book Archives - Amateur Earthling

Five Times Faster by Simon Sharpe

Five Times Faster takes a systems approach to understanding why we haven’t made nearly as much progress on climate as we need to over the last 30 years of trying. Sharpe — a former UK climate diplomat — looks at the problem from 3 different angles: the way we assess and communicate the potential impacts of climate change; the way we think about the economy in the context of climate action, and finally how diplomacy and international agreements around climate action have been structured and negotiated. In each of these contexts he highlights the need for more consideration of non-linearity, feedbacks, and the potential for changing the underlying dynamics of the climate, economic, and political systems.

Carbon Captured by Matto Mildenberger

Carbon Captured is another book in the vein of Leah Stokes’ excellent Short Circuiting Policy and Making Climate Policy Work by David Victor and Danny Cullenward. It examines the political economy of climate policymaking over the last ~30 or so years starting mostly in the late 1980s when the issue started showing up on national policy agendas.

The central idea of the book (as Mildenberger repeats many, many times) is that carbon-intensive power centers enjoy political representation on both the Labor and Capital ends of the political spectrum that organizes most national parties. Mining and industrial unions as well as the owners fossil-fuel based businesses have all fought climate policy, and this means that no matter who is in power, someone is going to me working against the energy transition. Before 1990 carbon intensity just wasn’t a dimension anybody thought about in politics. In most places it’s still not a dominant political axis, though in the US it seems like the parties tried very hard to turn climate action into a partisan litmus test for the time being.

On top of this idea of “double representation” Mildenberger layers a couple of additional dimensions: how “corporatist” vs. pluralist are a country’s policymaking institutions, and whether the Labor movement has a deep, direct connection to leftist political parties (he ignores the analogous variable on the right, since he found that conservative parties are universally deeply tied to the interest of capital). With these variables in mind he explores the climate policy trajectories of 7 wealthy countries: the US, Australia, Norway, Germany, the UK, Japan, and Canada.

The idea is that a country’s level of corporatism vs. pluralism, and how tightly integrated Labor is with the left-leaning political parties will strongly influence what kind of policy trajectory the country takes. Countries with political institutions that reinforce the double representation of carbon interests will tend to take weak action earlier, with little public engagement, while those with less institutionally entrenched interests will tend to have more open conflict, likely resulting in later — but potentially more aggressive — policies. I wasn’t particularly convinced of this on the basis of the 7 case studies he explored.

It was kind of tragicomic that he chose the Clean Power Plan as the US example of “late but costly” climate policy, given that it was immediately repealed and never implemented, and then the policy targets were met anyway ahead of time with net cost savings. In contrast to his predictions, to me the IRA seems more like a policy implemented late but which is entirely composed of carrots rather than sticks (with the possible exception of the methane fee).

Regardless of whether this hypothesis is valid it was still very interesting to read these condensed policy histories. It definitely gave me some surprising wider context.

Metazoa by Peter Godfrey-Smith

Metazoa is kind of a sequel to “Other Minds”, Godfrey-Smith’s excellent book about the nature of cephalopod intelligence. Metazoa takes a broader view, and explores the nature of minds in general, and how they’re inextricably linked to the animal way-of-being: having a unified, unitary body that can sense and react to the world around it. It was also an interesting book to read in combination with Sean B. Carroll’s “Endless Forms Most Beautiful” about animal body plans, and how they evolved through the use of gene regulatory networks and a meta-genetic toolkit that we share with all bilaterians.

This author kind of feels like a Carl Sagan of Marine Biology — very clearly trying to understand the world within a Materialist / Naturalist framework (which I appreciate) but without losing a sense of the mystical nature of existence. He’s asking “What kind of thing is a mind?” and “How can that kind of thing arise through evolution and be composed of nothing but a particular collection of matter and energy?” Why does this happen at all? How general or common a phenomenon is it?

Thoughts on The Color of Law

Richard Rothstein's recent book The Color of Law looks at the history of racism in US housing policy. It focuses especially on African Americans, and the constitutionality of these policies in light of the reconstruction era amendments that ended slavery.

Throughout the book, Rothstein makes a big point of the difference between de jure (in law) segregation and de facto (in fact) segregation. The purpose of the book (belied in its subtitle: "A forgotten history of how our government segregated America.") is to remind us that residential segregation did not just happen because private citizens expressed discriminatory preferences. Instead, he lays out the gory details of how government at all levels — through laws, official policies, financing terms, and officially sanctioned lack of enforcement — has enacted de jure segregation for more than a century. This has often included creating and enforcing segregation where it did not previously exist, in the West, and in the northern industrial centers as successive waves of migration from the South took place in the first half of the 20th century. He argues that because this segregation was perpetrated by the government, with the full force of law, we have a constitutional obligation to ameliorate the harm it has done to generations of African Americans.

The book felt kind of like a hybrid between Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow (about successive & evolving systems of black subjugation after the end of slavery, especially drug-war mediated mass incarceration) and Kenneth T. Jackson's Crabgrass Frontier (a history of suburbanization in the US). One of the main themes in The New Jim Crow is the remarkable adaptability of our systems of race-based social control. We outlawed slavery, but just a few decades later, Jim Crow was in full force, disenfranchising blacks throughout the south. The Civil Rights reforms of the 1960s outlawed many Jim Crow practices, but it wasn't long before the War on Drugs and mass incarceration had filled the gap.

Making Boulder into one of Jan Gehl’s Cities for People

A couple of months ago I finished reading Jan Gehl’s book Cities for People, and I’ve seen Boulder differently ever since. I’m both more frustrated with it as it is today and more excited about what it could be in 20 years. Where before I might have been diffusely irritated by or in love with a place, I’m now explicitly aware of details that enhance or degrade its functionality for humans. I can’t recommend the book highly enough. It’s short, it’s filled with pictures, and unless you’re a die-hard motorist or collapsitarian neo-primitivist, I think you’ll find its case persuasive. You can watch him give a talk about the book in NYC on YouTube too, if you want another preview.

Gehl is a Danish architect who’s lived and worked in Copenhagen for the last 40 years, designing urban spaces for human beings. His first memory of the bicycle is riding away from the city as a small boy with his father, all day and all night, to escape the Nazi occupation. In his childhood, Copenhagen was dominated by pedestrians and bicycles. By the time he’d become a young man, the city was being occupied not by an invading army, but by automobiles. He was trained as a modernist architect, in the tradition of Le Corbusier’s isolated towers surrounded by parklands and freeways — a tradition Gehl almost immediately rebelled against — but in the 1960s, few wanted to hear about cities for people. Somehow, human and humane cities were not part of society’s vision of The Future. A devastated continent was being re-built in the modernist mold, and re-designed to accommodate cars, but by the early 1970s citizens across northern Europe had begun to question that vision. A lot of the resistance to transforming Europe’s cities into automobile friendly spaces didn’t come from environmental concerns as we see them today. Rather, re-making cities to work well for cars ended up degrading the quality of urban life dramatically. Jane Jacobs said we’d either erode our cities with cars, or the cars would suffer attrition at the hand of good cities. Then the first OPEC embargo highlighted the economic risks associated with oil dependence. We chose erosion in the US, but many European cities chose attrition. Energy economics, the quality of urban life, and environmental concerns together were enough to convince these nations to re-consider their Modernist visions of the future, and they revolted against the automobile invasion.

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Renewable Energy Policy by Paul Komor

I just finished reading Renewable Energy Policy by Paul Komor (2004). It’s a little book, giving a simplified overview of the electricity industry in the US and Europe, and the ways in which various jurisdictions have attempted to incentivize the development of renewable electricity generation. The book’s not that old, but the renewable energy industry has changed dramatically in the last decade, so it seems due for an update. There’s an order of magnitude more capacity built out now than ten years ago. Costs have dropped significantly for PV, but not for wind (according to this LBNL report and the associated slides). We’ve got a much longer baseline on which to evaluate the feed-in tariffs and renewable portfolio standards being used in EU member countries and US states. I wonder if any of his conclusions or preferences have been altered as a result? In particular, Komor is clearly not a fan of feed-in tariffs, suggesting that while they are effective, they are not efficient — i.e. you end up paying a higher than necessary price for the renewable capacity that gets built. This German report suggests otherwise, based on the costs of wind capacity built across Europe. Are the Germans just biased toward feed-in tariffs because they’ve committed so many resources to them? NREL also seems to be relatively supportive of feed-in tariff based policies, but maybe this is because the design of such policies has advanced in the last decade, better accounting for declines in the cost of renewables over time, and differentiating between resources of different quality and utility.

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Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air by David MacKay

What does a world without fossil fuels look like? There are lots of different options, but none of them look much like the rich developed nations of the world today. David MacKay’s approach in Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air is to hold our rate of energy consumption constant, and explore the kinds of carbon-free energy systems that could satisfy that demand. The uncomfortable conclusion he comes to is that if we want to run our world on renewables, the energy farms have to be comparable in scale to nations. Comparable in scale to our agricultural systems. This is because all renewable energy is very diffuse, and we use a whole lot of energy.

Just as an example, of all the renewable power sources solar is the most concentrated, and PV farms like the ones cropping up in Bavaria because of Germany’s generous feed-in tariff average about 5W/m². With better siting (the Sahara, Arizona) you can do a bit better, and there’s a little more efficiency to be eked out of the panels, but for large scale deployments, you’re not going to get above 10W/m². If you’re an average citizen of the EU or Japan, your 5kW of power thus demands 500m² of land. Multiply that by 700 million people in the EU, and you get the total area of Germany. An average North American’s 10kW requires 1000m². Multiply that by 300 million people, and you get an the entire area of Arizona.

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