Economic Responsibility and the Environment

Apparently, the govt's first ever anti-Green leaflet is being distributed today to that small percentage of hourseholds who decide who runs the country. According to the SMH, the pamphlet argues that

Just as the major political parties must be environmentally responsible in pursuing economic responsibility, so too the minor parties and the Greens must be economically responsible in pursuing their environmental policies.

So, the argument cuts both ways. Economic policy needs to be environmentally responsible as well. What could that mean? Well, for a start it would mean acting to make our environmental duties more affordable.

Environmental policy, like economic policy, should be about providing the best for our children and our childrens' children. Can Grandpa Howard really cry poor for eight years? - claiming that we can't afford Kyoto - especially when he's down at the pub at election time buying rounds for the marginal voters!

Surely, someone's got to tell him to save up for the kids' future. By investing in structural changes to the economy to make it more environmentally sustainable.

In July, I asked the "responsible" govt ministers to respond to a report by the Australia Institute on our current contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, and the suggestions they made of how to address the problem. Here's the text of my letter. So far, no response.

================

Sirs.

As the responsible federal ministers, could you please comment on the recent report by Hal Turton of the Australia Institute called "Greenhouse gas emissions in industrialised countries: Where does Australia stand?", and in particular let me know whether the government would consider the suggestions made within that report on strategies for reducing Australia's emissions?

The report makes two claims that I found surprising. The first is that Australia's per capita emission's are not merely high, but in fact the highest in the industrial world. Australia's contribution are usually presented as high, but exceeded by other countries such as the US, on the basis of data on per capita energy-related emissions. The report suggests that this data gives only a partial representation of that contribution and that it should be replaced with data drawn from national communications and greenhouse gas inventory submissions to the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention of Climate Change) secretariat. When calculated from this more comprehensive data, the conclusion drawn is quite different:

Australians have the highest emissions per person of all industrial countries. At 27.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (t CO2-e) per person, emissions by Australians are 27 per cent higher than those of US citizens (21.4 tonnes) and more than double the average for industrialised countries.

It also argues against the assumption that, even if Australia has a high per capita contribution, because our population is so small, our total contribution is negligible. Again, I quote from the report:

While Australia accounts for 3.4 per cent of total Annex I emissions, Australia’s total emissions exceed those of major European economies such as France and Italy (each with around three times Australia’s population), and are only 20 per cent lower than those of the UK. Thus if Australia’s contribution to the climate change problem is trivial then so are those of these countries.

Are you, the ministers, disturbed by these findings? Do you disagree with the content of the report, and if so, are there other studies can you point me to which offer a different opinion?

Finally, I ask you to respond to three suggestions that the report makes, and to clarify the government's position on each of these proposals.

First, the report suggests that a less GG intensive mix of fuels (more natural gas and less coal) explains the smaller emissions of larger EU states, and changing Australia's mix is one avenue for future policy.

Another avenue is in transport policy. The report challenges the assumption that the large distances between centres explains Australia's higher GG emissions due to the transportation of freight. In fact, the average distance for freight in Australia is slightly shorter than Europe, because such a large of proportion of freight is transported within rather than between regional centres. Instead of lamenting the tyranny of distance we confront in Australia, the report suggests that policy-makers, such as yourselves, should set about influencing the number of additional trips and the average weight of freight transported, factors which do actually distinguish Australian freight practices from their European counterparts.

The third suggestion that the report makes concerns the status of the Aluminium smelting industry. The government clearly recognizes the significant contribution that this industry makes to Australia's GG emissions. On DFAT's "Kyoto Conference - Environment Home Page" the following comment is made:

Trade specialisation has caused Australia's economy to become more energy- and greenhouse-gas-intensive. The importance of changing trade patterns and specialisation of countries is probably best illustrated by Australia's aluminium industry, which is among the most energy-intensive of industries. Australia's aluminium industry has been among the five fastest growing industries in Australia, whereas elsewhere in the OECD it has been one of the most rapidly declining industries.

Yet, the report points out that it is also a heavily subsidized industry, "to the tune of $210-250 million per year through contracts for cheap electricity". It therefore suggests that the reduction of these subsidies may be a cost-beneficial response to the issue. Has the government considered reinvesting these subsidies in making the industry more environmentally friendly, rather than simply fuelling a growth that the same DFAT page suggests will be supported by greater trade liberalisation. Does the government feel that it needs to doubly support this industry by liberalisation of foreign trade and the maintenance of domestic subsidies?

One final question: the government's policy on Kyoto has been centred on the idea that an equitable protocol is one that has the same economic impact on all participants. What else is the government doing to ensure that Australia is in a better economic position in the future to contribute to the reduction of emissions? How have the government's policies over the past eight years improved Australia's ability to afford climate control?

Your response would be greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,
Justin Tauber

Internet cafes: the new salon?

In the eighteenth century, the salons of Paris became famous as the hotbeds of political and social debate. There collections of usually wealthy Parisians gathered to discuss, argue, polemicise, interrogate and dispute over a whole range of issues that had previously been reserved for the royal court. The salon did a lot towards democratizing French politics.

It also initiated a more important, albeit informal and indirect, role for women in policy formation. There is a more recent example of a similar phenomenon. In the 1970's Phil Donahue, or rather his audience, revolutionised the American political scene, by broadcasting the opinions of everyday women in suburban USA. Talk-back radio is another example.

Despite the tremendous impact of (almost) universal education, women's suffrogacy, broadcast television and talk-back radio, in the early part of twenty-first century, the greatest political problem we face is political participation. It seems that all these advances have shown us is the size of the gap between the democracy we represent and the democracy we actually have. Policy is not set through participation in the broadcast media, but more often by the owners of those media. Traffic has become one-way, and when the flow is reversed, it tends to take the form of Orwell's one-minute hate.

If the key task before us is to reinvigorate our political environment, then we must recognize that democracy means more than freedom of expression, or access to the means of expression. It must also include the accessibility of means of collaboration.

People often complain about the dumbing-down of the electorate, and long to relinquish authority to an expert elite. Alternatively, they address the electorate as though it were an idyllic community of experts already.

Both approaches are flawed, but we can see a way past them if we recognize what they have in common. Neither view imagines that the electorate can teach itself anything. Both right and left seems to imagine a body politic that is less-than-human, because it is not capable of learning.

Educators have for some time realised that there is a serious distinction to be made between deep learning and surface learning. I would suggest that, where there is an education of the electorate, it takes the form of surface learning. It is entirely passive, there is no emphasis of helping each other understanding, or, for that matter, on employing the knowledge being distributed - through print, radio, television, the web - in any way.

I think that a deep approach to political education - one that emphasizes collaboration, active choice (say about which issues, about what form, about when to consider them etc) and producing something for others - could address both the issue of participation and of education at the same time. A political education directed toward social ownership of the issues - and not solely reactive responses to the issues - is what is required.

How do we do this? There may be too many possible projects to enumerate here, and please add a comment if you think of any, but for starters we could begin by recognizing this:

The web is not solely a space for opinion, or comment. It is also a collaborative space, a space for the collective production of considered responses, among people who need have nothing in common but a concern and a desire to participate (though not necessarily by leading or even speaking).

We have the technology to establish minature political spaces, random and momentary collectives, whose only purpose is to briefly further the debate, and to think through their desires, their differences of opinion, together, for each other and for others (who knows who?).

It's time for us to combine our best learning practices with our varieties of political expression. Society is our assignment. It's time to transform our politicians from arbitrary, power-driven, lecturing decision-makers, into the moderators and facilitators of an interrogating, imagining, collaborating and ultimately learning body politic.

Why bother with insect intelligence?

This most delicious comment comes from slashdot. For someone who's spent five year reading embodied, embedded cognitive scientists congratulate themselves on absolving their intellectualist tendencies and discover the concrete, this is pay day!

A taste:

Every year we generate many millions of the most perfect and adaptive biological being the world have ever seen... babies...humans. Yet most of them get nothing but shit and are doomed to live on a dollar a day for their entire lives.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=122121&cid=10272822

Reading spaces = thinking room?

I was just thumbing through Robert E. Horn's tome Visual Language (MacroVU Inc., 1998) and came across this little gem:

Leaving spaces between words: reinvented during Charlemagne's reform of writing, the leaving of spaces between words enabled many readers to switch from reading aloud (which was the common way to read during the Middle Ages) to reading silently. Franc, c. 800CE.

What I find fascinating about this fact is the kind of mental space that silent reading allows. Pragmatists, like Wilfred Sellars and impressed by Wittgenstein's argument against private languages, have emphasized the need to see thinking as development from speaking, i.e. as the internalisation of a communicative function. This is opposed to a more classical view of speaking as derivative from thinking - as the expression of a thought that precedes the locutive performance.

The pragmatist approach subordinates theories of mind to theories of social practice. Minds are the kinds of things we have by virtue of our participation in a sophisticated social community.

Pragmatists regard traditional theories of mind, which take an individual's cognitive relation to a value-neutral world as primary, to be beginning with the wrong question. They see the development of the notion of an objective, mind-independent natural world in terms of its particular social function.

So far so good. Pragmatism works well as a criticism of traditional epistemology. However, I'd prefer to avoid a pragmatism that sees everything in terms of social values, because I think people are capable of disputing and interrupting social values in many ways. I also think that much of that resistance to social norms - which ultimately gives those values their normative significance - centres on the anomalous subject's embodiment.

Now, a full blown critique of (the strictest forms of) pragmatism would need to show that the development of the very social practices to which pragmatists appeal cannot be understood except via an account of corporeal embeddedness.

And this is where we come back to the spacing of words. What is the relationship between the spacing of words and the internalization of communication as thought? Charlemagne was responding to the capture of literacy by the priestly class, and proposed no less than a revolution in communication through the different corporeal stance toward a text. Charlemagne's reforms traded on the Gestalt properties of vision to break the connection between text and speech. These Gestalt properties cannot be understood in terms of social practices.

In the case of Charlemagne's reforms, it is the Gestalt character of the perceived world that acts as the hinge around which the reform of social convention occurs. Social change involves exploiting aspects of a presupposed embodied relation to a pre-social world (pre-social in the sense that the social conventions that determine the meaning of the text do not determine the limits of this relation as well).

It is through our bodies that social conventions get a grip, and it is through exploiting the ambiguity of embodiment - it's ability to escape being comprehensive controlled through its actual performances, because it maintains around it an aura of possible performance - that we can modify and affect the character of our social world.

So, our embodied perception of gestalts allows for thinking room between reading and speaking. Merleau-Ponty says that vision is thought within a field. Here the field (room) for thought is the space between words.