The case for ZEV mandates in India and elsewhere

Opinion published in the Business Line in India on Dec 13 In case the link (below the figure) is behind a paywall, full text is below

LINK

In the article ‘The benefits and challenges of transitioning away from oil’ (businessline, December 5), this author described why relying exclusively on financial subsidies to drive adoption of zero emission vehicles (ZEVs) such as battery electric vehicles (BEVs) and hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles (FCVs) is unsustainable.

There is also the fact that despite steep declines in international battery prices and substantial government subsidies, BEVs are costly, and adoption is slow. India, therefore, needs a new strategy to increase competition, bring greater scale, drive down costs and accelerate adoption using less tax subsidy per vehicle.

There are but four main ways a government can reduce pollution, or more generally, get people to behave socially responsibly. Economic theory suggests the simplest and efficient way is to tax or fine bad behaviour (and, of course, ensure enforcement). This is the idea behind a carbon tax which will make carbon emissions costly and drive adoption of and innovation in less-polluting practices.

Another is to provide financial inducements (example, subsidies, tax credits) for investing in clean technologies which people might otherwise find too costly. An example is the 23 per cent rebate on GST for BEVs which is at 5 per cent as opposed to 28 per cent for petrol/diesel vehicles.

A third way is to mandate or obligate specific actions people can or cannot undertake. Examples include requiring diesel vehicles to switch to compressed natural gas, mandating power distribution companies to procure renewable electricity, or mandating automakers to sell ZEVs. The last is in focus here.

A fourth approach is nudging people to take voluntary action. Examples include appeals to conserve energy or not to litter. We will not discuss voluntary approaches here further as there is little evidence that they can be relied upon when the stakes are high.

In reality, the first option of pollution taxes might not even suffice because of other reasons why people’s actions deviate from what is socially best. A subsidy, the second option, is popular but imposes a burden on public finances and also does not penalise people who may not take the subsidy and continue polluting.

The third route, a mandate or obligation to adopt clean technologies, does not burden public finances directly but like a pollution tax, tends to attract opposition from obligated parties. But a mandate may be welcomed by some businesses who are cleaner than the average firm and will gain a competitive advantage from such a regulation. To give a specific example, automakers that make generally more fuel-efficient vehicles will benefit from an increase in minimum fuel economy standards.

Likewise, automakers who have already made investments in ZEVs will have less to lose from a ZEV mandate relative to those that sell only petrol/diesel vehicles. This is why a mandate may yet represent an acceptable middle ground that balances environmental, economic, and political objectives.

ZEV obligations (ZEVO) typically require auto original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) or automakers to meet annual sales targets. In addition to the theoretical reasons above, there exist practical justifications for ZEVO.

First, India already provides substantial subsidies for ZEVs. Yet most OEMs appear to not be investing aggressively in ZEVs. And with a further four- to five-fold increase in subsidy outlay from FAME II is planned to FAME III, the net burden on automakers from ZEVO could be small.

Second, looking at solar, wind, biofuels, and BEVs worldwide shows that where these technologies have been scaled up and commercialised, mandates have been employed together with subsidies.

Purchase obligations

Third, India has the equivalent of ZEVO in electricity, which are called renewable purchase obligations (RPO), which requires Discoms to procure renewable energy and have been successful in growth of solar and wind facilities.

ZEVOs could have a similar effect on battery technology.

Fourth, even within the transportation sector, stringent obligations have been imposed on the auto industry in the form of Bharat Stage emission norms which have been complied with promptly, despite increasing vehicle cost.

Fuel economy standards are another example of obligation on auto sector being successful. Political will overcame industry opposition to regulations aimed at reducing pollution. A policy like ZEVO is the logical next step for India. Specific annual targets are not discussed here but these are typically set to ramp up slowly in initial years and steeply in later years.

ZEVO should be designed to allow trading of credits between firms and to a limited extent across segments, say, between bus and truck sales. It could also be designed to exempt lower priced cars to reduce the burden on buyers of small cars who tend to be the least wealthy among car buyers.

ZEVO could be designed with additional features to increase flexibility and reduce compliance costs. Policymakers could consider complementary obligations on operators of large fleets of cars (such as Uber, Ola), buses (both public and private) and trucks to ensure ZEV comprise a certain share of their fleet, or comprise a certain share of annual kilometres.

An example of such a policy is the California Clean Miles Standard on ride-sharing and on-demand delivery platforms operating in California. Mandates on oil market companies and petrol stations to acquire credits for selling electricity or hydrogen can help bring private investments in charging and fuelling infrastructure and make ZEVs more attractive to buyers.

In conclusion, a binding ZEV obligation on automakers with gradually increasing annual targets and financial penalties for non-compliance is the key missing element in the policy ecosystem.

The writer is an Associate Professor at UCLA in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and Dept. of Urban Planning

Twenty years of biofuels in twenty minutes

Webinar on Carbon Footprint of Biofuels held on Dec 5th by the Journal Carbon Footprints

Video Recording LINK  - Twenty years of biofuels in twenty minutes

LINK

The benefits and challenges of transitioning away from oil for India

This is an opinion piece published in the Business Line in India on Dec 5

In case this LINK is behind a paywall, here is the full text

Updated - Dec. 06, 2023 at 10:01 AM.

Electric transportation, despite its high upfront cost, tax revenues foregone and jobs lost, seems to be the best option. The issue here is to make policy to meet multiple goals

DEEPAK RAJAGOPAL

There appears to be a consensus in India that it should undertake serious efforts to address climate change without compromising its economic future. Although transportation currently accounts for only about 10% of India’s energy-related carbon emissions and despite the fact that it is currently cheaper to reduce greenhouse gas (for simplicity, carbon) emissions from electricity generation, there are strong reasons to already begin a transition to low-carbon transportation future that will eventually lead to a net-zero carbon transportation. 

Firstly, emissions from transportation can be mitigated in several ways such as slowing growth in private vehicles especially cars, increasing public-transit ridership, raising fuel economy of vehicles, and growing the share of rail freight. While each of these is worth pursuing, to achieve serious reductions in carbon in the longer run a transition away from oil is inevitable. Reducing oil consumption will also help improve energy imports and could help improve balance of trade and energy security depending on what and how much of it needs to be imported and from which countries.

Secondly, as challenging as it is to transition away from coal, moving away from oil-based transportation is far more challenging. For one, while there are multiple clean alternatives to coal including solar, wind, nuclear, hydro, and geothermal, there exist few alternatives that are obviously low-carbon and require little transformation of the infrastructure. Moreover, whereas electricity is a commodity that people don’t relate to personally and psychologically so long as the power flows when they need it, transportation and vehicles have a personal connection that cannot simply be reduced to cost per kilometer unlike a cost per unit of electricity. Lastly, government revenues from petroleum use are 8-fold and 13-fold greater than that from coal and electricity respectively.

Biofuels are one potential low-carbon alternative that can largely use the existing infrastructure. However, their water footprint is an order of magnitude or two greater than for oil, they require farm chemicals that pollute soil and water, and their tail-pipe emissions do little to reduce urban air pollution. Another alternative is Hydrogen which today is made from natural gas and is more carbon intensive as transportation fuel. Hydrogen made by splitting water using solar and wind energy is prohibitively costly. But even if its cost can be brought down in future, it will require tremendous amounts of potable-quality water. This leaves battery electric vehicles (BEV) as the only alternative to oil today with no tail-pipe emissions, low water footprint, already cleaner than petrol/diesel and will get greener as electricity gets greener. But BEVs are not without their own challenges such as higher upfront cost, lack of charging infrastructure, time for refueling, need for scarce critical minerals not available domestically, high end technology for making battery cells which needs to be imported, and high cost of recycling batteries. 

There are also macro-economic challenges of moving away from oil. An obvious one is the burden of subsidies on public finances. The FAME II 2019 scheme for BEVs had an outlay of Rs 10,000 crore  over 5 years but this amounts to only 0.04% of India’s annual budget of Rs 45 Lakh crores for 2023-24.  It has been reported that FAME III might have an outlay of Rs 40,000 to 50,000 crores.  The National Green Hydrogen mission announced in 2023 has twice the total outlay of FAME II across 7 years or 0.06% of current annual budget. These seem small but so is the total number of vehicles these subsidies can support.  FAME II aims to help adoption of a mere 5500 electric buses (<1% of India’s bus fleet) and 55000 cars (1% of annual sales of cars and commercial vehicles). 

Then there are implicit subsidies which are foregone revenues from the GST rebate on EVs (5% versus 28% for petrol/diesel cars) and lost excise and VAT on petrol and diesel which account for about 50 % of their retail price.  Currently oil products generate 90% of excise and central excise accounts for 12% of all central taxes (including state share) while VAT is major source of revenue for states. In a peer-reviewed paper published in the journal Energy Policy earlier this year titled “Implications of the energy transition for government revenues, energy imports and employment: The case of electric vehicles in India”,  I estimate that on a per vehicle basis, each petrol or diesel vehicle generates more than six-fold greater taxes for the central and state governments combined over its life relative to a BEV today. In fact, GST and fuel excise and VAT over the life of car amount to as much as the upfront cost of a mid-size car. What this paper also shows is that despite their upfront cost, BEVs can have a lower total cost of ownership even in the absence of any subsidies, and they help reduce total imports and carbon emissions. Finally, BEVs generate less total employment across their life as they require fewer components to be manufactured, assembled, maintained, and replaced. 

This is not to suggest that India should temper its ambitions for transitioning away from oil. Instead, it reveals the need for a more sustainable and well thought out long-term strategy that does not rely solely on subsidies, which already are substantial. Simply reducing the GST rebate runs the risk of making BEVs even costlier which will slow adoption. Implementing a carbon tax on fuels can help but this will also decline if the intended effect of reducing fossil fuel consumption comes to pass. Policymakers also need to plan for additional job creation to compensate for low labor intensity of an electrified transport sector.

 

Pre-industrial humans were as carbon efficient as today's natural gas (methane) burning power plants but with a couple of important differences

The basal metabolic need of an adult not engaged in any energy intensive activity is ~ 7 MJ/day. This amounts to ~1700 Cal (kcal)/day which explains why our the food labels are based on a daily diet of 2000 Cal/day. This is also ~ 2 kilo Watt hours  (kWhr) per day.

We exhale about 1 kg CO2/day

This means the CO2 intensity of our minimum daily subsistence is about 500 gCO2/kWhr

Of course, if we just subsisted by consuming food that is hunted or farmed organically with animal inputs (manure and ox for ploughing etc.) and water from rains and rivers diverted by water wheels and gravity then we are not adding any net CO2 to the atmosphere or oceans which was how it was in the pre-fossil age.

The enthalpy of combustion of natural gas or methane (CH4) is 890 kJ/mole, which translates to 55.62 kJ/gram or MJ/kg of methane. 

CH4+ 202->CO2+2H20

The combustion of methane emits 2.75 kgCO2/kg methane which translates to ~50 gCO2/MJ

However, the efficiency with which the heat energy released is converted to electricity in a modern gas turbines (without waste heat recovery or use for Combined heat and power) is about 37%, which means effective emission intensity of natural gas plants is = 481 gCO2/kWhr  (Calculation: 50gCO2/MJ *3.6 (MJ/kWhr)/0.37)

Therefore, pre-industrial humans were as carbon efficient as natural gas power plants with one important exception, the carbon they emitted was biogenic, i.e., was sequestered during photosynthesis and will be again while natural gas combustion adds to the atmospheric carbon stock. 

Another difference is that a typical gas power plant can be about 500 MW which means they generate 10,000 MWhrs/day (operating full capacity for 20 hours a day). This is the equivalent of BMR of 5,000,000 humans (Calculation: 10,000,000 (kWhrs/day)/ 2 KWhrs/day/human) 

While we could do stuff like capturing the carbon emitted and storing it underground or extracting it from the atmosphere called direct air capture but these come with a huge energy burden. As to the energy requirements for these, I will discuss in a future post. For now let me just say I am reminded of what the economist John Maynard Keynes is to have said in the context of what the government should do when stuck in a depression "If necessary, in the name of stoking demand and people’s expectations, “The government should pay people to dig holes in the ground and then fill them up.” Continuing to burn coal and then using energy to suck carbon from the air might end up amounting to that or worse for it would not even employ a fraction of the people manual hole digging and filling would.

Should 100% of public-university students be forced to pay $30 per hour for 1800 hours of instruction over four years ?

At the outset, I feel extremely lucky that a major and reputed academic institution employs me. I also am really happy that my institution ranks among the top in the nation for the percentage of students who are Pell grant recipients. But this post is about cost of 4-year college in general and how my industry (which it is after all) needs to get better at making education more affordable and not offer a one-size fits all solution. 

We all know the price of groceries and gasoline but how many of us know what we pay for say an X-ray or what we pay for a lecture in a college (let alone what is the true cost of each before insane markups both health care and our noble universities apply)? There are a lot of things we dont know the price of and that is ok and it doesn't mean we are irrational or flying entirely blind. There are good reasons why price of groceries and gasoline are prominently displayed voluntarily but not at the same granularity and transparency when it comes to healthcare or college lecture. For one the "university industry" sells you something that one cannot buy piece-meal (we used to be outraged that Microsoft shoved us a bundle of bad products along with their OS but which pales in comparison to how Apple extorts you today). It is like subscribing to a 4 year health plan at the end of the which you can see how you look in the mirror and there is no guarantee you will be any slimmer let alone healthier. But I want to just discuss the price students pay for a lecture in typical public undergraduate university in US. I wanted to know what my students are paying to learn from me.

At UCLA In-state tuition is $14,500 per year. Students need 180 units spread over 4 years, which is 45 units per year or a cost of $320 per unit. Each unit is 10 hours of instruction which implies  a tuition cost of $32 per hour. You pay the same if you sit in class of 400, 100 or 10 students which seems unfair. Clearly, in a class of 10 you get much more focussed and more personal attention from instructor yet you pay the same. Even in a cinema or concert hall you dont pay the same price (even before dynamic pricing, which makes sense but I hate as a consumer came about) then why do we make students pay the same. I am confident I offer $32 per hour worth of benefits one on one with a student, in fact even 5 students at a time and if I push it to 10. But do I provide $32 per hour per student when the student is in a class of 50 may be not, 100 and above, surely not.

So why should 100% of all students in a university be forced to spend 4 years and pay the same tuition in total irrespective of what degree they earn and what broad type of returns they can expect to derive? What percent of degrees really need 4 years of education? Also given that the class size diminishes drastically from Year 1 to Year 4, should the tuition in early years not reflect the lower cost and quality (not in the sense bad quality but lower teacher-student ratio and less advanced topics).  Start cheap in the 1st year and make the student take most credits and progressive increase cost per credit hour and require fewer credit hours. Also let people get a certificate of completion that can be used for employment and offer a proper Bachelors degree in 3 years with 80% the units of 4 year degree. I actually feel students can do 100% of the units in 3 years if they worked harder and partied less or took some summer classes. This is how  it is many other countries including India, if people with 3 year degrees and good programming knowledge can take jobs away from Americans, lets empower American students to do those same jobs in America. If they have to spend less on education debt, they can also afford less paying jobs and bring more jobs to America. And the few that really want to spend a 4th year in college paying with their parents' or their own money/debt then that is fine.

So how is this is not exploitation of our students by the industry called 4-year college? And I am not even talking what our big universities might be doing to the reputation of institutions like community colleges when we treat people from those places as less talented or qualified. Yet the option of reducing time spent getting a degree never seems to get brought up or discussed in discussions on how college education needed to change. Academics speak a lot about innovation, inequities in society and are paid to be critical of old ideas and developing new ones but how much do they really question the inefficiencies and non-competitive nature of their own enterprise because that means changing how they operate which no one wants. 

By the way, the cost of tuition quadruples in private universities and so we public university folks exploit you less. But if wealthy folks prefer to voluntarily spend more on private colleges that doesn't bother me but when they are able to snag faculty or students with better offers for grad education then it can create a few problems. 

I intend to in a later post discuss tuition revenue per hour as compared to faculty salary per hour. Can you guess what share is the latter of the former?

When do career warriors of social issues reduce to white-collar mercenaries?

 What is one's responsibility with respect to these problems

• Fight against poverty 
• Fight for affirmative action or diversity 
• Fight against environmental degradation 
• Fight for minimum wage or wage increases
• Fight for preservation of cultural and religious beliefs

Let's distinguish four potential distinct perspectives from which one might need to take a stand on the above: 

1. It is an issue that you personally suffered from and are not financially benefitting from the fight 
2. It is an issue that you personally suffered from but are financially benefitting from the fight  
3. You didn't suffer from it but you are financially benefitting from working on it and you need the money - the "career warriors"
4. You didn't suffer from it and you are not financially benefitting from working on it - the philanthropists and donor class

#1 Such people are authentic even if biased and should have the greatest voice. As to whether their ideas should be accepted unquestioningly is not so obvious. For instance, some solutions they propose might impose costs on some that might also not be fair and cannot be treated as collateral damage outright. Think reparations for descendants of slaves financed by raising taxes on all not just those who benefitted the most from it.  Or think affirmative action that hurts deserving but poor white (or in the case of my original home country India the upper-caste poor) from the best public education or jobs.

#2 Such people are also authentic and deserve a lot of voice but the solutions they advocate need to be examined a little more carefully because of the financial conflict of interest.

#3 These are people who choose to dedicate their professional career to these causes because they want to be altruistic. They do not have the authenticity of #1 and #2 because they did not experience those issues but have empathy. However, they also stand to gain financially and psychologically and  have an incentive to make the problem seem larger than it is.

#4 These are the funders - philanthropists and donors who support a cause they care about and support people in category #3. They obviously should not have too much of a voice just simply because they finance it (as to why I suggest Rob Reich's book Just Giving or Anand Giridhardas's Winners take all). But given what and who they choose to fund, they end of having a lot of voice through their agents.

I myself fall under #3, a career warrior although I am anything but a warrior for I cannot take anything too seriously and when I do, it is not for too long before I am bored of it. I heard Freeman Dyson say that about himself in a different context but my level of Math is nowhere close to his .And being employed at a public university I am financed by the taxpayer and while this frees me from the need to be kind to Business or Philanthropy (although my record of winning public grants is poor) this should not mean I can say what I like simply because it can get published or because I have brand name recognition behind me. For people in this group, fighting for other people's problems makes us feel good about ourselves, but when the problems are complex such as the above and we don't have full information or capacity to process all the information available, is it responsible to do the feel good thing or the popular thing? Is it is right to say imposing costs on some for the benefit others is worth it simply because one thinks those who are harmed can bear the costs.

I can say for myself that among the above problems, my entire career has benefitted from society's concern about environmental degradation. The way I have been to escape it is by living in leafy part of a city in wealthy country which outsourced a lot of pollution to the rest of the country which has outsourced a lot of the pollution to rest of the world. Of course, while I worked really hard right through and came out of a pressure cooker environment, I also had the benefit of good luck (being born into a stable middle-class family that valued and invested heavily in good schooling), and benefitted from massive public investments in college education by a poor country (my parents paid a total of about $500 in tuition for a four year Engineering degree in one of the  most competitive and prestigious engineering schools in India). 

And sitting from a lucky yet hard-earned position, if I simply join the bandwagon and preach how capitalism is destroying the planet (which is what discussion on environment gets reduced to often) or alternatively subscribe to how enlightened capitalism can save it (the B-school variety of delusion about cliches like the triple bottom line of people, planet and profit), what does that make me? Either I dont have the guts or the intellectual capacity to call out the hypocrisy or am part of a cult.  Should putting solar panels on one's roof, driving EVs, eating organic food, and buying carbon offsets for flying 50000 miles per year, voting for higher taxes and preaching about the issue absolve one of all blame and make them feel superior to the people who are skeptical of this whole enterprise? 

We call someone who gets paid to fight other people's battles a mercenary. So aren't well-to-do people (including academics like myself) who benefit from the persistence of an issue that doesn't really affect them materially and economically not simply white-collar mercenaries? In fact aren't we worse than mercenaries? At least mercenaries put their lives on the line. What are academics sitting in western democracies with full protection for their free speech and safety and having economic security risking when they pontificate how bad the world is and keep indoctrinating their students that the system they themselves benefitted from is rigged or for that matter even those who spread optimism that everything is achievable through enlightened capitalism or more scientific progress? 

Does mere belief in a cause make us different from mercenaries? And if this too extreme, because we are getting paid to do what we like, should that not make us have less of a voice and not more? Isn't that what we ourselves want when we vote in elections?

Can organic tobacco reduce smoking related illnesses?

If this sounds stupid at the outset that is because it is. But how come we buy the garbage most companies put out in the name of ESG? The social problem of tobacco is not that the tobacco is grown in a way that causes pollution but that its use is one the largest contributors to certain types of illnesses and cancers. So what does an commitment of a cigarette company to fight climate change and for diversity in the work place really mean? 

In the same vein, 

- the salient impact of a financial institution like banks on society is not the energy it uses to power its buildings and back office and travel etc but what it funds when it lends and who it lends to. 

- the salient impact of internet companies is not how much carbon is emitted in delivering content because it pales in comparison to their impact on your behavior - addiction to screens and how they compete for attention with reading, playing sports, deep contemplation or just resting and sleep. 

- the salient impact of meat production is not the environmental burden of raising livestock but that this is the one industry responsible for the merciless slaughter of animals. 

- the salient impact of a university is not whether the campus is net zero (a fad that is only helping inflate the size of administration and bureaucracy not to mention spending and budgets) but how it shapes the intellect of students and are they simply indoctrinating them on issues that are complex and have a simple but popular and flawed solution.

- the salient impact of the health care industry is also not climate change causing emissions or the hazardous wastes but how opaque the costs are from a consumer perspective and how excessively expensive and inaccessible good care is for most people in the world. 

Of course each of these industries signing up to flight climate change by shifting to renewable energy etc is ok but the energy cost of doing business for each of these types of industries is so trivial that they can switch away from fossil energy with almost no impact on profits. So what is all the hype about. And the fact that renewable energy is cheaper today is no thanks to them (a whole another topic as to who is it due to. Hint: not big business!). If anything, wealthy corporations switching to solar and wind is only driving up cost of renewables for the rest of society. 

The fact that businesses are lining up to do ESG and fight climate voluntarily suggests they must have figured out it not only doesn't hurt them but it benefits them. Coal, oil and gas producers or makers of steel, cement, fertilizer and automobiles the real products that have made our lives better (of course with  modern medicines and satellite communication as well) are opposing it because it requires them to fundamentally stop doing what is their core business unlike the users of these materials whose profits come from value added labor, capital and packaging (not just physical but psychological). 

Make no mistake, it is the fossil fuel economy that is the problem and that is both producers and consumers and lets focus on them and not be unsuspecting cattle that is happy with the fodder that industry feed us in the name of ESG. So when these so-called enlightened CEOs of wealthy companies in Internet technology, finance, health care, entertainment, even big academic corporations like universities, sign up as altruistic warriors for the environment and society look closer at whether they are really doing anything about the most salient aspect of their business which might not necessarily be climate change or lack of diversity, another popular issue of the day that makes a lot of people feel good about themselves when they champion it. 

I dislike the phrase putting lipstick on a pig because how the way we refer to and treat pigs and animals in general says more about who we are. So let me say ESG claims often amount to applying cosmetics.

The harsh reality of Sustainability

If you are intellectual about it, then you will be impractical. Seeking conceptual clarity, theoretical simplicity, and logical consistency means possibly lacking in one or more among empirical validity, practicality, urgency, and popular appeal.

If you are too activistic, then will be short on rigor 

If you take it too seriously, you become sanctimonious

If you talk incremental changes, they might not scale up or lead to big changes that appear necessary 

If you talk big changes, there is a risk of large unintended harmful consequences 

If you don't endure real pain and hardship in its pursuit, then you are not authentic. 

If you sacrifice and endure hardship, it still does not mean you have the right to ask others to sacrifice for the sake of greater good or belittle others' choices.  

If you feel good about helping the cause, then you are deriving personal benefits and not truly altruistic

If you don't feel good about it, then you are probably not going to do what it takes 

If you are paid to study or sell it, then you are not unbiased

If you are not paid to do it but yet do it, it is a choice or worse a privilege  

If you are not paid to work on it and it is not out of choice, then you have some real skin in the game which makes you biased but authentic. I prefer biased and authentic over inauthentic. Unbiasedness is too much to ask whereas authenticity is indispensable.

And then there are things we dont know that we dont know.

I am not convinvced that many people talking about Sustainability and Climate change are  themselves enduring real and meaningful pain and hardship. Often they are  people who also get paid for it and feel it is more important what they have to say or contribute financially or believe in the power of technology or energy rather than being honest about how their own wealth and consumption is excessive. Effective altruism is a philosophy that supports this world view but them Sam Bankman-Fried was the most popular face of effective altruism. 

In sum, sustainability, for me, is about doing the hard stuff that requires real personal sacrifice. But then we are ingenious at finding solutions to make the hard stuff easy and that is the source of all problems. So do the hard stuff and keep it hard which is hard because we live in a society where we are told the most important thing is to maximize pleasure or happiness. But if the one truth about human nature is that we seek happiness, and if that has what has led to an unsustainable world, then may be it is our pursuit of happiness which is the root of the problem and not simply fossil fuels and evil corporations. 

The ethics of hiring maids and professionals for cleaning our private spaces

This is specifically about hiring help to clean one's own private spaces - mainly homes and speaks to the  social dimension of sustainability. 

At the outset as an Indian and as someone considers Vedantic and more broadly India philosophical thought as amongst the deepest intellectual and spiritual achievements of humanity (I am not ready to write about how the concept of Karma is a logically quite sound albeit empirically unvalidatable theory to explain one's predicament needs further refinement), the same philosophy has been misused to treat people engaged in those professions unfairly, inhumanely and uncompassionately. Having said that, things did not descend to the level of sanctioning slave ownership as with other supposedly more enlightened societies, and cultures nor is it used to justify a call to assassinating or murdering people in the name of religion. Also not sure which is worse - keeping people engaged in cleaning near oneself but as a slave or treating them as impure enough to banish them to the remote corners of a village or town without enslaving them. Needless to say, both are unacceptable. I am also not talking about practical enslavement as indentured labor which was neither casteist nor a monopoly of Indian/Hindu society. In fact the outcastes probably never even qualified for an usurious loan in the first place. And I say this not as a normative statement about the cleaning class but a really sad empirical fact that the descendants of the upper castes and classes cannot simply wish away but need to come to terms with it without feeling the need to disown their culture or tradition entirely. Same goes for minorities who demolished and denigrated the beliefs of the majority (yes, I am not mistaken minorities heaping misery on majority as it happened during colonization of India starting with the Islamic invasions). After all, that Neils Bohr and Robert Oppenheimer found Vedanta as deeper than their own religious traditions, should count for something. Also looking down on cleaning or trash is a universal human virtue across time and societies and nothing uniquely Hindu about it. I am sure evolutionary psychology can surely suggest a scientific basis. There are a lot of activities that a parent would wish their child not make a career out of and I will hazard a guess being a hired cleaning help will be on that list even for people employed in that profession let alone for those who aren't. Again this is a statement of fact and not a normative claim of how it ought to be. 

Cleaning one's own home regularly is something most people will prefer to have someone else do it for them if they could afford it. Of course, there is the convenient argument that one's time is worth more and since we dont do many things ourselves, this is one such. We don't grow our own food, stitch our clothes, make our own fuels and electricity, etc. the list is endless. So this is perhaps the strongest argument in favor of getting hired cleaning help. But what about the morality of having someone else clean your private spaces, toilets, and trash. Even by providing the safest of chemicals and equipments and paying fair wages,  you are still having them do your dirty work. This is one area where I wouldn't have qualms about robots taking jobs away from cleaning people for the psychic benefit for me from not having one human clean another's refuse outweighs the cost of taking away a job that provides employment for the poorer amongst us. 

Going a step further, what about simply entertaining the thought that I want to do great things, intellectual things, be a leader, change minds, be my own boss and not work for anyone etc Aren't each of these essentially looking down on people doing what one sees as less prestigious work? Viewed from this perspective, a person who says I will do whatever makes we earn more or become more wealthy is far more honourable than those who say I dont care for the money. 

A rank ordering of harm caused by man to animals

After listening to Peter Singer's  Animal Liberation, reading and some of the works of Tom Regan, and listening briefly to Gary Francione, I decided to come up with a rank ordering of decreasing level of justifiable harm to animals with 1 being the greatest harm. Briefly, the views of the three which are more sophisticated and nuanced than can be summarized in two sentences like I do below are

• Peter Singer:  He is a Utilitarian and for him use of animals is not problematic so long as they dont feel pain and can be used to derive benefits for humans even if the animals themselves go uncompensated for their exploitation.
• Tom Regan: He gives a more deontological rationale that animals like humans are an end in themselves and should not be exploited. For him animals have rights. If this is the case, then using animals without their consent is exploitation which basically means we cannot use them for any human ends.
• Gary Francione: Humans don’t have a moral justification for using animals irrespective of how we treat them

Ranking of harm to animals by humans

1. For food - slaughtered for meat after spending entire life in captivity in terrible conditions - caged livestock
2. For leisure - hunted as game
3. For scientific research - for medical research
4. For scientific research - for non-medical purposes - food and cosmetics
5. For transporting people and goods
6. For food - slaughtered but raised in better conditions - free range 
7. Indirect harm through habitat loss - deforestation, roads, shipping, land development, increase in flooding and wild fires caused by human activity
8. Indirect harm through pollution - pollution of air, soil and water. 
9. Emotional harm through isolation - in public zoos and parks  and as pets in private homes 

I have two distinct harms when used for food and rank one much worse than the other and also rank some harms including being used as beasts of burden worse than slaughter when it is done after allowing them to lead a not so cruel a life. I also have one type of killing for food as less unethical or less harmful compared their use for scientific research. My reasoning for this is even as the benefit of scientific research might be greater and in an utilitarian sense greater, the harm to the animal undergoing testing could be much greater as it has to live through the pain and suffering while it is being tested, which seems more cruel than quick slaughter. On the other I put hunting for leisure, which also might be a quick death as worse than that because it is being killed for fun and in a utilitarian sense, I feel this is worse way to derive pleasure than satisfying one's hunger for eating meat. I also rank the harm from pollution as quite low relatively. Therefore to me, while climate change is going to have a big impact on animal life, to me it does not rise up the direct harms I listed as higher. I rate emotional harm from isolation when they are kept in captivity in zoos or as pets in homes as the least based both on the assumption they are treated the least badly in this context and cared for reasonably well although emotionally they might be in the same state as in a testing lab.  

Do you agree or disagree? How might your ranking differ? Beyond being vegan what else do we need to abjure to lead a life where we dont end up contributing to animal exploitation. Would you go to the extent of foregoing life-saving drugs? 

Free public transit to increase ridership and for climate justice? - Not so fast

This is in response to the LAist article - Why free public transit is also climate just?  And it is not a critique of the article or its writer but about the notion of this being some form of justice let alone climate justice. I write this as someone who certainly cannot say I have experienced being poor. However,  I ride a lot of public transit and including once or twice week for 2 hours each way and this has nothing to do with how inefficient or hard I find it for myself. Lets first dispense with the notion free transit is economically beneficial to the working poor or at least the most important thing they might want.

Average commute speed via public transit including walking, transfer and waiting - 10 mi/hour

Average commute speed via private car - 30 mi/hour

Time to travel 20 miles via public transit - 2 hours

Time to travel 20 miles via private car - 0.67 hours

Savings in fuel and maintenance and depreciation = $0.40 per mile* 20 miles = $ 8

Savings in parking cost = $5

Ticket fare = $2

Avoided cost by taking public transit = $8 +$5 - $2 = $11

Excess travel time = 1.33 hours

Minimum wage above which savings in time is worth more than savings in driving cost 

= $11/1.3 hours  

=$8.7 per hour

Basically, if you make more than $9, which is 40% below the $15.5 minimum wage in LA taking public transit is costlier unless you do it for some other non-monetary benefit. If we assume people are rational, this means no one who is riding transit is doing it because they like it and if they like it like myself, they would much rather it be costlier in exchange for quicker, cleaner and safer. Of course, based on the assumptions if I am more generous, I can make public transit worth while even up to $16 per hour but you get the point that it is for the poor at least in LA. 

So why do people take transit then?

• They are not eligible to get a license
• They are poor and cannot afford a car
• Public transit is the most convenient or for the sake of the environment - They dont like to drive -avoid stress from traffic, finding parking, they can do other things while not having to focus on the road 

The first two dont have a choice and asking them to help the environment (not literally asking of course) and the rest of us piggy-backing on their hardship to reduce emissions so we could emit more is cruel. The third group do it anyway and not for the cost. So who is really going decide to switch from driving to public transit just for the savings in ticket fare. And if they are, they likely are not doing the necessary and correct calculations. People who ride public transit are like the people who are waiting to migrate to America or Europe from the south. They are just waiting to be able to afford a car. I would rather the poor ride a car and save precious time wasted on public transit while earning low wages and commuting long distances.

Dont get me wrong, by all means use public transit and we should do a lot lot more to get people to ride it and ditch cars. I go so far as to say, public transit agencies should not be expected to make profit but to maximize ridership.  Given that fare collection accounts for a miniscule share of costs making it free is also not such a big extra burden for transit agencies. And by the way are we even enforcing payment now to make this even relevant? Or perhaps this is the reason nobody is opposing it. 

Either way  I just dont see how making it free make for better services - safer at all hours (yes, I as a male dread riding the red and purple homeless shelter after 630 pm!, yeah I know but ride it to and from work and then talk to me), reliable, clean, better riding experience, and adding new routes and more frequent services which will bring more people to ride transit which is what we need the most for climate and equity.  We are also not targeting the people who can afford to take extra hardship for the environment just asking the people who do to put up with poor services while the rest of us feel warm and fuzzy about living in a city with free transit while chipping in a few cents in taxes but never really will take the trouble of riding it even occasionally let alone for work. 

The issue is that anytime one mentions environmental justice (or diversity for that matter) few dare to question out of fear of being seen as elitist and out of touch or insensitive. 

Making public transit free for climate justice or increasing ridership - not so fast I say.