Grain’s agrofuel report

Grain, an NGO that supports poor farmers in poor countries, has published a large report that is getting a lot of publicity.

The press release is here, the report, a special issue of the magazine Seedling, is here, further reading here.

We begin with an introductory article that, among other things, looks at the mind-boggling numbers that are being bandied around: the Indian government is talking of planting 14 million hectares of land with jatropha; the Inter-American Development Bank says that Brazil has 120 million hectares that could be cultivated with agrofuel crops; and an agrofuel lobby is speaking of 379 million hectares being available in 15 African countries. We are talking about expropriation on an unprecedented scale…

Free Review of Environmental Economics and Policy

I have just received the first issue of the new Review of Environmental Economics and Policy in the mail. This issue can also be downloaded free of charge here.

Do fungi feast on radiation?

Fascinating. A major discovery, if confirmed.

A type of fungus can devour radiation and convert it to fuel, researchers say. [...]

Dark-coloured fungi use the same compound as people do, melanin, the pigment that makes both skin and truffles dark.

“Just as the pigment chlorophyll converts sunlight into chemical energy that allows green plants to live and grow, our research suggests that melanin can use a different portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, ionising radiation,” says Dr Ekaterina Dadachova of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.

From News in Science. Story in Scientific American here. The paper is here.

The Quartenary Conundrum

The Quartenary Conundrum is this: While current empirical and theoretical ecological forecasts suggest that many species could be at risk from global warming, during the recent ice ages surprisingly few species became extinct.

In a recent paper in BioScience, Forecasting the Effects of Global Warming on Biodiversity (pdf), Daniel Botkin et al. state that

Fossil evidence and recent ecological and genetic research, along with specific problems with present forecasting methods, lead us to believe that current projections of extinction rates are overestimates. Previous work has failed to adequately take into account mechanisms of persistence. [...]

Until recently, it was thought that past temperature changes were no more rapid than 1 degree Celsius (°C) per millennium, but recent information from both Greenland and Antarctica, which goes back approximately 400,000 years, indicates that there have been many intervals of very rapid temperature change, as judged by shifts in oxygen isotope ratios. Some of the most dramatic changes (e.g., 7°C to 12°C within approximately 50 years; Macdougall 2006) are actually of greater amplitude than anything projected for the immediate future. [...]

What, then, is the answer to the Quaternary conundrum? The answer appears to lie in part with the ability of species to survive in local “cryptic” refugia, that is, to exist in a patchy, disturbed environment whose complexity allows faster migration than forecast for a continuous landscape, within which species move only at a single rate. The answer also lies in part with greater genetic heterogeneity within species, including local adaptations,which allows rapid evolution. For example, populations close to latitudinal borders are likely to be better adapted to some environmental changes than the average genotype. However, the conundrum is not completely solved, and some important genetic research suggests that species are more vulnerable than the fossil record indicates. A fuller solution to the conundrum will be important for improving forecasts of climate change effects on biodiversity.

HT Carl Zimmer.

Note that this is not a call for complacency, it is a call for better models of climate change effects on extinctions.

New marine reserves

The (London) Telegraph reports (via Tim Worstall),

Eight large marine reserves where fishermen would be liable for damage to protected species are being proposed by the Government today in a new Marine Bill…

Ben Bradshaw, the environment minister, will announce a network of eight marine reserves, including different types of marine habitat from the sandbanks of the Dogger Bank and off North Norfolk to the Darwin Mounds, an area of deep-water coral 1,000 metres deep off north-west Scotland…

…fishing would be banned altogether in some of the reserves - so-called no-take zones - with public consultation being used to determine which…

Jean-Luc Solandt of the Marine Conservation Society said: “I don’t think the number of reserves the Government is proposing is big enough to comply with their international obligations. That would need 20-30 per cent of each habitat covered. It is all about the exchange of larvae between areas so species are resilient.”

What would a similar scheme cost worldwide? In the 2004 paper by Andrew Balmford et al. The worldwide costs of marine protected areas, the authors estimated that conserving 20-30% of the world’s seas would cost $5 to $19 billion per year, and would probably create around one million jobs.

Harmful subsidies leading to overfishing were estimated at $15 to $30 billion per year, with the annual global marine fish catch being worth $70-80 billion per year.

Control Fraud

James Galbraith mentions in a comment the very useful concept of “control fraud” introduced by William K. Black, see e.g. When Fragile becomes Friable: Endemic Control Fraud as a Cause of Economic Stagnation and Collapse (pdf),

Individual “control frauds” cause greater losses than all other forms of property crime combined. They are financial super-predators. Control frauds are crimes led by the head of state or CEO that use the nation or company as a fraud vehicle. Waves of “control fraud” can cause economic collapses, damage and discredit key institutions vital to good political governance, and erode trust…

Economic theory about fraud is underdeveloped, core neo-classical theories imply that major frauds are trivial, economists are not taught about fraud and fraud mechanisms, and neo-classical economists minimize the incidence and importance of fraud for reasons of self-interest, class and ideology.

Neo-classical economics’ understanding of fraud is so weak that its policy prescriptions, if adopted wholly, produce strongly criminogenic environments that cause waves of control fraud. Neo-classical policies simultaneously make control fraud easier and more lucrative, dramatically reduce the risk of detection and prosecution by maximizing “systems capacity” problems, and encourage crime by making it easier for fraudsters to “neutralize” the social and psychological constraints against deceit and fraud. Thus the paradox: neo-classical economic triumphs produce tragedy…

William K. Black is also the author of the book The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One.

New journal: Review of Environmental Economics and Policy

First issue in March 2007. The editor is Robert Stavins. Link here.

Sahara provides nutrients for the Amazon

Absolutely fascinating paper, but what does it mean?

Abstract. About 40 million tons of dust are transported annually from the Sahara to the Amazon basin. Saharan dust has been proposed to be the main mineral source that fertilizes the Amazon basin, generating a dependence of the health and productivity of the rain forest on dust supply from the Sahara. Here we show that about half of the annual dust supply to the Amazon basin is emitted from a single source: the Bodélé depression located northeast of Lake Chad, approximately 0.5% of the size of the Amazon or 0.2% of the Sahara. Placed in a narrow path between two mountain chains that direct and accelerate the surface winds over the depression, the Bodélé emits dust on 40% of the winter days, averaging more than 0.7 million tons of dust per day…

The evolution of altruism

One of the most important 2006 papers in the behavioral sciences is Sam Bowles’ Group Competition, Reproductive Leveling, and the Evolution of Human Altruism (Science vol 314, p 1569). He demonstrates that genetic differences between early human groups are likely to have been great enough so that lethal intergroup competition could account for the evolution of altruism. Crucial for his argument are distinctive human practices such as sharing food beyond the immediate family, monogamy, and other forms of reproductive leveling.

Comment by Yann Klimentidis here.

Here is an article in New Scientist about the paper,

Humans may have evolved altruistic traits as a result of a cultural “tax” we paid to each other early in our evolution, a new study suggests.

The following points are made in Science Week by Robert Boyd,

Nordhaus on the Stern Review

William Nordhaus reviews the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change here (pdf, hat tip Prometheus). He says that “It is virtually impossible for mortals outside the group that did the modeling to understand the detailed results in the Review“, and criticizes the Review’s “extreme assumption about discounting”,

The Review proposes using a social discount rate that is essentially zero…

While this feature of low discounting might appear benign in climate change policy, we could imagine other areas where the implications could themselves be dangerous. Imagine the preventive war strategies that might be devised with low social discount rates. Countries might start wars today because of the possibility of nuclear proliferation a century ahead; or because of a potential adverse shift in the balance of power two centuries ahead; or because of speculative futuristic technologies three centuries ahead. It is not clear how long the globe could long survive the calculations and machinations of zero-discount-rate military powers. This is yet a final example of a surprising implication of a low discount rate…

The radical revision of the economics of climate change proposed by the Review does not arise from any new economics, science, or modeling. Rather, it depends decisively on the assumption of a near-zero social discount rate…

… the central questions about global-warming policy – how much, how fast, and how costly – remain open. The Review informs but does not answer these fundamental questions.

Do IQ tests measure general intelligence?

On Alpha Psy Hugo reports on an interesting paper (Van Der Maas et al., A Dynamical Model of General Intelligence: The Positive Manifold of Intelligence by Mutualism).

Scores on a wide range of intelligence tests tend to correlate positively. From a statistical or psychometric point of view this creates a variable, g that merely indicates the strength of this correlation. If there were no correlation at all, there would be no g, but since the correlations tend to be high, people get excited and many of them take the next step of positing an underlying common cause (also called g). For the psychologists who defend this notion, there is a common variable (modulating, say, the way your neurons fire) that influences on the measures of all of these intelligence tests, thus creating the observed correlation. However researchers from the University of Amsterdam are challenging the common wisdom and suggest an explanation for the correlation that doesn’t need a common cause.

How important is intelligence? On Dilbert Blog Scott Adams says,

Endangered birds

Source: Butchart et al. Measuring Global Trends in the Status of Biodiversity: Red List Indices for Birds.

Birds in the Indomalayan region show a steep rate of deterioration during the 1990s because of intensifying deforestation in Indonesia. All those forest fires…

More information here.

International Political Economy Society

First annual meeting of the IPES. Papers can be downloaded here. A paper by Michael J. Lamla confirms the Environmental Kuznets Curve hypothesis.

World approaching deforestation turning point

From BBC,

Study hopeful for world’s forests

A new technique for measuring the state of the world’s forests shows the future may not be as bad as previously feared.

An international team of researchers say its Forest Identity study suggests the world could be approaching a “turning point” from deforestation.

The study measures timber volumes, biomass and captured carbon - not just land areas covered by trees.

The findings are being published in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“The trend is better than previously thought,” said Pekka Kauppi, one of the paper’s co-authors.

“We see prospects for an end to deforestation; we do not make a forecast but it is possible.”

The BBC story is here, map at the end of the article, previous post on forests in the European Union, the original article by Kauppi et al., Returning forests analyzed with the forest identity, University of Helsinki Forest Identity website, press release here.

Papers

There is now a new tag, Papers, in the Categories sidebar. So if you want to see the papers that have been mentioned in this blog, click on Papers in the sidebar.

Critique of cost-benefit analysis

Here is Lisa Heinzerling’s and Frank Ackerman’s critique of cost-benefit analysis, Pricing the Pricelesss: Cost-Benefit Analysis of Environmental Protection (they also discuss Larry Summers’ toxic waste memo). They write,

In recent years the use of “cost-benefit” analysis to set environmental standards has attracted a large and high-profile group of supporters. According to its advocates, cost-benefit analysis offers a way of achieving superior environmental results at a lower overall cost to society than other available approaches.

This view is mistaken. Cost-benefit analysis is a deeply flawed method that repeatedly leads to biased and misleading results. Far from providing a panacea, cost-benefit analysis offers no clear advantages in making regulatory policy decisions and often produces inferior results, in terms of both environmental protection and overall social welfare, compared to other approaches.

The paper is here (pdf).

No limits to life expectancy?

If you haven’t already seen it, take a look at this amazing graph illustrating the steady 3 months per year increase in life expectancy (and the errors of experts who thought that life expectancy was hitting a ceiling).

Fig. 1. Record female life expectancy from 1840 to the present [suppl. table 2 (1)]. The linear-regression trend is depicted by a bold black line (slope = 0.243) and the extrapolated trend by a dashed gray line. The horizontal black lines show asserted ceilings on life expectancy, with a short vertical line indicating the year of publication (suppl. table 1). The dashed red lines denote projections of female life expectancy in Japan published by the United Nations in 1986, 1999, and 2001 (1): It is encouraging that the U.N. altered its projection so radically between 1999 and 2001.

Source: Oeppen, J. and J. W. Vaupel: Broken limits to life expectancy. Science 296, 1029-1031 (2002). They conclude,

Three Findings
This mortality research has exposed the empirical misconceptions and specious theories that underlie the pernicious belief that the expectation of life cannot rise much further. Nonetheless, faith in proximate longevity limits endures, sustained by ex cathedra pronouncement and mutual citation (1, 8, 9). In this article we add three further lines of cogent evidence. First, experts have repeatedly asserted that life expectancy is approaching a ceiling: these experts have repeatedly been proven wrong. Second, the apparent leveling off of life expectancy in various countries is an artifact of laggards catching up and leaders falling behind. Third, if life expectancy were close to a maximum, then the increase in the record expectation of life should be slowing. It is not. For 160 years, best-performance life expectancy has steadily increased by a quarter of a year per year, an extraordinary constancy of human achievement.

How to Grow a Silicon Valley

Paul Graham observes

I think you only need two kinds of people to create a technology hub: rich people and nerds. They’re the limiting reagents in the reaction that produces startups, because they’re the only ones present when startups get started. Everyone else will move.

Observation bears this out: within the US, towns have become startup hubs if and only if they have both rich people and nerds. Few startups happen in Miami, for example, because although it’s full of rich people, it has few nerds. It’s not the kind of place nerds like.

Whereas Pittsburgh has the opposite problem: plenty of nerds, but no rich people.

Paul Graham is right, but we can be a bit more specific. You need not just rich people, but smart money, and not just nerds, but academic superstars.

The case for academic superstars may be disturbing to egalitarian sensibilities, but the evidence is good. A recent paper, Movement of Star Scientists and Engineers and High-Tech Firm Entry by Lynne G. Zucker and Michael R. Darby of UCLA finds no evidence that ideas, patents, or highly cited science papers has any influence on the creation of new high-tech firms. The New York Times reports on the paper,

The one thing the study does find to be consistently associated with high-tech start-ups is the presence of star scientists — not the ideas, which can be copied, but the scientists themselves. This seems to be the one way in which a university can be used as an engine of business growth. Landing the best scientists in the world can start a place on the way to economic superstardom. The catch is, there are not many superstars and they mainly want to be near one another. The study covered 1981-2004 but identified only 1,838 scientific superstars. That is about the same number of people who played in Major League Baseball over that period.

Many countries want to create high-tech clusters. How should they do it?

The recipe is not complicated. Academic superstars tend to concentrate. You need a first class university where they can congregate. You need quality academics, not quantity. Much like starting a Premier League football club, you will have to pay the market rate for the talent. Get the superstars, and the lesser nerds will follow.

You need not just rich people, but smart money. Smart money is money that is invested by people who really understand the industry and business they are investing in. They have usually made their money in the industry, so they have industry experience, knowledge, and contacts. More value than mere money is therefore added to new enterprises. You need a location that is attractive to these people, and it usually works best if they live not more that one hour’s drive from the firms they are investing in.

So here is the formula,

Academic Superstars + Rich People with Smart Money = High Tech Cluster

The Evolution of Work

Source: Alexandra Spitz, Are Skill Requirements in the Workplace Rising? Stylized Facts and Evidence on Skill-Biased Technological Change, Table 5.

Nice paper from Germany. Activities are classified in five skill categories: non-routine analytical tasks such as research, planning or evaluation activities; non-routine interactive tasks such as the coordination and delegation of work; routine cognitive tasks such as double-entry bookkeeping and calculating; routine manual tasks such as machine feeding or running a machine and non-routine manual tasks such as housekeeping or restoring houses.

What we are seeing here are the effect of two industrial revolutions.The first industrial revolution made it cheaper to make and transport things. The second, based on information technology, made it cheaper to manipulate and transport information. The first leads to a decrease in routine manual tasks, the second to a decrease in routine cognitive tasks.

We are left with non-routine manual jobs (when, oh when, will they come up with a device that can iron and fold clothes?), and jobs on the “ought” side of the is-ought divide. On the “ought” side, in the non-routine analytic and interactive jobs, we pay people for their judgments and preferences. Since these are based on trained emotional reactions, I don’t see any prospects at all for replacement of people by machines in these jobs.

Population Aging and Carbon Emissions

As populations age, lifestyles and consumption patterns change. Here is an interesting paper (hat tip Tim Worstall), Population aging and future carbon emissions in the United States. The paper shows that under reasonable assumptions (e.g. population living in elderly households increase from 10% to 20-40% in the long term), aging effects on emissions can be as large, or larger, than technology effects, leading to dramatic reductions in CO2 emissions.

Abstract

Changes in the age composition of U.S. households over the next several decades could affect energy use and carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions, the most important greenhouse gas. This article incorporates population age structure into an energy–economic growth model with multiple dynasties of heterogeneous households. The model is used to estimate and compare effects of population aging and technical change on baseline paths of U.S. energy use, and CO₂ emissions. Results show that population aging reduces long-term emissions, by almost 40% in a low population scenario, and effects of aging on emissions can be as large, or larger than, effects of technical change in some cases…