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.

The merits and tyranny of Competition

Animals have no choice but compete but do humans need to? Of course yes but to what extent and how is what I mean. And certainly animals too cooperate to an extent both with members of their own species and also other species.

If I understand Libertarianism correctly, its support for competition and free markets is because such an environment maximizes individual liberty, which is the ultimate end for this school of thought as the name  itself suggests. And so even to the most diehard supporters of free markets, competition is not an end but only an instrument for achieving a higher end. Of course when it fails to do that the people from this school will say that even if free market competition fails to deliver the best outcome that doesn't mean government intervention can do better and might likely do even worse and they end up arguing for competition anyway. For its cousin, the Utilitarians too, competition is an instrument to achieving a higher end but that end is some fuzzy notion of aggregate well being and they would be willing to take away some liberties for the larger social good however they conceive it. 

As for the socialists and communists, well unfortunately, my economics education, was largely neoclassical (evident from my lumping the two together), and did not expose me to as much of it as the former or any of the heterodox schools with the exception of ecological economics and so I am still educating myself. But in my limited understanding competition seems a more difficult theme to integrate into the socialist conception compared to with Libertarianism or Utilitarianism for it is more about the collective. However, I am sure for socialists too it has to be an instrument to a higher end if at all. So competition obviously has a lot going for it but my aim here is to present a few reasons as to why we need to be less sanguine about espousing it carelessly. 

Merits of competition

First and foremost is that the very notion of competition implies fairness. As someone who loves sports, I immediately associate it with competition in sports where everyone plays by the same rules, at least when a million camera's on them

Second is the slightly more sophisticated but in practice more bastardized idea of efficiency. Efficiency is simply about getting the most out of what we put it in - effort, time or resources with the corollary being inefficient implies all sorts of things such as lazy, slow, wasteful and incompetent. In an economic sense, competitive markets are efficient of course given some ideal conditions that dont exist in real world.

Third, competition is about overcoming struggle. It is only when you overcome struggle you get better. And this is intrinsically good in addition to being instrumentally good for learning to overcome future struggles. It is intrinsically good for one's own fulfillment or realization of the purpose of life. While we might all seek pleasure, we also value that which is earned by overcoming hardship more. We dont simply want to live in a pleasure machine like Nozick argued. A similar expression from John Stuart Mill is - "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is only because they only know their own side of the question.” This is not to say the life of a pig is free of struggle.

Among these attributes of competition, I put fairness and overcoming struggle above efficiency because it is not per se about outcomes or consequences but  seems inherently or intrinsically proper regardless of outcomes. That what is fair or just leads to better longer run consequences is only an instrumental reason for what is right and not the intrinsic reason for why what is fair is what is right. As someone who has been exposed to Vedanta , it is consistent with the philosophy of Nishkama Karma expounded in the Bhagavad Gita.  In fact most people who are consequentialists will prefer that the right outcomes also result from a fair process. This is why we tolerate democratic processes and a legal system based on innocent until proven guilty even when these occasionally seem to throw up unpalatable outcomes. With fairness, the outcome is endogenous while the process is exogenous.

In contrast, under the notion of efficiency, the outcome or end is exogenous while the process is endogenous which means one could resort to any means if the end goal is desirable or virtuous. It is what we seek to achieve efficiently (in the case of economics it is some fuzzy notion of overall welfare, often reduced by the mediocre or selfish, which is not all but most who have been exposed to some economics unfortunately, to something as crude as GDP). For economists, markets foster competition and competition leads to efficiency and efficiency means maximizing overall welfare for efficiency means we bake the biggest pie possible and a bigger pie also means we can have more redistribution.

The downsides of competition

The real world of course is more messy compared to the abstract and theoretical world which is necessary. It is important not to miss the forest for the trees but you cannot also describe a forest without understanding trees. So the merits often tend to be reductionistic and general while the demerits arise from the nuances and complexity of the real world.

1. Competition is not fair when there are inequities to begin with. If you are born less lucky (in a poor household or a household that is less than desirable)  

2. Competition is not efficient if conditions are not right. Asymmetric information, unpriced bads (like pollution) and goods (like knowledge production), monopolies, etc. If such conditions are not rectified then unfettered competition will not produce the best outcomes

3. As to what is worth competing for is something that individuals and society needs to determine for themselves. This requires wisdom, experience, judgement, developing one's own ethics and morals 

4. There is little empirical evidence that the greatest of advances that have been made technologically or socially would not have resulted without people competing to succeed and certainly a lot of it can be put down to curiosity (for inventions and discoveries prior to 20th century) and in recent times the biggest ones are due to public investment.

5. Markets are rarely competitive at least for the most important things that matter in life - health care (we know what coke cola costs before you buy but no one can tell what a bandaid will cost in a hospital), education (if your parents aren't wealthy enough to rent let alone buy a home in a good school district, your life prospects get cut even before the umbilical cord is severed upon your emergence), safety (last I checked we depend on publicly funded police and fire services), being able to travel (dont see any real competition - cars don't really compete with air travel which does not compete with ships), energy (your electricity supplier is a local monopoly and oil markets are not) and certainly not housing (havent you heard the cliche no two homes are same!). For everything else there is the mathematically elegant world that one is taught in Economics 101.

6. Everyone is trying to escape it. But the ultimate indictment is that no one wants to keep competing all the time. Even when not doing anything unfair to not compete, people are trying to escape or eliminate it. When you combine this with the fact that not all people may have the same resources to compete it is de facto not competition. In sport, successful sportsmen are able to hire more help - trainers, coaching, equipment, diet etc. In education, people hire tutors. In research, they get access to better equipment and data and design costlier experiments. In business, there is branding. Even in Academia which I know a little bit about people are trying to differentiate themselves which actually avoid competing or at least intended to convey they are not in competition or there is no competition. 

We need to value people overcoming struggle more than overcoming competition. If you work very hard at acing tests you will while someone else might not ace the test but have overcome far greater challenges. But how do we observe that accurately beyond depending on what people claim to have overcome or binning people into buckets based on certain social or demographic identity

Ethical dilemma of paying more than the going rate

Most people want corporations and businesses to pay more to their employees especially the blue collar workers.  We think such businesses are being socially responsible. However what about consumers voluntarily paying more for goods and services? An example in the US context is tipping but here I am talking about paying a higher price by not haggling with a shop keeper or a service provider. How much harm does one who can afford to pay more end up causing unintentionally when they pay more than they need to? Here I want to distinguish people paying more because they dont like to engage in bargaining because it is not their nature from those that pay because they feel they dont want to bargain with a poorer individual. My focus is on the latter. 

Every time I visit India and go shopping, where prices are rarely non-negotiable in any setting other than large retail grocery chains and online portals, I agonize over whether I should haggle. I avoid large chains and try to buy from smaller establishments for a variety of reasons. One is they are right on the sidewalk and dont have to walk into a large store or wait for long. It is much easier to do that in India than in the US for a variety of reasons. Smaller establishments seem much more in number and you dont have to take more effort to search and locate them. The most recent was for a slipper that was Rs 400 (about $5). If I were to haggle like a local, I could have got it for a 15 to 20% discount. I agonized over whether by not haggling I  am creating expectations where the shop keeper refuses to sell at a discount which then raises costs for the locals or whether I am doing the right thing like we do here in the US where we tip and make up for what we feel are paltry wages from employers although the latter is not a perfect analogy for haggling with self-employed person is different from tipping a wage worker. I dont think there are many who would pay more to the proprietor of a business voluntarily.

Another situation that I get conflicted over is when taking an autorickshaw in places where they dont use a fixed fare per km. But here I there are two alternatives - one is a Uber-like solution or take public transport when possible which comes with non-monetary cost but also some unique benefits. The issue with Uber is that what has happened is a lot of autorickshaws now refuse to serve outside the platform or ask for a huge premium which is making it hard for senior citizens who might not be comfortable with smartphones like my dad. I was befuddled by this because platforms take a huge chunk as commission from the fare we pay but the reason the drivers are rational is either that they get incentives for doing more rides even if it is lower earning per ride and so they feel they dont need each and every ride outside the platform.  The one other thing ridehailing does is it is increasing taxi use because once you have decided to use the smartphone, a taxi is just a click away and of course taxis which is more pollution intensive and crosses greater congestion by virtue of being a bigger vehicle and is operated by younger and slightly better off individuals compared to those that operate autorickshaws. My solution here is to take public transport as much as possible. 

So is one being miserly when haggling with a much poorer individual or are they being socially responsible? Is one causing more harm than good even when quietly (and not loudly like most do by announcing the good they did) trying to help a few by paying more voluntarily?  Just because I can pay and feel good about myself am I not raising costs for others? To be clear this is inevitable in a world of scarcity where every decision has a bearing on others or something else. It is just that we dont and cannot perceive the effect of our actions unless you are large buyer or seller.  But the point is not one of empirical reality but a normative one just like God is not an empirical reality but the notion holds enormous sway over people. Are you playing God when you try to do good, specifically when engaging in a commercial transaction?

Some thoughts on solar (in the US context) - interview for MoneyGeek.com

I really enjoyed responding to the questions below and was pleasantly surprised my full responses were posted as such online. This is more fun because most times I spend 30 minutes talking to a reporter and get mentioned  at most once if at all and they generally miss the most important or insightful thing I thought I had to say. This format is a lot more exciting for me and honest from a reader's perspective. The full article as part of which my responses were posted is here - Electricity Bill Got You Down? Solar Panels in Your State Might Not Be as Expensive as You Think

Considering the federal incentives for solar technology in the recent Inflation Reduction Act, why have some states not added additional state-level incentives to make solar panel usage even more enticing?

Firstly, I am not sure which states you are referring to specifically. If you see the Database of State Incentives for Renewables & Efficiency®, it suggests almost every state has a few incentives, and I think most of these predate the IRA 2022. That said, in general, it is easier to hazard a guess why a policy was enacted than why it wasn't. If it wasn't, it most likely means there wasn't enough lobbying, which, in turn, might be because the industry is still in its infancy in that state or it isn't a huge market, which begs the question of why. And the answer to that could be less solar potential or because of cheap electricity.

My observation and hypothesis are that electricity prices are growing at a faster rate in states where solar and wind are penetrating the fastest. This needs to be tested, but rates have shot up in the last several years when renewables have also expanded aggressively. So I am not entirely convinced renewable electricity has lowered energy prices, even if it is cheaper to produce at certain times of the day and in certain locations.

In California, my average electricity price from Southern California Edison after adding all costs (fixed + gen + delivery) is in excess of $0.29 per kW-hr. And despite this high price of electricity, the payback on the solar panel is 10 years for me after the 30% tax credit on upfront cost and generous net metering that cannot be sustained in the long run without raising costs for non-PV owners. This is also too slow for the middle class, let alone lower-income homeowners. For the wealthy, it is not about cost savings for those who choose to install.

How can solar panels help the average homeowner to save money?

I am not entirely convinced we need to aggressively push solar on rooftops. Despite tax credits and net metering, the payback period for most people is probably long (eight to 10 years for me) but still less than the expected life of 20+ years. Utility-scale solar, I think, is a better investment of taxpayer subsidies instead of individual rooftops. Yes, rooftop solar provides some social benefits, and to that extent, we need to help private homeowners install them. But it is so expensive that despite what policymakers do, it is wealthier people who are going to afford it. There are also issues with the quality of the roof, etc., which poor households might need help with. Should we help lower-income homeowners install? I am not too sure, for they could be better helped in other ways to provide them with what they need, more like ensuring their electricity rate is low up to a certain minimum level for monthly use for basic needs and ensuring they have reliable access.

What are some of the barriers to the broader adoption of solar technologies?

In my opinion, it is that despite all the hoopla in the U.S., it is hard to take most of our fellow countrymen seriously when they complain about energy costs, for despite all this, energy costs are quite low as a fraction of monthly budgets, and any increase could be accommodated by being prudent in what one spends on. Energy costs are a small fraction of homeownership for people who can afford a home, and if so, is the money better spent elsewhere? We need to help people buy more efficient products and get them to use less energy rather than help them fuel their inefficient use in cleaner but costly ways.

Despite all this, I am a big believer that we need a lot more solar and wind and a lot less coal. Just not sure if it needs to be rooftops of the wealthy or the poor! Lastly, today one cannot also ignore inflation, which has increased panel and installation costs and financing costs because of rising interest rates.

Learning by riding and Learning by seeing - why subsidies for public use vehicles goes farther

Our paper titled "Benefits of electrifying app-taxi fleet – A simulation on trip data from New Delhi" was just published in the journal Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment. New Delhi, the capital of India is usually in the news for a few weeks this time of the year because this is time the air quality tends to be the worst and so in a way it seems timely that this paper just came out.

A salient aspect of this study is it is based on actual trip data (thanks to Ola Mobility Institute) and one of the first such for an Indian city if I am correct. Using a dataset comprising ∼ 730,000 app-taxi trips spanning ∼ 15 million kilometers (km) in Delhi, India, we estimate that: i) ∼ 23000 BEVs with 200 km range and a network of 3000 50 kilo-Watt chargers could satisfy 100% of Delhi’s daily app-taxi demand, and relative to a compressed natural gas (diesel) fleet eliminate 180 (700) and 0.14 (70) metric tonnes of vehicle tail-pipe NOX and particulate matter emissions respectively annually and reduce lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions by 15% (27%) per km. We show that the impact on the electricity demand of a city is small and charging demand is not coincident with the times of the day when electricity demand peaks. 

A broader policy lesson is that when we subsidize clean and socially beneficial technologies, directing those subsidies towards adoption in settings where the technology or investment will be used publicly will yield greater returns. Otherwise it even risks being concentrated among the wealthy who may not use it much and in fact even prove counter-productive for mass adoption because it may be seen as a rich person's toy. This is because more people will be able to see it in operation,  experience it and learn from it. Therefore, a bus or even a taxi which is on the road a lot more relative to a private use vehicle and hence seen and experienced by more people might come to be seen as not just cool and clean but reliable and functional technology and thus help drive private adoption voluntarily with less subsidies. This is what I see as learning by riding and learning by seeing in contrast to learning by doing which we talk of on the manufacturing side, the idea that as firms make more of something they get better at it and are able to make something for less cost. In the case of taxis, the focus of this paper, the drivers are also poorer and hence helping them adopt is more equitable. 

Life cycle assessment (LCA) in an environmental and innovation policy context

Recently I gave a seminar presented at the UC Santa Barbara Bren School on Life cycle assessment (LCA) in an environmental and innovation policy context. If you are interested in Life cycle assessment and its use as a framework to inform and design policies to support specific technologies for their environmental benefits, you might find the presentation interesting else below is a brief summary. 

I like to think my take on LCA is quite different from the majority of the researchers and certainly practitioners of LCA whose focus by design or inadvertently is narrower than what it ought to be from a societal perspective and this is the part that really excites me – LCA's utility in a public policy context. I see it as a uniquely valuable tool – one that is grounded in basic scientific and engineering principles,  but also requiring understanding of the socio-economic context in which the products or technologies analyzed in LCA operate. However, most people trained in LCA tend to be those exposed only to the former and not the latter which is largely because LCA is mainly offered in environmental engineering programs and both the faculty and students may not have the background in micro-economics, environmental economics  and cost-benefit analysis which I think is really needed if one needs to provide proper guidance on policy use of LCA.  For what it is worth, I have encountered many engineers who dismiss LCA as not real engineering and more of economics. To the typical engineer, economics is nothing more than cost budgeting and doing NPV calculations which only betrays how little they know of economics. On the other hand, as I explain in this talk, economists don't take LCA seriously for they think directly targeting CO2 or SOx or NOx is simpler instead of through LCA of specific technologies, and LCA as being inferior to pollution tax which is simpler. My former PhD advisor, Prof. David Zilberman with his trademark wit and humour, likened it to a Rube Goldberg machine yet oversaw my dissertation on this topic.  Anyway to the economists who doubt LCA I insist, so long as pollution taxes are not adopted everywhere and uniformly, LCA despite its complexities makes a lot of sense. 

To conclude, I think LCA is both an exciting area for research for those interested in the unintended consequences of technology and a really valuable tool for environmental and innovation policy.  For more details as to why check out the talk HERE

Questions to ask oneself before choosing an interdisciplinary PhD

Why an interdisciplinary PhD in Environment/Sustainability? 

I will begin with why I made this choice.  I was applying on the back of a bachelor and master of science degree both in Mech Engg and about three years experience working as an Engineer in the research and development division of large private corporation. I was working on emerging energy technologies such as fuel cells and microturbines for distributed power generation mainly from an engineering standpoint but then happened to get assigned a project focussed on the business case for these technologies. This project really spurred my interest in issues related to cost of energy and policies to reduce pollution. I applied to an interdisciplinary PhD program with just a broad motivation to work on clean energy and not being able to articulate much more than professing that I felt it was my responsibility to work towards making the world more environmentally friendly, yes it was that corny and am embarrassed at my naivete.  

But while it has luckily worked out for me, my resume perhaps compensated for my naivete, I actually feel a bit more clarity as to why you really want to go this route, and what you want to do with it wouldn't hurt for this a big leap. You don't quite need to know what it is you want to research as much as what type of thinking and analytical skills you really want to learn. I would recommend asking yourself the following questions

1. Which among the two is the key motivating reason for you?

• Intellectual curiosity: A pure thirst for an understanding of why things are the way they are (in a scientifically/empirically verifiable sense) or how they ought to be/what we ought to do (from a given normative/ethical standpoint).  To me this is knowledge for knowledge sake or for your own intellectual satisfaction. We owe many of the scientific breakthroughs and innovations to this sort of drive - in basic physics, chemistry, biology etc. Only with intellectual curiosity will you really try to get to the bottom of the problem to understand the fundamental causes. In the context of sustainability, this involves asking fundamental questions such as what is our ethical responsibility to the poor and the future,  how do we make decisions under uncertainty (not just risk but fundamental ignorance), how do we discount the future, what types of new institutions we need etc. There are innumerable fundamental questions which more easily fall under philosophy, economics, political science, sociology, climate science etc. or even mathematics. If what drives you is pure intellectual curiosity, a PhD is for you without a doubt, at least if you want a traditional career and accepted forum to pursue this. As to whether you want to do an interdisciplinary PhD requires you to dig a little deeper into your motivations. I say this because, I often find myself craving for an even deeper understanding of say, ethical theories, physical or biological laws,  statistical theory etc. Secondly, I find sustainability research drawing on these more than contributing back to these traditional areas of inquiry, or at least that is my limited understanding based on what I read. It is of course possible to come out of an interdisciplinary program and make fundamental contributions to human understanding but there are more straightforward trajectories for that while remaining motivated by Sustainability. I say this because at its core sustainability is concerned with Ethics and it builds on a solid understanding of human behavior, political and economic systems, basic workings of nature and sustainability research is about taking these reductionistic understandings and saying something that is more than its parts. 

• Passion for impact on environment and society: I see this as absolutely necessary but not sufficient for while you can make a great impact armed with a PhD, you dont really need a PhD for this. In fact advanced degrees could even be a hindrance, fo at its core this is about learning to work with people to get some change going on the ground - by informing individuals, or working with or in businesses, non-profit institutions, and government and you need a capacity to translate science and be an effective communicator, organizer or manager. However, it is true that a PhD lowers the barriers to entry to various institutions through which you can impact on sustainability short of becoming an entrepreneur yourself. This is why a desire to contribute to change is necessary for without this motivation, why bother with  a PhD in Sustainability. I am bit more cautious about enthusiastically encouraging you to do a PhD if your primary objective is bringing about this sort of change. Also a desire to have an impact on the practice of Sustainability can make one impatient not wanting to take the time to learn the boring and painful and I know this because there are way too many classes that talk of lofty things, critiquing everything people, businesses and government do  while requiring little rigorous work or critical thinking. Unfortunately,  academics can often be  arm-chair or ivory-tower critics who themselves lead highly unsustainable lifestyles (flying to conferences, going away to a secluded place to think and write) ensconced in the security of assured and well paying jobs while exhorting students to go and enact change on their behalf. The least I could do is be authentic if I cannot walk the talk. But even if one walks the talk, they would be wrong in expecting others to be able to follow their path. Somewhat recursively, leading a sustainable life oneself is necessary but not sufficient to preach sustainability. 

At one level with an interdisciplinary PhD in environment this is also about asking yourself why do you want to be a generalist? I recall a book I read (more precisely, listened to the audiobook) Range: Why Generalists Triumph In A Specialized World by David Epstein. It doesn't hurt to know that Roger Federer is used as an example of someone who started off learning many sports before settling on tennis or that many nobel laureates while best at one thing are also very good at a few other things. Seems not really that striking but it is the simplest of things that we fail to tell ourselves when we need to and go looking for more profound stuff.  

As for me it was a combination of desire to switch career from engineering to working on environmental issues and since I already had a Masters it had to be a PhD, nothing more profound or no lifetime passion, none of that. But if you ask me both having a thirst for knowledge for knowledge sake and a desire to have an impact is ideal.

This brings me to a second question you should ask yourself

2. What would you like to do post PhD? 

A PhD in sustainability can help in each of the three different types of career's below which I rank order in terms of the returns to investment in a PhD in Sustainability. And by returns I don't mean financial returns (the order will be reversed if we are talking purely financial returns)

• Academia - research and/or teaching 
• Research non-academic 
• Non-research  

I personally feel this is a great time to get an inter-disciplinary PhD if you are interested in an academic career. We are not at a point where we can say the world has one too many generalists.  Also the number of opportunities in academia for interdisciplinary studies is growing (demand). But I suppose the supply of graduates is also growing faster relative to demand and so getting good academic jobs could get tougher. However, this supply and demand argument is less straightforward for there is so much room to differentiate yourself that if you are good you wont be easily comparable to others. If oil companies can brand a commodity like gasoline, I will find a way to differentiate yourself. I had earlier written about my approach and good fortune in choosing an academic career with an interdisciplinary PhD here

An interdisciplinary PhD is also very good for teaching Sustainability or research in non-academic settings. And last but least it can hold immense value in non-research careers in multinational corporations, think tanks, governmental organizations and multilateral institutions such as World Bank etc.

I would like conclude with a few cautionary notes. One is that as exciting and important as Sustainability sounds, coming up with something new, backing it up with evidence, and accomplishing it all in 5 years, is not an easy task. It really requires the discipline to very quickly shed any inhibition of wanting to change society through a dissertation and take up some thing that is small and become really good at it and I assure you it will not be insubstantial in effort or impact. I think it is important to be humble while wanting to make a mark. 

To quote the really wonderful Paul Eddington from my all time favorite political satire Yes Minister - "A journalist once asked me what I would like my epitaph to be and I said I think I would like it to be 'He did very little harm'. And that's not easy. Most people seem to me to do a great deal of harm. If I could be remembered as having done very little, that would suit me." - Excerpted from LINK

When voluntary actions come cheap

If you don't like the thought of lions killing deers, would you sympathize more with a lion in a jungle with 9 other lions and 100 deers or a lion in a jungle with no other lions and 20 deers? May be this not a great analogy for what I have to say, let's see.

Without wading into socialism vs capitalism, I suppose we can all agree, if you are really rich and doing something voluntarily and trying to take credit for it then you should be taking on some pain in doing the voluntary action and so the person taking the greater pain deserves relatively more goodwill even if they are both causing harm. By that measure, I feel the tech companies deserve no more goodwill than fossil companies but while we are hyper about fossil companies today we seem to be giving the really wealthy tech companies a free pass. And I say this notwithstanding the fact that the harm done by fossil energy to the environment is greater than the tech companies both in aggregate and per unit of their economic output, but please remember each's value addition is not easily compared.

Here is why 

Since I just picked on Google in the last post (please read that one first for this to make better sense), as a Californian, let me pick on the other big fruit (sorry I don't like to pick on Fish, big or small), Apple this time. Phasebook's turn will come in due course and I hope to eventually move up the coast (not down) to the Amazon and MostlySoft. But my point applies to these companies as well.

If you look at the fossil companies and their major products - coal, oil products and gas, and when you look at the life cycle green house gas pollution from each product, only a small share 10% (maybe little more) happens in the process of getting those to the ultimate end user. The rest of the pollution happens when we actually burn those fuels to make electricity or when we drive our car or heat our homes. For computers etc. most of the harm (specifically, GHG and some types of air pollution) happens when the consumers use them (from emissions associated with the electricity they use) and when they trash them or recycle them (a lot of which could eventually be landfilling). Apologies for a casual error in an earlier version of the post where I claimed the same for phones but they are not in the same league as laptops or pcs 

Now here is the question, Apple, Google and the like seem to be really flaunting their plan to make their offices, factories, and suppliers go renewable or clean or whatever, and people seem ok with it, whereas I am sure if Shell or Chevron said we are making our refineries become carbon neutral we would call that putting lipstick on something we should not be putting it on (I am sorry, I would rather take a cheap shot at the rich as opposed to a more benign creature we have chosen to treat like a ...) 

Let me reiterate, fossil fuel companies cause disproportionately more environmental harm in aggregate compared to tech companies. (I am steering clear of non-environmental harm, at a certain level technology is not different from cigarettes, a whole another issue) and the former needs to have their feet held to a blast furnace not just any fire. But given they are both obscenely wealthy (at least the very big ones in each) and when you control for the fact one can more easily afford to do more (again, read the last post), isn't it time tech companies really do substantially more or just shut up and have the guts to say we are doing our bit but it is not that hard instead of painting themselves like warriors. In fact, if you factor how much they are paying their employees, investors and stockholders and how that wealth gets spent in turn generating additional emissions and how much more easy and wasteful consumption the tech giants are enabling by making it easy to consume and the attendant pscyhological costs (of living in a bubble), I am not sure the tech industry's footprint is all that less than fossil fuel's and perhaps even worse.

So what has this to do with lions and deers. The nine (arbitrary number) lions situation refers to fossil fuel industry where there is more competition within it even if as whole they are not in competition with renewables except in some cases, while the lone lion situation is the limited competition environment within which each of the major tech giants operate. I still don't know if the analogy I opened with makes sense, but I hope the rest does. 

Which is worse - weak claims by wealthy or media cheerleading it without scrutiny?

What is a lay person to make of claims of wealthy companies to go carbon free? Of course it sounds great but when you look a little closer you will see it is not as tall as it is made out to be. Not just that, I suspect even many technically and financially adept people will think this is a big deal especially and when you have media houses like CNBC cheerleading such claims without proper scrutiny one cannot but lose trust and view every media claim with cynicism.

The specific issue that led me to write this was a request from a CNBC reporter as to what I thought of Google's claim to go carbon free and the CEO reported to be losing sleep over it. I wrote back saying you probably are not going to like what I have to say for it is a nuanced point which is this: Google and big tech are not the reason we face carbon issues and while their trying do such things is ok, it is really not a big deal for them. She wanted to hear more and so I shared the below and much more. 

This was my simple argument, which I call a smell test

• Google's annual revenues ~ $200 Billion
• Total annual google data center energy consumption ~ 14 TWh (tera Watthour). I got this from a presentation by Google employee here 
• Assuming a generous cost of $0.15 per kWhr, the energy cost of data centers = 14 TWh*0.15 $/kWh ~ $2 Billion
• Therefore, the energy cost share of their business (in terms of revenues) ~ 1% 
• Not only that, in all likelihood, switching to renewable electricity might even lower their cost for there are tax credits and even carbon credits to be sold if they build their own renewable facilities. Let's be generous and say their energy cost increases 50% or doubles and becomes 2%. Would a $200 Billion business which is a practical monopoly have to lose sleep over it? Give me a break!

However, a convenient weakness CNBC used was that my claim about their energy consumption was from an online search and not trust worthy. I cannot but help recall a line from perhaps the greatest political satire ever, the BBC's Yes Prime Minister, in which the Minister when his civil service secretary rejects his idea for raising taxes on cigarettes sky high  responds my statistics are mere statistics but his statistics are facts (Snippet here with the statement on statistics coming at t=3:19). What's more the reporter ran the numbers by Google who was supposed to responded that I am confusing matters of net zero and carbon neutrality or something like that. Therefore, nothing I said was trustworthy or useful for them such as my suggestion that would Google consider offsetting the energy of all the devices it expects to sell such as mobile phones and offset the emissions of their employees commuting to work and commit to zero landfilling of their devices. Of course, this is the real inconvenient truth. I found the Google presentation with their energy information only today.

So why does Google CEO have to lose sleep over this piddly stuff and why does the media choose to buy this greenwashing outright and fool us? And let's be clear, Google is not the reason we are facing an environmental crisis and what it wants to do is fine, but to say this is something great doesn't pass the smell test.

Coming back to the question of what is a lay person to make of the claims you hear about net zero claims of wealthy (companies, people and governments) - please don't just lap it up. I spent a couple hours to read, collect the above information above and spend time writing elaborate emails to the CNBC reporter who wanted me to help her understand what to make of this. Unfortunately, my facts didn't fit the story CNBC wanted to tell and as with these requests they can easily harvest respectable people whose views might pose less discomfort. While I am disappointed that I wasted time trying to help the writer and did not some much as get a mention, this is one more data point that the media is doing society a great disservice.

So if you ask me which is worse - claims made by companies of how much good they are doing or media cheerleading it without scrutiny, it is a no contest. And likewise we should also be a bit skeptical of media claims of harm caused by companies.