Tag Archives: Big picture

How many mobiles do we need?

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It is reasonably well known that despite widespread poverty and reliance on subsistence agriculture, growth in the uptake and use of mobile phones in Africa is the fastest in the world.

The opportunity to bypass the clunky fixed line option that you must wait months to have connected by going mobile has been too good to miss. Pay as you go options with tiny recharge amounts to cope with the cost just made it even easier.

All over the world and in just a few decades every man and his dog has acquired a mobile phone.

A recent techcrunch.com report has aggregated the consequences of this inevitable trend.

The headline figure is that the number of mobile-connected devices will exceed the number of people on earth by the end of 2012. And well worth a headline. Quite staggering really that we already have enough mobile devices to go around everyone.

More telling was the prediction that by 2016, there will be 1.4 mobile devices per capita. That year, there will be over 10 billion mobile-connected devices, including machine-to-machine (M2M) modules.

Pause a moment on the notion that having sufficient mobile enabled devices in circulation for one each, even though there are 7 billion of us, is not enough.

One device obviously does not cut it.

What this means is that once we have one, most likely we will get one, two, maybe several more.

Staying in touch has always meant a lot to us and, whatever way we look at it, we are a social species.  It looks like that instinct to stay on touch or to feel that we are able to connect is very important indeed – important enough to part with the funds to hire or buy multiple devices.

It may not be too late to invest in telecoms shares.

New eBook – Environmental Issues for Real

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Not satisfied with haranguing readers of this blog with environmental woes, I have branched out into the dynamic new world of ebook publishing.

Thanks to the amazing people at Smashwords my latest collection of essays on the environmental issues of the day is now available to download in all the usual formats.

Give it a whirl and maybe leave a review on the site. It would be great to hear what you think.

Easy or not

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Meercat taking it easyIn his book ‘Hot, flat and crowded’ Thomas L. Friedman rails against the glorification of easy. His main complaint is that anything we do to support ourselves in an increasingly hot and crowded world is not going to be easy. And those who say there is an easy way are just kidding themselves.

Humans are notoriously hard to motivate without some form of reward. Most of what we need to do to keep producing natural resources and accommodate climate change when there are so many of us will require some sacrifice. The only reward will be the hope that we have done the right thing. Saying it will be easy is at best naive and at worst irresponsible.

To illustrate his point Friedman quotes Michael Maniates of Allegheny College.

Maniates makes the following assertions about what we ask of ourselves and one another:

  • we should look for easy, cost-effective things to do in our private lives as consumers because
  • if we all do them the cumulative effect will be a safe planet, because
  • by nature, we aren’t terribly interested in doing anything that isn’t private, individualistic, cost-effective and, above all, easy.

I reckon Maniates is on the money.

In default mode we are lazy. We would rather not sacrifice but if we have to then please can we do it from the couch. Please do not ask us to actively sacrifice.

Friedman’s frustration is understandable because it was this lazy default mode that has seen us consume with abandon and take ourselves to the edge of the resource use precipice.

In his book ‘Thinking, fast and slow’ Daniel Kahneman even has an explanation for why lazy is the default.

Cognitive research seems to be telling us that we think in a couple of different ways. We intuit most things. This action is easy and fast and works well for the bulk of our everyday decisions.

Only our intuition is not very good at complex thought, especially where we need to analyse for or calculate a result. For this we have to engage the thinking brain. The only problem is that this type of thinking takes work – real physical work apparently – and we find it difficult.

Our environmental challenges are very new and not in the default program. Our intuition has evolved for us to know that food, water and shelter are either here now, or just around the corner. We are not used to thinking about where these things are going to come from; yet we are forced more and more to think analytically about the basics. Indeed we have to think twice: first to tell us that we have a problem and second to figure out some solutions.

Friedman suggests it is irresponsible to say that our environmental challenges are easy to solve when, in fact, they are hard. Potentially more challenging than the problems themselves is that we prefer to solve things in our default mode. We prefer to intuit answers because it is a lot easier that way. Thinking is just too hard.

Take a moment to recall your experiences in the workplace or at home. Ask yourself what proportion of your time and that of your colleagues and family members is spent in default mode

Yep, we prefer not to have to think hard. No surprise that we glorify easy.

Only there is a reason why talking up easy is so common. My guess is that any call to think hard about anything will fall on deaf ears.

Thinking

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Do we think enough or too much? It’s an interesting question with chalk or cheese answers depending on where you try to find them.

According to Parnell McGuiness writing in the Sydney Morning Herald we are not thinking enough because our breakneck media cycle and the domination of the lobbyist has eroded true thoughtfulness on the big issues. Immediacy and a need to be right have reduced the extent to which we really explore a challenge and so we have become stuck in a narrow range of options. Discussion has been reduced to argument and no one seems able or confident enough to subject their view to serious interrogation.

I must say I have to agree. Our serious media reports more on style than substance from our leaders, although to be fair, this is because there is so little substance to discuss. The intellect is there. It cannot be that so many highly educated individuals cannot figure things out or engage in the necessary debate on issues that are difficult to resolve. Yet it is hard to find that debate. Instead we are given the extremes of opinion without the logic flow that led the proponents to their definite conclusion.

McGuiness suggests a return to true open-ended questions such as ‘What is happiness?’ As opposed to the already constrained “Can we be happy in a capitalist society?” Implying that we have become too constrained in our thinking for thinking to be effective. She has a point. And her solution is that we create more fertile thinking places and get to it.

Then there are the new age types who tell us that we think too much. We live in a mental fog created by our thinking brain that makes it very hard to see the truth. Constant brain chatter has made us fearful of the future and a slave to all our past psychological damage. If we could only stop all that noise and intuit then we would know instinctively what must be done.

This spiritual solution, that is hardly new having been around in various guises for millennia, is to take up meditation, yoga and gentle walks in the countryside or any activity that will help our chatterbox brains take a breather. In short, think less.

So are we not thinking enough or are we thinking too much?

Well there is definitely too much chatter going on in our heads. We are far too easily distracted by the inane, argumentative and opinionated. And what is it with the thousands of TV dramas in which there is either murder, infidelity, corruption or, preferably, all three. Our minds are so stimulated that it is no surprise they are manic.

So yes, we think too much. And we could all do with some quiet and quieting time.

Only then we need to re-engage our thinking minds with the wisdom we will find in those quiet moments. We need our brains to help make intuition real because reality requires practical solutions. And they need some thought.

So maybe we each need a week of Vipassana meditation followed by a workshop at the nearest think tank. I wonder what kind of solution that would produce.

M

You can find the original essay on open-ended thinking by Parnel McGuiness in the latest issue of Binge Thinking

Problems for the environment

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Here is an interesting thing. Over time, each and every corner of the planet has experienced just about every extreme of environmental condition.

Any given place on the earth will have been really hot, freezing cold, wet, dry, flooded, parched, ravaged by fire, hit by tsunami or earthquake, bathed in toxic gases from volcanic activity and seen the effects of meteorite strikes large enough to send gigatons of dust into the jet stream. It has all happened.

The only thing needed for all of these events to occur in any one place is a very, very long period of time. So long that, although we can write down the length of time in numbers, it is beyond our human perception.

One million years is a yawn in evolutionary time and a blink in geological time.

Certainly when impacts occur, there is a change to the way the environment works. Ecological processes may speed up, slow or shut down for a while and many species may be lost until others arrive more suited to the new conditions.  But over time a new pattern emerges and life continues. No matter the severity or extent of change, disturbance and impact, planet earth has absorbed it and kicked on.

Even when the disturbance is extreme, such as a volcanic eruption sufficient to put the landscape under two feet of caustic ash, there is a period of apparent sterility until rain and the arrival of microbes start to turn the ash layer into something tolerable for bigger organisms. In a few hundred years, a little longer if the climate is cold, the process of succession will return a green mantle to the landscape.

So for the environment, there is no such thing as a problem, only change.

Not only is there change, but change is normal.

Enter Homo sapiens, modern humans, us. Initially we were of minimal consequence to this overall pattern of change. We started out with just a few million individuals spread far and wide in small groups in sync with the grand scheme of predator and prey on the savannas. This arrangement persisted for just shy of a million years, and then, all of a sudden, we figured out novel ways to appropriate resources – lots of them.

In an evolutionary blink we entered an exponential phase of population growth and migrated to all continents. Today we number 7 billion souls, with an additional 8,000 net added every hour (1.3 million per week). Together we appropriate over 40% of the global primary production, modify landscapes everywhere and have even started to change concentrations of atmospheric gases. If Homo sapiens were a species of insect or rodent the description would be ‘plague proportions’.

Still this is not a problem for the environment.

Voracious herbivores have come and gone before.  Appropriation of resources by one species simply leaves less carbon to fuel other species and most plagues pass. For the environment, a plague is just another source of change.

Not so for us. We see change as a problem, a big one if it means that our means of production are compromised, or worse, our primary needs for food, water and shelter might not be met.

Unlike the environment, we have an awareness of self that makes us worry about change. We alter the environment to best produce resources for us and then we want it to stay in that modified state, steadily delivering the resources we require. Except that the very modifications we induce are a driver of change to the ecological processes that support primary production. They are disturbances as severe and widespread as any other.

Not only do we disturb; we have developed a system that allows a handful of us to supply the primary resources for everyone else in return for cash. This has too many consequences to describe here but it means that most of us can bunch up and live far away from the sources of our food and water. We then use energy to move these resources, and ourselves about the place.

As the modified system of production is efficient (initially at least) most of us have time to consider, manufacture and acquire goods that supply our secondary needs – we acquire lots of stuff. These goods use up materials that we have found in the landscape and under the earth. We extract and transform natural resources and further modify the landscape generating by-products as we go.

Even when this goes on for 7 billion humans scrambling for food, water, shelter and wants, the environment does not see this as a problem. It is merely another novel disturbance akin to a meteorite the size of a city crashing into the desert. This is bad news for humans and their needs for food and water but just another bout of disturbance and change for the environment. It will shrug and go on just as it has through deep ice ages, big meteorite impacts and a host of other disturbances that are just the way of things.

So what if there is a mass extinction? This has happened half a dozen times before and over time biodiversity has come back stronger. It will do it again, only maybe not with quite the array of mammal species we have now.

Pretending that the environment has a problem is a deflection. In the long run there are no problems for the environment, only problems for us.

Stranded assets

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My analogue television is a stranded asset. It has perfect picture and sound, plus it has worked this way for years without a flicker. Only now there is no signal for it because we have moved into the digital age.

I could complain. My investment in that analogue TV still had time to run – I expected to get entertainment returns from reruns of the Simpsons for years to come.

Instead I was forced to purchase another asset, either a set-top box to convert the signal or a new digital TV. I chose the second option in plasma. By doing so I wrote off any returns from my stranded asset and made another investment.

And the world did not end.

In fact I did what the economists, politicians and business owners want; I made another purchase.

It would be interesting to see what would happen to the performance of super funds that have invested in fossil fuel power plants if those assets were also stranded. No doubt returns would take a hit, but again, I doubt that the world would end.

We are always told that superfunds, the investment vehicles that take a proportion of our before tax income that in Australia is a compulsory 9% of salary paid by all employers on behalf of their staff, are risk adverse investors. Surely then, they should have balanced portfolios.

Presumably someone has done the sums, but I would guess that the inherent and irrational volatility of the markets is a far bigger hit that the loss of some power stations. And like the banks that chose to lend to the Greek government, they might not be as sure of their returns as they think and they may not get a bailout.

So the noise and bustle over the loss of these assets to accommodate the necessary change to alternative fuels is really vested interest. It comes across as a rail against a redistribution of returns but in really, it is the fear that they might actually have got the investment wrong. That in following what they claimed was conservative investment management they, in actually, were taking a huge punt.

This reality comes for adherence to growth economics 101.

To keep economic growth happening, funds must be mobilized to generate new assets, goods and services. How else are the GDP numbers expected to grow?

In fact we do it all the time. It’s just that we are so under the thumb of the current set of asset holders we forget that as part of normal economic activity some assets will do well while others fail. It is a normal pattern of economic activity. Consequently there will always be stranded assets; and the world will not end.

More importantly we will have to spend to create new assets to allow us to complete the transition from fossil fuels without seeing the end of the economic world.

 

Enough clean energy

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“There are people who believe that unlimited cheap energy is a recipe for disaster in the long run…   But in the short run our problem is not having enough clean energy…”

Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute as quoted by Thomas L. Friedman in his fascinating book “Hot, flat and crowded”

What would happen if there were ubiquitous, cheap, energy?

Likely we would give in to our insatiable desire for stuff and just buy and buy and buy. Our houses would become cluttered with any amount of clothing we couldn’t possibly wear out, gadgets that waste more time than they save, and furniture we only sit on once.

Our stomachs would grow on the copious quantities of food in the fridge.

And the landfills will expand to cope with all the old stuff we (eventually) threw out.

All this would be possible because energy is a big cost to manufacturing and primary production. Make it cheap and available everywhere and no end of opportunities emerge for the production of salable goods.

The only thing holding back commerce would be the availability and cost of raw materials.

This outcome of ubiquitous, cheap, energy we might call the ‘no impulse control’ scenario. Unfortunately it aligns closely with the economic paradigm of growth. In order to keep economies growing we have to create and sell more stuff.

So cheap energy would simply fuel the runaway train.

Now if this energy were dirty in some way, either for the climate or as a more tractable pollutant that created smog or contaminated waterways and land, then there would inevitably be a regulatory check on its consumption. At some point public health concerns will slow the exploitation of a dirty resource. Sometimes environmental concerns can be enough to curb excess.

But what if it was clean? The clean, ubiquitous and cheap energy nirvana that is common in sci-fi novels. There would be nothing to stop rampant capitalism, especially if by ‘clean’ we meant next to no environmental impact, greenhouse or otherwise.

And this may indeed be a problem. Supply of other resources and skills would curtail some of the excess – there is already a global shortage of steel and skilled developers for large-scale infrastructure projects – but the social and economic ills of fast growth would still be a risk.

“But in the short run our problem is not having enough clean energy…” because right now we have cheap energy only it’s dirty and running out. We need the clean stuff and soon.

At the moment we have all the growth problems plus the dirty consequences. So we should be mobilizing our smarts, capital and entrepreneurial talent to find a secure, clean and scalable energy source.

Instead we invest yet more in fossil fuels.

Serious change should be controversial

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Back in 1979 when I still needed a hairbrush, I wandered the campus of the University of East Anglia as a sporty nerd. I was the type of student who spent far too long in the library but covered up this flaw with an addiction to team sports and the associated drinking games.

At the time I barely noticed that some of my peers were far trendier. They took to barricading themselves in the University registry – the main administration building that housed the office of the Vice –Chancellor and senior management staff – for days at a time. They would drape sheets out of the windows with slogans denouncing whatever oppression they were feeling. Each time the occupation was for a political, and no doubt, worthy cause that usually involved solidarity (a big word back then).

The longest occupation lasted a week. It was in solidarity with mine workers who were on the receiving end of a crusade by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to break the power of trade unions. Both Thatcher and those trendy students were railing for or against a serious change.

Thatcher won of course and sent the country into a market driven phase that arguably brought some prosperity but also eroded much of the traditional political divide and eventually gave the UK ‘New Labour’.

Even nerds got caught up in some of the radicalism of the day, albeit safely. Many of us boycotted Barclays bank because they happened to have a subsidiary of the same name in South Africa. We didn’t realize that undermining banks was probably not all that helpful to the struggle against apartheid but it was a statement we could make on the way to the library. I had my account with the Midland.

Spectacles may be rose tinted when remembering such heady days, but it does seem that, naive as we undoubtedly were, the issues of the time stoked ire and action. Politics was controversial as societies across the world brought about change.

Serious change should be controversial.

It was a big deal to break down union power that itself had come about in a struggle to correct past wrongs in exploiting the workforce; the same kind of wrongs that were fought against in the apartheid struggle.

Today there are still hard and controversial choices to be made, especially about environment, climate and resource use, but we seem to have lost the ire and action that sets up any issue as controversial.

At best we get posturing and egoist rhetoric with an occasional ‘straw man’ to give the appearance of real debate. In short we have argument for the sake of it. Nobody seems to occupy the registry anymore.

As the Harvard philosopher Michael J Sandel puts it:

“When everyone – Democrats, Republicans, corporations and consumers – claim to embrace your cause, you should suspect that you have not really defined the problem, or framed it as a real political question.”

We seem to get this all the time in the age of the sound bite. Noone seems to define the problem.

Rosy or not we need some true controversy back. Real dissention forces us to argue our position from first principles. We must not just react against the alternative view but think it through and become convincing, drawing on as much logic as we can muster.

Do this often enough and we shake hands with our core truths and get to know the problem.

The result will be some argument, perhaps even a demonstration or two, but also some political innovation. There will be thoughts that are outside the narrow middle ground into which the bulk of the west has converged.

A little controversy might help us to find real solutions to the challenge of keeping 7 billion people happy without destroying nature or each other.

Peeled potatoes

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In our world of doing it all easy, the latest labour saving option in the kitchen is pre-peeled potatoes.

What an outstanding idea. No need to whip out the peeler and waste time or get mud on your fingers. No more peels to get rid of and litres of water are saved from not having to clean off the grubby bits.

What, you are kidding!

How lazy can we get? It takes no effort at all to peel a potato or two. This has to be consumerism gone mad. ABC radio host Richard Glover thought so and created a funny skit to point out the craziness.

Only there are a couple of things.

First thing. An inevitable consequence of a market mechanism is that new products will emerge. Whatever people will buy, whether they really need it or not, the market will provide. The market will also provide things that they hope people will buy, often well before customers recognize that they might have a need for it. In the end, if a product works for even a few of us then it may be worth manufacturing. Witness, ‘peeled spuds in nitrogen’.

Second thing. There is always an opportunity for more efficiency in they system. If the supplier of the potatoes also recycled the peels into compost, this would be useful second product from the potatoes. Very few of the customers would do this and even if they did there would be no scale benefit.

We are at the stage where every nutrient and kilo of organic material that goes back into our agricultural soils is worth the effort given that fossil fuel based fertilizers are rapidly becoming another of our limited resources.

Our system of resource use is so bloated that there are efficiencies that will help our sustainability just about everywhere. All we have to do is look. One of these efficiencies, conversion of organic waste into fertilizer, will become commonplace. As will novel ways of doing it.

The idea that the recycling happens before the product reaches the kitchen might just be one of the better ones.