Jancovici: version 3

February 27, 2019

Yet another attempt to summarise and elaborate Jean-Marc Jancovici’s general argument.

Economies are not perpetual motion machines. The second law of thermodynamics can be phrased as perpetual motion machines are impossible. Economies involve energy consumption and dissipation (or require energy input), transform materials and produce waste and other entropic (or ‘disorderly’) processes, in their functioning. They also involve political struggles over allocations of goods and property, modes of exchange, modes of property, forms of labour, types of regulation, decisions about what costs shall appear ‘free,’ and what costs will be born by various groups, and so on. These factors are not incidentals but necessary and essential parts of the economy.

Often it seems that economies are portrayed as endless circulations, without energy being consumed, without politics influencing markets as standard practice, without destruction, without waste, and without disruptive consequences arising from standardized actions. Complexity and the laws of thermodynamics cannot be ignored if we wish to be accurate in our understanding of economies.

Constraints on energy constrains activity, while availability of energy increases possible activity. This seems fundamental. Energy is a driver of economic processes. If our technologies or bodies have no energy they cannot produce anything, or even do anything. Energy is necessary for transformation, and is released by organised and directed transformations such as burning or chemical reactions etc.

Energy is a necessary, although not sufficient for economic action. If we extend the notion of economy to cover ecology, as is frequently done to reduce ecology to economy, then this also true. While availability of energy is fundamental we do not expect to find life on Mercury or the surface of the sun.

The industrial revolution involves many processes such as, changes in patterns of class and power relations, changes in technology, changes in patterns of living, but it is also about the growth of energy supply, and the growing transition away from human and animal labour to machine and fossil fuel ‘labour’.

In other words when Adam Smith invented the labour theory of value, he did so by seeing that, in his society, the most obvious form of directed, organised and transformative energy availability came through human labour. Animal energy was organised by human labour, wind energy came about as a result of human labour and so on. Human labour itself, depended on the energy released by agriculture. Nowadays, human labour provides far less useful and transformative energy than fossil fuels, and it becomes easier to see that energy availability is as important as the organising force of human labour for economic processes.

All energy processes are affected by complexity and the laws of thermodynamics, and they are, currently, producing a series of crises.

Firstly, industrialisation is bringing about an increasing noticeability, and consequence, of the entropic (or disorderly) processes which result from it, and which it appears to require. These include ecological destruction and climate change. These ‘side effects’ are now affecting industrialisation. Actions in complex systems have unintended effects, and this affects the system.

Secondly, while we may be able to recycle materials (with increased energy expenditure), we cannot recycle energy. Energy, when used, cannot be used again. Once we burn oil or coal it has gone. Our cheap, easy, energy supply is being used up, and will not be regenerated in any relevant time frame. The energy, and other, costs of extraction will increase lowering energy availability, and this will have an effect on economic activity – most probably, hindering it.

Thirdly, further burning, or stretching the use of fossil fuels (primarily coal) will increase the entropic effects of disorderly climate and ecologies.

The need for new energy sources remains. We can possibly harvest energy directly from the sun, or its consequences – but this also requires existing energy, as solar energy is not “ready to hand” or “ready to use” in the same way as fossil fuels can just be dug up and burnt. Renewables have to be built (but so do fossil fuel energy stations). Furthermore, any transformation will cost a lot financially, in terms of effort, in reorganisation and political conflict as established powers attempt to protect their positions. This will be magnified by the consequences of ecological and climate instability

Transition is difficult and made more difficult by the crisis. We cannot assume that the economies’ ‘markets’ alone will save us, as ‘markets’ are themselves under pressure.

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Further reflections on energy and entropy in economics – Jancovici again

February 25, 2019

In the previous post, I suggested that Jean-Marc Jancovici insists that economists ignore problems of energy availability, and this distorts their (and our) economic expectations.

As previously implied, we can add that life and economics exist on this planet because of the slow self-destruction of our Sun. If the Sun emitted too much radiation (or the planet received too much radiation) it is doubtful that sophisticated life could exist anywhere on the planet – although possibly some life could survive deep underground or near vents in the deep oceans. If we received too little radiation, life might be similarly constrained. Eventually in the far distant future the sun will die, but this is way too far in the future for us to bother about at the moment.

In this sense solar energy is fundamental to life and society. Manual labour (the basis of many economic theories) and human thought, experiment or design only exist because of the energy humans and creatures extract from food, and that ultimately depends upon the Sun’s radiation and self-destruction. Energy from the sun is stored by, amongst other things, coal and oil, and is released in fire.

As we know, forms of organisation can massively magnify the power of human thought and labour (and massively disorganise them, or waste then, as well). Putting these points together, Jancovici’s argument declares that the energy we can extract through the ways we organise burning fossil fuels massively overshadows the power of human labour in creating social ‘value’ and material goods.

To restate:
Energy consumption and its organisation and implementation through social organisations and other technologies (the social aspects) is fundamental for the kind of economies we have today.

We should note that we also adapt our economies to the kinds of availabilities of energy that we have to deal with. Power is currently cheap at night because coal fueled electricity has not been ‘dispatchable,’ or particularly variable, and much energy is wasted.

Changes in energy supply and availability will have economic and organisational consequences, and we currently need to change energy supplies because an unintended consequence of fossil fuel based energy supplies is climate change. There are other forms of ecological destruction happening which are as important, and which reinforce climate change, but I’m currently putting them to onside – not, I hope, ignoring them. The prime cause of climate change reintroduces the importance of entropy.

Entropy is one of those scientific concepts over which there seems a fair bit of dispute, and a relative ease of misunderstanding. I’m warning any readers that this may be all be wrong. Please let me know if you know better. ‘Entropy’ is a description of a process, rather than a thing, so it is possibly better to talk about ‘entropic processes’ rather than ‘entropy’. The point of entropy is that any use of energy, any ‘work,’ engages entropic processes alongside that usage. These entropic processes are usually dissipated as heat (random molecular movement) and/or through reduction of what appears to be constructive order or demarcation.

It is often postulated that entropic processes will lead to “universal heat death.” This is a state in which there is no more energy in one part of the universe than in another. Particles are completely randomly distributed. Whether this state is a state of total order or total disorder is up to you – the paradox is obvious and implies life is a ‘mess’ (or ‘balance’ if you prefer) of order and disorder.

At the extreme, this idea also implies that too much work will generate too many entropic processes and the planet will warm independently of what precautions we take. The use of air-conditioners in some Cities is supposed to increase the heat of those cities (as the heat involved in producing the cooling dissipates outside the area of cooling), and thus encourages more air-conditioning and more heating. The same may be true of automobiles (engines moving people around get hot, and dissipate that heat). An economy necessarily produces (semi-organized forms of?) dissipated heat.

We all hope that this extreme fate is ultimately avoidable or far off, or avoidable because we have spare energy to do something about it. We could develop more efficient engines or ways of cooling, or better ways of organising those processes (but this can never stop excess heat being dissipated). Ordering processes can always create disordering processes – and we should not ignore the disordering, or entropic, processes simply because we like, or are impressed by, the order. What we define as order and disorder come together. Another problem here is that the more complex the processes we use to prevent the entropy we generate from overwhelming our order, then the more energy the order may take to keep going, and the more prone the system may be to accident or collapse.

Entropy also suggests that, while we use energy to produce useful transformations, we also produce waste or pollution by breaking things down. This is furthered by forms of social organisation which make it acceptable to create waste, or allow waste and poisons to be allocated to ‘unimportant’ areas, and onto relatively powerless people, where the effects can be ignored. If you like, blockage of information (in this case about pollution) is as important a part of current economic life as is accurate and resolvable transmission of information.

Just as wealth gets allocated by patterns and processes of ‘social class’, so does waste, probably in an inverse form; waste and risk of harm gets distributed away from wealth. However, as waste tends to randomness, this distribution may not be quite as rigorous. Few will totally escape climate change.

So we may say that the implications of Jancovici’s argument suggests orthodox economists not only ignore the availability and organisation of energy as important to economy (other than as labour), they also ignore entropic processes and waste and their forms of organisation and disorganistion.

It therefore appears we need a new orthodox economics which deal with these things. So part of the next stage is to look at some criticisms of Jancovici and the work that has been done to factor energy and entropy into economics.

To restate, yet again:

Energy availability, its capacities, organisation, distribution, implementation and consumption through social organisations and other technologies, and the effects (both intended and unintended, such as entropy waste and pollutions etc) of its production and organisation (etc.) is fundamental for understanding the kind of economies we have today.

Energy cannot be ignored

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Jancovici and energy in economics

February 25, 2019

Jean-Marc Jancovici is a French Engineer, who has spent a lot of time writing about economics. His longer form work is not translated into English, but I thought it might be useful to try and summarise some of his thinking, to think about it. There should eventually be a sequel to this post criticizing or developing it. Occasionally, its more me than Jancovici (and material I have taken or misunderstood from my brilliant colleague, whose name I’m removing for security purposes), but I hope nothing would be unacceptable to either of them.

Jancovici claims that the Western, and world, economies are based primarily on the availability of energy and only secondarily on the cost of energy. Availability of energy drives contemporary economic activity far more than labour or capital, although neoclassical economics largely ignores energy availability (and the ecological cost/destruction of economic activity) in favour of labour and capital. But:

“if we have plenty of workers and plenty of capital, but no energy,… we won’t get any significant production!”

Note this can mean that unless spending frees energy, it may have little effect on the economy.

He defines energy as something which is produced by, or allows changes in, the world/system. Energy is about transformation.

“As soon as the world that surrounds us (= ‘a system’) changes, energy plays a role, and the amount of energy involved measures the magnitude of the change of the system between before and after.”

The greater the transformation, the more energy is involved.

“Our economic system is nothing else than the transformation, on a very large scale, of natural resources into ‘something else’.”

The laws of thermodynamics state that in a closed system, energy can neither be created, nor destroyed, but only be transformed. Therefore, “the energy used by a system has.. to come from outside the system”, and this has usually originated from the sun, causing the water cycle, being transformed and stored in plant material (and then into food, or through release by burning fossil fuels, or simply burning wood or feaces) and so on. This process is essentially ‘free’, although extracting energy takes some energy (and the construction of technology to apply that energy to extract the energy). Every time energy is used it ‘degrades’ and some is lost; this corresponds to the notion of entropy. Every transformation increases entropy, and entropy is sometimes seen as a degree of disorder, or a departure from the order demanded by humans. In a closed system entropy eventually wins out.

the entropy of an isolated system never decreases over time.

Isolated systems spontaneously evolve towards thermodynamic equilibrium, the state with maximum entropy [full thermodynamic equilibrium means there is no flow of heat, no detectable energy….].

Non-isolated systems, like organisms, may lose entropy [or gain organisation], provided their environment’s entropy increases by at least that amount so that the total entropy either increases or remains constant.

Therefore, the entropy in a specific system can decrease as long as the total entropy of the Universe does not.

Entropy is a function of the state of the system, so the change in entropy of a system is determined by its initial and final states.

wiki sentences split apart for clarity.

Life exists on Earth, because of the energy that comes from the sun (and possibly from the interior of the Earth, although if there was no sun that heat would drain away into space).

The use of machines and new organisations of production, during the industrial revolution to transform the newly, and plentifully, available stored carbon and sunlight in fossil fuels, has magnified the amounts of transformation that humans can impose/make on the general system in a short amount of time. Much of this transformation has been declared good in terms of increasing human potential, and human power. Developed countries are able to exert power (military and trade)in the world with relative ease. This is why ‘developing countries’ who had not yet fully corralled this use of energy were, and are, so keen to instigate it. It provides some degree of security from active colonialism (in theory). Again, we can point to technological development as allowing an increase in the amount of energy we can extract – but this is hard to quantify. This is why previously dominant technological processes can lead to a social dead end; the cost of replacement of old tech with new tech seems excessive. The main point is that we are still not creating energy, only transforming it more efficiently and with greater effect on the world system.

Humans today are facing a crisis because of five factors:

  1. We have, over the last 70 or so years, been increasing human dependency on fossil fuels for our daily life and survival.
  2. Oil and gas are approaching, or have reached [it is disputable], peak production. Consequently, social availability of energy is likely to decrease.
  3. With decreasing availability, the energy cost of energy production, and the destruction resulting from energy production, will increase.
  4. The pollution from burning fossil fuels is overwhelming the planets ecological ability to process, or recycle, that pollution. The results of this excess is changing those ecological systems and producing climate change.
  5. The potential energy, and pollution, cost of replacing fossil fuels with renewables could be enormous.

In other words the way we have had of maintaining and generating our survival and way of life, undermines survival and way of life, and is likely to come to an end in any case.

Continuing to use fossil fuels increases the likelihood of dramatic instability in weather patterns, sea level rises, water shortages, floods and agricultural shortages. This will likely increase movements of people and produce armed conflicts. Increased temperatures will, in many already warm places such as Australia, make outside labour difficult and possibly harmful for labourers; this will possibly slow production. It also needs to be added that there are other pressures on the ecology as described by ‘Donut economics’ and planetary boundary theory: such as chemical pollution, nitrogen and phosphorus cycle disruptions, biodiversity loss, particulate pollution and so on. Production of chemical fertilisers may not be energy efficient, when joined with the loss of nutriments through disposal of waste, as when phosphorus is flushed into the sea (the real “metabolic rift”).

We may also have stretched the use of other resources to near their limits, which make production that depends on use of those resources, harder and more expensive. In one formulation, we have taken the easily obtained, “low hanging fruit,” and further fruit will require more energy expenditure to obtain, and this expenditure will likely increase over time. The fruit analogy gets broken, when we realise that the ‘fruit’ we have taken is unlikely to all grow back.

With a growing scarcity of easily available energy and resources (even without increased climate instability), economic growth and production (transformation of materials) will slow, and possibly decline.

“A reasonable hypothesis is to consider that our economy will not be able to grow faster than the energy supply.”

According to Jancovici’s figures (based on those provided by the World Bank), a decrease in the growth rate of GDP per capita, seems to have been happening in the developed world since the 1970s. World growth since then has largely come about through the increased use of energy in the developing world:

“no major old industrialized country has done better than a 1% per year growth on average for the GDP per capita over the first decade of the 21st century.”

With an economic slowdown, it will be harder to make a transition to a decarbonised economy and to lower pollution and chances of wild climate instability. The monetary capital will be less available and the costs of transformation are significant. They involve (at the least): changes in building insulation and design to lessen the need for air conditioning and heating; energy efficiency; transformation of water use and slowing our loss of drinkable water; transformation of agriculture to require less fertilizer and lower emissions; and massive replacement of fossil fuel dependent vehicles, changes in transport patterns, and corresponding changes in city layouts.

There is also the cost of moving into renewables when this is a product which does not provide a new service or a significant price reduction, but does involve significant reorganisations of grid requirements, transfer of energy over large distances (with resulting energy loss), changes in landscape usage and changes of energy transformation (and waste products) in manufacture and transport.

Renewables and storage may also involve transformation of resources with finite and increasingly difficult supply, such as lithium (remember economies are about transformation of materials). It may be that energy output per energy input may be better for renewables, as we don’t need to gather the resources to power them, once installed, but I don’t know.

This all takes lots of energy and capital, and is unlikely to be very profitable without taxpayer subsidy, so it is unlikely to happen through the market.

Certainly it appears that renewables may reduce the price of electricity, but price reductions can lead to more usage (Jevons effect), and hence further stress the system. In 2015 fossil fuels provided, in general, 80% of available energy, the rest was largely provided by hydro, nuclear, and biofuels (not by solar and wind); so the amount of work that needs to be done, and energy expended to transform, is huge.

Some forms of renewable energy can feed into destruction, as when biofuels remove waste which would function as fertiliser, or when they lead to deforestation and lessening of food production.

Replacing all fossil fuel and outputs through burning (especially in transport) requires a major and possibly ‘excessive’ level of investment as renewables may need to be able to over-supply energy to guarantee a constant minimum transmission of energy (although this may not be as necessary as is sometimes claimed, as people can adapt to fluctuating energy flows and did with relative ease 40 years ago). Over-supply of renewables is likely to cause conflicts over land use, as renewables tend to take large areas of land. Storage and release, in batteries, always involves an energy loss, and may also lower the quality of the storage medium. In other words storage mediums tend to decay.

Generating ‘sustainability’ (whatever that is) requires resource and energy usage, and we do not know how much it will take to get there, or what culturally defined “needs” actually need to be satisfied. As Jancovici says:

“Have we ‘met our needs’ when we have 100 square feet of heated living space per person, or will it be the case only when every inhabitant on Earth will own 1500 square feet with central heating, air con, plus a jacuzzi and a private spa?”

These individual needs may conflict with collective needs for survival, with the governance processes for separating them being quite difficult. Similarly, is it possible to be ‘sustainable’ and experience perpetual growth in prosperity, or to extend current living standards (together with the energy use required) to everyone in the world? Will such an extension also require a change in economics and governance? The speed of any such transformation will depend on the politics of the distribution of economic proceeds of the change, or lack of change.

Most of these changes involve changes in society, and threats to established power relations, which also brings up obstacles to them. If the owners and controllers of economic and energy machinery oppose transformation or suck away the profits, it will make transformation slower.

This is what we are observing at the moment. There appears to be a large popular awareness of the need for transformation, but there seems to be little political will to engage in conflict with the power of resistant private capital. Given that money, energy and materials may be short, governments may need to promote public projects in renewable energy, and that requires the possibility of offending powerful and wealthy people and organisations. However, it seems clear that any project that depends on oil or coal production continuing to be cheap should not be encouraged.

A sustainable economy must be able to extract the production of resources to keep the economy going. It must be able to provide energy for its machines, and food, shelter and relatively good health for the people within it.

“if we don’t finance the ‘good’ transition, we will get an economic collapse,”

and

“The sooner we move in the direction of massive ‘decarbonization’ of Europe, the higher our chances are to export what we have found (techniques, systems, ways of thinking) elsewhere.”

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Individualism and the Right?

February 24, 2019

I’m frequently told that the division between Right and Left is between ‘individualism’ and ‘egalitarianism’. However, I remain unconvinced. Let’s ignore whether right and left are well-defined categories at this moment, but assume they mean something useful – they certainly operate in the contemporary English Speaking world.

Certainly people on the Right, frequently describe themselves as ‘individualists’, that is true. After all, can individualism, be bad? “We are all individuals!”. We don’t want to be controlled by others. Maturity is a form of ‘individuation’. We should discover our individual talents, and so on.

The problem is that people on the Right, seem to be more accurately described as ‘supremacists’. They nearly always imply things like: the wealthy are great and good, men are better than women, gay people are inferior, white culture is better than any other and needs to be protected and promulgated, and so on. People of the right type are dominant because they are superior and deserve it. We frequently hear how Trump is a great leader because he is a great man, successful at business etc. He is superior and even favoured by God.

The current Right’s favourite policy of neoliberalism seeks to use the State to enhance powerful and wealthy interests, and suppress opposition through talk of ‘free markets’. Even in its individualistic forms this movement seeks to protect the powerful from the people and democratic regulation, but not the people from the powerful and what promotes their profit. It is implied that the corporately powerful are inherently better people; they do stuff.

All of these people seem quite happy to join together to enforce their supremacy; they have little reluctance to put the rights of their group ahead of the rights of outsider individuals, especially individuals who they define as inferior.

Indeed, it sometimes seems that they need inferior groups to denounce to make it clear that they are superior. These groups are nearly always groups which are not that powerful: unemployed people, unmarried mothers, drug addicts, refugees, racial minorities, sexual minorities, religious minorities and so on. Sometimes they denounce minor elites, when those elites disagree with them or say that their ideas are wrong: people like scientists, academics, non-neoclassical economists, post-modernists or so on. Often these people are people who have studied these areas of contention, but they can be denounced as inferior or corrupt. They don’t seem to worry that much about violence being directed at the inferior. It’s either necessary, provoked, or simply does not occur, whatever the evidence to the contrary.

Sometimes people on the Right pretend they are the victims of these inferior people, and this proves how the inferior really need to be put back in their place. We can think of men claiming they are victimized by feminism, white folk claiming the only racism comes from black folk, wealthy people claiming they are being held down by envy, taxes or unions, and so on. The inferior folk are deadly cunning and deserve what is coming to them.

It is this necessity for the construction and denunciation of the ‘inferior,’ that seems to lead to the ease with which people on the Right can join up with fascists, religious authoritarians, military authoritarians, racist groups and so on. It would be hard to explain how individualism merges with authoritarian collectivism if the Right were really individualists rather than supremacists.

If they were individualists, then it would be illogical to condemn other individuals who live differently, but if they are group-supremacists then it is quite logical and even necessary.

The group binding forces, also make it necessary for them to praise people on their side, even when it is clear they would be furious if people on the other side had done the same kinds of things – as is clearly shown by supremacist reactions to the Mueller inquiry. Does anyone seriously think that they would not be calling for Clinton to be executed if the evidence pointed to her being supported by Russians, trying to make contact with Russians, having commercial ties with Russians, and trying to suppress an inquiry into her contacts with Russians. But being a group promoting supremacy, it again becomes logical. Truth is irrelevant to supporting their power as is support for lack of corruption. They are superior and can do no wrong.

There may be people on the right who don’t support supremacy, but they are not that easy to find.

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More on Population and River flow

February 22, 2019

I have a somewhat cynical tendency to think that blaming population is a way that Western people (of a largely Protestant heritage) like dealing with climate change because it absolves them. Population growth is not happening because of ‘us’, it has happening because of people in India, China (now the one child policy is gone) and because of Muslims and Catholics who breed uncontrollably. This could be seen as an example of social category theory in action: it is an outgroup that is the problem, not us.

It probably does need to be said population could become a problem. 100 billion people is probably too many for any kind of civilization to survive and it probably would alter nature irreparably however we lived or died. We need to deal with population, but it is not our primary problem at the moment. It just intensifies the problem – we would still be in a mess if population growth stopped immediately.

A bigger issue is the question of how much in the way of resources people consume. The Murray Darling’s water was largely consumed by business, and these businesses were draining the water not because of population, but because of the demands that business always grow and because government values business over the environment (and everything else, we might add). Water could have been held back, but as we know through an article in the SMH yesterday, more water was allocated to business despite knowledge of the likely pressures faced by the river and its marginal safety. There was no consideration for the environment at all.

We have this reinforced by the official Coalition sponsored report which surprisingly mentions the forbidden term ‘climate change’ to explain the problem. [“The fish death events in the lower Darling were preceded and affected by exceptional climatic conditions, unparalleled in the observed climate record“. and “The recent extreme weather events in the northern Basin have been amplified by climate change.”] However, it hardly mentions irrigation usage at all. It also does not mention the facts that these irrigation businesses appear to have stolen water and engaged in fraud to get more water. Business as a explanatory cause is even more forbidden to the Right than ‘climate change’.

This has nothing to do with population – it has to do with an ideology that says business, and short term profit, must come first.

However, if we are going to blame population then how many people do we have to kill to solve the issue? 2 billion? 3 Billion? Reduction cannot happen naturally fast enough.

We as a population in Australia consume and destroy far, far more (massively more) than an equivalent population of people in India. Again this points to the fact that degree and style of consumption of resources by a population is the problem, not the population by itself. If the Average person in Australia or the US consumes 20 or more times what the average person does in China should we wipe out Australians or Chinese? It would clearly be more economic and easier to wipe out Australians and people in the US. Is that such an attractive proposition?

However, if we could solve the Murray-Darling crisis by penalising or regulating a few inappropriate businesses who use way too much water, wouldn’t that be easier and better? If businesses cannot work with the Murray Darling flowing, then they should not be there.

Clearly if we think that people in India or China have to consume as much as we have done, or as much as our businesses do, then there will be a problem in the future. Perhaps a solution is that we should consume and destroy less, rather than they consume and destroy more? But, in any case, lets not distract ourselves with future problems when we have problems which are being generated now, and can be fixed now through being aware of what they are.

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Population and Rivers

February 15, 2019

The other day, Dick Smith (a retired Australian businessman), launched an advertisement asking “why don’t you link the Murray Darling crisis to record population growth?”

Now it is true that infinite population growth is not sustainable in any situation, so population growth is a problem. However it is not what has caused the Murray Darling issue NOW. Current population figures do not necessitate pumping the river dry for cotton, or for other large scale agri-businesses. Partly because the cotton and food is largely grown for export: we don’t even process the cotton into goods for sale overseas. It is pretty much independent of the current population size in Australia.

Talking of population is, in this case, an avoidance of the real ‘elephant in the room’ – business – and the idea that business must always grow. If business must always grow then, in the current situation, it will always attempt to consume more water, more raw materials, and extract as much as it can from the land. This is irrespective of population growth. And these actions become particularly bad when the government thinks its main priority is increase the profit of big business, and to increase the consumption or extraction of limited natural resources by such businesses (to keep them going). And that thinking and action is well documented. The Right in particular govern for business profit alone.

Population growth may add to the pressures, but it does so in an environment which makes development, and high profit for some, more important than water conservation or conservation of land for food production and wildlife.

This is the ideology of neoliberalism. Profit and growth of profit is the only thing that counts.

Maybe we do need to slow population growth, but don’t pretend that will solve problems generated by business and compliant government.

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IPCC, complexity and climate

February 8, 2019

There seems to be a meme going around that the IPCC disproved climate change in one sentence and removed that sentence from reports. The sentence is:

“The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future exact climate states is not possible.”

The sentence is found in the “Climate Change 2001: Synthesis Report” edited by Robert T. Watson and the ‘Core Writing Team’, Published by Cambridge University Press, and recently available on the IPCC website.
here https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/05/SYR_TAR_full_report.pdf

(The IPCC website is being reorganized and hence stuff can be difficult to find – google does not appear to have caught up yet)

It is in the Technical Summary Section, p.58. or page 215 of the full report
According to Archive.org the text version of this was available between at least August 4 2009 until at least November 4 2018.

There is no particular evidence that they hid this sentence.

The sentence is included on a section entitled “Advancing Understanding” and is about further research into uncertainties. It is prefixed by the requirement that we need to “Explore more fully the probabilistic character of future climate states by developing multiple ensembles of model calculations.” I’d add that, it seems nowadays more generally realized that we cannot understand ecological, climate and social systems without an understanding of complexity theory.

By my understandings of complex systems, this apparently unsuppressed sentence is entirely true: we cannot predict exact weather, or climate states, within any accuracy in the relatively distant future for a particular date or year. That is the nature of complex systems. However that does not mean we cannot predict trends, or that any result at all is possible.

The sentence is not embarrassing, or disproving of climate science, it is, however, easily misunderstood.

People do not understand the limits on chaos and complexity. Because we cannot predict exactly what will happen does not mean that anything can happen, or that any predictable event has equal probability, which is what ‘deniers’ seem to argue.

It is, for example, if you will pardon the political implications, possible, but exceedingly improbable that President Trump will stop making things up, and everyone will agree that he is constantly telling the truth – at least I cannot predict the exact circumstances under which this would happen, and when it will happen. It is not an impossible event, but it is highly improbable based on the trends. Similarly, because I do not know where an ant will be on a moated table top in exactly quarter of an hour (assuming I have not placed some kind of sticky substance on the table on one spot etc.), does not mean it will start flying, or that it will talk to me. It is, likewise, extremely improbable that despite lack of certainty, and assuming weather stays stable, that it will snow in Sydney Australia in January or February.

The point is that the inability to predict an exact climate or weather state, does not mean we cannot make informed predictions based on the trends, provided we correct for further information as it arises.

The trends so far suggest, and seem confirmed by observation, that sea ice and land ice is thinning near the poles. Likewise glaciers seem to have been getting smaller over the last 30 years. There is no indication that these trends are reversing, and some that they are speeding up. The rate of disappearance appeared to slow down for a while, but it continued and never reversed. This in all probability means that sea levels will increase – it may mean water shortages in some places that depend on glaciation for water supply.

It is possible that as the gulf stream shuts down, some parts of Northern Europe (especially the UK) will freeze up and ice will accumulate there. But this probably will not help that much, and is no evidence that climate change is not happening or not going to have disruptive effects.

Similarly, if the average temperature keeps increasing elsewhere then weather patterns will be disrupted. Disruptions of the standard patterns of complex systems are nearly always fierce as the system ‘seeks’ a new equilibrium. This is especially so, if the pressures towards change continue or increase (ie if we keep emitting greenhouse gasses). It is a good prediction that we can expect more extreme weather (which is what we seem to be observing). We cannot pinpoint exactly when and where that weather will happen, but it would be foolish to pretend that this pattern is extremely unlikely to happen anywhere, or that it will discontinue in the near future. We can also expect it to become increasingly difficult to get insurance, or to find the money to rebuild cities wrecked by these storms.

Likewise increased heat in places which are already difficult for agriculture or prolonged human labour, will probably mean that these areas become increasingly uninhabitable and production will be lowered. If people try to air condition fields with fossil fuel power (or something), that will in the long term increase pressures. This trend probably means population movements as people try to move somewhere more habitable with better food supplies. That probably means national boundary defense issues will increase. Again there is nothing, at present, to suggest that these currently existing trends will not continue.

To encapsulate: While we cannot predict exact events, the trends are clear. If we keep emitting greenhouse gasses then the global average temperature will continue to rise. What we consider normal climate/weather will end. Sea levels will rise. Extreme weather events will become more frequent as the climate system destabilizes – the cost of repairing devastated cities may become prohibitive because there are so many crises happening simultaneously. Agricultural systems are highly likely to break down. People movement will intensify as people can no longer live in the areas they have lived recently. This may mean increased armed conflict, which is one reason why the Pentagon would be interested in climate change.

This does not mean that people should not struggle to change the trends and therefore change the likely course of climate disruption, but those actions are likely to have unintended consequences (which are almost inevitable in complex systems), and we need to be aware of this.

However there is almost no sign of such action happening, as people would rather pretend the unlikely is equally probable to the disastrous.

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Tax cuts

February 5, 2019

Why tax cuts are not always good:

a) They ignore the benefits that flow when the taxes are spent to do useful things for most people, such as provide open insurance for sickness, support for loss of work, public parks, museums, libraries, useful science and medical research projects, support for developing companies, courts, non-commercial broadcasting, old age pensions etc… Life without these services would be much harder.

b) It does not necessarily encourage wealthy people to do more work – they just got a massive pay increase for doing nothing (or political agitating), and tend to think getting tax cuts is better than working harder or smarter.

c) There is no evidence of a correlation between high tax rates and low rates of ‘growth’ or low living standards for most people. In fact poor countries tend to have much lower rates of total taxation than the rich ones.

d) Tax cuts are popular not because they work, but because high income, and hence powerful, people and organisations end up with more money for nothing, and low income people end up with lower benefits, and hence have to work more for less. It is a system which makes life worse for the majority, but cements power for the wealthy.

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Is rectification of words possible?

February 4, 2019

Is it possible to clear up misunderstandings between right and left in the English speaking world and restore courteous discussion?

This seems like a nice question, but the problem is that many, but not all, right wingers, seem to consider that abuse, name calling, obfuscation, and lying are essential to argument when used by their side. They have been following this pattern in the media, in politics and internet discussion for at least 25-30 years. However, they tend to get upset if abused themselves, when someone they don’t identify with, beaks after years of continual abuse.

Quite a few times over the years, rightists have explained to me that they see the point of discussion as total elimination of the opposition, and that anything they do is fair in pursuit of that target. These people do not appear to have a sense of discussion as a tool to increase understanding, learn things or reach a workable compromise. This is obvious when you look at righteous media commentators and politicians, especially the President, and how they act.

So no, they will largely not be interested in such ideas. Words have very different meanings to both sides and this causes problems and confusion, and furthers the vitriol they desire.

What follows is caricature. I offer a commentary in the spirit of Right wing ‘argument’, so it is a little bitter. Many people (especially real conservatives) may say they don’t believe this, but look at what the politicians on their side actually do as opposed to what they say they will do.

For instance:

Justice:
On the left, justice may mean something like reparation, restoring things back to where they were before the crime. The system should do everything to help people who have been victimised by crime. Similarly, convicted criminals should be given every opportunity to reform rather than be punished for ever, or in advance. However, some people cannot, or will not, reform, that’s sad but reality. Justice can also mean something like preserving relative equality before the law, so that powerful people do not stomp over everybody or automatically get lower sentences for their crimes, on the rare occasion they get convicted. Hence the idea of avoiding profiling as much as possible.

For the righteous, justice should be defined by the highest bidder. Libertarians, in particular, love the idea of justice for sale with private police and private judges. Again, people on their side in power can lie, obfuscate intimidate and so on and this is ok, because power and kicking the less powerful is what life is all about. Hence it is completely ‘just’ that wealthy white men run nearly everything in the English speaking world, and try to keep it that way. The laws have been largely written by the wealthy in the first place, but this is a good thing as it keeps other people in their place. Being kept in your place is just as God decrees this. People who challenge wealth and dominance are really criminal. People who look different are probably criminal as well, especially if they are not wealthy. Supreme court judges can lie openly if they are righteous, because God is on their side. Justice is about preserving the power of the righteous elites.

Truth:
For progressives finding truth is complicated and takes work. It takes research, discussion, experiment, testing and so on. Most progressives think that science is the best method we have of determining truth, even though it can be sometimes be mistaken. They think it is useful to be aware of the best knowledge we have at this moment and to be cautious if there is doubt.

For the righteous, truth is often whatever the victors (ie themselves) want it to be. It is whatever is convenient to argue against progressives. It’s usually on Fox news. Science is wrong and biased whenever it contradicts fundamental rightist ideology, or the making of profit. A righteous person can easily refute a philosophy or knowledge that they know nothing about, and be cheered on by the others. Some of the righteous seem to believe that truth can only be found in some books – such as the Bible, or those written by Ayn Rand or Ludwig Mises. They suppress scientific information on government websites, because they think it is simply a matter of opinion and they know better.

Hurt:
Some progressive may worry too much about people’s feelings being hurt.

The righteous know hurt is important. Hence they support hurting the feelings of those they consider weaker than themselves, and protect the feelings of those in power through libel and slander laws, and the self-censorship of reputable publishers. They love their President’s continual abuse of others, but are alarmed when people dislike their President and express it.

Government:
For progressives, government means encouraging everyone to participate in the governance of the country and making the laws that apply to them. Liberty is important, but unfortunately no one should have unrestrained liberty to hurt, injure or repress other people, otherwise there is no liberty. One of government’s main functions is to do useful things to help people fulfil their lives and to balance (to an extent) bad luck and disaster as much as possible. Government ultimately has to respond to reality, so it needs an educated population and good knowledge.

Righteous people define good government as rule by the powerful and wealthy, with exclusion of the unpowerful other than as tools and shock troops. They link this government to a refusal to look at the way reality works, as that might get in the way. It means preserving established wealthy power elites even if it means we all get destroyed because we cannot adapt to reality. Righteous people support bad education for the ‘masses’, because it helps relieve ordinary people from the burden of thinking about self-governance, and they are more easily lied to. You should only get the quality of education you can pay for. When the righteous talk about small government, they have no objections to massive regulation of ordinary people and government that works to support and fund corporate power and wealth; indeed they encourage it. This appears to be because they think that wealthy people are specially virtuous and have the right to continue to be wealthy, and keep others poor. This position is not always popular, even on their own side, so they try and win support by distraction: stirring up irrelevant culture wars and implying that those who side with them have the right to kick everyone who disagrees. Righteous people also believe that if you suffer misfortune, the misfortune should be compounded, or you should submit to charity. In this set up, liberty is about preserving or intensifying property, wealth and power distributions. The more unequal the country the better, as wealthy people should never be hindered by their underlings. Rightists perpetually ‘confuse’ corporate liberty with liberty for all.

Identity:
Progressives say people have many different identities. Celebrate this and learn. Respect identities which are not your own, especially ones that the righteous like stomping over.

The Righteous claim we should all defer to the one primary identity. Women should realise their purpose in life is reproduction and obedience to men. All us white men together are what made this country great, and we are now under threat. No one should make us listen to those other people. Talk of respecting others shows weakness. People on the right perpetually pretend to have the most victimised identities of them all. Thus racism only affects white people, sexism only affects men and so on. Racism and sexism are primarily displayed when someone on their side is criticised for being racist or sexist.

Conservatism/Conservation:
Progressives want to maintain the checks and balances that have developed over the years to protect people from the potential rapacity of capitalists and bosses, and which help people to survive standard human misfortune. They also like the idea of keeping the environment in such a state that it allows us to continue our civilisation.

For the Righteous, conservation means protecting neoliberal economics and supporting corporations in almost whatever they do (unless they seem progressive). This largely involves stripping away everything that gave ordinary people a decent life; lowering wages, conditions and liberties in the name of efficiency. It also means destroying the environment to support the profit of the already wealthy, as wealthy people have the right to hurt the non-wealthy. The righteous keen for the wealthy to poison ordinary people through pollution and maim them at work. Ordinary people are inherently inferior (otherwise they would be wealthy), and corporate profit as the only important thing. Sometimes they support authoritarian Christians who want to rule over and suppress sinners (ie those who don’t accept their authority)

The righteous elites are filled the idealism that the wealthy will provide good government, and need to have an even bigger share of the wealth so that the money might trickle down to ordinary people. In order to further the power and wealth of corporations they want to allow those businesses to pollute and poison more effectively. In other words they want you dead. They cavalierly destroy anything that gets in the way of this, and do not think to check whether their theories deliver what they promise. They may aim at other results than the ones they promise, so they may not be stupid here.

This is pretty terrifying.

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How to tell if climate crisis is unlikely

January 13, 2019

I’m sometimes asked what would convince me that global warming was not getting worse and that we did not need to do anything. This is easy. There are straight-forward observations and trends which, if present, would indicate we are not heading for climate disaster.

  • Average global temperatures returning to mid 20th Century levels or below.
  • The increase in temperature to reverse so that most of the hottest record years were not in the last 20 or so years.
  • Ocean temperatures to decline, rather than apparently warm faster than predicted.
  • Glaciers to start re-appearing on mountains
  • Ice shelfs to start thickening and stay thickened.

    • It would also be nice if we saw:

  • Fish populations start rising, with tropical fish moving back to the tropics.
  • A decline in pollution and deforestation (because if they don’t decline then you will have other problems).
  • Measurements of CO2 concentration declining back to mid 20th Century levels, rather than increasing, because the theory highly suggests that too much CO2 will increase temperatures and acidify the oceans leading to massive die-off.
  • A solution to the loss of phosphorus problem.
  • The halt of increasing numbers of species going extinct – as that is not a sign of a healthy ecology. (Really climate change is just one symptom of massive ecological destruction and we need a healthy ecology to prosper.)
  • Some common sense from denialists, and those who wish to increase pollution.

    • But I’m not holding my breath for any of these events.

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