Tagged: James Fallows
Sydney overkill and Beijing underkill
Earlier this week, various blogs and media outlets reported that Beijing was experiencing frightful levels of air pollution. To document the crisis, China hand James Fallows cited what he called “the indispensable (and highly controversial)” Twitter feed @Beijingair, which produces hourly readings of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) in Beijing. On Monday, @Beijingair showed readings in excess of 300 µg/m3, contributing to conditions the US EPA characterizes as “hazardous,” and warranting “health warnings of emergency conditions.”
What caught my attention was Fallows’s assertion that the @BeijingAir feed is “the only known source of PM 2.5 readings in China.” That is astounding: one PM2.5 meter for a nation of 1.3 billion people. By contrast, Sydney, Nova Scotia, population ~27,000,* has seven instruments that monitor PM2.5.
Bear with me for a brief technical digression. PM2.5 is a measure of the concentration of airborne particles smaller than 2.5 microns (millionths of a metre)—tiny particles that can find their way deep inside people’s lungs. It’s the air quality scientist’s indicator of choice for air pollution most likely to damage health.
To confound matters further, Sydney’s closely monitored air quality appears to be quite good. Here is the most recent publicly available data, from a 24-hour sample collected on October 12.
Each column represents a different monitoring station, each of which has two types of monitors. The highest reading among them was less than 1/1ooth of that registered this week in Beijing. These monitors run for 24 hours once every six days, a schedule that coincides with Canada’s National Air Pollution Surveillance (NAPS) network. A seventh Sydney-based unit operates continuously and contributes data used to calculate Environment Canada’s Air Quality Health Index (AQHI), but the PM2.5 results are not reported separately.
This appears to be a clear case of underkill in Beijing, where much better data is warranted, and I would argue, overkill in Sydney, where air quality has been unremarkable by North American standards for the last two decades. Over-measurement in Sydney reflects the public panic over the Tar Ponds cleanup in the late ’90s and early ‘oughts. A few environmental activists persuaded residents that air-quality impacts from the Tar Ponds were putting their health at risk, a falsehood Environment Canada has been loathe to correct. Ironically, back before Sydney’s coke ovens closed in 1988, the city’s air likely did pose a health hazard, but went largely unmonitored.
The relative hazards of air quality in China vs. Nova Scotia show up clearly in this NASA map compiled from satellite readings of average PM2.5 levels around the world between 2001 and 2006:
I would ascribe both conditions — Sydney overkill and Beijing underkill — to the politicization of environmental monitoring. Back when Sydney’s polluting steel mill and coke ovens were the largest employer in a region short of jobs, few people wanted to hear about associated environmental concerns, and government was content to turn a blind eye. Similarly, the Chinese government is reluctant to highlight the environmental costs of its spectacular economic growth (although, as Fallows often points out, its environmental record is not so indifferent as some in the west assume).
In subsequent posts on Beijing air monitoring, Fallows has subtly adjusted his claim about @Beijingair’s putative uniqueness in China. He now describes it as “the only public readings of PM 2.5.” The controversial feed is based on an air monitoring unit on the roof of the US Embassy in Beijing. Official chinese annoyance over it was the subject of a Wikileaks cable, and may have contributed to the Chinese government decision to block access to Twitter in 2009. There are welcome early signs, here and here, that China may soon begin more appropriate monitoring. I would be surprised if they are not secretly monitoring PM2.5.
My point here is that citizens should take care to view environmental hazards in context, and always remain mindful that any chemical hazard is proportional to dose.
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*Sydney no longer exists as a municipal unit, having been amalgamated into the Cape Breton Regional Municipality in 1995. Wikipedia puts the “Sydney area” population in the 2006 census at 33,012, but this is suspiciously high. I was unable to ferret out local population numbers from StatsCan’s online census information, but will be delighted if readers can steer me to them.
Hey! Look over here! – updated
James Fallows
Contrarian regulars know of my admiration for the eclectic James Fallows, who writes and blogs for The Atlantic. James is in China this winter, finishing up a book, and while he does that, rotating squads of unterbloggers are filling in for him. I’m in the rotation this week, and I’ve posted three items so far:
Meet Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim.
Alexander Graham Bell Defends His Butler.
My week of guest-blogging happens to fall amidst a crush of other work, so it’s unlikely I’ll get much posted here until things settle down. But I will alert you to posts at Jim’s site.
Japan’s found decade
Eamonn Fingleton, an ex-pat Irish financial journalist who lives in Tokyo, takes a decidedly contrarian view of the Japanese economy. Far from stagnating for 20 years, as received media wisdom would have it, Japan’s economy has been ticking along just fine, he contends.
Guest-blogging for James Fallows at TheAtlantic.com website (where Contrarian will take a guest-blogging turn the week of March 14), Fingleton cites a couple of inconvenient facts in support of his analysis:
- Japan’s current account surplus in 1990, regarded as the onset of its 20-year economic malaise, stood at $36 billion. By last year, it had risen to $194 billion.
- Over the same 20-year period, the yen rose 65 percent against the US dollar, the strongest performance of any major currency.
Moneyquote:
How can such facts be reconciled with the “two lost decades” story? I don’t think they can. There is clearly a contradiction here, and after studying the facts on the ground in Tokyo for decades I find it hard to avoid the implausible-sounding conclusion that the story of Japan’s stagnation is a media myth.
Certainly anyone who visits Japan these days is struck by the obvious affluence even among average citizens. The cars on the roads, for instance, are generally much larger and better equipped than in the 1980s (indeed state of the art navigation devices, for instance, are more or less standard on many models). Overseas vacation travel has more than doubled since the 1980s. The Japanese boast the world’s most advanced cell phones, and the biggest and best high-definition television screens. Japan’s already long life expectancy has increased by nearly two years. Its Internet connections are some of the world’s fastest — something like ten times faster on average than American speeds.
The rest of Fingleton’s argument is, to say the least, intriguing.
A climate change believer praises clean coal
China hand James Fallows expends a lot of time and words reassuring Americans that China is not the unstoppable, omnipotent superpower they fear it to be. Reality is more complicated, he argues, especially when viewed up close, from within China, where he has spent years.
However, a Fallows cover story in the current Atlantic warns of one technology in which China is leaving the west in its dust: the quest for ways to burn coal without emitting carbon. In exhorting the west to greater effort in pursuit of clean coal, Fallows takes aim at one of the environmental movement’s most sacred bovines: the belief that clean coal is a PR fraud perpetrated by coal and coal-power interests bent on evading responsibility for the planet-destroying externalities of their industry.
This has brought a shower predictable wrath in comments sections, as well as some thoughtful rebuttal, including a post from David Roberts at Grist. Roberts disagrees with Fallows on the future of coal, but regards him as “one of the most reliably excellent journalists working today.” He pays Fallows the further compliment of summarizing accurately the four broad points in the Atlantic piece:
- Coal does enormous damage to people and the environment.
- It will be impossible to meet future global energy demand without coal, which is cheap and plentiful. We can not eliminate it from the energy mix.
- We urgently need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by a radical amount.
- Given 2 and 3, it follows that making coal cleaner must be a priority, alongside an “all-out effort on all other fronts, from conservation and efficiency to improved battery technology to wind- and solar-power systems to improved nuclear facilities”
Nevertheless, Roberts views the piece as a takedown of environmentalists (DFHs in his ironic coinage) to the benefit of the powers that be (PTBs), whose self-serving intransigence doesn’t merit the encouragement:
If DFHs continue to believe coal can be eliminated, they will… release more reports and white papers to that effect. They’ll lobby lawmakers (and a few of the ones from California might even listen). They’ll protest outside coal plants. They’ll organize Facebook petitions.
If the PTBs continue to believe that coal is a precious piece of American Heritage to be protected at all cost and that climate change is either alarmism or an outright hoax, they will continue to funnel subsidies to coal, block policies that subsidize clean energy, manipulate markets to protect coal from competition, and otherwise quash innovations that might threaten the interests of dirty energy incumbents. There will be no “all-out effort.”
Which is worse? Sounds to me like the PTBs are in a position to do serious damage to America’s energy future. The DFHs, not so much….
If you believe, as Fallows does, that climate change is an urgent, enormous challenge, then it’s hard to see the value in worrying that some idealistic green somewhere thinks we can tackle it without coal. Being contrarian toward DFHs is a little … safe.
Fallows responds here. The whole exchange, and especially the Fallows piece, deserve close reading.
I claim some expertise with this topic because Cape Breton, where I live, is an island whose recent human history is defined by coal, from the first coal mine in North America at Port Morien, through a coal-fueled industrial boom in the first half of the 20th Century, doomed government efforts to keep mines and a steel mill alive on subsidies the last half, and finally to the mines’ eventual closure, protracted fights over industrial cleanups, and an intractably depressed post-industrial economy. In a journalism career here, and subsequently as a communications director for a massive (and massively controversial) cleanup of coal-based industrial waste, I’ve lived with coal issues throughout my working life.
Coal is massively destructive – to the health and lives of miners who extract it from deep mines; to the landscape wherever it is extracted by strip mining and mountain top removal; to the health of those living downwind of coal-fired power plant and cement factories; and most urgently to the planetary ecosystem through climate altering emissions from those plants.
But… North Americans and Europeans use vastly more energy per capita than the Chinese or the Indians, and much of China’s and India’s coal consumption occurs in the service of exports to the West. This leaves us in no position to look down our long white noses and demand restraint from our third-world brothers and sisters, especially when we are doing so little to curb our own steadily rising consumption.
Since coal is far and away our most abundant fossil fuel, the only one in no imminent danger of running out any time soon, the unmistakable conclusion is that the world will continue to burn lots and lots of coal. Let’s at least explore the technical and economic feasibility of doing so without unleashing carbon into the atmosphere.
For Roberts’s ironic term DFHs, I would substitute <em>eco-narcissists</em>: those who demand a solution to environmental problems, but for whom no actual solution is ever pure enough. In their reasoning, climate change threatens the very existence of the planet, but heaven forfend we combat it with wind power (too many dead birds and too much disease-causing, low-frequency noise), nuclear (too dangerous, and too much long-lived radioactive waste), tidal (too much harm to fisheries and marine mammals), clean coal (“George Bush’s favourite techno-fix,” in the ad hominem phrase of Canadian Green Party leader Elizabeth May), etc., etc.
Roberts contends that even if Fallows and I are right, we’re picking on a basically harmless, not to say easy, target. I think he underestimates the harm caused by environmentalist dogs in the manger.
Imagine if the driving forces of the civil rights movement in the 1960s had demanded an end to segregation, but opposed specific actions to desegregate buses, lunch counters, high schools, etc. In fact, conservative elements in the movement harboured grave misgivings about direct action. Had their views held sway, how much would that have slowed progress on the issue? How much does the dominant environmental movement position on coal — “The world is burning, but don’t use fire extinguishers; they contain chemicals that might increase asthma rates” — slow progress on this issue? It’s not obvious to me that the effect is trivial.
If you truly believe climate change threatens life on the planet, then surely we need to throw everything we have at this problem — conservation, wind, solar, tidal, ocean energy, geothermal, nuclear, clean coal — and no potential solution should be dismissed out of hand, especially for reasons that are more firmly rooted in culture and ideology than science.
An election in Maine
Political junkies in Nova Scotia tend to keep an eye on elections in adjacent provinces, but not so much in adjacent US states. The Atlantic’s James Fallows points to an interesting race for governor of Maine, where independent candidate (and Fallows friend) Eliot Cutler seemed to be coming on strong last week, rising in the polls and winning an avalanche of major newspaper endorsements.
As Fallows points out, victory for an independent is not so far-fetched in the Pine Tree State, where two of the last five governors won election as independents. Viewed from a region devoid of political leadership, Cutler sounds appealing.
He is serious (but also funny), well experienced in politics and with a politician’s natural affability, and extremely ambitious for his home state. Maine has all the natural endowments that tourists and residents of the rest of the country know about — but also some very deep problems with its school systems, its economic base, and the general preparedness of its year-round population for modern global competition. I heard Eliot Cutler talk about this a lot while we were in China [where Fallows and Culter both lived for several years]. Whatever new factory I’d visited or research project he’d learned about became the prelude for a discussion of what Maine would need to do to keep up. If you’re not from Maine, a little of this can go a long way — but for people of the state it’s a good kind of obsession for a public figure to have.
Sounds a bit like Frank McKenna.
Your lying pants
Last year, James Fallows illustrated the growing girth of North American’s by digging up photos from the 1950s of Jackie Gleason, Alfred Hitchcock, and Ramond Burr. Gleason was a notorious fatso. Hitchcock and Burr were celebrated symbols of portliness. None would draw a second look today.
Now comes evidence that the shift in our perception of what constitutes fat has been getting a quiet nudge from pants manufacturers in the form of “vanity sizing.”
Abram Sauer, of Esquire’s Style Blog, snuck a measuring tape into the change rooms of a series of men’s retail chains and came back with this heartbreaking news about the real state of his, and our, waistlines:
I recently bought some Haggar and Dockers pants on extreme sale at the Bay. My, but they’re comfy. Now I know why, dammit.
Hat tip: Daily Dish.
The choropleth problem
Before a reader draws me up short on Monday’s link to an interactive map showing explosive growth of unemployment in the US, I should acknowledge the choropleth problem. James Fallows introduced the issue, and the word, in a blog post about the same map Tuesday.
The problem is that geography does not equal population. A choropleth map depicting social trends (unemployment or election results) can mislead if its geographical units (states or provinces) vary widely in population. (The word derives from Greek terms for “area/region” + “multiply.”) Fallows gives the example of the razor thin 2004 US presidential election, in which the Democratic candidate outpolled the Republican, but a state-by-state choropleth gives the impression of a Republican landslide, because lower density Republican states take up most of the room. Maps that resolve to a county-by-county level (as opposed to state-by-state or province-by-province) greatly reduce but do not eliminate the distortion.
Cartograms are maps that attempt to solve the choropleth problem by distorting their geographical units to reflect the numerical value being measured. The county-by-county cartogram of the same election (at left) distorts boundaries but reflects the results more accurately. More here, here, and here. My earlier, much-complained about post about altitude maps depicting crime in San Francisco, relied on a special category of choropleth known to cartobuffs as a prism map.
War crime – followup
The appalling Wikileaks video showing a US helicopter gunship mowing down a group of Iraqis, including two Reuters journalists, two children, and a pair of Good Samaritans whose only offense was to come to the aid of a badly injured man, continues to provoke reaction. Reader Cliff White writes:
You can’t help wondering after watching that terrible video if killing has just become a game to those soldiers in the helicopter. It’s both terribly disturbing and dismaying to listen to their casual banter as they go about their “work”. Even when they learn that children have been injured it’s no big deal, it’s someone else’s fault. I’d like to see videos like this publicly displayed every time war fever is on the rise in the country. The reality is that this kind of behaviour is not the exception in war, it is frequently the norm…. Given the situation in Iraq at the time the video was shot was it standard military practice to kill anyone carrying a weapon and anyone else who happen to be in their vicinity?
Two things are important here: While the behavior of the soldiers was shocking, it’s probably not unusual. As Cliff says, when we make the decision to go to war, we need to understand that this is exactly what we are deciding to do. Second, ultimate responsibility for this travesty lies beyond the helicopter, with the generals in the war rooms.
I have been shocked at the breadth of efforts to dismiss the video as somehow not reflecting reality, or evidence that liberals don’t support “our boys.” You expect this from right wing organs like the National Standard, where blogger Bill Roggio posted an error-riddled screed against Wikileaks, later nicely debunked by Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald, who has been a one-man truth squad on the story. Among other things, Roggio and the New York Times chided Wikileaks for editing the tape, accusing them of redacting critical context. Wikileaks did edit the tape, but it simultaneously released the 39-minute original, completely unedited.
Greenwald’s coverage pointed me to a blogger called Jotman, who has relentlessly cataloged CNN’s cowardly coverage of the video (here, here, and here.) CNN won’t even show its viewers the most incriminating parts of the video. In a gesture reminiscent of Elvis Presley’s maiden appearance on the Ed Sullivan show, only far more sinister, Blitzer and Co. black out part of the screen when the shooting starts—all out of deference to the families of the victims, of course.
George Packer, a long time apologist for the war, pooh-poohs the video in, of all places, his New Yorker blog. The main thrust is that less worldly wise civilians fail to consider the context, fog of war, recent firefight, violent history of the neighborhood, blah, blah, blah, before condemning the soldiers’ actions. The blog is worth read both as an example of sophistry, and for the acuity of the New Yorker readers’ rebuttals.
The most apt response to this line of rationalization comes in a pair of unnamed readers’ comments to James Fallows’s blog yesterday.
First a question: If these loose rules of engagement were in common use in 2007, how do we explain the behavior of the victims? They were aware of the helicopter. Why didn’t they recognize their danger? [Ie, if it was commonplace for gunships to be shooting people with as little immediate provocation as we see, why did they dare expose themselves?]
Next, an observation: Door gunner-ship is not randomly assigned. It may well be that 99% (or 99.9%) of U.S. troops would not have allowed this tragedy to occur, but that simple fact quite possibly disqualified all those individuals from being in that position. (And I note this as a direct result of my Army tour in Viet Nam.) The same, of course, applies to Granger and gang at Abu Ghraib. It is possible to indict the individuals involved and their commanders and ‘the system’ without involving American troops categorically.
And a conclusion: Until one can say one would apply precisely the same reasoning and the same judgment without knowing the nationality of the miscreants, one flounders.
and:
You might — MIGHT — justify the initial attack on the group on the ground, but the American soldiers were itching to fire on the two men whose only crime was that they were trying to come to the aid of a wounded man. Those men in the van clearly did not have any weapons, and posed no threat to anyone. But the American soldiers were almost pleading with their command to be given permission to kill them. If you are going to excuse this by putting it into “context,” then you can excuse almost any behavior.
War crime – reaction
Some reaction to yesterday’s Wikileak disclosure of horrific footage from an American helicopter gunship mowing down unarmed* civilians, as crewmen gloated over the killings.
I can’t pretend to know the full truth or circumstances of this. But at face value it is the most damaging documentation of abuse since the Abu Ghraib prison-torture photos. As you watch, imagine the reaction in the US if the people on the ground had been Americans and the people on the machine guns had been Iraqi, Russian, Chinese, or any other nationality. As with Abu Ghraib, and again assuming this is what it seems to be, the temptation will be to blame the operations-level people who were, in this case, chuckling as they mowed people down. That’s not where the real responsibility lies.
Huffington Post’s Dan Froomkin:
Reporters working for WikiLeaks determined that the driver of the van [that arrived on the scene after the initial carnage and tried to rescue an injured man, only to be destroyed by the gunship] was a Good Samaritan on his way to take his small children to a tutoring session. He was killed and his two children were badly injured.
A New York Times dispatch from Mosul, Iraq, reports that the family of 22-year-old Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, who was killed in the incident, burst into tears as they watched the video.
“At last the truth has been revealed, and I’m satisfied God revealed the truth,” said Noor Eldeen, the father of the photographer… “If such an incident took place in America, even if an animal were killed like this, what would they do?”
Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald notes that the Pentagon was forced to admit Sunday that its initial whitewash of a similar war crime in Paktia Province, Afghanistan, February 12 was false.
[A]fter surrounding a home where a celebration of a new birth was taking place, [US soldiers] shot dead two male civilians (government officials) who exited the house in order to inquire why they had been surrounded, and then shot and killed three female relatives (a pregnant mother of ten, a pregnant mother of six, and a teenager).
WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange on MSNBC:
In this case, we really have unique material that shows how modern aerial warfare is done… [It] shows the debasement and moral corruption of soldiers as a result of war. It seems like they are playing video games with people’s lives.
Assange and Greenwald joined Iraq expert and surge architect Brett McGurck and Lt. Col Anthony Shaffer on MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan show to discuss the incident. I have embedded the conversation below, but the video does not show up on some browsers. You can link to it here.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
* Several sources say at least one person in the video appears to have a rifle dangling off his shoulder. I didn’t notice it. However, the people from the passing van who happened on the scene and attempted to remove the man injured in the first assault man were the clearly unarmed.
Editor-in-chief
A photo recently added to the White House photostream on Flickr reveals a startling presidential penchant for meticulous editing:
Ouch! The speechwriter who endured this grueling feedback, Jon Favreau, is the second-youngest in presidential history. The only man every to serve at a more tender age, Atlantic magazine writer and former Jimmy Carter speechwriter James Fallows, offered these comments on the photo:
The volume of Obama’s editing is unusual but not unheard of. The quality of his editing is exceptional for a public figure. Think of just one sentence in the shot above. The original says “This has always been our history.” Obama changes it to, “This has always been the history of our progress.” A different, more interesting, and more original-sounding thought.
Those wishing to track President Obama’s edits in detail can view an enormous version of the photo here.
