Earth Day 2023

Posted on April 25, 2023 by climatechangefork

Earth Day celebration logo

 (Source: Houston Arboretum)

This is obviously not my first blog titled Earth Day. Just put the title in the search box and start investigating. The day is unique for me on two levels: it celebrates our physical environment and commitments to preserve it for future generations and it falls on my wife’s birthday. She often indicates that saving the world might count as a proper birthday present.

This blog will be fully dedicated to Earth Day. This year, April 22 fell on Saturday. Since Earth Day celebrates the ever-changing physical environment and our reaction to it, it is not surprising that I feel a need to revisit it on an almost yearly basis; I feel I can justify this with fresh observations. In addition, since the focus is on the physical environment and its interactions with humans on a global scale, a productive celebration requires a foundation in the physical sciences displayed in a way designed to be understood by everyone.

I will start with a short Wikipedia history and the global scope that this day is now (fittingly) acquiring:

Earth Day is an annual event on April 22 to demonstrate support for environmental protection. First held on April 22, 1970, it now includes a wide range of events coordinated globally by EARTHDAY.ORG (formerly Earth Day Network)[1] including 1 billion people in more than 193 countries.[2][1][3] The official theme for 2023 is Invest In Our Planet.[4][5]

The first Earth Day was focused on the United States. In 1990, Denis Hayes, the original national coordinator in 1970, took it international and organized events in 141 nations.[11][12][13] On Earth Day 2016, the landmark Paris Agreement was signed by the United States, the United Kingdom, China, and 120 other countries. This signing satisfied a key requirement for the entry into force of the historic draft climate protection treaty adopted by consensus of the 195 nations present at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris. Numerous communities engaged in Earth Day Week actions, an entire week of activities focused on the environmental issues that the world faces.[14] On Earth Day 2020, over 100 million people around the world observed the 50th anniversary in what is being referred to as the largest online mass mobilization in history.[3]

Anthropogenic (human-made) climate change is the biggest threat that we are experiencing in the physical environment. Most of us recognize the threat, and we are trying to do something about it. The largest component of the anthropogenic threat is still the use of fossil fuels (mainly coal, natural gas, and gasoline) as our main energy sources. These involve oxidation of the fossil fuels, a process that liberates and emits carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Thus, the main mitigation step requires an energy transition to sustainable sources that do not liberate the stored energy (stored in the chemical bond of the fossil fuels), and therefore don’t emit greenhouse gases. The most straightforward approach to achieving this objective is to transform most of our energy use to electricity and produce electricity with sustainable energy sources. But, as I’ve mentioned repeatedly in earlier blogs, electricity is a secondary energy source that must be generated through the use of primary sources. Until very recently, these primary sources were exclusively from fossil fuels. However, the global energy transition in electricity production is now starting to become visible, as can be seen in Figure 2 and the following two paragraphs from an article in Scientific American:

Figure 2 – Global generation of electricity by source
(Amanda Montañez via Scientific American)

Last year renewables produced more electricity than coal-powered plants for the first time in the U.S. Wind and solar now produce about 14 percent of the country’s electricity, up from virtually nothing just 25 years ago. The U.S. Energy Information Administration expects that more than half of electric generation capacity added to the nation’s grid in 2023 will be from solar energy.

The main reason renewable energy has grown so much in recent years is a dramatic decline in the expense of generating solar and wind power. The cost of solar photovoltaic cells has dropped a stunning 90 percent over the past decade, partly because of ramped-up manufacturing—particularly in China—Bahar says. Government subsidies in countries such as the U.S. also helped renewables grow in the early years, as did policies making commitments to renewable adoption, says Inês Azevedo, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Precourt Institute for Energy. For example, many U.S. states set standards for how much of their electricity needs should be met with renewable energy by a particular year.

In New York City, where I live and teach, Mayor Adams just delivered an Earth Day present by resurrecting and retargeting ex-mayor Bloomberg’s (2002-2013)  PlaNYC program:

Mayor Adams Releases Ambitious Plan to ‘Get Sustainability Done’ — Full Funding to Come

The wide-ranging agenda, known as PlaNYC, includes proposals for electric car chargers, free solar arrays, and help for New Yorkers living in flood zones.

Adams’ first PlaNYC follows his efforts to expand food waste recycling citywide and cut emissions associated with food purchases by expanding plant-based offerings. In alignment with the state climate law, Adams’ agenda aims to run the city on electricity that doesn’t emit planet-warming gases — instead relying on sources like solar, wind and hydropower — by 2040, and to slash emissions from transportation, buildings and waste a decade after that.

But the administration says it is focused on improving quality of life issues sooner than that.

I am convinced and hopeful (but haven’t checked), that other local governments, around the world, are also in the process of giving presents to their citizens by mandating tools to preserve their environment and facilitate adaptation to future environmental changes.

In the US we also received a new national present from the federal government that has a good chance of significantly expediting the process:

The United States is on the brink of its most consequential transformation since the New Deal. Read more about what it takes to decarbonize the economy, and what stands in the way, here.

For the first time in history, the full financial weight of the United States federal government is aligned behind an epic transition to clean energy. A trio of energy, infrastructure, and science laws passed by the last Congress will deploy more than half a trillion dollars of public funding over the next decade to wean us off fossil fuels and make greener alternatives cheap and ubiquitous.

Uncle Sam will pick up a huge chunk of the tab for energy sources like wind and solar, and cleaner consumer choices like electric vehicles and heat pumps. Thanks to these new laws, which will also unlock hundreds of billions in private investment in clean energy, it’ll simply be the smarter financial decision to choose clean over dirty in the countless decisions made by millions of households and businesses. With the thumb firmly on the clean side of the scale, the fight against climate change in America has fundamentally changed.

And yet the work is just getting started.

In next week’s blog (and probably a few of those following) I will explore some of the complexities that we encounter by trying to celebrate Earth Day on a local level.

Posted in Electricity, Energy | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Teaching Students to be Involved in the Energy Transition

Posted on April 18, 2023 by climatechangefork

Spring Break at Brooklyn College

I am starting this blog at the tail-end of spring break at my university (CUNY). It will be posted as classes recommence for a month, followed by final exams and the summer break. This is a great time to start thinking about next semester’s classes. Over the fall of 2023, I will be teaching two courses focused on climate change and one on cosmology.

One of the two courses on climate change is part of our general education program and the other is more advanced, catering to our Honors College. The honors class is focused on our local mitigation and adaptation activities. My teaching in this course is part of a broader program focused on “Campus as a Lab” that I described in an earlier series of blogs (the last one in this series was from October 4, 2022). I am trying to approach the concept on various levels, spreading it around the campus at every opportunity. The details are summarized in the earlier blog.

Two weeks ago I got an invitation to attend a Zoom meeting that was co-organized by my university’s sustainability office and Con Ed, the dominant power company in New York City. The meeting was a workshop for solar and energy storage installers, part of a regular series of meetings that CUNY’s sustainability office organizes. The last one was pre-pandemic and was described in an earlier blog (July 2, 2019). I am attaching below the agenda for this meeting:

2023 NYC Solar+Storage Installer Workshop AGENDA

9:00 am Welcome and Workshop Overview

Tria Case, Exec Dir of Sustainability & Energy Conservation, CUNY
Sustainable CUNY’s Smart DG Hub: Accessing TA & Permitting Resources

Daniella Leifer, DG Ombudsman Emily Sweeney, Solar Ombudsman

9:15 am Con Ed Incentives, Interconnection Requirements, and Processes Opening Remarks

Shaun Smith, Director, Distribution Planning

Demand Response Program Gerianna Cohen, EE Program Manager EV Initiatives

Kevon Brown, Sr. Specialist, E-Mobility & Demonstrations FERC 2222 – NYISO Aggregator Participation Model Wassim Saloum, Project Specialist, Distribution Planning Kishan Patel, Project Specialist, Distribution Planning Utility Energy Storage

Masum Ahmed, Associate Engineer, Dist. Planning Technical Update from Dist. Engineering Constantine Spanos, Sr. Engineer Interconnection & Policy Updates

Christine Gorman, Sr. Specialist Julio Tardaguia, Project Specialist DG Ombudsman Team

10:30 am Sustainable CUNY’s Collaboration with FDNY

Daniella Leifer, DG Ombudsman Emily Sweeney, Solar Ombudsman

10:45 am Updates to FDNY Application Processes for Solar and Storage

John Ingenito, Supervisor – Rooftop Access Unit, FDNY Yash Patel, Engineering Consultant, FDNY

1:15 pm NYCHA’s ACCESSolar Program

Ron Reisman, NYC Solar Partnership Program Manager, Sustainable CUNY Christopher White, Program Manager – Sustainability, NYCHA

1:40 pm Updates to DOB Construction and Electrical Permits and Material Acceptance Application Processes

Yarnell Williams, Assistant Chief Plan Examiner, NYC Dept. of Buildings Abderrahim Charguini, Assistant Plan Examiner, NYC Dept. of Buildings Alan Price, Director, Office of Technical Certification & Research

3:10 pm Panel Discussion – NYC Solar and Storage Industry Outlook

Noah Ginsburg, Executive Director, NYSEIA Denise Sheehan, Senior Policy Advisor, NY-BEST Facilitated by Emily Sweeney and Daniella Leifer

3:30 pm Wrap-up and Next Steps

Ron Reisman, NYC Solar Partnership Program Manager, Sustainable CUNY

I am not a solar or energy storage installer and I am not trying to teach my students to become them. Two recent guest blogs that described the experience of solar installation (the last on March 21, 2023), are my only connections to the topic. The agenda of the meeting is so full of abbreviations that I had to use Google to decipher them. I will save you the effort and try to summarize them:

Sustainable CUNY’s Smart DG Hub: Accessing TA & Permitting Resources:

This collaborative effort was expanded to include energy storage systems (ESS) in 2013 and was formalized as the Smart DG Hub. Today, the Smart DG Hub’s dedicated and knowledgeable Ombudsmen provide support to the solar and storage industries as well as NYC agency staff who are tasked with creating new solar and energy storage regulatory structures (https://www1.cuny.edu/sites/sustainable/solar/nysolar-smart/)

FERC 2222 – NYISO Aggregator: NYISO is NY Independent System Operators; FERC is Federal Energy Regulation Commission.

FDNY – NYC Fire Department

NYCHA – NYC Housing Authority

DOB – NYC Department of Buildings

What intrigued me was the complexity that installers have to go through in order to make their input to our energy transition. While listening to the presentations I decided on a reasonable objective, that I can try to accomplish next semester with my students and with anybody else willing to listen: to try to guide them through the terrain of what else is being done to accomplish the same objective, including mapping the hierarchy of the organizations working on the problem.

I even came up with a new disciplinary name for the effort: Sociology of the Global Energy Transition. This is a reasonable title for a joint major of the Sociology Department and an interested STEM Department similar to the new collaborative majors that I described in an earlier blog (February 21, 2023).

According to Britannica, Sociology is defined as:

a social science that studies human societies, their interactions, and the processes that preserve and change them. It does this by examining the dynamics of constituent parts of societies such as institutions, communities, populations, and gender, racial, or age groups. Sociology also studies social status or stratification, social movements, and social change, as well as societal disorder in the form of crime, deviance, and revolution.

Achieving the global objective of zero-carbon energy sourcing within a reasonable time will require efforts by all constituents of human societies to address needed changes in the physical environment. The line of thinking for students (and others) starts with “What can I do?” It often continues with “What is everybody else doing?” and “What will happen if I do nothing?” I will focus below on a derivative of these relevant questions:

“What can students on my campus do to speed up the energy transition?” To answer this question the students will have to recognize the roles that everybody else related to their campus is playing.

For students of my campus the sociology of the process will follow this narrowing focus:

Global > Federal > State > Local (City) > University > College. When a student on my campus is asked what this campus can do to approach the zero-carbon objective he/she will probably answer the obvious – change all energy sources from fossil to sustainable sources. Unfortunately, on my campus, that cannot be done. CUNY is a multi-campus consortia institution whose real-estate and energy delivery —as I’ve described earlier (September 20, 2022)—are controlled by the central government. So, such changes would have to be top-down. Students, however, will have to look at bottom-up solutions. In collaboration with everybody else on campus, they can make important contributions through more efficient use of energy. There are also ways for the university and the campuses to encourage energy savings. I will explore some of the possibilities in future blogs.

Posted in Climate Change | 1 Comment

Inserting Climate Change into our Collective Thinking

Posted on April 11, 2023 by climatechangefork

(Source: SafeKids Worldwide)

Last week’s blog focused on collective crimes, collective blame, and collective wisdom. A timely question relevant to my teaching and to this blog is how we “fertilize” collective wisdom to prevent or mitigate global disasters such as climate change. This issue is directly connected to another topic that I dealt with extensively in a series of blogs called “Educating in the Anthropocene.” The last blog that summarized previous entries on this topic was posted on February 21, 2023. The focus of that blog was on reorganizing the educational programs in universities to expand various forms of interdisciplinary programs.

As we saw in last week’s blog, “fertilizing” global collective wisdom on climate change requires much more than changing the structures of higher education institutions. It requires attempts to educate everybody. For many reasons, including from a personal perspective, April is a good month to think about such issues. I am approaching the end of the semester and am currently in the middle of Spring Break, which means holidays, visitors from around the world, and beautiful cherry blossoms all around. All of this is a great environment to start thinking about the future. This is also the time when I am often invited to give talks focused on climate change to audiences with little technical background on the issue. I find the picture that opens this blog to be the most effective in introducing the topic. In an earlier blog, (April 17, 2018) I described in detail the potential threats of heat exposure to small children or animals in a locked car. On many levels, this situation, in which the child or animal lacks the ability to open doors or windows to equilibrate the inside temperature of the car with that outside can be likened to the global impact of climate change. It also links to the role that our energy use has played in facilitating global heating and its consequences.

If we want to “fertilize” collective reasoning on the topic that will lead to preventive action in the form of mitigation and adaptation, we have to focus on the young, if for no other reason than because they are going to suffer most from the impact—directly and indirectly through their growing families. To impact collective reasoning on such a topic in audiences without some technical prerequisites is not easy but we are now in the process of learning how to do it. This blog will summarize some initial efforts in this direction in various settings.

Higher Ed Institutions:

Here’s one example of using private donations to start enriching academic institutions with relevant facilities:

John Doerr, one of the most successful venture capitalists in the history of Silicon Valley, is giving $1.1 billion to Stanford University to fund a school focused on climate change and sustainability. The gift, which Mr. Doerr is making with his wife Ann, is the largest ever to a university for the establishment of a new school, and is the second largest gift to an academic institution, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. Only Michael R. Bloomberg’s 2018 donation of $1.8 billion to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, ranks higher. The gift establishes the Doerrs as leading funders of climate change research and scholarship, and will place Stanford at the center of public and private efforts to wean the world off fossil fuels. “Climate and sustainability is going to be the new computer science,” Mr. Doerr, who made his estimated $11.3 billion fortune investing in technology companies such as Slack, Google and Amazon, said in an interview. “This is what the young people want to work on with their lives, for all the right reasons.”

Doerr clearly believes that the new Stanford Center on Climate Solutions will prompt something like the intellectual explosion of studying computer science. The difference is that although computer science is involved in almost everything, it serves a similar purpose as a language. Indeed, while in the beginning, there was a balance between software and hardware majors in computer science studies, students’ interest shifted the focus much more on the software part. Areas directly concerned with climate change are now leaning more toward the study of “everything,” meaning they resemble the ancient study of philosophy.

Status in K12 schools:

There are certain barriers to including climate change in school curricula, although they differ by age group. Within middle schools:

Climate change is set to transform where students can live and what jobs they’ll do as adults. And yet, despite being one of the most important issues for young people, it appears only minimally in many state middle school science standards nationwide. Florida does not include the topic and Texas dedicates three bullet points to climate change in its 27 pages of standards. More than 40 states have adopted standards that include just one explicit reference to climate change.

Barriers to inclusion in early grades mostly come down to implementation:

“Nobody really knows yet at what age kids can understand climate change,” said Gary Evans, an environmental and developmental psychologist at Cornell University who is conducting a study of children in kindergarten through third grade to find out what they know about climate change and how it makes them feel. “Anyone who tells you that they know the best way to talk to young kids about climate change is doing so without the guidance of data.”

That said, it’s not all bad: some places are starting to include climate change in curricula:

New Jersey public school students will be the first in the country required to learn about climate change while in the classroom starting this school year. “Climate change is becoming a real reality,” New Jersey first lady Tammy Murphy, who spearheaded the initiative, told “ABC News Live” on Thursday. The new standards were adopted by the state’s board of education in 2020, but because of the pandemic, the roll out was halted, giving educators and districts more time to prepare the lesson plans for all students in grades K-12. “The districts themselves are able to design whatever it is that the way they want to implement and interpret this new education standard,” said Murphy. Lessons will focus on how climate change has accelerated in recent decades and how it’s impacted public health, human society, and contributed to natural disasters.

General communications to audiences with no prerequisites:

There are plenty of examples of anthropogenic (man-made) impacts that are readily available for use in schools—and outside of schools—on many levels:

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) water cycle diagram is still used by hundreds of thousands of students in the United States and worldwide. It’s also the basis for many, many spin-off diagrams. Today, the agency released a new diagram for the first time in more than 20 years, this time with humans as showrunners. Although people have long siphoned water from groundwater and diverted rivers into farm fields and industrial plants, the new diagram is the first time humans have been included in what was presented until now as a “natural” cycle. The change reflects the latest 20 years of research uncovering humanity’s central role in the cycle and how to communicate it visually. “We need to change how we think about these things to be able to live and use water sustainably for our future,” said Cee Nell, a data visualization specialist at the USGS VizLab, which designed the diagram. In addition to natural processes like ocean evaporation, precipitation over land, and runoff, the new diagram features grazing, urban runoff, domestic and industrial water use, and other human activities. Each label in the chart comes from data tracking the significant paths and pools of water worldwide.

Surmounting political opposition

Based on my own experiences of teaching the topic at Brooklyn College, we almost always include “denier” perspectives as part of the conversation. This is not just so that we comply with state mandates but also part of good teaching, which involves looking at all angles of an argument:

Ohio college and university instructors could be barred from teaching climate science without also including false or misleading counterpoints under a sprawling higher education bill that received its first hearing Wednesday. Senate Bill 83, or the Higher Education Enhancement Act, seeks to police classroom speech on a wide range of topics, including climate change, abortion, immigration, and diversity, equity and inclusion — all of which would be labeled “controversial.” On these and other subjects, public colleges and universities would need to guarantee that faculty and staff will “encourage and allow students to reach their own conclusions” and “not seek to inculcate any social, political, or religious point of view.” Colleges and universities that receive any state funding would be barred from requiring diversity, equity and inclusion training and have to make a commitment to “intellectual diversity” that includes “divergent and opposing perspectives on an extensive range of public policy issues.” The bill also includes provisions for annual reviews and reports, requirements for “intellectual diversity” in recruiting invited speakers, disciplinary sanctions for interfering with that diversity, a prohibition against faculty strikes, and more.

In many aspects, the slow introduction of complex topics such as climate change into the collective background of the general public, through its inclusion in curriculum, follows (from my own perspective) the slow introduction of the Holocaust into school curricula. As part of the last generation of survivors, I often participate in such efforts and often connect this effort with the probable future impact of climate change. As I mentioned in my earliest blogs (April 2012), this inclusion has been met with mixed reactions.

Posted in Climate Change | 1 Comment

Collective Guilt, Collective Blame, and Collective Wisdom

Posted on April 4, 2023 by climatechangefork

(Source: Spreaker)

A few days ago I was notified by our Judaic Studies Department about a new film that came out about the history of  German reparations to the Jewish people for the atrocities now known as the Holocaust. I saw the film, followed by a panel discussion with panelists who all looked to be born well after the signing of the Reparations Agreement on September 1952.

I have discussed my history with the Holocaust throughout the 11 years that I have been writing this blog, starting with the first posting (April 22, 2012). When the Reparations Agreement was signed, I was 13 years old, growing up in Israel. The signing followed major debates in Germany and Israel, and among Jews that lived outside Israel. The main issue in Israel was “money for blood,” an argument that boiled down to how anybody could set a price for the government-initiated genocide of six million people. The German government’s intent was to eradicate Jews (among other groups) from the face of the Earth; the toll only stopped at six million European Jews because the Germans lost the war. The main issue that the Jewish negotiators insisted on was that the reparations agreement not be confined to material reparations but rather expand to a public admission of collective German responsibility and sincere regret for the committed crimes, including an official apology to the victims. The main opposition argument in Germany was that the reparations and the moral admission constituted “collective punishment,” both material and moral. Collective punishment for crimes is still an open issue that continues to be discussed:

Collective punishment is a punishment or sanction imposed on a group for acts allegedly perpetrated by a member of that group, which could be an ethnic or political group, or just the family, friends and neighbors of the perpetrator. Because individuals who are not responsible for the wrong acts are targeted, collective punishment is not compatible with the basic principle of individual responsibility. The punished group may often have no direct association with the perpetrator other than living in the same area and can not be assumed to exercise control over the perpetrator’s actions. Collective punishment is prohibited by treaty in both international and non-international armed conflicts, more specifically Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocol II.[1][2]

When collective punishment has been imposed it has resulted in atrocities. Historically, occupying powers have used collective punishment against resistance movements. In some cases entire towns and villages believed to have harboured or aided such resistance movements have been destroyed. Occupying powers have claimed that collective punishment can be justified by necessity as a deterrent. Another view is that it is a retaliatory act prohibited under the laws of war.

Shortly after the agreement was signed, I grew up and entered high school. My high school got involved in the discussion, including in the form of a mock trial. I volunteered to be the defense coordinator for the trial, advocating for acceptance of the agreement. Our main argument was that we should look at the agreement not as money for blood but as a necessary step to build a strong Jewish state to make sure that the history of the Holocaust would not be repeated. I had to synchronize my position with a personal attitude. My mother and I were entitled to the reparations. My mother accepted but I rejected them. The reason for my mother’s acceptance was simple: she badly needed the money. The reason for my rejection, in addition to the fact that I really didn’t need the money, was a bit more complicated. Acceptance required that I produce a medical certification that I was “harmed” by the experience. Almost every physician in Israel would have issued me such a certificate, once he heard my family’s history, but my main effort in life at that time was to show that in spite of the experience I was growing up as a normal kid, meaning that any failure on my part was of my doing and not because of my earlier experiences. When my mother passed away some 20 years later, I inherited all her savings, so my “honorary” refusal became inconsequential.

As was mentioned earlier in the Wikipedia entry, most legal codes are anchored on individual responsibility. However, collective guilt and punishments are often invoked as “deterrents” or “accelerators.”  These border lines remain fuzzy. A relevant case that again is connected to the Holocaust and the fate of my family is the role of Polish citizens in the murder of 3 million Polish Jews during the Nazi occupation of their country. Below is an example of recent writing on the issue:

The framework of categories introduced by Raul Hilberg—perpetrators, victims, and bystanders—once conventionally employed in understanding the destruction of European Jewry has started to fall out of fashion among historians of the Holocaust. In the case of East Central Europe, particularly Poland, the people situated at the edges of the volcanic eruption of genocide have invariably begun their slide from “bystanders” to “perpetrators” in the recent turn in scholarship since the publication of Jan T. Gross’ Neighbors. Apart from the national debate unleashed in Poland in 2001, the major contribution of the book to the historiography was to banish a view of ethnic Poles solely as victims of Nazi Germany and to substantiate a long-standing claim found in Jewish survivor testimonies that Poles sometimes acted as perpetrators of Judeocide. The Jedwabne pogrom of July 11, 1941, has become the cornerstone of discussions about collaboration and perpetrators at the grassroots level in East Central Europe.

Throughout this blog and in other writings, I have invoked potential collective guilt in labeling the existential end-of-the-century threat of accelerating climate change “self-inflicted genocide” (see again the first blog in April 2012 and the two blogs that follow).

In a working legal system (to differentiate from a system that works to serve power), to convict an individual, you need to provide convincing evidence of the individual’s guilt. Can you do the same with collective guilt? One way is to prove that the collective education system and public communication are biased to encourage the crimes that are committed. In many cases, this involves cherry-picking of instances. Recently, a controversial technology has developed in which one can “chat” with a “collective” in the form of cumulative internet learning machines. These sites, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Bing Chat, and Bard by Google, provide detailed, well-written, answers that represent collective internet “wisdom.” I tried this technology, asking it to answer a general question in one of my recent blogs (December 14, 2022). Below I quote from an NYT Op-ed in which three “deep thinkers” write about this technology:

In 2022, over 700 top academics and researchers behind the leading artificial intelligence companies were asked in a survey about future A.I. risk. Half of those surveyed stated that there was a 10 percent or greater chance of human extinction (or similarly permanent and severe disempowerment) from future A.I. systems. Technology companies building today’s large language models are caught in a race to put all of humanity on that plane.

Drug companies cannot sell people new medicines without first subjecting their products to rigorous safety checks. Biotech labs cannot release new viruses into the public sphere in order to impress shareholders with their wizardry. Likewise, A.I. systems with the power of GPT-4 and beyond should not be entangled with the lives of billions of people at a pace faster than cultures can safely absorb them. A race to dominate the market should not set the speed of deploying humanity’s most consequential technology. We should move at whatever speed enables us to get this right.

More recently, an interesting exchange was presented in the NYT between the author/journalist Kevin Roose and Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google. I cite below the relevant two paragraphs from this interview. The first question shown here relates to the issue of approaching AGI (AI that surpasses human intelligence). “Human intelligence” is not defined. Presently, we have 8 billion humans on this planet. Which of them is being used as a comparison? There is no escaping from the conclusion that the intelligence that we are referring to is our collective intelligence, in which case, AI is only the tool for extracting it. The interview blames this tool for imperfections and dangerous consequences. This blame should more appropriately be directed at our “collective wisdom.” The second paragraph puts the AI feedback to the collective concern with climate change:

On whether he’s worried about the danger of creating artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., an A.I. that surpasses human intelligence:

When is it A.G.I.? What is it? How do you define it? When do we get here? All those are good questions. But to me, it almost doesn’t matter because it is so clear to me that these systems are going to be very, very capable. And so it almost doesn’t matter whether you reached A.G.I. or not; you’re going to have systems which are capable of delivering benefits at a scale we’ve never seen before, and potentially causing real harm. Can we have an A.I system which can cause disinformation at scale? Yes. Is it A.G.I.? It really doesn’t matter.

On why climate change activism makes him hopeful about A.I.:

One of the things that gives me hope about A.I., like climate change, is it affects everyone. Over time, we live on one planet, and so these are both issues that have similar characteristics in the sense that you can’t unilaterally get safety in A.I. By definition, it affects everyone. So that tells me the collective will will come over time to tackle all of this responsibly.

Recently ChatGPT was banned in Italy over privacy concerns.

I am trying the AI systems now as extra credit for my students in my Cosmology course who are trying to probe the “wisdom” of the collective to answer deep personal, cosmological questions and their concluding opinions about the quality of such probes.

Stay tuned.

Posted in Climate Change | 1 Comment

Politicizing ESG Means Politicizing Our Future

Posted on March 28, 2023 by climatechangefork

I have raised the issue of ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) investments in earlier blogs. A blog from this summer (August 16, 2022) delves into the details of the acronym, shown again in Figure 1. That blog also describes how the concept has started to penetrate global markets.

Figure 1 – Details of ESG

As with many other parts of our life, the concept is now being seriously polarized—to the degree that now both houses of Congress have passed a law forbidding pension funds from considering ESG as a factor for investment:

Often known as E.S.G. investing, this approach takes its name from the environmental, social and governance factors that are used by millions of people in countless investment, business, lifestyle and government policy decisions every day.

In the financial world, trillions of dollars have been placed in investments that take E.S.G. issues into account. “E.S.G. investing is now totally mainstream,” said Jon Hale, head of sustainable investing research for Morningstar. “It’s part of the thinking of every major investment company because, at its core, it’s just common sense.”

Yet as this approach has grown in popularity, it has set off a powerful political backlash. That was evident in Congress this past week, when the House and Senate approved bills aimed at restricting E.S.G. investing in workplace retirement accounts in the United States.

The White House has said President Biden will veto the legislation, so what happened in Congress won’t have immediate effects.

The Republican party was solid in voting for the law in both the House and the Senate and two Democratic senators joined them in facilitating its passage. President Biden promised to block the law and followed through:

More than halfway through his term, US president Joe Biden had yet to use his veto power. But that changed after the US Senate voted earlier in March to block a US Labor Department rule that would have allowed retirement plans to consider environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors in their investments.

Democrats argued that the Labor Department rule was neutral: Retirement funds could either choose to invest in ESG funds, or not. But Republican opponents have turned ESG into a political lightening rod, deriding it as a form of “woke” capitalism at odds with the needs of average Americans.

US pension funds manage over $20 trillion dollars (pdf) in assets and retirement savings, according to the OECD.

Congressional override of the presidential veto has failed. Joe Manchin, one of the two Democratic senators that joined the Republicans in passing the law, responded to the president’s veto:

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) blasted President Joe Biden’s veto of a congressional resolution to cancel a Labor Department rule allowing retirement fund managers to consider environmental, social, and governance guidelines when making investment decisions.

Manchin said Biden’s ESG policy “prioritizes politics over getting the best financial returns for millions of Americans’ retirement investments.”

“Despite a clear and bipartisan rejection of the rule from Congress, President Biden is choosing to put his Administration’s progressive agenda above the well-being of the American people,” Manchin said in a statement.

“This ESG rule will weaken our energy, national and economic security while jeopardizing the hard-earned retirement savings of 150 million West Virginians and Americans,” he said.

The law basically forbids those in charge of investing public funds from considering the issues mentioned in Figure 1 as factors in future profitability. To state it differently, investors can only consider present profitability and must ignore probable future impacts of broader issues that directly impact all aspects of our lives. This decision is being made when the world— in so many ways—is in upheaval.

The economic impacts of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the global impacts of COVID-19 were discussed often in recent blogs. The resulting global inflation and its direct impacts on interest rates are a bit more recent.

Over the last two weeks, instabilities and outright defaults of banks both in the US and Europe have brought the smell of disaster to many of us. An op-ed in the NYT comments on the mess:

We were hours away from the failure of two regional banks and, more precisely, the new widespread recognition that deposits in excess of $250,000 might not be safe, setting off a chain reaction. Customers at other regional banks who thought their deposits were risk-free were suddenly questioning whether they should move their cash to safer havens. Withdrawals began, and as a result, previously remote risks of failure became real.

Unfortunately, the bipartisanship of last weekend has faded, and the blame game has begun. Progressives claim that greater regulation would have prevented the failure. Others claim that the failures were the result of a shift in regulatory focus from prudence to socially oriented directives.

Both claims are off base. Worse, this opportunistic political rhetoric may distract us from both the risks of the moment and, as we look forward, the critical role banks play in our society.

France is up in arms because its government is taking the “drastic” step of increasing its retirement age from 62 to 64 (see March 7, 2023 blog). Israel is up in arms because the new administration, nervous about how long it can hold power, has decided to make drastic changes to the structure of government (while it still can) by giving the Knesset control over the judiciary.

Figure 2 shows a self-portrait of my high school roommate (5 years after the establishment of the State of Israel) in front of what has become a weekly demonstration. He wasn’t even the oldest there—a group of ladies over 90 years of age—some of whom took part in the War of Independence—were also among the demonstrators, often with their kids and grandchildren.

Figure 2 – A recent demonstration in Israel through the eyes of a friend

Michael Bloomberg’s comments on the immediate impact of the instabilities on the Israeli economy are shown below:

Under the new coalition’s proposal, a simple majority of the Knesset could overrule the nation’s Supreme Court and run roughshod over individual rights, including on matters such as speech and press freedoms, equal rights for minorities and voting rights. The Knesset could even go as far as to declare that the laws it passes are unreviewable by the judiciary, a move that calls to mind Richard Nixon’s infamous phrase “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government is courting disaster by trying to claim that same power, imperiling Israel’s alliances around the world, its security in the region, its economy at home and the very democracy upon which the country was built.

The economic damage is already being felt, as the pummeling of the shekel has shown. A large number of business leaders and investors have spoken out against the government’s proposal, publicly and privately. And in a disturbing sign, some people have already begun pulling money out of the country and re-evaluating their plans for future growth there. As the owner of a global company, I don’t blame them.

These are trying times for all of us. Stay tuned.

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Guest Blog by Phil Gallagher: Going Solar 2

Posted on March 21, 2023 by climatechangefork

This week, we have a follow-up guest post from my friend Phil Gallagher updating us on his “going solar” journey.

It’s been about seven months since I reported on the solar panels we installed last April 15; time for an update. Last July I noted that we received our first invoice from Con Edison: we were paying about $21 for delivery of electricity and $0.00 for electricity itself. Since we spent 110 days at our Maine hide-away between mid-June and early October, that first Con Edison bill didn’t really tell us much—we weren’t using their electricity because we weren’t here in Brooklyn.

We’ve been home in Brooklyn for a little over 5 months so we’re back to using Con Ed’s electricity once the sun goes down and on very cloudy days. As Con Ed’s invoice and net metering report for the period from December 5, 2022 to January 5, 2023 shows, we used more energy from the grid than in brighter months with longer days; during the winter we’ve been largely drawing on what was generated and ‘banked’ in the 110 days when we weren’t here. Bottom line: our monthly Con Ed payment is still less than $21.

In analyzing the net value of our solar panel installation there are a number of factors to consider; I’ll mention just two of the most important. Starting in late November and continuing to the present (March 10, 2023), we’re using 30% less natural gas from National Grid to heat the house. This is partially due to the fact that we’ve been using our LG mini-split system to heat individual rooms.  Since the outside temperature has gotten into the low 40s and 30s we’ve been using our gas-driven circulating hot-water heating system for only 30 minutes most mornings to warm the house; we’re using our electricity-driven mini-split system to keep specific rooms at 72 degrees throughout the day. We have mini-split units in 4 rooms; each can be controlled separately, enabling the heating of the kitchen or the living room or my wife’s office or the master bedroom without heating rooms that are unoccupied. Another factor keeping energy use less than in previous years has been the weather: this has been a warm winter so far. To fully analyze our savings in energy costs we’d have to have data from a number of years.

By late spring I hope to have additional data from both electric and gas bills.  Another type of data may also be available: the money we’re getting back from federal, state, and NYC tax incentives.  We’ll see our tax accountant soon. By early June there should be more data on which to judge the overall results of our solar panel installation.  Until then this report can only be considered a report in progress, but it’s encouraging. As for the future, I can announce that we are retiring our ‘restaurant’ gas stove (a Garland) which we’ve had for about 40 years and have ordered a fully electric LG induction range which we should receive by early April. Stay tuned.

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Population Decline: Remedies

Posted on March 14, 2023 by climatechangefork

Starting on February 28th of this year, I’ve posted a series of blogs mentioning proposed remedies to the local implications of the global population’s declining trend and consequential societal aging. These include seppuku (voluntary suicide of the old) suggested by a Yale, Japanese-born professor (February 28th) as well as some more “practical” approaches in Japan:

In 2020, Japan’s health ministry launched eight “living labs” dedicated to developing nursing-care robots. Yet in a way, the entire country is one big living lab grappling with the repercussions of a rapidly aging society. In business, academia, and communities around Japan, countless experiments are under way, all aiming to keep the old healthy for as long as possible while easing the burden of caring for society’s frailest.

Also on the books are a modest increase in retirement age in France and various experiments in Russia to use payments to encourage families to have children (March 7th blog). While these are state-led measures, other approaches are more individualistic. For instance, a more recent trend in Russia, directly connected to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, is the increase in “baby tourism”:

These are just some of the Russian women who posted on popular forums for “baby tourism” – a phenomenon that has been growing since the Kremlin launched an invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Since then, authorities say thousands of young Russians have flown to South America, Argentina in particular, where they don’t need a visa to enter the country, and where their babies are guaranteed a less restrictive foreign passport.

The Moscow-Buenos Aires route is also an easier way for the mothers to acquire local nationality. But now officials are concerned about the sheer scale of the problem after one Ethiopian Airlines flight landed in February with 33 pregnant Russian women on board.

A Euronews investigation has uncovered the network of Russian travel agencies and support services that charge up to $35,000 (€32,840) to pregnant Russian women and make false promises that lawyers say are tantamount to criminal activity.

On the other end of the life cycle, recent trends in China suggest attempts by certain segments of the population to make money on what they consider to be unavoidable trends resulting from the aging process (Analysis: As China ages, investors bet they can beat retirement home stigma):

HONG KONG/SHANGHAI, March 3 (Reuters) – Investors are betting big on a major attitude shift among elderly Chinese – that they will warm up to retirement homes as the world’s most populous country ages and smaller families struggle to support parents and grandparents.

Who takes care of the elderly in China, where pensions are tiny, is one of the major headaches policymakers face as they deal with the first demographic downturn since Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution.

Costly nursing homes are out of reach for most elderly and are generally frowned upon, with many judging the use of such facilities as a sign children are not fulfilling their duties.

But the hope of companies investing in the sector in China is that those attitudes will change soon, and fast – at least among the small percentage of elderly who got rich before they got old. China’s 1980 to 2015 one-child policy means smaller families are expected to support the old folk, some of whom would have no choice but to seek professional elderly care, investors say.

In the US, frightening and unlawful trends are being exposed of companies relying on populating the labor force with unaccompanied migrant child workers:

These workers are part of a new economy of exploitation: Migrant children, who have been coming into the United States without their parents in record numbers, are ending up in some of the most punishing jobs in the country, a New York Times investigation found. This shadow work force extends across industries in every state, flouting child labor laws that have been in place for nearly a century. Twelve-year-old roofers in Florida and Tennessee. Underage slaughterhouse workers in Delaware, Mississippi and North Carolina. Children sawing planks of wood on overnight shifts in South Dakota.

Largely from Central America, the children are driven by economic desperation that was worsened by the pandemic. This labor force has been slowly growing for almost a decade, but it has exploded since 2021, while the systems meant to protect children have broken down.

This brings us to the issue of immigration.

Figure 1 in last week’s blog showed that now, while there is a global trend of population decrease, the slow-down of population growth and the aging of the population are much more pronounced in developed, rich countries, than in developing ones. This dynamic opens the door for increased immigration from developing countries to developed ones. As shown in Figure 1 below, this trend is being quantified through increases in foreign-born residents in rich countries compared to developing countries. The situation in Russia in Figure 1 is a bit misleading, however, because it presumably contains many people who were born in the Soviet Union and became “foreign-born” after the USSR’s break-up in 1990.

Figure 1 – Percent of immigrants throughout the world (2017)
(Source: Pew Research Center)

The number of foreign-born occupants shown in Figure 1 integrates over the lifetime of the immigrants. These numbers apply to anyone born elsewhere, regardless of how long they’ve lived in their current country. Figure 2, on the other hand, shows recent trends of integration, counting only those who moved over the last five years as separate; native-born and six-year immigrants are grouped together. The two show similar trends, with some noticeable differences (Saudi Arabia, the US, Canada, etc.).

Figure 2 – Global migration (Source: Statista)

Statista, the same reference from which I took Figure 2, summarizes the recent immigration situation in the following way:

This map provides an overview of the migration trends in the world. It shows the annual net migration (arrivals minus departures) of all countries and territories, relative to their population size. Between 2017 and 2021, the regions of the world that lost the largest share of people via emigration were the Marshall Islands and American Samoa in the Pacific Ocean, followed by Lebanon and Venezuela. During this period, these four territories, some of which are experiencing severe economic hardship, experienced an average net loss of 28 to 42 inhabitants per 1,000 people per year.

In contrast, the regions that attracted the most migrants relative to their population size were the New Zealand-administered Tokelau Archipelago, the Caribbean tax haven of the Turks and Caicos Islands and, in Europe, Malta. For these three places, the average annual net migration was between 22 and 45 additional persons per 1,000 inhabitants.

The site quotes 281 million international immigrants in 2020 (3.6% of the global population). The immigration issue is complicated. Put the word “immigration” into the search box above and you will get many blog posts. However, the unfortunate reality is that globally the immigration process has become highly politicized. It’s transformed some democratic countries into “illiberal” ones where bigots float “replacement” concepts that claim immigrants leave their countries to “replace” richer native-born citizens. For a long time, immigration policies were tailored to attract young professionals that were in shortage in the target country. Canada often serves as an example of a more holistic immigration policy:

In recent years, Canada has become an even more attractive destination for immigrants after policies enacted under U.S. President Donald Trump severely restricted access to the United States. Yet, Canada is also experiencing a labor shortage exacerbated by a dearth of skilled workers. Its immigration system faces an array of other challenges as well, including a surge in asylum claims, rising deportations, and labor abuses against temporary-visa holders.

I will return to these issues often in future blogs.

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Population Decline: Impacts

Posted on March 7, 2023 by climatechangefork

Last week’s blog focused on the dynamics of global population changes, which are determined by the balance of births and deaths. The global population is still growing because births are still outpacing deaths but the near-term (one-generation) trends predict a coming reversal when the global population will reach a maximum beyond which it will start to shrink. An important impact of these changes is the global increase in median age: the world is aging. However, the timing of these global trends is not universal. Figure 1 shows the present distribution of older people (>65) in 2015 with its projections in the near future (2050).

Figure 1 – Percentage of elderly by country (Source: US Census)

An aging, shrinking world requires overcoming shrinking economic activity that often scales with population and increase in social spending. The OECD list of social spending by (mostly) developed countries is shown in Figure 2. It is a substantial fraction of these countries’ GDP. That fraction increases with the aging of the population.

Below is a list of three major countries that are experiencing these trends and some steps that they are trying to take to mitigate the situation. I will expand the list in next week’s blog, where I will put the emphasis on immigration:

France

Figure 1 shows that France is not in the worst position in terms of the aging of its population, but Figure 2 shows that it is at the top of the list in terms of social spending. Figure 3 shows that it has one of the lowest retirement ages in Europe (Ukraine and Russia have traditionally had lower retirement ages but we have yet to see how these will change after the war). Yet, the French government is now proposing to remedy this situation by raising the retirement age from 62 to 64. Major demonstrations are now taking place to block this “major” adjustment:

PARIS, Feb 7 [2023] (Reuters) – Public transport, schools and refinery supplies in France were disrupted on Tuesday as trade unions led a third wave of nationwide strikes against President Emmanuel Macron’s plans to make the French work longer before retirement.

Tuesday’s multi-sector walkouts come a day after pension reform legislation began its bumpy passage through parliament and are a test of Macron’s ability to enact change without a working majority in the National Assembly.

The government says people must work two years longer – meaning for most until the age of 64 – in order to keep the budget of one of the industrial world’s most generous pension systems in the black.

The French spend the largest number of years in retirement among OECD countries – a deeply cherished benefit that a substantial majority are reluctant to give up, polls show.

The French love to demonstrate; we will see how this will play out.

Figure 2 – Social spending by country (source: Statista via World Economic Forum)

Figure 3 – Retirement age by country (Source: Royal Maps via Maps on the Web)

South Korea

South Korea is among the record holders, in terms of both shrinking and aging population:

South Korea’s statistics agency announced in September that the total fertility rate — the average number of babies born to each woman in their reproductive years — was 0.81 last year. That’s the world’s lowest for the third consecutive year.

The population shrank for the first time in 2021, stoking worry that a declining population could severely damage the economy — the world’s 10th largest — because of labor shortages and greater welfare spending as the number of older people increases and the number of taxpayers shrinks.

Many young South Koreans say that, unlike their parents and grandparents, they don’t feel an obligation to have a family. They cite the uncertainty of a bleak job market, expensive housing, gender and social inequality, low levels of social mobility and the huge expense of raising children in a brutally competitive society. Women also complain of a persistent patriarchal culture that forces them to do much of the childcare while enduring discrimination at work.

Russia

Russia is now at the center of the news because of its invasion of Ukraine but its decline in its population started way before that:

Crippling disruptions from the war are converging with a population crisis rooted in the 1990s, a period of economic hardship after the Soviet breakup that sent fertility rates plunging. Independent demographer Alexei Raksha is calling it “a perfect storm.”

As mentioned above, the decline in the Russian population started with the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1990. The government started experimenting with various payments to encourage families to have children, and has continued the policy. More recent promises came out to a few thousand dollars. President Putin came to power in 2000. I traveled to Russia in 2006. Part of the itinerary was to take a river cruise from St. Petersburg to Moscow. Many of our guides on the cruise were young Russian ladies. I asked some of them if the incentives offered by the president would encourage them to have children. They laughed and said that if President Putin promised them an apartment, they would start a conversation.

In next week’s blog, I will discuss a new angle on this topic that has emerged since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

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Population Decline – Background

Posted on February 28, 2023 by climatechangefork

Figure 1 (Source: World Economic Forum)

While I was busy over the last few blogs talking about living and dying in the Anthropocene, a few major changes in the demography of the planet took place. These changes drove me to return to these issues, to try to analyze their consequences and impacts.

In a guest blog about 9 years ago, Jim Foreit, a noted professional demographer, addressed important demographic global developments that were in focus at that time (January 14, 2014). I wrote a thank-you comment to his blog that is probably still the longest comment of the 11 years that this blog has been running. A few key lines from my response are repeated below:

“The nature of exponential growth or decline are such that left unchecked they will lead to disasters. As Jim’s blog made clear, we have yet to develop some understanding how to stabilize populations on any level. The UN fiat of stabilizing the population at replacement rate without suggesting what policies have a chance of accomplishing it, is untenable.”

Nine years later, in November 2022, probably the most important marker in global population took place when the global population passed the 8 billion mark (it was 2 billion when I was born)

Another important marker that took place in the last few months is that China lost its “crown” of being the most populous country in the world, to India:

They are among hundreds of thousands of Chinese couples who turn to assisted reproductive technology every year after exhausting other options to get pregnant. They travel from all corners of the country to big cities like Beijing in the hopes of beating the odds of infertility. Many wait in long lines outside hospitals before sunrise, just for the possibility of a consultation.

Now, the Chinese government wants to make the technology [IVF], which it made legal in 2001, more accessible. It has promised to cover some of the cost — typically several thousand dollars for each round — under national medical insurance. It is one of more than a dozen policy measures that Chinese officials are throwing at what they see as a very big problem — a fertility rate so low that China’s population has started to shrink.

However, there is only one mechanism for the global population to change – changing the balance between births and deaths.

Figure 2 (Source: World Bank)

Figure 2 shows that almost all over the world, births still exceed deaths. In Europe and Central Asia (I’m not sure what exactly is included in that category), the two dynamics have trended toward each other. The world population is still growing. However, in almost all the regions, the decrease in deaths is much slower than the decrease in births. Figure 1 shows the reason: fertility rates are decreasing almost everywhere, while the death rate is staying at a more constant rate (Figure 3).

Figure 3 (Source: Our World in Data)

Figure 4 (Source: Statista)

Figures 3 and 4 both illustrate the trend. Figure 3 shows the convergence of global life expectancy with age and Figure 4 shows the steady increase in the global median age. As these data show, globally, birth rates still exceed death rates but both trends show that in a few years, the death rate will surpass birth rates and the global population will start to shrink. Figure 4 also shows that the population is aging significantly, with the median age doubling from 1970, almost coinciding with the start of the Anthropocene. What are the consequences of these shifts and are we prepared to face them? Below are two paragraphs from a report that the UN wrote about the transition:

“Population ageing is a defining global trend of our time,” the UN Department for Economic and Social Affairs writes in its World Social Report 2023, calling it a “major success story” that brings both challenges and opportunities. One of the main challenges for countries with ageing populations is to ensure that the economy can support the consumption needs of a growing number of older people, be it by raising the legal retirement age, removing barriers to voluntary labor force participation of older people or by ensuring equitable access to education, health care and working opportunities throughout the lifespan, which can help to boost economic security at older ages.

Especially countries in the early stages of the demographic shift have the opportunity to plan ahead and implement the right measures ahead of time, to effectively manage the challenges that come with an ageing population.

Japan has one of the world’s lowest fertility rates (1.37). Here is what a recent National Geographic article said about the situation there:

Japan’s path foreshadows what’s coming in many areas of the world. China, South Korea, Italy, and Germany are on a similar trajectory; so too is the United States, although at a slower pace. Five years ago, the world reached an ominous milestone: For the first time in history, adults 65 and older outnumbered children under five years old.

If Japan is any guide, aging will change the fabric of society in ways both obvious and subtle. It will run up a huge tab that governments will struggle to pay. Meeting the challenge won’t be easy, but the future isn’t necessarily all downhill. Japan’s experience, with its characteristic attention to detail and design, suggests extreme aging—a world in which an increasing share of the population is old—may inspire an era of innovation.

In 2020, Japan’s health ministry launched eight “living labs” dedicated to developing nursing-care robots. Yet in a way, the entire country is one big living lab grappling with the repercussions of a rapidly aging society. In business, academia, and communities around Japan, countless experiments are under way, all aiming to keep the old healthy for as long as possible while easing the burden of caring for society’s frailest.

Here is how one Yale Professor (Born in Japan and educated at MIT) suggested dealing with the Japanese aging issue:

In interviews and public appearances, Yusuke Narita, an assistant professor of economics at Yale, has taken on the question of how to deal with the burdens of Japan’s rapidly aging society.

“I feel like the only solution is pretty clear,” he said during one online news program in late 2021. “In the end, isn’t it mass suicide and mass ‘seppuku’ of the elderly?” Seppuku is an act of ritual disembowelment that was a code among dishonored samurai in the 19th century.

Since Japan is an early indication of what is awaiting all of us, we should hope that we can find a better alternative that lets us learn to live in a declining, aging world population. I’ve said that climate change amounts to self-inflicted genocide but that doesn’t mean I endorse mass suicide. The next few blogs will focus on symptoms of population changes, more realistic remedies, and scaling (different rates of decline in different places).

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Back to Educating in the Anthropocene

Posted on February 21, 2023 by climatechangefork

(Source: The Lancet)

The original caption of this figure reads “The Planetary Health Education Framework.” However, it is similar to the Venn diagram that I discussed in a previous blog (August 4, 2020), which includes climate change, equity, Covid-19, population, and jobs.

Previous series of blogs on the topic of this blog include some of the following (February 25 – March 25, 2013 and May 24 – June 14, 2016). Additionally, 5 blogs, starting on July 19, 2022 and ending on October 4, 2022 (with some interruptions) have titles that include “Campus as Lab.” This topic is obviously close to my heart and is big enough to withstand frequent revisits. I often mention the need to expand our educational programs in interdisciplinary topics. For reasons that I have mentioned in previous blogs, my involvement with attempts to apply this idea within my school has often gotten me into direct confrontation with campus politics. In many cases, departments view such expansion as competition for resources.

In this blog, I would like to focus on alternatives to interdisciplinary education that do not directly compete with the departmental underpinning of campus structure. All the examples in this blog will come from the school that I am most familiar with, the City University of New York (CUNY). CUNY is a multi-campus consortia institution that I’ve described earlier (September 20, 2022 or just put CUNY into the search box). CUNY’s sustainability efforts were also described earlier.

Like most other academic institutions, the faculty is responsible for all academic matters (The quote below comes from the AAUP, which stands for “American Association of University Professors”):

The faculty has primary responsibility for such fundamental areas as curriculum, subject matter and methods of instruction, research, faculty status, and those aspects of student life which relate to the educational process.4 On these matters the power of review or final decision lodged in the governing board or delegated by it to the president should be exercised adversely only in exceptional circumstances, and for reasons communicated to the faculty. It is desirable that the faculty should, following such communication, have opportunity for further consideration and further transmittal of its views to the president or board. Budgets, personnel limitations, the time element, and the policies of other groups, bodies, and agencies having jurisdiction over the institution may set limits to realization of faculty advice.

As the quote emphasizes, the academic responsibility of faculty comes with an important caveat: the administration is responsible for the budget. Since everything that can be done depends on the availability of budget support, this policy negates the exclusivity of faculty in decisions on academic affairs. It also negates the administration’s ability to implement academic decisions that the faculty opposes.

As I have mentioned at many previous opportunities, the Anthropocene describes the major changes that the world is now experiencing. Many of us think that academic institutions should be at the forefront of preparing students to function effectively through these changes. This realization is not yet embedded in the political reality of most countries, though. Below is a commentary from The New York Times about this moment and what the President of the United States did or did not say in the recent State of the Union:

In his State of the Union address, Biden offered no ambitious plans to fix America’s ailing schools. The Republican Party can’t utter a complete sentence on the subject of school reform that doesn’t contain the initials C.R.T. (Critical Race Theory). What we’re seeing here is a complete absence of leadership — even in the midst of a crisis that will literally bend the arc of American history.

This moment of disruption should be a moment of reinvention. It should be a moment when leaders rise-up and say: Let’s get beyond stale debates over charters, vouchers, gender neutral bathrooms and the like. We’re going to rethink the nuts and bolts of how we teach in America.

The consortia structure of CUNY makes it convenient to pioneer changes within the school that reflect the real changes around us. The multi-campus structure enables us to experiment with the impacts of individual changes on a trial basis before instituting any mandates for change throughout the whole university. CUNY is a public university, and like all public institutions, it has to follow the policies of its governing bodies and at the same time lead the academic changes that are in force all around us. It can do this only in a cost-effective way that is consistent with the budgetary priorities of its governing institutions.

One effective way to accomplish these changes in a cost-effective way is to cooperate with the community that surrounds us; that includes the business community:

University-business cooperation has risen to one of the top priorities for many higher education institutions, with its importance mirroring attention from scholars and policy makers worldwide. Despite prolific research in this area, however, few have investigated curriculum-related university-business cooperation or its facilitators. Hence, this study investigates five mechanisms as drivers of business engagement in the design and delivery of the curriculum and the alignment of the curriculum with business needs. Results of a European-wide survey of higher education institution managers show the positive impact of senior management engagement, alumni networks and external communication of university-business cooperation, particularly on business engagement in curriculum design and the curriculum meeting industry needs. The higher education institution’s dedication of resources emerged as irrelevant in this context. The conceptual model is validated across higher education institutions with different levels of curriculum-related cooperation with business and across three countries, leading to implications for management and future research directions.

Below are two examples from my environment that are presently in force:

1.    Joint programs between STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math), Social, and Business

Below is an example of the degree programs of our (Brooklyn College) Department of Business and other departments:

The department has pioneered several multidisciplinary programs with other departments within the college. Business students may pursue a program in earth and environmental sciences, film, philosophy, or Puerto Rican and Latino studies. Modern language majors in French, Italian, Russian, and Spanish may take a joint program in language and business. In conjunction with the Department of Computer and Information Science, the Department of Business Management also offers a Bachelor of Science in information systems. The department works closely with the Brooklyn College Magner Career Center to provide students with internships, identify job opportunities, and prepare students for their job search.

  1. School Programs that mutually serve students and communities:

I will mention here two successful programs that enjoy community support:

The Science and Resilience Institute at Jamaica Bay (SRIJB):

The Institute is a partnership among the National Park Service, the City of New York, and the City University of New York (CUNY) acting on behalf of a Consortium of seven other research institutions: Columbia University, Cornell University, Rutgers University, Stony Brook University, New York Sea Grant, Stevens Institute of Technology, and the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Our mission is to produce integrated knowledge that increases biodiversity, well-being, and adaptive capacity in coastal communities and waters surrounding Jamaica Bay and New York City.

The Institute is hosted and supported by Brooklyn College working closely with other CUNY colleges.

The Aquatic Research and Environmental Assessment Center (AREAC)
Below is an example of student activities in this program:

A few months ago, a student walked into AREAC and announced his desire to elevate his interest in vermiculture into a full-fledged research project. Self-motivated students are always welcome in AREAC, and Jorge will be conducting growth rate experiments on Tilapia using Red Wiggler worms to supplement their diet. This is an effective means to recycle food waste and turn it back into food production, and the use of worms as a diet supplement in urban aquaponics systems has already been demonstrated. Jorge hopes to calculate the nutrient and carbon recapture from this practice.

This will be the last blog in my attempts to analyze the needed societal changes to the emerging Anthropocene. Many more examples are at stake here (one suggested in the opening picture is the global healthcare aspect). I will return to this coverage once we have some progress in the formal labeling of our new epoch.

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