Category: Environment

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Environment

The Conservatives and climate change

Simon Wren-Lewis, in his mainly macro blog, points out that there is a big disconnect between Conservative party words and action on climate change. Their words are vaguely green, and imply that they take climate change seriously. Their actions are not in the slightest bit green.

In an earlier article, George Monbiot noted a part of the innocently titled ‘Infrastructure Bill’ currently going through parliament. Section (36, p39) is headed ‘Maximising economic recovery of UK petroleum’. Its principle objective is to do just that. Now it does not take a climate scientist to realise that trying to restrict our use of fossil fuels to avoid climate change requires leaving quite a lot of them in the ground. So this bill suggests that whatever the UK government says about climate change, the UK contribution in terms of limiting extraction of oil will be exactly zero.

On the whole, most people in the UK are not climate change deniers, so the Conservative party probably isn’t going to come out openly on that side of the debate.  But that won’t mean that they won’t behave like climate change deniers.

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Environment

Energy and economics

A somewhat frequent criticism of common economic theories and frameworks is that they are isolated from real world concerns such as energy and resource constraints: that the concept of limited resources, and ideas like the second law of thermodynamics, simply don’t seem to affect the economics at all. You come across this criticism primarily at what might be called the greener fringe, which means that it is rather poo-poohed by some.

Economic theory is, of course, just a model of the real world. It’s bound to simplify and abstract some aspects, and concentrate on others. And many economists don’t consider resource and environment issues to be of primary concern. But what might economics look like if it did take energy (and other resources) as fundamental to the model, rather than as extras which it would be nice to take into account? Gail Tverberg has an interesting piece in which she explains how she sees energy use as a primary driver of economic growth. It’s a good read, and makes a lot of sense. I’m looking forward to her follow-up piece which she says will talk about debt fits into the picture.

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Environment

Is it harder than physics?

Which is harder to understand, physics or earth system science?  Which is more important to get right? Which do film-makers try hardest to get right? Oliver Morton, on his Heliophage blog, says

a lot of people, both film makers and film discussers, think getting physics right, or at least seeming to or trying to, is in some way more important than getting the science of the earthsystem right. This shows, to my mind, strange priorities. The carbon cycle is a lot more easy to understand than general relativity…

He comes to this conclusion in the light of a number of films he’s seen this year. I’m not really a movie person, so don’t know if his impression is representative. But I get uncomfortable whenever I see gross misrepresentations of science, or stuff that’s just plain wrong. And, anyway, the carbon cycle, water cycle and all the other earth system stuff is mainly just physics and chemistry (with a small amount of biology thrown in).

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Actuarial Environment

Modelling isn’t just about money

Last autumn I was at an actuarial event, listening to a presentation on the risks involved in a major civil engineering project and how to price possible insurance covers. It must have been a GI (general insurance), event, obviously. That’s exactly the sort of thing GI actuaries do.

The next presentation discussed how to model how much buffer is needed to to bring the probability of going into deficit at any point in a set period below a specified limit. It sounded exactly like modelling capital requirements for an insurer.

But then the third presentation was on how to model the funding requirements for an entity independent of its sponsor, funded over forty to sixty years, paying out over the following twenty to thirty, with huge uncertainty about exactly when the payments will occur and how much they will actually be. It must be pensions, surely! A slightly odd actuarial event, to combine pensions and GI…

The final presentation made it seem even odder, if not positively unconventional: the role of sociology, ecology and systems thinking in modelling is not a mainstream actuarial topic by any means.

And it wasn’t a mainstream actuarial event. It had been put on by the professions Resource and Environment member interest group, and the topics of the presentations were actually carbon capture, modelling electricity supply and demand, funding the decommissioning of nuclear power stations, and insights from the Enterprise Risk Management member interest group’s work – all fascinating examples of how actuarial insight is being applied in new areas. And to me, fascinating examples of how the essence of modelling doesn’t depend nearly as much as you might think on what is actually being modelled.

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Environment

The real cost of keeping warm

If we are to deal with climate change, the price of carbon-intensive energy is going to have to rise, says Tim Harford.

It makes sense. We have to reduce our energy use, and pricing is a good mechanism to help that along. Along the same lines, fuel duty is a Good Thing.

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Environment

Does locality matter?

I’m a complete glutton for soft fruit, and love it when the shops are full of local (or at least british) berries. But there are some times of the year when there just isn’t much local produce around, and sometimes I really like the idea of some fresh green beans, say, even when they aren’t in season over here. But I always feel rather guilty about buying air-freighted fruit and vegetables – surely the carbon costs of all those air miles can’t be a good thing?

So I was really interested to read this blog entry in the Observer. There’s apparently a good argument that western consumers actually have a moral duty to eat strawberries out of season. There are several reasons – food miles within the UK are by no means negligible, and sometimes are actually more than for imported produce. Also, it’s the people growing fruit and veg in sub-Saharan Africa who will suffer disproportionately from climate change, so is it right to make them suffer in order to avoid climate change? And, anyway, if you buy imported organic produce you’re probably saving more emissions from the production of synthetic fertilisers and pesticides than you’re causing from air freighting. So the argument is that if you buy organic and Fair Trade you are outweighing the food miles.

It’s clearly not a simple matter, and I bet there are good arguments pushing in both directions. And in many ways life would be a lot easier if there were simple answers to questions like this. But from a purely selfish point of view I’m glad that I needn’t feel too guilty about occasionally indulging my taste for foreign fruit and veg.