Balancing the costs (real & opportunity) of mitigating climate change. Two Democratic reps sue over Open Meetings Law. And oats start as a liquid?!
Balancing costs on climate mitigation
We must remember, amid all our talk about climate change, that there are definite costs we will bear in trying to mitigate it.
We must remember too that we live in a finite world, with finite resources (one of which is our ability to attend to problems we face).
We should be remembering to balance these costs and constraints against what we might lose (or gain) by mitigation.
It is, further, entirely appropriate to do so.
One of the people who has greatly influenced my thinking on climate change is Bjorn Lomborg. I find his writings on the topic to be pretty reasonable and middle of the road (a goal I shoot for).
I read something recently by him and wanted to share, but what I was reading was not in a format that I could readily or easily share here. I sought out something which would have the same content and linked to it below.
I would recommend reading it. It's long, it's thorough, but it's worth the time. This is particularly the case if you want to find some counterpoint to the relentless drumbeat you hear from other quarters.
I want to take my limited time and space and focus in on a concept that I've harped about before: there is no choice without consequence. This applies to climate change just as much as it does to COVID.
In the case of climate change, I think this manifests in two ways. First, we have to pay to adapt to and to mitigate against climate change. Second, we have finite attention and resources in this world and every second, dollar, and unit of effort we spend on climate change is one that we DON'T spend on some other problem (this is what an economist would term an "opportunity cost").
Mr. Lomborg summarizes nicely in his report and I wanted to focus there.
Start with screenshot 1. Let me walk you through the graph. On the horizontal axis you have the temperature reduction due to our mitigation efforts. In other words, the 2.0 degree C point is saying that we would limit a global temperature increase to only 2.0 degrees C by the year 2100. The vertical axis shows you how much we would have to pay now to limit the temperature increase by that much. For example, follow the yellow vertically up from 3.0 C. It touches $50 trillion dollar mark. We would have needed to pay $50 trillion dollars in 2010 dollars to cap the temp increase from climate change in 2100 to only 3.0 C.
Okay so far? Now let's discuss the other features. That yellow line represents the cost we would have to pay to implement policy to mitigate climate change. Obviously it starts high and goes low because to limit temperature increases more and more will take more and more money. Said another way, doing nothing will cost nothing, but we'll get a high global temperature increase. The orange line represents costs we'll pay now and in the future from climate change (e.g. lost crop productivity, insurance claims, etc.). Just as obviously, this one goes up with temperature increase. If we don't do as much to cap temperature increase, we'll have more climate costs.
The black shading in the back of the graph is the total (you sum the yellow and orange lines). The salient feature here is to note the dip in the black shading. Translating from math to words, this dip is telling you that there is some point we can hit (and should be aiming for) where the costs for mitigating climate change AND the cost of the change itself are minimized.
Is that point actually 3.5 degrees C? I'm not so sure it's that exact number, but I can say it's a lot higher than what the rabid environmentalists and policymakers in this state are screaming about. The models they are using are the worst case scenario and do not at all take into account the cost of the policy they're wanting to implement.
Now, take a look at screenshots 2 and 3. I'm just as skeptical at the numbers here, but I present them for their qualitative features. Screenshot 2 gives us a cost vs year for various social ills and goes back to the turn of the century (for you young'uns, that's 1900). Screenshot 3 gives a picture of how much bang for our buck we could expect by investing in solving various societal problems. For example, we could get up to $15 benefit for every $1 we invest in helping people worldwide switch to more modern cooking fuels (in terms of climate, health, productivity, etc.).
What is the point here? One, look the relative height of the societal ills we've been working on since 1900. We've made great strides but the progress left to be made there dwarfs the cost we'll pay for climate change. Two, look at how much progress we could make at curbing climate change AND other societal problems if we invested more intelligently than dumping tons of dollars into renewables and explicit temperature mitigation efforts.
Since we have only so many dollars and only so much time (and attention, and effort, and etc.), shouldn't we be more judicious and thoughtful in how we spend what we do have? Are we being this kind of intelligent with our current efforts?
I submit we are not.
I was tempted to wrap up, but Mr. Lomborg does a better job than I could, so I want to point you to screenshots 4 and 5 to conclude. Give them a read.
Remember things like this. Share them with others. The conversation we've had on climate change has thus far been horribly unbalanced and we need reasonable people to speak up for thoughtful and intelligent strategies to adapt to it.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040162520304157?fbclid=IwAR2h87Ya6L5pvW1-dO2oU5olhRXXOKaFOtD04Quu_qaw2aP2Kly4mx_90Mo
Two Democrat lawmakers sue the Colorado House of Representatives over what they allege are open meetings laws violations.
I know I do not, in any fashion whatsoever, agree politically with Rep Epps (one of the lawmakers bringing the suit), I don't think I overlap much with the other (the more moderate Rep Marshall), but I do respect their willingness to speak up and buck their party leaders to bring a suit alleging that practices at the Colorado House have gotten to the point of violating Colorado's open records laws.**
Their allegations are pretty serious if you ask me. Quoting the CPR story below:
"A court complaint filed on Friday alleges that members of both parties routinely break the law by having substantial conversations about public policy without providing required notice to the public. It also targets the widespread use of 'ephemeral' messaging apps like Signal, which lawmakers can use to send self-deleting messages to their colleagues. The complaint describes several kinds of unofficial meetings. They include frequent planning sessions where Democrats allegedly mapped out how committee meetings would play out, with those meetings including enough members to constitute a quorum of the committee — which could allow them to decide the fate of bills before the committee hearing itself."
Not okay and I'm glad someone's calling it out.
Now, before anything else, I want to take a sec to note a couple things:
--the lawsuit makes similar allegations about Republicans (and I don't doubt they have their own violations), but my guess is that it's more speculative since they caucus separately.
--Rep Marshall also took pains to note (and thus I put it here out of fairness) that he believes this sort of thing is a system the current Republican and Democrat leadership inherited and didn't create.
I wish them luck with their suit and I hope it does what they seem to be saying they're after: driving change and opening up the conversation about transparency.
On a more political level, I'm glad to see some chinks in the armor of the Colorado Democrat machine. Not having everything in this state massaged and managed from on high is in the interest of everyone here, whether you're Democrat, Republican, or Independent.
**If you've read this page long enough, you've seen more than one post about the Democrat's secret, quadratic voting system to decide on funding of bills. Sadly, nothing in this suit addresses this. I guess there are limits to how much bucking is done, and how vigorous it is.
https://www.cpr.org/2023/07/10/two-house-democrats-sue-house-leaders-for-allegedly-breaking-open-meetings-law/
Oats start out as a starchy liquid if you can believe it!
This will be the last one for today, and, since I'll be away from my computer for a bit, it'll be the last one for a few days. I'll be back, but I'm taking some days to work on other things.
If I asked you how it was that a grain (let's use oats since it's what I'm growing and have pictures of, though this process is pretty generalizable if I understand correctly) developed, would you respond by saying that the grain starts small and gets bigger until it's ready to harvest? That would have been my answer prior to trying to grow oats.
I would've said it's going to go like a fruit does: maybe there's stuff going on inside, but it goes mini oat to regular size oat.
What I'm finding (and what I wanted to share) is that this is not really the process for grains like oats and wheat.
The weird part about grains is that they start out as a starchy liquid which solidifies over time!
There's some technical detail involved and if you want to get really into the weeds, I found a resource for you. It's linked below.
If you don't want technical detail, check out the pictures attached. The first one to look at is of the different seedheads on the plate. The ones on the left of the plate are more mature, the ones on the right less so.
Look at the greener, less developed seeds on the right. I pulled a grain out and opened it. Well, opened isn't the right word because frankly, it's entirely liquid inside that thing!
It was more squeezing it out than opening.
On the left, you'll see how they look when they progress a little further. The more mature seeds start to lose their green. Opening one up, you'll see it's wet inside but not liquid anymore.
By the way, the other two pictures are there to show you what the seedheads looked like on their respective plants before I plucked them.
At all stages (I've been checking and tasting because, weird as I am, I find eating them oddly compelling) the oats all taste like oats, which makes sense I suppose. It is weird to get something that tastes of oats and yet is not oatmeal, however. Perhaps I'd be less surprised if I drank oat milk.
According to my friend and former colleague (who used to teach soil science and crops at my school), the stages that the grains go through are called "milk" (the one on the right in the plate where it's liquid) to "soft dough" (on the left on the plate) to "hard dough" which I haven't seen much of ... yet.
Nature is sometimes weirder than fiction: grains go solid to liquid in their husks.
Anyways, I hope you have a good afternoon and I'll see you when I see you!
https://www.hutton.ac.uk/sites/default/files/files/publications/Oat-Growth-Guide.pdf