Wir fahr'n, fahr'n, fahr'n...mit Rad, Bus und Bahn

American economist Paul Krugman was apparently in Berlin recently, and he had some nice things to say about German urban planning and public transportation. (Via German Joys)

If Europe’s example is any guide, here are the two secrets of coping with expensive oil: own fuel-efficient cars, and don’t drive them too much.

Notice that I said that cars should be fuel-efficient — not that people should do without cars altogether. In Germany, as in the United States, the vast majority of families own cars (although German households are less likely than their U.S. counterparts to be multiple-car owners).

Krugman is right that this is not an issue of being 'anti-car': Germans, in my experience, love their cars.

But the average German car uses about a quarter less gas per mile than the average American car. By and large, the Germans don’t drive itsy-bitsy toy cars, but they do drive modest-sized passenger vehicles rather than S.U.V.’s and pickup trucks. [...]

And he's also right that they're not all driving micro-sized sub-compacts. There are a lot of substantial mid-sized cars on the road in Germany. You know, the ones you often see swishing by near the speed of sound on the Autobahn.

Some of these cars are not all that fuel efficient (especially when driven near the speed of sound), and the German auto industry has hardly been at the forefront of environmental technology (allowing Japan to gain an advantage in hybrids and the French to do so in diesels with particle filters to clean up their exhaust. I know that for many Americans the phrase 'French auto industry' is kind of a joke. They should get out more.)

However, truly monster-sized gas-guzzlers are a rarity. You see them, but they're rare enough that you notice seeing them.

Fuel prices have also, of course, been rising in Europe, where -- compared to America -- they were already quite high. Almost three years ago, the Christian Science Monitor pointed out that European were paying something around $7 a gallon. These days, we're paying about $8.25 for a gallon of diesel. Like about 40% of Europeans (according to the Monitor article), we drive a diesel, which has greater fuel economy: a little over 40 miles per (US) gallon in our case. (We buy it, of course, in litres. I've converted the measures for comparability. Because of differential taxation, diesel in Germany is cheaper than petrol -- but only just barely anymore.)

But, as Krugman points out, this is not just about fuel economy.

Can we also drive less? Yes — but getting there will be a lot harder.

There have been many news stories in recent weeks about Americans who are changing their behavior in response to expensive gasoline — they’re trying to shop locally, they’re canceling vacations that involve a lot of driving, and they’re switching to public transit.

But none of it amounts to much. For example, some major public transit systems are excited about ridership gains of 5 or 10 percent. But fewer than 5 percent of Americans take public transit to work, so this surge of riders takes only a relative handful of drivers off the road.

Among the various interesting bits of information in a recent report in Der Spiegel on how average Germans live, were statistics on how they get to work. (The whole report is here--a pdf, in German--and the relevant stats are on page 73, where you'll also find the very useful fact that 72% of Germans regularly sing while driving.)

Overall, about 13% of Germans commute via public transport. That's interesting -- even if I found it to be surprisingly low. (Still, it's more than twice the proportion of Americans.) More intriguing is the fact that 18% apparently commute via bicycle or even by foot.

Of course, this is based upon the fact that -- overall -- Germans are able to make these choices. And this is not an accident, but rather the result of a long-term town planning and transport policies.

Krugman:

Any serious reduction in American driving will require more than this [i.e., the minor rises in American public transit usage] — it will mean changing how and where many of us live.

To see what I’m talking about, consider where I am at the moment: in a pleasant, middle-class neighborhood consisting mainly of four- or five-story apartment buildings, with easy access to public transit and plenty of local shopping.

It’s the kind of neighborhood in which people don’t have to drive a lot, but it’s also a kind of neighborhood that barely exists in America, even in big metropolitan areas. Greater Atlanta has roughly the same population as Greater Berlin — but Berlin is a city of trains, buses and bikes, while Atlanta is a city of cars, cars and cars.

And in the face of rising oil prices, which have left many Americans stranded in suburbia — utterly dependent on their cars, yet having a hard time affording gas — it’s starting to look as if Berlin had the better idea.

I think it did.

It's not as if Europe is a paradise of rational foresight or a smoothly-functioning eco-utopia.

But what Krugman's article points out is the way that sensible planning (typically mocked by Americans as government interference) can increase freedom and allow people a greater array of options in living their lives.

And this is not simply true in large cities like Berlin.

We live in a small town in what is arguably 'the country' (I mean, we have tractors going by our front door every day, and a very short walk takes you into vineyards or fields planted with various crops...for someone born and raised in the suburbs, this is the country to me).

However, since the town -- like most small towns I've seen here -- is quite densely planned, we can walk to get essentially anything we need.

There are also lots of buses, some of which travel at least semi-regularly through surrounding villages.

Now, it's not as if all of this mass transit works perfectly or is ideal. But were we to become fully dependent upon it, we could manage with only a relatively small change in our lifestyle.

In much of the US, this is not the case.

Coincidentally, Molly Ivors at Whiskey Fire is soon to embark on an experiment to see just what shifting to mass-transit might mean.

Initial signs suggest this might be a good idea for her and her family:

The cold, hard, facts: A monthly bus pass costs less than a tank of gas.

Here on Liberal Mountain, we have two cars. One is a minivan which assures us it's a low-emission vehicle, but gets crappy gas mileage (about 20 mpg). It has a 26 gallon tank which, at current prices, costs us just over $100 to fill. We generally do so once or twice a week. The other is a small economy car which mostly belongs to the teen now. That gets slightly better mileage (about 30 mpg, on average), but also has a smaller tank. We generally spend about $50 filling that one weekly.

A bus pass for one adult for one month, entitled to bring up to three children free, is $35.

Sounds pretty good, only:

the bus doesn't actually come here. We have two choices, then. We can either (a) call the rural route bus, which is like a jitney and runs $2 per adult, or (b) drive to a place where the bus will meet us, preferably a parking lot where we can leave the car all day, maybe at a shopping center or similar. There are two places I can think of off the top of my head: one, a strip mall with Wal-Mart and Sam's Club and Barnes & Noble and stuff like that; the other the local library. The strip mall is 9.15 miles from Liberal Mountain, the library is 8.3 miles. So getting to either of those would mean driving more than half the distance to work anyway.

I can sympathise. I actually spent about 5 car-free years in America, actually in an area (suburban Maryland/Washington D.C.) with a reasonably good transit system. You get used to it, but even there it didn't always go where I needed and some of the routes were quite infrequent.

I'll be interested to see what Molly finds out about switching to the bus.

Of course, as Krugman points out, having spent a good half a century in constructing a society based upon cars and long-distance commutes, any improvement in the US is only going to come gradually.

But, it seems that it's going to have to come somehow.

Previous Obscene Desserts articles on related topics:
Going out on a line
Running on Empty (Words)
Auf Wiedersehen Wal-Mart

And in other 'Magic Bus' news...

In defense of naturalist green libertarian social democracy...or something like that

There was quite a remarkable essay by George Monbiot at the Guardian a few days ago that manages to combine zoology, libertarianism and the near-collapse of Northern Rock Building Society.

In particular, he discusses one Matt Ridley, who was not only chair of Northern Rock but is also a well known author of several fascinating books on human nature.

Silly me, I've never made the connection before. (But, then again, I have a difficult enough time remember whether it's Matt Ridley or Mark Ridley, let alone checking on the political allegiances and possible bank chairmanships of the zoologists I read.)

Monbiot gives Ridley's (quite astoundingly radical) libertarian philosophising a good drubbing, but the more interesting bit is where he brings up evolutionary psychology:

I studied zoology in the same department [as Ridley], though a few years later. Like Ridley, I am a biological determinist: I believe that much of our behaviour is governed by our evolutionary history. I accept the evidence he puts forward, but draw completely different conclusions. He believes that modern humans are destined to behave well if left to their own devices; I believe that they are likely to behave badly. If you belong to a small group of intelligent hominids, all of whom are well known to each other, you will be rewarded for cooperation and generosity within the group. (Though this does not stop your group from attacking or exploiting another.) If, on the other hand, you can switch communities at will, travel freely, buy in one country and sell in another, hire strangers then fire them, you will gain more from acting only in your own interest. You'll have an even stronger incentive to act against the common good if you run a bank whose lending and borrowing are so complex that hardly anyone can understand what is happening.

Ridley and I have the same view of human nature: that we are inherently selfish. But the question is whether this nature is subject to the conditions that prevailed during our evolutionary history. I believe they have changed: we can no longer be scrutinised and held to account by a small community. We need governments to fill the regulatory role vacated when our tiny clans dissolved.

In general, I tend far more toward Mobiot's arguments on this issue, even if I think he should avoid the use of the word 'determinist', particularly since so many evolutionary psychologists have been struggling to free themselves of that label and have rightly emphasised interactions between genetics and environment in describing behaviour.

But the larger point that becomes clear is the utter diversity of political views that can emerge from taking human nature seriously.

I note this aspect of Monbiot's reply partly because I have more than once run up against an assertion that evolutionary psychology more or less automatically entails some version or other of radical laissez-faireism and/or the creation of social policy that is 'conservative' in all kinds of undesirable ways. ('Undesirable' from the perspective of the generally liberal people with whom I have had these discussions.)

This is, as I think Monbiot nicely demonstrates, not the case, and I think he is right that the bulk of the evidence on human nature does not lead us to the conclusion that people -- left to their own devices -- will necessarily act in ways that are good. He is right that, for instance:

Human welfare, just as it was a million years ago, is guaranteed only by mutual scrutiny and regulation.

Precisely what the parameters and means of 'mutual scrutiny and regulation' should be is, of course, the tricky bit. Nevertheless, I think there's enough evidence from enough quarters to suggest that what is arguably the most successful form of human social organisation so far (with all its faults and shortcomings) -- i.e., liberal social democracy -- is not Homo sapiens's default state.

There are a lot more things that could be said on that, of course, but just to be brief, Monbiot's article has gotten me thinking about libertarianism again since it's something, actually, with which I have a not entirely hostile but somewhat conflicted relationship.

On the one hand, there are many ways in which I find libertarian thinking and commentary to be very insightful. For a while, for instance, I became a regular reader of Reason, with which I typically found myself in, alternatively, nodding agreement and seething disagreement. (In many ways, they're interesting for asking the right questions if not necessarily coming up with the right answers.)

And there have been various other places where I've found some intriguing thinking from the libertarian corner, particularly by those who seek to develop that thought humbly and consistently (i.e., not just screeching about low taxes and free-enterprise but advocating the passing of liberal immigration laws, the ending of the intrusive legislation of morality and the increased protection of civil rights).

Indeed, I would say that, along with social democracy and naturalism (by which I mean recognising our animal natures and connection to the ecosystems in which we live), libertarian principles of freedom form an important source for my -- admittedly perhaps somewhat ramshackle -- worldview.

Unfortunately, many (though not all) of my personal encounters with real, existing libertarians have tended to be rather negative. They have often held strangely simplistic (ranging to naive and fundamentally ahistorical) perspectives on the world and a relentless (ranging to bug-eyed and ranting) distrust of any concept of social or community good beyond (typically very narrowly conceived) individual interests. Libertarianism in these cases seems to only be an ideology for successful entrepreneurs: what it offers for people don't fit that category -- either because they are not entrepreneurs or because they are not successful -- tends to remain either unclear or be quite obviously vicious.

These, furthermore, have often been accompanied by two things.

1) A tendency toward hyperbole (e.g., 'all taxation is theft', sensible gun control laws are 'oppression' and the UN/EU/WTO/IMF/ATF -- and their fleet of black helicopters -- are plotting a tyrannical world government) and a slightly shouty form of unpleasantness

and

2) Almost limitless self-aggrandisement (i.e., seeing themselves among an extraordinarily creative and productive self-sufficient elite that, obviously, would thrive in the radically privatised world they envision creating). (The latter I blame partly on excessive reading of Ayn Rand, but that's another topic for another time. Or, preferably, for never).

Strangely enough, I have also encountered precisely these same two characteristics in many discussions with the radical left (mainly Trotskyists for some reason I'm not interested enough to speculate about). So, rest assured, I'm quite capable of being equal opportunity with my scorn.

Oddly enough, just about all the libertarians I've met have identified themselves as right-wing, even though a lot of the things that dominate right-wing parties (whether in Europe or America) these days -- xenophobia, religion, militarism, a strong desire to regulate morals -- are anathema to what I would see as 'real' libertarian thinking.

There's not, of course, anything inherently 'right-wing' about the notion of 'freedom' or about being suspicious of the state, or of emphasising forms of voluntary self-organisation to provide mutual assistance. These have long been elements in anarchist and some socialist thought, and the European green movement ('neither Left nor Right: Green' being one of their early slogans) has also long had the libertarian notion of decentralising power as one its core principles as well, even if at times it has been emphasised rather less than more. (Just to note one of the more obvious practical examples: green thinking on energy focuses on decentralised, even household, power production, freeing people not only from the centralised power of the state but also from the concentrated power of large corporations.)

Of the two general strands of thought that emerged from the 60s (and which have in various ways been around for long, long before that of course) -- i.e., 1) making a new world and 2) being left alone to do your own thing -- my own emphasis has been shifting toward the latter: partly because it's increasingly clear to me that the first -- whether in its left or right-wing form -- generally leads to Very Bad Things. (NB: Making a better world is, I think, still on the table though.)

Now, I know there are a lot of reasonable and very insightful libertarian ideas out there. (And I know that the Left has its own ideological silliness to answer for.)

Thus, it is encouraging to see, as Dale has pointed out, a thoroughgoing libertarian argument for tackling global warming published recently at Black Sun Journal.

In response to what seems to be a rather unhinged critique of the science of global warming, the journal notes:

Actually, it is the AGW [Anthropogenic Global Warming]-deniers who are the collectivists. They support allowing wealthy individuals and corporations to keep engaging in practices that essentially levy a heavy tax-burden on the rest of us. By depleting natural capital, the extractive robber-barons are externalizing their costs to other citizens and future generations. A true individualist libertarian would insist that everyone pay their fair share in the present-day rather than sloughing it off on their children, right? If you want to refrain from sounding completely ignorant and backward on this subject, you need to read and understand the concepts of Natural Capitalism, Externalities, Sustainability, and the Tragedy of the Commons. If you don’t, you have no business claiming to be a true Capitalist.

This article follows another (here), which contained the following:

Let’s look at the nature of our situation: Aside from radiation coming from the sun and other parts of space or the occasional meteorite coming in, and whatever heat is reflected or re-radiated into space going out, Earth is a closed system. Each of the 6.5 billion people who live here therefore have the right (an inherent human right as opposed to an arbitrary legal right) to fully use 1/6,500,000,000th of its resources and atmosphere, which are decidedly finite. If Stelene or Matt Drudge or Michael [Crichton] want to use more than that share of atmosphere or non-renewable resource, they need to purchase it from the people whose share they are consuming. That’s the free-market, right? It’s a classic problem of the commons, and even smart libertarians recognize this.

I imagine there are a lot of things that the writers at Black Sun Journal and I would disagree about. (I'm far from a 'true Capitalist', and they have that Strange Affection for Ayn Rand that I mentioned before and that I Just Can't Comprehend....)

The longer I spend blogging, however, the more I find it is difficult to find anyone with whom I completely agree anyway. But I'm also coming increasingly to the conclusion that, given the enormous decline in the civility of political discourse on the internet (described well, if with a certain justified incivility, at Whiskey Fire here and here) that I have come to see even a reasonable disagreement as, somehow, something precious.

And I am pleased to see the folks at Black Sun Journal take on crackpot irrationalism masquerading as secular, rational and libertarian free-thinking.

There are enough serious discussions to be had, after all.

[Update:] Just after posting this I found (via Pharyngula) a link to China Miéville's recent critique of libertarianism in In These Times. Worth reading. (As is his science-fiction novel Perdido Street Station, which I read recently on vacation.)

So long and thanks for all the fish...

Imagine the world without fish. It seems that some of us of a certain age (and many more of those who are younger) will have to face this prospect, according to a report appearing in the BBC:

Stocks have collapsed in nearly one-third of sea fisheries, and the rate of decline is accelerating.

Writing in the journal Science, the international team of researchers says fishery decline is closely tied to a broader loss of marine biodiversity.

But a greater use of protected areas could safeguard existing stocks.

"The way we use the oceans is that we hope and assume there will always be another species to exploit after we've completely gone through the last one," said research leader Boris Worm, from Dalhousie University in Canada.

"What we're highlighting is there is a finite number of stocks; we have gone through one-third, and we are going to get through the rest," he told the BBC News website.

Steve Palumbi, from Stanford University in California, one of the other scientists on the project, added: "Unless we fundamentally change the way we manage all the ocean species together, as working ecosystems, then this century is the last century of wild seafood."

Now, imagine the world without people, as this fascinating article from New Scientist suggests:

"The sad truth is, once the humans get out of the picture, the outlook starts to get a lot better," says John Orrock, a conservation biologist at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara, California. But would the footprint of humanity ever fade away completely, or have we so altered the Earth that even a million years from now a visitor would know that an industrial society once ruled the planet?

[...]

All things considered, it will only take a few tens of thousands of years at most before almost every trace of our present dominance has vanished completely. Alien visitors coming to Earth 100,000 years hence will find no obvious signs that an advanced civilisation ever lived here.

Yet if the aliens had good enough scientific tools they could still find a few hints of our presence. For a start, the fossil record would show a mass extinction centred on the present day, including the sudden disappearance of large mammals across North America at the end of the last ice age. A little digging might also turn up intriguing signs of a long-lost intelligent civilisation, such as dense concentrations of skeletons of a large bipedal ape, clearly deliberately buried, some with gold teeth or grave goods such as jewellery.

And if the visitors chanced across one of today's landfills, they might still find fragments of glass and plastic - and maybe even paper - to bear witness to our presence. "I would virtually guarantee that there would be some," says William Rathje, an archaeologist at Stanford University in California who has excavated many landfills. "The preservation of things is really pretty amazing. We think of artefacts as being so impermanent, but in certain cases things are going to last a long time."

Ocean sediment cores will show a brief period during which massive amounts of heavy metals such as mercury were deposited, a relic of our fleeting industrial society. The same sediment band will also show a concentration of radioactive isotopes left by reactor meltdowns after our disappearance. The atmosphere will bear traces of a few gases that don't occur in nature, especially perfluorocarbons such as CF₄, which have a half-life of tens of thousands of years. Finally a brief, century-long pulse of radio waves will forever radiate out across the galaxy and beyond, proof - for anything that cares and is able to listen - that we once had something to say and a way to say it.

But these will be flimsy souvenirs, almost pathetic reminders of a civilisation that once thought itself the pinnacle of achievement. Within a few million years, erosion and possibly another ice age or two will have obliterated most of even these faint traces. If another intelligent species ever evolves on the Earth - and that is by no means certain, given how long life flourished before we came along - it may well have no inkling that we were ever here save for a few peculiar fossils and ossified relics. The humbling - and perversely comforting - reality is that the Earth will forget us remarkably quickly.

'The Earth will forget us remarkably quickly.'

And so it should.

Remember: modern human beings have existed for about 100,000 years. Dinosaurs dominated the planet for more than 150 million years.

So, don't you go feeling special, now, newcomer.

It ain't easy being green

Is it just me, or is there something very confused about the following anti-green screed by Anthony Giddens?

Actually, it wasn't the green movement that alerted us to the dangers of climate change, it was scientists.

So, 'the green movement' and 'science' are two thoroughly different things, with no overlapping interests? That seems odd, with all those 'anti-science' greens promoting (highly technical as well as potentially highly profitable) technologies such as wind and solar energy and basing their calls for action on climate change, pollution and declining fish stocks on scientific study.

And, erm, nobody in 'the green movement' has contributed to the effort to warn about climate change? Really? Do 'scientific' ideas automatically filter through the rest of society without politically active interest groups to promote them?

Large sectors of the green movement actually have their origins in a quite different body of thinking. They are to be found in the writings of those hostile to modern industry, which was seen as destroying the integrity of nature - essentially a romantic, conservative reaction to industrialism.

There is something true about this...but, on the other hand, this in itself does seem to be a thoroughly conservative reaction to the more modern versions of environmental thinking, many of which have embraced technology and which seem to have become fairly mainstream (as is suggested, at the very least, here and here). If environmental issues have become popular topics for discussion, it most likely has as much to do with the activism of groups such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace as it does with the hard scientific work of agencies such as NOAA.

Furthermore, since it has been convincingly suggested that a highly significant part of climate change is a result of 'industrialism', has not the 'conservative reaction to industrialism' (however naive it might be in some ways) been contributory to recognising that danger?

This threat explains why so many greens are either hostile to science and technology, or at least ambivalent about them.

So, Giddens here subtly equates ambivalence about the results of science (which, I would suggest, is a rather reasonable and sane point of view) with hostility to science. Clever, don't you think? But it gets better:

The green movement developed around the idea of the conservation of nature in the face of the advance of human technology.

Partly true...so, yes, for example, it has focused on pointing out the perils of, say, CFCs for the ozone layer or fossil fuels for the climate.... which, in the end, has also been the focus of many scientists, who, according to Giddens seem to exist in a non-politicised cloud of ivory-tower purity...

The very imagery of "green" - a return to nature freed as far as possible from human tampering - is wrong. There can be no going back to "nature", since "nature" no longer exists, at least so far as climate is concerned - we are living in a world in which human influence is everywhere.

I'm not so sure that the vast majority of green thinking does, anymore, focus on a 'return to nature' which is straw-manned here by Giddens.

Moreover, if 'nature' no longer exists because humans have 'influenced' the world, when is it exactly that 'nature' stopped existing? Humans have 'existed' for - depending on one's view - around 100,000 years...and the first major human-caused extinctions may have been caused about 10,000 years ago. This sounds like a major 'influence'; so did 'nature' stop 'existing' way back then? If so, isn't the distinction being made here somehow silly?

There is, of course, a core insight buried somewhere in this...I too think that there is a romantic element in some green thinking which has created a kind of Frankenstein version of science which only does harm to the world. But, most of the sensible green thinking to which I pay attention (see my next post) takes this as a given.

On the other hand, most of the environmental problems with which scientists - and others - have to deal with are a result of human abilities to affect the environment which have been aided by...wait for it...science.

This all seems straightforward enough to me. And, I hope, to you.

But what I find bizarre in this comment from Giddens is his idea that a statement such as this -

Science and technology have to be a large part of our responses to climate change.

- is in any way in need of saying for the vast majority of people who would consider themselves part of the 'green movement' which he apparently so despises.

To suggest that the main obstacle to dealing with climate change in the next century is the green movement is, frankly, demented and perverse, and it is a thought more worthy of a hack novelist like Michael Crichton than an intellectual of Giddens's standing.

It really doesn't take too much originality to be a prominent thinker these days, does it?



As a PS to these thoughts, The Wife has the following to say:

Giddens opens his commentary with a statement that may seem to reflect the situation accurately, but it is nevertheless a piece of rhetorical obfuscation of the kind I usually give my undergraduate students to dissect. Climate change has not just "come to the forefront" in public discourse, it is being used, in public (which does not necessarily mean "by" the public), to achieve very specific political goals (some of which are as far removed from the ecological concerns on which they capitalise as they could be). Context, please!

I hope I'm not the only person around to find the green conscience recently sported by Blair and Cameron to curry favour with the voters a hypocritical and shameless instrumentalisation of the existential issues which green politics are addressing (and have, in some countries at least, been doing so for some decades). This is also the reason why I thought it rich, to say the least, that the political leader of a country that until a couple of weeks ago gave sod all about ecology, should urge the chancellor of Germany (clearly one of the more ecologically aware European countries and the first to elect greens to parliament) to push a common strategy on climate change.

Well-intended though Blair's intervention might have been, it had an irritatingly sanctimonious ring about it. As though he'd thought up the issue of global warming all by himself (maybe with the aid of an inspirational crystal or such).

Or as we say in German: as though it had grown on his own dungheap. Though in the case of Blair, we may have to refer instead to a Mayan mudbath.

Melt-down, continued

Last week I mentioned the near-disaster which occurred recently at a Swedish nuclear power plant. There is a much more detailed report on it (in English this time) available at Spiegel Online.

If anything, this article would seem to justify the conclusion that this event was even more unnerving than the original indications suggested.

I will be following up on this theme, as promised. Sometime soon.

Melt-down (Or, We're Doomed, Part 456)

The last couple of weeks have seen some very interesting stories related to that ever-sexy topic of sustainable development.

Sweden, for instance, was forced to shut down a nuclear power plant in Forsmark after it had malfunctioned. Die Welt reports that one reactor was shut down shortly before a meltdown. Two of the four generators which were supposed to switch on to provide emergency electricity failed to do so. Regulators suggest the media has overreacted; however, to be honest, I had a comparatively hard time finding this in other media outside Germany, so I think it’s hard to say that people have been too concerned about this. And, we are talking about a nuclear meltdown. (And one of the grounds for optimism mentioned in that article – namely, that two of the four generators did function – is not really cheering. Or am I being way too much a glass-is-half-empty man on this?)

Sweden, it turns out, produces about half of its electricity through nuclear power. However, like Germany, the country is currently in the process of abandoning nuclear power. Electricity prices have recently shot up dramatically.

Of course, while Sweden is giving up nuclear power, I believe Finland is busy building new nuke plants…probably in part to sell electricity to Sweden. Is it just me, or is it hard to see the progress in all this?

Speaking of melting down: in New York, it seems the enduring heatwave is continuing to put more strain on the power grid. This seems to have become an annual problem in a lot of places. (Is it my imagination, or is this not a fairly recent thing?) California was struggling not too long ago. And now New York faces ‘record demand’ and the electric company tells people to turn off unnecessary appliances.

Which raises my question: is it a good thing that Americans have to be told to turn off things they aren’t using?

And in the Guardian comes an interesting article about a report on the growth of single-person residences. The number of people living alone has been rising dramatically, and may, according to the report cited, lead to an ‘environmental crisis’. In 1971, 12% of households were made up of people living alone. Apparently, this figure may reach 38% by 2026.

The report's author, Dr Jo Williams, said: "Previously, the typical one-person
householder was the widow, often on a tight budget and thrifty. The rise in
younger, wealthier one-person households is having an increasingly serious
impact on the environment."

It said one-person householders are the biggest consumers of energy, land and household goods. They consume 38% more products, 42% more packaging, 55% more electricity and 61% more gas per person than an individual in a four-person household.

I was surprised at the extent to which living alone increases these kinds of environmental impacts, but it’s obvious once you start thinking about it.

The report’s author recommends the expansion of opportunities for communal-style living.

"Regretful loners who are forced into living alone by circumstances create demand for more collaborative lifestyles, such as more widespread co-housing schemes, where you have private space such as a bedroom, bathroom and kitchen but share some living and storage areas," she said.

"It allows people to share household chores, goods and consume less energy."

Studies and environmental planners suggest that high-density living is the most environmentally sound way of organising social life. This makes perfect sense, as it’s a simple way of making places more walkable and making the most efficient use of resources. And some of those artistic renderings of eco-cities of the future are really cool-looking and all.

But on the other hand, do people really want to live that way? How many ‘regretful loners’ are there? Is this something which would appeal to people? If so, what would it take to make them more appealing? I mean, when I think of ‘apartment block’ the images which come to mind are rather more grim than green.

After years of group-house living in college, I was thrilled when I finally got my own apartment. And, I know that I’m pretty ecstatic to have my own house with some green (or, due to the heatwave, more recently brown) land around it. (Environmentalist alibi: we bought an old house in an established community which is walkable with good train connections to other places. We’ve made a few energy-saving renovations and are planning on making more with time. So there.)

What I’m wondering is this. Sprawl is bad. We know that. Many people live with the consequences, and they’re not just all the usual litany of tree-hugging gloom and doom. Sprawl is simply ugly and a hassle and leads to all kinds of plainly obvious Bad Things like long commutes and traffic jams.

But does it help environmentalists to talk about ‘communal living’ and ‘high-density eco-cities’ when it seems a lot of people – even people who take the environment seriously’ may not really want to live that way?

Which brings me back to Sweden and New York.

I make a couple of assumptions. I assume that cheap energy is on the way out over the next couple of decades. I also, perhaps more debatably, think that democracy works as an inherent brake on politicians calling for people to adopt self-sacrificing behaviour (anyone recall the derisive laughter which followed Jimmy Carter’s advice to Americans in the last energy crisis to drive less, lower their thermostats and put on sweaters?). But might not current market trends (steadily rising energy and resource prices) nevertheless force people in one way or another into changing lifestyles? I mean, rather than idealism pulling people into communal living situations (which, let’s face it, is often a nightmare) might not increasing numbers of people be more or less compelled into it by economic necessity?

This optimistic thought to be continued…next week.

Keep cool, people.

Running on Empty (Words)

A recent spate of articles has been making a surprising – and counterintuitive – suggestion: not only may current ‘hybrid’ cars (such as the Toyota Prius) not be all they’re cracked up to be, efficiency-wise, they are less efficient than most typical SUVs, even the hideous-for-many-reasons Humvee.

This remarkable conclusion derives from a study by Art Spinella, President of CNW Marketing Research. Spinella and his team applied a very important green principle to examining the environmental impact of different vehicles: their ‘dust-to-dust’ energy costs. This means not only taking their fuel efficiency into consideration but also the energy expended upon things such as R&D, the making of component parts, transportation, repair and maintenance and disposal. Hybrids, since they employ highly advanced composite materials and motor technology, score quite high on the R&D and production energy-usage scale. So, taking everything into account, it would seem that there is no reason for people in general (and Americans in particular) to change their vehicle purchasing habits. As Shikha Dalmia put it in a gloating article at Reason: ‘Now here's a catchy slogan for the next Save the Earth campaign: Have you hugged a Hummer today?’

Terribly droll. But while I enjoy seeing a specious bit of conventional wisdom punctured as much as anyone, there was something about this story which didn’t seem right. Sure enough, a thirty-second search brought up an article from HybridCars.com which provided a few key missing points. As in any vastly detailed, mathematical analysis of efficiency, the original study made some key assumptions crucial to its final conclusions. One of them was that a typical hybrid car would run for 100,000 miles while a typical Hummer would run for three times that amount. This assumption, of course, drastically shrank the overall energy cost per mile driven for the SUV while raising it for the hybrid. (The Reason article did mention this assumption, but gave it far more credibility than it seems to deserve.)

There was another key point given insufficient airing in the articles which reported it. This was the obvious point that, although as cutting edge technological products hybrids have a far higher R&D energy component, the more years they are produced, the more these costs will be amortized, just as they have long been with the old-school, off-the-shelf components of the Hummer.

As the author of the original study himself points out – something ignored, for instance, in the Reason article – the Hummer’s energy advantage will be short lived. As hybrid technology develops, its per-unit energy costs will sharply decline, which, in combination with their superior fuel efficiency, will make them far and away superior to gas-guzzling SUVs, even when analysed in terms of their dust-to-dust energy costs.

As reported at HybridCars.com, Pinella believes

‘It would be totally different in three years. The hybrids will look
significantly better. The new hybrids they are developing now—the new ones that
I've seen, Prius III and Prius IV—are so much more simplified. They'll do what
the current versions do, but with far less complexity, lighter motors, more
recyclable parts, and longer lasting components. The current Prius, for all
intents and purposes, will be the Model T.’

It is troubling enough to see the wilfulness with which a detailed, carefully argued and cautiously laid out scientific study – which in no way ended up hostile to the further development of hybrid technologies – has been spun into something marking the death knell for environmentally-friendlier autos. Some of this is simply incompetent - or dishonest - reporting, much of it aimed at an audience with generally poor skills in scientific and mathematical reasoning.

But beyond all the specious number crunching, it was the self-satisfied tone of many critics of alternative technology and environmentalism which so stood out. From between the lines comes the joyful shout of ‘gotcha!’ as the environmentalists – those naïve elitist dilettantes – get their deserved comeuppance. (See the sarcasm dripping from Dalmia’s quote above.) For some, this whole discussion seems to revolve not around the questions of efficient resource usage or pollution, but rather about tarring environmentalists as yuppie liberals with a smug sense of superiority who deserve to be taken down a peg or two.

The battle over the environment is no longer (if it ever was) one mainly about facts, but instead part of a broader culture war, with environmentalists increasingly being stereotyped (once again, after a period of relative popularity) as naïve, foolish and liberal elitists. Thus, for some time, the anti-environmentalist verbal barrages have been most often fired from the right (where, either for reasons of greed or God, the environment is dismissed) or from the libertarian free-marketeers, who seem to see environmentalism only as a new excuse for big-government to mess with people's freedom.

The political imbalance is, however, not as stark as it seems, either in the past or the present. While vast amounts of environmental damage ensue from profit-driven capitalist enterprises and the consumerist lifestyle which it supports (or which supports it, depending on your view), the environmental record of ‘real-existing’ socialism was grim, whether in its Stalinist or Maoist flavours. (I heard a radio report only yesterday on the improvement in the water quality in the Elbe immediately following the collapse of the GDR. The hitherto largest nuclear disaster in world history will always remain a stain on the environmental record of the left. And China? I don’t even know where to begin…)

Closer to home, the West has always seen no shortage of blue-collar contempt for those who would stand in the way of mining, logging or industrial activities for the sake of water quality or biodiversity. In Europe, where green parties have established their own niche in the local political ecologies, the distinctions are somewhat clearer, as unlike in the US, unions and environmentalists don’t have to necessarily tolerate each other’s presence on the same team. As a result, the strains between red and green tend to come more out into the open. They resulted in some of the most dynamic tensions of Germany’s previous red-green coalition government (which, in many ways, were more fundamental, than many of those being staged in the current conservative and social-democratic one.)

Whereas left and right economic policy tends to be simply about producing more, green thinking at least raises questions about what we produce and how it is produced. And this, of course, points to a difficult – and perhaps insoluble – conflict of interests and raises disturbing questions about our lives as producers and consumers. It suggests that we may have to live differently, and, at least in a material sense, with less.

This is an unpopular message, and probably one of the reasons why the green movement will remain a niche interest. In a system where, even today, we are told that more is better, regardless of what it is or how it is produced, greens are the only ones who – however partially or imperfectly – seem to raise the truly fundamental (and therefore truly radical) questions.

The answers, of course, are a more difficult matter. And it is likely that the most promising ones will not only emerge from a single political tradition. European green parties have traditionally been critics of consumerism and profit-driven exploitation. They have also, however, often put themselves against big-government statism and the centralising tendencies of the left. If this position independent of left and right has allowed the greens to be highly creative, it has also been the source of their most destructive internal centrifugal forces and, furthermore, guarantees a continuous debate about their political identity.

Indeed, green parties tend to have their own shortcomings, such as a generally paranoid attitude toward science and sometimes romantic notions about peace and war. Moreover, although the mainstream versions of most political traditions have shown a criminal disregard for the environment, there have been streams within all of them which have taken a different view. In an important sense, environmentalism doesn't simply 'belong' to the greens.

There is, furthermore, no reason to see environmentalist perspectives as contrary to issues beloved of the right, whether national security or economic vitality. The goal of reducing dependence on oil should warm the hearts of any security-obsessed right winger, just as the economic potential of becoming a leader in green technologies (something which Germany has been doing with some success) should be good for business. (An article from yesterday’s Süddeutsche Zeitung suggests that the US market is already beginning to shift slightly away from SUVs and toward more fuel efficient cars, most of them non-hybrids.)

Which brings us back to the hybrids. Hybrid cars are not going to save the planet (and, indeed, the whole debate around efficiency is a distraction from question of whether we need fewer rather than better cars). However, the argument about them raises a broader issue. The development of new technologies, which in the long term will be essential to improving efficiency in resource use and reducing ecological impacts, will often, at first, involve things which seem inefficient, such as higher R&D costs or a period of subsidisation until they have become developed enough to compete in a market already dominated by longer-established technologies. These costs will be unavoidable in many cases, and accepting them will require a certain amount of political will: on the part of consumers, voters and governments.

But as long as environmentalism is perceived either as a partisan political opinion or as a merely faddish (but nevertheless self-righteous) lifestyle choice, there will be a great tendency for it to become the target of critics who will simply see it as some kind of alien imposition on their version of the good life. In some cases, this perception is real: there are political perspectives which are truly incompatible with green thinking. But in many cases, this is not so. Developing a sensible, sustainable approach to the environment will most likely not be based upon ideas from any single political tradition. Instead the thinking and approaches which will have to emerge will have to be a cross-breed of different principles and compromises among them, an amalgam of perspectives on humanity and social organisation and a mixture of technologies and new models of how to live.

It will be composed of many different elements. It will, in short, be a hybrid.

Apocalypse soonish

So, we're doomed then?

I've been reading Jared Diamond's latest book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, over the last few weeks. It is, admittedly, perhaps not the best selection for bedtime reading, since the overall image it paints of human beings and their abilities (or lack thereof) to live sensibly on this little blue planet is the stuff of nightmares. Diamond traces a series of past societies (Easter Islanders, the Anasazi, the Mayans, the Norse Greenlanders among others) and some modern ones (Rwanda and Burundi, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, China, Australia and the state of Montana) to examine the success - or more often failure - of human societies. Clearly, Diamond's story (as he clearly states) is skewed by his emphasis on collapse. Not every society, as do some of those he discusses, ends up in a deforested, blighted landscape plagued by incessant warfare and occasional cannibalism.

But some do. Moreover, alongside the more extreme, lurid closing chapters which some societies have written for themselves, the parallels which Diamond draws between some of the preliminary mistakes made in the past and those of the present are even more unsettling.

Although he emphases a variety of causal factors (external hostility, collapses in trade, disease, poor political choices), the main villain in Diamond's story could be summarised in one word: unsustainability. The exhaustion of the soil, the destruction of ecosystems and the over-exploitation of natural resources do not necessarily lead to immediate societal collapse. They can instead lead to a gradual, chronic worsening of living standards, increased tensions among and between societies (leading to internal unrest, widespread individual violence or war) and the slow extermination of a large portion of the non-human life on this planet.

By this point, assuming that you are still reading, one of two reactions has probably taken hold: nodding in despairing agreement or an eye-rolling frustration with doom-saying green pessimism. (Diamond is more positive than most environmentalists about the possibilities for change, and his book is by no means entirely pessimistic.) Environmentalists are often accused of 'crying wolf', but critics should reflect on their poor choice of words. At the end of that fable a wolf did in fact appear, and the presumed imaginary threat proved to be real.

I sensed I could hear that wolf scratching at the door more loudly after viewing Austrian director Erwin Wagenhofer's gripping documentary film We Feed the World, which takes a close look at the way modern food is produced.

As the website notes:

A quarter of Vienna’s residual waste consists of unconsumed food, most of which is still perfectly fit to eat. At the same time the number of starving people in the world is increasing steadily: 852 million people suffer from malnutrition, most of them in Africa and Latin America. Even in rich industrialised countries around 10 million people do not get enough to eat.

[...] Analysis carried out by the ÖAMTC Academy in 1997 revealed that even a classic Viennese breakfast with all the ingredients – bread rolls, ham, cheese, milk, sugar, eggs, yoghurt and breakfast drinks – sourced in Austria is the result of at least 5,000 kilometres on the road. If you give yourself the additional treat of a kiwi fruit from New Zealand, you can add a further 1,250 kilometres to that total – and that’s after 20,000 kilometres on a freighter.

[...] The environment also suffers: from the direct impact of pollutants on the one hand and high energy use and its concomitant contribution to climate change on the other. For example, a kilo of strawberries flown in from Israel costs almost five litres of petroleum oil before it reaches the supermarket shelf as compared with a kilo of strawberries from an Austrian farm which uses only 0.2 litres.

Highly industrialised food production leads, certainly, to 'cheap' food. It can only be seen as 'low cost' however, by looking exclusively at its market price. Otherwise, as this film (and the soon-to-appear film of Eric Schlosser's excellent book Fast Food Nation will probably also make clear) it exacts an enormous price in terms of environmental degradation (whether in Europe - see Spain's vast landscape of hideous, water-hogging greenhouses - or in the Brazilian rainforests being converted into soybean fields to feed first-world livestock, or in the over-fished oceans) social inequality (the disappearance of small farms and independent fishermen and their replacement by an unskilled, low-wage agricultural work force; the vast overproduction in American and European farms which make establishing a viable agricultural sector impossible for many developing countries) and cruelty to animals.

We are well accustomed to apocalyptic scenarios in which the world comes to a crashing end. Nightmares of social collapse are certainly well anchored in American culture. (I know several people who made emergency plans at the Millennium and at least one person who has seriously discussed building some kind of protective bunker in his basement.) From post-September 11th reactions to terrorism to the popularity of the Left Behind series, there seem to be no shortage of signs that there are a lot of people who expect the world to go out with a bang. There are also quite a few who confidently expect various things (the market, scientific ingenuity, the American spirit, etc.) to triumph over these problems, giving us the comforting message that all can continue as before.

There is a more likely, I think, though in itself fairly uncomfortable possibility. Rather than the all-encompassing disaster or the bright new future, one can see current trends as pointing to a different kind of apocalypse: one which is already underway, and one, much like the proverbial slow-boiling frog, which we won't notice until it is too late. (When I say 'we' in this case, I mean most people in advanced industrial/post-industrial societies: as Wagenhofer makes clear, there are large numbers of people who are already getting it in the neck, and who have been for some time now.)

The most likely result is a future in which there is a slow, grinding restriction in standards of living for the West (combined with an increasing gap between rich and poor) as well as an increase in social collapse, starvation and resource wars for those living in un-developed countries (and those from wealthier countries who go to fight them).

The good times, for many, won't come to an end, and there'll be cheap greenhouse strawberries (and t-shirts and flat-screen TVs) for the rest of us. There will be enough 'progress' for the market evangelicals to claim that there was nothing to worry about all along, but enough periodic disaster to feed our hunger for the ultimate end-time. In short, rather than a societal collapse as something which might or might not occur at some point in the future, it may rather be something that is occurring before our eyes. (In many ways, I think that the chronic physical and psychological degradation this involves has been well expressed the fiction of J. G. Ballard, but that's a discussion for another time.)

Most likely, the much feared (or much longed-for?) crash will probably not come. Human societies are, in general, fairly resilient things. But it is a resilience which is often bought at the price of savagery.

For human beings, most of whom crave clarity (even if it's disastrous) and who have a very hard time dealing with ambiguity, this may be an unsatisfactory conclusion. Much like the person to cut down the last tree on Easter Island, we don't even know how far gone we already are.