Numbers to obfuscate

(I'm still alive; I've just been working on my dissertation, which is due in two and a half weeks.)

If you are familiar with climate change regimes such as the Kyoto Protocol, or even the tenuous Copenhagen Accords, you'll know that there is a differentiation between the countries of the world. (We do this anyway, calling parts of the world "New" and others "Old", "developing" and "developed", "North" and "South", "capitalist" and "communist".) In the Kyoto Protocol, countries are either Annex I (industrialised, OECD countries) or non-Annex I (industrialising) countries. The responsibility of a country to scale back its greenhouse gas emissions depends on what bin the country is placed in--Annex I countries tend to have greater responsibilities than non-Annex I countries. There has been great debates about some of the countries placed in the non-Annex I bin--countries like India, China, Mexico, Brazil, and South Africa--because these countries, while spewing tremendous amounts of greenhouse gases and pollutants into the atmosphere, will have fewer responsibilities. Countries like the US, Canada, and Australia fight tooth and nail to have such countries assume greater burdens, while at the same time not really wanting to do much themselves.

As you can tell, it matters what you are binned as and called. Being called a "small employer" allows you tax incentives and loopholes. Being called an engineer allows you to do engineering things that non-engineering people, who may be fully experienced and qualified, cannot do. Calling oneself an "individual" is the first step to throwing your hands up in the face of systemic problems. So people will go to considerable lengths to come up with ways to obfuscate responsibility. Divide the population of the country with some non-sense economic statistic, multiply that number by some other made up metric, and raise that to the power of some voodoo polynomial, and WALA! Your country is no longer responsible for its actions. The number says it, not me!

This is exactly what two researchers, Michael Sivak and Brandon Schoettle, at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute and  Sustainable Worldwide Transportation have just done in the widely circulated and read American Scientist magazine. Their piece, titled Accounting for Climate in Countries' Carbon Dioxide Emissions (which also appalled my advisor) is exactly the kind of work that will continue to allow people, institutions, and organisations to get away with ecological degradation and environmental injustices. They found a way to use the number of days people in various countries have to use heating and cooling to live comfortably. These, they claim, are a sort of sunk cost. (Fair enough, I might be able to agree only to a certain degree with that.) But the key to their findings is the following figure:

The rankings for countries by their carbon dioxide emissions can shift considerably when the variable of climate is incorporated. The first column above shows the 15 lowest (top) and highest (bottom) emitters in a set of 157 countries based on emissions per capita. The second column shows the rankings that result when each country’s emissions per capita are divided by that country’s gross domestic product (GDP) per capita; countries that move into the top or bottom 15 under this index are shown in yellow. The rankings for the third column are calculated by dividing the results found for the second column by the average number of heating and cooling degree days each country experiences, a measure of how much typical temperatures vary from a set point. Countries that move into the far ends of the spectrum when all three factors are included are shown in purple. Under this measure, Jordan (which has a relatively mild climate) joins the heaviest emitters, and Sweden (which has a relatively cold climate) joins the countries with the lowest emissions. The numbers in parentheses show each country’s relative emissions, normalized to the lowest emitter. For instance, when population, GDP and climate are included, South Africa, the highest emitter, produces 60.8 times more emissions than does Chad, the lowest emitter. From here.

As you move from left to right, you see that the countries that are initially the highest polluters slowly disappear. You start with the Canada, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Luxembourg (all countries that the United States has close ties to) and the United States, and you end up with Libya, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and South Africa. These are the countries that must be held accountable! Not the US or its cronies! And it is toward the end of the article where the authors make their crowning remark:

Our results suggest that taking climate into account makes a significant difference in how countries fare in carbon dioxide emissions rankings. Because people respond to the climate they live in by heating and cooling indoor spaces, an index that incorporates climate provides a fairer yardstick than an index that does not. We hope that our approach will stimulate others to further refine this index to reflect even better the complexities involved in ranking countries on emissions (emphases added by me...of course).

Let's feel good about living the lifestyles we do! The Earth and its oppressed peoples be damned!

Intentional climate change, procedural justice and the case for individual action

I shall try to continue to make the case for individual action in this post, particularly in relation to trash and the effects of our consumerist decisions. I have written about the issue of personal responsibility and individual action here, here, here and here, each with slightly different emphases.

I just re-read a thoughtfully written article by Dale Jamieson on Ethics and Intentional Climate Change. He describes the current lack of ethical accountability for geo-engineering the climate, whether it be by large-scale reforestation using a single, fast-growing tree species, or putting up mirrors in space to reflect the downwelling incoming solar radiation by a certain amount. He also describes issues of unintentional consequences, which abound in engineering and technofixes that have been implemented in the past. For example, he describes the evolution of superbugs because of excessive use of pesticides and medicines in today's world. One of the most interesting things he talks about is the issue of procedural justice. We cannot argue against the fact that the current negative state of the world's environment is primarily due to a Western ethic of domination over nature, and that such an ethic promulgated to others in the East and "under-polluted" South without a full understanding of its consequences leads to even more environmental and social destruction. In response to growing concerns about climate change, you may know that that the United Nations has tried to facilitate talks to have a global agreement on the reduction of greenhouse gases under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. What has come out of such talks are ineffective "protocols" like Kyoto, and "declarations of goodwill" like that out of Copenhagen last year. If you are following climate change negotiations, you may be pessimistic about what may come out of Cancun in the next round of climate talks. Regardless, such approaches to solving global environmental issues, although coming out of the confluence of actions of institutions, organisations and people, are inherently dominated by the voices and money of a few actors. Nothing came out of the Copenhagen round of talks because of stalling on the part of the US and China. In the end, those most affected are those whose voices are silenced. It is the "freedom" and "sovereignty" of the US and China to stall important talks and agreements, but there is an inherent domination of sub-Saharan Africa that comes along with it. The same goes with geo-engineering and climate change. There are significant hurdles of procedural justice. Whose voices will be considered when making monumental decisions such as intentionally altering the Earth's climate to fight against "unintentional" climate change? Indeed, many of the ideas that are floating around for geo-engineering are much cheaper to implement than say providing "less fortunate" countries with resources and money for adaptation. The unintended consequences of changing large physical systems are most likely not reversible - climate change is likely irreversible, too. Jamieson lays the case that some serious ethical foundations must be laid before we can even think about implementing any large-scale geo-engineering scheme like seeding the world's oceans with iron so that large algal blooms can soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But how are we to find common ground with such a diversity of moral philosophies and traditions in the world? Many decades may pass before the US will see eye-to-eye with China. Indeed, the US is probably more concerned about cyber espionage and warfare with China than about dealing with climate change.

But what is reversible?  Human behaviour is reversible, even though it is difficult to get people to change their behaviour. We cannot wait for top-down, "global consensus" strategies to be implemented to solve such a dynamic, divisive problem. Individual action and choices have profound effects for our localities, economies and environment. When we take individual action to refuse, reduce and reuse we concretely address issues of greenhouse gas emissions, landfilling trash, burning toxic wastes, and shipping electronics to China and India for "recycling." No one can deny this. These actions do have an effect on those in contact with us. I can attest to that. There are no questions of procedural justice, distributive justice, or consensus that need to be addressed.