| Muck and Mystery Loitering With Intent |
blog - at - crumbtrail.org |
Perhaps the biggest impediment to progress in environmental improvement has been command and control regulation that attempts to define complex socio-ecological systems in simplistic terms, propose specific interventions and predict results based on those too simple system definitions. The typical scenario is to assemble a committee of experts who survey a system, note specific methods for improvement, which are them mandated. It is the French approach, the bureaucratic approach.
By specifying methods regulators undermine creative and inventive efforts of the real experts, the practitioners. Knowing that their ideas will be ignored they stop thinking about how to do their work well and devote their energies to managing regulations and regulators. This is precisely what anyone who thinks about it for a moment should expect. The incentives are skewed to rewarding cleverly skirting regulation and against true innovation. Worse, resources are consumed by compliance preventing alternative investment.
The effects are so profound and pervasive that the culture and staff of regulated entities change to match the regulatory environment, and the regulated entity loses the ability to innovate. In extreme cases whole nations become moribund.
This ineffective approach to systems management is made worse by the selection of misguided goals. The combined result of pursuing misguided objectives using ineffective techniques is expensive, wasteful lack of progress. Society is drained of resources without receiving benefits, an exercise in futility that merely fatigues rather than strengthens.
This post at worldchanging provides a case study of such behavior by recounting efforts in California to regulate automotive co2 emissions. It is a misguided objective since there will be no measurable effects. Complete elimination of such emissions would not affect California air quality or climate. Many other emissions, especially particulates and other byproducts of combustion do have serious effects, but co2 is irrelevant.
However meaningless the objective there are alternative approaches to reaching it; one that is an example of antiquated command and control method and another that intervenes to provide an altered playing field for the use of practitioners in whatever ways they can imagine and implement.
What makes the California approach particularly notable is that it is pushing for change in two seemingly very different ways: a near-to-mid term set of specific changes to standard automobile (and light-duty truck, including SUV) designs explicitly intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; and a mid-to-long term initiative to kick-start a transition to hydrogen-based vehicles by supporting the installation of H2 fueling stations throughout the state, the so-called "Hydrogen Highway" plan.The near term California Air Resources Board (CARB) plan proposes a fussy set of specific changes to vehicles that they estimate will reduce co2 emissions by 30% while not having dire negative consequences for society. It has been praised for being technically astute and socially aware, making realistic alterations to vehicles that won't bankrupt the state or selectively harm citizens (such as poor people).
But like most exercises in model building it doesn't actually do anything. It's an elegant model but all it does is sit and whirr. Reducing automotive co2 emissions by 30% is meaningless but by requiring principals to meet the regulations all their energies and resources will be consumed, thus preventing useful progress. Only a politician could love it.
The "Hydrogen Highway" plan is utterly different.
They're not picking winners, beyond the initial choice of supporting hydrogen. They're not trying to mandate a conversion to H2 cars, only make it possible. If the hydrogen vehicles take off, then the state-supported stations will soon be overwhelmed by commercial competitors; if H2 cars never quite make it big, overtaken by biodiesel hybrids or somesuch, the hydrogen stations can be quietly mothballed, like the electric-car-recharging stations that appeared briefly in grocery store parking lots around the state in the late 90s.If California is smart it will reject the CARB proposal and focus on hydrogen since it will actually be useful. It not only achieves the spurious co2 objective but also a useful reduction in all the other byproducts of combustion. It is tempting to see this as a sort of environmental kung-fu where the hysterical energies of the creeps and cranks that make up the co2 hate squads are used to implement useful change. Rather than opposing them for their foolishness, just deflect their headlong, futile flight slightly so that they land in a bed of roses rather than the dung heap. Their destructive attack is neutralized but no one gets hurt and all are happy with the result. Is California Governor Schwarzenegger's team really that smart? How refreshing.