The Shoreline Should Be Treated As A Commons, Not Private Property

The American cult of individualism, the doctrine of private property, and human short-sightedness are combining to set the stage for a vast, wholesale tragedy in New York Harbor:

Thomas Kaplan, New York’s Storm Recovery Plan Gets Federal Approval

A proposal to buy the damaged homes of New Yorkers who want to relocate after Hurricane Sandy is finding few takers, as most residents opt to rebuild, state officials said on Friday.

“It’s up to the homeowner, and the vast bulk of homeowners are deciding to stay right where they are and rebuild,” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said at a news conference in Albany.

Why is it up to the homeowner  when it is the government spending billions of our money to stupidly rebuild provate homes in neighborhoods that will undoubtedly be swept by hurricanes again in the near future? Will Cuomo say the same, then? Of course, he may be out of the Governor’s mansion then, and off doing other things.

We are in the postnormal, and this is the sort of result we can expect. We’re confronted with an existential threat — the increasing violence and frequency of ocean storms, rising sea levels — and we respond as if this is still 1950, or 1850. We are unwilling to adopt new responses to new problems, and the first barrier is our understanding: we don’t realize we aren’t in Kansas anymore, but on the other side of the rainbow.

People are over Sandy now. We’re on to the next tragedy. Done. Forgotten.

27 April 2013 9 Permalink

The West Is Returning To Grassland

The great drought is making ‘ranching’ beef cattle unaffordable. I put ‘ranching’ in quotes because it sounds old-timey, and conceals the fact that it’s industrial agriculture, based on low-cost oil, abundant water, cheap fertilizer, cheap grain, and the beneficence of the US Department of Agriculture. And now that water is getting scarce — and likely to remain scarce for decades — the system is falling apart.

However, some ranchers are doing pretty well, principally because the reverted to native grasses in the fields, and are raising grass-fed, not grain-fed, beeves:

Stephanie Strom, A Long Drought Tests Texas Cattle Ranchers’ Patience and Creativity

[…] the Prices have had to buy hay to feed their cows during only two weeks in the last three years. Their animals graze the “bunch grasses” that were native throughout the prairie when the buffalo roamed and that Mr. Price reintroduced on his ranch after admiring their resilience on a small patch of virgin prairie left on his property.

Those grasses, which grow to five or six feet tall, have long roots that can tap into water far underground. Though they live a long time, when such grasses die, the roots deteriorate, helping to aerate the land for better water penetration. The thicker, taller grasses also create a kind of webbing that slows runoff, keeps sediment out of lakes and tanks, and creates shade that protects lower growing grasses and helps the ground retain water.

At times, Mr. Price rotates his cattle twice a day to give the grasses a chance to recover. He has not had to cull his herd, maintaining about 200 head throughout the drought, though he has not replaced cows as quickly as he would have if rainfall patterns were more normal.

He also has developed another source of revenue: hunters from Dallas and Fort Worth who pay to shoot the quail that like to nest in the bunch grasses on his land.

The Prices have won several awards for their land management practices. “I believe this is the best way to do it, not just for profit but also for sustainability,” Mr. Price said. “But every ranch is a specific entity with its own resources — its own shade, its own water.”

Asked whether he thought the Texas cattle industry would ever recover its former glory, Mr. Price thought for a moment. “We’re all very concerned about the decline in cattle numbers and also about the losses of infrastructure, feedlots and slaughtering facilities,” he said.

Reminds me of Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm in Virginia, who has been advocating grass-fed cattle for decades as the best way to convert sunlight into protein. It requires more human interaction — moving the cattle from one field to another to allow the grasses to recover — but less of all other artificial inputs. 

The recovery of the grouse speaks volumes about the recovery of the grasslands. In a few years, the only ranchers left in the dry lands will be the ones that fall back on tending the grasses, and using the cattle to fertilize them, with a valuable by-product: beef.

6 April 2013 33 Permalink

New Mexico Water Wars

The drought in the Southwest continues, and the region’s agriculture is being destroyed. In New Mexico, farmers — who use 80% of the water there — are using every means necessary to keep ‘their’ water flowing:

Felicity Barringer, New Mexico Farmers Seek ‘Priority Call’ as Drought Persists

How dry is it? In 2012, parts of the riverbed were dry for 77 days, said Mike Hamman, the area manager for the federal Bureau of Reclamation in Albuquerque. In 2011, with the drought sending feed prices up, the Clovis Livestock auction house, the region’s biggest, sold 144,000 head of cattle, 20 percent above average. “Some herds have sold out,” said the president, Charlie Rogers. Most ranchers have reduced their herds to 25 percent of their previous size, he said. Hay, he said, costs too much.

Higher prices, however, did not offset the losses that hay farmers like Mark Weems and Billy Grandi in Carlsbad suffered when they could not water their fields. Mr. Weems said he had to sell 22 acres to make payments on his farm and equipment. The buyer: an oil-related company that wanted the water rights.

As for Brantley Lake, the nearest reservoir, “Two months ago it looked like you could drive a four-wheeler across it,” Mr. Weems said. Mr. Grandi added, “If the drought continues, a lot of farmers will just have to sell out.”

Mr. Hamman understands that fear. “If indeed we are moving into a new climate regime that is going to limit the ability to continue the status quo,” he said “we may have to do something different — reallocate the system, or make adjustments to existing settlements.”

The climate and the economy on which existing compacts were based may have fundamentally changed. In the West, “the 1 percent of the economy that is farming takes close to 80 percent of the water,” Dr. McCool said. The Pecos feud, he said, is a prelude to wars on rivers like the Colorado, which provides water to more than 20 million people. A recent federal study showed that the Colorado will not have enough water to satisfy existing claims.

In a shakeout, farmers cannot prevail, Dr. McCool argued. “Let’s see, we could dry up some hay farms or we could dry up Las Vegas. Which one is it going to be? It’s going to be the new economy of the West with the focus on recreation and tourism and hunting.”

“There will be farming ghost towns,” he said.

At the moment, the discussion is about who gets the available water, the farmers or the cities. Relatively quickly though, it will be more obvious that we’ve moved into a postnormal dilemma, when the farmers are bust and there is no water for Las Vegas, either. This is not a ‘problem’ that can be ‘solved’.

Time for the farmers and ranchers to move where there is water, like the Ohio River valley, or here, in NY, along the Hudson. The Southwest is quickly reverting to desert, after a geologically brief period of wet seasons, and it’s just no place to grow alfalfa or make mozzarela cheese.

27 March 2013 7 Permalink

The Arab Spring And Climate Change

Anne-Marie Slaughter, Caitlin Werrell, and Francesco Femia have released The Arab Spring and Climate Change, but they stop short of saying that drought in the region and climate events elsewhere caused the Arab Spring:

“The Arab Spring and Climate Change” does not argue that climate change caused the revolutions that have shaken the Arab world over the past two years. But the essays collected in this slim volume make a compelling case that the consequences of climate change are stressors that can ignite a volatile mix of underlying causes that erupt into revolution.

This is a giant hedge, and when examined closely, as is the case in the collected essays, the evidence for a causal linkage is pretty solid.

All of these authors [the contributors to the report] are admirably cautious in acknowledging the complexity of the events they are analyzing and the difficulty of drawing precise causal arrows. But consider the following statements:

• “A once-in-a-century winter drought in China contributed to global wheat shortages and skyrocketing bread prices in Egypt, the world’s largest wheat importer.” (Sternberg, p. 7)
• “Of the world’s major wheat-importing companies per capita, “the top nine importers are all in the Middle East; seven had political protests resulting in civilian deaths in 2011.” (Sternberg, p. 12)
• “The world is entering a period of ‘agflation,’ or inflation driven by rising prices for agricultural commodities.” (Johnstone and Mazo, p. 21)
• “Drought and desertification across much of the Sahel—northern Nigeria, for example, is losing 1,350 square miles a year to desertification—have undermined agricultural and pastoral livelihoods,” contributing  to urbanization and massive flows of migrants. (Werz and Hoffman, p. 37)
• “As the region’s population continues to climb, water availability per capita is projected to plummet. … Rapid urban expansion across the Arab world increasingly risks overburdening existing infrastructure and outpacing local capacities to expand service.” (Michel and Yacoubian, p. 45)
• “We have reached the point where a regional climate event can have a global extent.” (Sternberg, p. 10)

In September 2011, I wrote here, 

Youthful hope may soon change into embittered and obdurate anger, unless structural changes in the economy take place, not just a series of political coups unseating pharaonic despots.The Arab Spring has been mythologized into a renaissance of suppressed people, catalyzed by the agency of social media. An uplifting passion play, suitable for several upcoming major motion pictures, I am sure. But for those that are looking closely into the drivers of the unrest there, you will find deep unemployment caused by rising food prices tied to long-term drought in the entire region and food production problems elsewhere. The transition of power that will follow won’t turn Libya and Egypt into Spain and Portugal, after the fall of their fascist regimes. Tunis and Cairo won’t morph into Westernism with something like parliamentary democracies, closely integrated into a neoliberal world, the way that Madrid and Lisbon managed to do. So I suggest that the heated rhetoric about those countries be cooled for a bit, until we can see the shape of what emerges. Most importantly, the drought, high food prices, and endemic unemployment and lack of opportunity for the youth of the Arab world has not been banished with Mubarak and Gaddafi. They will be with us for a long time to come. And youthful hope may soon change into embittered and obdurate anger, unless structural changes in the economy take place, not just a series of political coups unseating pharaonic despots.

It’s increasingly clear that the drought is continuing, perhaps even worsening, and climate-related agriculture problems in other places — like the worsening droughts in the US and China — are leading to a rise in food prices worldwide, which will continue food price pressures in the Arab world and elsewhere.

3 March 2013 6 Permalink

Get Ready For The Drought Of 2013

It’s going to be really, really dry this year, out west.

Thin Snowpack Signals Summer of Fire and Drought - NYTimes.com

After enduring last summer’s destructive drought, farmers, ranchers and officials across the parched Western states had hoped that plentiful winter snows would replenish the ground and refill their rivers, breaking the grip of one of the worst dry spells in American history. No such luck.

Lakes are half full and mountain snows are thin, omens of another summer of drought and wildfire. Complicating matters, many of the worst-hit states have even less water on hand than a year ago, raising the specter of shortages and rationing that could inflict another year of losses on struggling farms.

Reservoir levels have fallen sharply in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada. The soil is drier than normal. And while a few recent snowstorms have cheered skiers, the snowpack is so thin in parts of Colorado that the government has declared an “extreme drought” around the ski havens of Vail and Aspen.

“We’re worse off than we were a year ago,” said Brian Fuchs, a climatologist at the National Drought Mitigation Center.

The only good news is that this could be the tinder to set a fire under Washington’s ass, and Obama’s. People have come to accept the direct connection between climate change and weather calamities like Hurricane Sandy and the Drought of 2013. Obama will have to take serious action, because this year is going to be even drier that the last two, and American food production will be seriously impacted.

And it’s going to be really bad:

“A year ago we went into the spring season with most of the reservoirs full,” Mr. Hungenberg said. “This year, you’re going in with basically everything empty.”

National and state forecasters — some of whom now end phone calls by saying, “Pray for snow” — do have some hope. An especially wet springtime could still spare the Western plains and mountains and prime the soil for planting. But forecasts are murky: They predict warmer weather and less precipitation across the West over the next three months but say the Midwest could see more rain than usual.

Water experts get more nervous with each passing day.

“We’re running out of time,” said Andy Pineda of the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District. “We only have a month or two, and we are so far behind it’s going to take storms of epic amounts just to get us back to what we would think of as normal.”

And storms of epic amounts would lead to flooding, especially damaging since the ground is so dry.

We are going to see a lot of farmers quitting the land, and moving away from the dry dusty middle of the continent. Moving back to the Ohio and Hudson River valleys, I bet.

23 February 2013 10 Permalink

The Biggest If Of All, Part II

Scott Rafer riffs on my recent post, The Biggest If Of All, where I suggest that this time it might be different, this time we may have moved into a new era, a new economy: the postnormal. Rafer says it’s just the same old same old:

@stoweboyd This purely academic question gets asked every business cycle. It was being asked on the upside in the late 90s if you recall. In this (not very) regulated financial environment, investment managers figure out how to play new conditions which makes the answer to your question “No” +/- 20%. 

Well, logically, just because someone said X would happen 15 years ago and it didn’t doesn’t mean that someone saying X now is wrong. Those are independent events, at least in principle.

My point is something else entirely. We are living in a time where uncertainty is so great that businesses and investors are finding it increasingly impossible to make judgments about where things are headed. Andrew Ross Sorkin recently wrote about this:

The Election Won’t Solve All Puzzles - Andrew Ross Sorkin via NYTimes.com

“Uncertainty” has become the watchword over the last several years for many chief executives, politicians and economists as an explanation — or perhaps an excuse — for the economy’s slow growth, for the lack of hiring by business and for the volatility in the stock market.

“The claim is that businesses and households are uncertain about future taxes, spending levels, regulations, health care reform and interest rates. In turn, this uncertainty leads them to postpone spending on investment and consumption goods and to slow hiring, impeding the recovery,” a group of professors from Stanford University and the University of Chicago wrote in a study that found “current levels of economic policy uncertainty are at extremely elevated levels compared to recent history.” (The professors have created a Web site, policyuncertainty.com, where you can track the “uncertainty” levels.)

If you go look at the other charts — like the European Policy Uncertainty Index — economic uncertainty has been steadily rising since 2007.

We are moving from a world of problems, which demand speed, analysis, and elimination of uncertainty to solve, to a world of dilemmas, which demand patience, sense-making, and an engagement of uncertainty. - Denise CaronSo my point is different. Investors and other business people will find it harder to reason about possible futures because we have moved onto shifting ground. It’s a VUCA world, characterized as increased volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.

As I wrote in July, regarding our blindness regarding the postnormal climate we’ve made for ourselves,

The biggest problem is that people’s thinking patterns are stuck in the old days, and I don’t just mean their expectations about ‘normal’ weather. No, even worse is that people can’t accept the reality that in the post-normal we will never have the luxury of time to assess and then adapt. Linear problem-solving approaches will simply not work anymore.

But this is not a call for more old world leadership, characterized by moving fast, and looking for permanent ‘solutions’ to well-defined and researched ‘problems’. Instead, we need leaders demonstrating the ‘VUCA Prime’ characteristics, as Bob Johansen has styled it.

Denise Caron makes the break between the old world and the new one very clear:

We are moving from a world of problems, which demand speed, analysis, and elimination of uncertainty to solve, to a world of dilemmas, which demand patience, sense-making, and an engagement of uncertainty.

So, in this context, there is no ‘solution’ to infrastructure stress and failure based on more violent weather. We are stuck in a problem space which is fundamentally unsolvable, but we have to try to make sense of this in the context of the larger world.

For example: the financial constraints of our weakened economy mean that we may not be able to repair the interstate highway system, but we might extend and maintain the train system for people moving. Do we have the foresight to disinvest in the highway system? Can we shift from a truck-based logistics system to boats, trains, and airships for long-distance hauling?

We are just as trapped in our thinking as we are in a rapidly changing global weather system, and without leaders with the mindset and skillset geared for the post-normal world, we will never find our way out.

The analysis about weather is paralleled by our inability to logically untangle the financial mess the world is in. And it’s not that we need to get smarter, do more analysis, put more brilliant minds on it: the system is so large, interconnected, and complex that it cannot be understood. It is a complex non-linear system, barreling along as fast as we can fuel it, and it cannot be neatly reduced to a set of smaller, more easily understood parts, unless we actually start disconnecting the parts.

But are we taking steps to disconnect the world’s financial markets? To raise trade barriers, and diminish global supply chains? To require companies to only do business in one country, and to only compete in a single marketplace? To break up vertically integrated multinationals? No. And leaving aside whether this would be a ‘good’ thing in some moral or ideological sense, we aren’t doing it. If anything, the world is growing more interconnected and complex. 

At the macroeconomic level, this poses astonishing policy issues, the first of which is seeing the forest for the trees: that we’ve moved into new territory and we have no map. At the microeconomic level, the investor or business leader has a set of tools that used to work, a map that used to show the way, a compass that found north. But they don’t work anymore. They no longer point the way, or suggest that all ways forward are equally uncertain of success.

Specifically with regard to investments in tech, David Lee at SV Angel recently said ‘It has never been easier to start a company, and never harder to build one’, regarding the structural issues in the tech funding world. VC’s don’t see a clear path for a real return on investments in commerce 2.0, games, or apps that rely on Facebook, Twitter, or other platforms. And the result of that uncertainty is being reflected in a decreased amount of later stage investments. This is an echo of the international fund managers I wrote about in the first installment of The Biggest If Of All, many of whom state that uncertainty has never been greater, or of more import in the investment world. So they, like tech VC’s, are holding back, and waiting for a return to normalcy.

But what if it never comes?

We know that the changes we’ve already made to our ecological world will take at least hundreds of years to reverse. Perhaps we’ve turned a similar curve in the economic and policy world. And we don’t know what the world will look like in a hundred years or so, and perhaps there is simply no way to figure out what is going to happen in the next five years, either.

14 January 2013 27 rafer Permalink

Post-Normal Weather: The Need For New Leadership

As the weather spins into the post-normal — more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) — our aging infrastructure is failing, and we are going to see much more serious disruptions in the future because our governments a/ don’t want to talk about the climate (too scary) and b/ are laying off the workers that we should be using to fix the power lines, train tracks, roadways and bridges.

Matthew Wald and John Schwartz, Rise in Weather Extremes Threatens Infrastructure via NYTimes.com

The frequency of extreme weather is up over the past few years, and people who deal with infrastructure expect that to continue. Leading climate models suggest that weather-sensitive parts of the infrastructure will be seeing many more extreme episodes, along with shifts in weather patterns and rising maximum (and minimum) temperatures.

“We’ve got the ‘storm of the century’ every year now,” said Bill Gausman, a senior vice president and a 38-year veteran at the Potomac Electric Power Company, which took eight days to recover from the June 29 “derecho” storm that raced from the Midwest to the Eastern Seaboard and knocked out power for 4.3 million people in 10 states and the District of Columbia.

In general, nobody in charge of anything made of steel and concrete can plan based on past trends, said Vicki Arroyo, who heads the Georgetown Climate Center at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, a clearinghouse on climate-change adaptation strategies.

Highways, Mr. Scullion noted, are designed for the local climate, taking into account things like temperature and rainfall. “When you get outside of those things, man, all bets are off.” As weather patterns shift, he said, “we could have some very dramatic failures of highway systems.”

Adaptation efforts are taking place nationwide. Some are as huge as the multibillion-dollar effort to increase the height of levees and flood walls in New Orleans because of projections of rising sea levels and stronger storms to come; others as mundane as resizing drainage culverts in Vermont, where Hurricane Irene damaged about 2,000 culverts. “They just got blown out,” said Sue Minter, the Irene recovery officer for the state.

In Washington, the subway system, which opened in 1976, has revised its operating procedures. Authorities will now watch the rail temperature and order trains to slow down if it gets too hot. When railroads install tracks in cold weather, they heat the metal to a “neutral” temperature so it reaches a moderate length, and will withstand the shrinkage and growth typical for that climate. But if the heat historically seen in the South becomes normal farther north, the rails will be too long for that weather, and will have an increased tendency to kink. So railroad officials say they will begin to undertake much more frequent inspection.

Some utilities are re-examining long-held views on the economics of protecting against the weather. Pepco, the utility serving the area around Washington, has repeatedly studied the idea of burying more power lines, and the company and its regulators have always decided that the cost outweighed the benefit. But the company has had five storms in the last two and a half years for which recovery took at least five days, and after the derecho last month, the consensus has changed. Both the District of Columbia and Montgomery County, Md., have held hearings to discuss the option — though in the District alone, the cost would be $1.1 billion to $5.8 billion, depending on how many of the power lines were put underground.

Even without storms, heat waves are changing the pattern of electricity use, raising peak demand higher than ever. That implies the need for new investment in generating stations, transmission lines and local distribution lines that will be used at full capacity for only a few hundred hours a year. “We build the system for the 10 percent of the time we need it,” said Mark Gabriel, a senior vice president of Black & Veatch, an engineering firm. And that 10 percent is “getting more extreme.”

Even as the effects of weather extremes become more evident, precisely how to react is still largely an open question, said David Behar, the climate program director for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission. “We’re living in an era of assessment, not yet in an area of adaptation,” he said.

In the post-normal we will never have the luxury of time to assess and then adapt. Linear problem-solving approaches will simply not work anymore.

The biggest problem is that people’s thinking patterns are stuck in the old days, and I don’t just mean their expectations about ‘normal’ weather. No, even worse is that people can’t accept the reality that in the post-normal we will never have the luxury of time to assess and then adapt. Linear problem-solving approaches will simply not work anymore.

But this is not a call for more old world leadership, characterized by moving fast, and looking for permanent ‘solutions’ to well-defined and researched ‘problems’. Instead, we need leaders demonstrating the ‘VUCA Prime’ characteristics, as Bob Johansen has styled it.

Denise Caron makes the break between the old world and the new one very clear:

We are moving from a world of problems, which demand speed, analysis, and elimination of uncertainty to solve, to a world of dilemmas, which demand patience, sense-making, and an engagement of uncertainty.

So, in this context, there is no ‘solution’ to infrastructure stress and failure based on more violent weather. We are stuck in a problem space which is fundamentally unsolvable, but we have to try to make sense of this in the context of the larger world.

For example: the financial constraints of our weakened economy mean that we may not be able to repair the interstate highway system, but we might extend and maintain the train system for people moving. Do we  have the foresight to disinvest in the highway system? Can we shift from a truck-based logistics system to boats, trains, and airships long-distance hauling?

We are just as trapped in our thinking as we are in a rapidly changing global weather system, and without leaders with the mindset and skillset geared for the post-normal world, we will never find our way out.

26 July 2012 11 underpaidgenius Permalink