The Bustard has discovered, while exploring an attic, the manuscript of Ronald Stone’s 2096 novella, Waterford. Given its relevance to environmental matters, the work has now been published and is available on Amazon in e-book format.
All sales proceeds in January 2016 will be donated to Veganuary.
The Bustard has been busy with real work and novel writing, hence its absence. Now right back to climate policy.
The special one, Jose Mourinho, is no longer so special, and his second stint at Chelsea came to a sorry end a couple of weeks ago. In the end Mr Abramovich lost faith and it was time for change.
The EU ETS has its own special ones, or at least industries which consider themselves special ones:
The fertiliser industry is special: International Fertiliser Association tells us: “Fertilizers account for 50 per cent of global food production; without them, we simply wouldn’t have enough food.”
The coal industry is special: Brian Ricketts, Euracoal’s secretary-general, argues that coal lifted humanity out of servitude. (http://www.euractiv.com/sections/energy/coal-lobby-chief-cop21-means-we-will-be-hated-slave-traders-320424)
I have heard the case that steel is special, and cement are special: without them we wouldn’t have the built world which is an integral part of the civilisation we know.
I have heard it argued that aviation is special because it gives people an amazing freedom and the chance to discover the world.
Industry lobbyists argue to the European Commission that they are special (technologically, economically, socially, and so forth) and therefore need particular protection under the EU ETS – that is, they need lots of free allowances.
I don’t think the special argument should work, because, funnily enough, everyone is special (and when they are under threat of CO2 regulation, they get all the more special.) If you make exceptions for everyone because they have their little bit of special, you end up with ineffective regulation.
The Commission needs to argue that being special is no longer enough to get free allowances.
Rather, these industries, whose very existence is threatened by strong climate regulation, need to change tack and embrace the challenge less ambiguously.
They should say: we want plenty of free allowances because this is the 2050 Zero Emission Marshall Plan for our sector: we are teaming up with all the main global manufacturers and are jointly establishing a biennial technology prize of $1m for the best advance in cutting emissions in our sector; we are teaming up with MIT or Max Planck Institute to create a dedicated crack team of scientists to crack the top five technology problems in our sector; we are establishing a $1bn fund for investment in R&D and promising new low-carbon technologies; we are training 10,000 engineers world-wide in cutting emissions from operations; we are forming teams with users of our products (food producers, farmers, architects, engineers, builders, or what have you) to minimise down-stream emissions from our products… and so forth.
Note: doing things, not planning to do things.
If it means a degree of collaboration that blows a hole in competition orthodoxy, blow hard.
So by all means support these industries. But not because they are special ones. Rather, because they are dead seriously committed to a bold, aggressive plan to take us to zero emissions by 2050 and they need all the help we can give them.
I have spent time this summer helping refugees in Budapest and also got engaged in discussions with people about “what to do about the refugee problem”. In the press and on Facebook I came across many claims intended to support one view or another. I noticed that often the quality of argument is very poor. People often expressed views which were shot from the hip but then they could not support them with knowledge or evidence. Sometimes anecdote clashed with principle; sometimes reason battled with emotion. Sometimes quite intelligent and well-educated people said things a primary school kid could take to pieces. Other times people completely switched off their thinking brain and let the instinct brain babble away. Little progress was made.
I found myself agreeing and disagreeing with stuff on both sides – although again I didn’t have much to go on to agree with or disagree with, because I also didn’t have many facts at my finger tips. Like: do refugees really boost the economy? It sounds nice, but where was that, when did it happen? Or do refugees burden the economy? Which ones?
And then, do I care what the economic impact of accepting refugees is – does that really matter when we are dealing with people who are fleeing from really shit places. No-one is going to starve as a result of our GDP taking a hit because of the cost of being kind and letting in a million people. So get real. But that, too, is an unformed argument. Perhaps someone might starve. I don’t have any model or facts to support or counter that claim.
Do immigrants enrich our culture or undermine it? And then what do I mean by “our culture”? Is that the fact we play our football matches at 3pm on Saturday and have nice old churches? Is that all so important compared to questions of life and death? And what is this sudden interest in Christian culture? The churches still seem pretty empty to me, so I think this Christian culture might not be so Christian really, after all. And aren’t Christians supposed to love their neighbours and be good Samaritans (Luke 10: 25-37)? So how does that work? Is there like some limit to how Christian a good Christian should be in order to be a good Christian but not too good a Christian for his own good?
So I felt that the whole refugee question, being quite serious, deserves much, much more rigour. Look at all the science which goes into climate change – the immense cumulative effort of the IPCC, the work of thousands of scientists. Is as much rigour applied to making decisions about refugee policy?
I needed to start somewhere so I got a pencil and a piece of paper and started to list the claims made by each side. I wanted to build a catalogue of the arguments and see how they interlink, support or rebut each other. I wanted to see how each claim is supported by evidence and what is the source of that evidence. Or if a claim is supported by an assumption, how reasonable is that assumption and what is it based on.
Then, if one claim leads to another claim, what is the logical connection between the two, and how reasonable or robust is that connection.
But then the scope got a bit more ambitious. I also wanted to investigate the values which underpinned claims – when someone is worried about the impact on the Christian heritage of Europe, how Christian is that, and how does that work? Or if someone is dogmatic about letting everyone – yes everyone – into our country, what are the values underlying that and are they being applied consistently? And, what other claims do those values support? Do the same values support any claims on the other side?
I wanted to chase arguments to ground, to see where they lead to, rather than seeing them peter out as the thread changed tack.
I wanted to strip out the emotional and rhetorical content from each claim and shine a bright light on it so see its factual and logical content.
I wanted sift through this logical construct of claim, values, implications and supporting evidence, in order to search for common ground. If I could find claims on opposing sides which happen to have common ground, then there might be ways of developing policy proposals which can command broader support – providing they are communicated in the right way.
Well, all this became very ambitious, so I began to think about who might be interested in doing this, rather than thinking about how I can do it. I realised I don’t have a “model of political argument” or associated technology needed to do a proper mapping of the claims and related arguments. And I certainly don’t have the time to work on this.
So I conceived of a project which might be suitable for students of political science.
The project would list claims made on all sides of the debate (e.g. “Large influx of people will undermine our precious culture”) and map out all their features: assign to them the underlying value set they come from (e.g. settler, or Conservative); reference the supporting assumptions or evidence (e.g. such and such an academic study); cite the evidence which backs the assumptions; plot out the implications of the claim, i.e. generate new claims which are implied by each claim, and then subject the implied claims to the same analysis; link them to counter-claims – see how they match up; classify rhetorical attributes; evaluate any emotional but not reasonable attributes … thus create a complete map of the arguments.
The mapping would serve various uses:
(i) Analysing and evaluating political argument – how sound are the arguments; do they really stack up once you have stripped out the rhetoric; how right or consistent are they? Do they have any implications which don’t stack up?
(ii) Communicating clearly to the general public and interested users the validity of the argument and the conditions under which it is valid: it would be very useful to shine a bright and rigorous light onto the bullshit and scaremongering as well as onto the unquestioning hopefulness one can see in the debate.
(iii) Searching out potential for common ground: once you have stripped out the rhetoric and analysed rigorously each claim, you can see better the distance between claims on each side and possibly find common ground (simple example: one side says “they should go back to Syria”; another says “they should stay”: potential common ground is to say “they can stay until there have been two years of peace then they have to go back”)
(iv) Searching out for inconsistencies in positions
(iv) etc etc
Finally, I figured that if this kind of rigour could be applied to political argument generally, and communicated in a way that the general public can understand, we could bring about an improvement in political argument. We could also even move to properly working bullshit-meters or argument-o-meters which could be incorporated into FB pages, newspapers etc. Eventually woolly-thinking, bullshit and emotionally charged argument would be eliminated.
If you work in political science and think there is mileage in this, and it hasn’t been done, please run with it.
How do you work out how many refugees each country should take?
I thought of four main things which are relevant:
– Ability to afford – the richer a country is, the less pain caused by admitting refugees
– Population – the larger the population, the less impact an additional refugee has
– Historical responsibility – the more a country interfered in a relevant country, the more refugees it should take from that country
– Cultural proximity – the close a country is culturally, the easier it is to accept refugees from another culture
I wanted to model this. I considered that ability to afford is represented by GDP per person. Population and GDP per person give us GDP. So the first two are covered by GDP
Historical responsibility is quite well linked to how much you took part in arming, bombing or fighting in that country. Even if a country only had “diplomatic” responsibility for the refugee crisis, the likelihood is that in the background they are supplying arms to one or both sides and that probably means they spend a lot on arms themselves. I think a reasonable proxy for this is how much money did a country spend on arms since 1990.
Now, given that basically the richer a country and the more populous it is, the more it can afford to spend on weapons, I decided that the arms spending variable doubles up for GDP. So now I can reduce the first three factors to total spend on arms since 1990.
I am tempted to adjust this for distance, because (with the exception of global policeman USA) the further a country away is from trouble, the less you it is to interfere with it.
Distance is also useful for cultural proximity. The inverse of distance from the country in question as a simple proxy. Culture disperses over geographical space because it is about people moving, trading and communicating. Until very recently the closer you were physically to a country, the more contact you would have, and therefore the more cultural proximity. This perhaps does not work in the case of colonialism, but let’s see.
As distance is an indicator of cultural proximity – but not a very strong one – and as I do need distance for adjusting my military spending as well, it can serve usefully in my formula.
So the formula is like this:
The number of refugees country X should adopt from country Y = total military spending of country X since 1990 / distance between country X and country Y.
I guess this should be adjusted for the number of refugees already taken, but we can adjust for that later.
Let’s take the example of Syria. I assumed 5 million refugees from Syria. I got military spending data from the World Bank’s data website (data.worldbank.org) and distances from www.distancefromto.net). Spend is calculated in 2005 US$s for the sake of argument. I included the top fifty military spenders only.
The top ten come in like this:
It is good to see muslim powerhouse Saudi Arabia country playing its part. Also it is good to see China doing its bit despite being a fair distance from things. I am missing Russia, but it gets away from being in the top ten because it stretches so far east, and the distance measurement takes the midpoint of the country. If I measure, in Russia’s case, from Moscow, then the top ten is like this:
I think this is fairer, both to India and Russia. So the formula needs to be adapted to reflect not the geographical centre but the economic centre of a country.
The top twenty look like this:
The Southern European countries are also taking refugees from Africa. This example only assumes Syria, and the exercise has to be repeated for all relevant countries to get the full quota.
I think this system might be a bit unfair to southern European and Mediterranean countries (e.g. Greece, Italy and Spain) whose geographical proximity to the Middle East is greater than their cultural proximity.
I tweaked the numbers by adjusting for the % muslim population in order to strengthen the cultural proximity. I got a list of % muslim population by country from the Guardian website (http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/jan/28/muslim-population-country-projection-2030). If I simply multiply the military spend / distance by % muslim population, I get very unfair results, because historical responsibility gets too diluted:
Clearly some big, militarily responsible countries (e.g. the USA and the UK) get away lightly here.
A good compromise (even if we are using formulas, political compromise is needed) is to give a weighting of three to the first formula and a weighting of one to the second. The result for the top twenty is this:
From these figures we will have to deduct those already taken.
Even if the final agreement of the 2015 Telford Protocol on Refugee Adoption brings different results, it is an interesting exercise to think through how different contributing factors influence the outcome. What I have written above might be too simplistic, but it is a start. At the moment the whole thing seems very ad hoc and certain governments are spending too much time building walls and fences and not enough time thinking.
By huge irony, bad government can be good for society. Which actually means that bad government is good government. How can that be?
The Hungarian government has handled the refugee crisis in a quixotic manner. This year it has taken two main policy steps to deal with the ca. 150,000 refugees / migrants / asylum seekers who have entered the country this year. First, it launched a national bill-board campaign with sentences, in Hungarian, such as: “If you come to Hungary, you can’t take work away from Hungarians.” The tone of this campaign provoked division in the country: it stoked up anti-immigrants (mainly right-wingers of different kinds); and it enraged people of more liberal disposition. So that was very unhelpful and probably deliberately so. The confusion of immigration and terrorism in a national consultation on immigration policy was deliberate and wrong.
Then it decided, with the skimpiest of consultation, to build a 175km razor-wire fence along the Serbian border where most of the refugees / migrants / asylum seekers come in from. The fence is being built at such a pace that the military and the unemployed are being recruited to help in the effort.
I don’t think the Hungarians are any better or worse than other countries. Slovakia recently announced it would only let Christians in. Macedonia had to resort to tear gas. The British are relying on a fence in Calais for the management of their immigration policy. None of this is worthy or intelligent. It is just that behaviour like this in the nature of people with power.
So how can this bad government be good for a country?
Since June this year in Hungary numerous voluntary groups have sprouted up, mainly over the medium of Facebook, to organise and focus efforts of ordinary citizens to help the refugees. Some help refuges immediately on their arrival in Hungary; others cook for them; others help them on their way from the entry point to the designated camps which are hundreds of kilometres away. Many of these activities are focussed around the railway stations.
Often for the first time, thousands of us are getting involved in volunteering. We meet victims of war for the first time. We have amazing conversations with people from countries we know little about: Afghanistan, Cameroon, Iran, Iraq, Mali, Senegal or Syria. On one bewildering evening I met a senior official from the Ministry of Pilgrimage in Kabul; a biologist from Senegal; helped a Syrian man clean his grotesquely blistered feet. We are witness to the extraordinary and the surprising. Some get up at dawn, others stay to the early hours with a motivation much stronger than that of making money.
Because railway stations are a melting pot of all walks of life, we meet and talk to homeless people, railway officials, cleaners, policemen, security guards – people we might never talk to in our normal lives. We hear their stories, we have drink coffee with them. We learn that other people in Hungary have similar views and values. We also practise engaging with people whose views and values do appear to be quite different.
And in a way it is selfish: ironically you learn that volunteering is enriching and enjoyable.
Through this process Hungarian society is being enriched. Ordinary people are learning new skills, learning about people and the world and its complexities and subtleties; forming new friendships and communities; having new encounters and discussions; revising their political views.
The government might have acted with clinical, Swiss efficiency, where refugees would pass unseen into hermetic processing centres. But then we would never have experienced any of the above. There are hundreds of meetings, conversations, emotions and experiences we would never have had.
Bad government can give ordinary people the opportunity to live life in a more meaningful way. On reflection it is obvious: we leave the government to do one of the most important, enriching human activities: caring for others. This is no excuse for incompetence, nastiness and corruption. But when the government fails, and we are left to our own devices, we have a chance to pick up the pieces and become richer for it.
