A Path to a Sustainable Future? Part 2-Energy

Yesterday I discussed the importance of being increasingly intensive with agriculture if we are going to save the environment and feed people both at the same time. This also means a continuation of the trend toward a greater fraction of people living in urban places. If we do things right, these activities can also be associated with major sustainable changes in the way we power our lives. While I was traveling earlier this week I had a chance to read Lester Brown and associates' new book "The Great Transition." Lester Brown has been a long-time leader in the environmental movement and I am very impressed by the positive tone that he's putting forth. To be sure, I have often had students over the years say to me--what can we do! And this book gives us some answers. In particular, the message is that we are moving more quickly to reliance on solar and wind energy than most of us are aware, and we have to do all we can to accelerate that process. Here are some highlights, all of which (and more) are discussed in detail (with extensive citations) in the book:

The price of solar photovoltaic panels has declined 99 percent over the last four decades, from $74 a watt in 1972 to less than 70 cents a watt in 2014. Between 2009 and 2014, solar panel prices dropped by three fourths, helping global PV installations grow 50 percent per year.

Over the past decade, world wind power capacity grew more than 20 percent a year, its increase driven by its many attractive features, by public policies supporting its expansion, and by falling costs. By the end of 2014, global wind generating capacity totaled 369,000 megawatts, enough to power more than 90 million U.S. homes. 

 U.S. coal use is dropping – it fell 21 percent between 2007 and 2014 – and more than one-third of the nation’s coal plants have already closed or announced plans for future closure. Meanwhile the Stowe Global Coal Index – a composite index of companies from around the world whose principal business involves coal – dropped 70 percent between April 2011 and September 2014.

In China, electricity generation from wind farms now exceeds that from nuclear plants, while coal use appears to be peaking.

The transition away from fossil fuels, in particular, is not going to be painless. As Dr. Pollock noted in a comment on yesterday's post, most fossil fuel based energy firms are worried about the short-term impact on themselves and shareholders, not the long-term impact on the sustainability of life on the planet. But Lester Brown's book provides strong evidence that the momentum is shifting toward a reliance on sustainable energy sources, and that the transition can be accomplished fairly quickly, even if not painlessly. One way to promote this, as the book points out, is for all of us to endorse the divestment movement, in which organizations are asked to drop their investments in fossil fuel based companies.

A Path to a Sustainable Future? Part I-Food

Thanks to Justin Stoler for pointing me to a NYTimes story about the ideas of a group of academics and policy-planners to keep the human species going for a while longer. As I have been saying for a long time, the idea of sustainable development is nonsense unless we make sure that the population stops growing and we figure out how to raise standards of living (and, of course ever more food) without relying on coal and oil. Indeed, we need to forget about the term "sustainable development," and think more pragmatically about improving human well-being without destroying the environment. This is exactly the approach taken in the Ecomodernist Manifesto. Let's talk about food (Part 1), energy (Part 2), and population growth (Part 3). With respect to food, The Ecomodernist Manifesto suggests that we need to be realistic:

This new framework favors a very different set of policies than those now in vogue. Eating the bounty of small-scale, local farming, for example, may be fine for denizens of Berkeley and Brooklyn. But using it to feed a world of nine billion people would consume every acre of the world’s surface. Big Agriculture, using synthetic fertilizers and modern production techniques, could feed many more people using much less land and water.

As the manifesto notes, as much as three-quarters of all deforestation globally occurred before the Industrial Revolution, when humanity was supposedly in harmony with Mother Nature. Over the last half century, the amount of land required for growing crops and animal feed per average person declined by half.

“If we want the developing world to reach even half our level of development we can’t do it without strategies to intensify production,” said Harvard’s David Keith, a signer of the new manifesto.

The eminent Australian conservationist William Laurance, who is not involved with the eco-modernists, put it this way, “We need to intensify agriculture in places that we have already developed rather than develop new places,” he said. “What is happening today is much more chaotic.” 

And, of course, we need to stop wasting good land growing corn as a biofuel, rather than as food. On top of that, everyone needs to eat less meat, so that land (and water) can be devoted to feeding human directly rather than feeding a lot of animals for slaughter. 

Manhattan's Lower East Side as a Prism of Demographic Change

The twentieth century witnessed the most dramatic demographic changes ever to occur among human populations--huge declines in death rates leading to massive population increase, declines in fertility, a high volume of migration, urbanization, and changes in the way that people organized their households, families, and their lives in general. I thought about this yesterday in the car as I was listening to Here and Now on NPR. A story about the incredible demographic shifts in Manhattan's Lower East Side brought to mind the fact that this small plot of land has witnessed all of those demographic changes. Indeed, "demographic change" was the major story line as expressed by Adam Steinberg of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.

In demography, the Lower East Side is especially important because it was the place that inspired Margaret Sanger to push for birth control. As it turns out, that story is also told at the Tenement Museum, as explained in a NYTimes article a few years ago:

WHEN you tour the Lower East Side Tenement Museum’s restoration at 97 Orchard Street, you walk through the experience of the immigrants who arrived in waves at the turn of the 20th century, often to live five or six to a tiny room. According to the 1900 census, the 18 wives in the Orchard Street building had given birth to 111 children altogether, of whom 67 were then alive.

A 40 percent infant and child mortality rate sounds shocking now. Back then it was the norm. Maternal mortality was 99 percent higher than it is today; 40 percent of those deaths were caused by infection, of which half resulted from illegal or self-induced abortion. Birth control was to revolutionize women’s health. But it would take a social revolution to get there.

In 1912, Margaret Sanger was a nurse serving poor Lower East Side women like Sadie Sachs, a mother of three who had been warned that another pregnancy would kill her. When Sadie asked her doctor how to prevent pregnancy, he told her to tell her husband to sleep on the roof. Pregnant again, Sadie self-induced an abortion, contracted an infection and died.

Sanger began to address women’s lack of information about birth control by writing a sex education column called “What Every Girl Should Know” for The Call, a socialist newspaper. But in 1914, a warrant was issued for Sanger’s arrest. She stood accused of violating the Comstock law, which made it a crime to circulate “obscenity” through the mail.

Out of those efforts came the family planning movement and an increasing global awareness of the issues associated with population growth. So, next time you head to the Lower East Side for dinner or drinks at one of the many bistros and bars, think about the incredible changes in child mortality, birth control, the in- and out-migration of people that the neighborhood has witnessed in its history, and the subtle but important impact that it has had on demographic changes everywhere.

Visualizing the Source of World Population Growth

Max Roser at Oxford University has done an amazing job of pulling together huge amounts of data and creating visualizations that can help us better understand the world at a glance. "Our World in Data" includes much more than demographic data, but in a sense everything about the modern world is embodied in the graph below, which traces the path of child mortality from the 18th century to the present. The increasing survival of children is the single most important cause of population growth, and it is bound up with the same aspects of the scientific revolution that created the modern world. The discoveries of antisepsis, vaccines, antibiotics, oral rehydration therapies, along with methods for ensuring clean water, adequate sewerage, and things like the use of bed nets, have been the combined forces behind keeping children alive in unprecedented numbers. But, equally important has been the sharing of those discoveries and technologies around the world. 

As it turns out, though, we value longer life much more than we value the limitation of offspring that is required to keep a balance with nature when the death rate goes down. The science that has gone into birth prevention is also amazing, but sharing it has not been as high on the world's agenda as sharing the death prevention technology.

Do Immigrants Contribute to Inequality in America? It Depends

The 2010 US Census found that 13 percent of people in this country were foreign-born, so we're pushing up to the nearly 15 percent foreign-born back in 1910. Since immigrants tend to be young people who are of reproductive age, a disproportionate share (one in five) of children under age 18 in this country have at least one parent who is foreign-born. What does this mean for the educational attainment of those children? That is a question that many have examined, and is taken up in a paper just published in the latest issue of Demography. The paper is open access, so you can check out the details for yourself. The authors, Renee Reichl Luthra & Thomas Soehl, set up the story this way:

Although the distribution of immigrants in terms of human capital is bimodal, it is especially the large group of immigrants with little formal education that raises concerns about the impact of immigration on social inequality. With the children of immigrants currently composing more than 20 % of the U.S. population under age 18, the extent to which this population will inherit the educational characteristics of their parents is significant for the immediate and long-term future of ethnic stratification in the United States.

Their concern is that much of the previous research on this topic has used aggregated data, rather than data that relates individual children to their own parents. As is true in so much social science research (ask me how I know!), the individual level data can tell a somewhat different story than data that are aggregated at the group level. As it turns out, they were able to tap into four large surveys that provided educational attainment data for children and their parents.

Three of these surveys sampled second-generation respondents in four different metropolitan areas in the United States: the Immigration and Intergenerational Mobility in Metropolitan Los Angeles (IIMMLA) survey; the Immigrant Second Generation in Metropolitan New York survey (ISGMNY); and the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Survey (CILS), which surveyed the children of immigrants in San Diego and Miami. In addition, we rely on the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS), which provides nationally representative samples of several na- tional origin groups.

The results do show that for the majority of immigrant groups the children achieve higher levels of education than their parents. Some groups, of course, such as Indians and Filipinos (and increasingly immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa) come to the US as documented immigrants with English language skills, higher than average education and higher status jobs. Their children are likely to do well, and are unlikely to contribute to growing inequality. For those children whose parents came as undocumented immigrants, the educational level in the family is low to begin with, and it is harder for those children to get ahead without extra-familial resources. Just advancing beyond their parents does not necessarily make them competitive with the children of native-born parents nor with the more privileged immigrant groups. They need more resources. This research is in line with policies aimed to provide extra assistance to children of certain immigrant groups who are at a real disadvantage in society. There is resistance to spending such funds, but the payoff is going to be a more productive next generation and that's good for everyone.