Private-public spaces

The other day I was in the library. As I wandered back among the shelves of new books, a flight of shelves that is placed right in the center of the space, I heard a couple arguing. A man and a woman were sitting back by the windows, and, while not exactly yelling, were certainly speaking at a volume level that seemed surprising for a library.

The subject matter was even more surprising. Apparently this was a couple just after or in the process of a divorce, and they were discussing surprisingly intimate details of their lives. He doesn't like that her new boyfriend has been in prison, she doesn't like the influence of his new girlfriend on their daughter, he has some stuff of hers that he doesn't want to return, she doesn't want him stepping on her property: the usual sordid stuff of break-ups. (In case you think I was lingering to hear, they managed to cover this apparently well-trod territory in about 45 seconds; as it was, I inched away well before I had looked at all the new history books.)

It occurred to me that, despite the ever-increasing assertion of a "right to privacy," we are moving farther away from that all the time. Here is a crude taxonomy of the places we used to have:

• Private-private: There was a time when a bedroom, for example, was off-limits to anyone who wasn't in the family. I'm sure this is still true, for the most part, but our common agreement that there are such spaces seems to me to be eroding. We see bedrooms on TV, not just in fictional programs (where we can tell ourselves that it's just a set), but on reality shows, and we can wonder whether these places are truly considered private.
• Public-private: These are the places which belong to us, but into which we can invite people. These spaces have evolved quite a bit, from the formal receiving parlor through the living room to the family room of today, but they continue to fulfill their function of a space we control, but to which we can allow access to others.
• Public-public: There are still places where there is no real expectation of privacy, though that can be modified by behavior. For example, if you're in a public plaza talking with someone openly, it would not be unusual for an acquaintance to walk up and join your conversation. (If you're speaking more furtively or intimately, we recognize that as an attempt to create an artificial place of privacy.)
• Private-public: These are the places where, though they are ostensibly public, we maintain a reasonable illusion of privacy. For me, these include libraries and, perhaps, benches - I expect that I am in isolation in those places, I respect other people's privacy as I would expect them to respect mine.

It is these last for which I see the most change. Train passenger cars are a case in point; some years ago, a given individual would be allowed to do whatever they're doing and be left alone. Now, we hear people carrying on loud, fairly intimate cell phone conversations that violate the walls that were previously understood to exist.

There was a time it would have been unthinkable to hold a divorce discussion in the library. Today, it's seen as a real option, despite the potential for public embarrassment (did that woman really want people, some of whom might know her, hearing that "Jimmy" was an ex-con?). Perhaps they saw the library as somehow safe, given the public aspect of it, but that shows no understanding of the violation of norms that their meeting represented.

This is a topic I may return to, since my thoughts are at the moment relatively unformed. I find distinctions among the four types of space I have listed to be significant and useful (the invitation of a date to a private-private space is a clear signal, similar to the moment in a French conversation when references move from vous to tu; if everyone routinely traipses through the bedroom, it seems to me something is lost). The blurring of the lines carries with it a real social dislocation, one that will likely need to be replaced - but with what?

Dye that collar and get rich

I guess I'm in an environmental mood, as this post is something of a follow-up to yesterday's, in which I criticized the proponents of cap-and-trade systems for carbon emission control for mischaracterizing these schemes as market-based when they're really not. To clarify, I'm not against programs to combat global warming, and cap-and-trade has some real advantages, but I think its supporters blunt the argument for it when they use false advertising simply to lure in the market zealots.

Today, I'm going to change gears slightly and look at another claim of the green revolutionaries, that, far from being a GDP killer, changes in our environmental policy will usher in a brave new world of so-called green-collar jobs. Taking one candidate's plan as an example, Hillary Clinton's initiatives will "help transform our economy and create at least 5 million jobs from clean energy over ten years."

I'm not picking on Hillary here, I'm using her program to talk about this because it's the most elaborately worked out one I could find (Obama's is very similar, but not as detailed, and McCain seems to feature a lot of hand-waving). (The details of her plan are here.) I'm not going to go through it in detail, but I want to pick out the parts that have to do with job creation.

These claims are summarized by Eric Pooley in a TIME article as:

The green jobs that cap and trade could help create would be a big employment sector—including production of wind turbines, pollution scrubbers and more.

Hillary's plans also talk about another category of jobs, those in construction and installation of these new green products, and swings by engineering and consulting without specific quantification. Unfortunately, these rosy predictions aside, there are two major criticisms that can be made.

1) Incremental or replacement?
There is an underlying assumption that these new green-collar jobs will simply appear with the right combination of tax breaks and innovation. Pleasant as that might be to believe, it is not clear that would happen.

Let's say that liquid hydrogen becomes the winner in the "How do we fuel our cars?" sweepstakes. Hey, we'll need thousands of drivers to get the liquid hydrogen from the plant to the new hydro stations, that'll be plenty of jobs.

Yes, it will, but what will happen to the existing gas truck drivers? Oh, right, they'll become the hydro truck drivers. It's difficult to see exactly how this switch will generate more jobs (unless hydrogen is less dense than gasoline, requiring more trucks, but also requiring more fill-ups - not a total win).

Right down the line, in every job category that has been mentioned, I have seen no appraisal of how the switch to green technology will create more jobs than old non-green technology. I accept the obvious truth that the environmental industry will grow; I'm not sure how that generates more jobs than we have today.

(One possible counter-argument: by sending less money to overseas petro-nations, we'll be keeping more of our money in the U.S., allowing us all to become rich. That's possible, but mitigated by my second point.)

2) American jobs?
We're going to add jobs by building "wind turbines, pollution scrubbers and more." Presumably this will happen in the same way that we've added jobs by producing consumer electronic goods in the U.S....

Wait, we moved those jobs overseas a while back. Just because it's a green revolution doesn't make the pressure to offshore new jobs any less. If it makes financial sense to let Korea or China make our plasma televisions, it almost certainly makes just as much sense to let those same countries make our turbines and scrubbers. We run into the same issues with environmental manufacturing as we have with any other manufacturing, and any plausible plan needs to address that.


There's another aspect to this - what if the breakthrough in the green revolution doesn't come in the U.S.? We're going to ramp up our educational systems to produce the environmental engineers of the future, but, presumably, we're going to continue to educate the world's children in that area (as in all others). Therefore, there's no guarantee that our efforts to upgrade the workforce will actually upgrade the American workforce. We don't have intellectual property laws covering what someone learns in our colleges, where an Indian MIT grad who finds the next advance is forced to work for an American company until we've wrung every piece of innovation out of him or her.

I'm not advocating restriction of providing educational opportunities to the rest of the world, but we need to think about what will happen if the next big energy discovery comes out of China or Kazakhstan or Norway. We may not be dependent on the Middle East sheiks any longer, but seeing solar-dollars or hydro-dollars flow out of the country instead of petro-dollars hardly seems a slam-dunk improvement.

I'm gonna cap your carbon

I don't write much about environmental issues, global warming and the like, because I'm no expert and offer no special knowledge. I believe that global warning is real, and the debate (largely muted by now) as to whether it's natural or man-made is unhelpful, even specious. Even if it were true that the increase in temperature is largely an outgrowth of natural forces, we've built our society around the conditions we have; New York City developed with sea level at a certain point, and, if that changes, the city will be in trouble.

So if we can do something to mitigate the effects of global warming, we should, but the solutions will have to fit into a context of political and economic reality (Fareed Zakaria, on Charlie Rose last night, said that the U.S. will have to built green energy plants in China and India to replace coal; to his credit, he acknowledged that it would be a tough sell politically - I think he underestimated that).

The answers seem to be coalescing around a consensus, that the nation must invest in research for clean energy, that we need to increase the fuel economy standards, that we must talk up the benefits to adopting everyday measures to cut harmful emissions, and, most particularly, that we should institute a cap-and-trade program for carbon emissions. While this is probably a good idea, there is one grating central idea that underlies all these discussions (there was a pretty good summary of the current cap-and-trade situation in TIME magazine written by Eric Pooley).

I could summarize cap-and-trade, but I'll let Wikipedia do the job this time:

A central authority (usually a government or international body) sets a limit or cap on the amount of a pollutant that can be emitted. Companies or other groups are issued emission permits and are required to hold an equivalent number of allowances (or credits) which represent the right to emit a specific amount. The total amount of allowances and credits cannot exceed the cap, limiting total emissions to that level. Companies that need to increase their emissions must buy credits from those who pollute less. The transfer of allowances is referred to as a trade. In effect, the buyer is paying a charge for polluting, while the seller is being rewarded for having reduced emissions by more than was needed. Thus, in theory, those that can easily reduce emissions most cheaply will do so, achieving the pollution reduction at the lowest possible cost to society.

I'll not get into the charges and cross-charges that surround the general idea of cap-and-trade, especially as it compares to direct taxation. What I want to talk about is why this mechanism is so attractive to people in the modern-day political climate.

That can be simply expressed (Pooley: "That's the trade in cap and trade, and it harnesses the power of the
marketplace to fight warming, a concept that helped Republicans like McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee, fall in love with the idea."). This is something that you hear all the time, that cap-and-trade is a market mechanism, and therefore superior to other forms of emission controls.

But, of course, this is nonsense. Cap-and-trade is market-esque, in that half of it is something that appears to be a market. After all, trading is the essential market activity, isn't it? But there's still that nettlesome word cap in the term, and that clearly has nothing to do with the market at all. Whenever an external body creates limitations to a market (or, as in this case, creates the market from nothing), we simply do not have a true market in the economic sense.

I understand there's a need to sell the idea of restricting carbon emissions, especially when it appears that there will be a cost, certainly in financial terms and probably in lifestyle changes, but to push one particular scheme ahead of others because it is "market-based" is spurious.

There's a difficult reality coming, and it's very unlikely that magic will occur and the pain eliminated. The easy way is to continue living as we have, burn oil and gas and coal, fueling a long-driving exurban life.

But it's ever more obvious that the easy way is no way at all. Things will change, and the nation that has been riding the highest on the status quo will have to change the most. That will be a tough realization for the United States, but a necessary one. Invoking the magic of the market won't ease any of the pain, and is intellectually bankrupt to boot.

Ladies, stop your engines

There's an elementary school near the public library, and I run past it once in a while. I did so today, about 2:20PM, and saw yet again something appalling. There are vehicles, mainly minivans, parked on the streets near the school, as the parents (invariably mothers) wait for their youngsters to get out at 2:30.

In many cases, close to half I would say, the vehicle is sitting there with its motor running. Remember, this is not a case where Janie or Bill Jr. is running out the door and Mom cranks the engine, this is 10 minutes before the final bell. And Mom is sitting there, reading a magazine, maybe listening to some tunes, as precious petroleum drifts away into the sky.

I've read that idling expends as much gas as running the vehicle at 30 mph. It also pollutes the atmosphere around the school, putting the young lungs of children at risk (an article here from the New Yorker discusses a project in Brooklyn to combat this).

The irony of this is clear. Undoubtedly, there are units during the school year to teach environmental awareness, urging recycling, and so forth. But we don't let kids walk to school (though there is an International Walk to School Day in October; some kids get goodie bags just for walking, so bribes do work), and we're fine with running the minivan engine.

Some people have accused me of being too negative, railing against problems without proposing solutions. If you read this blog, you'll probably agree. But there are a lot of solutions out there (tomorrow I'll be reviewing a book that's chock full of them), and we're not exactly jumping on them.

The problem, I think, is that, for long-term changes, attitude has to precede action. Until people believe, truly believe, that our earth is in danger, they won't modify their behavior. And most people don't believe, not deep-down. There will be a technological fix, or gas will come back down to 50 cents a gallon, or we'll discover teleportation.

In the face of that, modifying behavior without changing minds leads to resentment. Many people have proposed a gas tax; drivers may be forced to fill up less often, but they won't automatically understand the need for conservation.

If you think that reading a magazine is more important than saving limited fossil fuel, you're going to resist any attempts to get you out of that seat. All the hectoring in the world won't change that, at least not until there is no more gas to be had. What a shame we have to wait for a crisis.