Scared of Shadows?

Last week the schools were closed for a day in Los Angeles. Almost seven hundred thousand children missed a day’s education because of a threat that was received in an email that apparently originated in Germany. The same email was sent to the authorities in New York and possibly several other cities, who took very little time to determine that it was not a credible threat. Their counterparts in Los Angeles took a different line and ordered the closure of the schools. 1,500 of them were closed and 2,800 law enforcement officers conducted searches of school premises at a cost of “millions of dollars” according to City Councilman Paul Krekorian. And 17 year old Andres Perez who should have been in class was hit by a truck and killed in Highland Park.

This is just one incident of many that prompt the question – “What are Americans so scared of?”.

The United States is by an enormous margin the mightiest power the world has ever seen. Partly that is a function of timing. In their days the Roman and Chinese Empires and even the British Empire were all as dominant as the USA is today but they didn’t have the sheer economic and military muscle that has resulted from two hundred years of the industrial revolution. On the other hand those earlier empires appeared much stronger than the USA of today in the confident manner with which they confronted the world.

The Los Angeles school closure is just the latest example of fear-driven behaviours that have changed life for the worse. Many of them are irrational and actually cause more damage than the problems they are supposed to solve. The most obvious of these is the complete political impossibility of restricting the availability of deadly firearms. Many people in the USA – and I have met and talked to some of them – genuinely believe that they need a gun for “protection”. It doesn’t matter how much evidence is accumulated that owning a gun makes it much more likely that you will be killed by one. The belief persists and is acted upon.

Some of the behaviours are genuinely risible. For many years whenever I entered the USA I had to fill in a form that asked a number of questions about me and my intentions. Did I intend to overthrow the government? Had I been guilty of moral turpitude? I understand that the questions are mandated by Act of Congress and would require another Act to change them. They are still stupid. But in terms of costly stupidity they pale into insignificance compared to the antics of the Transportation Security Agency. This panic response to the 9/11 atrocities now employs 55,000 people at a cost of $7.5 Billion per year and has so far caught not a single terrorist. It is a colossal waste of resources and the source of enormous frustration to millions of travellers forced to endure the indignities it visits upon them. And yet it is politically untouchable. Like the pistol in the bedside cabinet of otherwise sane Americans it is there “just in case”. Just in case the next terrorist attack uses exactly the same methods as previous ones. Just in case the completely impracticable process of producing binary liquid explosives proves to be a real threat despite all the analysis that has demonstrated that it isn’t. Just in case an evil-doer might be such a convincing actor that a flight crew would mistake a child’s water pistol for a real gun.

The fact is that the TSA is untouchable because of fear. The fear of 435 Members of Congress and 100 Senators that they will lose their seats if they vote to get rid of it or even to moderate its stupidity. Given the current state of US politics the fear is probably well-founded.

All of the current candidates for the Republican presidential nomination are running campaigns based on fear. Fear of “terrorism” is the most prominent although there seems to be little agreement on how to actually define terrorism. In the rhetoric of Trump, Carson, Fiorina and all the others only Islamic terrorism seems to count – in 2015 at least. Another fear is economic. The fear that other parts of the world are achieving economic success at the expense of the United States. Fear that living standards are depressed by an influx of cheap manufactured goods from China and cheap labour from south of the border. And then there are the truly irrational fears that improving the lives of historically oppressed groups such as women, ethnic minorities and gay people will necessarily make things worse for the previously dominant sections of society.

All of these fears are demonstrably based on falsehoods but all of them appeal to a certain narrative that is strong in US society. It is a narrative that will drive the USA down the path that is familiar to any student of history, the path of the declining empire. Time and again through the ages a dominant power has faded away because it was unable to adapt to changing times. Persia, Greece, Rome, Spain, and of course Great Britain all enjoyed their time of dominance and all faded away when the times changed. In every case the rulers and the privileged were the last to understand what was happening.

In the 21^st century the rules of engagement have changed compared to the ancient world or medieval times. Obtaining an empire by military conquest is no longer desirable. The development of nuclear weapons has made the dream of world conquest in the style of Alexander or Napoleon infeasible. Extending influence by economic means is the name of the game today. The most influential great power across Africa today is without doubt China – a country that has never put a combat soldier in the field outside its own region. And yet the USA continues to spend more on its military than the combined total of the next seven major powers. Even if the USA reduced its military expenditures by 75% there is still zero possibility that its homeland could be conquered by any conceivable military force. It is said that generals are condemned to be always ready to fight the battles of the last war. The same may be said for whole civilisations.

So if all the fears are unfounded why do they persist? To put it another way, who benefits by keeping the people terrified?

The obvious answer is politicians like Donald Trump. He has garnered huge support by pandering to the fears of the American people. But in many ways Trump is just the visible manifestation of a much deeper issue. The USA, like many Western countries, is about thirty years in to a social revolution which has reversed a long-term trend. In these countries wealth is being concentrated into a smaller and smaller group within society. In his book “Capital in the 21^st Century” published last year, Thomas Piketty demonstrated that this is an inevitable consequence of the essential workings of capitalism unless it is checked by deliberate government action. Until the 1970s that government action was considered to be a basic responsibility. It was the mark of a civilised state that its government should support Jeremy Bentham’s fundamental axiom (See Enlightened Stories) of seeking the greatest good for the greatest number.

Not any more. Since the 1980s the tide of politics has turned. Concentration of wealth into a smaller number of hands is not only acceptable it is the inevitable consequence of policies that have become mainstream. Regressive taxation which bears down heavily on the poor and practically bypasses the rich has become the norm. The movement of capital around the world to exploit low-wage economies at the expense of middle class people in the US and Europe is an established – and highly lauded – business strategy. The fruits of the staggering technological developments of the last hundred years are being apportioned in a manifestly unjust manner.

So why do people put up with it? Why is it impossible for a politician who advocates a return to Benthamite values to get elected? That’s where the fear comes in.

George Orwell was one of the great thinkers and writers of the 20^th century. In 1984 his picture of a world divided into three competing super powers in which populations were controlled by maintaining a constant state of war rings eerily true today. Of course it didn’t predict every facet of modern life and of course it would be folly to take it as a manifesto for today’s world. That said I can’t help thinking of Orwell whenever I hear a politician talk about the “War on Terror”. There is nothing better than an open-ended and fundamentally unwinnable “war” to excite the public and distract it from other political issues that have far more impact on their lives.

As long as people are fearful they are less likely to be angry with their leaders. And as long as they aren’t angry about things that could be fixed then nothing much can change. It suits the immensely wealthy individuals and organisations that finance politicians to keep the fear flowing. The mass media are, in general, controlled by the same interests that finance the politicians. It should come as no surprise that the furtherance of fear and ignorance is such a big part of their business strategy.

So the United States lives in a constant state of fear. And yet it doesn’t. On an individual level and at the level of communities the people of the United States are capable of enormous levels of courage, not to mention care of the weak and kindness towards strangers. Whether it's the 9/11 firefighters who ran towards the collapsing towers or the bravery under fire of Chief Warrant Officer Edwin J. Hill, during the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941 (If you don’t know about Hill, it’s worth a few minutes of your time to read his story here) or the every day courage of the families caring for disabled children across the country, Americans are tough, strong and brave. So why as a nation do they allow themselves to be ruled by fear? And more importantly how can they change that?

Those questions are too big for me to answer, especially as a non-American. Whatever the answers are they have to come from within. One thing that might help would be more engagement between ordinary Americans and the rest of the world. It is an often-quoted factoid that only about 5% of Americans travel overseas each year. That’s not many  compared to other developed nations but given the size of the country and the low number of vacation days that Americans enjoy it’s not that outlandish. But you don’t have to travel physically to engage with others. In today’s world it’s easy to see foreign movies and TV, to play online games with people on the other side of the world and to eat exotic food from every continent. It’s easy so why don’t many more people do it? Crack that puzzle and there may be a way to reduce the fear of the unknown.

And then there is religion. For a country with a constitutional separation of church and state there’s a whole lot of bible-bashing in American politics. Things might just improve a bit if the folks who bring you ideas like Original Sin, The Last Judgement and The Rapture were to confine themselves to the realm of the personal and play less of a part in the body politic.

Whatever the solution I do have confidence in the American people that they will eventually find it. There will probably be more bumps in the road. The fear mongers will have some more successes along the way but if the USA is to avoid the fate of those earlier empires reason will have to prevail in the end. And I am a great fan of reason, as I may have mentioned before.

Thoughts on Climate Change from an Inveterate Traveller

Someone posted this on Facebook a couple of days ago. Like most of the quotes attributed to Michael O’Leary it may or may not have actually come from his mouth. If it did there is no doubt in my mind that it was said purely as part of his never-ending campaign to get free publicity for his airline. Some years ago I met Mr O’Leary a number of times in a business context and I am absolutely certain that he is way too smart to succumb to this sort of category error. Weather and climate are not the same thing. There is absolutely no contradiction between our inability to predict next week’s weather and the very strong probability that average global temperatures will continue to increase for many years to come based on the greenhouse gasses already in the atmosphere.

So why would the CEO of one of the fastest-growing airlines in history want to encourage doubt about the existence of human-made climate change? Obviously because he wants to put off as long as possible the inevitable day when the airline industry will be required to make its contribution to slowing the damage and maybe even starting to reverse it.

The other extreme of this argument is represented by the protesters who disrupted access to Heathrow the week before last. Their position is that aviation is causing such enormous damage to the global climate that it should be stopped in its tracks or at the very least have severe constraints placed on its growth. Humans should revert to the lifestyles of a hundred years ago when most people never moved more than a few miles from their birthplace unless some calamity like a World War temporarily made them more mobile.

So where do I, as a scientifically-literate, left-leaning, inveterate air traveller with several million air miles under my belt stand in this argument? As always when we confront the big issues in life I think it’s quite complicated. Answers need to be nuanced and sophisticated rather than shouted from soap-boxes with the loudest voice winning.

Firstly, climate change is real. There is no serious doubt about that and if you are having trouble accepting it you should be reading a different blog to mine. Perhaps this one. On current rates of growth in greenhouse gas emission the earth is on track to increase its average temperature by four or five degrees Celsius. That doesn’t sound like a lot but it will be enough to melt most of the ice in Greenland and Antarctica, raise sea levels several metres and make large swathes of the planet uninhabitable. World leaders are meeting right now in Paris to try to agree ways to restrict the temperature rise to 1.5 or 2 degrees. This is still a big rise and will cause substantial problems, especially for low-lying island nations, but on the whole most of humanity will be able to adapt and get on with life.

The main cause of climate change is the emission of gasses into the atmosphere by human activity. Carbon dioxide is the one that gets most of the attention but there are others including methane, nitrous oxide and water vapour. This is not speculation. The physics has been well understood for over a century. The impact has been known in scientific circles for over thirty years. In 1977, during the second year of my physics degree, I wrote a paper describing the impact of this “greenhouse effect” and the steps that would be needed to counteract it. I said we should curtail the use of fossil fuels, develop renewable energy technologies and bridge the gap by judicious use of nuclear fission. In 2015 that’s still probably the best plan although thirty years of inaction mean that it’s rather more urgent now than it might have been.

Where does aviation fit in to this picture? Clearly the biggest issue is that aircraft burn fossil fuels. Lots of them. In particular jet engines burn a petroleum product called paraffin in the UK and kerosene in the USA. When they do this they emit carbon dioxide which accumulates in the atmosphere along with all the other greenhouse gasses. It’s real. There is no doubt whatsoever that airline flights are contributing to climate change.

So should we severely curtail the amount of flying that we do as a species as part of our efforts to maintain a habitable world? For many the answer is an obvious yes but that would be to ignore the great benefits that aviation can bring.

Aviation brings us together. It facilitates trade which increases prosperity. It improves understanding between people from different cultures and backgrounds. The huge growth in civil aviation of the last few years has meant that a broader cross-section of people has been able to travel and to get exposure to other places and experiences or just to get a well-deserved holiday in the sun. It is not fanciful to say that aviation is one of the most important factors that brings us together as a human family rather than pushing us apart into a series of distrustful tribes. We still have a long way to go in this respect but I firmly believe that the world is a better place when its peoples are able to meet and understand each other.

So, we have a problem. Aviation is a good thing for the reasons I have outlined but it is a bad thing because it contributes to climate change. How do we square that circle?

It might be useful to look at some numbers. There are around 28,000 commercial airliners in service today and together they contribute somewhere between 2.5% and 3.0% of all greenhouse gas emissions. That number is growing and it may be that emissions high in the stratosphere are more harmful than those nearer the ground. However aviation is a very long way indeed from being the most significant contributor to the problem. There are around 1.2 Billion vehicles on the world’s roads and they contribute around 10% of the greenhouse gasses. Livestock is responsible for about 18%, electrical power generation 25% and housing (heating, lighting, cooking etc) 10%. Industrial and commercial buildings generate about 15% of the global carbon footprint. (By the way I do have reputable sources for all these numbers but I am not trying to write a referenced scientific paper here so you must choose whether or not to trust me). If we want to make significant reductions in greenhouse gas generation the major impacts must come from sectors other than aviation. Not only that but all of these other sectors have viable alternatives that will enable reductions to be made in the short term providing the will is there. The basic physics of aviation require the use of energy-dense hydrocarbons as fuel – at least for the time being.

It looks as if the aviation fan sitting on my left shoulder is winning out in this argument over the ecologist on the right. The benefits of aviation are such that we should just overlook its admittedly small contribution to climate change? Well no. Not really.

It is true that the big benefits of carbon reduction are not to be found in clobbering commercial flight in the short term at least. But in the longer run the world will need to reduce its emissions far more than most of us currently realise. And in that longer run getting the contribution from aviation down by a significant amount will be necessary. Even if aircraft emissions remain steady in real terms they will grow as a percentage when other sectors bring theirs down. Airlines and aircraft makers should be working on this now.

For the time being the best thing that we can do is to fly more people in bigger aircraft, improving the carbon economy per passenger. We need to develop air traffic control technology such that aircraft can always fly the least-fuel route and we need to deploy smart technology like electric tugs so that aircraft can move around on the ground without burning kerosene. And airlines need to continue replacing older aircraft with more modern fuel efficient models.

In the slightly longer term we need to shift to hydrocarbons that we manufacture using biology rather than extracting them from the ground. First generation biofuels based on sugars have a mixed reputation not least because they use agricultural land that is needed for food production. Future biofuels will be made using algae or bacteria, probably genetically engineered, in industrial processes that use solar radiation to produce the energy-dense fuel that we need.

In the really long term we will be using more exotic technologies like beamed energy to power us around the globe and maybe off it. But that is a subject for another day.

For today we may look to Paris. The climate change conference there is due to end this week. It will produce some kind of agreement on how the nations of the world plan to reduce the impact of climate change. It is unlikely that any treaty will have explicit provisions to affect the airline industry but there is no doubt that there will be measures agreed that will require it to look to its future practices. Perhaps there will be a carbon tax that will increase the cost of flying. In the short term that will be a setback for Michael O’Leary and his airline’s profitability but handled effectively it will combine stick and carrots. Airlines that establish a path to reducing their climate impact will benefit financially as well as enjoying the warm glow that comes from simply doing the right thing. Some of Mr O’Leary’s other ideas like cramming in twice as many passengers by making them stand up might just bring him plaudits for reducing the carbon emissions per passenger faster than anyone else.