[LINK] “Rich Chinese Export Pollution to Poorer Regions”

This Scientific American article shouldn’t be surprising, not least since size-wise China is the size of an entire continent.

Just as rich nations have passed the responsibility for carbon dioxide emissions to the developing nations, so the rich provinces of China have exported the problem to the poorest regions, according to new research.

The world’s biggest single emitter of the greenhouse gas – 10 billion tons in 2011 – has undertaken to reduce the “carbon intensity” of its economy. But, according to Klaus Hubacek of the University of Maryland and colleagues, the richest and most sophisticated regions of China – those with the most stringent and specific pollution abatement targets – are buying manufactured goods from places like Inner Mongolia, a poorer region where targets are less constraining.

“This is regrettable, because the cheapest and easiest reductions – the low-hanging fruit – are in the interior provinces, where modest technological improvements could make a huge difference in emissions,” said Steven Davis of the University of California, Irvine, and one of the authors.

“Richer areas have much tougher targets, so it’s easier for them just to buy goods made elsewhere,” Davis added. “A nationwide target that tracks emissions embodied in trade would go a long way towards solving the problem. But that’s not what’s happening.”

[. . .]

In 2009, at the United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen, China vowed to reduce the carbon dependence of its economy by lowering CO2 emissions per unit of gross domestic product from 2010 levels by 17 percent by 2015. This would be achieved by imposing 19 percent reductions in the affluent east coast provinces, and 10 percent in the less developed west, the country said.

The implication is that emissions-reducing policies tend to push factories and production into regions where costs are lower, and pollution standards less stringent.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• The Burgh Diaspora points to articles discussing Germany’s ongoing demographic issues.
• Crooked Timber’s John Quiggin meditates on the rapid urbanization of China.
• Daniel Drezner expects somewhat more out of the recent Iranian election of a moderate president than of North Korea’s latest diplomatic moves.
• The Dragon’s Tales’ Will Baird shares the news that none of the planets discovered orbiting Tau Ceti are likely to be habitable, e being Venus-like and f closer to Mars. There’s still space for a low-mass planet orbiting between e and f, though, right?
• Geocurrents criticizes the recently publicized linguistics thesis claiming that languages which have ejective consonants are likely to have evolved in mountainous areas, where these sharp sounds are suited to area with low air pressure.
• Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen agrees now with Dani Rodrik’s long-staning critique of Turkish politics this past decade as undemocratic.
• The New APPS Blog notes the blemishing of Erdogan’s record in Turkey and mass protests in Brazil’s Sao Paulo over public transit.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer wonders if the Colombian-American alliance might worsen Colombia’s insurgencies.
• Peter Rukavina shares the GIS numbers of Prince Edward Island, the geographical coordinates of a box encompassing the island province.
• Torontoist notes that Toronto saw the first pay-TV show, a 1961 Bob Newhart special.
• The Volokh Conspiracy notes the imprisonment in Egypt of a Muslim cleric convicted of offending Christians.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Bag News Notes’ Michael Shaw takes a look at NSA Edward Snowden, as good as look as can be taken.
• Centauri Dreams’ Paul Gilster reflects on Iain M. Banks as a designer of megascale structures.
• The Dragon’s Tales’ Will Baird reports on Chinese interest in paying for the reconstruction of a Nicaragua canal.
• Eastern Approaches notes that the iconic Gdansk shipyards, which fostered the growth of solidarity, are at risk of closing.
• Geocurrents’ Asya Perelstvaig writes about the coverage of the news of the last speaker of the Baltic Finnic language of Livonian, in all of its flaws.
• Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen likes a book describing why some East Asian economies hit the First World and others didn’t, while Alex Tabarrok advocates for a new regime in the United States for the approval of medications.
• New Apps Blog’s Lisa Guenther uses a documentary on the fate of the long-term incarcerated to start a discussion on what we grow to tolerate.
• Normblog’s Norman Geras interviews Daniel Libeskind.
• The Signal’s Bill LeFurgy writes about word processing, the killer app that jumpstarted the computer revolution.
• Window on Eurasia argues that Ukrainians generally haven’t assimilated the Crimean Tatar history of deportation into their own and quotes from a Kazakhstani writer who argues that real, broad-based Russian influence is much more threatening to Kazakh identity than anything the Chinese have done or are likely to do.

[LINK] “China space capsule lifts off on 15-day mission”

Via James Nicoll, I learned of China’s newest manned space mission, the Shenzhou 10.

China’s latest manned spacecraft successfully blasted off Tuesday on a 15-day mission to dock with a space lab and educate young people about science.

The Shenzhou 10 capsule carrying three astronauts lifted off as scheduled at 5:38 a.m. ET from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on the edge of the Gobi Desert.

It is China’s fifth manned space mission and its longest. The spacecraft was launched aboard a Long March 2F rocket and will transport the crew to the Tiangong 1, which functions as an experimental prototype for a much larger Chinese space station to be launched in 2020. The craft will spend 12 days docked with the Tiangong.

On the heels of Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield’s wildly popular YouTube videos from the International Space Station, the Chinese crew plans to deliver a series of talks to students from aboard the Tiangong.

The craft carried two men, mission commander Nie Haisheng and Zhang Xiaoguang, and China’s second female astronaut, Wang Yaping.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Charlie Stross mourns fellow and recently passed Scottish writer Iain (M.) Banks.
• Crooked Timber, Lawyers, Guns and Money, and New APPS all take a look at the disgusting self-justifying behaviour of philosopher Colin McGinn towards a female grad student of his.
• Daniel Drezner wonders about the extent to which ideology will become important in upcoming seasons of Game of Thrones.
• Language Hat wonders if Dutch spelling reforms have cut off contemporary speakers of Dutch from easy access to Dutch literature predating the mid-19th century.
• Marginal Revolution wonders if European Union Internet privacy and security regulations will make things worse for American firms.
• Personal Reflections’ Jim Belshaw writes about the continuing mystique of the monarchy in Australia.
• Registan’s Reid Standish talks about the marginal improvements in law and order in Kyrgyzstan.
• Strange Maps’ Frank Jacobs talks about the recent map reimagining the countries of the world on a reunified Pangaea as a rhetorical ploy.
• Understanding Society’s Daniel Little charts the ways in which life for Chinese has improved over the past four decades, asnd the ways in which things are still lacking.
• Window on Eurasia quotes from alarmists worrying about the “de-Russification” of Tatarstan, demographically and otherwise.

[DM] “Three links on cities as enormously productive, and predictable, social organizations”

Over at Demography Matters this evening I had a links post up to three interesting theoretical papers on cities.

• The first paper I came across via via blogger James Nicoll. The 2007 article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences, “Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities”, by Luís M. A. Bettencourt, José Lobo, Dirk Helbing, Christian Kühnert, and Geoffrey B. West, argues for the existence of structured urban hierarchies.
• Via The Atlantic Cities‘ Emily Badger, meanwhile, I came across “Urban characteristics attributable to density-driven tie formation”. Authored by Wei Pan, Gourab Ghoshal, Coco Krumme, Manuel Cebrian, and Alex Pentland, and originally presented in June 2012, the paper makes some interesting claims about the exceptional benefits of large cities.

Via io9, I came across the April 2012 McKinsey Global Institute report“Urban America: US cities in the global economy”, by authors James Manyika, Jaana Remes, Richard Dobbs, Javier Orellana and Fabian Schaer. It makes the claim that the United States is uniquely highly urbanized, and hence uniquely prosperous.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Centauri Dreams notes that exoplanet discovery of late is still limited.
• Crooked Timber’s Maria Farrell, as wife of a British soldier, opposes the latest initiative of the British panopticon state aimed at protecting soldiers.
• Daniel Drezner thinks that Michelle Obama should have met her Chinese counterpart.
• Eastern Approaches covers the floods in Germany and the Czech Republic.
• The Everyday Sociology Blog examines the question of the Boy Scouts of America and sexual orientation.
• Lawyers, Guns and Money makes the case that the United States has become the energy colony of Canada (more specifically, Alberta).
• Speed River Journal’s Van Waffle considers whether gardeners should pick seeds or seedlings. It depends on their plans and experience.
• Towleroad maps the global acceptance of homosexuality based on a recent survey.
• Window on Eurasia suggests Siberian alienation from Russia, specifically in the Russian Far East, is growing.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• In a guest photo essay at Bag News Notes, Rita Leistner draws from her experiences in Afghanistan to investigate the ways in which different forms of photography can have different effects on their users.
• Centauri Dreams notes the latest effort to discover planets orbiting Proxima Centauri, the dim red dwarf star that’s not only the dim third component in Alpha Centauri but the closest star to our own. (No superterrestrials in the habitable zone, at least.)
• Daniel Drezner starts to define the Sino-American relationship, noting that continuing cooperation disproves the idea that they are inherently confrontational.
• Geocurrents’ Martin Lewis notes Egyptian upset at Ethiopia’s plan to dam one of the tributaries of the Nile, noting that Egyptian (and Sudanese) dependence on current flows of the Nile and the ongoing efforts of upstream black African countries to develop may be a serious cause for tension.
• Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen draws too much importance from the ongoing horrors in Syria, which no more disprove the idea of progress than other isolated horrors.
• The Numerati’s Stephen Baker likens the brief tumultuous and fatal activity of a cicada to that of a teenage human contemporary.
• Torontoist’s Hamutal Dotan notes the belief of Gawker that the alleged Rob Ford crack video is “gone”, whatever that means.
• Window on Eurasia reproduces a Tatar nationalist’s call for a national revolution in Tatarstan.

[BLOG] Some Friday links

• Bag News Notes profiles a now-vanished New York Times photo essay, one detailing children residing as restaveks with Haitian families who are–or are not?–servants.
• Centauri Dreams considers how the New Horizons probe might detect subsurface oceans on Pluto.
• Daniel Drezner thinks that applying bad analogies to contemporary international relationships can unduly prejudice the contemporary world, and wonders if the impending construction of the world’s tallest building in China signals the end of the Chinese boom.
• Eastern Approaches notes the continued political strike in Poland over in-vitro fertilization.
• Geocurrents’ Asya Pereltsvaig profiles the deportation of Soviet Koreans from their Pacific homeland to Central Asia in the late 1930s, and notes echoes of this deportation in the music of Soviet Korean singer-songwriters.
• GNXP’s Razib Khan profiles the cat family tree.
• Language Hat links to a blog post demonstrating how Hittite was recognized as an Indo-European language.
• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Robert Farley recommends against Canada’s purchase of F-35 fighters as unhelpful for Canada’s likely missions in the Arctic.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer wonders if secure property rights really are as essential to economic growth as some have suggested.

[LINK] “Are Kaesong curtains drawn for good?”

Aidan Foster-Carter‘s Asia Times article makes the point that the extreme rhetoric used by the North Korean government against the South has the effect of shutting down possibilities for inter-Korean concord and cooperation. What incentive does the South have to cooperate with such a North? And how would the North, absent involvement with the South, avoid envelopment by China?

Fortunately, North Korea as yet lacks any such capacity, so this all had a staged and cartoonish character. That did not make it any less unsettling. Though little remarked, there may be a parallel here with last spring’s vicious and highly personalized propaganda campaign against South Korea’s then President Lee Myung-bak, including vile cartoons of him as a rat being bloodily done to death in a variety of ways. We covered this here in detail at the time.

These cartoons can no longer be found on KCNA, but Jeffrey Lewis has usefully preserved some for posterity. One comment there is worth quoting for its wider resonance: “How do you negotiate with a government that presents propaganda posters showing your president’s gory dismemberment?”

This year’s campaign lacked the cartoons’ visual nastiness and personal animus, but was no less extreme in its language. Quoting this in extenso would be tedious. Any reader – except in South Korea; will President Park end this needless ban? – has only to turn to KCNA.kp, which helpfully files its main diatribes under the telling sidebar “DPRK in All-Out Action Against Enemies,” and scroll back over the past two months. Of late they have toned this down, but only slightly.

As recently as May 10, party daily Rodong Sinmun could still write: “The DPRK remains steadfast in its attitude to meet any challenge of the hostile forces for aggression through an all-out action based on nuclear deterrent of justice, bring earlier the day of the final victory in the great war for national reunification (emphasis added) and guarantee the prosperity of a reunified country and the independent dignity of the nation for all ages.”

Leaving aside the bizarre idea of nuclear “all-out action” as a way to “guarantee prosperity” – guarantee poverty, more like – taken literally what can this mean except that North Korea would welcome a “unification” achieved by the nuclear defeat (as if!) of South Korea, with all the catastrophic material and human loss of innocent lives that would entail? Or if they don’t really mean it, why do they say it? To adapt the question above, how can you talk usefully to a regime which purports to gleefully contemplate nuking you into submission?