tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84991502024-03-05T23:03:23.522-08:00Envision Hope or Perishsolutions that offer hope.Brian Cadyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00774014063263991567noreply@blogger.comBlogger93125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8499150.post-18117697182502870462021-05-03T04:55:00.008-07:002021-05-29T06:30:35.135-07:00Cook and make biochar with merely a shovel? - Dakota fire hole modified to make biochar cleanly - progress so far.Dakota fire holes are easy to build/dig, burn cleanly and clean up well. For more on these one can see: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_pit#Dakota_fire_pit" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_pit#Dakota_fire_pit</a><br>
Here I attempt to extend one to resemble a TLUD biochar stove. TLUD stands for Top Lit Up Draft, and is an arrangement of chambers and air flows that forms charcoal while cleanly burning the smoke produced. For more on these one can see: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-lit_updraft_gasifier" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-lit_updraft_gasifier</a><br>
I dug a Dakota fire hole, then dug below one of the holes to form a char-making chamber. <br>
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It differed from this drawing in that there was no primary air supply. I guess it is actually not a TLUD, but a 'TLND' (Top Lit No Draft).
Then I loaded the chamber with dry wood, spread kindling and tinder above, but still way below ground level. Then I lit a fire atop the fuel. It burnt pretty cleanly, but released a little smoke. I'd like to improve this and will try to figure out how. Below are some photos of the resulting char in the hole.
To enlarge a photo fragment below, to see the entire image, click on each fragment.
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Brian Cadyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00774014063263991567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8499150.post-49433828562364227912020-12-18T05:40:00.007-08:002021-03-15T13:16:47.657-07:00Downhill for All Involved <p> <b>Downhill for All Involved</b> </p><p>Global underwriters and insurers now risk vast losses from the climate crisis.(1)</p><p> “Recent research from Cambridge University…warns that if climate change is left unchecked, catastrophic losses on property investments from disasters like wildfires, hurricanes, and flooding will triple over the next 30 years… the resulting losses to the insurance industry could cause a global financial crisis.”(2 Forbes 2019-5-22) </p><p>Can we protect our global economy by fixing our damaged climate? Who has means and motive? Are there lessons within history? </p><p>HISTORY:
In the 1750s, Benjamin Franklin and others founded a house fire insurer in Philadelphia, which raised rates on more hazardous homes, and refused to insure the riskiest.(3) In 1777, Anthony Hill swept Philadelphia chimneys for this ‘Philadelphia Contributorship’.(4) This chimney sweeping exemplifies a significant step, by fledgling American insurers, beyond merely avoiding or pooling risk, to risk reduction. </p><p>In 1893, William H. Merrill midwifed the safety-troubled electrical industry into the behemoth we know today, after the young engineer started working for insurance underwriters. They hired him to inspect electrical set-ups at the Chicago World’s Fair grounds for the Fair’s opening. Merrill, just graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), proposed Underwriters Laboratories (UL) to test and certify fire safety for the insurance underwriting industry. Rejected at first, he later succeeded in convincing underwriters to start this.(5) </p><p>So ended an era of deadly, catastrophic fires that scarred USA’s young cities. For example, The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 killed about 275 people and caused $222 million dollars of damage, equivalent to $4.6 billion 2018 dollars.(6) It accompanied three other fires that week, in Peshtigo, MI, Port Huron, MI, and Urbana, IL which killed more than 2,200.(7)
Today we again suffer the devastating effects of fire - not from burning houses, but from burning fossil fuels. The resulting carbon dioxide ruins the climate that our food system depends on, and for which our buildings were designed. </p><p>WHAT CAN BE DONE?
The Stern Review of 2006 (8) estimates annual climate crisis containment costs to be 2% of World Gross Domestic Product (WGDP),(9) with damages thus avoided at 5% of WGDP. In 2019, WGDP totaled about $87 trillion,(10) hence annual climate crisis containment costs would near $1.74 trillion a year. </p><p>The Drawdown Review of 2020 forecasts the cost and benefits of climate preservation in two scenarios.(11) The first scenario forecasts $22.5 trillion in initial investments stopping 994 gigatons of CO2 or equivalent greenhouse gas emissions, with lifetime costs running to -$95.1 trillion and lifetime profits of $15.6 trillion. Note: Lifetime costs are negative – beyond just the direct profit to investors, more than four times the investment value would be returned to society.
These reviews describe how it could be cheaper to fix rather than suffer a ruined climate; indeed, so much cheaper that, in the Drawdown analysis, it’s actually profitable. </p><p>APPROACH:
Many have struggled to contain Earth’s climate crisis. But who has both the motive of understanding this climate crisis, and the means to contain it? We at risk are numerous; many have the motive which understanding provides. However most of us lack the means to preserve our climate; within the few with the means, there are fewer still understanding this climate risk and their ability to contain it. </p><p>With about $27 trillion dollars in assets,(12) do the world’s underwriters and insurers have the means to control the climate crisis? If four decades of climate crisis containment were invested in at once, at a cost of $69.6 trillion, according to the Stern Review, underwriters and insurers would need to borrow $42.6 trillion, but stand to gain from the $174 trillion in climate damage costs avoided over those forty years. And the insurance industry now has enough for the Drawdown’s first scenario’s investments. </p><p>How might this occur? A global underwriter consortium might set standards that would identify carbon-neutral or -negative provision of goods or services. Policies might then specify that to receive insurance, underwriter’s insurers and customers must only use carbon-neutral or -negative goods and services that meet that standard; while also specifying direct investment into climate protection, and out of climate destruction, by underwriters, insurers and customers. This first part mimics Underwriters Laboratories’ success, the second could adhere to Stern and Drawdown Reviews’ prescriptions. </p><p>Much can be done affordably; it costs more to suffer climate crisis than to avoid it; and the insurance industry has both means and motive to protect our climate. A corollary of ‘Don’t put all your eggs in one basket’ might be: ‘With all your eggs in one basket, protect that basket.’ </p><p>1 https://www.forbes.com/sites/energyinnovation/2019/05/22/the-global-insurance-industrys-6-billion-existential-threat-coal-power, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/21/climate-change-could-make-insurance-too-expensive-for-ordinary-people-report </p><p>2 https://www.forbes.com/sites/energyinnovation/2019/05/22/the-global-insurance-industrys-6-billion-existential-threat-coal-power/ citing https://www.cisl.cam.ac.uk/business-action/sustainable-finance/climatewise/news/investors-and-lenders-need-better-tools-to-manage-climate-risk-to-homes-mortgages-and-assets-finds-new-research. </p><p>3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philadelphia_Contributionship 9/14/20 </p><p>4 http://www.philadelphiabuildings.org/contributionship/timeline.cfm 10/11/20 </p><p>5 https://www.ul.com/sites/g/files/qbfpbp251/files/2019-05/EngineeringProgress.pdf </p><p>6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chicago_Fire 9/13/20 </p><p>7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_town_and_city_fires 9/13/20 </p><p>8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern_Review 9/13/20 </p><p>9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern_Review 9/13/20 </p><p>10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal </p><p>11 https://www.drawdown.org/drawdown-framework/drawdown-review-2020 page 88.<br /></p><p>12 https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=INSIND</p>Brian Cadyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00774014063263991567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8499150.post-5577268558522299412020-12-09T12:40:00.002-08:002020-12-18T05:50:39.560-08:00Andro Linklater quote"At one period in my life, I believed passionately in...egaltarian ideals, and lived for longer than was sensible on communes in the United States and Europe, farming unproductive steeply sloping fields locked away in the mountains unwanted by their original owner. The experience offered a salutory lesson in understanding how ownership of the earth shapes the way society is organized. The most attractive qualities of a primitive commune, sharing the labor and the rewards, turned out to be its most destructive. It was not the group, but the individual who actually plowed the field, dug the ditch, milked the goats, and made the granola. Over time, it became obvious that some performed these tasks better, or more slowly, or more lazily, than others, and so the tasks either had to be organized with rigid efficiency to spread the burden fairly, or... dissensions... boiled up and tore the community apart.... Far from being able to dispense with government, equal ownership entailed a surprising intensity of organization and policing of personal foibles." <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andro_Linklater">Andro Linklater</a>, 2014, Owning the Earth: the Transforming History of Landownership. London, Verso.Brian Cadyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00774014063263991567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8499150.post-44741915898259286342020-09-12T13:43:00.003-07:002020-09-12T14:33:01.260-07:00The Presuppositions of Policy - Daly and Farley continue EE Chapter 3 - Ends, Means and Policy<b>The Presuppositions of Policy</b>
Ecological economics is committed to policy relevance. It is not just a logical game for autistic academicians. Because of our commitments to policy, we must ask: What are the necessary presuppositions for policy to make sense, to be worth discussing? We see two.
First, we must believe that there are real alternatives to choose from. If there are no alternatives, if everything is predetermined, than it hardly makes sense to discuss policy – what will be, will be. If there are no options, then there is no responsibility, no need to think.
Second, even if these are real altenatives, policy diologue would still be make no sense unless there were a real criterion of value to use for choosing between the alternatives. Unless we can distingish better from worse states of the world, it makes no sense to try to acheive one state of the world irather than another. If there is no value criterion, then these is no responsibility, no need to think.
In sum, serious policy must presuppose (1) non-determinism – that the world is not totally determined, that there is an element of freedom that offers us real alternatives; and (2) non-nihilism – that there is a real criterion of value to guide our choices, however vaguely we may perceive it.
The fact that many people engaged in discussing and making policy reject one or both of these presuppositions is, in A. N. Whitehead’s term. “the lurking inconsistency,” a contradiction at the basis of the modern worldview that enfeebles thought and renders action halfhearted. If we even halfway believe that purpose is an illusion foisted on us by our genes to somehow make us more efficient at procreation,(17) or that one state of the world is as good as another, then it is hard to get serious about real issues. And ecological economics must be serious about real issues. As Whitehead noted, “scientists animated by the purpose of proving that they are purposeless constitute an interesting subject for study.”(18)
<b>Determinism and Relativism</b>
The preceding section may seem pretty obvious and consistent with common sense. What is the point in stating the obvious? The point is that many members of the intelligentsia deny non-determinism or non-nihilism, yet they want to engage in a policy dialogue. It is not just that we disagree about exactly what our alternatives are in a particular instance or about what our criterion implies for a concrete case – that’s part of thee reasonable policy dialogue. The point is that determinists who deny the effective existence of alternatives, and nihilists or relativists who deny the existence of a value criterion beyond the level of subjective personal tastes, have no logical basis for engaging in policy dialogue – and yet they do! We cordially and respectfully invite them to remember and reflect deeply upon their option of remaining silent – at least about policy.(19)
One may well agree with the logic of our position – that policy rules out determinism and nihilism – but argue that there are so few real determinists and nihilists around that in effect we are kicking at an open door or attacking a straw man. We hope this is true. However, one leading biologist, Paul R. Ehlich, who has contributed much to ecological economics, recently wrote a book with this stated purpose.(20) “to give an evolutionist’s antidote to the extreme hereditary determinism that infests much of the current discussion of human behavior – the idea that we are somehow simply captives of tiny, self-copying entities called genes” (p.x). In other words, Ehrlcih felt that the influence of the hard-line determinists is sufficiently toxic to require a 500-page antidote, even if a rather mild and general one.
A stronger and more specific antidote was thought necessary by Wendell Berry, who took particular aim at the influential writings of Edward O. Wilson, especially his recent book Consilience. Berry deserves to be quoted at some length.(21)
"A theoretical materialism as strictly principled as Mr. Wilson’s is inescapably deterministic. We and our works and acts, he holds, are determined by our genes, which are determined by the laws of biology, which are determined ultimately by the laws of physics. He sees that this directly contradicts the idea of free will, which even as a scientist he seems unwilling to give up, and which as a conservationist he cannot afford to give up. He deals with this dilemma oddly and inconsistently.
First, he says that we have, and need, “the illusion of free will”, which he says further, is “biologically adaptive”. I have read his sentences several times, hoping to find that I have misunderstood them, but I am afraid that I understand them. He is saying that there is an evolutionary advantage in illusion. The proposition that our ancestors survived because they were foolish enough to believe an illusion is certainly optimistic, but it does not seem very probable. And what are we to think of a materialism that can be used to validate an illusion? Mr. Wilson nevertheless insists upon his point; in another place he speaks of “self-deception” as granting to our species the ”adaptive edge”. Later, in discussing the need for conservation, Mr Wilson affirms the Enlightenment belief that we can “choose wisely”. How a wise choice can be made on the basis of an illusory freedom of the will is impossible to conceive, and Mr. Wilson wisely chooses not to try to conceive it.(p.26)"
We have learned from personal conversation with Wilson that he considers the question of how one squares scientific determinism with purposeful policy to be the “mother of all questions.” Mutual humility in the face of mystery and paradox is more easily expressed, and understood, in friendly conversation over wine and dinner than in dry academic print. No one can, in practice, live by the creeds of determinism or nihilism. In this sense, no one takes these creed seriously, not even the advocates themselves. So we tend to discount any effect on policy of these doctrines. However, may open-minded citizens halfway suspect that the learned scholars who publicly proclaim these views might know something that they do not. Maybe I really am just a robot controlled by my selfish genes; maybe purpose really is just an epiphenomenal illusion; maybe better and worse really are just meaningless terms for lending undue authority to subjective personal preferences to class-based, gender-based, or race-based interests. The fact that determinist or nihilist views cannot consistently be lived out in practice by individuals does not mean that their existence, lurking in the back of the collective mind, is not capable of disabling policy.
In the introduction, we referred briefly to the difficulty some ecologists have in dealing with policy, the messy world of human affairs. To the extent that the ecologist , like some biologists, is a determinist, policy of any kind kind would be silly. Such an ecologist would necessarily be more laissez-faire that the most extreme free market economist. Hence our view that ecological economics is not simply a matter of bringing the light of ecology to dispel the darkness of economics. There is that to be sure, but the is also some darkness within ecology that economists do not need to import.
Perhaps we should take some cues from modern physics, just as traditional economics takes cues from nineteenth-century mechanical physics. Quantum indeterminacy and chaos theory have upset the “scientific “ foundations of determinacy. And many of our greatest modern physicists, those who have best come to understand the physical matter underlying the scientific materialism paradigm, increasingly question its ability to provide any ultimate truths. For example, Einstein points out that scientific knowledge “of what is does not open the door directly to what should be.” He goes on the ask, “What should be the goal of our human aspirations? The ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source.”(22) In Schrodinger’s words, “The scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts our experience in a magnificently consistent order, bu it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near our heart, that really matters to us – we do not belong to the material world the science constructs for us.”(23)
Policy students, including the economists, implicitly assume that the world offers more than one possibility to choose from and that some choices really are better than others. This is also true of course, for ecological economists, who, while continuing to take biology and ecology seriously, must not fall into the traps of determinism or nihilism that seem to have ensnared some in those disciplines.
To be sure, not every conceivable alternative is a real alternative. Many things really are impossible. But the number of viable possibilities permitted by physical law and past history is seldom reduced to only one. Through our choices, value and purpose lure the physical world in one direction rather than the other. Purpose is independently causative in the world.
<b>Sidebox 3-1: Determinism in the History of Philosophy</b>
Materialism, determinism and mechanism are closely related metaphyical doctrines about the basic nature of reality. If you study the history of philosophy, you will see that they go back to Epicurus, Democritus and Lucretius, over 2,000 years ago, and these doctrines are still very much with us today. It would be arrogant for two economists to think that they can resolve this ancient puzzle but also naive to think that we can sidestep it, since economics is unavoidably about choice. If choice is an illusion, what does that say about economics?
Because humans are part of reality, it follows that if matter in motion is all there is to reality, then that is all there is to humans as well. Since the motions of matter are determined by mechanical laws, it follows that the same laws ultimately determine human action. This ‘Determinism’ rules out free will – it means that our purposes are not independently causative in the world. Only mechanical motion of matter is causative. Purposes, intentions, values, choices are all dreams or subjective hallucinations. They are effects, not causes.
‘Nihilism’, the rejection of all moral values, is the ethical consequence of of the materialist, determinist cosmology. Things are what they are, and you can do nothing about it because your will and purpose have no power to change things. You can have no responsibility for what cannot be otherwise. For Epicurus this was a great relief – much better than worrying about the gods anger and retribution, about responsibility and guilt and punishment. Relax, don’t worry, do your best to enjoy life. Nothing can really hurt you, because when you are dead, that’s the end of you no longer suffer. This view is still very much alive in the modern secular world, although it has a long history of conflict with Christianity, Judaism and Islam, as well as other philosophies that reject materialism as an adequate view of reality. They insist that good and evil are as real in our experience as matter and that humans have at least some capacity for choice between them. To ignore our direct experience of good, evil and freedom is considered anti-empirical and against the deeper spirit of science.
It is not our intent to convert you either to or from Epicurism, Christianity, or any other position. Maybe you do not yet have any position on this question. But logic does have its demands, and no doctrine is exempt from them. Even the early materialists recognized the contradictions involved in a doctrine that ruled out freedom, novelty and choice. Epicurus tried to restore a modicum of freedom in an ad hoc manner by introducing the notion of the ‘clinamen’ – the idea that atoms swerved from their determined motions for unexplained reasons and that this was the source of novelty, and perhaps some degree of freedom. Our advice is to be skeptical of any easy answer to a problem that has been around for 2500 years and also to be humble in the face of any logical contradictions that you cannot resolve.
<b>The Ends-Means Spectrum:</b>
Ultimate means and the ultimate ends are two extremes of an ‘ends-means spectrum’ in the middle of which economic value is determined. In everyday life, it is our mid-range ends and means that interact, not their ultimate origins in the realms of the spirit or the electron. We wi9ll discuss this intermediate, mid-spectrum interaction in our consideration of the function of markets and relative prices (see Chapter 8). But for now it is useful to think of the entire ends-means spectrum depicted in Figure 3.1. The economic choices that exist in the mid-range of the spectrum are not illusory. They are not totally determined by material causes from below, nor are they rendered meaningless by an absence of final cause from above or the presence of a predestining final cause. As we shall discuss later, prices, relative values, are determined by supply and demand. But supply reflects alternative conditions of relative possibility, of the reality of ultimate means, while demand reflects independent conditions of relative desirability, rooted in perceptions of the ultimate end.
In it’s largest sense, humanity’s ultimate economic problem is to use ultimate means efficiently and wisely in the service of the ultimate end. Stated in this way, the problem is overwhelming in its inclusiveness. Therefore, it’s not hard to understand why in practice it has been broken up into a series of sub-problems, each dealt with by a different discipline, as indicated on the right side of the ends-means spectrum [diagram].
At the top of the spectrum, we have the ultimate end, studied by religion and philosophy. It is that which is intrinsically good and does not derive its goodness from any other instrumental relation to some other or higher derivative. Needless to say, it is not well-defined. As noted earlier, there are unacceptable consequences from denying its existence, but the dimness of our vision of the ultimate end is part of the human condition and requires a great deal of mutual tolerance. Th error of treating as ultimate that which is not is, in theological terms, idolatry.
At the bottom of the spectrum is ultimate means, the useful stuff of the world – low-entropy matter-energy, which we can only use up and cannot create or replenish, and whose net production cannot possibly be the end result of any human activity. The ultimate end is much harder to define than the ultimate means our current approximation to the ultimate end, unfortunately, seems to be economic growth, and part of the critique of economic growth is that our devotion to it has become idolatrous, worshiping a false god, so to speak, because it is not really ultimate. But it is not easy to formulate a central organizing principle of society that does not border of idolatry.
To reiterate, since we are forced by scarcity to choose which of our many intermediate ends will be satisfied and which will be sacrificed, we must rank our intermediate ends. Ranking means establishing priority. Priority means that something goes in first place. That holder of first place is our operational estimate of the ultimate end. It provides the ordering criterion for ranking other intermediate ends. Second place goes to whatever is nearest to or best serves first place, and so on. This ranking of intermediate ends relative to our vision of the ultimate end is the problem of ethics. Economists traditionally take the solution to the ethical problem as given and start their analysis with a given ranking of intermediate ends, or with the assumption that one person’s ranking is as good as another’s, so that ethics is indistinguishable from personal tastes.
At the bottom of the spectrum, physics studies ultimate means, and technics studies the problem of turning ultimate means into artifacts specifically designed to satisfy each of our intermediate ends. Economists also habitually assume the technical problem to have been solved; that is, technology is taken as given. Thus, the remaining segment of the spectrum is the middle one of allocating given intermediate means to the service of a given hierarchy of intermediate ends. This is the significant and important economic problem, or rather political economic problem, quite distinct from the ethical or technical problems.
The middle-range nature of the problem of political economy is significant. It means that, form the perspective of the entire spectrum, economics is, in a sense, both too materialistic and not materialistic enough. In abstracting from the ethical and religious problem it is too materialistic, and in abstracting from the technical and biophysical problem it is not materialistic enough. Economic value has both physical and moral roots. Neither can be ignored. Yet many thinkers are attracted to a monistic philosophy that focuses only on the biophysical or only on the psychic root of value. Ecological economics adopts a kind of practical dualism. Dualism is not as simple as monism, and it entails the mysterious problem of how the material and the spiritual interact. That is indeed a large and enduring mystery. But on the positive side, dualism is more radically empirical than either monism, refusing to deny or ride roughshod over the inconvenient facts just to avoid confronting a mystery.(24)
Brian Cadyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00774014063263991567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8499150.post-68812915748840837922020-09-11T14:04:00.003-07:002020-09-11T14:18:26.525-07:00Ends and Means: A Practical DualismHerman Daly and Joshua Farley: Ecological Economics 2nd edition: Chapter 3: Ends, Means and Policy
<b><i>Ends and Means: A Practical Dualism</i></b>
"Ecological economics has at least as much in common with standard economics as it has differences. One such important common feature is the basic definition of economics as the study of the allocation of scarce means among competing ends (though we will explain in later chapters why focusing on scarce resources is necessary but not sufficient). There are disagreements about what is scarce and what is not, what are appropriate mechanisms for allocating different resources (means) and how we rank competing ends in order of importance – but there is no dispute that using means efficiently in the service of ends is the subject matter of economics. Using means in the service of ends implies policy. Alternatively, policy implies knowledge of ends and means. Economics, especially ecological economics, is inescapably about policy, although the rarefied levels of abstraction sometimes reached by economists may lead us to think otherwise.
Economic anthropologist Karl Polanyi states “The substantive meaning of economics derives from man’s dependence for his living upon nature and his fellows. It refers to the interchange with his natural and social environment, in so far as this results in supplying him with the means of material want satisfaction.”
If economics is the study of the allocation of scarce means in the service of competing ends, we have to think rather deeply about the nature of ends and means. Also, policy presupposes knowledge of two kinds: of possibility and purpose and of means and ends. Possibility reflects how the world works. In addition to keeping us from wasting time and money on impossibilities, this kind of knowledge gives us information about trade-offs between real alternatives. Purpose reflects desirability, our ranking of ends, our criteria for distinguishing better from worse states of the world. It does not help much to know how the world works if we cannot distinguish better from worse states of the world. Nor is it useful to pursue a better state of the world that happens to be impossible. Without both kinds of knowledge, policy discussion is meaningless.(1)
To relate this to economic policy, we need to consider two questions. First, in the realm of possibility, the question is: what are the means at our disposal? Of what does our ultimate means consist? By “ultimate means” we mean a common denominator of possibility or usefulness that we can only use up and not produce, for which we are totally dependent on the natural environment.
Second, what ultimately is the end or highest purpose in whose service we should employ these means? These are very large questions, and we can not answer them completely, especially the latter. But it is essential to raise the questions. There are some things, however, that we say by way of partial answers, and it is important to say them.
<b>Means</b>
‘Ultimate means’, the common denominator of all usefulness, consist of low-entropy matter-energy.(2) Low-entropy matter-energy is the physical coordinate of usefulness, the basic necessity that humans must use up but cannot create, and for which the human economy is totally dependent on nature to supply. Entropy is the qualitative physical difference that distinguishes useful resources from an equal quantity of useless waste. We do not use up matter and energy per se, (First Law of Thermodynamics), but we do irrevocably use up the quality of usefulness as we transform matter and energy to achieve our purposes (Second Law of Thermodynamics). The capacity for entropic transformations of matter-energy to be useful is therefore reduced both by the emptying of finite sources and by the filling up of finite sinks. If there were no entropic gradient between source and sink, the environment would be incapable of serving our purposes or even sustaining our lives. Technical knowledge helps us to use low entropy more efficiently; it does not enable us to eliminate or reverse the direction of the metabolic flow.
Matter can of course be recycled from sink back to source by using more energy (and more material implements) to carry out the recycling. Energy can be recycled only by expending more energy to carry out the recycling than the amount recycled, so it is never economic to recycle energy – regardless of price. Recycling also requires material implements for collection, concentration and transportation. The machines used to collect, concentrate and transport will themselves wear out through a process of entropic dissipation, the gradual erosion and dispersion of their material components into the environment in a one-way flow of low-entropy usefulness to high-entropy waste. Any recycling process must be efficient enough to replace the material lost to this process. Nature’s biogeochemical cycles powered by the sun can recycle matter to a high degree – some think 100%. But this only underlines our dependence on nature’s services, since in the human economy we have no source equivalent to the sun, and our finite sinks fill up because we are incapable of anything near 100% recycling.
<b>Information: The Ultimate Resource?</b>
There is a strong tendency to deny our dependence on nature to achieve our purposes. Among the more explicit denials is that from George Gilder: (4)
“Gone is the view of a thermodynamic world economy, dominated by “ natural resources” being turned to entropy and waste by human extraction and use. … The key fact of knowledge is that it is anti-entropic: it accumulates and compounds as it is used. … conquering the microcosm, the mind transcends every entropic trap and overthrows matter itself.”
According to The Economist, George Gilder is “America’s foremost technology prophet” who’s recommendation can cause the share price of a company to increase by 50 percent the next day(5). If Gilder is really that influential, it simply proves that stock prices are often based on erroneous information and irrational expectations. To cast further doubt on Gilder’s ‘Gnostic’ prophecy, one need only recall the aphorisms of Nobel chemist Frederick Soddy, “No phosphorus, no thought,”(7) and of Loren Eisley, “the human mind .. burns by the power of a leaf.” As Kenneth Boulding – one of the pioneers of ecological economics – pointed out, knowledge has to be imprinted on physical structures in the form of improbable arrangements of matter before it is effective in the economy. And low entropy is the quality of matter-energy that increases its capacity to receive and retain the improbable imprint of human knowledge. For example, to receive the imprint, a typical computer microelectronics plant producing 5000 wafers per day generates some 5 million liters of organic and aqueous solvent waste (i.e. high entropy) per year,(8) in addition to the raw materials and energy used. With regard to retaining the imprint, recent estimates suggest that the information economy in the U.S. consumes 13% of the electricity we use as a nation, and this level in increasing rapidly. (9)
Furthermore, as important as knowledge is, it is misleading to say it grows by compounding accumulation. New dollars from compound interest paid into a bank account are not offset by any decline in old dollars, that is, the principal. Yet new knowledge often renders old knowledge obsolete, as we saw in our discussion of scientific revolutions and paradigm shifts. Do the scientific theories phlogiston(10) and the ether (11) still count as knowledge? And when knowledge becomes obsolete, the artifacts that embody that knowledge become obsolete as well. Again, the IT economy is the best example. According to the US EPA, Americans purchased some 65 million computers and monitors loaded with toxic materials in 2007 and stored or disposed of 72 million. This is just part of the 1322 tons of toxin-laden computer products that reached the end of life that year.(12) For every three computers that enter the market, two become obsolete. The corollary of Moore’s law – that computer speed will double every 18 months while prices fall – is that brand-new IT devices are never far from becoming electronic waste. This is hardly anti-entropic. Physicists will not be surprised, because they have never found anything that is anti-entropic.
As E. J. Mishan noted, technological knowledge often unrolls the carpet on increased choices before us by the foot while simultaneously rolling it up behind us by the yard(13). Yes, knowledge develops and improves, but it does not grow exponentially like money compounding in the bank. Furthermore, new knowledge need not always reveal new possibilities of growth; it can also bring serious harm and reveal new limitations. The new knowledge of the fire-resisting properties of asbestos increased its usefulness; subsequent knowledge of of its carcinogenic properties reduced its usefulness. New knowledge can cut both ways. Finally, and most obviously, knowledge has to be actively learned and taught every generation – it cannot be passively bequeathed like an accumulating stock portfolio. When society invests little in the transfer of knowledge to the next generation, some of it is lost, and its distribution often becomes more concentrated, contributing to the growing inequality in the distribution of income, as well as to the general dumbing-down of the future.
<b>Waste as a Resource?</b>
The common view among economists and many others is that waste is just a resource we have not yet learned to use, that nature supplies only the indestructable building blocks of elemental atoms, and that all the rest either is or can be done by humans. What counts to economists is value added by human labor and capital – that to which value is is added is thought to be totally passive stuff, not even worthy of the name natural resources, as evidenced by Gilder’s putting the term in quotation marks. Natural processes, in this view, do not add value to the elemental building blocks – and even if they did, man-made capital is thought to substitute for such natural resources.
The brute fact remain, however, that we can only get so much energy from a lump of coal, we cannot burn the same lump twice, and the resulting ashes and heat scattered into nature’s sinks really are polluting wastes and not just matter-energy of equally-useful potential, if only we knew how to use it. Eroded topsoil washed to the sea and chlorofluorocarbons in the ozone layer are also polluting wastes on a human timescale, not just “resources out of place.” No one denies the enormous importance of knowledge.(14) But this denigration of the importance of the physical world, and exclusive emphasis on knowledge as our ultimate resource, seems to be a modern version of Gnosticism. It appears to be religiously motivated by a denial of our creaturehood as part of the material world, by the belief that we have, or soon will have, transcended the world of material creation and entered an unlimited realm of esoteric knowledge, albeit technical now instead of spiritual. Thus, even in the discussion of means we are pushed out of the purely biophysical realm to consider alternative religious philosophies, including most prominently the revival of the ancient Christian heresy of Gnosticism.
<b>Ends:</b>
We argued earlier that there is such a thing as ultimate means and that it is low-entropy matter-energy. Is there such a thing as an ‘ultimate end’, and if so, what is it? Following Aristotle, we think there are good reasons to believe that there must be an ultimate end, but it is far more difficult to say just what it is. In fact we will argue that, while we must be very dogmatic about the existence of the ultimate end, we must be very humble and tolerant about our hazy and differing perceptions of what it looks like.
In an age of pluralism, the first objection to the idea of ultimate end is that it is singular. Do we not have many ultimate ends? Clearly we have many ends, but just as clearly they conflict and we must choose between them. We rank ends. We prioritize. In setting priorities, in ranking things, something – only one thing – has to go in first place. That is our practical approximation to the ultimate end. What goes in second place is determined by how close it came to the first place, and so on. Ethics is the problem of ranking plural ends or values. The ranking criterion, the holder of first place, is the ultimate end (or its operational approximation), which grounds our understanding of objective value - better or worse as real states of the world, not just subjective opinions.
We do not claim that the ethical ranking of plural ends is necessarily done abstractly, <i>a priori.</i>
Often the struggle with concrete problems and policy dilemmas forces decisions, and the discipline of the concrete decision helps us implicitly rank ends whose ordering would have been too obscure in the abstract. Sometimes we have regrets and discover that our ranking was not in accordance with a subsequently improved understanding of the ultimate end. Like scientific theories, desirable ends should also be subject to empirical testing and falsification.
Neoclassical economists reduce value to the level of individual tastes or preferences, about which it is senseless to argue. But this apparent tolerance has some nasty conseque3nces. Our point is that we must have a dogmatic belief in objective value, and objective hierarchy of ends ordered with reference to some concept of the ultimate end,however dimly we may perceive the latter. This sounds rather absolutist and intolerant in modern devotees of pluralism, but a little reflection will show that it is the very basis of for tolerance. If A and B disagree regarding the hierarchy of values, and they believe that objective value does not exist, then there is nothing for either of them to appeal to in an effort to persuade the other. It is simply A’s subjective values versus B’s. B can vigorously assert her preferences and try to intimidate A into going along, but A will soon get wise to that. They are left to resort to physical combat or deception or manipulation, with no possibility of truly reasoning together in search of a clearer shared vision of objective value, because, by assumption, the latter does not exist. Each knows his own subjective preferences better than the other, so no “values clarification” is needed. If the source of value is in one’s own subjective preferences, then one does not really care about the other’s preferences, except as they may serve as a means to satisfying one’s own. Any talk of tolerance becomes a sham, a mere strategy of manipulation, with no real openness to persuasion.(15)
Of course, we must also be wary of dogmatic belief in a too explicitly defined ultimate end, such as those offered by many fundamentalist religions. (16) In this case, again, there is no possibility of truly reasoning together to clarify a shared perception, because any questioning of revealed truth is heresy.”
ISBN: 978-1-59726-681-9 2011
Brian Cadyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00774014063263991567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8499150.post-21092081358072651332019-04-22T04:28:00.001-07:002019-04-22T04:28:12.128-07:00<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34185049-from-uneconomic-growth-to-a-steady-state-economy" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px;"><img alt="From Uneconomic Growth to a Steady-State Economy" border="0" src="https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/book/111x148-bcc042a9c91a29c1d680899eff700a03.png" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34185049-from-uneconomic-growth-to-a-steady-state-economy">From Uneconomic Growth to a Steady-State Economy</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/15523185.Herman_E_Daly">Herman E Daly</a><br />
My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2794906895">5 of 5 stars</a><br />
<br />
Lucid, timely, wise and important; the writings of this book clearly embody much great thought, and I find they inspire much additional thought.
<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/5765656-brian">View all my reviews</a>
Brian Cadyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00774014063263991567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8499150.post-29449577033331313182018-06-23T14:06:00.000-07:002018-06-23T14:08:40.897-07:00Why our Earth is unlike Venus, and comparing two ways to keep it this way. The surface temperature of Venus melts lead, while Earth’s supports life, and water. While Earth is farther from the sun, this explains only part of the temperature difference. (1)
The greenhouse effect and the different amounts of greenhouse gases in their atmospheres
explains most of the surface temperature difference between Earth and Venus and explains why
Venus is on average hotter than Mercury even though Mercury is closer to the sun.<br />
Earth avoided Venus’s fate, so far, despite starting with similar amounts of carbon (2) , by reacting
carbon dioxide (CO2) with mafic rock. (3) Mafic rocks are rich in magnesium and iron, and
underlie most of our ocean floors, and form Earth’s mantle, but are rarer atop continents. Most of
Earth’s CO2 has reacted with such rocks already, yielding the carbonate rocks that store most
carbon on Earth. (4)<br />
We increasingly have too much CO2 in our air and oceans now to keep the climate we
rely on for our food. (5) The recent increase in air’s CO2 got here by our burning fuels for energy. (6)
‘Unburning’ these fuels would require energy we now don’t have, since we used it already. (7) But
the reaction between these mafic rocks and CO2 is energetically favorable. (8) It occurs
spontaneously whenever water, mafic rock and CO2 come together, requiring no further energy.
So to react these rocks with this CO2, we need to bring them together. <br />
Should we bring
the CO2 to the rock, or the rock to the CO2? Reasonable proposals differ on this. For example,
let’s compare two carbon dioxide reduction (CDR) approaches: Olaf Schuiling’s Enhanced
Weathering (EW) of olivine, a mafic rock, compared to a combination of David Keith and
others’ Direct Air Capture (DAC), linked to Juerg Matter and others’ Injection(I) of CO2 into
basalt rock, permanently forming carbonate rock. We’ll term the joint DAC and I process
(DACI).<br />
Schuiling proposes bringing the rock to the CO2. Grinding the mafic olivine rock speeds
the reaction between them. In part he suggests ground olivine substitute for limestone in
agricultural use, because, while both will reduce soil acidity, olivine will also eventually bind
with CO2 as carbonate rock at the ocean’s bottom, after CO2 in rainwater, as carbonic acid,
dissolves that olivine.<br />
Bringing the CO2 to the rock, DAC’s CO2 would be injected in basalt. In DACI, first,
Keith and others’ two-part process extracts CO2 from air. Then Matter and others’ injection (9) would combine this CO2 with Icelandic basalt permanently as carbonate rock.<br />
It is not fair to assume that this DACI combination would be a commercially viable
process, as this combined process is neither a stated goal of DAC nor of basalt injection. But
without attaching CO2 basalt injection to DAC, comparing it to EW would also be unfair, as
EW sequesters CO2 permanently as rock, while DAC without injection merely isolates it in
labile gaseous form, liable to leak out and renew troubles, and basalt injection assumes a stream
of gaseous CO2, unlike EW’s starting point of CO2 dissolved in air. Thus we will compare
DACI and EW processes with similar initial conditions and results: from CO2 in air to CO2 in
rock.<br />
But how best compare these? Straight-forward economic analysis, while tractable,
ignores non-monetized costs; like pollution’s effect on health, and reliance on non-renewable
resources; and mis-monetized costs; like USA’s vast oil exploration subsidies. How should we
evaluate and contrast these two distinct CDR approaches? We need a method to weigh different
proposals’ costs and benefits to Earth, not to the individual human actors performing CDR.<br />
One cost measure is the amount of sunlight energy used up in every step needed and
sufficient for each proposal, and a measure of benefit is the amount of sunlight energy acquired
or saved by the proposal. Developed and used in the fields of environmental accounting and
ecological engineering to rate multiple proposals, this approach compared differing methods,
with varying environmental impacts, which addressed the same situation. (10)<br />
Let’s approach these two CDR proposals with this environmental
accounting method to guide us.<br />
- <br />
1.
“ The CO2-rich atmosphere [of Venus] generates the strongest greenhouse effect in the Solar
System, creating surface temperatures of at least 735 K (462 °C; 864 °F) . [12 ] [58 ] This makes
Venus's surface hotter than Mercury 's, which has a minimum surface temperature of 53 K
(−220 °C; −364 °F) and maximum surface temperature of 693 K (420 °C; 788 °F) , [59 ] even
though Venus is nearly twice Mercury's distance from the Sun and thus receives only 25 % of
Mercury's solar irradianc e .” Wikipedia Venus entry, 2018-June 20th .<br />
2.
http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/77/12/6973.full.pd f<br />
3.
Earth’s carbonate rock contains about 60 million gigatons carbon, while dissolved in the
oceans as carbon dioxide is 38,400 gigatons carbon, with air containing 720 gigatons carbon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_cycle, citing doi:10.1126/science.290.5490.291<br />
4.
Same as footnote #3 .<br />
5.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect .<br />
6.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect .<br />
7.
No energy conversion is perfectly efficient, and we already used up the energy we got from burning the fuels. Thus reversal of fuel oxidation requires more energy than was first liberated .<br />
8.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/06/180605103437.htm<br />
9.
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6291/1312<br />
10.
Table 12.1 Evaluation of Alternatives for Pulp Paper Wastes in North Florida, OdumHT 2007 Environment,
Power and Society For the Twenty-First Century :359.Brian Cadyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00774014063263991567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8499150.post-40074544343806735512018-03-30T11:00:00.003-07:002018-03-30T11:00:40.969-07:00Some investors consider more than their own financial returns,
considering investment’s environmental sustainability and social
responsibility, as well as corporate governance. Each of such ‘ESG’
investing strategies have now been shown to actually <em>enhance</em> returns: <a href="https://www.db.com/newsroom_news/2016/ghp/esg-and-financial-performance-aggregated-evidence-from-more-than-200-empirical-studies-en-11363.htm">https://www.db.com/newsroom_news/2016/ghp/esg-and-financial-performance-aggregated-evidence-from-more-than-200-empirical-studies-en-11363.htm</a><br />
Furthermore, the risk of total loss of capital in ESG investing has been
shown to be quite comparable to money otherwise invested: <a href="https://insight.factset.com/the-hidden-risks-of-csr-esg-and-sri-investing" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://insight.factset.com/the-hidden-risks-of-csr-esg-and-sri-investing</a>.Brian Cadyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00774014063263991567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8499150.post-16849612425567907472018-03-11T07:50:00.002-07:002018-03-17T07:07:14.904-07:00Realizing Our Economic Maturity.Maturity? <br />
<br />
In our individual lives, growth precedes a long period of maturity, which is recognized as both the goal of growth and as a process itself. To mature is both to achieve a certain size and to achieve a certain standard of behavior. <br />
<br />
Economic Maturity? <br />
<br />
Our physical economy can’t grow forever on our finite earth. Despite those feeling a healthy economy must always grow, nothing healthy grows forever - such cancerous growth wouldn’t fit on this planet. Common sense heeds calls for healthy economic maturity, yet many economists fail to understand. <br />
<br />
Economic Growth with Physical Maturity?<br />
<br />
Some claim society can become mature physically while continuing to grow economically, but we know economic growth without physical growth as inflation. There’s the sound argument that value can grow separate from physical growth; a growth in quality versus quantity. Does conceding this surrender to full separation of economic growth from physical growth? Certainly products can improve in value apart from changes in product mass. But the needed research changes the physical world, and thereby increases entropy. Real value intrinsically has a physical component. Yet this physical component may even shrink with growth in quality, value and economy. One can distinguish between such massless economic development and economic growth which intrinsically involves physical increases. Would such economic development with physical maturity satisfy the economic requirement for ‘growth’? Can such development be systematically massless, or does the needed physical exploration cost render even economic development intrinsically linked to physical growth? In any event, ‘economic growth’ is too imprecise a term for increases in value with physical maturity.<br />
<br />
Realize? <br />
<br />
Here the word can have two meanings; first, to achieve; second, to become aware of something. Both meanings fit; economic maturity might be achieved in our city, and we might become aware of economic maturity and it’s appropriateness.<br />
<br />
Why Realize Economic Maturity?<br />
<br />
What’s wrong with economic growth forever? The problems with this fiction are many:<br />
1) It won’t fit. Our earth, having a definite size, can sustain a limited physical economy. More industry than this degrades the environment upon which that industry relies. Others argue that economic growth need not accompany physical growth, but isn’t that merely inflation? Stagflation, where inflation accompanies no growth, shows that these two are separable, but stagflation isn’t economic health. Eventually sanity calls for economic health without physical growth. But when should we begin to consider what amount of economic activity is mature? Perhaps, as air’s carbon pollution exceeds limits of climatic stability, upon which our food supply depends, now is not too early.<br />
<br />
2) Economic growth promises social equality, but has delivered increasing inequality consistently instead. Piketty showed that growth accompanied worsening inequality thoughout Western economic history. If growth doesn’t give poor folks a better chance, why bother? Why crowd things; things needed by us and our children?<br />
<br />
3) Accepting false limits weakens, but accepting real limits can strengthen by focusing limited resources where real, but limited, opportunity exists. Clear language can help us distinguish false from real limits, and false from real opportunity.<br />
<br />
How Do We Realize Economic Maturity?<br />
<br />
In one meaning of ‘realize’; to understand and acknowledge, we might realize economic maturity (in the sense of physical maturity), when we see that it has grown to it’s ultimate desirable size. <br />
<br />
In another meaning of ‘realize’; to achieve, we might realize economic maturity (maturity in the sense of full ethical development) by seeing beyond preoccupation with growth; with economic ‘bigness’ to better, more ethical measures, based on qualities, not quantities.<br />
<br />
Do societies have lifespans? Every society that previously existed did. What limits that lifespan? What extends that lifespan? What does a society need to ‘live’? Let’s ask the students of history; the historians. <br />
<br />
How to better equality without overgrowth has been explored by prominent ecological economists Herman Daly http://www.steadystate.org/eight-fallacies-about-growth/, Joshua Farley, Hazel Henderson and in recent work by Tim Jackson. Let’s apply this wisdom to understanding how we can better our real fate.Brian Cadyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00774014063263991567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8499150.post-25634889794097197702018-03-03T12:40:00.001-08:002018-03-03T12:40:56.151-08:00Robocalypse?Robocalypse: What’s not to like about the elimination of all human labor with robots? Isn’t it good to eliminate labor with productivity?<br /><br />In the pre-industrial world, filled with fossil fuels, minerals and ores, and empty of people and pollution, those before us brilliantly eliminated much labor using these resources and new techniques. And it fit: the techniques proliferated, the population burgeoned and the inevitable pollution dissipated at first. Techniques were key to this transformation, inspired and rewarded by patents, and by research and development tax write-offs, and quantified by measuring labor productivity. Such a central and celebrated measure was soon referred to simply as ‘productivity’, and expected to grow forever.<br />So the world filled with people and pollution, while emptying of the easiest-to-access resources. At first, negligible resources were used up in transforming resources into products, yet eventually, coal might be mined from such difficult-to-access seams so rocky that machinery breaks faster than the coal dug can repair it. This exemplifies the energy return on energy invested (EROEI) reaching zero, where net energy returns have dwindled to nothing. At that point it is easier to stay home than to work and burn all the mined coal just to mine, repair and clean up after that very mining. Another way to zero EROEI is through increasingly risky and polluting mining or oil drilling, where cleaning up the inevitable seems unaffordable, and is worse than the resources extracted are good.<br />In our world today, still filling with willing workers, pollution and problems, while emptying of easy-to-access resources, we can all be better off by increasing resource productivity while sacrificing labor productivity. We can employ many more, pollute much less and conserve our dwindling limiting resources. This can clearly help the worst-off. But what of the majority? It turns out that even the best-off of us can benefit by opportunity broadly increasing, since we are all measurably stressed by the fear of poverty and healthily reassured by greater equality of social opportunity, as documented in The Spirit Level.<br />Instead of the Robocalypse sparing us lives of drudgery, further elimination of labor worsens our lives, and misses the chance to make the best use of what we have the least of.<br />But isn’t this Robocalypse inevitable? It may be, but why hurry to meet it? Instead, we can slow the evolution of labor-eliminating techniques by lessening revenue loss via tax write-offs for research and development, and for further extraction of fossil fuels we can’t afford to burn.<br />Hat tips to Herman Daly, Hazel Henderson, Richard Wilkinson, Kate Pickett and others.Brian Cadyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00774014063263991567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8499150.post-45314750699825286572018-02-23T09:24:00.002-08:002018-02-23T09:24:20.670-08:003rd Industrial Revolution?Well worth viewing: <br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QX3M8Ka9vUA">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QX3M8Ka9vUA</a>Brian Cadyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00774014063263991567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8499150.post-46322470620360383312016-12-06T08:44:00.001-08:002017-06-15T10:33:36.223-07:00Air Repair via ways of least cost, waste, disruption and uncertainty.<style type="text/css">p { margin-bottom: 0.24cm; direction: ltr; line-height: 120%; text-align: left; }p.western { font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; }p.cjk { font-family: "Liberation Serif"; font-size: 12pt; }p.ctl { font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12pt; }a.western:link { }a.cjk:link { }a.ctl:link { }</style>
<br />
<div align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1cm;">
<span lang="en-US">1) The least possible cost is negative; carbon
removal that is profitable independent of the carbon removed.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1cm;">
<span lang="en-US">2) The least disruptive carbon removal methods may
already escape notice. </span>
</div>
<div align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1cm;">
<span lang="en-US">3) The least uncertain technologies already exist
and work now.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1cm;">
<span lang="en-US">4) The least wasteful methods waste nothing while reducing earlier existing waste.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1cm;">
<span lang="en-US">Hence let’s consider existing, profitable, efficiency-enhancing yet
unnoticed carbon removal methods.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1cm;">
<span lang="en-US">Reducing atmospheric carbon inevitably takes
energy. Indeed, in storing energy, life reduced carbon, and in
getting some of that energy back, we humans are oxidizing carbon.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1cm;">
<span lang="en-US">The least disruptive energy source may well be
existing sunlight already hitting earth, yet not inducing
photosynthesizing much.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1cm;">
<span lang="en-US">Two large regions now catching sunlight that
don’t photosynthesize much are deserts and
High-Nutrient-Low-Chlorophyll (HNLC) ocean regions.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1cm;">
<span lang="en-US">Supply of limiting nutrients can allow greater
productivity, where and when other nutrients supplied can not.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1cm;">
<span lang="en-US">Provision of limiting nutrients to plants and/or
plankton may be the greatest photo-productivity increase opportunity
worldwide.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1cm;">
<span lang="en-US">Deserts are dry due to climate. HNLC regions are unproductive due to oddities of water chemistry in oxygen-rich
environs. </span></div>
<div align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1cm;">
<span lang="en-US">Deserts cover 10% of earth’s dry land, while
HNLC waters stretch across 1/5th of the oceans, Dry land covers
nearly 30% of earth, while water covers about 70%.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1cm;">
<span lang="en-US">10% of 30% is 3%; 20% of 70% is 14%, 4.8-fold
more, hence, opportunities for engaging sunlight energy in carbon
reduction in HNLC waters may exceed those in deserts.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1cm;">
<span lang="en-US">Are there existing unnoticed profitable activities
that increase photosynthesis in HNLC waters?</span></div>
<div align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1cm;">
<span lang="en-US">Phytoplankton in HNLC waters typically
photosynthesize so little because low iron levels limit their
conversion of sunlight in three ways:</span></div>
<div align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1cm;">
<span lang="en-US">1) Low iron directly constrains photosynthesis,
since iron irreplaceably catalyzes photosynthesis in multiple ways.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1cm;">
<span lang="en-US">2) Ongoing iron additions to HNLC waters are tiny.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1cm;">
<span lang="en-US">3) Iron rapidly precipitates out of oxygen-rich
waters, due to surprising oddities of chemistry.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1cm;">
<span lang="en-US">What existing profitable activity brings iron to
HNLC waters without notice?</span></div>
<div align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1cm;">
<span lang="en-US">1) On the Georges Bank, a once-rich fishing
region, fully 4% of these water’s iron content came to Georges Bank
every year as trace iron in fishing fleet engine fuel, according to</span></div>
<div align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1cm;">
<a class="western" href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/georges-bank"><span style="color: navy;"><span lang="en-US"><u>https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/georges-bank</u></span></span></a><span lang="en-US">.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1cm;">
<span lang="en-US">2) Energy output is the driving objective of fuel
consumption.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1cm;">
<span lang="en-US">3) Iron in fuel additives catalyzes more complete
oxidation of fuel carbon, reducing soot while increasing energy
output, in matching counterpoint to iron's catalysis of carbon
reduction in photosynthesis.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1cm;">
<span lang="en-US">4) Some iron picrate fuel additives have proven
profitable by increasing energy output of marine engines.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1cm;">
<span lang="en-US">5) FPC is a prominent iron picrate fuel additive
company worldwide.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1cm;">
<span lang="en-US">6) The world’s shipping fleet burns about 300
million tons of fuel oil each year.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1cm;">
<span lang="en-US">
<style type="text/css">p { margin-bottom: 0.24cm; direction: ltr; line-height: 120%; text-align: left; }p.western { font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; }p.cjk { font-family: "Liberation Serif"; font-size: 12pt; }p.ctl { font-family: "Courier New"; font-size: 12pt; }a.western:link { }a.cjk:link { }a.ctl:link { }</style>
</span></div>
<div align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1cm;">
<span lang="en-US">7) FPC’s current fuel additive treatment levels,
of 50 ppb Fe, optimize individual ship owner profitability.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1cm;">
<span lang="en-US">8) The Redfield ratio describes marine life’s
ratio of use of sea nutrients, and predicts which nutrient’s low
levels will limit sea life growth. It addresses carbon, nitrogen and
phosphorus. Sea life uses C:N:P in the ratio of 106:16:1. The
original Redfield ratio has been extended to describe another
limiting nutrient, namely iron, after the discovery of iron’s
importance in limiting sea life. The extended Redfield ratio is still
under exploration, and is estimated to be C:N:P:Fe = 106:16:1:~0.001.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1cm;">
<span lang="en-US">9) If 300 millions tons of marine fuel oil were
treated with 50 ppb iron, and a fifth of this iron fell on HNLC
waters, catalyzing photo-productivity, (at an extended Redfield ratio
of C:N:P:Fe = 106:16:1:0.001), this iron would induce 1.5 million
tons of carbon removal from air via HNLC waters’ increased
photosynthesis.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1cm;">
<span lang="en-US">Perhaps marine fuel can be treated with higher levels of iron,
to optimize, not ship owner profitability, but global carbon removal.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1cm;">
<span lang="en-US">1) The upper acceptable limit on treated fuel’s
iron content may be maintaining existing fuel ash levels in tests at
about 0.01%, or 100 ppm,.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1cm;">
<span lang="en-US">2) Increasing fuel iron content via treatment to
50 ppm, instead of 50 ppb, might increase carbon removal in HNLC
waters 1,000-fold, while perhaps negligibly affecting fuel ash
content.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1cm;">
<span lang="en-US">3) Expanding fuel treatment at these higher levels
to the entire worldwide shipping fleet’s fuel usage of ~300 million
tons fuel oil per year might increase carbon dioxide removal in HNLC
waters to 5,500 million tons; carbon removal there to 1,500
million tons, to ~4% of annual human carbon release, and to more
than the current carbon release of the entire worldwide shipping
fleet’s fuel usage.</span></div>
<div align="left" class="western" lang="en-US" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1cm;">
<br /></div>
<div align="left" class="western" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-indent: 1cm;">
<span lang="en-US">1) Mapped here are shipping densities worldwide. </span>
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/(http://nicolasrapp.com/shop/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/F21CHAv2-1.jpg)"><span lang="en-US">(http://nicolasrapp.com/shop/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/F21CHAv2-1.jpg)</span></a></div>
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<span lang="en-US">2) “HNLC conditions occur in remote, offshore
areas of the</span></div>
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<span lang="en-US">subarctic north Pacific, subtropical equatorial
Pacific, and Southern Ocean...” EldridgeML 2004: 19</span></div>
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<span lang="en-US">3) Much shipping crosses to and from Asia and
North America via‘Great Circle’ routes, between Asian
manufacturing and USA consumers. Perhaps this shipping traverses the
subarctic North Pacific.</span></div>
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<span lang="en-US">4) Perhaps FPC targeting those ships traversing
subarctic North Pacific waters for fuel treatment at the higher 50
ppm level would restore much carbon fixation/reduction while using
existing infrastructure in profitable ways.</span></div>
Brian Cadyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00774014063263991567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8499150.post-83660459917579087072016-11-03T03:38:00.001-07:002016-11-03T03:38:20.182-07:00Industrialism or survival? Trump is a train wreck, but Clinton, also too bound to Wall Street, can not stop industrialism from ruining our earth. Wall St. finances most industry, and industry now eliminates too much labor using technology and too much resources. This yields unnecessary unemployment and pollution, while depleting resources and destroying our climate, and thus our food system. <br />
<br /> Trump is a nightmare, but Clinton awakens us not from that horrible dream. Committed to industrial finance atop the world, she too would doom earth to this ongoing climate crisis; to unneeded unemployment, and thus undue poverty spreading widely; and to expanding wars for fleeting resources, wastefully propping tottering industrial titans up for moments more, before industry, thus expanded, takes more of humanity out by it’s inevitable collapse.<br />
<br /> We need Dr. Stein as U.S. President. Jill understands the interlocking nature of finance, industrialism and the degradation of earth’s human habitability. She is acutely aware of the opportunities awaiting us by turning from industrial suicide to sustainable survival.<br />
<br /> Why choose between different flavors of apocalypse? We can quickly convert industrialism into something lasting, helpful, and just. Vote Jill.<br /><br /><br /><br />Brian Cadyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00774014063263991567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8499150.post-23544189898680251892016-06-06T07:34:00.000-07:002016-06-06T07:34:07.797-07:00Did our Ancestors Stumble From Night Paddocks to Grain Agriculture?Did our ancestors stumble upon grain agriculture through paddock grazing?<br /><br />Many grain crop ancestors exhibit fur-zoospory. In other words, many wild relatives of grain crops are adapted to burlike dispersal, forming spiny seedheads that tangle in livestock, etc. fur so that the seed is carried enmeshed animal’s coats to distant grounds to grow.<br />Night paddocks can protect herded animals from non-human predators. Burlike fur-zoospore seed might be inadvertantly sown into night paddocks rendered fertile by livestock manure built up over the night stays of the animals.<br />A livestock rotation among night paddocks could induce grazing down of competitors, fertilizing with manure and seeding with large-seeded grain relatives, all to yield grain-like harvest after a seasons’ growth. Rotation among paddocks could help interrupt livestock pest and disease cycles.<br />Perhaps early nomadic gatherer-pastoralists noticed better wild grain relative yields where night paddocks were the year before, then tried sowing paddocks after grazing.<br />
<br />One way to check whether this happened is to see whether it is happening among current mixed pastoralists-agriculturalists now.Brian Cadyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00774014063263991567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8499150.post-49974726788602863002016-06-06T07:28:00.001-07:002019-08-21T09:33:33.082-07:00Raising Grain.
Grain farming provides us with calories,
protein, and edible oils (from oil seed crops). But the current
culture of annual spring and summer grain crops, (and ‘biennial’ winter
grain crops) uses lots of energy-intensive plowing and cultivating,
leading to wind and water erosion of our practically irreplaceable
topsoil.<br />
<br />
Enter the dream of perennial
grains, that would yield year-after-year continuously, and catch the
spring sunlight that annual grain plants are still too small and
young to intercept. By catching more sunlight, perennial grains might
both yield well and have energy reserves to fight off diseases and
such, to survive and yield for many years. Perennial grains could
also preserve soil from erosion, by leaving ground exposed by
tillage less frequently, compared to annual tillage for annual
grains.<br />
<br />
In practice, according to
Rodale’s Peggy Wagoner, attempts at perennial grains have yielded
either lots for a few years or little for many years.[source] This
may be because of the different life strategies of
massively-seed-yielding annuals versus massively-pest-resistant
perennials. To explain, perennials face a longer window of disease
and pest susceptibility. Their perennial life strategy is a gamble
that they can do better than annuals by setting seed years from now,
instead of this year (or next). To hedge their bet, they invest
energy resources in preparing to fight, and actually fighting off,
diseases and pests. This leaves less energy to build big seed yield
in early life.<br />
<br />
This contrasts with
heavy-yielding annual grains, which dodge much pest and disease
susceptibility by going to seed quickly and completely. This uses up
energy put into seed that might have otherwise been available for
weathering the long multi-year windows of disease and pest
susceptibility faced by perennials. Is there a reason that it has
been so difficult to combine large yearly seed yields with long life?
Perhaps there has been both evolution of traits valuable for either
lifestyle, as well as evolution of assemblages of these traits.
Please let me explain...<br />
<br />
DNA
(deoxyribonucleic acid) encodes traits in specific locations within
chromosome chains. Maybe traits useful for either one lifestyle or
another; either annual or perennial, have grouped into assemblages of
traits which are nearby on a DNA chain, through evolution. They might
tend to have evolved to be in two groups, one for each lifestyle,
because plants did well with either one assemblage, say annual, or
the other, perennial, but plants with mixed traits did poorly, and
left relatively less mixed-trait offspring. This can explain why it’s
been so difficult to combine heavy, constant yields and long life in
grains.<br />
<br />
Is, then, the dream of having
living roots continually holding soil while yielding grain
year-after-year practically impossible? Is there any way to use what
we have created; short-lived heavy-yielding grains and long-lived,
light-yielding grains, to piece together some method that can sustain
itself, while sustaining humanity?<br />
<br />
Masanobu Fukuoka sowed winter grain into ripening rice in autumn,
then, a couple of weeks later, he harvested the rice, leaving the
winter grain growing with a head-start on the weeds. Late next
spring, he then sowed rice into the ripening winter grain before
harvesting the winter grain, so the rice growing in the stubble also
had a head-start on weeds. This model, of staggering two short-lived
grains growing together to continually hold the soil, might guide us.
A part of Fukuoka’s method may be hand-harvesting - heavy
mechanical combines might crush the young sprouts beneath the ripe
standing ready-to-harvest crop.<br />
<br />
Can we
overlap a set of the short-lived high-yielding perennial grains that
Wagoner documented, to have living roots continually holding soil,
but by an ever-changing, overlapping assemblage of plants? This might
yield harvests of mixed seed.<br />
<br />
Can we
sort, after harvest, different grains mixed within the same year’s
harvest, or use them mixed together? We now sort weed seed from grain
commercially, so separating differently sized grains seems
do-able.<br />
<br />
If this works, we might
succeed at getting harvests of grain, while living roots continually
hold grain field soil, yet without any one grain holding open a long
window of susceptibility to diseases and pests.<br />
<style type="text/css">p { margin-bottom: 0.1in; line-height: 120%; }</style>Brian Cadyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00774014063263991567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8499150.post-45055008114932343472016-03-25T07:30:00.001-07:002016-03-28T15:32:52.441-07:00Splitting the Difference with Somewhat-Perennial Grains<br />
<br />
Splitting the Difference with Somewhat-Perennial Grains <br />
<br />
The difference being split here is between grain crops that live less than a year and long-lived crop relatives that persist over a decade. It is the difference between traditional grain crops and the perennial relatives under development for ongoing grain yields every year. The word ‘perennial’ has two meaning that contrast here; it means ‘year-after-year on an ongoing basis’ as used generally, and means ‘surviving more than a couple of years’ in a botanical sense. I accentuate this distinction because of the importance of crop relatives that ‘split the difference’ - they persist more than a couple of years, yet die out over a decade or more. But first a review of other competitive approaches.<br />
Most grain crops are annual or biennial. There are annual spring barley, oats, wheat and rye, as well as winter rye, barley and wheat, that can be considered biennial, as they survive a winter. After these crops ripen and are harvested, the ground is traditionally plowed and another crop sown. This kills weeds, but allows erosion of soil, as before the newly sown crop grows roots, the soil is not held in place by any living roots.<br />
Why not just use long-lived perennial relatives of our crops instead, as The Land Institute strives to do? Wes Jackson’s institute has striven to produce perennial grains that would yield lots of useful grain year-after-year, without yearly plowing. They’ve been cross-breeding our annual grain crops with their wild, perennial relatives, striving to combine long life with heavy yield. They hope to develop crops which yield well every year, while the living roots permanently hold the soil from eroding. But it has been difficult. They have been breeding plants for decades. While the dream of everlasting yields from one planting has drawn interest perennially, the work has been hard.<br />
The problem may lie in strong genetic linkages between, first, traits that we hope to combine, and second, traits that we hope to omit. We want large yields and long life. But long life provides an extended window of disease and pest susceptibility. Long-lived plants survive these long susceptibility windows by guiding energy to defense, energy that could have gone to large yields, as in our short-lived crops. Since there’s a limited amount of sunlight energy caught by any plant, there must be a choice between defense and reproduction - and this choice has been faced by our crops and their wild relatives for eons; faced for so long that clusters of these traits may have evolved to be tightly bound together, so that a plant either prepares to withstand long windows of susceptibility, or commits itself to forming lots of offspring rapidly, but not both. Breaking these genetic linkages may be the difficult challenge of The Land Institute’s approach.<br />
Let’s look a bit afield, for inspiration:<br />
1. Some varieties of biennial winter grains will not go to seed until they’ve experienced a winter, even if first planted three seasons earlier, in spring. But most crops are annuals, and die after going to seed.<br />
2. There are crop wild relatives that are not quite as short-lived as annuals, yet are still pioneer species adapted to large seed yields and short life spans, unlike long-lived perennials. For example barley, <i>Hordeum vulgare</i>, is closely related to <i>Hordeum bulbosum</i>, a short-lived perennial with large yields of big, heavy seed, which crosses with barley. And rye, <i>Secale cereale</i> has a relative, <i>Secale montanum</i>, that also colonizes disturbed soils for a few years, via its large seed yield of heavy seed.<br />
3. Farmers sometimes ‘oversow’ seed for a following crop above the previous standing crop, before harvesting the standing crop. This leaves the ‘oversown’ crop with a head-start on any weeds that start to grow after the previous crop’s harvest, if everything works out.<br />
4. Shingles protect an entire roof, yet each shingle is shorter than the whole roof.<br />
In light of these four factoids, perhaps there’s another way that splits the difference between annuals and long-lived perennials. Perhaps we can conceed long life, because what we really want is living roots always holding the soil. Could we have a constantly-changing succession of plants growing roots that protect soil over the duration, like a roof, yet with each crop itself only surviving a short portion of that time, like a roof shingle? Perhaps we can have living roots constantly holding soil, yet have those roots grow, not from one long-lived crop, but from an overlapping series of short-lived crops, growing one after another. If these crops overlap their times in the field, one crop’s roots can grow in as a previous crop’s roots die, so that soil is always held by living roots. Thus, like shingles, each crop’s life is short, yet together their roots hold soil for the duration. This is a central concept to an alternate approach that might be called ‘somewhat-perennial grains.’<br />
As an aside, these two wild relatives, <i>Hordeum bulbosum</i> and <i>Secale montanum</i>, share an adaptation; a means of seed dispersal. They form seedheads which get stuck, via long spiny parts, to the fur of animals that travel and distribute that seed. Fur-zoochory or animal-fur-borne dispersal of seed, allows the seed to be heavy, compared to wind-dispersed seed, and still disperse. This seed density may have been very attractive to early humans, because they could easily winnow apart heavy seed from light chaff. Perhaps early animal herders protected their flocks in night paddocks, which got grazed down, manured and seeded to these wild crop relatives via fur-zoochory. Then perhaps <i>Hordeum</i> species grew and set much seed, and people harvested it, liked it, understood what happened, and learned to sow to repeat this feat. In any case, fur-zoochory in crop relatives may signal usefulness in somewhat-perennial grain cultures.<br />
‘Grains’ here means seed crops, and includes peas, lentils, edible vetches and chickpeas and their wild relatives, as well as flax, sunflower and the like. And as folks at The Land Institute have so ably envisioned, polycultures of somewhat-perennial grains could include:<br />
1. summer-adapted grasses, like sorghum, maize and millet, and their wild relatives,<br />
2. cool-season-adapted grasses like barley, wheat, rye and oats, and their relatives,<br />
3. composites, like sunflower, and relatives, and<br />
4. legumes like peas, lentils, vetch and chickpeas, and their relatives. These could grow together, and their seed could perhaps be separated by shape, size and density, if harvested together, or could be used together.<br />
In sum, some short-lived wild grain relatives (with lifespans in the single digits) might help form a more sustainable agriculture that would use plowing only rarely. These grain relatives might be over-sown into ripening crops before the earlier crop's harvest, to allow the over-sown crop a head-start over weeds. Like shingles shielding a roof, these crops together might protect soil over an extended duration, while yielding year after year, yet without any one crop presenting a long window of vulnerability to pests and disease. Brian Cadyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00774014063263991567noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8499150.post-7047413495011246392016-03-16T12:56:00.001-07:002016-03-16T13:23:44.159-07:00Garden plot after 2015/16 winter.<div style="text-align: left;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghBEfj-gkrOnYx-Oh-u1saOeAFJCdM74WZwPrhY3ceAMf04kdzD61vS_v2UXf7UupTt8fdyJAA4amBV7KdCoCPkSarfBMkgYeDRGnFBDulcXe9951utQvXupC4L_ztUzQvrHEG/s1600/20160316_150823.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghBEfj-gkrOnYx-Oh-u1saOeAFJCdM74WZwPrhY3ceAMf04kdzD61vS_v2UXf7UupTt8fdyJAA4amBV7KdCoCPkSarfBMkgYeDRGnFBDulcXe9951utQvXupC4L_ztUzQvrHEG/s640/20160316_150823.jpg" width="360" /></a></div>
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Overwintered yellow vetch, <i>Vicia grandiflora</i> cv. 'Woodford'.
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg43i6BUqY-GDEG2OFhMvdQZYpnyBvLlP9EufX9aClh9uSdtZdr8vIj5LMftyljzrQgq-m5NBPS8pRtkC4AQs_TMSqUv4uvBz6nCY_f1vrYHUtEl_1g3fxyg_Mlccnp7vPVs0gJ/s1600/20160316_150724.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg43i6BUqY-GDEG2OFhMvdQZYpnyBvLlP9EufX9aClh9uSdtZdr8vIj5LMftyljzrQgq-m5NBPS8pRtkC4AQs_TMSqUv4uvBz6nCY_f1vrYHUtEl_1g3fxyg_Mlccnp7vPVs0gJ/s640/20160316_150724.jpg" width="360" /></a></div>
Overwintered spinach, cv. 'Giant Winter' March 16th, 2016
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9GESe-OocaQeYMKKpPOTBKsxydhqHI1ydIc1TcKiDDybHOY4WZ8wpyC6SR6aKt_IuhOV5zl9w0A-1qIL4_URt916LXxh7F2dDqPvttE3V20og9vGydZdDGkouYn3pOq8n4mil/s1600/20160316_150916.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9GESe-OocaQeYMKKpPOTBKsxydhqHI1ydIc1TcKiDDybHOY4WZ8wpyC6SR6aKt_IuhOV5zl9w0A-1qIL4_URt916LXxh7F2dDqPvttE3V20og9vGydZdDGkouYn3pOq8n4mil/s640/20160316_150916.jpg" width="360" /></a></div>
Foreground: Yellow Vetch.
Midground: Overwintered Chicory-Endive cross.
Background: Spring Crocuses. Mar 16th, 2016<br /><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Brian Cadyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00774014063263991567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8499150.post-35599368198209488492016-03-05T23:33:00.001-08:002016-03-14T09:11:57.672-07:00Our Future After ProgressMostly, we currently progress technically, which is dependent on industry. Industry itself depends on burning fuel carbon into air.<br />
Because our agriculture depends on a steady climate, and increases in air's carbon alter our climate, our food system can not withstand much more carbon in our air.<br />
So, to keep eating, we must stop burning. Hence our industrial progress must cease.Brian Cadyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00774014063263991567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8499150.post-56070375286813297312016-03-02T04:32:00.002-08:002016-03-02T04:32:23.019-08:00Why green jobs will abound in any green future.<span class="smalltext"><strong> </strong></span>
<br />
<div class="post_body" id="pid_3421">
Industrial humanity uses fuel and tech to eliminate labor. This
approach cleverly suited a world empty of laborers and replete with
fuel, mineral resources and air to pollute into. But in our current
world, now emptying of fuel, mineral resources and air to carbonate, and
full of workers willing to labor, we can all do better together by
altering the tech we use to that which employs more of our plentiful
labor and uses up less of the now-scarce fuel and resources, as well as
less of the air we depended on for climatic stability. I tip my hat to
Herman Daly and Hazel Henderson, from whom I learned this.<br />
<br />
Some argue that the future holds less work and more leisure or
unemployment, but this supposes industrialism somehow continues
eliminating labor with resources and tech. While that has certainly
predominated in the past, we know this can not continue, since resources
are growing scarce. Air, into which to burn carbon, is the first limit,
and our past stable climate is an early casualty of industrialism.
Increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide can not continue. Either
industrialism will end the agriculture industrialism relies on, by
altering the climatic stability farmers need; or in a green future, fuel
will be used less, and labor more. Any robotic replacement of human
labor would rely on industrialism’s dependence on finite resources,
hence must be fleeting. The sooner we acccept the essentiality of labor
in our green future, the better.<br />
<br />
Is USA a special case? Does USA's dependence on industrial agriculture
now bode slack labor tomorrow? Or can we assure the now-jobless USers of
green jobs?
</div>
Brian Cadyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00774014063263991567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8499150.post-74986778777483423522015-05-27T17:17:00.002-07:002020-08-29T04:39:16.409-07:00Climate, krill, iron, and the Southern OceanHalf a year of humanity's fossil carbon release might be bound in an iron-nourished Southern Ocean each year, but what would the climate effect be?<br />
<br />
Humanity causes <a href="http://co2now.org/Current-CO2/CO2-Now/global-carbon-emissions.html" target="_blank">36.7 gigatons</a> of carbon release into air each year, from land use, cement-making and fossil fuel burning. But if future krill trawlers went to sea, not empty, but full of iron, half that carbon could be fixed by sealife in the Southern Ocean, where the krill are caught per year. But what would happen to the carbon thus caught? Would it fall to the bottom? Would it anaerobically become methane, or induce nitrous oxide release, both worsening the climate crisis, or would it remain in sediments, halfway solving our greenhouse gas problems?<br />
<br />
I understand China hopes to increase it's annual Antarctic krill catch 7-fold, to 2 million tons wet weight[8]. This krill catch would, at 28 micrograms iron per gram of krill dry weight[3], and at 20%dry weight:wet weight[5] contain 11.2 tons of iron. <br />
<br />
The projected Chinese krill catch, ten-fold existing catches, would be from wild standing stock of ~0.5 billion tons[2], which might contain 2,800 tons Fe[3,4]. Since 1/4 of the krill's range's Fe[1] is in the krill, there could be a total krill range iron content of 11,200 tons. So taking 11.2 tons/year from this would reduce total Fe in range by ~0.1%.<br />
<br />
Let's say those trawlers carried 2 million tons of ferrous sulfate heptahydrate from China's iron works to the Southern Ocean's' krill pastures in otherwise empty holds, and spread it evenly as they caught their krill each year. This would contain, at an Fe:S:O4:H14:O7 ratio of 56:32:64:14:112, about 1/5th Fe, or 0.4 million tons Fe.<br />
<br />
With krill containing 1gram Fe for every 355 grams P and at Redfield's ratio of 106C:16N:1P , every ton of Fe ending up in krill would temporarily bind 1 x 355 x 106 = approximately 37,630 tons of carbon. So (37,630 x 0.4 million tons x 1/4 of the range's iron being in krill [1], the year's iron supplied by the fleet could fix ~3.8 billion tons of atmospheric carbon temporarily, in living krill, with an additional 11.3 billion tons of carbon in phytoplankton or dissolved. Summed up, 15 gigatons of carbon per year might be fixed, which is about half the fossil fuel carbon emitted per year.<br />
<br />
But would all that iron be taken up by Southern Ocean sealife? The Southern Ocean is 20.3 million square kilometers[6], about 4% of Earth's total surface area of <span class="nowrap"><span style="white-space: nowrap;">510 million<span style="margin-left: .25em;">sq. km. This ocean's productivity is iron limited; It is a part of the </span></span></span><br />
<span class="nowrap"><span style="white-space: nowrap;"><span style="margin-left: .25em;">1/5th of the world's oceanic area limited by iron. Experimental addition of iron</span></span></span><br />
<span class="nowrap"><span style="white-space: nowrap;"><span style="margin-left: .25em;">to the Southern Ocean resulted in vastly increased photosynthesis[7]. I'm still </span></span></span><br />
<span class="nowrap"><span style="white-space: nowrap;"><span style="margin-left: .25em;">pursuing the effects on sealife.</span></span></span><br />
<br />
But if half the carbon temporarily fixed became methane and a fifth of that returned as methane to the atmosphere, with 72 times the warming potential effect of CO2 over two decades (1/2 x 1/5 x 72 =7.2), the carbon as methane would increase heat trapped by about seven times. We need to know the fate of that carbon.<br />
<br />
<br />
1 NicoiS 2010 'Southern Ocean fertilization by...'<br />
2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_krill<br />
3 LocarninaSJP 1995 'Trace element concentrations in Antarctic Krill, Euphausia superba' <br />
Locarnina reports Fe content of 28 micrograms/gram fresh weight, and 9.94 milligrams P per gram, for an P:Fe ration of 355P:1Fe.<br />
4 Partly derived from an estimate within JenningsS, KaiserH, ReynoldsJD; _Marine Fisheries Biology_, John Wiley & Sons 2009 :34 "..if krill wet weight is 10% carbon(Morrill et al 1988, Ikeda & Kirkwood 1989)..."<br />
5 Approximate average from Table 1, RaymontJEG 1971 'The biochemical composition of <i>Euphausia superba</i>'<br />
6 06/30/15 https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/oo.html<br />
7 BarberRT 'SOFeX: Southern Ocean Iron Experiments. An Overview of the Biological Responses.<br />
8 http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/epaper/2015-03/04/content_19716649.htm<br />
<br />Brian Cadyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00774014063263991567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8499150.post-35860550170440604602015-05-19T06:05:00.001-07:002015-05-20T08:30:59.700-07:00Dear Bill Gates: On high taxes not stopping high growth.<div class="usertext-body may-blank-within md-container ">
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The "highest economic growth decade was the 1960s. Income tax rates were 90 percent."
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— <a href="http://www.politifact.com/personalities/bill-gates/">Bill Gates</a> on Sunday, May 17th, 2015 in an interview on CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS"</div>
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In sum: While
true, there's no longer any room on earth for such growth, if the
growth is real. If it's not real growth, then it's just inflation, which
won't help. We need to separate economic health from economic growth.
Growth promises equality, but never delivers. We need to enforce fair
markets and anti-trust law to head toward equality.</div>
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<a class="author may-blank id-t2_8cdde" href="http://en.reddit.com/user/skrilledcheese">skrilledcheese</a><span class="userattrs"></span> <br />
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Could you expand on your point a little? I admittedly know little about the subject, and this seems like an interesting point.</div>
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On this, I'm echoing Dr. Herman Daly, ex-World Bank economist and co-author of the textbook <i>Ecological Economics</i>.
His Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (CASSE)'s
website is a good place to start on this: steadystate.org, as are the
writings of Hazel Henderson, and John Michael Greer.<br />
Seven plus billion of us live now on our planet, depending on it for our
food and more (fiber, ores, etc.) With so many of us, our dependence is
degrading our earth's ability to provide 'tomorrow' what it yielded
'yesterday'. For example abusive ag.'s soil erosion degrades
future crop yields. We're running out of resources, including room to
pollute, while we're increasing in number of willing workers.<br />
Those before us, in a world empty of workers but full of resources,
figured ways to eliminate labor using resources and technology. Yet in
today's world, full of workers but emptying of resources, we still
idolize <i>LABOR</i> efficiency, when what suits our present circumstances is
<i>RESOURCE</i> efficiency.<br />
Economists among us idolize economic growth as politically-acceptable
panecea for inequality. There's growth in population and per capita income
growth, but there's nowhere to put any of this growth on
our earth. We can't fit infinite growth on our finite earth, even per person growth in income, because if the income growth is real, it means more resources extracted and used.<br />
Meanwhile,
the effort to increase equality has been thought of as a way for the
rich to acceed to the demands of poor, so it is thus a 'reason' for growth. Yet, equality has been progressively receding
away over our horizon even as we clamor, through growth, toward that horizon. <br />
So since growth doesn't fit earth today, and won't deliver equality, how do
we cope with that and Piketty's insight that capital returns exceed growth rates throughout history? How do we deal with the frightening cries about poverty that stress us all? Measures of well-being in societies with great inequality are on
average worse than more equal societies, according to the thoroughly
researched Wilkerson and Picketts' <i>The Spirit Level: Why greater equality makes societies stronger</i>. Further, how do we make opportunity fairly available to each child, as demands the
meritocracy that we aspire to be, and philosophically lean on as
rationale?<br />
We should, at least, drop suicidal oil
exploration subsidies, for example. We should, at least,
face ourselves 'at the pump' with the true pollution costs of the
gasoline energy we use to eliminate labor. <br />
We should, at
least, charge 'at the pump' for the inevitable degradation of the now
polluted commons we all suffer in, rich and poor alike, when we as spenders
chose to eliminate labor with use of resources that pollute when
used. Also, we should at least recognize that the value of market share, as
distinct from pure 'economies of scale', is monopolist's money, unfairly gotten. We should, at least, extend legal protection, conveyed now in the form of ‘common carrier’
law, to small and minority retail consumers, to the wholesale markets as well, as in
Maryland’s law that small hospitals can’t be paid less for the same
procedure than larger hospitals are otherwise able to negotiate, with
market share’s clout, when dealing with health insurance companies.<br />
Here in Boston, this should take the wind out of the
hospital ‘consolidation’ drive. It should also, in opposing fashion,
squeeze the breeze on health insurance conglomeration as well. It should take the profit out of market domination by large market share buyers of small market share sellers, for example, as well as by large market share sellers squeezing small market share buyers.<br />
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Brian Cadyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00774014063263991567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8499150.post-59266148805786259002015-05-06T13:00:00.001-07:002015-05-10T13:14:45.445-07:00A False Dilemma: Economic Efficiency vs. Equality"Equality and efficiency are often thought to be in a zero-sum relationship: the more we have of one, the less we have of the other (18). Many policy issues therefore take the form of debating what is the best 'mix' of equality and efficiency, or how much of what we currently have in one dimension we should give up in order to obtain more in the other dimension. Tax and welfare policy are two areas where the belief in a trade-off is strongest. Since there are good reasons to think the relationship between equality and efficiency is not zero-sum, it is worth summarizing the 'logic' of the trade-off view.There are three 'reasons' why efficiency and equality are thought to be in a trade-off. The first and foremost is the motivation argument. It holds that equality eliminates the differential rewards necessary to motivate people to be productive. Any move toward equalization of incomes - such as through welfare grants, progressive taxation, or restructuring of wages - 'will' reduce individual effort, personal savings and eventually, the level of productive investment a society can generate. The motivation argument goes back at least as far as Reverend Malthus's eighteenth-century treatise on poverty, in which he postulated that the stimulus of providing for oneself and bettering one's condition in life is necessary to 'overcome the natural indolence of mankind' . Thus, greater equality through income redistribution to the poor would necessarily lead to less work and lower production.(19)<br />
The second 'reason' for the trade-off is that to maintain equality, government must continually interfere with individual choices about how to use resources, and in doing so, it curbs useful experimentation and productive innovation. One element of this innovation argument is that the more we have a policy of equality, the larger the government bureauocracy has to be. and the larger the bureaucracy, the more inflexible it is likely to be. In large organizations, innovators tend to be suppressed (20).<br />
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The third 'reason' is the waste argument. To maintain equality 'requires' a large administrative machinery that uses up resources but is not itself productive. The admnistrative machinery of equality - tax bureaus, welfare agencies, labor departments and the judicial apparatus for resolving conflicts generated by these entities - represent an 'actual' loss of valued resources. The labor, buildings, computer and paper thus used could go to producing other things. Arther Okun dramatized this argument with his metaphor of a leaky bucket: any redistributive policy is like carrying money from rich to poor in a leaky bucket. The policy question for Okun is how much waste one will tolerate before deciding it is not worth engaging in transfer at all.<br />
The motivation argument is familiar from the great debate about equity. If you do not accept need as the primary motivator, if you believe people work also for the inherent satisfaction of the sense of belonging, then you will probably not be terribly convinced by the argument here. But the most important critique of of the motivation theory comes from another corner. Even if people are motivated by need and by the desire to increase differences of status and wealth between themselves and others, such enormous differences as we currently have are not necessary to sustain motivation. We could move in the direction of more equality without sacrificing efficiency. ... Some redistribution ... obviously does not halt experimentation and innovation. If it did, tax and welfare systems would have long ago killed the American economy, not to mention the West European and Japanese economies. Of course, we can always wonder what marvelous innovations might have happened had the last tax dollar not been extracted, but then, we can also wonder what marvelous innovation might have happened had the next tax dollar gone to finance education or basic research.<br />
Neither is it clear that administrative machinery is wasteful. In the first place, to call something 'administrative' rather than 'productive' is to win the argument by sheer rhetoric. But more importantly, administrative machinery employs people, integrates them in a social group, and gives them dignity, if it accomplishes nothing else. In a society that stakes personal worth on paid employment but cannot provide employment for everyone, that is no small contribution. And finally, the administrative machinery necessary for equity is arguably no less productive, no less useful to soceity than some of the innovations spawned by the pursuit of profit – hula hoops and pet rocks, fruit loops and fruity pebbles, gold fingernails and green hair. Hula hoops may indeed contribute to both individual and social welfare, if only because they, too, provide jobs, but one would be hard put to say that they contribute more than a government agency.<br />
The mos telling evidence against an immutable equality/efficiency trade-off comes from cross-national studies. Japan has very high taxes on capital, steeply progressive taxes on personal income, fairly high inheritance taxes and very low taxes on consumption(such as sales taxes). Yet it has one of the highest rates of personal savings in the world, is a leader in technological innovation, and leads the industrial countries in productivity growth. West Germany has high corporate taxes, a generous pension system, a comprehensive universal health insurance system, and a far more equal distribution of income than does the United States.<br />
As Robert Kuttner has shown, there are many different ways of reconciling equality with economic performance. There are many ways a society can go about providing economic security, collecting taxes, maintaining full employment, stimulating investment, promoting economic development and distributing income. These are political choices. Where Labor is well-organized and shares significant political power, where in other words there is someone to “articulate the self-interest of the nonrich” economic policies tend to reconcile equality with efficiency. The idea that the two are incompatible is a politically useful myth for the rich and powerful(22).<br />
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_Policy Paradox and Political Reason_ , Deborah Stone, Harper-Collins 1988.<br />
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[In Sum: ‘Economic Equality or Efficiency' is a false dilemma, often justified in three ways:<br />
1) Needed to 'overcome the natural indolence of mankind'(Malthus) False<br />
2) ‘Needs intrusive gov’t., which stifles innovation.’ False<br />
3) ‘Needs big gov’t., which is wasteful’ False]<br />
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18: The idea of a trade-off between these two policy goals was popularized by Arthur Okun's Godkin Lectures, published under the title _<u>Equality and Efficiency: the Big Tradeoff</u>_ (Wash. D.C.: Brookings Inst. 1975)<br />
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19 T. R. Malthus, _<u>An Essay on the Principle of Population</u>_, Anthony Flew, Ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970 :245<br />
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20 This is one of Okun's arguements, and it seems to be the one that most convinces him of a zero-sum relationship. See Okun op. cit. (note 18):56-60<br />
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21 Lester Thurow, _<u>The Zero-Sum Society</u>_(NY, Basic Books, 1980):201-202<br />
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22 Robert Kuttner, _<u>The Economic Illusion: False Choices between Prosperty and Justice</u>_ (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984):267<br />
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<br />Brian Cadyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00774014063263991567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8499150.post-20360515347040585542015-01-15T12:27:00.001-08:002015-01-15T12:27:12.330-08:00Short version - Out of the Frying Pan, into the Freezer Cold. O'Ness buttoned up his tweed jacket and reached for that warming mug, quietly burping as he pondered in a University of British Columbia research building in Vancouver , under-equipped for the Pacific Northwest snow. Sudden in earth's history, in human lives the cold was year by decade chilling. <br /> How had Earth become less like Venus and more like Mars? Somehow the proverbial journey 'Out of the frying pan into the fire' didn't happen for earth, despite humanity's vast fossil fuel consumption, and Tadhg was chasing down why. Some things were obvious, including the now-accepted central role of air's carbon in the sudden warming of the earlier climate crisis. Where had so much of air's carbon gone? Plants were curiously darker now and grew faster, almost all of them. O'Ness put down the cup and rubbed his temples. Salmon harvests had inexplicably rebounded vastly, even while harvesting decimated returning spawners. Much of what had been infertile ocean turned greener as plankton grew where little had grown before. So much had changed.<br /> The routine salmon fry surveys started by the boffins before him allowed comparison with his current work. Comparing these showed that sockeye salmon juvenile's spleen became darker about the same time that the seas seemed to become greener. But how could these be correlated, and what caused these? O'Ness pushed the computer mouse away and sighed, got up from his squeaky chair, closed doors and walked through snowy streets, home to wife, kids and dinner.<br /> As he opened home's door, aromas of salmon and potato wafted out, and two children ran up cheering. Later, the meal done, O'Ness pushed back his creaking chair. As he and the kids washed up after the meal, he told them tales of life before, when humanity accelerated right at certain death without blinking, by burning so much fuel that the ice melted. They didn't really follow the carbon-in-air link in that chain yet, but give them time. In their beds, the children fell asleep, and O'Ness returned to pondering.<br /> Geoengineering concepts usually involved shading earth to lessen warming, but as we eat the sun's energy as our food, less sunlight reaching earth would have starved some of the 7 billion people then alive by shading crops, reducing food crop yields. Hence the earth shading concepts were thought shelved. Yet the earth was cooling. Were sulfate aerosols secretly spread in the stratosphere via a contrail conspiracy, shading earth? There was one way to tell; measure current levels of sunlight at the planetary surface. This revealed that the sunlight now reaching through the atmosphere was still as strong as before the cooling.<br /> His wife came up to him.<br />“I want a divorce.”<br /> Reeling, Tadhg sat down. “Why?”<br />“You don't really love me, nor do you care about our children.”<br />“That's not true. Why do you say that?”<br />“You walk in a daze through this house, never really seeing anyone else, never really looking at us.”<br />“I've just been preoccupied with work.”<br />“I've had enough, I want you out.”<br />“Honey, I work so hard because I love you, Ben and Sally, and I've just had a breakthrough in the work. That's why I've been so preoccupied. Now the hard part of the work starts; nailing down the details and getting the word out. If this works like it should, we'll earn more, and Ben and Sally will live in a world that isn't so cold. I need your support now more than ever. Please, Don't end this now, for our family and for the world.”<br />“Cut the crap. Pack your stuff and get out by next week. Until then, sleep on the couch. ”<br /> Tadhg was far too upset to sleep, couch or no couch. He went angrily back to campus and stayed awake all night working. He was in top form teaching his first class. He didn't even take it out on the students, much. Then he went to the gym and pulled his back out. Tadhg hobbled through the showering and back to the office.<br /> Leaving the office for the day, Prof. O'Ness hobbled slowly, his back jolting him with pain when his feet slipped suddenly on ice. Where to? He ate on campus in a cafeteria and inquired after rooms to stay in. Finding none, Tadhg returned home, collected a change of clothes and trundled off to a hotel for the night. Latching the hotel room door brought much-needed shelter. Tadhg sighed.<br /> Tadhg returned to the office in the morning and searched listings for a room near campus. Graduate students sharing apartments had rooms available; Tadhg picked one that seemed quiet and not too far from home and campus. <br /> Tadhg gingerly shuffled home again, avoiding back twinges. He met a friend and colleague, Ned, to help move suitcases to the new room. At the old house, his children Ben and Sally looked at him. He sat down with them, briefly explaining the situation that they'd surely heard before, as Ned moved bedding and suitcases to a car. <br /> At a restaurant, later, Tadhg didn't dare drink alcohol; he would teach class in the morning, and also feared numbing what he was still trying to understand, despite the temptation. Ned shared news from the Biochemistry Department.<br /> “They've found that while the darkening of the plants coincided with no apparent nuclear DNA change, it did correlate with a DNA change in the chloroplast.” <br /> To Tadhg, the news was like a balm; the tale of the DNA change calmed him. While recent events didn't make much sense, at least here was an area where sense still seemed useful. Ned dropped Tadhg at the apartment, brought the suitcases and bedding in, then, before driving off, gripped Tadhg's shoulder once, which only twinged Tadhg's sore back a bit. <br />---------------------------------<br /> “Consolidated Fish Feed is purchased, Dr. Inouye.” Phoebe Inouye's agent Sheneilla Overburg had just signed the purchase agreement on a controlling interest in the last major salmon fry feed maker that Phoebe didn't already own.<br /> “Thank you, Ms. Overburg.”<br /> Phoebe thus assembled, in one year, a veiled colossus. By using agents like Overburg and off-shore shell corporations to buy each fish feed company, no one but her knew of her stake in the salmon feed market. So started the stage in which the typical quasi-monopolist would start to squeeze both suppliers and buyers, using the clout of 'market-share' to financially bludgeon in both directions. Inouye, an ichthyologist-turned-businesswoman, was fishing for a different catch. After she acquired control of the fry feed plants, she altered the sockeye feed composition to include more trace iron. But how could this pay off the massive debt Dr. Inouye incurred? <br />***Sidebar A: Oceanic iron, The Aleutian Eruption and the Following Salmon Onslaught. ***<br /> Oceans are remarkably diffuse in iron, with concentrations so low that even rare vanadium is more prevalent. Iron averages as low as 75 nanomoles per cubic meter in much of the North Pacific, or about 4 kilograms per cubic kilometer of seawater there. The wind has blown 98% of oceanic iron there to the ocean as dust from deserts such as the Gobi, upwind of the North Pacific. The reason iron is so scarce in surface waters is that it easily forms insoluble precipitates that fall like snow to the ocean floor. <br /> Why does this matter? Because phytoplankton use iron as a co-factor in enzymatically transforming nitrogen, including cyanobacteria's nitrogen fixation (from dissolved air's nitrogen gas) – and because nitrogen constrains ocean photosynthesis by phytoplankton in much of the world's oceans. This limiting iron flow historically limits the North Pacific's overall productivity severely, along with other vast HNLC oceanic areas - HNLC stands for 'high nitrogen – low chlorophyll'. This fifth of the oceans has enough fixed dissolved nitrogen to nourish more plankton, yet these areas remain low in planktonic chlorophyll, revealing that plankton lack something besides nitrogen. This puzzled early oceanographers, until iron was found to be the limiting nutrient in most of these areas.<br /> In 2008 an Aleutian island volcano eruption fed plankton downwind, changing blue seas green in the months following the eruption by depositing ash containing iron across the Northeast Pacific Ocean.<br />http://communications.uvic.ca/photos/ash_cloud_2008.jpg<br />http://communications.uvic.ca/photos/Phyto_distn_2007.jpg<br />http://communications.uvic.ca/photos/Phyto_distn_2008.jpg<br /> This plankton bloom preceded a sudden population explosion in the pink salmon population that returned to land during 2009. And the 2010 sockeye salmon return was also unexpectedly large. Pink salmon return two years after they enter the ocean as young fry, while sockeyes return about three years after they enter the sea. The trace iron that the volcano added to the salmon feeding waters, by causing the plankton blooms, nourished these massive returns of salmon.<br /> Another way to get iron to those ocean pastures might be within the sockeye salmon already heading that way to feed, by loading their spleens with iron stores before they leave shore, within the hatcheries, by feeding iron-enriched feed. Why in sockeye salmon? While pink salmon fry head to sea right after hatching, feeding negligibly in fresh water streams, sockeye salmon fry spend a year feeding in fresh water before venturing to sea. Hatchery sockeye fry might be fed iron during this year. Since iron is so critically rare in the ocean, it makes sense to expect that sockeye salmon fry have adapted to sequester iron in their spleens for adult use. Natural dispersion of these stores, over the three years of sockeye salmon presence in these oceanic pastures, could supply the critical iron, inducing phytoplankton blooms that in turn nourish the same sockeyes and the rest of the sea life, too.<br />-----------<br /> Amidst the entire industrial spending spree, Phoebe had sold long puts on wild salmon delivery futures, promising to sell salmon in the future at prices set today. She thus gambled in her own field, where she had inside knowledge, and now, inside power. <br /> A year later pink salmon returned from ocean pastures rendered fertile by the supply of the one nutrient missing; iron, brought via sockeye spleen. Salmon returned in record numbers to a fish-starved market. But Dr. Inouye's counterparts in the salmon futures market, by agreeing to buy Phoebe's long puts at earlier, then-prevailing high prices, had bet that the salmon supply would continue as tight as before Phoebe's veiled iron supplementation started. Beforehand, too many trawlers chased too few fish, so thinking that this would continue seemed sensible. The 'put' buyers, that Phoebe contracted with, bet with what seemed like an optimistic fool; they lost and she gained by filling those earlier contracts to deliver, at high earlier prices, with what now flooded the market; plentiful and cheap wild salmon.<br /> There had been oddly productive years of salmon returns before, but as peaks in a downward-sloping yield-by-year line. So those who bet once with Phoebe and lost in the futures market, bet again the next year, never knowing that they were dealing with the same person, or that Phoebe held the cards. <br />-----------------------------<br /> The next morning Tadhg hobbled through class, then calculated the influence that the darkening of the plants might have on atmospheric carbon levels and flows. Calculating carbon fixed by the increase in growth in plants darkened worldwide, and in air's carbon fixed subsequently, O'Ness still couldn't explain the steadily dropping air carbon levels. Where had the rest of the air's carbon gone?<br /> He headed back to the new flat, picking up a simple to go meal on the way. Tadhg called home and reached his son Ben.<br /> “How was school, Ben?”<br /> “OK. We studied the same old stuff; multiplication”<br /> “Multiplication? I use that all the time.”<br /> “You do?”<br /> “Yeah, today I used it to look into why it keeps getting colder. It might have to do with plants being darker now.”<br /> “Oh. What was it like before?”<br /> “Plants were mostly greenish, instead of being nearly black. In the country, apart from in winter, everything was green.”<br /> “Why is it different now?”<br /> “We're still finding out, Ben.”<br /> Tadhg talked with Sally too, then slept. In the morning at school he explored publishing a letter jointly with the plant scientists in Biochemistry, and with a climatology boffin as well, on this proposal to account for missing atmospheric carbon via the darkening of the plants. <br />***Sidebar B: <br /> Plants use chloroplasts to catch light and make sugar and stuff. Chloroplasts are captured remnants of independent bacteria engulfed by early eukaryotes and then integrated within the eukaryotic cells, that thus became the first plants. Chloroplasts retain just a bit of their ancestor's DNA molecules, since most of their free-living ancestor's DNA shifted over to the plant nucleus. The chloroplasts use their DNA in conjunction with the plants' nuclear DNA to form the enzymes with which light is caught and sugar, etc. made. But the light caught is not all the light encountered – much green light bounces off chloroplasts. This is why plants look green. Chloroplasts basically ceased evolving independently after their engulfment by the first plants. <br /> http://biology.mcgill.ca/phytotron/lightwkshp1994/1.1%20Geiger/Fig%20Gei%202.jpg<br />Green light contains about a fifth of the sunlight energy reaching earth's surface. Outside of plants, algae and microbes have evolved to use green light in addition to red and blue light. But these microbes were not the ones that the first plants engulfed, so plants still basically use only red and blue light. They use this light to pump electrons and protons across the insulating cell membrane in the 'Light' reactions, then, in the 'Dark' reactions, use the returning of those protons to power making sugar, etc. from air's carbon dioxide.<br /> A photon flew from the sun. Eight minutes later, half of it's fellow companion photons were absorbed or reflected within earth's atmosphere, but this one made it through. It wobbled with a frequency near 560 terahertz, travelling with a wavelength of 535 nanometers; it was green. It hit a molecule of proteorhodopsin and was absorbed, which knocked a proton across the thylakoid membrane into thylakoid space. This complemented the chlorophyll and carotenoid liberation of protons within thylakoid space. Both sources of protons powered the formation of ATP as the photons returned to the stroma through ATP synthase, mounted in the thylakoid membrane.<br /> Through the happenstance of accidental evolution's stumbling along in the dark, plants hit on sugar-making 'Dark' reactions with notable inefficiencies. When oxygen, instead of carbon dioxide, reacts with 'RuBisCO', an enormous photosynthesis enzyme central to the dark reactions, glyoxylate forms. Mopping that glyoxylate up takes considerable cellular energy. A few microbes, like Chloroflexus, have evolved an alternate enzymatic pathway using oxygen-insensitive enzymes. The pathway avoids glyoxylate buildup, and is characterized by it's 3-hydroxypropionate intermediate, and is hence called the 3-HOP pathway. While the Chloroflexus genus organisms do incidentally produce glyoxylate, they efficiently metabolize it.<br /> Atop a German charcoal-making pile grew a Streptomyces like no other known – in this warm, carbon-rich aerobic environs it alone fixed nitrogen at near-ambient temperatures and thrived, by virtue of an oxygen-tolerant nitrogenase, who's encoding DNA was almost lost with the loss of the organism in a lab mishap.<br /> In nano-injection, DNA is electrostatically stuck to a positively charged microscopic lance, which, jammed into the chloroplast, released that DNA to transform the chloroplast once the electrostatic charge is reversed. This nano-injection and the nitrogenase mentioned above also feature in our story, to which let's now return.<br /> --------<br /> After a few rings, Tadhg heard a mechanical voice announcing “Central Satellite Imaging Service.” Tadhg pressed the extension mentioned in the letter in his hand. <br /> “Samir here.”<br /> “Hi, Samir, This is Tadhg O'Ness from U.B.C. following up after your recent response.”<br /> “Oh, Hi Tadhg, How can I help?”<br /> “I just wanted to check on your production schedule for the ocean chlorophyll data.”<br /> “Tadhg, It looks like it will be two weeks before we can get to your order.”<br /> “Thanks, Samir, If there are any issues, please do contact me.”<br /> “Will do, Tadhg. Is that it?<br /> “Yes, Samir, and it was good to talk with you in person.”<br /> “Thanks, Tadhg, and likewise. Have a good day.”<br /> Tadhg turned to the mail of the day; a letter from his wife's lawyer. Ugh.<br />-------------<br /> Decades earlier, William Jackson desperately scoured the microbial photosynthesis literature for ways to improve photosynthesis and plant growth, to bind air's troublesome carbon increase. He was obsessed with trying to ameliorate the climate crisis, and why not? He had time, ambition, good intentions and maybe a little psychosis, so it seemed possible to overcome his lack of high academic status or significant capital. As a son of biology department faculty, he had some access to tools and lab materials, and that might be all he needed. He recognized the opportunity; nearly a fifth of sunlight reaching earth went unused by plants - mostly green light. Sure, some green light was utilized, especially lower in the canopy, but much was lost. In plants of that era the 'Light' reactions missed out on much of green light's considerable power, and the 'Dark' reactions were inefficient when leaves were hot. Furthermore, fossil fuel price hikes had boosted nitrogen fertilizer prices worldwide, at a time when over a quarter of the world's population ate due to the crop yields dependent on that artificial nitrogen fertility. William sought to change all that by engineering a viroid to bring three microbial pathways to plants; first, a rhodopsin that powered cell growth with green light; second, the improved oxygen- and heat-tolerant 'Dark' pathway called '3-HOP'; and third, Streptomyces' oxygen-tolerant nitrogenase to fix nitrogen from air for the plant.<br /> William finally nano-injected chloroplasts with the darkening viroid, then introduced the aphids into the growth chamber. Will the darkening spread within the plant? Will the viroid also infect the aphids? Will the aphids spread any viroid to the experimental plants?<br /> There was a knock on William's basement laboratory door, then a crash of splitting wood as men in white coats kicked the door in. They stumbled rapidly through the breach and grabbed William as he turned from the growth chamber. William's hands were torn from the isolation glovebox. In the confusion, the crudely built glovebox fell off the counter. It's light wooden frame broke and the plastic film panels tore. Soil mix and plants tumbled into a heap, and infected aphids flew through the eddies of air. As the men dragged William out the open cellar door, William realized with shock that the aphids were free in the world, and the viroid with them. <br /> Months went by slowly in the asylum for the now-drugged William, but through the window one day he noticed plants outside becoming darker, he thought. Maybe it's just the light that day. Bemused, William wondered groggily whether earth's plants were darkening with proteorhodopsins; whether the engineered nitrogenase and 3-HOP pathways worked.<br /> After a decade, in which the darkening of the plants took hold outside of Williams' window, William was transferred to a less restrictive facility, where he learned through his old college buddy of Tadhg's interest in plant darkening. William wrote O'Ness, and awaited a reply.<br />--------------------<br /> At Prof. O'Ness's office, Tadhg's phone rung. <br /> “Professor O'Ness?”<br /> “Speaking.”<br /> “This is Sally and Ben's principal. Your daughter's gotten into fights again, which this time also involved your son. Unfortunately we've had to suspend both of them for three days.”<br /> “Oh. I guess I should come by and pick them up.”<br /> “There's no need – your wife is coming. I just wanted to let you know.”<br /> “Well, thank you, and sorry for the trouble.”<br /> Tadhg turned back to calculating estimations of the additional carbon fixed through the darkening of the plants. He also wrote colleagues, arguing for further fish spleen studies. Colleague comments came back about how difficult this change in salmon fry iron transport would be. Tadhg invited alternate explanations and pleaded that others look into fish iron flux budgets, especially salmon's. Tadhg had data backing up increased iron transport by sockeye salmon, and was asking others to gather more. Besides, he wasn't arguing that these transformations were easy, or likely, he was arguing that they were done. <br />***Sidebar C: <br /> Much coastal desert area might be converted by dikes to keep seawater, not out, but in. This could flood extensive desert areas, which could bloom with aquaculture, incidently fixing carbon into sealife and seashell carbonates. Vast windmill farms might ring these coastal deserts, pumping seawater up and over dike after dike, into the deserts. Above each dike would lie a pond; within each pond the seawater would grow saltier via evaporation, - the farthest ponds, as saltpans, would churn out salt by the railcar-load. Before the final ponds an additional band of windmills could split water into hydrogen gas and hydroxide. which could precipitate magnesia in these penultimate ponds. The magnesia produced could become cement of a type that uses MgOH2 instead of CaOH2. Using this cement would avoid the carbon released during conventional cement preparation, an energy-intensive high-temperature process.<br /> Coastal deserts are often beside upwelling zones, where arctic-cold and relatively fertile deep ocean waters are drawn to the surface. With the addition of even more fertility within the dams, this dammed seawater could support vigorous plankton and algae growth. The algae could be food types like kelp, and the abundant plankton might feed edible fish. While the deep ocean's surface is often very unproductive due to lack of nutrients, shallow waters are typically hundreds of times more productive. People could insure such productivity in this seawater-flooded coastal desert aquaculture.<br /> --------<br /> The telephone rang again. <br /> “Doctor O'Ness, It's Central Satellite Imagery Service calling. Would you care for, in addition to the chlorophyll change data covering the sea, data covering the recently diked coastal desert areas?”<br /> “Oh, yes indeed. That'd be wonderful. Thank you. When will this all be available?”<br /> “It'll take a bit longer to include the diked desert data. Probably two weeks from now.”<br /> “That long. Well, I'm eager for the data, and will be waiting. Thanks.”<br /> A week later, Prof. O'Ness stood before the college tenure committee, sweating and quaking a bit.<br /> “Tadhg, you haven't published for years now. The college ratings give us little choice...”<br /> “Samuel, I'm gathering final data for a significant article that ought to be accepted within months.”<br /> “That's all well and good, but if the department's tenured faculty publications per year drops below the number of faculty, the entire department is at risk of being axed. We can't afford to risk that, so we're not granting your tenure request now, but we will put it on hold, and will reactivate it if publications are accepted.”<br /> Tadhg's stomach twisted. <br /> A week later, back at the office, Tadhg dialed the young journal's editor, who answers in person after quite a few rings.<br /> “Betty Travois speaking.”<br /> “Ms. Travois, This is Professor O'Ness again of the University of British Columbia.”<br /> “Yes, Professor,”<br /> “I'm calling you about a draft article which I emailed to your firm earlier.”<br /> “Professor O'Ness, we've received the piece, but without further data, I'm unwilling to take reviewer's time with it.”<br /> “I understand, and hope to have the data in and analyzed by next week.”<br /> “Good. Let's talk then.” Click.<br /> “Central Satellite Imagery Service. If you know your party's extension...”.<br /> Tadhg gets through Samir.<br /> “Samir, Is there any chance the data on chlorophyll within HNLC areas and diked deserts is ready yet?”<br /> “Tadhg, I'm sorry, It will probably be a week more. There's quite a few projects in the pipeline.”<br /> After hanging up, Tadhg started to wonder about other greenhouse gases that he might be able to get data on more rapidly, like methane. Then Tadgh found Joseph Fosjocki's old article on transforming cattle salivary glands to excrete alpha-galatosidase. <br />***Sidebar D: <br /> In 1995 livestock emitted seventy eight million tons of methane from within both their guts and manure, from organisms capable of digesting galactose oligosaccharides using the alpha-galactosidase enzyme. These oligosaccharide sugars are built by legumes. The ancestors of mammals somehow lost the ability to digest these eons ago, with climate-scale effects. While methane over a century has 35 times the warming effect of carbon dioxide, over two decades it has 85 times carbon dioxide's effect, according to the 2013 IPCC reports. A mumps-like viroid might be engineered to implant a transgene into cattle salivary gland cells, to secrete alpha-galactosidase in saliva, so oligosaccharide sugars like raffinose and stachyose are digested and utilized by livestock for additional growth, before hindgut microbes can make methane from them.<br /> -----------<br /> Two decades earlier, Joey Fosjocki completed the assembly of a mutated mumps virus designed by Joey to induce salivary gland secretion of alpha-galactosidase in cattle, so cattle could start digesting oligosaccharides from legumes directly. Then his lip itched, so he thoughtlessly reached around his face guard and scratched it with the gloved hand he'd been working with. 'I really should get lip balm' he thought, 'on my way home', licking his lip. He ate a late lunch, and finished off other work the rest of the week, then on Friday sneezed all the way home on the subway. By a week after the Monday exposure date, his cheeks ached, and the next week was painful, but soon afterwards he could eat beans without gas. The same fate befell those near him on the subway, and soon the world's people could eat beans without bubbles, and cattle of the world grew more rapidly and passed much, much less methane gas. But Joey's company couldn't sell what the world got for free, whether the world wanted it or not, so the company folded, closing it's doors for good. Joey was out of work. <br />----------<br /> Tadhg scribbled on the back of yet another envelope, his fingers chilled. The Vancouver cold exceeded the building's heating capacity, which had been designed for a milder climate. Still not enough cooling accounted for, even with gasless cattle and people. What else had changed air's carbon?<br /> ***Sidebar E: <br /> Some grain sorghum varieties might replace much rice in tropical paddy fields since they cook like rice and yield more, but there's prejudice for rice over sorghum, which is known as 'poor man's rice'. <br /> Grain sorghum might be developed to use Gluconacetobacter to fix nitrogen inside the plants, as was discovered occurring in Brazil inside the stems of sorghum's close relative, sugarcane. <br /> A reduction in methane release to air might follow from the switch, in many flooded pond fields, or 'paddies', from growing rice to sorghum. When grown in flooded soils, sugarcane induced a more than ten-fold reduction in 'paddy' soil methane release, by altering the redox state in the pond field's rhizosphere. This might reduce 'paddy' methane emission worldwide by 50 billion tons of methane per year, while the grain sorghum's greater yields would increase food yields. We seven billion humans might appreciate that, especially considering that many of us eat today thanks to artificial nitrogen fertilizing, who's energy cost, by releasing carbon, threatens the climate-dependent agriculture it fertilizes.<br />----------<br /> The short half-life of atmospheric methane and it's enormous impact on global climate within a twenty year period, Tadhg realized, made it particularly likely as a cause of the recent cooling. Tadhg thought slowly as he ate an Indian meal at a nearby restaurant. Then he stopped, looking at the meal. The grain was the newly prominent, yet quite ancient grain sorghum that cooked like rice. Perhaps here was another clue to climatic change. Back at the office, O'Ness scoured Pubmed, then the entire internet for works on altered paddy methane emissions, and found Dwivedi's 1980s article on sorghum's close relative, sugarcane, in paddy fields and it's effects on methane emissions as compared with rice. Luckily the rice-to-sorghum conversion data were quicker to get than the satellite data.<br /> Checking his email, Tadhg came across the satellite data, finally in from the satellite service. O'Ness began a flurry of analysis, plugging satellite data into spreadsheets and programs he'd prepared. The transfer of data went as planned, so soon the cumulative greenhouse gas changes from sockeye's iron shuttling, plant darkening, increased aquaculture via diked deserts, magnesium-based cement substitution, gasless cattle (and people) and sorghum adoptation in ex-rice paddies were tallied. The combined effects succeeded in explaining the cooling of earth.<br /> Tadhg called his wife. O'Ness and his wife set a date to meet with the divorce lawyers.<br /> For a change of pace, Tadhg glanced at the backed-up campus mail. He noticed William's letter from the asylum.<br /> “Dear Professor O'Ness,<br /> I understand that you are estimating the climatic effect of plant darkening. You might be curious to know how this occurred...<snip>...Anyhow, if you do discover an effect, I hope you will document it's source, and the sanity of the effort, given the then-prevalent overheating of earth. This might help free me from the asylum.” <br /> Tadhg replied, asking William to go on the record with the aphid viroid work.<br /> Later, Tadhg opened the paper as he ate lunch and found reports of Phoebe Inoue sued for price-fixing with her now-revealed near-monopoly. Overburg had came forward with suspicions of cornering the fish feed market, stimulating an investigation that showed the conglomerate Phoebe hid for so long. Now Tadhg had the agent of the sockeye spleen darkening documented too and a motive for the iron addition. Also in the paper was the tale of the mumps epidemic of some years ago. Joey Fosjocki's work was revealed, and his professional life ended, but for Tadhg, the article added background depth for his article. He worked all night, then sent the results to the journal editor. <br /> Betty liked what she saw and sent the piece out to peer reviewers.<br /> Then...<br />From: Betty Travois, Syndicated Science Publications<br />To: Prof. Tadhg O'Ness<br />Subject: Congrats, the last reviewer approved!<br />Body: Tadhg, your article's been accepted for publication, and will in fact lead a special issue on earth's surprising recent cooling...<br /> After the department tenure ceremony, back in his office, Tadgh discovered his mug. Picking up the leftover black coffee, he glanced at his family photo. His wife gone, the children in limbo, mostly now out of his reach, Tadgh sipped a bitter, cold victory cup.</snip>Brian Cadyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00774014063263991567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8499150.post-33507866708289756262014-06-05T11:48:00.000-07:002014-06-05T11:56:22.492-07:00"Valuation of research as intangible capital in agriculture can be measured by quantifying the impact of research on changes in asset values. This study examines the valuation of research as intangible capital in agriculture using Tobin's q theory. Both public and private research capital have been highly valued in U.S. agriculture. Using four different approaches, each $1 of public research capital had an average value that was 8.59 times higher than $1 of tangible capital or conventional assets such as real estate, vehicles, machinery and livestock. Private research capital was valued 5.2 times higher than tangible assets. Since the rate of return on conventional assets averaged 4.9% over the 1950-1991 period, the valuation price indicates that the rate of return on [public] research would be 40.4%." from Abstract, 'Valuation of intangible capital in agriculture' White FC, _J._Ag._and_Applied_Economics_27_(2):437 1995<br />
<br />
"...bias against agriculture has resulted in lower rates of return on investment in other economic sectors. In a survey of about 1,650 public-sector investment projects, for example, the rate of return averaged 11.5% in nations with a strong bias against agriculture and 18% where the bias was moderate or low. Rates of return on private-sector projects in these two classes of nations were 13 and 16 percent, respectively." Erlich PR _The Stork and The Plow_, citing Dasgupta 1993 [within] Schiff M, Voldez A, _The plundering of agriculture in developing countries_ Wash DC 1993<br />
<br />Brian Cadyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00774014063263991567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8499150.post-89892777897089000482014-04-18T12:03:00.002-07:002014-04-18T12:03:53.801-07:00After Growth, Economic Maturity?<br />
<ol>
<li>More exponential physical growth of industrial humanity can't fit on our finite planet – we already use more than earth can sustainably provide by about half.</li>
<li>Economic growth with physical growth won't fit on our one earth.</li>
<li>Economic growth without physical growth is a mirage. It is just inflation, a zero-sum game that may alter the score but can't make the system better overall.</li>
<li>In organisms growth often precedes or leads to maturity. </li>
<li>Economic maturity remains conceptually underexplored. </li>
<li>What guidelines would well manage economic maturity?</li>
</ol>
Brian Cadyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00774014063263991567noreply@blogger.com0