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 without regard for how we derive it and from what we derive it 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.

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