Practical Epicureanism: What you can do to combat global warming

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The following is excerpted from the December 8-14, 2018 edition of the New Scientist, written by Graham Lawton, staff feature writer:

Keeping global warming below 1.5°C will require behavioural changes – but that doesn’t mean you have to don a hair shirt. The cumulative effect of small, low-effort actions can be great, and the more each of us contributes, the less impossible it will be to meet the target. Here’s a selection of the most doable and effective interventions, as selected by scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Veg out
Switching to a plant-based diet can reduce the carbon footprint of your food by more than 90 per cent. If nothing else, avoid beef: its carbon footprint is three times that of pork and six times that of chicken. The second-worst offenders are tropical fruits imported by air, and cheese. It is estimated that a shift to a plant-based diet across the globe would cut carbon emissions by up to 70 per cent.

Drive off
Car journeys, especially short ones in cities, account for a disproportionate share of emissions. That doesn’t mean you have to stop driving entirely: a 2017 study in the Netherlands found that members of a car-sharing scheme drove 15 to 20 per cent fewer kilometres than before they joined, and so emitted between 13 and 18 per cent less CO2.

Leg power can replace many car journeys, too. In London in 2009, for example, journeys to places within walking distance (defined to be up to 2 kilometres) accounted for 11 per cent of the distance travelled in cars, while trips within cycling distance (up to 8 kilometres) accounted for 55 per cent.

Be warned, though: all of the small gains achieved by not driving can be wiped out by taking a single holiday flight. A return economy flight from London to Majorca in Spain – about 2 hours’ flying time – emits the equivalent of 490 kilograms of CO2, about the same as you would save in a year by going vegetarian or driving 2500 kilometres less.

Run a tight ship
According to a US study from 2009, just choosing an energy-efficient model when it comes to replacing a home appliance could reduce your carbon emissions by 1.9 per cent on average. Other simple changes such as lowering the temperature of your hot water and washing machine, using a lower-flow showerhead, not leaving appliances on standby and drying washing on an outdoor line rather than with a tumble dryer can cut a further 2.2 per cent – not huge, but everything counts.

Smart thermostats would make a bigger contribution. A modelling study in Germany in 2017 found that these can reduce a household’s emissions by up to 26 per cent, with a bonus reduction in energy bills.

And if you are rattling round a big house, consider downsizing. A smaller home can cut your emissions by 27 per cent, according to a UK study in 2016.

Be a desk warrior
Offices are a major source of unnecessary emissions. So turn off lights when everyone has left for the day, switch off your workstation when you go home and don’t leave phone chargers plugged in when they aren’t in use. A UK study from 2017 found that these simple actions can cut office emissions by up to 28 per cent.

Even better, don’t go into the office if you can get away with it. A US review from 2012 found that homeworkers travel up to 77 per cent fewer kilometres in a vehicle by avoiding a commute.

Brexit: my most instant, heartfelt posting ever

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Britain on Tuesday: May lost by over 400 votes! The rolling, roiling disaster gets worse by the day.

Lack of forethought, bullying, and downright ignorance rule the day! Epicurus would advise me to calm down, to be philosophical, to assume all will eventually settle down and rationality will be restored. It is possible that he could be correct, but I am also a patriot. I am writing this within minutes of the disastrous “No” vote that throws a crazy Brexit situation into even worse turmoil, uncertainty, and paralysis, led by people who want to finally unwind all the laws and rules that protect the old and the poor, their healthcare, their State pensions, their rights and protections. They want a winner-takes-all country dominated by the super-rich and by foreign money launderers – the “let-em-starve” mob.

I am a dual American and British citizen. I feel I am losing the country of my birth and the country of my adoption simultaneously. One could joke and call it careless. Like a refugee fleeing Middle Eastern man-made disasters I worry desperately about both of my countries, but particularly about the British futures of my five grandchildren who, whatever happens, will be growing up in a deeply divided country whose economic future is extremely questionable, to say the least. They are, in part, victims of the referendum, part financed by Vladimir Putin, and eagerly supported by dim-witted people who naively believed all the lies of the right wing Press.

Britain on Wednesday: Less emotionally, this is an extract from an article by the excellent writer, Anne Applebaum, in the Washington Post today:

“….Brexit has been a catastrophic failure. This messy, unpopular deal, the most unpopular policy that anyone can remember, was produced by a political class that turned out to be ignorant – about Europe, Europeans, trade arrangements, institutions – and arrogant, disdaining knowledge and expertise. It was the work of leaders who favored identity politics over economics, who preferred an undefined notion of “sovereignty” to the real institutions that gave Britain influence and power, and who believed in fantasies and scorned realities.”

“Time that could have been spent on other things – on debating defence, or poverty, or clean beaches – has been wasted on a policy that won’t make Britain happier, wealthier or stronger. Instead, this long debate has produced confusion and gridlock.”

Mobile phones

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The average Briton checks a mobile phone every 12 minutes and is online for 24 hours a week, according to Ofcom. A fifth of British adults feels stressed if they cannot access the internet, while only 12% of adults never use it. A quarter of adults spend more than 40 hours a week on the internet – a move driven by the uptake of smartphones, which many people are checking frequently from when they wake up in the morning until the moment they fall asleep at night. Time spent making phone calls from mobiles has fallen as people use messaging services instead. (The Guardian. 4 Aug 2018)

At the gym where I go the young people seem to spend almost as much time on their phones as they do exercising. Health first, politics second. You can’t do anything about
politics, but you can inflence your health.

How the Democrats are becoming more like Trump

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In America nowadays, we hear a lot about partisan polarisation. Republicans and Democrats couldn’t be more different, it is argued, with the former moving to the right, the latter to the left. This is certainly borne out on Twitter, where Trump’s dominance is matched only by self-described ‘socialist’ congresswoman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. However, in three crucial aspects, the Democrats are actually becoming more like Trump:

  1. An embrace of a realist, non-interventionist foreign policy. Between the Second World War and the election of Obama in 2008, there was a broad bipartisan consensus regarding America’s relationship with the world. The United States had a moral responsibility to be a superpower, intervening abroad to uphold democracy and maintain world peace. During the Cold War, the country saw itself as the protector of the free world against Communism. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, America would use its status as the world’s only superpower for humanitarian purposes. But with Obama elected in no small part due to his scepticism of the Iraq War, America began to retreat from the world. The desire to uphold liberal values internationally had come at the expense of the country’s security and economic health. Realist international relations theory rose to prominence, advocating a security policy based on interests and power politics, not values. Trump may be openly isolationist in a way Obama wasn’t, but both men have contributed to this long-term trend. This is why Democrats’ critique of Trump’s Syria policy seems so hollow; no one believes the Democrats have the political will to invade Syria and defeat Assad.
  2. A scepticism of free trade. A significant part of Trump’s appeal in the Rust Belt was his criticisms of NAFTA and American trade policy more generally. Trump argued free trade deals allow companies to ship American jobs overseas, then import their goods back to the country at a very low cost. Free trade benefits the Democrat-voting coastal cities, by lowering the cost of imported goods. But it comes at the expense of good manufacturing jobs in the American heartland, as well as a healthy trade balance. Democrats are confused as to how to respond to Trump’s trade policy, partly because they need the white non-college educated voters who instinctively approve of protectionism. Centrist Democrats are quick to defend NAFTA and the TPP, arguing raising the cost of living for consumers isn’t progressive. Progressives have taken a different stance, framing free trade deals as part of a war on Middle America by greedy, unaccountable corporations. With the progressive wing of the Democrats ascendant, the party’s descent into protectionism looks set to continue.
  3. A wholesale embrace of populism. Despite being a billionaire New Yorker, Trump contrasts himself with the elites. He attacks the media, judges, the intelligence agencies and the universities for all being a part of the ‘Deep State’- a conspiratorial notion of a liberal establishment trying to thwart the will of the people. Hypocritical as it may be in most cases, the appropriation of populist rhetoric is necessary in an age of disillusionment and dissatisfaction. Trump is to a large extent, simply a product of his time. The Democrats are also increasingly populist, railing against the elites just like Trump. But Democrats define the establishment differently. While Trump defines the establishment exclusively by their liberal values, Democrats define the establishment by their economic interests. The wealthy few may have benefited from the free-market policies enacted by Washington since the 1980s, but ordinary Americans have suffered. Democrats have gone from critiquing exploitative business practices to condemning business itself, particularly big business, as being inherently exploitative. Democrats also have a values dimension to their populism: they are enraged by an establishment based on ‘privilege’, where some people have treated far better than others based on uncontrollable characteristics- race, gender, sexuality etc.

None of this is to deny the polarised nature of American politics. In most respects, the country’s two parties are more different than ever. But it is important to note the underlying trends that have affected both parties. Both Democrats and Republicans will be profoundly reformed by realism, protectionism and populism for the foreseeable future.

Artificial intelligence – in the right hands?

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The Guardian Weekly of 4 January 2019 carried an article by Vivienne Ming about Artificial Intelligence. In theory, she says, poverty, mental health, climate change, inequality – almost everything – could be addressed by AI. The problem, she says, is not the concept of AI, but the people behind it. She points out that AI is being developed by young men (mostly) “who have never solved a problem in their lives. They have never done anything from scratch to make someone’s life better”. And here we are trusting to these youngsters (some of whom are technically brilliant, but possibly on the autistic spectrum, (although she doesn’t mention this, nor do I have any data to prove it) to usher us into the Age of Artificial Intelligence.

Take the issue of gender bias. Some techies seem to think that they can throw an algorithm at a subject like this and it will come up with an answer. But if the people who constitute a company don’t know how to avoid bias in real life, AI will not solve the problem. If you throw a neural network at a pile of data, it will find patterns that predicts a person’s grades, job prospects, or the odds that they will re-offend. But human beings are infinitely complicated. What we desperately need is deeper understand about life – the real causes of good grades, re-offending, or why a person seems to have good job prospects.

The answer is to recruit advisors who are old, experienced and who have a measure of wisdom. It’s the old story – if you feed in trash out will come – trash.