26 May 2011 – Skullduggery and evidence

Colleagues,

This coming Sunday, at Annesbrook House in Duleek, Ireland, an auctioneer will be offering a peculiar object for sale: the preserved head of Saint Vitalis of Assisi.  The marinated skull, contained in an elegant display case, was found among the contents of a country house in Louth, and may have been acquired by a member of the house’s family during a trip abroad.  According to the article in the Meath Chronicle, the head and case appear to have spent a good deal of time in a garden shed, a consequence of the unwillingness of the lady of the household to share quarters with so grisly an object, however holy it might be.(Note A)  Another possible explanation for the head’s exile might have been that she felt no particular need for its former owner’s intervention.  Saint Vitalis, you see, is accounted the patron saint of those who suffer from afflictions and diseases affecting the bladder and genitals, a portfolio deriving from his personal history, which saw him give up an early life spent in debauchery, immorality and licentiousness in exchange for the Benedictine mantle and a life of contemplation and self-abnegation at the monastery of Santa Maria di Viole. 

19 May 2011 – Chemical Weapons Destruction update

Colleagues,

Between spending most of the past week writing a paper on the status of Libya’s chemical weapons (CW) destruction process in the context of the current crisis in that country, and wasting two fantastic hours last Saturday watching The Destroyer melt Acuras with his face, the word “destruction” has been on my mind a lot lately. 

Figure 1 - In Asgard, they understand that incineration is far superior to hydrolysis as a CW destruction methodology

So it’s not surprising that, whilst perusing the riveting Gossip and Style sections of the Salt Lake Tribune on Tuesday last, a headline all but jumped out at me: “Last of bulk mustard gas destroyed at Deseret Chemical Depot.”(Note A)  This naturally drew my attention away from the neighbouring article, which described the remarkable case of a chap ingesting his 25,000th Big Mac a mere 39 years after consuming his first, and caused me to dig into my back-files on the US chemical weapons programme to refresh my memory.

Deseret is one of the facilities that’s a plague to dabblers in the CW world, because it’s one of two names applied to what is essentially the same place.  Technically, the name of the facility is the ”Deseret Chemical Depot”, but due to the fact that it’s associated with the Toelle Army Depot and is located in Toelle, Utah, it tends to get referred to in international fora, and from time to time even by the Americans, as “Toelle” (pronounced “Two-Ella”).  Although not the oldest CW-related site in the US (that honour belongs to Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland), Toelle is far and away the largest.  When the Chemical Weapons Convention entered into force in 1997, the depot held more than 13,600 tons of CW agent - roughly half of the entire declared US stockpile - in close to a million different containers and projectiles. 

Figure 2: The US CW Stockpile at entry-into-force, 1997

The grand total of munitions stored at the depot was staggering:

H, HD, HT (Mustard)
105 mm artillery shells: 54,663
155 mm artillery shells: 63,568

GB (Sarin)
105 mm artillery shells: 798,703
155 mm artillery shells: 89,141
M-55 free-flight artillery rockets: 17,353

VX
155 mm artillery shells: 53,216
M-55 free-flight artillery rockets: 3,966
M23 land mines: 22,690

Additionally, the depot also held blister and nerve agent in one-ton bulk storage containers and spray tanks. 

Figure 2 - 1-ton containers of distilled mustard (HD) stored at the Deseret depot, 1998 (there’s more mustard in this picture than Libya has left in its stockpile)

Such a vast quantity of weaponry and toxic chemicals - much of it aging (some of the mustard dated to the Second World War, while the depot also held quantities of pre-WWII Lewisite, as well quantities of Tabun(GA) that had been captured from the Nazis during the War) - posed a wide variety of challenges to destruction.  Mustard, for example, tends to polymerize (thicken) in storage, becoming first gluey, then gelling, and finally taking on the consistency of a hockey puck.  This makes it impossible to destroy by hydrolysis, necessitating incineration.  However, due to the nature of production processes used at the time the mustard was synthesized, a good deal of it turned out to be contaminated with mercury, imposing much tighter emissions controls and necessitating the installation of very fine filters, scrubbers and electrostatic precipitators on the incineration equipment (and consequently pushing costs through the roof; at last report, the US CW destruction programme was projected to cost well over $40B by the time it is complete in a decade or so).  Different agents and weapons posed different problems; one-ton containers tend to be easy to drain and destroy, while artillery shells have to be defuzed and drilled first.  Land mines contain fuzes, too.  Worst of all were the M-55 rockets, which - because they have thin-walled aluminum bodies - tend to develop leaks, making them horrible to handle, and which contain fuzes, rocket motors, high explosives and batteries.  The technology that had to be developed to demilitarize VX-filled M-55 rockets was nothing short of staggering.

Unlike the Russians, the US tackled the hard stuff - the mines, shells and rockets - first, and left the easy stuff (the ton containers) for the end.  Completion of the bulk mustard destruction process therefore means that Toelle is getting near to the end of a programme that got underway in 1996, before the Convention even came into effect.  Only a small quantity of munitions remain to be destroyed, among them about 350 shells where the mustard was so badly polymerized that it was impossible to remove the agent from the projectiles.  Such problem cases tend to be destroyed by contained explosion in specially-built mobile destruction facilities.

Figure 4 - the US Army Chemical Materials Agency’s Explosive Destruction System (EDS) can safely detonate and decontaminate up to 6 CW projectiles at once

The staff at Deseret also plan to destroy the above-mentioned Lewisite and Tabun munitions by early next year.  Once this has been taken care of, all that will remain at Deseret are the “solid waste management pits” - old munitions dumps dating from decades ago, when munitions were destroyed in the open air (which is now forbidden by the Convention).  Most of the personnel will be transferred to the Toelle Army Depot, and the destruction facility will be closed.

The impending closure of the Deseret/Toelle CWDF brings up an interesting problem that the States Parties to the Convention will have to wrestle with at this year’s Conference of the States Parties (coming up in Nov-Dec 2011 in The Hague).  In 2009, there were 13 CW destruction facilities (CWDFs) in operation around the world: one in India, four in Russia, and eight in the US.  India has since completed its destruction programme and closed its CWDF, and the destruction operations at Kambarka in Russia, and at Newport, Indiana and Dugway, Utah have likewise come to a close.  Libya began destroying chemical precursors at its CWDF (at Rabta, with three sub-sites at Ruwagha east of Waddan, about 700 km southeast of Tripoli) last May, and commenced mustard destruction there last fall, which was going well up until the hydrolysis equipment broke down and repair parts could not be obtained due to the present crisis.

The decline in destruction activities is inevitable as CW stockpiles continue to fall; more than 62% of all declared CW have been destroyed to date; and it is relevant because the vast bulk of inspection activity conducted by the OPCW - more than 85% of inspector-days - is related to continuous monitoring and verification at the destruction facilities.  Article VI (or “Industry”) verification accounts for only about 1/6 of the Organization’s inspection activities.  Once all the weapons are gone, not nearly as many inspectors will be needed.

But it won’t be a smooth decline.  The final deadline for destruction of all CW is 29 April 2012.  Both Russia and the US have advised that they are likely to miss this deadline, probably by many years (and it now looks like Libya could miss it, too).  The difficulty from the perspective of the Organization is that CWDFs that have been operating for many years now are coming to the end of their programmes, while some others - for example, at Kizner and Pochep in Russia, and at Blue Grass, Arkansas and Pueblo, Colorado in the US - are still under construction, and in some cases won’t commence operations for years.(Note B)  As a result, there is going to be a gap of several years during which there will be a much smaller need for continuous monitoring and verification at CWDFs than there has been for the past 14 years.  This means that the OPCW is going to have to cope with direction from the States Parties to significantly downsize both the Inspectorate and its operational budget for 2-3 years (or even longer, if construction on new CWDFs proceeds slowly) - and then will have to expand both again once the new facilities begin destruction operations.

This won’t be easy; trained chemical munitions specialists are no longer common, because there are no longer any large CW programmes in the world.  The generation that supplied inspectors to UNSCOM, UNMOVIC and the first generation of the OPCW is retiring.  The OPCW now has to make inspectors instead of simply hiring them with years of experience.  Unfortunately, there is no alternative to downsizing; States Parties will not accept having the Inspectorate grossly underemployed for several years; and although it would be highly desirable to reorient allocated inspector-hours to Industry verification, for political reasons this would be impossible.  Every year the Technical Secretariat attempts to increase the number of Industry inspections by 5-10 (there were 208 Article VI inspections in 2009, but more are required, the argument being that the true threat of CW proliferation is no longer at CW storage and destruction facilities, but rather at small, flexible, multipurpose batch production plants), and every year it takes days of intensive wrangling between States Parties to agree on the total number of Article VI inspections - generally with the Western European and Other Group (WEOG) demanding more inspections, and the Non-Aligned Movement, led or goaded on by India, Cuba, South Africa, Iran and China, demanding fewer inspections (often as leverage to wring more Article XI, or “Economic and Technological Development”, money out of the Organization - but that’s a topic for another CoP).  So simply quintupling or sextupling the number of Industry inspections to keep the Inspectorate busy, however desirable it might be, is just not an option.

The wrap-up of the bulk mustard destruction programme at Deseret illustrates how time moves on, things change, and international organizations - if they want to remain relevant - have to change with them.  Dealing with the downsizing of the Inspectorate, a significant trimming of the Organization’s budget (in 2009, verification accounted for €34.9M of the Organization’s expenditures of €71.3M - Note C), and the impending non-compliance of the US, Russia and possibly Libya with the Convention’s destruction obligations, are sure to make for fascinating fodder at this year’s Conference of States Parties. 

A good thing, too, because as some of you probably know from first-hand experience, Den Haag in December is a lot more like Jotunheim than Asgard.

Cheers,

//Don//

Notes
A) http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/51823485-78/chemical-depot-weapons-agent.html.csp
B) REPORT OF THE OPCW ON THE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE CONVENTION ON THE PROHIBITION OF THE DEVELOPMENT, PRODUCTION, STOCKPILING AND USE OF CHEMICAL WEAPONS AND ON THEIR DESTRUCTION IN 2009, OPCW, C-15/4, 30 November 2010, 5.
C) ibid., 63.

11 May 2011 – Uncommon scents

Colleagues,

Fascinating news this week out of Vanderbilt University.  In a report published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vanderbilt professor of biological sciences and pharmacology Lawrence Zwiebel and his laboratory team are credited with discovering a compound that may prove thousands of times more effective than contemporary chemicals at repelling mosquitoes and other pernicious insects.(Note A)

The state of the art in bug repellents today is DEET (N,N-Diethyl-3-methylbenzamide), a yellowish oil developed by the US Army after its experience with malaria in jungle warfare during the Second World War.  It entered civilian use in 1946 and is the key active ingredient in most insect repellent sprays.  DEET works primarily by activating a mosquito’s olfactory cells that are optimized for detecting 1-octen-3-ol, a volatile organic compound present in human breath and sweat; it also works because it activates some of the olfactory receptor neurons that are also activated by natural repellents, e.g., eucalyptus oil.  Basically, it’s an odour that mosquitoes just don’t like.  It’s not without problems; for example, DEET is a mild fish toxin and a skin irritant, and it’s recently been discovered to be a mild acetylcholinesterase inhibitor, similar to carbamate toxins and insecticides (or organophosphorous nerve agents).  Health Canada prohibits sale of DEET in concentrations higher than 30%, and has recommended against using concentrations higher than 10% on children.

What makes the new compound so much more effective is the way it impacts a deeper layer of the mosquito’s olfactory system.  Mosquitoes have an array of exquisitely sensitive olfactory cells called odorant receptors (ORs) located on their antennae, and it has been known for some time that different ORs are activated by different chemicals.  This enables the mosquito to find its primary food, i.e., blood, by looking for and following the wide array of different volatile organic compounds emitted by mammals.  In order to attack the mosquito through its ORs, it would be necessary to target all of the different receptor functions, which would mean finding a mixture of chemical compounds that covers every possible chemical target - and there are a lot of them.  Obviously, this would be impractical.  The vulnerability of the mosquito olfactory system lies in how the activation messages from individual ORs are transmitted to the mosquito’s brain.  Each OR complex is connected to the brain via a special cell called an OR co-receptor (ORCO) which receives an activation message from the OR and converts it into a general signal to the brain.  Zwiebel’s team has been trying to find a chemical compound that directly activates the ORCOs instead of trying to target the individual ORs - and it looks like they’ve found one.  Dubbing it “Vanderbilt University Allosteric Agonist” or VUAA1, the chemical simultaneously “turns on” all of a mosquito’s ORCOs at once, overloading its olfactory system and preventing it from receiving any of the olfactory cues it needs to find food.

What’s nearly as interesting as the discovery is how they did it.  Over the past ten years, the chemical and pharmaceutical research and development industries have been revolutionized by computerized microsynthesis.  Instead of each synthetic operation and all of the subsequent testing for a new compound being performed by a human in a fume hood with Bunsen burners, Florence flasks and pipettes, the operations are now all carried on in miniaturized, computerized laboratories operated by complex robotics.  New chemicals can be synthesized in microlitre quantities (amounts far too small for a human to manipulate) and tested against arrays of other chemicals or biological samples much more rapidly and comprehensively than ever before.  This makes it possible to take a “broad-brush” approach to synthesis and analysis.  Rather than try to guess which chemicals might do the job, Zweibel’s team, using Vanderbilt’s high-throughput screening facility (originally installed for drug research), decided to “throw the kitchen sink” at the problem.  They ran computerized test runs using the full array of 118,000 small molecules normally employed in drug testing against genetically engineered human embryonic kidney cells that had been modified to include mosquito ORs. The computerized test runs found numerous chemicals that activated one or more individual Ors - and also identified a compound that activated them all simultaneously.  This is the compound that became VUAA1.  The researchers note that it could serve as the basis for similar chemicals promising broad-spectrum control options for all manner of scent-oriented pernicious nasties.(Note D)

The project, which was originally designed to identify new solutions to the ages-old problem of malaria transmissions, was funded by the National Institutes of Health using money provided from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, and it offers a potentially fantastic solution to malaria-stricken nations.  Previously, the only solution to the anopheles mosquito was to kill it, and the importance of programmes aimed at controlling mosquito populations has been underscored by the disastrous EPA decision in the early 1970s to ban DDT (1,1,1-trichloro-2,2-di(4-chlorophenyl)ethane) and to restrict funding to developing nations that continued to use it.  The UN has placed annual malarial infections at 20M+, and deaths at ca. 850,000, 90% in Africa, and mostly among children under 5; other credible estimates are higher.  If VUAA1 proves to be as effective as this new research is suggesting, it might be possible to simply neutralize mosquitoes as disease vectors without having to resort to insecticides - even largely harmless ones, like DDT - to kill them.

The next step, according to the project’s scientists, is to try to modify the compound by eliminating parts of the molecule that don’t contribute to its activity.  Once that’s done, they have to test the resulting, trimmed-down compound for toxicity - especially mammalian toxicity.  This is a fairly important consideration; one of the problems with identifying good, broad-spectrum insecticidal compounds is ensuring that they don’t kill us, our animals, or our plants.  Earlier this week, news reports out of New Zealand alleged that the deaths of 7 tourists since January at the “Downtown Inn” in Chiang Mai, Thailand, were the result of poisoning by chlorpyrifos, an organophosphorous insecticide commonly used to kill bedbugs.(Note B)  This is an old, old story; after the DDT ban in the US, farmers switched to organophosphorous insecticides like malathion (S-1,2-bis(ethoxycarbony)ethyl O, O-dimethyl phosphorodithioate ), which is as effective an insecticide as DDT, but which has much higher mammalian toxicity.  While there is no record of any fatalities resulting from DDT use in the US or elsewhere, the human health impact of malathion is significant.  When Pakistan began spraying with malathion in the late 1970s after the DDT ban, for example, 2800 out of 7500 spray men were poisoned, and 5 of them died.(Note C)

Most of chemistry is common sense, and it makes good sense to use the least hazardous chemical necessary to get the job done.  It also makes sense to deter if you can, and destroy only if you must.  If VUAA1 pans out, it will be one of the most significant advances in insect control technology in a generation.  Here’s hoping.

Cheers,

//Don//

Notes

A) [http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/05/10/ultimate-bug-repellant-may-help-fight-malaria-and-other-insect-borne-diseases/#more-39687]

B) [http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/World/2011/05/08/18120296.html]

C) W.N. Aldridge, J.W. Miles, D.L. Mount and R.D. Verschoyle, “Malathion Not as Safe as Believed - 5 Die - 2,800 Poisoned”, Archives in Toxicology, 42:95-106, 1979.

D) I’d be remiss if I failed to note that, from a defence perspective, computerized microsynthesis and analysis setups are also ideal for rapidly identifying supertoxic compounds in small, easy-to-conceal laboratory settings.  The future of chemical warfare (and especially chemical terrorism, if our enemies decide to get serious about it) is not in huge plants producing tons of mustard or nerve agent; it’s in small-scale custom synthesis facilities capable of fast-turnaroud computerized batch production.  And the future of identifying new toxic chemicals for warfare or terrorist use lies in microsynthesis.

6 May 2011 – Virtual necking, demography, and robots

“I’m afraid the Holodeck will be mankind’s last invention.”

– Scott Adams, The Dilbert Future

Colleagues,

Stephen King once said that everyone’s mind is like a sink, and we all have a different filter that strains out the gunk at the end of every day.  One of the unusual things that got caught in my mental gunk-filter this week was an article about how robotics researchers in Japan working at the Kajimoto Laboratory of the University of Electrocommunications are in the final stages of perfecting a device for kissing over the internet. 

Yeah, you heard that right – it’s a machine for recording oro-lingual input, transmitting it digitally, and recreating it at the other end.(Note A)  It’s not such an alien concept, really; after all, a fax machine is just a device that optically scan pieces of paper, recording white pixels as zeroes and dark pixels as ones, transmits the numbers over a phone line, and recreates them as a picture at the other end.  A traditional telephone did the same thing with sound waves absorbed and transformed into electric current by a piezoelectric receiver, and turned back into sound waves by a piezoelectric transmitter at the other end.  Hell, a telegraph machine uses a simple switch to send on-off pulses over a wire, which were then turned by an electromagnet back into clicks.  This dandy new gadget is the direct lineal descendent of a Morse code key.  It just happens to be one that you stick in your mouth.

I don’t imagine I need to describe where, given human inventiveness, this sort of development is likely to lead; suffice it to say that it’s likely to involve the words “hardware interface” and could eventually render “sexting” as anachronistic as hoopskirts.  But thankfully, we’re not there yet, and the proof is in the “hardware interface” that has been developed at Kajimoto.  Take a look at a picture of the device in use.  It might sound hot in theory, but in practice it’s about as erotic as a breathalyser.

“You have witchcraft in your lips, Kate: there is more eloquence in a sugar touch of them than in the tongues of the French council; and they should sooner persuade  <404 ERROR>“

As I see it, this is all part of an interesting and potentially very problematic trend.  In addition to using robots in innumerable applications designed to free humans from dangerous tasks (for example, measuring radiation levels in buildings at the damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant), Japan is leading the world right now in the development of anthropomorphic robots.  Japanese robotics engineers are pushing the envelope for all they’re worth, trying to bridge the “uncanny valley” that separates creatures (and features) that humans can identify with from those that we cannot.(Note B)  The more outré examples tend to be the ones that make the news – for example, “female” robots designed to hit the runway as 95-pound fashion models (Note C), or child-sized robots designed to serve as surrogates for childless couples (Note D).  There are of course other examples, but decorum forbids mentioning them here.

Compared to the internet kiss-transmitter, attempts to develop convincing anthropomorphic robots represent the opposing end of the spectrum of seamless human-machine interface engineering.  Developments in this fascinating field are proceeding apace.  According to a recent (and admittedly hilarious) Google search, somewhere between 2034 and 2037 the US government will be fielding “autonomous attack drones” or even an “autonomous robot army”; by 2050, sex with robots will be “possible”; by 2056, robots will be given the same rights as humans; and by 2059, humans will have “domesticated” robots.(Note E)  Leaving aside the wisdom, propriety and morality of giving rights to machines that we have not yet domesticated (let alone dimming the lights, putting on some Barry White, and cracking the Spumante Bambino with something that is physiologically indistinguishable from us and self-aware, but is legally a non-person), clearly the popular zeitgeist expects roboticists to bridge the “uncanny valley” at some point in the near future.  No pun intended.

Okay, so why should we care?  Well, not to come off like a waxen-haired televangelist, but there’s something a little pathologically misanthropic in seeking interpersonal interactions with a machine instead of with a real person.  The idea that a child-shaped robot is a desirable sop to the unsatisfied maternal/paternal instincts of humans who didn’t have children of their own is a little chilling.  And not to wax too apocalyptic, but there’s something else that Japan is known for that bears an interesting correlation to their fascination with the non-human.  It’s that fact that Japan has by far the lowest total fertility rate of any G8 country.  In fact, Japan’s TFR of 1.21 children per woman (estimated for 2011) stands at 215th out of 220 states and regions.  Replacement rate to maintain zero population growth is roughly 2.1 children per women.  With a TFR of 1.21, Japan’s population is declining faster than just about any population in the civilized world.(Note F)

 I’m not the first to mention this; far from it.  Pundit and self-described “demographics bore” Mark Steyn noted it years ago in America Alone, the book that got him hauled before three separate “Human Rights” commissions and tribunals for alleged “Islamophobia”.  One of the phenomena he noted was that national fertility rate statistics tend to be deceptive; while the UK, for example, boasts a TFR of 1.66, that is an average figure comprising very low fertility rates for native Britons, and much higher fertility rates for immigrant communities.  The disparity in fertility rates, Steyn argues, is changing the ethnic, religious and socio-cultural makeup of Western nations that have attempted to mitigate their own declining birthrates through expansive and liberal immigration policies.  Japan, which does not have an “expansive and liberal” immigration policy, more accurately reflects the rapidly declining birthrates common among industrialized Western nations.  It is worth noting that Japan’s neighbours on the low end of the TFR scale include nearly all European nations, eastern and western alike; while the top end of the scale includes the African, Middle-Eastern and South Asian states that are the points of origin of many of the larger and growing immigrant communities in the West.

To the extent that changing demographics are a matter of strategic concern for Western countries, one of the larger issues meriting investigation must be the fact that a combination of declining birthrates in industrialized nations and much larger birthrates among immigrant communities is rapidly transforming the sociocultural makeup of the West.  In the context of the ongoing “war on terror”, the fact that states of concern, and the slow-to-integrate immigrant communities that come from those states, have a much higher TFR than the countries attempting to stem the tide of Islamism and the jihadism that comes with it, is surely a matter of strategic interest.  Canadians – or at least those with a passing knowledge of our own history – should be more sensitive to this phenomenon than most; after all, it wasn’t all that long ago that Quebec nationalists were talking about “la vengeance des berceuses.”  That did not come to pass, of course; Quebec society, in the violence of reaction against the stultifying grip of the Church, embraced the libertine excesses of the 1960s with far greater enthusiasm than did the rest of Canada, and the impact on Quebec’s TFR was noteworthy. 

Today Quebec’s TFR (1.74) is slightly above the Canadian average of 1.68.  Some have suggested that this is due to the high TFR of large immigrant communities.  But if we look at the data, there does not seem to be any obvious correlation between the TFR of a province, and the proportion of that province’s population listing a place other than Canada as their place of birth.

This chart (prepared with 2006 census data from StatsCan) compares total fertility rates (TFR) per province against the proportion of each province’s population listing a place other than Canada as their place of birth.  There are some preliminary conclusions that may be drawn; first, that the maritime provinces are not popular as a place of settlement for new immigrants to Canada, while BC and Ontario definitely are; and second, that if we eliminate the maritime provinces as a clustered anomaly, there appears to be a very loose, inverse, correlation between the proportion of a province’s population not born in Canada, and the total fertility rate of that province.  This would appear to fly in the face of the theories posited by inter alia Steyn.

But perhaps it’s only certain segments of the immigrant community that affect birthrates?  The next chart compares provincial TFRs against the proportion of provincial populations contributed by immigrants from high-TFR regions, i.e., Africa, West Asia and the Middle East, and South Asia (again, using 2006 census data):

Again, the correlation appears to run counter to the arguments posed by Steyn et al.  If we once again deduct the Maritimes, where proportional representation by immigrants is very small (perhaps too small to enable us to draw robust conclusions), then what this chart appears to show is in fact an inverse correlation between provincial TFR and the proportion of the provincial population contributed by immigrants from high-TFR regions.  Ontario and BC, after all, have the two highest provincial representations by immigrants from Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, and two of the lowest fertility rates in the country; while Saskatchewan and Manitoba, with low representation from these regions, have TFRs above the Canadian average.  It is, of course, also likely that the overall low representation of immigrants from these regions on a national level (4.7%) is too low to have a significant impact on aggregate provincial TFRs.  It is equally possible that these data, which are 5 years old, are no longer representative (but they do post-date Steyn’s book).  The census currently under way will provide new numbers that will enable us not only to conduct more accurate investigations into demographic change in Canada, but also to look at how change itself is changing over time.

If there were an observable correlation between immigrant representation and TFR, then in theory the quickest way to neutralize the transformative effect of differential birthrates between native and immigrant populations in Western states would be to effect the integration of new immigrants as rapidly as possible.  This may be what the charts are showing. It has also been posited that declining birthrates throughout the Western world are at least in part a consequence of the welfare state, which provides means of support for aging citizens other than the traditional primate method of guaranteeing familial stability by having children.  The problem, of course, is that support programs are paid for by taxpayers, and the more citizens who avail themselves of such support in lieu of procreating, the fewer citizens there will be in the next generation to provide the revenue to pay for the continuation of the programs.  This is the heart of the “unfunded entitlements” dilemma overshadowing the present US problems with long-term deficits (and also the heart of the demographic pothole that China is facing as a result of its one-child policy).  It is also the basis of the principle that because voting public largesse, availing one’s-self of it, and declining to procreate are all individual choices, the resultant inevitable societal decline – as Japan’s citizens, with their catastrophic TFR and, as a consequence thereof, equally catastrophic public debt problem are discovering – is also by definition a choice.

Politicians in Washington have been decrying the accumulation of debt that will have to be paid “by our children and grandchildren.”  They should consider themselves lucky; with a TFR of 2.05, Americans, their horrific spending habits and massive debt notwithstanding, are at least more likely to be able to dig themselves out of their hole than anyone else in the Western world, because unlike the rest of the West, they’re at least still having children to leave their debt to.  The situation is far more precarious in countries that are racking up enormous, historically unprecedented levels of public debt, but whose populations, instead of having children, are designing anthropomorphic child- and spousal-replacement droids and trying to figure out how to swap spit over the internet.

I guess if there’s a moral to the story, it might be one that was mooted on Futurama a few years back:

 Anthropomorphically yours,

//Don//

Notes

(A) [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/05/03/japanese_internet_kissing_machine/]
(B) [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/8494633/Japanese-robot-twins-fail-to-bridge-the-uncanny-valley.html]
(C) [http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29720798/ns/technology_and_science-innovation/]
(D) [http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Japan_child_robot_mimicks_infant_learning_999.html]
(E) [http://www.xkcd.com/887/]
(F) [http://www.indexmundi.com/g/r.aspx?c=ja&v=31]

28 April 2011 – The stench of victory

Colleagues,

A whiff of putrefaction, a savour of rot, and the smell of post-mortem decay was in the air this past week as folks awaited the culmination of an eagerly-anticipated event of international significance. 

I refer, of course, to the extremely rare blossoming of Amorphophallus Titanum – the infamous ‘corpse flower.’

This sort of thing doesn’t happen very often.  Native to Indonesia (specifically, western Sumatra), the corpse flower, which is also known as Titan Arum, derives its popular moniker from its name in the working Malay tongue: bunga (“flower”) bangkai (“cadaver”).  The name was awarded in recognition of the colossal reek that the thing emanates as part of its reproductive strategy; you might call it the ‘Drakkar Noir’ of the plant kingdom.  It has been cultivated worldwide, especially in tropical botanical gardens, but there have only been about 135 flowering events outside of Sumatra in the past century.  This makes the opening of the horrid, two-metre-tall blossom an event of some significance.  Last weekend, for example, saw crowds flock in their thousands to gardens as far apart as Hawaii (note A) and Switzerland (note B) to witness the opening of the gargantuan flowers.  You can even view the events via time-lapse photography on the internet.(note C)  Perry the Corpse Flower, which resides at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota, even has his own Facebook page.

Figure 1 - an Amorphophallus Titanum in all its blooming glory.  Note the erect spadix, centre of the flower’s olfactory puissance

What does all this have to do with Defence, you ask?  Well, the search for stench-inducing compounds – putrescent chemical agents, or ‘malodorants’ as they’re commonly known – is pretty much as old as warfare.  There are sound evolutionary reasons for this.  Most things that smell bad, after all, are generally also bad for you to eat, or to otherwise introduce into your body (e.g. via a puncture wound).  Animals tend to shy away from the smell of rotting flesh, as this usually indicates a kill site.  The purpose of malodorants is to capitalize upon ingrained responses to bad smells to convince people to voluntarily cease what they’re doing and/or leave an area, generally for riot control purposes (I mentioned this tangentially in a post last August).  It also, of course, attracts creatures that prefer dead prey over live (vultures, for example).  In the case of Amorphophallus, the stench serves to entice the insects that pollinate it: carrion-eating beetles and flesh flies of the family sarcophagidae (literally, “corpse-eaters”).  Insect pollination, incidentally, is necessary because while both male and female flowers grow within the same inflorescence, they bloom a few days apart, preventing the thing from self-pollinating.

For humans, there is an additional layer of complexity to the problem of designing chemicals to cause aversion.  Natural biological olfactory revulsion is overlain both by a significant socio-cultural matrix, and by large variances in individual responses to given odours.  This makes figuring out a broad-spectrum malodorant that will be effective against everyone in a given group a challenging proposition.  Researchers investigating potential candidate compounds in the US, for example, have documented widely varying responses among US test subjects from different ethnic backgrounds.  Americans of recent Japanese descent, for example, appear more tolerant of human fecal odours than the average US citizen, due possibly to the centuries-old widespread use of night soil as fertilizer in a country that has traditionally had a very low domestic ovine population.  At the same time, test subjects of Japanese descent seemed to be less tolerant than the average US citizen of the smell of rotting meat.  This, it has been postulated, may be due to the much greater historical prevalence of meat in American than in Japanese diets. 

Within such broad cultural generalizations, of course, individual preference may skew results with even greater margins of error.  We all know people, for example, who are repulsed by different odours, or who seem to be more sensitive to certain smells than other people are (one explanation for the increasing prevalence of workplace posters asking folks to use sense when applying scents).  Given such variation on the individual level, how is it possible to find something that, not to put too fine a point on it, is likely to make everyone sick?  Well, one way is to go to the chemicals that lie at the source of the smells.  Lest we imagine that this is a simple prospect, here’s a list of some of the floral volatiles that have been detected emanating from a blossoming Amorphophallus: ketones, hydroxides, nitrophenols, anisoles, acetic acid, acetophenones, pinenes, terpinolenes, benzaldehyde, beta-pinene, bicyclogermacrene, citronellol, dimethyloctadiene, E,E-alpha-farnesene, estragole, ethyl acetate, ethyl alcohol, geranial, geraniol, isohexanoic acid, limonene, methyl-butanoate, -benzoate, -butyrate and –isobutyrate, myrcene, cresols, phenylmethanol, sabinene, skatole, sulcatone, sulfanes and trimehtylheptadiene. 

The flower is a literal cornucopia of complex organic compounds, some of the latter of which are the truly interesting ones.  Organic sulphur compounds and skatoles have played key roles in the development of malodorant chemicals.  The Israeli Defence Forces, for example, reportedly developed a riot-control mixture known as “skunk.”  Based on common organic products (including yeast and baking soda), “skunk,” which replicates the odour produced by the eponymous beastie, may be dispersed as a liquid or mist, leaving rioters smelling “less than fresh.” According to at least one news article, the stench of the compound can linger in clothing for up to five years.(note D)  The organic compounds in question – methyl and butyl thiols (sulphur compounds) commonly known as “mercaptans” – are also found in rotten eggs and garlic, and are produced when vulcanized rubber (which contains sulphur) is burnt.  Mercaptans are some of the most potent odorants in existence, detectable by the human nose in concentrations as low as 10 parts-per-billion (ppb).  For this reason, certain of these compounds (originally ethanethiol, now t-butyl mercaptan) are added to natural gas, which is naturally odourless, in order to make leaks detectable.  Mercaptans are preferred for these applications because they are less dangerously reactive than other very smelly compounds, such as ammonia and hydrogen sulphide.

High-grade malodorants may have reached their zenith in two compounds produced for the US military: “US Government Bathroom Malodor”, which smells exactly like the name implies; and “Who, me?” a compound developed during the Second World War that was intended for use by resistance forces to demoralize occupying German troops, but which was allegedly discontinued because of the difficulty of dispersal (the disperser often ended up smelling as bad as the target.  Self-contamination is not an unusual problem when dealing with chemicals potent in ppb concentrations).  The “Bathroom Malodor” mixture actually contains some of the same volatile organic compounds given off by the corpse flower, including skatole, hexanoic acid, and various thiols.  Other compounds have been tried as well.(note E)  Unfortunately, a lot of the original archived documentation on malodorants once held by cbwtransparency.org is no longer available.  The website closed down some years ago, and the URL has been camped by a site offering dog training tips.

The question has been raised whether malodorants constitute “chemical weapons” under the Chemical Weapons Convention.  Those who argue that they do base their position on the Article II definition of “toxic chemical” as “any chemical which through its action on life processes can cause death, temporary incapacitation or permanent harm to humans or animals.”  The argument hinges on whether malodorants impact “life processes”, i.e. whether the physical revulsion resulting from exposure is a biological/physiological reaction or a purely psychological one – i.e., are you fleeing and/or vomiting not merely because you’re grossed out, but rather because the chemicals are interacting with your body chemistry?  There are, after all, chemicals that will force you to vomit; they’re called “sternutators”, and have been in use since the First World War (Adamsite, aka diphenylaminechlorarsine or DM, is one example); but there is no experimental evidence to suggest that malodorant compounds actually induce a physiological reaction.

Beyond the variance in responses, perhaps the most significant complicating factor in trying to design an effective malodorant is not the legal status of the compounds, but rather the fact that personnel can become inured even to horrific smells through long exposure to the individual odorous compounds used in formulating the mixtures.  This is not an uncommon animal response when acute irritants become chronic; we are adaptive creatures by nature, and can learn to put up with a surprising amount of discomfort and annoyance in order to avoid facing up to unpalatable alternatives.

All of which to say that, while our friend Amorphophallus may smell truly awful, it at least has the virtue of not lasting very long; the magnificent spadix droops, and the colossal blossom collapses and dies only 24 hours after blooming into its full, reeking majesty.  Would that all irritants were as transitory.

Cheers,

//Don//

Notes

A) [http://www.staradvertiser.com/news/hawaiinews/20110425_Crowd_swarms_to_sniff_stinky_

corpse_flower.html]

B) [http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/WeirdNews/2011/04/23/18057936.html]

C) [http://www.bigislandvideonews.com/2011/04/26/video-corpse-flower-blooms-in-hilo-hawaii-on-easter/]

D) [http://www.haaretz.com/news/israel-develops-skunk-bomb-for-riot-control-situations-1.135003]

E) [http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/01/0107_020107TVstinkbomb.html]

NATO, Kosovo and Crisis Management

Well, it's about bloody time.

If you've noticed the new header on my blog, you'll note that I've finally gotten around to publishing my dissertation on Kindle.  It's now available at Amazon.com - 439 pages, all the NATO you can stand, and then some.

If you're at all interested in the topic, head on over and check out the sample.  I hope you find it useful.

Cheers,

//Don//

19 April 2011 – Poll position

Colleagues,

‘Tis the season when everybody seems to be paying attention to pollsters, so I thought I might take a moment and talk about some polling data that has absolutely nothing to do with anything going on in Canada.  There's a new Brookings paper out that uses polling data to analyze the “climate of public opinion” on climate change in Canada and the US.  I take this as an indication that I’ve been lax in recent weeks in commenting on the state of the climate debate, and that some (or at least one) of you are feeling the lack most acutely.  Mea culpa; I thought I had already sufficiently thrashed this deceased equine, but apparently not.  So be it; I am but a servant.  Ask, and ye shall receive. Time to turn the crank once more.  Boy, my whip!

The paper, entitled “Climate Compared: Public Opinion on Climate Change in the United States and Canada “, was written by 3 political scientists from various universities, and is attached.  It makes for interesting reading.  The timing, too, is interesting, particularly in view of the spate of polling results from around the world showing a general decline in public belief in global warming.(Note D)

From a scientific perspective, the paper has a number of problems.  First, while the pollsters asked all sorts of questions about “belief” in global warming, they didn’t ask any questions that would enable the analysts to differentiate between respondents who believe that global warming is driven by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions (which is the key contention of the anthropogenic global warming or AGW hypothesis), and those who believe it to be a natural phenomenon. This is the single most important scientific question of the debate; Kyoto, Copenhagen, carbon taxes, cap and trade, and other emissions control mechanisms are all useless - and potentially destructively useless - unless human carbon emissions are indeed, as the IPCC contends, the single most important factor driving global climate.  All the survey asked was “From what you’ve read and heard, is there solid evidence that the average temperature on Earth has been getting warmer over the past four decades?”  Even if this is true - and I’m not saying it’s not true; if the temperature records are accurate, then the Earth has been warming, although for a lot longer than the 150 years of human industrialization – even if it’s true, from a policy perspective what’s important is not whether but rather why the warming has occurred.  That’s a big oversight and, as the purpose of the study is to guide policymaking, the authors’ failure to investigate the issue of causality undermines the whole exercise.  As one observer puts it, ”the fact of warming tells us nothing about the cause.”

The failure to differentiate between the existence of a warming trend and its origin is not surprising, because the second problem is that the authors confuse “determinant” with “correlation.” On the basis of their results, for example, they argue that political affiliation is a “determinant” of belief in global warming.  The problem is that the word “determinant” implies a causal relationship.  Correlation is not causation.  One can certainly note a correlation between political affiliation and belief in global warming based on these data, but the data do not support the alleged causal link, because the questions weren’t designed to elicit which came first, the political affiliation or the belief.  In fact, the data equally support the argument that belief in global warming is a determinant of political affiliation.  This is not all that different, ironically, from how the IPCC, based on an observed, linear increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and an observed (though nonlinear) increase in average global temperatures during the 20th Century, has posited a causal relationship between the two phenomena.  Very little empirical evidence presented to date justifies inferring a causal relationship between temperature and CO2 concentrations, and that which does - the Vostok and other Antarctic ice cores - actually demonstrates that over the past million years or so, temperature increases have preceded increases in CO2 concentration by hundreds of years - or in other words, the arrow of causality appears to point in the direction opposite to that posited by the AGW thesis.(Note E)  This example illustrates the importance of not interpreting correlation to mean causation without data to support your interpretation.

This is not a small point.  For example, based on the authors’ definition of “determinant” and the data they present in Table 4, there’s a stronger case for arguing that being a woman is a “determinant” of believing in global warming (63% correlation) than there is for arguing that being a Republican is a “determinant” of non-belief in global warming (43% correlation). As a matter of fact, after Democrats (69% believers), there is a far higher correlation between folks on the distaff side and belief in global warming than there is between political affiliation and belief. According to a 2009 Rasmussen poll, women in the US also significantly lead men in believing that Jesus Christ rose from the dead (87% women/70% men) and that he was the son of God (89% women/74% men).(Note A)  This leads us to some odd conclusions.  On the basis of the results cited in the Brookings article, for example, one is not justified in concluding that political affiliation determines belief in global warming; but on the basis of the results presented in the Brookings article and this second poll, one IS entitled to surmise that, by a statistically relevant margin (10% or greater) women are more likely than men to believe in a proposition that, shall we say, lacks empirical support.

This observation is neither sexist nor critical of the theologically-inclined; I am merely making a value-free deduction from statistical evidence presented by one of the Western world’s premiere polling firms.  Don’t shoot the messenger!

The authors of the Brookings paper should probably also have further investigated the remarkable split among Democrats on the question of belief in global warming - the 53% divergence between the two sides (69% believers/16% non-believers) is simply extraordinary, and statistically far more interesting than the statistically irrelevant 2% divergence between Republicans (43/41). It’s also interesting, although the authors pretty much ignore it, that uncertainty about whether there is sound evidence for global warming correlates positively with age; the older you are, the more likely you are to be on the fence.  In any case, according to another 2009 Rasmussen poll, the proportion of Americans who are unsure whether there is evidence for global warming (16%) is lower than the number who believe in ghosts (23%).(Note B)  Not sure if that proves anything, but I would suggest that it says something about our ability/willingness to believe - to use the Rasmussen article’s words - “as-yet-unprovable things.”  Interestingly, that latter survey shows that the percentage of US women who believe in ghosts is virtually the same as men, which calls into question the point I made above.  Why would men be proportionally more likely to be sceptical about global warming and matters of faith than about ghosts?  Similar studies show that US liberals, despite being on average slightly less religiously observant than US conservatives, are statistically more likely to report having seen a spectre.(Note C)  All of this is fascinating and bears on the question of why we believe (or disbelieve) the things we do. 

To put it another way, we are justified concluding that “humans are unpredictable and illogical.”  Although, while true, such a conclusion doesn’t lead us anywhere…and in any case, it’s hardly original.

Finally, from a methodological perspective, I have problems with using unscientific, emotionally-loaded words like “believe.”  Of course, using scientifically acceptable terminology would push the polling effort toward questions that would require respondents to have at least a passing familiarity with oodles of complicated research and would require laymen to evaluate the strength of evidence (“Do you think that the Urban Heat Island effect, poor station siting, station dropout, manual manipulation of temperature data and excessive interpolative smoothing undermine the US ground-based temperature record?”) - at which point you might start getting a lot more “don’t knows”, or responses that an institution like Brookings could potentially find uncomfortable.  I feel bad for Brookings, by the way; the last time I was there, they had a very earnest Gordon Gecko “greed is good” chappie give a presentation on how carbon markets were the way of the future.  It must be more difficult to find such presenters now that the Chicago Climate Exchange has gone belly-up and assumed room temperature.  There’s also the issue of whether questions of science should be decided by polls instead of through validation or falsification of an hypothesis by observed data; if that was the way science worked, we’d all be breathing phlogiston and having our children’s cranial contours checked by credentialed phrenologists to determine whether they were likely to become axe-murderers.  Finally, I would note that while the Brookings article talks about “climate change”, the poll questions were all about “global warming”.  This suggests to me that the authors think that the two are the same, although the IPCC and most proponents of the AGW thesis have argued for several years now that they are not, and that increased carbon dioxide concentrations may lead to cooling as well as to warming (because if they can’t, then the last 15 years of temperature data tend to falsify the AGW thesis).  This terminological confusion suggests either that the authors didn’t get the memo, or that the poll was conducted while “global warming” was still the officially-sanctioned term, and had not yet been replaced by “climate change”.  If they repeat the exercise, they might wish to note that the new term is “climate disruption” (or maybe “man-caused disasters” - I’ve lost track of the euphemisms) so as to forestall accusations of lax lexicography.

Why should we care about all this?  No reason.  No reason at all.  It’s an interesting paper about how climate change is perceived in the US (and Canada).  But the horse is starting to stiffen up and stink, so I think I’ll lay off it for awhile, and let it continue to decompose in peace.

Cheers,

//Don//

Notes

A) [http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/lifestyle/holidays/april_2009/79_believe_jesus_christ_rose_from_the_dead]

B) [http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/lifestyle/holidays/october_2009/23_believe_in_ghosts_do_you]

C) [http://www.usatoday.com/news/offbeat/2007-10-25-ghosts-poll_N.htm]

D) [http://www.gallup.com/poll/146810/Water-Issues-Worry-Americans-Global-Warming-Least.aspx]

E) The Vostok Ice Core data and their interpretation is a fascination subject.  The data themselves are available on-line at [http://cdiac.ornl.gov/ftp/trends/co2/vostok.icecore.co2].  For interpretations, see J.R. Petit, et al., “Climate and atmospheric history of the past 420,000 years from the Vostok ice core, Antarctica”, Nature 399 (1999), 429-436. Another author notes that “A review of the recent refereed literature fails to confirm quantitatively that carbon dioxide (CO2) radiative forcing was the prime mover in the changes in temperature, ice-sheet volume, and related climatic variables in the glacial and interglacial periods of the past 650,000 years”.  Willie Soon, “Quantitative implications of the secondary role of carbon dioxide climate forcing in the past glacial-interglacial cycles for the likely future climatic impacts of anthropogenic greenhouse-gas forcings”, Physical Geography, 4 July 2007 [http://icecap.us/images/uploads/Soon07-CO2-TempCORR-Preprint.pdf].  Also, “Over the full 420 ka of the Vostok [ice core] record, CO2 variations lag behind atmospheric temperature changes in the Southern Hemisphere by 1.3 +/- 1.0 ka [thousand years].”  Manfred Mudelsee, “The phase relations among atmospheric CO2 content, temperature and global ice volume over the past 420 ka”, Quaternary Science Reviews 20 (2001), 583 [http://www.manfredmudelsee.com/publ/pdf/.  The_phase_relations_among_atmospheric_CO2_content_temperature_and_global_ice_volume_over_the_past_420_ka.pdf].  The same conclusions have been reached by many other researchers; see, for example, H. Fischer, et al., “Ice core records of atmospheric CO2 around the last three glacial terminations”, Science 283 (1999), 1712-1714; A. Indermuhle, et al., “Atmospheric CO2 concentration from 60 to 20 kyr BP from the Taylor Dome ice core, Antarctica”, Geophysical Research Letters 27 (2000), 735-738; E. Monnin, et al., “Atmospheric CO2 concentrations over the last glacial termination”, Science 291 (2001), 112-114; P.U. Clark and A.C. Mix, “Ice Sheets by Volume”, Nature 406 (2000), 689-690; and N. Caillon et al., “Timing of atmospheric CO2 and Antarctic temperature changes across Termination III”, Science 299 (2003), 1728-1731.

11 April 2011 – Financial disincentives vs. non-discretionary spending

Colleagues,

President Obama raised hackles last week when he offered a glib response to a questioner at a town hall meeting in Pennsylvania who was concerned about the rising price of gasoline.  The official White House transcript of the event (note A) reads as follows:

Now, I notice some folks clapped, but I know some of these big guys, they’re all still driving their big SUVs. You know, they got their big monster trucks and everything. You’re one of them? Well, now, here’s my point. If you’re complaining about the price of gas and you’re only getting eight miles a gallon -- (laughter) -- you may have a big family, but it’s probably not that big. How many you have? Ten kids, you say? Ten kids? (Laughter.) Well, you definitely need a hybrid van then. (Laughter.)

“Laughter”, eh?  For the record there is no hybrid vehicle on the market today that will carry a driver and ten children.  And while the President loves to criticize SUVs, he might want to look out the back window of his three-tonne armoured limo - which gets considerably less than 8 miles to the gallon, I might add - at the dozen or so Chevy Suburbans that follow him everywhere, and ask himself how many of those Secret Service folks, D-Boys and assorted strap-hangers you could cram into a Chevy Volt.

But I digress.  The point is that this town hall exchange makes it clear that the Obama Administration, like many other political entities (on both sides of the spectrum) appears to believe that consumer behaviour that they define as undesirable - in this case, consuming fossil fuels for transportation purposes - can be altered through financial disincentives.  This belief betrays something about their attitude re: the free market, because the same thesis has traditionally been applied to so-called “sin taxes” on products like tobacco and alcohol.  The comparison is strangely apt, because sin taxes demonstrably affect consumption only at the margins.  While casual consumers may reduce consumption of “sinful” products in response to price increases, individuals who are physically addicted to cigarettes and alcohol are not disincentivized by growing costs.  Rather, they support their increasingly expensive addiction by reducing expenditures in other areas, often with catastrophic personal and societal results.

This raises an interesting comparison.  In contemporary Western society, how big a role does consumer choice really play in fossil fuel consumption?  In other words, is consumption of fossil fuels a casual purchase, or are we more akin to addicts?  I use the latter term deliberately, as Western society is routinely and roundly condemned for being “addicted to fossil fuel.”  Obama, in remarks addressing last summer’s oil spill in the Gulf, cited “America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels” as an argument for favouring “green energy” over exploiting offshore and other domestic oil resources.(note B)  If this is true - if we are in fact “addicted” to fossil fuels - then choice is less of a factor in energy consumption than people think, and it is illogical to expect financial market disincentives to alter consumer behaviour.  That, after all, is what “addiction” means.

This is fairly easy to check out, actually.  All we need to do is take a look at US fuel consumption patterns over the past several decades. 

Figure 1 - US Fuel consumption patterns 1991-2011

(source: Energy Information Administration, Note C)

For ease of comprehension, I’ve only listed the two most significant types of fuel consumed in the US - distilled motor gasoline (including diesel) and distilled fuel oil - over the past twenty years.  Three features pop out of this graph.  First, fuel oil consumption peaks in the winter months and bottoms out in the summer months; while gasoline consumption peaks during the summer months and bottoms out in the winter months.  No surprises there; winters are cold, and summers are when goods are shipped and people travel.  Second, fuel oil consumption in Feb-Mar of 1994 was atypical, which is also not surprising, as 1994 was an abnormally cold winter in large areas of the US.(Note D)  Third, the effect of the current recession on fuel consumption is clearly evident; gasoline consumption has declined somewhat, and fuel oil consumption has declined enormously, since the recession began in the fall of 2008.  However, it is worth noting that the proportional decline in consumption is much less for gasoline and diesel - transportation fuels, in other words - than it is for fuel oil.  One reason is because fuel oil has many industrial uses beyond heating homes, and the decline in fuel oil consumption reflects the enormous increase in unemployment and the decline in industrial output associated with the recession.  The divergence in the two curves post-2008 demonstrates that transportation fuel consumption is less likely to be affected by a severe economic downturn than fuel oil consumption.  To put it another way, the recession hasn’t caused anywhere near as large a drop in transportation as it has in industry.  Even if they aren’t working, after all, people still have to move, and they still have to eat.

Okay, so how robust is fuel consumption in the face of price changes?  If consumption of transportation fuels is a matter of choice, then, ceteris paribus, as practitioners of the ‘dreary science’ say, an increase in price should result in a concomitant decrease in consumption, right?

Figure 2 - US Fuel (diesel and gasoline) prices vs. total fuel supplied 1991-2011

(source: Energy Information Administration, Note C)

Wrong.

The blue and yellow lines in figure 2 represent, respectively, the price per gallon of gasoline (all grades) and diesel fuel in constant 1982-84 dollars (I had to use 82-84 dollars as that was the only consumer price index data available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the whole of the period in question - Note E).  The pink line represents the total of diesel and gasoline supplied for consumption, while the black line is a four-period moving-average smoothed trendline for total fuel supplied (I used four-period smoothing because the data was in weekly increments.  The smoothing establishes monthly patterns, offset to the right by one month.  As you can see, the black line more or less replicates the pattern shown by the yellow [transportation fuels] line from Figure 1).

Okay, what does figure 2 show?  Well, as the pink and black curves demonstrate, transportation fuel consumption cycles annually, high in the summer period, and low in the winter period.  Apart from a gradual increase over the past 17 years, the only significant change was the decline in consumption due to the current recession.  Post-2008, however, we can see a slight recovery during peak consumption periods (i.e., summers) but not during low consumption periods (i.e., winters).  The blue and yellow lines, by contrast, show fuel prices in constant dollars.  Gasoline and diesel prices map so closely on an annual basis that there’s little point in treating them separately. 

We can extract a number of interesting lessons from fuel price behaviour over the past 20 years.  First, fuel prices adjusted for inflation were pretty much the same in 2004 as in 1994.  There was a noticeable bump from 2000-2002, which correlates with the economic disruptions due to the Dot-Com scandal and 9/11; a major increase in 2008; a major drop-off shortly thereafter; and a rapid increase from the recessional trough to the present.  The massive increase took place from summer 2007 to summer 2008, at the same time as grain shortages resulting from cropland diversion to ethanol production led to massive increases in worldwide food prices; and the massive decline correlates precisely with the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage industry in the US that touched off the current recession.  The more recent increase in prices has been linked to increasing demands from industrializing nations like China and India; the 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico; supply concerns resulting from ongoing regulatory constraints on resource exploitation in the US; and, more recently, the explosion of popular discontent in the Middle East.

What’s interesting in this graph is the obvious lack of a significant correlation between the price of transportation fuels and fuel consumption patterns.  Look at the first half of the chart.  The 2000-2002 price bulge produced no detectable change in the consumption curve.  If fuel was truly a pure market commodity, a “nice-to-have” good that was subject entirely to consumer choice, then logically an increase in price should have led to a decrease in consumption, or vice-versa (or, if you like, the other way around - an increase in consumption should produce an increase in demand and therefore in price, and vice-versa).  No such thing happened.  One of two interpretations is possible: either the cost of fuel for the average American consumer represents proportionally such a miniscule percentage of total household expenditures that price changes are relatively meaningless (i.e., fuel is cheaper than dirt); or the purposes for which fuel is purchased are so important that price is relatively meaningless, and the consumer will continue to consume it in accordance with existing patterns, regardless of price changes (i.e., fuel is a necessity).

Well, these are also easy interpretations to check out.  According to a recent Reuters report, increases in motor fuel prices are going to raise the average US household’s expenditures on motor fuel by $700 (28%), to $3235, for 2011.(Note F)  Given that the median income in the US in 2009 was $50,000 (US Census Bureau), motor fuel costs represent more than 10% of the average family’s after-tax income.  This is a significant proportion of the average family’s expenditures and eliminates the “fuel is cheaper than dirt” argument.

Does this mean that fuel is a necessity and that consumption, therefore, is less dependent on price than we think?  Take a look at the right half of the graph in Figure 2.  Looking closely at the black moving-average trendline, we can see a very slight deceleration in the aggregate increase in fuel consumption from 2004-2008.  During this period, the real cost of fuel doubled.  The fact that a doubling in price correlates with only a barely-detectable decline in consumption further reinforces the impression that fuel consumption is poorly linked to fuel price.  This in turn suggests that consumer decision-making about fuel purchases is driven largely by factors other than price.

As a gross error check on this reasoning, think about your own driving patterns.  How many of the kilometres that you drive in a week are truly “discretionary” - i.e., how much of the driving that you do is done for purposes that could easily be eliminated without inflicting a significant impact on your personal life, to the point of forcing a “step-change” in your behaviour?  How much of your driving is because you want to, not because you have to?

If the bulk of transportation fuel purchases are indeed effectively non-discretionary, then there is only a very limited extent to which consumer behaviour patterns vis-à-vis transportation fuel consumption are subject to alteration through the imposition of artificial price increases regardless of how they are accomplished; direct taxes (like carbon taxes levied at the pump) or indirect taxes (like price increases resulting from trading in carbon credits purchased by petroleum distillers, with costs passed on to consumers), even if enormous, will not have the desired effect.  This is the difference between a luxury and a necessity.  If the price of caviar goes up, chances are you’ll eat less caviar; and if it goes up enough, you might well phase it out of your diet.  Nobody needs caviar, after all.  If the price of wheat goes up, though, chances are you’ll still buy bread; you’ll just have to adapt by reducing consumption in areas that are more discretionary.  You’ll see fewer movies, put off buying that X-Box, or not purchase the sofa you’ve been saving for.  You don’t really have a choice about buying bread, you see, because the alternative is starvation.

And as the data demonstrate, you largely don’t have a choice about driving your car.  The little discretionary things - like that trip to Disney World you wanted to take the kids on - will disappear.  But that’s less than 10% of the gas you’ll buy in a year.  And a 10% reduction at the margins of consumer behaviour will have a negligible impact compared to much larger effects - like the massive reduction in fossil fuel consumption imposed by a crushing economic crisis; or the massive increase in fossil fuel consumption occasioned by increasing demand for fuel in the growing economies in Asia.

When 90% of your purchases in a given sector are non-discretionary, you’re an addict.  So the bottom line, I guess, is that for all practical purposes, we ARE addicted to fossil fuels - at least in the sense that price changes do not appear to significantly impact consumption patterns (looks like I agree with Obama on something.  Somebody write the date down).  Which is why trying to modify behaviour through price manipulation won’t work.  Forcing consumers to pay higher prices for largely non-discretionary commodities like transportation fuel will not lead to a significant reduction in fuel consumption; it will simply lead to a lower standard of living by forcing them to make sacrifices in discretionary areas.  Spending an extra $700 on gas simply means that the family won’t be able to afford the nice-to-haves, like sending little Johnny to hockey practice.  Which of course means that Mom won’t have to drive him there, which means that she’ll save the expense of the fuel that would have been consumed, which in turn means a concomitant reduction in those greenhouse gas emissions Obama was talking about when he advised that Pennsylvania man to buy a hybrid to transport his 10 children in.

Of course, any family that is having difficulty affording a $700 increase in annual fuel costs probably isn’t in a position to spend $40k on a Prius.  But, hey…details.

Cheers,

//Don//

Notes

A) [http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/04/06/remarks-president-town-hall-discussion-energy-fairless-hills-pennsylvani]

B) [http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-nation-bp-oil-spill]

C) [http://www.eia.gov/petroleum/data.cfm#consumption]

D) [http://climvis.ncdc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/cag3/state-map-display.pl]

E) [ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/cpi/cpiai.txt]

F) [http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/09/us-usa-gasoline-price-idUSTRE7286IO20110309]