If you love the earth, then kill your cat

An NY Times article re-iterates a conclusion I've heard before: cats are bad for the environment.

Ecological disaster.  Image from NY Times.

Are we too far gone to save?

Just attended the beautiful Ellerslie Flower Show at Hagley Park, here in Christchurch. Pictured here is a a mask from one of the competitions.

Near the exit from the Countdown food tent, I saw a lady putting a plastic cup into the recycle bin.

"Are you sure that's recyclable?" I asked. Asking the question was my first mistake. I'm not the recycling cop.

She said, "It doesn't matter. Mankind is already too far gone. We may as well use up what we've got and get it over with."

My second mistake was trying to reason with an irrational person. "Hang on, don't spoil it for the rest of us. Better to work to keep things going."

Then she got annoyed. "Have you got a car? Huh!? Do you own a car!?" But by then, I'd caught on. I clammed up, not wanting to say I drive a Prius, that I'd taken the bike to the garden show, and I've committed a huge part of my energy to finding solutions to environmental problems. Whatever I do, she would see hypocrisy in it.

The world environment is in bad shape, and it's our fault. The solution, though, is to pull together, and tell our government to pull the big levers required to make the big changes. Fatalism is an excuse for a tragically depressed person to act stupid. Hope calls forth creativity and hard work.

It's cheap to be green

Friends & colleagues, please read Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman's column in the NY Times today, "It's Easy Being Green."

Last June, I gave a decision tree on global warming. The distinguished economist says my numbers are wrong - that it's much cheaper to avert disaster than I had assumed. Skepticism of global warming is like smoking. It's socially unacceptable. We have to fix this earth.

If you want good news on the subject, read up on biochar. It would be cool to merge a simulation of a region's farms with a transportation problem, to see if biochar would do against petroleum, examining requirements and emissions for water, nitrate, and carbon. I bet the farmers would come out ahead from all that transportation saved. But I'm too busy with the water market work to get to it this year.

Another reason to avoid sugar drinks

Researchers at Georgia State have shown that fructose disrupts memory in rats.

Besides the obvious, another point struck me: "Fructose, unlike another sugar, glucose, is processed almost solely by the liver, and produces an excessive amount of triglycerides — fat which gets into the bloodstream. Triglycerides can interfere with insulin signaling in the brain, which plays a major role in brain cell survival and plasticity, or the ability for the brain to change based on new experiences." Whoa! Dr Atkins would be pleased.

When we think of Coca Cola, what comes to mind? It's all bikini-clad girls, dancing, sports, and good times. Fantastic marketing! What actually happens to us when we drink the stuff? We get health and brain problems, our teeth literally dissolve, we get fat, we get diabetes, we get dementia. And we've wasted a lot of money, which incentivizes environmental damage.

I've written about this problem before. If you drink sugar drinks (or worse, low-cal chemical drinks), ask yourself, "Am I suckered by the marketers? Why don't I just drink water or milk, which are cheaper and healthier?"

File this one under agriculture, corruption, diet, environment, greenwash, nutrition, and obesity. Why all those tags? Because agriculture is taking massive subsidies to give us pseudo-food that makes us sick, while the marketers do their part to hide the facts.

Dental image source.

Plant, Krauss, and ... Toth.

Whoa! Cool video. Maybe the world can still make cool music.



More importantly, here's another lurch toward saving the world with O.R.: my smart colleague Sandor Toth at University of Washington won the "Best Presentation" prize in forestry for "Optimal Reserve Selection Subject to Contiguous Habitat Requirements." The work aims to find the best way to connect plots of land into larger contiguous regions in order to improve ecological functions. Hard stuff - graph theory, economics, computer programming, algorithms, but this work and similar research will eventually show us how to improve ecology on a continental scale, and at least cost.

Here we are, nerds plodding along with our computers and algorithms, and few people see the impending revolution in the environment. Engineers and scientists don't get the visibility of the rock stars. Saving the world won't be easy, and undoing all the environmental damage we've done will take the best talent we can find to solve these problems, and political will, too. These problems are solvable, and the political will is starting to be there. But, again, we do need talented folk to help us. Then we have to raise the profile of these solutions sufficiently high that society can buy into them.

Save the economy by losing weight.

CNN iReport has a post titled "Won't you join me?" This is a surprisingly well-done posting about our health and our economy.

I successfully lost weight using DietPower. I hugely improved my health. I remember some fantastic days, when I went to bed feeling great, slept soundly, and woke up feeling energized. Amazing!

Eventually, I was sufficiently dissatisfied with DietPower that I have started developing my own, Wagmu.

While I have not regained the weight, I am now very much out of shape, partly because I've had a painful case of shingles for the past month, but more because I wasn't going to the gym for months before that. Perhaps being out of shape weakened my immune system, and allowed entry to the shingles.

So it's time I went back to the gym! We can improve our health and improve the economy (through better productivity and lower health costs) if we diet and exercise. We can also reduce our dietary impact on the earth by eating less sugar, less dairy, and less meat. So I'll join Alison Victoria on this, and I hope you will, too.

Update: So I went to the gym, and despite my weeks of discomfort, finished supercharged! I felt fantastic. I wanna do that again!

I commissioned my talented niece Florence Kerns to create this image that represents some of my interests: the impact of business on the hydrological cycle; the interactions of water, energy, and nutrition; the impact of cities on ecology.

Agriculture produces demands of energy, water, and soil, and supplies of energy and food. These demands and supplies interact in complex ways. Agriculture’s supply of food also affects transportation, inventory management, and nutrition. Consumers' choices of foods produces demands on the food supply chain. Consumers' choices of habitat and transportation also produces demands on agriculture and the environment. It's a complex world!

How can we sending price signals to get commerce to back off its environmental impact? My research is to find ways to gently press business away from its environmental impacts. Toward that end, here is our proposal to solve part of the world water crisis.

If you use this image, please reference me and Florence.

Good news & bad

1. Bad. Best to get the bad news out of the way. Burning coal at home is making a comeback. Here is a suggestion for high school science teachers: get kids to analyze coal for its toxicity. Let them find out for themselves. From a business point of view, people are working for short term profits without thinking about the obvious mid and long-term risks.

2. Good. International law comes down on Mugabe. The rule of law is civilization's way forward. Somebody seizes power then starts stealing. Then someone else seizes power and starts stealing, plus revenge. The cycle breaks only by intervention, local or international, which installs democracy.

3. CNN has a video of a human-powered car. I've been thinking of this for ages.



Now if we can just get a cheap Chinese-made clone of it!

Death by obesity

Today's news had another tragic tale of a person dying of obesity. When the average shifts a bit, the tails of the bell curve shift too. The most obese people are now much heavier than the most obese people of 50 years ago.

Over the past five weeks, I have been traveling across the U.S. presenting my research on smart markets for water resources. I see that many Americans are still driving alone in SUVs, still packing huge portions from Portillos and giant burgers from Burger King, still drinking chemical drinks - with and without sugar, still buying bottled water, and still without a clue about the health problems they are imposing on themselves and the environmental problems they will leave to their children.

Could we please control our eating? If we think we have some self-control, can we demonstrate it by buying the garden salad instead of the extra large fries? Can we choose a bowl of oatmeal instead of steak, two eggs, hash browns, and four pancakes? Can we split the corned beef sandwich with a friend, rather than eating the whole thing alone? Please?

Use less fuel. Eat less meat.

Prof. Mark Sutton wrote a great article describing the environmental problems arising from agricultural nitrate. Have a look at it. The punchlines, I'm sorry to report, are the same boring things I've been saying all along here: use less fuel, and eat less meat.

The sad thing is that we know how to solve nitrate runoff problem, but can't get anyone interested in it! If you want to solve it, drop me a note. Unfortunately, we don't have any cool electronic widgets or simple pills on offer, but rather a modest rewiring of the economy.

Science Daily has an article that says energy drinks are linked to risky behaviour. To my MBA students who want to learn how to manage risk, here's some advice: use less fuel and eat less meat. And no energy drinks! (They're called "energy drinks" because of the massive energy required to produce them.) These rubbish drinks are pretty unhealthy anyway, more, more, more, and more still.

Once again: Save the world by going on a diet!

Four Japanese researchers have evaluated the impact of Japanese beef production on the environment. I would think that this large impact is partly due to the fat subsidies that the Japanese government lavishes on their agricultural sector. Their study is supported by an American one, Reducing Energy Inputs in the US Food System, by Pimental et al. (Hey, Springer, how 'bout making this article open access?)

But we don't need a study to know that meat has a big environmental impact. Just look at the price! The Christchurch Countdown yesterday had fresh boneless chicken breast on sale for NZ$15/kg, and also dried mung beans for NZ$4.5/kg. Interestingly, the chicken is from right here in Canterbury, while the beans came all the way from Canada. While not perfect, cost is a pretty good indicator of environmental impact.

You will be healthier, live longer, and help save the world if you would eat more wisely. Skip all junk food. Abandon all the chips, crisps, and lollies. Never have a carbonated drink again, nor an "energy" drink, nor bottled water. Schedule your meat intake for 2 to 3 times per week at most. The rest of the time, eat beans, rice, tofu, eggs, corn, whole grain bread, oats, potatoes, lots and lots of vegetables. Asparagus, beets, broccoli, brussel sprouts, cabbage (red is nice), califlower, dandelion (the young leaves), egg plant (I confess I'm not keen on egg plant), fennel, green beans, kale, lima beans, mushrooms, onion, parsley, peas, silver beet (Swiss chard), spinach, zucchini. Seeds are good; sunflower seeds are cheap, fairly low fat (much lower than walnuts) and loaded with vitamin E. Please suggest some more foods!

How to save the world with a pressure cooker

I got a pressure cooker for my birthday. It's a Hawkins brand, apparently made in India, obviously designed for safety.

At the grocery store, locally-made chicken breast is selling for $18/kg - about $2/serving (about $1,500/year for two people). Mung beans sell for $4/kg, and that's shipped to New Zealand from Canada!

Put a half cup of mung beans, a half cup of brown rice, and a cup of water in the pressure cooker. Turn on the heat. Once it starts hissing, cook for 5 minutes, then turn off the heat and lose pressure on its own. Serves at least two. I usually have a third serving which I take for lunch the next day.

Elapsed time: maybe 15 minutes. Nothing had to be refrigerated. No chance of salmonella. Total cost: about $0.40/serving (about $300/year for two people).

This factor of 5 difference in costs directly reflects the difference in resources required to produce, deliver, and prepare the foods. That means a factor of 5 difference in impact on the environment, too.

Choices - energy or food?

I read a disturbing article, "Rethinking the Meat-Guzzler," on the NY Times web site. Meat uses far more energy and water, and it causes far more damage to the environment through runoff, than does vegetable foods. Furthermore, we're eating too much of it for our own health. Yet meat production is subsidized - another very stupid anti-environment, anti-health, anti-free market policy by some folks in Washington, D.C.

As oil runs out, and we find the limits of the agricultural capacity, we will have to choose between producing meat or producing energy. It looks to me like we're all going to be eating a lot less meat in ten years time.

Thoughts on how to solve some of humanity's problems

I've noticed that economics and the drive for profit drives a lot of things. As a graduate of the University of Chicago, I have to admit that I don't mind that humanity is basically Ferengi, and resource allocation via markets is definitely the best form of resource allocation. But it seems that some of humanity's problems come from our insatiable demand for more.

Markets by their nature demand more all the time. They're going to push every boundary imaginable for greater profit. The solution is not to forego the market approach, but to discipline the market approach.

The problems that I think I know how to address are (1) lack of water, as I described in my first post, (2) lack of natural space where people generally stay out, in order to give the rest of nature a chance, and finally (3) obesity and its siblings poor nutrition and hunger.