How the persecution of sparrows killed 2m people
IN 1958, UNDER the rule of Mao Zedong, China began the Great Leap Forward, a four-year attempt to transform the country from an agrarian society into a modern industrialised one. It was a disaster: the industrialisation was stillborn, and the collectivisation of farming caused one of the biggest famines ever recorded. Somewhere between 15m and 50m people are thought to have died.
In a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, an American organisation, Eyal Frank, an environmental economist at the University of Chicago, and his colleagues examine one of the Great Leap Forward’s grimmer quirks. The “Four Pests” campaign aimed to rid China of flies, mosquitoes, rats—and sparrows. There was no great controversy about the campaign’s first three targets. But sparrows were singled out for destruction because Mao had heard complaints from farmers about the birds eating their grain and damaging crop production.
Scientists cautioned against the plan. Zhu Xi, a well-known biologist, cited a previous attempt at sparrowcide in Prussia in the 18th century, which resulted in an outbreak of other pests. But Mao did not listen, and the Four Pests campaign was taken up with zeal. People destroyed any sparrow nests they could find, and banged pots and pans to scare the birds away from any that were out of reach. Within two years, somewhere in the region of 2bn birds had been killed. Dr Frank’s paper suggests that the consequences of that policy would kill some 2m people, too.
Though it is true that sparrows eat grain, especially in the winter when other food is scarce, they also eat insects such as locusts and rice borers, which likewise attack crops. In the summer such insects make up most of a sparrow’s diet. As an ecologist might have predicted, once the sparrows had gone the population of those pests exploded, with many parts of the country experiencing severe infestations.
The policy of centrally redistributing crops made things even worse. Since the government was convinced that killing sparrows would mean more grain, it felt justified in taking more crops from the places that had exterminated the most birds. These two forces combined severely squeezed the food supply in certain regions, including Anhui province in the east and Guizhou in the south.
Dr Frank and his colleagues used climatic data, such as temperature and rainfall, to calculate how suitable each of China’s thousand-plus counties—an administrative division below a province—were for sparrows to live in. The more habitable a county was, they reasoned, the bigger the local sparrow population probably had been, and the more were killed during the Four Pests campaign. The researchers then compared agricultural production, population fertility and death rates in counties where sparrow habitability was high against those in which it was low.
The results make for grim reading. In highly habitable counties, grain output and fertility rates decreased and death rates rose (see chart) compared with less habitable ones. In total, Dr Frank and his colleagues estimate that the anti-sparrow campaign by itself accounted for nearly 20% of the fall in crop production during the famine. They reckon that loss, amplified by the effects of the redistribution system, killed about 2m people directly. Food shortages may have prevented another 400,000 from being born.
Eventually word reached the upper ranks of the Party that the sparrow massacre had done grave damage. In 1960 Mao decided to remove sparrows from the ranks of the “Four Pests”, replacing them with bedbugs. By this point sparrows were almost extinct, and China had to import 250,000 from the Soviet Union to try to restore their numbers. China in effect abandoned communism in the 1980s, and has never again experienced a famine on anything like that scale. As for the sparrows, their population eventually recovered. These days the birds are once again a common sight flitting around both the cities and the countryside.
Original post via The Economist
Study: Western U.S. wildfires undo 2 decades of air quality progress
The big picture: Fires have damaged federal efforts from the Environmental Protection Agency to improve air quality mainly through reductions in automobile emissions, per the study published Monday in The Lancet Planetary Health.
What they found: From 2000 to 2020, air quality has worsened in the western U.S. due to wildfires.
- Black carbon concentrations have risen 55% on an annual basis, mostly due to the wildfires, researchers found.
- The fires have also caused an increase of 670 premature deaths per year in the region in the two-decade span.
Meanwhile, the eastern U.S. had no major declines in air quality during the same time period.
Deaths From Coal Pollution Have Dropped, but Emissions May Be Twice as Deadly
Coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels, is far more harmful to human health than previously thought, according to a new report, which found that coal emissions are associated with double the mortality risk compared with fine airborne particles from other sources.
The research, published Thursday in the journal Science, linked coal pollution to 460,000 deaths among Medicare recipients aged 65 and older between 1999 and 2020.
Yet the study also found that during that period the shuttering of coal plants in the United State, coupled with the installation of scrubbers in the smokestacks to “clean” coal exhaust, has had salubrious effects. Deaths attributable to coal plant emissions among Medicare recipients dropped from about 50,000 a year in 1999 to 1,600 in 2020, a decrease of more than 95 percent, the researchers found.
“Things were bad, it was terrible,” Lucas Henneman, the study’s lead author, and an assistant professor in environmental engineering at George Mason University, said in an interview. “We made progress, and that’s really good.”
Continue reading on New York Times…
Polluting Industries Say the Cost of Cleaner Air Is Too High
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is about to announce new regulations governing soot — the particles that trucks, farms, factories, wildfires, power plants and dusty roads generate. By law, the agency isn’t supposed to consider the impact on polluting industries. In practice, it does — and those industries are warning of dire economic consequences.
Under the Clean Air Act, every five years the E.P.A. re-examines the science around several harmful pollutants. Fine particulate matter is extremely dangerous when it percolates into human lungs, and the law has driven a vast decline in concentrations in areas like Los Angeles and the Ohio Valley.
But technically there is no safe level of particulate matter, and ever-spreading wildfire smoke driven by a changing climate and decades of forest mismanagement has reversed recent progress. The Biden administration decided to short-circuit the review cycle after the E.P.A. in the Trump administration concluded that no change was needed. As the decision nears, business groups are ramping up resistance.
Continue reading on New York Times…
China, World’s Top Methane Emitter, Plans to Cut Pollution
China, the world’s largest emitter of methane, said it will boost monitoring, reporting and data transparency to reduce releases of the super-potent greenhouse gas.
The nation will also deploy new technologies to spot methane pollution, according to a document released on Tuesday by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment.
Continue reading on Bloomberg…
Study: Nation’s pollution fight increasing longevity
A decade ago in Beijing, air purifiers sold like hot cakes and people locked themselves indoors in an attempt to escape the blanket of heavy smog outside. Breathing the toxic air was a serious health hazard. Today, the same air purifiers gather dust as Beijingers enjoy the great outdoors without the fear of falling ill and fresh air is no longer considered a luxury.
The reversal over the past 10 years has been nothing short of remarkable. Chinese authorities often demonstrate the vast difference in air quality between then and now by pointing out the decrease in density of air pollutants in the atmosphere and the steady increase in the number of days with fairly good air quality each year.
A recent study by a United States-based institute, however, highlights the effect of the improvement in air quality in a more direct manner — it means Chinese people can expect to live longer.
China’s air pollution level in 2021 was 42.3 percent lower than what it was in 2013, the year before the country launched a “war against pollution”, according to the annual Air Quality Life Index report, compiled by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago in late August.
“Due to these improvements, the average Chinese citizen can expect to live 2.2 years longer, provided the reductions are sustained,” it said.
The world only experienced a “small decline” in air pollution levels between 2013 and 2021. The decline was “entirely due to China’s progress”, it stated.
It said, “Without China’s steep decline in pollution, global average pollution would have increased slightly from 2013 to 2021.”
Continue reading on China Daily…
Millions of tons of waste could be eliminated by ‘nudging’ consumers to skip the plastic fork
Food delivery and take-out has had a renaissance in the past few years. Not only did it provide an economic lifeline to the restaurants amid the COVID-19 pandemic, but it also kept people safe and fed by limiting exposure to the virus. However, our to-go favorites often come with a huge side of waste. In 2021, over 400 million metric tons of plastic waste of all kinds was produced worldwide and the United States uses more than 36 billion plastic utensils every year. Plastic pollution is also expected to outpace the efforts to reduce waste and could even outpace coal’s greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.
Plastic cutlery from delivery orders presents new challenges, but a study published September 7 in the journal Science found that the “green nudges” that encourage customers to skip asking for cutlery with take-out orders were very successful. They could even be a new policy tool in reducing single-use waste.
“Few policies target plastic waste production at the consumer level, except charges on plastic bags,” co-author and EPIC-China’s research director and Hong Kong University Business School economist Guojun He said in the statement. “Our findings show that simple nudges can make a big difference in changing consumers’ behaviors and could become a tool for policymakers as they confront the immense challenge of plastic waste.”
According to the team, reducing single-use cutlery waste in the food-delivery industry is particularly important in China as the country is the world’s largest producer and consumer of single-use cutlery. Over 540 million Chinese citizens were active users of food-delivery services as of 2019, consuming more than 50 million sets of single-use cutlery per day. In an effort to reduce waste, policy-makers set a target of reducing single-use cutlery usage in food deliveries by 30 percent by 2025.
For the study, the team worked with Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba’s online food-ordering platform called Eleme. The platform is China’s second largest food-delivery company, with more than 753 million users last year, and is similar to DoorDash and Uber Eats in the United States. The team evaluated the effectiveness of Alibaba’s green nudges to reduce single-use cutlery consumption. These nudges included switching the default selection on the platform to “no cutlery” and including green points as rewards for not using the cutlery. Green points could then be redeemed to plant a tree under the customer’s name (but that’s a whole other can of worms).
Continue reading on Popular Science…
What Companies Can Learn About Climate Action From a Study on Plastic Take-Out Cutlery
Whenever I order food for delivery, I play a little game to guess how many sets of cutlery the restaurant will provide with my meal. Sometimes restaurants will throw in two, three, or four sets for just one order. But I rarely need any cutlery at all, and the waste goes in the trash or collects dust in a kitchen drawer.
Researchers working with Chinese technology conglomerate Alibaba tried a simple fix to this pervasive problem. Instead of just wastefully doling out cutlery sets, the company required food-delivery customers in select cities in China to pick how many sets of cutlery they wanted to receive. The default was set at zero. The result, published today in the journal Science, was a 648% increase in the share of no-cutlery orders. If applied across China, researchers found, the approach would save nearly 22 billion sets of plastic cutlery and cut 3.26 million metric tons of plastic waste. The study doesn’t cover carbon emissions, but it’s safe to say that the impact would be significant given the high-emissions cost of petrochemical production.
Companies have a lot of hard work ahead to green supply chains and bring clean products to market, but this study struck me as a useful reminder of the many low-hanging fruits across the economy that can cut waste, and emissions. Nudging its customers cost Alibaba nothing more than a few hours of software engineering time, and the impact was immense. There is scant research on the global possibilities for nudges from the private sector—and yet the scale of the opportunity is clearly significant.
It’s useful to understand the origin of nudging. The concept comes from the field of behavioral economics known as nudge theory, laid out in the aptly named 2008 book Nudge by economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein. Nudge theory suggests that subtle cues can encourage good human behavior without the need for coercive policies that limit choice or economic penalties that raise the cost of bad behavior. To nudge customers to eat better, for example, a restaurant might organize its menu by listing healthy options first, and bury unhealthy ones at the bottom.
Delivery App Tweak Could Save 22 Billion Sets of Plastic Cutlery a Year, Study Shows
The advent of the food-delivery app has left a bad taste in the mouths of governments, environmentalists and others left wondering how to cope with the mountains of plastic waste produced in the pursuit of culinary convenience.
One answer to the problem, according to a new study, lies in a technique that has stirred debate: the behavioral nudge.
Examining consumer behavior on a popular food-delivery app in China, a team of scientists based in Asia has found that messages nudging users to forgo single-use cutlery could be effective enough to reduce plastic waste in the country by more than 3 million metric tons a year—the equivalent weight of 10 Empire State Buildings—if rolled out nationwide.
Rather than ordering people to act a certain way, limiting their choices or using monetary incentives to influence them, nudges seek to change decisions by altering the way choices are presented. Evidence is mixed as to how effective nudging is as a solution to societal problems, but the gentle approach proved effective in this instance, according to the study.
“People generally prefer to be empowered rather than simply being told what to do,” said Albert Park, professor of economics at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, one of the authors of the study, which appears in this week’s issue of Science magazine.
Air conditioner curbs add to heat deaths – but renewables can help
When Japan shut down its nuclear power reactors in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima disaster, it asked its citizens to conserve scarce energy, such as by using fans instead of air conditioning during summer heat.
But that public-spirited conservation push – the kind of call being made across Europe this winter in response to gas shortages following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – is estimated to have caused 7,710 premature heat-related deaths each year, most among Japan’s elderly, a new study has found.
The study covered the years 2011 to 2015, the period energy conservation measures in response to the nuclear shutdown remained in effect.
The data suggests that well-intended public policy aimed at curbing people’s energy use to limit climate change or tackle other threats could have unintended health consequences – with swift investment in renewable energy the best way to avoid them.
“People usually think energy saving is a good thing. It helps mitigate climate change and helps people save money,” said Guojun He, a study co-author and an associate professor at the University of Hong Kong.
But the data from Japan suggests “it’s probably a bad idea to restrict individuals’ energy consumption,” he explained.
“The policy objective should be substituting dirty, non-renewable energy with renewable energy (so) it doesn’t matter how much energy you consume.”