Save the pandas?
This is something that gets my goat every time I see it referenced in a nature documentary, on a T-shirt, wherever. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I’ll own up to the fact that the immediate impetus for this post came from a Facebook game. I guess it was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
The game is called Pet Society, and it’s in the (honestly pretty boring) style of virtual pet games like Tamagotchis but with more modern flair and Flash animation. You keep your pet healthy and happy, decorate your pet’s home, and interact with your pet’s friends (the pets of your Facebook friends). It’s a good time-filler for those days when my work in lab involves a lot of waiting, but not for long enough periods to get anything meaningful accomplished while I wait. Here’s a cropped screenshot from the “Garden Store,” where your pet can purchase seeds to plant or various lawn furniture and decorative items.
What is that NPC cashier talking about? Well, if you play any games on Facebook, you won’t be surprised to hear that the game includes a way to spend real money on “premium” items for your pet. This NPC is advertising the fact that the makers of Pet Society have recently partnered with the World Wildlife Fund to offer WWF- and giant panda-themed items for sale. 10% of the profits will apparently go to the WWF.
Now, that’s a good thing in general. Although I hesitate to call myself an environmentalist for reasons I’ve explained here before, as far as I know the WWF is a good and worthwhile organization. I’m in favor of conservation. I’m generally irritated by products that advertise themselves as a way to donate to a worthy cause, because if the product’s junk you’re still wasting 90% or whatever portion of the money you spend. You’d be better off just donating the handful of change directly, or better yet, donating the full cost of the item (or more) instead of buying something you don’t need. But fine, if it’s more effective at raising money, go ahead.
However, that’s not really the topic I want to discuss. I want to talk about giant pandas in particular. Why are we so fixated on saving them? I suspect it is mostly because they are adorable. And they certainly are. But let’s look at the different reasons why species survival is such a challenge for giant pandas. (I’ve heard all of this from many sources, but I’m confirming the specifics by checking this article.)
- Poachers hunt pandas for their fur.
- Their habitat is shrinking, leading not just to reduced living space but also to reduced availability of the bamboo that makes up basically their entire diet.
- Basically their entire diet is bamboo, and if it’s not available they’ll pretty much starve. (With the teeth and digestive system of an omnivore, they are capable and allegedly willing to eat other things, but if given the choice they apparently go for bamboo the vast, vast majority of the time.)
- Bamboo hardly has any nutritional value for pandas because they cannot completely break down the cellulose, so they need to eat constantly in order to stay healthy.
- Female pandas are only fertile for 2-3 days a year.
- Female pandas raise their cubs alone, and are only able to care for one at a time. When a panda gives birth to multiple cubs, she chooses one to raise and lets the other/s die.
- It’s very difficult to convince pandas to mate in captivity. (Zookeepers have actually tried giving pandas Viagra and showing them videos of mating pandas to get them in the mood.)
Now, the first two are caused by humans. We ought to enforce laws and crack down on poaching in general; it’s bad for many species. We should also be more conscious of our impact on the world’s ecosystems. Nevertheless, it seems to me that humans are maybe not the main problem. To paraphrase the NRA slogan, it’s pandas that are killing pandas. They’re only barely able to reproduce. They can’t seem to feed themselves properly. (They’ve even evolved a kind of thumb out of a wristbone, so great is their need to hold stalks of bamboo in order to survive.) As much as I am in favor of conservation efforts, I remember that new species develop and become extinct all the time, and that this happens based on how well-adapted a particular species is for survival. The panda does not seem all that well-adapted. I think we be focusing our conservation efforts on animals that are working with us for their survival, not against us.
Gallons per mile
There are lots of very difficult, nuanced issues in politics — issues where two intelligent people could disagree, have an intelligent back and forth for hours, and still come out with totally intact, cogent views on the topic. These are often fundamental questions about the very way our country works. But there’s another kind of issue. There’s the kind of issue where there is just an obvious correct decision, with very little room for intelligent discussion. Sometimes these issues are incredibly important, but more often they are small and just slip by, because only a handful of people is involved in the relevant decision, and they didn’t realize what they were doing. These issues annoy me the most, because, however minor they are, there’s no excuse for failing to do the obviously correct thing.
The way we measure fuel efficiency is one of these dumb things. Using miles per gallon is really misleading. It can make tiny gains seem huge, and huge gains seem tiny. Let’s take two totally hypothetical vehicles. One one hand you have a hybrid car, which gets 40 mpg, and you convert it to a plug-in hybrid, which gets 100 mpg. On the other hand, you have a very inefficient small truck, which gets 10 mpg, and you put in a more efficient engine, pushing it to 15 mpg. It seems like the former improvement is better. It’s a 60 mpg improvement rather than a 5 mpg improvement. It’s a 150% improvement rather than a 50% improvement. Nevertheless, if we assume both vehicles are driven 1000 miles, the hybrid goes from using 25 gallons to 10 gallons, saving 15 gallons, where as the small truck goes from 100 gallons to 67 gallons, saving 33 gallons. The gain from improving the truck’s efficiency is massively better than the gain from improving the car’s.
This is a general mathematical fact. The inefficient vehicles are the ones using lots of fuel, and small changes in their mileage are large percentage changes, so very small mpg changes can save a lot of fuel. The super-efficient cars use very little fuel anyway, so even massive improvements can’t save that much. Consumers, obviously, think about mileage in the units that it’s given to them in, so they value it in an irrational way. (Science Pundit has a great post about this.) It would make a lot of sense to change to gallons per mile (or per 1000 miles) and get consumers thinking more rationally, but I can understand the reluctance. The switch to a new unit takes mental adjustment, and it’ll take a while for consumers to get a good handle on what counts as “good” or “bad” mileage, meaning they’ll probably take efficiency into account less during that unit transition. (Interestingly, it seems that this is already frequently done in many other countries. Sociological Images posts this video that shows mileage in L/100km.)
What really makes no sense is using mpg in regulation. US automobile efficiency is regulated by the CAFE standards, which mandate a minimum average mileage for the fleet of vehicles produced by each manufacturer. The problem is, by using miles per gallon, rather than gallons per mile, the economic incentive is to produce more super-efficient hybrid small cars, whereas much bigger gains could be made through smaller improvements to the worst vehicles. Adding 3 mpg to a hybrid doesn’t cancel out a loss of 3 mpg in a pickup truck, but that’s how the standards work. You could easily pick the new required average to be no more or less stringent than the current one — it would just be more intelligent. If anything, it would help US manufacturers over Asians ones, since it’s the Asian manufacturers that are producing the small, hybrid cars.
There is only one intelligent argument I can think of against this change, which is that these super-efficient cars are the ones that are pioneering technologies that will push down to all vehicles sooner or later. This might be true, but I doubt it’s fundamentally necessary. (It’s easier to put a more advanced engine or a battery in a big vehicle than a small one.) Maybe you can make an argument that this over-counting of gains for small cars is a way of subsidizing the technological innovation behind them. I don’t really buy that, though. A change in the regulatory measures seems obviously good.
Support nuclear power
I care a whole lot about the environment and humanity’s impact on it, but I hesitate to describe myself as an “environmentalist.” That’s because I disagree vehemently with one of the fundamental beliefs of major environmentalist organizations like Greenpeace and the various PIRGs. I think nuclear power is a big part of the answer to our environmental woes, rather than part of the problem. When canvassers with clipboards and pamphlets approach me on the street to ask for a donation, I ask them if they’re still against building nuclear power plants. Then, when they launch into a prepared speech beginning with an enthusiastic yes (they think I’m on their side), I tell them to call me when they change their mind, and I walk away.
Setting aside all the science for a (brief!) moment, I want to point out that the tactics environmental groups use for pushing this anti-nuclear agenda are often pretty shady. It’s often merely implied by the language they use — for an example, see this US PIRG report that constantly refers to “fossil fuels and nuclear power,” that exact phrase, as if they’re equivalent in all important respects. Fossil fuels are bad for the environment, so it’s implied that nuclear plants must be equally so. After all, they’re always right there, one after the other! Never mind that the vast majority of the text devoted to explaining this is actually only talking about fossil fuels.
That said, let’s get to it. This “fact sheet” written in 2005 claims to explain why nuclear power is “expensive, dangerous, and unnecessary”. It’s full of generalizations and misleading statements, and not full enough of hard facts (though it’s decorated with lots of pretty charts to help disguise that). I could go through it sentence by sentence, but that wouldn’t do much more than make me too angry to finish this post. Instead, I will explain why all three of those adjectives aren’t fitting, and that nuclear power is affordable, safe, and absolutely necessary. Read more