside Asia's Biggest Slum," Time (12 June 2006)

UN-HABITAT Global Report on Human Settlements,

Flickr Map of Netaji Nagar, Poona (Pune), Maharashtra State, India

GoogleMapCreator

Click for interactive map Link goes to custom map in MapTube made with GoogleMapCreator (CASA, UCL, London)

After wading through this paper, I realized I was reading an infomercial for a software called "GoogleMapCreator" (or simply GMapCreator).  The software is introduced and available for download here, and the name says what it does: it creates maps using data supplied from Google and whatever other appropriate sources one can find.

A shapefile is loaded into the application and displayed on the screen. [...] The displayed attribute, colouring of the data, geographic extents and maximum zoom levels are defined by the user. Colouring is achieved by setting colours and thresholds for values in the attribute data e.g. any region over 1.0 is red. [...]

This software was accompanied by a web hosting service, MapTube, which hosts maps created with GMapCreator.

This is pretty cool, although the output is a bit hard on the eyes.  The map appears as a layer in Google Maps although one could introduce a 3rd layer, like an historical map of London.

Hudson-Smith & Crooks paper (PDF--p.11), after introducing GoogleMapCreator and MapTube, turns to the idea of Neogeography, in which the many digital mappings of our world are linked to form a GeoWeb:

The ideology behind such developments can be linked back to David Gelernter (1991) in his seminal book Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox. 

Gelernter (1991) defines ‘Mirror Worlds’ as software models of some chunk of reality, some piece of the real world going on ‘outside your window’ which can be represented digitally. Gelernter predicted that a ‘software model’ of your city, once setup, will be available (like a public park)… it will sustain a million different views... each visitor will zoom in and pan around and roam through the model as he chooses’ (Roush, 2007).

Again, Hudson-Smith & Crooks have something to promote: a virtual London, modelling every building inside the M25, which is notable because they introduce the linkage between (a) a 3rd dimension in maps, corresponding to the built environment (now available for applying data with physical coordinates) and (b) the demands this raises for a navigational environment in a virtual manifold.*

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* A manifold is used here in the mathematical sense: the graph in n dimensions of a function of (n - 1) variables.  In the simplest form, this is a graph of a function y = f(x), or z = f(x,y).  In a computer imaging program, the simulated 3-space visible is accompanied by time coordinates (as, for instance, the effect of the sun moving over a simulated view of London).

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SOURCES AND ADDITIONAL READING

Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), The Bartlett (Faculty of the Built Environment), University College of London, UK

Wade Roush, "Second Earth," MIT Technology blog (18 June 2007)

Andrew Hudson-Smith & Andrew Crooks, The Renaissance of Geographic Information: Neogeography, Gaming and Second Life, Digital Urban blog (6 Aug 2008); links to their working paper of the same title (PDF).

Robert Blinn on sustainable design

The truth of the matter is that environmentalism and ecological sustainability is a huge subject—indeed, it's the largest possible subject. 

First of all, there's the problem of competing goals: should environmentalism seek to challenge the basic structure of society, on the grounds that it's in an inescapable conflict with sustainability? Or is the object rather to make other social decisions (such as they are) sustainable through [technical] engineering? Then there's the point of view of scientists evaluating costs and benefits of mitigation plans: do we focus on greenhouse gas abatement or toxin abatement? habitat preservation or emissions regulation? 

 In my "Cataclysm" series (link is to part 1) I wrote about ways of thinking about technology. In "Jevon's Paradox" I discussed at least one very important obstacle to engineering our way out of environmental catastrophe. 

Robert Blinn, writing at Core77, also introduces the economic conflicts with environmental protection.

When mankind took up only a small portion of the planet, our growth could subsist on the losses of the far larger animal population. Now, instead of displacing the habitats of others, we're beginning to disturb our own. The "commons" were so large relative to us that our abuses were barely noticeable, but now that we're over six billion strong, our damage is starting to show. We're contributing to what's being termed the anthropocene era, where human pollution is influencing the geological fate of our planet. The commons can no longer afford to be discounted; they're all we have. The tragedy of the commons is a type of collective action problem, a social trap where all parties agree that action should be taken, but gains will not be realized unless they all act as one. While each player knows what would be best for the communal good, self-maximizing choices fail to realize the optimal outcome for all parties.

In practical experience, there really is no resolution to the Tragedy of the Commons besides some enlightened state or meta-state; and even this approach has severe shortcomings.

Looking at the world through such a lens makes one thing clear: Despite our mansions and our roadways, our designer jeans and our iPhones, human beings have made very little. Instead we've transmuted stored energy into temporary value in exchange for long-term waste...It burns stored solar energy to provide the illusion of growth. The amount of stored energy, real value, in the world is actually shrinking. Our process of "growth" is entropic, creating local pockets of order at a greater net cost in energy.

In the comments section that follows, there seems to be some confusion about the idea of zero-sum phenomena in economics. Blinn refers to the consumption of fossil fuels, which represent solar energy in a very concentrated form. 

A basic concept in economics is the idea of future discounting. You can't have your cake and eat it too; and usually economists assume you'd prefer to eat it (now), since future consumption is always valued less than present consumption. Likewise, consider the oceans: they're an example of the commons. The oceans allow for massive movements of their own resources, such as fish, over vast distances. Hence, there's no way of staking a claim over a segment of the ocean's resources and protecting it as private property. 

Individuals have a personal incentive to extract as much value as possible from the commons for their own use. While oil fields are controlled by nation-state "owners" of the surface, the zero-sum issue arises with present-versus-future consumption of such a valuable resource. I had some semantic issues with Blinn's use of the term "zero-sum." His definition of the term (and re-definition for commentor John) didn't make clear that zero-sum transactions do include situations where both parties capture some utility.

An example is terms of trade between two mineral-exporting countries. Since they cannot really increase production over the short run, their wealth depends on the comparative value of their own respective mineral. If one country exports gold and the other oil, an increase in the demand for gold will necessarily reduce the real wealth of the oil-exporting nation (since it has to pay for gold with exports of oil). 

The other problem is fairly basic: the increasing-sum component of the modern world economy arises from the ability to add some value to a product that is greater than the cost of the raw materials. It's not inconceivable that a future USA could consume less of every type of raw material, and still have a higher GDP: improvements in economic or technical efficiency could lead to lighter products of superior usefulness.

Biofuel scam

UPDATE (11 Feb 2014): This article has been substantially revised since initial posting.

One popular idea for addressing energy security, energy "independence," and the trade balance, is biofuels.

The idea is to use modern farming technology to grow sugars that can be converted to fuel for modified car engines, or even biomass energy (e.g., growing plants to be burned for electric energy; the carbon released will be sequestered by plants being grown for more fuel).¹ The carbon released in biofuels, likewise, is supposedly captured by the process of renewing them. A major dilemma, however, has been the energy return on energy invested (EROEI) of biofuels in non-tropical regions.²  If EROEI is less than 1, then even very high market prices for gasoline/diesel fuels will not make biofuels economically viable: the energy deficit has to come from somewhere--most likely, the gasoline or diesel the fuel was supposed to replace in the first place.  If the EROEI is greater than 1, but not by much, then erosion and other emissions will more than offset any greenhouse gas reductions from the enterprise.³

In "The Clean Energy Scam," author Michael Grunwald reports on the disastrous impact the biofuel sector has had on the Brazilian rainforest.

Time: But the basic problem with most biofuels is amazingly simple, given that researchers have ignored it until now: using land to grow fuel leads to the destruction of forests, wetlands and grasslands that store enormous amounts of carbon.

Backed by billions in investment capital, this alarming phenomenon is replicating itself around the world. Indonesia has bulldozed and burned so much wilderness to grow palm oil trees for biodiesel that its ranking among the world's top carbon emitters has surged from 21st to third according to a report by Wetlands International. Malaysia is converting forests into palm oil farms so rapidly that it's running out of uncultivated land. But most of the damage created by biofuels will be less direct and less obvious. In Brazil, for instance, only a tiny portion of the Amazon is being torn down to grow the sugarcane that fuels most Brazilian cars. More deforestation results from a chain reaction so vast it's subtle: U.S. farmers are selling one-fifth of their corn to ethanol production, so U.S. soybean farmers are switching to corn, so Brazilian soybean farmers are expanding into cattle pastures, so Brazilian cattlemen are displaced to the Amazon. It's the remorseless economics of commodities markets. "The price of soybeans goes up," laments Sandro Menezes, a biologist with Conservation International in Brazil, "and the forest comes down."

Deforestation accounts for 20% of all current carbon emissions. So unless the world can eliminate emissions from all other sources--cars, power plants, factories, even flatulent cows--it needs to reduce deforestation or risk an environmental catastrophe. That means limiting the expansion of agriculture, a daunting task as the world's population keeps expanding.

It's difficult to to make this connection obvious, especially given the amazingly pervasive greenwashing of biofuels by investors like BP.

The Problem with "Energy Independence"

Ever since the Nixon Administration (and the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973), US leaders have paid lip service to the goal of "energy independence." The concept is willfully vague, in part because ambiguous goals are easier to meet than explicit ones; but one metric of energy dependence might be the share of transport fuels that have to be imported. So, for example, if most transport was powered by domestically-produced electricity, it would be all right if a country imported most of its crude oil since its crude oil consumption played a small economic role anyway.

That's obviously not the case for the United States.

Oil is an extremely important economic input in the US industrial system and will remain so for a long time to come. This is widely recognized, so a lot of advocates for energy independence have called for either increasing domestic production, or else for subsidizing energy substitutes like biofuels.

Increasing domestic production is a motivation behind long-standing tax subsidies for producers, such as the oil depletion allowance.⁴ This subsidy is quite expensive and consists of a huge subsidy to investors for exploration (especially on federal lands). It has had the effect of increasing the rate of US oil extraction above market levels, meaning that tax policy has stimulated oil depletion of US territory. If nothing had been done, then presumably oil would have been slightly costlier, and the USA would have greater reserves than it actually does. Very likely it would have developed an economy less dependent on cheap oil, and today we would consume less and have more.

In other words, the pursuit of energy independence has, in practice, meant a commitment to more oil of US provenance now, at the expense of more oil in the future. It's meant cheaper oil, but higher taxes, meaning that the US government has intervened elsewhere--just as it did with agriculture--to support prices made artificially low by exploration subsidies. At the pump, oil is taxed less than it is in other industrial countries, but Americans pay higher taxes to subsidize exploration and recovery (since the oil companies pay hardly any taxes, and they can get substantial rebates from the US government just for depleting the government's own oil). This has resulted in greater oil dependency, leading to a secular trend--over long periods of time--to costlier oil, more imports (as domestic output exhausted the low-hanging fruit).

One could argue that the quest for "energy independence" has been amazingly void of serious public discussion. It's a bromide that no one takes seriously.

This is far from unusual, incidentally. Many countries have policies that, taken altogether, are astonishingly perverse. But that's not the point.

The point is that "energy independence" has never been taken seriously by its proponent, other than as a scheme to get more perverse and destructive policies. It can be used to contrive "successful" arguments, or rationales, for "green" subsidies that actually make environmental problems worse. If the object is merely to replace imports of energy with anything, however costly, then "energy independence" is an insidious folly. If the object is to mitigate an actual problem with national accounts, or with environmental impact, then a serious discussion of costs and benefits is far more likely to ensue.

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Notes

1. For an introduction to the concept of "biomass" as a source of electricity generation, see Zia Haq, "Biomass for Electricity Generation," US Department of Energy: Energy Information Administration Annual Energy Outlook (Dec 2001--accessed 11 Feb 2014)



2. For estimates of EROEI for various energy sources, some options are: Dana Visalli, "Getting a decent return on your energy investment," Resilience blog (12 Apr 2006). Unfortunately, this article does not examine biofuels in detail; it merely introduces the concept of EROEI. One study of Brazilian cane sugar ethanol is Edward Smeets, Martin Junginger, André Faaij, Arnaldo Walter, & Paulo Dolzan, "Sustainability of Brazilian bio-ethanol", Copernicus Institute--Utrecht University  (Aug 2006), whose findings are summarized in Robert Rapier, "Report: Brazilian Ethanol is Sustainable," The Oil Drum blog (6 Oct 2006).  I will freely admit that I have not read the entire 135-page report and am wholly reliant on the summary in The Oil Drum.  Rapier concludes that an estimated EROEI of 8.3(or more) is valid for Brazilian sugar cane.
   
   Rapier helpfully includes analysis of soil erosion from corn versus sugar cane; Brazilian cane has an erosion rate of about 1.24 t/ha/yr, compared to US corn erosion of 12 t/ha/yr. So even if the EROEI were sharply increased in corn ethanol, this would have a disastrous impact on North American land fertility.
   
   Estimates of EROEI for corn ethanol in the USA seem to range from 0.9 to 1.65; see Roel Hammerschlag, "Ethanol’s Energy Return on Investment: A Survey of the Literature 1990−Present" in Environmental Science & Technology, 2006, 40 (6), pp 1744–1750. The lower estimate factors in the costs of farm machinery.


3. For those interested in the subject, there are several issues. Suppose (for sake of discussion) the EROEI for some ethanol cycle is 2. This means for every joule of energy used to produce the fuel, 2 joules worth of energy are "created" (technically, the energy is not created at all, but captured from sunlight by photosynthesis).  That particular sector will consume energy equivalent to its entire output for the rest of the economy, since half of its output--or equivalent--will need to be plowed back into the production process. Even the most optimistic estimates of corn biofuels suggest an EROEI much less than 2 in North America.  "In theory," this would be sustainable, if goofy--if the only environmental impact were greenhouse gas emissions from direct consumption of fuel.


4. The oil depletion allowance is an exceptionally sweeping tax exemption that allows many profitable oil companies to avoid most taxes. The method of assessing it was changed (supposedly removing some of the oil companies' tax advantages) in 1975, but in fact it was merely re-arranged. The oil depletion allowance was created in 1926 and has survived, and even become more baroque with time. David C. Johnston, Daniel Johnston, Introduction to Oil Company Financial Analysis, PennWell Books (2006), p.67ff. For analysis, see Gary Zatzman & Rafiqul Islam, Economics of Intangibles, Nova Publishers (2007), p.179ff. One does not need to accept Zatzman's and Islam's overall ideological conception to benefit from their explanation of the financial returns accruing from the oil depletion allowance.

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Sources & Additional Reading

Michael Grunwald, "The Clean Energy Scam," Time (27 Mar 2008) (via LunchoverIP, Bruno Giussani)

US Energy Information Administration website--extremely valuable source of data for energy price history, global consumption, and so on.

What is coltan and what does it have to do with my cell phone?

UPDATE (11 Feb 2014): This article has been substantially revised since initial posting.


"Coltan" is short for columbite-tantalite, a mineral from which niobium (AKA columbium) and tantalum are extracted.  It's a mineral found mainly in Nigeria, Rwanda, Mozambique, Malawi, and Congo-Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of Congo). "Tantalite" is the usual internationally-used name for this mineral, which--depending on the grade--carries different concentrations of either tantalum or niobium.

About Tantalum

Niobium is usually used in the production of high-strength steel alloys, not semiconductors; tantalum is used in the production of cell phones because, as a superconductor, it sharply reduces the amount electricity required.¹ Superalloys account for about a fifth of consumption. Tantalum has an extremely high melting point, 3017° C, and is an excellent conductor.²  It can be made extremely strong for cutting tools, resists corrosion, and can be used to make surface acoustic wave (SAW) filters used in cell phones, etc.  In cell phones it is also used in capacitors and the lenses of cameras.

The Supply

Not all, or even an especially large proportion, of tantalum/niobium comes from Africa; most comes from Australia or South America, and much comes from minerals other than tantalite; however, tantalite is one of the more important ones, commercially (often any commercially significant tantalum-bearing mineral is called "tantalite.")³

Cell Phone Recycling Guide: The legacy of "blood diamonds" is well known, however the fact that a similar arrangement exists to mine coltan (Columbium Tantalum) is lesser known. Tantalum is a superconductor, one of the best on Earth. It is used to coat capacitors to help them create more power from less energy so that your cell phone no longer needs a battery larger than the phone itself. In war torn central Africa, people are forced into modern day slavery to mine this rare element, which is then sold to fund the wars in this region. Recently the majority of Tantalum production has shifted to Australia, however it is a rare element, so decreasing demand helps decrease the likelihood that manufacturers will turn to African supplies.

A lot of the moral headaches associated with African tantalite arise from "artisanal mining" (artisanal & small scale mining, or ASM) only a part of which comes from areas controlled by warring militia from Congo-Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of the Congo).  One of the features of the Dodd-Frank Act was a provision requiring companies reporting to the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) to say whether or not the tantalum they bought came from the conflict region.⁴

Tantalum Market Overview: A major problem with the whole issue of conflict tantalum is the ability to track tantalum back through several stages to its original source. A key element of this is the concept of “bag and tag”, which essentially means identifying tantalum ore at the source of production and providing the means to track it down the chain.

The industry itself has introduced several schemes to address this. One is the Conflict-Free Smelter (CFS) Program, which was developed by the electronics industry to eradicate unethical sources of raw materials from the supply chain. Driven by the Electronics Industry Citizenship Coalition (EICC) and Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI), the CFS Program is being adopted by the automotive, aerospace and other metal-consuming industries and a growing number of tantalum smelters are now certified as conflict-free.

Since originally posting this essay, the locus of concern about "conflict exotics" (i.e, artisanal mining of exotic metals and strategic materials in warzones, usually under duress) has shifted from the DRC to the Central African Republic (CAR).

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Notes

1. "Niobium: Market Outlook"; "Tantalum: Market Outlook," Roskill (accessed 11 Feb 2014)


2. "Tantalum Market Overview," Minor Metals Trade Association (accessed 11 Feb 2014).  The MMTA report mentions:

   For most of the 2000s it was often reported that the majority of the world’s tantalum resources were located in Central Africa and in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in particular. Towards the end of the decade, however, the Tantalum-Niobium International Study Center, the industry’s principal forum, estimated that some 40% of the most likely global resource base is in Brazil and elsewhere in South America, followed by Australia, with 21%. Central Africa was estimated to account for less than 10%.

   Is this true, or was "artisanally mined" tantalum accounted for as contribution from Brazil?


3. Tantalum - Raw Materials and Processing," from website for Tantalum-Niobium International Study (TIS) Center (Lasne, Belgium--accessed 11 Feb 2014). A major development since originally posting this article was the collapse of demand/prices and some national suppliers in 2009-2012.  


4. See Ken Matthysen & Iain Clarkson, "Gold and diamonds in the Central African Republic: the country’s mining sector, and related social, economic and environmental issues" , ActionAid Nederland and Cordaid (Feb 2013), p.11, for the Dodd-Frank Act disclosure requirements re: tin, tungsten, tantalum, and gold.

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Sources & Additional Reading

"Cell Phone Recycling Guide," Phone Scoop blog (via Textually blog, 19 Jan 2005)



John F. Papp, "Mineral resource of the month: Niobium (Columbium)" (December 2007 accessed 11 Feb 2014); and Larry D. Cunningham, "Mineral Resource of the Month: Tantalum" (August 2004), both from GeoTimes blog. Both discuss the applications for the materials (including substitutes).


"Columbium (Niobium) and Tantalum" , Larry D. Cunningham, USGS (1999)


ADDED 13 Nov: "Mobile phones link to bloody Congo conflict" (Independent.ie, 9 Nov 2008)

Historical Inevitability-Part 2

(Part 1)

In the previous segment I talked about the philosophical dilemmas associated with free will. Now it is necessary to extend this discussion from that to the matter of historical inevitability. As I mentioned in part 1, one of the major controversies in historiography has to do with the question of determinism.

Inevitability in Conflict with Free Will

Isaiah Berlin is the famous apostle of free will as an ethical necessity.¹ His defense of the idea of free will is based on the objection to determinism, that it is impossible to think coherently about human actions without an assumption that actors can chose between good acts and bad ones. The argument seems at first like an appeal to consequences: we must believe something because bad things will occur if we don't (people will feel that they are under no moral compulsion to resist temptation). But Berlin's argument is actually somewhat different. He is aware of what Kant wrote about the issue (RNL🙵A), so he has no noble lie to propagate; rather, he believes the concept of action degenerates to nonsense unless we assume the actor has some degree of choice over it. The state of being conscious requires a belief in one's ability to control one's own actions, even if this belief is erroneous.

Read more »

Jevon's Paradox Revisited

(Part 1)

Click for larger image Curved red lines represent different levels of "utility" (i.e., general well-being). Straight blue lines represent budget lines. Note: the utility curves are derived from a linear-expenditure model.

Utility functions are an extremely important part of economic analysis. When predicting the effects of fuel economy standards on overall fuel consumption, an economist is likely to reach Jevon's conclusions: increased efficiency will lead to increased marginal utility of consumption.

The effect of a change in prices or the shape of the utility function is to alter consumption. An increase in income will lead to an increase in the consumption of both x and y, and therefore of utility U. The shape of the utility curve determines by how much consumption of both goods goes up. Usually, when I explain the concept I set y equal to a particular good of interest, and set x equal to everything else. This is because (a) we are interested in the effect of changes in price, etc. on one particular good among many that people tend to need; and (b) the usual supply-demand curves use the y-axis to represent the price of one particular good.


Reverting to my original analysis in part 1, we see efficiency having the exact same effect as a reduction in gasoline prices. In the chart, petrol prices have fallen 26% so you can now buy 35% more per dollar than you could before (or, conversely, engine output per unit of fuel has increased by 35%).¹ The first thing we did was plot the new (dotted) budget line, with its steeper slope. There was an increase in liters of gasoline purchased by 37% and a 1.4% reduction in the physical amount/dollar amount of everything else. Utility has increased from the second red line to the third.


Not content with this, we are still interested in the income and substitution effects caused by this. So I plotted a "utility-equivalent budget line." This is a budget line that passes through the new (higher) utility function; but it has the exact same slope as the old budget line. If the same new level of utility had been achieved as a result of an increase in income (rather than an increase in efficiency) then gas consumption would increase by only 16%, while "everything else" would increase by 8.3%. The effect of increased efficiency was that consumers substituted gasoline for other forms of consumption: gas consumption rose another 17%, while consumption of everything else fell 9%.


The significance of the two effects is not trivial. To the extent that the concepts explained above are to be taken seriously, policymakers can use taxes and subsidies to correct for perverse substitution effects. A fairly common proposal related to peak oil and ACC concerns is to restructure tax policies to offset the substitution effects caused by (say) higher CAFE standards. In other words, it would be necessary to raise gas taxes in order to pay for reductions in other taxes.

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This illustrates a shift from one utility function (red) to another (brown) as a result of more efficient use of y.

Returning to the 2nd approach, we used another computer model to estimate what the effect of an actual increase in efficiency would be. Part of the challenge was applying the linear-expenditure model to gasoline; the first approach merely treated efficiency as a change in budget, whereas the second treated efficiency as a change in the utility function (and hence, in differently-shaped indifference curves). Mathematically, the difference between a linear-expenditure model utility function and the more commonplace Cobb-Douglass one is that the former is actually the latter minus a constant for all values of x and y.


The graph above illustrates the shift in x-y preferences caused by increased efficiency. In the scenario I depicted, the four brown curves represent (left to right) the same four successive levels of utility as the red curves. The same budget line is is tangent to a higher "brown"indifference curve than "red" indifference curve. This time, the increase in efficiency has caused gas consumption to increase by 33% (about the same as the price decline did) but since there's no "income effect," the substitution is much larger: a 20% decline in the consumption of "everything else." Now, to clarify a point I hinted at in the previous entry: this is a bit ominous because the ratio of energy expenditures to other things has increased by a lot more than if we approximated efficiency increases by slashing the "price" of gas. In the first scenario, energy efficiency had gone up, making the dollar worth more (since more energy-intensive stuff could be bought), so the economy become somewhat more energy intensive. In the second scenario, we've faithfully replicated the changed technical conditions, with the result that the economy becomes a lot more energy intensive.


As I've mentioned as often as practical, these utility functions, graphs, and inferences are mostly arbitrary. One of many problems with the utility function, for example, is that it's long been insisted by economists that the function U(x,y) only allows you to supply a rank for different values of x and y. In order to plot these numbers at all I had to create a function in which U was a specific numerical value: 20, 30, 40... The logical implication was that 3 units of gas and 6 units of everything else, say, would produce a utility of 20, whereas if gas were increased to 8, utility would be 40. This does not mean that a 2.67-fold increase of gas consumption will make one twice as happy as before, though; it only means that one is in a position that is preferred to one in which utility = 20.


This may seem like a manageable arrangement unless we consider the thorny problem of comparing different utility functions. With a new utility function we need to compare the utility furnished by old and new bundles of goods, which cannot really coexist in time for purposes of comparison.


A more sensible handling of utility is to begin with the explanation that we aren't really measuring "well-being" in a meaningful sense, anymore than average GDP per capita measures "well-being." We are actually measuring something known more properly as "welfare," which is a rational deduction of well-being based on the ability of an economic actor to exchange or arrange what she has to achieve something nearer to her heart's desire. Welfare, another subject unto itself, could be said to capture this concept.²



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Notes:

1 The attentive reader will notice that I'm actually saying fuel efficiency went up by 35%, which is exactly the same as the price of gas declining by 26%. We calculated that the actual amount of money spent on gas, or expenditure, went up 2%, while money spent on other stuff went down 1.4%. An implication of this is that people spent about 40% of their income on gas. This is really an exaggeration, even if we pretend "gasoline" refers to all forms of energy and include indirect purchases of energy, e.g., the share of a pizza's cost that goes towards the gas used in delivery, the natural gas used in baking it, the nitrates used in the cultivation of the wheat and tomatoes, and so on. Still, if we did account for costs like that, I think energy would account for a solid 7% of GDP.

By the way, if I had used a Cobb-Douglass utility function, then the expenditure on energy would remain entirely unchanged. This makes no sense to me: if something suddenly provides more satisfaction per dollar spent, and if you are free to do so, you will tend to spend more dollars on that thing than you did before.

2 See Partha Dasgupta, On Well-Being and Destitution, Oxford University Press (1993), p.70ff. Unusually for this blog, the link goes to a display of the actual page in Google Book where the explanation begins. Dasgupta, however, does not propose to measure well-being/welfare (W) as an alternative to utility, but as an enhanced version of it: freedom plus utility. I think this misses a splendid opportunity.

Jevon's Paradox

What happens to the consumption of a fuel, like coal or gasoline, when efficiency improves? The answer is that it goes up. This surprising answer was observed by William Stanley Jevons in 1865:

The number of tons of coal used in any branch of industry is the product of the number of separate works, and the average number of tons consumed in each. Now, if the quantity of coal used in a blast-furnace, for instance, be diminished in comparison with the yield, the profits of the trade will increase, new capital will be attracted, the price of pig-iron will fall, but the demand for it increase; and eventually the greater number of furnaces will more than make up for the diminished consumption of each. And if such is not always the result within a single branch, it must be remembered that the progress of any branch of manufacture excites a new activity in most other branches, and leads indirectly, if not directly, to increased inroads upon our seams of coal.
["Of the Economy of Fuel"]

This post will explain the concept of the Jevons Paradox in greater detail. The concept of the utility function is explained here; it's fairly handy for explaining the complexities of the Jevons Paradox.

Click for larger image

A paraphrase of the paradox is that, if the utility of anything is increased (e.g., the benefits to an individual of consuming a liter of gasoline), then the consumption of that thing increases as a share of total consumption. To illustrate, I created a chart with utility functions generated by the linear expenditure model of utility.


The first chart shows what happens if the price of gasoline declines. The vertical (y) axis illustrates the quantity of gasoline; the horizontal (x) axis represents everything else. The red lines indicate levels of well-being or satisfaction; any point along them is supposedly "indifferent," or equally, desirable. It is assumed that more of either x or y enhances one's well-being, but if one already has a large amount of (say) y, then one will be reluctant to give up a little x unless one receives a lot of y.


The blue line is the budget line. It is straight, and its slope represents the price of y in terms of x. It intersects the x-axis at the point where one spends 100% of one's income on x, and likewise with y. In the chart, the price of gasoline is lowered 26%, a decline so extreme it amounts to a sharp increase in real income. We can see the consumer responds by actually spending more on gasoline: she buys 37% more of it, and 1.4% less of everything else (the indicator lines on the chart were inserted manually).
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Computing & Children

I'd like to make a personal digression today. My wife and I are expecting our first child; we're starting rather late in life, and of course we're anxious about being good parents. I'm the youngest of five children, and my siblings all have two children apiece. So J. is coming into the world with eight cousins. We've been scattered to the corners of the North American landmass since I was in college, and I've always been pretty shy around my siblings. So gatherings are pretty awkward. But thankfully my wife, L., is extremely well-adjusted socially and a great bodyguard.

K. is the hyper-functional older sister; she's a college professor in Canada, and before that she was a developer at a Silicon Valley startup. She was on her way back from a professional visit to Seattle and stopped by for about three hours this Saturday. To my relief, I wasn't really called upon to say anything. K. spoke nonstop for about three hours, with occasional stimulus from L. At one point, L. left for a bathroom visit, and K. turned to me, asked me a question, and interrupted me before I had completed a sentence. I was relieved, actually, even though she was busy criticizing what she surmised I would have said had I been allowed to say it. Having a personal relationship with someone who is paid hundreds of dollars per hour to speak is inherently difficult.

Much as I would have liked to deconstruct K.'s three-hour summary of parenting advice, however, it must be said that it all seemed quite sound to me. One thing that surprised me was her aversion to the modern fashion of trying to immerse children in activities; K.'s always seemed to show stunning celerity in taking up pursuits, something mercifully mitigated by motherhood. Worse yet is the idea of steeping children in computer technology. (For this idea taken to a pathological extreme, see this site advertising computer camps). K. was horrified by daycare centers with computers for games. When she remonstrated with the staff about it, they protested that the children needed to learn basic computer skills early. K., who used to be a developer, reports that her own son easily overtook her in basic computer usage skills by age 5. By 2020, when he enters the job market or university, anything mentioned on this blog will be as obsolete as George Washington's wooden dentures. K. half-facetiously discussed wanting to sabotage the computer when no one was looking, to save the children from a bleak future of virtual reality. (What a perfectly dystopian—and apt—description!)

And now, I thought I'd interject a sentiment that's been gnawing in my soul for a long time. Here it is, from James Howard Kunstler:

I think the eminent Jungian psychologist James Hillman is right when he asserts that, despite all our lip-service to "family values," Americans actually hate their children. In suburbia, where most Americans now live, children can't use an everyday environment that has been constructed solely for the convenience of motorists — at least not without the assistance of Soccer Mom. By the way, in arranging things this way, we manage to deprive children of a terribly important stage of their development: the period between, say, eight and fifteen when they need to a acquire a sense of their personal sovereignty and how it operates within the context of the everyday environment.

Children over seven years old need more than a safe place to ride their bikes. They need at least as much as adults. They need places to shop. They need honorable gathering places — not just the scraps left over from the commercial developers, the berms and parking lots. They need cultural institutions, libraries, theaters, museums. And they need access to all these things on their own without the assistance of Soccer Mom. As things stand today, the public realm for children in suburbia is the psychotic principality of TV. Instead of seeing the full spectrum of society in normal operation (including honorably occupied adults who are not their parents) all they get are the antics of Marilyn Manson, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Beavis and Butthead. These are their models for adulthood.

One of the more insidious ideas of the Electronic Age is the notion that the virtual is an adequate substitute for the authentic. A virtual pet is as good as a puppy. A virtual friend on the internet is as good as a real friend. A group of hobbyists constitutes a "community. This idea is false. The artificial public realm of TV is not an adequate substitute for authentic civic life, and at some level most people who are not completely insane recognize this. For instance, where adults are concerned, an emotional involvement with soap opera characters is not the same as having relationships with real people in the real world — though I daresay there are plenty of adults in this country who might be confused about this today. That's how psychotic our culture has become. And, of course, Barney the Dinosaur is a poor excuse for a childhood chum. He's not even a very good artificial imaginary companion. He isn't equal to the average child's innate imaginative ability (which is precisely why Barney is so sickening to intelligent parents.)

In my next post, I'd like to give this idea a little more attention.

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ADDITIONAL READING: "On Beauty and Being Just" (PDF), Elaine Scarry; "Virtual is No Refuge From the Real," James Howard Kunstler;

Economic Development versus Economic Growth

There's actually a substantial body of literature on "sustainable development," although occasionally it's noted that the phrase is redundant: expansion that isn't sustainable isn't development, it's merely growth. Careful readers will notice the objection is not valid: a country can indeed be developed in an unsustainable way, if that development requires an unmanageably large ecological footprint.

Economic growth is easy to observe and measure: usually it involves measures of the total output of goods, at market prices. If a country produces mostly oil for export, and imports nearly everything it consumes, then economic growth is almost wholly the result of changes in relative prices. Efficiency or capital accumulation has nothing whatever to do with growth. And it's not unlikely that our imaginary country is not developing at all; or it may at any rate remain underdeveloped decades after the oil boom began.

Development requires economic growth, of course, since something has to pay for the increased stock of capital (fixed and human). Other inputs, like solar panels and wind farms—instead of fossil-fuel electric generation—could enhance the stream of permanent energy, or even replace metal used copiously in autos with metal used sparingly in mass transit systems. However, development is slower, and requires a steady build-up of local inputs. If the inputs are dependent on a local oil field, mineral seam, or real estate boom, then that might be recorded as development. But the depletion of the field, seam, or view is inevitable, and will of course undo any "development" that occurred.

At this point, we reach the controversial nexus of "sustainable development" with the economist's notion of "development." Economists have toiled mightily to paper this controversy over: the World Bank, IMF, and other advocates for the money power have spared little effort to propagate the notion that there's a harmony between their desires and the well-being of the rest of the human race.

Fiscal Dimensions of Sustainable Development (IMF, 2002): Fiscal policy is central to the work of the IMF. The IMF’s mandate is to promote international monetary cooperation, the balanced growth of international trade, foreign exchange rate stability, and orderly foreign exchange arrangements among countries. Fulfilling this mandate is the IMF’s primary contribution to sustainable development. Within this general setting, fiscal policy plays a key role in all three main aspects of the IMF’s work: IMF-supported programs, surveillance, and technical assistance. In IMF-supported programs in countries facing balance of payments crises, the IMF often finds that reestablishing the credibility of the government’s fiscal position is key to restoring sustainable growth.

Economists usually try to suppress the notion that there's any difference at all between "socially sustainable development," ecologically sustainable development, and economically orthodox notions of development. This is pure public relations.

• Socially sustainable development: development in which resources are channeled into future economic production in a way that distributes benefits meritoriously. "Meritoriously" implies that free market systems of distribution still prevail, and there is not a class-based or regionally-based favoritism. Please not that, defined this way, "socially sustainable development" is not the same thing as socialized control of resources. A market economy, for example, can manage socially sustainable development provided development does not lead to insuperable barriers of class. Frequently, the elites are able to "buy" a friendly, and interventionist, political system that expropriates wealth from other classes. SSD seeks to avoid this.
  
• Ecologically sustainable development: development which does not exhaust resources faster than they can be replaced, preferably locally. Desirable because modes of development favor substitution of labor or prior output (capital) for non-renewable resources.
  
• Economically orthodox notions of development: development driven by the market; defined purely on the basis of whether or not annual rates of capital depreciation is heteroskedastic. If depreciation is heteroskedastic, i.e., the pool of capital stock experiences annual rates of depreciation with variances that change over time, then accumulation is not leading to development; expenditures on capital stock are actually not being consumed at stable rates, and could conceivably become useless en masse.
  

Assuming readers are adamant about the superior virtues of a market economy, SSD requires the concept "meritorious" in its definition. "Fair" could mean anything, but "meritorious" means that, given social norms of ownership, a person can achieve more wealth by market-favored behavior. Capital accumulation can occur, and hence, disparities in income; but the son-in-law of the dictator ought not to inherit ownership of the coastline (when it previously was part of the national commons).

Economists pay lip service to ESD because of growing political pressures to do so, but privately are hostile to the notion that massive global trafficking in industrial resources or wastes should cease. Usually, they claim that such trafficking is an immutable part of "free" trade, but suppress the fact that it requires massive violations of the principle of SSD: corporations, after all, are surrogates of state power and constitute a political class. It's false to assume that whatever corporations do is consistent with the ideals of free enterprise. It's false to assume that a government controlled by its industrialists, landlords, and bankers is always (or even sometimes) going to make laws that are consistent with free market principles. This is a point almost uniformly ignored in modern discussions of public policy. Of course, when it ends badly, the former cheerleaders of "free enterprise" will always remember this; but never before.

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NOTES:
Goods: usually economists refer to "goods and services." In this case, the term really is redundant: services are an economic good. However, the national income and products account (NIPA) treats the two separately.

Subtopia

One of the purposes of this blog is to explore the way technology and the built environment have molded our lives. That's a very broad subject, and I've been torn between focusing on writing about technology on which I need to be conversant for work, and the sociology of material culture. One of the blogs I've noticed, but feared was a bit too far afield to link to on the sidebar (at least, for now) is Subtopia, a blog devoted to the militarization of the urban landscape.


Click for larger image

When I first became aware of the subject, I was astonished at the degree of specialization. Surely there's not much to say about this subject? On the other hand, I know I have a lot of hobbyhorses that would appear to be exhausted in no time. And after a few minutes of utterly fascinating exploration, I discovered that Subtopia has an endless reservoir of material. First, with the phenomena known collectively (and wrongly) as "globalization," the world in which we live has become criss-crossed with defensive boundaries. The most famous are probably the Israeli "security fence" and the Mexico-US border. Other famous examples include the border between the Koreas, the Spanish (Ceuta)-Moroccan border, and neighborhood barriers enforcing segregation. This enforcement of borders, though, is by no means confined to windswept, austere border regions. The mania for prisons and gated communities reflects the deep divisions imposed by the soaring disparities in income or privilege; surveillance cameras and electronic sensors are used to regulate and control movement, even when that movement is sanctioned.

Now, I want to make some clarifications here for my readers. I'm not opposed to walls or controls or regulations. To be honest, looking at photos of the barrier between the US and Mexico fills me with great shame and sorrow, but I understand the demand for them. The industrial system per se seems to require hard boundaries as a form of heat engine, rather the way the invention of the steam engine required the ability to machine tool steel containers for high-pressures. Still, I believe people need to know the artificiality and occasional barbarism of these barriers. Perhaps then they might realize how arbitrary and random their station in life is.

Anarcho-Primitivism

In the commonwealth I would by contraries
Execute all things; for no kind of traffic
Would I admit; no name of magistrate;
Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,
And use of service, none; contract, succession,
Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none;
No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil;
No occupation; all men idle, all;
And women too, but innocent and pure;
No sovereignty;

All things in common nature should produce
Without sweat or endeavour: treason, felony,
Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine,
Would I not have; but nature should bring forth,
Of its own kind, all foison, all abundance,
To feed my innocent people.
The Tempest, II.i., William Shakespeare

Anarcho-primitivism (A-P) is a tendency of Anarchism founded on a repudiation of the origins of civilization, or (conceivably) our specific civilization. While there is no political movement that proposes to implement the aims of A-P, it remains an extremely influential ideology.

Many of my readers may share my bemusement at the way anarchism has different tendencies; the Wikipedia post on anarchism lists twelve different tendencies, of which primitivism is one; a 13th is "anarchism without adjectives," which apparently sensed the illogic of hyphenated disciplines of anarchism. The surmise that one would have, that people opposed to any form of hierarchy whatever are unlikely to form a serious challenge to state authority, is indeed born out by experience. In the 19th century, the tragic life of Sergei Nechayev exemplified the problems faced by the early anarchists: paranoia, unrealistic strategies of political action, petty factional quarrels, widespread contempt, profound alienation from the social lives of virtually everyone, and so on.

With A-P, the goals have shifted away from a direct abolition of the state (because that is not possible) to a critique of all forms of power structure. A-P being a critique, rather than an ideological goal, is necessary for several reasons:

1. The A-P critique of actually-existing society is more extreme than any other; other extreme ideologies, such as Fascism or Communism, claim that their triumph would lead to well-being under prosperity and modern technology.
   
2. A critique of a thing does not preclude using it or being it. It is not necessarily so that a person has to have a viable alternative to the thing she criticizes. For example, Christianity holds that all humans are sinful and require redemption by Jesus. It is absurd to demand that the Christian supply an alternative to being human; the lack of an alternative to being sinful is beside the point.
3. Requiring a critic of a thing to be logically consistent by refusing to use or benefit from that thing imposes a Catch-22 on criticism generally: someone who points out the shortcomings of cars as transportation might object to the lack of alternatives to cars, but if she refuses to use cars she couldn't show up to defend her views. If A-P were a bona fide ideology (as opposed to a critique), no sincere proponent could appear to discuss it.
   

At its most intellectually rigorous, A-P amounts to the most radical exploration of possible alternative human possibilities that could occur.

My initial exposure to A-P stimulated utter disgust and contempt. It is common to praise the lot of the aborigines as "noble savages," but these people were taking the idea of nostalgia to absurd extremes. I was particularly irritated by the confidence of some of my pseudo-hippie classmates that people like the !Xung of Botswana were somehow happier than (say) we were. How could they know the relative "happiness" of people? They might surmise they could possibly be happier not knowing the conveniences of modern life, but how could they claim to be certain? It didn't help that the A-P philosophy was suddenly thrust into the public eye by the Unabomber. A disturbing aspect of A-P was that it seemed improbable that adherents would be content to remain a philosophical critique. The Unabomber, who claimed to act on behalf of a "Freedom Club," and whose manifesto (linked below) repeatedly invoked "freedom," insisted that he was fighting for freedom. But if so, it was the terrifying delusion of one insisting that our obvious preference cannot possibly be a "free" choice. Humans could only be free his way.

A-P philosophers mostly disavowed the Unabomber; it was obvious that his campaign of random assassinations was totally counterproductive. And indeed, the Unabomber's own manifesto has little by way of explanation for what he hoped to accomplish. However, it is true that A-P enthusiasts frequently have an apocalyptic view of society; they look forward (perhaps with the cheerfulness that phrase implies) to a massive die-off of humanity. That was a fairly common experience I had in college, when I encountered A-P's. In private, they maintained that virtually all humanity was going to die off, and they regarded this as a positive good. But they also insisted that this won't their fault, or, less trivially, that it wouldn't be a consequence of widespread acceptance of A-P; a lot of the more extreme peak oil theorists, while not remotely anarchists of any type, and visibly distressed by the prospect, also anticipate a massive crisis leading to a die-off of tens of millions. Likewise, they can always point out the non-human, or non-Usonian, population of the earth, suffers immensely from our lifestyle; it's unreasonable to complain about A-P's mordant world view when our country slaughters 100 million pigs annually [*]. What about increased mortality among humans caused by secondary water consumption of the US economy?

A-P critiques usually target technology as representing an insidious and necessarily coercive trend that is alien to wholesome human society. One of the problems of A-P is explaining how civilization became so pervasive if it is alien to human nature; and if it is not alien, but a natural tendency of humans to organize and develop tools, then how can such a bad thing be prevented? In response to this, many A-P thinkers have conceded that they don't wish to abolish civilization, so much as to radically transform it through analysis and example (Moore).

This has led to one major rift in A-P, between lifestyle anarchists who seek to replicate pre-industrial modes of living, and radicals who ignore the paradox of civilization's origins. The latter may be accused of not being thinkers so much as ranters, since they also tend to reject scientism as a feature of technology and civilization. Unfortunately, without the theoretical underpinnings of science, A-P ceases to be anything but a negation. There can be no philosophy of A-P since it lacks anything like an experimental or deductive method, and as a set of goals it is based on a romantic abstraction of actual social organization. The idea that human actions are aimed at addressing needs significant to the individual is incompatible with radical, normative A-P.

It is my observation that A-P tends to be a materialist analogue to chiliastic theology. The movement is impossibly fragmented and rejects any goal of creating a new society, yet the idea of a philosophical critique of civilization without any constructive action at all is rather pointless. So the result is that adherents tend to anticipate the obliteration of civilization by a crisis of its own making, such as a nuclear war or peak oil.

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Aborigine: literally, "forest dweller"; nowadays, applied almost exclusively to the indigenous people of mainland Australia. Initially, the term referred to a primary category of socio-economic organization, that of the hunter-gatherer. The other categories were pastoralists (shepherders) and agrarians (farmers). There is an erroneous impression in some circles that "aborigine" is an ethnic slur, although this term is used by the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations (something that would be unlikely if it were pejorative).

"Aborigine" is not a synonym for "Indian"; although it would be an accurate description of some Native American peoples at some periods of their history. Also, aboriginal peoples are not necessarily primitive; for example, many of the Pacific Northwestern peoples had highly advanced crafts, but remained hunter-gatherers. Many Inuktiut peoples are aboriginal while engaging in high-tech activities, such as cinematography. (I recently watched a movie made by an all-Inuktiut crew).

Secondary water consumption: every year the USA imports millions of tons of cattle feed from other countries, such as Guatemala. One point of view has it that this is a case of the free market making it easier for the agricultural sector to meet US domestic demand for beef, pork, and poultry. Naturally, if a population eats a lot of meat, then the livestock also must consume water and grains grown with water. As the populations of industrialized countries replace plants with meat, they increase their secondary water consumption by a very large amount. Typically, ranchers respond to the limits imposed on local supplies of water by importing feed from 3rd world countries, where ownership of water may be highly concentrated. Hence, the consumption of water by the US farming sector includes very large amounts that fell onto distant lands.

Another point of view maintains that the "overflow" of water demand, or effective importation of water from countries with undervalued currencies, sharply restricts the ability of Third world farmers to meet the demands of their own people for food. First world consumption of cash crops may supply the elites with foreign exchange reserves, but the need of the population for water is an absolute that no amount of increased GDP will replace; no amount of economic orthodoxy can change that fact.

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ADDITIONAL READING & SOURCES: "A Primitivist Primer," John Moore; "Industrial Society & Its Future," Theodore Kacsinsky (AKA the Unabomber)