Boulder’s “Climate Action Plan”: inefficient, ineffective

This was printed in the Boulder Daily Camera on Saturday, January 14, 2012.

The Boulder City Council’s website touts a “Climate Action Plan” as one of its primary goals. “The current goal is equivalent to the Kyoto Protocol target – to reduce emissions to a level seven percent below 1990 levels by 2012,” it says. With the city’s carbon tax set to end early next year, it’s worth asking: Is reducing carbon dioxide emissions the best way to respond to global warming?

Reviewing analysis by retired NCAR Senior Scientist Tom Wigley, Boulder’s University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) states that even if the “industrialized and nearly industrialized countries called upon to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the protocol … continued to abide by Kyoto’s limits” through 2100, global average temperatures would be at most 0.38 degrees Fahrenheit less than midpoint warming projections. Put in perspective, global temperatures decreased by this amount between 1900 and 1910, according to NASA.

Given this tiny effect, I’m not surprised that expert climate economists commissioned by the Copenhagen Consensus Center ranked emission reductions last among cost-effective responses to climate change. More efficient methods, listed at FixTheClimate.com, include adaptation, climate engineering, and carbon storage technologies.

With or without global warming, people — especially those in developing nations –face threats from extreme temperature, coastal flooding, hurricanes, malaria, poverty, starvation, and water stress. While global warming may increase these risks, scholars including Indur Goklany and Bjorn Lomborg convincingly argue that directly reducing these threats and promoting prosperity save more lives at lower cost than attempts involving emissions reductions.

Translight Photonic Crystal Modeling Software

Translight Photonic Crystal Modeling Software
by Andrew L. Reynolds

Translight 3.01 (for Windows, on Google docs)

Source code (zip, Google docs)

Translight Manual (pdf)

Cosmo VRML Viewer
I used to use this with Internet Explorer, but as noted on the NIST
link above, it may not work after April 2006. Following the instructions
on the NIST link above, I installed it successfully on Opera, though I
had trouble with Firefox (multiple tabs opened).

Google Spreadsheet and Web-Based Applications

On a recent blog post Seth Godin has a link to Google Spreadsheet. Both Yahoo! and Microsoft have webmail clients that mimic Outlook, a desktop application. The trend toward replacing common applications such as word processing (Writely) and (with Google Spreadsheet) spreadsheets appears to be spreading. This is damn cool. On Google Spreadsheet, you can keep your files on-line and access them from anywhere, and determine what other Google users can access them. Surely some pundits predict that webApps will replace conventional ones, which will significantly decrease the importance of operating systems. (Paul Graham wrote about this five years ago.) We’ll see.

Wikipedia

It’s about time I acknoweledged Wikipedia as one of the best sites around. Here’s a good article on it, as posted on Geekpress.

It’s worth saving at a profit.

Next week Patri Friedman will speak at the University of Colorado about seasteading that is, creating sovereign floating cities at sea. Such ventures have been tried before, and failed. Yet, Patri is well informed, and credentialed, in economics, history, business, and engineering, and seems to have thought this plan out quite well. Last night I listed to Patri’s speech given at Freedom Fest ’04. I’ve heard government functions discussed in economic terms before, most notably by his father, David Friedman, and Randy Barnett, but Patri explained it so simply and succinctly, it just blew me away:

I think many libertarians have the intuition that if we can just communicate our ideals passionately and effectively, we can reverse this trend. While this is romantic, I really don’t think its true. When you think through the logic of why government grows, you realize that it is the natural behavior of a system with certain characteristics. Those characteristics mainly have to do with the incentives facing individuals, not the political philosophy they believe in. Spreading our philosophy is worthwhile, but rhetoric is not enough.One of the basic tenets of economics is that people respond to changes in incentives. The problem with government is a problem of incentives, and the solution is to change them. One of the most powerful ways to change incentives is through technology, and it turns out that the technology of floating cities will dramatically change the incentives facing governments. Let’s see how.

Think of government as an industry. It has two main features that make it uncompetitive. First, the cost of switching providers is very high. You have to leave your job, sell your house, pack your possessions, leave your friends and family, apply for new citizenship, get a job, buy a house, etc. As some of you probably know firsthand, it’s colossal. This dramatically reduces market feedback. The difference to an individual between two governments must be higher than this huge cost in order to make it worthwhile to move. So it’s natural for governments to exploit their current customer base, rather than innovating to try to keep them.

Second, government has a huge barrier to entry. Even something like designing a brand-new operating system seems almost easy compared to creating a new government. Consider the current situation in Iraq as an example of the tremendous difficulty and expense of regime change. You can’t just start fresh on land because all land is claimed by some existing country. “Give me liberty or give me death” is an effective way of getting land – land that’s wide as your shoulders, as long as you are tall, and six feet deep. Since the barrier to entry is high, there are few firms, which again limits competition.

Taken together, we can see that government is an uncompetitive industry, so is no surprise that it performs so poorly.

Now think about how floating cities change these factors. The barrier to entry for the governing market is much lower, because Mark Twain’s famous line “Buy land they’ve stopped making it” becomes false. We can build new territory in unoccupied areas instead of fighting for the currently fixed supply. Nor do you need to acquire a large, contiguous territory at once. It can be built piece by piece as funds and interest become available.

Wow. Typically people think of the marketplace operating “within” governments (I’ve written about this), and the view Patri presented above reverses this relationship.

This is quite inspiring to me, as earlier in the day, while writing a paper on nanotechnology policy, I wondered if a career being a policy wonk would really be fulfilling. How could I know if I made a difference? Since the paper is really about government and market regulations intended to protect occupation, consumer, and environmental health and safety, I’d been reading much of W. Kip Viscusi‘s work, and wondered if, after so many books and papers, he knows he’s made a positive difference.

In the Machinary of Freedom, David Friedman quoted H.L. Hunt: “If this country is worth saving, it’s worth saving at a profit.”

Shred this!

In the truth-is-stranger than fiction category: industrial shredding, linked from geekpress.com.

Marburger, Powell, Rushdie, and Butler

A good week for talks, and I’ll finally let myself write about it, as I found the “bug” in my program after one long and frustrating day. A multiplication instead of a division symbol. Doh!

I met the President’s Science Advisor, John Marburger. I gave him a copy of an article on science funding by Terence Kealey, and Marburger asked for my e-mail so he could get back to me. That was surprising. We’ll see. In any case, I e-mailed Kealey, in England, and he was glad to hear it:

Thank you for your kind e mail. It gave me great pleasure to receive it. I didn’t answer earlier because I was away for a couple of days. My suspicion is that President Bush, like the Republicans since Hoover, is into corporate welfare and will see the federal support for science in that light (and of course bioterrorism research has given the federal government funding of science a further boost). But I’m not American and I might be wrong and I might not understand the nuances of American policy shifts. I’m certainly delighted by the thought that John Marburger has actually seen my stuff. That is genuinely exciting – thanks!

So that made my day.

Earlier this week I heard Michael Powell speak. The Cato Institute has said some good things about him (link), and he seems to see the value in letting entrepreneurs be creative and free. Apparently he’s not too hot on censorship issues (he’s not averse to it), but it seems that the FCC did a good job on letting new technology (wireless, DSL, etc) flourish. (link)

George Butler directed Pumping Iron, which followed Arnold Schwarzenegger, Lour Ferrigno, and some amateur body builders on their quest for winning top honors in their respective competitions. Seeing Arnold back then, early-mid ’70s, was interesting, as he appeared to be quite the politician then. However, the new DVD release apparently shows that he made up some things for the camera. Alas, the politician. It was inspiring to hear Butler speak of this, his first film, and his percerverence in raising money. He approached 3000 people for money, and fewer than 1% donated/invested anything. Butler claimed, if I recall correclty, that this movie made Arnold’s career. Maybe I’m forgetting the nuances of what he said, but in any case, it’s amazing how the action of one person can change the course of history, that is, assuming that Arnold’s subsequent films and political career really change the course of history. It’s tough to tell. It reminds me of Boornstein’s Cleopatra’s Nose.

Lastly, Salman Rushdie spoke at CU. It was nice to hear from a man whose world was literature, art with words. Yet, it was a packed house, and I, like many others there, had never read a word of his, and was there only because some bad people wanted him dead twenty years ago. I thought he’d be above this, but he trashed The Da Vinci Code, as if its author Dan Brown had any pretenses of writing literature. Really. Can’t Rushdie appreciate the novel for what it is, not literature, but a screenplay for an action movie turned into a novel? I suppose Rushdie would argue the while the book had some historical context, got people interested in how things came to be, and was a page-turner, it could have had the things it did not have: character development and higher-quality of writing. But please. Rushdie complains about current TV and film (“things used to be better”), and then complains about what people are reading, too. Why not look at the positives of the Da Vinci Code, and positive aspects of current film and TV, e.g., the number of “indie” films being made, the expanded market for them, perhaps through cable stations that cater to niche tastes, as well as HBO’s TV series that can also cater to narrower, more “sophisticated” audiences, unlike broadcast TV. For things to be better, they need not be like the mythical “good old days” (when people yearned for the good older days). Things can be better in new and different ways. And sure also worse. But there’s generally more art these days, some bad, some worse.

OK, that was not the most coherent screed. But I’ll leave it at that.

Luna at the Fox Theater

On Monday evening I saw the band Luna perform in Boulder. Great show. Often at concerts I find myself thinking about what the next song will be before the current song is over. This time I was quite absorbed in the moment, enjoying the song in the present. They sounded great. No gimics. During an extended version of a song I realized that the drumming created a tension that reminded me of The Feelies, especially Track 4 (Forces At Work) on Crazy Rhythms, which I wrote about in my May 22 ’02 post. After the concert I read that their drummer, Stan Demeski, played for The Feelies. But … he joined them after Crazy Rhytms, and left Luna in ’97. So, uh, nevermind.

Last week I was at a party where the host played records instead of CDs. He has a nice collection, and claims that records do sound better. There’s a reason, too, and HowStuffWorks has a <a href="http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/question487.htm”>good article on it. There’s also an article, somewhere on-line, where someone digitizes some songs from records, and the same ones from CDs, and compares their spectral content. It was pretty neat. The test for me is to hear the same song on vinyl and CD played at the same time, and switch from one to the other using the receiver. Next time I’m at that house I’ll bring my Talking Heads Remain in Light CD.

Citations of my articles

My advisor has informed me that two published articles have sited my 2003 paper in JOSA B, my first article: (prepare for long titles) “Propagation in and scattering from a matched metamaterial having a zero index of refraction” and “Frequency-dependent envelope finite-element time-domain analysis of dispersion materials”. The second one actually uses the structure I designed.

Do I really want to know?

This week Paul posted an article Geekpress that reveals the secrets of some David Blaine magic tricks. Reading them, I found that I value the entertainment he provides more than the actual knowledge of how he does the tricks. After all, there’s enough technological “magic” around these days to be impressed and inspired by.

Paul also linked an article about computers that recognize your mood according to the tone of your voice. Just how much is communicated with tonality, and not words? Carol Fleming works with this, and stressed its importance.

And then there’s the idea that you can work it backwards; speak as though you’re in the mood you want to be in, and you will be in it. Sounds sort of froofy, but “fake it until you make it” might have something to it. Perhaps it’s grounded in the influence technique (Robert Cialdini) of being consistent.

To change topic, The Cato Institute has a book, The Half-Life of Policy Rationales: How New Technology Affects Old Policy Issues, which excites me. That’s a field I’d like to get paid to learn about.