Kevin Anderson via the Tyndall Centre's radical emissions reduction conference page:

"The next five years for the principle emitting countries of the world - in that I also include the 300 million people in China who live lives like those of us relatively wealthy ones within the EU - if the high-emitting people on the planet have not radically reduced emissions [within 5 year's time] we will have effectively locked ourselves into a high carbon future. We will have locked the poor people around the planet, our own children and most other species into a future that will be somewhere between detrimental and disastrous. It's hard to know exactly how that's going to play out, but it's not a future you'd want to bequeath to your own children, let alone other people's children, let alone the planet itself. I think we're on that cusp. The rate of emissions growth is so rapid, if we don't come off that curve in 5 years from now, the emissions will be so high that we're talking about 3 to 4 degree type futures."

We just lost a proposed £4 billion, 1.2 GW offshore wind installation. RWE cite `technological challenges and market conditions'. We're spending £16 billion for 3.2 GW of nuclear and a whole load of uncertainty about waste the taxpayer appears to be responsible for.

Offshore windfarm: £3.33 billion per GW vs nuclear: £5 billion per GW. Oh good. (Looking here the windfarm output figure is an annual average output based on meteorological models/data, not peak output, so should be comparable.)

Let's hope this was more `technological challenges' than `market conditions' and that the market conditions didn't include mixed signals from government. Losing 1.2 GW of carbon-free generation right now? Madness. (Yeah, I know there's carbon in the production of wind turbines...)

I'm for nuclear too: despite the issues involved, Hinkley Point is still 3.2 GW, whatever the per-watt price. But it's awful to see projects like the Atlantic Array get so close to reality and then fail.

"You have millions of people here in the affluent part of the planet who turn their heads. They see the house on fire; they see the child screaming from the upstairs window, and they say: I’ve got to go to the library and read a book about combustion because I don’t know enough about fires."

Danaher, K., ‘Changing Culture: Choosing Life over Money’, in Welton & Wolf, (Eds.), Global Uprising, (2001, Canada, New Society Publishers), p.28

A quote from Ed Glaeser:

"The internal combustion engine was more than just another, faster commuting technology. The car is a point-to-point transit method while all of the older technologies were essentially hub-and-spoke, where people walked to a stop and then took the bus or train. The car made it possible to live at lower densities since it was unnecessary to walk to any bus stop or to walk to get groceries or perform any other function. The second impact of the internal combustion engine was to break down the traditional monocentric city. These cities were generally built around a port or a rail yard but that transportation infrastructure became increasingly irrelevant over the twentieth century. Trucks don't require central stops and as a result, factories could be decentralized. The decentralization of employment has led to much flatter cities that look and feel completely different from the monocentric cities of the past." (Glaeser, `Cities, Agglomeration & Spatial Equilibrium' 2008 p.46)

Oops, another P3 comment, discussing this lovely little refutation from Krugman today.
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Yes, that's the clearest bit of refutation I've seen recently (and the FRED data is awesomely accessible), though Krugman's been doing the same day in day out for years: "you say x about economics? Here's the evidence and here's the macro 101 that we've known for decades that says y."

This is excellent: "it’s not often that you see an economic theory fail so utterly and completely. Yet that theory’s grip on the GOP has only strengthened as its failure becomes ever more undeniable."

Krugman's work - and the post you highlight here is a fantastic exemplar of that - illustrates what's wrong with another recent take on `economic denialism' (I wonder what you think of this?) by Aditya Chakrabortty. From this point of view, all neoclassical economists (Krugman's one; my PhD uses his core-periphery model extensively for spare parts) are merely "high priests" blessing existing power structures with their otherwise meaningless mathematical incantations.

Which, if it were true, actually matches what Krugman's accusing Republicans of. As Phillip Ball puts it, it's all “citadels of crystalline mathematical perfection that would shatter if touched by the harsh rays of reality” (Ball 2007 p.647). This Krugman post is a nice illustration that's not true of all economists - and I think the difference isn't in the models, it's in the modellers' understanding of their uses and meaning. In that respect, it's quite different to, say, climate modelling (I think). (Nice Marshall quote on that: "economic laws and reasonings in fact are merely a part of the material of which conscience and common-sense have to make use in solving practical problems, and in laying down rules which may be a guide to life.” Marshall 1895.)

Which is not to deny there's a definite relationship between power structures and a particular, brittle set of economic concepts - Krugman himself acknowledges this when he explains why he pursued a general equilibrium form for the core-periphery model as a way to entice others in his field to consider geography: "mainstream economics isn’t going away: like it or not, the White House has a Council of Economic Advisers, not a Council of Geographical Advisers, the World Bank hires lots of economists and not many geographers." (The New Economic Geography, Now Middle Aged, 2010, PDF.)

So yeah - we're looking at much the same process that I mentioned standing out so clearly in the Boston Globe's coverage of Willie Soon. Economics, climate... doesn't matter. Evidence seems to end up like a butterfly in a gale when it approaches power centres.

The obvious answer seems to be to remove the influence of money in politics - but to get that via any current democratic route, you'd need politicians to vote for who eschew major donations. They would lose. Or you would need politicians to vote for imposing, say, modest but even state-funded campaigns - and again, of course, if they're already on the money, how will that happen?

Another second-hand post via a P3 comment. I wish I could let those rants loose here a bit, seems commenting elsewhere lets them out. Anyway, here's the second half of the comment:
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Update: this thread's picked up over at Stoat's blog.
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I've been having a rather odd week listening to some people who, in theory, accept the science of climate change but have bought a truckload of political assumptions with them. I never used to think this was a problem: so, some left-leaning people accept the science, perhaps for non-scientific reasons? So what? Now I'm not so sure. A recent example from Naomi Klein that kind-of captures what I mean - actually citing Tyndall Centre scientists too, arguing for degrowth as the only effective response.

I have no problem with scientists having views on what should be done, but I am worried about lazily assuming climate change just happens to support your political view. Right-wing laziness is its mirror: reject the science rather than think about political solutions that would work.

It's a severe cultural problem. Last night I heard Duncan Clark lecturing on his and Mike Berners-Lee's book, the Burning question. Spot-on stuff. The follow-up round of questions from mostly left-leaning academics (of which I'm one) made me uncomfortable. I suppose it shouldn't be a surprise that anyone sees an issue through the prism of their own views on how the world should be - of course we do that. But there's something about the climate change issue that really makes me want to run in the other direction: there are solutions that have naff all to do with, say, getting rid of consumerist culture. I keep on posting this, but David Mitchell nails my feeling on it. There's a version of the future where - hmm, maybe not the North Pole - but where Jeremy Clarkson gets to drive a 4x4 to the South Pole while drinking gin - only it's not powered by a carbon fuel. That's culturally unacceptable to many on the left, but climate change absolutely does not rule it out. (Maybe some other environmental issues might intervene...!)

The future may the constrained - but it always has been. The problem isn't the existence of constraints, it's backtracking from our current position. I still want a future where, if someone happens to want to spend all their money on some awful gas guzzling monster that I hate because I'm a tofu-knitting Guardianista, they're fecking allowed to. This may be self-justification. I don't fly or drive, but I'd quite like to pay the 5p ish an hour for my stupidly power-hungry graphics card, so I can play childish games, without being made to feel like I'm stealing winter fuel from an old age pensioner. (I'd also like policies that protect OAPs from the cold, but again: climate change doesn't actually stop us, if we want, from marching old people out onto freezing moors and letting them die of exposure as a way to conserve resources...)

I suppose this is just a variant of the hairshirts vs techno-utopians thing, but... well, not really. That's the thing I like about the price system: me getting to decide I'm OK with my 5p-an-hour watt-guzzling eternal adolescence and someone else being OK with their stupid 20 foot high truck with wheels the size of small cars. There's a bigger question there about distribution of wealth - but that's emphatically NOT a climate change question, despite what anyone may argue.

Urgh. Leftie guardianista arguing for more space for right-wing ideas in climate discussion.

Just a quick clarifying post, following the previous PhD wiffle, where I picked on the transition movement to come up with some modelling questions. I want to say this now so I don't keep on repeating myself in later posts: it's not my intention to try and disprove the relevance of what the transition movement is doing. Whatever the merits of any assumptions its actions are based on, I have nothing but the highest respect for people working to reclaim some direct control over their own economic destinies. I am acutely aware that one of the historic roles of quantitative modelling (whether implicitly or otherwise) has been as a tool to justify robbing people of agency. This is especially true in its most pervasive form, finance-ministry-condoned economic methods: incredibly consistent across the world, and something no-one has a great deal of choice in since the vast majority of political parties do little more than tinker at the edges.

That use of models is, unsurprisingly, not something I have any desire to contribute to - but I don't think that should mean rejecting quantitative methods as a tool for helping steer our direction of travel. Economic self-determination is a good thing - I see no reason why quant methods shouldn't support it. We should have a future where quant planning tools work with the grain of democratic decision making and public action. There are reasons why, theoretically, quant tools have tended to go against that grain; again, that's a topic for later.

It's not an easy problem to solve. Here's an instructive example I hope to study in a bit more depth, off the back of this paper (a colleague of mine is a co-author). It aims to probe the idea of `smart cities'. The concept has, it seems, gained a lot of traction in US planning circles; David Roberts has argued strongly in support of the idea and his articles via that link give a good overview.

But the `takeaway for practice' from the JAPA article is:

Urban form policies can have important impacts on local environmental quality, economy, crowding and social equity, but their influence on energy consumption and land use is very modest: compact development should not automatically be associated with the preferred spatial growth strategy.

That's quite a modest set of conclusions: `compact development' is not necessarily a carbon and energy cure-all. The fundamental reason the paper finds this is that it actually adds some economics of land use to the problem. I need to get a special symbol for "I'll come back to this"... but the crucial part of this story has been the reaction: it seems to have caused a pretty intense ruckus among those with a deep commitment to the smart growth / smart cities idea.

Which leads me to wonder about the problems involved in linking quant/economic modellers and decision-makers - not just policymakers, but the kind of people working at a local level in the transition movement. It's easy enough to envision some perfectly healthy relationship between the two, but the reality is (and has always been, actually) pretty dysfunctional.

One solid reason for that: it's much harder to roll a boulder up a hill when someone's following you up questioning your rolling method the whole time. Social action benefits from having an agreed set of assumptions to work with. Despite these thoughts on the transition movement I am still, when it comes down to it, quite unsure about some of the fundamental assumptions that drive it. But like that climate cartoon ("what if its a great hoax and we create a better world for nothing?") dense economic webs made up of a froth of small-scale activity stand entirely on their own merits. Cop out? Hmm.

Update: but I reserve the right to change my mind about quant models. There's a small but definite risk that, on further investigation, it might become obvious that the democratic downsides outweigh any actual insight they might supply, and we should thus break the fingers of all coders attempting to model society. Harsh but fair, and I'll offer my own fingers up for the hammer first.

Now that it's finally over, let's have a go at writing about the PhD. Here's a github page with the full PDF and live model runs if anyone's interested in a glance-through. The model output pics in the results chapters are probably the nice bits to look at.

I'll break it down into blog chunks rather than attempt to deal with it all at once. Unfortunately I think there's no way around starting with a cathartic "once upon a time" ramble back through how it ended up the way it did - as always, likely of more value to me than anyone else.

The original idea was all that Hayekian stuff: is there really a problem with planning in complex systems? Can something like agent-based modelling (ABM) be used to dig into the question? (Some people think Hayek would have been an agent modeller had he had access to the technology.)

That question lost its appeal when it became apparent (due to the work of Elinor Ostrom and others) that people can generally muddle through to solutions that have little to do with either Hayek's "plan to resist all planning" (Oakshotte) or the totalitarian demon he so vividly summoned (Cartoon version here!)

Hey NSA/GCHQ. How's it going? I'm writing this in Evernote and, being a cloud service, let's presume it's getting harvested. I'm sure nothing I'll say would be likely to trigger your early warning systems, but just, you know - saying hello. It's the principle, really. Some random thoughts, thanks for storing a backup for me. These may seem a bit shrill - watching the UK's massive "meh" has made me that way.

Libertarians vindicated then? A supposedly liberal-minded law professor as US president, this is what we get. The enabling tech is, historically, hardly out of the womb - but we've now seen the state's response to it as clearly as one could hope for - and it turns the internet on its head. We've volunteered to integrate monitoring devices into our personal and working lives and, on the whole, seem happy to trade the tangible convenience gained for what may seem like entirely abstract 'privacy' issues (as Henry Porter laments). I know, I'm so far doing the same.

Politicians' easy dismissal - and Hague's truly astonishing nothing to fear quote - do they genuinely see no potential threat from political change in the future? Dumbasses. Contrast all this to the reaction to ID cards. Opposition there boiled down to "all that information in one database, scary!" What do we have instead? A public/private mashup including some companies that reach right into the tiniest corners of our lives, producing a data nexus that has soooo much more potential than the ID card system (as the NSA/GCHQ partnership has recognised and worked to exploit).

People generally think about the threat back-to-front, imagining the worst scenario being the Chinese experience: monitored, blocked, controlled. In the future, the risk may instead come from the information in the gaps (exformation is not a nice word!) The result is that, if a tiny minority attempt to challenge the setup, they'll show up in big flashy lights against the general background acceptance of our voluntarily adopted pocket tracking devices and Breaking Bad viewing machines.

It's easy enough to picture a future where everyone posts to facebook or a version of it. Over time, a social norm becomes a requirement in business and then eventually a state requirement: failing to let the world know how breakfast was immediately singles you out as deviant. There must be some reason why you'd withold your status update; every good citizen shows they're happy to be transparent. You have nothing to fear, after all, right?

The same applies to the location information collectable just from triangulating via masts. Given some half-decent demographic information and a search engine I could knock up some algorithm for matching "radical leanings" to phone location, providing a handy system for identifying gathering of trouble types. Fuck it, why not go the whole hog and build in an auto-drone attack, while we're waxing dystopian? Note the kind of phone data already gathered from triangulation - GPS not required, all already available to security services, all already matched against one firm's existing demographic data.

This reminds me of an almost quaint-seeming ritual we'd go through at some direct action meetings: removing batteries from mobiles. We didn't do this until we were all in the room. Up to that point, we could just have been a bunch of friends at the pub. Imagine a map of a city's triangulated phone positions, down to the 200m square resolution (I think) that `smart steps' above promises: you'd see a mass of indistinguishable signals. But code in a simple test: flash red any set of signals that deactivate within a nine-square block within an hour time window. The very act of removing our phone signals more or less simultaneously would be easily detectable. If you have nothing to hide, why are you deactivating your personal tracking device? If several of you are doing it...?

The internet was always an international relations 101 lesson waiting to be learned. It's been sold as a light-speed hi-tech manifestation of Freedom - that flowed very well with the grain of a certain kind of Freem n Moxy propaganda. If the net genuinely threatens the main power blocks controlling it (the US currently) you'll soon see how natural that freedom really is. Again, another good call today for engineers to get stuck in to reversing the "US betrayal of the internet". But it's an open question: wasn't this idea of the Net as a neutral substrate always nonsense?

As that article suggests, though, maybe the answer is Hayekian (or I read it that way): to neuter totalitarian power build up, you distribute it. The internet can, obviously, be exactly that kind of structure - but it's still cables and satellites and routers. Realistically, can the internet ever develop genuine immunity to exploitation and control? What happens now?