Credit: National Geographic

It is a commonly repeated refrain that generating 100% of America’s electricity from renewable sources is not possible because doing so would mean blanketing the country in solar panels or windmills. In contrast to fossil fuels, the argument goes, which require a very small amount of land to generate our power needs, renewables have enormous space requirements that guarantee that they will never be anything more than a niche provider of electricity in a country the size of the United States. Most recently, this idea has been advanced in the documentary Switch, currently touring college campuses around the country.

But how accurate is this argument? On its face it makes intuitive sense: solar panels are large (as are windmills) and neither generate electricity as efficiently as a coal or natural gas power plant. It seems plausible then that renewables would require a large amount of space to generate an amount of electricity comparable to fossil fuels. But what are the numbers? And what happens when the land disturbed by coal mining or natural gas drilling is considered? A brief internet search yields unsatisfying results; arguments seem to be split based on previous opinions towards renewable energy, and when articles do include numbers, they do not appear to be accurate.

Not finding a satisfactory answer to the question already developed, I decided to create my own model of land use for each of seven types of electricity generation: wind, solar PV, concentrated solar, nuclear, natural gas, coal, and woody biomass. The model is based on estimates of capacity factors, plant size, and input requirements from a number of sources including NREL, the EIA, the IAEA, and California Energy Commission. The premise was simple: determine how much land would be required to generate an amount of electricity equal to America’s consumption in 2011 for a total of ten years if each of the seven sources was the only one utilized. The time frame was extended to ten years to better account for the fact that fossil fuels require the disturbance of new land every year in the mining or drilling process; in contrast to renewables which only require disturbance for the initial construction of the plant. Despite the fact that some of this land is reclaimed, it can never be reclaimed to its virgin condition. Because quality data do not exist for the area disturbed by things like pipelines, transmission lines, and compressor stations, this area was not considered and, as a result, the estimates for the fossil fuels should be seen as lower bounds only. However, the land covered by plants and the land disturbed in the mining/drilling process was considered. The total amount of land for each was then laid out on the map below.

Woody biomass is not included in the map because the space required covers multiple United States.

The results are surprising. Wind is by far the most land intensive, but even this is somewhat misleading. The reason wind farms are so large is because the windmills must be spaced a certain distance apart from one another. This is not because they physically occupy all of that land. In fact, most the land remains usable as farm land which is a big reason some farmers actively seek out wind farms as additional sources of revenue from their land. Solar thermal and solar PV require comparable amounts of land — only about 20% more for solar PV. But surprisingly, if the land disturbed over 10 years by mining is considered, coal requires only 50% less land than Solar PV. If a 20 year time horizon is considered — roughly half the length of the useful life of a coal plant — then they are equivalent in land-use.

Perhaps the most important result is the clear indication that renewables would not actually blanket the country in solar panels or windmills. Natural gas and nuclear clearly require far less land for a comparable amount of electricity than renewables, but that was expected. In terms of space used, nuclear is clearly the most efficient source of power — even accounting for the land needed to mine uranium (but not accounting for land required to store waste) — but solar and wind are certainly feasible options from a spatial perspective.

Finally, why is this posted here in the Biodiversity & Ecosystems section rather than Energy? Because the way in which we generate energy has enormous implications for biodiversity. From the effects of windmills on migratory birds and bats, to the conversion of CRP land to produce additional biofuels, there is a very strong connection between biodiversity preservation and energy generation. This is particularly important to consider when thinking about renewables if they are going to require more space than fossil fuels. While the positive impacts on biodiversity from the long-run carbon reduction of renewables will almost certainly outweigh any local effects of land conversion, it is important not to forget that the siting of these new power generation projects will have implications for local biodiversity.

Before epidemiologist Dr. Gary Slutkin’s Ceasefire Chicago program Martin Torres might have gotten off the Greyhound bus he rode to Chicago for his favorite nephew Emilio’s funeral, packed the .38 and .380 guns he borrowed from old friends and, soaked in liquor, killed the men allegedly responsible for shooting Emilio in the chest in 2008.

It would have been just another homicide in the South Side of Chicago, where violent, often gang-related, retribution killings fuel the rising homicide rate. In 2007, the year before Torres returned home a total of 448 murders took place. In 2008, homicides in the city rose to 513—more than one killing per day.

While most people saw these murders as inevitable, Dr. Slutkin, a physician and professor of epidemiology and international health at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Public Health, thought they could be prevented.

In 2000, he started Ceasefire Chicago, using what he knew from studying infectious diseases in Africa. The idea was to look at violence, especially gang and drug-related violence, as a transmittable disease. Like preventing a death from an infectious disease, preventing a death from homicide would not only save a life, but it would decrease the likelihood that more homicides would occur. In other words, it would stop “the infectious spread” of homicides.

The Ceasefire Chicago project, now known as Cure Violence, represents a new approach to a problem that is typically attacked through tougher sentencing and more policing. Proponents of this epidemiological approach to social ills say that society is currently structured to “treat” or “quarantine” the problem of violence and homicide after it occurs by incarcerating criminals associated with violent crime and murders, such as gang members or drug offenders.

But, as with outbreaks of infectious diseases, Dr. Slutkin says we can take preventative approaches by using known disease models to identify the conditions under which violence spreads, preventing an outbreak of even more violence.

The model is especially useful for gang violence, says Dr. Slutkin, who found that former gang members could act as “interrupters” who could diffuse conflicts like Torres’s planned murder, in order to keep one act of violence or homicide from begetting another.

Ceasefire identified Zale Hoddenbach, an old friend of Torres, as a potential interruptor and Hoddenbach talked Torres out of killing his nephew’s assailants. The organization believes this prevented further shootings or killings that may have resulted from Torres’ retribution.

The study of disease has long taken into account how social factors, such as socioeconomic status and neighborhood crime put people at greater risk of disease, but the idea that homicide and other social problems like incarceration are diseases has only recently been used as a way to tackle these problems.

“I think it’s an interesting way to look at it—to turn homicide on its head and not look at it as something deviant people do and catch the deviant people in order to stop it,” said Dr. April Zeoli, an assistant professor at the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University and a trained epidemiologist. “If we look at it as a societal issue, where we have that source of infection, mode of transmission and susceptible population, then we can potentially come to new answers.”

Of course, there is no pathogenic homicide virus that can contagiously jump from one person to the next, but homicide may move on a map the way that a virus would.

“Violent activity predicts the next violent activity like HIV predicts the next HIV and TB [tuberculosis] predicts the next TB,” Dr. Slutkin has said.

Incarceration in America follows similar patterns, according to Dr. Ernest Drucker, an emeritus professor of family and social medicine at Montefiore Medical Center/Albert Einstein College of Medicine and an adjunct professor of epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.

In his book, A Plague of Prisons, Dr. Drucker applies public health analysis usually reserved for epidemics like the flu, tuberculosis, AIDS and other diseases to demonstrate how incarceration takes on the characteristics of an infectious epidemic by moving through particular populations with self-perpetuating virulence.

“It started as a metaphor, but I realized, researching the book, that this really does look like an epidemic. It does meet the criteria,” he said at a recent talk at Columbia University.

Like many epidemics, mass incarceration is rampant in the poorest neighborhoods of America’s cities, affecting young minority men, primarily black and Hispanic. In some communities, 90 percent of families have members who have been incarcerated. Like a hereditary disease, children of an imprisoned parent have lower life expectancy. It is also six to seven times more likely that they will be put in prison compared to children of families not affected.

Dr. Zeoli has taken this approach a step further than a mere analogy, by mapping, or geocoding, the physical and temporal movement of Newark homicides on record the way epidemiologists map infectious diseases like cholera or HIV. The study was published in the journal Justice Quarterly.

She and her colleagues, Jesenia M. Pizarro, Sue C. Grady and Christopher Melde, geocoded every homicide documented by Newark Police Department’s Homicide Unit in Newark, N.J. from January 1982 to September 2008 and viewed their movement on a map.

They were surprised to find that, by comparing the maps of homicides overall to gun- and gang-related homicides, the “infection”—increased homicides—arrived even before the homicide clusters linked to guns or gangs, the proposed “infectious agent.”

This could mean that something other than gang or gun violence—which criminal justice analysts often blame—was initially at work in propelling the spread. Dr. Zeoli and her colleagues suspect that socioeconomic realities, like poverty or poor community infrastructure, may play a bigger role.

Dr. Zeoli’s ongoing study explores the possibility that socioeconomic status may better predict homicide movement, providing a promising alternative to those who see harsh policing and strict sentencing as anachronistic. To be sure, the application of epidemiology to these topics comes with complications that are similar to those that come with studying true diseases. Finding accurate data and interpreting trends is still quite difficult.

And, unlike an infectious disease, it is much more difficult to isolate a cause for homicide, violence or imprisonment.

But those who take the social ills as disease approach say its value is in identifying prevention measures.

Dr. Drucker, points to proposals to reform sentencing laws and programs that decrease recidivism, or reentry into prison, such as the Goldman Sachs funded Osborne Association in New York. In addition, Dr. Drucker says, changing drug-laws in order to decriminalize drug addiction—considered an actual disease in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder)—could also prevent incarceration.

“If we can dig down and discover what that source is, what that mode of transmission looks like, who that susceptible population is, and what population is resistant and why,” said Dr. Zeoli, “then we can really use those principles of infectious disease prevention or control to halt the spread of homicide or different types of violence.”

Detractors argue it is not clear whether the preventative approach is working.

Although Ceasefire Chicago has taken credit for the drop in homicides in areas where the organization was operating, Tracy Siska, a writer for the blog chicagojustice.org, proposed that other factors were occurring at the same time, like new policing strategies, increased incarceration and national drops in crime, which may have had a greater role in the reported decreases in crime, than the  interrupter’s work.

Social ills do not have one single cause and are not going to be stopped through one form of prevention. But, for Dr. Drucker, the approach provides an alternative to what he says have been largely ineffective measures used thus far and also ensures that “public health people are in the room when governments make decisions.”

 
Edited by Elaine Meyer. Additional research by Lauren Weisenfluh.

Article originally posted on the2x2project.org, an online publication sponsored by the Department of Epidemiology at Columbia University. 2×2 aims to inform the health conversation through timely and effective communication of emerging public health science.

Photo Credit: Discover

Forests provide many life supporting services to individuals living in tropical countries, but public health is not often considered one of them. In fact, for many years the best way to fight malaria was thought to be the destruction of the tropical forests and swamps that sheltered disease-carrying mosquitoes. However, new research published last week in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases suggests not only that this approach may have been ineffective, but also that malaria control should now be counted among the many services provided by healthy forest ecosystems.

Using data from several villages on the edges of forest ecosystems in Brazil’s Atlantic rainforest and a model predicting the spread of malaria based on biodiversity metrics the authors found that an increase in biodiversity around human settlement decreased the incidence of malaria. The authors offer two primary explanations for this result. First, increasing biodiversity increases the number of potential hosts (mammals) for the mosquitoes, thus increasing the number of “dead-end” hosts, or hosts who are infected but do not pass the disease onto another mosquitoes. Second, increasing biodiversity supports additional species of non-vector mosquitoes which compete with the vector mosquitoes for the scarce resource of available blood and thus reduce the number of vector mosquitoes.

While counter-intuitive — increasing mosquitoes and their food source reduces the spread of malaria? — these results provide another example of how greater system complexity can buttress the over-all functionality of the human-environmental system. As the authors suggest:

The absence of malaria cases can be explained by the diffuse mosquito vector competition and dead-end transmission of parasites provided by high abundances of mosquitoes and vertebrates. Greater abundance of mosquitoes and vertebrates can be correlated with higher levels of biodiversity, which increases ecosystems functional redundancy, thus decreasing the chances of malaria occurrence, which is in keeping with the insurance hypothesis . . . an insurance effect is the ability of an ecosystem to buffer perturbations . . . as well as the ability of the species in the community to respond differentially to perturbations . . . these mechanisms that hinder malaria parasite transmissions are services provided by the forest ecosystems.

Nor is this an isolated result, the study cites several other examples of work that have shown decreasing levels of biodiversity increase the risk of contracting schistosomiasis, West Nile, hantavirus, and Lyme disease.

While the public health benefits of preserving forests and biodiversity have, until now, been overlooked these benefits have substantial economic implications. Malaria alone is estimated to reduce per capita income by nearly $4,000 in some countries. If protecting intact and highly biodiverse forest ecosystems is an effective means of fighting this disease, it adds a powerful and appealing argument to the already substantial case for forest and biodiversity protection.

According to the EIA, world energy consumption will increase by approximately 53%, from 505 quadrillion BTU in 2008 to 770 quadrillion BTUs by 2035, a global increase of 23% in per capita energy use. While energy efficiency technology begins to slow this runaway growth, time is running out. We don’t need to just drastically reduce demand; we need a new source of energy. Unfortunately, while the search for and development of renewable resources drags on, the focus on “inoffensive” energy efficiency has had a perverse side effect. Rather than large investments in disruptive innovation which could change the energy conversation entirely, business and government continue to extend current technology with small, risk-free investments in efficient technology – crowding out investment in these potential game-changers.

Many researchers suggest that efficiency measures are ultimately ineffective, thanks to an observed phenomenon known as the rebound effect. The idea behind the rebound effect is fairly straightforward—as consumers become more efficient at using energy, they save money, which then allows them to use more of that energy than before. The energy usage can be either direct- turning the heat up a few extra degrees or driving a few extra miles – or indirect- using the energy savings on that cross-country flight you always wanted to take. Breakthrough Institute, an American think tank, recently conducted one of the largest literature reviews on the topic to date, concluding that at the economy-wide level, the rebound effect could have serious consequences.

The unfortunate fact is that the efficiency conversation takes time, attention, and research funds away from the crucial search for alternative, sustainable energy sources. It does not make good business sense for an individual company to invest in development of a new technology that may take years and billions of dollars in R&D to reach market, and therefore cannot provide the immediate low-risk ROI offered by energy efficiency measures. Currently, each company selects and implements its energy-saving, carbon-reducing measures to either save money or comply with regulations, based on the quickest return on investment for that individual business. The result is a collective action problem: if each company is looking out solely for their own short-term bottom line, who then will lead the search for critical new energy resources?

It is when we are faced with these collective action issues that we often look to our respective governments to display the foresight and prescience to address the problem before any crisis arises. The scope of the problem surpasses the capacity of traditional R&D of individual private enterprises.  In the traditional model, the government should work to fund and direct basic research, coordinating the required actors to perform the early work before the private sector, with its profit motive and competitive drive, undertakes the commercialization of the resulting technology. However, in the current fiscal climate, it is easier for the government to support short-term efficiency solutions, which funds today’s energy reductions by selling tomorrow’s potential. This is not only counter-productive to the task at hand, but an inversion of the job to which government is best suited. By taking the long view, free of quarterly reports, the government can pursue the kinds of basic science that, while not immediately profitable, provides for future economic activity and benefit. In this process, the government is providing a public good (basic scientific research) while laying the groundwork for its own future efforts. Michael Faraday explained this process more than 150 years ago when he was asked by the British Parliament to explain the practical worth of electricity:  “One day sir, you [the government] may tax it.” Obviously the benefits of electricity have gone well beyond the government’s tax bill – but Parliament reaped dividends far beyond the price it paid for the research. Parliament’s original investment was repaid many times over, and electricity powered Britain into the 20^th century.

There are two things particularly interesting here. First, the bill defines sustainable development as “a mode of human development in which resource use aims to meet human needs while preserving the environment so that these needs can be met not only in the present, but also for generations to come, but not to include the idea, principle or practice of conservation or conservationism.” In other words, the bill effectively outlaws the use of public funds in projects that aim to protect resources for future generations. Not only would the future not be considered in project funding under this law, consideration of the future would be banned from any projects that sought public funding.

Second, this bill could have a huge impact on the burgeoning wind industry in Kansas. Recent DOE studies have estimated that Kansas has a wind-energy potential of 3,102 terawatt-hours per year, which would cover approximately 80% of the energy demand of the entire US each year. Developing even a small fraction of that could yield nearly $8 billion in economic benefits to the state.

The bill’s proponents have said that the bill would have a minimal impact on the wind industry, as Kansas currently does not support the wind industry with public funds. However, expansion of the still-burgeoning industry, like any large-scale infrastructure project, will likely require at least some public support.. While the price of wind power has been dropping over the last several years, it is likely to remain more expensive than traditional energy for the near future. With this bill in place, wind — which is typically pitched as a zero emission and secure, rather than cheap, source of energy — would remain unfunded.

Luckily, the bill never came to a vote. However, it is likely to reappear in the next legislative sessions. Let’s hope more long-term thinking prevails.

Credit: National Geographic

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) programs are touted by some as the solution to destruction of the environment in the name of development. These programs offer the opportunity to pay for the protection of an environmental resource that provides value in its current state but is threatened by the need of people living around the resource to generate income. PES programs tick all the necessary boxes to be in vogue: they rely primarily on market principles, rather than legal restrictions; they recognize that the environment provides valuable services that would have to be replaced, at a cost, if that ecosystem was destroyed; and they frame development and environmental protection as complementary rather than competitive. If not for the fact that they may not fix things, they are a perfect solution.

The increasing popularity of PES programs has resulted in the creation of a number of projects around the world. Sven Wunder and his co-authors provide a description of the implementation of projects in two popular categories — water and forest protection — in Ecuador that demonstrates their utility as tools for development. The particular strength of PES programs in development is that they provide a natural way to harmonize what have historically been mutually exclusive goals: environmental protection and economic development.

This harmonization is particularly evident in the example of REDD+ — perhaps the largest proposed PES scheme in the world. In many tropical countries, the need for farmers to expand agricultural land in order to increase production and income drives deforestation. This expansion comes at the expense of the surrounding forest’s ability to absorb carbon, an environmental service that is valuable to the rest of the world. A natural solution then is for the rest of the world to pay the farmers not to expand their fields. The farmers receive their increased income, and the rest of the world gets its carbon absorption.

But this is a textbook example — it only works on paper. The question is whether PES programs work in the real world. Unfortunately, as several authors have pointed out, there is little systematic analysis of their effectiveness. Whether they work or not remains a question without an answer.

Two recent papers have made an attempt to find that answer but their results are somewhat mixed. In the first paper, the authors find that the transaction costs associated with certain types of PES programs can be prohibitively high; while in the second, they find that economic benefits often only materialized in certain circumstances that may require project designs that are not conducive to lower transaction costs.

Both of these papers hit on the greatest challenge of PES programs: that they bring services that have historically been provided outside of a market into a market setting and must find some mechanism for monetizing the services provided. This integration is a major theoretical strength of the programs but in some cases, it can be an implementation nightmare. Program developers, in effect, must create a brand new market with newly defined commodities, trading rules, and means of measurement. This challenge is clearly apparent in the debate surrounding how carbon sequestration rates should be measured — how do you commoditize something that you can’t see, hold, or directly measure? The solutions that currently exist are expensive, technical, and time-consuming.

The costs associated with this commoditization are generally termed transaction costs and vary depending on the particular ecosystem service being incorporated into the market. In some cases — water in particular — the costs may be low enough relative to the size of the market that the creation of beneficial PES programs is feasible. In other cases — the authors highlight REDD+ in particular — it may not be feasible to generate a private PES program. Rather, it may require government involvement or country-wide projects to generate the necessary economies of scale. These results are certainly not the last word on the subject, but they do serve to reinforce the tensions between the need to have community level projects to generate buy-in and the need for scale sufficient to offset the transaction costs.

The second recent paper deals more directly with how economic benefits of PES programs reach communities. Focusing specifically on community managed resources in Nambia the authors examine the question of why people choose to participate in a community resource conservancy project. They find that these programs do in fact improve the welfare of people who choose to participate directly vis-à-vis those who do not. However, this finding is dependent on several specific program characteristics. Namely that the project provide “wage employment or large dividend shares,” without which “benefits cannot compete with income generate opportunities such as livestock farming” that are mutually exclusive with the conservancy project. These results suggest another source of tension between large and small projects: while large projects help offset transaction costs, they also increase the number of participants, which increases competition for available wage paying jobs in the project and dilutes dividend payments.

Despite the challenges outlined in these papers, PES programs are here to stay. They may not be the perfect solution but ultimately they are fixing things. They are a solution. This far outweighs the current issues that plague the programs. The challenge then, is to develop projects at the proper scale so that they benefit all of the involved parties without excessive transaction costs. This can be done. It will require creative project design, innovations in ecosystem measurement, and, ultimately, trial and error. But success will mean a way out of poverty for millions of people that does not sacrifice their environmental heritage.

]]> http://www.senseandsustainability.net/2013/04/19/the-scale-of-ecosystem-payments/feed/ 0 http://www.senseandsustainability.net/2013/04/13/a-new-way-for-the-middle-kingdom/ http://www.senseandsustainability.net/2013/04/13/a-new-way-for-the-middle-kingdom/#comments Sat, 13 Apr 2013 17:28:41 +0000 Sachin Desai http://www.senseandsustainability.net/?p=4435

Credit: Brookings.edu

This has been especially true during the terms of China’s 11^th Five-Year Plan (2006-10). Two provinces in China, for example, each constructed over 100 wastewater treatment plants by 2010, a feat made more impressive by the fact that in 2006, one of these provinces only had two such plants. Within this same time period, installation of pollutant reducing scrubbers on China’s coal-generating capacity has gone from 10% to 86%. Nothing has changed in terms of the traditional environmental law framework in China, but dozens of inefficient factories and power plants are being shut down. What is causing all of this?

Professor Alex Wang, the former Director of the China Environmental Law & Governance Project for the Natural Resources Defense Council, believes he understands the answer. After years of research and interviews on the ground in China, he explains the source of this turnaround in his article “The Search for Sustainable Legitimacy: Environmental Law and Bureaucracy In China.” (Listen to Sense & Sustainability’s podcast with the author here.)

According to Prof. Wang, this environmental reform should not be credited to policy or lawmaking, but rather to the system by which provincial leaders are monitored and ranked by the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Many don’t realize that the leadership in Beijing controls its provincial leaders by ranking them on their annual progress according to key metrics. This “cadre system,” as it is called in China, is a bureaucracy management tool that is, at its simplest, a rubric for “grading” lower-level leaders.

Historically, the key “grade-sheets” score highly for economic growth, which in practice relegates environmental considerations to a secondary position; however, starting in the 11th Five-Year Plan, these grade-sheets started to incorporate environmental metrics as well. In particular, they incorporated two sets of metrics around energy-intensity reduction (emissions per $ GDP) and emissions reductions. Points were awarded for creating emissions goals, shutting down old plants, piloting demonstration facilities, creating monitoring programs, and implementing investments per a national target.

Interestingly, because of a problem with accurate data collection in China, the Chinese Central Government cannot rely on emissions and pollution data from the provinces. Readers may recall the famous “gigatonne” gap, where the difference alone in emissions reported by the provinces versus those reported by the central government in 2010 was equivalent to Japan’s entire annual carbon emissions. With this discrepancy in mind, Beijing would have had a tough time regulating emissions and “grading” provinces on how much pollution they emitted; instead, they decided to score provincial governors on other, easier to track metrics that stood as proxies for actual pollution reductions. Focused less on traditional regulation and monitoring, these metrics included accounting for the number of old facilities closed and dollars spent on investments such as treatment plants. Interviews with Chinese officials lead to an estimation that 60-80% of the pollution and energy reductions came from infrastructure investment, 20-30% by shutdowns, and very little by regulations and monitoring.

Credit: The Guardian

This is not to say, however, that the Western world itself does not sometimes act similarly. The US Clean Air Act, for example, allows the federal government to impose emissions regimes on states with non-compliant pollution levels. As regulation has stalled, American policy has moved in the direction of incentivizing investment through mechanisms such as feed-in-tariffs, which encourage investment as a proxy for emissions reduction. Even as American laws approach the Chinese model, one should not forget that China’s environmental practices are not perfect and can stand to progress by improving transparency and encouraging citizen involvement.

In addition to his studies on the driving factors for change, Professor Wang examines why the government is deciding to change its practices now. He hypothesizes that China’s leaders view their right to govern as existing within a “performance legitimacy” framework: the government is legitimate if it performs what the citizens want. The American government proceeds under a “process” or “ideology” legitimacy framework, where it claims its right to rule in large part because of the process by which it was selected—democratic election—rather than because of its recent performance. The Chinese government now believes that environmental damage—and the local riots it increasingly causes—is starting to hurt economic growth and damage the public’s perception of its performance.

Professor Wang discusses the issues above in his article, which will be published in the Spring 2012 issue of the Harvard Environmental Law Review. A draft of the article is available on SSRN at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2128167.

Image Courtesy of OMA

This interview originally appeared on ArchDaily as “Behind the Scenes of OMA’s Latest Tower with Sustainability Consultant Arpan Bakshi.”

It’s not the flashiest sustainable tower out there.  It doesn’t have a green roof, solar panels, or even a lushly vegetated facade. But, unlike those other “conspicuously” eco-friendly skyscrapers, the Essence Financial Building (EFB), a new office tower designed by OMA (the well renowned architecture firm behind China’s CCTV Headquarters), is quite possibly the future of sustainable design.

The innovation in the tower, located in Shenzhen, China, is not immediately apparent — not even to the well-trained eye. So to understand why the EFB could be, in the words of OMA Partner David Gianotten, the first of “a new generation of office tower”, I decided to pick the brains of Arpan Bakshi, an architect, engineer, and sustainability Manager at YR&G (OMA’s sustainability consultants), who led the environmental design for the building.

Not only is Bakshi an expert in environmental design, he is also intimately familiar with the state of sustainability in building design in China today. And (1) with China continuing to lead the way in urbanization and (2) buildings remaining the number one source of greenhouse gas emissions, the status of sustainable design in China is of serious concern.

Vanessa Quirk: How was the experience of working with OMA on the Essence Financial Building (EFB)?

Arpan Bakshi: Working with OMA is exceptionally collaborative, and there is never a napkin sketch. The design is a product of a cerebral and often exhaustive process of research and experimentation. In my first project with OMA three years ago, a multi-use development in Jilin, China, I expected to receive some formal studies following the project kick-off meeting. Instead, I was given a 59 page document with research about trends in population, culture, economic development, urban scales, land use, and program, among other topics. No one preemptively arrived at a solution without investigating the context. I have also observed [that] the lines dividing roles between OMA and their consultants are blurred to create an open working environment towards identifying relevant design drivers across disciplines. This is an ideal working relationship.

The EFB hopes to spearhead a new, contemporary office tower typology for Shenzhen — where does sustainability fit into that typology?

Unlike the contemporary office tower, which provides only a visual connection to the outdoors, occupants on every floor of the EFB have the ability to open a set of doors and walk outside of the building to occupy an open air space shaded by an unglazed and open structural grid. What you cannot see from the renderings is that EFB is really a building within a building. The architectural enclosure is separated into multiple planes to meet modern considerations of energy, useful daylight, comfort and biophilia without the use of additional materials often found in the application of external shading devices. This is accomplished by pulling the structural assembly outside and away from the glazing plane. The structure no longer occupies interior floor space and serves the dual purpose of protecting conditioned spaces from the Shenzhen climate.

The facade of the EFB is “designed with reference to Shenzhen’s climate and urban context.” Can you explain how the facade does this?

We started the project with an assessment of environmental resources. We studied both the natural and the urban environment to understand how historical climate conditions intersect with the impact of neighboring buildings. For example, there is a variation in the EFB façade module size and depth, both horizontally and vertically. This was informed by the study of the interactive relationship between the movement of the sun, the city layout, outdoor temperatures and indoor activity which determine the experience inside the building. Balancing these considerations affects the size of mechanical equipment and the energy it consumes.

Considering the speed in which the world, and particularly China, is developing, do you find it difficult to achieve your environmental agenda, when often familiar, unsustainable practices are quicker or easier to implement?

Sustainability is the only way China can continue to grow. It provides a framework for using resources effectively. As we have seen throughout history, there comes a time when it costs more to ignore an environmental situation than it does to address it. During our own industrial revolution, the strain on livability reached a point of saturation. This is when the clean-up started to happen, as it will in China and other rapidly industrializing nations.

How important is sustainable design today for Chinese developers?

Businesses in China equate a sustainable building with a quality building. Project proposals clearly state goals like ecologically-friendly, comfortable and efficient. This indicates a demand on developers for sustainable design from their tenants.

What does sustainable design mean today? How can design tackle the many issues currently facing the world?

Sustainable design today means working at the intersection of people and technology. For instance, technology helps us analyze complex design scenarios and operate building systems with precision. But technology only responds to inputs from the people who operate it. Understanding and informing human behavior, and coupling that with technological innovation can bring about massive change upstream.

What concerns do you think will become more important in the future? Is architecture, as it exists now, equipped to respond to these challenges?

Today’s architecture is shaped primarily by the physical growth of urban areas as a result of rural migration. Urbanization will continue to be both a challenge and an opportunity. Buildings in the future will not only be efficient, they will be versatile. Professionals are equipped with the necessary design tools, but architecture doesn’t exist in a vacuum; finance and politics add complexity to implementing new ideas. Sustainability will inevitably have to shift from prevention to adaptability, as meteorological events become increasingly volatile.

Topic:

Episode Summary:

China has been at once the poster child for rapid industrialization and subsequent environmental deterioration. But can improving Chinese environmental quality become a priority on par with maintaining rapid economic growth? Dr. Alex Wang suggests that it already has.

In this episode, a collaborative effort with the Harvard Environmental Law Review (HELR), S&S features recent work by Dr. Alex Wang on the subtle yet significant shifts in the prioritization of environmental issues among the Chinese political leadership — changes which have already begun to have an effect on the ground. Wang argues that Chinese leadership sees environmental pollution as a critical challenge to political legitimacy of the ruling communist party, and that shifts at the top have resulted in concerted  efforts (albeit at times clumsy and inefficient) by local governments to clean up their act. How are local governments balancing these twin goals of environmental protection and economic growth? What are some of the key challenges? How do the political idiosyncrasies of the Chinese system aid or hamper the process? Dr. Wang, Jisung, and Sachin Desai of HELR discuss these and other issues.

Bio:

Mr. Wang was a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) based in Beijing and the director of NRDC’s China Environmental Law & Governance Project for nearly six years. In this capacity, he worked with China’s government agencies, legal community, and environmental groups to improve environmental rule of law and strengthen the role of the public in environmental protection. He helped to establish NRDC’s Beijing office in 2006. He was a Fulbright Fellow to China from 2004-05. Prior to that, Mr. Wang was an attorney at the law firm of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP in New York City, where he worked on mergers & acquisitions, securities matters, and pro bono Endangered Species Act litigation. He was selected to the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations’ Public Intellectuals Program 2008-10, and is a member of the Advisory Board to the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations.

Mr. Wang is a regular speaker on issues related to China and environmental protection, and has been an invited speaker at various institutions, such as the Council on Foreign Relations and the Asia Society. His commentary has appeared in such places as the New York Times, Huffington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Bloomberg News, China Daily, Global Times, Time Magazine, National Public Radio, Marketplace, and CCTV.

Image Credits: New York Times

Air conditioners for sale in Mumbai, India, where A/C has become “a new status symbol.”
Source: Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times

Humanity has at least two ways of dealing with climate change: adaptation and mitigation.  Adaptation means dealing with the effects of a warming planet, while mitigation means trying to prevent the planet from warming in the first place.

In an ideal world, we would do our best to mitigate and adapt as needed, but ours is not an ideal world.  In some respects, at least, it seems that efforts to adapt to climate change could come at the expense of mitigation, and vice versa.

Case in point, consider this NBER working paper about air conditioning, climate change, and mortality (emphasis added):

…we find that the mortality effect of an extremely hot day declined by about 80% between 1900-1959 and 1960-2004.  As a consequence, days with temperatures exceeding 90°F were responsible for about 600 premature fatalities annually in the 1960-2004 period, compared to the approximately 3,600 premature fatalities that would have occurred if the temperature-mortality relationship from before 1960 still prevailed… The adoption of residential air conditioning (AC) explains essentially the entire decline in the temperature-mortality relationship.  In contrast, increased access to electricity and health care seem not to affect mortality on extremely hot days.  Residential AC appears to be both the most promising technology to help poor countries mitigate the temperature related mortality impacts of climate change and, because fossil fuels are the least expensive source of energy, a technology whose proliferation will speed up the rate of climate change.

Certain mitigation policies, like carbon taxes and cap-and-trade schemes, are necessarily going to make air conditioning more expensive, and thereby make it harder for poor countries to deal not only with the effects of a warming planet, but even with a stable atmosphere that occasionally gets very hot.  Not all mitigation strategies will necessarily have this effect — a cost-effective carbon-capture technology need not raise air conditioning costs, for example — but carbon taxes and cap-and-trade schemes, two popular mitigation strategies, do unfortunately have this drawback.

An important implication is that adaptation and mitigation can interact in dangerous and sometimes unpredictable ways.  Any proposal to deal with climate change has to take those interactions into account to be predictable.

Another important implication is that greenhouse gas emissions are not the best measure of how well we’re dealing with climate change.  An approach to climate change that reduces greenhouse gas emissions to absolute zero would not be worth it, if it ultimately costs more lives than it saves (which a zero-emissions policy certainly would — though no one is actually proposing that).  By the same logic, even a technology that saves 3,000 lives per year for 50 years might not be worth using, if in the end it costs more than 3,000 lives per year via its effect on the frequency of droughts, hurricanes, etc.

The bottom line is that ultimately, the goal of any climate change policy should not be to reduce greenhouse emissions just for the sake of reducing emissions, but to maximize human welfare.  Things like mortality, welfare, and utility can be extremely difficult to measure given the complexity of social and environmental systems, but the point is that at the end of the day, what matters is life and maximizing the quality of life.  Intermediate factors like greenhouse gas emissions, arctic sea ice, sea levels, and air temperatures are only important via their effects on those two things.

A budding research community, including Sense & Sustainability’s own Jisung Park, is going beyond emissions and sea level rises, by measuring the connections between climate change, climate policy, mortality, and human welfare.  This paper on air conditioning is just one example, but there is a growing number of others like it — researchers are now studying things like how a warming planet might affect labor productivity, how classroom attendance and test scores are affected by temperature (which in turn is affected by access to air conditioning), how climate change and climate change policy interact with investment in everything from physical capital to R&D, and all the little hidden costs of extreme weather events either caused or enhanced by global warming.

The welfare impacts of climate change and climate policy are what matter, so I look forward to sharing more research along these lines.

This post has also been published on Jacob’s personal blog, with the generous permission of Sense & Sustainability.

Estimates put the reserve Japan tapped for its experiment, in the Nankai Trough near Japan’s south-central coast, at about 40 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of methane — enough to replace 11 years worth of LNG imports (currently Japan’s primary source of energy). The story is even more remarkable elsewhere — a recent Bureau of Ocean Energy Management report estimates that total US hydrate reserves total over 51,000 tcf of gas, or enough gas for slightly more than 2100 years worth of use at the 2011 rate of 24.4 tcf per year.

Of course, none of these estimates take economics into account. Extracting and using hydrates is prohibitively expensive and is likely to remain a significant technical challenge for decades to come. However, the existence of such a significant remaining source of hydrocarbons should put the idea of “the end of fossil fuels” to bed — and potentially create significant competition for new, cleaner alternative energy sources.

according to a groundbreaking academic study . . . countries among the most impoverished in the world could see acute poverty eradicated within 20 years if they continue at present rates.

And the second:

Climate change and other environmental disasters could put 3.1 billion people into extreme poverty by 2050, if no significant steps are taken, says an annual United Nations report on the state of global development.

The first claim is from a study by researchers at the Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative, and the second is from the United Nations’ 2013 Human Development Report. Both were released this week.

The Oxford researchers say that acute poverty (not exactly the same thing as “extreme poverty,” as discussed in the study) could be eradicated in some of the poorest countries by 2033, while the United Nations report says that extreme poverty could swallow up 3.1 billion people — yes, with a b — by 2050.

How to reconcile those claims?

First, the Oxford researchers’ claim is not strictly a prediction — it is an “if-then” statement. If present rates of poverty reduction continue, then some of the poorest countries will eradicate acute poverty. Their study leaves open the possibility that current rates will not continue, or even go into reverse. And if you believe in some kind of conditional convergence, then you would expect current rates of growth to come down.

Second, the Human Development Report’s claim is not strictly a prediction either — it is also an “if-then” statement. If people do nothing whatsoever about climate change, deforestation, and other environmental challenges, then a lot of them are going to be very, very poor. In fact, the 3.1-billion number is only in the worst-case scenario, which the report ominously calls the “environmental disaster scenario.”

Figure 4.4 of the Human Development Report tells the story:

Third, the two claims are about two different groups of people, at two different points in time. So the two claims are not necessarily on opposite ends of some environmental spectrum, nor are they mutually exclusive. Three billion people could fall into extreme poverty by 2050, while the seven or so “star performers” of 2013 will have had already eradicated extreme poverty more than ten years prior. It could very well be that in 2050 Nepal, Rwanda, and Bangladesh are all thriving, while China is not.

What does this tell us about predictions about poverty? The most obvious lesson is that predictions are hard, and you shouldn’t take any of them too seriously. A lot of us could be very poor in 2050 . . . or, the exact opposite. It’s just not clear.

This is sort of obvious if you think about it from the perspective of someone trying to make predictions about the year 2000 in the year 1950 — back then the Cold War was at its apex, the United States had no interstate highway system, and the internet did not exist, so how could you make reliable predictions? What Great Unknowns lie between today and 2050 — is it robots, 3-D printing, or something else?

But the more important lesson is that one of today’s Great Unknowns is the role that the environmental will have on development. No prediction about the future is without some implicit prediction about humans’ relationship with the environment.

So when we’re making predictions about poverty in 2050, the answer is not “X people will be poor.” The answer is just about always “it depends,” and in 2013 we know a lot depends on the environment.

This post has also been published on Jacob’s personal blog, with the generous permission of Sense & Sustainability.

Robert Thomson / The Washington Post via Getty Images

In my previous post, I discussed the economic costs of deteriorating infrastructure to the United States, and the potential of crafting a long-term policy for maintenance and upgrades to the country’s transportation and energy network. With federal spending facing economic sequestration and states and cities tightening their budgets, governments could re-prioritize spending to maintain existing infrastructure, while new projects could be funded based on their contribution to productivity and economic growth. Ultimately, however, improvements will require significant increases in funding, and Federal and state governments could supplement changes to infrastructure policy planning by addressing the shortcomings of existing public funding mechanisms. In this second post, I examine how new funding strategies and a National Infrastructure Bank can help address America’s infrastructure needs.

Broadening funding sources

Existing government funding channels for highways and bridges are drying up. The federal fuel tax, whose revenues are the source of most federal financing for highways and mass transit, has remained unchanged since 1993, and its revenues have declined significantly due to both inflation and the increasing fuel efficiency of cars. Measures to raise the gas tax or even index it to inflation have proven politically impossible, and consequently Congress has had to turn to short-term cash infusions to keep the gas tax-supported Highway Trust Fund afloat.

To account for the rising costs of highway construction and maintenance, several economists, including Matthew Kahn of UCLA and David Levinson of the University of Minnesota, and Edward Glaeser of Harvard, have proposed implementing user fees and congestion pricing. User fees, such as tolls on bridges and highways, are a tried-and-true funding mechanism that could be deployed quickly and with minimal administrative cost; the proceeds from tolls could be directly channeled toward maintenance and upgrades, and the system could be managed within existing state and local departments of transportation.

Congestion pricing, by contrast, imposes charges on users during periods of peak activity. Congestion pricing measures vary widely, ranging from raising existing tolls during rush hours and designating high-occupancy toll (HOT) lanes on highways to charging premiums to drive into dense city centers (London currently has such a system and a similar plan was unsuccessfully floated for New York), though elevated rush hour tolls and HOT lanes are the most popular in the U.S. Examples include the I-495 Express Lanes in Northern Virginia, the Katy Freeway in Houston, and the Metro Express Lanes in Los Angeles.

Broader implementation of user fees and congestion pricing could add $38 billion to $54 billion to transportation budgets each year, note experts Jack Basso and Tyler Duvall in a Hamilton Project policy brief. And beyond serving as a funding measure, such pricing arrangements could encourage a shift to carpooling and public transportation among commuters, potentially reducing carbon emissions in the process. The concept could also be extended to airports; economists Adam Looney and Michael Greenstone have discussed the potential of charging airlines and individual aircraft operators for usage of air traffic control and runway slots based on traffic levels.

Additionally, private capital could serve as another source of infrastructure investment. As I covered in a previous post, public-private partnerships (PPPs) have become an increasingly popular way for state and local authorities to construct and improve highways and bridges. Under a typical PPP, private investors finance the construction and maintenance of an asset while assuming responsibility for operating the asset over a fixed period, earning back their investment through user fees. As Glaeser points out, PPPs have significant advantages, since private operators may be more cost-effective in their investment than public authorities, have a built-in incentive to maintain the asset, and will allocate further investment to a project only if they anticipate enough demand. Projects involving PPPs include a number of toll roads, HOT lanes, and tunnels around the U.S.

A National Infrastructure Bank

A strategic rethink to infrastructure policy alone will not solve the problem of coordinating funding and policy planning, and numerous experts have proposed the establishment of a National Infrastructure Bank (NIB) to do just that. The idea has been floated for a number of years, and though it has enjoyed support from the Treasury and a broad and bipartisan coalition, enabling legislation has yet to get off the ground.

Creating an NIB could significantly streamline the planning and implementation of U.S. infrastructure policy. It would be able to undertake cost-benefit analyses and allocate funding to projects while remaining detached from the political process, thereby enabling it to take a long-term, strategic view of infrastructure spending. At the same time, it would be able to tap the private sector for co-investment in infrastructure projects, while building an overarching framework to manage the growing number of PPPs around the country. While 33 states actually have separate state infrastructure banks (SIBs), Bill Galston and Korin Davis of the Brookings Institution point out that they are generally undercapitalized, limited to supporting intrastate projects, and located within state departments of transportation, which restricts their funding to transportation projects. An NIB could facilitate multi-state projects, while channeling funds to upgrade energy and communications systems in addition to transportation infrastructure.

The urgency of investment

One week after the State of the Union address, the White House unveiled the president’s plan for investing in infrastructure. The plan calls for $50 billion to be directed toward the U.S. transportation system – with $40 billion going toward a “Fix-It-First” program – as well as for the establishment of a National Infrastructure Bank. It is likely to face an uphill battle to receive congressional approval, not only because of the expansion in federal spending but also because, as Galston and Davis observe, congressional leaders will be loath to relinquish their power to appropriate infrastructure spending through earmarks.

But as deferred maintenance to the American transportation system threatens trillion-dollar economic costs over the next decade, it is increasingly clear that the U.S. needs a long-term infrastructure strategy. The costs of maintenance are likely to rise if inaction continues, and at a time when the costs of borrowing are near all-time lows, there may be no time like the present to begin investing in infrastructure upgrades. Prioritizing existing public spending and alternative funding channels like user fees and PPPs will be key elements of a multi-pronged infrastructure plan, but approving increases to federal and state transportation budgets should remain on the table. Establishing an NIB may be the best way to coordinate these diverse funding sources while articulating a long-term strategy for investment.

In the current protracted debate on the merits of government spending, it is worth remembering that investment in infrastructure is ultimately investment in the capacity for future growth, and by extension investment in future quality of life. Washington, the states, and cities should work on crafting policy instruments that will leverage public and private dollars to equip U.S. infrastructure to meet the country’s 21st-century economic needs.

Thanks to my elementary school nurse, I finished school on time. That’s right: In the 5^th grade, I strained during a school vision test to read the little letters I saw projected on a screen 10 feet away. Asking in bewilderment if I wanted to try again, the screener asked, “How have you even been seeing the chalkboard?” Off to the nurse I went to get my prescription recorded for her records, and glasses were ordered that day.

In the context of today’s school health services, my experience seems paradisiacal. That’s because today, public school health services are conspicuously absent. As a youngster, I never gave much thought to how the presence of that nurse or vision screener and her assessment impacted my uninterrupted performance in school. Given that we know academic success and wellbeing are inextricably linked, the low number of school-based health centers and staff is particularly troubling. Increasing the number of centers and health professionals—nurses and school psychologists in particular—can greatly improve child health, as well as academic performance.

The Affordable Care Act appropriated $200 million for the explicit purpose of building and expanding school health centers, a number that still seems low considering that only 45 percent of public schools have a full-time nurse, and 30 percent can only count on a nurse part time. A quarter of public schools have no nurse at all. A mere 12 states have met the Department of Health and Human Service’s desired ratio of one nurse for every 750 students.

The cost of a school nurse—the average salary hovers around $43,000 a year—and of equipping a center with supplies varies from state to state, and even county to county. If the ACA money were used solely on nurses, it would only allow 4,651 nurses to enter the field. After covering the staffing of public schools in New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago we would be left with funding for a little over 1,000 full salaries—without even beginning to consider the cost of dedicating and maintaining a physical space in a school and procuring supplies.

Historically, school-based health centers have done everything from dispensing Band-Aids and cleaning cuts to providing immunizations, dispensing medications, and coming to the aid of children suffering from seizures. These centers have also offered preventive care and treatment for children who may not otherwise have access to health insurance. They can have a significant impact on what is known as the “achievement gap,” the major race and socioeconomic disparities in academic success that begin to emerge as early as elementary school, by working to address the health issues that have the greatest impact on a child’s performance in school.

An emerging body of research points to the ways in which these disparities could be drastically reduced, and preventive care restored, with the return of robust care being offered in-house at our public schools.

The Journal of School Health devoted an entire issue to research by Charles Basch, Ph.D., of Teachers College, Columbia University, that highlights health issues with historically high socioeconomic, racial, and urban health disparities, how they contribute to poorer academic outcomes for minority youth, and how school-based health care can mitigate them. Children of color currently make up 85 percent (PDF) of New York City’s public school system, one of the most racially segregated in the nation, and Basch’s research outlines seven health problems that can be easily addressed by a school nurse within these segregated environments and help reduce the disparities.

The least contentious health issues addressed are asthma, vision and nutrition. The prevalence of asthma among black children in the United States is 12.8 percent versus 8.8 percent for white children, and the annual estimate of asthma attacks among black children is 8.4 percent compared to 5.8 percent among white youth. Poorly controlled asthma can impact cognition and plays a significant role in absenteeism; the overuse of emergency departments and underuse of effective medications among minority youth are a good measure of how the affliction is having greater negative consequences for children of color.

As someone who needed glasses fairly young, it’s unsurprising that more than a fifth of youth have vision problems. A national sample of nearly 50,000 children showed those from low-income families were less likely to have vision diagnoses than high-income children. Once diagnosed, black children have less intensive and sparser care than whites. And everyone knows that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but one study showed that among 9-year-old girls over a three-day period, 77 percent of white children had breakfast every day while only 57 percent of black children did. Of children qualifying for reduced or free lunch in their public schools, less than half participated in schools’ free breakfast programs for which they were eligible. Nutrition influences brain activity, which results in significant impacts on children’s learning and cognition.

There are uncomplicated solutions to these problems. Asthma screenings are quick, and medicines are immediately effective. Dealing with symptoms and management of asthma at school can decrease both absences and severe attacks. Vision screening is widespread in schools, but the coordination of follow-up care by a school health professional is essential for children in need of eye-care interventions and is the biggest culprit behind current disparities. Participation in universal school-breakfast programs has shown reductions in absences, and allowing children to eat breakfast in their classrooms as opposed to the cafeteria has resulted in increases in the programs. School-based health centers can oversee the distribution of healthy meals for children in need of these programs, with the added perk of highlighting which students may benefit from other school-health services.

Attention deficit and attention deficit hyperactivity disorders (ADD and ADHD) have received much attention in recent years. ADD/HD affects sensory perception, absenteeism, cognition, and even organizational and planning skills. Urban youth of color are more likely to be affected by and less likely to receive a correct diagnosis and effective medication. Screenings by school psychologists and learning specialists can aid in the diagnosis of ADD and ADHD and the accessing of medications, as well as help students with effective behavioral modifications. School nurses are in a position to manage the medications by dispensing them to students at school if necessary, and ensuring that the timing and dosage are accurate.

Most contentious of the issues tackled by Basch in his call to arms is teen pregnancy. Among 15- to 17-year old girls, the pregnancy rate among blacks is more than three times higher than whites, and the rate among Hispanic teens is more than four times as high. Teen mothers on average have two fewer years of schooling. They are 10-12 percent less likely to finish high school, and have 14-29 percent lower odds of attending college. The implementation of evidence-based, comprehensive sex education is the best way to reduce the teen pregnancy disparity. This requires the overhaul of the popular abstinence-only education programs, which have been shown to leave students ill-equipped to make the healthiest decisions. Given the fraught political environment, comprehensive sex education is not widespread, and school nurses can be an essential resource for students beginning to engage in sexual activity. From dispensing condoms to connecting students to community resources for treatment who may disclose concerns about both pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, and being the person on campus who can answer questions privately about reproductive health, nurses can address issues that are not part of classroom learning.

There are signs of hope, as Basch was asked by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to outline national health strategies in schools, but the now well-known public funding cuts to both healthcare and education continue to threaten the health status and educational attainment of youth in America’s public schools.

The disparities can be shocking. But these specific health issues are fairly straightforward, do not require specialists, and can be tackled easily within a school environment by nurses, resulting in the improvement of both kids’ public health and academic achievement—as long as they are given the finances and support to do so. As a front line of defense against immediate health emergencies and the prevention and maintenance of chronic diseases that develop in elementary school years, ensuring the presence of fully staffed, funded, and stable school-based health centers is essential—especially for our children already victim to a shameful lack of resources.

Edited by Jordan Lite. Additional research by Arti Virkud.

This article originally appeared on the2x2project.org, an online publication sponsored by the Department of Epidemiology at Columbia University. 2×2 aims to inform the health conversation through timely and effective communication of emerging public health science.

Photo credit: David Gould / Getty Images

Perhaps the most hated corporation in existence, Monsanto is a huge organization, best known for creating, selling, and, most importantly, patenting genetically engineered crops (GE crops) that are resistant to Monsanto’s brand of herbicide, Round-up. Commonly known as “Round-Up Ready” crops, Monsanto’s seeds include corn, alfalfa, and soybeans and are so widely used that pretty much everything we eat contains at least some GMO (Genetically Modified Organisms).

GE crops have several environmental implications. First, having crops that are resistant to toxic herbicides like Round-Up allow farmers to use more of them on their crops. This means that there’s more pesticides being swept up in stormwater runoff and end up in the water supply, causing havoc.

Second, because seeds are passed on very easily by pollinating animals, so-called “super weeds” that are also resistant to herbicides are beginning to pop up unintentionally far away from their point of origin. Stronger and more potent herbicides are needed in greater amounts in order to get rid of these, compounding the runoff problem and potentially removing a tool in the fight against invasive species. The same is happening with Monsanto’s line of pesticide resistant crops, where the very bugs the pesticide is targeting are becoming resistant themselves (isn’t evolution wonderful?).

While these are very serious problems, the reason Monsanto is so reviled is more due to the way it treats farmers. Because the genes themselves are patented, Monsanto is allowed to prosecute patent infringement rigorously – and it does so to great effect. Monsanto has also been accused of harassing and intimidating farmers into settling rather than pursuing their cases, which usually works because of the incredible resource disparity between local farmers and a huge conglomerate like Monsanto. Of the cases that have made it to court (11 out of 145 according to Monsanto’s website) every single one has been decided in Monsanto’s favor.

Now, however, one of these cases has made it into the Supreme Court. SCOTUS recently heard arguments in Bowman v. Monsanto, originally decided by the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. Bowman found a way to save GE seeds without buying them directly from Monsanto and ostensibly without violating Monsanto’s licensing, which prohibits farmers from saving or planting the seeds that were grown from Monsanto’s seeds.

Some of the GE seeds were sold (legally) into the commodity seed market and mixed with other seeds. Bowman bought seeds from the commodity market, planted them, then sprayed them with Round-Up to find which ones survived. Then, free of the Monsanto usual licensing agreement forbidding seed saving, Bowman saved the Round-Up Ready seeds from the commodity crop for planting in the next season.

Monsanto sued Bowman, claiming that their patent had been infringed and the Federal Circuit agreed. This decision may be directly contradictory to previous SCOTUS precedent saying that patent holders cannot require the entire supply chain to license their patent.

However, the questions asked during oral argument were not very sympathetic to Bowman. The justices equated planting the resulting seeds with making a copy of the original, patented product rather than simply using the original product in the manner for which it was intended.

But the fact that we have allowed Round-Up Ready crops to become so ubiquitous that these questions need to be answered has implications for more than just patent law. Even setting aside the unique environmental problems that Round-Up Ready crops pose, how sustainable is the practice of patenting the genes in a seed?

Many people have a very visceral reaction to the idea that farmers can no longer plant seeds that came from crops that they grew, or that seed cleaners could be sued for cleaning patented seeds. Food is one of the fundamentals for our survival; it’s natural to be concerned when the government hands a single company a genetic monopoly over its production.

We’ve seen a glimpse of the end-game of such a system in India, where farmers are committing suicide by the thousands after experimental crops fail and they are left with nothing but the monumental debt required to buy them.

It seems as if the Supreme Court won’t be where this system changes, but there’s always the hope that Congress will act. Hopefully that happens before GE seeds go from close to 90% of our corn and soybeans to 100%.

Kelci Block is in her final year at William and Mary Law School and is co-president of William and Mary’s Environmental Law Society. She has interned at the Southern Environmental Law Center, Chesapeake Bay Foundation, and the Virginia Outdoors Foundation. She has previously been published in the Environmental Law Reporter.

Previous climate reconstructions, like Michael Mann’s (in)famous hockey stick (PDF), had examined trends primarily over the past 2,000 years, so Marcott and his team dramatically expanded current knowledge of global climate trends. In their paper, they largely corroborate several important points of consensus in the existing literature. First, while the current temperature is not yet the highest over the 11,300 years studied (that honor goes to the interglacial period), our rate of temperature rise far outpaces anything previously experienced. Secondly, the climate was undergoing a period of cooling starting about 5,000 years ago that ended about 100-200 years ago. In fact, Marcott noted in an interview with the New York Times that “we were on this downward slope, presumably going back toward another ice age.”

This comprehensive data is the most damning evidence yet that anthropogenic emissions are causing climate forcing at a scale unknown in world history.

Episode Summary: We hear much talk about how current healthcare systems are “unsustainable”, particularly in rich developed economies. But what exactly do we mean? What is unsustainable about them? In this episode, Dr. Wen and Jisung discuss one critical piece of the puzzle of sustainable healthcare: the relationship between doctor and patient. Dr. Wen shares her unique perspective which is informed by both her work as an emergency physician as well as her mother’s battle with breast cancer. In addition to concrete steps that both patients and doctors can take to bring back the lost art of correct diagnosis, Dr. Wen offers valuable career advice for students interested in medicine and public health.

Bio: Dr. Leana Wen is an emergency physician at Brigham & Women’s/Massachusetts General Hospital, clinical fellow at Harvard Medical School, and a former Rhodes Scholar. Inspired by her own childhood illness and then her mother’s long battle with cancer, Dr. Wen is passionate about guiding patients to advocate for better care. She has been featured in TIME, Newsweek, ABC News, NPR, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, The New York Times, Washington Post, Teen Vogue, and the award-winning HBO documentary Reporter. Dr. Wen speaks regularly across the U.S. and in Europe, Asia, and Africa to on simple yet effective ways for patients to take control of their health and her new book: When Doctors Don’t Listen: How to Avoid Misdiagnoses and Unnecessary Tests. Follow @DrLeanaWen.

Related Links:

Additional media coverage of “When Doctors Don’t Listen”:

WBUR: http://commonhealth.wbur.org/2013/01/when-doctors-dont-listen

CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/16/health/doctors-listen/index.html?hpt=he_t2

TIME: http://business.time.com/2013/01/28/get-well-sooner-and-cheaper-two-medical-insiders-pull-back-the-curtain-on-the-doctor-patient-relationship/

The Doctor is Listening Blog: http://whendoctorsdontlisten.blogspot.com/

When the bird flu, or H5N1, began sweeping across three continents in 2004 (PDF), it caused a worldwide panic, killing more than 50 percent of its 600 human victims and 100 million birds. It also added to growing fears about the unpredictability of such epidemics, which were taking an increasingly more significant economic and human toll.

Although H5N1 seemed to come out of nowhere, the early 2000s was not the first time the world had encountered the virus. Five years earlier, H5N1 left plenty of so-called “viral chatter”—small outbreaks that precede large outbreaks—killing six of the 18 people who were infected in Hong Kong, China. If scientists had recognized these infections before they turned to outbreaks and then a global pandemic, the story of H5N1 would have been much different.

“No emerging infection has ever been predicted before it appeared in humans,” says Dr. Stephen Morse, a professor of epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health and an expert on emerging infectious disease.

Up to this point scientists have never been able to identify a highly contagious pathogen like H5N1 until it has broken out in humans and, in most cases, left some damage in its wake.

Dr. Morse and a small cohort of fellow infectious disease epidemiologists are trying to change this. They say the current approach is too reactive, that in a 21^st century world where disease emerge and travels quickly across the world, surveillance needs to search out the infecting pathogen before it ever enters a human.

Considering that 60 percent of all emerging infectious disease, such as HIV, H5N1, and pandemic influenza, originated from animal sources, the evidence for targeting the link between animals and humans is persuasive.

“We see new things all the time,” says Dr. Nathan Wolfe of Metabiota, who studies pre-emergence interactions in African bush meat hunters. “We see new retroviruses out there—which is the category that HIV falls into—and we’re very, very concerned because this is the part of the world where HIV jumped from chimpanzees to humans. There’s no reason why other viruses in that same class won’t have the capacity to leap to humans.”

Once diseases are identified, health authorities have been able to prevent its spread by quarantining infected people and administering vaccines. However there can be significant lag time between when people are infected and when they show symptoms –sometimes weeks, or even months after becoming infected. By the time a pathogen is identified, much damage has already been done.

The approach of scientists like Dr. Morse is to pre-emptively identify potential outbreaks before they emerge by going directly to the source—the frontlines of where humans and animals co-exist.

These landscapes can include anything from animal markets in China—where dinner is butchered on the street—to pig farms in Malaysia, to illegal bush meat hunting in central Africa.

In a December 2012 Lancet article, Dr. Morse and his co-authors say that authorities need to monitor such locations where dense populations of humans and animals interact—“hotspots” for emerging infectious disease.

It is here that pathogens often jump from an animal to human, resulting in what is known as a novel zoonosis, a transmissible disease or infection between vertebrate animals and humans.

“There is no question of whether we will have more zoonotic pandemics – the question is merely when and where the next pandemic will emerge,” says Dr. Morse. “The challenge now is to establish whether and how researchers can intervene before a pathogen reaches the human population and develop appropriate triggers for action.”

At the forefront of disease prediction systems is Dr. Morse’s PREDICT project (PDF), part of USAID’s Emerging Pandemic Threats Program.

PREDICT focuses on the rapid detection of pathogens at an early stage by building laboratory capacity to meet these threats, and coordinating with a wide range of authorities to respond.

The organization is currently active in 20 viral “hotspot” countries, which have been identified by computer models as high risk for disease emergence.

Because of globalization, close interactions between animals and humans—like hunting and butchering—are increasing, making it more likely that novel pathogens will spillover into the human population.

By figuring out how and where humans alter the landscape, and identifying areas of high biodiversity, scientists can determine where novel zoonotic pathogens are likely to spill over into the human population.

The technology is undeniably in its infancy, challenging scientists to push beyond their current capabilities into new lines of inquiry to look at new routes of transmission, and the ability of a pathogen to evolve into the next pandemic.

“It’s essentially risk assessment, being able to understand what is out there and its potential before it really gets into the population,” says Dr. Morse.

These changing dynamics provide the ideal environment for the emergence of novel pathogens, a stage referred to Dr. Morse and his colleagues as “pre-emergence”—when a pathogen is still in its natural reservoir, usually wildlife, yet is changing its interactions with potential hosts, such as livestock and humans. Examples include the encroachment of livestock into wildlife, and ecological changes due to climate change.

PREDICT partners with other organizations, such as Metabiota, to understand pathogens at this stage of “pre-emergence” in viral hotspots.

Embracing a principle that a coalition of clinicians and veterinarians call One Health, that human and animal health should not be studied in isolation, researchers at Metabiota travel to the heart of Africa to hunt for viruses that are on the brink of emergence from wildlife into human populations.

In central Africa, people rely on illegal bush meat hunting—the butchering of wild animals—to feed their families and provide income. These hunters are in close contact with the blood and guts of their game, acting like a driver who has stopped on the side of the road to allow a pathogen to hitchhike into human populations.

Dr. Wolfe is currently working with bush meat hunters to catch these pathogens before they emerge in humans.

To do so, he teaches the hunters to collect bush meat blood on cards after butchering. These cards help preserve the blood’s microscopic contents as they are transferred to a facility for identification.

The microscopic life of these blood cards are subsequently analyzed and catalogued by microbiologists, such as Dr. Ian Lipkin, an internationally renowned expert on pathogen discovery and director of Columbia University’s Center for Infection and Immunity—known as the “man from which viruses cannot hide,” and a co-author with Dr. Morse of the 2012 December Lancet article.

“We’ve discovered at least 400 new viruses since I came to Columbia in 2002, and the process is accelerating,” said Dr. Lipkin in an interview with the New York Times.

Tremendous strides in molecular diagnostics have made pathogen discovery closer to reality than science fiction. Integrative polymerase chain reaction (PCR) sample preparation has simplified pathogen identification. Scientists can cheaply identify pathogens at the family level using broad-based PCR, avoiding costly technology that identifies pathogens at more specific levels—such as species.

One difficulty is in identifying which pathogens will actually jump from an animal to a human, since many pathogens never leave their host species.

Scientists are still trying to figure out what makes one pathogen more likely than another to make the fatal jump.

“There’s no established methodology for this,” Dr. Morse says. “That’s what makes it interesting. How do you separate [pathogens at high risk of emergence] from all of the noise? That’s the challenge with prediction.”

Regardless, information like that being gathered by Dr. Wolfe would have been invaluable during the early stages of the 2002 H5N1 outbreak.

“By capturing this moment [of intimate interaction between bush meat hunters and their prey], we might be able to move to a situation where we can catch [pathogens] early,” notes Dr. Wolfe.

Advances in communication technology have played a key role in disease forecasting systems. Cell phones and social media have provided a much faster and easier way for users to report real-time outbreaks.

While the technology is fragmented throughout the world, the ability of Twitter and Google Flu Trends to accurately predict infectious disease outbreaks suggest they will play a key role in the future of disease forecasting. With the help of this technology, professionals can identify and contain localized outbreaks at an earlier stage than historical surveillance systems.

Yet, without political recognition and investment in these disease prediction systems, they are unlikely to succeed. The budgetary coordination and ability to build and maintain these systems on both local and national government levels “might be the greatest challenge of all,” concede Drs. Morse, Lipkin, and co-authors.

As with any new technology in its infancy, there are also skeptics.

“It’s outside people’s comfort zones” Dr. Morse says. “We tend to divide the world up into disciplines…we need a cultural change. That’s going to take time. My hope is that the younger generations will be more amendable to it.”

With worldwide health at stake, the incentive for the embrace of disease prediction systems by both policy makers and scientists is urgent.

Says Dr. Morse: “With new technologies, for the first time in history, we are now poised to predict and prevent emerging infections at the source, before they reach us.”

Edited by Elaine Meyer. Additional research by Arti Virkud.

This article originally appeared on the2x2project.org, an online publication sponsored by the Department of Epidemiology at Columbia University. 2×2 aims to inform the health conversation through timely and effective communication of emerging public health science.

Kanaka Menehune

In his State of the Union address on February 12, President Obama singled out rebuilding America’s infrastructure as a policy priority. Citing the deteriorating quality of the country’s transportation and energy networks, he proposed a “Fix-It-First” program to fund the most urgent infrastructure upgrades and repairs, as well as a federal initiative to co-source funds from the private sector for future upgrades. Obama framed these measures as an urgent task, noting the potential of these improvements and repairs to attract investment and jobs to the United States while boosting America’s global economic competitiveness.

Indeed, infrastructure investment should be a pressing issue for U.S. policymakers, as transportation and energy networks planned and built decades ago strain to meet the needs of the 21st-century American economy. Deferred maintenance on existing infrastructure and a reluctance to embark on large-scale projects have cost Americans hundreds of billions of dollars in lost economic productivity, while budget constraints and the current polarization of government spending threaten to continue this worrisome trend. In this first post of a two-part discussion, I outline the problems facing U.S. infrastructure and examine how a more strategic approach to spending can help address them.

The costs of neglect

A number of recent reports paint a stark picture of America’s transportation and energy systems. In the World Economic Forum’s annual Global Competitiveness Report, the United States has slipped from first place in quality of overall infrastructure in 2005 to twenty-fifth place in 2013. The 2012-2013 edition ranks the U.S. 20th in roads, 19th in ports, 30th in airports, and 33rd in the quality of electricity supply. The most recent Report Card for America’s Infrastructure from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) assigned a D- grade for American roads, a C for bridges, a D for transit systems, and a D+ for the energy grid. A 2012 report from the bipartisan Building America’s Future Educational Fund details the impact of deteriorating transportation systems on the economy with some sobering figures; for example, freight congestion at ports and in rail and road corridors imposes costs of $200 billion a year, while the costs of Americans stuck in traffic totaled $101 billion and 1.9 billion gallons of lost fuel during 2010 alone.

Inaction on infrastructure investment will multiply these economic costs to truly staggering levels. The Building America’s Future report projects that 94% of American economic growth will take place in metropolitan areas, where many existing highways, airports, and transit systems are already overburdened from use. And a new study from the ASCE warns that, if current infrastructure investment trends continue, system deficiencies will cost U.S. households $611 billion and businesses $1.2 trillion by 2020. Nor does it help, as the Building America’s Future report points out, that America’s economic competitors – from Canada and the European Union to emerging economies such as China and Brazil – are currently investing heavily in infrastructure upgrades and maintenance.

But the fear of potential economic losses from both waste at home and competition abroad may not be enough to galvanize federal and state governments into action. Concerns over the soaring federal deficit, combined with the persistent budget battles in Washington, have rendered any significant expansion in infrastructure spending a remote possibility under the current Congress. The latest standoff has led to an automatic series of budget reductions known as the “sequester,” which took effect on March 1. Sequestration is slated to cut $28.7 billion to nondefense discretionary spending, which includes federal funding for infrastructure, in 2013 alone. Meanwhile, state and local governments, many of which operate under balanced-budget requirements, have also adopted fiscal tightening measures in response to looming debts.

In an era of escalating budget deficits and widespread fiscal austerity, how can America prevent the loss of economic productivity posed by aging, overused, and underfunded infrastructure? The answers lie with overhauling infrastructure policy strategy and identifying new sources of funding.

Strategizing spending

American transportation policy planning is a convoluted process divided between the federal government, the states, and municipalities. According to the Congressional Budget Office, some 75 percent of public spending on transportation and water infrastructure comes from state and local governments, with Washington accounting for the remainder. Yet transportation funding is typically passed on a piecemeal, as-needed basis, with cities and states generally relying on bonds and the federal government on grants. The “long-term” transportation bill passed by Congress last year typified this approach; it was the first such bill passed since 2005, covered only two years of funding, and was negotiated on the eve of a transportation funding crisis. As Bill Galston and Korin Davis of the Brookings Institution point out in a recent paper, the U.S. has no “long-term plan, strategic set of priorities, or dedicated funding stream” to coordinate planning and spending at these various levels of government.

America could take a simple step toward establishing a more coherent infrastructure strategy by re-prioritizing the infrastructure spending that federal, state, and local governments have already approved. One approach would be to focus on maintaining and improving existing highways, bridges, railways, and ports instead of constructing new ones, which would do much to optimize the current transportation system and reduce the costs of congestion in the short term.

Economists Matthew Kahn of UCLA and David Levinson of the University of Minnesota advocate such a “Fix-It-First, Expand-It-Second” strategy in a 2011 paper for the Hamilton Project at Brookings. They note that the current system of government grants and political earmarking creates a bias toward funding new construction rather than upgrading existing infrastructure, since the latter is less visible to constituents and thus less likely to generate support for the politicians controlling the purse strings. Mandating that existing funding mechanisms such as the Highway Trust Fund channel their grants to improving existing infrastructure would reduce the cost of future maintenance and the probability of systemic breakdowns such as bridge collapses.

In addition to maintaining existing resources, cash-strapped states and municipalities could prioritize investment in projects most likely to boost long-term productivity and economic growth. As outlined by economists Adam Looney of Brookings and Michael Greenstone of MIT in another Hamilton Project paper, such “investment in the future” would involve conducting rigorous cost-benefit analyses when allocating funds and improving transparency by publicly disclosing these allocations. The latter could also help prevent public funds from going toward “bridge to nowhere” boondoggles while improving public confidence in infrastructure spending.

While adopting these spending strategies will help, addressing America’s infrastructure needs will ultimately require sizeable increases in funding. The current political climate of budget austerity poses a significant obstacle to increased government spending, but other pathways exist to raise the needed dollars for transportation and energy systems. In a second post, I will examine these other funding sources and how they can be incorporated into a long-term infrastructure policy strategy.

As scientists vie to explain the mysteries of the human brain, the rest of us are left to grapple with the implications of potentially challenging results. But while many studies in neuroscience suggest that our decisions—large and small—are simply a result of the neural networking of our brains, their conclusions may suggest a systematic bias in both the way that neuroscientists ask their research questions and the way the media reports on them.

For example, why do people do things that hurt others?

That was the question asked by Dr. Anthony Jack, an assistant professor of cognitive science at Case Western Reserve, and his colleagues in a recent study published in the journal NeuroImage.

Using fMRI, a tool that allows researchers to visualize brain activity in real time, and various problem-solving tasks, Dr. Jack and his team identified how social tasks deactivated regions associated with mechanical reasoning and vice versa. The study suggests that there are two separate, mutually exclusive neural networks for analytic and empathetic thought, and each network suppresses the other when activated.

Neuroscience research like this, with its inherent determinism, can pose a difficult problem: it chips away at our understanding of free will and our deepest-held conceptions regarding choice and human behavior. Indeed, some neuroscientists, like Patrick Haggard and Sam Harris, have gone as far as to say that our current understanding of the human mind establishes that individuals lack free will. And research like that of Dr. Jack seems to support these assertions.

But there are a couple of problems here.

First, many researchers overreach their conclusions. The primary aim of most neuroscience research is to characterize pathological processes in the brain that might underlie neurological diseases. For example, the research conducted by Dr. Jack may have important implications in therapy for individuals with autism and Williams’ syndrome. This is much different from attempting to explain human behavior more generally—a task which requires substantially more diligence and corroboration. In this regard, neuroscientists would do well to better clarify the strengths and weaknesses of their research in supporting a deterministic perspective on the world.

Second, despite reams of studies showing null findings, media coverage focuses only on studies with positive findings. This provides a lopsided picture of what we know about the brain. While it may be harder for media sources to create a compelling story from studies that fail to identify exciting neural networks, by not covering negative results, they leave the public with a biased perspective on the state of neuroscience.

With these important biases in mind, free will might still have a chance. It’s time researchers and reporters exercise theirs to make neuroscience coverage less sensational and more accurate.

Article originally posted on the2x2project.org, an online publication sponsored by the Department of Epidemiology at Columbia University. 2×2 aims to inform the health conversation through timely and effective communication of emerging public health science.

Credit: National Geographic

In a recent post we highlighted commentary in Nature that calls for more complex, integrated models of the world’s ecosystems in the style of the global climate models. The authors lay out a convincing case for the ecological and scientific reasons that these types of models will be beneficial, but they ignore another strong argument for developing integrated, global models of ecosystems: the need for the data that these models could provide in economic and development decision-making.

The development of GEM models may be anathema to some ecologists because of the level of abstraction that comes with such models, as economists are well aware. However, even abstract models can be useful in guiding thinking and making policy.  In analyzing the trade-offs between multiple courses of action, which is at the heart of all economics and especially development economics, abstract cost/benefit models are essential.  A relatively common example illustrates the point: is an investment in the development of beach-side condos more valuable than preserving the beach in an undisturbed state as a tourist attraction?  As with many development questions, once the trade-off is made the decision is relatively irreversible.  It is difficult to imagine tearing down condos to restore the beach if it turns out that a nature reserve would have been more valuable.

The irreversible nature of decisions regarding the preservation or alteration of stocks of natural capital underline the importance of getting the cost/benefit model right.  In this case, the development of GEMs could augment the cost-benefit models of economists considering the utility of specific development projects.  Providing data on how the complex connections in a landscape affect the operation of an ecosystem is the first step towards both valuing the discrete aspects of that ecosystem and, in turn, assessing the costs of modifying elements of the ecosystem.  Knowing these costs is essential when considering the inevitable trade-offs inherent in development questions.

It is important to note, however, that building GEMs will not answer the question of whether we should or should not develop.  They simply provide additional data for the cost/benefit model and make it possible for that model to more accurately reflect the true costs and benefits of a project.  It is still necessary to examine these costs and benefits and decide of the project is worthwhile.  Unfortunately, there is not an agreed upon set of standards for deciding if projects should move forward.That is the realm of politics, not economics.  But a good rule of thumb might be the same used by doctors: first do no harm.  If a project would make local populations substantially, and irreversibly, worse off, then it may not be worth pursuing.

In some cases, the costs to local populations are immediate and obvious.  Siting pollution power plants or bus depots in low income areas is a clear and common environmental justice issue.  In these cases the local population is obviously made worse off – though perhaps not irreversibly so– with little or no direct benefits.  But many development questions, particularly when the direct cost is the destruction of an ecosystem, do not have such clearly defined effects on the well-being of local populations.

The current controversy over the development of the Pebble Mine in Alaska’s Bristol Bay is an excellent example.  On one side is the world’s largest and most productive single salmon fishery – bringing in $310 million annually to Alaska’s economy and the 7,500 residents of Bristol Bay.  On the other is the $500 billion worth of copper, gold, and molybdenum that lie under the headwaters of the salmon fishery.  Opponents of the project, which include Audubon, NRDC, and the native populations of Bristol Bay, claim that the development of the mine would destroy the salmon runs and the economic lifeblood of the region.  Proponents of the project, however, claim that the science around the salmon runs is questionable and the project stands to bring millions of dollars in economic growth to the region.

It is naïve to believe that a GEM of Bristol bay would provide uncontestable evidence of the impacts of the mine one way or the other.  What it could do, however, is provide a deeper understanding of how the ecosystem functions and suggest additional sources of value – other than the salmon runs – to be included in a cost/benefit analysis (CBA).  In the case of the Pebble Mine, such additional considerations would likely cause any CBA to show that the most sustainable development is no development.  Rather, the sustainable solution is the continuation of an economy based on the natural capital of the region.

In fact, developing and integrating GEMs into CBA analyses around the world might show that a great deal of development is not sustainable, particularly when the “do no harm” maxim is considered.  Given the irreversible aspects of most alteration of natural capital, this is not surprising.  But it is crucial that we develop a deeper understanding of the functioning of ecosystems in order to better integrate them into our economic decision-making.  Creating GEMs is a first step in this process towards a greater recognition of the total costs of development and the notion that sometimes sustainable development means no new development.

As in the developed world, new financial power in the developing world can translate into political power. The virtual proximity that mobile phones grant developing and rural communities helps to eliminate a portion of social control and subsequent corruption or abuse of power, once the norm, as financial relationships are opened. In these corners of the world, mobile innovations are making it possible to circumvent state and local authorities and increase local political participation. For example, Ushahidi, an open-source software platform for interactive mapping and information sourcing was created to allow citizen journalists to upload and map violence and peace efforts in their communities via their mobile phones. In India, I Paid a Bribe acknowledges that rampant corruption was born from a failure of the political system, and serves as a reporting portal to record how many bribes are paid each day, under what conditions, and to what end.

Companies that seek to serve this growing and potentially lucrative need must consider this new reality while developing new products, and managing innovation. Mobile development companies, both hardware and software, have typically been designing products for users that fall into the traditional mold—educated, literate, and rich. However, the large developing market has higher rates of illiteracy, or has never owned a piece of high technology, making this approach not only useless. To address this, companies like MobilGlyph sent digital designers into rural areas to study how people use their mobile phones. In rural India, where 40 percent of the population is illiterate, researchers found that phones are often purchased second-hand, are text-based, and are a symbol of frustration and shame for those who cannot read letters or numbers – issues with huge implications for companies that seek to serve this increasingly important demographic.

These examples demonstrate the possibility for non-corporate entities to engage in mobile innovation when supported by preexisting infrastructural technology. This basic infrastructure is the first step to increase research and development. In 2007, Sonatel invested in Senegalese cellular service. Seven years prior, less than 700 of 16,000 towns had telephonic infrastructure. With no roads or transportation system, there was no outside world. SONATEL saw the profit in installing mobile access in remote regions where fixed-line providers never ventured, despite the government never incentivizing investment. Telecomm revenue in the country exceeded $1.4 billion USD in 2011, and by 2012, and overall mobile telephony contributed 13.6% of overall economic growth.  While emerging markets are benefiting from a relatively open playing-field to develop their mobile businesses, government cooperation is crucial. The Kenyan government has been acclaimed as a leader in developing mobile capacity in East Africa, where it has supported the development of broadband to rural areas by establishing infrastructure, implementing development-friendly tax policies, and facilitating market liberalization. Increasing competition in the telecommunictions markets of East Africa helps foster a range of pricing plans and prepaid options so that an increased percentage of the population has access to these important tools, increasing their economic viability and political capital.

The political capital gained from being connected on a mobile device is critical for empowering disconnected populations—urban and rural alike. It creates shared meaning and value for those whose voices have often been silenced by circumstance. Mobile connectivity is a very basic expression of a networked existence and is often mistakenly thrown into the mix of Internet-powered cyberactivism and networked social movements. Having a mobile phone, versus a robust cyberculture powered by in-home, café or school connectivity, has become a basic requirement for survival in some circumstances. It creates difference between the banked and unbanked, the rural and the diaspora, even the represented and the disenfranchised. Mobile connectivity grants access to a rapidly developing economic world, but often times lacks the power to send messages to a multiplicity of people that fosters social movement.

To increase the availability of both basical mobile connectivity and highly diffused Internet access, the social contract for basic innovation requires businesses and policy makers to execute research and development that provides a societal and economic good. Mobile commerce and learning are a result of the advance of modern human capital. The ability to create and distribute knowledge is more important to the economy than almost anything else. Innovation policy must therefore become more user-centered and demand-based. Incentivizing innovation, properly shaping regulatory institutions to provide safety nets for those who cannot keep up with the change, and increasing competition to enhance the uptake of ICT should be a priority for any organization serious about improving the global economy. However, in order to foster the competition needed to increase mobile penetration, governments, transnational bodies, and private organizations should encourage crucial invest in highly-skilled R&D, and improve opportunities for training abroad.

By Dana March

 
A study that casts doubt on whether being overweight is associated with a shorter life span has sparked 2013’s first public health controversy — and a fiery one at that.

Published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) by researchers at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics, the study found that individuals who have a body mass index that classifies them as overweight lived about six percent longer than those considered to be normal weight, contradicting a widespread belief that those who are overweight have shorter lives. The study also found that the lives of individuals in the obese BMI category were 18 percent shorter compared to those of normal weight.

That obesity shortens life is consistent with the current campaign to trim the population’s collective waistline. That being overweight might lengthen life is not. And although the study is peer-reviewed and scientifically sound, several experts have taken issue with the methods as well as the findings, claiming they could undermine the current full-scale public health effort to combat the obesity epidemic. The debate has revealed some of the major fault lines over how health authorities communicate to individuals about weight loss, and represents more about dogmatic beliefs regarding health than the actual merits of the study. It also sets into relief some of the risks of resisting the introduction of new scientific knowledge in the context of a public health war.
 

The Skinny on the Study

 
BMI, a widely used measure around which standard international weight categories are constructed, is controversial. The measure, which is calculated by dividing weight in kilograms by height in meters squared, has been criticized for being an inadequate measure of health, particularly regarding who is considered overweight and obese.

So while it is probably not surprising that actor Marlon Brando is considered obese — not the Brando who sizzled in A Streetcar Named Desire but the Brando of Apocalypse Now — it would probably surprise most people that actor Tom Cruise, at 5 feet 7 inches tall and 166 pounds is considered overweight according to his BMI. Two less surprising comparisons: singer Beyonce Knowles at 5 feet 6 inches tall and 130 pounds is considered normal weight, while actress Angelina Jolie at 5 feet 8 inches tall and 115 pounds is considered underweight.

But though it may be imperfect, BMI does have its defenders. A recent study conducted by Columbia epidemiologists found that it is as good as any other measure when predicting many health conditions.

The JAMA study, which was a systematic review, or a study of studies, sought to address controversial inconsistencies in the scientific literature addressing BMI-based weight categories and risk of death. However, despite its rigor, sound methods, and transparent presentation, the study has elicited a spectrum of reactions from scientists and other commentators, many of whom take issue with the study for opposing reasons.

“This study is really a pile of rubbish and no one should waste their time reading it,” Dr. Walter Willett of the Harvard School of Public Health, told NPR. “We have a huge amount of other literature showing that people who gain weight or are overweight have increased risk of diabetes, heart disease, stroke, many cancers and many other conditions.”

Dr. Willett did not identify any methodological grounds for dismissal of the study, however. To Willett, it seems, the study was flawed because it did not address the association between overweight, obesity and chronic disease.

The study focuses explicitly on risk of death from all causes, including chronic diseases, unintentional injuries and suicides. Some causes of death, particularly diseases that lead to a form of severe weight loss known as wasting, may pose greater risks for normal weight individuals than those who are overweight.

Coming from the other end of the spectrum, Paul Campos, author of The Obesity Myth, seized onto the results of the study, writing in a The New York Times op-ed piece that the fear of fat is “absurd” in the United States and that the study’s results provide evidence that governmental claims of Americans’ expanding waistlines is “exaggerated and unscientific.”

Campos also claims that “the American obsession with fat . . . serves the economic interests of, among others, the multibillion-dollar weight-loss industry and large pharmaceutical companies,” failing to acknowledge also the powerful, symbiotic forces of the food industry.

Dr. David Katz, director of Yale University’s Prevention Research Center reacted sharply to Campos’s op-ed, pointing to the perils of playing “ping-pong with science because of misguided bias or motivated self-interest.” Indeed, neither Willett nor Campos acknowledged that the 18 percent increase in mortality risk for obesity relative to normal BMI reported in the study is consistent with the rest of the literature, which gives some credence to the overweight finding, and provides further evidence that obesity has deleterious effects.

“This literature has not been assembled in one place before in any kind of way . . . I think when people talk about things being controversial or questionable, they only tend to cite one or two studies,” Dr. Katherine Flegal, lead author of the study, told JAMA in an interview.

Scientists do not collect their own data for systematic reviews but rather assemble data from other studies on the subject. This kind of study addresses the inherent challenge in summarizing epidemiologic literature, which is dealing with a variety of comparison categories and methods that often obfuscate the overall pattern of findings. Because most studies have different measures and definitions, a systematic review provides an unbiased synthesis of the existing scientific literature. It is conducted with methodological rigor, using explicit inclusion and exclusion criteria for potential studies, which means that the review is reproducible.

One approach to the systematic review of quantitative studies, known as meta-analysis, statistically summarizes the data of the studies included in the review. The JAMA study is a meta-analysis of data from 97 longitudinal observational studies, known as prospective cohort studies, mostly from the U.S., Canada and Europe, with a total of almost three million subjects and over 270,000 deaths from all causes.

According to Campos, the studies included in the meta-analysis cannot establish cause. “Observational studies merely record statistical correlations,” says Campos. However, Campos does not account for the fact that observational studies like those included in the JAMA study can provide valuable, if exhaustive, information regarding whether and how risk factors ultimately influence outcomes, like disease or death. The statistics calculated in these studies are not just correlations — they provide estimates of the degree to which risk factors influence outcomes by holding other factors constant. In addition, observational studies can be conducted when experimental studies would be inappropriate or unethical.

As Dr. Katz notes, “A meta-analysis is never any better than the studies it is aggregating.” Thus, meta-analyses operate on a “garbage in, garbage out” principle. But the quality of the carefully selected observational studies in the JAMA study seems to have nothing to do with Dr. Willett calling it “rubbish.” After all, Dr. Willett leads a research group that is conducting three of the largest and longest running observational studies of women’s health, the Nurses’ Health Studies, which provided some data for the JAMA meta-analysis, helping to establish that obesity is associated with a shorter life span.

Whether the observational studies included in the meta-analysis demonstrate cause and effect or provide useful information regarding interventions is also a point of contention.

“. . . [T]here is no reason to believe that the trivial variations in mortality risk observed across an enormous weight range actually have anything to do with weight or that intentional weight gain or loss would affect that risk in a predictable way,” Campos says.

Indeed, some epidemiologists focused on the science of establishing cause and effect in observational studies, like Dr. Miguel Hernán of the Harvard School of Public Health, have questioned the validity of these studies that address BMI and mortality. In a 2008 paper, for example, Dr. Hernán notes,“BMI . . . is the potential result of many different types of interventions.” And different interventions may have different effects on risk of death. Therefore, Hernán argues, observational studies should account for as many factors as possible that influence both BMI and risk of death, such as diet, exercise, smoking, genetic predisposition and illness. By accounting for these factors, which are often connected, these kinds of studies can better establish cause and effect and inform interventions.
 

The Language of War and Intervention in the Battle of the Bulge

 
The current controversy and public debate sparked by the JAMA study seems to turn not on methods, but on the finding that overweight people might actually live a little longer. And being overweight is one step (or lack thereof) closer to being obese.

“. . . [A]t the population level, epidemic obesity is incontrovertibly established as a clear and all-but-omnipresent danger,” Dr. Katz writes, much in the same way a military official might write about terrorism.

It is this very construction of a disease or a condition that sheds light on the discomfort with scientific findings that are inconsistent with the current Zeitgeist in public health: we are at war with obesity.

Indeed, the lexicon of war is manifest in public health — the war on drugs, the war on tobacco. Public health, like war, involves campaigns against diseases, disorders or conditions we deem to be our enemies. As in military wars, our objective in public health campaigns is victory.

In no war have the leaders of our armed forces embraced partial defeat. Similarly, no public health campaign has ever had as its goal a partial victory. For example, in the war on tobacco, the public health messages focus on elimination of the exposure: quit smoking, or don’t ever start. The message is not, “Smoking a Marlboro Red occasionally is fine.” In the war on drugs, moderation does not feature into public health messages in the United States, in contrast to other countries, like Denmark, which support needle exchange programs to reduce the incidence of diseases transmitted through shared needles in intravenous drug use. The Just Say No campaign offers evidence of that.

In yet other areas, like the campaign to reduce salt intake, public health may even ignore scientific evidence in order to wage a war.

However, engaging in a public health campaign and dismissing evidence that challenges our course of action in population health is akin to waging a ground war with incomplete intelligence or no intelligence at all. In the case of the public health war on obesity, findings like those of Flegal and her colleagues are valuable because they are consistent with the obesity message while at the same time urging further research with regard to the impact of being overweight, the intermediate between normal weight and obesity, on mortality and its causes. Is it truly protective? If so, why? Are there methodological or biological reasons, or both, for this observation?

Unfortunately, resistance may hamper such research. If the study simply found that being overweight does not increase mortality risk, scientists and commentators might be somewhat less dismissive of it. That the study found overweight individuals actually lived longer — a protective effect — poses a particular challenge in public health for two reasons.

First, we are traditionally more comfortable with findings that show an increase in the exposure (here, BMI) is related to an increase in the outcome. We would be most at ease with a study that showed that being overweight shortened life, and being obese shortened life even more.

Second, we are traditionally more comfortable with harmful exposures because public health is good at eliminating exposures or taking action to prevent the development of disease in response to exposure — think smallpox eradication.

Within this context, scientific, political and social discomfort with the evolution of knowledge, particularly when that involves shifts in our understanding of risk known as crossovers — going from harm to protection or the reverse — is both palpable and potentially dangerous.

For example, the evidence addressing hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and health has evolved markedly, and indeed, has crossed over twice. HRT went broadly from good to bad; now it’s back to good, with a recent reevaluation of the evidence showing that the benefits of HRT exceed the risks. These findings have marked implications for clinical practice, which has been shaped sharply by the shifting evidence base. Moreover, the evolution of HRT science has implications for whether and how we embrace — or reject — scientific findings that run counter to our current clinical practice and public health action.

It is for this reason that dismissing scientific findings that are contrary to current public health messages may be perilous. We risk not evaluating potentially important mechanisms, thereby missing potentially effective courses of clinical and public health action.

Our problems with obesity have particular contours, as do our consumption behaviors regarding food — and science in service of public health. The findings reported by Dr. Flegal and her colleagues in the recent JAMA meta-analysis, and the spectrum of reactions to them, demonstrate clearly that when it comes to the war on obesity, one size does not fit all.

Edited by Elaine Meyer. Additional research by Joshua Brooks.

This article originally appeared on the2x2project.org, an online publication sponsored by the Department of Epidemiology at Columbia University. 2×2 aims to inform the health conversation through timely and effective communication of emerging public health science.

Despite global concern for those displaced by climate change, “climate refugee” remains merely a descriptive term under the UNHCR’s international refugee regime. The 1951 Convention does not account for people fleeing natural disasters, and thus confers no legal obligation of asylum on States. Even defining the term “climate refugee” poses problems, as this type of displacement can be attributed to many factors, including scarcity of land resources, political pressures, and natural hazards. While climate change may exacerbate these problems – causing more frequent extreme weather events or gradually reducing agricultural productivity – it is virtually impossible to separate climate causes from other drivers of migration. Accordingly, no established methodology exists for calculating the actual number of people displaced by climate change.

Whatever quibbles statisticians may have over the numbers, one thing is clear –millions of people remain displaced and unaccounted for as they do not fit neatly into the UNHCR’s definition of refugee. Is it a matter of renaming this category of people to fit within the international refugee regime? Or, in a warmer world, must the definition and understanding of the concepts of ‘refugee’ and ‘protection’ adapt?

The Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford has identified regional hotspots for potential displacements due to natural disasters and long-term climate change. One such location, the Mekong Delta region on the southern tip of Viet Nam, provides a progressive model for building resilience to the impacts of climate change.

Because of Viet Nam’s vulnerability to typhoons and floods, the government has proactively implemented state-managed policies and programs that relocate people living in disaster-prone areas. Since 1998, authorities have been trying to relocate 200,000 households – about one million people – to less flood-prone areas. The current policy called “living with floods” will see at least 135,500 vulnerable households relocated to flood-proof homes by 2015. This included the relocation of 260,000 people before tropical storm Son-Tinh hit Viet Nam’s coastline this past October.

Additionally, Viet Nam’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment has promoted behavioral changes, such as encouraging villagers to switch to aquaculture from agriculture, teaching children to swim, and equipping them with buoys. Thanks to these preventative measures, village populations are more resilient to climate hazards and less likely to become climate refugees.

Viet Nam’s proactive disaster management policies compare favorably to the reactive measures of other countries such as Bangladesh, Ghana and Kenya. With no state strategy in place, these nations do not commit financial and professional resources to preventing climate-induced migration or supporting those already displaced. These governments should look to Viet Nam for a well-developed institutional framework to better care for these groups.

We must continue to seek durable solutions for this group, one of the world’s most marginalized refugee populations. We see in this population the human face of climate change, and we must accommodate this emerging breed of refugee within international frameworks. In the name of climate change, we have adapted our infrastructure, our lifestyles, and our understanding of sustainability.  Why not our definition of refugee?

Miyuki Hino contributed to this article.

The upshot of all this is that, even as US emissions have declined dramatically in recent years, European emissions appear to be on the rise again.

How big of a problem is this? Is the rise of natural gas in the US being offset by the coal renaissance in Europe? If so, what, if anything should be done? Based on last night’s State of the Union, US President Barack Obama clearly thinks so – but how much, and how?

The population health implications of sex-selective abortion

By Larkin Callaghan

Anyone paying attention to the election this past year—or, frankly, even those who tried to avoid it—has at least a superficial understanding of what the abortion rights argument looks like in the United States.

But the long-term population health outcomes of abortion are generally not considered as part of the argument. That’s because when a woman terminates a pregnancy in America, the decision is rarely made based on the sex of the fetus. However, in many developing and growing countries, that is at the crux of a woman’s decision—and the significant shift in gender representation is changing their population health status, and perhaps even the picture of the burden of disease. One of the countries in which this is most evident is China.

Interestingly, and likely unsurprisingly for those invested in a woman’s right to choose, we see that sex selection is itself a manifestation of the gender inequities in economic and social standing in many of these countries—not so different than many of the reasons cited by women in the U.S. seeking abortions. So while the outcomes of sex-selective abortion abroad may pose different problems, it should be acknowledged that the need for abortion is rooted in similar circumstances around the globe.

This issue is addressed by one of the few research studies to explore the ramifications of China’s one-child policy, published in the New England Journal of Medicine. China is a prime example of the increase in the male population due to women terminating pregnancies that were discovered to be female, a practice deemed illegal but nonetheless carried out widely.

The ratio of male to female live births in industrialized countries generally ranges from 1.03 to 1.07 (103,000 – 107,000 boys born for every 100,000 girls born). In China, since the inception of the one-child policy, the ratio has risen from 1.06 in 1979, to 1.11 in 1988, to 1.17 in 2001 (117,000 boys born for every 100,000 girls). Some regions show even higher numbers, with the Anhui, Guangdong, and Qinghai provinces reaching ratios as high as 1.3 (meaning that for every 130,000 boys born there are 100,000 girls born).

There are distinctions between urban and rural areas as well, since couples in rural provinces are generally allowed to have more than one child. The sex ratio comes in high at 1.13 for the first birth in urban regions, since one child is usually all a couple will be allowed. It peaks at 1.3 for the second birth (130,000 boys born for every 100,000 girls), which if couples are allowed to have, the preference is clearly male. This contrasts markedly with rural areas, in which the ratio for the first child is normal at 1.05 (105,000 boys for every 100,000 girls), indicating that sex-selection is not a huge issue since rural couples are allowed a second child. However, the ratio sharply increases at second births, reaching 1.23 (123,000 boys for every 100,000 girls).

(Recently, China has noted that their thinking may be changing in regards to the one-child policy, with the possibility of extending the two-child allowance to everyone.)

This has unsurprising impacts on the health of the population. Some of the more pressing concerns noted by researchers that they articulate as a result of there being fewer women to marry and partner with include mental illness and socially disruptive behavior issues in men. Recently, studies have begun to document these trends, underscoring the significant long-term consequences of this gender imbalance. One recent study showed that even after adjusting for age, education, and income level, unmarried men in China were more likely to have lower self-esteem, higher depression, higher aggression, and more likely to have suicidal thoughts or actions than married men—at statistically significant levels.

The findings of another study, comprised of interviews conducted with people in China born just before and just after the implementation of the one-child policy showed similar results. Researchers found that the policy itself had created a less trusting and less trustworthy population, who are more risk-averse and less competitive, more pessimistic, less conscientious and even more neurotic. The impact of anti-social behaviors in a predominantly male population seems to be shifting the mental health profile of the entire nation.

More concerning as a result of sex-selective abortion and a decrease in the number of women available for marriage is the increased in trafficked women, and the subsequent increase in the number of commercial sex workers. Researchers note that a broad range of high-risk sex behaviors are often demanded by the surplus male clients, increasing the incidence of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. This alone has been noted as having a likely significant affect on the spread of HIV throughout China, posing a major national public health threat for the country.

The health implications aren’t limited to reproductive health and mental illness. If it is in fact accurate that most of the children living in China’s orphanages are girls, it is unclear how the future healthcare needs of these girls as they age into women will be handled and by whom, with a rapidly growing aging population already relying heavily on the significantly less populous younger generation.

Critics of abortion, sex-selective or not, often cite mental health issues and resulting regret as major reasons why women should not get abortions. So what about the health status—physical and mental—of the women who have these procedures?

Recently, public health researchers have worked to create the first body of scientific literature answering these very concerns. A group of University of California, San Francisco researchers at the group Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health recently presented some of the findings of their longitudinal research known as the Turnaway Study. They found that women who were seeking abortions and who were denied were more likely to have slipped into poverty a year later, more likely to be on public assistance, and less likely to have a job. There was no correlation between abortion and drug use, or abortion and depression.

Abroad, given that sex-selective abortion is usually a procedure performed by private providers due to legal restrictions, tracking this kind of information is extremely difficult. And while this research was limited to the experiences of American women, the results showing decreases in economic status and increases in reliance on some form of public assistance, if available, certainly seem like potential outcomes in countries with worse statistics in terms of gender equality and economic growth.

Is there a solution? The gender imbalance, and therefore the changing prevalence of certain diseases, will not balance out unless sex-selective abortion is essentially made impossible, but it is imperative that the issue of sex-selective abortion not become a rallying cry to end the right to the procedure overall for women. As seen by the work done by researchers in China and the findings by UCSF researchers, the issues surrounding the choice to have an abortion, whether in the United States or abroad, are complex and inextricably linked to the economic and social circumstances of the women.

To tackle the burgeoning disease differences emerging from the sex-selective abortions, the work must begin by tackling the fundamental issues regarding the reasons why women seek these abortions in the first place.

Edited by Dana March. Additional research by Josh Brooks.

This article originally appeared on the2x2project.org, an online publication sponsored by the Department of Epidemiology at Columbia University. 2×2 aims to inform the health conversation through timely and effective communication of emerging public health science.

As recent bouts of wild weather have suggested, perhaps we don’t have as long as we thought we did to address these issues. Perhaps what we do now, today, really will matter down the road.

To that end, here on Sense & Sustainability, the month of February will be devoted to “moving the needle.” What can be done, and what is being done, right now to address these increasingly pressing issues? Keeping all else constant, what can be done right now to help?

From a solar-powered military, to simple regulatory & legal changes, to the use of mobile technology for environmental management, many public & private organizations are already working hard to address sustainability issues right now – but will these efforts be enough? And what else can be done?

Over the next month we will be discussing these and many other efforts in the pages of this blog. We invite you to read, comment below, and join in the discussion.

The shale breakthrough

Shale gas is no different in composition than conventional natural gas, but while the latter is found in concentrated reservoirs that enable it to freely flow to the surface when drilled, shale gas is trapped in much smaller pockets throughout the shale rock, preventing its extraction by conventional methods. Key to the development of shale gas has been hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” a drilling technique that involves highly pressurized injections of water, sand, and chemical additives into shale rock layers some 3,000 to 8,000 feet underground. The fluids force open the rock, creating fissures for the natural gas within to flow into the well and upwards to the surface. Though fracking has been around since the 1940s, it achieved prominence within the energy industry only in the last fifteen years, as the development of new horizontal drilling techniques, three-dimensional geologic mapping, and an optimal mix of chemical additives for fracking fluid made large-scale shale gas extraction commercially viable.

That technological breakthrough coincided with a period of rising natural gas prices, spurring further investment in shale gas that had previously been too expensive to extract. Beginning in the early 2000s, vast new natural gas fields were developed from shale formations such as the Marcellus and the Utica in Pennsylvania and the Barnett, Haynesville, and Eagle Ford in Texas (map here).

The resulting changes to the American energy landscape have been rapid and extraordinary. Shale gas development reversed a thirty-year decline in U.S. natural gas reserves, with proven reserves of natural gas climbing by 60 percent from 2004 to 2010. Natural gas production in the U.S. reached all-time highs in 2012, and production from shale alone has more than doubled since 2010. Burgeoning supplies have caused natural gas prices, which reached record highs in 2008, to plunge to their lowest levels in over a decade last year. Although the price collapse has slowed drilling rates, production and investment continue in the major American shale plays, and the International Energy Agency predicts that the U.S. will overtake Russia as the world’s largest natural gas producer by 2017.

Economic driver and bridge fuel?

The sudden abundance of cheap natural gas is having a similar game-changing effect on the U.S. economy. A December 2011 report from PricewaterhouseCoopers pegs shale gas as the catalyst for a “renaissance in U.S. manufacturing,” predicting that its availability as a low-cost energy source could help generate 1 million manufacturing jobs by 2025. Indeed, signs of a gas-fueled industrial revival are already apparent. The need for drilling and pipeline components has generated growth in heavy manufacturing sectors such as the steel industry, which is reversing a decades-long trend of decline by investing in its historical manufacturing centers of Pennsylvania and Ohio, close to the booming Marcellus Shale. Another bright spot has been the petrochemicals industry, where natural gas is a crucial feedstock for the production of plastics, fertilizers, synthetic fibers, and paints. Attracted by the ready availability and low costs of domestic shale gas, chemicals firms have earmarked billions for new or expanded production facilities in the U.S. One company is even dismantling a methanol plant in Chile for reassembly in Louisiana.

Perhaps even more significant is the impact of shale gas on U.S. power generation. In the last decade, gas has made significant gains on coal as a leading electricity source, accounting for nearly 30 percent of electricity generated in 2012. Consistently low prices have made natural gas a competitive alternative, and strengthening air pollution regulations have made constructing new coal-fired power plants increasingly costly. Though utilities appear to be moving towards a balance of energy sources rather than a full replacement of coal with natural gas, the continued adoption of gas for power generation has had an important side-effect: it helped bring carbon dioxide emissions in 2012 to their lowest levels in 20 years, since burning natural gas releases approximately half as much CO2 as coal. For this reason, natural gas has often been touted as a “bridge fuel” to a less carbon-intensive economy.

Environmental risks

Despite these apparent economic and environmental benefits, the shale gas boom has encountered significant opposition. The rush of heavy trucks, drilling equipment, and thousands of workers into rural Pennsylvania, Texas, and elsewhere has disturbed neighboring communities and overwhelmed local infrastructure. But the most damaging charge leveled at shale gas – and prominently portrayed in film, twice – is the potential for fracking to contaminate local groundwater supplies. The fracking process involves injecting millions of gallons of water underground at a time, only to re-emerge through the well afterwards as “flowback” mixed with chemical additives from the fracturing fluid and naturally occurring underground elements. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) briefings indicate that the flowback water can contain known carcinogens and radioactive materials, and while flowback is treated at specialized facilities, the treatment plants may be unable to remove all contaminants from the wastewater, further increasing the risk that the contaminated water may be discharged into nearby rivers and streams. Though the gas shales are typically separated from groundwater supplies by thousands of feet of rock, wastewater and methane leaks from poorly-constructed or abandoned wells remain a very real risk to underground water sources. The EPA, for its part, has yet to release a report that fracking is definitively linked to cases of water contamination in drilling areas.

Leaks of “fugitive” methane, which may also arise from the flaring of excess gas during the extraction process, may offset the advantage of natural gas over coal in greenhouse gas emissions. Despite the lower carbon intensity of burning natural gas, methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, and Robert Howarth of Cornell University drew much attention to this fact in a 2011 paper where he argued that shale gas development could have a greater greenhouse gas footprint than coal over a 20-year timespan. Other scholars have since challenged Howarth’s findings, and Michael Levi of the Council on Foreign Relations argued in a recent paper that the long-term impact of methane on climate change may be overstated.

Regulating the revolution

Though its environmental impact remains contentious, shale gas development has become an unavoidable part of the American energy landscape. The extent of whatever impact it may have will be determined by how regulations surrounding shale development are crafted.

Those regulations, in turn, will be determined by how well the Obama administration balances environmental concerns against the shorter-term interests of the energy industry. The Bureau of Land Management is set to propose the first federal regulations governing hydraulic fracturing in March, but the release comes after the original proposed regulations were abruptly scrapped due to pressure from both industry and environmental groups. The federal-level regulations would impose new standards on drilling, well construction, and wastewater management and disposal. However, they may also require drillers to fully disclose the chemical additives used during the fracking process, a measure championed by environmental groups and bitterly opposed by energy companies, who argue that the mixtures constitute proprietary information.

Hydraulic fracturing is currently regulated at the state level, and although fracking chemical disclosure requirements exist in 14 states, a 2012 report from the National Resources Defense Council found that none of these state regulations constituted a comprehensive disclosure of chemicals, with existing requirements either weakly enforced or riddled with loopholes. While the coming federal rules will only cover gas drilling on federally-owned lands, their adoption could set an important regulatory precedent for state authorities to follow, particularly if these rules contain full chemical disclosures.

Much is at stake in this regulatory debate. The rapid development of shale gas has contributed significant benefits to the economy and emissions-reduction, yet the extraction methods that enabled these benefits could pose serious risks to human health and the environment. Mitigation of these risks will rely on enacting a standardized, comprehensive set of regulations governing extraction procedures, while including mandates to disclose fracking chemicals would do much to reassure a wary public. By taking these steps, Washington could properly account for the non-commercial costs of shale gas production while ensuring safe and responsible development of this promising new resource.

How might we channel recent advances in computational modeling to help policymakers identify and quantify these links – the links between natural ecosystems and human economies?

A new piece in Nature highlights emerging efforts at doing just that: modeling the earth’s key ecosystems, in an effort to better inform policy decisions on issues like climate change and biodiversity conservation.

From the article, by Drew Purves and others:

“We think that analogous general ecosystem models (GEMs) could radically improve understanding of the biosphere and inform policy decisions about biodiversity and conservation. Currently, decisions in conservation are based on disparate correlational studies, such as those showing that the diversity of bird species tends to decline in deforested landscapes. GEMs could provide a way to base conservation policy on an understanding of how ecosystems actually work.”

Image Credits: YI LU/VIEWSTOCK/CORBIS, Nature.com

To combat this and other issues, Krista Donaldson, a lecturer at Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, founded a Palo Alto-based non-profit product development company called D-Rev (funded by both the Mulago Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation) with the vision of “delivering affordable and world class products that improve the health and incomes of people living on <$4 per day.” Thus far, the small D-Rev team has worked or is currently working in India, Haiti, Nepal, Ecuador, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Botswana, Bangladesh, and Iraq, with the issue of inadequate jaundice treatment being one of the primary challenges the D-Rev team is hoping to overcome.

In order to do so, D-Rev has teamed up with Stanford Medical School to perform a study of medical facilities in India and Nigeria. Through this fieldwork, D-Rev determined the unmet need for phototherapy alongside the frequency with which poor irradiance levels are delivered in medical facilities. They discovered that 95% of the facilities they evaluated did not meet the standards of phototherapy set by the American Academy of Pediatrics, and about a third of the phototherapy devices observed had one or more bulbs burned out or missing. In addition to showcasing these results at the 2011 Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) and Asian Society for Pediatric Research (ASPR) conference in Denver, Colorado, the D-Rev team also presented the design and specifications of their innovative LED-based solution to the problem – Brilliance – and showed that this tool has significant potential to reduce infant mortality and brain damage resulting from serious cases of neonatal jaundice.

The Brilliance LED lasts 16 to 25 times longer and consumes half the power of the blue compact-fluorescent bulbs generally used to treat infants with severe jaundice. Moreover, Brilliance LEDs can run off back-up battery power, useful when power outages occur. Best of all, the product is valued at less than $400 making it more than 85% cheaper than traditional phototherapy technologies, which typically cost around $3000. A single Brilliance device can treat nearly 420 newborns prior to LED replacement; by contrast, current phototherapy devices can treat approximately 85 babies before requiring bulb replacement.

Brilliance holds particular promise in India where the traditional blue compact-fluorescent bulbs burn out quickly and are expensive to replace. The D-Rev team’s goal is to treat 2 million newborns in the next two years in India alone. In order to do so, the team has partnered with a Chennai-based company called Phoenix Medical Systems through a licensing agreement that seeks to incentivize sales to public hospitals in countries listed by the United Nations Human Development Index as “low or medium resource-limited.” The agreement is particularly well placed, since Phoenix Medical Systems has distribution channels not only in India but also in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa – areas to which D-Rev may expand.

Donaldson states that though the team does have minimum royalties on products alongside licensing deals, their real measure of success will be based on “how well (they) treat children who wouldn’t otherwise receive treatment.” Both Donaldson and John Dawson (chairman of the board at D-Rev) feel confident that the Brilliance product will have a huge impact, saying that “D-Rev has identified both a need and a demand” for this medical intervention, rather than simply one or the other.

Given that Brilliance is in early-stage distribution, we will likely see the results of this new technology soon. The potential for success is high, for Brilliance manages not only to optimize quality of care but also keep product costs low – an ideal combination for sustainable implementation in the developing world. This is a model that companies similar to D-Rev ought to emulate and one that social enterprises (such as Embrace) have successfully employed in the past. To stay up-to-date with D-Rev’s development, keep an eye on the team’s blog to see how Brilliance is saving lives of infants in the developing world.

Debris from the 2009 Iridium-Cosmos collision. Credit AGI

In early 2009, two satellites – one a defunct Russian military satellite, the other an active commercial communications satellite from the US – slammed into each other 490 miles above the Siberian Peninsula. The two satellites hit each other at approximately 26,170 mph, completely destroying both and creating more than 1,000 significant pieces of debris in the process.

Space is a perfect example of a public good. Given the vast amount of, well, space out there, space is non-rival (one country’s use of it does not limit the ability of others to use it) and non-excludable (it is nearly impossible to limit access to it). This public nature has been critical to a number of technologies we take for granted today – without free access to space, we would not have the cellphones, GPS navigation systems, or 500-channel satellite TVs we currently enjoy.

From the earliest days of the Space Age great care was taken to ensure that space was freely accessible to all and used exclusively for peaceful purposes. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 declared that space is free for exploration & access for all countries and organizations with the capability to access it. Additionally, it declared that space is not subject to national appropriation under any circumstances or by any means. This has ensured that all regions of outer space are freely accessible and utilizable for any nation, company, or organization with the means to access it.

This treaty, and the following 50-plus years of unfettered space exploration and utilization, resulted in an explosion in the international uses of space, from communications to navigation to cutting-edge science. However, the explosion in access to space has had a serious and, in retrospect obvious, side-effect.

The modern rocket launch had not changed appreciably from the earliest days of the Apollo and Sputnik programs. Notably, nobody has yet figured out how to have a “clean” rocket launch. The need to deliver a relatively small payload to outer space necessitates the use of staged rocket boosters, with each stage burning its fuel before detaching and falling off to allow the next stage to move a smaller payload higher into orbit. In other words, modern rockets fall apart as they ascend, and they leave a lot of junk in their wake.

Importantly, because no one owns space, and access is open to all, there is no governing authority to manage this junk. Free access to space has led to free use of space – and the free discarding of space junk in orbit. The fact is that the continued free use of space has begun to threaten the future free use of space – a textbook case of the Tragedy of the Commons.

While we have successfully put more than 1,000 functional satellites, several space stations, and hundreds of manned spacecraft into orbit, we have also put an estimated 21,000 pieces of junk into our skies.  Importantly, the amount of junk is growing every day, and may have even reached a critical tipping point, dubbed the “Kessler syndrome,” after which space junk continually collides with itself and creates an ever-growing cloud of debris in certain regions of orbit.

Clearly, steps must be taken to both safeguard our existing satellite infrastructure and limit the creation of future space junk. A number of proposals have been floated to accomplish this, with varying degrees of success. A handful of economists, taking cues from such diverse sources as efforts to control overfishing and public land management, have attempted to apply the standard economic remedies to the problem. However, given the “universal access” rule and the position of space as a global commons, it is unlikely that the assignment of property rights or launch quotas will ever be accepted by global players.

More feasible are proposals to assess fees on spacecraft launches, which would provide compensation for potential damages caused by jettisoned junk. Andrew Bradley and Lawrence Wein, both of Stanford, have determined that a flat launch fee of $980 per launch would be appropriate and, given the number of launches in a given year, sufficient to pay for the management of debris and any potential damage resulting from a collision with a functioning satellite. The idea is that this fee is added to what is effectively a space debris insurance co-op, which would pay out for any satellites damaged by space debris. As a satellite operator, your fee is added to the pool upon the launch of your satellite, and is paid back to you once you deorbit your satellite at the end of its functional life (to prevent a repeat of the 2009 collision).

While the idea is sound, the implementation would be a significant challenge. While $980 per launch may be sufficient to offset future damages, who is going to be responsible for assessing fees and managing the insurance pool? There is no overarching organization managing space. The open access model adopted in exploration has precluded any kind of governing authority from putting the required rules in place to limit the creation and duration of space junk. Even successful space governance models (for example the international standards that “govern” the use of geosynchronous orbit) developed through a messy multi-lateral process, rather than the development of a central set of standards or organizing authority.

What is clearly needed is a central mechanism for managing the growing issue of space junk. The problem is too large and complex, and space too public a good, for individual actors to handle themselves. Launch fees are one of many potential solutions, but without some central authority or set of standards to govern the use and management of outer space, space junk is likely to remain a serious problem for decades to come – with potentially serious consequences to the space infrastructure that is so critical to modern life.

While Congressional action on traditional pollutants is unlikely to say the least, it is for those seeking a reduction in carbon emissions that the Washington outlook seems most sclerotic.  First, Congressional action on greenhouse gases will not be forthcoming. Those who hold out hope for a carbon tax need remember only one figure – $0.20 – the politically devastating estimated increase in the cost of a gallon of gas under even a moderate tax agreement. The Administration’s actions too are disappointing to the environmental community; while new rules allowed by the Supreme Court’s decision on carbon in Massachusetts v. EPA are tough (though legally tenuous) for new plants, existing coal plants as of yet exempt and will likely face only relatively benign requirements for higher efficiency.

Despite this, few recognize that emissions of CO2 have fallen at least 430 million tons in the last seven years (a 7.7% cut). While some attribute this mainly to economic factors, a rebuttal can be seen in the European Union, where emissions have remained roughly flat over the same period. Further, the last decade has already seen a more than 50% fall in emissions of pollutants like sulfur (SOx- think acid rain) and nitrogen oxides (NOx- a precursor to smog), thanks in part to the Bush-era Clean Air Interstate Rule. These trends, though aided by the economic downturn, are unlikely to be drastically reversed by recovery because of two factors working in tandem: the Obama Administration’s ever-tighter regulation of traditional pollutants and the revolution in shale gas hydraulic fracturing.

Natural gas was the first part of this one-two punch. The combination of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing have unlocked truly unprecedented amounts of gas (often estimated at a 100 year supply), and sent prices tumbling from highs that may not be seen again for decades. Responding to this new glut, utilities with gas plants used traditionally only in peak hours have flipped those turbines on full throttle and scaled back use of coal facilities. Through the fall, the US had used 100 million fewer short tons of coal in 2012, and for the first time ever use of natural gas hovers at roughly the same percentage of power generation as coal. Of course, gas has not only much lower levels of traditional pollutants, but also roughly 50% less CO2 than coal.

The second blow to the coal-burning fleet comes courtesy of the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation. As mentioned, previous regulations have helped to more than halve emissions of traditional pollutants such as sulfur and nitrogen oxides in the last decade. However, a mix of court orders and self-initiative have seen the Obama Administration seek to push these cuts deeper, with rules demanding that utilities reduce mercury emissions by some 91% and drive further cuts of other pollutants like acid gasses, particulate matter, SOx and NOx either finalized or in the final stages of completion. While some of these recent rules have been overturned in court, those that have stuck or are yet to come are among the most impactful in air quality history. Many are forcing the installation of extremely costly pollution abatement equipment like sulfur scrubbers. Individual plants have spent upwards of $700 million on similar retrofits; some will install this equipment but the cost will be too high for a large swath of the fleet.

These two forces – cheap gas and stiff regulations – have combined to drive the closure of an unprecedented number of coal plants. Nearly 50 gigawatts of coal is slated to go off-line in the next few years, from a nationwide base of roughly 300GW. More announcements are likely, as plants that are just barely profitable now compared to cheap, gas fired competitors find themselves uneconomic and unprofitable if forced to install hundreds of millions of dollars in environmental compliance equipment. In such an environment, there is virtually no discussion of building new coal capacity, and increasing interest in closing existing sites. The decades old plants that close will be replaced largely by new gas turbines; state of the art, efficient turbines running on a much cleaner fuel.

To be certain, this churning in the electric fleet will raise costs on consumers, and those who fret over hydraulic fracturing will find little to cheer about. However, barring sweeping losses in court or stiff new regulations of hydraulic fracturing, the revolution in power generation will continue over the coming decade, and with it will come less carbon, less sulfur, less nitrogen, and cleaner air across the country.

The Cataloochee Valley on the edge of Great Smokies National Park still draws reunions of the families forced to move out more than 75 years ago when the park was created.

Unfortunately, all indications are that the extractive view of land/resources remains the dominant view. The Yasuni rainforest project in Ecuador is a stark illustration of the dominance of the extractive view. A sustainable plan to help Ecuador develop without extracting their oil has been put forward; it only needs sufficient buy-in from the rest of the world, which has a stake in seeing the oil remain in the ground. But despite the lip-service paid in the developed world to the need to create a sustainable future, when asked to put up the money and resources to generate this world, they fall short.

This extractive view of land is incompatible with a sustainable economy in which resources are managed by more than the dictates of the market. In this second part of the discussion of our relationship with land, I suggest that a more sustainable view of land — as a flow of valuable outputs rather than a pool of value to be drained — can help to shape a more sustainable economy in general.

Two thinkers — Wendell Berry and Tim Jackson — have been particularly concerned with the question of how our relationship with land oscillates between extractive and conservative and, in turn, how a more conservative view can lead to a sustainable steady-state economy. In 2012 one produced a lecture and one produced an essay that explore how the preservation of our land can be an act of affection and how an economy that was built on affection, rather than a ruthless drive for efficiency, might in the long-run produce a more satisfied society.

For Wendell Berry the population is divided into two types of people: boomers or stickers. Stickers are exactly what they sound like — they stick in the same neighborhood or town, or in Berry’s case the same farm, where they were born and develop a close attachment to the land where they are from. As a sticker, it is perhaps not surprising that Berry feels a special connection to stickers. Boomers, on the other hand, are those for whom the place they were born is not enough. They leave for the wider world and they are the innovators, the drivers, and the dynamic force that pushes a growing economy. If not for the boomers, the United States would still be an agrarian economy populated by small, family farms. This, in Berry’s view, might not be such a bad thing.

Berry’s distinctions are coarse, and his dismissal of boomers too abrupt, but his attachment to stickers may not be misplaced. Substitution of the terms above for Berry’s terms leaves one with extractors (boomers) and conservationists (stickers). In the world that Berry imagines the differences between the two groups are driven by affection for the land or area from which they come. For the stickers (conservationists) this drives them to care for and preserve that inheritance in perpetuity. The lack of affection for their land is what allows boomers (extractors) to first leave and then mine, log, or otherwise destroy either theirs or someone else’s land to wring out the land’s value. The world undoubtedly needs boomers. Despite Berry’s view, the United States is unquestionably better off today than if it was still an agrarian nation. But, moving into the future, replacing some of the boomer mentality with the affection of the stickers will be necessary to generate a sustainable economy.

It is this point that Tim Jackson takes up in a commentary published by the New York Times Review. He envisions a world in which affection, rather than efficiency, is the measuring stick of the economy. In his world, the focus is on the improved provision of services that require personal attention: the medical fields, education and the arts. These are fields that are not necessarily amenable to constant productivity increases, where efficiency can mean decreased care because they rely on human-to-human interaction. Creating an economy that prioritized these affection based, fields is one that employs more people, helps correct the imbalance that many Americans, pressured to increase productivity at work, feel in their lives, and, ultimately, increases quality of life. As Jackson notes, shifting from a consumption based to a service based economy might also reduce the resource intensity of the economy to levels that are sustainable.

Letting the oil remain in Yasuni is not the most efficient or economically productive choice, but that doesn’t mean it’s the wrong one. “Efficiency” as it is known today ignores the un-quantified harm that comes from destroying the biodiversity of Yasuni, of interfering with previously un-contacted native tribes, and of destroying a unique ecosystem. So, even if it is more “efficient” to extract the oil, burn it, and plant trees elsewhere to offset the resulting carbon emissions, that efficiency comes at a price. The world is presented with the choice of paying the price, in efficiency, to leave the oil in the ground today and begin to build a more sustainable economy or to extract the oil and pay the price of lost biodiversity and lost culture someday in the future.

“Individual bees can’t be understood separately from the colony or from their shared, co-created environment. So it is with human networks; bees make hives, we make mobile phones.”

The majority of the global population is now able to afford a mobile device. By 2012, almost six billion people had mobile phone subscriptions worldwide, with eighty percent of the newest subscribers in developing nations. In 2006, there were 200 million devices owned by Africans; today there are 735 million. Tablets sales are set to outpace PC sales by 2016. Statistics, anecdotes and experiences are all pointing to the reality that Information Communication Technology [ICT] is and will continue to dramatically alter life for billions of people.

In today’s economy, knowledge has become as important to economic growth as traditional factors such as capital, labor, or natural resources. Economies of the OECD  are more dependent than ever on the production and distribution of services, rather than goods, created by processing the huge amounts of information produced by the global economy – a capability made possible by the development and deployment of high-powered ICT. The flow of goods, services, investment, and human capital work to connect the knowledge-based economy even as the spread of high-tech (and expensive) ICT has made surviving in the knowledge economy more capital-intensive.

A consequence of this economic transition is the aggressive rise of “m-” everything. The rapid rate of global mobile penetration challenges traditional models of economic development, and necessitates a new policy approach in order to allow a fast-changing high-tech sector to thrive. From small start-ups to big-business, mobile development continues to drive development and empowerment around the world, even as it rejects precedent.

One such example of game-changing, runaway success is M-PESA , an eponym for mobile money transfers. SafariComm, the creator of M-PESA and one of the larger African telecomm companies, generates 16 percentof its revenue from the service, and has pioneered the spread of this technology across the world. The social benefits of this are clear: 25 percent of Kenya’s Gross National Product now goes through M-PESA. Afghanistan’s leading telecomm company, Roshan, has mimicked M-PESA with  M-Paisa – an example of rural communities gaining access to institutions that were once reserved for urban elites. 97 percent of Afghanistan’s population wouldn’t have access to a bank account were it not for M-Paisa.

The catch? This kind of successful m-banking deployment is scattered and anecdotal. Safaricom controls half of the world’s mobile-money transactions, and few other countries have caught up simply because the company has a huge head start in terms of subscribers and customers – and they are notoriously stingy with their data. Moreover, there are jurisdictional questions, regulatory issues, oligopolistic ties that don’t allow for innovation in certain countries, and security hazards.

These m-commerce platforms are unique because they are addressing the specific issues of developing nations. For example, only 10 percent of remittance recipients in Latin America have a bank account, subjecting families to surcharges and long journeys to a nearby Western Union – imposing significant economic costs. However, mobile money transactions are increasingly beginning to address this. SMART, an operator in the Philippines, claims $50 million of remittances are being sent over mobile phones every month. This innovation is a game changer, considering that some national economies rely more on remittances than foreign direct investment and foreign aid combined for capital flows. Much like the Safaricom story, this innovation is made possible by preexisting, established organizations with the extra capital needed to create new revenue streams such as mobile payment platforms.

These innovations have been successful largely because they typically begin in-country, addressing the issues of local groups rather than replicating market solutions that were successful in other environments. People with few resources, sporadic incomes, and little chance to create savings have never been attractive to traditional banks, cutting this portion of the population off from the flows of credit needed to stimulate economic growth. Changing this equation can lead a subsistence farmer to become a micro-business owner and self-investor, with a season’s-worth of crops no longer being invested in livestock or other unreliable assets, but into a savings account for future needs.

Mobile innovations like these are encouraging GDP growth in developing countries at twice the rate of developed countries, yielding a .6 percent increase in GDP for every additional 10 mobile phones per 100 people. Adoption of mobile technology is what the Gates Foundation has called the most powerful tool to end global poverty, noting that GDP growth happens earlier and faster for mobile penetration than it does the Internet.

As companies plan around the financial needs of developing nations, these disruptive market forces are at risk as they often rely on regulatory and governmental support. Competition specifically increases the chances of mobile penetration, going from 8 percent in a single operator market to 21 percent in markets with more than 3 operators. To harness these benefits, governments, transnational authorities, and private organizations must invest in highly skilled research & development, improving opportunities for global innovation in this sector, and avoid limiting access to the market for potential competitors. This new-found financial power is translating into political and social capital, yielding a second generation of m-growth, and boundless opportunities for sustainable market solutions.

S&S is excited to announce a new partnership with the Harvard Environmental Law Review (HELR), the nation’s premier publication on environmental law. We hope to expand our coverage of the legal dimensions of sustainability issues, and to share perspectives across the disciplinary spectrum.

Since 1976, the HELR has been bringing key insights to hot button issues from creating international aviation emissions agreements to expediting green energy innovation. Published twice annually, it is currently edited by a staff of over 50 Harvard Law School students. The HELR selects and edits articles by leading scholars and practitioners, and publishes comments on recent landmark cases and notes on the most cutting edge legal issues. While the The Review’s backbone is still the print journal, it has posted all of its articles online. The HELR has also launched a new HELR Online Journal, which hosts quick but still intensive reads on the most current topics, such as the impact of the recent Health Care Decision on current US environmental laws. 

As always, our goal is to bring you snapshots of the research frontier in rigorous but digestible form. We hope that partnering with HELR will allow us to continue doing so!

This tendency to react rather than prepare is well documented throughout history. The Netherlands and London, now armed with world class flood defense systems, only built their barriers after major disasters. The post-Katrina levees erected around New Orleans are yet another reminder of our natural instinct to react, not prepare. Further, hurricanes rarely venture as far north as Manhattan, so perhaps the city lacked any sense of urgency. But climate change may force New Yorkers to reevaluate what they consider a normal weather pattern.

Even without the complicating factor of climate change, planning disaster risk reduction projects is fraught with difficulty. With lifetimes of 50 to 100 years, flood defense projects require long-term thinking – and decision-makers are not accustomed to thinking beyond the next election. As a result, the “not in my term of office” attitude is frequently taken for costly disaster risk reduction projects with no obvious payoff. After all, a flood defense pays itself back through damages avoided – and “it could have been worse!” is not exactly re-election slogan material. Adding to the complexity, these projects require billions of capital and cooperation among environmental, social, and financial groups.

In an interesting study, decision-makers in London are asked to confront a hypothetical situation in which the West Antarctic ice sheet collapses. Such an event could cause a rapid 5m sea level rise over 100 years. To discover how a threatened city such as London might respond, interviews were conducted with national and local government officials, emergency planners, environment groups, and private sector representatives. The resulting discussion is revealing:

“No government works more than 2-3 years ahead.  Politically it would be difficult to see any government taking big, unpopular, decisions.  There would always be questions about probability”

“If you predict this kind of eventuality and make plans for it and it doesn’t materialise you get voted out of office. Would the Government sit on it then, until it is too late?” 

“In order to make decisions you had to be certain about your data, particularly where there was a huge resource commitment.”

In one word, uncertainty. The root cause behind this decision paralysis is uncertainty over the timing, frequency, magnitude, and location of disasters. The prospect of climate change only compounds the confusion. For example, the New York area will likely be affected by rising sea levels and more frequent storm surges. But how quickly will these changes take place, and how drastic will the impact be? Planners risk under-preparedness when catering to the best-case scenario and over-spending if preparing for the worst. This dilemma results in inaction.

Adaptive management provides one possible means of resolving such decision paralysis. In this approach, planners do not commit themselves to the worst-case or best-case scenario. Instead, flexibility is prioritized: an incremental step is taken while preserving the options to do more in the future if appropriate. As time passes, data and knowledge accumulate, and additional decisions can be made with greater certainty. This approach manages our uncertainties – we aren’t idly waiting for disaster to strike, but we are reducing the risk of maladaptation.

The Thames Estuary 2100 plan is one prominent example of adaptive management in flood defenses. Finalized in 2010, it is designed to protect the region from flooding until the next century through an observe-and-adapt approach. For example, walls are built with widened foundations in case they must be heightened later. Land is set aside for new barriers or safeguarded as flood storage zones. Different defense options are developed for the future, but the actual decision point is decades away. All the while, key indicators such as mean sea level, peak surge height, and the value of assets at risk are monitored to guide decisions on what to do and when to do it. Though the financial burden remains heavy, spreading the spending across different time periods alleviates the pressure on one administration to sustain the entire cost. If we plan with foresight and keep our options open, we can harness this paralyzing uncertainty and transform it into action.

Leading climate scientist John Weyant wrote that climate change is “a problem requiring sequential decision-making under uncertainty rather than requiring a large, one-shot, ‘bet-the-planet’ decision.” Embracing this model – and relieving our decision paralysis – will go a long way towards avoiding Sandy-like tolls of procrastination in the future.

Two feet of snow blankets the trails of Snowshoe Mountain, West Virginia—on Halloween! Eight million mid-Atlantic residents lose electricity. Jamaica takes a direct hit from a newly minted Category 1 hurricane. A cyclone comes ashore south of Atlantic City, trapping coastal residents who ignored evacuation orders. Deluging rains saturate Haiti’s deforested terrain, triggering mudslides and killing 60 people. New York City subways sustain the worst flooding in the system’s 108-year history and seven East River tunnels fill with water. Tropical storm gusts and high surf whip the entire Atlantic coast of Florida as a hurricane sweeps over the Bahamas. A transformer explodes in Breezy Point and 111 units burn to the ground in a six-alarm conflagration fueled by gale-force winds.

These diverse events, compressed into the span of a single week, were all manifestations of one massive weather system that became known as “Superstorm Sandy.” Almost 70 million people across eight nations, 24 U.S. States, and Puerto Rico encountered the storm. Their experiences varied from a bad weather day to a catastrophic event.

Sandy was a meteorological chimera. For those in its path, the storm materialized as an entirely different animal, depending upon timing and locale.

How do we begin to make sense of the range of potential health effects of such a novel event?

We are actively exploring how the physical forces of harm in a disaster transform into both physical and psychological consequences for the disaster-affected population using an approach called trauma signature analysis, or TSIG.

TSIG provides a much-needed tool to expedite the provision of evidence-based, actionable guidance for a coordinated disaster health response. This process integrates disaster public health and disaster mental health. It is premised on the notion that each disaster leaves an imprint on the affected population. Understanding this distinctive “signature” can help prepare and protect responders and better serve survivors by tailoring response to the disaster’s defining features.

TSIG is epidemiological, examining the person, place, and time dimensions of exposure to natural and human-generated hazards during the impact phase of disaster, and to a variety of losses and changes in the aftermath.

The initial step of TSIG involves constructing a hazard profile of the disaster to delineate the types, magnitude, intensity, scope, and scale of exposures. This information can be rapidly gleaned from disaster situation reports released in real time as the event is unfolding, and from disaster monitoring and research centers.

The next step of TSIG involves assessing the potential psychological effects of the physical forces of harm characterized in the hazard profile. A stressor matrix is created, presenting the salient risk factors for psychological consequences within each of the disaster phases and this is cross-referenced with a review of the evidence-based literature. Finally, TSIG juxtaposes hazard, vulnerability, and resilience factors and provides a synopsis of findings in a TSIG summary.

For Sandy, the hazard profile is more complex than for most disaster events. Because disasters are experienced locally, individuals’ memories of Sandy will be compartmentalized by time, geography, and community. For tropical cyclone-savvy millions in Jamaica, Cuba, the Bahamas, and the Florida peninsula, Sandy was both predictable and unexceptional.

Sandy started out as a typical counter-clockwise spiral of thunderstorms in the southern Caribbean, creating a vortex and a healthy outflow before moving northward to collide with Jamaica, hurdle eastern Cuba, and batter the Bahamas. Sandy stayed offshore from the U.S., moving parallel to the Southeast coast. This trajectory is typical of storms in the waning weeks of the Atlantic Basin Hurricane season.  These storms almost always curve back into the Atlantic Ocean, chill over cold waters, and dissipate.

Not Sandy.

In the mid-latitudes, anomalous weather fundamentally altered the course of the storm. As Sandy moved northward, the polar Jet Stream that usually deflects storm systems into the Atlantic, developed an inward inflection, drawing Sandy inexorably toward the mid-Atlantic coast.

Approaching New Jersey, Sandy was reinvigorated with an infusion of cold energy that “spun the system from the top down,” according to James Franklin of the National Hurricane Center. While the storm retained extraordinary power, the forces became broadly diffused across the system’s rapidly expanding diameter rather than concentrated in the center.

Notable for its enormity, Sandy simultaneously slammed the New Jersey coast, pummeled New York City with record-setting surge waves at high tide, dumped two to three feet of wet snow on West Virginia’s Appalachians, and blasted the densely-populated Northeast with flooding rains amid strong gusts.

Given Sandy’s multifaceted nature, and multitude of presentations across a range of climatic conditions and topographies, the physical and psychological consequences of the destruction were widely dispersed and highly variable. In the U.S., enduring damage, destruction, and displacement were concentrated primarily in New Jersey’s Atlantic City area, the site of hurricane landfall, and in coastal portions of the New York City metro area that were inundated as the storm’s forward motion and counter-clockwise winds funneled waves into Long Island Sound and the New York Harbor.

A distinguishing feature for Sandy was the interplay between the natural elements of the storm system with the vulnerable human-built environment and fragile infrastructure that led to many of the harms and hardships experienced. Eight million people along the East Coast of the U.S. lost electrical power for prolonged periods, disrupting television, telephone, and Internet communication. Over 20,000 people were displaced from flood-ravaged homes. In New York City, tunnels and subways flooded. There were shortages of food and gasoline. And, a powerful Northeaster, Athena, created harsh winter weather conditions.

Perhaps the greatest unmet public health need is outside of the U.S., however. In Haiti, Sandy affected 1.5 million residents, creating a population displacement and food security crisis. Though Haiti received only mild tropical storm force winds, Sandy’s outer bands pelted barren hillsides with 20 inches of rain, setting off raging floods, destroying crops, and drowning livestock.

Fortunately, the death toll is modest for such a large-scale event (about 115 deaths in the U.S. and 200 deaths total). Sandy’s price tag is over $50 billion in the U.S., the second costliest hurricane in the nation’s history. This reflects pervasive but relatively mild damage for large numbers of citizens as well as severe losses in focal impact areas of prime real estate in New Jersey and New York City.

TSIG analysis of Sandy is the most recent in a series of case studies, such as those of Haiti and Japan, which apply this novel method to a spectrum of natural and human-generated disasters and humanitarian crises. The current stage of TSIG development deals with the creation of algorithms and protocols for translating post-impact, pre-deployment TSIG analysis into practical guidance for response. In 2013, an Internet-based Delphi Method with a group of nominated experts in disaster public health and disaster behavioral health will be conducted to refine and validate the process with the goal of having a fully operational tool by year’s end.

Despite the scope and scale of the storm, Sandy certainly will be remembered lifelong by millions, but as a wholly different creature depending on the vantage point and the geography of the beholder. Sandy’s signature is indeed unique, but it seems as though with climate change, the writing on the wall is clear. Anticipating the range of possibilities, enabled by an approach to disaster response with tools like TSIG, we can be better prepared for the aftermath of other disasters whose autographs we would rather not have.

Edited by Dana March.

This article originally appeared on the2x2project.org, an online publication sponsored by the Department of Epidemiology at Columbia University. 2×2 aims to inform the health conversation through timely and effective communication of emerging public health science.

Image courtesy US Navy

In March the Secretary of the Navy, Ray Mabus, was called before the Senate Armed Services Committee to defend the Navy’s newest program. The Navy Energy Program, designed to help the US Navy operate more efficiently and effectively by limiting the fuel burned and energy consumed in everyday operations, has cost the Navy millions of dollars over the past year with little to no demonstrated success – in the eyes of Congress. Secretary Mabus was asked to justify the program’s cost, particularly the Navy’s heavy involvement in alternative fuel development, to a group of skeptical and budget-conscious lawmakers. As one particularly pointed questioner put it, “You’re not the Secretary of Energy, you’re the Secretary of the Navy.”

Such questioning represents a fairly myopic view of the military’s role, its needs, and what it can provide the nation beyond pure military might. The military, with its near-unlimited budget and willingness to develop & deploy cutting edge technologies, is effectively the world’s largest venture capital fund. Spurred by operational realities, the military is taking an active role in the development and deployment of next generation energy technologies, which will help pave the way for adoption in the civilian world, speeding our transition to cleaner and more efficient energy sources.

The Navy’s energy efforts haven’t occurred in a vacuum. They are instead a component of a broad, DoD-wide effort to dramatically change the US military’s energy profile. Recognizing the major role that energy plays in the US military’s capabilities, and the significant risk an interruption in energy supply could pose to military operations, the DoD established the Office of Operational Energy to work to understand the issue and mitigate any major risks. In 2011, this office established the first DoD Operational Energy Strategy. This strategy was based on three key pillars:

• More fight, less fuel: Reduce overall demand for energy for military operations and installations by 1) increasing efficiency of operations and 2) carefully controlling energy costs and risks
• More option, less risk: Expand and secure the supply of energy to the US military to ensure adequate supplies for any required operation. This includes 1) protecting access to energy supplies and 2) diversifying the sources of military energy
• More capability, less cost: Build energy security into the future US military force by integrating consideration of energy issues and risks into the planning for future forces and operations

Each of these pillars plays a key role in the future development of military energy, and implementation is already underway. The DoD Operational Energy Implementation Plan sets a number of specific targets for each service, and details concrete steps for reaching them. Progress has already been made along a number of these goals. For example, the US Navy has committed to a 15% reduction in afloat energy use by 2020; the US Air Force has a stated goal of improving fuel efficiency by 10% by 2015; the US Army plans to establish 16 Net Zero installations by 2020.

However, it is in the second pillar, “More options, less risk,” that the real opportunity (and controversy) exists. The Implementation plan sets two key targets for this pillar. First, improving energy security at military installations and second, promoting the development of alternative fuels by establishing departmental alternative fuel policies and building investment portfolios in alternative energies.

While this goal impacts all services, it is the Navy that has moved most aggressively to expand its fuel options. As this site has already discussed, the Navy has publicly committed to replacing at least half its annual fuel use with “advanced renewables” by 2020 (roughly 600 million barrels worth of fuel) while simultaneously jointly investing in advanced biofuels with the DOE and USDA. The Navy has couched these investments in terms of security – by replacing a certain portion of its significant petroleum use with renewables that can be produced locally, the Navy can limit some of its exposure to volatile global energy markets and its reliance on long, easily interrupted supply chains. In doing so the Navy hopes to improve its ability to perform its mission while reducing the budgetary pressure created by rising energy prices.

Members of Congress have been increasingly strident in their opposition to these efforts, either on the grounds of cost (the Navy is currently paying roughly $26 per barrel of biofuel used, as opposed to the $3-$4 paid for traditional JP-5 jet fuel) or mission (the Navy’s mission is to protect the interests of the United States, not research and develop new fuels). However, this opposition is short-sighted and forgets the US military’s history as an innovation engine.

A broad cross-section of technology we consider indispensable to our modern lifestyle was, in fact, military-funded, military-developed, and military-applied – at least initially. GPS, the ubiquitous navigation technology in everything from our cars to our homes, is an excellent example.

Your iPhone’s location services owe a debt of gratitude to the first man-made satellite, Sputnik, launched by the USSR in 1957. While studying the satellite, scientists noticed that they could track the satellite’s orbit by listening to the changing frequency of its radio broadcast as it flew by. From this observation, it was a short leap from “where is the satellite relative to me” to “where am I relative to the satellite?”

Working from this foundation, the US Navy built the TRANSIT satellite system, eventually containing 10 geosynchronous satellites, in the 1960s to help nuclear submarines navigate the world’s oceans. DoD eventually built on this, and the rocket technology developed during the Space Race, to design and build the modern GPS network in order to give its forces continuous navigation information. The first satellite was launched in 1978, and the system was completed in 1995. By this time the GPS signals were used for far more than ship navigation, as aircraft, missiles, and other vehicles began relying on the system to navigate accurately. The system was fully opened to the public in 2000, resulting in an explosion of civilian uses. Today, everything from your car to your cellphone relies on the system for effective navigation and communication, and the system is estimated to be worth some $122 billion to the US economy.

GPS is by no means unique. The military led the development of peaceful nuclear energy for use in warships, developed the precursor to the internet, and has been at the forefront of aviation technology for decades. In each of these cases, technology developed for military use, often in concert with civilian partners, has created enormous and widespread benefits to civilian life.

This brings us back to the US Navy’s biofuels program. Critics have assailed it for its high cost per barrel of fuel, and for overstepping the traditional role of the US military. However, the development of a domestic alternative fuel supply – one that is stable, secure, and cost-competitive – has obvious benefits, and the US military is in a unique position to stimulate its growth. While costs per barrel of fuel are high today, that is largely a function of the start-up nature of the industry and the low level of demand. The Navy has committed to purchasing 300 million gallons of 50/50 biofuel blend by 2020, with the Air Force adding another 387 million by 2016. The combined 687 million gallons of biofuel blend (or 343 million gallons of biofuel) represents significant growth for the market, pushing it towards commercial viability and self-sufficiency. Should civilian airliners move more aggressively towards adoption (noting the military’s effective use and somewhat stable domestic demand), add another 1.9 billion barrels of fuel to demand – more than enough to sustain a robust domestic biofuel industry without the need for government support.

The primary impediment to doing so is the high start-up cost for advanced biofuel companies – the R&D needed to develop the fuels, the capital to build demonstration-scale refineries, and the uncertainty of financial success despite a viable fuel product. The military has the capacity to solve this problem on its own. Understandably focused on operational success, they can insure that any advanced biofuels are technologically viable and functional in the toughest environments on earth; because they are not driven by profit, they can happily eat the high initial costs of RD&D to develop operationally-viable fuels; and once the fuels have proven operationally viable and costs have begun to come down, the private sector can step in to help the industry expand beyond military uses. That is the model that worked for GPS, nuclear power, and the internet, and that is the model that should be used here.

Should a domestic biofuels industry come to fruition, the benefits will be felt far beyond the front lines. National energy supplies could be more secure, mitigating the need to deploy the military to volatile but energy-rich regions; drivers could pay less at the pump; air travel could be moderately cheaper; the industry itself could create and sustain jobs. Just as importantly, biofuels could play a key role in transitioning our economy to a low-carbon future – but not without initial support, which the military has proven itself more than willing to provide. For this reason, Congress should get out of the way and let the military do what it is best at – solving difficult problems with novel technologies.

Published October 30th, 2012

In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy’s devastation, it would be all too easy to blame some of its victims for refusing to heed mandatory evacuation orders. Twenty-six people are dead along the storm’s path, and nearly 100 homes are destroyed. New York’s iconic subway system is under water, as is much of lower Manhattan—the result of a 14-foot storm surge. Nearly 6 million people lack electricity throughout the Northeast.

Nearly 375,000 New York City residents had been ordered Sunday to head to inland shelters. Despite calls to evacuate from the mayor and the governor, and the declaration of a state of emergency in New York by President Obama, many refused to leave their homes, possessions and pets behind. By Monday morning, only 3,000 had checked into shelters, leaving the vast majority unaccounted for (although some might have left the city or stayed with friends or family in other areas).

However, while the decision to act preventatively in the face of a disaster is an obvious one for public health authorities—indeed, it defines their mission—for ordinary citizens, following evacuation orders isn’t so simple.

Though my 10^th floor Manhattan apartment wasn’t in a mandatory evacuation zone, my childhood home during 1992’s Hurricane Andrew was. On the first night of that storm, I huddled with my family under several mattresses stacked haphazardly in the main hallway of our Miami home while Andrew wreaked havoc on South Florida. My little brother had been born only five days before, and given that all the routes out of harm’s way involved trying to head north off of the Florida peninsula through standstill traffic with a newborn, my father decided that hunkering down was our best option. At 8 years old, the gravity of the situation couldn’t hit me until I emerged from the night’s cocoon to the devastation that befell my neighborhood—and the rest of the state.

Twenty years older, as an epidemiologist and public health advocate listening to the fury of Sandy rattling my windows, I understood the arguments for evacuation. The first and most intuitive is that authorities had weighed and measured the risks, and decided that it was better for those living in certain areas to leave their homes.

But what if the authorities were wrong, and Sandy had turned out to be another Hurricane Irene—knocking over a couple of lawn chairs and blowing some leaves off trees late last summer, but causing little damage of consequence in the city? After all, evacuation isn’t easy. It means leaving behind all that you care about and the place where you’re most comfortable to stay in a public space with strangers, not knowing when you’ll return.

Ethically, the argument public health authorities make to residents of potential disaster zones doesn’t feel right, either. It’s inherently paternalistic, assuming that people can’t make their own best decisions. It violates their autonomy to choose for themselves, forfeiting that right to the authorities.

Then there’s the shadow argument that attempts to sidestep the thorny ethical problem—that orders of evacuation actually exist to protect first responders.

That argument goes something like this: Some places are higher risk than others, and residents who stay in areas ordered to evacuate are both more likely to be in harm’s way and to endanger the rescue personnel who have to save them if and when things go wrong. By staying, those who ignore evacuation orders are both hogging response resources that are in short supply and exposing brave service people to unnecessary harm.

But what if residents were to waive their right to first responders? Should they then be permitted to stay if they’ve ensured they’re not putting anyone else in harm’s way?

Another question has to do with enforcement. Although the New York Police Department spent Monday morning barking evacuation orders at stubborn residents over loudspeakers, those orders are, in the strictest sense, non-enforceable. While the authorities can remind, even cajole people to leave their homes, they do not force them to do so, meaning the choice to leave remains, in the end, with the resident.

Both why authorities issue evacuation orders and how enforceable they are center around the question of when and why public health authorities can tell people what to do.

This issue is at the core of public health, a practice founded on collectivist principles that inherently subjugate the autonomy of the individual to the wellbeing of the collective. And public health ethicists have wracked their brains around these questions. Consider, for example, outdoor smoking bans—are they justified because it’s simply better for the smoker not to smoke, or because smoking really does hurt others? As another example, consider motorcycle helmet laws—it’s clear that they decrease motorcycle mortality—but what if individuals are confident in their riding abilities and like feeling the wind flow through their hair as they ride?

Here’s the twist: For most individuals, be they disaster-zone residents, smokers, or motorcyclists, the risk of actually experiencing a bad outcome from playing the odds is pretty low. That’s why we hear stories about someone’s great uncle who smoked like a chimney and never got lung cancer, or weathered the storm on a beachfront property without a scratch. But the risk of the outcome among the population of those who engage in a particular risk behavior—like choosing not to evacuate during a hurricane—is pretty high.

In this way, evacuation highlights one of the most difficult challenges to public health: In the absence of the ability for authorities to enforce, public health requires individuals who may themselves have low chances of ever suffering a particular outcome to voluntarily do things that ultimately curb the likelihood of that outcome among the entire population, even if those things may not influence their own risks all that much. In effect, it requires that individuals sacrifice for the collective—something most of us aren’t very good at.

In the end, Sandy—like Andrew—was a catastrophic storm, warranting evacuation to protect the population, even if for individuals, the decision was not that easy.

Edited by Jordan Lite

Article originally posted on the2x2project.org, an online publication sponsored by the Department of Epidemiology at Columbia University. 2×2 aims to inform the health conversation through timely and effective communication of emerging public health science.

Published November 5, 2012

Imagine your run-of-the-mill nursing home—a brick building with individual rooms for each of the elderly residents many of whom have chronic conditions, periodic infections, and the need for continued care. Now, pack two or more of those residents in each room, put bars on the doorway, wrap a fence around the perimeter and, in some ways, you’ve got a picture of what prisons could look like in several decades.

State and federal prisons in 2010 housed over 26,000 inmates 65 and older and around 124,400 aged 55 and up, according to a Human Rights Watch report. One in 12 inmates in state and federal prison is 55 and up. Today’s prison population is much older than it has been in the past, which could create new economic and health concerns for an already ailing prison infrastructure.

Much of the growth in the prison-bound elderly mirrors demographic trends outside the prison system, with the aging of the baby-boomer generation. But in prisons, this has been exacerbated, in part, by strict sentencing laws, like the Three Strikes Laws and long-term sentencing for drug offenders.

The Three Strikes Law was implemented in 28 different states across the United States since 1993, with varied forms of application in each state. Between 1995 and 2010, America’s prison population grew by 42 percent, while the proportion of inmates over 55 years old grew by seven times that rate.

These laws were developed to deal with recidivism by requiring minimum sentences of 25 years to life for three-time offenders with prior serious or violent felony convictions. But, in many states, particularly California, where the sentencing has been most extreme and county prosecutors are given discretion to apply the law as they see fit, the third strike can be a nonviolent crime and still land a person with a 25-to-life sentence with no eligibility for parole for 25 years.

As applied, these laws made sentences longer and limited the possibility of parole for nonviolent crimes. In California alone, where the Three Strikes law was applied particularly strongly, 56 percent of those put away on Three Strikes were put away for nonserious or nonviolent crimes. A Pew Center on the States report showed that drug offenders in 2009 spent 36 percent longer behind bars, on average, than in 1990. Furthermore, one out of ten state prisoners is in for life, while the same proportion of prisoners aged 50 and above are in for 30-to-life. That means that over 100,000 prisoners will die in prison, a persistent and costly burden on the health system.

For each inmate older than 50, inmate healthcare costs are upwards of $68,270—sometimes more. According to the ACLU, providing health care for these aging prisoners will cost American taxpayers roughly $16 billion annually.

So, how do we address the problem?

First, we could consider releasing elderly prisoners provided they are nonviolent and unlikely to commit new crimes. At first, this approach may sound unsafe, but after age 50, people, in general, are far less likely to commit serious crimes, according to a U.S. Department of Justice report. Arrest rates drop from about 12 percent for 16-19 year olds to 2 percent for people at age 50. At 65, arrest rates are nearly zero. And older inmates who are released rarely return. For example, a New York State study followed 469 inmates sentenced for violent crimes for 13 years after their release as senior citizens. Only eight of those former inmates returned to prison and only one went back for committing a violent offense.

That said, releasing large groups of prisoners is never politically expedient, so it’ll be a sunny day in solitary confinement before that happens. But even without releasing elderly prisoners, the strict sentencing and Three Strikes policies that created this problem will continue to compound it.

Several studies have already questioned the effectiveness of Three Strikes policies. A study by researchers at UC Riverside suggests that the Three Strikes law has not deterred crime in California, where the law was enforced most strongly. In fact, the study suggests that the decrease in violent crime began two years before the law was passed. Other studies have shown no differences in crime rates between counties that used the law excessively and those that used it less so.

Three Strikes is borne of an old outlook, one that viewed punitive enforcement and harsh sentencing as the way toward a less crime-ridden society. Rather, approaches like the Drug Market Initiative, which offers social welfare and job support instead of strict sentencing, could be an alternative, less costly and more humane way forward.

We don’t doubt that some prisoners require long sentences, given their crimes, but the Three Strikes law and strict sentencing for nonviolent crimes will continue to create massive health burdens in aging prison populations, on top of the toll these policies already reap on society. Failure to address these problems not only adds to the bill taxpayers will pay for ineffective prison healthcare, but construct—brick by costly brick—prisons that look more like assisted-living homes than correctional facilities.

Edited by Abdul El-Sayed. Additional research by Arti Virkud.

Article originally posted on the2x2project.org, an online publication sponsored by the Department of Epidemiology at Columbia University. 2×2 aims to inform the health conversation through timely and effective communication of emerging public health.

Image courtesy of Broad Group via Gizmag

A longer version of this article first appeared on ArchDaily. To read that version, click here.

It’s a global exodus that shows no signs of stopping: millions making their ways from rural outskirts to big cities, hoping for opportunity, money, or education. By 2008, half the world’s population were living in towns and cities; according to the United Nations Population Fund, that number will swell to almost 5 billion by 2030.

Perhaps nowhere has this shift been more pronounced, or more associated with economic growth than in China. In only forty years, China’s population has gone from 20% urban to 51% urban, which translates to about 700 million people living in cities.

For every new face, it seems there is a new accompanying “mega-scraper.” According to The National, “There are 239 buildings taller than 200 meters (about 656 ft) being built in the country, far more than any other nation.  At the end of last year, there were only 61 buildings taller than 300 meters (about 984 ft) in the world, but in five years, China will have more than 60.”

However, in the West, where contemporary discourse on urbanization emphasizes the importance of low-impact, sustainable design, these ever-taller skyscrapers have experts concerned. With China so willingly hurtling forward in the name of progress, sustainability, ecological responsibility, and even health and safety have taken a back seat.

China’s Rocky Road to Sustainability

From reports of “cancer villages” near dirty factories to constant threats of water shortages, an ever-thickening smog, and shoddy, life-threatening constructions, the repercussions of China’s “progress” has forced the country to acknowledge that its path cannot be maintained. Indeed, in the last few years the Chinese government has made conscious strides towards sustainability: their five-year plan for 2011-2015 emphasizes cutting down energy/water intensity and investing in clean technologies.

Moreover, their goal relies heavily upon reforming the field of sustainable construction. Over 2.6% of China’s GDP (over $100 billion) is spent on the research and development of key industries in China, with the construction industry often receiving special attention. The country has even set up its own green certification system, the “three star” program, which will rival LEED.

However, there are a few caveats to China’s commitment to sustainability. First, as Richard Brubaker, writing for the Guardian Professional Blog, explains, China’s top priorities remain socio-economic in nature: economic growth, urbanization, and the alleviation of poverty. Thus, it will be the tangible social issue of citizen health & safety, and not any ecological imperative, that will truly drive China’s path to sustainability.

Second, for China, it’s not just a question of maintaining growth at all costs, but also of maintaining the image of  growth. Architect Timothy Johnson, chairman of the Chicago-based Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH), suggests that these buildings are really all about projecting an image, about “telling the story of the accomplishments of China.” Thus, the country will not want to sacrifice its image of economic accomplishment to achieve sustainability. No matter how much the West, and the world, may want it to.

But must sustainability, economic viability, and “image” be mutually exclusive? Is it possible for China to build up its cities in a way that is at once sustainable, cost-effective, quick, safe, and, still, well, big? It’s a tall order – with an equally tall solution.

A Radical Proposal

At Broad Town, the headquarters of the Broad Sustainability Group, you, the employee, should be able to run 7.5 miles over the course of 2 days. You should be able to recite company “policy” – covering everything from how to save energy to how to brush your teeth – at a moment’s notice. You should refer to your boss as “my chairman.”

Why so strict? It may have something to do with the fact that the CEO and founder of Broad, Zhang Yue, a.k.a the chairman, doesn’t just consider himself the head of a construction company, but of a “structural revolution.”

Zhang, who started out manufacturing boilers and industrial air-conditioning units (and subsequently made his wealth), was inspired to shift his career to sustainable construction following  two major life events: one, more than a decade ago, when he became a committed environmentalist , and two, in 2008, when a 7.9-magnitude earthquake hit China’s Sichuan Province, killing nearly 87,000 people.

Despite initial censorship in the Chinese media, it was common knowledge that a large percentage of those deaths, particularly those of thousands of students, were the result of poorly constructed buildings. Zhang subsequently became obsessed with the idea of designing an earthquake-proof, environmentally-friendly structure.

So Zhang conscripted about 300 of his engineers to the task. What they came up with was radical: the world’s first factory-built skyscraper.

The Promise of Pre-Fab

Over 93% of the Tower Hotel in Yueyang, Hunan, was prefabricated (as a series of modules) at Broad’s factory. Once on site, workers only needed to bolt the modules together: no welding, no scaffolding, no water (a typical construction site uses about 5,000 tons of water to build), and very little waste (only 25 tons, instead of the 3,000 tons usually created in skyscraper construction). The entire assembly process of a 30-story building took 15 days.

And while the speed certainly raises eyebrows about the structural integrity of the skyscraper, the quality of the construction is actually the Tower’s greatest selling point. According to Lauren Hilgers, the Wired correspondent who spent time with Zhang Yue at the Broad Headquarters, “In a nation where construction standards vary widely, and where builders often use cheap and unreliable concrete, Broad’s method offers a rare sort of consistency.” In fact, according to Broad, the structure could survive an earthquake of up to 9.0 on the Richter Scale.

Moreover, the Tower Hotel uses only 10% of the concrete required by other buildings its size, meaning it requires less structural steel (drastically reducing its total weight). Its exterior is comprised of thermal insulation and five-paned windows that keep the rooms cool. It can produce biogas from sewage and heat itself from hot waste water. It costs about $400 less per square meter than a traditional commercial high-rise in china.

But Zhang isn’t satisfied yet. His latest project – if it succeeds – will be one for the record books.

Sky City One will, at 2,750 ft (220 stories), be the world’s tallest structure, beating out the Burj Khalifa by about 33 feet. Like the Tower Hotel, it will be sustainable, earthquake-proof, assembled at Broad’s factory, and built quickly – in about 210 days (to compare, 9 times as fast as the Burj Khalifa) for only $628 million dollars.

According to one of Broad’s workers, the idea is to “to attract eyes[...] to shock the world.” There will be little doubt of that. Even if you argue that the sheer size of the structure makes it a waste of resources, no matter how comparatively sustainable it may be, there’s no arguing that the height will call attention.

It’s a strategic move to call attention to Broad’s construction revolution, which – if adopted on a large scale – would be a vital step towards China’s move towards sustainability.

A New Chinese Dream

In a recent op-ed for The New York Times, Thomas L. Friedman points out that if China follows in America’s consumerist footsteps (or, as he puts it, adopts the “American Dream”), the use of resources will be such that we’ll “need another planet.” He describes a new “Chinese Dream” beginning to take form (and that he hopes take root), one which adopts from traditional values of harmony and balance, that redefines the concept of personal prosperity from ownership of products/services to access to them, and encourages sustainable habits.

Although China’s issues with sustainability generally stem from industrial processes, and not directly from consumerism (as Friedman seems to claim), Broad’s vision of the sustainable skyscraper speaks directly to both these worlds. On one level, it offers a radical reformation of one of China’s most wasteful and hazardous industries; on the other, this dense, mixed-use building (which will offer access to communal services), constructed safely and sustainably, truly manifests the emergent “Chinese Dream.”

Should Sky City One reach completion, the world’s tallest tower will be a powerful symbol – not just of economic power, but also of China’s sustainable future.

Photo from Thinkstock.com

Marriage is an important predictor of health. Married people live longer, and married mothers are less likely to deliver prematurely. Once born, their babies are generally healthier, and are less likely prone to infant mortality than those born to unmarried mothers.

Yet relationships are changing — and marriage is no different. Larry Bumpass, a sociologist who studies marriage at the University of Wisconsin notes that marriage has changed dramatically over the past several decades, arguing that marriage has undergone a “decline in significance” as marital norms that shape the way that couples relate with one another have changed, and both men and women have become more individualistic in their goals and desires. What’s more, young people are increasingly choosing against marriage, as the proportion of unmarried heterosexuals aged 30-44 cohabiting with a partner has doubled since the mid-1990s.

It makes sense, then, that if marriage has deteriorated, the social goods that substantiate the health advantage for married people may also break down — things like social, emotional, and financial support shared between partners in a couple.

In a study published in Public Health Reports we considered how the relationship between marriage and premature births has changed with time. As the graph below shows, the likelihood of prematurity increased among married women and decreased among unmarried women who delivered babies with time in the state of Michigan between 1989 and 2006.

While some of this observed effect may be due to changes in marital norms, as the old adage goes, “correlation doesn’t equal causation,” and there’s another wrinkle to the story.

Married women are also richer and have better access to obstetrical care than their unmarried counterparts, on average. As technologies have improved that allow us to deliver sick babies earlier than ever before, it’s possible that the effect we observed in the study could be explained by a higher rate of clinically-indicated premature births among married women compared to unmarried women, given the difference in access to these life-saving technologies between them.

What’s more, other researchers have noted an increase in elective cesarean section deliveries. Married women, owing to their economic advantage, may also be more likely to have elective c-sections that fall just before the period in which a baby is no longer considered premature.

Rather than one explanation or the other, it’s likely that these findings represent all three underlying trends — our observations are likely to be partly attributable to changing marital norms, as well as to elective and clinically indicated delivery among richer, married women.

Where does the science go from here? To parse out the main driver of this changing relationship between maternal marriage and infant health, we’re now conducting a study to see if we observe the same change over time in the relationship between marriage and infant mortality — an outcome much less likely to be explained by maternal or physician choice.

Figure adapted from published article: El-Sayed AM, Galea S. Changes in the Relationship Between Marriage and Preterm Birth, 1989-2006. Public Health Reports. 2011: 126: 717-725.

Edited by Karestan Koenen.

Article originally posted on the2x2project.org, an online publication sponsored by the Department of Epidemiology at Columbia University. 2×2 aims to inform the health conversation through timely and effective communication of emerging public health science.

These worthy efforts stand in heightened relief during an election season marked by the binary, simplistic, black-and-white discourse of political campaigning.

The emblematic low point: Mitt Romney’s climate laugh-line at the Republican National Convention.

“President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet . . . My promise is to help you and your family.”

Journalists, bloggers, pundits and Facebook users decried the disregard, the denialism, the downright poor taste of this comment. But the implicit dichotomies of people versus planet and economy versus environment are, perhaps, even more disturbing.

This is a prime moment to recall fruitful examples of, and ongoing possibilities for, productive exchange and even alliance building among strange bedfellows.

The evangelical climate movement — what I call climate care — is one such example.

In 2006, much to the surprise of onlookers from both sides of the aisle, evangelical leaders launched an advocacy effort on climate change with an announcement in the New York Times and Christianity Today: “Our commitment to Jesus Christ compels us to solve the global warming crisis.”

The Evangelical Climate Initiative emerged amidst public perception that evangelicals marched in lockstep with the GOP, which, under the Bush Administration, maintained entrenched opposition to action on climate change.

Yet these high-profile evangelical leaders stood up and stepped out, challenging dominant stereotypes.

They went on to partner with non-evangelical, even atheist, scientists; politicians red, blue and purple; and leaders from the mainstream environmental movement.

In thought and action, these climate care leaders cross the chasms of persistent binaries: liberal / conservative, secular / religious, human / environment, material / spiritual, science / faith.

As I write in Between God & Green, such dichotomies may provide good soundbite fodder, but they ultimately limit the ways we understand and respond to issues.

[C]learly, religion and environment are not inimical, nor are scientists and evangelicals or political liberals and theological conservatives on definitively opposing sides. Synergies between them are apparent and increasingly intersect on climate change.”

We can reject the unhelpful, black-and-white language of the season and instead heed the lessons, and embrace the hopefulness, of the climate care story.

To investigate and re-investigate our own dichotomous thinking is an urgent necessity. Maintaining tired frames needlessly limits us to half truths, half solutions and missed opportunities to build alliances on the issues that matter most.

Topic: Between God and Green — Faith-Based Environmentalism and Climate Change

Bio: Dr. Katharine K. Wilkinson is a consultant at the Boston Consulting Group, where she specializes in behavior change, and the author of Between God & Green: How Evangelicals Are Cultivating a Middle Ground on Climate Change (OUP 2012). Her research, writing, and public speaking explore the intersection of sustainability, meaning, leadership, and the public square, aimed at fostering engagement on environmental issues. A Rhodes Scholar and two-time Udall Scholar, Wilkinson holds a DPhil in environmental studies from Oxford and a BA in religion from Sewanee: The University of the South.

Dr. Wilkinson’s extensive experience in sustainability includes work for the Natural Resources Defense Council, consulting on strategic communications and stakeholder engagement, and teaching environmental social science and humanities at Oxford. An Atlanta native whose heart is often atop the Cumberland Plateau, Wilkinson is actively involved in equestrian sports, the Posse Foundation, the Outdoor Academy, and the Rhodes Trust.

Episode Summary: What is faith-based environmentalism, and how might it transform the sterile political divides around American climate politics? Katharine and Jisung talk about the recent rise of “Evangelical Climate Care” and how religious leaders have been complementing the “what” of science and policy with the “so what” of religious beliefs and values, around the historically very contentious issue of climate change.

About the Book: Between God and Green

Drawing on extensive focus group and textual research and interviews, Between God & Green explores the phenomenon of climate care, from its historical roots and theological grounding to its visionary leaders and advocacy initiatives. Wilkinson examines the movement’s reception within the broader evangelical community, from pew to pulpit. She shows that by engaging with climate change as a matter of private faith and public life, leaders of the movement challenge traditional boundaries of the evangelical agenda, partisan politics, and established alliances and hostilities. These leaders view sea-level rise as a moral calamity, lobby for legislation written on both sides of the aisle, and partner with atheist scientists.

Wilkinson reveals how evangelical environmentalists are reshaping not only the landscape of American climate action, but the contours of their own religious community. Though the movement faces complex challenges, climate care leaders continue to leverage evangelicalism’s size, dominance, cultural position, ethical resources, and mechanisms of communication to further their cause to bridge God and green.

 Links:

Bryan Norton on Values and a Pragmatist Philosophy of Sustainability

Wilkinson on the Yale Forum

“Did Evangelicals Change the Climate Change Conversation?”

Sense and Sustainability Executive Director Jisung Park and Business & Technology Editor James Hacker first wrote a longer version of this article that appeared on Bloomberg.com. To read the full article, click here.

Sure, it would be rash to describe Hurricane Sandy as climate change incarnate. But it does make one wonder just how much longer we can ignore the bigger picture.

The bigger picture is that of a storm eating the northeastern United States from the Carolinas in the South to Lake Michigan in the West. More than 60 million Americans have been affected, many of them in areas where hurricane damages have not historically been a concern. Initial estimates by Eqecat put insured losses at $10 billion to $20 billion, with up to another $50 billion in economic damages. Once economists tally the total losses from property damage to homes, stores, cars, and utilities, as well as the opportunity costs of foregone wages and other productivity losses, the figure is likely to be even higher.

Storm-related damages of this magnitude are not new. Hurricane Irene cost the economy more than $7 billion last year, and Hurricane Katrina is estimated to have caused more than $100 billion (pdf) in damages. What is new about Sandy is that it hit directly at the heart of urban America – New York City. Sandy revealed New York’s vulnerabilities the way an arrow in the heel revealed Achilles’s.

To read more, click here.

The election revolves heavily around ‘social’ issues and the corresponding public policies that will directly impact women (and make no mistake about it — men as well). These include equal access to employment and rights to equal pay; access to quality, affordable healthcare; the regulation of women’s bodies, reproductive health, and freedom of choice in relation to contraceptives and abortion — even what constitutes rape. ‘Women’ are everywhere in the debates.  We are featured alongside the why’s and what-now’s of the ailing economy and over and above the war in Afghanistan.

I’m captivated even as I struggle to understand the reasons why this is the case — didn’t ‘developed’ nations figure out long ago that social and economic equality and right to healthcare and decision-making over reproductive issues were key to prosperous, healthy, sustainable communities?

Women’s issues are treated as a subset of ‘social issues,’ and are scoffed at by those who assert they are a distraction from more important and serious debates around the economy, job creation, and high unemployment. This view is erroneous. Women’s reproductive freedom, right to equal pay for equal work, and access to quality healthcare are very much economic issues, and are directly related to what it means to be a developed country.

Women in the US are tuned into the debates as well. By now we’ve all heard about the ‘gender gap’ in pre-election polls — more women seem to favor the Democratic platform of President Obama over that of Republican candidate Mitt Romney — and in considerable numbers.  Let’s be clear about something — this isn’t about the old color-of-the-tie psychology theory.  What is interesting is what these numbers can tell us, particularly when they are broken down. For example, among the female democratic supporters are women of color, immigrant women, single mothers, and low-income women.  So what is the story behind the numbers?

Women know what they need. There are 46.2 million women, or 15.1% of the population, living in poverty in the United States (notably, there are 4 million more poor women than men). Social services such as those provided by Planned Parenthood (access to birth control, non-judgemental abortion, and gynecological exams), food stamp programs, and state assistance in caring for children and the disabled (work that women overwhelmingly do) are imperative for women and their families living in poverty. In part, President Obama’s numbers are boosted by those women lacking equal access to employment and who are  directly impacted by the fact that women still only make 77 cents to every dollar (and women of colour 61 cents to every dollar) that men make. Women’s issues are as much economic as they are social. Any woman wanting to limit the number of children she bears, that struggles to feed her family, or is unable to make ends meet in a low-paying job can tell you that.

A great deal of women clearly know what is at stake on a personal level in this election. The gender gap in the polls makes a lots of sense to me — it’s the impetus behind the debates that does not. Have the big guys in power suits forgotten what being a developed country involves?

There is no one universal or concrete definition for a developed country. What constitutes ‘developed’ is highly contested, and definitions vary according to the weight placed on different social, economic and political indicators.  While it lags behind in some indicators, gender equality being one of them, the US is considered a developed country — and indeed one that invests in promoting development in other countries. Considering the differing perspectives and definitions, I think it is safe to look to the UN Millenium Development Goals for guidance on some of the characteristics of a developed country. These would indicate one that is free from poverty and hunger, and with universal access to education, for a start. It would also have gender equality, excellent child and maternal health, and would have universal healthcare provision. Countries where women have particularly low status and little access to social, economic and reproductive rights often fall into the ‘developing’ or ‘less developed’ category.

Public policies that work towards sustainable development would support women’s access to reproductive health services, such as information on family planning, safe contraceptives and abortions, and pre- and post-natal care. They would also ensure universal access to healthcare regardless of your position as a CEO, a student, or a janitor. They would promote women receiving the same pay that men did for the same work, and also the same access to employment — which might include provision of childcare services so that single or low-income mothers could engage in paid employment outside of the house. Women suffer, as do their families and communities, when they are not supported via inclusive policies. One need only look at international statistics on maternal mortality, domestic violence, and female illiteracy — as well as what happens when women’s rights are upheld — to understand this.

Considering that these are the types of policies that have immediate relevance for low-income women, and within this group a disproportionate number of women of color, single mothers, and immigrant women, it’s no wonder that female support is markedly greater for one party’s platform than that of the other. Feminists have insisted that ‘the personal is political’  since the 1960s and ’70s — a statement with continued relevance today. Women are engaged in these elections because the outcome will have direct, tangible, every-day impacts on their lives. My fascination with the US presidential election stems partly from a morbid curiosity — I just can’t wrap my head around why a ‘developed’ country would retract the policies that helped propel it towards that coveted status in the first place. The election will show whether a majority of American women feel the same.

That strategy represents a notable shift from the rhetoric of his 2008 campaign and the early months of his administration, when he emphasized reducing fossil fuels consumption and spurring clean energy investment in the name of combating climate change. On the 2012 campaign trail, by contrast, Obama has been quick to note the rapid domestic expansion of oil and gas production on his watch, and has highlighted his efforts to improve fuel efficiency and alternative energy development in the context of cost-reduction and job creation. The result has been a pragmatic and flexible approach to energy policy that attempts to appeal to all segments of energy interests, from oil companies to green energy advocates.

The platform

The energy plank in the 2012 Obama campaign platform advocates the need to “take control of our energy future” by encouraging the development of domestic fossil fuels and alternative energy sources alike. The goal of achieving “energy independence” by replacing imports of oil from outside North America with domestic production has also been a theme for the energy strategy of Obama’s Republican challenger Mitt Romney. However, Obama and Romney differ significantly in their proposals to regulate U.S. oil and gas drilling and production, and for President Obama domestic fossil fuels development is part of a broader push towards a more diverse energy portfolio.

The Obama administration’s 2011 Blueprint for a Secure Energy Future (a one-year progress report can be found here) outlines the president’s “all-of-the-above” energy strategy with three objectives in mind:

• Develop and secure America’s energy supplies
• Provide consumers with choices to reduce costs and save energy
• Innovate our way to a clean energy future

Here the Obama administration frames its energy policy as a significant step towards increased U.S. energy security, relief from high oil prices, and the increased adoption of clean energy sources and higher fuel-efficiency standards. The Blueprint serves as the policy foundation for the 2012 Obama campaign energy platform, so we can examine the platform itself through each of its three goals:

Develop and secure America’s energy supplies. The Obama campaign calls for expanded production of domestic oil and gas resources, in order to reduce reliance on foreign energy supplies, expand supply in the face of high oil prices, and encourage power companies to switch from coal to cleaner-burning natural gas. The administration plans to encourage “safe, responsible development” of both oil and gas through leasing public lands for development and tightening federal drilling, leasing, and safety regulations.

Provide consumers with choices to reduce costs and save energy. Obama has made increasing energy efficiency standards the focal point of this initiative. His plan would call for an average fuel economy of 35.5 miles per gallon (mpg) for new cars and trucks by 2016, with a mandate for automakers to increase standards to 54.5 mpg by 2025. The plan also advocates continued investment in electric vehicle components, advanced biofuels, and subsidies towards energy efficiency upgrades of homes and commercial buildings.

Innovate our way to a clean energy future. Obama has called for continuing the deployment of renewable energy sources, expanding subsidies to clean energy research and manufacturing, and continuing existing programs such as the Production Tax Credit for wind and biomass energy. Additionally, federal subsidies would continue towards developing carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technologies for “clean coal” power generation. Also included in the Obama energy plan is a renewed push for a Clean Energy Standard, a credit scheme for electric utilities that would set a target of generating 80 percent of electricity from clean energy sources – including renewables, nuclear, “efficient” natural gas, and clean coal – by 2035.

Expanding energy policy to “all of the above”

In the first months of his presidency, Obama centered his energy policy on reducing oil consumption and embracing green energy initiatives, with a broader aim of reducing carbon emissions linked to global warming. Towards those ends, he pursued higher vehicle fuel-efficiency standards, removed federal barriers to regulating automobile tailpipe emissions, passed a $90 billion stimulus towards clean energy investments, and spoke of creating a “new American energy economy.” Three years later, by contrast, oil and natural gas share top billing with clean energy initiatives on the president’s energy plan. The White House proudly points out that U.S. domestic oil production is at its highest level in over a decade and net oil imports are the lowest in 16 years, while domestic natural gas production has reached all-time highs.

The anemic economic recovery has prompted a shift towards an energy policy more inclusive of fossil fuels. Stubbornly high unemployment, coupled with high oil prices for most of the past four years, have forced the administration to weigh clean energy policies and regulations by their impact on jobs figures and individual American purse strings. During the same period, the energy sector has enjoyed spectacular growth as technological advances have helped unlock vast new domestic reserves of oil and natural gas, generating hundreds of thousands of energy, manufacturing, and services jobs. With economic revival as his foremost policy priority, President Obama has not been willing to risk slowing growth by curbing domestic fossil fuel production. The 2012 election has only amplified that political consideration, with both Obama and Romney offering visions of economic growth powered by fossil fuels.

A pragmatic balance?

By its very nature, the Obama all-of-the-above energy plan is a policy strategy of compromise. Economic constraints have made it politically costly for the president to count out fossil fuel development; and since the failure of a cap-and-trade plan in 2010 and strong Republican gains in that year’s congressional elections, any broad legislation targeting climate change or carbon emissions has faced slim chances of passing. All-of-the-above has emerged from these circumstances as a middle ground. It has a broader goal of moving towards a cleaner, more efficient energy economy, yet it recognizes the foundational role that oil and gas will play for the foreseeable future.

As with other policy compromises, it has come under fire from both sides of the political aisle. The prominent role given to oil and gas in Obama’s energy policy, as well as the inclusion of coal in the mix, has unnerved many environmental and green advocates who enthusiastically backed him in 2008. Climate change did not come up even once as a talking point in any of the presidential debates, and green activists have been frustrated by what they see as “climate silence” on the part of the presidential campaigns. Meanwhile, energy industry leaders, the expected beneficiaries of the president’s pivot towards oil and gas, continue to fulminate over the administration’s rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline and its decision not to expand offshore drilling on the Atlantic coast. Conservative policy analysts, such as Nicolas Loris of the Heritage Foundation, have derided subsidies towards CCS technology and renewable energy as “wasteful and an economic drain” while warning that new regulations on coal-fired power plants will “drive up energy costs for American households and businesses.”

The all-of-the above policy has had notable public shortcomings – several of the renewable energy firms receiving federal stimulus funding, including the infamous Solyndra, have gone bankrupt, and CCS technology may prove uneconomic – but it has also taken momentous steps towards a cleaner energy economy.  Renewable electricity generation capacity has doubled since 2008. The administration has moved towards enacting the first-ever cap on carbon emissions of new power plants, and it has worked with the auto industry to put ambitious vehicle fuel economy standards in place. The policy has had little to do with the boom in natural gas, but its regulatory measures have only accelerated the longer-term shift of many utilities from coal to natural gas in power generation. That switch to gas-fired power has helped bring U.S. energy-related carbon emissions to their lowest levels in 20 years, and will continue to reduce carbon emissions over the long term.

Though it has been dismissed as weak by some and political posturing by others, an all-of-the-above energy plan has some real merits. In particular, it carries the potential to gradually point U.S. energy policy in a more sustainable direction with minimal disruption to the current energy economy. It does not threaten to snuff out the boom in domestic oil and gas; it instead seeks to put regulatory policies in place to ensure that development can continue while minimizing the risks of environmental damage. It may not explicitly focus on the threat of climate change, but it encourages greater energy efficiency and reductions in carbon emissions through regulatory standards and the encouragement of cleaner energy technologies. A compromised policy is not an easy sell, but in an area as complex as the energy economy, it may be one of the few feasible steps forward to a future of lower carbon emissions, given the current economic and political environment.

In a country racked by four straight years of historic joblessness, this overwhelming focus on employment makes sense intuitively. With unemployment continuing to ravage communities across America for years now, of course we want energy jobs! But this sentiment is only partially right: we do need jobs, but energy policy is the wrong place to look for a solution. Energy policy has real objectives to address — like facilitating affordable availability or mitigating the associated environmental and health damages — but unemployment is not one of them. The unemployment we face is a macroeconomic issue that requires macroeconomic solutions. Treating energy as a way to “create jobs” misinterprets our current unemployment problems while also doing a disservice to the pursuit of sensible energy policy.

To see this disconnect, it is useful to begin by assessing the source of America’s unemployment woes. Economists traditionally divide unemployment into three categories: structural unemployment, defined as mismatch between the available jobs and the skills of available workers, frictional unemployment, which refers to temporary periods workers spend between jobs, and cyclical unemployment, caused by disruptions to the macroeconomy that reduce the overall demand for goods and services and, hence, the demand for labor. Some observers have claimed that the United States faces a decline in employment that is primarily structural. If this were the case, policies to support employment in particular industries, perhaps including energy, that match the existing distribution of worker skills could plausibly be supported as a useful method of targeted job-creation. However, structural unemployment is not the problem. Multiple academic analyses, as well as Federal Reserve projections and commentary from economists on opposite sides of the political spectrum, confirm the idea that cyclical factors are causing our persistently high unemployment. In the long run, therefore, the unemployment rate is expected to return to its much lower natural rate.

So what exactly does “cyclical” mean? It means that the labor market hasn’t recovered because the economy still hasn’t recovered from its freefall and GDP remains far below its trend, or “potential,” level. In simpler language, this means that people are buying fewer goods and services than we are capable of producing, leaving some people without work. This shortfall of aggregate demand, as economists call it, has many potential remedies including monetary policy, fiscal policy, improvements in the world economy that support American exports, or reductions in consumer debt that restore the ability to spend. While the lingering effects of financial crises can take years to overcome, we can confidently expect the economy to return to its long-run equilibrium of full employment when aggregate demand finally recovers.

It is in that long-term context of full employment that energy policies enacted today will play out and in that context that the focus on job creation makes so little sense. In a normal economy, the purpose of jobs is not simply to have make-work for people to do, but rather to create as much value for society as possible at the lowest feasible cost. Wealth creation, not job creation, is the goal. And while some argue somewhat convincingly that “targeted” jobs strategies can be important to ensure the jobs we do have are good jobs with high wages, a subtle point on this matter is often overlooked. If wages equal productivity, then the quality and quantity of employment in a sector actually work in opposite directions. For a given amount of value created in the energy sector, wages would be higher if fewer people were creating that value. That is what defines productivity. Unless energy consumption were to increase or the capital intensity of energy production were to change, a plan to “create energy jobs” can equivalently be considered a plan to lower productivity in the energy sector.

Two allegories help illustrate this point. In Frederic Bastiat’s famous 19^th century parable, producers of candles argued that free light from the sun ought to be restricted to avoid the threat that such unfair competition posed to their jobs. And if employment in the candle industry were a policy goal, they would be right. Similarly, consider whether it would really make sense to turn down an analogous hypothetical stream of endless free energy in the name of preserving employment in the energy sector. As another example, imagine we faced an environmental problem where toxic sludge constantly fell from the sky in large quantities, but many people were employed in the toxic sludge cleanup industry. Would it really make sense not to shut off the flow of toxic sludge because we wanted to avoid reducing employment in the toxic sludge cleanup industry?

These examples all share a key underlying assumption: that freeing up labor will allow workers to do other, more useful, things. This is the hallmark of economic growth: producing what we already use more efficiently and allowing people to innovate new goods and services to make the best use of the remaining supply of available labor. But in our seemingly endless economic rut, this mentality seems to have faded. Instead, our rhetoric has embraced the Luddite fear, contradicted by centuries of experience, that continued increases in productivity will suddenly leave us with no jobs left to do. We have lived in a high unemployment world for so long that we have forgotten the dynamism that characterizes the healthy churn of jobs in a functioning economy. And as international headwinds and political failures prolong our macroeconomic problems to keep these fears at the forefront of our minds, we continue to look in the wrong places, like energy policy, for solutions to the jobs deficit.

The best argument for job creation as energy policy is a political one. In the 2012 Presidential election, jobs are the defining issue and any advantage a candidate can gain by claiming that his policies will create more jobs is one worth exploiting. But informed voters should recognize these claims as political sales jobs that run contrary to the remarkable consensus among academic economists that sector-specific policies do not have major effects on aggregate levels of employment. There are legitimate and stark differences between Mitt Romney’s incessant focus on expanding the supply of fossil fuels and Barack Obama’s broader strategy that includes promoting efficiency and alternative energy sources. But when it comes to claims about energy policy creating jobs, five million green ones or three million brown ones might as well be ten million pink ones for all the sense these statements make as analysis of economic policy.

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It’s almost impossible not to be confused by the Affordable Care Act, even though it’s one of the most significant laws to be passed in the last fifty years.

If the content slicing and dicing weren’t enough, there were the disingenuous characterizations of the law from its opponents, and the flagrant mistakes that some of our leading news organizations made in reporting the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the law in June. A few misunderstandings that are particularly egregious keep arising in public discussions about the ACA.

Let’s clear them up, shall we?

Myth #1: The ACA is a Sign of Impending Socialism

It’s true that the ACA is the biggest social welfare legislation since Medicare. It’s also true that socialized medicine has existed here for decades, with little opposition and even much support.

The crux of the socialist argument seems to hover around the issue of government control over an industry that would supposedly better function under a free market framework and limited restrictions. But it should be obvious that this is the framework we’ve operated under for decades and that is has left millions without care. And true socialized medicine presumes that Americans are contributing to a government-administered healthcare delivery system. But that’s just not the case with the ACA.

Myth #2: The Government is Taxing You for Healthcare

Taxes have long been the poster child for government control. But the way this supposed “taxing” functions in the context of the ACA is tricky. Normally, taxes are levied against all citizens, gleaned from earnings or tacked onto spending — like the income and sales taxes you learned about in Econ 101.

While some justices used Congress’s taxing authority to render the law constitutional, the penalty fee — the “tax” in question — only applies to those who choose not to buy insurance, so outside of legal circles, calling it a tax seems a bit disingenuous to the true character of the penalty.

What’s more, whereas taxes are intended to pay for public goods that the government provides to everyone, the penalty under the individual mandate is intended to charge those individuals who don’t choose to buy insurance for the cost that society incurs as a result of their decisions — emergency room fees should they get hurt, for example.

Myth #3: It’s Going to Plunge Us Into More Debt and Cost Us Trillions

The claim that the entire bill will increase the deficit isn’t quite accurate. In fact, the Congressional Budget Office projects the ACA will save us money and cut the deficit by about a trillion dollars during its second decade of implementation.

In fact, as explained above, the ACA prevents average Americans from paying the healthcare costs of others: as is, those with insurance pay for the uninsured, who show up at emergency rooms requiring care. As a result, premiums go up, procedures grow more costly, and physicians charge more. The ACA helps end this cycle by requiring people to buy insurance — or else pay the penalty.

Myth #4: The Government is Eliminating My Choices

Opponents argue that under the ACA, the government will decide who lives and who dies and where Americans must buy insurance. In fact, choice is built into the ACA with health insurance exchanges. These allow people to choose the providers and plans they want, something that most people support and many states have begun to implement. By giving you the ability to select your physician, the ACA gives you the power, previously held by insurance companies, to decide which doctors you can see.

Additionally, with the expansion — and elimination, in some cases — of spending limits, you are no longer forced to choose which essential medical tests or procedures to pursue based on arbitrarily low spending limits imposed by insurers. Previously, these annual limits were in the tens of thousands. Now, the annual limit can be no less than $2 million, and lifetime limits are illegal for nearly all plans. This means you’re far less likely to run out of coverage if you develop a costly illness. It also means you don’t have to limit options if you and your physician choose additional forms of care or treatment that may improve your condition.

Myth #5: Obama is Raiding Medicare

In the last decade, payments from Medicare to private plans have increased dramatically — in fact, figures show that Medicare actually overpaid by 14-20 percent, and the costs of these over-payments fell on our seniors via increased premiums. Worse, there’s no evidence that these higher payouts to insurance companies improved care, probably because insurance companies — not seniors or providers — controlled allocation of that money.

The ACA has made Medicare more efficient by cutting some of that overpayment. This saves Medicare millions, but more importantly, it improves care for beneficiaries in ways that a raid would not: cuts will help close the prescription drug gap, reducing seniors’ costs. It also gives them preventive care free of any co-pays. Because of these changes, increases in payments to hospitals and providers are predicted to slow, hopefully slowing the growth of premiums and copayments along with them. Most importantly, saving Medicare money ensures its presence long into the future.

Article originally posted on the2x2project.org, an online publication sponsored by the Department of Epidemiology at Columbia University. 2×2 aims to inform the health conversation through timely and effective communication of emerging public health science. 

We read about the latest and greatest health study in the media every day, but with so many contradictory results, health news can be difficult to navigate. That’s why Columbia’s Department of Epidemiology has created the 2×2 Project, a new online venue dedicated to bringing you “Health Beyond the Headlines.”

2×2′s team of journalist-epidemiologists takes you behind the chatter to the heart and science of public health. Content includes an engaging mix of in-depth reviews of the studies and health policy issues that are making headlines, commentary on the most important health issues of the day from leading health experts and interesting data from the latest papers and reports. Most importantly: no specialized background in public health is required.

S&S has partnered with 2×2 to feature pieces at the nexus of sustainability and health — a partnership to which we look forward.

Check out the discussion at the2x2project.org. You can also find 2×2 on Twitter and Facebook.